ilosophy, those great and simple doctrines of
virtue and immortality and of the God who is a Spirit, were certain
truths. He who brought the message that these ideas were realities, and
who, on the strength of these realities, declared polytheism and the
worship of idols to be obsolete, had the mightiest forces on his side;
for the times were now ripe for this preaching. What formed the strength
of the apologetic philosophy was the proclamation that Christianity both
contained the highest truth, as men already supposed it to be and as
they had discovered it in their own minds, and the absolutely reliable
guarantee that was desired for this truth. To the quality which makes it
appear meagre to us it owed its impressiveness. The fact of its falling
in with the general spiritual current of the time and making no attempt
to satisfy special and deeper needs enabled it to plead the cause of
spiritual monotheism and to oppose the worship of idols in the manner
most easily understood. As it did not require historic and positive
material to describe the nature of religion and morality, this
philosophy enabled the Apologists to demonstrate the worthlessness of
the traditional religion and worship of the different nations.[342] The
same cause, however, made them take up the conservative position with
regard to the historical traditions of Christianity. These were not
ultimately tested as to their content, for this was taken for granted,
no matter how they might be worded; but they were used to give an
assurance of the truth, and to prove that the religion of the spirit was
not founded on human opinion, but on divine revelation. The only really
important consideration in Christianity is that it is _revelation, real
revelation_. The Apologists had no doubt as to what it reveals, and
therefore any investigation was unnecessary. The result of Greek
philosophy, the philosophy of Plato and Zeno, as it had further
developed in the empires of Alexander the Great and the Romans, was to
attain victory and permanence by the aid of Christianity. Thus we view
the progress of this development to-day,[343] and Christianity really
proved to be the force from which that religious philosophy, viewed as a
theory of the world and system of morality, first received the courage
to free itself from the polytheistic past and descend from the circles
of the learned to the common people.

This constitutes the deepest distinction between Christian philosophe