The world in which Christianity grew up was above all things one of extinguished nationalities, of obliterated democracies, of decaying intellectual energy. Wherever the Roman Empire spread, a rigid limit was set to the play of public spirit, whether as criticism of the political order or as effort to improve the social structure. The forms of municipal government remained; but the natural and progressive struggle of classes and interests was at an end. The Jew must give up his polity of applied theocracy; the Greek his ideal of the City State; even as the Roman Senate itself shrank into an assembly of sycophants, content to register its master's decrees. All alike, on pain of extinction, must mutely or fawningly accept the imperial system, and abandon hope of shaping their own political destinies. In such a world the thinking faculty, denied almost all exercise on the living problems of polity and conduct, necessarily turned to the themes that were open to it; and as the very calibre of men's minds had narrowed with the suppression of their freedom, which meant the curtailment of their personality, there was no such general faculty available as could grasp the difficult problems of science and philosophy led up to by the hardy speculation of the ages of freedom and by the skilled specialism of the endowed students of pre-Roman Alexandria. For the mass of the people, above all, save where the Greek drama was still presented to them, concrete religion was the one possible form of mental life; and for the more serious such mental life was at once a solace and a preoccupation. Under a despotism which in so many ways conformed to oriental types, serious men developed something of the oriental aloofness from the actual: from action they turned to brooding; from seen interests to the problems of the unseen. Even in Rome itself, where the upper classes were much more indifferent to Christism than those of the Eastern provinces, the new conditions developed a new interest in theological problems on the pagan side.