So preaching founded upon the epistles of St. Paul, a man “who was one of the stupendously great men of the earth,” and “a superb statesman,” appealed chiefly not to the ignorant but to the naturally stupid! “No such testaments [as the stupid epistles of St. Paul and the silly legends and pious frauds called the Gospels] could be offered by the priests of Mithra, Cybele or Attis. For their deities were after all mythical. Only the Christians had a real man to worship; a unique and divine man, it is true, but nevertheless a person who had known human woe and pain, who had suffered, and who had for at least three days been dead. That element of naturalism, of closeness to human reality, must have made Christianity a faith of extraordinary attractiveness.”[193] Surely Browne does not believe that a simple teacher of ethics, who, with good health, would have been a soldier, was actually dead and rose again, for he has told us that such a legend arose from pious frauds suspiciously like the frauds practiced long before in the case of Zoroaster. He must be meaning to say that the stupid followers of St. Paul and later preachers of miracle religion _believed_ Christ to have been a Divine Man who was once dead. They must, then, have believed in the Resurrection. Is that to be regarded as an element of naturalism? “There was a wondrous comfort in that religion”--of the stupid; “a mighty zeal that made it possible for the martyrs to go to their death actually with a smile on their lips. It took vile slaves out of the slums where they rotted, and somehow breathed supernal heroism into them. It told them that ... death for the truth would mean only life everlasting.”[194] “Then came Constantine, and, in the year 313, an end to the persecutions.”[195] An end to the persecution of a corrupt yet wonder-working Christianity originated by the abnormal St. Paul, you will observe, which must have worked through the powers of hysteria, epilepsy and suggestion. One would think that there was little harm left for Constantine to do. Nevertheless, “It was a costly triumph for Christianity, as every other such triumph has been in all history. What happened to Buddhism when it set out to conquer the Far East, now happened also to Christianity in the West.” What, did it lose its power? No. “It became an official and successful institution--and so degenerate.”[196] A Mithraist ritual, draped in the rags of dying pagan mysteries and Philo-Pauline doctrines from an European Africa, manages to degenerate! It staggers on its downward way, growing more and more drunken with the heady liquor of mystery salvation drawn from a Europe located in the Orient. “A faith cannot be institutionalized,” Browne informs us, “for it is a thing of the spirit.” An institution, then, is something which subsists in matter. Men with faith in anything cannot be drawn together into an institution. Only men who believe in nothing can belong to institutions.