The last centuries before the birth of Jesus and the opening centuries of our era were marked by an increasing religious longing and unrest, first among the Greeks and then among the Romans. There was a weariness and a dissatisfaction with the inherited forms of religious expression; and many felt a sense of separation from God, of a gulf between the human and the divine, which they hoped might be bridged by a direct revelation, by a vision, which would grant immediate knowledge of God. These eager desires led in part to an increase in superstition and credulity, over which we need not now pause; in part to the resort to the oriental mysteries of which I have just spoken; and in part to a revival of Pythagorean mysticism and of mystic Platonism among the intellectuals, who no longer felt that the reason and the will gave them the assurance which they required. The later mystic philosophies laid much stress on an ascetic discipline in this life, to secure the soul’s purification, and all taught that the great end of man was to attain to the knowledge of God, wherein lay man’s supreme happiness. Such knowledge, it was thought, could come only through a revelation. Here these philosophies agreed with the teaching of the oriental mysteries, and indeed with popular belief as well. On the question of the immortality of the soul, however, the later mystics brought forward no new arguments. Plotinus, the greatest of the Neoplatonists, virtually repeats the proofs adduced by the founder of the Academy.[31] Undoubtedly during the opening centuries of the Christian era there was a growing belief in the soul’s immortality, or at least an increasing hope of a future life, but such hopes and beliefs, outside Christianity, were not based on new arguments. Plato had once for all in antiquity, supplied the philosophic grounds for confidence. Only in modern times have new arguments of any weight been adduced. * * * * *