to
Christianity and the Oriental mysteries lead almost always beyond the
limits of the Roman empire into the Hellenistic Orient. The religious
conceptions which imposed themselves on Latin Europe under the Caesars[8]
were developed there, and it is there we must look for the key to enigmas
still unsolved. It is true that at present nothing is more obscure than the
history of the religions that arose in Asia when Greek culture came in
contact with barbarian theology. It is rarely possible to formulate
satisfactory conclusions with any degree of certainty, and before further
discoveries are made we shall frequently be compelled to weigh contrasting
probabilities. We must frequently throw out the sounding line into the
shifting sea of possibility in order to find secure anchorage. But at any
rate we perceive with sufficient distinctness the direction in which the
investigations must be pursued.

It is our belief that the main point to be cleared up is the composite
religion of those Jewish or Jewish-pagan communities, the worshipers of
Hypsistos, the Sabbatists, the Sabaziasts and others in which the new creed
took root during the apostolic age. In those communities the Mosaic law had
become adapted to the sacred usages of the Gentiles even before the
beginning of our era, and monotheism had made concessions to idolatry. Many
beliefs of the ancient Orient, as for instance the ideas of Persian dualism
regarding the infernal world, arrived in Europe by two roads, the more or
less orthodox Judaism of the communities of {xxii} the dispersion in which
the gospel was accepted immediately, and the pagan mysteries imported from
Syria or Asia Minor. Certain similarities that surprised and shocked the
apologists will cease to look strange as soon as we reach the distant
sources of the channels that reunited at Rome.

But these delicate and complicated researches into origins and
relationships belong especially to the history of the Alexandrian period.
In considering the Roman empire, the principal fact is that the Oriental
religions propagated doctrines, previous to and later side by side with
Christianity, that acquired with it universal authority at the decline of
the ancient world. The preaching of the Asiatic priests also unwittingly
prepared for the triumph of the church which put its stamp on the work at
which they had unconsciously labored.

Through their popular propaganda they had completely disintegrated the
ancient nat