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CHAP. III them to save and perfect their souls for the Kingdom of God. Some would interpret this broadly, others narrowly; some would actually be constrained by it, and others merely do it a polite obeisance. But acknowledged it was by well-nigh all men, according to their individual tempers and the varying times in which they lived.

Platonism was an idealistic cosmos; Stoicism a cosmos of subjective ethics and teleological conceptions of the physical world. The furthest outcome of both might be represented by Augustine's cosmos of the soul and God. As for reasoning processes, inwardly inspired and then applied to the world of nature and history, Christianity combined the idealizing, fact-compelling ways of Platonic dialectic with the Stoical interest in moral edification. And, more utterly than either Platonist or Stoic, the Christian Father lacked interest in knowledge of the concrete fact for its own sake. His mental glance was even more oblique than theirs, fixed as it was upon the moral or spiritual—the anagogic—inference. Of course he carried symbolism and allegory further than Stoic and Platonist had done, one reason being that he was impelled by the specific motive of harmonizing the Old Testament with the Gospel, and thereby proving the divine mission of Jesus.

Idealism might tend toward dualistic ethics, and issue in asceticism, as was the tendency in Stoicism and the open result with Plotinus and his disciples. Such, with mightier power and firmer motive, was the outcome of Christian ethics, in monasticism. Christianity was not a dualistic philosophy; but neither was Stoicism nor Neo-Platonism. Yet, like them, it was burningly dualistic in its warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

We turn to other but connected matters: salvation, mediatorship, theory and practice. The need of salvation made men Christians; the God-man was the one and sufficient mediator between man and God. Such was the high dogma, established with toil and pain. And the practice graded downward to mediatorial persons, acts, and things, marvellous, manifold, and utterly analogous to their pagan kin. The mediatorial persons were the Virgin and the saints; the sacraments were the magic mediatorial acts;