Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/19

 large. It was this Hellenistic Judaism which culminated in St. Paul and the expansion of the Christian Church, whilst orthodox Judaism, that is to say the provincial Jewery of Palestine reverted to its racial attitude under the pressure of circumstances partly reactionary against the too rapid progress of Hellenism and partly political in character.

The old pagan religions showed many local varieties, and from these a world-wide religion could only be evolved by some speculative doctrines which reconciled their divergences. Never has a religion of any extension been formed from local cults otherwise than by the ministry of some kind of speculative theology: sometimes the fusion of cults has spontaneously produced such a theology, as was the case in the Nile valley and in Mesopotamia in early times, and when the theology was produced it brought its solvent power to bear rapidly and effectively on other surrounding cults. As many races and states were associated together in the Greek Empire which, though apparently separated into several kingdoms, yet had an intellectual coherence and a common civilization, and this was still more definitely the case when the closer federation of the Roman Empire followed, philosophy was forced more and more in the direction of speculative theology: it assumed those ethical and doctrinal functions which we generally associate with religion, the contemporary local cults concerning themselves only with ritual duties. Thus in the early centuries of the Christian