It was this strong sympathy with the simplest view of the Christian faith that made the life-work of Clement possible. He was to go far outside the ordinary thoughts of the Christian community round about him--inevitably he had to do this under the compulsion of his wide experience of books and thinkers--but the centre of all his larger experience he found where his unlettered friends, "believing without letters," found their centre, and he checked his theories, original and borrowed--or he aimed at checking them--by life. "As in gardening and in medicine he is the man of real learning (_chrestomathes_), who has had experience of the more varied lessons...; so, I say, here too, of him who brings everything to bear on the truth.... We praise the pilot of wide range, who 'has seen the cities of many men'... so he who turns everything to the right life, fetching illustrations from things Greek and things barbarian alike, he is the much-experienced (_polypeiros_) tracker of truth, the real _polymetis_; like the touchstone--the Lydian stone believed to distinguish between the bastard and the true-born gold, he is able to separate,--our _polyidris_ and man of knowledge (_gnostikos_) as he is,--sophistic from philosophy, the cosmetic art from the true gymnastic, cookery from medicine, rhetoric from dialectic, magic and other heresies in the barbarian philosophy from the actual truth."[41] This, in spirit and letter, is a very characteristic utterance. Beginning with the Lord as "the vine"--from which some expect to gather clusters of grapes in the twinkling of an eye--he ranges into medicine and sea-faring, from Odysseus "of many wiles, who saw the cities of many men and learnt their mind," to Plato's _Gorgias_, and brings all to bear on the Christian life. What his simple friends made of such a passage--if they were able to read at all, or had it read to them--it is not easy to guess, but contact must have shown them in the man a genuine and tender Christian as Christocentric as themselves, if in speech he {274} was oddly suited,--a gay epitome of Greek literature in every sentence.