none of these things could have come about; and that for the same reason that you cannot have total darkness in a room in which a lamp is lighted.  But this darkness was total:  intolerance is the negation of spiritual light.  Of all the various movements in the Roman world that had not actual members of the Lodge behind and moving them, Christianity had the greatest impetus; and it was the one that first entered into this murk and deadly gloom.  So that it may seem, to an impartial but not too deeply-seeing eye, as if it were Christianity that invented the gloom.  Not so; nor Judaism neither; nor any Christians nor Jews.  It was the men who burned Croton; the man who killed the Mysteries in Gaul.  For every disaster there are causes far and far back.

Christianity had spread, by this third century, perhaps as much through the Parthian empire as through the Roman.  The Zoroastrians had been as tolerant as the Romans; much more so to Christianity;—­though the motive of their toleration had been pure indifference to everything religious; whereas in Rome there was statesmanship and wisdom behind theirs.  The Persians reacted against Parthianism in all its manifestations.  They were shocked at Parthian indifference.  The Persian is as naturally religious as the Hindoo:  and has the virtues and vices of the religious temperament.  The virtues are a tendency to mysticism, a need to concern oneself with the unseen; the vices, a non-immunity to fanaticism and bigotry.  They came down now from their mountains determined to combat the slackness; the indifference, the materialism of the world.  The virus of intolerance was in the air,—­a spirit like the germ of plague or any epidemic; one religion catches it from another.  Let it be about, and you are in danger of catching it, unless your faith is based on actual inner enlightenment, and not faith at all, but knowledge; or unless you have a Teacher so enlightened to adjust you, and keep you too busy to catch it;—­or unless you are totally heedless of the unseen.  The Persians were not indifferent, but very much in earnest; and they had no knowledge, but only faith:  so they stood in peculiar danger.  And presently a Teacher came to them, and they rejected him.

His name was Mani; he was born in Ctesiphon, of noble Persian family, probably in 215; and came forward as a Teacher (according to the Mohammedan tradition, which is the most trustworthy) at the coronation of Sapor I, Ardashir’s successor, in 242.  Sapor at first was disposed to hear him; but the Magi moved heaven and earth to change that disposition.  Ardashir had bound church and state together in the closest union:  no worship but the Zoroastrian was allowed in his dominions.  This was mainly aimed at the Christians, and must have caused them much discomfort.  But Mani, it would seem, rose against all this narrow-ness.  It has been said that he taught Reincarnation, and again denied;—­this much he taught certainly,—­that all religions