of St. Paul. The transcendent geniuses, the deathless orators of a marvelous epoch were Cicero and St. Paul.
Is it therefore strange that the early Christian fathers who gave scientific form and logical consistency to Christian theology and ethics should have embraced with an enraptured tenderness the "Pagan Christian" who had been illumined by the first premonitory rays that fell from the rising Light of the World? Beginning with Minutius Felix and Lactantius, the tide of Ciceronian influence upon Christian thought, which Tertullian strove in vain to check, flowed steadily on until it reached its high-water mark in the writings of St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine. The first named, the famous bishop of Milan, clearly perceiving that in the new Christian literature there was an utter lack of a complete and harmonious system of Christian ethics, undertook to supply it in his De Officiis Ministrorum, modeled without disguise upon Cicero's De Officiis. The second so far lost himself in the study of his favorite author that, as he tells us himself, Christ came to him in a dream, during a critical illness at Antioch, and reproached him because he was more of a Ciceronian than a Christian. The third, who occupies a theological position really unrivalledas no single name has ever possessed such power over the Christian church, as no single mind has ever made such a profound impression upon Christian thought as that of St. Augustine-went so far as to attribute the beginning of his conversion to Christianity to the study of Cicero's Hortensius. In the history of the transmutation of human thought few things are more imposing than the meeting of the mind of the last and greatest philosopher of pagan Rome with that of the first really great philosopher of the Latin church.