this heathen mind encountered the Christian; in short, how, “after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased Him through the folly of Christian preaching to save those that believed.”(321) Let us trace the encounter of heathen wisdom—that is, Philosophy—with Christian wisdom, that is, the truth of a God incarnate and crucified, with all its consequences, as upborne by the Christian Church and planted among men. Now the system of polytheistic worship which was then in possession of the Græco-Roman world had been subjected for many ages to all the analytic power of human reason as exercised by the most gifted of races which have hitherto embodied their genius in a corresponding civilisation. The philosophy of Greece is in fact such an analysis, and the rise of this philosophy is carried back by the ablest inquirers to the time of Thales and Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ, In the beautiful climate of Ionia and Southern Italy there arose at this time men who attempted by the efforts of their own reason to form a physical and a moral theory of the world which surrounded them. Philosophy is not merely thought, but methodical thinking, thinking consciously directed upon the knowledge of things in their connection with each other. Nor is it content merely with the collecting of observations and the knowledge so derived, but proceeds to gather the individual instances into a whole, to draw to a centre what was scattered, and to form a view of the world resting upon clear conceptions and at unity with itself.(322) This was the nature of that work which Thales and Pythagoras commenced. Let us give a glance at the race which bore them, and of which they were representative men.