Transplanted from the poor and arid soil of Hebraism into the rich and fruitful loam of Graeco-Roman civilisation, the Christian plant was sure to grow apace and be transformed. Catholicism is as much Pagan as Apostolic Messianism was Jewish--from the same causes, and according to the same law. More Greek in the East, more Roman in the West, it bears always and everywhere the traces of its origin. Study successively all the features of the Catholic Church, and you will find on each of them this indelible mark. The dogmas of the Councils and the theology of the Fathers, who does not see at the first glance their true character? Who does not see that the material is Greek in form, in colour, in every fibre of its tissue? Whence came those terms and notions, of which Hebraism knew nothing, but which the theologians of all the schools will henceforth bandy to and fro--those abstract concepts, substance and hypostasis, nature and person, essence and accident, matter and form? Whence came the science of the Fathers of the Church, their exegesis, their history, their logic, their psychology, and that lofty metaphysic which has so completely transformed the Prophetic into a Platonic firmament? All this came from Athens, Ephesus, Samos, and Miletus, _via_ Alexandria and Rome. The Justins, the Athenagorases, the Clements and the Basils, Athanasius even more than Arius, Jerome as well as Augustine, had been nourished from their childhood on Greek and Latin literature. They had read Plato, Heraclitus, Zeno, Philo, Cicero, Posidonius, and Seneca as much and more perhaps than the Old Testament. What is there astonishing in the fact that their theology should have followed step by step the theology of neo-Platonism until this latter, for Augustine, should have become the true introduction to the Gospel, and that in the Middle Ages the names of Plato and Aristotle should have been invested with an authority not less than those of Isaiah, St. Paul, and St. John?