eaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul
had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against
this exaggeration; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and
not a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly based on fact.
The historical reasons for it are suggested above, in the first of these
essays.

My description of this complicated change is, of course, inadequate, but
not, I hope, one-sided. I do not depreciate the religions that followed
on this movement by describing the movement itself as a 'failure of
nerve'. Mankind has not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads
to the fuller and deeper knowledge of the world: the patient and
sympathetic study of the good citizen who lives in it, or the ecstatic
vision of the saint who rejects it. But probably most Christians are
inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure,
without a contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly attain
the religious life. I can imagine an historian of this temper believing
that the period we are about to discuss was a necessary softening of
human pride, a _Praeparatio Evangelica_.[124:1]

I am concerned in this paper with the lower country lying between two
great ranges. The one range is Greek Philosophy, culminating in Plato,
Aristotle, the Porch, and the Garden; the other is Christianity,
culminating in St. Paul and his successors. The one is the work of
Hellas, using some few foreign elements; the second is the work of
Hellenistic culture on a Hebrew stock. The books of Christianity are
Greek, the philosophical background is Hellenistic, the result of the
interplay, in the free atmosphere of Greek philosophy, of religious
ideas derived from Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. The preaching is
carried on in Greek among the Greek-speaking workmen of the great
manufacturing and commercial cities. The first preachers are Jews: the
central scene is set in Jerusalem. I wish in this essay to indicate how
a period of religious history, which seems broken, is really continuous,
and to trace the lie of the main valleys which lead from the one range
to the other, through a large and imperfectly explored territory.

The territory in question is the so-called Hellenistic Age, the period
during which the Schools of Greece were 'hellenizing' the world. It is a
time of great enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high importance
to history. It is a time full