ed
it to analyse the power of life they felt within them? It was enough to
live and to rejoice; and their works are one long hymn of triumphant
hope and overflowing thankfulness.

[Sidenote: In contact (1) with the vulgar.]

It was easier for the first disciples to declare what their own eyes had
seen and their own hands had handled of the Word of Life, than for
another generation to take up a record which to themselves was only
history, and to pass from the traditional assertion of the Lord's
divinity to its deliberate enunciation in clear consciousness of the
difficulties which gathered round it when the gospel came under the keen
scrutiny of thoughtful heathens. Whatever vice might be in heathenism,
there was no want of interest in religion. If the doubts of some were
real, the scoffs of many were only surface-deep. If the old legends of
Olympus were outworn, philosophy was still a living faith, and every
sort of superstition flourished luxuriantly. Old worships were revived,
the ends of the earth were searched for new ones. Isis or Mithras might
help where Jupiter was powerless, and uncouth lustrations of the blood
of bulls and goats might peradventure cast a spell upon eternity. The
age was too sad to be an irreligious one. Thus from whatever quarter a
convert might approach the gospel, he brought earlier ideas to bear upon
its central question of the person of the Lord. Who then was this man
who was dead, whom all the churches affirmed to be alive and worshipped
as the Son of God? If he was divine, there must be two Gods; if not, his
worship was no better than the vulgar worships of the dead. In either
case, there seemed to be no escape from the charge of polytheism.

[Sidenote: (2) with the philosophers.]

The key of the difficulty is on its other side, in the doctrine of the
unity of God, which was not only taught by Jews and Christians, but
generally admitted by serious heathens. The philosophers spoke of a dim
Supreme far off from men, and even the polytheists were not unwilling to
subordinate their motley crew of gods to some mysterious divinity beyond
them all. So far there was a general agreement. But underneath this
seeming harmony there was a deep divergence. Resting on a firm basis of
historic revelation, Christianity could bear record of a God who loved
the world and of a Redeemer who had come in human flesh. As this coming
is enough to show that God is something more than abstract perfection
and in