Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

34* THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMJSeneea, Epictetus, Plutarch, Nutuenius, Plotinus, Por-pliyrius, and the rest. The utmost that one couldsay of these, supposing, which is far from the i'act,that each had taught truth and accordant truth withthe others, would be that they were like irrigatedpatches in a desert, lying apart, and insufficient evento form an oasis. ut where was the philosophic landfull of pasture for the human flock, and watered withfountains for human thirst ? Philosophy could makeno such a country. They who strove to set up anideal Pythagoras in envy of the work of Christ, neverattempted even that society which Pythagoras, fraughtwith the elder wisdom of Egypt and the East, conceived.All this work of teaching in private families,of philosophers acting as quasi-chaplains to noblemen^^^M__l__ or emperors, of great _^H__T professorial chairs, of supposedCynic missionaries discoursing upon human rights andduties to mixed audiences from city to city, endedin this way. One day the most famous of philosophersasked an emperor, conspicuous for his persecution ofChristians, to bestow on him a city wherein to drawtogether the devotees of philosophic teaching. Theemperor refused. Platonopolis never existed in Campania,and philosophy in all the Roman world couldmake no city of its own. It had, indeed, wielded thearm of demolition against things once sacred, and thenworn out or perverted, but it did not possess materialsof its own to build with, and still less the art ofconstruction.The positive result appears to be this. An attemptwas made to prop up the falsehood of the polytheisticworship by substituting a pantheistic unity. A handfulof philosophers announced this unity, and asprinkling of the educated classes accepted it. The