The Christian philosophy which thus rose out of philosophical Judaism was partly apologetic and partly speculative. The apologetic part of it arose from the necessity of defence. The educated world tended to scout Christianity when it was first presented to them, as an immoral and barbarous atheism. It was necessary to show that it was neither the one nor the other. The defence naturally fell into the hands of those Christians who were versed in Greek methods; and they not less naturally sought for points of agreement rather than of difference, and presented Christian truths in a Greek form. The speculative part of it arose from some of its elements having found an especial affinity with some of the new developments of Pythagoreanism and Platonism. Inside the original communities were men who began to build great edifices of speculation upon the narrow basis of one or other of the pinnacles of the Christian temple; and outside those communities were men who began to coalesce into communities which had the same moral aims as the original communities, and which appealed in the main to the same authorities, but in which the simpler forms of worship were elaborated into a thaumaturgic ritual, and the solid facts of Scripture history evaporated into mist. They were linked on the one hand with the cults of the Greek mysteries, and on the other with philosophical idealism. The tendency to conceive of abstract ideas as substances, with form and real existence, received in them its extreme development. Wisdom and vice, silence and desire, were real beings: they were not, as they had been to earlier thinkers, mere thin vapours which had floated upwards from the world of sensible existences, and hung like clouds in an uncertain twilight. The real world was indeed not the world of sensible existences, of thoughts and utterances about sensible things, but a world in which sensible existences were the shadows and not the substance, the waves and not the sea.[222] * * * * *