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 in aim, and there was a craving, it may be quite irrational, but still human, which longed to create, or at least to imagine, something higher than self, something mightier than mind, something to which the irrational and traditional side of man could appeal; and so, as one God died, a newer and more mystical personage took his place. Jupiter had ceased to dominate the world with a visible potency, Mithra, more mystical, more sentimental, took his place as a power, so intimately connected with man's physical parts and passions, that the world of philosophy, which dealt with the body through the mind, could scarcely touch the fringes of his garment.

There was, therefore, in Rome at the beginning of the third century A.D. a party of men strongly attached, for sentimental or neurotic reasons, to one or other of the recently imported Eastern creeds; but there was also a large party of conservatives whose atheism was as cool and detached as that of Horace; and a still larger party of ordinary people whose attachment to the old practices or Roman Polytheism expressed all that they considered either necessary or expedient, from the point of view of ordinary piety. But in each case the religion was subordinated to a paramount political, not to an essentially religious life, which life was evolving, as we learn, from nearly all authors, towards degeneration, despite the fact that culture and literature was still based upon the philosophy of intellectual freedom.

Unfortunately, the very rule which had made for