There is now no need for apology if one wishes frankly to consider the genesis of the fundamental ideas and prevailing institutions of earlier and later Christianity, although hitherto a certain religious shyness, which belongs to the national character, may have made English {22} scholars reluctant to attempt the anthropology of our national faith; and the progress of the subject owes more to foreign workers. Our own theological students of distinction have not evaded the question as to the early influences that may have moulded the religious thought of Christ and St Paul; but these were naturally sought mainly in the later Judaism; and though the debt of the developed Christianity to Hellenic philosophy has never been ignored, yet that neither our sacred books nor Judaic literature nor Greek philosophy explain the whole complex of historic Christianity, is a conviction of recent growth, and the investigations to which it has prompted are recent. For instance, it was a new departure of great promise for the future of our science when, in a course of Hibbert lectures delivered some years ago, Dr Hatch publicly expounded the deep indebtedness of Christianity in respect of ritual, organisation, and even religious concept to the Eleusinian Mysteries and other mystic societies of Greek lands. And the few {23} students of Hellenic religion in England have often noted its many ties of affinity with our own, though of these there has been as yet no complete and authoritative account. We may admit that the triumph of a new and great creed may imply a potent revelation, perhaps a sudden mental transformation in the catechumens difficult to equate with any formulated law of evolution. Still we cannot gainsay the experience that as the religion establishes and organises itself, it draws nourishment from the old soil which is full of the living germs of past organisms. Therefore it was inevitable that Hellenic religion should leave a deep impress upon earlier and later Christianity; partly because the religious temper in the Greek world throughout the centuries immediately preceding the adoption of Christianity was more powerful and fervid than it had been in the days of Homer or Pericles, and mainly because Hellenic converts became the pillars of the Church. But the comparative student must pursue the {24} problem further afield and beyond the track of Hellas. The old Phrygian religion, which Professor Ramsay’s travels and investigations have assisted us to know, must be seriously taken into account; for Phrygia was one of the earliest homes of Christianity, its aboriginal religion had germinated in ideas strikingly akin to some that are primary in all or many of the creeds of Christendom; and the morbid and ecstatic temperament of the native Phrygian, which gave so distinct a colour to the Cybele-Attis cult, seems to have appeared again in certain schismatic forms of Christian doctrine in Phrygia, especially in the heresy of Montanism.