The character of these oriental religions offers a marked contrast to that of the Roman. In my last lecture I pointed out that this latter was a formal, practical, bread-and-butter sort of religion, one that was natural to an unimaginative agricultural people; it was a religion in which the worship of the gods consisted primarily in the exact performance of ritual to secure practical blessings of a material kind. I further tried to show that this religion offered no satisfaction to man’s deeper questionings, made slight appeal to religious emotion, and had little moral effect except in the emphasis which it laid on duty; we also saw that the forms of Greek religion, which were imported into Italy, were serviceable chiefly in that they were cults in which all classes of citizens could share, and because they offered certain aesthetic satisfactions; I likewise spoke of the way in which the Greco-Roman religion of the state fell into decay after the end of the third century before our era, so that before Cicero’s day the intellectual class had lost their belief in it. This did not mean, however, that men had lost their religious longing. Far from it. For there is abundant proof that under the stimulus of Greek philosophy and mysticism, questionings as to the nature of man, his relation to divinity, and his immortality became more earnest. To these questions the Greco-Roman religion offered no answer. The oriental gods, however, were of a very different sort from those of Greece and Rome: they required a spiritual devotion on the part of their devotees and they made strong appeals to the religious emotions. These appeals were increased by the exotic character of these foreign cults, for it seems to be a characteristic of the human mind in time of special need or distress to seek some foreign source of help or relief. Egypt and the East made a far greater appeal to the imagination at the close of the Roman Republic and in the early Empire than they do even today. Furthermore many of these religions could claim the warrant of great age: Isis and Osiris had been mighty in Egypt for two thousand years; the Great Mother of the Gods belonged to a class of Asiatic mother-goddesses of immemorial antiquity; and Mithras came from a period beyond the knowledge of the Roman world. Whenever records failed, pious tradition supplied the need. The devotees formed closed communities, sacred brotherhoods, to which admission was obtained through rites of initiation. Their rituals were essentially mysteries, in which through emotional experiences and revelations the devout gained assurance of divine aid here and hereafter. Furthermore these oriental religions had proselyting priests who recruited the number of devotees by their appeals, and each religion numbered among its followers considerable bodies of men who followed a certain holy life—they were known as sacrati, “the consecrated.” There was, in