As far, then, as I can see at present, I may have to limit my attention in the lecture-courses of these three years during which I fill this post, to the phenomena of the Mediterranean area, and these are more than one man can thoroughly elucidate in a lifetime, as the manifold activity in various departments of this field, attested by the Transactions of our recent Congress of the History of Religions, will prove to those who read them. And I shall endeavour in the future to follow out one main inquiry through a short series of lectures, as this is the best method for a reasoned statement of consecutive thought. But I propose in this lecture to sketch merely in outlines the salient features of some {4} of the religions of the Mediterranean area, and hope thereby to indicate the main problems which the student of comparative religion must try to solve, or the leading questions he must ask, and thus, perhaps, to be able to suggest to others as well as to myself special lines of future research and discussion. What, then, are the questions which naturally arise when we approach the study of any religion that has advanced beyond the primitive stage? We wish to discover with definiteness what is the idea of divinity that it has evolved, in what forms and with what concepts this idea is expressed--whether, for instance, the godhead is conceived as a vague “numen,” or as a definite personality with complex character and functions, and whether it is imagined or presented to sense in anthropomorphic forms. The question whether the religion is monotheistic or polytheistic is usually answered at a glance, unless the record is unusually defective; but in the case of polytheism careful inquiry is often needed to answer the other morphological questions that press themselves upon us, whether the polytheism is an organised system of co-ordinated and subordinated powers or a mere medley of uncorrelated deities. If the former, whether the unifying tendency has developed in the direction of monotheism or pantheism.