Hermas solved the problem by having recourse to another element in Jewish thought. He appealed to the possibility of repentance, and put his solution of the problem into the form of a revelation made to him by an angel--the Shepherd of the book. The revelation which Hermas announces is that there is one repentance, but only one, for those who sin after baptism. If repentance is taken merely as an act of contrition this obviously does little to solve the problem: it is not really sufficient to cover the facts of human nature. But for Hermas repentance is much more than contrition. It consists apparently of cheerful submission to all the unpleasant {119} happenings of life, which are regarded as organised by an angel, specially appointed for the purpose, in order to adapt them to the improvement of sinners. From the general characteristic of the parables it is clear that Hermas did not contemplate the immediate restoration of the penitent, or the immediate elimination of sin. Penitence is for him an unpleasant process of education, and I think he contemplates the probability that it is life-long. Like all education it demands that the pupil shall obey his teacher, and the teacher is in this case the angel of repentance, who arranges life so as to make it educative. It is the beginning of the great Catholic system of penance which it is so difficult to estimate at its full value because of its corruption and exploitation in the Middle Ages. Whether one believes in the existence of an angel of repentance or not, the view that life with all its happenings is an education, which gradually teaches men, if they are willing to accept it, how to cease to be sinful, was a great lesson for the second century, and I do not doubt that it had much to do with producing in the next century a Church which, in spite of persecution, ultimately won the assent of the best part of the Roman world. Though the form in which Hermas presented his teaching was mythological and crude it contained truths which cannot be neglected. No one can read _The Shepherd of Hermas_ without feeling that it has not been adequately discussed by modern scholarship. It is the key to the proper {120} understanding of Roman Christianity at the beginning of the second century, but to use this key properly it must be subjected to a process of criticism to determine the relations of its constituent parts to one another, and to the contemporary or almost contemporary documents--1 Clement and the Epistle to the Hebrews. Adoptionist Christianity was not destined to conquer the world, and though Roman Christianity proved to be the surviving form it had first to change much of its character in a manner which can with some degree of picturesque exaggeration be described as conquest by Ephesus.