Antioch, where Christianity thus took its first feeble steps, was a handsome and bustling commercial city, the capital of the Greek Seleucid kings, and the acknowledged metropolis of the Syrian area. _At the time of Paul (if there was a Paul)_, it probably contained half a million people; it was certainly the largest town in Asia, and worthy to be compared with Rome itself in the splendour of its buildings. Many things about its position are deserving of notice. It stood upon the banks of the Orontes, a {365}sacred stream, ensconced in a rich agricultural plain, fourteen miles from the river’s mouth. Its Ostia was at Selucia, the harbour whence flowed the entire export trade of Syria and the east towards Hellas and Italy. The Mediterranean in front connected it with Rome, Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece; the caravan routes across the Syrian desert in the rear put it in communication with the bazars of Mesopotamia and the remoter east. It was thus the main entrepôt of the through trade between two important worlds. The Venice of its time, it lay at the focal point where the highroads of Europe and of Asia converged. Scholars of repute have pointed out the fact that even earlier than the days of Paul, Buddhist ideas from India seem to have dribbled through and affected the Syrian world, as Zoroastrian ideas a little later dribbled through and affected the thought of Alexandria: and some importance has been attached to this infiltration of motives from the mystical east. Now, I do not care to deny that budding Christianity may have been much influenced on its ritual and still more on its ethical side by floating elements of Buddhist opinion: that the infancy of the Christ may have been nursed by the Magi. But on the whole I think the facts we have just been considering as to the manufacture of artificial human gods and the nature and meaning of piacular sacrifices will suffice to show that Christianity was chiefly a plant of home growth. The native soil contained already every essential element that was needed to feed it--the doctrine of the Incarnation, the death of the Man-God, the atoning power of his Blood, the Resurrection and Ascension. So that, while allowing due weight to this peculiar international position of Antioch, as the double-faced Janus-gate of Europe and Asia, I am not inclined to think that points peculiar to Buddhism need have exercised any predominant influence in the evolution of the new religion. For we must remember that Buddhism itself did but subsume into its own fabric ideas {366}which were common to Peru and Mexico, to Greece and India, to Syria and Egypt, and which came out in fresh forms, surging up from below, in the creed of Christendom. _If anything is clear from our previous researches it is this--that the world has never really had more than one religion--“of many names, a single central shape,”_ as the poet phrases it.