That Samaritan Jesuism, then, may early have outgone the Pauline in making Jesus "the One God," in rivalry to the Jewish Yahweh, is a recognizable possibility. But still we do not reach the conception of a zealously monotheistic cult, relying specially on a polemic of monotheism. Justin fights for monotheism as against paganism, but on the ordinary Judaic-Christian basis. This is a later polemic stage. Nor does the thesis of a new monotheism seem at all essential to the rest of Professor Smith's conception of the emergence of Jesuism. He agrees that it exfoliated from a scattered cult of secret mysteries: the notion, then, that it was at the time of its open emergence primarily a gospel of One God, and that God Jesus, is ostensibly in excess of the first hypothesis. It is also somewhat incongruous with the acceptance of the historic fact that it spread as a popular religion, in a world which desired Saviour Gods. [267] Saviour Gods abounded in polytheism; the very conception is primarily polytheistic; and all we know of the cast and calibre of the early converts in general is incompatible with the notion of them as zealous for an abstract and philosophical conception of deity. Whether we take the epistles to the Corinthians as genuine or as pseudepigraphic, they are clearly addressed to a simple-minded community, not given to monotheistic idealism, and indeed incapable of it. In positing, further, a rapid "triumph" of Christism in virtue of its monotheism, Professor Smith seems to me to outgo somewhat the historical facts. There is really no evidence for any rapid triumph. Renan, after accepting as history the pentecostal dithyramb of the Acts, came to see that no such quasi-miraculous spread of the faith ever took place; and that the Pauline epistles all presuppose not great churches but "little Bethels," or rather private conventicles, scattered through the Eastern Empire. [268] He justifiably doubted whether Paul's converts, all told, amounted to over a thousand persons. At a much later period, sixty years after Constantine's adoption of the faith, the then ancient church of Antioch, the city where first the Jesuists "were called Christians," numbered only about a fifth part of the population. [269] "At the end of the second century, probably not a hundredth part even of the central provinces of the Roman Empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces were practically unaffected."