II THE ARREST OF ENQUIRY 53 



baptismal regeneration or of the real presence ; no 

 worship or apotheosis of Mary as the Mother of 

 God ; no worship of saints or relics. 



On the philosophic side, it was the Greek influence 

 in the person of the more educated converts that 

 shaped the dogmas of the Church and sought to 

 blend them with the occult and mysterious elements 

 in Oriental systems, of which modern ' Theosophy ' is 

 the tenuous parody. That old Greek habit of asking 

 questions, of seeking to reach the reason of things, 

 which, as has been seen, gave the great impulse to 

 scientific enquiry, was as active as ever. Appeals 

 to the Old Testament touched not the Greek as 

 they did the Jewish Christian, and the Canon of the 

 New Testament was as yet unsettled. Strange as it 

 may seem in view of the assumed divine origin of the 

 Gospels and Epistles, human judgment took upon 

 itself to decide which of them were, and which were 

 not, an integral part of supernatural revelation. The 

 ultimate verdict, so far as the Western Church was 

 concerned, was delivered by the Council of Carthage 

 in the early part of the fifth century. There arose 

 a school of Apologists, founders of theology, who, 

 to quote Gibbon, ' equipped the Christian religion 

 for the conquest of the Roman world by changing 

 it into a philosophy, attested by Revelation. , They 

 mingled together the metaphysics of Platonism, the 

 doctrine of the Logos, which came from the Stoics, 

 morality partly Platonic, partly Stoic, methods of 

 argument and interpretation learnt from Philo, with 

 the pregnant maxims of Jesus and the religious 

 language of the Christian congregations/ Thus 

 the road was opened for additions to dogmatic 



