of the weakness and sinfulness of man, and a perpetual reference to another world, were the essential characteristics of Christianity, the source of all its power, the basis of its distinctive type. Of all these, the teaching of Seneca is the direct antithesis. Careless of the future world, and profoundly convinced of the supreme majesty of man, he laboured to emancipate his disciples “from every fear of God and man;” and the proud language in which he claimed for the sage an equality with the gods represents, perhaps, the highest point to which philosophic arrogance has been carried. The Jews, with whom the Christians were then universally identified, he emphatically describes as “an accursed race.”(642) One man, indeed, there was among the later Stoics who had almost realised the Christian type, and in whose pure and gentle nature the arrogance of his school can be scarcely traced; but Marcus Aurelius, who of all the Pagan world, if we argued by internal evidence alone, would have been most readily identified with Christianity, was a persecutor of the faith, and he has left on record in his “Meditations” his contempt for the Christian martyrs.(643) The relation between the Pagan philosophers and the Christian religion was a subject of much discussion and of profound difference of opinion in the early Church.(644) While the writers of one school apologised for the murder of Socrates, described the martyred Greek as the ’buffoon of Athens,’(645) and attributed his inspiration to diabolical influence;(646) while they designated the writings of the philosophers as “the schools of heretics,” and collected with a malicious assiduity all the calumnies that had been heaped upon their memory—there were others who made it a leading object to establish a close affinity between Pagan philosophy and the Christian revelation. Imbued in many instances, almost from childhood, with the noble teaching of Plato, and keenly alive to the analogies between his philosophy and their new faith, these writers found the exhibition of this resemblance at once deeply grateful to themselves and the most successful way of dispelling the prejudices of their Pagan neighbours. The success that had attended the Christian prophecies attributed to the Sibyls and the oracles, the passion for eclecticism, which the social and commercial position of Alexandria had generated, and also the example of the Jew Aristobulus, who had some time before contended that the Jewish writings had been translated into Greek, and had been the source of much of the Pagan wisdom, encouraged them in their course. The most conciliatory, and at the same time the most philosophical school, was the earliest in the Church. Justin Martyr—the first of the Fathers whose writings possess any general philosophical interest—cordially recognises the excellence of many parts of the Pagan philosophy, and even attributes it to a Divine inspiration, to the action