Note 49.1 — The Evolution of Religion

As regards the affinities discernible in respect of hieratic institutions, the organisation of churches, the relations of Church and State, I have only space to cite a few salient illustrations. The earliest Christian Church, a private religious society united by the bond of faith, the members contributing to each other’s wants, with a simple democratic organisation of ecclesia and sacred officials, would not strike the contemporary Greco-Roman world as an unfamiliar phenomenon; for its family likeness to the Hellenic “thiasoi” or brotherhoods of cult was sufficiently obvious, and has often been commented on. They, like it, were often proselytisers, and, ignoring the barriers of caste, gens, and city, accepted in principle the religious fellowship of man. “It is well to consider all men friends and brothers, as being the family of God,” says Apollonius,49.1 echoing the doctrine of the Stoics. The soil was ready prepared for the new cosmopolitan religion.