=The Early Situation of Christianity.= The Orient was the source of the Gospel, as of the other religions of this time. The power of Christianity lay in the spontaneous force of its pure religious feeling, with which it entered the lists for the conquest of the world. Christianity was not a philosophy, but a religion. It appealed to a different class than did the Alexandrian schools. The lower class received it first, and so the questions of science and philosophy occupied the early Christians but little. They were neither the friends nor the foes of Hellenism, and they took no interest in political theories. The Christian society was a spiritual cosmopolitanism, which was inspired and united by belief in God, faith in Christ, and in immediate communion with Christ. Conviction of the Second Coming of the Lord determined the conduct of the early Christians. Indeed, that moral reformation and moral conduct were the dominating aims of the Christian communities is proved by the following facts: the documents dealing with Christian life of that time are almost wholly moral; the discipline upon the members was for moral and not doctrinal reasons. Still these early Christians had some simple doctrines, which were seemingly taken for granted; and the danger is, to conceive the early Christians as either (1) too simple or (2) too ignorant. They believed that there is one God, that man has personal relations to God, that history has a dramatic course, that right was God’s command and absolutely different from wrong, that the Last Judgment would surely come.