Note 44 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

In positing, further, a rapid “triumph” of Christism in virtue of its monotheism, Professor Smith seems to me to outgo somewhat the historical facts. There is really no evidence for any rapid triumph. Renan, after accepting as history the pentecostal dithyramb of the Acts, came to see that no such quasi-miraculous spread of the faith ever took place; and that the Pauline epistles all presuppose not great churches but “little Bethels,” or rather private conventicles, scattered through the Eastern Empire.44 He justifiably doubted whether Paul’s converts, all told, amounted to over a thousand persons. At a much later period, sixty years after Constantine’s adoption of the faith, the then ancient church of Antioch, the city where first the Jesuists “were called Christians,” numbered only about a fifth part of the population.45 “At the end of the second century, probably not a hundredth part even of the central provinces of the Roman Empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces were practically unaffected.”