[9] "Starting from an insignificant province, from a despised race, proclaimed by a mere handful of ignorant workmen, demanding self-control and renunciation before unheard of, certain to arouse in time powerful enemies in the highly cultivated and critical society which it attacked, the odds against it were tremendous." (Ibid., p. 41.)
[10] "It is not easy to imagine how, in the face of an Asia Minor, a Greece, an Italy the Roman split up into a hundred small republics; of a Gaul, a Spain, an Africa, an Egypt, in possession of their old national institutions, the apostles could have succeeded, or even how their project could have been started. The unity of the Empire was a condition precedent of all religious proselytism on a grand scale if it was to place itself above the nationalities." (Renan, E., Hibbert Lectures, 1880; Influence of Rome on the Christian Church.)
[11] In Acts xxv, 1-12, it is recorded that the Apostle Paul, accused by the Jews and virtually on trial for his life before the provincial governor Festus, fell back on his Roman citizenship and successfully "appealed to Caesar." (See footnote 3, page 57.)
[12] "The miracle of miracles, greater than dried-up seas and cloven rocks, greater than the dead rising again to life, was when the Augustus on his throne, Pontiff of the gods of Rome, himself a god to the subjects of Rome, bent himself to become the worshiper of a crucified provincial of his Empire." (Freeman, E. A., Periods of European History, p. 67.)
[13] In 319 and 326 the clergy were exempted from all public burdens, and only the poor were to be admitted to the clergy. In 343 the clergy were exempted "from public burdens and from every disquietude of civil office." In 377 all clergy were exempted from personal taxes. (See R. 38.)
[14] From the Roman world the idea has spread, through the Greek Catholic Church, to Greece, parts of the Balkans, and Russia; through the Roman Catholic Church to all western Europe and the two Americas; and through the Protestant churches which sprang from the Roman Catholic by secession, and the Mohammedan faith, to include almost all the world. Only among uncivilized tribes and in Asia do we find any great number of fundamentally different religious conceptions.
[15] Paul to the Romans (x, 9) stated the fundamentals of belief as follows: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."
[16] M. Boissier. La Fin du Paganisme, vol. 1, p. 200.
[17] Justin Martyr (105?-167), a former Greek teacher and philosopher, continued to follow his profession, wear his Greek philosopher's garb, and held that the teachings of Christianity were already contained in Greek philosophy, and that Plato and Socrates were Christians before the coming of the Christian faith.
Clement (c. 160-c. 215), the successor of Pantaeus as head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, held to the harmony of the Gospels with philosophy, and that "Plato was Moses Atticized."