and yet awful in its
limitless and arbitrary power of chastisement; what should it be but
divine, like nature, and an object to be appealed to, propitiated,
worshipped? At any rate the cultus of the emperor spread in the Roman
world, and particularly in the Asiatic provinces. It could ally itself
with the current pantheistic philosophy and also with popular local
cults: for it was tolerant of all and could embrace them all, or in
some cases it could identify itself with them--the emperor being
regarded as a special manifestation of the local god. And it made
itself popular through games--wild beast shows and gladiatorial
contests--which it was the business of its high priests or presidents
to provide or to organize. Thus it was that the Roman world came to be
organized by provinces for the purposes of the imperial religion, and
the provincial presidents, whom we hear of in the Acts as 'Asiarchs' or
'chiefs of Asia,' and from other sources as existing in the other
provinces--Galatarchs, Bithyniarchs, Syriarchs, and so on--were also
the high priests of the worship of the Caesars, by which it was sought
{26} to make religion, like everything else, contribute to cement
imperial unity[17].

Now there can be no doubt at all, if we look back from the fourth or
fifth centuries of our era, to how vast an extent this Roman unity had
been made an engine for the propagation of the Church. And the
Christians--the Spanish poet Prudentius, for instance, or Pope Leo the
Great[18]--betray a strong consciousness of the place held by the
empire in the divine preparation for Christ. For long periods the
Roman authority was tolerant of Christianity and suffered its
propagation to go on in peace; and at the times when it became alarmed
at its subversive tendencies, and turned to become its persecutor,
still the Church could not be prevented from using the imperial
organization, its roads and its means of communication. Again, every
step in the progress of the Greek language facilitated the spread of
the new religion, the propagation of which was through Greek; and
conversely Christianity became an instrument for spreading the use of
this language which previously was making but a poor struggle against
the languages {27} of Asia Minor; for it is apparently a simple mistake
to suppose that even the apostles were miraculously dispensed from the
difficulties of acquiring new languages, and were enabled to speak all
languages as it were