The main characteristics of crowd psychology are familiar enough. Crowds do not reason. They accept or reject ideas as a whole. They are governed by phrases, symbols, and shibboleths. They tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction. The suggestions brought to bear on them invade the whole of their understanding and tend to transform themselves into acts. Crowds entertain only violent and extreme sentiments and they unconsciously accord a mysterious power to the formula or leader that for the moment arouses their enthusiasm. Any movement in order to become popular, in order to 'get over' to the general public, has to operate within the limits set by this psychology. The amount of change, adaptation, and development necessary before a movement can fit into these limitations and express itself powerfully within them is so considerable that no historical example can probably be found where the required accommodation has been accomplished in less than three generations. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace, so far as the surviving source material permits, the steps of this accommodation in the case of early Christianity. For some time before Christ the Jewish people had been restless. Their desires and aspirations for national and religious greatness had been repressed and inhibited. The unrest thus generated took various forms; patriotic uprisings, religious revivals, etc. Christ was at first considered merely as another Theudas or Judas of Galilee or John the Baptist. In the pagan world the pax Romana produced a somewhat similar restlessness. Travel increased; wandering, much of it aimless, characterized whole classes of people;[1] there was a marked increase in crime, vice, insanity, and suicide which alarmed all the moralists. This condition of affairs was eminently suitable for the first beginnings of a crowd movement; indeed no great crowd movement can begin except under such circumstances. The wanderings of St. Paul and the other Christians apostles--called missionary journeys--were really only particular cases of a general condition. The same organic demand for new stimulation, the same sense of shattered religious and philosophic ideals prevailed in the pagan as in the Jewish world. It would be hard to find a greater contrast of character than Christ and Lucian. Yet the fiery earnestness with which Christ denounces contemporary Jewish religiosity and the cool cynicism with which Lucian mocks at the pagan piety of the same age have a like cause. Economic pressure on the lower strata of society contributed to the unrest. The slave, the small shopkeeper, and the free artisan had a hard time of it in the Roman world. Economically oppressed classes are material ready to the hand of the agitator, religious or other. In the crowd movements recorded in the Acts we can trace the first beginnings of the Christian populace.[2] "In Iconium a great multitude both of Jews and of Greeks believed but the Jews that were