Freedom from daemons, forgiveness and reconciliation with God, gladness and moral strength and peace in the holy spirit--of such things the early Christians speak, and they associate them all invariably with one name, the living centre of all. "Jesus the beloved" is a phrase that lights up one of the dullest of early Christian pages.[33] "No! you do not so much as listen to anyone, if he speaks of anything but Jesus Christ in truth," says Ignatius.[34] "What can we give him in return? He gave us light ... he saved us when we were perishing ... We were lame in understanding, and worshipped stone and wood, the works of men. Our whole life was nothing but death.... He pitied us, he had compassion, he saved us, for he saw we had no hope of salvation except from him; he called us when we were not, and from not being he willed us to be."[35] "The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation, has brought to all the world the grace of repentance."[36] "Ye see what is the pattern that has been given us; what should we do who by him have come under the yoke of his grace?"[37] "Let us be earnest to be imitators of the Lord."[38] These are a few words from Christians whose writings are not in the canon. Jesus is pre-eminently and always the Saviour; the author of the new life; the revealer of God; the bringer of immortality. It made an immense impression upon the ancient world to see the transformation of those whom it despised,--women, artisans, slaves and even slave-girls. Socrates with the hemlock cup and the brave Thrasea were figures that men loved and honoured. But here were all sorts of common people doing the same thing as Socrates and Thrasea, cheerfully facing torture and death "for the name's sake"--and it was a name of contempt, too. "Christ's people"--_Christianoi_--was a bantering improvisation by the people of Antioch, who were notorious in antiquity for impudent wit:[39] it was a happy shot {152} and touched the very centre of the target. "The name" and "his name," are constantly recurring phrases. But it was not only that men would die for the name--men will die for anything that touches their imagination or their sympathy--but they lived for it and showed themselves to be indeed a "new creation." "Our Jesus"[40] was the author of a new life, and a very different one from that of Hellenistic cities. That Christianity retained its own character in the face of the most desperate efforts of its friends to turn it into a philosophy congenial to the philosophies of the day, was the result of the strong hold it had taken upon innumerable simple people, who had found in it the power of God in the transformation of their own characters and instincts, and who clung to Jesus Christ--to the great objective facts of his incarnation and his death upon the cross--as the firm foundations laid in the rock against which the floods of theory might beat in vain. For now we have to consider another side of early Christian activity--the