world than to the
synagogue. And, as the Church was being built, the original enthusiasm
must needs vanish. The separation from Judaism having taken place, it
was necessary that the spirit of another people should be admitted, and
should also materially determine the manner of turning the Old Testament
to advantage.

6. But an inner necessity was at work here no less than an outer.
Judaism and Hellenism in the age of Christ were opposed to each other,
not only as dissimilar powers of equal value, but the latter having its
origin among a small people, became a universal spiritual power, which,
severed from its original nationality, had for that very reason
penetrated foreign nations. It had even laid hold of Judaism, and the
anxious care of her professional watchmen to hedge round the national
possession, is but a proof of the advancing decomposition within the
Jewish nation. Israel, no doubt, had a sacred treasure which was of
greater value than all the treasures of the Greeks,--the living God--but
in what miserable vessels was this treasure preserved, and how much
inferior was all else possessed by this nation in comparison with the
riches, the power, the delicacy and freedom of the Greek spirit and its
intellectual possessions. A movement like that of Christianity, which
discovered to the Jew the soul whose dignity was not dependent on its
descent from Abraham, but on its responsibility to God, could not
continue in the framework of Judaism however expanded, but must soon
recognise in that world which the Greek spirit had discovered and
prepared, the field which belonged to it: [Greek: eikotos Ioudaiois men
nomos, Hellesi de philosophia mechris tes parousias enteuthen de he
klesis he katholike] [to the Jews the law, to the Greeks Philosophy, up
to the Parousia; from that time the catholic invitation.] But the Gospel
at first was preached exclusively to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel, and that which inwardly united it with Hellenism did not yet
appear in any doctrine or definite form of knowledge.

On the contrary, the Church doctrine of faith, in the preparatory stage,
from the Apologists up to the time of Origen, hardly in any point shews
the traces, scarcely even the remembrance of a time in which the Gospel
was not detached from Judaism. For that very reason it is absolutely
impossible to understand this preparation and development solely from
the writings that remain to us as monuments of that short earlie