It was natural that those who held to the earlier forms of Christianity should take alarm. “I am not unaware,” says Clement of Alexandria, in setting forth the design of his _Stromateis_,[223] “of what is dinned in our ears by the ignorant timidity of those who tell us that we ought to occupy ourselves with the most necessary matters, those in which the Faith consists: and that we should pass by the superfluous matters that lie outside them, which vex and detain us in vain over points that contribute nothing to the end in view. There are others who think that philosophy will prove to have been introduced into life from an evil source, at the hands of a mischievous inventor, for the ruin of men.” “The simpler-minded,” says Tertullian,[224] “not to say ignorant and unlearned men, who always form the majority of believers, are frightened at the Economy” [the philosophical explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity]. “These men,” says a contemporary writer,[225] of some of the early philosophical schools at Rome, “have fearlessly perverted the divine Scriptures, and set aside the rule of the ancient faith, and have not known Christ, seeking as they do, not what the divine Scriptures say, but what form of syllogism may be found to support their godlessness; and if one advances any express statement of the divine Scripture, they try to find out whether it can form a conjunctive or a disjunctive hypothetical. And having deserted the holy Scriptures of God, they study geometry, being of the earth and speaking of the earth, and ignoring Him who comes from above. Some of them, at any rate, give their minds to Euclid: some of them are admiring disciples of Aristotle and Theophrastus: as for Galen, some of them go so far as actually to worship him.”