The Western communities not only took over the greater part of the inheritance, but also proceeded to assume in a still greater degree the correspondence of ideas with realities, and of inferences about ideas with truths about realities. It added such large groups to the sum of them, that in the dogmatic theology of Latin and Teutonic Christendom the content is more Western than Eastern. But the conception of such a theology and its underlying assumptions are Greek. They come from the Greek tendency to attach the same certainty to metaphysical as to physical ideas. They are in reality built upon a quicksand. There is no more reason to suppose that God has revealed metaphysics than that He has revealed chemistry. The Christian revelation is, at least primarily, a setting forth of certain facts. It does not in itself afford a guarantee of the certainty of the speculations which are built upon those facts. All such speculations are _dogmas_ in the original sense of the word. They are simply personal convictions. To the statement of one man’s convictions other men may assent: but they can never be quite sure that they understand its terms in the precise sense in which the original framer of the statement understood them. * * * * * The belief that metaphysical theology is more than this, is the chief bequest of Greece to religious thought, and it has been a _damnosa hereditas_. It has given to later Christianity that part of it which is doomed to perish, and which yet, while it lives, holds the key of the prison-house of many souls. LECTURE VI. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS. It has been common to construct pictures of the state of morals in the first centuries of the Christian era from the statements of satirists who, like all satirists, had a large element of caricature, and from the denunciations of the Christian apologists, which, like all denunciations, have a large element of exaggeration. The pictures so constructed are mosaics of singular vices, and they have led to the not unnatural impression that those centuries constituted an era of exceptional wickedness. It is no doubt difficult to gauge the average morality of any age. It is questionable whether the average morality of civilized ages has largely varied: it is possible that if the satirists of our own time were equally outspoken, the vices of ancient Rome might be found to have a parallel in modern London; and it is probable, not on merely _à priori_ grounds, but from the nature of the evidence which remains, that there was in ancient Rome, as there is in modern London, a preponderating mass of those who loved their children and their homes, who were good neighbours and faithful friends, who conscientiously discharged their civil duties, and were in all the current senses of the word “moral” men.[230]