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tinople. He was kindly received by the bishop, and soon became both a great popular preacher and a favourite at court. The fate of many preachers and court favourites overtook him he excited great jealousy, was accused of heresy and banished from the city; and only by the personal intercession of the Empress Eudoxia was he received back again into ecclesiastical favour.

Such are some of the indications of the influence of Greek Rhetoric upon the early churches. It created the Christian sermon. It added to the functions of church officers a function which is neither that of the exercise of discipline, nor of administration of the funds, nor of taking the lead in public worship, nor of the simple tradition of received truths, but that of either such an exegesis of the sacred books as the Sophists gave of Homer, or such elaborated discourses as they also gave upon the speculative and ethical aspects of religion. The result was more far-reaching than the creation of either an institution or a function. If you look more closely into history, you will find that Rhetoric killed Philosophy. Philosophy died, because for all but a small minority it ceased to be real. It passed from the sphere of thought and conduct to that of exposition and literature. preachers preached, not because they were bursting with truths which could not help finding expression, but because they were masters of fine phrases and lived in an age in which fine phrases had a value. It died, in short, because it had become sophistry. But sophistry is of no special age or country. It is indigenous to all soils upon

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which literature grows. No sooner is any special form of literature created by the genius of a great writer than there arises a class of men who cultivate the style of it for the style's sake. No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with Christianity. It came into the educated world in the simple dress of a Prophet of Righteousness. It won that world by the stern reality of its life, by the subtle bonds of its brotherhood, by its divine message of consolation and of hope. Around it thronged the race of eloquent talkers who persuaded it to change its dress and to assimilate its language to their own. It seemed thereby to win a speedier and completer victory. But it purchased conquest at the price of reality. With that its progress stopped. There has been an element of sophistry in it ever since; and so far as in any age that element has been dominant, so far has the progress of Christianity been arrested. Its progress is arrested now, because many of its preachers live in an unreal world. The truths they set forth are truths of utterance rather than truths of their lives. But if Christianity is to be again the power that it was in its earliest ages, it must renounce its costly purchase. A class of rhetorical chemists would be thought of only to be ridiculed a class of rhetorical religionists is only less anomalous because we are accustomed to it. The hope of Christianity is, that the class which was artificially created may ultimately disappear; and that the sophis

tical element in Christian preaching will melt, as a transient mist, before the preaching of the prophets of the ages to come, who, like the prophets of the ages that are long gone by, will speak only "as the Spirit gives them utterance."

LECTURE V.

CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

THE power of generalizing and of forming abstract ideas exists, or at least is exercised, in varying degrees among different races and at different times. The peculiar feature of the intellectual history of the Greeks is the rapidity with which the power was developed, and the strength of the grasp which it had upon them.

The elaboration of one class of such ideas, those of form and quantity, led to the formation of a group of sciences, the mathematical sciences, which hold a permanent place. The earliest and most typical of these sciences is geometry. In it, the attention is drawn away from all the other characteristics of material things, and fixed upon the single characteristic of their form. The forms are regarded in themselves. The process of abstraction or analysis reaches its limit in the point, and from that limit the mind, making a new departure, begins the process of construction or synthesis. Complex ideas are formed by the addition of one simple idea to another, and having been so formed can be precisely defined. Their constituent elements can be distinctly stated, and a clear boundary drawn round the whole. They can be so marked off from other ideas that the idea which one

man has formed can be communicated to and represented in another man's mind. The inferences which, assuming certain "axioms" to be true and certain "postulates" to be granted, are made by one man, are accepted by another man or at once disproved. There is no question of mere probability, nor any halting between two opinions. The inferences are not only true but certain.

The result is, that there are not two sciences of geometry, but one: all who study it are agreed as to both its definitions and its inferences.

The elaboration of another class of abstract ideas, those of quality, marched at first by a parallel road. To a limited extent such a parallel march is possible. The words which are used to express sensible qualities suggest the same ideas to different minds. They are applied by different minds to the same objects. But the limits of such an agreement are narrow. When we pass from the abstract ideas of qualities, or generalizations as to substances, which can be tested by the senses, to such ideas as those, for example, of courage or justice, law or duty, though the words suggest, on the whole, the same ideas to one man as to another, not all men would uniformly apply the same words to the same actions. The phenomena which suggest such ideas assume a different form and colour as they are regarded from different points of view. They enter into different combinations. They are not sharply marked out by lines which would be universally recognized. The attention of different mcn is arrested by different features. There is consequently no universally recognized definition of them. Nor is such a definition possible. The ideas themselves

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