of
beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its
greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile
superstitions, if we {xii} know the moral antecedents of the world in which
it developed."

M. Cumont is therefore a contributor to our appreciation of the continuity
of history. Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation,
but a composite of slow and laborious growth. Its four centuries of
struggle were not a struggle against an entirely unworthy religion, else
would our faith in its divine warrant be diminished; it is to its own great
credit, and also to the credit of the opponents that succumbed to it, that
it finally overwhelmed them. To quote Emil Aust: "Christianity did not wake
into being the religious sense, but it afforded that sense the fullest
opportunity of being satisfied; and paganism fell because the less perfect
must give place to the more perfect, not because it was sunken in sin and
vice. It had out of its own strength laid out the ways by which it advanced
to lose itself in the arms of Christianity, and to recognize this does not
mean to minimize the significance of Christianity. We are under no
necessity of artificially darkening the heathen world; the light of the
Evangel streams into it brightly enough without this."[2]

Finally, the work of M. Cumont and others in the field of the ancient
Oriental religions is not an isolated activity, but part of a larger
intellectual movement. Their effort is only one manifestation of the
interest of recent years in the study of universal religion; other
manifestations of the same interest are to be seen in the histories of the
Greek and Roman religions by {xiii} Gruppe, Farnell, and Wissowa, in the
anthropological labors of Tylor, Lang, and Frazer, in the publication of
Reinach's _Orpheus_, in the study of comparative religion, and in such a
phenomenon as a World's Parliament of Religions.

In a word, M. Cumont and his companion ancient Orientalists are but one
brigade engaged in the modern campaign for the liberation of religious
thought. His studies are therefore not concerned alone with paganism, nor
alone with the religions of the ancient past; in common with the labors of
students of modern religion, they touch our own faith and our own times,
and are in vital relation with our philosophy of living, and consequently
with our highest welfare. "To us moderns," says Professor Frazer in the
preface t