conception of a Father in heaven, and gave it a new meaning. It took existing moral precepts, and gave them a new application. The meaning and the application had already been anticipated in some degree by the Jewish prophets. There were Jewish minds which had been ripening for them; and so far as they were ripe for them, they received them. In a similar way we shall find that the Greek Christianity of the fourth century was rooted in Hellenism. The Greek minds which had been ripening for Christianity had absorbed new ideas and new motives; but there was a continuity between their present and their past; the new ideas and new motives mingled with the waters of existing currents; and it is only by examining the sources and the volume of the previous flow that we shall understand how it is that the Nicene Creed rather than the Sermon on the Mount has formed the dominant element in Aryan Christianity.

The method of the investigation, like that of all investigations, must be determined by the nature of the evidence. The special feature of the evidence which affects the method is, that it is ample in regard to the causes, and ample also in regard to the effects, but scanty in regard to the process of change.

We have ample evidence in regard to the state of Greek thought during the ante-Nicene period. The writers shine with a dim and pallid light when put side by side with the master-spirits of the Attic age; but their lesser importance in the scale of genius rather adds to than diminishes from their importance as representa

tives. They were more the children of their time. They are consequently better evidence as to the currents of its thought than men who supremely transcended it. I will mention those from whom we shall derive most information, in the hope that you will in course of time become familiar, not only with their names, but also with their works. Dio of Prusa, commonly known as Dio Chrysostom, "Dio of the golden mouth," who was raised above the class of travelling orators to which he belonged, not only by his singular literary skill, but also by the nobility of his character and the vigour of his protests against political unrighteousness. Epictetus, the lame slave, the Socrates of his time, in whom the morality and the religion of the Greek world find their sublimest expression, and whose conversations and lectures at Nicopolis, taken down, probably in short-hand, by a faithful pupil, reflect exactly, as in a photograph, the interior life of a great moralist's school. Plutarch, the prolific essayist and diligent encyclopædist, whose materials are far more valuable to us than the edifices which he erects with them. Maximus of Tyre, the eloquent preacher, in whom the cold metaphysics of the Academy are transmuted into a glowing mysticism. Marcus Aurelius, the imperial philosopher, in whose mind the fragments of many philosophies are lit by hope or darkened by despair, as the clouds float and drift in uncertain sunlight or in gathered gloom before the clearing rain. Lucian, the satirist and wit, the prose Aristophanes of later Greece. Sextus Empiricus, whose writings—or the collection of writings gathered under his name-are the richest of all mines for the investigation of later Greek philosophy. Philo

stratus, the author of a great religious romance, and of many sketches of the lives of contemporary teachers. It will hardly be an anachronism if we add to these the great syncretist philosopher, Philo of Alexandria; for, on the one hand, he was more Greek than Jew, and, on the other, several of the works which are gathered together under his name seem to belong to a generation subsequent to his own, and to be the only survivors of the Judæo-Greek schools which lasted on in the great cities of the empire until the verge of Christian times.

We have ample evidence also as to the state of Christian thought in the post-Nicene period. The Fathers Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Jerusalem, the decrees of general and local Councils, the apocryphal and pseudonymous literature, enable us to form a clear conception of the change which Greek influences had wrought.

But the evidence as to the mode in which the causes operated within the Christian sphere before the final effects were produced is singularly imperfect. If we look at the literature of the schools of thought which ultimately became dominant, we find that it consists for the most part of some accidental survivals.1 It tells us about some parts of the Christian world, but not about others. It represents a few phases of thought with

1 Tertullian (adv. Valentin. c. 5) singles out four writers of the previous generation whom he regards as standing on an equal footing: Justin, Miltiades, Irenæus, Proculus. Of these, Proculus has entirely perished; of Miltiades, only a few fragments remain; Justin survives in only a single MS. (see A. Harnack, Texte und Untersuchungen, Bd. i. 1, die Ueberlieferung der griechischen Apologeten des zweiten Jahrhunderts); and the greater part of Irenæus remains only in a Latin translation.

adequate fulness, and of others it presents only a few fossils. In regard to Palestine, which in the third and fourth centuries was a great centre of culture, we have only the evidence of Justin Martyr. In regard to Asia Minor, which seems to have been the chief crucible for the alchemy of transmutation, we have but such scanty fragments as those of Melito and Gregory of Neocæsarea. The largest and most important monuments are those of Alexandria, the works of Clement and Origen, which represent a stage of singular interest in the process of philosophical development. Of the Italian writers, we have little that is genuine besides Hippolytus. Of Gallican writers, we have chiefly Irenæus, whose results are important as being the earliest formulating of the opinions which ultimately became dominant, but whose method is mainly interesting as an example of the dreary polemics of the rhetorical schools. Of African writers, we have Tertullian, a skilled lawyer, who would in modern times have taken high rank as a pleader at the bar or as a leader of Parliamentary debate; and Cyprian, who survives chiefly as a champion of the sacerdotal hypothesis, and whose vigorous personality gave him a moral influence which was far beyond the measure of his intellectual powers. The evidence is not only imperfect, but also insufficient in relation to the effects that were produced. Writers of the stamp of Justin and Irenæus are wholly inadequate to account for either the conversion of the educated world to Christianity, or for the forms which Christianity assumed when the educated world had moulded it.

And if we look for the literature of the schools of

thought which were ultimately branded as heretical, we look almost wholly in vain. What the earliest Christian philosophers thought, we know, with comparatively insignificant exceptions, only from the writings of their opponents. They were subject to a double hate-that of the heathen schools which they had left, and that of the Christians who were saying "Non possumus" to philosophy.1 The little trust that we can place in the accounts which their opponents give of them is shown by the wide differences in those accounts. Each opponent, with the dialectical skill which was common at the time, selected, paraphrased, distorted, and re-combined the points which seemed to him to be weakest. The result is, naturally, that the accounts which the several opponents give are so different in form and feature as to be irreconcilable with one another.2 It was so also with the heathen opponents of Christianity. With one

Marcion, in the sad tone of one who bitterly felt that every man's hand was against him, addresses one of his disciples as "my partner in hate and wretchedness” (συμμισούμενον καὶ συνταλαίπωρον, Tert. adv. Marc. 4. 9).

2 Examples are the accounts of Basilides in Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus, compared with those in Irenæus and Epiphanius; and the accounts of the Ophites in Hippolytus, compared with those of Irenæus and Epiphanius. The literature of the subject is considerable: see especially A. Hilgenfeld, die Ketzergeschichte des Urchristenthums (e.g. p. 202); R. A. Lipsius, zur Quellenkritik des Epiphanios; and A. Harnack, zur Quellenkritik der Geschichte des Gnosticismus.

3 The very names of most of the heathen opponents are lost: Lactantius (5. 4) speaks of "plurimos et multis in locis et non modo Græcis sed etiam latinis." But for the ordinary student, Keim's remarkable restoration of the work of Celsus from the quotations of Origen, with its wealth of illustrative notes, compensates for many losses (Th. Keim, Celsus' Wahres Wort, Zürich, 1873).