Note 428 — Chapter X · SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

“He who hath ears to hear, let him hear”—there is no claim to power in these words. But the Western Church never conceived its mission thus. The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, like those of Zoroaster, of Mani, of Mahomet, of the Neo-Platonists and of all the cognate Magian religions were mystic benefits displayed but in nowise imposed. Youthful Christianity, when it had flowed into the Western world, merely imitated the missionarism of the later Stoa, itself by that time thoroughly Magian. Paul may be thought of as urgent; the itinerant preachers of the Stoa were certainly so, as we know from our authorities. But commanding they were not. To illustrate by a somewhat farfetched parallel—in direct contrast to the physicians of the Magian stamp who merely proclaimed the virtues of their mysterious arcana, the medical men of the West seek to obtain for their knowledge the force of civil law, as for instance in the matter of vaccination or the inspection of pork for trichina.