If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and salvation everlasting. Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had made this unavoidable. From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public drunkenness and many other things that were even worse. Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes. As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto the world a primary system of abstract truth and a practical code of conduct, based upon virtue, they now supplied the people of foreign lands who insisted upon images and incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and Dionysus and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above suspicion as far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless enjoying immense popularity. The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had frequented the shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar with their great God Baal (the arch-enemy of Jehovah) and with Astarte his wife, that strange creature to whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very heart of Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized as the official protector of the city of Carthage during her long struggle for the supremacy of the Mediterranean and who finally after the destruction of all her temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the shape of a most respectable and demure Christian saint. But the most important of all, because highly popular among the soldiers of the army, was a deity whose broken images can still be found underneath every rubbish pile that marks the Roman frontier from the mouth of the Rhine to the source of the Tigris. This was the great God Mithras.