ss Stawell's lecture, as serving
to show you how great and how real this was. It really was not a mistake
when an honest but rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more
acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers like Clement and
Origen, thought that they heard the authentic accents of the 'Word' of
God in the great philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.

The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not
wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development
and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and
individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the
post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and
poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its
conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it
gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well
be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the
self-sufficingness ([Greek: autarkeia]) of the wise man, or when he says
that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet
these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension
which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered
that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear
in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once
and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the
'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different
and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were
capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the
children of God and capable of communion with Him.

It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a
new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which
justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the
tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at
times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into
the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which
would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the
State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first
fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great
authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws
it