Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE MODERN MAN The world we live in is obviously very different from that of the apostles, and the presuppositions of our thinking are vastly different from theirs. Indeed, it would be difficult to overestimate the contrasts between the age of the New Testament and our own as far as the fundamental attitudes of the social mind are concerned. In the outer forms of life there are, it is true, many points of similarity. It would be difficult to find a more modern period in history than the first Christian century. Barring their inability to apply steam and electricity to industry,—an exception of incalculable importance,—the men of the first century of the Roman Empire were much like the men of to-day. They had their great business corporations, their art, their literature, their professions, their universities, their "new women," their athletics. Indeed, we learn that at Carthage students were disorderly in lectures, that at Rome they failed to pay their fees, and that at Alexandria professional athletes were maintained through something closelyresembling that ingenious device of to-day, the training table. It is true the ancient world did not have football, but it had gladiatorial sports as a tolerable substitute. But over against these similarities are at least four fundamental differences: — i. The modern age is primarily scientific and controlled by the conception of process. It is difficult for us to appreciate what scientific thought must have been in a world that believed its universe consisted of a flat earth around which the waters flowed, with several heavens superimposed, and with a great pit beneath in which was the abode of the dead. There was considerable knowledge in ancient culture of the movements of the heavenly bodies, but all religious t... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.