ing of this we discover in the Pauline
Epistles themselves; Paul's use of the word "mystery" shows how he
adapted his teaching to the understanding of those to whom he addressed
himself. To quote Gardner: "In the growth and spread of popular
superstition, if we may call them by so harsh a name, we may well
discern a gradual preparation for Christianity.... These religions stand
toward Christianity, to continue my biological comparison, as the wings
of a penguin stand toward those of an eagle, and it is surely no slight
on Christianity to say that it met the blind longings of a pagan nation
and showed them a path toward which they had, for long generations, been
trying to find their way. The religious needs which were very
imperfectly met by the initiations and ceremonies and prayers of the
cults of the pagan saving deities found a complete and perfect
satisfaction from faith in an exalted Christ."[63]

[Footnote 63: "The Growth of Christianity," Gardner, p. 136. For fuller
treatment with suggestive detail see Fraser "The Golden Bough," chapter
37.]

Christianity could not do this really very great thing without at the
same time being affected by that which it, in a measure, took over and
completed. The influence of Asia upon Christianity is, therefore, a
very real influence. One can only wonder what would have happened had
the course of empire been East instead of West. Christianity might then
have been carried into India and China and through long centuries been
given so distinctly an oriental content as to have taken on a character
radically different from its Western form. But this did not happen. To
follow Gardner's figure still farther, it was baptized into Greek
philosophy and Roman imperialism and the power of the nascent nations of
western Europe, and into the medieval spirit, and so we have become its
heirs. More than that, the East took its own way, uninfluenced by the
West, until two entirely different types of culture, civilization,
religion and approach to reality had been developed, as far apart as the
East is from the West, and each, until almost our own time,
substantially uninfluenced by the other.

_The West Rediscovers the East; the East Returns Upon the West_

Given the contacts of the modern world this massive isolation of
cultures could not continue. The East and the West were bound to meet
and religion was bound to be affected by their meeting. Western
Christianity has for more than a hundre