entirely from ourselves, and it is a duty to begin by recognizing them.

For the study is one not only of living interest, but also of supreme importance. Other history may be more or less antiquarian. Its ultimate result may be only to gratify our curiosity and to add to the stores of our knowledge. But Christianity claims to be a present guide of our lives. It has been so large a factor in the moral development of our race, that we cannot set aside its claim unheard. Neither can we admit it until we know what Christianity is. A thousand dissonant voices are each of them professing to speak in its name. The appeal lies from them to its documents and to its history. In order to know what it is, we must first know both what it professed to be and what it has been. The study of the one is the complement of the other; but it is with the latter only that we have at present to do. We may enter upon the study with confidence, because it is a scientific inquiry. We may hear, if we will, the solemn tramp of the science of history marching slowly, but marching always to conquest. It is marching in our day, almost for the first time, into the domain of Christian history. Upon its flanks, as upon the flanks of the physical sciences, there are scouts and skirmishers, who venture sometimes into morasses where there is no foothold, and into ravines from which there is no issue. But the

science is marching on. "Vestigia nulla retrorsum." It marches, as the physical sciences have marched, with the firm tread of certainty. It meets, as the physical sciences have met, with opposition, and even with contumely. In front of it, as in front of the physical

sciences, is chaos; behind it is order. We may march in its progress, not only with the confidence of scientific certainty, but also with the confidence of Christian faith. It may show some things to be derived which we thought to be original; and some things to be compound which we thought to be incapable of analysis; and some things to be phantoms which we thought to be realities. But it will add a new chapter to Christian apologetics; it will confirm the divinity of Christianity by showing it to be in harmony with all else that we believe to be divine; its results will take their place among those truths which burn in the souls of men with a fire that cannot be quenched, and light up the darkness of this stormy sca with a light that is never dim.

LECTURE II.

GREEK EDUCATION.

THE gencral result of the considerations to which I have already invited your attention is, that a study of the growth and modifications of the early forms of Christianity must begin with a study of their environment. For a complete study, it would be necessary to examine that environment as a whole. In some respects all life hangs together, and no single element of it is in absolute isolation. The political and economical features of a given time affect more or less remotely its literary and philosophical features, and a complete investigation would take them all into account. But since life is short, and human powers are limited, it is necessary in this, as in many other studies, to be content with something less than ideal completeness. It will be found sufficient in practice to deal only with the proximate causes of the phenomena into which we inquire; and in dealing, as we shall mainly do, with literary effects, to deal also mainly with those features of the age which were literary also.

The most general summary of those features is, that the Greek world of the second and third centuries was, in a sense which, though not without some just demur, has tended to prevail ever since, an educated world. It

was reaping the harvest which many generations had sown. Five centuries before, the new elements of knowledge and cultured speech had begun to enter largely into the simpler elements of early Greek life. It had become no longer enough for men to till the ground, or to pursue their several handicrafts, or to be practised in the use of arms. The word σοφός, which in earlier times had been applied to one who was skilled in any of the arts of life, who could string a bow or tune a lyre or even trim a hedge, had come to be applied, if not exclusively, yet at least chiefly, to one who was shrewd with practical wisdom, or who knew the thoughts and sayings of the ancients. The original reasons, which lay deep in the Greek character, for the element of knowledge assuming this special form, had been accentuated by the circumstances of later Greek history. There seems to be little reason in the nature of things why Greece should not have anticipated modern Europe in the study of nature, and why knowledge should not have had for its chief meaning in earlier times that which it is tending to mean now, the knowledge of the phenomena and laws of the physical world. The tendency to collect and colligate and compare the facts of nature appears to be no less instinctive than the tendency to become acquainted with the thoughts of those who have gone before us. But Greece on the one hand had lost political power, and on the other hand possessed in her splendid literature an inalienable heritage. She could acquiesce with the greater equanimity in political subjection, because in the domain of letters she was still supreme with an indisputable supremacy. It was natural that she should turn to letters.

It was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon speech. For the love of speech had become to a large proportion of Greeks a second nature. They were a nation of talkers. They were almost the slaves of cultivated expression. Though the public life out of which orators had grown had passed away with political freedom, it had left behind it a habit which in the second century of our era was blossoming into a new spring. Like children playing at "make-believe," when real speeches in real assemblies became impossible, the Greeks revived the old practice of public speaking by addressing fictitious assemblies and arguing in fictitious courts. In the absence of the distractions of either keen political struggles at home or wars abroad, these tendencies had spread themselves over the large surface of general Greek society. A kind of literary instinct had come to exist. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education.

Two points have to be considered in regard to that education before it can be regarded as a cause in relation to the main subject which we are examining: we must look first at its forms, and secondly at its mass. It is not enough that it should have corresponded in kind to certain effects; it must be shown to have been adequate in amount to account for them.

I. The education was almost as complex as our own. If we except only the inductive physical sciences, it covered the same field. It was, indeed, not so much analogous to our own as the cause of it. Our own comes