eeds, all over the Mediterranean world. Centuries before,
Alexander the Great had struck out the splendid idea of the marriage
of East and West. He secured it by breaking down the Persian Empire,
and making one Empire from the Adriatic to this side of the Sutlej
or Bias. He desired to cement this marriage of East and West in a
way of his own. He took three hundred captive princesses and ladies,
and married them in a batch to Macedonian officers--a very
characteristic piece of symbolism. But his idea was greater and
truer than the symbol.

The Roman marriage of the East and West was a more real thing, for
behind it lay three centuries of growing intercourse and knowledge
along Alexander's lines. In the sphere of religion we find it most
clearly. There rises a resultant world-religion--a religion that
embraces all the cults, all the creeds, and at last all the
philosophies, in one great system. That religion held the world. It
is true, there were exceptions. There was a small and objectionable
race called Jews; there were possibly some Druids in Southern
Britain; and here and there was a solitary atheist who represented
no one but himself. These few exceptions were the freaks amongst
mankind. Apart from them mankind was united in its general beliefs
about the gods. The world had one religion.

First of all, let us try to estimate the strength of this old
Mediterranean Paganism. It was strong in its great traditions.
Plutarch, who lived from about 50 A.D. to 117 or so, is our great
exponent of this old religion. To him I shall have to refer
constantly. He was a writer of charm, a man with many gifts.
Plutarch's Lives was the great staple of education in the
Renaissance--and as good a one, perhaps, as we have yet discovered,
even in this age when there are so many theories of education with
foreign names. Plutarch, then, writing about Delphi, the shrine and
oracle of the god Apollo, said that men had been "in anguish and
fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years"--and
Delphi has not lost it. For ninety generations the god has been
giving oracles to the Greek world, to private people, to kings, to
cities, to nations--and on all sorts of subjects, on the foundation
of colonies, the declaration of wars, personal guidance and the hope
of heirs. You may test the god where you will, Plutarch claimed, you
will not find an instance of a false oracle. Readers of Greek
history will remember another great write