But the miraculous personality of the teacher, however essential to the proclamation and reception of the teaching, was not the teaching itself. There were doctrines of an essentially theological character, and strong emotions that only religion could excite, which operated along with the unique personality of the Founder in laying a firm foundation for the ethics of the gospel. The most important of these doctrines was the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. This is a matter with which in Christian countries we are now so familiar that not a few find it difficult to realize how prominent an element it was in the Christian creed, and how powerful must have been its action in the creation of a new school of morals in the midst of the heathen world. By the Fathers of the Church, however, in the first and second centuries, the ethical virtue of this element {203} was never overlooked; they knew only too well, from their own personal experience most of them, and all of them by what they saw written in the habits and maxims of a corrupt society, how easily Polytheism had lent itself to draw a beautiful veil over what was ugly, and to stamp the most debasing vices with consecration. Philosophers, like Xenophanes and Plato, in whose breasts these things had long ago roused a rebellious indignation, might well despair of converting to a pure morality a people who, though they might be sober on all the other days of the year, would think it necessary, as an act of piety, to appear publicly intoxicated on the feast of Dionysus. The salt of goodness, it is quite true, which kept the body of Polytheism so long from rotting, has often been overlooked, principally by the exaggeration of Christian writers, seldom remarkable for candour; and the early Fathers of the Church, engaged, as they were, in actual warfare with the many-headed foe, may well be excused if their zeal was not always accompanied by that fairness to which even error is entitled. But with the most honest purpose to do justice to the moral element of Polytheism, as we may find it exhibited most favourably perhaps in the living pictures of the Homeric poems, it cannot be denied that the obvious deduction from the Polytheistic creed was, in all cases to palliate, in some cases even to justify, vice; and that this deduction was often made we may gather from the familiar fact that the most illogical people even now suddenly become very acute reasoners, the moment it is necessary to defend their prejudices, or to protest against the amendment of their faults. In a system of faith, where every {204} instinct had its god, and every passion its patron-saint, it required either a rare training, or a remarkably healthy habit of mind to keep the low and the high in their just seats of subordination and supremacy. No doubt the more imperative moral virtues to a well-constituted Heathen mind were conceived as represented by Jove, who was the real moral governor of the world; and