In the contact of East and West originates the movement of history. The historical position of Christianity

cannot be rightly understood except in its relation to this immemorial meeting and conflict. The present book

is based on the view that Christianity is the religion which associates East and West in a higher range of

thought than either can reach alone, and tends to substitute a peaceful union for the war into which the

essential difference of Asiatic and European character too often leads the two continents. So profound is

the difference, that in their meeting either war must result, or each of them must modify itself. There is no

power except religion strong enough to modify both sufficiently to make a peaceful union possible; and

there is no religion but Christianity which is wholly penetrated both with the European and with the Asiatic

spirit --so penetrated that many are sensitive only to one or the other.

Only a divine origin is competent to explain the perfect union of Eastern and Western thought in this

religion. It adapted itself in the earliest stages of its growth to the great Graeco-Asiatic cities with their mixed

population and social system, to Rome, not as the Latin city, but as the capital of the Greek-speaking world,

and to Corinth as the halting-place between Greek Asia and its capital. Several chapters of the present book

are devoted to an account of the motley peoples and manners of those cities. The adaptation of Christianity

to the double nationality can be best seen in the Apocalypse, because there the two elements which unite in

Christianity are less perfectly reconciled than in any other book of the New Testament. The Judaic element

in the Apocalypse has been hitherto studied to the entire neglect of the Greek element in it. Hence it has

been the most misunderstood book in the New Testament.

The collision of East and West throughout history has been a subject of special interest to the present

writer from early youth; and he has watched for more than twenty-five years the recent revival of the Asiatic

spirit, often from a very close point of view. In 1897, in a book entitled Impressions of Turkey, he tried to

analyse and describe, as he had seen it, "the great historic movement" through which "Mohammedanism

and Orientalism have gathered fresh strength to defy the feeling of Europe." It is now becoming plain to all

that the relation of Asia to Europe is in process of being profoundly changed; and very soon this will be a

matter of general discussion. The long-unquestioned domination of European over Asiatic is now being put

to the test, and is probably coming to an end. What is to be the issue? That depends entirely on the

influence of Christianity, and on the degree to which it has affected the aims both of Christian and of non-

Christian nations: there are cases in which it has affected the latter almost more than the former. The

ignorant European fancies that progress for the East lies in Europeanising it. The ordinary traveller in the

East can tell that it is as impossible to Europeanise the Asiatic as it is to make an Asiatic out of a European;

but he has not learned that there is a higher plane on which Asia and Europe may "mix and meet." That

plane was once in an imperfect degree reached in the Graeco-Asiatic cities, whose creative influence in the

formation of Roman and modern society is beginning to be recognised by some of the latest historical

students, and the new stage towards which Christianity is moving, and in which it will be better understood

than it has been by purely European thought, will be a synthesis of European and Asiatic nature and ideas.

This book is a very imperfect essay towards the understanding of that synthesis, which now lies before us

as a possibility of the immediate future. How imperfect it is has become clearer to the writer as in the writing

of it he came to comprehend better the nature of the Apocalypse.

The illustrations are intended to be steps in the argument. The Apocalypse reads the history and the fate of

the Churches in the natural features, the relations of earth and sea, winds and mountains, which affected the

cities; this study distinguishes some of those influences; and the Plates furnish the evidence that the

natural features are not misapprehended in the study.

The Figures in the text are intended as examples of the symbolism that was in ordinary use in the Greek

world; the Apocalypse is penetrated with this way of expressing thought to the eye; and its symbolic