Between Heathenism and Christianity -Public Domain play online

It is admitted by students of history of every shade of belief that the origin of Christianity and its rapid spread over the ancient world is the most remarkable fact in the recorded annals of the human race. When we remember that it was, from the first, more or less closely identified with the despised religion of the despised Jews; that largely for this reason it had to make its way against a united front, presented by the learned and intelligent in the whole gentile world, while the Jews themselves almost unanimously repudiated it; that the most efficiently organized government that had existed until then, was indifferent or hostile; that it set before the heathen world a condition of society in which all current economic ideas were transformed, and that it demanded a complete renunciation of its time-honored creeds, we may well ask in amazement, How came these things to pass?

Second in order among the great facts of ancient history is the growth of the Roman Empire. Here we see a people at first occupying a few square miles of territory, compelled for nearly fifteen generations to exert themselves to the utmost to keep their enemies at bay, suddenly bursting the barriers that confined them and in less than half this time bringing under their scepter almost the whole of the then known 6world. Romes conquests have been exceeded in rapidity, but they have never been equalled in permanence.