_On the philosophic side_, it was the Greek influence in the person of the more educated converts that shaped the dogmas of the Church and sought to blend them with the occult and mysterious elements in Oriental systems, of which modern "Theosophy" is the tenuous parody. That old Greek habit of asking questions, of seeking to reach the reason of things, which, as has been seen, gave the great impulse to scientific inquiry, was as active as ever. Appeals to the Old Testament touched not the Greek as they did the Jewish Christian, and the Canon of the New Testament was as yet unsettled. Strange as it may seem in view of the assumed divine origin of the Gospels and Epistles, human judgment took upon itself to decide which of them were, and which were not, an integral part of supernatural revelation. The ultimate verdict, so far as the Western Church was concerned, was delivered by the Council of Carthage in the early part of the fifth century. There arose a school of Apologists, founders of theology, who, to quote Gibbon, "equipped the Christian religion for the conquest of the Roman world by changing it into a philosophy, attested by Revelation. They mingled together the metaphysics of Platonism, the doctrine of the Logos, which came from the Stoics, morality partly Platonic, partly Stoic, methods of argument and interpretation learnt from Philo, with the pregnant maxims of Jesus and the religious language of the Christian congregations." Thus the road was opened for additions to dogmatic theology, doctrines of the Trinity, of the Virgin Birth, and whatever else could be inferentially extracted from the Scriptures, and blended with foreign ideas. The growing complexity of creed called for interpretation of it, and this obviously fell to the overseers or bishops, chosen for their special gifts of "the grace of the truth." These met, as occasion required, to discuss subjects affecting the faith and discipline of the several groups. Among such, precedence, as a matter of course, would be accorded to the overseer of the most important Christian society in the Empire; and hence the prominence and authority, from an early period, of the bishop of Rome. In the simple and business-like act of his election as chairman of the gatherings lay the germ of the audacious and preposterous claims of the Papacy.