Indian, the Egyptian and the Jew, the people even of Athens, the very centre and eye of Greece, were prepared to admit the cardinal doctrine of Paul's preaching." The same writer cordially admits the moral grandeur and the moral power of the philosophers whose teaching had, for several generations, been leavening the thought and ennobling the humanity of the Roman world. "The philosophy of the Stoics, the highest and holiest moral theory at the time of our Lord's coming,--the theory which most worthily contended against the merely political religion of the day, the theory which opposed the purest ideas and the loftiest aims to the grovelling principles of a narrow and selfish expediency on which the frame of the heathen ritual rested--was the direct creation of the sense of unity and equality disseminated among the choicer spirits of heathen society by the results of the Macedonian conquest. But for that conquest it could hardly have existed at all. It was the philosophy of Plato, sublimed and harmonized by the political circumstances of the times. It was what Plato would have imagined, had he been a subject of Alexander." "It taught, nominally at least, the equality of all God's children--of Greek and barbarian, of bond and free. It renounced the exclusive ideas of the commonwealth on which Plato had made shipwreck of his consistency. It declared that to the wise man all the world is his country. It was thoroughly comprehensive and cosmopolitan. Instead of a political union it preached the moral union of all good men,--a city of true philosophers, a community of religious sentiment, a communion of saints, to be developed partly here below, but more consummately in the future state of a glorified hereafter. It aspired, at least, to the doctrine of an immortal city of the soul, a providence under which that immortality was to be gained, a reward for the good, possibly, but even more dubiously, a punishment of the wicked."