hs later the "Hibbert Trust" invited him to
Oxford to develop certain subjects which he had touched upon at Paris. In
this volume have been collected the contents of both series with the
addition of a short bibliography and notes intended for scholars desirous
of verifying assertions made in the text.[1] The form of the work has
scarcely been changed, but we trust that these pages, intended though they
were for oral delivery, will bear reading, and that the title of these
studies will not seem too ambitious for what they have to offer. The
propagation of the Oriental religions, with the development of
neo-Platonism, is the leading fact in the moral history of the pagan
empire. May this small volume on a great subject throw at least some light
upon this truth, and may the reader receive these essays with the same kind
interest shown by the audiences at Paris and Oxford.

The reader will please remember that the different chapters were thought
out and written as lectures. They do not claim to contain a debit and
credit account of what the Latin paganism borrowed from or loaned to the
Orient. Certain well-known facts have been {xvi} deliberately passed over
in order to make room for others that are perhaps less known. We have taken
liberties with our subject matter that would not be tolerated in a didactic
treatise, but to which surely no one will object.

We are more likely to be reproached for an apparently serious omission. We
have investigated only the internal development of paganism in the Latin
world, and have considered its relation to Christianity only incidentally
and by the way. The question is nevertheless important and has been the
subject of celebrated lectures as well as of learned monographs and widely
distributed manuals.[2] We wish to slight neither the interest nor the
importance of that controversy, and it is not because it seemed negligible
that we have not entered into it.

By reason of their intellectual bent and education the theologians were for
a long time more inclined to consider the continuity of the Jewish
tradition than the causes that disturbed it; but a reaction has taken
place, and to-day they endeavor to show that the church has borrowed
considerably from the conceptions and ritualistic ceremonies of the pagan
mysteries. In spite of the prestige that surrounded Eleusis, the word
"mysteries" calls up Hellenized Asia rather than Greece proper, because in
the first place the earliest Christ