The Gnostic speculations were, however, destined to pass out of the hands of unlearned men. Although it was hardly likely to have been noticed at the time, the day was past for national or particularist religions having for their object the well-being of one nation or city; and men’s relations to the Divine world were coming to be looked upon as a matter concerning the individual rather than the State. Alexander’s work in breaking down the barriers between people and people was beginning to bear fruit in the intellectual as it had already done in the political world, and the thoughtful were everywhere asking themselves, as Tertullian tells us, not only whence man and the world had come, but what was the meaning of the evil within the world[290]. Along with this, too, had come a general softening of manners which was extremely favourable to speculation on such subjects, and to which the vagaries of the Caesars of the Julian house have made us somewhat blind. A reign of terror might often exist among the great families in the capital under a jealous or suspicious Emperor, and the majority of the proletariat might there as in other large towns be entirely given up to the brutal or obscene amusements of the arena or the theatre. But in the provinces these things had little effect on the working of the system set up under the Empire; and the civilized world was for the first time, perhaps, in its history, beginning to feel the full benefits of good government and freedom from foreign invasion. It is quite true that the population were then, as at the present day, leaving the country and flocking into the towns, thereby acquiring new vices in addition to their old ones; but this also led, as town life must always do, to increased respect for the rights of their neighbours, and to the extension of the idea of law and order rather than of the right of the strongest as the governing principle of the universe. The Roman law, upon which the jurisprudence of every civilized country is still based, first took coherent shape in the reign of Hadrian; and Ulpian’s fundamental maxim that before the law all men are free and equal was founded on a conception of the rights of the individual very different from the Oriental notion that all subjects high and low were the chattels of the king.