rom the confluence of two mighty spiritual
streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already
influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and
social permanence.

It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive
Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after
death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the
proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the
same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which
was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel;
and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an
orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the
Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the
clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the
dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into
Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be
understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the
Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste
of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the
kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter,
verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus
to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise
again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves,
questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and
_raison d'etre_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt.
xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29;
vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that
passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of
Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."

And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was
born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised
him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not
presuppose a mere immortality of the