has been its insistence on
"morality." Some modern writers indeed have gone so far--forgetting, I
suppose, the Stoics--as to claim that Christianity's chief mark is its
high morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the
moral sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that,
in the true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been
much more 'moral' as a rule--that is, ready as individuals to pay
respect to the needs of the community--than the later and more civilized
societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of
the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on
the just-mentioned kind of morality, which we should call CIVIC DUTY TO
ONE'S NEIGHBOR, the Christian made morality to consist more especially
in a mans DUTY TO GOD. It became with them a private affair between a
mans self and-God, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end
to a very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief
inspiration was not the helping of one's fellow-man but the saving of
one's own soul.

There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between
Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we
may recognize these two--(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the
world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b)
the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of
duty to God rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to
society generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led
to this differentiation.

Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the
effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known
world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities,
with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken
up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially
modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life
and religion was already being traced. By the time of the founding of
the first Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly
extended and established the process. The Mediterranean had become a
great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all
directions; tourists visited its shores. The known world had become one.
The numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies with