Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

482 THE CHRISTIAN CHUECH ANDcede the publication of the Christian religion inthe Roman world, possess a value far beyond anyintrinsic merit of their own. It is a study ofpathology the results of which are far as yet frombeing gathered in. It is only by carefully examiningwhat the philosophers taught in theologyand morals-for they aspired to be and were boththe theologians and the moralists of those agesthat we can at all form an adequate judgment ofthe real work which the Christian Church haswrought in the world. It is only by using thehistorians and poets as a mirror of that generalsociety to whose cultured classes the philosophersspoke, that we can estimate what the great massof mankind then was, and what effect the philosophersproduced on them. The difference betweentheir world and their society and ours isthe measure of Christian work. The hundredyears preceding Claudius, which include in themalmost all the greatest names of Roman literature,are the most important of all in this point of view,both as containing the result of scientific thoughtin the five preceding centuries, and as giving thedepth of the moral and intellectual descent. Welearn from this whole long period the fulness ofthe truth conveyed4 in those words of the angelicdoctor at the commencement of his great work :u Even for those thins which can be investiatedconcerning God by the force of human reason, itwas necessary for man to be instructed by a divine