rsecutor for a
few weeks more; but how if he could himself see what the dying Stephen
said that he saw? Would not that be a welcome liberation? The vision
came in the desert, where men see visions and hear voices to this day.
They were very common in the desert of Gobi when Marco Polo traversed
it. 'The Spirit of Jesus,' as he came to call it, spoke to his heart,
and the form of Jesus flashed before his eyes. Stephen had been right;
the Crucified was indeed the Lord from heaven. So Saul became a
Christian; and it was to the Christianity of Stephen, not to that of
James the Lord's brother, that he was converted. The Pharisee in him was
killed.

The travelling missionary was as familiar a figure in the Levant as the
travelling lecturer on philosophy. The Greek language brought all
nationalities together. The Hellenising of the East had gone on steadily
since the conquests of Alexander; and Greek was already as useful as
Latin in many parts of the West. A century later, Marcus Aurelius wrote
his Confessions in Greek; and even in the middle of the third century,
when the tide was beginning to turn in favour of Latin, Plotinus
lectured in Greek at Rome. Christianity, within a few years after the
Crucifixion, had allied itself definitely with the speech, and
therefore inevitably with the spirit, of Hellenism. At no time since
have travel and trade been so free between the West of Europe and the
West of Asia. A Phrygian merchant (according to the inscription on his
tomb) made seventy-two journeys to Rome in the course of his
business-life. The decomposition of nationalities, and the destruction
of civic exclusiveness, led naturally to the formation of voluntary
associations of all kinds, from religious sects to trade unions;
sometimes a single association combined these two functions. The
Oriental religions appealed strongly to the unprivileged classes, among
which genuine religious faith was growing, while the official cults of
the Roman Empire were unsatisfying in themselves and associated with
tyranny. The attempt of Augustus to resuscitate the old religion was
artificial and unfruitful. The living movement was towards a syncretism
of religious ideas and practices, all of which came from the Eastern
provinces and beyond them. The prominent features in this new devotion
were the removal of the supreme Godhead from the world to a
transcendental sphere; contempt for the world and ascetic abnegation of
'the flesh'; a longing f