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 Judæa; strange eastern or northern or African cults from the remotest parts of Pontus or Mauritania. Others were intermixtures or 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 and 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 Judæa. 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 it 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 Galilæans, 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.
CHAPTER XVIII.—THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY.
WHILE the world was thus seething and fermenting with new faiths the creed of the Christ made its first appearance on the seaboard of Asia. In spite of certain remarks in my first chapter, I am not such a “gross and crass Euhemerist” as to insist dogmatically on the historical existence of a personal Jesus. Of the Christ himself, if a Christ there were, we know little or nothing. The account of his life which has come down to us in the Gospels is so devoid of authority, and so entirely built up of miraculous fragments, derived from elsewhere, that we may well be excused for gravely doubting whether he is not rather to be numbered with St. George and St. Catherine, with Perseus and Arthur, among the wholly mythical and imaginary figures of legend and religion.