the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the murderers, and the idolators, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie:” within were “they which were written in the Lamb’s book of life.” To be a member of the community was to be in reality, and not merely in conception, a child of God and heir of everlasting salvation: to be excluded from the community was to pass again into the outer darkness, the realm of Satan and eternal death. Over these earliest communities and the theory which they embodied there passed, in the last half of the second century and the first half of the third, an enormous change. The processes of the change and its immediate causes are obscure. The interests of contemporary writers are so absorbed with the struggles for soundness of doctrine, as to leave but little room for a record of the struggles for purity of life. In the last stages of those struggles, the party which endeavoured to preserve the ancient ideal was treated as schismatical. The aggregate of visible communities was no longer identical with the number of those who should be saved. The dominant party framed a new theory of the Church as a _corpus permixtum_, and found support for it in the Gospels themselves. Morality became subordinated to belief in Christianity by the same inevitable drift by which practice had been superseded by theory in Stoicism. In both the production of this change and its further developments Greece played an important part. The net result of the active forces which it brought to bear upon Christianity was, that the attention of a majority of Christian men was turned to the intellectual as distinguished from the moral element in Christian life. And when the change was effected, it operated in two further ways, which have survived in large and varied forms to the present day.