So get that picture clear in your minds, of the Roman Empire as a means of sending out the Greek culture everywhere. There is something else that you have to see coming in on top of the Greek thought, distributed along with that thought, through all the world. That something else is Christianity. You have seen this--if you will remember--that in the course of our story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal in their lives. To the ancient Egyptians it had meant very much. To the {223} ancient Babylonians it was the same. The Persians came with the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, which influenced their lives enormously. The Greeks were the first of the peoples to whom religion meant very little. There were a few ceremonies, annually performed, and so on; but nothing that affected their character. With the Romans it was the same. The early Roman had reverence for the "mos majorum"--the custom of their fathers. They had high ideas of justice and of such virtues as courage and of their duties as citizens. But no religion affected their lives or their thoughts. [Sidenote: Influence of the Jews] Now, you saw how the Jews from time to time were dispersed--to Egypt, to Babylonia, to various parts of Asia Minor, to the islands and to the Greek cities. The Greeks, not caring deeply for religious things, although greatly interested in philosophy and speculations about the mysteries of life, allowed the Jews to follow their own religion and customs wherever they settled. And the Jews adhered to their own religion and customs very strictly and tenaciously. They did not lose them in the countries in which they were dispersed. But they did not bring the people among whom they settled to their own way of thinking. They did not try to do so. Their idea of their religion was that it was for them only, for the Jews, for "the seed of Abraham"--that is, the descendants of Abraham. When Christianity came, founded on the Jewish religion, this was all altered. Yet it was not altered just at first. You will remember that it was said that the Gospel, the good message, of Christianity was "for the Jew first, and also for the Gentile." By "Gentile" was meant any man or woman who was not a Jew. {224} But you will also remember that this idea, the idea that Christianity--the religion which branched out from the old Jewish religion--could be for any others than the Jews came as quite a new idea--almost as a shock, as we might say. You will remember perhaps how St. Peter dreamed that dream about the meats that were "common or unclean," as he considered them. In his dream he declined to eat those meats. Then he was rebuked for calling these things, which had been divinely created, common and unclean.