[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 infinity, there is nothing incredible in a real incarnation, or in a real trinity inside the unity of God.  But the heathen had no historic revelation of a living hope to sustain him in that age of failure and exhaustion.  Nature was just as mighty, just as ruthless then as now, and the gospel was not yet the spring of hope it is in modern life.  In our time the very enemies of the cross are living in its light, and drawing at their pleasure from the well of Christian hope.  It was not yet so in that age.  Brave men like Marcus Aurelius could only do their duty with hopeless courage, and worship as they might a God who seemed to refuse all answer to the great and bitter cry of