ritual
endeavour rarely paralleled. In the Roman Empire everything travelled.
Religions travelled. In the centres of civilisation there was scarcely a
faith of mankind which had not its votaries.

It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse
religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas. These things
facilitated the progress of Christianity. They made certain that if the
Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men claimed, it
would one day conquer the world. Equally, they made certain that, as the
very condition of this conquest, Christianity would be itself
transformed. This it is which has happened in the evolution of
Christianity from its very earliest stages and in all phases of its
life. Of any given rite, opinion or institution, of the many which have
passed for almost two millenniums unchallenged under the Christian name,
men about us are now asking: But how much of it is Christian? In what
measure have we to think of it as derived from some other source, and
representing the accommodation and assimilation of Christianity to its
environment in process of its work? What is Christianity? Not
unnaturally the ancient Church looked with satisfaction upon the great
change which passed over Christianity when Constantine suddenly made
that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the
religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because
their minds rested upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not
unnaturally the metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which
had taken place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their
eyes. In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity
had passed permanently beyond the stage in which it had been
preponderantly a moral and spiritual enthusiasm, with its centre and
authority in the person of Jesus. It became a system and an institution,
with a canon of New Testament Scripture, a monarchical organisation and
a rule of faith which was formulated in the Apostles' Creed.

To Baur the truth as to the conflict of Paul with the Judaisers had
meant much. He thought, therefore, with reference to the rise of
priesthood and ritual among the Christians, to the emphasis on Scripture
in the fashion of the scribes, to the insistence upon rules and dogmas
after the manner of the Pharisees, that they were but the evidence of
the decline and defeat of Paul's free spirit and of the resurg