Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/36

10 twentieth, among the cultivated, they were the titles of the classical divinities of the poets. Still less was the worship of the genius of Rome in the person of the emperor, first the dead emperor, then the reigning despot, anything more than a State function assiduously observed in fear of the dread accusation of læsæ majestatis.

But it was not from this quarter that the awakening came. That arose in the East and swept in wave after wave of religious excitement across to the demoralised, enervated West. We might almost say that Christianity itself was carried over the empire on the crest of a wave of religious revival, if we did not know that it moved on by virtue of its own superb spiritual life. Still, it is just to affirm that it appeared in an age of revivalism, and was the one successful among many rival efforts to bring back the world to a sense of the Unseen. From Asia Minor came the worship of the "great mother," with which was associated the ancient sacrifice of the  and its purifying bath of blood. From Egypt was brought the cult of Isis and Serapis by troops of white-robed, shaven priests, who were to be seen going in procession through the streets of the cities of Europe, introducing mysteries of a dim antiquity to the wondering West—telling of the tenderness of Isis, Queen of Heaven, who prepared the way for the Church's worship of her Queen of Heaven, the Theotokos, the "mother of God"—proclaiming the wonders of Serapis, the god of the unseen world of the dead, with his promise of eternal life. Above all, from Persia came the worship of Mithra, who, from being the angel Messiah of the earlier Zoroastrian religion, having absorbed the Babylonian worship of Bel, became the great Sun-god, the chief divinity of Roman emperors for generations, so that even Constantine had his image on the reverse of coins which bore on the obverse the Christian . So potent was this cult, that Renan has said, "If the world had not become Christian it would have become Mithrastic." Its rites of baptism and of