No period of man's earlier doubting can be more interesting than that of the centuries just prior to the Christian era, when the peoples of the Mediterranean contributed so much, directly and indirectly, to the preparation for Christianity and to the discovery, or revelation, which finally came and in due time changed the ancient to our modern world. What the preparation was has already been indicated, at least partially, in the references that have been made to the Sophists and to the Pharisees. Christianity has been only the interest, the earned increment, or rather should I not say the compounded principal, of the scepticism, of the formalism and the utilitarianism which beset the Greeks and the Hebrews, to mention no others, as their peculiar civilizations were merging into the larger and deeper life of a great empire. In their several lives the demand came, and came, too, from within, not merely from without, as in all life [p.265] it must come, for use of their gathered treasures, whether spiritual or material, and the rise of Rome was but the result of that demand satisfied, of the use realized. As for the scepticism, this with all its incidents made the use possible, made it possible for the peoples to give or relinquish what they had to the larger life to which they all belonged, while the religion of Christianity spiritualized for them all the resulting empire. Those wonderful races of the Mediterranean, who achieved--at least some of them--such great things in all that counts for civilization, became at the last most extravagant sceptics, not only formulating, but also very generally living up to, the conviction of ignorance and forgetfulness of reality. Everything which their long past had gathered for them they resigned--or let me say crucified--and themselves they threw, as if with an investor's recklessness, upon a world of chance or fate, upon a world seemingly of empty forms in all human relations, a world of disguises for license and of mere conceits of moral power and religious piety. Sensuous mysticism and pantheism, formalism of all kinds, Stoicism, Epicureanism, legalism, and cosmopolitanism were crosses upon which one people and another, one class and another, nailed their long-cherished devotions, their love of God and man and nature, of temple and family and country. A great doubting, then, was truly theirs. A great sacrificial offering was their preparation for Christianity. In a way, with a completeness that seems to have no parallel in history, they put their talents to the bankers--despairing, of course, but hoping also, [p.266] if only their doubting, when it came, may be supposed as genuine as their earlier believing. From the North and from the East and from the South their good men came, and their rich and their wise, and laid what they had at the feet of the life that was new born.