“Who denies it? But in what do exhortations consist? In being able to show, whether to one man or to many men, the contradiction in which they are involved, and that their thoughts are given to anything but what they really mean. For they mean to give them to the things that really tend to happiness, but they look for those things elsewhere than where they really are. (That is the true aim of exhortation): but to show this, is it necessary to place a thousand chairs, and invite people to come and listen, and dress yourself up in a fine gown, and ascend the pulpit—and describe the death of Achilles? Cease, I implore you, from bringing dishonour, as far as you can, upon noble words and deeds. There can be no stronger exhortation to duty, I suppose, than for a speaker to make it clear to his audience that he wants to get something out of them! Tell me who, after hearing you lecture or discourse, became anxious about or reflected upon himself? or who, as he went out of the room, said, ‘The philosopher put his finger upon my faults: I must not behave in that way again’? “You cannot: the utmost praise you get is when a man says to another, ‘That was a beautiful passage about Xerxes,’ and the other says, ‘No, I liked best that about the battle of Thermopylæ.’ “This is a philosopher’s sermon!”[193] I have dwelt on this feature of the Greek life of the early Christian centuries, not with the view of giving a complete picture of it, which would be impossible within the compass of a lecture, but rather with the view of establishing a presumption, which you will find amply justified by further researches, that it was sufficient, not only in its quality and complexity, but also in its mass, to account for certain features of early Christianity.