us preached to the Scipionic circle. From this the Roman learnt
that as a part of the divine universe Man himself is divine: that as
endowed with a portion of that Reason which itself is God, he has a
sacred duty to perform in using it. Thus, as the Universal was revealed,
so the Individual was ennobled; and the only thing wanting to make of
this a real religion was a bond that might unite the two more
effectually in conduct as well as in thought. Though a later development
of Stoicism did indeed all but achieve this union, that of the later
Republic failed to do so, because it inherited the old Stoic neglect of
the emotional side of man's nature, and could take little advantage from
a strong current of mystical feeling that was running side by side with
it. The Stoic ingredient in the soil which was being prepared for
Christianity was rich and valuable, but in this one respect it was poor.
It was intellectually beautiful, but it stirred as yet no "enthusiasm of
humanity."[957]

Another ingredient in the soil was that imaginative transcendentalism
which we discussed under the name of Mysticism, in which the soul
becomes of greater interest than the body, and a strange yearning
possesses the mind to speculate on the nature of the soul, its existence
before this life, and its lot in another world. These imaginative
yearnings were not native to the Roman, who had never had any very
definite idea of a future life, nor had ever troubled himself about a
previous one; they filtered through the Pythagorean and Platonic
philosophy into that type of later Stoicism which attracted him. They
were hardly treated in Roman society with real religious earnestness,
except perhaps in some few moments of sorrow and emotion such as I dwelt
on in the experience of Cicero. But the mere fact that they were in the
air at Rome is of importance for us. They _stimulated the imaginative
faculty in religious thought_; they kept alive in the minds at least of
some men the questions why we are here, what we are, and what becomes of
us after death. They prepared the Roman mind for Christian eschatology;
and this, though never so important in the Latin Church as in the
Greek, was yet an important part of the teaching of the early Church.
St. Paul exactly expresses the yearning thus dimly foreshadowed in the
mystical movement of which I am speaking: "We that are in this
tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed,
but that we