nd not merely a center for worship. It is this
aspect of the early religious associations which I wish to stress; for
it is the question, whether this phase {189} of the church still exists
to justify the church as an institution, into which I wish to enquire.

In the vast loneliness of the Roman Empire, men felt the need to draw
together in order to escape the dreariness of life. The teeming
interests and intense loyalties of the old city-state had disappeared
and left men stranded in a cosmopolitan State, ordered from above, in
which they had no vital participation; it was too gigantic and formal
to touch them in a personal fashion and to kindle those enthusiasms
which lift men beyond economic cares. It was well to be a Roman
citizen, but such an honor did not suffice for the more homely needs of
everyday existence. In the days of Athenian greatness, the individual
was lost in the citizen; in the Roman Empire, the citizen was lost in
the individual. Man is a social animal--to adapt Aristotle's famous
expression--and the inhabitants of the various countries sought to
create associations of various sorts to fill this gap caused by the
destruction of the old political interests. In other words, men tried
to weave a new social tissue of a private type to answer their craving
for companionship and for the chance to do something worth doing.
Remove the business, artistic, political, trades-union, literary and
social interests in their present free and varied form from modern
life, and we can gain some idea of the unsatisfactoriness of human life
under the Empire for the lower and poorer classes. Monotonous as
village life is to-day, it is throbbing with life as compared with the
village or tenement district of ancient days. The farmer has his
newspaper, the farmer's wife the magazine, and the piano, and the trip
to town. Small wonder that these men and women of the Hellenistic and
Roman worlds {190} formed clubs and associations in which to escape
from a disheartening loneliness and feel themselves members one of
another.

But the Empire essayed to stamp out these brotherhoods, in order that
it might be all in all and receive the loyalty and affection which
these private organizations evoked. The ancient state was unable to
conceive that division of interests into public and private which is so
marked a feature of modern civilization. As Renan points out, the
Empire "was trying, out of homage to an exaggerated i