Much attention has been paid in recent years to the religious development of the Romans under the Empire, and to the momentous conflict of religions which was going on from the age of Hadrian until the final triumph of Christianity. Humanly speaking, it was “touch and go” between several religions competing for the vacant place in the faith of the Empire, and at the last the strife was practically narrowed down to a duel between two oriental monotheistic systems, Mithraism[91] and Christianity. The subject is too vast for anything like adequate treatment here. But I would emphasise one point of view which is often overlooked. The Roman state is too often regarded merely as the enemy and persecutor of the Christian religion. It is forgotten how large a share Rome may claim in its establishment. Not only did the Romans discover Christianity, but they organised it and sent it forth conquering and to conquer in the wake of the legions. It is not a case of a wicked and corrupt people suddenly converted in the midst of its sins. On the contrary it is easy to show that the thinkers of the Roman Empire were tending towards philosophic and religious ideas which made them ready to accept with astonishing rapidity both the ethical teaching and the theological revelations of the Son of God. It is unnecessary to remind the modern reader how large a part the Greek philosophy of Stoicism with its Roman modifications had played in shaping the thoughts of one Roman citizen, Paul of Tarsus. Philo, the Alexandrian Platonist, had developed a doctrine of the Divine _Logos_, which profoundly influenced the philosophy of the fourth Evangelist, and through him the whole course of Christian teaching. The Romans may have added little to abstract philosophy or to metaphysics, but they made the somewhat barren abstractions of Zeno the Stoic into something more than a philosophy, into a faith which had a power to influence conduct far beyond the power of the State system of half-Greek Olympian Gods. If the power and the sincerity of a religion may be tested rather by its martyrs than by its proselytes, Stoicism had a worthy record. Men like Thrasea Pætus, Helvidius Priscus, and Barea Soranus were facing the tyrant’s frown for the sake of their Stoic sense of duty, just as truly as Peter and Polycarp.