e great Catholic system of penance which it is so
difficult to estimate at its full value because of its corruption and
exploitation in the Middle Ages. Whether one believes in the existence
of an angel of repentance or not, the view that life with all its
happenings is an education, which gradually teaches men, if they are
willing to accept it, how to cease to be sinful, was a great lesson for
the second century, and I do not doubt that it had much to do with
producing in the next century a Church which, in spite of persecution,
ultimately won the assent of the best part of the Roman world. Though
the form in which Hermas presented his teaching was mythological and
crude it contained truths which cannot be neglected.

No one can read _The Shepherd of Hermas_ without feeling that it has
not been adequately discussed by modern scholarship. It is the key to
the proper {120} understanding of Roman Christianity at the beginning
of the second century, but to use this key properly it must be
subjected to a process of criticism to determine the relations of its
constituent parts to one another, and to the contemporary or almost
contemporary documents--1 Clement and the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Adoptionist Christianity was not destined to conquer the world, and
though Roman Christianity proved to be the surviving form it had first
to change much of its character in a manner which can with some degree
of picturesque exaggeration be described as conquest by Ephesus.

The early development of Christianity in Ephesus is more obscure than
it is in Rome; it ceased quite soon to flourish in its place of origin,
but lived on elsewhere. The documents which represent the first stages
of its growth are the later Pauline epistles, and the Fourth Gospel.
They are inextricably involved in critical questions which have as yet
received less attention than the synoptic problem.

This is especially true of the later epistles. In them, as distinct
from the earlier epistles, we have a cosmical Christology which regards
Christ as a pre-existent divine person who became a human being. Of
that there is no doubt, nor can it be disputed that there are one or
two passages in the earlier epistles which seem to pave the way for
this kind of thought; but these passages are very few, and as it were
wholly {121} incidental. Thus the critical question arises whether
these later epistles were written by the same person as the author of
the earlier