ies behind the Christianity and
doctrines of the Apologists, but Greek philosophy (Platonic metaphysics,
Logos doctrine of the Stoics, Platonic and Stoic ethics), the
Alexandrine-Jewish apologetics, the maxims of Jesus, and the religious
speech of the Christian Churches. Justin is distinguished from Philo by
the sure conviction of the living power of God, the Creator and Lord of
the world, and the steadfast confidence in the reality of all the ideals
which is derived from the person of Christ. We ought not, however, to
blame the Apologists because to them nearly everything historical was at
bottom only a guarantee of thoughts and hopes. As a matter of fact, the
assurance is not less important than the content. By dint of thinking
one can conceive the highest truth, but one cannot in this way make out
the certainty of its reality. No positive religion can do more for its
followers than faith in the revelation through Christ and the prophets
did for the Apologists. Although it chiefly proved to them the truth of
that which we call natural theology and which was the idealistic
philosophy of the age, so that the Church appears as the great insurance
society for the ideas of Plato and Zeno, we ought not at the same time
to forget that their idea of a divine spirit working upon earth was a
far more lively and worthy one than in the case of the Greek
philosophers.

4. By their intellectualism and exclusive theories the Apologists
founded philosophic and dogmatic Christianity (Loofs: "they laid the
foundation for the conversion of Christianity into a revealed
doctrine."[459]) If about the middle of the second century the short
confession of the Lord Jesus Christ was regarded as a watchword,
passport, and _tessera hospitalitas (signum et vinculum)_, and if even
in lay and uneducated circles it was conceived as "doctrine" in
contradistinction to heresy, this transformation must have been
accelerated through men, who essentially conceived Christianity as the
"divine doctrine," and by whom all its distinctive features were
subordinated to this conception or neutralised. As the philosophic
schools are held together by their "laws" ([Greek: nomoi]) as the
"dogmas" form the real bond between the "friends," and as, in addition
to this, they are united by veneration for the founder, so also the
Christian Church appeared to the Apologists as a universal league
established by a divine founder and resting _on the dogmas of the
perfectly k