ispose with profit, in the shape of forms of ritual,
and, what was even of greater value, words of real significance in the
old religion, which were destined to become of permanent and priceless
value in the Christian speech of the western nations. There were also
other points in the society and organisation of the Roman Empire which
were of great importance for the growth of the new creed; but these lie
outside my proper subject, and have been dealt with by Professor Gardner
in the lecture to which I alluded at the beginning of this lecture, and
most instructively by Sir W. M. Ramsay in more than one of his books,
and especially in _St. Paul, the Traveller and Roman Citizen_.

And yet, all this taken together, so far from explaining Christianity,
does not help us much in getting to understand even the conditions under
which it grew into men's minds as a new power in the life of the world.
The plant, though grown in soil which had borne other crops, was wholly
new in structure and vital principle. I say this deliberately, after
spending so many years on the study of the religion of the Romans, and
making myself acquainted in some measure with the religions of other
peoples. The essential difference, as it appears to me as a student of
the history of religion, is this, that whereas the connection between
religion and morality has so far been a loose one,--at Rome, indeed, so
loose, that many have refused to believe in its existence,--the _new
religion was itself morality_,[990] but morality consecrated and raised
to a higher power than it had ever yet reached. It becomes active
instead of passive; mere good nature is replaced by a doctrine of
universal love; _pietas_, the sense of duty in outward things, becomes
an enthusiasm embracing all humanity, consecrated by such an appeal to
the conscience as there never had been in the world before--the appeal
to the life and death of the divine Master.

This is what is meant, if I am not mistaken, by the great contrast so
often and so vividly drawn by St. Paul between the spirit and the flesh,
between the children of light and the children of darkness, between the
sleep or the death of the world and the waking to life in Christ,
between the blameless and the harmless sons of God and the crooked and
perverse generation among whom they shine as lights in the world. I
confess that I never realised this contrast fully or intelligently until
I read through the Pauline Epistles from b