We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of moral ideas: we shall find that it was an age in which the ethical forces of human nature were struggling with an altogether unprecedented force against the degradation of contemporary society and contemporary religion, and in which the ethical instincts were creating the new ideal of “following God,” and were solving the old question whether there was or was not an art of life by practising self-discipline. We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of theological ideas: we shall find that it was an age in which men were feeling after God and not feeling in vain, and that from the domains of ethics, physics, metaphysics alike, from the depths of the moral consciousness, and from the cloud-lands of poets’ dreams, the ideas of men were trooping in one vast host to proclaim with a united voice that there are not many gods, but only One, one First Cause by whom all things were made, one Moral Governor whose providence was over all His works, one Supreme Being “of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.” We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of religion: we shall find that it was an age in which the beliefs that had for centuries been evolving themselves from the old religions were showing themselves in new forms of worship and new conceptions of what God needed in the worshipper; in which also the older animalism was passing into mysticism, and mysticism was the preparation of the soul for the spiritual religion of the time to come. We shall then, in the case of each great group of ideas, endeavour to ascertain from the earliest Christian documents the original Christian ideas upon which they acted; and then compare the later with the earlier form of those Christian ideas; and finally examine the combined result of all the influences that were at work upon the mental attitude of the Christian world and upon the basis of Christian association. * * * * *