secure his literary gifts have secured him that immortality. But the regeneration comes not through rhetoric. "The powers that be!" - there is no guidance in that star. Therefore the democracy will not found on Paul. Rather it will found on the Carpenter of Galilee, and with him will ask in every age whether the powers that be are the powers that ought to be.

CHAPTER XV

ANNEXED

THE process of Romanizing the Man of Nazareth which was begun by Paul, was taken up after him by Greek philosophers. We have seen that an imperialized Jesus was quite what the Roman Empire wished; she would thereby be rid of an insurrectionary force that was giving her no small trouble, and would, furthermore, in the portrait of an imperial christ, obtain a buttress to her own imperial idea. She was prepared, therefore, to encourage teachers who would continue the business inaugurated by Paul. In the schools of Greek philosophy she found them.

The Greek brain for a long time back had been renting itself to the "prince of this world." In Athens and the other cities of the peninsula, society was based on slavery. But her philosophers saw in that nothing to criticize. They were themselves allied with the slave owners. Philosophers belonged to society's upper crust, and could not be accused of any proneness to caste disloyalty. Hatch has convincingly pointed out the influence of Greek ideas on christianity. He says of these Greek sophists that they made both money and reputation. The more eminent of them were among the most dis

tinguished men of the time. We remember that The Carpenter did not stand high socially. But these Greek philosophers, who, in the person of their successors, were to interpret him to the world, were the pets of society. They often became domestic chaplains. Lucian in his essay, "On Persons Who Give Their Society for Pay," has amusing vignettes of them, singularly like what is pictured of chaplains in the novels of a hundred years ago. Philosophy had become a profession. It afforded an easy means of livelihood; therefore it had grown degenerate. Philosophers were employed on affairs of state at home, and on embassies abroad. They were sometimes placed on the free list of their city, and lived at the public expense. When they died sometimes beforestatues were erected in their honour. This was the class into whose hands The Carpenter fell for interpretation.

It is needless to say that in handling his life they interpreted away much that had been there, and interpreted into it much that had not been there. And this, not altogether with malice aforethought. Out of two hundred thousand people in Athens, all but twenty-seven thousand were slaves. Thus Greek philosophers had lived so long in a society whose industrialism would not stand investigation, that the habit of keeping away from the theme of economics had become ingrained in their thought processes-brain tracts devoted to thoughts industrial, were not in their case "shovelled out." They were unable to grasp the thought of Jesus as connected in any way with the working class. His life presented difficulties to them. The conception of him as an im

perial conqueror, and as the divine Wisdom and Power, was inconsistent with the meanness of a common workingman's career. Accordingly they resolved his life into a series of symbolic representations. The Greek mind, lifted into the haze of metaphysics and sedulously guarding its aloofness from such inconvenient subjects as work and the workers, had become complex, unreal, artificial. Christianity in their hands became likewise unreal and artificial. They crushed out its uncultivated earnestness. Laying more stress on the expression of ideas than on the ideas themselves, they tended to suppress the very forces which had given christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent into a broad but feeble stream. In the time of The Carpenter sheep was the commonest form of live stock in Palestine. To thrust home to his hearers the essential wolfishness of the invasive Romans, he used often the figure of sheep being devoured by wolves. And he saw that his own death was like to come from that quarter: "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is a hireling and not the shepherd seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth; and the wolf catcheth them." But the church leaders reversed the figure. They proclaimed that the christian trait is fundamentally one of sheepishness-that the common people were made to be eaten legitimately by the grace of God. And they exalted as the type of manly perfection an Agnus Dei.

This emasculation of The Carpenter took place not without protest on the part of the lowly among his followers. We find traces of a controversy. Says Ter

tullian: "The simpler-minded, not to say ignorant and unlearned, men who always form the majority of believers, are frightened at the philosophy of the doctrine of the Trinity." And he himself cries out: "What resemblance is there between a philosopher and a christian?" Clement of Alexandria refers to the objection raised by the common people against the philosophizing trend of himself and his fellow theologians: "I am not unaware," says he, "of what is dinned in our ears by the ignorant timidity of those who tell us that we ought to occupy ourselves with the most necessary matters, those in which the faith consists; and that we should pass by the superfluous matters that be outside them." And he cites those "who think that philosophy will prove to have been introduced into Kfe from an evil source."

But the common people, in these protests, were overridden. It suited "the powers that be," to have christianity metamorphosed into a cult of submissiveness and a system of philosophy. And metamorphosed it was. The history of the second century is the history of the clash between these new mystical and metaphysical elements in christianity, and its earlier forms. When the struggle ended, there was seemingly so complete a victory of the original communities and of the principles which they embodied, that their opponents seem to vanish. But in reality it was a victory in which the victors were the vanquished. There was so large an absorption by the original communities of the principles of their opponents as to destroy the main reason for a separate existence. The absorption was less of speculations than of the tendency