They had loved money, and the praise of their fellow-men; they had their fashions and their customs, old and time-honored, and so interwoven with their very life as to be almost identified with it. Some of their notions and practices the bare announcement of the Gospel sufficiently condemned; and these must go at once. But where was the line to be drawn? Did the Gospel aim at regenerating the world by forbidding marriage and laying a ban on human labor; by making life intolerable with asceticism; by emptying the streets and the market-places, and driving men to Nitria and the frightful rocks of the Upper Nile? And what made the question doubly exciting was the two-fold fact, first, that in those very days men and women were continually fleeing from home and family, and hiding, in the desert; and secondly, that there were in that very city congregations of {50} men calling themselves Christians, who proclaimed that it was wrong to marry, and that flesh-meat and wine were sinful indulgences. The answer that Clement gave to these questionings is found mainly in that work of his which is called _Paedagogus_, or "The Teacher." The answer needed was a sharp, a short, and a decisive one. It needed to be like a surgical operation--rapidly performed, completed, with nothing further to be done but to fasten the bandages, and leave the patient to the consequences, whatever they might be. Society had to be _reset_. We need not repeat for the thousandth time the fact of the unutterable corruptness and rottenness of the whole pagan world. It was not that there were wanting certain true ideas of duty toward the state, the family, the fellow-citizen: the evil lay far deeper. It was not good sense that was wanting; it was the sense of the supernatural. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," was the formula that expressed the code of popular morality; and because men could not "eat and drink" comfortably and luxuriously without some sort of law, order, and mutual compact, it followed as a necessary consequence that there must be law, order, and compact. It was not, therefore, that Clement had merely to hold up the Gospel and show them its meaning here and its application there. He had to shift the very groundwork of morality, to take up the very foundations of the moral acts that go to make up life as viewed in the light of right and wrong. He had to substitute heaven for earth, hereafter for here, God for self. And he did so--in a fashion not unknown in the Catholic Church since, as indeed it had been not unknown to St. Paul long before. He simply held up to them the crucifix. Let any one turn to the commencement of the _Paedagogus_, and he will find a description of what a teacher ought to be. At the beginning of the second chapter he will read these words: "My children, our teacher is like the Father, whose Son he is; in whom there is no sin, great or small, nor any temptation to sin;