Many circumstances undoubtedly contributed to this result. A consolidated empire, with nearly all the representative nations fused into a union, comprising all the existing elements of culture and forces of civilisation; the great Roman highways, with means of easy communication so abundant as to be surprising to us; the widespread understanding of the two leading languages, making virtually of one speech a great section of the most important part of the world; the innumerable communities of Jews, everywhere tolerated, and “cutting channels through the adamantine mass of heathen society,”[325] immensely aided the missionary activities of the apostles and their followers. Moreover, the moral and religious condition of the Empire, the bankruptcy of the old faith, the despair and confusion and perplexity of people, everywhere seeking mightier or better deities than they knew, everywhere trembling “between the two immensities of terror,” rendered possible the victory of Christianity. Multitudes were thus prepared to welcome a Deliverer who had come in the name, not of Jupiter Maximus Tonans, but of the Father in heaven, to give peace in this world’s tribulations, and sure hope of joy in the world beyond it.[326] And yet all this, even when added to Gibbon’s five causes, will not account for the historical puzzle, that a faith, originating in a manger in a Syrian cattle-shed, brooded over for thirty years of a life of poverty and toil, preached for three, with the result of being almost universally rejected, and quenched to all appearance in the blood of crucifixion, should immediately after the death of its Founder have broken out all over the Roman world. Converting its agents from farms, and harbours, and prisons, it called them to martyrdom; for it sent them—poor “weavers, and shoe-makers, and fullers, and illiterate clowns”—to proclaim “barbarous dogmas,” and “extravagant hopes,” “universally detested” by Jew and Gentile, and to bear the full weight of a prolonged series of persecutions involving indescribable tortures and disgrace.[327] Yet somehow it never paused for a moment, never abated one iota of its claim, till in the course of a few generations it was found upon the throne. We never will explain this wonder by showing how, as a system of ethics, or as a new theory of life, it found the condition of the world favourable to its reception. The correlation of the state of the world to the new faith has been claimed as providential,—an indication of a Divine purpose making all things work together, for this manifestation of a new power or principle of life in society, which as yet has had no historical counterpart.[328]