Augustine shows a discrimination on this subject too important to be overlooked, when he declares that while the noble philosophy of the Platonists turned his thoughts away from his low gratifications to the contemplation of an infinite God, it left him helpless.  He was profited both by what philosophy taught him and by what it could not teach:  it created wants which it could not satisfy.  In short, he was prepared by its very deficiencies to see in stronger contrast the all-satisfying fulness of the Gospel of Eternal Life.  Plato could tell him nothing of any real plan of redemption, and he confesses with tender pathos that he found no Revealer, no divine sacrifice for sin, no uplifted Cross, no gift of the transforming Spirit, no invitation to the weary, no light of the Resurrection.[28] Now, just here is the exact truth; and Augustine has conferred a lasting benefit upon the Christian Church by this grand lesson of just discrimination.  He and other Christian fathers knew where to draw the lines carefully and wisely with respect to heathen errors.

We often have occasion to complain of the sharpness of the controversies of the early Church, but it could scarcely be otherwise in an age like that.  It was a period of transitions and of rude convulsions.  The foundations of the great deep of human error were being broken up.  It was no time for flabby, jelly-fish convictions.  The training which the great leaders had received in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen dialectics.  They had something of Paul’s abhorrence of heathen abominations, for they saw them on every hand.  They saw also the specious admixtures of Gnosticism, and they met them squarely.  Tertullian’s controversy with Marcion, Augustine’s sharp issue with Pelasgius, Ambrose’s bold and uncompromising resistance to Arianism, Origen’s able reply to Celsus, all show that the great leaders of the Church were not men of weak opinions.  The discriminating concessions which they made, therefore, were not born of an easy-going indifferentism and the soft and nerveless charity that regards all religions alike.  They found a medium between this pretentious extreme and the opposite evil of ignorant and narrow prejudgment; and nothing is more needed in the missionary work of our day than that intelligent and well-poised wisdom which considers all the facts and then draws just distinctions; which will not compensate for conscious ignorance with cheap misrepresentation or wholesale denunciation.

1.  Now, first of all, in considering the methods of the early Church and its secret of power in overcoming the errors of heathenism, it must be borne in mind that the victory was mainly due to the moral earnestness which characterized that period.  In this category we must place the influence which sprang from the martyrdom of thousands who surrendered life rather than relinquish their faith.  That this martyr spirit did not always produce a true symmetry of Christian