life, it has ever opened new channels in
which theological speculation could flow out and expand itself. For
the purpose of giving an answer it is necessary to recollect what is
already agreed upon by the best writers as to the intellectual food
which theology first assimilated. It is conceded on all sides that the
earliest language of the Christian Church was Greek, and that the
problems to which it first addressed itself were those for which Greek
philosophy in its later forms had prepared the way. Greek metaphysical
literature contained the sole stock of words and ideas out of which
the human mind could provide itself with the means of engaging in the
profound controversies as to the Divine Persons, the Divine Substance,
and the Divine Natures. The Latin language and the meagre Latin
philosophy were quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly the
Western or Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the
conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them. "Latin
Christianity," says Dean Milman, "accepted the creed which its narrow
and barren vocabulary could hardly express in adequate terms. Yet,
throughout, the adhesion of Rome and the West was a passive
acquiescence in the dogmatic system which had been wrought out by the
profounder theology of the Eastern divines, rather than a vigorous and
original examination on her part of those mysteries. The Latin Church
was the scholar as well as the loyal partizan of Athanasius." But when
the separation of East and West became wider, and the Latin-speaking
Western Empire began to live with an intellectual life of its own, its
deference to the East was all at once exchanged for the agitation of a
number of questions entirely foreign to Eastern speculation. "While
Greek theology (Milman, _Latin Christianity_, Preface, 5) went on
defining with still more exquisite subtlety the Godhead and the nature
of Christ"--"while the interminable controversy still lengthened out
and cast forth sect after sect from the enfeebled community"--the
Western Church threw itself with passionate ardour into a new order of
disputes, the same which from those days to this have never lost their
interest for any family of mankind at any time included in the Latin
communion. The nature of Sin and its transmission by inheritance--the
debt owed by man and its vicarious satisfaction--the necessity and
sufficiency of the Atonement--above all the apparent antagonism
between Free-will and t