2. In the second place, it is necessary to take account of our own personal prepossessions. Most of us come to the study of the subject already knowing something about it. It is a comparatively easy task for a lecturer to present, and for a hearer to realize, an accurate picture of, for example, the religion of Mexico or of Peru, because the mind of the student when he begins the study is a comparatively blank sheet. But most of us bring to the study of Christian history a number of conclusions already formed. We tend to beg the question before we examine it. We have before us, on the one hand, the ideas and usages of early Christianity; on the other hand, the ideas and usages of imperial Greece. We bring to the former the thoughts, the associations, the sacred memories, the happy dreams, which have been rising up round us, one by one, since our childhood. Even if there be some among us who in the maturity of their years have broken away from their earlier moorings, these associations still tend to remain. They are not confined to those of us who not only consciously retain them, but also hold their basis to be true. They linger unconsciously in the minds of those who seem most resolutely to have abandoned them. We bring to the latter, most of us, a similar wealth of associations which have come to us through our education. The ideas with which we have to deal are mostly expressed in terms which are common to the early centuries of Christianity, and to the Greek literature of five centuries before. The terms are the same, but their meaning is different. Those of us who have studied Greek literature tend to attach to them the connotation which they had at Athens when Greek literature was in its most perfect flower. We ignore the long interval of time, and the new connotation which, by an inevitable law of language, had in the course of centuries clustered round the old nucleus of meaning. The terms have in some cases come down by direct transmission into our own language. They have in such cases gathered to themselves wholly new meanings, which, until we consciously hold them up to the light, seem to us to form part of the original meaning, and are with difficulty disentangled. We bring to both the Christian and the Greek world the inductions respecting them which have been already made by ourselves and by others. We have in those inductions so many moulds, so to speak, into which we press the plastic statements of early writers. We assume the primitiveness of distinctions which for the most part represent only the provisional conclusions of earlier generations of scholars, and stages in our own historical education; and we arrange facts in the categories which we find ready to hand, as Jewish or Gentile, orthodox or heretical, Catholic or Gnostic, while the question of the reality of such distinctions and such categories is one of the main points which our inquiries have to solve.