Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but unique, in the development of human character, but that here was created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul's Epistles nor Tacitus nor Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate accident immeasurably superior to them. This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead, he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to assure its victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; "it was Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.