In whatever mode, natural or supernatural, we choose to account for the
early Monotheism of the Hebrews, there can be no question that its
reception by the Gentiles was only rendered possible by the slow
preparation which the human mind had undergone from the philosophers.
In the age of the Caesars nearly the whole educated and cultivated class
had outgrown the polytheistic creed, and though individually liable to
returns of the superstition of their childhood, were predisposed (such
of them as did not reject all religion whatever) to the acknowledgment
of one Supreme Providence. It is vain to object that Christianity did
not find the majority of its early proselytes among the educated class:
since, except in Palestine, its teachers and propagators were mainly of
that class--many of them, like St Paul, well versed in the mental
culture of their time; and they had evidently found no intellectual
obstacle to the new doctrine in their own minds. We must not be deceived
by the recrudescence, at a much later date, of a metaphysical Paganism
in the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools, provoked not by
attachment to Polytheism, but by distaste for the political and social
ascendancy of the Christian teachers.
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