no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of
dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the
era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in
the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the
deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could
offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and
on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had
not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own
nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a
liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising
such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that
it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad
man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There
is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There
is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a
Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But
Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small
wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other
such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical
phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The
study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with
the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
importance, the intensity of which made every other question
insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how
God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his
creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity
of philosophic speculation.

Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,
the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether
_matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato
thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret
of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,
reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God
would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He
worked in some way defeated hi