the very ideal of a martyrdom, must have awakened very different feelings.  An undercurrent of dissatisfaction, almost of disgust, at the arid and unspiritual seminary teaching of the Pharisees now surged up and came very near the surface.  His bigotry sustained him as a persecutor for a few weeks more; but how if he could himself see what the dying Stephen said that he saw?  Would not that be a welcome liberation?  The vision came in the desert, where men see visions and hear voices to this day.  They were very common in the desert of Gobi when Marco Polo traversed it.  ‘The Spirit of Jesus,’ as he came to call it, spoke to his heart, and the form of Jesus flashed before his eyes.  Stephen had been right; the Crucified was indeed the Lord from heaven.  So Saul became a Christian; and it was to the Christianity of Stephen, not to that of James the Lord’s brother, that he was converted.  The Pharisee in him was killed.

The travelling missionary was as familiar a figure in the Levant as the travelling lecturer on philosophy.  The Greek language brought all nationalities together.  The Hellenising of the East had gone on steadily since the conquests of Alexander; and Greek was already as useful as Latin in many parts of the West.  A century later, Marcus Aurelius wrote his Confessions in Greek; and even in the middle of the third century, when the tide was beginning to turn in favour of Latin, Plotinus lectured in Greek at Rome.  Christianity, within a few years after the Crucifixion, had allied itself definitely with the speech, and therefore inevitably with the spirit, of Hellenism.  At no time since have travel and trade been so free between the West of Europe and the West of Asia.  A Phrygian merchant (according to the inscription on his tomb) made seventy-two journeys to Rome in the course of his business-life.  The decomposition of nationalities, and the destruction of civic exclusiveness, led naturally to the formation of voluntary associations of all kinds, from religious sects to trade unions; sometimes a single association combined these two functions.  The Oriental religions appealed strongly to the unprivileged classes, among which genuine religious faith was growing, while the official cults of the Roman Empire were unsatisfying in themselves and associated with tyranny.  The attempt of Augustus to resuscitate the old religion was artificial and unfruitful.  The living movement was towards a syncretism of religious ideas and practices, all of which came from the Eastern provinces and beyond them.  The prominent features in this new devotion were the removal of the supreme Godhead from the world to a transcendental sphere; contempt for the world and ascetic abnegation of ‘the flesh’; a longing for healing and redemption, and a close identification of salvation with individual immortality; and, finally, trust in sacraments (’mysteries,’ in Greek) as indispensable means of grace or redemption.  This was the Paganism with which Christianity had