Christianity

CHRISTIANITY

(CHRISTIANITY is derived from the adjective Christian, J which is formed from the name Χριστός, the Anointed, and means the religion introduced by Jesus Christ and communicated by Him to His circle of followers.

The Christian religion is the result of two factors, neither of which can be omitted if a true description is to be given. On the one hand there is the objective element, which consists in the manifestation and revelation of God to His people for the purpose of salvation; and on the other side there is the subjective element, which consists in the appropriation of this manifestation and what it implies by man through faith. Both elements enter into and form the constituent elements of a new life, which all Christians share in-common, and which is the essence of Christianity. This common life of Jesus and His people has many ways by which it can make itself seen and known. Christians have from the beginning exercised no small influence upon the ordinary political and moral life of the world. They have been able to effect changes in generally received moral ideas and maxims. They have altered the course and character of legislation. They have introduced new opinions and beliefs. They have formed fellowships for worship, built places of meeting, held councils and assemblies, and in many ways given evidence of their presence and power in the world. But it must always be remembered that Christianity is neither the church simply, nor theology, nor Christian ethics. It is more than all these put together. The common life of Jesus and His people, which is the core of Christianity, manifests itself in an outward visible organization for the purpose of worship, which is commonly called the church (see Church). But this worship is not Christianity; still less are the various institutions and ceremonies according to which worship is carried on.

Christianity cannot help powerfully affecting the whole of the intellectual side of man’s life. The spiritual events on which it rests must have their rationale, and the spiritual forces which course through it must have their rule, and man must more or less comprehend them, and assimilate them. The Christian cannot help having a very different idea of God from that held by Aristotle or Plato. The Christian regards sin as something which affects the whole human race, while the pagan believes it to be the mistake or misfortune of individuals. Christianity cannot help remoulding the beliefs and opinions of mankind, but theology and Christianity are two very different things.

The Christian is moved by moral impulses and guided by moral principles which are peculiar to himself. He cannot look on marriage, for example, from either the purely economic or the purely sensuous point of view. He cannot help reorganizing the scheme of virtues, and giving to the principle of love a pre-eminence which it has not in pagan ethics. Christianity cannot help putting a new face on morality, but Christian ethics and Christianity are still not one and the same thing.

Christianity includes all these and much more besides. It is nothing less than the whole round of human life in all its various departments in so far as it is related to and illumined and dominated by the divine love revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the presence of Jesus among His people and all that is implied in such a presence.

The close and inseparable connection between Jesus Christ and Christianity, which is implied in the name, and which study only makes more and more evident, produces the inevitable consequence that our view of the nature and characteristics of Christianity must depend on the answer which we give to the question which Jesus himself put to His disciples—“Whom do ye say that I, the Son of man, am ĭ ” There are different theories of Christianity, because there are different theories of Christ, and in order to know how various conceptions of the nature of Christianity arise it is necessary to be familiar with the various views which men have held and hold about the nature and work of Christ. For example, different theories of Christianity arise when we ask what was the relation existing between Jesus and what went before Him, what was the relation in which Jesus stood to His contemporaries and His immediate followers, what is the connection which subsisted between Jesus and the future. All these inquiries reveal different theories about the nature and work of Christ, which are reproduced in different theories of the essential nature of Christianity, and enable men whose opinions and principles are widely different to call themselves, to their own satisfaction at least, Christians.

Jesus Christ claimed to have a definite relation to the past history of that people among whom He was born. In His teaching He put himself at the end of the Old Testament, and declared that He came to fulfil the Law and the Prophets. Christianity, therefore, however it be explained, has a close connection with Judaism, and the religion of Jesus cannot be considered without regard to the religion of Moses. This is now universally acknowledged, however variously the relation between the two may be explained. Criticism finds an ample confirmation of the claims of Christ in the intimate connection in which His teaching, life, and work stand to the Old Testament and the past life of the inspired Hebrew people. The whole of the Mosaic dispensation, the whole of the Jewish economy, with its prophecy, priesthood, and kingship, is recognized as summed up in the person and work of Christ. The Old Testament, which without Christ is but a collection of sacred books written at different times and in various manners, is regarded when looked at through Christ as an harmonious whole of anticipatory revelation. Indeed, one of the chief differences which critical apologetic finds between the Old Testament and other so-called sacred books is, that Christ is at the end of the Old Testament, and that no other scriptures have such a conclusion. But all this implies that Christianity is a development from Judaism, and that our idea of the one will be modified by our conception of the other. Those who refuse to admit that Judaism is more than one of the many natural religions of mankind can. hardly admit the supernatural character of Christianity, or regard it in any other light than as the outcome, perhaps the highest outcome possible, of that side in man’s nature which has been called by some the religious faculty. Those who attempt to derive Mosaic institutions from Egypt, who seek the basis of Hebrew prophecy in epileptic tendencies, and see nothing in the theocratic idea which was not suggested by ordinary kingship, cannot have much difficulty in analyzing Christianity into the natural development of the religious sentiment aided by a somewhat extravagant enthusiasm. Those, on the other hand, who find it impossible to accept the assumptions, and to get over the innumerable difficulties attending the naturalist theory of the Old Testament and of the history of the Hebrew people, find in Christianity something different in kind as well as in degree from all natural religions. Modern criticism even of the negative kind often indirectly supports the supernaturalist theory of the Old Testament and of Christianity, for its fundamental maxim, that waters cannot rise higher than their source, has proved the impossibility of explaining away Old Testament institutions and New Testament truths into merely the natural outcome of the religious faculties of a peculiar people. It has proved that the Old Testament religion contains materials which were not got from the intercourse of the Jews with other nations, and which did not arise naturally from the geographical position or the ethnographical characteristics of the Hebrew people. It has shown that the Old Testament religion was not a natural stream gathered from many a smaller rill, but came forth gushing, like the water of Hebrew history, from the Rock which contained it; and in doing so it has given its testimony to the altogether unique and supernatural character of Christianity.

The relation of Jesus to His contemporaries, and of His disciples and their writings to the founders of the various ethnic religions, is another point whence proceed various views of the nature of Christianity. The old deist view, adopted and intensified by the Encyclopedists, that Jesus was a charlatan, that His disciples were partly cheats and partly dupes, and that Christianity was founded in fraud and perpetuated by deceit, has to all intents and purposes disappeared. But many believe that Christianity is only one of the many religions which are all of them true though none of them contain the whole truth. The modern notion of evolution has been called in to enforce this view, and Christianity is explained to be the most perfect development yet reached by the religious spirit of mankind; while the character of Jesus and the New Testament writings are explained on the same principle. On theories of this kind Christianity is the prcduction of the natural forces of the period which gave birth to it, and· contains nothing which cannot be traced back to the circumstances of the time, and the conditions of humanity. All such theories commonly rest on the general principle that the supernatural is impossible, and that whatever involves a miracle is tpso facto incredible, and then proceed by means of some special principle to explain the presence of facts which seem to imply the supernatural. (See article Apologetics.) These principles are used to explain not so much the origin of Christianity itself as the origin of the Christian writings of the New Testament, and the production of the scheme of doctrine and morals therein contained. Perhaps the most ingenious of these theories is that cluster which has been produced by the writers of the Tübingen school, who have suggested the general method which has been almost universally followed by anti-supernaturalist writers. The method is by an ingenious negative criticism to separate between the original elements of Christianity as these were present in the mind of Jesus and communicated by Him to His disciples, and those elements which were afterwards added by more philosophical adherents, and to explain how, out of the conflict between the two opposite tendencies of Judaism and antiJudaism, the various and conflicting elements at last settled into a somewhat harmonious whole. By this ingenious method Jesus is reduced to the position of a Jewish rabbi, not much more noticeable than some of his contemporaries, and Christianity is not the religion of Jesus, but what grew out of that religion when it was subjected to the influences of Roman civilization, Greek philosophy, and Eastern theosophy. Such theories are unsupported by external, and rest confessedly on internal evidence. The weakness of internal evidence when unsupported by external is well known, atíd in this case the internal evidence is anything but strong. There are many serious objections to be taken to the Tübingen hypotheses (see article Bible) merely as hypotheses, and these difficulties are so great that it is almost evident the hypotheses would never have been put forward unless the anti-supernaturalist idea of Christianity had been taken for granted at the outset. There can be little doubt that if the supernatural be admitted these various hypotheses, while they suggest some difficulties which have not yet been solved, will be found to be at variance with the plain results both of external and internal evidence.

On the other hand those who believe in the supernatural take a different view of the relation of Jesus to His contemporaries. He was no mere Jewish rabbi, but spake as never man spake, and did what never man did. He was the manifestation of God, and came to give by His presence, person, and work, as well as by what He said, the full revelation of God. He was while on earth the centre of the world’s history, to whom all had looked forward, to whom all look back. And Christianity is not the simple product of the contemporary philosophical and religious systems, but is the embodiment of the unique appearance and work of Christ.

The relation in which Christianity stands to the future is also a basis on which various views of its nature have been rested, according to the theory of the peculiar powers of diffusion and propagation which it is supposed to possess. Anti-supematuralists consider Christianity to be merely a moral force, acting through mere moral enlightenment; but this has already been sufficiently dwelt upon. There are, however, what may be called two Christian views of the modus propagandi of Christianity, which produce two of the real nature of Christianity itself. This difference of view is best seen in the variety of answers given to the question how Christianity subsisted after the departure of Christ, and how it subsists now from age to age, a more or less compact organic life in the world. The various answers given may be roughly placed in two classes as they lay stress on the spiritual or the mechanical side of the process, and enlarge on the spiritual or the mechanical influences at work. Those who take what may be called the spiritual view of Christianity hold that it was sustained after the ascension of Christ by the mission and work of the Holy Spirit, whose presence and influence enable it to go on from age to age, spreading in the world and developing according to the laws of its growth. And they believe that as the chief result of Christ’s work consisted in a change of moral relation between God and those for whom Christ died, the spread and permauence of Christianity is purely moral, and manifests itself mainly in a change of wilL Of course all this takes place in special ways and by appropriate means. These means are called the means of grace, and are usually held to be the Word, Sacraments, and Prayer; but it is always to be understood that all such means are secondary or subordinate, and that the primary means of grace is the Holy Spirit, who works through these subordinate means, but may and does work in other ways. It is always understood that the operations of the Spirit cannot be limited to special actions nor confined by mechanical laws. On the other hand those who look at Christianity from what may be called the mechanical point of view are inclined to lay stress upon the means by which the Spirit works. They do not ignore the mission of the Holy Ghost nor His work, but are apt to say that He works only in certain prescribed ways, and through one set of means, and the tendency is to lay almost exclusive stress on one set of subordinate means—the Sacraments, and to represent that the persistence and spread of Christianity depend upon the constancy and correctness of sacramental ceremonies.

These opposite views of the nature of Christianity depend upon differences of dogmatic conception which may be briefly indicated. All through the one view, a change in the relationship between God’s will and man’s will is held to be the fundamental result which flows from the work of Christ. All through the other view man’s nature rather than man’s will is considered, and the result of Christ’s work is looked on rather as a process within human nature than as a change in moral relations between man and God. In this way the progress of Christianity is looked on as the gradual semi-physical impregnation of human nature by the nature of Christ, a prolongation of the Incarnation rather than a development of the consequences of the finished work of Christ, to be produced by keeping Christ incarnate in the sacrifice of the Mass and impregnating mankind by means of Transubstantiation in the Sacrament of the altar. The one view is the view of churches which have accepted the Reformation, the other is that of churches which have not.

These various conceptions of Christianity may be further illustrated by the views which are held by the partisans of each concerning the relations between Christianity and the Bible. The Bible and Christianity cannot be separated, but different opinions may be and have been held about the relation in which the two stand to each other. On the one hand naturalists, and those who take the mechanical view of Christianity, are inclined to regard the Bible chiefly as a compendium of abstract truths, which may be condensed into dogmas and summarized in creeds; while those who take the spiritual view of Christianity regard the Bible as the medium which reveals God and His gracious deab'ngs personally to the believing reader or hearer. To the one the Bible is a quarry of doctrines to be rationally criticized or implicitly accepted when once stamped as genuine by the church, to the other it is above all things a means of grace which the most ignorant can use and profit by. To the naturalist the Bible has been formed by the church, it is simply the natural production of the minds of those who formed the old Jewish and the early Christian communities, and grew to be what it is without the aid of superhuman intervention. To those who have adopted a mechanical view of Christianity the Bible is also the product of the church, but of the supernatural power in the church, and has grown to be what it is because it has been sanctioned by the church. To those who take the spiritual view of the nature of Christianity, the Bible, on the other hand, is and always has been the formative power in the church and that round which the church gathers itself, for it is the presence of God speaking to His people.

Both naturalists and those who hold a mechanical theory of Christianity agree in holding that there is an external sort of development in the Bible, and that the church can go beyond the Bible, whereas those who hold the spiritual view of Christianity deny both these positions. Naturalists hold that one part of the Bible is beyond the other, and since the Bible is simply the outcome of man’s religious thoughts and feelings in certain ages and places, they believe that men now may give utterance to thoughts and sentiments which in depth of feeling and insight may surpass those contained in the Bible. The Tübingen theologians, for example, believe that the New Testament is a series of deposits of religious truth, in which the truths taught by Jesus are supplemented by the teachings of His disciples, by the lessons of Paul, and by the theories of Christians educated in the philosophy of Greece; while Dr Newman considers that the church, in virtue of a supernatural gift bestowed upon her, can add to the doctrines contained in the Bible according to certain well-defined lines of development. On the other hand those who hold the spiritual view of Christianity believe that the church can never go beyond the Bible, and that progress in Christian theology means greater insight into the manifestation of God in the Bible and greater power to interpret the supernatural facts and forces made known therein.

The various theories differ also in the closeness of connection which they think subsists between Christianity and the Bible. The naturalist and those who put the church above the Bible as the formative power in Christianity both make the relation between Christianity and the Bible a purely intellectual one, whereas those who hold by the spiritual view make the Bible a means of grace and not merely the quarry whence to hew theological dogmas. But the naturalist agrees with spiritual Christians in maintaining the authoritative character of the Bible, while the mechanical Christian sets the Bible aside when it does not agree with church tradition. With the naturalist, however, the Bible is authoritative because it is the only set of documents which tell him about Christianity in its primitive state. It is authoritative because it is the only witness to the historical facts of Christianity, not because it is to be a law to him. To the spiritual Christian, on the other hand, the Bible is authoritative because it is a revelation of those spiritual forces and a record of those spiritual events on which Christianity still depends, and which teach him the way of salvation.

To sum up, then, Christianity claims to be no mere social revolution or natural step in the march of human progress. It is a religion whose sources are not to be found within man’s nature but outside of it in the saving revelation of God in Christ, and Jesus is thus the author and giver of an eternal life which spreads itself and is maintained, not by mechanical contrivance, but by the living Spirit of God entering into human history, and building on the basis of reconciliation a kingdom of God which is both human and divine, and which comes and comes again and again in wave after wave of developing completion until the will of God is done on earth as in heaven.

Christianity began its career in the world at a time singularly propitious both politically, socially, and religiously for the advent of a new universal and spiritual religion.

Even apart from the entrance of Christianity the reign of Augustus over the whole Roman empire was an epoch-making period. Never before had the various races of mankind been united under one universal empire which promised to be permanent. For the Roman power was different from the governments of Asiatic adventurers and Greek warriors. Where Rome planted her foot was fated to remain Roman. The ancient Asiatic empires had been for the most part the creation of victorious generals, and had been kept in life only by a tolerably rapid succession of dynasties; their power seemed to depend on the character of the individual ruler. And the empire of Alexander, while more enduring, was not coherent. But from the beginning of her conquests the spirit of Rome herself seemed always to be greater than the vigour and ability of her generals and rulers, and she alone of empires seemed to be indifferent to the precarious stability of government ensured by regular dynastic succession. “The Romans conquered like savages, but ruled like philosophic statesmen, till, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the shores of Britain and the borders of the German forests to the sands of the African desert, the whole Western world was consolidated into one great commonwealth, united by bonds of law and government, by facilities of communication and commerce, and by the general dissemination of the Greek and Latin languages.” The world had a centre as it never had before, and the golden threads of well-established government connected all the world with Rome. Roads were made connecting Rome with the remotest countries, and a system of posts established which provided for easy communication with the capital. Military colonies carried Roman usages and manners, civilization and privileges, to the remotest corners of the empire. Magnificent cities were built in such outlying dependencies as Britain, Gaul, and Germany. The arts and civilization were gradually extending their dominion and subjugating the most distant and most desolate places. To all this Augustus added a more perfectly devised centralization which made the empire a more compact whole, so that any new influence made its throbs felt from centre to extremities in a wonderfully short time. The world was made ready for the furtherance of the spread of opinions as it had never been before, and for becoming spell-bound by invisible spiritual laws like those which Christian morality weaves around its disciples. The time of Augustus, if it was the beginning of the decline and fall of the Roman empire as a visible earthly dominion, was also the beginning of its permanent establishment on earth in a purely invisible way, when its policy, statesmanship, and legislation were to pass into all the nations of the earth and become part of their lives so long as the world endured.

Socially, too, the world was wonderfully ripe for the entrance and spread of a universal religion. Slavery it is true flourished, and there were conquerors and conquered, privileged and unprivileged classes. But the beginning had already been made of that lavish distribution of Roman citizenship which laid the foundation of a common political life throughout the empire.

The religious character of the times was also marvellously adapted for furthering the advance of Christianity. The old national creeds were fast disappearing, and were being submerged in the vast cosmopolitan religion of Rome. It was the wise custom of conquering Rome to do nothing to disturb the religions of the peoples subdued by her armies, and commonly the principal deities of the conquered nations were added to the overcrowded pantheon of Rome. This religious tolerance or indifference gradually began to eat the heart out of paganism, and all over the civilized world the pagan creeds sat lightly on their worshippers. The various deities were looked on as interchangeable manifestations of a supreme fate-power who reigned alone in the invisible world, while in this visible earth the genius of Rome seemed to be the one object of worship. The old national religions with their well-defined outlines and limits were being gradually effaced, and men were longing for some religion which, while it had the universal character which the times required, should have more individuality and personal power in it than were supplied by the thoughts of a supreme spiritual fate, or by the mere materialist conception of the genius of Rome. And all this bred a thirst for information about sacred things which was unknown in earlier times. The claims of conflicting religions were philosophically discussed, and amid all the gross materialism of the period there were longings for some deeper, truer religion than any they had known. These longings were further stimulated by the gradual but almost universal advance of new religious ideas coming from the far East, which was then regarded as the cradle of science and philosophy. In the 5th century before our era the vast Buddhist movement had overspread all the East from Thibet to Ceylon, and the Greek and Roman conquests in Asia brought Europe within the intoxicating influence of its subtle religious ideas. This strange Eastern theosophy, which during the first four centuries of our era is known by the name of Gnosticism, had a most powerful influence on the old religions of the West, which seemed to dissolve under its touch. Everywhere in the art and literature of the period we find its prevalence in the West during the age of Augustus and his successors. It insensibly undermined the beauteous sensuous mythology of Greece and the harder sterner religion of Rome, and substituted for them a religion in which, if fear was the prevailing emotion, worshippers still felt that there was more spirituality and greater claims to universality than their old national religions could give. And thus the gradual defacement of old religious outlines, the stimulation of strange cravings to know the mysteries of nature and of worship, and the longing for rest in a universal religion of deliverance prepared the world for the coming and spread of the religion of Jesus Christ.

The great problem Christianity had to face and to solve was one of no ordinary difficulty, and one involving a number of side issues which greatly perplexed the early church. The practical side of the problem as it met the early Christians may be put thus :—How could Christianity, which was rooted in Judaism, be at the same time a religion equally open to Jew and Gentile; how could the exclusiveness of Judaism and the utter want of exclusiveness in Christianity be reconciled with each other? And the solution of this problem brought the early Christians into conflicts of a special kind with the government and philosophy of the times.

When Jesus proclaimed His mission, and when He sent forth His disciples on preaching tours to make known himself and His work, we find the phrase “kingdom of heaven” perpetually occurring; and it was this phrase and what it suggested that brought the early Christians face to face with the great problem they had to solve. When Jesus announced that the kingdom of God was at hand, His message was quite intelligible to His Jewish audiences. The phrase was sacred and familiar, and their thoughts went back at once to the old theocracy of Israel. And when after the death and ascension of our Lord, His Jewish believers got a truer and deeper insight into the meaning of the expression, still the idea it conveyed bound Christianity, with bands that could not be untied, to Judaism, the Old Testament Scriptures, the miraculous life of the J ewish nation, and the ideal Israel long expected and long announced. Throughout the Old Testament Scriptures we find three ideas connected with the thought of the kingdom of God. It implied first and primarily the share in the inheritance in the land which the Lord gave to His people and to their children; and then it implied security in this possession, deliverance from Egypt and a succession of enemies, and, lastly, the possession of an inward spring of covenant life, which guaranteed them both salvation and possession, These three things were the historical and material basis on which rested the whole spiritual and prophetic superstructure of the ideal kingdom of God, which lay enshrined in the heart of every devout Hebrew. When our Lord by His preaching, by His life, death, and rising again, and by His mission of the Holy Spirit, gave new meanings to these thoughts, He only widened, deepened, spiritualized, and gave personal point and application to what the prophets and holy men of old had already declared. And when He and His apostles guided by His Spirit taught His early followers that His kingdom of God meant possession of the spiritual blessings of God’s grace, and deliverance from sin, death, and Satan, and a life of adopted sonship which guaranteed them in all these blessings, devout Jews could feel that now they were only learning what the prophets had taught, and they rejoiced in the thoroughgoing oneness which existed between the kingdom of God as proclaimed in the Old Testament and the kingdom of heaven which Jesus preached. But if it was a sine qua non that Christianity should spring out of the Old Testament Scriptures and be identical in all essentials with the Old Testament church, it was no less necessary that it should be now a religion for Gentiles as well as Jews, and here the difficulty emerged. Could the old Jewish church be carried over into the Christian church if all that outwardly distinguished it were abolished? Could the continuity be preserved if the ceremonies and restrictions which made up the visible life of the Old Testament worship were no longer to be observed? Would not the Old Testament church be entirely destroyed and the continuity between it and the New Testament church be done away with if the Old Testament ceremonial law was abandoned? So long as the members of the Christian church were Jews only or Gentiles who had become proselytes the difficulty was not felt. The Christians had not openly broken with Judaism, and were acknowledged even by their Jewish opponents to be a Jewish sect,—a sect everywhere spoken against it is true, but still a sect just as the Sadducees were a sect. But whenever Gentiles who were not proselytes became believers then a fierce struggle arose between those who thought that the continuity between the Old Testament and Christianity could not be kept up unless it were visibly perpetuated in those observances which distinguished the Jewish religion from all others, and those who were contented with a continuity which was more of the spirit than of the letter and the form. The practical shape which the struggle at first assumed was, whether Gentiles could be Christians without first becoming proselytes, and whether Jewish Christians mustcease to be believers if they associated with Gentiles who had not been circumcised, and had not rendered themselves servants to the law of Moses. To understand the difficulty rightly it should be remembered that when the difficulty arose the New Testament canon was not in existence, and the (⅛urch had to be guided mainly by the Old Testament Scriptures and the memory of Jesus preserved by the apostles. In spite of what has been advanced by critics of the Tübingen school, it seems evident that the apostles one and all in their letters to the church faithfully followed out the solution which Christ’s discourses gave. In these discourses our Lord carefully distinguished between the permanent and the temporary elements in the Old Testament dispensation, and assumed that His office as Messiah gave him full authority to abolish or alter the latter. He also pointed out that the permanent parts of the Mosaic economy were the various modes of expressing that love to God and to man which He declared to be the sum of the law and the prophets. These were unalterable, but any change might be made in the subordinate and temporary elements, if only this great principle was more fully and better expressed by the change. This leading thought Christ used as much to detect and condemn false developments of the Mosaic economy lp.g. i Pharisaism) as to test its true development in Christianity. The apostles of Jesus carried out the principles of their Master. There is not a trace in the epistles of Peter, James, and John of the idea that salvation and entrance into the kingdom of God could only be obtained by those who were first Jews and then Christians. There is no statement, for example, that Gentiles must be circumcised before they can be baptized. On the contrary, James speaks of the perfect law of liberty, and Peter and John have expressions equally strong. Within the writings of the apostolic circle everything goes to show that the church was taught from the beginning that Christianity was not to be confined within the limits of natural or adopted Jewish nationality.

But when we turn to the Acts of the Apostles, and to the epistles of Paul, especially to the Epistle to the Galatians, we find that the apostolic solution of the difficulty was not acceptable to the early Jewish Christians, and was not accepted by many of them. We even find that the practice of members of the apostolic circle was not always in accordance with the principles which they had enounced in accordance with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. There was a strong ultra-Je wish party in the early Christian church, which was able in some measure to control the conduct of the apostles themselves. And this was what was to be expected. Men who had been trained in Judaism, where the connection between religion and politics was so very close, whose religious thoughts were always expressed in outward ordinances, could scarcely avoid insisting upon some visible connection between Judaism and Christianity. They could not see that Christianity was the completion of Judaism if the practices of the Mosaic economy were not kept up. Thus we find at least two parties, a Judaizing and a Gentile party, in the early church. At first the Jewish party was so strong as to force a compromise upon the leaders of the Gentile church, and require that every Gentile Christian should at least become a proselyte of the gate by abstaining from things offered to idols, from things strangled, from blood, and from πopvda or a breach of the Old Testament regulation about marriage; and it is probable that Jewish Christians were required to keep up all the practices of the Jewish religion and more especially to share in the sacrificial worship of the temple. Afterwards this Jewish party grew weaker, and it became the universal belief in the early church that Christians born Jews did not need to observe the ceremonial law of Moses or to share in the temple-worship, and that Christians born Gentiles did not require to show, by keeping certain Jewish regulations, that they were believers in a creed which was a development of Old Testament ideas. The capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple separated the Christian Jews who were of the sect of the Pharisees from their fellow Christians, and the severe persecution of Jewish religion and rites which followed the revolt under Bar Cochba sent most of them over into the ranks of the Essenes, and thus the Christian church was left in peace to reconcile its intimate connection with Judaism with its abandonment of Jewish ritual on the principles of Christian liberty. But in solving the problem the early Christian church was scarcely true to the principles of its Master. In order to defend more strenuously their separation from Judaism, it was customary for the fathers of the church to look at Christianity as supplying in detail all that Judaism possessed, and this led them almost as far from the fundamental principles of continuity laid down by Christ as the old Judaizers had gone. They required a new law to set over against the old law of Moses, a new service to take the place of the temple service of the Old Testament, a new daily sacrifice, “the new law’s new oblation” instead of the sacrifices of Moses, a new ritual which after it had gradually grown complex enough was found to correspond bit by bit with the ritual of Jerusalem, and a new priesthood whose functions were to be not unlike the duties of the sons of Aaron. In church traditions, a ritual of worship, and a service of priests, they found the proof of their relation to the religion of the Old Testament, and forgetting the unseen continuity of sameness of spiritual principle, found a consolation in a fancied similarity in external routine of worship. In this way early Christianity succeeded and failed in realizing to herself the real continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament kingdoms of God.

But if early Christianity found it difficult to reconcile the New Testament idea of the kingdom of God with the Old Testament conception, it was no less troubled when it came to work out this New Testament thought on the broad basis prepared for it by the existence and character of the Roman empire. There were difficulties without as well as difficulties within. Christians are men with bodies as well as souls, and Christian ideas tend to take sensible shape, sometimes false and sometimes true. No sooner had Christianity shaken off its Jewish thraldom than it seemed eager to betake itself to a new slavery—eager to lay down the kingdom of God on lines already furnished by the government of pagan Rome, or the creeds of pagan philosophy. At all events we can trace in early Christianity the workings of two subtle influences, the one of which strove to reduce the kingdom of God to a material and earthly empire, while the other would have dissolved it into a system of philosophy. The ecclesiastical empire of the Middle Ages and the scholastic theology overthrown at the Great Reformation were slowly built up by principles which Christianity almost unconsciously assumed during her long struggle with pagan Rome and with pagan philosophy.

The relation of Rome to Christianity was very peculiar. Both aimed at world-wide dominion, and the one was the very incarnation of polytheism, while the other forbade in the sternest terms all idolatrous worship. The Christians, while citizens of the great empire which ruled the world, found the idolatry which they hated and denounced interwoven inextricably with the law of the land, possession of property, social observances, and public ceremonies. And Christianity had scarcely emerged from Palestine when it found itself engaged in a hand to hand struggle with the imperial power of Rome herself.

The uniform policy of Rome was to respect the laws and the religion of the conquered peoples who came under her dominion. The Roman system of jurisprudence, it is true, was extended to all parts of the empire, and capital offences were generally tried according to Roman law before Roman tribunals; but, generally speaking, conquered nations lived under their own laws and were allowed to practise their own religions. By this wise policy Rome not only avoided stirring up religious wars, but contrived to be the religious and legal as well as political centre of all the conquered tribes. In one way only was the religion of the conquered interfered with, when the worship of the emperor was forced upon all his subjects. Whatever motives of policy urged this haughty indifference to all creeds, and this easy toleration of every form of pagan faith, they were in reality founded on an intense belief in the eternity ιnd almost divinity of Rome itself. Rome had remained for ages and seemed likely to endure the Eternal City, and when all other feelings of reverence had fled, the heart of the genuine Roman was fuU of awe for the majesty and might of perenduring Rome. It was no mere servile adulation which led to the deification of the emperors. The emperor was God, and divine honours were paid to him because he was the visible symbol of imperial Rome making manifest its power and permanence. And it was a real feeling of worship that raised in every house the altar to the divus imperator, and spread over the whole of the Roman empire, jostling aside its myriad creeds, the one faith in Rome, in its power, its eternity, and its mysterious strength. It was in this way that paganism and Rome became almost synonymous, and that Christianity and Rome were foes from the first.

Rome never treated Christianity as other religions were treated. Gibbon tells us that the Romans were already somewhat intolerant of Judaism and extended their intolerance to the new Jewish sect, somewhat more intractable than their neighbours, which Christians were supposed to be. He also shows that Christians who had neither temples nor synagogues were supposed to be atheists, and so beyond the pale of toleration, and that the secret assemblies of Christians were supposed to have a hostile political meaning. But something more is required to explain the uncompromising hostility of Rome, especially when we find that latterly that hostility was strongest under the greatest and noblest emperors. Since Roman toleration was founded on public policy, there was an end of it with regard to a religion which was of no use in curbing a conquered people. ∙ The Christian religion was nova and illidta ; it was not a national religion nor a recognized faith, and was a new and unaccountable phenomenon which might be, and most probably was, fraught with danger to the sacred state. We find, too, in many of Rome’s ablest statesmen a strange instinctive dread of Christianity. They made inquiries about it and were watchful of it, and yet could get no real insight into it. They could not help noticing how in spite of edicts and persecutions Christianity was rapidly increasing; they saw how, with a daring which to them was simply inexplicable, it was nothing loath to match itself against the power of Rome. To the ears of these dark and jealous emperors came tidings of Christianity copying the jurisdic tion of Rome in its ecclesiastical divisions of the land, of its success in the large towns in the empire, of its entrance into the army. They saw, too, what Constantine was the first to make use of, that Christianity acted in such a way upon the physical frame that Christian soldiers were stronger and braver than their fellowS, and man for man and battalion for battalion were more than a match for the pagans. Above all, they heard rumours of a new kingdom which the Christians were to establish, of confidently expressed hopes that the kingdom would soon come, and of openly asserted resolutions and prophecies that it would be established on the ruins of Rome itself. And, on the side of the Christians, Tertullian was ready to boast that in a few years the Christian empire had more extensive boundaries than the Roman, and that Christian soldiers had penetrated and triumphed in regions where the Roman arms were unknown or defied. Christian martyrs marching to the arena confidently predicted the speedy overthrow of the cruel paganism which sent them there. As the struggle deepened, too, there entered a distinctly new element on the Christian side, and the contest became not merely one of the true religion against a false paganism and a pagan and persecuting state; it became a battle between two kingdoms. The Christian bishop and the Roman governor were two rival authorities, viceroys in two warring empires; and the saints would inherit the earth, when the church ruled instead of Rome as the mistress of the world. During the long struggle between Rome and Christianity we see this subtle influence entering into and withering the true spiritual conception of the kingdom of God, until at last it is almost transformed into an earthly empire. St Augustine has seized on and represented this idea with sublime dramatic power in his Civitas Dei in peregrinatione per terras, where the Civitas Dei, or the church, is set over against the Civitas Terrena, or state; and where the kingdom of God, however grandly pictured, is almost as material, earthly, and sensible as the empire of pagan Rome. From this fatal influence have come all the attempts to realize the universality and catholicity of the church in a purely external or visible way, and the failure to understand how Christianity may be all-embracing without visibly covering and controlling the earth.

In her contest with Rome Christianity succeeded in realizing and giving expression to her claim to universal dominion, but in Rome’s overthrow she inflicted an almost fatal wound on herself when she was unconsciously induced to take the government of a pagan empire as her model for the organization of a spiritual kingdom.

In the contest which Christianity had to maintain with pagan philosophy the early Christians were compelled to work out another side of the great problem which confronted the early church—the relation of the Old Testament to the New Testament kingdom of God. Philosophy when engaged upon topics which belong to Christianity is always easily distinguished by the way in which it puts its questions. The question with philosophy, for example, is, What is Sin? How can its existence be explained? But the Christian question is: How can I get rid of sin? To the philosopher sin is food for meditation, but to the Christian it is something to be escaped from. Outside Christianity there were many schools of thinkers who busied themselves with speculations about the origin and nature of sin, death, God, judgment, holiness, and so on, and there were many philosophers who were quite willing to take help from the Hebrew Scriptures in their difficulties. It was always a matter of earnest endeavour on the part of Christian theologians to make it clear that Christianity was not a philosophy to be discussed but a life to be lived; but when they were called, by the views of some of the Gnostics, to explain their relation to the Old Testament Scriptures and to the New Testament canon, we find them unable to realize the full significance of the problem. To the early Christians the Old Testament was pre-eminently the scripture, it was in their possession before the New Testament, and the New Testament canon was gradually formed as one after another of the writings which compose it were found worthy of a place beside the Old Testament Scriptures. Certain of the Gnostic sects made use of the facts, statements, and truths contained in the Scriptures in their theories of creation and redemption, of man, sin, and salvation; and Christian theologians were compelled to refute the Gnostics by setting forth over against the false doctrines what they held to be the truths concerning the matters taught. In this way and gradually there grew up an intellectual system of Christian truth, embodied in the creeds of the church and in the writings of her theologians. The necessity was laid upon Christian theologians to present Christianity intellectually in this way, and oppose a true to the false γvωσις ; but just as in her contest with Judaism and Rome Christianity insensibly adopted part of the error contended against, so here the struggle against intellectual evil had the result of tending to dissociate Christian life from the Holy Scriptures, and of creating two kingdoms of God—one of life which was to be lived on the lines of the old Roman empire, and one of doctrine which was to be based on the foundations of Greek philosophy. This latter tendency did not appear in the church until the early Jewish element had almost died out. To the Jew Judaism was an historical past which it was not to the Gentile, who could with difficulty think of the church of the Old Testament as a spiritual organization into which he was actually brought by regeneration. To the Jew the Mosaic Law and the Old Testament Scriptures generally did not so much mean a series of commandments or prescriptions as a mode of life. No doubt when they thought of the Old Testament their minds were full of laws and commandments, but still the most prominent idea was that their fathers had lived and had been enjoined to live a particular mode of life. To the Jew the Old Testament was the past covenant life of his fathers in which he might share, and it showed him God much more as the covenant God with whom Israel had lived in communion than as a mere Lawgiver. But it was more difficult for the Gentile to feel this. He could not easily feel that the covenant life described in the Old Testament was the life into which Christ had brought him, and he felt as much outside of it as the Jew felt within it. And so to him the Old Testament was not so much a haven of religious fellowship as a series of commandments which he might understand and at least could obey. When the Gnostics drew false inferences from statements in the Old Testament, and when the church theologians corrected these in creeds, this forced making of creeds intensified the tendency to look at the Bible—Old Testament and New Testament—rather as a storehouse of theological weapons, than as the medium of personal intercourse between a covenant God and His people. One of the main characteristics of the Biblical idea of the kingdom of God was lost—the thought of personal intercourse with the King through His word realized in an act of personal trust, and the idea of faith lost its sense of trust with personal communion and took the character of assent to intellectual truths. But as the life can never be fed upon abstract truths and their comprehension, and must have some support, Christian life became gradually divorced from any relation to the Word, and became rooted on a system of observances, of which the sacrament of the Supper became the centre. The efforts of the church to realize its relation to the Scriptures were in this way partly successful, because it recognized its duty to set forth the truth of God; but from the way taken the result was to displace Christianity from its position of rest upon the Old Testament church and the Scriptures, and to send it to its own machinery for life and strength.

One other phase of early Christianity ought to be referred to, as it illustrates another side of the same great problem which was presented for solution. Both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament conceptions of the kingdom of heaven the idea of a new life, or at least of a separate consecrated life, is a conspicuous element. The kingdom of God implies that those who are within the kingdom live a life different from those without. In all ages of Christianity this new and separate life has been an object of speculation, and many various ideas of its true nature have been promulgated. The very conception of a life which is new is sufficient of itself to produce strange conjectures respecting its nature, and in the epistles of St Paul we find evidence that many of the Gentile Christians were disposed to think of the new life of Christianity as one entirely outside of the realm of ordinary moral law. This lawless or immoral tendency was sternly checked in the Christian church, and only gained head in sects outside of it; but traces of the tendency were not infrequent. The function of the Holy Spirit in the church was always made a ground of conjecture concerning the real nature of the new Christian life, and it was from mistaken views of the character of the Spirit’s influence and work that disturbing pietist theories perplexed early Christianity. These pietist theories gained distinctive form and acquired great power in what has been called Montanism, and the church’s efforts to rid herself of this incubus, while well intentioned, led to permanent results by no means satisfactory. One of the chief characteristics of this early pietism was the idea that the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit rendered possible a continuous revelation, and it was believed that the prophetic gift was permanent in the Church. The Montanist prophets presumed to add to revelation, and to overturn ecclesiastical laws and jurisdiction by means of infallible utterances disclosed to them. The practical effect would have been to reduce the organization of Christianity and the intercourse between Christians to a precarious dependence upon the dictates of self-constituted prophets, whose ideas of revelation resembled the heathen soothsaying much more closely than the Old Testament prophecy or the New Testament inspiration, and this led the church to adopt a severer discipline and more monarchical constitution. But this must be afterwards referred to.

To sum up, then, early Christianity, in working out the problem of its connection with Judaism and the Old Testament Scriptures, achieved success in four great directions, but at the same time made four great mistakes. It insisted rightly on the fact that in order to be a development of Judaism Christians did not require to become Jews first, but it erred in attempting to make Christianity the exact counterpart and rival of Judaism. It insisted rightly that the kingdom of heaven was a kingdom to be set up on earth and so all-embracing as to include the whole earth within its boundaries, but it erred when it conceived it to be a kingdom which in any way could be compared with the Boman empire, and when it began to translate spiritual power and possession into physical and temporal dominion. It insisted, rightly, that the church was the custodier of truth, but it erred when it made faith intellectual assent, when it gave to the Bible an entirely intellectual aspect, and laid the foundations for infallible creeds. It rightly expelled from its midst a false pietist prophecy, which in course of time would have undermined alike scriptural and ecclesiastical authority, but it erred when it conferred on a consecrated privileged caste the sole authority to interpret scripture and regulate ecclesiastical discipline. These attempts and failures in early Christianity have been so often repeated that they may be looked upon as true and false principles ot development inherent in it.

The history of the world presents no phenomenon so striking as the rise and early progress of Christianity. Originating in a country not remarkable for any political, commercial, or literary influence, emanating from One who occupied a humble sphere in the community amidst which He appeared, and announced in the first instance by men of mean extraction, of no literary culture, and not endowed with any surpassing gifts of intellect,—it nevertheless spread so rapidly that in an incredibly short period of time it had been diffused throughout the whole civilized world, and in the fourth century of its existence became the recognized and established religion of the Roman empire. When it is remembered that this result was achieved not only without the aid of any worldly influence, but in the face of the keenest opposition on the part of all the learning, wealth, wit, and power of the most enlightened and mightiest nations of the earth, the conclusion is strongly forced upon us that a power beyond that of man was concerned in its success, and that its early and unexampled triumphs afford an incontestable proof of its inherent truth and its divine origin. Nor has the rapid advance of Christianity been confined to its earlier years. “After a revolution of fourteen or fifteen centuries that religion is still professed by the nations of Europe, the most distinguished portion of human kind in art and learning as well as in arms. By the industry and zeal of Europeans, it has been widely diffused to the most distant shores of Asia and Africa, and by means of their colonies has been firmly established from Canada to Chili in a land unknown to the ancients.” And when we turn to the results of modern missionary enterprise we find a success no less remarkable.

Historical critics who have no. sympathy with the supernatural elements in Christianity have attempted to account for this wonderful success by natural causes, and have pointed out various circumstances which go far to account for the rapidity of its spread. Sceptical critics of a past generation contented themselves with enumerating various distinct causes combining to produce the effect, while naturalist writers of our own day try rather to show that Christianity was the natural outcome of the intellect of the age which produced it. The great disadvantage attaching to the one mode of criticism is that no parade of causes or conditions of success can ever get rid of the supernatural character of Christianity, for it is always impossible to show that these are the only causes at work, and the retort can be made that these causes are themselves part of the supernatural plan for the introduction and furtherance of Christianity, while the other labours under the necessity either of getting rid of the Christ of history and putting in his place an elaborate poem—an attempt not yet successful—or of reducing the character and work of Jesus to the level of those of Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet, or other founder of a purely naturalist religion. The celebrated five causes of Gibbon are perhaps the best specimen of the one mode of argument, while the elaborate theories of the Tübingen school are certainly the most noteworthy instance of the other. Gibbon thinks that the Christian faith obtained so remarakable a victory over the established religions of the earth because it was effectually favoured and assisted by the five following causes :—1. The inflexible, and if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived it is true from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and unsocial spirit, which instead of inviting had deterred the Gentiles from embracing the law of Moses; 2. The doctrine of a future life improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that important truth; 3. The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church; 4. The pure and austere morals of the Christians; 5. The union and discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman empire. It does not need the possession of an anti-Christian spirit to admit that these causes of Gibbon’s may have helped greatly to spread the Christian religion, and indeed the Christian critic has to object not so much to this statement of causes as to the covert insinuation which lurks in the historian’s exposition of their influence. For the question still remains to be put, why was it that Christianity possessed so many characteristics which made it adapted as no other religion was to the needs and capacities of mankind. Still it ought to be observed that when we turn to the pages of the early Christian Apologists, especially to the writings of those of them who were converted to Christianity after having spent many years as intelligent pagans, we find them almost unanimous in declaring that they themselves were attracted to Christianity chiefly by these three reasons :—1. The sublimity and simplicity of the Christian doctrines of God, sin, and salvation; 2. The noble purity of the Christian life, more especially of the life of a Christian woman; and 3. The grandeur of the doctrine of creation contained in the Old Testament Scriptures. The inefficiency of the theories of modern critics who would explain the origin and success of Christianity on purely naturalist grounds has already been discussed under the head of Apologetics.

The strong and deep influence which Christianity soon began to have even over the lives and opinions of those who were not Christians, is even a more striking testimony to its paramount claims than the rapidity of its spread. The struggle of Christianity with Rome has already been alluded to, but even before Rome gave up the struggle in despair, before the last persecution, and before the triumph under Constantine, the influence of Christianity was making itself felt morally, socially, and politically, while its influence on intellect and science was no less remarkable.

It is almost impossible for us to realize how powerfully paganism acted upon the general morality of the great peoples of antiquity and encouraged all manner of lawlessness and indecency. In the time of the later republic and of the early empire we have the spectacle of Roman law and philosophy powerless to restrain the brutal and obscene passions of the people excited by the influence of the popular religion, even when they had ceased to regard it as an intelligible creed. All paganism is at bottom a worship of Nature in some form or other, and in all pagan religions the deepest and most awe-inspiring attribute of nature was its power of reproduction. The mystery of birth and becoming was the deepest mystery of nature; it lay at the root of all thoughtful paganism and appeared in various forms, some of a more innocent, others of a most debasing type. To ancient pagan thinkers, as well as to modern men of science, the key to the hidden secret of the origin aud preservation of the universe lay in the mystery of sex. Two energies or agents, one an active and generative, the other a feminine, passive, or susceptible one, were everywhere thought to combine for creative purpose, and heaven and earth, sun and moon, day and night, were believed to co-operate to the production of being. Upon some such basis as this rested almost all the polytheistic worship of the old civilization, and to it may be traced back, stage by stage, the separation of divinity into male and female gods, the deification of distinct powers of nature, and the idealization of man’s own faculties, desires, and lusts, where every power of his understanding was embodied as an object of adoration, and every impulse of his will became an incarnation of deity. But in each and every form of polytheism we find the slime-track of the deification of sex; “there is not a single one of the ancient religions which has not consecrated by some ceremonial rite even the grossest forms of sensual indulgence, while many of them actually elevated prostitution into a solemn service of religion.” The corrupting influence of paganism entered into the very essence of the social life of the Roman at the time when Christianity began its career. The thoughtful reader of contemporary literature cannot fail to observe how day by day the poison instilled itself into every nook and cranny of the social life of the people. “It met him in every incident of hfe, in business, in pleasure, in literature, in politics, in arms, in the theatres, in the streets, in the baths, at the games, in the decorations of his house, in the ornaments and service of his table, in the very conditions of the weather and the physical phenomena of nature. It is not easy to call up as a reality the intending sinner addressing to the deified vice which he contemplates a prayer for the success of his design; the adulteress imploring of Venus the favours of her paramour; the harlot praying for an increase of her sinful gains; the pander begging the protection of the goddess on her shameful trade; the thief praying to Hermes Dolios for aid in his enterprizes, or offering up to him the first-fruits of his plunder; young maidens dedicating their girdles to Athene Apaturia; youths entreating Hercules to expedite the death of a rich uncle. And yet these things and far worse than these meet us over and over again in every writer who has left a picture of Roman manners in the later republic and under the beginning of the empire” (North, Brit. Rev., vol. 47). When we turn to the writings of the early Christian Apologists we find them exposing in a scathing way this whole state of things and contrasting it with that moral law which is written by nature on the heart of men; and the pure lives of the Christians in the midst of this sea of iniquity had a wonderful effect. There is no contrast more wonderful than that which may be drawn between the grandeur of Roman law and the debasement of the ordinary social life of the Roman people; but Roman law was founded much more on economic than on moral foundations. But when Christianity entered into the Roman empire, and when it at last had made head against paganism, the imperial law found an ally in Christian ethics which it had been without during the reign of paganism, and discovered, too, a higher sanction for its precepts than mere economic interests. From the time of Constantine onwards the influence of Christianity on Roman law is remarkable, and always on the side of morality in the highest sense of the term. We find from the Acts of the Apostles that the first organization of Christians was for the better distribution of charity to those in need of it, and one of the earliest results of the political triumph of Christianity in the empire was the promulgation of laws ensuring the protection of the feeble and the helpless. The nineteen years of civil war which preceded the final victory of Constantine had produced the usual scenes of misery, and great numbers of orphan children were thrown upon the world without protection. The influence of the celebrated Lactantius, to whose care Constantine had committed the education of his son Crispus, was able to secure the publication of a law declaring that the emperor was the father of all these children, and that the expense of their upbringing was to be defrayed by the state. At the same time the exposure for sale of unfortunate children was sternly forbidden, and those who so exposed them were condemned to the amphitheatre. The condition of slaves was also greatly ameliorated by the new spirit of Christianity which was then working in society. Slavery was not abolished, but various laws were made restricting the power of slave-holders. The master was deprived of the arbitrary power of life and death. It was ordained that when royal estates were divided the families of slaves of the soil were not to be separated. New laws breathing a more Christian spirit regulated the relation of the sexes. Divorce was made a much more difficult matter. The laws against rape and seduction were made more severe, and adultery became a capital offence. The nameless crime, which was the disgrace of Greek and Roman civilization, was made punishable by death. The making of eunuchs was forbidden, and it was enacted that slaves who had suffered this mutilation might claim their freedom. But the silent revolution which Christianity wrought in social morality cannot be measured by legislation. It is to be traced in a purer literature, a higher moral life, a better public spirit, and, above all, in the establishment of buildings for the reception of strangers (ξevωves), alms-houses for the poor (πτωχoτpoφAa), hospitals and orphan-houses for the sick and the forsaken, and houses of refuge for the support of helpless old men and women. AU these were due to the church, and the bishops vied with each other in the proper exercise of a munificent charity. One of the most celebrated of these establishments was the Basil ias of Basil of Caesarea, where strangers were hospitably entertained, and medical attendance and nursing were provided for those sick of whatever disease. In the Basilias everything was on the most magnificent scale. The physicians of the establishment resided within the walls, and workshops were provided for all the artizans and labourers whose services were needed. The presence of such institutions, and the Christian charity to which they bore witness, must have had a wonderfully restorative influence on the corrupt pagan society in which they were set up. Law and religion became allied, not opposing forces.

The political influence of Christianity is as marked as its moral power, and had as great an effect upon the paganism into which it was thrown. It was Christianity which gave to the world those two great factors in civü liberty,—a consolidated public opinion and an efficient system of representative government. Gibbon has gone out of his way to sneer at the passive resistance of the early Christians, and has lent the weight of his authority to the idea that a struggle for civil liberty is opposed to the whole tenets of primitive Christianity; but whatever the views of the Christians were on these points, it is plain that Christianity put a new public life into the Roman empire which greatly retarded its final faU. It has been frequently remarked that Christianity did as much for Constantine as he did for it, and the history of the time amply justifies the observation. Whatever be the truth about the sincerity of his conversion, it is undoubted that he, from first to last, looked at the church from a political point of view, and made use of it accordingly for his own political aggrandizement. It should be remembered that the Roman empire hung badly together, and that apart from the sentiment which may be called belief in the genius of Rome there was no common life and no common nationality. There was no popular life, such as we are accustomed to in modern Europe. From the beginning the empire had been a military tyranny. The emperor was imperator, and ruled because he commanded the state as an army, and the rule in the provinces was really military. It was imposed on the people from without and did not spring from themselves. There was not even that solidarity in it which an hereditary absolutism begets. Of course such an empire had very little cohesion, and was only kept together by the feeling of the genius of Rome and by the grand system of Roman law. But there was within the empire a new corporate life, a new kingdom, which subsisted in virtue of the life which was in it, held together by the inward power of growth. When Constantius and Constantine looked at the Christian church with the eyes of statesmen, they saw before them a great selfregulating organization which had a common life, a cohesion, and a corporate character quite unlike anything else in the empire. It was impossible to touch the church anywhere without the whole body being thrilled throughout from end to end, so thoroughly was it one. If the emperor could bring any influence to bear on the Christian organization, he might hope to move these hidden spiritual springs of action which are so much more powerful than anything lying at the command of a mere military government. The organization of Christianity was such that all over the empire and beyond it there was, without undue centralization, a confederation of local churches whose government was thoroughly democratic and based on the principle of representation by means of office-bearers elected by the people, which produced a unity of sympathy and action. Besides all this the common fife was kept up by active sympathy between the various churches. If there was a famine in Africa, the churches in Spain and Gaul sent grain. If Christian Gauls had been carried off into captivity by the pagan Germans, the wealthy African and Roman churches sent money for their redemption. The military roads, the system of posts, the relays of ships which Rome kept up to bring intelligence and produce from the provinces, were all used by the church for the purpose of keeping up a lively communication between all the various parts of the Christian world. In this way Christianity within the empire was the one organization for creating, stimulating, and guiding public opinion. It was that one part of the Roman empire which, scattered over all its extent, had common feelings and all those various common instincts which go to make up a commonwealth. This was the force that Constantine sought to put himself at the head of, and. because he succeeded he was the first Roman emperor who ruled with something like what we should call “public opinion” at his back. The victory of Constantine was the first instance of the triumph of that mysterious popular force which has given organized freedom to the civüized nations of Europe, and which is equally removed from the civic freedom of the ancient democracy and from the military tyranny of the great empires of antiquity. It is to Christianity that modern Europe owes organized public opinion and representative government.

The silent influence which Christianity has exercised upon the human intellect, and especially upon its scientific researches, is too important to be passed over. AntiChristian writers have combined to show the hostility which they think exists between religion and science, and have painted in glowing colours the hindrances which Christianity places before the advance of scientific ideas; but suchattempts resemble the effortsof a man to kick down the ladder which has enabled him to reach the elevation on which he stands. Christianity did not create philosophy nor science, and many of the earlier Christian theologians denounced in no measured terms the philosophies of Greece and Rome because of their connection with paganism, while philosophy on its side was the last remnant of the old pagan civilization which withstood the Christian conquest. Soon, however, philosophy and Christianity came to terms, and in the writings of St Augustine we find the noblest Platonism allied with the loftiest Christian theology. The science of paganism has never been on a par with its philosophical speculations, and whether we examine the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome which have passed away, or those of India and China which remain, we seek in vain science and scientific knowledge in the modern sense of the term. The truth seems to be that science requires to build on a foundation supplied by Christianity, and which paganism is unable to furnish, or at least has never yet furnished. Science presupposes and rests on the idea of the oneness and uniformity of the universe, and this idea is, strictly speaking, a Christian conception. Aristotle, the most scientific of the ancients, was unable to conceive the uniformity of nature or the totality of things in anything like the sense which these phrases have to modern thinkers. His conceptions of matter and form, of potentiality and actuality, and so on, implied a subtle duality which effectually stood in the way of such a thought. The uniformity of nature, the capacity of the ideal to realize itself in actual things, was always apt to be thwarted by an inward stubbornness of matter which declined on occasions to submit itself to law. It was this idea which stood in the way of the modern thoughts of the uniformity of nature and of the totality of things which are so essential to science. But such a stubborn, formless matter as pagan philosophy and science delighted to speculate about was quite foreign to Christian speculation and was opposed to the deepest instincts of the Christian life—of trust in the Father who is in Heaven. Christianity did not propose to itself the solution or even the statement of scientific problems, but its yearning to get near God enabled it to see deeper into the problem of the basis of science than the whole of pagan thought had been able to do. The Christian doctrine of creation and the Christian doctrine of providence furnish the foundations on which modern science rests. The Christian doctrine of creation states the absolute dependence of all things on God. He made them out of nothing; and the religious nerve of the doctrine consists in the feeling of absolute dependence on God which this implies. We and all things have our birth and being from God, and from nothing else. Practically God is all in all to us, for on Him all things depend for their origin, and they depend on Him alone. The Christian doctrine of providence presents the same thought in another form The nerve of this doctrine is that God can and does make all things work together for the good of His people. Here again is the idea of the absolute dependence of all things on God, not merely for their origin but also for their existence and endurance. In this way the thought of God as the creator and preserver of all things gives a complete unity to the universe which pagan thought never reached, and gave that basis for the thought of the uniformity of nature which science demands. It was long ere Christianity could force this thought on the human intelligence, but until it had permeated the whole round of man’s intellectual work it was vain to look for advances in science. It was the task of the scholastic theology and philosophy to knead into human thought Christian ideas, and among the rest this idea of the unity and uniformity of nature. AntiChristian critics have spoken of the deadness and uselessness of scholasticism, but its value for science and scientific inquiry can scarcely be over-estimated ; for it was scholasticism which worked Christianity into every department of human and intellectual activity, and so leavened them with it, that when its work was done, the intelligence of man was so thoroughly saturated with the Christian view of nature that it could never again forget it. When scholasticism had accomplished its task modern science sprang into being dependent for its very foundation on that Christianity to which it is supposed to be so bitterly hostile.

The organization of Christianity belongs more properly to the description of the church, but it is impossible to pass the subject without any allusion. Christianity, which has been described to be a new life which takes an organic form and grows like other living things, cannot help taking to itself an external form or organization which approaches perfection in the proportion in which it is adapted to express the life which it contains. On the one hand, the external form of Christianity must not be confounded with Christianity itself, and on the other it must be remembered that Christianity does, and must from its very nature, embody itself in an external organization And a two-fold danger arises from the neglect of this principle, when on the one hand the machinery of Christian worship and discipline is mistaken for Christianity itself, and when on the other it is mischievously imagined that the purity of Christianity depends on tho realization of an impossible invisibility or absence of organization.

All the various modes of Christian organization or çhurch government profess to imitate the apostolic model, and to be founded on and agreeable to the New Testament Scriptures, and the comparative scantiness of information therein supplied has led to violent controversies upon the subject into which we need not now enter. Many have supposed with great probability that the New Testament contains so few positive instructions on this subject, because the apostles did not invent a new organization for Christianity, but simply took over from Judaism that organization for worship and discipline which had no connection with the temple service—the synagogue system—and that the early Christian worship was simply a reproduction of the synagogue service. We may at all events believe that the early Christian organization, if not exactly the same, was modelled upon that of the synagogue, and that the reaso⅛ why we have so few descriptions and instructions in th· New Testament is that the apostles did not require to describe what was so very well known to the Jewish Christians who composed the apostolic church. At first the Christians seem to have shared in the common worship of the Jews and to have engaged at the same time in services which were peculiarly Christian (Acts ií 46), and in this way they appeared to be and were called a sect (α"pεσιs) of the Jews. They do not seem to have had any ecclesiastical organization distinctive enough to separate them from the Jews. Founding on these and other facts Vitri nga has derived the whole of the Christian machinery of worship and discipline from the Jewish synagogue. But this is going too far. Two influences, so far as we can gather, seem to have combined to modify the early state of matters which we see existing in the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, and these were the hatred of the Jews and the entrance of Gentile Christians. These two circumstances led to the introduction of a new church organization distinct from the Jewish and more suited to the requirements of Christianity. This early Christian organization, whose growth can be obscurely traced in the New Testament, is characterized by two special features. It was evidently founded on and in many respects analogous to the Jewish religions community, and the constitution was thoroughly democratic.

When Christianity arose, Palestine, and indeed the whole of the civilized world where Jews had penetrated and settled, was covered with a network of synagogues in constant correspondence with each other. The synagogue system was an organization for public worship, but also had to do with the lives and conduct of the worshippers, and possessed quasi-judicial functions. The worship of the synagogue was not sacrificial, like that of the temple. It was simply devotional, consisting in prayer, praise, reading, and preaching, and was regulated by a fixed liturgy. The synagogues were ruled by a variety of office-bearers. In the first place, there was commonly a college of elders, with the chief of the synagogue at their head. These elders had a variety of names—almost all of the designations given in the New Testament to the Christian office-bearers are used to denote these Jewish Z’Kenim. These elders were the real rulers; they had the power of excommunication, and superintended the worship and charities of the synagogue. Besides these elders there was an officiating minister who was the delegate of the congregation; the rules which Paul laid down to be observed 'n the choice of a bishop almost exactly correspond to the conditions to be satisfied in the election of the Sheliaeh. The lowest class of office-bearers were the ordained servants or ministers of the synagogue, who are sometimes called the young men, and who like the Sheliaeh and the Z’Kenim were ordained by laying on of hands. In this synagogue system, with its simple devotional worship, its office-bearers to preserve discipline and encourage the exercise of charity, the early Christians found an organization ready to hand which they could at once take advantage of and either adopt or at least copy in important details.

All throughout the New Testament we are reminded that the office-bearers exist for the community and not the community for the office-bearers, and this truth is enforced with emphasis when the diversity of office in the Christian church is made to depend upon diversity of gifts (Eph. iv. 4-16), and upon the appreciation of those gifts by the Christian community testified to in the process of election.

We get these two primary ideas therefore about the early Christian community, that possession of office meant the possession of gifts suitable for the edification of the community, and the recognition of this fact by the people. In the New Testament the ordinary office-bearers in the Christian communuity have a variety of designations. They are called προϊστάμενοί, πpεσβυτεpoι, επίσκοποι, πoιμεvες, and ηγούμενοι , but all these names are used evidently to express the same kind of officers, for they are continually used interchangeably the one for the other. In the earlier times of Christianity the service was probably very simple, and the meetings were held in the houses of the first converts or of the officers of the little Christian community. In an old liturgy we find a rubric enjoining the deacons to order all mothers to take up their infants at a peculiarly solemn part of the worship, which shows us a picture of an early Christian assembly with the babies crawling peacefully over the floor during the greater part of the service.

Many controversies have arisen about the relation of these office-bearers to the community on the one hand, and to the apostles on the other. As the New Testament writings do not give us more than passing allusions to the mode in which the government of the Christian community was carried on, and describe it in action rather than give a detailed account of the principles on which it was founded and the way to apply them in practice, we may be expected to find there descriptions of the Christian organization at various stages of early development. Some have believed, not without great probability, that we have in the account of the choice and consecration of the seven men (Acts vi. 1-6) the beginning of the Christian organization on a distinct and separate basis of its own, and that these seven men were the first regularly chosen office-bearers in the early Christian community. These seven men were chosen to take charge of the charities of the small Christian community, and it is not difficult to see now from this how they came to rule the community. We find no trace of a distinct and separate election of elders or pastors; and it is worthy of note that the special service to which these men were appointed, viz., to take charge of the poor, is the work which we find the elders engaged in on the first occasion on which they are mentioned (Acts xi. 29-30). Habitual almsgiving was regarded as a religious service of no ordinary significance, and was specially enjoined on all true believers, and the men appointed to take charge of this must have held a very high position in the church. It is evident, besides, that the superintendence of the charities involved a certain amount of disciplinary control, and so the other duties of the office-bearers in the Christian church naturally clustered around this one. The recipients of charity were to be suitable persons (1 Thess. v. 12 -15, 1 Tim. V. 9-16); and we can easily see how gradually the benevolent oversight passed over into the rule of discipline, until men originally elected to regulate the benevolence of the community became the rulers of the church.

But whatever the earliest office-bearers were, and however they were chosen, it seems evident that their special function was to rule or to exercise discipline rather than to teach. In the apostolic church there seem to have been two kinds of teaching recognized, the apostolic announcement of the evangel and the preaching of the word. The latter was evidently at first open to all and sundry who had or who thought that they had the gift, and the only restriction placed upon indiscriminate exhortation was the command forbidding women to speak in public. The gift of preaching or exhortation was looked upon as a gift of the Spirit independent of office; and the earliest office-bearers were men who ruled rather than men who taught. Open preaching continued for a long time in the post-apostolic church, and is distinctly recognized in the so-called Apostolic Constitutions; but there are evidences in the New Testament that the practice had its inconveniences and was discouraged by the apostles. James warns heedless preachers that they take great responsibility upon them, and shall receive the greater condemnation (Jas. iii. 1), and Paul in several passages takes notice of the irregularities and unedifying confusion attending the practice. Hence we find the function of instruction at an early period engrafted on that of rule, just as the function of rule had grown out of that of oversight of the distribution of charity; and one of the special qualifications of elders of the church was aptness to teach. In the Epistles to Timothy we even find traces of a plan for giving a special education and training to young men who were set apart to prepare themselves for the office of elders who were to teach. In the post-apostolic Church we find another office quite distinct from the eldership, the office of deacon. The deacons in the post-apostolic church were officers who waited upon the bishop, and many have thought that the election of the seven men was really the election not of elders but of deacons; but there seems no reason to suppose this. The real warrant for the existence of the diaconate consists in the fact that the office and duties of the deacon correspond very nearly to those of the “ministers” of the synagogue, and also in the many scattered references in the New Testament to the existence of “young men” (one of the technical terms for the synagogue deacons), who waited upon the apostles. To sum up then, the office-bearers in the early Christian community were men selected by the voice of the congregation, and confirmed by the apostles, to administer the charities of the community; and to this primitive function there was added soon after the duty of oversight, leadership, or rule, and somewhat later the duty of providing for the proper teaching of the people.

The relation of the apostles to these office-bearers and to the Christian community is a problem not without difficulties. Apostle primarily denotes one who is sent on a special mission, and in the Seρtuagint is used to translate the Hebrew Shaluach, meaning one who has a special commandment from God. The word was in common use among the Jews to denote a special messenger and more especially messengers sent on foreign missions. Thus the Jews who were sent from Palestine to stir up the foreign synagogues against the Christians are called apostles. All these ideas help to show us what the Christian apostles were. It should be remembered, however, that the term apostle is used in its Christian sense in two ways at least, in a wider and in a narrower sense. In the narrower and more strictly technical sense the apostles were the eleven whom Christ chose to be special witnesses for Him because they had been with Him from the beginning, together with Matthias, selected by the apostles to fill the place of Judas before the descent of the Holy Spirit, or as some with more probability think, Paul, who was selected for this place by Christ Himself. On the other hand, many others are called apostles who did not belong to this company,—Barnabas, for example (Acts xiv. 14), Andronicus and Junias (Rom. xvi. 7), and others (2 Cor. viii. 23; Phil. ii. 25). This vagueness in the New Testament use of the term makes it somewhat difficult to βpeak with anything like precision of the relation in which the apostles stood to the office-bearers and members of the early Christian community. But one or two statements enable us to see what were the functions of the apostles strictly so called. It is said, for example, that Christians are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone (Eph. ii. 20), and the capacity of the apostles to act in this way as & foundation is explained by passages which seem to say that the qualifications for apostleship were—to have been with the Lord from the beginning, to have seen and recognized Christ after the resurrection, to have been witnesses of the ascension, and to have been gifted with peculiar spiritual gifts. And we may say generally, that just as the prophets of the Old Testament were the links between their own generation by their speech, and between future generations by their writings, and the •Saviour that was to come, so the apostles were the links between the first generation of Christians by their presence and influence, and between all succeeding generations of Christians by their writings, and the Saviour who had come. They were to serve as the connection between the first generation of Christians and Jesus, and were to have no successors but the writings of the New Testament canon, which has taken their place and done their work for all succeeding generations.

The relation of the apostles, therefore, to the primitive church was altogether unique, as indeed is implied in their name; and when they act or give official advice apart from their apostolic office, which they did in certain cases, they do so as elders chosen to act along with the other elders who did not possess apostolic gifts. If these views are correct the autonomy of the early Christian communities was complete during the lifetime of the apostles, and was quite independent of the apostolic office and authority.

This thought has an important bearing on the history of the growth of the Christian government. In the 5th and 6th centuries we find that the government was episcopal, and that the principles on which it rested were very different from those which lay at the basis of the government of the Christian community during the apostolic times. The identity of the terms bishop and presbyter within the apostolic church is now so universally admitted by scholars that the sole question really is, When did bishops begin to exist as separate and superior officers? and the dispute becomes one of historical facts rather than dogmatic theories. According to one account the episcopate became the form of the government about the year 70 a.d., to meet and supply in a legitimate way a want which, if not supplied, might have caused the ruin of Christianity; and according to another and more probable theory, the episcopate in the strict sense of the word was not established until the 3d or 4th century. It arose during a panic, and was really a false development of the primitive government, and sanctioned neither by scripture nor by the necessities of the times. Of course the discussion is very much mixed up with the question whether the apostolic office was or was not a permanent one in the Christian church.

According to the one theory, the year 70 a.d. may be taken as the turning point. In that year Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish church of Jerusalem rudely shaken, and by this time John only of the apostles remained alive, and he had already left Jerusalem. It was at this time, according to several scholars, that the episcopate arose to take the place of the apostolate and preserve the church from breaking up into several small sects when no longer governed by the apostles and not yet in full possession of the New Testament canon. Apart from the historical evidence to be urged in support of this theory, its chief strength lies in the mere assumption that the presbyterian rule of the apostolic church was unfit to carry on the government when unsupported by the authority of the apostles, and had to be supplemented by an episcopate. When examined, the historical proofs for this state of affairs are not very satisfactory. We certainly soon find men who are called bishops distinct from the other elders, and are superior to them; but the name and the duties which belong to them appear to be not so much those which pertain to a bishop in the episcopal sense of the term, but rather those which are performed by a minister or preaching elder in the modern Presbyterian organization. In the early church the first convert, the best speaker, he whom the apostle had made his friend during his brief stay, would naturally be elected to preside at the meetings of the college of the elders who ruled the affairs of the community, and to represent it at conferences with other communities, and would naturally be invested with the name which denoted special oversight. And the extension of the church would naturally involve a further development of this process. When one church became too small, another was built, and a presbyter sent from the first congregation to work there under the superintendence of his bishop, and so on until the minister or presiding elder of the earliest planted or mother church became the perpetual president or overseer of various dependent congregations. But this is very different from the theory which afterwards became dominant in the church, and fails to account for the origin and almost universal supremacy of episcopacy. Perhaps of all the accounts which have been given of its origin, that which connects it with the disturbances engendered by Montanism is the most satisfactory. While the church was governed in the manner described above, a wave of religious excitement passed over it, connected doubtless in some way with the striking phenomena of Montanism and the new prophecy, and characterized by an overstrained zeal for enforcing discipline in all cases of departure from a high standard of Christian life. It was the peculiar characteristic of Montanism to set forward its prophets as successors of the apostles, having the same gifts from the Holy Spirit, and sent on a similar message of instruction to the Christian church. They uttered prophecies which were deemed supplementary to the revelation contained in the Old and New Testaments, and they did not scruple to set aside the authority of the regularly ordained officials of the church in order to execute the behests of a supposed spirit of prophecy. And thus the Christian communities were everywhere burdened by the presence of ignorant intolerant fanatics, who insisted that all their fellows should follow the dictates of their narrow and ignorant conscience, and who backed up this unwarranted interference with Christian liberty and responsibility by claiming to hold the place and exercise the powers of inspired successors to the apostles. It was at this juncture, according to a not improbable theory, that Cyprian of Carthage was able to popularize and gain acceptance for a theory of Christian organization which had been slowly growing up within the church, and which is now known as Episcopacy. Cyprian, bishop of a church which more than any other had suffered from the consequences of Montanist excesses, was the founder of a revolution of a kind which has been frequently repeated in the political world. Montanism and its after wave had influenced in an especial way the minor clergy and the more fanatical laity. Cyprian, like many a succeeding absolutist, seems to have subverted the aristocracy of a presbyterate infected with Montanism by persuading the people to make common cause with the bishop. He promised deliverance from arbitrary and unofficial successors of the apostles by boldly setting forth the episcopate as the true successors of the apostles. He transferred, in all sincerity, to the episcopate all the powers and gifts laid claim to by the Montanist prophets, and at the same time showed the people how easy the yoke of a legitimate monarchy was when compared with the lawless rule of a mob of self-anointed tyrants. From Cyprian’s time onwards the whole constitution of the church became changed, and the foundations of what ultimately became Ultram ontanism were laid. The episcopate claimed and exercised as part of its official duties all those gifts of rule and special inspiration which the Montanist prophets had laid claim to. The bishops laid claim to powers of rule over the Christian community not as chosen representatives of the Christian people, but as the official representatives of the apostles.

It only remains to allude briefly to the corruptions of Christianity. It has been already stated that Christianity had a fourfold conflict to maintain with Judaism, Rome, Gnosticism, and an enthusiastic and sometimes immoral pietism. If we add to these pagan superstition, we shall have the chief heads of the opposition which Christianity had to encounter. After its triumph these sources of antiChristian action still remained to be contended against, and became the chief springs of its corruption. The spirit of Judaism, of Roman worldly policy, of pagan superstition, of pagan philosophy, and of immorality entered into Christianity and tended to corrupt it.

One of the earliest causes of the corruption of Christianity was the attempt to translate the Christian kingdom of God into a visible monarchy in which the saints inherited the earth in a literal way. The Church was the more tempted to enter into this course during the period of the decay of the Roman empire, when civil authority became very weak and the real rulers were in many cases the principal clergy of the place. The consciousness of power inspired a desire for its insignia, and soon the bishop and superior clergy adorned themselves in the official robes of Rome’s municipal and provincial officers. This whole tendency received a great impulse during the period that Rome was abandoned by her emperors, and when the chief citizen in the imperial city was undoubtedly the Christian bishop. How all this tended to corrupt Christianity is very apparent. In the first place it generated the idea that the Christian kingdom is a visible monarchy and that its marks are such as can be seen; and it led Christians to postpone everything to the earthly aggrandizement of the church. It translated spiritual forces into mechanical and physical equivalents. The very term spiritual, which belongs to the affections and emotions and thoughts and will, to the whole inward life, was used to denote whatever belonged to the church or the clergy. Land became spiritual when it passed into the hands of the bishops; men were spiritual if they were servants of the church; things were spiritual if they were church property. There resulted, in short, a gradual coarsening of ideas, and all that was most inward, hidden, and sacred was forgotten in the strife for worldly position and power and wealth. On the other hand, this tendency worked a good deal deeper. Worldly men who found their way into the ministry were tempted to favour any kind of superstitious error that tended to bring them profit and power. The people were often disposed to fancy that the priests could serve God in their stead, and that there were mysteries in religion which the priests understood, but which the laity need not know anything of and ought not to inquire into. Hence they were ready to follow blindly the guidance of the priests in religious matters, just as a man trusts his legal concerns to his lawyer, doing what he directs and not considering it necessary himself to study law. Ambitious and worldly minded rulers, too, are generally glad to make use of religion as an instrument for securing the submission of the people to tyrannical oppression, and for aiding their ambitious views when they seek to subdue their neighbours under the pretext of propagating the true faith. Then again, this idea tends to breed false views of Christian unity. It leads men to think that they cannot be true Christians unless they belong to one community which is visible and universal. And this idea tends to keep up and intensify other errors. For if a man is convinced that all Christians are bound to belong to some one community on earth, he will dread nothing so much as separation from that church, whatever it may be, which he considers as having the best claim to be that one community.

Many corruptions of Christianity have been either introduced or favoured and kept up by moral corruption in the members of a Christian Church. For it belongs to the true gospel to purify and also to elevate the moral character. Hence there is a complete and constant opposition between genuine Christianity and all the evil and base propensities of man’s nature. Every kind of depravity or moral defect therefore predisposes men either to reject Christianity altogether, or else to introduce or to accept some erroneous views of it. And there is no kind of religious corruption against which men are usually less on their guard. They are well aware, indeed that there is a danger of mens falling into sin in violation of the precepts of religion, but they are too apt to think that a man who has embraced a true faith will therefore be made a good moral man. This erroneous idea appears in its most extreme form in the views of those who have been called Antinomians, and who have appeared in all ages of the church from apostolic times down to our own day. They appear to believe that whoever has faith is thereby lifted into a new life to which the moral laws of the old life are inapplicable, and are therefore privileged to do without censure or danger what others would be condemned for.

Nothing perhaps has tended more thoroughly to corrupt Christianity than the introduction into it of superstitions which are really pagan themselves, or have been suggested by pagan practices. Paganism, unable to oppose Christianity successfully, has done much to corrupt it, and in numberless ways has made inroads upon its purity.

The corruptions which entered into Christianity from Judaism have already been noticed, and the corrupting effects of the reproduction of the symbolic temple worship and the Jewish idea of priesthood need not be again referred to. It only remains to speak of those corruptions which have arisen from the contact of Christianity with pagan philosophy. The special corruptions which have arisen from this contact have been called heresies, and have been of various kinds and degrees, but of these we need not speak. A more subtle influence, and one to be even more jealously guarded against, is the transformation of Christianity itself into an intellectual system or philosophy, or the supposition that it is the intellectual side of Christianity which is the only one or the chief. The inevitable tendency of such an impulse is to remove Christianity as a system to be apprehended from the Christian people, and to reduce their relation to it to a submissive assent to Christian doctrine as that is manufactured for them by the dogmatic machinery of the church. And thus, in place of that whole-hearted trust which waits for personal illumination, there is on the side of the people a blindfold assent, and on the other side the claim to an infallible system of intellectual truth.

The continual and steady growth of Christianity, its vigorous life in spite of various seasons of unavoidable ebb and notwithstanding the presence of all these and other sources of corruption, and its continual rejuvenescence, are no ordinary proof of its divine origin as well as of its supreme fitness for the position in the world which it claims to occupy.

See the various hand-books of church history, especially those of Gieseler, Neander, and Döllinger; Dean Milman’s History of Christianity, and History of Latin Christianity ; Dollinger’s Hcid∙ enthum, und Judenthum; RitschΓs Entstehung der Alt- Katholischen Kirche ; Rothe’s A nfäng. d. Christi. Kirchs. (T. Μ. L.)