But Seneca, in spite of his inner alienation from the world, remained in active relations with the world. He desired to found a kingdom of virtue upon earth. At the courts of Claudius and Nero he used the arts of intrigue to further his ends, and even quietly approved deeds of violence which he thought likely to serve his cause. Finally, he grasped at the supreme power; and paid the supreme penalty. Stoicism had made an attempt to reform the world, and had failed. The great thinkers began to despair of exercising any influence upon history, the Senate was powerless, all public bodies were deprived of their rights. Then a spirit of resignation came over the world. The alienation from the world, which in Seneca had still been only half serious, was come in earnest. The time of Nero and Domitian was a great epoch in that hidden spiritual history which goes silently forward side by side with the noisy outward history of the world. When Stoicism, in this development, had been deepened by the introduction of neo‐Platonic ideas, it was on its way to become the Gospel. But by itself it would not have given birth to that new thing. It attached itself as a formative principle to Judaism, which was then just breaking loose from the limitations of nationality. Bauer points to Josephus as a type of this new Roman Judaism. This “neo‐Roman” lived in the conviction that his God, who had withdrawn from His Temple, would take possession of the world, and make the Roman Empire submit to His law. Josephus realised in his life that for which the way had been spiritually prepared by Philo. The latter did not merely effect a fusion of Jewish ideas with Greek speculations; he took advantage of the universal dominion established by the Romans to found upon it his spiritual world. Bauer had already pictured him in this rôle in his work “Philo, Strauss, and Renan, and Primitive Christianity.” Thus was the new religion formed. The spirit of it came from the west, the outward frame was furnished by Judaism. The new movement had two foci, Rome and Alexandria. Philo’s “Therapeutae” were real people; they were the forerunners of Christianity. Under Trajan the new religion began to be known. Pliny’s letter asking for instructions as to how to deal with the new movement is its certificate of birth—the original form of the letter, it must be understood, not the present form, which has undergone editing at the hands of Christians. The literary process by which the origin of the movement was thrown back to an earlier date in history lasted about fifty years.