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Rh communion of bread and wine were denounced by Christian writers as impious imitations of the Christian sacraments. While the coarser Asiatic cults ran rampant in the West, the Greeks were more attracted by the milder rites of Adonis. These Oriental religions had their societies of members, with clergy called "presbyters," so that when the apostles founded churches for their converts, superficial observers in the Greek and Roman world would see at first in the Christian brotherhoods only what was to be expected from the organisers of a new religion.

Lastly, this religious revival was accompanied by attempts at moral reformation and a marked advance in ethical teaching. At Rome Seneca, the tutor and the mentor of Nero and subsequently the mad emperor's subservient minister, taught the loftiest principles of duty that the pagan world had ever known, principles so like much that we find in the New Testament that ready currency was given to the forgeries which supported the erroneous legend of the Roman Stoic's connection with St. Paul. In the East Plutarch was expounding the ancient virtues, basing them on religious faith, and adding to the stern, strenuous rigour of Stoicism a new humanitarianism that was to have a marked effect in softening the brutality of society. This would have attracted more attention in later ages if it had not been outshone by the greater glory of the enthusiasm of humanity that was glowing in the breasts of the new sect from Galilee. The next century saw the lame slave Epictetus teaching bracing lessons of moral independence, and the melancholy Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting up at night by his camp fire on the Danube to write meditations on duty and resignation. Stoicism was winning the adhesion of the strongest, finest natures to a very high type of duty. But its glory was the secret of its failure. Only the strongest, finest natures could breathe the keen air of its lonely heights. The mass of the people never attained to it; and it had no power for recovering the failures. The world was