Harnack cannot share Baur’s view that the triumph of the Logos-Christology at Nicaea and Chalcedon was inevitable.  A certain historic naturalness of the movement he would concede, the world on which Christianity entered being what it was.  He is aware, however, that many elements other than Christian have entered into the development.  He has phrased his apprehension thus.  That Hellenisation of Christianity which Gnosticism represented, and against which, in this, its acute form, the Church contended was, after all, the same thing which, by slower process and more unconsciously, befell the Church itself.  That pure moral enthusiasm and inspiration which had been the gist of the Christian movement, in its endeavour to appropriate the world, had been appropriated by the world in far greater measure than its adherents knew.  It had taken up its mission to change the world.  It had dreamed that while changing the world it had itself remained unchanged.  The world was changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought.  But Christianity was also changed.  It had conquered the world.  It had no perception of the fact that it illustrated the old law that the conquered give laws to the conquerors.  It had fused the ancient culture with the flame of its inspiration.  It did not appreciate the degree in which the elements of that ancient culture now coloured its far-shining flame.  It had been a maker of history.  Meantime it had been unmade and remade by its own history.  It confidently carried back its canon, dogma, organisation, to Christ and the apostles.  It did not realise that the very fact that it could find these things natural and declare them ancient, proved with conclusiveness that it had itself departed from the standard of Christ and the apostles.  It esteemed that these were its defences against the world.  It little dreamed that they were, by their very existence, the evidence of the fact that the Church had not defended itself against the world.  Its dogma was the Hellenisation of its thought.  Its organisation was the Romanising of its life.  Its canon and ritual were the externalising, and conventionalising of its spirit and enthusiasm.  These are positive and constructive statements of Harnack’s main position.

When, however, they are turned about and stated negatively, these statements all convey, more or less, the impression that the advance of Christianity had been its destruction, and the evolution of dogma had been a defection from Christ.  This is the aspect of the contention which gave hostile critics opportunity to say that we have before us the history of the loss of Christianity.  Harnack himself has many sentences which superficially will bear that construction.  Hatch had said in his brilliant book, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in the Church signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount.  The centre of gravity of the Gospel was changed from