The explanation is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the apparent and superficial antagonism, between certain leading ideas of current philosophy and the leading ideas of Christianity there was a special and real kinship. Christianity gave to the problems of philosophy a new solution which was cognate to the old, and to its doubts the certainty of a revelation. The kinship of ideas is admitted, and explanations of it are offered by both Christian writers and their opponents. “We teach the same as the Greeks,” says Justin Martyr,[212] “though we alone are hated for what we teach.” “Some of our number,” says Tertullian,[213] “who are versed in ancient literature, have composed books by means of which it may be clearly seen that we have embraced nothing new or monstrous, nothing in which we have not the support of common and public literature.” Elsewhere[214] the same writer founds an argument for the toleration of Christianity on the fact that its opponents maintained it to be but a kind of philosophy, teaching the very same doctrines as the philosophers—innocence, justice, endurance, soberness, and chastity: he claims on that ground the same liberty for Christians which was enjoyed by philosophers. The general recognition of this kinship of ideas is even more conclusively shown by the fact that explanations of it were offered on both the one side and the other. (_a_) It was argued by some Christian apologists that the best doctrines of philosophy were due to the inworking in the world of the same Divine Word who had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. “The teachings of Plato,” says Justin Martyr,[215] “are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar.... For all the writers (of antiquity) were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted Word.” It was argued by others that philosophers had borrowed or “stolen” their doctrines from the Scriptures. “From the divine preachings of the prophets,” says Minucius Felix,[216] “they imitated the shadow of half-truths.” “What poet or sophist,” says Tertullian,[217] “has not drunk at the fountain of the prophets? From thence it is, therefore, that philosophers have quenched the thirst of their minds, so that it is the very things which they have of ours which bring us into comparison with them.” “They have borrowed from our books,” says Clement of Alexandria,[218] “the chief doctrines they hold, both on faith and knowledge and science, on hope and love, on repentance and temperance and the fear of God:” and he goes in detail through many doctrines, speculative as well as ethical, either to show that they were borrowed from revelation, or to uphold the truer thesis that philosophy was no less the schoolmaster of the Greeks than the Law was of the Jews to bring them to Christ.