Chapter IV: The Evolution of the Cult (2)

The embodiment of the rite of baptism on the basis of the Baptist's alleged acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, either carried with it or followed upon the claim that Jesus, hitherto regarded as a simple Saviour-God, was a Messiah. After the fall of Jerusalem, the old dream of an earthly Messiah who should restore the Kingdom of Judah or Israel [300] was shattered for the vast majority of Jews. Even in the Assumption of Moses, in the main the work of a Quietist Pharisee, written in Hebrew probably between 7 and 29 of the first century, [301] there is a virtual abandonment of Messianism, the task of overthrowing the Gentiles being assigned to "the Most High." [302] In the composite Apocalypse of Baruch, written in Hebrew, mainly by Pharisaic Jews, in the latter half of the first century, probably as an implicit polemic against early Jesuism, [303] we see the effect of the catastrophe. In the sections written before the fall of Jerusalem, the hope of a Messianic Kingdom is proclaimed; in those written later there is either at most a hope of a Messianic Kingdom without a Messiah or a complete abandonment of mundane expectations. [304] What the Jesuist movement did was to develop, outside of Jewry, [305] the earlier notion of a Messiah "concealed," pre-appointed, and coming from heaven to effect the consummation of all things earthly. [306]

Such Messianism may have either preceded or proceeded-on an adoption of the rite of baptism. Given a resort to Messianism by the Jesuists after the fall of Jerusalem, the alleged testimony of the Baptist to Jesus as the Appointed One might be the first step; and the resort to the baptismal rite would follow on the myth that Jesus had been actually baptized by John. In Acts, i, 5, Jesus is in effect made to represent John's baptism with water as superseded by a baptism in the Holy Ghost. [307] In the Pauline epistles we have trace of a conflict over this as over other Judaic practices, Paul being made to declare (1 Cor. i, 17) that "Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel," though he admits having baptized a few. [308] All that is clear is that the Jesuists were not primarily baptizers; that they began to baptize "in the name of Jesus Christ," [309] with a formula of the Holy Ghost and fire, but really in the traditional manner with water; and that long afterwards they feigned that the Founder had prescribed baptism with a trinitarian formula. [310]

Thus far, the local movement was not only Jewish but Judaic. It may or may not have been before the fall of Jerusalem that a Jesuist "apostle" named Paul conceived the idea of creating by propaganda a new Judæo-Jesuist movement appealing to Gentiles. Such an idea is not the invention of Paul or any other Jesuist; the idea of a Messianic Kingdom in which the Gentiles should be saved is found in the Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the years 109 and 106 B.C. [311] But, thus made current, it might well be adopted by Jesuists. The reason for supposing this to have begun before the year 70 is not merely the tradition to that effect but the fact that in none of the epistles do we have any trace of that "gospel of the Kingdom" which in the synoptics is posited as the evangel of Jesus. That evangel, which is a simple duplication of the alleged evangel of the Baptist, and which we have seen to be wholly mythical, being devoid of possible historic content, [312] is part of the apparatus of the retrospective Messianic claim. But the Pauline Epistles, even as they show no knowledge of the name Nazareth, or Nazaræan, or Nazarene, or of any gospel teaching, also show no concern over a "gospel of the Kingdom." Whether or not, then, they are wholly pseudepigraphic, they suggest that a Paulinism of some kind was an early feature in the Jesuist evolution.

According to the Acts, Paul's name was originally Saul, though no such avowal is ever made in the epistles. The purpose of the statement seems to be to strengthen the case as to his Jewish nationality, which is affirmed in the epistles, as is the item that he had been a murderous persecutor of the early Jesuists. All this suggests a late manipulation of the traditions of an early strife. To claim that the Gentilizing apostle had been a Jew born and bred would be as natural on the Gentilizing side as to allege that the typically Judaic Peter had denied his Lord; while the charge of persecuting the infant church would be a not less natural invention of the Judaic Christians who accepted the tradition that Paul had been a Pharisee and a pupil of Gamaliel. In point of fact we find the Ebionites, the typical Judaic Jesuists, knowing him simply as "Paul of Tarsus" in their version of the Acts or in a previous document upon which that founded. [313] And many Jewish scholars have declared that they cannot conceive the Pauline epistles to have been written by a Rabbinically trained Jew. [314] This does not preclude the possibility that the original Paul, of whose "few very short epistles" personally penned [315] we have probably nothing left that is identifiable, [316] may have been such a Jew, but the presumption is to the contrary.

On the face of the case, nothing was more natural than that the Jesuist movement should appeal to civilized Gentiles. Judaism itself did so, striving much after proselytes. The question was whether the Jesuist proselytes should be made on a strictly Judaic basis. Now, even if the fall of Jerusalem had not given the impetus to a severance of the cult from the dominating religion, the sacred domicile being gone, it is obvious that an abandonment of such a Jewish bar as circumcision would give the developing cult a great advantage over the other in propaganda among Gentiles. Circumcision must have been a highly repellent detail for Hellenistic Gentiles in general; and a gospel which dispensed with it would have a new chance of making headway. And such a severance certainly took place, though we can put no reliance on the chronology of the Acts. [317] Paul [318] remains a doubtfully dated figure, because the chronology of the whole cult is problematic.

But we can broadly distinguish between a "Petrine" and a "Pauline" Christism. In the Acts (ii, 22-40), which clearly embodies earlier lore, prior to that of the gospels, the Jesus Christ preached by Peter is not represented as a saving sacrifice. As little is he a Teacher, though he is a doer of "mighty works and wonders and signs." If we were to apply the biographical method, the presentment might be held to indicate the Talmudic Jesus. Only after his resurrection "God hath made him both Lord and Christ"--that is, Messiah; and the Jewish hearers are invited to "repent" and be "baptized ... in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins." Peter's Jesus, like him of the Teaching, is the "Servant" of God, not his Son. And there is no mention of a sacrament, though there is noted a "breaking of bread at home" (42, 46) recalling the "broken" (bread) of the Didachê. The sacrament, then, was apparently a secret rite for the Jewish group.

The speeches, of course, are quite unhistorical: we can but take them as embodying a traditional "Petrine" teaching with later matter. Thus we have baptism figuring as a Jesuist rite, whereas in the synoptics, as we have seen, there had been no such thing. The story of Peter being brought to the pro-Gentile view is pure ecclesiastical myth, probably posterior to the Pauline epistles, which are ignored but counteracted in so far as they posit strife between Pauline and Petrine propaganda. Peter and Paul alike are made to teach that "it behoved the Christ to suffer" (iii, 18; xvii, 3), even as they duplicate their miracles, their escapes, and their sufferings. But while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26). At Athens, in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the "unknown God" of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as "a man" raised by God from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will "henceforth go unto the Gentiles." Nevertheless he is made to go on preaching to the Jews. The narrative as a whole is plainly factitious: all we can hope to do is to detect some of its historic data.

Two things must be kept clearly and constantly in view: first, that what we understand by a literary and a historical conscience simply did not exist in the early Christian environment; second, that in all probability the Acts, which to start with would be a blend of tradition and fiction, is much manipulated during a long period. We are not entitled to assume that an "original" writer duplicated the careers of Peter and Paul for purposes of edification. One or more may have wrought one narrative, and a later hand or hands may have systematically interpolated the other. [319] We are to remember further that it was an age in which most Christians, assimilating the eschatology of the Persians and the Jews--the spontaneous dream of crushed peoples--expected the speedy end of the world, and did their thinking on that basis. In such a state of mind, critical thought could not exist save as a small element in religious polemic.

Let us then see what we reach on the hypothesis that early Jesuism even in the first century, and possibly even before the fall of Jerusalem, was running in two different channels--one movement adhering to Jewish usage, making Jesus the Servant of God, and conceiving him as a God-gifted Healer whose death raised him to the status of the Messiah, the promised Christ or Anointed One who should either close the earthly scene or bring about a new God-ruled era for the Jews. For the holders of this view, the Kingdom of God was coming. Jesus was ere long to come in the clouds in great glory and inaugurate the new life. To ask for clear conceptions on such a matter from such minds would be idle. There were none. The one idea connected with the mythical evangel was that Jews should repent and prepare for the new life. To that elusive minimum the latest biographical analysis, assuming the historicity, reduces the "ministry" of the gospel Jesus. [320] The rest is all post-apostolic accretion. On the other hand, the Petrine Jesus has proved his mission for his devotees, first and last, by miracles, and by his resurrection--things which the biographical school rejects as imaginary.

Upon this movement there enters an innovator, Paul of Tarsus. Round him, as round Peter, there are clouds of myth. That he was originally Saul, a Pharisee, a pupil of Gamaliel; that he began as a bitter persecutor of the Jesuists; and that he was converted by a supernatural vision, become common data for the church. That the charge of persecution was a Judaic figment, on the other hand, is perhaps as likely as that the story of Peter's denial of his Master was a Gentile figment. We are in a world of purposive fiction. But the broad divergence of doctrine seems to underlie all the fables. Saul, on the later view, changes his Jewish name to the Grecian Paul when he plans to make the Jesus-cult non-Jewish, using the tactic of monotheism against pagan polytheism in general, in the very act of adding a Son-God to the Jewish Father-God, as so many Son-Gods had been added to Father-Gods throughout religious history. To the early Jewish Jesuists, the notion of the Son had been given by the old cult of sacrifice, with its Jesus the Son--an idea obscurely but certainly present, as we have seen, in the lore of the Talmudists.

Clearly it was the Pauline movement that made of Christism a "viable" world religion. As an unorganized Saviour-cult it would have died out like others. As a phase of Judaism, it could have had no Jewish permanence, simply because its Messianism was a matter of looking daily for an "end of the world" that did not come. After two centuries of waiting, the Jews would have had as clear a right to pronounce Jesus a "false Messiah" as they had in the case of Barcochab or any other before or since. The mere belief in a future life, at one time excluded from their Sacred Books, had become the common faith, only the aristocratic Sadducees (probably not all of them) rejecting it. On that side, Jesuism gave them nothing. Well might Paul "turn to the Gentiles"--albeit not under the circumstances theologically imagined for him in the book of Acts.

Even for the Gentiles, Jesuism was but one of many competing cults, offering similar attractions. In the religions of Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas ("the Lord, a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews' exoteric names for Yahweh"), a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. Had a Frazer of the second century told them that their Adonis and Attis were but abstractions of the annual sacrificial victim of old time, they would have told him, in the manner of Festus (not yet obsolete), that much learning had made him mad. They "knew" that their Redeemer had lived, died, and risen again. The unbelief of philosophers, or of scoffers like Lucian, affected them no more than scientific and critical unbelief to-day disturbs the majority of unthinking Christians. The busy sacrificial and devotional life of Hierapolis would be as little affected by Lucian's tranquil exhibition of it as the life at Lourdes has been by Zola's novel. On that side, we can very easily understand the past by the present.

So little psychic or intellectual difference was there between Jesuism and the other "isms" that Paul's propaganda made no measurable sensation in the colluvies of the Roman empire. As Renan avows, even on the assumption of the genuineness of the Epistles, he was the missioner of a number of small conventicles, all convinced that they alone were the "true Church of God upon earth." It is an error of perspective to ascribe extraordinary faculty to the missionary who either converted or "stablished" such believers; and it is plainly unnecessary to assume in his case any abnormal sincerity or persuasiveness. If we were to estimate him in terms of the records we should describe him either as a halluciné or as a fanatic who had shed Christian blood in his Judaic stage and never in the least learned humility on that score, his phrases of contrition being balanced by the fiercest asperities towards all who withstood him in his Christian stage. But we have no right to draw a portrait of "Paul," who is left to us a composite of literary figments testifying only to the previous activity of a propagandist so-named.

One conclusion, however, holds alike whether or not we accept any of the epistles as genuine: or rather, the more we lean on the epistles the more it holds: Paul had no concern about the life, teachings, or "personality" of his Jesus. [321] His Jesus, be it said once more, is a speechless abstraction. One of the strangest fallacies in the procedure of the biographical school is the assumption that the acceptance of the epistles as genuine involves the admission of the historicity of the Founder. In actual fact, it was a belief in the substantial genuineness of the main epistles that first strengthened the present writer in his first surmises of the non-historicity of the entire gospel record; just as a perception of the historical situation broadly set forth in Judges confirms doubt as to the historicity of the record of the Hexateuch. The two will not consist. On the other hand, Van Manen, who had previously been troubled about the historicity of Jesus, was positively set at rest on that score when he reached the conclusion that all the Paulines were supposititious. This happened simply because he had scientifically covered the field only on the Pauline side: had he applied equivalent tests to the gospels, he would have reached there too a verdict of fabrication. There is strictly no absolute sequitur in such a case. The myth-theory is neither made nor marred by the rejection of the Paulines.

Even those who cannot realize the indifference of "Paul" to all personal records of his Jesus--or, recognizing it, are content to explain it away by formulas--must see on consideration that belief in a Saviour God no more needed biographical basis in the case of Paul than in the case of the priests of Mithra, who, it may be noted, had a strong centre at Tarsus. [322] There is a certain plausibility in the argument that only a great personality could have made possible the belief in the Resurrection story--though that too is fallacy--but there is no plausibility in inferring that a conception of a personality he had never personally known was needed to impel Paul to his evangel, which is simply one of future salvation by divine sacrifice for all who believe. That is the substitution made by Gentile Christism for the miscarrying Messianism of the Petrine doctrine. It was probably the normal doctrine of many pagan cults--Mithraism for one, which for three hundred years, by common consent, was the outstanding rival of Christianity in the Roman empire. [323] It was, then, no specialty of dogma that ultimately determined the success of the one and the disappearance of the other. It was a concatenation of real or "external" causes, not a peculiarity of mere belief.

§ 5. Real Determinants

The more we study comparatively the fortunes of the Christian and the rival cults, the more difficult it is to conceive that it made headway in virtue of sheer monotheism. If we assume that Judaism had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage, inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a "Holy Spirit" superadded, to the God of the Jews.

But the ordinary argument as to the vogue of "pure monotheism" at any time is in the main a series of traditional assumptions. For the more thoughtful of the ancients, polytheism was always tending to pass into monotheism. We see the process going on in the Vedas, in Brahmanism, in the Egyptian system, in the Babylonian--to say nothing of the Greek. [324] It proceeded partly by way of henotheism--the tendency to exalt any particular deity as the deity: partly by way of the compelled surmise that all the deities of the popular creeds were but aspects or names of one all-controlling Power. Wherever creeds met, the more thoughtful were driven to ask themselves whether the heavens could be a mere reflex of the earth, with every nation represented by its special God; and to fuse the national Gods into one was but a step to fusing the Gods of the various natural forces into one. Since religions became organized, there must always have been monotheists, as there must always have been unbelievers.

Nevertheless, polytheism is just as surely popular as monotheism is inevitable to the more thoughtful who remain "religious" in the natural sense of the term. One of the great delusions maintained by the acceptance of the falsified history of Judaism and the conventional religion of the Bible is the notion that the Jews were a specially monotheistic people. They were not. [325] They were originally tribalists like their neighbours, holding by a tribal God and a hierarchy of inferior Gods. To this day we are seriously told that Abraham made a new departure as a monotheist. Abraham is a mythical patriarch, himself once a deity; and the deity represented to have been believed in by Abraham is a tribal God. And not even the tribal God was monotheistically worshipped. The Sacred Books are one long chain of complaints against the Israelites for their perpetual resort to "strange Gods"--and Goddesses. [326]

Two brilliant French scholars have advanced the thesis that this alleged polytheism is imaginary; [327] and that the Israelites in the mass always worshipped only the One God Yahweh. [328] But this position, which is grounded on the inference that the mass of the historical and prophetic literature is post-exilic, outgoes its own grounds. Even if we assume, with the theorists, that Jewish monotheism was universalist from the moment it took shape as monotheism in literature, [329] we get rid neither of the question of pre-exilic polytheism nor of that of popular survival. To say that the post-exilic Jews are "the only Jews known to history," and that the apparently old lore in Genesis is "perhaps really the most modern," being invented for purposes of parable, is only a screening of the fact that the Hebrews evolved religiously like other peoples. A resort to alien Gods is seen to be universal in the religious history of the ancient world. Every conquered race was suspected to have secret power in respect of "the God of the land [330]"; and wherever races mixed, cults mixed. It is only on a provision of special Sacred Books, themselves treated as fetishes, that the attractions of alien cults can be repelled; and not even Sacred Books can make real monotheists of an uncultured majority. Even later Judaism, with its angels, its Metatron, its Satan, was never truly monotheistic. [331] Islam is not. The universalism which in later Judaism still commonly passes for a specialty of the Hebrew mind was really an assimilation and development of Perso-Babylonian ideas; [332] and Satan made a dualism of the Jewish creed even as Ahriman did of the Persian.

In the Romanized world, Judaism had never a really great success of proselytism, just because the more cultured had their own monotheism, and had in Greek literature something more satisfactory than the Hebraic, with its barbaric basis of racialism and its apparatus of circumcision, synagogues and Sabbaths. The proselytes were made in general among the less cultured--not the populace, but the serious men of religious predilections, who were the more impressed by the Sacred Books as rendered in the Septuagint because they were not at home in the higher literature of Greece. And if Judaism could not sweep the Roman empire in virtue of monotheism, Christism could not, especially while it lacked sacred books of its own.

Professor Smith's thesis of a rapid monotheistic triumph is partly founded on his own vivid interpretation of many of the gospel stories of cast-out demons and diseases as a symbolism for successes against polytheism. And his symbolistic interpretation, which is at first sight apt to seem arbitrary, is really important at many points, accounting as it does convincingly for a number of gospel stories. But if we are to assume that all the gospel stories of casting out devils, curing lepers, healing the lame, and giving sight to the blind, were composed with a symbolic intent, we shall still be left asking on what grounds the Name of Jesus made any popular appeal before and after the symbolizing gospels were compiled.

Professor Smith draws a powerful picture of the relief given by monotheism to polytheists. In his eloquent words, the "tyranny of demons" had "trodden down humanity in dust and mire since the first syllable of recorded time"; and the new proclamation "roused a world, dissolved the fetters of the tyrannizing demons, set free the prisoners of superstition, poured light upon the eyes of the blind, and called a universe to life." [333] But let us be clear as to the facts. If by "demons" we understand the Gods of the heathen, there was really no more "bondage" under polytheism than under monotheism. Spiritual bondage can be and is set up by the fear of One God who is supposed to meddle actively with all life; [334] and the Jewish law was in itself notoriously an intellectual and social bondage. It is expressly represented as such in the Pauline epistles. If again we have regard to the fear of "evil spirits," there was really no difference between Jew and Gentile, for the "superstition" of the Jew in those matters was unbounded. [335] Nor is there any ground for thinking that the Jew had more confidence than other people in divine protection from the spirits of evil.

In what respect, then, are we to suppose Jesuist monotheism to have been an innovation? The argument seems to require that Jesuism delivered the polytheist from belief in the existence either of his daimon Gods or of his evil spirits. But obviously it negated neither of these. Daimons of all sorts are constantly presupposed in Jesuist polemic. The "freedom in Christ" proffered to Jews and Gentiles by the Pauline evangel is, in the terms of the case, not a freedom from the terrors of polytheism as such. It was certainly not regarded as a freedom, from "demons," for exorcism against demons was a standing function in the early church for centuries; and the fear of a demon or demons is implicit in the "Lord's Prayer." What is proffered is primarily a freedom from the Jewish ceremonial law, and secondarily a freedom from fear in respect of the judgment-day and the future life, the divine sacrifice having taken away all sin. We are told by eloquent missionaries in our own day [336] that the Christian doctrine gives a new sense of freedom and security to negroes, in particular to the women; though we also learn on the other hand that where the two religions can compete freely Islam makes the stronger claim in respect of its exclusion of the race bar which Christianity always sets up in the rear of its evangel. But here, if the fear of evil spirits is really cast out, it is by a modern doctrine of their non-existence, not found in the New Testament, but generated by modern science.

Whatever preaching of monotheism, then, entered into early Jesuism, it gave no deliverance from belief in evil spirits: rather it added to their number by turning good daimons into bad. What is more, there enters into Christian polemic at a fairly early stage a use of the terms "God" and "Gods" for the "saints" which is on all fours with the common language of Paganism; [337] and this is a much more common note than the "high" monotheism of the Apology of Aristides, which has hardly any Christian characteristics. His monotheism is rather Pagan than Christian. The broad fact remains that so far as we can know the early Jesuist polemic from the gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, the Apocalypse, or the patristic literature, it was not a wide and successful assault on polytheism as such by an appeal to monotheistic instinct, but just a proffer to Jews and Gentiles of a kind of creed common enough in the pagan world, its inconsistent monotheism appealing only to a minority of the recipients. [338] The very miracle-stories which Professor Smith interprets as allegories of monotheistic propaganda became part of the popular appeal as soon as they were made current in documents; and they appealed (he will admit) as miracle-stories, not as allegories. Peter and Paul in their turn are represented as working miracles of healing. It was all finally part of the appeal to primary religious credulity.

Of two positions, then, we must choose one. Either the miracle-stories of the gospels, and by consequence those of the Acts, were as such otiose inventions for an audience which, on the view under discussion, would have been much more responsive to an explicit claim of triumph over polytheistic beliefs, the thing they are said to have been most deeply concerned about, or the miracle stories in general were meant as miracle-stories, only some later symbolists seeking to impose a symbolic sense on the records along with the Gnostic conception that the Christ had spoken in allegories which the people were not meant to understand. This later manipulation undoubtedly did take place. The parable of the Rich One, as Professor Smith convincingly shows, is an allegory of Jew and Gentile--the Rich One being Israel. But it is not by such manipulation that cults are made popular, congregations collected, and revenue secured. And it was on these practical lines that Christianity was "stablished."

The factors which made this one Eastern cult gradually gain ground, and finally hold its ground, as against the many rival cults, were--

1. The system of ecclesiæ, modelled at once on the Jewish synagogue and the pagan collegia.

2. The practice of mutual help, making the churches Friendly Societies--again an assimilation of common pagan practice.

3. The colligation of the churches, primarily by means of a new sacred literature of gospels and epistles, and secondarily by a system of centralized government, partly modelled on the imperial system.

4. The backing of the new Christian Sacred Books by the Jewish Sacred Books, giving an ancient Eastern background and basis for the faith in a world in which Eastern religious elements were progressively overriding the Western, which had in comparison no documentary basis.

5. The giving to the whole process a relatively democratic character, again after the model of the Jewish system, wherein the people had their main recognition as human beings with rights. Thus Christianity was at once a "secret society" under an autocracy, as were so many Hellenistic religious groups, drawing members as such societies always do in autocratically governed States, [339] and a popular movement as contrasted with Mithraism, which always remained a mere secret society, whence its easy ultimate suppression by the Christianized government.

6. It was the wide ramification and popular importance of the Christian system that at length made it worth the while of the emperor to cease persecuting it as a partly anti-imperial organization and to turn it into an imperial instrument by making it the religion of the State.

To explain the process as the morally deserved success of a religion superior from the start, in virtue of the superiority of its nominal Founder, would be to adhere to pre-scientific conceptions of causation, akin to the geocentric assumption in astronomy. Hierology ultimately merges in sociology, as mythology and anthropology (in the English limitation of the term) merge in hierology; and sociology is a study of the reaction of environments as well as of the action of institutions and doctrines. The Christian success was finally achieved by the assimilation of all manner of pagan modes of attraction on the side of creed, and the absolute ultimate subordination of the specialties of early Christian ethic to the business of political adaptation.

And to all attempts to obscure the problem by figuring Christianity as a continuously beneficent and purifying force it is sufficient here to answer that it is in strict fact a religious variant which survived in a decaying civilization, a politically and socially decaying world; that it lent itself to that decay; and that it did less than nothing to avert it.

Where superior hostile power efficiently fought it, it was suppressed just as it suppressed the organized cults of paganism and some (not all) of its own heretical sects. Its further survival, which does not here properly concern us, was but a matter of the renewed "triumph" of an organized over unorganized religions, and of the adoption of that organization by the new barbaric States as before by the declining Roman empire.