“To explain how that could have happened, one must remember what was going on just then in the Roman Empire. A great hunger was gnawing at its vitals, a desperate hunger for salvation.”[177] Now what does Browne mean by salvation in this instance? Ethical salvation? Salvation by law and order? Or salvation in the miraculous Christian sense, i.e., salvation from the macula of original sin? He is evidently writing from vague memories of what he has read and heard, from a host of facts, fancies and prejudices which he has uncritically allowed to find lodgment in his mind. It is not likely that he means anything in particular. But he tells us that-- “The whole Roman world seemed to be writhing in the throes of death, and the fear of that death drove it to a frantic and panicky clutching after any and every chance of life. As a result, the mysteries, those secret cults [of Greece and Rome] which whipped men into orgies of hopefulness, flourished everywhere.... Those mysteries ... in origin ... were largely Oriental, and in essence they grew out of the belief that by certain magic rites a man could take on the nature of an immortal god.... That same legend was told--with variations--concerning Dionysus, Osiris, Orpheus, Attis, Adonis, and heaven knows how many other such gods. Arising out of the common desire for an explanation of the annual death and rebirth of vegetation, that legend was common to many parts of the world.”[178] It seems that what so agitated the Romans was a desire to explain the annual death and rebirth of vegetation--a phenomenon almost unknown in the climate of Rome. Anyway, they ran to these explanations in the midst of their panicky fear. But surely those mad pagan orgies which whipped men into hopefulness were not puritanical, ethical orgies. Nor were early Christian orgies, according to Browne. For “By the first century of this era, the legend [of Christ] had spread to every civilized province of the Roman Empire ... and had everywhere made the people drunk with the heady liquor of its mystery salvation.”[179] So Browne now admits that Christianity, even in the first century of its era, had ceased to be a mere ethic and become a “mystery salvation.” Granting for the sake of an argument which is no argument that, coming from One whose “all consuming passion” was the obsessive hope of His people that some day they would be “miraculously freed” by the Messiah it could ever have been anything else--granting this self-contradictory assumption, where are we to suppose the heady liquor came from? Answer, “From more learned folk.” For--