nd also, strange
to say, offering private charms and spells to put them on the right
way of salvation.

But Greek religion was not thus to be reformed. It was not from the
priests that the growth of the higher faith of Greece was to proceed,
but from the philosophers. While much of the teaching of the
philosophers was apparently negative and destructive of faith,--for
Greece had her religious sceptics who turned the shafts of ridicule
on existing beliefs, her Agnostics who considered that nothing
certain could be affirmed about the gods, and even her secularists
who held religion to be a mere invention of priests and rulers for
their own purposes,--the course of Greek philosophy was, on the
whole, constructive, even in matters of faith, and laboured to
provide religion with a stable foundation in thought. In this great
movement of the human mind the thinkers of Greece--Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, to name no more--were working at the same problem which
occupied the prophets of Israel, and building up the rule of one God,
a Being supremely wise and good, source of all beauty, and the worker
of all that is wrought in the universe, in place of the many fickle
and weak deities who formerly bore sway. In many ways the schools of
Greece were the forerunners of Christianity. As the Jews, carried far
from their temple, form a new principle of religious association and
learn to meet for the service of God, without any sacrifice, in pious
mental exercises, so the Greeks, for whom their temples could do so
little, form little communities of earnest seekers after truth under
some teacher. The philosopher's discourse is held by students of the
early Christianity of the West to be the model on which the Christian
sermon was formed. Some of the schools even developed a true pastoral
activity, exercising an oversight of their members, and seeking to
mould their moral life and habits according to the dictates of true
wisdom.

Thus there arose on Greek soil, after the temples had grown cold,
what may truly be called a second Greek religion. It took possession
of the Roman world, and was, when Christianity appeared, the
prevailing form of religion among the more educated. Both in its
outward forms of association, in its doctrine of God, which went
through later developments very similar to those of Judaism, and in
its concentration of thought on ethical problems and on the moral
life of the individual, it powerfully prepared for Christi