legendary portraits accepted as faithful likenesses of their Lord. Fables were invented, like that of Veronica's napkin, to give currency to certain heads as the Christ's own image of himself miraculously imprinted on a cloth. They claimed to have seen him, in moments of ecstasy; they ascribed to his prompting, states of feeling, purposes and courses of action. By every means they created and deepened the impression that the Divinity they worshipped was a real God, and no intellectual abstraction. This was the very thing the pagan world wanted--a _personal_ Deity, Providence, Saviour. Through their acquiescence in this demand, other oriental faiths, without a tithe of Israel's grandeur--mythological, superstitious, sensual even--gained a popularity that Judaism could not attain. The strange Egyptian divinities drew many to their shrines. Three emperors--Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus--are said to have been devoted to the mysteries of Isis and Serapis. Juvenal describes Roman women as breaking the ice on the frozen Tiber, at the dawn of day, and plunging thrice into the stream of purification; as painfully dragging themselves on bleeding knees around the field of Tarquin; as projecting pilgrimages to Egypt, expeditions in search of the holy water required at the shrine of the goddess. The Persian Mithras had his throngs of adoring devotees. The prominence given at this period to the statues of Mithras, the existence of temples to Isis and Serapis, attest the power that these divinities exerted over the imagination of the Italian people. These people demanded deities human in shape and attributes. So clamorous were they for images, that they would consecrate them at any cost of decency. The emperor Augustus was deified. His statue on the public square, his insignia on a banner, his name on a shield excited veneration. The noblest religion without a human centre was less prized than the ignoblest with one, and the faith of Israel was compelled to yield to the degrading fascinations of the Bona Dea. The Christian Jews, with their Messiah, took the popular desire at its best, and satisfied it. The image they presented, though to the mind's eye only, was so much more gracious than the loveliest that eastern or western art furnished that its acceptance was assured. Early in the fourth century the impression made was too deep to be overlooked by the controllers of public opinion. The politic Constantine, seeking a spiritual ally, and finding none among the faiths of his own land, called in the Nazarene to aid him in establishing an empire over the souls of his subjects. Christ was king in fact before he was formally crowned.