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450 that system of jurisprudence which exercised so potent an influence on the formation of later codes of laws. However, the Christian view of history will prevent the teacher from sharing that one-sided admiration of antiquity which was so disastrous among the humanists during the Renaissance, and which is found sometimes in the ranks of professional philologists. The Greeks were indeed a race endowed with exceptional gifts of body and mind. However, we need not and cannot shut our eyes to their many moral defects, especially to that frightful kind of immorality which has received its name from the Greeks, and which manifests itself even in the finest pieces of their literature.

Nor is the Christian teacher's attitude towards imperial Rome very different. At the time when Christ appeared on earth, Rome under Augustus had risen to the zenith of her glory, and the poets sang that the golden age had returned on earth. But under a glittering surface lay hidden the misery of slavery, universal corruption, scepticism and despair. In the midst of this darkness appeared the "Light to the revelation of the Gentiles." Yet the darkness did not surrender without a fierce struggle, the greatest which the world has ever seen. The history of this struggle between Christ and Caesar, between Christianity and paganism, between faith and infidelity, is the keynote of the first three centuries, nay more, of the nineteen hundred years which have since elapsed.

The Christian historian, although objecting to Gibbon's explanation of the spread of Christianity from merely natural causes, admits that, apart from