[622] “On peut dire que, si le christianisme eût été arrêté dans sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eût été Mithriaste.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5me ed., p. 579.
[623] “Isis and Serapis and Mithra were preparing the Western world for the religion which was to approve the long travail of humanity by a more perfect vision of the divine.”—Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904), p. 574.
[624] Acts xvii. 29.
[625] New to the multitude. Some of the Stoic philosophers, as we have seen, held and taught this doctrine.
[626] The Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, and some Oriental cults, particularly that of Mithra, imported into the Roman Empire, made the participation in a blessed life beyond the grave dependent upon moral purity of life on earth and through this doctrine exercised a favorable influence upon morality (see [p. 254]).
[627] This thought and conviction of the immortality of the individual was, it is possible, in part the outcome of the decay of the ancient city, whose fancied eternity had satisfied for a time the instinct of immortality. But when some centuries had passed, the “Romans sailed round the Mediterranean and recognized that the cities of the past were not eternal, and with the same waft of conviction came a compensating belief that eternity was the heritage of every son of man. Immortality arose on the horizon of the man, as its last glow faded from the city” (Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 341). It was the same in Judea; as immortality faded from the political horizon of Israel, it arose on that of the individual soul.
[628] Though the account of the fall of man forms the prelude of the Hebrew Scriptures, the conception never influenced to an appreciable degree pre-Christian ethics.
[629] See Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 322.
[630] “L’humanité cherche l’idéal; mais elle veut que l’idéal soit une personne; elle n’aime pas une abstraction.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5me ed., p. 582.
[631] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 8.