christianity grew. it was a natural product. it did not spring, full-fledged, from any one man’s brain, as athene sprang from the head of zeus. it was not even invented by any little group or school of men, petrine or pauline, the apostles or the disciples, the early church of jerusalem, antioch, or alexandria. christianity grew—slowly. it developed, bit by bit, for three long centuries, taking shape by gradual stages in all the teeming centres of the roman world; and even after it had assumed a consistent form as the holy catholic church, it still went on growing in the minds of men, with a growth which never ends, but which reveals itself even now in a thousand modes, from a vatican council to the last new departure of the last new group of american sectaries.

christianity grew—in the crowded cosmopolitanised seaports and cities of the roman empire—in antioch, alexandria, thessalonica, cyrene, byzantium, rome. its highway was the sea. though partly jewish in origin, it yet appears from its earliest days essentially as a universal and international religion. therefore we may gain some approximate knowledge of its origin and antecedents by considering the religious condition of these various great towns at the time when christianity began to spring spontaneous in their midst. we can arrive at some idea of the product itself by observing the environment in which it was evolved.

once more, christianity grew—for the most part among 363the lower orders of the cosmopolitan seaports. it fashioned itself among the slaves, the freedmen, the jewish, syrian, and african immigrants, the druidical gauls and britons of rome, the petty shopkeepers, the pauperised clients, the babes and sucklings of the populous centres. hence, while based upon judaism, it gathered hospitably into itself all those elements of religious thought and religious practice that were common to the whole world, and especially to the eastern mediterranean basin. furthermore, it gathered hospitably into itself in particular those elements which belonged to the older and deeper-seated part of the popular religions, rather than those which belonged to the civilised, hellenised, and recognised modifications of the state religions. it was a democratic rather than an official product. we have to look, therefore, at the elder far more than the younger stratum of religious thought in the great cities, for the influences which went to mould christianity. i do not deny, indeed, that the new faith was touched and tinged in all its higher parts by beautiful influences from neo-platonism, alexandrian judaism, and other half-mystical philosophic systems; but for its essential groundwork we have still to go to the root-stratum of religious practice and belief in antioch and alexandria, in phrygia and galatia, in jerusalem and rome. it based itself above all on sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection. yet again, christianity originated first of all among the jewish, syrian, or semitic population of these great towns of the empire, at the very moment of its full cosmopolitanisation; it spread rapidly from them, no doubt at first with serious modifications, to the mixed mass of sailors, slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who formed apparently its earliest adherents. hence, we must look in it for an intimate blend of judaism with the central ideas of the popular religions, aryan or hamitic, of the mediterranean basin. we must expect in it much that was common in syria, asia minor, hellas, and egypt,—something even from gaul, hispania, carthage. its first o w great 364apostle, if we may believe our authorities, was one saul or paul, a half-hellenised jew of semitic and commercial tarsus in cilicia, and a roman citizen. its first great churches sprang up in the busy ports and marts of the levant. its very name of christian was given to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan city of antioch.

it is here, then, in these huge slave-peopled hives of hellenised and romanised commerce, that we must look for the mother-ideas of christianity.

antioch was quite undoubtedly in the earliest times the principal cradle of the new religion. i do not mean that jerusalem was not very probably the place where men first began to form a small sect of esoteric christ-worshippers, or that galilee was not the region where the christ himself most largely lived and taught, if indeed such a person ever really existed. in those matters the traditions handed down to us in the relatively late gospels may be perfectly correct: and again, they may not. but christianity as we know it, the christianity of the pauline epistles and the later writings, such as the gospels and the works of the fathers, must have been essentially a cult of wider syrian and gentile growth. it embraces in itself elements which doubtless lingered on in secluded corners more or less among the mass of the people even in jud忙a itself, though discountenanced by the adherents of the priestly and official jahweh-worship; but which were integral parts of the popular and even the recognised religion throughout the whole of northern syria.

antioch, where christianity thus took its first feeble steps, was a handsome and bustling commercial city, the capital of the greek seleucid kings, and the acknowledged metropolis of the syrian area. at the time of paul (if there was a paul), it probably contained half a million people; it was certainly the largest town in asia, and worthy to be compared with rome itself in the splendour of its buildings. many things about its position are deserving of notice. it stood upon the banks of the orontes, a 365sacred stream, ensconced in a rich agricultural plain, fourteen miles from the river’s mouth. its ostia was at selucia, the harbour whence flowed the entire export trade of syria and the east towards hellas and italy. the mediterranean in front connected it with rome, alexandria, asia minor, greece; the caravan routes across the syrian desert in the rear put it in communication with the bazars of mesopotamia and the remoter east. it was thus the main entrep么t of the through trade between two important worlds. the venice of its time, it lay at the focal point where the highroads of europe and of asia converged.

scholars of repute have pointed out the fact that even earlier than the days of paul, buddhist ideas from india seem to have dribbled through and affected the syrian world, as zoroastrian ideas a little later dribbled through and affected the thought of alexandria: and some importance has been attached to this infiltration of motives from the mystical east. now, i do not care to deny that budding christianity may have been much influenced on its ritual and still more on its ethical side by floating elements of buddhist opinion: that the infancy of the christ may have been nursed by the magi. but on the whole i think the facts we have just been considering as to the manufacture of artificial human gods and the nature and meaning of piacular sacrifices will suffice to show that christianity was chiefly a plant of home growth. the native soil contained already every essential element that was needed to feed it—the doctrine of the incarnation, the death of the man-god, the atoning power of his blood, the resurrection and ascension. so that, while allowing due weight to this peculiar international position of antioch, as the double-faced janus-gate of europe and asia, i am not inclined to think that points peculiar to buddhism need have exercised any predominant influence in the evolution of the new religion. for we must remember that buddhism itself did but subsume into its own fabric ideas 366which were common to peru and mexico, to greece and india, to syria and egypt, and which came out in fresh forms, surging up from below, in the creed of christendom. if anything is clear from our previous researches it is this—that the world has never really had more than one religion—“of many names, a single central shape,” as the poet phrases it.

the syrian people, semites by race and cult, had fallen, like all the rest of the eastern world, under the hellenic dominion of the successors of alexander. a quick and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic, they underwent rapid and facile hellenisation. it was an easy task for them to accept greek culture and greek religion. the worshipper of adonis had little difficulty in renaming his chief god as dionysus and continuing to practise his old rites and ceremonies to the newly-named deity after the ancestral pattern. the astarte whom the east had given to hellas under the alias of aphrodite, came back again as aphrodite to astarte’s old sanctuaries. identifications of gods and cults were but simple matters, where so many gods were after all essentially similar in origin and function. thus the easy-going syrian had few scruples about practising his primitive ceremonies under foreign titles, or admitting to the hospitality of his semitic temples the hellenic deities of the reigning antiochi.

the seleucids, however, did not fare so well in their attempt to impose the alien gods on the fierce jehovistic zealots of the southern mountains. antiochus iv. endeavoured in vain to force the cults of intrusive hellenism on his new kingdom of palestine. he reckoned without his hosts. the populace of jerusalem would not away with his “idolatrous” rites—would not permit the worship of zeus and pallas, of artemis and aphrodite, to usurp a place in the holy city of jahweh. the rebellion of the maccabees secured at least the religious independence of jud忙a from the early seleucid period down to the days of vespasian and titus. lower syria remained true in her arid hills 367to the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the god of israel. and at the same time the jew spread everywhere over the surrounding countries, carrying with him not only his straw and his basket, but also his ingrained and ineradicable prejudices.

in antioch, then, after the roman absorption of syria, a most cosmopolitan religion appears to have existed, containing mingled semitic and hellenic elements, half assimilated to one another, in a way that was highly characteristic of the early empire. and among the popular cults of the great city we must certainly place high those of adonis and dionysus, of aphrodite-astarte, and of the local gods or goddesses, the baalim and ashtareth, such as the maiden who, as we learnt from malalas, was sacrificed at the original foundation of the city, and ever after worshipped as its tyche or fortune. in other words, the conception of the human god, of the corn and wine god, of the death of the god, and of his glorious resurrection, must have all been perfectly familiar ideas to the people of antioch and of syria in general.

let us note here, too, that the particular group of jah-weh-worshippers among whom the christ is said to have found his personal followers, were not people of the priestly type of jerusalem, but galil忙an peasants of the northern mountains, separated from the most orthodox set of jews by the intrusive wedge of heretical samaritans, and closely bordering on the heathen phoenician seaboard—“the coasts of tyre and sidon.” here judaism and heathenism marched together; here jahweh had his worshippers among the fishers of the lake, while hellenism had fixed itself in the statelier villas of tiberias and ptole-mais.

alexandria was another of the great cosmopolitan seaport towns where christianity made its earliest converts, and assumed not a few of its distinctive tenets. now, in alexandria, hellenism and the immemorially ancient egyptian religion found themselves face to face at very close 368quarters. it is true, the town in its historical aspect was mainly greek, founded by the great macedonian himself, and priding itself on its pure hellenic culture. but the mass of the lower orders who thronged its alleys must surely have consisted of more or less mongrel egyptians, still clinging with all the old egyptian conservatism to the ideas and practices and rites of their fathers. besides these, we get hints of a large cosmopolitan seafaring population, among whom strange faiths and exotic gods found ready acceptance. beside the stately forms of the greek pantheon, and the mummified or animal-headed egyptian deities, the imported syrian worship of adonis had acquired a firm footing; the annual festival of the slaughtered god was one of the principal holidays; and other syrian or remoter faiths had managed to secure their special following. the hybrid serapis occupied the stateliest fane of the hybrid city. in that huge and busy hive, indeed, every form of cult found a recognised place, and every creed was tolerated which did not inculcate interference with the equal religious freedom of others.

the ptolemaic family represents in itself this curious adaptability of the gr忙co-egyptian alexandrian mind. at alexandria and in the delta, the kings appear before us as good hellenes, worshipping their ancestral deities in splendid temples; but in the thebaid, the god ptolemy or the goddess cleopatra erected buildings in honor of ptah or khem in precisely the old egyptian style, and appeared on their propyla in the guise of pharaohs engaged in worshipping amen-ra or osiris. the great alexander himself had inaugurated this system when he gave himself out as the son of “zeus ammon”; and his indirect representatives carried it on throughout with a curious dualism which excused itself under the veil of arbitrary identifications. thus serapis himself was the dead apis bull, invested with the attributes of an osiris and of the hellenic hades; while amen-ra was zeus in an egyptian avatar.

the large jewish colony at alexandria also prepared the way 369for the ultimate admixture of neo-platonism in the christian faith; while the egyptian belief in triads of gods formed the groundwork for the future doctrine of the trinity, so doggedly battled for by the alexandrian athanasius. it is true that amp猫re and preller have strenuously denied any egyptian admixture in the philosophy of alexandria; and their reasoning may be conclusive enough as to the upper stratum of thought: but it must at least be admitted that popular belief in the city of the ptolemies must have been deeply coloured by the ideas and creeds of its egyptian substratum. now, in the growth of christianity, it was the people who counted, not the official classes, the learned, or the philosophic. we must not attribute to the population of the east end of london the theology of pusey or the evolutionism of herbert spencer.

christianity would seem also to have taken part at least of its form in rome. and as roman influence extended likewise over every portion of the vast empire, i must say a very few words here about the origin and growth of the roman religion.

that religion, as it comes upon us in the few glimpses we get of its early italic and pre-hellenised form, was one of the rudest and most primitive type, almost savage in its extreme simplicity. it knew hardly any great gods by name: the few deities it possessed, it expressed only for the most part by adjectival names. few, i say, as to type, for as to number of individuals, their name indeed was legion; they pervaded the whole, world in that reckless multiplicity which distinguishes the simple ghosts or spirits of early hunting or pastoral peoples. with the romans, this multiplicity, ubiquity, and vagueness survived into a relatively settled and civilised agricultural condition. a vast number of small departmental gods, with few or no great ones—that is the first state of the roman pantheon.

the central point of old roman religion was clearly the household; the family ghosts or lares were the most honoured 370gods. we may instructively compare mr. chalmers’s account of the theology of new guinea. beside these ancestral shades, or almost identical with them, came the p茅nates or practical deities of the store-room, perhaps the representatives of the victims slain as foundation-ghosts at the first erection of the building. of these two, the lares were undoubtedly the departed ancestors of the family; they lived near the spot where they were first buried (for the old romans were buriers), and they still presided over the household as in life, like its fathers and senators. they were worshipped daily with prayers and simple offerings of food and drink; their masks or busts which hung on the wall were perhaps the representatives, or in ancient days the coverings, of the old oracular heads or skulls; for the skulls themselves may have been preserved in wax, as so often elsewhere at an earlier period. * the penates, which were worshipped with the lares, seem to have stood for the family spirit in a more generalised way; they represent the continuity and persistence of its fortune; and therefore, if we may trust the analogy of the fortune of a town, they are probably the ghosts of the foundation or renewal victims. in judging of all this, we cannot attach too great importance to the analogy of negritto and polynesian customs.

* to this use of the oracular head i would venture also to

refer the common employment of small masks as amulets: an

employment which, as bottiger rightly remarks, explains “the

vast number of such subjects met with in antique gems.”

other deities are more public. but most of them seem to belong to the simplest and most immediately ghost-like stratum. they had to do with sowing, reaping, and vintage—in other words, were corn or wine gods. or else they had to do with the navigable river, the tiber, and the port of ostia, which lay at its mouth—in other words, were spring and river gods. or else they had to do with war and expeditions—in other words were slaughtered campaign gods of the iphigenia pattern, bellonas and battle-victims.

among 371this dim crowd of elder manufactured deities, saturnus, the sowing god, was most likely an annual corn-victim; his adjectival name by itself suggests that conclusion. terminus, the boundary god, is already familiar to us. about these two at least we can hardly be mistaken. a red-haired man (as in egypt) no doubt preceded as yearly corn-victim the red-haired puppies still slaughtered for the crops within the ken of festus. seia, segetia, tutilina, the successive corn-deities, we have already considered. they seem to equate with the successive maidens slain for the corn in other communities, and still commemorated in our midst by the corn-baby and the corn-wife. at each stage of age in the corn, a corresponding stage in the age of the human victim was considered desirable. but how reconcile this idea with the existence of numerous petty functional deities—gods of the door and the hinge?—with the cunina who guards the child in the cradle, and the statina who takes care of him when he begins to stand? i answer, all these are but adjectival gods, mere ghosts or spirits, unknown in themselves, but conceived as exercising this particular function. “the god that does so-and-so” is just a convenient expression, no more; it serves its purpose, and that was enough for the practical roman. how readily they could put up with these rough-and-ready identifications we know in the case of aius locutius and of the deus rediculus.

each terminus and each silvanus is thus the god or protecting ghost of each boundary stone or each sacred grove—not a proper name, but a class—not a particular god, but a kind of spirit. the generalised and abstract gods are later unifications of all the individuals included in each genus. the janus, i take it, was at first the victim once sacrificed annually before each gate of the city, as he is sacrificed still on the west coast of africa: as the god of opening, he was slaughtered at the opening of every new year; and the year conversely opened its course with the month sacred to the god of opening. perhaps he was also slain 372as fortune at the beginning of each war. the vesta is the hearth-goddess; and every house had its vesta; perhaps originally a slaughtered hearth-victim. every man had in like manner his genius, an ancestral protecting spirit; the corresponding guardian of the woman was her juno; they descend to christianity, especially in its most distinctive roman form, as the guardian angels. mars was a corn-spirit; only later was he identified with the expeditionary god. his annual expulsion as the human scapegoat has already been considered. the jupiter or jovis was a multiple wine-god, doubtless in every case the annual victim slain, dionysus-wise, for the benefit of the vineyard. each village and each farm had once its jovis, specially worshipped, and, i doubt not, originally slaughtered, at the broaching of the year’s first wine-cask in april. but his name shows that, as usual, he was also identified with that very ancient sky-god who is common to all the aryan race; the particular jovis being probably sacrificed, himself to himself, before the old sky-god’s altar, as elsewhere the dionysus-victim at the shrine of dionysus.

these identifications, i know, may sound fanciful to mere classical scholars, unacquainted with the recent advances in anthropology, and i would not have ventured to propound them at an earlier stage of our involved argument; but now that we have seen and learned to recognise the extraordinary similarity of all pantheons the whole world over, i think the exact way these deities fall into line with the wall-gods, gate-gods, corn-gods, wine-gods, boundary-gods, forest-gods, fountain-gods, and river-gods everywhere else must surely be allowed some little weight in analogically placing them.

the later roman religion only widens, if at all, from within its own range, by the inclusion of larger and larger tribal elements. thus the deus fidius, who presided over each separate alliance, i take to be the ghost of the victim slain to form a covenant; just as in africa to this day, when 373two tribes have concluded a treaty of peace, they crucify a slave “to ratify the bargain.” the nature of such covenant victims has been well illustrated by professor robertson smith, but the growth of the covenant-gods, who finally assumed very wide importance, is a subject which considerations of space prevent me from including in our present purview. the victim, at first no doubt human, became later a theanthropic animal; as did also the jo vis-victim and the representatives of the other adjectival or departmental deities. the roman mars and the sabine ouirinus may readily have been amalgamated into a mars ouirinus, if we remember that mars is probably a general name, and that any number of martes may at any time have been sacrificed. the jovis of the city of rome thus comes at last to be the greatest and most powerful jupiter of them all, and the representative of the roman union. under hellenising influences, however, all these minor gods get elevated at last into generalised deities; and the animal victims offered to them become mere honorific or piacular sacrifices, hardly identified at all with the great images who receive them.

the hellenising process went so far, indeed, at rome that the old roman religion grew completely obscured, and almost disappeared, save in its domestic character. in the home, the lares still held the first rank. elsewhere, bacchus took the place of liber, while the traits of hermes were fastened on the adjectival roman bargain-spirit mercurius. yet even so, the roman retained his primitive belief in corn and wine gods, under the newer guises; his ceres he saw as one with the attic demeter; his rural ceremonies still continued unchanged by the change of attributes that infected and transfigured the city temples. moreover, the romans, and later the cosmopolitan population of rome, borrowed gods and goddesses freely from without in ever increasing numbers. in very early days, they borrowed from etruria; later, they borrowed apollo from greece, and (by an etymological blunder) 374fixed upon their own hercules the traits of heracles. on the occasion of a plague, they publicly summoned asclepios, the greek leech-god, from epidaurus; and at the very crisis of the life-and-death conflict with hannibal, they fetched the sacred field-stone known as cybele, the mother of the gods, from pessinus in phrygia. the people of pessinus with strange compliance let their goddess go; and the whole orgiastic cult of attis was thus transported entire to italian soil. the rites of the great festival were carried on at rome almost as they had been carried on before in phrygia; so that an asiatic worship of the most riotous type found a firm official footing in the centre of the empire. the priest, indeed, was still an asiatic, or at least not a roman; but the expulsion of hannibal from italy which followed on this adoption of a foreign god, must have greatly increased the prestige and reputation of the alien and orgiastic deity.

the luxurious aphrodite of eryx in sicily arrived in rome about the same time with cybele. originally a semitic goddess, she combined the hellenic and oriental ideas, and was identified in italy with the old latin venus.

later still, yet other gods were imported from without. new deities flowed in from asia and africa. the population of the city under the early empire had almost ceased to be roman, save in the upper strata; a vast number of slaves from all parts of the world formed the lowest layer in the crowded vaults: the middle rank was filled by syrians, africans, greeks, sicilians, moors, and freedmen—men of all places and races from spain or britain to the euphrates and the nile, the steppes and the desert. the orontes, said juvenal, had flooded the tiber. among this mixed mass of all creeds and colours, subfusk or golden-haired, a curious mixture of religions grew up. some of these were mere ready-made foreign importations—isis-worship from egypt; jahweh-worship from jud忙a; strange eastern or northern or african cults from the remotest parts of pontus or mauritania. others were intermixtures 375or rationalisations of older religions, such as christianity, which mingled together judaism and adonis or osiris elements; such as gnosticism, which, starting from zoroastrian infiltrations, kneaded all the gods of the world at last into its own supreme mystic and magic-god abraxas.

looking a little deeper through the empire in general, we see that from the time of augustus onward, the need for a new cosmopolitan religion, to fit the new cosmopolitan state, was beginning to be dimly felt and acknowledged. soldiers, enlisted in one country, took the cult and images of their gods to another. the bull-slaying mithra (in whom we can hardly fail to see a solar form of the bull-god, who sacrifices a bull, himself to himself, before his own altar) was worshipped here and there, as numerous bas-reliefs show, from persia to britain. the gaul endeavoured to identify his own local war-gods with the roman mars, who had been hellenised in turn into the duplicate presentment of the greek ares. the briton saw his river-gods remodelled in mosaic into images like those of roman tiber, or provided with the four horses who drag the roman neptune, as neptune had borrowed the representation at least from the greek poseidon. and this was all the easier because everywhere alike horses were sacrificed to sea or river, in lieu of human victims; just as everywhere corn-gods were dressed in green, and everywhere wine-gods wore coronals of vine-leaves on their holy foreheads. men felt the truth i have tried to impress, that everywhere and always there is but one religion. attributes and origin were so much alike that worship was rapidly undergoing a cosmopolitanisation of name, as it already possessed a similarity of rites and underlying features. language itself assisted this unifying process. in the west, as latin spread, latin names of gods superseded local ones; in the east, as greek spread, hellenic deities gave their titles and their beautiful forms to native images. an artificial unity was introduced 376and fixed by a conventional list of greek and roman equivalents; and in the west, as greek art gained ground and spread, noble greek representations of the higher gods in ideal human form became everywhere common.

but that was not enough. as the government was one, under a strong centralised despotism, it was but natural that the religion should be one also, under the rule of a. similar omnipotent deity. man makes his heaven in the image of earth; his pantheon answers to his political constitution. the mediaeval hall of heaven had an imperial god, like the othos or the fredericks, on his regal throne, surrounded by a court of great barons and abbots in the angels and archangels, the saints and martyrs: the new religions, like spiritualism and theosophy, which spring up in the modern democratic world, are religions of free and independent spirits, hardly even theistic. the roman empire thus demanded a single religion under a single strong god. it tended to find it, if not in the genius of trajan or antonine, then in some bull-slaying mithra or some universal abraxas. materialists were satisfied with the worship of the emperor or of the city of rome: idealists turned rather to isis or to christ.

one religion there was which might have answered the turn of the empire: the pure and ideal monotheism of jud忙a. but the cult of jahweh was too local and too national; it never extended beyond the real or adopted sons of israel. even so, it gained proselytes of high rank at rome, especially among women; as regards men, the painful and degrading initiatory ceremony of judaism must always have stood seriously in the way of converts. yet in spite of this drawback, there were proselytes in all the cosmopolitan cities where the jews were settled; men who loved their nation and had built them a synagogue. if judaism could but get rid of its national exclusiveness, and could incorporate into its god some more of those genial and universal traits which he had too early shuffled off—if 377it could make itself less austere, less abstract, and at the same time less local—there was a chance that it might rise to be the religion of humanity. the dream of the prophets might still come true and all the world might draw nigh to zion.

at this critical juncture, an obscure little sect began to appear among the jews and galil忙ans, in jerusalem and antioch, which happened to combine in a remarkable degree all the main requirements of a new world-religion. and whatever the cult of jesus lacked in this respect in its first beginnings, it made up for as it went by absorption and permeation.

it was a catholic church: it stood for the world, not for a tribe or a nation. it was a holy church: it laid great stress upon the ethical element. it was a roman church: it grew and prospered throughout the roman empire. it made a city what was once a world. whence it came and how it grew must be our next and final questions.