discrimination. He and other Christian fathers knew where
to draw the lines carefully and wisely with respect to heathen errors.

We often have occasion to complain of the sharpness of the controversies
of the early Church, but it could scarcely be otherwise in an age like
that. It was a period of transitions and of rude convulsions. The
foundations of the great deep of human error were being broken up. It
was no time for flabby, jelly-fish convictions. The training which the
great leaders had received in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen
dialectics. They had something of Paul's abhorrence of heathen
abominations, for they saw them on every hand. They saw also the
specious admixtures of Gnosticism, and they met them squarely.
Tertullian's controversy with Marcion, Augustine's sharp issue with
Pelasgius, Ambrose's bold and uncompromising resistance to Arianism,
Origen's able reply to Celsus, all show that the great leaders of the
Church were not men of weak opinions. The discriminating concessions
which they made, therefore, were not born of an easy-going
indifferentism and the soft and nerveless charity that regards all
religions alike. They found a medium between this pretentious extreme
and the opposite evil of ignorant and narrow prejudgment; and nothing is
more needed in the missionary work of our day than that intelligent and
well-poised wisdom which considers all the facts and then draws just
distinctions; which will not compensate for conscious ignorance with
cheap misrepresentation or wholesale denunciation.

1. Now, first of all, in considering the methods of the early Church and
its secret of power in overcoming the errors of heathenism, it must be
borne in mind that the victory was mainly due to the _moral earnestness_
which characterized that period. In this category we must place the
influence which sprang from the martyrdom of thousands who surrendered
life rather than relinquish their faith. That this martyr spirit did not
always produce a true symmetry of Christian character cannot be denied.
The tide of fanaticism swept in, sometimes, with the current of true
religious zeal, and inconsistencies and blemishes marred even the
saintliest self-sacrifice; but there was no resisting the mighty logic
of the spirit of martyrdom as a whole. The high and the low, the wise
and the unlettered, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, strong
men and delicate women, surrendered themselves to the most cr