It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives beheld the rays of a new hope. At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free. No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the great of this world. On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father. They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof. They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas. For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity was the first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance. Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies, brotherhoods and federations; when they have begun to obey a single directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest, then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true founders of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in all history. The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the ancient empire was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and charity which the Master himself had taught. But on the other side it found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart from the rest of the world. In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men which was as efficient as it was illogical.