This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Its effect in the second century of our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial: it had its fixed ideas and its permanent categories: it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own form. The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated—a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality—a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated earnestness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream. LECTURE III. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS. Two thousand years ago, the Greek world was nearer than we are now to the first wonder of the invention of writing. The mystery of it still seemed divine. The fact that certain signs, of little or no meaning in themselves, could communicate what a man felt or thought, not only to the generation of his fellows, but also to the generations that came afterwards, threw a kind of glamour over written words. It gave them an importance and an impressiveness which did not attach to any spoken words. They came in time to have, as it were, an existence of their own. Their precise relation to the person who first uttered them, and their literal meaning at the time of their utterance, tended to be overlooked or obscured. In the case of the ancient poets, especially Homer, this glamour of written words was accompanied, and perhaps had been preceded, by two other feelings.