The influence of Egypt upon the religious-ethical life of the West was reënforced by a like influence from Persia, which came through the cult of Mithra.[620] This worship came into Europe by the way of Asia Minor. Its missionaries were seemingly Oriental recruits in the Roman legions. It came bearing many accretions gathered in its passage through the west Asian lands, and yet with all the characteristics which marked the old Persian religion as a religion of combat and strenuousness, of moral striving and moral achievement.[621] During the last three centuries of the Empire the cult spread widely in the Western lands, taking deep root especially in the frontier regions of the Danube and the Rhine, and in the remote province of Britain. This incoming of Mithraism had special significance for the reason that Mithra, as the god of light, was invested with certain moral qualities symbolized by his physical attributes. He was the god of truth and purity. It was this moral element in the cult, in connection with its doctrine of a future life,--the promise and hope of which was dependent upon purification, inward as well as ceremonial, from all earthly stains and impurities,--which in a measure met and satisfied the yearnings of the age, and which, in the great religious and ethical propaganda that marked the later centuries of the Roman Empire, rendered the religion of Mithra the most formidable rival of Christianity in its great competition with the various Oriental religions and cults for supremacy in the hearts and consciences of men.[622] [Sidenote: Relation of the Egyptian and Persian propaganda to that of Christianity] But the pagan priest no more than the pagan philosopher could effect the moral renovation of ancient society. Like the moral propaganda carried on by Cynic, Stoic, and Neoplatonist missionaries and preachers, these efforts of paganism to effect its own moral regeneration failed, perhaps because these pagan cults lacked what Christianity possessed--“the dynamic of a great personality.” Yet these efforts were not without influence upon the ethical development of the Western nations. In two ways the Egyptian and Persian propaganda was a preparation for the moral revolution effected by Christianity: first, it helped to give morality a religious basis, which it did not have in classical antiquity; and second, it taught men to seek in deity and not in themselves the pattern of moral excellence.[623] Thus did Egypt and Persia, through the mediation of religion, contribute important ethical elements to Greco-Roman civilization, and thereby help to give a fresh impulse and a new trend to the moral evolution of the Western world. CHAPTER XII THE ETHICS OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY: AN IDEAL OF RIGHT BELIEF [Sidenote: Ethical import of the Christianization of Rome]