THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.

know the moral background of the world in which it developed.”

M. Cumont is, therefore, a contributor to our appreciation of the continuity of history. Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, but a composite of slow and laborious growth. Its four centuries of struggle were not fought against an entirely unworthy religion, or else our faith in its divine justification would be diminished; it is to the credit of Christianity, and also to the credit of the opponents that succumbed to it, that it finally overcame them. To quote Emil Aust: “Christianity did not wake the religious sense into being, but it afforded that sense the fullest opportunity to be satisfied; and paganism fell because the less perfect must give way to the more perfect, not because it was sunken in sin and vice. It had, through its own strength, laid out the paths by which it advanced to lose itself in the arms of Christianity. To recognize this does not mean to minimize the significance of Christianity. We are under no necessity of artificially darkening the heathen world; the light of the Gospel shines into it brightly enough without this.”*

Finally, the work of M. Cumont and others in the field of the ancient Oriental religions is not an isolated activity, but part of a larger intellectual movement. Their effort is only one manifestation of the recent interest in the study of universal religion; other manifestations of this same interest can be seen in the histories of the Greek and Roman religions by...

• Die Religion der Römer original: "The Religion of the Romans", p. 116.