pire, and raised them to standards.
And we must value all the more the numerous undertakings and
performances, in which it appeared that the new view of life was
powerful enough in individuals to beget a corresponding practice even
without a sure belief in revelation.[133]

_Supplement._--For the correct understanding of the beginning of
Christian theology, that is, for the Apologetic and Gnosis, it is
important to note where they are dependent on Stoic, and where on
Platonic lines of thought. Platonism and Stoicism, in the second
century, appeared in union with each other: but up to a certain point
they may be distinguished in the common channel in which they flow.
Wherever Stoicism prevailed in religious thought and feeling, as for
example, in Marcus Aurelius, religion gains currency as _natural_
religion in the most comprehensive sense of the word. The idea of
revelation or redemption scarcely emerges. To this rationalism, the
objects of knowledge are unvarying, ever the same: even cosmology
attracts interest only in a very small degree. Myth and history are
pageantry and masks. Moral ideas (virtues and duties) dominate even the
religious sphere, which in its final basis has no independent authority.
The interest in psychology and apologetic is very pronounced. On the
other hand, the emphasis, which, in principle, is put on the contrast of
spirit and matter, God and the world, had for results: inability to rest
in the actual realities of the cosmos, efforts to unriddle the history
of the universe backwards and forwards, recognition of this process as
the essential task of theoretic philosophy, and a deep, yearning
conviction that the course of the world needs assistance. Here were
given the conditions for the ideas of revelation, redemption, etc., and
the restless search for powers from whom help might come, received here
also a scientific justification. The rationalistic apologetic interests
thereby fell into the background: contemplation and historical
description predominated.[134]

The stages in the ecclesiastical history of dogma, from the middle of
the first to the middle of the fifth century, correspond to the stages
in the history of the ancient religion during the same period. The
Apologists, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus; the Alexandrians;
Methodius, and the Cappadocians; Dionysius, the Areopagite, have their
parallels in Seneca, Marcus Aurelius; Plutarch, Epictetus, Numenius;
Plotinus, Porphyry; Iambl