Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/219

Rh Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of a religion may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its tolerance, and there were such limits in Classical religions as in others. It was, indeed, one essential character of these religions that they were numerous, and another that they were religions of pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of toleration, as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for the cult-formalities as such was postulated and required, and many a philosopher, even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this law by word or deed, was made to realize the limits of Classical toleration. The reciprocal persecutions of the Magian Churches are something different from this; there it was the duty of the henotheist to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false tenets. Classical cults would have tolerated the Jesus-cult as one of their own number. But the cult-Church was bound to attack the Jesus-Church. All the great persecutions of Christians (corresponding therein exactly to the later persecutions of Paganism) came, not from the "Roman" State, but from this cult-Church, and they were only political inasmuch as the cult-Church was both nation and fatherland. It will be observed that the mask of Cæsar-worship covered two religious usages. In the Classical cities of the West, Rome above all, the special cult of the Divus arose as a last expression of that Euclidean feeling which required that there should be legal and therefore sacral means of communication between the body-unit man and the body-unit God. In the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Cæsar as Saviour, God-man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church brought to expression in a supremely national form. The sacrifice for the Emperor was the most important sacrament of the Church — exactly corresponding to the baptism of the Christians — and it is easy, therefore, to understand the symbolic significance in the days of persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts. All these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma-drinking of the Persians, the Passover of the Jews, the Lord's Supper of the Christians, similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal ceremonies amongst the Mandæans, the Christians, and the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Indeed, the individual cults of the Pagan Church might be regarded almost as sects and orders — a view which would lead to a much better understanding of their reciprocal propaganda.

All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those founded by the Pythagoreans in the South-Italian cities about 500 B.C, had been placebound, and had consisted in some symbolical act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed themselves from their localities; they could