Ex-President of the Ohio University, and Professor of Greek, ibidem; translator
of Weil’s Order of Words, and author of a
History of the German Language.
“He who distrusts the light of reason will be the first to follow a more luminous guide; and if with an ardent love for truth he has sought her in vain through the ways of this life, he will but turn with the more hope to that better world where all is simple, true, and everlasting: for there is no parallax at the zenith; it is only near our troubled horizon that objects deceive us into vague and erroneous calculations.”
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
Chicago, New York, Toronto
1899
Copyrighted 1899, by Fleming H. Revell Company
PREFACE.
It is admitted by students of history of every shade of belief that the origin of Christianity and its rapid spread over the ancient world is the most remarkable fact in the recorded annals of the human race. When we remember that it was, from the first, more or less closely identified with the despised religion of the despised Jews; that largely for this reason it had to make its way against a united front, presented by the learned and intelligent in the whole gentile world, while the Jews themselves almost unanimously repudiated it; that the most efficiently organized government that had existed until then, was indifferent or hostile; that it set before the heathen world a condition of society in which all current economic ideas were transformed, and that it demanded a complete renunciation of its time-honored creeds, we may well ask in amazement, “How came these things to pass?”