it is the necessary result of knowledge and virtue. Their great object was to assure the belief in immortality. "Religion and morality depend on the belief in immortality or the resurrection from the dead. The fact that the Christian religion, as faith in the incarnate Son of God the creator, leads to the assurance that the maker of all things will reward piety and righteousness with the bestowal of eternal and immortal life, is the essential advantage possessed by the Christian religion over all others. The righteousness of the heathen was imperfect in spite of all their knowledge of good and evil, because they lacked the certain knowledge that the creator makes the just immortal and will consign the unjust to eternal torment." The philosophical doctrines of God, virtue, and immortality became through the Apologists the certain content of a world-wide religion, which is Christian because Christ guarantees its certainty. They made Christianity a deistical religion for the whole world without abandoning in word at least the old "teachings and knowledge" ([Greek: didagmata kai mathemata]) of the Christians. They thus marked out the task of "dogmatic" and, so to speak, wrote the prolegomena for every future theological system in the Church (see Von Engelhardt's concluding observations in his "Christenthum Justin's" pp. 447-490, also Overbeck in the Historische Zeitschrift, 1880, pp. 499-505.) At the same time, however, they adhered to the early-Christian eschatology (see Justin, Melito, and, with reference to the resurrection of the flesh, the Apologists generally), and thus did not belie their connection with early Christianity.[458] _Interpretation and Criticism, especially of Justin's Doctrines._