Two things stand out, when we study the character of the early church--its great complexity and variety, and its unity in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. In spite of the general levelling which Greek culture and Roman government had made all over the Mediterranean world, the age-long influences of race and climate and cult were still at work. Everywhere there was a varnish of Greek literature; everywhere a tendency to uniformity in government, very carefully managed with great tenderness for local susceptibilities, but none the less a fixed object of the Emperors; everywhere cult was blended with cult with the lavish hospitality of polytheism; and yet, apart from denationalized men of letters, artists and dilettanti, the old types remained and reproduced themselves. And when men looked at the Christian community, it was as various as the Empire--"Thou wast slain," runs the hymn in the Apocalypse, "and thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation." There soon appeared that desire for uniformity which animated the secular government, and which appears to be an ineradicable instinct of the human mind. Yet for the first two centuries--the period under our discussion--the movement toward uniformity had not grown strong enough to overcome the race-marks and the place-marks. There are great areas over which in Christian life and thought the same general characteristics are to be seen, which were manifested in other ways before the Christian era. There is the great West of Italy, Gaul and Africa, Latin in outlook, but with strong local variations. There is the region of Asia Minor and Greece,--where the church is Hellenistic in every sense of the word, very Greek upon the surface and less Greek underneath, again with marked contrasts due to geography and race-distribution. Again there is the Christian South--Alexandria, with its Christian community, Greek and {142} Jewish, and a little known hinterland, where Christian thought spread, we do not know how. There was Palestine with a group of Jewish Christians, very clearly differentiated. And Eastward there rose a Syrian Christendom, which as late as the fourth century kept a character of its own.[1]