The victory of Greek ethics was complete. While Christianity was being transformed into a system of doctrines, the Stoical jurists at the imperial court were slowly elaborating a system of personal rights. The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, which the earliest Christian communities endeavoured to carry into practice, have been transmuted by the slow alchemy of history into the ethics of Roman law. The basis of Christian society is not Christian, but Roman and Stoical. A fusion of the Roman conception of rights with the Stoical conception of relations involving reciprocal actions, is in possession of practically the whole field of civilized society. The transmutation is so complete that the modern question is not so much whether the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount are practicable, as whether, if practicable, they would be desirable. The socialistic theories which formulate in modern language and justify by modern conceptions such an exhortation as “Sell that thou hast and give to the poor,” meet with no less opposition within than without the Christian societies. The conversion of the Church to Christian theory must precede the conversion of the world to Christian practice. But meanwhile there is working in Christianity the same higher morality which worked in the ancient world, and the maxim, Follow God, belongs to a plane on which Epictetus and Thomas à Kempis meet. LECTURE VII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. I. THE CREATOR. Slowly there loomed through the mists of earlier Greek thought the consciousness of one God. It came with the sense of the unity of the world. That sense had not always been awakened. The varied phenomena of earth and sea and sky had not always been brought under a single expression. The groups into which the mind tended to arrange them were conceived as separate, belonging to different kingdoms and controlled by independent divinities. It was by the unconscious alchemy of thought, working through successive generations, that the separate groups came to be combined into a whole and conceived as forming a universe.