The general result of the considerations to which I have already invited your attention is, that a study of the growth and modifications of the early forms of Christianity must begin with a study of their environment. For a complete study, it would be necessary to examine that environment as a whole. In some respects all life hangs together, and no single element of it is in absolute isolation. The political and economical features of a given time affect more or less remotely its literary and philosophical features, and a complete investigation would take them all into account. But since life is short, and human powers are limited, it is necessary in this, as in many other studies, to be content with something less than ideal completeness. It will be found sufficient in practice to deal only with the proximate causes of the phenomena into which we inquire; and in dealing, as we shall mainly do, with literary effects, to deal also mainly with those features of the age which were literary also. The most general summary of those features is, that the Greek world of the second and third centuries was, in a sense which, though not without some just demur, has tended to prevail ever since, an educated world. It was reaping the harvest which many generations had sown. Five centuries before, the new elements of knowledge and cultured speech had begun to enter largely into the simpler elements of early Greek life. It had become no longer enough for men to till the ground, or to pursue their several handicrafts, or to be practised in the use of arms. The word σοφός, which in earlier times had been applied to one who was skilled in any of the arts of life, who could string a bow or tune a lyre or even trim a hedge, had come to be applied, if not exclusively, yet at least chiefly, to one who was shrewd with practical wisdom, or who knew the thoughts and sayings of the ancients. The original reasons, which lay deep in the Greek character, for the element of knowledge assuming this special form, had been accentuated by the circumstances of later Greek history. There seems to be little reason in the nature of things why Greece should not have anticipated modern Europe in the study of nature, and why knowledge should not have had for its chief meaning in earlier times that which it is tending to mean now, the knowledge of the phenomena and laws of the physical world. The tendency to collect and colligate and compare the facts of nature appears to be no less instinctive than the tendency to become acquainted with the thoughts of those who have gone before us. But Greece on the one hand had lost political power, and on the other hand possessed in her splendid literature an inalienable heritage. She could acquiesce with the greater equanimity in political subjection, because in the domain of letters she was still supreme with an indisputable supremacy. It was natural that she should turn to letters. It was natural also that the study of letters