was developed by steps which we can no longer trace, the science of astrology, which entered into a close alliance with the religion of Mithras, and shared in its triumphs throughout the Western world. The symbols of the planets and the constellations of the Zodiac by which their path was marked out, and their supposed influence on human affairs defined or modified, figure too prominently on Mithraic monuments to admit of doubt with regard to the close connexion between the two systems. Among the rock-sculptures of Antiochus I of Commagene at Nemrud-Dagh we find the horoscope of the king, who, as we have seen, was an ardent votary of Mithras; and we shall find further confirmation of the fact in studying the rites and liturgy of Mithraism.

6

At this point we must pause to examine the religious and intellectual conditions of the world of Hellenism upon whose threshold the new creed had now set foot. We have travelled far since the days when Matthew Arnold wrote of a Paganism which was never sick or sorry'; the prattle of Gorgo and Praxinoe no longer passes for the typical expression of ancient religious sentiment. Prof. Gilbert Murray, borrowing from Prof. Bury a title for one of his lectures on the four stages of Greek religion-in some ways the most suggestive of the series-gives us as the keynote of our period 'The Failure of Nerve'; and there may be many who would regard the religious phenomena of the Græco-Roman world rather as the result of a rising tide of asthenic emotion' than as a 'necessary softening of human pride.'

6

Neither view does justice to the complexity of a world which, the better we come to know it, seems the more strangely modern. Not for all our admiration of the glorious centuries of Hellenic freedom and their imperishable achievement must we be blind to the fact that its brilliant societies were consumed by the whiteheat of their narrow patriotism, and that its critical intellects scaled heaven only to find it empty. The city of Gods and men,' which took the place of the wóλis, was peopled by a motley crowd, diverse in race and speech and traditions; and this was true as well of its heavenly as of its earthly denizens. But man can neither live nor die to himself; detachment is a luxury which only the few can afford; and in the new world brought into

being by the conquests of Alexander fresh ties were formed between man and man, and man and God.

This is not the place to trace the growth of a system of what has been called 'Hellenistic theology'-a body of doctrine gradually emerging from the clash of creeds and posited by all alike.* Stress has often been laid, and rightly, upon the important part played by Eastern ideas in the formation of the new beliefs. Harnack † has summed up, in a few pregnant paragraphs, the essential concepts borrowed from Oriental religion. Dualism lies at the root of them all. The transcendence of God and the inherence of evil in matter, the sharp antithesis of soul and body, the doctrine of the 'divine spark' which came down from heaven and must strive to return thither by the path of redemption through knowledge-these doctrines were the potent germs which, when fructified by Greek speculation, grew into a tree of mystical knowledge whose branches overspread the ancient world. But we must remember that it was not merely the religious emotions which craved satisfaction. We think of later antiquity as a time when the soul of man was stirred to its depths by a passionate longing to put off the soiled robe of the flesh; when the demand for an assurance indifferently called by the names of Faith and Knowledge became ever more insistent; when allegory and symbolism made it possible for the adept to find in the manifold mysteries' which offered him the means of redemption, facets of a truth shot with many hues, staining that 'white radiance of eternity' which mortal eyes might not behold. But in the Greek world at least the problem of conduct, once posed, never ceased to press for its solution; and the problem of the universe continued to exercise the intellect of a race to which the mechanism of the heavens had always seemed, together with that of man himself, the proper study of mankind.

The subject has been treated in this Review (July, 1910, p. 210 f.) by Mr Edwyn Bevan.

+ Expansion of Christianity,' Vol. i, pp. 31 seq.

In the antithesis between 'salvation by faith' and 'salvation by knowledge' drawn out by Mr Carter in the work cited at the head of this article (which gives a popular account of the religious conditions of the period), Knowledge' seems something different from the Gnosis' of the sects.

We have lately come to recognise with increasing clearness the important part played by the Stoic philosophy in guiding ancient thought into its new channels and thereby contributing to a result which its professors were the last to foresee. The Stoic sage is familiar enough; the Stoic savant deserves to come by his own, for he not only played a leading part in that diffusion of more or less accurate knowledge which was a feature common to the Hellenistic age and our own, but also furnished mankind with a popular philosophy of Nature which was food for the religious imagination. It has often been pointed out that the founder of the school and many of its later leaders were of Semitic origin; but the fact, though suggestive, gives little more than a hint at the source of the Oriental element in Stoicism. We seem to be on firmer ground when we examine the cosmography of the later Stoics. It is now recognised that the Chaldæan' order of the seven planets, in which the Sun occupies the central place, was unknown to the Greeks until the 2nd century B.C., when it was adopted by the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon; * but it was reserved for a greater than Diogenes to popularise, by means of this astronomical speculation, a mystical theology which challenged and all but conquered the Christian faith. The learned mystics of all times have let their imagination run riot in visualising the universe and the divine order of its motions. saw the spindle which turned for ever in the lap of Necessity, and the Sirens standing upon its revolving spheres and uttering the notes of the celestial harmony; Dante, endowed with an imagination richer, if less plastic, than that of Plato, found in the heavens a revelation, not of Necessity but of 'l'amor che muove 'l sole e l'altre stelle.'

Plato

But, for all their literary grace, the visions of Plato and Dante have never acquired the popularity which was enjoyed by the doctrine of Posidonius of Apamea, the master of Cicero, in the early centuries of our era. It was easy for the Stoic philosopher, who regarded the

* Sir T. Heath (Aristarchus of Samos,' p. 107) seems to be right on this point. Others hold that the Chaldæan' order was adopted by Hypsicles, the author of the so-called Fourteenth Book of Euclid. Cf. Cumont, La Théologie Solaire,' p. 471.