~ vi ~
The principal difference between my treatment and theirs lies in this—that I am more impressed, than they seem to be, with the feeling that the silent and unofficial diffusion of a new time-cycle through a vast empire is a very remarkable fact and that it argues some powerful motive behind it, and I have spent some effort in trying to arrive at some conception of what this motive was. Further this same feeling has led me to the belief that the Planetary Week, like Mithraism and the other mystery-religions, is an important factor in the background of primitive Christianity, and that its existence must not be ignored, especially when we consider the origin of the Christian Sunday. This aspect of the question is almost totally ignored by the scholars I have mentioned and indeed, I think, by nearly all the theologians who have examined with laborious and sometimes fanciful ingenuity the possible traces of the mystical beliefs of paganism in Christian theology and institutions. Some years ago I listened to a paper on this subject by an eminent divine now dead. I said to him afterwards, 'There is one thing you have not mentioned—the week.' He looked at me with surprise and said, 'Who do you mean by the weak?' When I explained that my word was spelt with an e he remained equally mystified.
While I have no illusions which would lead me to expect a wide circulation for the book, I
