Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/34

8 sophists were adopted by the Christian theologians, and the oratorical services of the rhetoricians employed by the Church's preachers. Biblical exegesis followed the lines laid down by Alexandrian grammarians in their interpretation of Homer, and the very form of the Christian sermon based on a brief "text," which has been stereotyped apparently for all time, is an imitation of the sophists' cvmningly elaborated oration as the development of the hidden meaning of a single line of Homer.

The Græco-Roman world on which the vessel of the gospel was launched by the apostles and their followers was a seething ocean of restless life and thought, in a period of transition after the old national and racial boundaries had been swept away and before any tide had been felt setting strongly in one definite direction. We might compare it to a choppy sea, broken by the clash of cross currents and tossed about by a whirl of winds from all quarters of the compass. In literature, in art, in philosophy, and worst of all in morals, it was a decadent age; its society was like that which was recently characterised among ourselves as fin de siècle. And yet, while bestial gluttony and monstrous vice ran riot among the plutocracy, no doubt there were many innocent folk who were living simple lives in remote country places. Certainly not a few in the cities were wistfully groping after the light of truth and the power of purity. But no one clear answer rang out in response to their eager questioning. Their ears were assailed by a babel of voices. The quest for truth and goodness was baffled by the many bewildering avenues that opened out before it; and seekers after the summum bonum were lost in a vast maze of ideas. Philosophy was eclectic, religion syncretic. Both skimmed a wide surface; neither touched bottom. So there was no settlement, no conclusion. The almost identical experience of Justin Martyr in the second century and Augustine in the fourth, their going from teacher to