avowing and concealing his belief in his Messiahship; prescribing by turns secrecy and publicity to his auditors, blind faith and simple good works to his disciples--he is the heterogeneous product of a hundred mutually frustrative hands, a medley of voices that never was and could not be in one personality. Through his supernatural mask there speak the warring sects and ideals of three centuries: wisdom and delusion, lenity and bitterness, ventriloquize in turns in his name. Even as the many generations of Jewish teachers had preluded all their changing counsels with a "thus saith the Lord," so did their Christist successors seek to mint their cherished dogmas, their rigid prejudices, and their better inspirations, with the image and superscription of the new Logos, the growing God of a transforming world. The later product is thus as unreal as the older. It is only on presuppositions themselves the fruit of belief in the myth that such a growth seems unlikely or impossible, or that something supernormal is needed to account for the wide development of the Christian system. Those who look upon the historic flood in the broad and peopled plain are slow to conceive that it had its rise in the minute rills and random brooks of a far-off mountain land. But it is so that the great rivers begin. CHAPTER II THE ENVIRONMENT The artificial organism which we have seen beginning to take shape is to be conceived, like organisms properly so called, as depending on and adjusting itself to its environment. Of this the nature has been partly set forth in tracing the beginnings of the cult, but it must be considered in itself if the relation is to be at all fully understood. § 1. Social and Mental Conditions in the Roman Empire