arship to consult the records of the past only to
find the reflection of its own features.

The general condition of religion in the Roman Empire at the beginning
of the Christian era was one of far advanced disintegration and rapid
synthesis. In every district there could be found the remains of old
local religions, which retained the loyalty of the conservative, but no
longer aroused any vital response in the emotions of the multitudes or
in the interest of the educated. At that time, and for many
generations afterward, the Roman landowners, to take one example,
maintained the ceremonies and customs of an agricultural animism which
for their ancestors had been a living religion, but for them had become
aesthetic, conventional, and superstitious,--an appendage to life, not
its driving force. Those who wish can read a description of it,
written with a sympathy possible only for one who felt the analogy of
his own experience, in the pages of _Marius the Epicurean_, in which
Walter Pater, by a wonderful _tour de force_, wove an exact and
scholarly knowledge of the original documents into such a web of
artistic English that the deep learning of the book cannot be
appreciated except by those who have some small share in it themselves.

Over these local religions had been thrown throughout the Empire the
covering fabric of Greek mythology. It had lost much of its power; it
was {3} no longer sincerely believed; it was in every respect decadent;
but it still played its part in unifying, and to some extent
civilising, the diverse races of the Empire. But more important than
the Greek mythology was the Greek philosophy, which was indeed in many
ways its antidote. If the mythology of Greece appeared to sanction an
infinite number of gods and goddesses, her philosophers taught with
equal persuasiveness that the divine reality is one, though its forms
be many. A remarkable synthesis was thus gradually accomplished,
though it will always be a question whether the stronger tendency was
to philosophise mythology or to mythologise philosophy.

Yet another element was provided by the stream of Oriental religions
which were coming into the Empire. Though these religions had all of
them at one time been national, quite as much as the religion of Greece
or Rome, their adherents had been detached violently by the conquering
hand of Rome from adherence to ancestral shrines or to political
institutions. The Cappadocian or the Syria