The Classical religion lived in its vast number of _separate cults_, which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man, essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. Outside the Classical landscape they have never been genuine and living. The divinity is always _bound to and bounded by one locality_, in conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in which the significances lie in the _form_ of its ritual procedure and not in a dogma underlying them. Just as the population was scattered geographically in innumerable _points_, so spiritually its religion was subdivided into these petty cults, each of which was entirely independent of the rest. _Only their number, and not their scope, was capable of increase._ Within the Classical religion multiplication was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for men could practise these cults without _belonging_ to them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the feeling of the nation--that is, the Polis.

In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion--the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, “when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” It is self-evident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false.[313] The relation between this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to the Church--in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in _the creed_.

As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis of all the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued. This is a most important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion enters in the shape of the Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as the cults of the star-gods and Baals (Jupiter Dolichenus, Sabazius, Sol Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion in the form of a Yahweh-cult (for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian communities of the Ptolemaic period[314]), and primitive Early-Christianity too--as the Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show--took substance as a Jesus-cult. And however loudly each of these various religions (which from about Hadrian’s time drove the genuine old Classical deities completely into the background) might proclaim itself as the revelation of the one true faith--Isis styled herself _deorum dearumque facies uniformis_--in reality they carry, one and all, marks of the Classical separatism--that is, they multiply to infinity; every community stands for itself and is local; all the temples, catacombs, Mithræa, house chapels, are holy places to which (in feeling, even though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be attached.[315] Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this piety. Classical cults are _practised_, and one may practise as many of them as one pleases, but of these newer, _a man belongs to one and one alone_. In the old, propaganda is unthinkable; in the new it goes without saying, and the purport of religious exercises tends more and more to the doctrinal side.

From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian and the flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The consequences of the Pseudomorphosis continue, _but it is now cults of the West which tend to become a new Church of the East_--that is, from the sum of separate cults there evolves a community of those who believe in these gods and their rituals--and so there arises, by processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early Judaic, a Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms of detail-procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma concerning the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now represent each other, and men no longer practise or perform them in the old way, but become “adherents” of them. And the little god _of_ the place becomes--without the gravity of the change being noticed by anyone--the great God really present in the place.

Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to its development--the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults into Eastern Churches--has been missed.[316] Yet without this key it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras as cult-deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With these it was never face to face, for the public city-cults had long been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men’s souls. The formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as _a powerful new Church_ and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult-Church, but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which, under a thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same divine principle.

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,[317] 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 place-bound,[318] and had consisted in some symbolical act or process. Within the field of the Pseudomorphosis these freed themselves from their localities; they could be performed wherever initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the Magian ecstasy and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place had transformed themselves into practising Orders. The community of the Neopythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the Jewish Essenes, is anything but a Classical “school of philosophy”; it is a pure monastic order, and it is not the only such order in the Syncretic movement that anticipated the ideals of the Christian hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes. These Pagan Churches had their anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous conversions, scriptures, and revelations.[319] In the significance of images there came about a very remarkable transformation, which still awaits research. The greatest of Plotinus’s followers, Iamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300, evolved a mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid ritual for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally sacrificed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all eternity.[320] He sought even to create cloisters for meditating men and women and to introduce ecclesiastical penance. This great work was supported by a great enthusiasm which rose to the height of martyrdom and endured long after the Emperor’s death. Inscriptions exist which can hardly be translated but by the formula: “There is but one god and Julian is his Prophet.”[321] Ten years more, and this Church would have become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only its power, but also in important details its very form and content were inherited by Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted itself to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The latter structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period when the two were in touch--Constantine the Great acted simultaneously as convener of the Council of Nicæa and as Pontifex Maximus, and his sons, zealous Christians as they were, made him _Divus_ and paid to him the prescribed rites. St. Augustine dared to assert that the true religion had existed before the coming of Christianity in the form of the Classical.[322]