long training as a "peculiar people," were
especially adapted for receiving this new revelation, based, as it was,
on that monotheistic idea to the preservation of which their national
life had been devoted. Upon them the primitive Christians, most of whom,
like St. Paul, were "Hebrews of the Hebrews," brought to bear the
instrument most adapted to their conversion, namely, the argument
deduced from the sacred Scriptures of their race.

And when the Church finally turned towards the Gentile world, it was
still the popular religion, the religion of the poets, rather than the
philosophy of the schools, with which its apologists first came into
contact, and it is very evident from such writings as the recently
recovered _Apology_ of Aristides, "philosopher of Athens," and many
other works extending over the whole Ante-Nicene period, that much of
the energy of the early exponents of Christianity was directed towards
the conversion of the populace who still adhered, at least formally, to
the religion of their own poets.

The function of the primitive Christians, so far as the content of their
belief was concerned, was to preserve and transmit to their successors
an _implicit_ faith. The value of this faith they attempted to show
chiefly by practical, ethical demonstration. Thus they preached chiefly
by example, and it is on the ground of _life_ rather than that of
_thought_ that they made their plea to the Gentiles. In their struggle
for existence, threatened on every side by official persecution and
popular fury, they had no opportunity for speculation on
fundamentals--they pleaded merely to be allowed to live the life to
which they were pledged. With the Eastern training, which most of them
had had, so foreign to the ideals of Greek philosophy, and so tenacious
of the idea of God, and with the person of Christ so near to them as to
blind their eyes to the possibility of any other standard of truth than
His words, they naturally afford us no material for the question under
discussion.

Thus we must wait for the rise of Christian philosophy, and take as our
_terminus a quo_ the middle of the second century, when first there
appears that literature which bears evidence to the conversion of
philosophers to the Christian Church, and affords us examples of their
attempts to present the new doctrines to the schools which they had
abandoned.

Our _terminus ad quem_ will be the Council of Nicea. The reason for this
is in part