Even those who cannot realize the indifference of "Paul" to all personal records of his Jesus--or, recognizing it, are content to explain it away by formulas--must see on consideration that belief in a Saviour God no more needed biographical basis in the case of Paul than in the case of the priests of Mithra, who, it may be noted, had a strong centre at Tarsus. [322] There is a certain plausibility in the argument that only a great personality could have made possible the belief in the Resurrection story--though that too is fallacy--but there is no plausibility in inferring that a conception of a personality he had never personally known was needed to impel Paul to his evangel, which is simply one of future salvation by divine sacrifice for all who believe. That is the substitution made by Gentile Christism for the miscarrying Messianism of the Petrine doctrine. It was probably the normal doctrine of many pagan cults--Mithraism for one, which for three hundred years, by common consent, was the outstanding rival of Christianity in the Roman empire. [323] It was, then, no specialty of dogma that ultimately determined the success of the one and the disappearance of the other. It was a concatenation of real or "external" causes, not a peculiarity of mere belief. § 5. Real Determinants The more we study comparatively the fortunes of the Christian and the rival cults, the more difficult it is to conceive that it made headway in virtue of sheer monotheism. If we assume that Judaism had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage, inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a "Holy Spirit" superadded, to the God of the Jews. But the ordinary argument as to the vogue of "pure monotheism" at any time is in the main a series of traditional assumptions. For the more thoughtful of the ancients, polytheism was always tending to pass into monotheism. We see the process going on in the Vedas, in Brahmanism, in the Egyptian system, in the Babylonian--to say nothing of the Greek. [324] It proceeded partly by way of henotheism--the tendency to exalt any particular deity as the deity: partly by way of the compelled surmise that all the deities of the popular creeds were but aspects or names of one all-controlling Power. Wherever creeds met, the more thoughtful were driven to ask themselves whether the heavens could be a mere reflex of the earth, with every nation represented by its special God; and to fuse the national Gods into one was but a step to fusing the Gods of the various natural forces into one. Since religions became organized, there must always have been monotheists, as there must always have been unbelievers.