e from them forever. They awaited
his resurrection and return in all the heavenly glory of the "Son of Man,"
and saw him in their ecstatic visions, attending their love-feasts,(1403)
or walking about on the lake of Nazareth while they were fishing from
their boats, or hovering at the summit of the mountains.(1404) This was
but the starting point of that remarkable religious movement which grew
first among the lower classes in northern Palestine and Syria,(1405) then
gradually throughout the entire Roman Empire, shaking the whole of
heathendom until all its deities gave way to the God of Israel, the divine
Father of the crucified Messiah. The Jewish tidings of salvation for the
poor and lowly offered by the Nazarene became the death-knell to the proud
might of paganism.

8. But the ways of Providence are as inscrutable as they are wonderful.
The poor and lowly members of the early Christian Churches, with their
leaders, called "apostles" or "messengers" of the community,--elected
originally to carry out works of charity and love,(1406)--would never have
been able to conquer the great world, if they had persisted in the Essene
traditions. They owed their success to the large Hellenistic groups who
joined them at an early period and introduced the Greek language as their
medium of expression. Henceforth the propaganda activity of the
Alexandrian Jews was adopted by the young Church, which likewise took up
all the works of wisdom and ethics written in Greek for the instruction of
the proselytes and the young, scarcely known to the Palestinian schools.
The Essene baptism for repentance was replaced by baptism for conversion
or initiation into the new faith, while the neophyte to be prepared for
this rite was for a long time instructed mainly in the doctrines of the
Jewish faith.(1407) Subsequently collections of wise sayings and moral
teachings ascribed to the Nazarene and handed down in the Aramaic
vernacular, orally or in writing, were translated into Greek. These
together with the manuals for proselytes were the original Church
teachings. The Greek language paved the way for the Church to enter the
great pagan world, exactly as the Greek translation of the Bible in
Alexandria brought the teachings of Judaism to the knowledge of the
outside world.

At first the same obstacle confronted the early Church which had prevented
the Synagogue from becoming a world conqueror, namely, the rite of
circumcision, which was required f