In Palestine Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance, admitted that their Messiah had now come and gone. Egyptians and followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal life. Thus, those who had not been initiated—the poorer classes, most of the women, and the slaves—had a joyous feeling that at last the Mysteries had been revealed, that “many things which were hid had been made plain”. And some students of Platonic philosophy could admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. For they could see in Christ one who had first taught in a new and simpler way, and had then Himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying to say all their lives—that, in order to achieve immortality, it is necessary to “die” to this world of the senses and the appetites, and that he who thus “dies” is already living in eternity during his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death. “Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Lastly, followers of Philo and his school saw in the Christ the Logos itself incarnate in human form, the Word made Flesh. Such were some of the numerous ideas and emotions which had become embedded in the Greek language by the time that, somewhere about a hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose, in the first place, the dogma and ritual of the Catholic Church, and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern Europeans and Americans.