These two illustrations must suffice to suggest the ways in which Christian thought was influenced by its pagan environment.
Finally we will consider an example of parallelism between pagan and Christian ideas. It is evident that the Greeks, who made such large use of successive rebirths, following periods of punishment and purification below, thought of these repeated lives and deaths as forming a moral series, so that moral progress, or degeneracy, at one stage was inseparably connected with both the preceding and the following stages. To them life here and life in the other world were indissolubly bound together. This was also as true of Stoicism with its limited reward for uprightness, as it was of Platonism. The Greek mysteries, which did not concern themselves with metempsychosis, by the fifth century before our era likewise made future happiness depend in part at least on righteousness in this life; the oriental mysteries too made this existence the condition of the next. In short, we may say that wherever men believed in any kind of a future existence, they almost universally held to the common belief that future happiness was to be the reward of a virtuous life on earth. But this is one of the fundamental principles of Christianity. Paganism, therefore, was in accord on this point with its enemy, and thereby favored the propagation of the new religion; moreover, the superior ethical demands of Christianity and its humanitarian principles no doubt found a ready response, especially in enlightened circles.
So we have returned to that which seems to me most important in the relations of paganism and of early Christianity. In many ways paganism provided an environment favorable for the spread of the religion which Jesus founded. The two were at many points irreconcilable, and the former has not always benefited the latter by its influence; but it is a grave historical error not to recognize the areas in which the thought of the two ran parallel. Is the nobler faith the poorer because its paths were made broad by the pagan in his search after Immortality?
1. Eduard Norden, _Aeneis_, _Buch VI_, Leipzig, 1903, is most useful for its commentary, especially on religious and philosophic matters.