I. ROMAN RELIGION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. THE STOICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 III. PLUTARCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 IV. JESUS OF NAZARETH . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 V. THE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS . . . . . . . . . 141 VI. THE CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND JEW . . . . 167 VII. "GODS OR ATOMS?" . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 VIII. CELSUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 IX. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA . . . . . . . . . . 262 X. TERTULLIAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 {1} THE CONFLICT OF RELIGIONS IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE CHAPTER I ROMAN RELIGION On the Ides of March in the year 44 B.C. Julius Caesar lay dead at the foot of Pompey's statue. His body had twenty three wounds. So far the conspirators had done their work thoroughly, and no farther. They had made no preparation for the government of the Roman world. They had not realized that they were removing the great organizing intelligence which stood between the world and chaos, and back into chaos the world swiftly rolled. They had hated personal government; they were to learn that the only alternative was no government at all. "Be your own Senate yourself"[1] wrote Cicero to Plancus in despair. There was war, there were faction fights, massacres, confiscations, conscriptions. The enemies of Rome came over her borders, and brigandage flourished within them. At the end of his first _Georgic_ Virgil prays for the triumph of the one hope which the world saw--for the preservation and the rule of the young Caesar, and he sums up in a few lines the horror from which mankind seeks to be delivered. "Right and wrong are confounded; so many wars the world over, so many forms of wrong; no worthy honour is left to the plough; the husbandmen are marched away and the fields grow dirty; the hook has its curve straightened into the sword-blade. In the East, Euphrates is stirring up war, in the West, Germany: nay, close-neighbouring cities break their mutual league and draw the sword, and the war-god's unnatural fury rages over the whole world; even as when in the Circus the chariots burst {2} from their floodgates, they dash into the course, and pulling desperately at the reins the driver lets the horses drive him, and the car is deaf to the curb."[2] Virgil's hope that Octavian might be spared to give peace to the world was realized. The foreign enemies were driven over their frontiers and thoroughly cowed; brigandage was crushed, and finally, with the fall of Antony and Cleopatra, the government of the whole world was once more, after thirteen years of suffering, disorder and death, safely gathered into the hands of one man. There was peace at last and Rome had leisure to think out the experience through which she had passed.