3. The new habit of mind manifested itself not less in the importance which came to be attached to it. The holding of approved opinions was elevated to a position at first co-ordinate with, and at last superior to, trust in God and the effort to live a holy life. There had been indeed from the first an element of knowledge in the conception of the means of salvation. The knowledge of the facts of the life of Jesus Christ necessarily precedes faith in him. But under the touch of Greek philosophy, knowledge had become speculation: whatever obligation attached to faith in its original sense was conceived to attach to it in its new sense: the new form of knowledge was held to be not less necessary than the old.
The Western communities not only took over the greater part of the inheritance, but also proceeded to assume in a still greater degree the correspondence of ideas with realities, and of inferences about ideas with truths about realities. It added such large groups to the sum of them, that in the dogmatic theology of Latin and Teutonic Christendom the content is more Western than Eastern. But the conception of such a theology and its underlying assumptions are Greek. They come from the Greek tendency to attach the same certainty to metaphysical as to physical ideas. They are in reality built upon a quicksand. There is no more reason to suppose that God has revealed metaphysics than that He has revealed chemistry. The Christian revelation is, at least primarily, a setting forth of certain facts. It does not in itself afford a guarantee of the certainty of the speculations which are built upon those facts. All such speculations are dogmas in the original sense of the word. They are simply personal convictions. To the statement of one man’s convictions other men may assent: but they can never be quite sure that they understand its terms in the precise sense in which the original framer of the statement understood them.
The belief that metaphysical theology is more than this, is the chief bequest of Greece to religious thought, and it has been a damnosa hereditas. It has given to later Christianity that part of it which is doomed to perish, and which yet, while it lives, holds the key of the prison-house of many souls.
Lecture VI.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
It has been common to construct pictures of the state of morals in the first centuries of the Christian era from the statements of satirists who, like all satirists, had a large element of caricature, and from the denunciations of the Christian apologists, which, like all denunciations, have a large element of exaggeration. The pictures so constructed are mosaics of singular vices, and they have led to the not unnatural impression that those centuries constituted an era of exceptional wickedness. It is no doubt difficult to gauge the average morality of any age. It is questionable whether the average morality of civilized ages has largely varied: it is possible that if the satirists of our own time were equally outspoken, the vices of ancient Rome might be found to have a parallel in modern London; and it is probable, not on merely à priori grounds, but from the nature of the evidence which remains, that there was in ancient Rome, as there is in modern London, a preponderating mass of those who loved their children and their homes, who were good neighbours and faithful friends, who conscientiously discharged their civil duties, and were in all the current senses of the word “moral” men.[230]
It has also been common to frame statements of the moral philosophy which dominated in those centuries, entirely from the data afforded by earlier writers, and to account for the existence of nobler elements in contemporary writers by the hypothesis that Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, had come into contact with Christian teachers. In the case of Seneca, the belief in such contact went so far as to induce a writer in an imitative age to produce a series of letters which are still commonly printed at the end of his works, and which purport to be a correspondence between him and St. Paul. It is difficult, no doubt, to prove the negative proposition that such writers did not come into contact with Christianity; but a strong presumption against the idea that such contact, if it existed, influenced to any considerable extent their ethical principles, is established by the demonstrable fact that those principles form an integral part of their whole philosophical system, and that their system is in close logical and historical connection with that of their philosophical predecessors.[231]