s nature; whether it must carry
man beyond himself; and whether a real redemption was necessary. It is
ultimately the dispute between morality and religion, which appears as
an unsettled problem in the theses of the idealistic philosophers and in
the whole spiritual conceptions then current among the educated, and
which recurs in the contrast between the Apologetic and the Gnostic
theology. And, as in the former case we meet with the most varied shades
and transitions, for no one writer has developed a consistent theory, so
also we find a similar state of things in the latter;[344] for no
Apologist quite left out of sight the idea of redemption (deliverance
from the dominion of demons can only be effected by the Logos, i.e.,
God). Wherever the idea of freedom is strongly emphasised, the religious
element, in the strict sense of the word, appears in jeopardy. This is
the case with the Apologists throughout. Conversely, wherever redemption
forms the central thought, need is felt of a suprarational truth, which
no longer views morality as the only aim, and which, again, requires
particular media, a sacred history and sacred symbols. Stoic
rationalism, in its logical development, is menaced wherever we meet the
perception that the course of the world must in some way be helped, and
wherever the contrast between reason and sensuousness, that the old Stoa
had confused, is clearly felt to be an unendurable state of antagonism
that man cannot remove by his own unaided efforts. The need of a
revelation had its starting-point in philosophy here. The judgment of
oneself and of the world to which Platonism led, the self-consciousness
which it awakened by the detachment of man from nature, and the
contrasts which it revealed led of necessity to that frame of mind which
manifested itself in the craving for a revelation. The Apologists felt
this. But their rationalism gave a strange turn to the satisfaction of
that need. It was not their Christian ideas which first involved them in
contradictions. At the time when Christianity appeared on the scene, the
Platonic and Stoic systems themselves were already so complicated that
philosophers did not find their difficulties seriously increased by a
consideration of the Christian doctrines. As _Apologists_, however, they
decidedly took the part of Christianity because, according to them, it
was the doctrine of reason and freedom.

The Gospel was hellenised in the second century in so far as th