2. It was inevitable that when the Puritan party had left the main body, and when the most spiritually-minded of those who remained detached themselves from the common life of their brethren, there should be a deterioration in the average moral conceptions of the Christian Churches. It was also inevitable that those conceptions should be largely shaped by Greek influences. The Pauline ethics vanished from the Christian world. For the average members of the churches were now the average citizens of the empire, educated by Greek methods, impregnated with the dominant ethical ideas. They accepted Christian ideas, but without the enthusiasm which made them a transforming force. As in regard to metaphysics, so also in regard to ethics, the frame of mind which had been formed by education was stronger than the new ideas which it absorbed. The current ideals remained, slightly raised: the current rules of conduct continued, with modifications. Instead of the conceptions of righteousness and holiness, there was the old conception of virtue: instead of the code of morals which was “briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” there was the old enumeration of duties. At the end of the fourth century the new state of things was formally recognized by ecclesiastical writers. Love was no more “the hand-book of divine philosophy:”[307] the chief contemporary theologian of the West, Ambrose of Milan, formulated the current theory in a book which is the more important because it not merely expresses the ideas of his time and seals the proof of their prevalence, but also became the basis of the moral philosophy of the Middle Ages. But the book is less Christian than Stoical.[308] It is a _rechauffée_ of the book which Cicero had compiled more than three centuries before, chiefly from Panætius. It is Stoical, not only in conception, but also in detail. It makes virtue the highest good. It makes the hope of the life to come a subsidiary and not a primary motive. Its ideal of life is happiness: it holds that a happy life is a life according to nature, that it is realized by virtue, and that it is capable of being realized here on earth. Its virtues are the ancient virtues of wisdom and justice, courage and temperance. It tinges each of them with a Christian, or at least with a Theistic colouring; but the conception of each of them remains what it had been to the Greek moralists. Wisdom, for example, is Greek wisdom, with the addition that no man can be wise who is ignorant of God: justice is Greek justice, with the addition that its subsidiary form of beneficence is helped by the Christian society.