It lies on the face of the case that the Christist cult could make no rapid headway by offering to people of any class higher ethical ideals than they had already been wont to recognize. To claim that it did is to upset the concurrent theorem that the pagan world into which Christianity entered was profoundly corrupt. If men and women on all hands welcomed the new teaching for its moral beauty, they must already have acquired a taste for such beauty, and cannot conceivably have been "sunk in trespasses and sins." It is true that in every unlettered population--in modern India and pre-Christian Mexico as well as in classic antiquity--a repute for asceticism has brought great popular honour, men reverencing a self-denial they feel unable to practise. But a cult and a community which actually seek to embrace the common people cannot exact from them a "saintliness" which in the terms of the case is a rare phenomenon. In reality the Christian ethic was duplicated at every point by that of Judaism or of one or other of the pagan schools or cults; and the contrast still commonly drawn between the church and its moral environment is framed by merely comparing Christian theory with popular pagan practice. Theory for theory, and practice for practice, there was no such difference. If the ethical literature of the period be first taken, it is found that the teaching of (for instance) Seneca had so many points of identity with that of Paul as to give colour to a Christian theory that the pagan moralist and the apostle had had intercourse. It is now admitted that no such intercourse took place, and that the pretended letters of Paul and Seneca are Christian forgeries. But the community of doctrine is undisputed. It was largely traceable to elements of oriental ethic which had been imported into Greek Stoicism by writers of Semitic race; and on Seneca's side the moral principles involved are at some points much further developed than they can be said to be in either the gospels or the epistles. In some respects he is concrete and practical where the gospels are vague and abstract, as when he condemns all war and urges habits of kindly fellowship between masters and slaves. On the latter head, Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish Platonist, went still further, explicitly condemning slavery as the worst of evils and denying Aristotle's dictum that for some men it is the natural state. Such doctrines as those of reciprocity and the forgiveness of injuries were of course the common property of the moralists of all civilized countries before the Christian era--of the teachers of China and India as well as of Greece; and the duty of practical beneficence, which in a section of the gentilizing third gospel is made the whole question of moral and religious life, was indicated in almost exactly the same terms in the much more ancient sacred books of Egypt.