“They saw,” says a writer who was under no temptation to exaggerate the charity and zeal of the primitive Church, “their fathers and mothers, their sisters and their dearest friends, hurrying onward to that fearful pit, laughing and singing, lured on by the fiends whom they called the gods. They felt as we should feel were we to see a blind man walking towards a river bank.... Who that could hope to save a soul by tears and supplications would remain quiescent as men do now?.... In that age every Christian was a missionary. The soldier sought to win recruits for the heavenly host; the prisoner of war discoursed to his Persian jailer; the slave girl whispered the gospel in the ears of her mistress as she built up the mass of towered hair; there stood men in cloak and beard at street corners who, when the people, according to the manners of the day, invited them to speak, preached, not the doctrines of the Painted Porch, but the words of a new and strange philosophy; the young wife threw her arms round her husband’s neck and made him agree to be baptised, that their souls might not be parted after death[10]....” How could people thus preoccupied be expected to concern themselves with theories of the origin of a world about to perish, or with the philosophic belief that all the gods of the nations were but varying forms of one supreme and kindly power? Before the end of the Ist century, however, this belief in the immediate nearness of the Second Coming had died away[11]. The promise that the second Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus that some of His hearers should not taste of death until they saw the Son of Man come with power[12], had become incapable of fulfilment by the death of the last of those who had listened to Him. Nor were all the converts to the faith which His immediate disciples had left behind them possessed with the same simple faith and mental equipment as themselves[13]. To the poor fishermen and peasants of Judaea had succeeded the slaves and freedmen of great houses—including even Caesar’s own,—some of them professionally versed in the philosophy of the time, and all with a greater or less acquaintance with the religious beliefs of the non-Jewish citizens of the great Roman Empire[14]. The preachings and journeys of St Paul and other missionaries had also brought into the Christian Church many believers of other than Jewish blood, together with the foreign merchants and members of the Jewish communities scattered throughout the Roman world, who were better able than the Jews of Palestine to appreciate the stability and the organized strength of the Roman Empire and to desire an alliance with it. To ask such men, deeply engaged as many of them were in the pursuit of wealth, to join in the temporary communism and other-worldliness practised by the first Christian Church would have been as futile as to expect the great Jewish banking-houses