at is
to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven and Hell, and of Angels good
and evil, and it speaks of a "garden of Righteousness" with the "Tree of
Wisdom" in its midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first century
B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.

(1) Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with
prophecies of a coming Mahdi.

(2) See Edition by R. H. Charles (1893).

But the Savior-god, as we also know, was a familiar figure in Egypt. The
great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both in his life and death: in
his life through the noble works he wrought for the benefit of mankind,
and in his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness and
his resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven. (1) The Egyptian
doctrines descended through Alexandria into Christianity--and though
they did not influence the latter deeply until about 300 A.D., yet they
then succeeded in reaching the Christian Churches, giving a color to
their teachings with regard to the Savior, and persuading them to accept
and honor the Egyptian worship of Isis in the Christian form of the
Virgin Mary.

(1) See ch. ii.

Again, another great stream of influence descended from Persia in the
form of the cult of Mithra. Mithra, as we have seen, (1) stood as a
great Mediator between God and man. With his baptisms and eucharists,
and his twelve disciples, and his birth in a cave, and so forth,
he seemed to the early Fathers an invention of the devil and a most
dangerous mockery on Christianity--and all the more so because his
worship was becoming so exceedingly popular. The cult seems to have
reached Rome about B.C. 70. It spread far and wide through the Empire.
It extended to Great Britain, and numerous remains of Mithraic
monuments and sculptures in this country--at York, Chester and other
places--testify to its wide acceptance even here. At Rome the vogue of
Mithraism became so great that in the third century A. D., it was quite
doubtful (2) whether it OR Christianity would triumph; the Emperor
Aurelian in 273 founded a cult of the Invincible Sun in connection with
Mithraism; (3) and as St. Jerome tells us in his letters, (4) the latter
cult had at a later time to be suppressed in Rome and Alexandria by
PHYSICAL FORCE, so powerful was it.

(1) Ch. ii.

(2) See Cumont, op. cit., who says, p. 171:--"Jamais, pas meme a
l'epoque des invasions mussulmanes, l'Europe ne sembla plus pres
de devenir as