|Christianity {362}grew. It was a natural product. It did not spring, full-fledged, from any one man’s brain, as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. It was not even invented by any little group or school of men, Petrine or Pauline, the apostles or the disciples, the early church of Jerusalem, Antioch, or Alexandria. Christianity grew--slowly. It developed, bit by bit, for three long centuries, taking shape by gradual stages in all the teeming centres of the Roman world; and even after it had assumed a consistent form as the Holy Catholic Church, it still went on growing in the minds of men, with a growth which never ends, but which reveals itself even now in a thousand modes, from a Vatican Council to the last new departure of the last new group of American sectaries. Christianity grew--in the crowded cosmopolitanised seaports and cities of the Roman empire--in Antioch, Alexandria, Thessalonica, Cyrene, Byzantium, Rome. Its highway was the sea. Though partly Jewish in origin, it yet appears from its earliest days essentially as a universal and international religion. Therefore we may gain some approximate knowledge of its origin and antecedents by considering the religious condition of these various great towns at the time when Christianity began to spring spontaneous in their midst. We can arrive at some idea of the product itself by observing the environment in which it was evolved. Once more, Christianity grew--for the most part among {363}the lower orders of the cosmopolitan seaports. It fashioned itself among the slaves, the freedmen, the Jewish, Syrian, and African immigrants, the Druidical Gauls and Britons of Rome, the petty shopkeepers, the pauperised clients, the babes and sucklings of the populous centres. Hence, while based upon Judaism, it gathered hospitably into itself all those elements of religious thought and religious practice that were common to the whole world, and especially to the Eastern Mediterranean basin. Furthermore, it gathered hospitably into itself in particular those elements which belonged to the older and deeper-seated part of the popular religions, rather than those which belonged to the civilised, Hellenised, and recognised modifications of the state religions. It was a democratic rather than an official product. We have to look, therefore, at the elder far more than the younger stratum of religious thought in the great cities, for the influences which went to mould Christianity. I do not deny, indeed, that the new faith was touched and tinged in all its higher parts by beautiful influences from Neo-Platonism, Alexandrian Judaism, and other half-mystical philosophic systems; but for its essential groundwork we have still to go to the root-stratum of religious practice and belief in Antioch and Alexandria, in Phrygia and Galatia, in Jerusalem and Rome. _It based itself above all on sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection_. Yet again,