CHAPTER I.

THE DECAY OF THE APOSTLES AND PROPHETS.

IN the earliest age of Christianity the external constitution is of altogether secondary importance compared with the living personalities. The course of events was shaped by men whose names were well-known and who were animated by a profound sense of their call. It is true that the congregations were gradually formed into an organization, but there was as yet nothing permanent about it: it was entirely under the influence of the Spirit. As to the personality of St Paul, the apostle by revelation, it eluded all attempts at inclusion under any organization whatever.

The great men died out, the stream of inspiration ran dry. Hence the change. We have here one of those facts which, while they explain everything else, do not themselves admit of explanation. There is a great gap between the apostles and the bishops and teachers of the commencement of the second century. The picture of the aged apostle St John in Asia Minor is altogether fanciful, however much the later tradition knows about it. It is only with Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr that we emerge again from the tunnel into the daylight. In between lies the great anonymous period.

The organization of the itinerant preachers, men driven by the Spirit, did, it is true, resist the tendency to decay for a considerable time. But it is the rule in history, that institutions outlive the spirit that created them. After a long struggle it finally succumbed to the episcopal organization and to the catholic theology. The Catholic Church came into being in the course of this struggle. There is something tragic about it, as the vanquished, while representing the higher idea, are inferior to the victors in moral strength. The former are the prophets, the latter the priests and theologians.

The first missionary period had come to an end even before the close of the first century. We hear no more of the sending forth of new missionaries, of collections for them, of the founding of new congregations. Not that we are to infer from this that Christianity no longer spreads as rapidly as before. On the contrary, the extension of Christianity has only just begun, and there is a marked increase every decade. But there is all the difference in the world between the two methods. In the one case the Christian merchant or soldier carries the gospel message with him on his business journey, on his day’s march; in the other, single congregations send out regularly appointed missionaries who evangelize in accordance with a carefully organized plan. The most important documents of this age, the Acts, the Pastoral epistles, the Fourth Gospel, show no missionary interest in their own time. The author of the Acts recounts the history of the first missions as something entirely past. He nowhere takes up the thread to continue his story and tell us something of the missions of his own day. The end of every incident is the appointment of presbyters, not the sending forth of new missionaries. Timothy is, it is true, called an evangelist in the Pastoral epistles, but his work consists entirely in the establishment of the congregations and the controversy with the heretical teachers. The founding of new congregations lies entirely beyond the horizon of the author of these letters. One might at first sight appear to have rather more justification in appealing to certain passages in the Fourth Gospel in support of the view that missionary work still continued. All that the author really says, however, is that the mission to the Samaritans and that to the Gentiles can both be traced back to Jesus Himself, and in so doing he offers an explanatory comment on the story in the Acts. His interest centres in the struggle with Judaism, but even so he cannot really be said to have the conversion of these Jews at heart, otherwise he would not have described the attitude of Jesus as so absolutely opposed to them, nor the Jews themselves as such perverse children of the devil. But the alterations introduced into the parable of the Good Shepherd are in themselves sufficiently significant for the changed position of affairs. The Shepherd is no longer to go out to seek and to save the lost. His duty now, the duty of His successors, is simply to protect the fold from attacks.

The new task which is now laid upon the apostles and prophets is no longer the foundation of new congregations, but the welding together of the old ones. They continue to wander about preaching, but it is to fully organized Christian congregations. Decay sets in quite of itself, owing to the cessation of their real work as missionaries, with all the sacrifices and the privation which it involved. Want of discipline, mendicancy, trickery and charlatanism are increasingly prevalent amongst the itinerant preachers. They make use of their divine authority—he that receiveth you, receiveth God—to the damage of the congregations. These are the false prophets that come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. They boast of prophesying and casting out devils and work miracles in Jesus' name, and yet they are steeped in wickedness. They do not spare the flock of Christ, but, shameless beggars that they are, get what they can—silver and gold and raiment. Or they creep into houses and captivate women laden with sin and slaves to all kinds of passions. These few passages, taken from the first and third evangelist, and the Pastoral epistles, are well illustrated by the Didache and the eleventh commandment of Hermas. There the apostle is described as staying as long as possible in each congregation so as to take his ease in a comfortable berth, and then at his departure he gets himself furnished with plenty of provisions for the journey, and if he can manage it, money as well. Or the prophet appears on the scene, falls into an ecstasy, orders a meal and consumes it cheerfully; or else he exclaims in rapt tones, “Give me money,” and puts it into his pocket with a very solemn face. The people flock to the Christian prophet as though to a soothsayer. He is quick at understanding their questions and their wishes, and cuts his cloth after their measure. Of course he does nothing gratis. Thereupon he makes his public appearance, as impudent as ever, claims the seat of honour, insists upon being present at every festival and every meal; the only thing that he avoids is the public service of the Church. In the end there was no difference whatever between these Christian apostles and prophets and the Greek sophists and Oriental magicians. All the more urgent was the protection needed by the congregations against these impudent men of God. There must be some means of testing these gentry. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” “Not everyone who speaks in ecstasy is a prophet, but only he who at the same time walketh in the way of the Lord.” “By his deeds shall the true prophet be distinguished from the false.” “Test the man who claims to have the Spirit of God by his life.” The working of miracles soon falls into discredit. Doubt in the Holy Ghost, once the greatest of sins, now becomes a duty. In this crisis the apostolic order must have come to an end, whilst the prophets just managed to continue to exist. Discipline was restored first of all in the West.

A new and very serious danger arose through the appearance of the Gnostic heresy among the itinerant preachers themselves. It began quite gradually and anonymously—the influence of certain foreign religions combined with tendencies originating in the Christian feeling of freedom. A strange and characteristic phraseology came into use: words such as “the higher knowledge,” “superior wisdom,” “completion of the teaching of the apostles,” “progress and liberty.” It was the itinerant preachers who now carried the new phraseology from place to place just as before they had disseminated the Gospel of Jesus. They are best known to us in Asia Minor. There was a prophetess at Thyatira—she is called Jezebel in the language of the Apocalypse—who recommended fornication and the eating of meats offered to idols as a means of arriving at the knowledge of the depths of Satan; while others, again, went about preaching asceticism, forbidding men to marry or to partake of certain articles of food, and appealing to the Old Testament as their authority, which they explained according to their own liking. Soon, too, dogmatic heresies took root and began to grow. Cerinthus appeared in Asia teaching that the creator of the world, the demiurge, was not the highest God and Saviour, but quite a subordinate being; and that the divine Christ who descended at baptism and returned to heaven before His death, must be sharply distinguished from the human Jesus. In the time of the Johannine letters we find people with a similar Christology travelling up and down the country as missionaries, and claiming to be inspired by the Spirit. Later on, when Ignatius visits the churches in Asia Minor, he is perpetually coming across traces of these sowers of tares. Appealing to their inspiration by the Spirit and under the pretext of a superior wisdom, they propagate Judaistic and Docetic heresies. Nor was the state of affairs very much better in other districts, especially in Egypt and Syria, where the Epistle of St Jude and the Didache note the presence of Gnostic heretics.

It was in consequence of this receptivity of the prophets for every kind of heretical spirit that new measures were taken to protect the congregations, and tests were set up of a dogmatic and ethical character. “Righteousness,” “Faith and Love,” “Jesus Christ come in the flesh”—such were some of the shibboleths by which all teachers were to be judged. Not everything that claims to be of the Spirit is of divine origin; it may also be due to the suggestion of demons, of Antichrist. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits whether they are of God.” The only prophecy tolerated is that which conforms to the creed of the Church. We meet with such ecclesiastical prophets throughout the whole of the second century down to the Montanist controversy; nor can it be denied that they did the Church good service in the struggle against the Gnostics. But the spirit of the first age that set up and rejected free rules and canons had long ceased to find utterance in them.

Besides the two enemies, however, which have been already mentioned, there was yet a third, a formidable rival, which was bound finally to make an end of this order of itinerant preachers, and that was the constitution of the single congregations. The Church was now composed of a number of separate churches permanently established. No single prophet could supervise all these churches any longer, or influence them by his spirit. Each congregation had its own officers, and they now began to protest against the outside interference of apostles in matters which they neither knew nor understood. Their protests were well founded. Autonomy was essential for the future development of the congregations in these troubled times of State persecution and Gnostic confusion, and had to be substituted for the former system of government from outside. In the third Epistle of St John we have a touching piece of evidence for the clash of the old with the new system of organization—touching, because the writer himself belongs to the old time, and is distressed as he contemplates the process of change. He has sent his messenger round to inquire as to the faith and love of the congregations. But a certain Diotrephes who wants to be first among them, declines to receive them, and expels those who wish to do so from the Church. But was this wicked Diotrephes so very much in the wrong, if he found that the messenger had no business at all in his congregation? The author of the Pastoral epistles and Ignatius were exactly of his opinion. The apostles and prophets come and stir up strife in the Church unnecessarily, they alienate the congregations from their bishop, they hold conventicles and start rival services. Elsewhere, in the Didache, the itinerant preachers and the officers of the congregations are still to be found working amicably together. The prophets and teachers are still honoured far more highly than the bishops and deacons: the former are looked upon as inspired, the latter are just elected officials. And yet the author of this legal document is a warm advocate of the officials—“despise them not, for they are deserving of your respect together with the prophets and teachers”; while he sets up a perfect barricade of precautionary measures against the inspired evangelists. There is no doubt, therefore, which of the two will gain the upper hand in the future.

At Rome, again, we find altogether different conditions prevailing. The prophets had evidently never enjoyed the same esteem there as in the East, for even the end of the first century witnessed the episcopal organization with the principle of apostolic succession fully matured in all essentials. Here, too, there were prophets (Hermas), but if they did not prove obedient to the constitution, they were set aside as false prophets, relegated to obscurity, and so entirely degenerated. From the very first, order here prevailed over anarchy.

The diminished importance of the itinerant preachers and the decay of this institution brought about an important change in ecclesiastical terminology, at least in so far as the apostles are concerned. The title of ‘Apostle’ was reserved for the Twelve and St Paul; the other missionaries are no longer called apostles but evangelists. This altered use of words was accelerated by the historical fact that Paul was the only apostle for his congregations; he never calls his fellow-missionaries apostles. Perhaps he had them in view when, in the letter to the Ephesians, he introduces the term ‘evangelist.’ The new theory, however, that it was only in the first age, the age when the foundations were laid, that apostles existed, and that therefore the apostolic age is to be distinguished from all later ages by the sole possession of this charisma, is entirely destitute of historical foundation, and is in contradiction with St Paul himself.

The passing away of the apostles and prophets was no event of merely secondary importance in the history of Christianity. It signified the end of inspiration. God ceased to speak directly through men. One main element in early Christianity—the Faith in a God that speaks and works in the present—had begun to decay.

CHAPTER II.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EPISCOPACY.

THE question now arises, Who stepped into the place left vacant by the inspired leaders of the first age?

It was the presiding officials of the single congregations, whose duties were originally confined to the care of public worship, Priests and Levites according to Jewish conceptions. In the very earliest age of all, they were persons who came forward voluntarily, either men of substance who placed a room at the disposal of the community for the meetings and there supervised the discipline, or men of trust, in whose hands the offerings for the poor were placed for distribution. In his earlier letters St Paul calls them ‘presidents’ or ‘workers.’ In the letter to the Philippians, written not long before the apostle’s death, they appear for the first time in the two divisions of overseers (bishops) and ministers (deacons). The apostolic age knows nothing as yet of an election and institution of these officials; it is only in the succeeding age that this becomes the rule. Presbyterial colleges appointed by election, frequently at the suggestion of apostles and prophets who happen to be present, are the constant characteristic of the sub-apostolic age. Proofs for the existence of these colleges, which are as yet without any monarchical form of government, are to be found in almost all the writings of this period which have come down to us: the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Pastoral letters, 1st Peter, James, Clement, Polycarp, the Didache, Hermas. The titles which are used in these writings to designate the presidents of the colleges are very various. They appear now as ‘overseers’ (bishops), now as ‘elders’ (presbyters), now as ‘shepherds,’ and again as ‘leaders,’ nor can any appreciable difference be discovered in the use of these titles. The ‘overseers’ and ‘elders’ especially evidently designate the same persons; and a second conclusion which is equally certain is that the ‘ministers’ (deacons) are subordinate helpers of the overseers.

The work of the colleges was of a wide and all-embracing nature in the conduct of the communities affairs generally. That is expressed by the words ‘leaders,’ ‘shepherds,’ ‘presidents.’ More especially, however, their activity may be considered under the three chief heads of the conduct of religious worship, the preservation of public order, the dispensation of social charities. The enumeration of the qualities required of the members of the colleges shows us better than anything else that their energies were concentrated in this direction. Sincerity, honesty, mildness, gentleness, are the chief characteristics that were looked for in them. Teaching and preaching formed at first the least part of a priest’s work. The teachers and the prophets were there for that purpose, and everyone was free to expound the word. But the struggle with Gnosticism brought about an entire change. In the Pastoral letters, the maintenance of sound doctrine—i.e., of the apostolic tradition—against heresy comes to be the bishop’s chief function. That is why it is so important that the bishop should be apt to teach, and that is why the teaching presbyters are to receive a double reward. In these passages one can still plainly trace the fact that teaching did not originally enter into a bishop’s activities. Ignatius goes a good deal further. He would have nothing done without the bishop: every ecclesiastical act is to be submitted to him. Thus the scope of the bishop’s office is gradually enlarged. Originally he is simply the president of a presbyterial council, finally he takes over all the functions of a prophet and an apostle, though, to be sure, only with the application of the principles of the division of labour and of strict subordination.

The increased dignity of these officials keeps pace with the development of their functions. Originally it was only the apostles and prophets that counted as the messengers of God’s word and representatives of God and of Christ for the Church, whilst the bishops were the officials of the single congregations without any higher honour. Their exaltation to their new position of dignity was brought about in a threefold manner.

1. By the theory of apostolic succession. The way is paved for this theory by the Acts of the Apostles, which emphasizes the apostolic institution of the presbyters and makes Paul speak to the presbyters at Miletus as though to his successors. Then it is regularly formulated by Clement of Rome (ch. 42-44). At the bottom of the theory lies the fact that the office of president goes back to the apostolic age; but it is just in the case of Rome that the principle does not apply, for the Roman Church was not an apostolic foundation. Clement is the first to draw up the line “God, Christ, the apostles, the elders,” which gives the elders a share in the divine dignity by means of tradition. Similar thoughts of a succession are to be found in the Pastoral letters (St Paul’s “gift”). At bottom this theory of apostolic succession forms a counterpart to that of the Jewish Rabbis; like this theory, it is of a legal nature and therefore especially comprehensible to the Romans.

2. By the theory of a special gift of the Spirit attached to the office. We find it first of all in the Pastoral epistles side by side with that of the apostolic succession. The two, in fact, run into each other as they did in the case of the Rabbis. The gift of the Spirit is made to depend upon the right succession. Amongst the Christians this theory was bound to strengthen the hands of the defence against the heretics and the prophets. For itinerant preachers and Gnostics alike appealed to “the Spirit.” In order to check their extravagances it was now maintained that the Spirit was only to be found amongst the Church officials, not amongst the Gnostics, but—and this is the evil consequence of the theory—no longer amongst the congregation either. “I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God which is in thee through the laying on of my hands. For God gave us not a spirit of fearfulness but of power, love, and discipline . . . . the ‘good deposit’ guard through the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us.”

The ‘we’ who have the Spirit are the officials of the Church alone. An Ignatius, it is true, felt himself to be inspired, for he believed himself entitled to boast of genuine visions; but then he tries to make his theory apply to all bishops, even to those who never had any inspiration of this kind. The only way in which the theory can gain the victory over enthusiasm and prophecy is by falsely proclaiming every bishop to be a prophet.

3. By the theory of the Old Testament priesthood. The first trace of it is to be found in the first Epistle of St Clement (ch. 40), where reference is made to the typical nature of the Israelite priesthood; but it may just as well have arisen in Egypt or Syria amongst the readers of the Didache—in fact, wherever the Old Testament was counted a sacred book of the law. There in the Old Testament they read of a clear and sharp distinction between clergy and laity—this is noticed even as early as Clement!—and of a hierarchy with different degrees of dignity. The type was endowed with creative power. The Didache, as is well-known, furnishes other evidence of the great and commanding influence which the Old Testament exercised upon the congregations.

All three theories possessed the further advantage of being capable of combination. This is what actually occurred a little later. The bishops became the successors of the apostles, prophets, and priests. By the end of the first century the foundation of the whole system had been laid.

CHAPTER III.

THE ORDER OF THE SAINTS.

As long as there were apostles and prophets they were the homines religiosi, the representatives of ecstasy and exaltation, and of all that was extraordinary. They were the incarnation of the enthusiastic impulse, of that excess of zeal, love and energy which could find no room in the everyday life. This impulse had to discover a new outlet when the order of the apostles and of the prophets succumbed to the altered circumstances of the times. The Christian life was too abnormal, too vehement, too volcanic to find full satisfaction in the office of bishop or of teacher, and in the ordinary layman’s piety. There must be saints to set a goal to the longing of the deepest natures, to whom the masses could look up and venerate as heroes. They are the successors of the apostles and the prophets in the abnormal manner of their lives, though not in their historical calling. They do not represent anything distinctively Christian; they belong rather to the universal history of religion than to the history of the Gospel.

Who are the saints of the sub-apostolic age? First of all come the martyrs. It was a time of struggle, and they died a hero’s death for their Redeemer. Even in the Apocalypse they occupy the first rank. It is of them that the writer is thinking when he praises the great multitude who have come out of the great tribulation, who have conquered in the strength of the Lamb: they are the first to rise from the dead and to live and reign with Christ in the millennial kingdom. One is mentioned by name, the martyr of Pergamos, Antipas the faithful witness. The Apocalypse itself is intended as an invitation to martyrdom: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth” [i.e., as martyrs]; “yea, saith the spirit, they shall rest from their labours; for their works follow with them.”

Other writings celebrate the martyrs of past ages as saints, so the Epistle to the Hebrews. The catalogue of the men of faith—the cloud of witnesses—is closed with the martyrs. The author enumerates every variety of death and terror. “Some were crucified, others had trial of mockings and scourgings; yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, tortured, sawn asunder; they were slain with the sword: they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, evil-intreated, of whom the world was not worthy.” That applies to the martyrs of the Jewish Church, but it shows how Christian enthusiasm was kindled by such fancies. The Acts of the Apostles celebrates the apostles as martyrs. Nothing but his martyrdom is related of James, and not much more of Stephen. St Peter and St Paul are heroes of suffering. But the fatal termination is by no means the most important part of a martyrdom. The most famous cases are those when the hero is rescued from the greatest danger by a divine miracle: Peter in prison, Paul at Lystra and at Philippi. The first Epistle of St Clement refers to the two apostles St Peter and St Paul, who died the martyr’s death. “To whom were added a great number of the elect, who, suffering many torments and much dishonour through jealous enmity, gave us thereby a most excellent example.” The “Shepherd” of Hermas, written in a time of persecution, is especially instructive. In his vision the prophet is about to seat himself on the right hand of the woman that appears to him, but she refuses to give him this seat of honour; it belongs to the martyrs alone who have endured scourgings and imprisonment, great plagues, crucifixion and wild beasts for the sake of the Name. It is true, however, that the same third vision afterwards mentions only the martyrs in the second place, namely, after the apostles, bishops, teachers and deacons. The martyr is accordingly to rank above the prophets but below the bishops, which points to the first beginnings of disputes as to precedence. Martyrdom is already reckoned as so high a merit, quite in itself and apart from the rest of the Christian life, that Hermas feels himself compelled to enter the lists against this exaggerated estimate of its value. To certain martyrs or confessors he declares: “Had ye not suffered for the name of the Lord, ye had been as dead in the sight of God because of your sins.” At the same time he declares that martyrdom procures forgiveness of sins for all men. Such were the views of the Church at Rome. The martyrdom of Polycarp and the Ignatian letters show us how far more highly martyrdom was esteemed in the East than the episcopal office, for both Polycarp and Ignatius were bishops. So we read in the martyrdom of Polycarp. “We pray to Christ as to the Son of God, but we love the martyrs as the disciples and followers of the Lord.” Ignatius, who has so lofty a consciousness of his episcopal office, declares that it is only now, in martyrdom, that he begins to be a true disciple of Jesus. It is only the martyr who in the strict sense of the word follows the steps of Jesus. The high esteem, therefore, in which these martyred saints were held had consequences of a directly political nature for the surviving confessors. They were considered to be inspired in an extraordinary degree—according to Jesus’ promise that the Spirit should be their advocate when they should be delivered up for judgment—and so they came to be the rivals of the bishops.

The ascetics formed the second class of the saints. 1 Cor. vii. and the enigmatic and uncertain saying of Jesus concerning those who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake in Matt. xix. led many in very early times to attach a superior sanctity to the single state. This form of asceticism was reckoned as the token of an especial charism. Separate orders of virgins and of widows came into being. The author of the Lucan writings helps to exalt and to glorify them by his enthusiastic description of the widow Hannah and of the virgin Tabitha. By the time when the Pastoral letters were written the honourable title of widow must have been very grossly misused. Not only was greater sanctity attached to it, but considerable support was assigned to the widows by the congregations. Thereupon widows with large families of children presented themselves for admission into the sacred order, or quite young widows whose secret intention was to marry again. The energetic manner in which the author sets about the reform and reduction of the order of widows is very entertaining. He is fighting at the same time for the episcopal authority, upon which these holy ladies often trench. From the very first the ascetic was the natural rival of the bishop. He had the greater sanctity, the bishop the greater dignity. If the ascetic began to boast into the bargain, then strife was scarcely to be avoided. “The ascetic is not to boast”—the words of warning come to us from a document of the first century—“for he knows that it is not from himself that he has received the strength to be continent.” Bishop Ignatius writes to Bishop Polycarp still more uncompromisingly: “If a man possesses the power to remain continent then he shall refrain from vaunting in honour of the body of the Lord [i.e., of the Church]. If he vaunts, then he is lost; and if he is accounted more highly than the bishop, then he has utterly perished.” That sounds like the motto for the great war that was to be waged for centuries between the official position and the holy life, between the bishop and the monk. The esteem in which the ascetic life was held was still further increased by certain mystic tendencies: the marriage with Christ did not appear to be quite capable of realization save in the case of the unmarried. Then there was the loathing felt for the only too familiar heathen life of impurity, together with various forms of the late-Jewish and foreign aversion to nature. Even at this early date asceticism was exalted to the highest honour in current legends. Abundant proof of this statement can be found in the Acts of the virgin Thecla, in almost all the apocryphal Acts of Apostles, and in the Gospel of Mary. Entire continence is everywhere accounted the higher and truer form of Christianity. No wonder that the bishop fell into disrepute and that the episcopal author of the Pastoral epistles inveighs loudly against those emissaries of the devil who forbid marriage. In the eyes of a great portion of the Christian community the ascetics appeared to be the only people who had seriously set out in quest of the ideal of the Gospel.

The beginnings of the voluminous literature of hagiology can be traced back to the end of the first century. The series is begun by the Gospels; Jesus Himself appears in them as the first of the saints, though He is, it is true, at the same time the messenger of the clear Word of God. The various Acts of the Apostles follow next; they reflect the ideal of popular piety. The men of God are there depicted as converters of the heathen, as workers of miracles, as ascetics, and as martyrs. It is possible that our canonical book of the Acts is the first of this group of literary productions. But the editor reproduces the legend of the saints with an ecclesiastical bias and writes as a conscious advocate of episcopal authority. In the apocryphal writings, on the contrary, the saint is pourtrayed without any ecclesiastical coloring. They are the last products of the dying enthusiasm. Human and divine here melt into one; the miraculous forms the rule, the ordinary the exception. The tendency is throughout ascetic and anti social, but secular interests claim their due in the romantic form in which they are composed. At bottom all these saints are, after all, caricatures of Jesus and of His great successor.

Thus equipped with bishops, theologians and saints, the Church goes forward to meet the problems of the new age. There were no longer any great personalities with an immediate divine calling. That is not the fault of the Church. The time now came when second-rate characters and talents were strong enough to find a place for the new religion in the world and to preserve it from entire destruction therein.

CHAPTER IV.

THE JEWISH FAITH.

IT was only the Jewish war and the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. that finally effected the external breach between Jews and Christians. It was now clear to all Christians that the mission of Jesus and the apostles to Israel had been in vain, and had not stayed the judgment of God. The fulfilment of Jesus’ prophecies, the wrath of God poured out upon Jerusalem as a punishment for the murder of Jesus—such seemed (to all Christians) to be the meaning of the terrible events which had just taken place, for everyone who could read the signs of the times. And while these convictions were gaining ground among the Christians, the authors of the Apocalypse of Baruch and of Ezra were pouring forth their lamentations for the desolation of the holy land and the destruction of the holy city. Something was gradually settling down between Jews and Christians, something of greater weight than theological differences. A rift in thought and feeling was gradually broadening, which removed every possibility of mutual understanding. The same event called forth rejoicing and contentment in the one camp and dismay in the other.

The Jews retaliated first of all by the expulsion of all Christians from membership in the synagogues. Everyone that espoused the cause of Jesus was immediately excommunicated with the most terrible curses. The passage in St Luke’s Gospel alludes to this where it is written: “Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company and reproach you and cast out your name as evil for the Son of man’s sake.” A nice illustration is also to be found (in the Fourth Gospel) in the story of the man that was born blind. This man was cast out of the assembly, “for the Jews had agreed that if any man should confess Him to be Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue.”

A further step was taken when the Christians were denounced to the Roman governors under the pretext of being politically dangerous. The Jews were the principal instigators in the persecution of Christians that now began; it was they who sowed broadcast the accusations of revolt, innovation and conspiracy, and thrust Christianity from them as an “illegal religion.” The Lucan writings contain a series of such denunciations: “Jesus perverted the people, forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that He Himself is Christ a king.” “The Christians have turned the world upside down; they act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus.” It is true that, according to the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, these accusations usually fell flat. The Roman governors were too wise and just not to turn a deaf ear to such fabrications. So it should have been, but such was not the actual state of affairs. We know, on the contrary, that in consequence of Jewish denunciations the Christians were condemned as innovators and revolutionaries dangerous to the well-being of the State. Even the Apocalypse couples the denunciation of the Jews and the persecution of the Christians together. The martyrdom of Polycarp is the best instance that we possess of the fierce hatred which the Jews nourished against the Christians. The voices of Jews mingle with those of the heathen multitude and clamour for the execution of Polycarp; then, “as usual,” they drag the wood up to the stake, and finally they try to hinder the body from being handed over to the Christians. Political denunciation was, however, only one of the weapons which the Jews employed; the other, equally effective, was the defamation of the moral character of Jesus and the Christians, the wholesale dissemination of all those calumnious reports concerning the birth of Christ, the theft of His body after His death, and the like, against which St Matthew’s Gospel already feels bound to protest. The whole story of Jesus was travestied and vulgarized, and thus exposed to the mockery of the educated classes. Although Justin’s report of an official mission of Jewish calumniators soon after Jesus’ death is legendary, there was a basis of fact upon which his supposition was built. The philosopher Celsus appears to have been acquainted with a Jewish pamphlet full of aspersions upon the Christians. He despises it himself, but for all that he enjoys making use of it. Thus, then, the Jews did their utmost to root out the Christians, and the wild hatred which these latter conceived for them was not altogether unmerited.

The influence of Judaism upon Christianity would never have been of any consequence had the combatants confined themselves to these brutal methods of warfare. But from very early times controversy was employed as well as calumny. Thus the teachers of the two religions engaged in learned disputations, which naturally scarcely ever had any practical results, but did not fail to exercise a considerable influence upon men’s minds. The earliest picture of such a disputation is to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. The record of the speeches and of the argumentation of St Stephen and of St Paul affords us at the same time an insight into the circumstances of a later age. Next, we have the disputes of Jesus with the Jews at Jerusalem, contained in the Fourth Gospel. Here the author simply carries back into the life of Jesus the wranglings between Jews and Christians of his own day. Lastly, in his dialogue with the Jew Trypho, Justin gives us the outline of a regular disputation, of course in a Christian light. This work of Justin’s compensates in a measure for the loss of the older disputation between Jason and Papiscus, of which Aristo of Pella is said to have been the author. Justin’s dialogue is in any case an authority of the highest value if we would determine, not only the outer procedure in such a disputation, but also the apologetic methods in detail. Other anti-Jewish writings, such as the Epistle to the Hebrews and that of Barnabas, afford us additional valuable information.

If we ask, what was the subject of this controversy and what were the main points in the dispute, then we must be prepared to find that the specific differences between the Christian and the Jew had not been grasped at all by either party in the theological dispute. For in reality two completely different types or species of religion stood opposed to each other, and they could only be contrasted as wholes: it was not a question of single dogmas or customs; the point at issue was the entire relation of man to God. Does man claim to be God’s child, or is he His slave? Are love and joy to prevail in him, or is it fear? Which is important in God’s sight—the abiding in the three realities, or a hundred secondary matters? The answer to these fundamental questions was that which really differentiated the Christian from the Jew. But even in the earliest Christian Church the subject of controversy was less the new element in religion than the dogma of the Messiah. Could it be applied to Jesus in spite of His death or not? This dispute began the process whereby the fundamental points of difference were obliterated and obscured. Then, in addition to this, there came in, through Paul, the strife concerning the law. Paul sets up a sharp antithesis—the law or Jesus Christ. Here was at any rate a faint glimmering of the truth. It is because Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man and the barrier of the law no longer exists for the Christian, that His religion is of a totally different nature—it is the glorious liberty of the children of God. St Paul had indeed a profounder conception of the superiority of Christianity than any other man. But for the succeeding age the resulting difference is a merely external one. Compared with the Jews the Christians have at once lost and gained. They have lost the burden of the ceremonial law, they have gained the faith in Jesus the Messiah. In other words, the life of the Christians has become easier, their faith a harder matter. The expression of the comparison with their opponents could hardly have been less felicitous. Matters were made worse by the constant attempt of the Christian apologetic to transform the absolute antithesis between the law and Christ, such as St Paul had proclaimed it, into a merely relative difference whereby Christ was discovered everywhere in the Jewish Book, even in the law, and validity was claimed for the law, even in the Christian Church, only in a modified sense. The belief in Christ was itself to prove to be something Jewish and of extreme antiquity; and, on the other hand, the law was to be a revelation which only the Christians were able to read aright. By this apologetic device they deprived themselves of the very possibility of understanding the peculiar characteristics of Christianity and its superiority over Judaism. Nor is this the only occasion on which apologetics, instead of bringing light, have darkened counsel.

We have now to give an outline of the Christological controversy between the Jews and the Christians and the Christological apologetics of the latter. The starting-point was the question: Is Jesus the Messiah expected by the Jews or not? But since St Paul had created an entirely new Christology—the Son of God from heaven, the mediator of creation and of revelation in the Old Testament—this speculation had also to be defended against the Jews.

Here were two things as far as the poles asunder—Jewish eschatological doctrines and new Christian speculations. The dialogue with Trypho (ch. 48) shows conclusively that the difference between Jews and Christians was clearly realized. Trypho says, that Jesus should be the Messiah is paradoxical, but to assert that He pre-existed as God and then became man in a supernatural fashion, is “not only paradoxical but foolish,” whereupon Justin admits that the proof of the second statement is rather more difficult.

First of all, it had to be proved that Jesus was the Messiah. This was in reality no easy task, seeing that Jesus had eliminated nearly all that was Jewish from the conception of the Messiah and referred His disciples to the future for the little that remained. But the difficulty was no longer felt. It was maintained that Jesus had been acknowledged as the Jewish Messiah while He lived on earth. The chief rock of offence was now, as ever, His death, which the Jews interpreted as punishment for wrongdoing. Hence the greatest part of this Messianic theology is apologetics for the death of Jesus. The Resurrection there appears as evidence of restitution, and is itself defended by an ever-lengthening chain of proofs. When the Jews persisted in spreading abroad the report of the theft of the body of Jesus, the Christians invented the story of the watch and the sealing of the grave by way of refutation. The legends concerning the miraculous occurrences at the death of Jesus were in like manner furnished with the evidence of eye witnesses, and completed the story of the Resurrection.

The proof from prophecy was intended to remove any further objections that might be entertained. In the first place, prophecies of Jesus Himself were fulfilled in the story of the Passion—there was a whole series of detailed predictions and of symbolical actions, from which the inference was to be drawn that He did not bow before superior force but died of His own free will. Next, the whole of the Old Testament was interpreted as the book of the death of the Messiah, not merely Isa. liii., but all the sacrifices and laws of the trespass offering, all the lamentations of the Psalmists, the sacrifice of Isaac, the scarlet thread of Rahab the harlot, the brazen serpent in the wilderness, the hands of Moses up lifted crosswise in the battle against the Amalakites, and so forth. Nothing was too recondite to deter them. Barnabas writes with the greatest equanimity, “The red heifer in Numbers xix. is the Lord Jesus.” The later evangelists, especially St Matthew and St John, are careful to note the exact fulfilment of single prophecies in the history of the Passion. “In order that the scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, I thirst.”

The last recourse of apologetics was the proof of the voluntariness of Jesus' sufferings. He could have asked God to send Him legions of angels, but He would not. If by the mere utterance of the words “I am He” He made His enemies fall to the ground, how easily might He have escaped from them. His life was His own to give or to keep, and if He gave it, then it was for our sakes and that the scripture might be fulfilled. Finally, the different legends about Judas were proofs of the judgment of God upon the traitor, and that was succeeded by the terrible revelation of His wrath upon the murderers and their city. More abundant proof could not be required of any apologetics. In the Gospels we can still see quite clearly how the apologetic narrative gradually increases in intensity. Mark always begins the series, Matthew and John always come last. In the same manner an ever-lengthening chain of Old Testament proof stretches from the Acts over John and Barnabas to Justin. The Christian teachers carefully preserved their store of apologetic arguments and handed it on with further additions. But their line of defence was after all pitiably weak, and the Jews broke through it and came out victorious in the end. The Christians admitted that Jesus’ death destroys His claim to be the Messiah, if it were not that. . . . The want of taste in the reasoning is of little moment compared with the far more serious, wantonness with which passages were altered, perverted, or invented by the apologists. They inserted glosses of greater or less extent in several passages of the Old Testament (Son of God, Wood, etc.), and thereby rendered themselves liable to the charge of forgery. Nor was it any blessing for Christianity if, thanks to this apologetic of theirs, importance was attached even more exclusively than heretofore to the death of Jesus.

The rest of the history was, however, not entirely neglected. Difficulties had to be removed and further proofs of the Messiahship furnished. The doctrine of Jesus Davidic descent was maintained in spite of Jesus’ answer to the Scribes, and in spite of the story of the miraculous birth—now just beginning to appear among the Gentile Christians—which of course invalidates this argument. Barnabas alone rejects the descent from David in favour of the divine Sonship. A consequence of the Davidic descent was the postulate of the birth in Bethlehem (cp. Matt. ii. 5 and John vii. 42), which was clearly contradicted, however, by the fact that Jesus came from Nazareth. The postulate was transformed into history. The first evangelist shows us how it came about that Jesus, who had been born at Bethlehem, grew up at Nazareth, and the third explains how it was that the parents of Jesus, who were settled at Nazareth, came to have their child at Bethlehem.

Galilee was, however, still the land of darkness. Can the Messiah come from Galilee? The first evangelist has recourse to the prophecy of Isaiah—the light of the Messiah is to spring up in Galilee. The fourth evangelist simply transfers the scene of Jesus’ activity to Jerusalem in order that every reproach of Jesus having taught in a corner and in secret might be removed. This apologetic transformation of the life of Jesus equals in boldness the transference of His birthplace. One other apparent obstacle to the doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah had to be surmounted—the baptism of Jesus by John, for surely the Baptist is the greater, and the baptized is even a sinner. To counterbalance these inferences the first evangelist inserted the conversation in the course of which the Baptist humbles himself before Jesus; the third placed the Baptist in an inferior position through his previous history; the fourth made the Baptist to be the first publicly to confess the Son of God that came down from heaven to reconcile the world; and lastly, Justin proved that the Jewish doctrine of the anointment of the Messiah by Elijah had been fulfilled in the baptism of Jesus. In a similar manner we find that Jewish objections have had to be taken into account in very many places in the Gospel tradition. Although the Gospel of St Mark was itself inspired by a most enthusiastic faith and intended to awaken a like faith, it proved to be the source of considerable perplexity to later writers, for its author had evidently under-estimated the keenness of his adversaries’ perceptions. With an entire absence of suspicion he lets the men of Nazareth speak of Jesus’ trade as a carpenter, and tells us how Jesus own relations once took Him to be mad. He had shown Jesus’ powers to be subject to limitation on all sides, even in the moral sphere. He will not suffer Himself to be called good; He knows neither the day nor hour of the Parousia; nor can He dispose of the places in the kingdom of heaven. He is repeatedly compelled to have recourse to questions. He asks the name of the demon, inquires who it was that caused power to go forth from Him by touching Him; or again, He would know the subject of the disciples’ conversation, and the duration of the epileptic’s malady. Even His miraculous power is limited. At one time He can do no miracles. At another all the sick are brought to Him, and He heals, not all, but many; He cannot make the blind man to see immediately; the deaf He heals, but with many sighs. When He is asked to confirm His position by giving a sign He refuses. Whilst these are the very features for the sake of which we, at this present day, ascribe the greatest historical accuracy to St Mark, his oldest Christian readers were greatly distressed by so many obvious defects in the picture of Jesus, which afforded such convenient points of attack for scornful adversaries, at first Jewish, and later Greek as well. Every later evangelist, Matthew, Luke and John, is therefore very eager to remove such rocks of offence, either through simply omitting them or by correcting them or by smoothing them away by means of explanation; and yet, as the criticism of the Jew in Celsus, and as Celsus himself shows us, more than sufficient points of attack remained. For us this is a great comfort. We sometimes fear lest the true figure of Jesus is lost to us because of the draperies in which it has been shrouded, and His true features hopelessly obscured because of the successive layers of colours under which they lie concealed. Here we have a proof that a real human being, and no mere product of faith, is speaking to us.

The main question still remained unanswered as before: Does the life of Jesus as a whole give one the impression that He was the Messiah? Originally the Christians universally shared the belief that Jesus had yet to come as Messiah. The Messianic glory had not yet been revealed in Him. It was only the return of Jesus and the ‘advent of Messiah” that was to furnish the full Messianic proof. But in the course of the controversy with the Jews, and under the influence of the Pauline conception of the Son of God who had already appeared, the proof began to be attempted that Jesus was the Messiah who had already come, and not the one whose coming had still to be expected. The task was an impossible one. Jesus’ life was marked so clearly by the characteristics of a lowly origin, of suffering, of want, of distance from God. What proof could here be found of the Messianic glory in the Jewish sense of the word? All the national prophecies had evidently not been fulfilled by Him.

The Christian apologists sought to surmount the difficulty in two mutually exclusive ways. The first, and the more honest, was the artificially constructed theory of the twofold advent of the Messiah—one in humiliation, one in glory. The first traces of this theory are to be found in the Lucan writings, where we have the explanation—first the suffering and then the glory. It is completed in Barnabas and in Justin, together with the proofs from the Old Testament. On the great day of Atonement there were two he-goats resembling each other, according to the Rabbinical theory; just so the Jesus of the second advent will be like the Jesus murdered by the Jews. This theory possessed one great advantage: the story of Jesus could be taken as it was in reality. But then the chief proof had to be deferred to the uncertain future.

Hence the origin of the opposite theory. The Messianic glory was manifested during Jesus’ earthly life. The first evangelist goes a long way to meet it with his great proof from miracles (ch. viii.-ix.), and the proof from prophecy throughout the whole of his book. One who possessed such miraculous powers, and in whom so many prophecies were fulfilled, was the Messiah in the fulness of His glory. He needed not to be baptized, He needed not to die. Characteristic, too, is the omission of the words, “Why callest thou Me good?” And yet all that this evangelist does, is a very modest beginning compared with the total transformation of the life of Jesus, effected in the Fourth Gospel in the interests of the Messianic theory. “When Christ cometh will He do more miracles than these which this man hath done?” This exclamation of the Jews might serve as a motto for the whole book. The evangelist’s aim is the proof that Jesus was the Christ during His life on earth, and not in the future only. The future Parousia of Christ is an entirely subsidiary consideration: he has something better to offer than consolation by means of a hope that is still to be realized. Behold the Messiah, who has come in the full glory of God. The mighty miracles, the changing of the water into wine, the healing of the man who had been lame for thirty-eight years, and of the man born blind, the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on the sea, the raising of Lazarus after three days—they are all signs of the Messiahship of Jesus, the revelation of His Messianic glory; for they are all of them wonders, such as could only be expected to occur in the Messianic age. This Messiah possessed sinlessness, omniscience and omnipotence upon earth. Jesus’ death was voluntarily a proof of His love. How could anyone fail to believe that He was the Messiah? To meet the demand of the Rabbis, who were forever clamouring for testimonies, authoritative proofs, the fifth chapter of the Gospel furnishes a whole concatenation of proofs—the testimony of John, the wonders, the voice of God, the Old Testament. Then again he investigates the difficult questions whether the testimony of Jesus to Himself is valid or not, and decides that it is, because Jesus’ testimony carries greater weight than that of any man, His knowledge being subject to no limitations, and as it is always accompanied by the testimony of God, it fulfils the requirement of the law that testimony shall be in the mouth of two witnesses. Hence furthermore, as a natural consequence, the Messianic judgment was executed by the mere appearance of Jesus, and the Messianic gift of everlasting life was imparted by Jesus; for the presence of the Messiah implies judgment and everlasting blessedness. John was merely the apologist who consistently drew all the consequences from the proposition that Jesus was the Messiah. Had it depended upon him, the Christians might entirely have discarded the proof from the Parousia while retaining the hope in the Parousia itself. But the Church did not accept this theory. It was rejected even by as early a writer as Justin. The impression of Jesus’ lowly life left by the Synoptic Gospels was too strong and the hope in the Parousia too important for the great mass of the Christians. The only theory which held its ground was that of the double Parousia. This did not imply, however, the rejection of the Christ of glory as He appeared in the Johannine Gospel. For the Gentiles especially the evangelist thereby furnished a proof that God had appeared upon earth. Thus, then, while John did not attain his proximate aim by his unsparing idealization of history—that is to say, the refutation of the Jews—he did make a deeper impression upon the Greeks than he would have done otherwise. John himself is in reality perfectly well aware that however many testimonies he may gather, his arguments do not carry conviction to any learned Jew. He alone that has the Spirit can understand the Christian doctrine, can recognise that the death of Jesus was a judgment, not upon the Crucified, but upon the devil, and that the Old Testament is full of types of the death of Jesus. That is the conclusion of every controversy.

Jesus had not been the Messiah of the Jews. The whole artificial series of proofs brought forward by the Christians simply corroborates this assertion. All that they advance is figment, feint and fabrication. No single Christian had the courage to tell the Jews straight out: Jesus was not that which you wish Him to be, because He was something a great deal better.

There were, of course, many Christians to whom the title of Messiah did not imply very much, though that which they substituted for it was in no wise better. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews belongs to this class. Although he calls Jesus Christ he knows practically nothing of the Messianic theology, and therefore the Jewish Alexandrine school of thought to which he belongs attached no importance to this doctrine. His favourite book is the Pentateuch, which makes no mention of the Messiah. When he wishes to picture Jesus clearly to himself and the Jewish readers of the Bible he can only do so by means of the types and conceptions of the Pentateuch. Hence he derives his favourite idea, Jesus the high priest according to the order of Melchisedec.

His letter is addressed to Christians, but to such as are deeply impressed by Judaism. Christianity—so some of these Christians would say to each other—is a poor and insignificant kind of faith. It is forever putting us off with hopes for the future which are never realized, whilst Judaism has its divine institutions in the present. They were jealous of the ecclesiastical privileges of Judaism, just as so many Protestants secretly envy Rome her prerogatives. Israel had angels as mediators of the covenant, it had its public worship and its divinely ordained priesthood, and derived the certainty of its future salvation from these actual guarantees. The simple fact that the war of the year 70 A.D. had swept away the Church of Israel did not cause these Christians to waver in their partiality for Judaism. They believed the sacred book more than the actual present.

The usual result of apologetics can be traced in our author. Instead of brushing these preposterous objections aside he takes them into consideration and really tries to prove that the Christians possess the better Church with a higher ritual and priesthood. It was an amazing undertaking. The method employed was to apply the Pentateuch to Jesus. But Jesus was not of Aaron’s line, and had He been He would but have been the equal of the Jewish high priests. So our Christian author selects the figure of Melchisedec, naturally incited thereto by the 110th Messianic psalm, which had for a long time past been interpreted in a Christian sense. He need trouble himself as little about the Jesus of history as St Paul or the author of the Apocalypse. It is sufficient for him to identify Jesus with the high priest Melchisedec in order to undermine the foundations on which the prerogatives of Israel rest. Melchisedec hereby does our author the same good turn that Abraham had done St Paul. He furnishes the proof from antiquity. As high priest after the order of Melchisedec, Christ is older than Levi and Aaron. The whole Jewish priesthood paid tithes and did reverence to Melchisedec in the person of their ancestor Abraham. It is one of the pleasant little ironies of history that the very character which had been invented by the Jews for the express purpose of in vesting Jerusalem with a halo of magnificence in a remote antiquity, should now be used as the lever whereby all Jewish prerogatives were overthrown.

Starting from this figure, our author proves on the one hand the similarity of Christ to the Jewish high priests, but above all, the difference that exists between them and His superiority over them. The priests of Aaron are many, Jesus one; they are the sinful, He the sinless; they worship in the temple made with hands, He in the heavenly temple; they make atonement to God year by year, He once; they with the blood of bulls and calves, He with His own. In all this clever trifling it does not of course matter that Jesus is explained now as priest and now as victim, for the author never employs that imaginative power which welds different features into one consistent picture. It is possible that he is influenced by another typical figure in the Jewish faith, that of the heavenly high priest Michael, believed by the Jews to represent their people continually in the sanctuary of God in heaven. Philo had already identified this archangelic high priest with his Logos. Philo’s pupil—our author—may very well have combined the Melechisedec Christ with the heavenly Michael in like manner. But this is merely supposition. What is certain is that the figure of Jesus was now distorted for good and cast into a priestly mould so that such Christians as were attached to the old Jewish high priest might have some compensation for their loss. The whole comparison is a theological tour de force. Thank heaven, the real Jesus was the outspoken opponent of the high priest. To take from the high priesthood the colours for His portraiture was pure perversity.

We do not really enter the domain of speculation until we come to the title ‘Son of God.’ The expression was originally a mere title for the Messiah, though even as such it was by no means common in the terminology of the schools. St Paul was the first to develop the theory of the heavenly Son of God, whose nature is inherently superior to our own. He is God’s own true Son, whereas we only become His sons by adoption. As Son of God He is to be conceived as dwelling in heaven from all eternity. This Pauline theory of the Son of God was immediately accepted by the teachers of the sub-apostolic age (e.g., the authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of St John’s Gospel, and the letter of Barnabas) as a certain basis on which to build. It was now also drawn into the controversy with the Jews.

The Jews clung firmly to their belief that God was the Father of all, so that they might call themselves His children. They altogether refused to accept Jesus as the Son of God in an especial sense. The Christians answered by denying the Jewish faith in God the Father, and by separating Jesus still more sharply from men. In St John’s Gospel Jesus is made to tell the Jews in awful words that they are the children, not of God, but of the devil. A truly terrible statement, for it destroys the presupposition of Jesus’ whole teaching—the divine Fatherhood. There is no longer anything childlike in the religious relationship, nor is a direct approach to God possible. The consequences immediately make themselves felt for the Christians. They are no longer sons of God, as St Paul still calls them, but ‘children’ of God, i.e., the divine Sonship is reserved for Jesus. Hence forward God the Father and God the Son—with the addition of the word ‘only’—belong together as in the later Trinitarian dogma. The expression God the Father in the earlier sense is confined to prayers. Theology knows it no more. The teachers who are responsible for having effected this change in reality perpetrated a robbery upon Christianity which only escaped notice because of the ardour of their apologetic zeal.

If, however, the Son of God was thus removed from the children of God, then the question as to His relation to God was bound to come to the front at once. Once more the Jews were the instigators. They accused the Christians of apostasy from monotheism, of pure idolatry. Our oldest Gospel, St Mark, refers to this accusation when it tells us that Jesus was condemned to death as a blasphemer because He had called Himself Son of God; then the Fourth Gospel reproduces the charge made by the Jews in so many words: “Jesus by calling God His Father makes Himself equal with God.” “He blasphemes God in that He being a man made Himself God.” This accusation is, of course, directed against the worshippers of Jesus, and not Jesus Himself. For the first time the Christians are exposed to the painful reproach of endangering the pure faith in God by their faith in Christ. The whole abyss stands revealed between the Pauline theology and the words of Jesus, “Thou shall worship God alone: no one is good but God.” When John appealed to the passage in the Psalms, “I have said, ye are Gods,” it was merely a theological evasion. The only inference from this passage was that the Old Testament itself did not employ the word God very strictly; nothing was gained thereby for Jesus' cause. There was only one means of rebutting the accusation that the Christians worshipped two Gods, and that was distinctly to declare Jesus' entire subordination to God. Such was John’s escape from the dilemma. He makes Jesus Himself confess that the Father is greater than He, that He received all things from the Father, and has nothing of Himself, that in all His works He follows the Father and fulfils the Father’s work. St John’s Christology is a compromise between the pure divinity of Christ, to which the evangelist nearly attains, and the unity of God, the dogma brought forward by the Jews in opposition to it. This compromise—the theory of subordination—owes its origin to nothing else than the anti-Jewish apologetics. After all, this impaired divinity is a mythological figure. The absurd antithesis now arose, the Jews merely had the Father, but the Christians the Son in addition. That was not John’s opinion, for he says that he alone has the Father, who has the Son, but it was held by many Christian laymen. He that confessed this did, of course, at the same time admit that Judaism was the higher religion, free as yet from mythology.

The development of the Pauline Gnosis led the Christians a great deal further than the defence of the divine Sonship. Since the days of St Paul it was a universally accepted opinion that the whole of the Old Testament bore witness to Jesus as Lord. Both at the creation and in revelation He had acted mediatorially and vicariously. Now, as ‘the Lord’ is the Old Testament name of God, really all that is wanting in St Paul’s account is the name God for Jesus. The thing was there. As regards the Jews this was a complete innovation. The framework of the old Messianic theology was broken. The Jews protested, We dare not accept a second God. The Old Testament knows only one God—the Creator, and His servants—the angels.

In spite of this protest the Christological exegesis of the Old Testament prevailed in the Church. According to the Epistle to the Hebrews God created the world through His Son. This Son, the effulgence of the divine glory, is highly exalted above all angels. It is of Him that we read in the Psalms, “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” And, “Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands: they shall perish, but Thou continuest.” Thereby the Jews are confounded with all their loud boasting in the revelation of angels.

John, too, declares that God created the world through His Son, the Logos. But above all it is through Him that He revealed Himself to men. All theophanies, e.g., that of Isaiah, were Christophanies. It was Christ who came to the patriarchs: even then children of God arose in a wonderful manner through His word of promise. No man ever saw God. Wherever, therefore, God is described as coming to man in the Old Testament, we must apply the words to Christ. The Epistle of Barnabas follows along the same lines. For him, too, the Lord of this world is the Son, and it is generally acknowledged amongst the Christians that God spoke to Christ when He said, “Let us make man.” It is only with Justin, however, that we enter into the midst of the controversy with the Jews regarding the Old Testament. Both Christians and Jews accept the fact of the existence of mediators for God’s revelation to man as certain. The use of the plural in Gen. i., the mention of the angels and archangels of God, the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, compel us to admit this conclusion. The question is merely between Christ and the angels. Now, since in many of the narratives in Genesis and Exodus the expressions ‘God’ and ‘angel of God’ are interchanged, Justin concludes that the heavenly visitant must be more than an ordinary angel (for He is God), and yet not the highest God (for He is an angel). He is therefore the Son of God, the second God. However great his efforts, the Jew Trypho cannot quite escape from the horns of this dilemma. Justin also shows us to what an extent the Christological exegesis of the Old Testament has already proceeded.

What are the names by which Jesus is known in the Old Testament? Word, Wisdom, Day, the Rising Star, Sword, Stone, Staff, Jacob, Israel, Joseph, Judah, Archangel, Angel, Apostle, Man, Son of Man, Child, King, Priest, God, Lord, Glory of the Lord. That is to say, Jesus is everything in the Old Testament.

Trypho’s comment upon this is very effective: “Very well then; you Gentile Christians may be worshippers of this Lower Deity, but let us continue to be worshippers of the highest God.” That hits the nail upon the head. It is a choice between monotheism and mythology. The Christians preferred the latter, because they thereby rendered themselves masters of the Old Testament, and because it was better suited to the needs of such as were Gentiles.

The Christians were fully persuaded in their own minds that they had come forth from this controversy with the Jews victorious in all points. They had satisfactorily proved Jesus to be the Messiah by wonders and prophecies; they had proved Him to be a high priest according to the order of Melchisedec, to be Son of God, to be Lord and God in the Old Testament. They had started from the Messianic proof of the early Christian Church and the Gnosis of St Paul; and upon this foundation they had continued to build without change of plan. A straight line of succession can be traced from St Paul through St John to Justin. Proceeding from the secure basis of the Pauline Gnosis, the surrounding country is conquered until the whole of the Old Testament becomes a Christian book, and the Lower God stands beneath and by the side of the God of creation. But the controversy with the Jews mightily furthered and hastened this theological work.

And yet this victory over the Jews implied at the same time an increasing alienation from Jesus Himself. It is an awful spectacle: here we have theologians fighting for Jesus, taking up arms in His defence, exalting Him, deifying Him, and at the same time inventing texts in His favour, transforming and perverting others, and all the while they never asked who He was in reality and what His aims were. The subject of all this anti-Jewish apologetic is never really Jesus, but the titles of Messiah, Son of God, and the like. The evangelist, who is the ablest champion of this defence of the faith, composes a new life of Jesus without any compunction as a theological commentary or canon of interpretation for the stories which he found to hand. No single Christian said what he might have said: “Jesus is our Redeemer, because He led us to God, because He freed us from the Scribes, because He made our lives wholesome and honest as against the Pharisees, because He inspired us with glad hope, forgiveness, courage and joy.” All this is to be found, to be sure, in the first three Gospels, though not as the real proof. The following, on the contrary, is indicated as the line of action to be pursued. He that would defend Jesus must first of all give Him the right titles; he must prove these titles by wonders and by prophecies; he must ransack the whole of the Old Testament for corroborative matter, and all the while care as little as possible for the real Jesus. This plan had such wide-reaching effects that to this day it is difficult to retain one’s joy in Jesus in the teeth of all Christological fables.

The Christological controversy served to keep alive amongst the Christians the sense of the contrast between their religion and that of the Jews. Simultaneously, however, a strong current was making for a silent and gradual approximation of the Christian faith to that of their adversaries. Jewish eschatology, the Jewish belief in angels, even Jewish conceptions of God Himself, pass over into the Christian Church more and more extensively, though without at first attracting notice.

In its origin Christian eschatology was merely a form of the Jewish. All that Jesus did was to simplify and denationalize the Jewish hope. Even in St Paul we notice a very great increase in apocalyptic conceptions, theories as to the metamorphosis of the body, the concatenation of catastrophes, Antichrist and his destruction. Next the Christian Apocalypse regularly flooded the thoughts of the future hope with the Jewish Apocalypse. Nor did the process cease: it continued in an increasing measure. One single fact proves this more than an entire series of treatises. The whole of the later Jewish apocalyptic literature, even that which dates from after the year 70 A.D., crosses silently over to the Christians, and is held by them in canonical estimation. The Epistle of St Jude employs the books of Enoch and the ascension of Moses; Barnabas uses the Apocalypse of Ezra; Hermas the prophecy of Eldad and Medad; Papias actually quotes a text from the Apocalypse of Baruch as a saying of Jesus. And by the side of this apocalyptic literature a whole mass of eschatological mysteries passes over to the Christian teachers by oral tradition, so that the further we are removed from Jesus the more abundant the esoteric Jewish doctrines as to the future which we encounter amongst the Christians. This applies, e.g., to the legend of Antichrist, but not to it alone. If in spite of 1 Cor. xv. the belief in the resurrection of the flesh obtained a firm footing as Christian dogma, Jewish influences may very well have been at work here. Chiliastic fancies dominate not merely bishops like Papias, whose critical powers are not very great, but even theologians like Justin, and give rise subsequently to a great movement in the Church through Montanus and his prophetesses. In spite of all Hellenistic influences, the gaze of Christians is ever turned expectantly towards the Holy Land in which Messiah is to descend together with the heavenly Jerusalem. One feature alone is wanting in this Utopia—Israel’s political position; in every other point the majority of Christians are Jews as regards their hopes for the future. Nor was this attended by any immediate evil consequences. Very soon, however, the influx of the Jewish eschatology caused a line of cleavage to appear between the enlightened and educated, who abominated these sensual expectations, and the plain and simple Christians, who clung to them with all their heart and soul. The greater inroads Judaism makes, the greater the severity of the subsequent conflict between the Hellenistic and the Semitic spirit in Christianity.

The belief in angels naturally formed an integral part of Christianity from the very first. Yet how very little Jesus says about angels. So close is the connection between Him and His disciples and the Father that there is no room for any intermediary beings. Here, too, St Paul takes up the position of Jesus. He will not suffer the intervention of angels in the relationship to God. He is at bottom opposed to angels, whom he almost always pictures to himself as being hostile to God, and tempting men away from God. Once again it is the Apocalypse which submerges Christianity under a flood of Jewish fancies. Here the angels regularly occupy an intermediary position between men and God. They are the channels of all communication from earth to heaven, to such an extent that angelolatry has already to be forbidden. One of these angels, Michael, is considered to have vanquished Satan in heaven, and ranks as a kind of redeemer. The process thus begun, continues according to the rule: the further removed from Jesus the deeper the descent into Judaism. Our Gospels are very instructive in this connection. The first old tradition which they incorporate is as yet free from angelology, but in the later the secondary parts, in the stories of the birth and the resurrection, angels, e.g., Gabriel, have an important role assigned to them. It is only in St John that the idea then emerges that Jesus’ intercourse with God was effected by means of a constant ascending and descending of the angels. But it is the book of the Acts which best shows us how important the faith in angels had become by this time for the ordinary layman’s religion. Angels are pictured as the constant companions of the saints: they counsel and comfort them, and set them free from grievous dangers; but for simple Christians too they are mediators carrying men’s prayers up to God, and bringing back His answers. An average Christian has henceforth more to do with the angels than with God. Every page of our principal authority in angelology, the “Shepherd” of Hermas, proves that this statement is no exaggeration. To begin with, his knowledge about angels is boundless. There are the seven archangels, and their head, Christ. There is the angel of repentance, the angel of punishment, the two angels of righteousness and wickedness, the angel of the prophetic spirit, the angel of pleasure and of deceit, the angel Thegri, who is set over all animals, and many more. The very fact that he sometimes mentions Christ by the side of the archangel Michael and sometimes sets Him in his stead, proves that his faith in Christ is only intelligible to him as a special case of his belief in angels, but that at the same time he cannot quite rearrange the angelic hierarchy to suit his own ideas. Angels are the intermediaries in the whole sphere of religion. Men are handed over from one angel to another for their higher education, and so God’s purposes are carried out. This angelology appeared to the Christians at one time to be so important that they formulated it dogmatically. The Apocalypse begins with the salutation from God, from the seven angels before His throne, and from Jesus. In like manner Justin defines the Christian faith as belief in God, in Christ, in the angelic host, and in the Holy Ghost, although he is acquainted as well with the enumeration of the Holy Ghost in the third place. Here, too, it is quite possible to account for the firm footing which this belief in angels obtained in the Church by the admission of the Jewish Apocalypses, the chief source of Jewish angelology. But oral intercourse with the Jews did more than anything else. However caused, this importation cannot be considered to have been a blessing.

The Christian faith in God inevitably suffered loss through the influx of so many later Jewish speculations. It is wonderful how rapidly the early faith in God the Father deteriorates. Men like St Paul and St John, who stand on the same high level as the Gospel of Jesus, do indeed from time to time give glad expression to their faith that God has manifested His love to us as the Father. But these same theologians, writing as apologists, proclaimed the terrible God of wrath or the hidden, unapproachable God who decrees death upon all who stand without the Church. What wonder, then, if even within the Church Christians but seldom obtained or retained the joyful trust in God the loving Father, and were content with His deputies and substitutes, Christ, the angels and the saints. At present, no direct intercourse with God is possible, for He is surrounded by His heavenly court filling all the heavens and encompassing Him so closely that no eye can pierce through it. It is only in the future, when the angels shall have smitten the whole earth with their plagues and executed their judgments, that one may hope that God will appear upon earth in mercy, though still inspiring terror. So Christians and Jews alike had once more reverted to the old conception of God, and the resulting frame of mind was a state of suspense, a perpetual oscillation between fear and hope, neither trust nor joy. And this again brought about the further consequence that the Christians, not being able to take their stand firmly upon the redemption, which Jesus had really effected, were the more inclined to look for their superiority in the wrong quarter, i.e., in the vain imaginations of Christology.

CHAPTER V.

THE LAW AND JEWISH ETHICS.

NEXT to Christology the question as to the law was the chief point of contention between Jews and Christians. Since Paul had proclaimed the annulling of the law for all Christians, they had remained practically free. Isolated attempts on the part of the Jews to reintroduce the law among the Christians were at once energetically repulsed—we need but look at the Epistle to the Hebrews, and at that of Barnabas. In Justin’s time, things have come to such a pitch that those who cling to the law after the manner of the old Jewish Christians are denied all hope of future blessedness by many members of the Church Catholic. It was impossible to go back upon the position laid down by St Paul. But to formulate and establish his theses soon proved to be impracticable. He himself had gone no further than to declare that the law had been annulled. The Jews forthwith reproach the Christians with having fallen away from the faith of the fathers in order to live in a state of immoral license. All that St Paul said about the influence of the Holy Spirit and one’s baptismal obligations was in vain. The absence of law meant licentiousness. The reproach of the Jews was all the more dangerous as they had an appearance of right on their side with their political denunciations. Thereby they compelled the Christian apologists to take up a positive position towards the law. The point to be proved was that far from being apostates, the Christians alone truly observed the law. In reality they were maintaining that which was not true. No man in all the world ever observes the Sabbath, circumcision and the regulations concerning food, by not troubling about them. This was not the first time, however, that the art of the theologian managed to turn No into Yes, and Yes into No.

The First Gospel makes the earliest attempt in this direction. It is possible that the great declaration in the Sermon on the Mount, “I came to fulfil the law, not to destroy it,” may have been originally inserted by Judaizers. It is certain, however, that the words, as we read them to-day, are to be taken, not in a Jewish sense, but in that of the Catholic Church, and only thus obtained a footing in the Church. This is proved by the mere fact of the addition, “and the prophets” to the word “law.” Jesus here simply declares that He is the true interpreter of the Old Testament, that He alone has seized its inner meaning, and that this meaning is to be accepted by the Church. Naturally this is only possible if the interpretation be free and allegorical, in other words, Christian. Christ is the second Moses, who has seized upon the true meaning of the law. The Christians, therefore, do not transgress the law but fulfil it.

The addition, “and the prophets,” is very characteristic of the methods pursued by the Christians in their apologetic. Whilst the Jews take their stand firmly upon the law and fight against the Christians from this basis, the latter substitute the “law and the prophets” in their defence: they shelter themselves behind the Old Testament as the word of God, of prophecy. Both the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Lucan writings, and the Johannine Gospel convert the controversy as to the law into one concerning prophecy. The law, too, is to be read as foretelling Christ. St Luke’s procedure is very instructive in this connection. In the source which lay before him he found the saying: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fall.” He could not simply omit the saying. It was too well known, and one had to define one’s position towards it. He therefore inserts in front of these words as to the eternal validity of the law the other statement, “the law and the prophets were until John,” in order at least to indicate their meaning. And then he further shows in what sense they are to be interpreted by the concluding words of the following parable. Moses and the prophets are the road to Faith, the law is to be forever valid as a prophecy leading to Christ. Hence Paul says in the Acts, “I believe all things which are according to the law and which are written in the prophets”; and so too Jesus says in the Fourth Gospel, “If ye believed Moses ye would believe Me; for he wrote of Me”; as though the important matter in the case of the law were believing and not much rather doing. Now, as soon as the law is itself regarded as a prophetic book the contrast between the law and Christ of course entirely disappears; the law can itself be explained as the Revelation of Christ, who is the giver of all prophecy and every word of God. This is what John has done. He was the first to regard the law given by Moses as a subordinate and merely preparatory gift of the same Logos who afterwards appeared in Jesus Christ in all His mercy and truth. Here the Pauline controversy as to the law is almost entirely forgotten. The law is itself regarded from a Christian point of view, but it ceases to count as law in the earlier sense of the word.

In spite of all, however, the controversy continued. It could not be definitely settled by simply smoothing over the real points of opposition. The fact that the ceremonial law was no longer obligatory upon Christians had to be established by some clear theory. The first attempts to discover such a theory are to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the speech of Stephen. The transitory nature of the ceremonial law is proved from the Old Testament itself. If God, speaking by the prophets, foretells a new covenant and a high priest after the order of Melchizedek and therefore not of Aaron’s, He Himself declares the old legislation to have been superseded. The severe sayings of the prophets directed against sacrifices and the temple, in which God Himself rejects the Jewish ceremonial, point in the direction. These indications are expanded into a fully developed theory in Barnabas; he was one of the most outspoken opponents of Judaism, and at the same time devoted heart and soul to the Old Testament. The starting-point of his criticism is the story of the breaking of the tables of the law by Moses as he descended from Mount Sinai; which signified that God had already gone back upon the covenant which He had proclaimed with Israel in order that the Christians might be the first to have the true covenant with Jesus sealed in their hearts. This criticism could, however, be refuted from the book of Exodus itself, and was therefore rejected by the Christian teachers. The opinion that God had given the law in a Christian spirit and that the Jews had misunderstood it in taking it literally, having been visited by an evil spirit, was of greater importance subsequently. Barnabas rests this theory upon numerous anti-ceremonial prohibitions in the prophets which proved to him that God does not desire their literal fulfilment. But this criticism was also unsatisfactory, failing as it did to distinguish sufficiently between the different parts of the law and verging perilously near upon Gnosticism by its assumption of a Satanic temptation. The only portions that held their ground were, first, the spiritual interpretations given to circumcision, the Temple, the regulations concerning food and the Sabbath, all of which were presumably a good deal older than Barnabas, and then, secondly, the important thesis: “We Christians have Christ’s new law, which is the law of liberty.”

Justin was the first to find a satisfactory explanation of the difficulty, and his answer has been accepted ever since by the Church. He collected the apologetic works of his predecessors, and also contributed to the collection. Peculiar to himself and decisive for the future was his comprehensive view of history, with the leading thought of the divine education of the human race, and the acceptation of the Stoical conception of the everlasting law of Nature. The development was effected gradually. The righteous men of pre-Mosaic times knew the everlasting law of Nature, and by fulfilling the same attained to blessedness. Then God caused it to be written down in the Decalogue for the first time. And finally, after that it had been obscured in a variety of ways, Christ the new Lawgiver restored it again by setting up the two commandments of love. In Christianity, therefore, we simply have the eternal moral law restored to us in its original purity and perfection. God only gave the ceremonial law for a transient purpose. The Jews were marked by circumcision as a punishment, and the other ceremonial laws were added because of the hardness of their hearts to keep them from idolatry. True, the ceremonial law has an inner meaning which is for all time, besides the literal meaning which was but for a season, but then this inner meaning was not clearly revealed before Christ came. We find these thoughts of Justin’s expressed still more clearly and consistently by Irenaeus. Supported by these theories the Christians no longer felt themselves to be apostates but the possessors of a knowledge of the divine purpose in the granting of the law, which placed them in a position of proud superiority.

The significance of the whole of this controversy was purely theoretical. The actual freedom of the Christians from the law was its presupposition; it needed to be sanctioned, it already existed as a matter of fact. Nor, thanks to this same theoretical character, had the new doctrine, that Christianity is the new legal religion, any bad consequences for the moment. This very doctrine, which had originated in the endeavour to meet Jewish views, was now employed to justify the breach with the Jews. Formally the point was granted, there must be a law, but the concession was merely the steppingstone to the actual victory gained by the purely moral conception of the law. It was fatal, however, that the thesis as to the new law obtained a footing at the very time when Judaism had just begun to make its way into Christianity from another direction.

For, whilst the controversy as to the validity of the national law was occupying public attention, a far more important process was pursuing its silent course with entirely opposite results. All that was essential in Jewish ethics was tacitly being accepted by the Church, just as the apologetic and angelology in the domain of faith. The squabbles of theologians are not the only objects of importance in the world. The greatest changes are effected quietly by the natural exchange of ideas in social intercourse without being either prohibited or permitted.

The reasons for this influx of Jewish ethics into the Christian Church are evident. The words of Jesus were at first but little known, and scanty as they were in number they referred to but a few of the many relations of life. But Paul himself had made very frequent use of the Old Testament, especially of the Proverbs and Psalms. It was easiest to follow him in this direction. Almost all the ethical admonitions, e.g., that are contained in 1 Peter, 1 Clement, and also in St James, are based upon the Jewish proverbial philosophy in the Psalms, Proverbs, and also the Prophets, Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom of Solomon, or they are founded upon the Old Testament narrative as the great collection of moral examples. For all these Christian teachers the ceremonial law has simply been annulled, but the moral treasures of the sacred book they do not intend to give up under any considerations whatever. But in so doing they appropriate a system of ethics which has a character quite of its own—the ethics of later Judaism.

The procedure of the Christians was, moreover, exactly the same here as in the domain of faith. They took over the most recent Jewish writings of an ethical character and turned them into Christian tracts by a few scanty additions. An unquestionable instance of this is to be found in the Jewish Testaments of the twelve patriarchs, an example of an exceedingly copious and lofty moral literature, to which were appended a few Christological statements. The origin of the little tract concerning the two ways—the Way of Life and the Way of Death—is not quite so certain. It now stands at the commencement of the Didache as a catechism for proselytes, but we meet with it before this at the conclusion of the Epistle of Barnabas. The tract originally formed an independent work. There is nothing Christian about it, nor are parallels wanting in the nearly-related Jewish literature for the absence of everything that is distinctively and nationally Jewish. But the fact that a Christian and a Jewish origin can be maintained for the same writing is in itself remarkable. The exceedingly close resemblance between later Jewish and Christian ethics alone renders this possible. The commandments and parables of Hermas likewise set forth a morality which is closely connected with that of the Testaments, and must be called Jewish, if we except a few sentences. Probably Hermas really made use of Jewish tracts. It is worth noticing, too, that so powerful a Christian work as the Epistle of St James could be considered Jewish on account of its surprisingly abundant points of contact with Jewish moral writings.

The presuppositions of these later Jewish and early Christian ethics strike us to-day as strangely childlike. Every human being is placed between God and the devil. Both would influence him and win him over. For this purpose they send forth their angels or spirits to him. Now these are nothing but the various moods and feelings, fancies and impulses, which are conceived of as something foreign to the man and due to external influence. We find it is true beside this, the impersonal conceptions of lust, pleasure, and conscience as immanent powers. Man is completely free to decide between good and bad. According to his decision the good or evil spirit wins the upper hand in him and the thought passes into deed, with the consequent reward or punishment. Even after the deed is done man retains his freedom. If he has hitherto followed the evil spirit he can choose the road of repentance which leads home again. Not only the Testaments and the commandments of Hermas, but the Epistle of St James and even the First of St Peter presuppose conceptions such as these.

From the abundant ethical material of all these writings we can easily recognize what appeared to be of especial importance to later Judaism. First of all, as a rule, comes the demand to believe in the one God, the Creator of the world, i.e., the confession of monotheism in opposition to the polytheism of the converts surroundings. “Believe thou, above all, that there is one God who hath created all things.” Such is the beginning of the commandments of Hermas, and the Two Ways begins in a similar fashion. That there is one God is the fundamental article of the creed which even the devils believe. All the catalogues of virtues in Hermas begin with faith. Thoroughly Jewish, again, is the circumstance that Hermas immediately adds the fear of God to faith, and the Two Ways describes religion as the “fear of God.” Indeed that is the name which is characteristic of Jewish propaganda everywhere.

The next thing that is enjoined is usually continence or chastity: the commandment to keep oneself unspotted from the world. The whole world appeared to the religious man of that age to be a temple of immorality, be it in deed or merely in desire. The manifold temptations with which the religious man is assailed in his goings out and his comings in are minutely described, sometimes too minutely, so that they acquire an especial interest of their own. For it cannot be maintained that Judaism merely took sins that were actually committed into account. The distinction between sins of fact and sins of thought was one with which it had long been familiar, and through the greater inwardness of the moral claim it had only too often been led to a weak and even morally dangerous introspection of motives and the birth of sin. By its detailed examination of the origin of an evil lust in the author’s heart, the first vision of Hermas provides a commentary on the text in St James: “People are in every case tempted by their own passions—allured and enticed by them. Then the passion conceives and gives birth to sin, and sin on reaching maturity brings forth death.” Hence the exhortation to the strictest vigilance and discipline of the senses. Men are warned against the dangers, not only of immorality, but also of drunkenness, against the eagerness to acquire wealth and to seek amusement, against luxury; and the close connection between these sins and the first, which is the greatest of all, is pointed out.

Next to chastity we hear most frequently of singleness of heart, and of its contrary double-mindedness. The ideal of the religious life was held to include the earnest endeavour to attain to a morality which should be at once complete, clear and simple, lifted far up above all doubt and hesitation or secret participation in the forbidden fruit, and of transparent sincerity both in what it did and in what it left undone.

Within the narrower circle of the brethren, sympathy, benevolence and compassion are esteemed most highly. To visit the widows and fatherless in their affliction is almost the half of true religion for St James and also for Hermas. At all times the Jews have achieved very striking results by their works of charity to the poor of their own faith. A proof of this is the wonderful amount of cohesion that existed amongst the Jews of the dispersion. At the same time, however, they exaggerated the value of such charity to a terrible extent. The text, “Love covers a multitude of sins,” which made its way from later Judaism into all early Christian writings, as though it were the most important article in the creed, is taken to mean, “Almsgiving lightens the burden of sins.” But, on the other hand, a more inward signification was attached to compassion and pity. And the inference was then drawn in a manner which reminds us almost of the Gospel itself, that all anger, jealousy, envy and hatred are of the evil one and must be combated.

It is by no means easy clearly to characterize the difference between these late Jewish ethics and the ethics of the Gospel. The latter have evidently found an ally in the former. Both agree in their indifference to all that is merely national, in their greater inwardness, in their extension of the claim of morality to the whole of man’s life. We come across Christian sayings, even reminiscences, of Jesus in St James’ Epistle, although the author is probably almost entirely unacquainted with the words of the Gospel.

And yet it is a new ethics which now enters into the Christian Churches. The most striking characteristic is legality. It would be going a great deal too far, it is true, to ascribe its origin to the influence of Judaism alone. It is a constantly recurring feature in the history of religion that that which began in the freedom of spirit ended—was bound to end—in the restriction of law, for it is only possible to discipline large masses of men by laws and institutions. This process was still further accelerated in the Christian Church by the rise of the Gnostic heresies which in many cases proclaimed an entire emancipation from law and order, to the ruin of the Churches. Judaism played a very important part, however, in the introduction of the idea of legality into the Church. The Old Testament and later Jewish literature, which was read for purposes of edification to the almost entire exclusion of every other, presented the religious relation predominantly as one of obedience to the law resting upon positive divine authority and confirmed by threats and promises.

In his Jewish source Hermas found a parable describing the dispersion of the people of God—the Israelites—all over the world under the protection of the law. The archangel Michael was the governor of this people, and gave the law to each individual Israelite. Varying results followed, and these the parable indicated by its distinction of three principal classes: the righteous, the sinners who have not as yet lost all hope of repentance, and the utterly lost. The law he explains as being the Son of God, and the people of God as the different peoples who have accepted the Faith. But a few lines further on he forgets his Christian exegesis, and is completely under the influence of his Jewish source. Even the name and office of Michael are left unaltered. He speaks of the law and of the law alone. Martyrs are men who have suffered death for the law, while there are others who were grievously oppressed for the law—though they were not actually put to death—and did not deny their law. The meaning which he attaches to the law is, of course, quite different to that which it possessed in his Jewish source, but the form is the same. Like Hermas, James introduced purely Jewish legalism into the Christian congregations; and in whatever other devotional writings we find emphasis laid upon the keeping of the commandments as the most important factor upon which reward and punishment depends, these old Jewish associations are exercising their influence by the side of the teaching of Jesus.

The consequences of this legal view of morality were exactly the same as those which manifested themselves in Judaism. The moral ideal is divided up into a number of single equivalent commandments which soon defy every attempt at comprehensive survey. They have to be learnt by heart as something external, something that derives its authority entirely from its divine origin and the system of rewards and punishments, i.e., from results. Now, too, the practice of drawing up long lists of virtues and vices becomes increasingly common among the Christians. The tract of the Two Ways is a model for such lists. First of all, the chief sins are enumerated in the order of the Decalogue and forbidden; then follows the prohibition of the roots of these sins in desire, thought, and speech. The Testaments of the twelve patriarchs ascribe a vice or a virtue to each of the patriarchs, which are then examined at length in their origin and their consequences. The commandments of Hermas treat of the single virtues or vices successively and separately in quite a similar manner, whilst other portions of the book give us catalogues of virtues arranged according to the numbers 7 and 12. Traces are not absolutely wanting in Hermas that he perceived the necessity of an inward connection of the virtues in man; but he is quite incapable of setting forth this connection clearly. The author of the Epistle of St James, too, has an idea, though he is unable to give it anything but the baldest and most external expression, that moral action is, or at any rate ought to be, an individual whole. There is a continual process of addition and subtraction; where one is wanting, the sum is not complete. Then, too, faith and works stand to each other in a perfectly external relation. Man is no longer placed face to face with the three great realities: he is immersed in a sea of details where no one knows exactly what is important. The only connecting links between these separate commands are the divine sanction and the consequences preordained by God. That is “good” which has been revealed to mankind by God and His angels, and—so the Christians go on to say—which Jesus and His apostles have taught, and which has the promise of future reward.

But as soon as the positive law sets up a criterion of good and bad, the conception of works of supererogation, of merit, arises. Even St Matthew had connected alms, prayer and fasting in his Sermon on the Mount as acts done for God’s sake and meriting special reward. But it was Hermas beyond all others who sanctioned the Jewish idea of ‘merit’ by his prophetical writing. He discovered a parable in his source intended to illustrate this very idea. There was a servant who did a good work in addition to the task laid upon him by his Master, and then divided the reward which was allotted to him among his fellow-servants, thereby meriting a double reward. So in like manner fasting is doubly meritorious: firstly, as a good work in addition to that which God has commanded; and secondly, in so far as one denies oneself something in order to divide it among the poor. Hermas did, it is true, write a criticism of fasting by way of a preface to this parable, and gave it a Christological interpretation; but the Jewish theory of merit can be read between the lines, and obtains a firm footing.

The diffusion of this same conception was still further aided by the code of morals current among the Jewish proselytes. There were proselytes of different degrees; such as only subjected themselves to the Jewish morality of the Two Ways, and such as took upon them the whole yoke of the Lord. It was only the second that led to perfection. The insertion of the catechism for proselytes into the Christian Didache gave this theory of a double standard of morality—with modified demands in the second case—apostolic sanction. In other cases, too, the fatal use of the word ‘perfection’ passes over from Judaism to Christianity. In St Mark Jesus calls upon the rich man to sell his goods, else he would not inherit eternal life; but St Matthew says else he would not attain to that perfection, which goes beyond obedience to the commandments. On the other hand, in St Matthew, the saying of Jesus as to the turning of the other cheek is still a command, it is a part of God’s will, to do which is for all men the way into the kingdom of God. In the Didache we find a tendency to account this a special mark of perfection, and inasmuch as it takes this command and the similar sayings concerning love for one’s enemies and boundless liberality as illustrations of the divine love and not of the love of one’s neighbour, it must be held to be in a great measure responsible for the transformation of the core and centre of the claim of Jesus into a work of supererogation. The best way of realizing how far removed from the teaching of Jesus is this tendency to attach an especial value to the performance of more than duty requires, is to recall Jesus' parable about the unprofitable servants immediately after reading the fifth parable of Hermas.

But by far the worst consequence of the encroachment of legalism upon morality concerns the religious relation itself. Religion is again turned into a legal relation of performance and reward. God is the taskmaster and judge; man His slave who seeks to earn his reward in fear and trembling. Owing to the Jewish source from which he worked, this change is to be found very largely exemplified in Hermas. Every deed, be it good or bad, is recorded in the heavenly account-book, and every change of fortune is considered as the divine answer to man’s actions. Hence all misfortune is looked upon as punishment, with the possible exception of martyrdom, and even in this case its value for the sinner consists in its being repentance for his sins. If the misfortune appear to be greater than the merited punishment, then it must be supposed to have a supererogatory efficiency, and to be punishment for the sins of other members of the family. According to strict justice, the punishment lasts exactly as long as the sin has been indulged in; but for our feelings a day of pleasure corresponds to a year of torment. Amongst the evils and misfortunes which the author is especially fond of looking upon as punishments, may be mentioned business losses, illness, disorder, ill-treatment at the hands of the unworthy. And yet if one meets with any one of these misfortunes one may still account oneself happy, for it is a proof of the divine education—God wishes our betterment—a sign that one need not fear retribution in the world to come. And then again we come across another genuine Jewish feature. God is not entirely tied down to this legal system. The Jewish religion is ever a religion of justice, and of mercy besides. As Almighty Sovereign, standing above all law, God can, according to His own good pleasure, set strict justice aside, and pardon. He then merely strikes out the debit side of the account. Hermas is full of the praise of God’s mercy; he thence derives all his comfort. Were it not for this we should despair. This arbitrary exercise of mercy, however, which at times breaks through the framework of the legal religion, changes one’s general impression but little. It does not allow of the growth of any unshaken confidence. There is no cessation of that alternation between hope and fear which characterized Judaism before Jesus and St Paul, which must exist wherever an external law intervenes between God and man.

The second principal characteristic which sharply differentiates the ethics influenced by Judaism from the ethics of the Gospel is its ecclesiasticism. This tendency, too, originated independently in the Christian Churches, and merely received a powerful impetus through the pattern presented by Jewish ethics, which for a long time previously had tended to accentuate the contrast to the heathen world, and to tighten the bonds of ecclesiastical unity. St Paul had already been strongly influenced in this point by the ecclesiasticism of Jewish ethics. All that his successors did was to continue and to exaggerate what he had begun.

In the first place, the Christians take over the position occupied by the Jewish synagogue towards the Gentiles. The conceptions ‘Gentiles’ and ‘world.’ are, generally speaking, an inheritance from Judaism. The Jew included all the peoples and states of antiquity in all their manifold variety as one uniform mass under the conception of the ‘nations’ (Gentiles), and contrasted them with his Church as an unclean world under the dominion of demons. St Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount shows Jewish colouring in this particular. Those who are felt to be furthest removed from the Christian ideal are called Publicans and Gentiles. “Do not even the publicans the same?” “Do not even the Gentiles the same?” and so again, “Let him be unto thee as the Gentile and the publican.” The evangelist does not notice how badly this colouring of his words harmonizes with Jesus own life. As for Hermas, his thoughts and words are entirely influenced by this theory. The righteous, sinners, heathen—such is his division of mankind. The righteous are inheritors of the world to come. The sinners and the heathen are lost; the former because they sinned and did not repent, the latter because they knew not their Creator. “They consorted not with the righteous, but lived together with the heathen.” Such is the judgment upon one class of sinners. How would Jesus have stood in this judgment? But as it was necessary after all to have dealings with the Gentiles, definite rules to regulate this intercourse had to be drawn up. The so-called decree of the apostles, the prohibition of fornication, of meat sacrificed to idols, of blood, and of strangled things, which was not yet current in St Paul’s time, is to be entirely ascribed to Jewish influences. For there was nothing more abominable to the Jews than eating meat sacrificed to idols. The Didache speaks of it as the sacrifice of death, employing a Jewish term in order to foster this feeling of abhorrence. The prohibitions of blood and of snared game are in like manner Jewish. The starting-point is the Jewish psychology which the Christians appropriate. According to Jewish conceptions, the pure Jewish blood is tainted by fornication, hence this is coupled so frequently with idolatry. The passing of this decree does not imply a victory of the old Jewish Christianity, but merely of Jewish modes of thought with regard to the world.

The converse of this strict separation from the Gentiles is presented by the intimate relation of the brethren. Paul copies the Jews in this point and goes beyond them. Clement refers his panegyric of love to love of the brethren within the Church, and surely not without some reason. When Paul, summing up his moral exhortations, speaks of love as the bond of perfection, we are involuntarily reminded of the Jewish catalogues of virtues in which love is always the keystone of the arch. One of the most important manifestations of this love—though it is by no means exhausted herein—is benevolence to one’s co-religionists. Love, peace, and humility belong together, and together constitute the complete character of a faithful member of the Church such as Clement holds up to the Corinthians as an ideal. Humility does not, in this case, denote fasting, as it usually does in Jewish writings; it rather describes the subordination of the individual to the community in contrast with a proud individualism. That is the specifically Catholic conception. Hermas, again, shows us how his Jewish sources were bound to confirm this tendency. We hear their complaints of such as follow their own insight instead of the understanding of others, and who thereby go astray; about such as quarrel with each other, and do not live at peace with each other, but are always causing schisms and divisions; about such as do not unite in fellowship with God’s servants, but holding themselves aloof, destroy their souls. In like manner the catechism of the Two Ways enjoins upon all Christians: “Daily shalt thou seek the face of the saints that thou mayest be refreshed by their conversation. Thou shalt create no schism, but be a peacemaker between them that strive.” This is radically different from the saying of Jesus, “I came not to send peace but a sword.”

No one will reproach the young Christian Church for seeking instruction and advice in its ethics from the older and far more experienced Jewish Church. The position of both Churches was at bottom the same. Why should the younger pass by the treasures of wisdom of earlier generations? But then one must not be astonished to find Christian ethics retrograding in many places to the position in which Jesus and Paul found them.

CHAPTER VI.

THE JEWISH CHURCH AND ITS INSTITUTIONS.

JESUS had prophesied the destruction of the Jewish Church. The external rupture between the Christians and that Church had been brought about by St Paul, since whose day the Christians had stood outside of any ecclesiastical communion with the Jews. But it was none other than St Paul who had done more than all others to found and consolidate the new Christian Church; and this in two ways. First, he laid down the theory that the way to salvation led through the ecclesia of Jesus Christ alone, and that all were lost who remained as unbelievers outside of the Church. Only the believer will be saved, “extra ecclesiam nulla salus.” But at the same time he established a connection between the new Church and the Israel of old, by means of his gnosis, through the theory: “The Christians are the Israel of God, the spiritual Israel; all pious Jews of pre-Christian times were Christians before Christ.”

CHAPTER VII.

THE HEATHEN STATE AND THE HEATHEN RELIGION.

IT was very fortunate for the new religion that through Jesus’ words, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” all revolutionary and zelotic projects of the Christians were nipped in the bud. As a Christian Pharisee St Paul had inculcated obedience to the powers that be as the will of God, and had held up the State to the Christians as God’s ministry. This was before the beginning of the persecutions. After a short panic in Nero’s reign the Christians had to endure the undisguised hostility of the State from the year 90 A.D. onwards. The persecution began in Asia Minor, the birthplace of the Apocalypse, and the place to which St Peter’s first letter is addressed. The Apocalypse dates from the early years of the persecution. God’s minister has been transformed into the minister of the dragon. Wild songs of triumph are now chanted by the Christians over the imminent fall of Rome, the great whore. To refuse to worship the emperor comes to be the sign of a Christian. Yet no word is uttered of revolution: the patient endurance of the saints, that is the watch word. And with that the author preserves his Christianity.

The Christians now have to choose between one of two feelings: hatred of the State as the power of the devil—that is what the Apocalypse preaches—or resignation to God’s will. He rules even through the emperor. Which is going to be the stronger?

We must draw a clear distinction between the official position of the Christian writers and the feeling of many groups of laymen whose favourite book was the Apocalypse, and who shared the author’s hatred against Rome. From time to time there is an altogether unpremeditated outburst of wrath against the tyrants, as in the case of Lucius, the Christian whose story Justin Martyr tells us. When he saw how Ptolemaus the teacher was condemned to death for no other crime than that of being a Christian, he broke out into reproaches against the prefect Urbicus who had passed the sentence, rebuking him for his unjust and unworthy behaviour. Being thereupon at once himself condemned to death, he cried out that he was very thankful to Urbicus. He knew that he was now quit of these bad masters of his, and was going to the Father and Lord of heaven. So, too, the Christian’s longing for the end of the world—let grace begin, let the world perish—is to be interpreted as a heartfelt cry for delivery from the tyranny of the State. All the millenary expectations of the old Christians likewise presuppose hostility against the State. They look forward with eager expectation to the establishment of the kingdom of God upon earth in place of Rome. Meanwhile the Christian knows that his fatherland is in heaven. He is a stranger and a sojourner upon earth. The beginning of the first parable of Hermas is worth noting: “Ye know that ye live in a foreign land, ye servants of God, for your true city is far distant from this city.” To hold opinions such as these in the midst of persecution was at least honest.

The official attitude of many of the Christian authors is an entirely different one. From first to last it is obsequious. Christianity is to be a religio licita, like Judaism and in the place of Judaism, and that at any cost. Hence it makes advances to the State, and even assigns a fixed place to it in the liturgies borrowed from Judaism. The author of the First Epistle of St Peter is anxious to adapt St Paul’s words as to the powers that be to the changed circumstances of his own time. In so doing he abandons the position that the State is the minister of God, as the State which persecutes the Christians cannot possibly be so called any longer. For the Lord’s sake, however, it is to be obeyed. The fear of God and the honour due to the king are not mutually exclusive; only let each keep to its own place. As yet, faith in the calling of the State and the right to exercise protection is as strong as ever, and St Paul’s words on the subject find ready credence. Besides, obedience to the governor is a duty incumbent on the Christians because of the malignant slanders that are current. They have got to prove that they are no anarchists. And yet this letter, in spite of its perfectly correct attitude to those in authority, claims to have been written in Babylon. Rome is Babylon, that is the author’s secret meaning. And just like him, the author of the Pastoral epistles reminds his readers of the Pauline words, and explains them in the sense that they are to lead a tranquil and a quiet life, reviling no man, but kindly to all. The Lucan writings and the Johannine Gospel defend the Christians against the accusation of enmity to the State in the course of the narrative. The conceptions of Messiah and kingdom of God are explained in a nonpolitical sense. The kingdom of Christ is not of this world, as is proved by the pacific nature of the Christians. The kingdom of Jesus consists entirely in His testimony to the truth. And a proof of this is that when on one occasion the Jews wanted to crown Him king, He escaped from them by flight. Care is taken also to remove the reproach that the Christians refuse to pay taxes. It is proved that the Christians are the true Jews, and that the Jews lie with all their instigations. The trial of Jesus and the trial of St Paul are henceforward important subjects from an apologetic point of view. Pilate, Felix, and Festus have to appear as witnesses to the innocence of the accused. Above all, the whole plan of the book of the Acts furnishes the desired proof of the antiquity of Christianity. Christianity is nothing else than the old Jewish religion which is now spreading over Gentile countries.

The First Epistle of St Clement is the first document to afford us an insight into the political element of the old Christian liturgies. Its great concluding prayer contains the first petition known to us for “all that are in authority upon earth; may God grant them health and wealth, and peace and concord.” Again and again the statement is repeated that rulers derive their power from God. Even though it be older than the age of persecution—for presumably it is derived from Judaism—it was nevertheless commonly used in this age and so again forbade the Christians every kind of revolution. The author of the Pastoral epistles, and after him Polycarp, asks all the Christians to use this or a similar prayer. They are to pray for all men, for kings and all persons in authority, because it is only if peace and order be established in the State that the Christians will be able to practise their religion in tranquillity and quietness. As both of these authors write in a time of persecution, we may infer that it is the official attitude to the heathen world—one that is by no means a matter of course—that is here prescribed.

It was only when it became evident that neither the Church’s prayers for the emperor and the governor nor the Church’s literature exercised any influence whatever upon the persecutors, that the Christian apologetic literature, properly so-called, took its rise. The prophet Quadratus was the first apologist. He dedicated his apology to the Emperor Hadrian. Next came the philosophers Aristides and Justin under Antoninus Pius. The only innovation consisted in the instrument that was now employed. The frankly apologetic attitude of the Church was not new, but several decades older. Many glaring inconsistencies were, however, the result of this policy. The liturgies were especially rich in contradictory passages. Prayers are prescribed for the health and wealth of those in authority, and at the same time, following the old Christian custom, for the end of the whole existing order of things. In his devotional treatise on prayer, Tertullian utters sentiments which are almost the exact contrary of what he says in his great Apology, which is addressed to the public in general. Justin protests the unpolitical character of the kingdom of God in his Apology, whereas in his Dialogue with Trypho, where the common Christian element is rather more evident, he longs for the establishment of the kingdom upon earth. Even John the evangelist, who as apologist eliminated as far as he could every eschatological element, eagerly looks forward in his first letter to the end of the world, when the State, whose servant Pilate was, shall disappear in the destruction of all things. At bottom there is a note of insincerity in the professions of friendship for the State on the part of all these apologists. It was their last resource. Open war prevailed between Church and State, and apologists like Justin died the death of heroes in this war. Their position is sufficient excuse for the contradiction in which they involved themselves. Their greatness lies in this, that when the decisive moment came they abjured the State and died like Polycarp with the confession, “Jesus is Lord, and not the emperor,” upon their lips.

The Heathen Religion.

Its Jewish parentage in itself determined the position of Christianity towards all the popular religion of the Gentiles. Heathendom was all lies, darkness, and the service of the devil. Whilst the philosophical monotheism of the Greeks was combined as a rule with a certain feeling of reverence for the ancient gods who were conceived of as subordinate powers of the world spirit, Jewish monotheism was from the first characterized by exclusiveness and intolerance. In the long run, however, this proved to be fortunate for the new religion, which was thus preserved from dissolution in the universal fusion of religions. Unfortunately, our authorities for the impact of Christianity upon Paganism are extremely deficient. The Acts resting upon the theory that St Paul always began by preaching to the Jews, avoid almost every mention of the struggle in its early stages. But for all that, some of the episodes which it recounts are exceedingly instructive. We there become acquainted with the Christian missionaries as the workers of miracles, faith-healers, and exorcists, creating great excitement which ends, according to circumstances, either in apotheosis or in outbursts of rage. In Cyprus they have to contend with a magician, at Lystra they are taken for Zeus and Hermes because of the healing of a lame man. The priest is on the point of offering sacrifice to them when the matter is cleared up. At Philippi they cure a certain prophetess of her idle superstition, and thus depriving her masters of this source of income, are ill treated and imprisoned as a punishment. All these anecdotes are valuable as types. Only, instead of Paul and Barnabas and Silas, we must also from time to time picture to ourselves missionaries of an inferior type of character, men, in fact, who were little better than magicians or exorcists. But of direct public attacks upon the heathen religion we hear but little. Occasionally the Christian revivalist holds a public meeting in the open air. His object is to arouse the curiosity of his audience, he interlards his sermon with copious quotations from poets and philosophers, and in return for all his pains he will very probably be ridiculed by some passing philosopher, as Paul was at Athens. The most vivid picture of all is that given us of the riot of the silversmiths at Ephesus under Demetrius. The silversmiths have begun to notice that the sale of the little shrines of Artemis is decreasing, because the preaching of the Christian missionary robs them of their sanctity. So they flock together and cause no little commotion throughout the whole city of Ephesus by their cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” Here at last we have one clear point, where Christianity attacks the social system of the ancient heathen world. It was at Ephesus, too, where the Christians burnt all their books of magic, the charms called “Ephesian letters,” on a great pile, and boasted that the value of these idolatrous objects amounted to 50,000 drachmas—an act which might likewise easily give rise to serious collisions. But when we have enumerated these few instances we have exhausted all the material that is of any value in the book of the Acts. The apocryphal stories of the apostles elaborate these themes, but in a grotesque and tasteless fashion corresponding to the taste of the later age from which they date. It is only with Tertullian, at the end of the second century, that we obtain a very complete insight into the countless problems and conflicts produced by the collision of the hostile religions.

On the other hand, we have a mass of Christian apologetic literature in which the attempt was made to enter into the feelings of the Greeks and to adapt the new faith as far as possible to meet their needs. The earliest evangelist, Mark, wrote his Gospel for converts from heathendom, and with this object in view, very largely effaced the Jewish colouring of his tradition. Next follow in succession the Lucan writings, the Fourth Gospel, the preaching of St Peter, and finally the whole of the official apologetic literature. From these writings we derive a fairly good picture, not only of the struggle against the heathen religions, but also of the preaching of Christianity itself. But at the same time we see that Christianity does not only give but likewise receives, and that the defence of the Church is one of the strongest impulses that make for the process of Hellenization.

The attack upon the old gods keeps entirely to the lines laid down by the Jews and the Greeks themselves. Nowhere do we find any trace of original thoughts. We are here concerned with three theories of religion.

1. Under the influence of Judaism the Christians apply a coarsely materialistic theory to the Greek religion. The Jew only believes what he sees. The pictures are made by hands, the sacred animals are just animals, the sacred trees, wood, the sacred stones, stones and nothing else. But surely it is the height of folly to worship mere natural objects or the works of human art. This pitiful theory, by which it is just the religious element which is hidden away out of sight—i.e., the divinity that was supposed to reside in the objects—was the one that prevailed amongst Christian laymen. It can be traced back to St Paul and thence to its Jewish source, the wisdom of Solomon. St Peter’s preaching knows no other. Even Aristides, who had been taught better things by the philosophers, follows it, at least when he is examining barbarian religions. Where this theory prevails we may safely assume Jewish culture.

2. The Christians borrowed another, a rationalistic, theory of religion from the philosophers. It is known as Euhemerism. A very cursory examination is sufficient to show, of course, that the pictures and God are not the same, that the picture has been consecrated to God. But the gods appear, and this, especially in the Homeric poems, as over-men, of whose birth, suffering, and death we are often told. The objects of this worship were therefore the mighty men of old. This theory we meet with first of all in Aristides. He came across it in some Greek text-book.

3. The most important theory practically was that of the demons, in which both Jews and Greeks agreed, the only difference being that the Greeks conceived the demons to be demi-gods of a neutral character, while the Jews looked upon them as evil spirits. The Jewish theory of demons recognizes the reality of the heathen religion and its outward effects, but explains them as a great temptation to lead men away from God. The starting-point is always the fact of prophecy and of miracles. Hence the whole world is looked upon as a great kingdom of demons, while the heathen ritual is merely one favourite province thereof. This was the only theory that practically governed men in their every-day relations. St Paul was already acquainted with it. It was based upon the Greek Bible The hall-mark of Christianity was the knowledge that only demons, and not true gods, were the creators of Paganism, and that Christ has freed us from them. He freed us when He was upon earth by repeatedly casting out devils. He still frees us by means of exorcisms. That is why the name of Jesus is uttered over the convert at baptism, in order that He may cast the devils out of us.

The question now was how to set up the new Christian God in the place of the fallen heathen divinities. In their establishment of monotheism, the Christians, from the very first, simply followed in the lines laid down by the philosophers as soon as they attempted to produce any arguments beyond those furnished by the Old Testament. This subject rather belongs, therefore, to our next chapter, in which we are to consider the general influence of philosophy upon the Christians. The defence of Jesus, on the other hand, entirely enters into the conceptions of the popular religion. Jesus Christ is opposed to the old gods as the new and stronger God. That is the meaning of the “Divinity of Christ.” The idea arose amongst the heathen, and must be conceived of in antithesis to the heathen gods.

One thing we must grasp clearly. The notion is as little Jewish as it possibly can be. The Jews simply have no room for a second being called God in the strict sense of the word. “The alone true God,” “The only God,” as John and Clement call Him, that is Jewish. The Messiah is a man chosen or sent by God hence in any case a created being. Therefore the strict Jewish Christianity, and Mohammedanism, which is based upon it, have always entirely excluded this thought. It is true that the Jew, Paul, goes a long way beyond the humanity of Jesus when he discovers Him from time to time in the Lord of the Old Testament, and says that the fulness of the God head dwells in Him. But, firstly, he never calls Him God himself, and he shows us in his chief eschatological chapter how strongly he clings to monotheism. Secondly, he is anything rather than a Jew in his Christological exegesis of the Old Testament. Here he leaves all Jewish tradition on one side and gives free vent to his mythological vein: whence he derives it would be hard to tell. No road leads up to the doctrine of the divinity of Christ from the Old Testament and from Rabbinism.

But amongst the heathen, apotheosis was exceedingly common. The number of their deities is not limited, and they range by the most varied series of degrees imaginable down to the hero who is deified. The characteristic signs of a god are always considered to be great power, miracles, and prophecy. For the Jews a miracle proves the truth of a doctrine, for the Gentiles it denotes the presence of a god on earth. Hence St Paul was twice taken to be a god, at Lystra and at Malta, because of the miracles that he performed. So, too, the Roman centurion exclaims beneath the Cross, “This was a Son of God!” because of the miracles which accompanied the death of Jesus. The Jewish word “Son of God” has, by itself, the sound of hero or demi-god in Greek ears.

And so as soon as it came to the Greeks, accompanying the pictures of the great worker of miracles, over whom death had no dominion, faith in the divinity of Christ arose at once. It is the original faith of the Gentile Christians. Christological dogma did not grow by slow additions, but, on the contrary, by the Jewish and antagonistic subtraction from this popular belief. The Gentile Christian immediately gives Jesus a place in his worship. He sings his “carmen Christo quasi deo.” The apocryphal Acts of the Apostles are the clearest authority that we possess for this popular belief! Throughout these writings the new God Christ is contrasted with the heathen gods. It matters not whether He is called God or Son of God.

Partly consciously, and partly unconsciously, the Christian apologetic accommodated itself to this faith from a very early date. The first condition for this was the transformation of the picture contained in the Gospels in a universalistic sense. Paul had already ascribed to Jesus’ death an atoning power for the whole world. And now the whole world must be described as the object of the affections of the living Jesus of the Gospels. This was effected first of all by simply supplementing the national Jewish activity of Jesus by the command to go and preach to all people, which was ascribed to the risen Lord. That is the procedure adopted by our three Synoptists, in all of whom a certain hiatus is noticeable between the real history and the theory. Next, John paints his picture without any concern for the actual history. It begins with the Logos, the mediator both for creation and revelation to the whole world, and throughout proclaims Jesus to be the Saviour of the world, while it reaches its height in the scene when the Greeks come to Jesus and Jesus declares how He, being lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Himself. This proclamation of universalism was necessary in order that the Greeks might be able to say “The new God did not come for the Jews in a little corner of Syria, but for the world, and for us.”

In the next place, Jesus had to be proved a stronger God than the demons. St Mark’s Gospel undertakes this proof by presenting Jesus to all the world as the Son of God, the worker of miracles, the conqueror of the demons, and the prophet. Hence the important position here assigned to miracles, and amongst the miracles, especially to the victory over the demons. The empire of Satan is at an end. Legions of demons fall into the sea. Jesus is Lord over nature. He stills the storm. He makes the sea to be firm land. His power knows no limits, Mark naturally did not picture all this to himself after the same heathen fashion in which it must have worked upon his readers.

Soon after this (by analogy with other myths of the gods) the parentage of the Son of God is ascribed to God and a mortal woman. Such is the account in the opening chapters of the First and Third Gospels. The myth sprang up amongst Gentile Christians. A great proportion of the old Jewish Christians rejected it, and rightly, for it did away with the descent from David, which was a matter of such importance to them. The Christian spirit has, to be sure, been at work at this myth, and has removed from it every trace of sensuality and anthropomorphism. It is not God Himself but God’s Holy Spirit who begets Jesus. But even as early as Justin the analogy had been discovered: “When we say that He was born of a virgin, you may consider that as something which He shares with Perseus.” Celsus, the adversary of the Christians, finds still further analogies in Amphion, Aeacus and Minos, which examples he puts into the mouth of the Jew who appears as the opponent of the Christians. It is not for nothing that the story of the miraculous conception became so popular among the Gentile Christians: God’s Son is He whose Father is God and no man.

The Christology of the Fourth Gospel has, it is true, borrowed the idea of the Logos from philosophy. Besides this, consideration for the feelings of the Jews leads the author to emphasize the subordination of Christ to God. But concealed beneath the philosophy and the anti-Jewish apologetic, the popular belief in the new God that has appeared upon earth can be discovered in all its power. The miracles of Jesus—all of them the miracles of an omnipotent deity—are conceived of as a proof of the Messiahship for the Jews, and for the Greeks as a revelation of the Godhead. When Thomas sees the crucified Saviour with the stigmata risen from the dead, he cries out, as any Gentile might, “My Lord and my God!” And the evangelist would like to bring all people to make this same confession. All men should honour the Son as they honour the Father, i.e., just as God, and such is the will of the Father Himself. Then there is the mantic art, second sight and prophecy, which, next to the miracles, are a proof of the divinity. Like a God, Jesus looks into the hearts of all men, so that no man needed to tell Him what there was in man. He knows all the past history of the Samaritan woman with whom He talks, and knows from the very first that Judas is destined to betray Him. If He asks it is only to test those whom He questions. No god has a clearer insight. Neither need He eat or drink. His food is obedience to the Divine Will. If He asks for water to drink, then the want is but apparent, and the request is really made to introduce the conversation. Even if He prays it is but for the sake of those that hear and not for Himself. He has conquered death. Heaven is His home: thence He came; thither He shall go. Throughout His sayings it is the God that has descended from heaven that we hear speaking. Hence, too, He is at once introduced as a God in the prologue to the Gospel. Thus it is that the evangelist writes for the Greeks. His successor herein is the author of the apocryphal Acts of St John, where the hints of the author of the Fourth Gospel are exaggerated in an absurd and fantastic manner. So, for instance, he says that often when one followed after Jesus as He walked along He left no footprints behind Him. As one felt His body it would be at one time quite impalpable, so that one’s hand simply passed through it, and at another hard. It is not merely because of a higher canon of taste that the evangelist omits features such as these, which entirely destroy the humanity of Jesus. He himself, as opponent of the Gnostic Docetae, is thoroughly in earnest in his belief in the incarnation of the Logos. And yet, is his Jesus much else than a phantom? He needs neither to eat nor to pray, nor to ask for information, nor to die. Even in his own case the popular docetic belief and the anti-docetic theory are balanced against each other.

Prophecy and miracles together formed the proof of the divinity of Christ. For John is just as far removed from an ethical conception of the divinity of Christ as the whole of the rest of Christian antiquity after him. The doing of God’s will, to whatever degree of perfection one may attain, is still something human. It is man’s duty. It is at most important for St John in so far as a sinful man can not be God’s instrument. Indeed, the ethical conception of Christ’s divinity only came to be entertained when men began to find miracles a stumbling-block, and were yet loth to abandon the title of God. For St John God is the highest hyperphysical force. Consequently a human being upon earth can only prove himself to be divine by manifestations of this force. It was not because he felt the impression of Christ’s moral splendour, but because he marvelled at the conquest of death by life, that St Thomas uttered the exclamation, “My God!” It is not because of His moral supremacy that all men are to honour the Son as God, but because He does His Father’s work, because He raises the dead and comes to judge the world. So, too, the Son’s unity with the Father is not merely the unity of a loving will, but the unity of power. No demon can take those that are His out of His hand, for otherwise he would have to be more powerful than God Himself, who is Lord of all. He that hath seen the Son seeth the Father, because the Son does the Father’s mighty works. This same divine, miraculous power is to do still greater works through the disciples, but not in order that they too may appear as bearers of the Divinity, but in order that the Father may be glorified in the Son, in honour of the divinity of Christ, in whose name these wonderful works are done by the disciples. In appealing, therefore, to the miracles, and the miracles alone, as the proof of Christ’s divinity, all later apologists faithfully follow the example of St John.

The greatest obstacle to belief in Jesus’ divinity was His death, just as it seemed impossible to harmonize it with His claim to the Messiahship. Hence the frequent recurrence to this subject in the anti-Jewish apologetic. Justin did, it is true, find analogies for the death, too, in Greek mythology. There was Asclepius struck by lightning, Dionysus dismembered, Heracles burnt on the funeral pyre, and all these were worshipped as gods or the sons of God. This clever discovery had, however, not been made by the earlier apologists. They strained every nerve to harmonize the death of Jesus with His divinity. They succeeded in doing so by adopting the same method as in the anti-Jewish apologetic, by a brilliant description of the Resurrection, by multiplying the miracles and the instances of fulfilled prophecies in the story of the Passion, by emphasizing the voluntariness of the death. Many Gentile Christians would have preferred to have denied the death of Jesus altogether. His death was only outwardly apparent. According to the Acts of St John it is only for the populace that He is crucified, while at the same time He appears to His disciples in glory. But this consequence of the “divinity of Christ” was at once indignantly rejected as a Gnostic error. We may account for the moderate position adopted by the Christian apologists with reference to the death of Jesus as a reaction against this extreme exaggeration.

Whilst the other apologists were satisfied with proving the physical superiority of Jesus over the old gods, the Fourth Gospel alone attempted to give a clear answer to the question what gifts God had brought men down from heaven. His answer was shaped to meet the needs of the Greek world. Chiefest of all the gifts was that of truth or knowledge, light, illumination. Such conceptions were current even amongst the Jewish proselytes. This, too, is when we find mention of the opposites, light and darkness, truth and lies, knowledge and ignorance. With these conceptions John as well as the Jews would describe monotheism—the worship of the only true God—and the knowledge of the lies of the demons. The only thing which is both novel and great is the way in which these privileges are here conceived of as gifts of God through Christ. Whilst in many other apologists monotheism and faith in Christ lie side by side without any apparent connection, the Fourth Gospel laid a great Christo-centric foundation for the whole faith in God, and strongly emphasized St Paul’s statement that the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the alone true God.

The next great gift which Christ brought the Greeks from heaven was everlasting life, i.e., immortality, or rather the present assurance of the certain possession of the same. That, too, was a great source of comfort for the Greeks, facing the future as they did with such hesitation, scepticism, and fear. The tangible proof was furnished by the resurrection of Jesus and by the preceding raising of Lazarus from the dead.

It was only amongst the Gnostics that the pure doctrine of the divinity of Christ was maintained. In the Church it was counted as a heresy just because of the Gnostics and with deference to the accusations of the Jews. This popular belief, however, in the appearance of the new god constitutes the kernel of the new Christology. A striking proof of this assertion is furnished by Ignatius’ letter to the Ephesians. The virginity of Mary and her birth and the death of the Lord remained concealed from the Prince of this world. They were three mysteries which spoke aloud in the stillness of God. How, then, were they revealed to the ages? A star appeared in the heavens brighter than all other stars, and the light thereof was inexpressibly great, and its strangeness spread consternation. But all the other stars, together with the sun and the moon, formed a circle round this star, yet its light exceeded the light of all the others. And the hearts of men failed them, for they could not tell whence this strange star appeared unto them. Henceforth all magic was at an end and all the bonds of wickedness were snapped asunder. Ignorance was dethroned, the old reign was no more, now that God Incarnate had come to give men the newness of everlasting life. Nowhere, even in the New Testament, is the significance of Christ for the downfall of Paganism formulated as clearly as here.

The question now presents itself, How was Christianity related to the religion of the mysteries? There were likely to be several points of agreement. Both tended to fix the attention on the world to come, to attach importance to holy rites and moral purity, and to seek happiness in the common life. Did not this imply so close an inner relationship that the outer forms were bound to be exchanged mutually?

From the very first the Gospel courted publicity and claimed to be a message intended for the light of common day. A city set upon a hill cannot be hid. The candle is not intended to be placed under the bushel but on the candlestick. Even though we begin with whispering in the ear and speaking in the chamber, yet the end clearly aimed at is to preach on the roof and in the public streets. And just as the Gospel courts publicity, so its scope is universal. Why, it is the exact opposite of everything that is exclusive. It abolishes the privileges of the learned and throws its doors wide open to the simple layman. There is nothing esoteric in the preaching of Jesus from first to last. It is one of the great and comforting features in His character that the love of mystery and aristocratic self-sufficiency are alike alien to Him. Hence Christianity and the mysteries are mutually exclusive.

So, too, the aim of the disciples of Jesus and of St Paul was not to found a sect, but to gather together and to increase the people of God. By their choice of the Old Testament as their sacred book they declared their intention of remaining faithful to the public religion. Their adoption of the name ‘Church’ points in the same direction. For the Church is something public, something which embraces all men alike in opposition to every private society. The enthusiastic manner in which the earliest Christian apologists defended this public character of Christianity in opposition to all secret sectarianism is very admirable. The author of the Acts never wearies in his attempt to prove that the Christians are merely the true people of Israel. That is why he insists on the fact that the original apostles and St Paul never abandoned the old sanctuary, the Temple, but assembled there in the sight of all men and praised God. So Paul can declare when he is brought to trial, “These things have not been done in a corner.” The author of the Fourth Gospel emphasizes the public character of Christianity still more strongly. The founder is the Logos, the light of the world. When a Jewish Rabbi once visited Him secretly at night He concluded His conversation with him by the saying as to the light. That is why He appears so frequently in Jerusalem and in the Temple, that all the world may see. “I have spoken openly to all the world; in secret have I said nothing.” When brought to trial He appeals to this; and as the Lord’s Supper was commonly calumniated amongst the Gentiles as a secret rite defiled by horrible orgies, immorality, and cannibalism, by analogy of much that was ascribed to many mysteries, Jesus is described by the evangelist as delivering a spiritual exposition of the Sacrament in public at Capernaum, and thus he refutes the slanderous accusations. St John is followed by Justin in the two Apologies. His method is to set forth all the Christian doctrines and customs without the slightest reserve, and so he takes the sting out of the heathen attack: “Study our religion; then you will convince yourselves how little reason we have for shunning the light.” It may evidently be inferred from this method of Church defence that in the eyes of the Christian teachers themselves their religion was perfectly separate and distinct from the mysteries.

But for all that there was an inner resemblance between the two. In the first place, the persecution of the national Jewish Church and afterwards of the Roman Government actually forced the Christians to live, so to speak, underground in the dark and in mystery. Even the Fourth Gospel speaks of a meeting with closed doors for fear of the Jews. By positively refusing to acknowledge the public character of the Christian religion, the State itself made of Christianity a sect that shunned the light. Besides this external reason, however, there was a second, due to the essential character of the original society. Christianity was at first organized as an exclusive community. Hence its strength. It was only within these narrow limits that the teaching of Jesus could be realized. But as such a community it only possessed a limited public character. The sacrament of baptism formed a sharp dividing line between members and non-members. It was itself a sectarian form borrowed from the sect of the disciples of the Baptist. The Lord’s Supper was only intended for the brethren, and the same remark applies to several other rites and customs, e.g., the public confession, the kiss of brotherhood, etc. Now as Christianity spread under the form of this organization and thus became known to the Greeks and Romans, it could only appear to them to be a sect, and they then judged it like many other sects which shunned the light, and that with good reason.

As a matter of fact a contradiction existed between the claim of Christianity to be the world religion and its sectarian form, its rites and ceremonies adapted only to a small society. We are conscious of this contradiction even at the present day as soon as we ask ourselves what place the sacraments really occupy in our national and established Churches.

As a result of the confusion caused by the rise of Gnosticism, numberless small sects appear by the side of the one sect, which still upheld its claim to be the Church. Prolonging, as nearly all of them did, a precarious existence in almost greater obscurity than the Church, they were the first to fall irrevocably under the influence of the mysteries, because from the very beginning they cultivated an exclusive aristocratic spirit and an esoteric doctrine. In opposition to this tendency the belief in the universal scope of Christ’s message and its public character was the more firmly rooted, and once again this was exceedingly fortunate for the Church.

Ecclesiastical Christianity won the victory over Gnosticism, but not without submitting to the influence of the mysteries. Without themselves being conscious of it, the Christian teachers adapted themselves in many points to the opinions of their opponents in the course of their controversies and defence of the Church. It is in the development of the idea of the sacraments that we have the strongest evidence of the influence of the mysteries.

The essential characteristic of the mysteries was, of course, inherent in the sacraments from the very first. Simple human actions are invested with mysterious attributes. They can exorcise evil spirits, become the channels of divine power, bring men into communion with the Lord on high. These opinions cannot be derived from the teaching of Jesus; they show us how Christianity in its infancy was drawn into the chaos of Oriental religions. Paul, apostle though he was of the spirit and the word, nevertheless found a place in his great theological system for the sacred rites of the first Christian community as means of salvation. For him, too, they are the definite points where Christ or His Spirit impart themselves to the community and to the individual, in order to lift them up to themselves. Baptism is incorporation into the body of Christ, the Lord’s Supper the continued support from the supply of His strength. This conception, however mysterious, still retained the Christian thought that our present salvation depends upon the person of Christ. And besides this, it was effectively balanced by the preponderant ethical note in the apostle’s teaching and character, which enabled him to draw moral imperatives even from the sacraments.

In the sub-apostolic age, belief in sacramental efficacy grows in proportion to the rapidity with which Christianity takes root in heathen soil. There, among the Greeks and in contact with the thoughts disseminated by the mysteries, the unseen world comes to dominate everywhere as the only true reality, filling the whole foreground of life, and baptism and the Lord’s Supper are subordinated to it as mysterious initiatory rites, while at the same time the sacramental apparatus becomes evermore and more complicated through competition with other sacraments.

The original simplicity of baptism, washing in running water and utterance of the name of Jesus, no longer sufficed. The laying on of hands was added. This addition alone, so the author of the Acts tells us, afforded a channel for the descent of the Holy Ghost. It was the prerogative of the apostles—later, of the bishops. Somewhat later appeared the anointing with consecrated oil. If the First Epistle of St John knows the name we may conclude that the thing, too, existed either among Catholic Christians or Gnostics. Possibly the name Christ, the anointed, facilitated the reception of this rite. Ignatius refers to the anointing of Christ in Bethany, and thence derives the custom. It was, at all events, long before the time of Tertullian (to whom we owe our first treatise on baptism), possibly a century earlier, that the sacrament consisted of three separate ceremonial parts—immersion, unction, imposition of hands. We really have three sacraments united in one, or rather there are four, since the utterance of the name of Jesus has itself the efficacy of a sacrament. At the beginning of the second century baptism into the name of Jesus began to give way to baptism into the name of the Trinity, the latter practice being founded on the passage in St Matthew’s Gospel which traced the formula back to Jesus Himself. But it was an innovation, for we see from the Acts that the apostles and St Paul only baptized into the name of Jesus. How and where the phrase arose we cannot tell, but we are acquainted with a transition stage. The author of the Apocalypse knows of such as have the name of the Lamb and of the Father written on their forehead. To others he promises that they shall be pillars in the temple of God, and upon them shall be written the name of God and the name of the new Jerusalem and the name of mankind. We may here learn something of the motives which led to the growth and final victory of the Trinitarian formula. It was produced by no doctrinal theory, but by the need that men felt to be quite on the safe side through the employment of yet more powerful names. From the very first, forgiveness of previous sins and the pouring forth of God’s Spirit were regarded as the gifts obtained by means of baptism. Hence it was called “birth of regeneration,” “renewing of the Holy Spirit,” “birth from above by water and the Spirit.” New designations, ‘illumination’ and ‘seal,’ came to be added to these, the oldest, Christian names. Both were probably derived from the phraseology of the mysteries. Through wonderful illumination the convert steps forth from the kingdom of darkness and ignorance into the kingdom of light and of knowledge. Without actually naming baptism, Clement describes this solemn moment. Through Christ the eyes of our heart were opened. Through Him our ignorant and darkened understanding climbed the steep ascent into His wonderful light. Through Him the Lord wanted us to taste of the knowledge that perisheth not. Hence Justin speaks of a birth of repentance and of knowledge. We are breathing the air of the Greek mysteries. The expression ‘seal’ implies protection against the demons and initiation into the world to come. Long before this Paul speaks of Christians as anointed, sealed, having the earnest of the Spirit. In the Apocalypse the one hundred and forty-four thousand Israelites are sealed in order that they may come safely through all temptations and plagues and reach the kingdom of heaven. We cannot be quite sure what the author meant by this sealing. Most probably, however, he pictured to himself that the name of God or of Jesus which exorcised the evil spirits was engraved upon the foreheads of the faithful. And now baptism itself was regarded as such a protective measure—the holy name being pronounced as well. Its efficacy can, of course, be completely destroyed or impaired; denial of the faith in time of persecution, grievous sins of the flesh, stain it; but wherever it is kept untainted it is a mighty protection against all demons and a guarantee of everlasting life. When Hermas declares that even those who died before Christ came and are now in Hades must receive the seal—the seal, he adds, is the water—since without this none can enter into the kingdom of heaven, he is looking upon baptism as the rite of initiation which alone confers upon men the blessedness of the world to come. Faith alone no longer suffices. The magic power of the sacrament is needed besides. In like manner, too, the Lord’s Supper comes to be looked upon as food and drink for this life. “He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is meat indeed and My blood is drink indeed.” Such are the words which the evangelist John puts into the mouth of Jesus, and he can only mean that the elements received in the Lord’s Supper create the spiritual, the resurrection body of the Christian. His successor Ignatius says, with perfect outspokenness, the Lord’s Supper is the magic rite whereby we obtain immortality: it is the medicine which prevents our death and secures our perpetual life in Jesus Christ. Then there follows in Justin the first attempt at explaining this change of the body and blood of Christ into our own body, and the apologist reminds us at the same time of the analogy presented by the mysteries of Mithras, where, in like manner, bread and a cup of water are presented and certain invocations used when anyone is to be initiated. Naturally it is only the initiated who can fully participate in this mysterious food. “Let him that is holy draw near, and if anyone be not holy then let him repent.” The saying of Jesus, “Give not that which is holy to the dogs,” is applied in the Didache to the Lord’s Supper.

We have traced the first steps of that fateful development which, under the influence of Greek and Oriental mysteries, made of Christianity a religion of superstition and of magic charms. True, there is no lack of Christian teachers in our period, just as little as there was in later periods, who, when they speak of the sacraments, immediately treat them as symbols and the means of inculcating moral truth, whose end and aim is the grace of God and spiritual communion with the Redeemer through these outer magical media. But in interpreting the sacraments after their own fashion, these teachers give the Christian people the right to do so after theirs—i.e., to look upon them as magic rites. The only really valid argument that can be advanced in favour of the sacraments is surely this. No religious community could continue to exist—certainly not in the age of the mysteries—without some such outer signs intended to excite the feelings and to inflame the fancy. Had Christianity not possessed baptism and the Lord’s Supper from the very first, it would have derived its sacraments from some other source. In any case the purely ethical and personal religion was bound to degenerate. For here there is but one alternative. One thing is needful: either the condition of the heart or the reception of the sacred rite. When the very smallest importance is attached to the reception of the rite, there the Gospel, with its three great realities, the soul, the brethren, and God, is destroyed.

In eschatology, too, we can trace the beginnings of a further development destined to be of great consequence. Eschatology lost its abhorrence of the Greek idea of the future world and assimilated thence all that it possibly could. It is true that we have come to the time when the flood of the Jewish Apocalyptic conceptions swept over the young religion with their gigantic and fantastic imagery more than ever before. The eschatology of most of the Christian congregations has still more of a Jewish than a Greek appearance. The expectation of the kingdom of God upon earth and of the resurrection of the dead—i.e., the two thoughts which are least Greek in character—still stand in the centre of the Christian hope. Even so educated a Christian as Justin is a convinced millenarian. And yet the process of Hellenization set in about the end of the century, and it is this same Justin who is our witness for it.

CHAPTER VIII.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

THE Apostle Paul would have nothing to do with philosophy. He was still an apologist of the layman’s religion. Human wisdom and divine revelation were entirely opposed to each other in his view. Long before his time, however, an alliance had been concluded between these two opposites in Alexandria and even in Palestine. As Clement of Alexandria so beautifully expresses it, the divine reason did not merely educate for Christianity the Jews through the law but the Greeks through philosophy. Philosophical and religious monotheism, philosophical and religious ethics, had met and had discovered, to their astonishment, that they were near relations. Had it not been for this alliance, Christianity had not conquered the world.

The first meeting-point was in the criticism of the old polytheistic faith. Greek philosophers had written text-books in which all the weaknesses and failings of mythology had been collected and criticized. They had then proceeded to put forth various theories to explain the great deception, amongst others, the theory of Euhemerus. In his controversy with Apion, all that Josephus need do is simply to refer to the majority of the philosophers, especially Plato. There is no doubt that Aristides copied Greek patterns in his criticism. It is true that he says that he has the philosophers against him. It was, however, but one section of them, after all, which maintained that all the different gods proceeded in the end from one nature. In his Apologies Justin Martyr quotes the philosophers at every step as his authorities. By thus uniting with Greek philosophy in the removal of ignorant superstition, Christianity was able to boast at a very early date that it was a civilizing power.

The positive point of contact in monotheism was of still greater importance. Originally, it is true, Jews and Greeks attached a very different signification to the same name, for the Greeks started from the laws of nature and the Jews from the miracles of their historical past. As a matter of fact, therefore, their agreement in the use of the same formula meant the immediate and wide acceptance of the philosophical view of the world, both by Judaism and by Christianity. The process begins in the Jewish writings, even in the Old Testament itself, in the 9th chapter of the Proverbs. So, too, Philo’s idea of the world as an everlasting order fulfilled by the forces of Deity is entirely Greek.

Turning to the New Testament, we find the first traces of this Greek view, though naturally still intermingled with Jewish conceptions, in the two little apologetic speeches in the Book of the Acts (xiv. and xvii.). In the speech at Lystra, God is first introduced as the creator, and that with the current Jewish expressions. Characteristically Jewish, too, is the assertion that in the first place God occupied Himself only with Israel, and treated the heathen according to the principle of laissez aller, laissez faire. The whole order of nature, however, is regarded as showing forth God’s lovingkindness towards the heathen, and is in so far produced as a proof (‘testimony’). Here we have Greek popular philosophy in its simplest form; we can recognize it, too, by the emphasis laid on the goodness of God. The speech at Athens begins in the same way with a whole string of Jewish ideas—God the creator, criticism of the heathen religion, especially of idol worship, and then, finally, the eschatological menace. But in between these is a great deal borrowed from the Greeks. As in later Apologies, God is shown to be placed above all want. All the blessings of Nature, that we live and breathe, are His gifts. The heathen, too, have received their seasons and their boundaries from God, that they may seek God and find Him. Hereupon there follows the thoroughly Greek pantheistic formula, “In Him we live and move and have our being,” and this is supported by the quotation from Aratus, that all men are of God’s family. Even the word “the divine,” the abstract term instead of the person, is a sign that Hellenism has already gained considerable ground.

Our next document, St Clement’s letter to the Corinthians, is entirely impregnated with Greek popular philosophy (see especially chaps. xix., xxi., xxiv. seq., and lx.). The Godhead there appears as Father and Creator of the whole world—a faith in God the Father which differs greatly from that of the early Christian—or as the great Demiurge and Lord of the universe. The constant and invariable order of Nature as God’s work is there described at great length. The heavens stand fast through God’s government (dioikesis); day and night succeed each other without let or injury. Sun and moon and stars continue in their appointed course. The earth knows its seasons and the sea its bounds. Summer and winter, spring and autumn, all follow in due course. The winds and rivers are alike governed by fixed laws, and laws likewise govern the instincts and impulses of the animal world. All this has been ordered by the Lord of the whole world, that peace and harmony may prevail, and all that He does is good. At first sight, it is true, this description of Nature resembles that of the Psalms. In both cases everything is referred back to God’s own command. And yet the point of view is more Greek than Jewish. The independence of Nature is greater. Between it and God stands His unchangeable ‘dioikesis.’

In chaps. xxiv. and xxv. we have the first attempt to find a rational basis for the belief in the resurrection by analogies from Nature. There is a resurrection throughout Nature, there is the change of night and day, of seed-time and of harvest. This is a proof of the greatness of God’s providence. The view is further supported by the great miracle of the resurrection of the phoenix, and finally there is a sufficient, if somewhat meagre, scriptural proof from the Old Testament.

CHAPTER IX.

THE ORIGIN OF GNOSTICISM.

THEOLOGICAL inquiry has not as yet mastered the complex and intricate problem of Gnosticism. Our description must therefore confine itself carefully to the few points that have been clearly ascertained, unless it is content to assume an altogether problematical character. With the question of the origin of Gnosticism it is only concerned in a very secondary degree. Can Gnosticism be derived from the same root as Catholicism or not? Was it imported from outside sources, or does it spring out of Christianity itself?

The question can only be answered if Gnosticism itself be present to the reader’s mind in bare outline. For of course it can only be a question of presenting the chief features, that which the different Gnostic sects possessed in common.

The following points are common to at least a great portion of the Gnostic schools and sects.

1. A definite principle of authority. The Spirit is the source and norm of all knowledge which thus claims to be based upon revelation. The sacred writings play a great part—the apocryphal even more than the canonical. But it is the Spirit that decides what is divine in these books and what is not, and that alone understands the revelation contained in the sacred book. As the Old Testament is the canon of all Christians, it is exposed to the sharpest criticism and partially to rejection, or at any rate to an interpretation which is almost tantamount to rejection. In any case it is the Spirit interpreting it that is the highest authority. This holds good with respect to Jesus and the apostles. In their case, too, the Spirit decides as to the acceptation and rejection and the interpretation. Naturally the Spirit does this, not as the individual human spirit, but as a divine revelation within him.

2. A definite belief in God. The God who had hitherto been worshipped both by Jews and Christians, the Jehovah of the Jews, is not the highest God revealed by Jesus. This latter is rather a new, hitherto concealed God who is enthroned high above the world and above all spirits; high, too, above the creator of the world. He is not the God of this world, the author of men’s creation and preservation, and, generally speaking, this world does not belong to Him directly. Practical consequences of this are the destruction of the faith in Providence, and the hostile, or at best indifferent, relation of the Christian to the whole of this world, to nature, to the body, to human ordinances; all of which we ought not only not to ascribe to the highest God, but rather regard as something that has fallen away from Him.

3. A definite eschatology. Man’s chief end is to return to God, who is his home, to the uppermost realm of light out of this prison-house of decadence and of exile. The creature in man, the flesh, is not capable of this return, but only that element, call it spirit or soul, which has had its birth in the celestial light. Immediately after death the soul of man is intended to set out upon its homeward journey, and to make its way upwards through the innumerable hostile spirits which fill the long interval between God and this lower earth.

4. A definite Christology. The Saviour Christ is a spiritual being sent down from the realm of light above to the earth below in order to reveal divine truth to men and to illuminate their minds. As a divine being He was neither born nor did He die; He was only in outward appearance a man such as we are, in that He clothed Himself with a human body. His work consisted essentially in imparting the higher knowledge and the sacraments.

5. A definite Soteriology. Redemption is effected by the liberation of man from the bondage of the lower gods, and by the due preparation for his return to his true home above. This liberation is brought about by the imparting of the superior wisdom, the removal of man’s ignorance regarding his origin, his destiny, the hindrances in the road and the way to overcome them. Thereby the divine element in man, the Spirit, becomes self-conscious. Then the Christian has to prepare himself for his homeward journey, first by the reception of the sacraments and the seals, which will procure him a safe passage through all the hosts of hostile spirits, and next of ascetic practices, by the mortification of the flesh, of all that is the work of the demiurge. Occasionally an unbridled license took the place of this asceticism, both alike springing from the same root—dualism. Such is the course of man’s redemption, at once intellectual, magical and physical.

6. A definite view of the Church. That which the Christians usually call Church is not the Church of God at all. That Church consists of the number of the spiritual, i.e., of those who bring with them from the upper world the seed, the spiritual embryo. For them alone Christ appeared. They alone return after death into the kingdom of light. The aim of the Gnostic propaganda and of their conventicles is to gather them together and to awaken the slumbering divine life within them by imparting the higher mysteries to them. The natural inequality of man is presupposed. Whilst the Catholic Church in vain strives to remove this inequality by sending forth her missionaries, the Gnostic conventicles suffer Church and world to go to ruin, and reserve heaven for themselves.

Such, in the barest outline, is the Gnostic theology. What is its source? According to the theory of the later anti-gnostic Fathers of the Church, Gnosticism arose by a wholesale rejection of Catholic theology. The Catholic Church, it is said, has always remained the same; it has never changed; it is only the heretics that have changed. There is a good deal that is true in this theory. On the whole, Catholicism is in the straight line of development from primitive Christianity. But the hypothesis that the Gnostics fell away from this unchangeable and fully developed Catholicism is altogether mistaken. Both Gnosticism and Catholicism can be traced to a common source—the theology and piety of the apostolic ages, which was neither Gnostic nor Catholic. Catholicism itself is in fact to a great extent only to be accounted for by the opposition to the Gnostic movement. There was a time when the two brothers, who were such deadly enemies later on, still lived at peace side by side, when the later Catholics themselves harboured a number of Gnostic ideas. For from the very first there was in the Church no lack of modes of thought and of feeling which later on spontaneously crystallized into Gnosticism.

Where, now, do we find in primitive Christianity the starting-point, the source of the Gnostic movement?

One thing is clear to begin with. The Jesus of history and the Jesus of Gnosticism have nothing whatever to do with each other. Although Jesus was placed in the centre of the Gnostic systems, He and His worshippers have no connection with each other. Speculation and mysticism are alike foreign to Jesus. His teaching never leaves the domain of the practical and the ethical, the problems of human life. He knows that He is surrounded by a world of spirits, but His curiosity is never directed towards that world. There is one occasional saying, related by St Luke, about the fall of Satan from heaven, and that only served to comfort the disciples.

Even St Paul’s Christology very seldom came into contact with the historical Jesus. What St Paul said about Jesus was really a myth—a drama to which Jesus gave His name. But then by the side of this St Paul declared the whole practical gospel of Jesus; he is a true disciple of the Lord in all his aims and ideals. Hence the great difference between him and the Gnostics. One point alone both alike confirm, viz., that the deepest speculations about Jesus offer us no kind of guarantee for true Christianity.

Nevertheless points of contact with Gnosticism have been discovered by modern writers even in Jesus. The fact is instructive, for it shows us how deeply rooted Gnostic tendencies were even in the Church itself.

1. Jesus had spoken in parables to the people. Why had He done so? For all Hellenistic Jews ‘parables’ were dark and mysterious sayings. The chief idea suggested by the word was something that needed explanation, problems that awaited solution. Hence the parables of Jesus were necessarily regarded as riddles and mysteries. That is the case throughout the New Testament. According to the Synoptists the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven are contained in the parables. The people are not meant to understand them, but even the disciples cannot; they are too difficult. It is only with the ‘solution’ of Jesus that the deeper knowledge of the parables begins. The evangelist Matthew appeals for the Greek word ‘parables’ to Ps. lxxviii. 2, where the parallel passage reads “things hidden from the commencement of the world.” St John goes still further. It is only in parables and riddles that he makes Jesus speak to the disciples as well as to the people. The reason he gives for this is that as long as Jesus lived the understanding of the disciples did not attain to the level of the Master, and Jesus Himself therefore could not declare all as yet. These theories are not meant in a Gnostic sense. Neither St Mark nor St John mean that the parables of Jesus contain mysteries for the majority of Christians which perhaps only a chosen few understand. They only wished to emphasize the difference with which the disciples regarded and understood Jesus after the resurrection. It must be admitted, however, that we have here a point of departure for later Gnostic theories if once it were established that Jesus’ words often or nearly always signified something else in addition to the apparent meaning. In fact, during the whole of the second century, the Church and the heretics completely agree as to the rationale of Jesus' use of parables. The difference between Catholics and Gnostics is entirely relative in this matter. The Gnostics take an earlier and a keener interest in the parables of Jesus, whilst the Catholics, e.g., Barnabas and Justin Martyr, show a preference for the Old Testament parables. Hence Irenaeus, to take one instance out of many, is really defenceless against the Gnostics; his only safety lies in appealing to the creed and in diverting attention from the mysterious to the simple and plain sayings of Jesus.

2. A second point of contact was the difference observable in the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. In St Mark’s Gospel, St Peter and the two sons of Zebedee appear in several places as the recipients of especial marks of love and of confidence. They alone, e.g., were eyewitnesses of His mysterious transfiguration, of which they were not to speak till after His resurrection. It was to them and to Andrew alone that Jesus revealed the future. They were Jesus' favoured disciples. What more easy to suppose than that Jesus had revealed to them many mysteries of which the rest of the disciples were ignorant? The transfiguration itself was a proof that He had done so. Here St Mark himself paved the way for Gnosticism by working upon this esoteric theory. He tells a story unknown to the majority of the apostles in Jesus’ lifetime. The need for such secret traditions, based upon the authority of those most intimate with Jesus, must have been felt in an increasing degree in the sub-apostolic age. St John endeavoured to meet this need by the introduction of the great unknown—the disciple whom Jesus loved. The case is a somewhat peculiar one. He receives no special revelation, but merely supports the Fourth Gospel by his authority. Every special revelation is indeed denied by the theory of the Spirit. We see, therefore, that while the evangelist accepts the tendencies of his age he entirely recasts them at the same time. We may therefore conclude that it was the custom amongst many Christians thus to appeal to the highest available authority for secret traditions. Papias indirectly confirms this statement when he speaks of himself as going about from one aged Christian to another and inquiring what Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John and Matthew said. For the Church, however, the apostolic body as a whole took the place of all single favourites. After all, the difference is merely relative.

CHAPTER X.

THE INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE.

THE first encounter between the Church and the Gnostic tendencies occurred while St Paul was still alive. Heretical teachers appeared at Colossae, who had already been engulfed in the great whirlpool of religions. They boasted of their Jewish circumcision and of their Greek philosophy, recommended angelolatry and ascetic practices. Paul combated them from the standpoint of his gnosis, and opposed practical Christian principles to their asceticism. We know nothing as to the further history of this Colossian sect. It was the advance guard of the invading army which attacked the Church on all sides in the last two decades of the first century, and is noticed in almost every contemporary ecclesiastical writing. The Pastoral and Johannine epistles (about 100 A.D.) are the earliest documents to give us a clear conception of their opponent’s position. It is very instructive how quickly, after all, the consciousness of the difference between what was Christian and what was Gnostic was acquired. We see how the Pauline theology impelled even ecclesiastical teachers such as John, e.g., to travel very far in the direction of Gnosticism. Speculation was very highly esteemed. God and the world, the spirit and the flesh, were discussed in a dualistic fashion. In certain additions made to the Gospels a very near approach indeed was made to Docetism. But these very same representatives of the ecclesiastical Gnosis instinctively rejected anything that was Gnostic theology properly so-called. There is only one explanation of this. Their feeling for that which was and that which was not Christian, was on the whole too strong to be endangered by any speculations of a Gnostic tendency. This was fortunate for the Church, and honourable for these men. Their theology was a very incomplete reproduction of Christianity. The real Jesus fitted neither to the Jewish nor to the Greek formulae which they employed. But they had that personal Christianity which is patient of every kind of speculation—up to the point when it is itself threatened. When once this point is reached it is stirred into activity, and silences the theologian in the midst of his speculations. So it was now. The Church theologians themselves entered the lists against the Gnostics, and opposed their antithesis to every thesis brought forward by the latter. We can now clearly recognize which side preserves the true line of Christian succession in every point.

1. The debate as to the first capital point, the principle of authority, was the most unfortunate The Gnostics proclaimed the supremacy of the Spirit. This implied the right of license and the victory of the non-Christian element over the Gospel. Had Christianity developed along the lines indicated by this theory, it would have disappeared altogether in the chaos of peoples. The Church’s teachers, however, declared that the Spirit of Christ alone—i.e., the Christian tradition—was decisive. Nothing could be more sensible. Unfortunately ecclesiastical law was exclusively substituted for the Spirit in the process of the determination and limitation of the tradition. We shall have occasion to recur to this point when we discuss the forcible measures employed by the Church. But this is the place to mention another matter. The divinity of the Old Testament, even of the law, is maintained against the criticism of the Gnostics. It was the Old Testament to which the Gnostic spirit could least of all adapt itself. It was held in very low esteem, made out to be the work of a lower order of spirits, of the demiurge or even of Satan himself; and to establish their position they made use of apocryphal writings both old and new. It was felt, however, by the Church that the destruction of the Old Testament cut the ground from under the feet of the Christians and exposed them to every storm. There were additional weighty motives of a practical character. The proof from prophecy was needed for apologetic purposes, and for this the Old Testament writings were indispensable. And the defence of Christianity as of the old and lawful religion, was invalidated by the abandonment of the Old Testament. It was a difficult matter to defend the Old Testament as a Christian book at once against the Gnostics and the Jews. But this position was maintained. The author of the Pastoral epistles warns the bishops not to suffer the Old Testament to escape them through the perversions of the Gnostics. “Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for doctrine, for instruction, for reproof, for correction, for discipline which is in righteousness.” He presupposes the Jewish doctrine of the inspiration of the Old Testament, and merely fights for the ecclesiastical utility of the book. But what is to be counted as belonging to the Old Testament? No very clear decision was reached as to this point. On the one hand, we find a disposition to submit to the judgment of the Jewish Rabbis at Jabne, whose canon of the Hebrew Old Testament exactly corresponds with our own. Hence certain Christian teachers began to reject the Apocrypha at a very early date. The author of the Second Epistle of St Peter, who copies the whole of the letter of St Jude, carefully omits or obliterates the quotations from the book of Enoch and the Ascension of Moses. Jerome’s later statement, that many Christians rejected the letter of St Jude because of its quotations from the book of Enoch, agrees with this. People, however, like the author of the Second Epistle of St Peter were the exceptions in this first age. The great majority of the Christians possessed the Septuagint, and the canon set up by the Rabbis of Jabne did not apply here. Apocryphal Jewish writings must have been very extensively employed in the Church up to the time of Origen. There was the same absence of decision with regard to exegesis. In spite of Gnostic abuses of the practice, the right of allegorical interpretation was maintained. There was no saving the Old Testament without allegory. The best illustration of the lengths to which some went in this direction are to be found in the Epistle of St Barnabas, where he applies the red heifer to Christ, and the Gematry of Elieser, Abraham’s three hundred and eighteen servants, to Jesus the crucified. The chief point was, however, gained: the Old Testament remained intact as a divine book and as the canon for the Church. In spite of all disastrous consequences, that was a fortunate event for the future history of mankind.

2. The Gnostics separated the creator of the world from the redeemer. The Church maintained their unity. The creator is no inferior God, but the true and highest God, the redeemer. The author of the Pastoral epistles combats the Gnostic theory of the divinity by insisting on the unity of God and opposing asceticism. “Every creature of God is good. God has created meat and drink for the Christians, to be received by them with thanksgiving.” It was clearly recognized in the Church that it was no mere matter of speculation. Had the Christian any right to believe in Providence? That was the issue at stake. Is God or the devil supreme in this world? Is the believer indebted for his life, his health, his natural powers, to the God that redeems him, or to an enemy of God? About the middle of the second century the old expressions “the devil, the prince of this world,” etc., almost vanish from Christian writings. By a bold exegesis Irenaeus makes out that Paul never called Satan God of this world. And on the other hand, God appears in the creeds as creator of heaven and earth. At all costs the negative attitude to the world is to be avoided.

3. The defence of “the resurrection of the flesh” against the purely spiritualistic eschatology of the Gnostics was a natural consequence of the belief in God the creator. The heresy that the Resurrection had already taken place is first met with in the Pastoral epistles, and both Polycarp and Justin make further mention of it. We may reasonably assume that the practical significance of this dogma—which was of Jewish origin—had been already realized, as it certainly was later by Irenaeus and Tertullian. The body belongs to the whole man such as he was created by God. Whoever denies the resurrection of the flesh thereby attacks the God of creation. An additional reason was the unwillingness to give up the Jewish eschatology. But the really decisive argument was the first. Much difficulty indeed was occasioned by St Paul’s statement, that flesh and blood should not inherit the kingdom of God. Irenaeus tells us that it was the main support of the Gnostics; and even before this, Justin attempted to adapt the phrase to the creed of the Church in a book which has been lost. But the stories of the risen Lord appeared more important than words of St Paul. Here the theory of the resurrection of the flesh was actually realized. There is something truly magnificent in the way in which the martyrs go forth to death with the certainty that the God who created their body can likewise restore it.

4. From eschatology we turn to Christology. Here the most valuable tenet, the humanity of Jesus, was protected against the Gnostics and their Docetic dissolvent. This Docetism appeared at a very early date as a natural consequence of the ‘divinity’ of Christ; nor was it confined in all probability to the Gnostic schools. It was opposed first of all by the author of the Pastoral epistles, who maintains the true humanity of Jesus, “One mediator between God and man—the man Christ Jesus.” The author of the Johannine epistles has to do with opponents who deny that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, and who dissolve, as Cerinthus did, the nature of Jesus, i.e., distinguish between the heavenly Christ and the earthly Jesus. They also deny the blood, i.e., the death of Jesus. In opposition to these views John dwells upon the human body of Christ, upon His real death, and upon the unity in the nature of Jesus Christ the Redeemer. A little later we find the characteristic expressions of Docetism in use among the heretics, the adversaries of Ignatius: it was, the body in which Christ suffered was only a phantom. Everything human that is told us of Jesus, His Davidic Sonship, His birth, His eating and drinking, His death and resurrection, all His actions, were only in appearance. In opposition to this Ignatius takes his stand upon the statements of the creed, and to each he adds his ‘verily.’ Here again it is a practical interest for which the Church is struggling; is the personal assurance of salvation to rest upon a phantom or a reality? “Why,” asks Ignatius, significantly, “why should I suffer myself to be cast to the lions for a faith which rests upon an illusion?” And here at least the Church had a very powerful ally in St Paul. His whole system fell to pieces, if its core and centre, the cross, was only a phantom. The reconciliation of the divinity of Christ with His humanity, that was so stoutly defended, causes no anxiety for the present. It is none other than Ignatius who speaks of Jesus by preference as God. The fact itself was all that was of importance. The way in which it was brought about was a question left for future generations to solve. We may at any rate thankfully acknowledge our debt of gratitude to these men. Had it not been for them, the historic Christ would have been entirely explained away.

5. The physical soteriology of the Gnostics now has to make way for the moral and ecclesiastical doctrine of salvation. The Gnostics appealed to St Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit. However one-sided and arbitrary the fashion in which they interpreted this, they were right in the main thought: the Christian is redeemed by the power of God coming over him. How important the Spirit was to them we may infer indirectly from the fact that salvation by the Spirit is completely thrust into the background both in the Pastoral letters and in that of St John. Through the latter we get to know a number of expressions current among the Gnostics: “I have known God; I am in the light; I dwell in God; I am born in God and God’s seed dwells in me; I have passed from death unto life; I love God; the love of God is completed in me; we do not sin, neither have we sinned.” Knowledge always occupies the first place; the second is assigned to mysticism as the fruit of knowledge, to the flight of the soul above all the world to God, and the indwelling of God in the soul. This ideal of piety was in nowise necessarily followed by licentious excess. Even in the case of noble and elevated souls it was, however, usually attended by the neglect and depreciation of simple morality, of love, and social duties. Ignatius excellently characterizes these religious epicures: “They care nothing for love, nothing for widows, nothing for orphans, nothing for the sick, nothing for prisoners or freed captives, nothing for them that hunger and thirst. They neglect the holy eucharist and the prayers of the Church.” The temptation to indulge in this mystic and contemplative piety, appealing as it did so confidently to the words of the Apostle Paul, was very great, and that the Church resisted it with a like confidence, is a proof of its sober sanity. The authors of the Pastoral epistles and of the Johannine writings stand shoulder to shoulder in their zeal for the practical and ethical interpretation of the Gospel of Jesus, in their rejection of all speculations of mysticism and asceticism. Faith and love, says the pseudo-Paul, are the greatest things. Here we have the sound doctrine. All depends upon righteousness, faith, love and unity with one’s brother Christians in the Church. Christians are to do good works, that is, praiseworthy and profitable to men. No Christian is to spend a fruitless life. Better a piety that is useful in many ways than an asceticism which profits but little. The First Epistle of St John contains the same thoughts, only they are expressed in the author’s far more impressive and characteristic phraseology—How is a Christian to be recognized? If he keeps the commandments, if he does righteousness, if he loves the brethren. This is all that really matters. Knowledge and mysticism are empty phrases as soon as simple morality and love are wanting. But where love is, there is also knowledge and communion with God. As God cannot be the direct object of our love, we ought to show the love of God to the brethren. In both groups of letters the doctrine of salvation by the Spirit is thrust into the background; in the Pastoral epistles it is actually given up altogether, because it seriously threatened morality. The Church and the Sacraments take the place of the Spirit; in them the saving grace of God draws near to men. But, then, the Christian is himself to work and to labour, that the new life may be formed in him. A natural consequence of the emphasis thus laid upon morality was the defence of the freedom of the will which first Justin and then Irenaeus undertook. Henceforth nature and man’s will were the watchwords. This antithesis corresponded to actually existing contrasts. The very existence of Christianity as the highest ethical religion was at stake.

6. The last antithesis was the truest. Sect or Catholic Church—the gathering together of the spiritual, or the call to go forth and make disciples of all men. The Gnostics had withdrawn arrogantly from the Church. They had refused to take part in the life of the fellowship. We may infer from St John’s First Epistle that they hated the brethren, i.e., the ordinary Christians; that they criticised and despised them, and gave themselves up exclusively to their mystic love of God. Ignatius says still more plainly: “Love is of no importance to them. They care nothing for widows or orphans, for the sick, or for them that are in bonds, for those set free, for them that hunger and thirst—they withdraw from the Eucharist and the prayer of the Church.”

As against such conduct the watchword is proclaimed: hold fast by the unity of the Church and follow zealously after love in the Church. St Paul himself gave out this watchword in his last letters, for a special congregation in the Epistle to the Philippians, and for the Church as a whole in the so-called letter to the Ephesians. “Forbear with one another in love; giving diligence to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, even as also ye were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.” But this thought of unity receives its most impressive expression in the high priestly prayer in the Gospel of St John. The unity of the Church amidst the Gnostic storms is the aim of the whole of this prayer, the last testament of Jesus to His disciples. Four times Jesus repeats the petition, “That they may be one, even as we are one; I in them and thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one.” But not the prayer alone: the last discourses of Jesus taken as a whole, with the magnificent parable of the vine and the branches which forms their centre, with the new commandment of the love of the brethren and the promise of the spirit of truth—all aim at this duty of ecclesiastical unity. The mere setting forth of the ideal without any direct polemic imparts their wonderful impressiveness to these admonitions. Hence we can understand why the love of the brethren receives such prominence in the First Epistle of St John, in the Pastoral epistles, and in Ignatius. It is not merely zeal for practical Christianity in accordance with the teaching of Jesus which is manifested therein—it is also zeal for ecclesiastical unity and ecclesiastical fellowship which is displayed in all the works of love enumerated by Ignatius. But however ardently this Church may close up its ranks and set forth unity as its aim, it excels the Gnostic sects in its wideheartedness and its universal democratic tendencies. Whilst the Gnostics limited salvation to the spiritual and claimed Christ for themselves, their ecclesiastical opponents, the authors of the Pastoral and Johannine epistles, are the advocates of universal salvation, of the equality of all men before God; God would have all men to be saved. Jesus is the redeemer of all men, the atonement for the whole world. So, too, they reject all the extra sacraments and the superior knowledge of the sectarians, and proclaim the equality of all Christians in knowledge and ripeness. For John, all such as believe are also such as have knowledge. “Ye have the unction of saints, and ye all know. Ye need not that anyone should teach you.” And such, too, is the opinion of the author of the Pastoral letters. Faith is the knowledge of the truth. There is nothing higher than faith. Ignatius warns the Ephesians against the so-called sacrament of unction. “Why do we not then all become men of understanding, seeing we have received the knowledge of God, namely, Jesus Christ?” So the democratic character of Christianity is to be preserved; upon the broad basis of the faith no differences are recognized save those of advance or retrogression in the walk in righteousness.

It was no insignificant or worthless portion of Christianity that the Church determined to defend at all costs against the Gnostics. Of course all that it defended was not of equal value. Christianity clings firmly to its foundation in the Old Testament. It carefully preserves the three articles in its creed which it took over from Judaism: the belief in God the creator, the central position of morality, the hope for the future. The struggle in which it likewise engaged for the sensuous Jewish eschatology and the rabbinical doctrine of inspiration was due to the special circumstances of the time, and did not do very much harm.

In like manner the Church retained the best elements in the Gospel of Jesus: His promise and His claims, the fundamental democratic trait in His character, with His search for the light. On no single point is the Gospel of Jesus on the side of the Gnostics. And thus far the reproach of having fallen away from the Church was fully justified.

The relation of the two contending parties to St Paul was, however, somewhat different. Both seized hold of a portion of his teaching; the Paul whom the Church finally retained was not the whole Paul, but one cut after an ecclesiastical pattern. It cannot be denied that the Gnostics understood many thoughts of St Paul better than the Church his pessimism, his eschatology, his thoughts of the spirit and of redemption. The complete understanding of the Pauline soteriology ceases in the Church after the Gnostic controversy. In opposition to the Gnostics far greater importance is attached to free will, to good works, and the body than was done by St Paul. Man’s natural power and the force of character are estimated more highly, whilst the operations of the divine grace and of the Spirit are exclusively attached to the sacraments. With great tact, however, the Church discovered just what was of use to herself; it was at the same time that which was pre-eminently Christian—Faith, Love, the emphasis laid on works, the connection with the Old Testament. Nor can there be any doubt as to the side on which St Paul would have ranged himself. Can you fancy St Paul abandoning his Church in favour of any conventicling fanatics, however great their sanctity or superior knowledge? The Paul of the Pastoral letters resembles the real Paul—however far he is inferior to him in intellectual power—a hundred times more nearly than the Paul whom the Gnostics imagined for themselves.

The ecclesiastical teachers who remained faithful to the Old Testament, to the Gospel of Jesus, and of the apostle St Paul—that is, the St Paul of the Church—saved Christianity from the greatest danger, the subtlest temptation, with which it was ever threatened. Gnosticism was an attempt on the part of the chaos of peoples to absorb the Gospel of Jesus—an attempt which was doubly dangerous, because it assumed the appearance of a reaction and professed to have attained to a truer estimate and a clearer understanding of Christ and His power. The chaos of peoples declared its readiness to assign to Jesus the very highest position in the Gnostic religion of redemption if He were prepared to become the leader of this its product, consisting of superstition and philosophy, of the superior wisdom, of the mysteries, of the ascetic ideal, of mysticism and of longing. It was the veritable Satan who said to Jesus: “All religions of the world are thine, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me.” But the ecclesiastical teachers who fought the cause of Jesus withstood the temptation. Rather a poor, human, crucified Jesus with His serious morality than this king and god in the realm of superstition. There was honest reverence for reality, and honest indignation against shams in this their answer. There was something straightforward, too, a note of democratic defiance, of limited but thoroughly healthy Philistinism, a decided “No “to every kind of esoteric or aristocratic religion or religious epicurism. Indubitably we have here a reaction of the historic Jesus against the fantastic figment of human invention.

Would that the victory had been complete and the deliverance less imperfect! But in not a few places the chaos of heathen religions left a deep mark on ecclesiastical Christianity; the Church did not succeed in entirely repulsing the foreign elements. The Gnostic speculations were rejected, and the ecclesiastical thereby the more securely established. But are the latter a great deal better or more intelligent? The divinity of Christ and the Logos-Christ are heathen fabrications just as much as the Gnostic Soter, only it is a great deal more difficult to harmonize them with the human Jesus than was the case with the Gnostic Christology.

The defeat of the Gnostic mysteries was effected in like manner. They were reduced in number. Instead of the many initiatory and other rites, the Church retained for the moment but two Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But a portion of the physical and ceremonial theology of redemption remained in the very centre of Christianity. This one portion was sufficient to hand over the Christian religion—for centuries and throughout whole countries—to the dominion of superstition. However great an emphasis was laid upon morality, it was impossible entirely to avert the danger which was conjured up by the sacraments.

Lastly, the ascetic ideal had to give way to the ethical of the Gospels. How loudly the author of the Pastoral epistles thunders against those who would hinder marriage. Yet the same author declares people who contracted a second marriage to be unfit for the office of bishop or deacon. This is a result of the ascetic view of marriage. The opinion that marriage is a stain and that virginity is consequently to be esteemed more highly as a more holy state, is still upheld by the Church. Here we have the source of the later monasticism. In spite, therefore, of many striking contrasts the Church and Gnosticism continue to share more than enough in common—intellectualism and dogma, the sacramental religion, the ascetic view of the sexual relation. It is exceedingly significant that these three factors find no support whatever in the teaching of Jesus, while they are upheld by several passages in the writings of St Paul. And indeed many words of the apostle are already accounted as highly as those of their master.

We must not, it is true, forget that the dangerous attempt to break up the Christian Church into a number of little conventicles of fanatical saints was brilliantly defeated. The one Catholic Church comes forth from the struggle with the Gnostics mightier and more imposing than ever before, without having lost anything of its public, universal, and democratic character. Separatism appears to be entirely banished from it. There is only one kind of Christianity, that of faith, of love, of good works. And this was entirely in harmony with the teaching of Jesus, who did, it is true, recognize the difference between the leaders and the disciples, but suffered no class distinctions among the latter. Though the intention was excellent, the Church’s protest was all in vain, however. The deep lines of cleavage existed as a matter of fact. There was, first of all, the difference between the philosophers and the laymen, the ‘simple Christians’; and next there were the saints and the average worldly Christians. The first distinction was the result of the Hellenization of Christianity at the very time when it was materialized by the influx of international superstition. The latter came in the train of the ascetic and ecstatic tendencies noticeable since the days of St Paul. The Christianity founded by Jesus was a layman’s religion, because in accordance with His teaching, all that really matters in God’s sight are the fruits of righteousness, of purity of heart, of brotherly love, of trust in God. And that is why it accords neither theologian nor monk any preference. But even in the apostolic age, speculative, mystic and ascetic tendencies began to develop by the side of these great essentials. Hence, even at this early date, the existence of a twofold kind of Christianity, which fact the Gnostics turned to the best account, and the ecclesiastical teachers could not suppress with the best will in the world.

And yet, after all deductions, the Church’s victory was the victory of the Gospel within the limits that were alone possible at that time. The Church’s teachers, the opponents of the Gnostics, were the representatives of the old Christianity, such as they had received it, such as they understood it. No blame, therefore, can attach to them. Their merit is to have recognized the attainable and to have attained it. In so doing, they secured a fresh lease of life for Christianity.

The forcible measures employed by the Church.

The conflict between the Catholic and Gnostic teachers was not carried on to the end with merely spiritual weapons. Yes, however bitter it may be to have to make the confession, the spiritual weapons of the Church would not have sufficed to gain the victory. The struggle began when the Church’s institutions were exceedingly primitive, the products of enthusiasm. The men of the Spirit—apostles, prophets, and teachers—were as yet the only authorities besides the words of Jesus, and the canon of the Old Testament. Complete freedom of teaching prevailed, and great freedom in public worship, with a broad-hearted extension of the name of Christian to all who called Jesus Lord. This state of things endangered the existence of the congregations and threatened them with dissolution, while it rendered the clear distinction of the opposing forces exceedingly difficult. The employment of forcible measures by the Church becomes intelligible, and partly, at least, excusable, when we take this desperate position into account.

Three measures were taken by the Church to put an end to the prevailing license. 1. The teachers were placed under Church authority. 2. Public worship was centralized and the government of the congregations entrusted to the bishops. 3. Heretics were excluded and condemned. The birth of the Catholic Church dates from the employment of these measures.

1. The only means of setting some limit to the chaos of conflicting opinions appeared to be to place the teachers under Church authority. What was the use of refuting erroneous opinions as long as each teacher could appeal to the Spirit? The question had to be put: Is any and every person to be allowed to bring forward his new doctrines on the authority of the Spirit? The question needed but to be put to be answered in the negative.

The authors of the Pastoral letters and of the letters of St John, and Ignatius, are united in their efforts to put an end to the freedom of teaching. But they use two different means.

There was first of all the theory that the bishop as such possessed the Spirit. The object of this theory was to create fitting instruments for the office of teaching. The spirit of knowledge is in the possession of few, the apostles and their successors, the bishops. They alone preserve the divine tradition (gift—depositum). The spirit of truth is handed on in succession from one to another by the laying on of hands. The Pastoral letters, which were the first to set up this juridical theory, wanted the presbyters themselves to exercise the teachers office. But this expectation was doomed to be disappointed. The officials had too much to do, and there were teachers besides. Nevertheless, the kernel of this theory won the day, that is, the doctrine of the ‘depositum’ in the hands of the bishops. We find it later in Irenaeus and on a more secure foundation, connected, namely, with the Roman theory of apostolic succession. It was now no longer necessary that the bishop should likewise be a teacher. Merely as bishop, the purity of the teaching was guaranteed in his case. So Ignatius conceived of his position. He was acquainted with bishops to whom the gift of spiritual speech had not been vouchsafed. They were better able to keep silent. It mattered not! In spite of all, the bishop is the representative of God. He who does not keep to the bishop—even in teaching—is far from God.

Next we have the theory of the Rule of Faith. The aim of this theory is itself to create the pure doctrine. It is significant that we come across it in the Johannine epistles. The author of these epistles is no ecclesiastic, nor is the building up of ecclesiastical office his object. His aim is rather to set up a principle which would make a judge of every Christian and not merely of the bishop. We are to try the spirits, i.e., the prophets and the teachers, whether their spirit is of God or not. Knowledge of their teaching is sufficient for this examination. He whose teaching is Docetic is not of God. “Jesus Christ come in the flesh”: such is here the regula fidei. Thereby John attains the same end as the Pastoral epistles, only by a shorter road, without strengthening the position of the bishops.

But the setting up of the Rule of Faith is older than John. The author of the Pastoral epistles is in reality acquainted with both of these ecclesiastical measures. There was an old “preaching of Christ,” a short summary of all that was essential in Christology. St Paul had taught his congregations such an epitome: died, buried, raised again on the third day. Additions were gradually made to this short confession, and first of all without any reference to Gnostic opponents, the object being merely to instruct new converts. The author of the Pastoral letters is acquainted with the following new clauses: Of the house of David; under Pontius Pilate; who shall come to judge the quick and the dead. The omission of all mention of the Virgin Birth, as well as the older view of the descent from David, are sufficient proof that at this time the story of the miraculous birth had not as yet received official sanction. It is only when we come to Ignatius that we find this further addition to the summary, though the Davidic descent is as yet by no means suppressed. His statement is either: of the house of David, of Mary; or, of the seed of David, of the Holy Ghost. Soon after this the Davidic descent was either removed from the creed altogether—so in the old Roman form: of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary—or ascribed to Mary. This is what Justin does: Of Mary the Virgin, who is of the house of David. These additions and changes, however, are not to be ascribed to any anti-gnostic tendency, but to the necessity of harmonizing the catechetical teaching with the widened Faith. We are even told that Gnostics managed to interpret this teaching of Christ docetically. And yet the creed was of use in the conflict with the Gnostics. It furnished a concise formulary of the principal articles of the Faith. On this the Christians could take their stand, and to this they could retreat when they were hard pressed at any point. Ignatius needs but to add his ‘verily’ to the ‘born, died,’ etc., and he has already driven the Gnostics from the field. The congregations were instructed to interpret the creed in a strictly anti-gnostic sense, and to use it as a defensive weapon. At the beginning of the second century it was used here and there in connection with the baptismal confession of belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From this combination arose the Apostles Creed. Where it was used first of all we do not know.

Two conditions were now clearly laid down for the teachers:—

1. Whenever a teacher wishes to exercise his vocation he has to be approved by the bishop and be licensed by him.

2. Every teacher is strictly bound by the regula fidei.

Important alterations followed hence. The withdrawal of the free permission to teach implied negatively the cessation of free theological production, positively the exaltation of the ecclesiastical tradition, i.e., of the apostles and their writings, into the place of the sacred canon.

One characteristic of the sub-apostolic age is the immense increase in the esteem with which the first apostles were regarded. All the Gospels, the Acts, the First Epistle of St Clement, Ignatius, the Epistle of St Jude, the Didache, all go to prove this point. The men of the earlier age—St Paul above all others—had thought in the Spirit. The men of this age seek their inspiration in the thoughts of the apostles instead of depending directly upon the Spirit. The apostles are the Spirit. The farewell discourses in St John are especially instructive in this connection. Here we find the last trace of the old theory of the Spirit, but only in favour of the apostolic traditions. The apostles are led by the Spirit into all truth. In the apostles the character of Jesus receives its full illumination; i.e., it is understood in all its depth and breadth, and yet so that nothing really new is added, but we merely have a reminiscence of that which Jesus taught before. The mark of a Christian, according to St John, is the abiding in, i.e., the clinging to, Tradition, contrasted with the progressive tendencies of the Gnostics. It is now, by means of this theory of the special gift of the Spirit to the apostles, that the opinion is gradually developed that the apostles have once for all authentically and exhaustively described the person and the work of Christ, and that the task of later theology is practically the tradition of the apostolic interpretation. As early a writing as the Book of the Acts corroborates this opinion by its canonization of the apostles and glorification of the golden apostolic age, compared with which the author’s own age appears a time of decadence. To the prevalence of this opinion must be ascribed, too, the composition of numerous pseudonymic apostolic writings—above all, of the Catholic epistles. Had there not been a very strong feeling of decadence abroad, men would never have gone to such lengths.

As a rule these writings are of a perfectly harmless character, and at least they do not threaten the stability of the Rule of Faith by any originality. We may safely conclude, e.g., from the occurrence of the idea of Christ’s descent into Hades in the First Epistle of St Peter, that it had already found acceptance in a considerable portion of the Church. Later, to be sure, it found its way even into the Creed.

The increased reverence paid to the apostles and their work resulted in the formation of the canon of the New Testament. At first we have, of course, just a collection of the apostolic writings. The process was, however, a very rapid one. The first letter of St Clement, written from Rome to Corinth towards the end of the first century, assumes its readers acquaintance with a number of the letters of St Paul, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Synoptic Gospels, the Acts. Two decades later we find in Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, mention of all four Gospels, the letters of St Paul, including the Pastoral epistles, and the Apocalypse; shortly afterwards in Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, the Acts, and the First of St Peter and the First of St John in addition. The Epistle of Polycarp is especially instructive for the rapid growth of the canon. The writer is a widely respected bishop, who is said to have had personal intercourse with the apostles, or, at least, with the disciples of Jesus. And yet he gives us scarcely anything but quotations from the later writings of the New Testament, scarcely any thing of his own. In so doing he presupposes the possession of copies of the apostolic writings by the larger congregations in their archives. Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis and contemporary of Polycarp, shows us what great interest was still taken in the oral tradition of the apostles. He travelled about everywhere inquiring for sayings of the apostles, and based upon these inquiries he published a collection of apocryphal sayings and legends in his “Exposition of Oracles of the Lord.” But the presupposition of his whole work is that everyone is acquainted with the main features of the gospel story as contained in the written Gospels. The commencement of the formation of the canon really dates from very soon after the turn of the first century. It is marked by two characteristics, the collection of the apostolic writings and the consciousness of living in a decadent age. Everything else—the investment of the book with its sacred character, its elevation to the level of the Old Testament—flows from these without breach of continuity or sense of innovation.

The formation of the canon marks the end of the first age of Christianity under certain aspects. The old Christianity projects itself, as it were, into the canon, and sets up its own past as an object of veneration. Now, too, the chief motive power of the first great age, hero-worship, may be said to be no longer operative.

Instead of the heroes themselves, their writings are accessible as a written law. Here, half a century before Montanism, we have the death-knell of prophecy and of the ever-progressive spirit. The Church of tradition has been formed. Its teachers, Justin and Irenaeus, are right in maintaining that they are merely conservative, that they hand on unchanged to their successors the old and sacred deposit which they have themselves received.

2. Nor was the second measure, the centralization of public worship and Church government in the hands of the bishop—who was almost everywhere in an independent position of supremacy—less decisive.

In the old time it was the itinerant preachers who exercised all the authority and were counted as the divine instruments for the whole Church. As often as they came to a congregation they took the precedence over all the church officers. It was supposed, e.g., that a prophet could pray more effectively than a bishop. Here we have the key to the power which the Gnostics managed to acquire. Owing to these peculiar circumstances they were able to gain adherents in every congregation, and to form branches of their schools and sects in every locality. We have therefore to picture to ourselves congregations in which Catholic and Gnostic societies existed happily side by side, just as did the various family churches which Rom. xvi. presupposes. Indeed the progress of Gnosticism was in a great measure due to the fascination which preachers coming from outside always exercise in a congregation.

If, therefore, Gnosticism was to be extirpated, the freedom of public worship and of ecclesiastical action must be limited. This had not as yet happened at the time of the Pastoral letters. And yet things were pointing that way. We read, for instance: He that “consenteth not to sound words and to the doctrine which is according to godliness (which surely includes the services of the Church), is puffed up.” Definite measures of centralization, however, are still wanting; nor can we be surprised at this as long as the bishop is merely the president of the college of presbyters. Public worship can only be effectively centralized when episcopacy has become monarchical.

The Johannine letters, too, which probably date but a few years later than the Pastoral epistles, furnish us with proofs that public worship had not been completely centralized by the time of their composition. In the Third Epistle we still find the old itinerant preachers wandering about and trying to gain a hearing, while the head of one particular congregation—presumably the bishop—refuses to give them a reception. Here we have both tendencies actively at work—that to the monarchical episcopate (Diotrephes, who very much wishes to be the first); and that to the centralization of public worship—the exclusion of the itinerant preachers.

Both tendencies reach their culminating point in Ignatius. The monarchical episcopate must now be presupposed, at least for Asia Minor and Syria. There is no longer any need to struggle for that. But the struggle still continues for the centralization of public worship and church government in the hands of the bishop and the college of elders. That is the only weapon wherewith to ward off the danger of heresy. And it is something relatively new, for the greatest emphasis is laid upon it. So entirely does it engross the thoughts of Ignatius, that he speaks of it even in an ecstatic condition. Once at Philadelphia, he cried out in the midst of an assembly in a loud voice, the voice of God: “Keep to the bishop and the presbytery and the deacons.” Afterwards he assures the men of Philadelphia that he had had no previous knowledge of divisions in the congregation: his utterance had been inspired by the Spirit. And no wonder, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. On the lips of Ignatius the word bishop occurs about as frequently as the phrase ‘kingdom of God’ did on those of the previous generations of Christians.

Never did any man use more extravagant language about the ecclesiastical importance of the bishop than Ignatius. To the people he says: “Where the shepherd is, there do ye follow as sheep”; “Wherever the bishop appears, there let the multitude be; just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Church Catholic.” Apart from bishop, presbyters, and deacons there is no Church. “As many as are of God and of Jesus Christ are with the bishop.” The practical consequence of this exaltation of the episcopate is the one command which runs through all the letters alike: “Let no man do anything without the bishop”; “He that doeth anything without the knowledge of the bishop serveth the devil.” That Eucharist is alone to be held lawful which is celebrated by the bishop or by his duly appointed deputy. “It is not allowable either to baptize or to hold a love feast without the bishop, but whatsoever he may approve, this also is well-pleasing to God.” Those who marry are likewise to obtain the bishop’s consent to their union. “One body of Christ, one cup, one altar, just as there is one bishop together with his presbyters and deacons.” So speaks the first sacerdotalist.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FATE OF JESUS.

THE origin of the New Testament is the last important event in the history of the early days of Christianity, and at the same time that which most deeply influenced all successive centuries. It is most intimately bound up with the struggle against the Gnostics, because this implied the cessation of the original productive activity and the consecration of tradition, i.e., of the apostles and their writings. Its sources, however, are to be traced to far older fundamental presuppositions of Christianity.

Christianity was bound to obtain its New Testament, because Judaism had its Old Testament. Originating as it did from a book-religion and developing in the constant veneration of the sacred writings, it was inevitably destined itself to become a, book-religion in its turn. Jesus, it is true, wished to set His disciples free from the learning of the Scribes, and St Paul gave as his watchword: “Not the letter but the Spirit.” The great mass of Christians, however, remained as incapable as before of conceiving religion without the sacred book, and the Pauline gnosis confirmed them in this tendency. One can never overestimate the power of such a tradition. Individuals can emancipate themselves from it, but not the community. Is not the fact that the whole of the Old Testament could become a Christian book very striking in itself? How many chapters, how many books, it contains which directly contradict Jesus and the Gospel! And yet the question whether it should be received or not was never even raised in the Church. It is of a text which must have sounded exceptionally strange to Christian ears, “I said, Ye are Gods,” that Jesus says (according to the Fourth Gospel), “The Scripture cannot be broken.” When people, however, have conceptions such as these of a book-religion so completely engrained in them from earliest infancy, it may confidently be predicted that they are certain sooner or later to obtain their own sacred writings. Thus ultimately the origin of the New Testament can be traced back to the consecration of the book of the law, Deuteronomy, under King Josiah. It was only a question of time when the veneration that was felt for the Old Testament should be extended to Christian writings as well.

But the origin of the New Testament was likewise necessitated by the circumstances of Christianity itself. St Paul, the founder of the science of the Church, is the father of the New Testament, although he himself certainly thought of nothing less than that. It was he who first clearly contrasted Christian thought as revealed knowledge with all non-Christian thought as natural knowledge. Christian writings did not enter into his consideration here in the very remotest degree; but it is plain that a later generation could as easily ascribe Christian writings to the inspiration of the Spirit as St Paul ascribed glossolaly and prophecy. Here, too, we have the only justification for the separation of the New Testament, not from other Christian writings, but from the writings of other peoples and religions. The Christian Scriptures alone are the product of the Christian spirit—or ought to be, one thinks of the Apocalypse!—no other book is the fruit of this Spirit. The more foreign elements the Church took over in course of time from Judaism and Hellenism, the more important it was that it should possess in these writings of the earliest Christian age a constant standard for that which was Christian or in conformity with the Church. At the same time, of course, the argument from Scripture is subject to the same limitations as that from the theory of the Spirit in which it originates—both alike appeal exclusively to such as are Christians already; no one else can be convinced by them.

It was the struggle with the Gnostics and, generally speaking, certain definite conditions, which determined the selection of these Christian writings. The first decade of the second century seems to fulfil these conditions best. The fact that the writings which form the New Testament towards the end of the second century were already—with scarcely any exceptions in the possession of the ecclesiastical writers Ignatius, Polycarp and Papias, at the beginning of the century, and that no others come under the same category, would appear to lead us inevitably to such a conclusion. This applies to the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of St Paul with the Pastoral epistles, the First letter of St Peter, the First of St John, the Apocalypse. The Epistle of St Jude is too short to admit of our saying definitely that it was known to these writers. But the Second Epistle of St Peter shows us that it was well known at a time when apostolic writings were still manufactured. I expressly do not say that their writings formed the canon at this early date. The only fact that it is important here to establish is that teachers of the Church found edification and instruction in these writings and in none others, and made copious use of them. Our insight into the growth of the idea of the canon is unfortunately very much less clear than it would otherwise have been, owing to the fact that of Justin’s writings (dating from about the middle of the century) only apologies and no ecclesiastical tracts have been preserved. For in controversial writings intended for heathen or Jewish readers there was no place for any appeal to the authority of St Paul, and it is a mere chance that we obtain an accurate knowledge of the esteem in which the Apocalypse was held in the Church. The only facts that we can establish are that the Epistles of St Paul, the Gospel of St John, and the Acts, belong to the necessary presuppositions of Justin’s writings. We learn from a genuine fragment that he had a controversy with the Gnostics concerning a passage in St Paul in 1 Cor. xv. 50. It is probable, therefore, that his statement as to the reading of the gospels together with the law and the prophets in the public services does not tell us—i.e., his heathen readers—everything. In addition to this we have the frequent use of the New Testament writings in the contemporaneous Gnostic schools, which certainly dates from a later time than that of the Church. All these considerations incline us to conclude that the decisive occurrences of the collection and selection of these writings out of the whole mass of Christian literature took place while the second century was still in its infancy.

Now if the New Testament as a whole dates from the beginning of the second century, its theology must in the main be the theology of this period. The theology of the New Testament is the theology of Catholicism, as it originates at the beginning of the second century. However much older the single writings may be, however much unwritten tradition those who collected and ordered the writings may have respected in addition, the body of writings as a whole must have corresponded to their thoughts and feelings. Here we have a fact which deserves notice even to-day. When the New Testament as a whole is our authority, then we are simply submitting to the judgment of the Church at the beginning of the second century. It is not the words of Jesus or the letters of St Paul which are then our final court of appeal, but the thoughts of the ecclesiastics who selected the words of Jesus and the letters of St Paul together with documents of a later date to form the canon of the Christian scriptures.

The New Testament is composed of two strata of documents. The older includes the Synoptics, the genuine letters of St Paul, the Apocalypse; the later the Gospel of St John, the Acts, the Pastoral epistles, 1 Peter, 1 John. The two strata are to be conceived of in such a relation that the older writings are occasionally to be interpreted by the later, and occasionally they are obscured by them—that is the world-historic significance of the New Testament.

The writings of the older strata are our real authority for the history of the earliest Christian age—the world’s greatest possession for all time. A grand and savage freedom characterizes them all, though in varying degrees. What St Paul has left us has come down to us with the least change, a series of occasional letters called forth simply and solely by the needs of the moment, revealing the man just as he was, rough-hewn, without any artificial shaping or polishing. The letter to the Ephesians is the only one that here and there strikes one as not belonging to the series, but that which it shares in common with his other letters outweighs in importance the marks of a later age. If only Jesus could speak to us as directly as His apostle, how gladly we would surrender all the gospels! In the best of cases it is but a broken impression that we obtain of Him. We have lost the oldest written sources, the collection of logia from which Matthew and Luke derived their discourses, and much else besides. No writing of an eyewitness of Jesus has come down to us. Even St Mark’s narrative would have been incorporated by the first and third evangelists in their compilations and so deprived of its separate existence had they been able to do as they wished. In spite of the amputated conclusion it is a great piece of good fortune that they did not succeed. Although entirely the product of the faith of the Church, it is the least ecclesiastical writing about Jesus. It describes the prophet, the worker of miracles, the Messiah, the Son of God, with such ardent enthusiasm, so heroic, so great, and yet so human, that ten years later it could not be tolerated. Matthew and Luke created the great ecclesiastical gospels; the former, more nearly allied to Jewish thought and speech, writes rather more legally and with ecclesiastical institutions in view, the latter for the Gentile Church; he is edifying, and would touch the feelings even at the cost of stern truth. The gospels of the infancy and the conclusions are characteristic of this later age. All that was missed in the life of Jesus was put into the mouth of the risen Lord: the mission to the Gentiles, baptism, the christianizing of the Old Testament. These two Gospels already mark the transition to the second group. Then, again, the Apocalypse is a book that stands by itself; it is a prophecy and a war-cry, and both are inspired by the Holy Ghost. It stands in the New Testament as the book of the Spirit, to which one pointed with pride in controversy with the Jews abandoned by God’s Spirit.

We must endeavour to realize what inconvenient problems were occasioned for the later age by the existence of these writings. In the first place, Jesus and St Paul by no means agreed together. In Jesus we have the promise of the kingdom of God and the call to do God’s will in order to enter into this kingdom. Such are the essential contents of the preaching of Jesus in all three Synoptists. The person of Jesus is painted with ecclesiastical enthusiasm, but the preaching of Jesus is not ecclesiastical until we come to the conclusions. Nowhere do we find blessedness attached to Jesus alone, or faith in Him as the Messiah demanded by Himself. The whole groundwork of the synoptical tradition originates from a time when there was as yet no Church. The gospel of St Paul is of an entirely different nature: the heavenly Son of God who was crucified for our salvation and rose again, and the way to salvation, faith in the grace of God that was manifested in Him. How can these two be harmonized? And even if the Church decided to follow St Paul—and in all essential points it did follow his guidance—then it had some very hard knots to untie in his own person. He stands there in complete isolation, in eager contest with the emissaries from Jerusalem, not over-friendly to the twelve themselves, united to Jesus Himself by nothing but a vision. And his gospel is unusually severe and stern, hostile to the law, dangerous to morality itself when it proclaims the impossibility of the fulfilment of the law and the supremacy of the Spirit instead of the law. True, St Paul is a Churchman, but how free he is, how enthusiastic, how indifferent as to whether he creates lasting ecclesiastical organizations for later generations. The genuine historic Paul looks down like a giant from a steep and solitary height upon a race of dwarfs.

It is true that the early Christians scarcely realized these contradictions and problems as sharply as this. Had this been the case, then all the writings of the second strata must of course have been conscious forgeries composed with the set purpose of effacing the picture of the first age by superimposing another. And then, too, we should have expected some reactionary movement to have been started long before Marcion stood forth as the enthusiastic champion of the older era. Such a supposition is unnecessary. The smoothing of rough corners and edges, the harmonizing of contradictions, the setting of Jesus and St Paul in an ecclesiastical framework, can be explained for the most part, without the assumption of any conscious intention, through the rapid development of catholic modes of thought in the second and third generation. We can realize this process very vividly when we examine the way in which the synoptic sources have been edited. It was a perfectly natural assumption for the later evangelists to suppose Jesus to have been really such as they depicted Him in their additions and corrections. They are entirely innocent of so wanton an act as the conscious adaptation of the historic picture of Christ to the imaginings of their own faith. On the contrary, they fancy that it is the earlier evangelists, who are their models, who have made mistakes and omissions which they correct, fully supposing themselves to be in the right. And then, too, we must not forget that this later age finds many points of contact—real or imaginary—in the old writings for its own favourite thoughts. Certain expressions and verses in St Mark which were intended in anything rather than a Pauline sense suggested to it quite naturally Pauline thoughts of the Son of God, of the atoning death of Jesus, of universal salvation, of the necessity of faith. Before the Gospel of St John was written the Synoptists were read in a Johannine, that is, a Pauline sense. No very great power of imagination is needed in order to understand how this could be done, as three-fourths of the readers of the Bible still read it in exactly the same way, and the most popular devotional literature effectually prevents the possibility of any other method of interpretation. In reading the Sermon on the Mount faith in Jesus is simply taken as a natural presupposition. The sayings and parables of the forgiveness of sins through the love of God, our Heavenly Father, are interpreted with the tacit addition “for the sake of the blood of Jesus Christ.” So our readers of the Bible read the Gospels to-day, and so, too, the Christians read them at the end of the first century. Now just as Jesus was here interpreted in an ecclesiastical and Pauline sense, so St Paul had also to suffer his letters to be interpreted in an altogether different sense from that in which they were written. They were read as the letters of a talented ecclesiastic and preacher, whereas they had been written by a revolutionary and altogether original genius. This generation, which exalted the continuity of tradition into the canon of truth, had no understanding for his originality and independence, for his antithesis “of God and not of men.” They were disposed to cover up the disputes of Christians with each other under the mantle of love. So great was the change that had come over the whole ecclesiastical position, that as often as they read about the sharp antitheses of his theology they endeavoured to harmonize and to minimize them, while edifying themselves with his polemics against the Jews, with his comforting words as to grace and faith, with his lofty morality and the inexhaustible treasures of practical ecclesiastical wisdom in his letters. All this was done before the Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral epistles existed, just as it is done to-day on the basis of these writings. Nor can we fail to recognize the influence of the Gospels on the interpretation of St Paul. A positive relation to the law, a higher estimation of good works, are like wise discovered in St Paul, and he is imagined as an evangelist of the life of Jesus as well as of His death.

It is impossible to arrive at any fair estimate of the writings of the second strata unless we realize the entire change which had taken place in the thought of the Church, in which all Christians participated alike and which cannot be attributed to any single individual. The authors of the Gospel of St John and the Acts of the Apostles and the rest of these documents must still be allowed a considerable measure of original composition, even if the motives and presuppositions of their writings are to be found in the Christian atmosphere by which they were surrounded. It is only by taking this atmosphere into account that it becomes comprehensible that they dared to do what they did, and that they were met by understanding and approval in all quarters. But then it also becomes evident that their writings cease to be historical documents for Jesus and His gospel, or for St Paul, his character and his theology. They tell us what the growing Catholic Church thought about Jesus and St Paul. Further than that their historical reliability does not go.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FATE OF PAUL.

OF the other writings of the second strata of the New Testament, none approaches even from afar to the importance of the Fourth Gospel, which it would not be too much to say has influenced the world’s history by its Pauline transformation of the picture of Jesus. But yet it is significant, too, how the Apostle Paul and the twelve are adapted in these later writings to the Catholicism of the turn of the century. In St Paul’s case the Acts and the Pastoral epistles which are based upon it have to be considered.

In these writings Paul appears as the great missionary to the heathen, the opponent of the Jews, the ecclesiastical organizer. The Paul of history was all this most decidedly—only after a somewhat different fashion, and he was something else besides. The first point which is everywhere emphasized is that Paul became a Christian from being a persecutor of the Christians, and right from the midst of this persecution. Three times the story of his conversion is repeated in the Acts. It was a striking example for this later generation how God can turn the heart even of an enemy of the faith. Thus, then, it serves the Church as one of the most impressive stories of a conversion, but not as that which it really was to St Paul—the genesis of his gospel and his apostleship. It is indeed remarkable how completely the impression of his independence has been lost, and how marked the tendency is, on the contrary, to attach the convert firmly to the old tradition. Ananias, a pious Jewish Christian in Damascus, baptizes him and introduces him to the Christians in that town. Being not long after expelled thence, he comes to Jerusalem, where Barnabas brings him to the apostles and he associates with them. The work of Ananias appears so important to the author that he twice gives us a detailed account of it. Nothing is omitted that could serve to establish an unbroken chain of apostolic tradition. As Luke in all probability read the Epistle to the Galatians containing St Paul’s own account, one can here see how the Epistles of St Paul were read—in a devotional and ecclesiastical spirit, as was only right and fair, about in the same way as they were read up to the days of the great F. C. Baur of Tübingen. But it is instructive to notice that our authors go still further in their friendly disposition towards the old tradition, for they evidently delight in assigning great prominence to the strong Jewish tradition in St Paul. In the judgment of the Acts, St Paul was not to be blamed but rather congratulated on having been a pious Pharisee from his youth up. Does he not notice in the case of Ananias himself how, judged by Jewish conceptions, he had been a devout observer of the law? The Pharisees are the men of hope; even as a Christian St Paul feels himself related to them. What else is Christianity but Judaism with its hopes fulfilled? The Christian is the true pious Jew, and therefore, as a Pharisee, Paul was on the surest road that led to Christianity. He only lacked the knowledge that in Jesus the Messiah had already come. And therefore he can say that he has served God from his forefathers in a pure conscience, as though no breach in his religious relation had ever taken place; and therefore he can praise Timothy for having been educated by his grandmother and mother in the true Jewish piety that was based upon the Scriptures. The revolutionary has been here transformed into the regular conservative. This is quite in accordance with Catholic modes of thought. For Catholicism can endure no revolution. All the dangerous elements in St Paul have been suppressed.

The picture that is drawn of St Paul is altogether based upon this conception. Everything great and original, the apostleship that is of revelation, the new gospel of Christian liberty, the conflict with the twelve, the great controversy with the judaizers, has completely disappeared or has been smoothed away past recognition. Peter, not Paul, is the first missionary to the Gentiles; Paul does not go to heathen lands till he and Barnabas are sent by the congregation of Antioch. Even now he will not go to the Gentiles in the first instance, and it is only the opposition of the Jews that drives him to it. Then a division of opinion certainly does arise over the question of the circumcision of the Gentile Christians. The recollection of this was evidently too firmly imprinted in men’s minds for our author to omit all mention of it. But the only use he makes of it is, first, to afford Peter and James an opportunity for the proclamation of the universal scope of the Gospel on the basis of the faith that alone confers blessing, while Paul gives an account of his missionary journeys and takes no part in the debate; and next to refer the origin of the so-called decree of the apostles to a solemn moment in the history of the Church. Again, one asks oneself in amazement, can this man have read the Epistle to the Galatians, seeing that he thus transforms the great controversialist and champion of liberty into a harmless participant in the missionary meeting at Jerusalem? And yet this letter was read by the Church in later ages as well, and with the solitary exception of Marcion, no one noticed anything. Naturally, then, the unedifying quarrel with Peter at Antioch, and the great Jewish counter-mission, together with Paul’s opposition to it, were passed over altogether; why should we preserve these unpleasant pages in history? Every edifying method of treating history understands the art of silence in such cases.

The picture which the book of the Acts draws of St Paul is even thus a mighty one. Something of the magic charm of the first Christian mission, with all its new outlook, its surprises, its obstacles and victorious progress, accompanies all the journeys of the apostle. Rich, invaluable material here lay to hand in the so-called “we-source,” the travel-journal of a companion. From this we learn, amongst other things, that St Paul did really first turn to the Jews in order to get access to the Gentiles. Here our author found a foundation for his theory that it was in every case and always the unbelief of the Jews that was the occasion of the mission to the heathen, and that as a matter of fact it was against their will that the missionaries were led by God to take up their new task. It was an apologetic theory, formed to meet the Jewish reproach of the frivolous abandonment of the religion of their fathers, while at the same time it satisfied the Catholic consciousness which furthered the retention of the old tradition as long as possible. There are other instances, too, where valuable pieces of information appear in a special light, owing to the author’s special method of selection. The circumcision of Timothy, the vow in Corinth and afterwards in Jerusalem, are not necessarily inventions, but the mention of them spoils the picture of the apostle, if all features of complete emancipation from the law are omitted. But what is one to say to the theology which is ascribed to St Paul in the speeches to the Gentiles and in his controversies with the Jews? Here we see the change produced by the ecclesiastical position in the case of a man who sincerely meant to be a disciple of St Paul. He has, of course, grasped St Paul’s fundamental thought that Jesus was the Saviour of the world, and that faith in Him carries with it the promise of eternal life. As far as this foundation is concerned, he is a true follower of the apostle. But in the arguments that he produces to convince the Jews he differs altogether from St Paul. It is no longer the question of the law, the proof of the impossibility of the fulfilment of the law, the arousing of the feeling of despair that leads to faith in Jesus as the Redeemer, but the Jewish theology of the Messiah, the proof of the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ. The only subject of controversy between St Paul and the Jews is whether Jesus is the Messiah according to the Scriptures, and whether the Messiah had to die and rise again. This is exactly the way in which John tries to arouse faith in Jesus. And hereby, surely, the Pauline preaching is deprived of all its deep dramatic and personal elements, and is clothed instead in the dress of an altogether trivial scholastic theology. And this comes about without any special fault on the part of the author himself. It is simply due to the entire change in the position of affairs: the dogmatic controversy with the Jews now occupies the foreground. It is only like a faint recollection of old times that we occasionally hear that St Paul was really persecuted by the Jews because of his abandonment of the law.

The account that is given us of the oldest form of Christian life in the Pauline congregations is exceedingly scanty. There is no trace, for instance, of any attempt to draw upon the rich treasures of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Nor should we ever have imagined, had we possessed the Acts alone, that such a thing as the enthusiasm of the early Christians ever existed in the Pauline congregations. The more significant, therefore, is the selection of the few details which the author does impart to us: the appointment of the elders, the last instructions to the deputation from Miletus with the warning against the false teachers. But it is just these few details of ecclesiastical organization which the book of the Acts presents that form the connecting link with the Pastoral epistles which present us with a Paul who does nothing but regulate the constitution of the Church and combat the false teachers. The Paul of the Acts and not of the Epistles is the starting-point here, in spite of the little difference that the bishops now claim that reward for their labours which the speech at Miletus had bidden them forego. Nor is it very edifying to see the great destroyer of Jewish ecclesiasticism and the creator of free communities subject to nothing but the Spirit, here exalted as the first example of the clever ecclesiastic.

The theology of the Pastoral epistles is built upon the foundation of the Pauline soteriology, but goes further in a Catholic direction than St John. Faith in Jesus comes, as ever, first and foremost; it accepts the free grace of God which came down to us in the expiatory death of Jesus. But then love, righteousness, patience, and, generally speaking, good works, must at once be added to faith, if we are to attain to the right kind of piety. There is no mention of the Spirit in this connection except—and this is significant—when speaking of baptism. Otherwise the Spirit is confined to the officials. John would surely scarcely have written this. And in like manner predestination is much more clearly abandoned than in St John. It depends upon a man’s own self whether he become a vessel to honour or dishonour, whether he purge himself or not. The Church is the great house full of saints and sinners. Here, too, we have a sign that the age of early enthusiasm is past.

But in spite of all this it is a practical, an excellent conception of Christianity, one which would by no means discredit even St Paul himself. The author knows exactly what the Church of his age needs above all else in order to be steered safely through all perils and dangers. But as he would have had too little authority had he written merely in his own name, he assumes the authority of the aged apostle. Some few short notes of St Paul to his younger missionary associates may very likely have been known to him, and may have helped him to clothe his thoughts in a skilful dress, but at the very beginning of the Second Epistle to Timothy he has abandoned his rôle, and the greater part of these letters is, after all, his own addition.

The transformation of St Paul into a Catholic ecclesiastic in the Acts and the Pastoral epistles was far from being attended by the important consequences which resulted from the exaltation of St John over the Synoptic Gospels. A man who served the Church with such devotion as St Paul had done, cannot object if she added some touches to the original picture in order to adapt it for her use in later times. And yet the world was thus deprived of some of the best and greatest elements in the apostle’s character. It could no longer look back upon the picture of a man who trusted in God and conscience alone, and thence derived the gigantic strength to overthrow traditions and authorities in vested with the sanctity of centuries.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE.

ONE is always glad to turn aside from the theology of this period to the personal religion of the age, for here we can trace the personal influence of Jesus. Never has the theology of any age been identical with its Christianity. Never has it been anything else than an attempt at harmonizing the Gospel with the spiritual force of each age. St Paul was a true disciple of Jesus in his conception of personal religion, of that which we call the life with God. It was only in his apologetics, in his proof of the way, the one sole way, which leads to this piety, that he did not keep close to his Master, but fashioned a theology of his own in his controversy with the Jews, which he then took to be the Gospel itself. So it was again in the course of the second century. Theological systems were often put forward so prominently that one was tempted to mistake them for the Christianity of that age. We can assure ourselves of our mistake if we trace the power of the Gospel on the lives of men even in this age of the growth of Catholicism.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE CHRISTIAN MODE OF LIFE.

FROM the very first there was a sharp distinction between the Christianity that was actually lived in the churches and the Christianity which the teachers of the Church postulated in their writings. It is the old chasm between the real and the ideal. The higher and the purer the ideal, the greater the divergence was bound to appear the more severe the criticism to be applied. That which is called worldliness did not make its way into Christianity through decay from some high level of excellence. It came through the mission itself as each new convert brought in a portion of the world along with him, and could not be raised at once to the level of the morality of the Gospel. Even in the apostolic age the world thus obtained a firm footing in the congregations, only it was, as a rule, still more or less concealed by the enthusiasm of the first love. There may of course have been isolated ideal congregations, but never an ideal Church. The First Epistle of St Clement gives us, it is true, a picture of the Church of Corinth which is painted in an altogether ideal light; everything was perfect in this church—faith, piety, hospitality, knowledge, order, humility, unity, and charity—a magnificent picture. The descent from these heights to the actual reality a little later appears truly lamentable. But we may consider most of this description to be due to the vivid colouring of Greek rhetoric, the aim being to accentuate the contrast as much as possible. It is Paul and not Clement who presents us with a true picture of the Christianity of the Corinthians. It is true that in the sub-apostolic age we shall have to speak of an increase of worldliness. Enthusiasm, the first love, grew cold, and the position was rendered still more critical by the entrance of great multitudes into the Church. In some places worldliness flaunts about without either shame or attempt at concealment, so that the sharp line of distinction between the world and the congregations was obliterated at a very early date. Then came the distraction consequent upon the Gnostic controversies, which completely disorganized the congregations and often produced actual schism. The subsequent persecutions should have favoured a moral renovation; instead of this they frequently rather encouraged apostasy and hypocrisy. Nearly all the writings of our period bear witness to the great damage wrought by this process of worldliness, most of all the Pastoral epistles, the epistle of St James, and the “Shepherd” of Hermas. Decay set in among the leaders, and thence made its way through the whole of the congregation down to the newly-converted proselytes. Many of the old itinerant preachers, no longer exposed to the privations of a missionary’s life in a heathen country, were the first to deteriorate in the shameless enjoyment of their privileges and in fanatical insubordination. This brought the ‘Spirit’ into discredit, and the place of the free teacher was taken by the permanent official. It soon became evident, however, that the presbyters were themselves in many cases too degenerate to be equal to the new and exacting claims that were made upon them. The author of the Pastoral epistles has to remind them of the elementary claims made by decency and order. Drunkenness, covetousness, coarseness, impurity, disorder in their own households, seem to have been found only too often even amongst the ruling elders. Such men exposed the Christians to the mockery of the heathens, and could acquire no authority in the congregations. It sometimes happened that proselytes were made bishops immediately after baptism, and then “being puffed up, fell into the condemnation of the devil.” It is possible that the earnest admonitions of the Pastoral epistles contributed to bring about a real improvement in the state of the officials. A comparison with the demands which Polycarp makes of them points to this conclusion. But examples of bad shepherds were not wanting even in later times, and it is from Polycarp himself that we hear how a certain presbyter named Valens and his wife caused great scandal at Philippi, especially by their covetousness, but also in other ways. Hermas complains at Rome of deacons who deprived widows and orphans of their means of subsistence and contrived to profit thereby themselves. It was indeed a calamity for the Christian Church that from the very first the officials in the congregations frequently fell so far short of the ideal of their office. Complaints against priests and bishops are as old as Christianity itself. With the Gnostic movement came recrimination and competition amongst the office-bearers. Many congregations split asunder. Conventicles of the Gnostic prophets were held by the side of the principal assembly under the bishop. Even where there were no Gnostics, as in Hermas’ time at Rome, there were other false prophets of a similar nature who prophesied in secret and worked against the bishops. When the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy had been clearly drawn and peace thereby restored to the Catholic congregations, it turned out that the bishops had serious rivals in their own congregations in the shape of the saints. Amongst all non-ascetic admirers of the ascetic ideal the ascetic was esteemed more highly than the priest. But the sanctity of these saints themselves—and the widows were counted as belonging to their number—was often of a somewhat fragile character. At a very early date we hear of widows in receipt of the charity of the congregation by reason of their honourable title, who nevertheless lived in luxury or simply went out in quest of a husband. It was so comfortable and profitable to be called widow that many women had themselves enrolled in the sacred order though they possessed means enough to support themselves and their children. Later on, the bishops had to meet yet another form of competition. Able teachers founded schools which became the intellectual centres of the congregations, to the great annoyance of many of the official leaders.

CHAPTER XV.

THE REDEMPTION.

CHRISTIANITY appeared in the world as the religion of redemption. Promising, as it does, everlasting bliss to mankind, and setting forth as the road thereto the doing of God’s will, its aim is to inspire men even now with courage, strength and joy for the new life, through the gladness of communion with God. Jesus Himself was more than a prophet and teacher of God’s will. He came to men as their Redeemer, to bring God near to them and lift them up to be children of God.

After His death, His redemptive power continued to work in the fellowship of His disciples, as the Spirit of Christ, to use St Paul’s expression. The story of His life, and, still more, the new life of His disciples, kindled at His flame, now took the place of His Person. Christianity ever clung fast to this its claim. It did not merely hold up the goal to men and show the way to blessedness. It did, as a matter of fact, set their feet on the right road and led them to their journey’s end by imparting the power of God which lives in Jesus and His disciples. Everything, therefore, converges on the message of the love or grace of God.

What do we learn of this redemption in the sub-apostolic age? We must draw a sharp distinction between the actual experiences and the postulates. The latter we shall do well to regard with the greatest distrust. Christian writings are filled from one end to the other with statements as to the value of the death of Jesus and of baptism, of the new birth and reception of the Spirit. But they are partly apologetic, and partly devotional watchwords and formulas handed on from one man to another, a part of the language of Christianity, without any objective reality necessarily corresponding to them. The Epistle of Barnabas may serve us as a deterrent example: “We enter the water full of sin and of filth; we come forth with fruit in our hearts, for we have our hope set on Jesus in the Spirit. Before this our heart was a dwelling place of demons; when we received forgiveness and hoped in His name, then we were created anew from the beginning.” Nothing could be better expressed. If it were only true! The authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the First of St Peter, the First of Clement, and Justin ascribe forgiveness and cleansing power to the blood of Jesus, and thereby prove that reliance was placed on this. Here we have merely theories, however, and theories alone are never able to guarantee a new life. Listen to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “If the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” The learned author is, of course, perfectly right in refusing to admit that the blood of the sacrificial victims has any efficacy upon the conscience: but is the blood of Christ, then, any more suited to cleanse the conscience? How can the debt of personal, moral wrongdoing be wiped out by another’s blood? Much superstition was attached from the earliest times to the blood of Christ and to baptism. The effects of both were conceived of as magical, even where no change in the moral nature followed. A necessary consequence of this theology of the blood of Christ and of the sacraments was that men contented themselves with the external objective facts and never asked themselves the question: Am I really a redeemed person in my life?

We are on different ground altogether when Christians speak of their conversion. Here we come across positive facts. The majority of every congregation was as yet formed of converts from heathen ism. Here conversion was an occurrence the day and hour of which were known to every man, for it divided the whole life into two clear divisions. For most men it marked the breach with an evil past, when the filth of bestial barbarity and childish superstition were laid aside. The Christian fellowship conferred great gifts upon them: a pure and moral faith in God, the Gospel ideal of life, and an unshaken hope which lifted them up above all need. In addition they received at their entrance the promise of the forgiveness of all past sins, a gift that brought the greatest blessedness to earnest seekers, of doubtful value, however, to such as were of baser alloy. The new converts were by the grace of God confirmed in their possession of all these realities. The sudden transition to their new condition produced psychical convulsions in many, mysterious ecstatic phenomena. Yet such cases were exceptional. The preponderant feeling which characterized the reception of these new gifts was something half rational, half superstitious. The immense impression made by conversion, the sharp antithesis between then and now, finds frequent expression in early Christian literature. If the expression is not all too stereotyped, we may be sure that there is some underlying experience. Yet in very early times such experiences came to be clothed in a traditional liturgical language which has to be accepted with caution.

But now we come to the principal question: Does the rest of the Christian life correspond to the conversion? Does the Christian really lead a redeemed life from baptism onwards?

All that we gather from the Pastoral epistles, the Epistle of St James, the “Shepherd” of Hermas, the sermon of Clement, leads us to answer the questions decidedly in the negative. Very many Christians indeed cannot be counted redeemed. The difference between the former and the present life was frequently imperceptible. Heathen laxity and licentiousness, superstition, uncertainty and fear, party spirit, care—all made their way over into the Christian congregations from their heathen surroundings. The state of things presupposed by the Epistle of St James and the personality of Hermas afford the plainest evidence. The readers of the Epistle, e.g., are on so low a plane that it is quite intelligible that the question has been asked whether they are Christians at all. The author inveighs against his rich readers with a “Woe unto you,” as though they stood outside of the Church. And naturally, for they blaspheme the Christian name by their un-Christian conduct. Nor do the majority of the congregation appear to have been much better. “You crave for something and do not get it. You commit murder and try your utmost to secure the thing and yet you cannot do so. You quarrel and fight. You do not get what you want because you do not ask. When you ask you do not get it, because you ask for a wrong purpose—to spend what you get upon your pleasures.” “Make your hands clean, you sinners, and your hearts pure, you vacillating men! Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep.” Are these men still to be considered Christians? Yes or no, as you like it. Redeemed children of God they are not.

With the exception of Ignatius, the Roman prophet Hermas is the only Christian whom we get to know personally from his writings. The declaration at his baptism that his sins were forgiven him had made a profound impression upon him. This forgiveness, however, only covered his pre-Christian past. After baptism—so he was taught—the Christian was to sin no more, but remain pure. This was a sheer impossibility for Hermas and his family. His household was disorderly. His children blasphemed God, betrayed their parents, and lived riotous lives. His wife sinned continuously with her tongue. But he himself is far from being an ideal character. At the very beginning of his book his conscience pricks him because of adulterous thoughts; his imagination is altogether corrupt and easily trespasses on forbidden ground. He behaves toward his children like a good-natured blockhead, and shuts his eyes to their failings. The third commandment contains a terrible confession as to his truthfulness: “Never in all my life have I spoken a single true word, but always and to all men have I spoken with cunning and made my lies pass as good coin among all; nor did any man ever contradict me, but they believed my words.” Hence, too, throughout his life he knows that he is full of sin, and confessions of sin are never absent from his lips. His will-power is half broken. He has no backbone. Fear always has the upper hand in him. The picture which we gather from his writings as a whole gives one the impression of an unredeemed nature. Sin holds him fast in her chains. He cannot shake himself free. Hence his anxious question, “What must I do to be saved? How shall I make atonement to God for my misdeeds, if even sins of thought are recorded?”

The picture is, of course, incomplete. We have not got the whole Hermas, any more than the prophet Ezra in his prayers and questionings is the whole Ezra. His personality is divided into a strong and a weak half. The former is represented by the angel, Hermas’ better self. True, the woman who appears to him in the first vision merely represents his evil conscience, which fills him with misery. But otherwise the angel is sharply distinguished from him, as the soul of all that is good and confident and glad and strong. He speaks but to utter vigorous commands. “Be of good cheer, doubt not; be strong, believe; cast thy care upon the Lord.” The fourth vision is especially instructive, where Hermas overcomes the terrors of the last vision by recollection of the voice which he heard, “Doubt not, Hermas.” Thereupon Hermas puts on the armour of faith, thinks of the great things which the angel has taught him, and plucks up courage. His conversation with the angel at the close of the twelfth commandment is likewise full of comfort. When he asks in doubt whether God’s commandments can ever be fulfilled, the angel answers: “If you resolve that they shall be fulfilled, they can be easily: they will not be hard.” Hence in the end the picture emerges of a Christian who in spite of all weakness and corruption has good and glad moments in his life whence he draws strength to persevere bravely on his journey.

In addition to this there is the great consolation which Hermas is able to announce to himself and all Christians: God’s great mercy affords all Christians yet one other grace, that of repentance. If they avail themselves of this at once while it is still to-day, their earlier Christian sinful life shall be wiped away. Hermas describes the impression which this message made upon him: “When I heard thee announce this to me in these very terms, I was awakened unto life.” So in the third vision: “Power came upon you and ye became strong in the faith, and when the Lord beheld your strength He rejoiced.” “It is as though a man should receive an inheritance a short while before his death that raises him up to renewed strength.” Such was the effect of forgiveness upon Christians. It was, of course, a law of grace, which had for its reverse all manner of terrors. Woe to the Christian that sins again! Yet they took it to their hearts and were glad, for once more they were able to hope.

There is no lack, therefore, of bright touches to relieve the prevailing gloom of the picture which Hermas leaves us. But he had no experience of the redemption which Jesus wanted to bring. Just as Jesus Himself is unknown to him, so likewise are the God of Jesus and the Gospel. God is not his heavenly Father! nor is He the God of love! He has no certainty of salvation, no comfort strong enough to overcome all the anguish of sin, no personal power for the good. Man remains the creature of his moods and feelings; there is none higher than himself that can set him free. After all, this is nothing but the religion of fear and hope, which prevailed before Jesus and which Jesus had overcome. Not a word is said of our being the children of God. St Paul’s criticism of Judaism applies to this form of Christianity as well: “A spirit of bondage unto fear.” As is the leader, so are the led. Hermas’ description of his flock shows us throughout a lukewarm average Christianity. We hear not a word of redeemed men and women. The majority of Christians lacked the power to live the new life: they could get no further than good resolutions.

As often as Hermas divides his Christians into classes and passes them in review, the number of the bad classes is sure to exceed that of the good. This, however, is partly due to the fact that the vices of Christians are always more striking than their virtues, and afford greater occasion for talk. In all the churches there lived a great company of men and women who had become new creatures through Jesus and His disciples, and had passed from death unto life. Theirs was a hidden life unknown to history—but the life was lived. The redemptive power of Christianity is brought before us so impressively in quite a number of Christian writings, that we feel that we have here the record of a real experience. The most striking of all these is the First Epistle of St John, full of the gladdest and yet soberest consciousness of an abiding redemption. Here we have a life that is lived above the world in love and the joy of God, free from all care and anxiety. The writer can find no words to express his praise and glad rejoicing. How boundless are the Christian’s possessions: the knowledge of God, the forgiveness of sins, the victory over the devil, the confidence of prayer, courage on the day of judgment, the certainty of being a child of God and an heir of eternal life, perfect joy. “Behold what love the Father hath shown us, that we are called God’s children, and such we are.” He that has experienced all this in his own person may well attain in the bold flights of his faith to the statement that he is born of God, and in possession even now of eternal life. That is a judgment of faith, no empirical knowledge, and yet a judgment of faith which is based upon facts which are matters of experience—the keeping of the commandments, the love of the brethren. Hence the triumphant final judgment of this letter: “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one.” That we are of God is also confirmed to us by the Spirit with a sovereign self-consciousness. The Christian bears the witness within himself as Paul writes: “The spirit beareth witness to our spirit that we are the children of God.” But just as St Paul ever took refuge from this inner testimony in the outer objective fact, the proof of God’s love in the death of Jesus, in order to be secure from all the varying moods of his soul, so St John, too, places the water and the blood—i.e., the manifestation of God’s love in the gift of His own Son—by the side of the Spirit’s testimony. It is only because God’s love has become so clear to him in Jesus—beyond all power of expression—that he can live his glad life, resting on the forgiveness of sins. It is of course a comfort for him, too, to feel sure that, in case he falls away and his conscience accuses him, the all-knowing God is greater than our accusing heart, and beholds the soul of goodness in sinful man. And yet how poor a consolation this would be in itself. Does not the thought of God’s all-seeing eye call forth fear and terror within the breast of ordinary men? But for John the fact that God can read his inmost being is a comfort, because through Jesus he knows God as love, and is sure of pardon through faith in this love. We need but to compare John with Hermas if we would realize the difference that it makes for a Christian whether Jesus is ever before his soul or not. Though they are nearly contemporaries, the divergence between the two is immense. Hermas—a man who never gets beyond a state of alternate fear and hope, without trust in God and His love, his horizon limited by sin and the avoidance of sin. John, the sober Christian, who by no means considers himself to be sinless, but has nevertheless attained to the unshaken conviction, through experience of God’s love, that he is a child of God in spite of all sin, and in this conviction goes boldly and gladly forward to obtain the promises, full of love and confidence. It is just the complete contrast between one that is redeemed and one as yet unredeemed.

Notes such as John strikes, so full of the purest joy, are, it is true, not all too common. On the whole, it was the persecutions that were fitted to awaken the new life in the Christians. The authors of the First Epistle of St Peter and Ignatius are instances of this. In view of the sore tribulation the contrast with the world is accentuated, the devil stands bodily before man’s soul. He has no other choice: either he must conquer or worship Satan. Temptations and cares which formerly hindered and oppressed the Christian are now easily overcome, since it is a question of life or death. The tares are separated from the wheat. Every Christian who clings firmly to the confession accomplishes the decisive act, bids farewell to the whole world in view of the promises. That awakens a hitherto unknown enthusiasm in the soul, a feeling of freedom from all former burdens, joy, longing, abandonment of all to God. Now the Christian praises God for that: he has a living hope which looks beyond death to the inheritance in heaven. He is glad with an unspeakable, a transfigured joy. Not till now does he enter into complete fellowship with Christ, now that he suffers with Him, looking forward to the rapturous joy of the revelation of His glory. In view of death he calls Christ his true life, his hope, his joy. To come to Christ is his only aim. “How could we live without Him?” Wherever this martyr joyfulness speaks to us it presupposes redeemed men, for joy is the best token—everywhere—of the new and blessed life.

But redemption is also to be found wherever the moral task is clearly realized and the courage attained to fulfil it. In spite of their boundless hope, the Christians of our age were not, like Paul, of an emotional nature, but rather sober-minded, almost prosaic. Stormy, ecstatic outbursts do, it is true, flash forth now and then, but they are always felt to be exceptions, and it is just the teachers who have left us writings to whom they are comparatively unknown. Take them one after another, the authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of the Catholic and Pastoral epistles, the Apostolic Fathers. With the exception of Hermas, the apocalyptic visionary, only one of them boasts of personal revelations, voices of the Spirit—Ignatius; but the only specimen which he gives us of these is of so episcopal and theological a character that the good man would have spoken in exactly the same manner even had he been uninspired. All the others, not excepting John, are noble-minded moralists filled with a sure hope and animated by great moral earnestness, and just as such they are the saviours of Christianity; but there is no trace of the ecstatic enthusiast about them. Nor are the modern experiences of grace any less strange to these men than the manifestations of the spirit of ancient times. Not one of them boasts of the rapid alternations of feeling, from a miserable sinner to a pardoned child of God, which he experiences as a Christian in hours of blessed joy. Most of them rather, as a rule, look back upon pardon as a definite single event in the past, and expend all their power in the present, no longer to stand in need of it. Certainly one element in the greatness of this age is that Christians do not make much ado about their pious feelings and special experiences. Some of their teachers would in that case have without doubt themselves inveighed against the practice as mischievous, and likely to be attended by religious self-deception. So the author of the Epistle of St James. One of the immediate consequences of this great sobriety is that the joy of present redemption finds no expression in many cases. That is not to be regretted, however, nor is it a sign of decay. The first disciples of Jesus presented all that they had received from Him within the limits of the promises and the claim; it was only in their enthusiastic description of Jesus Himself that the gratitude of redeemed men finds expression. But the authors of these letters, living in a later age, had not to speak about Jesus but to point out the tasks of the present to the Churches. Their simplest, their most natural course, was therefore to say: As Christians, the greatest of all conceivable promises await us in the future, but their fulfilment is attached to one condition, that we should do God’s will now in the present. That alone answered their purpose. And then by encouraging hope themselves and kindling moral zeal by their appeals, by calling attention to weak spots in the armour and giving good counsel, they furthered the true work of redemption without much eloquent palaver. Nor is it greatly to be regretted that they appealed to the will of their hearers instead of to God’s grace and strength. For Jesus Himself had followed exactly the same course. What else are His words than imperatives addressed to a man’s power of self-determination? On no single occasion does He make any mention of grace besides. The later teachers were therefore likewise fully justified in not diluting their energetic moral appeals by the message of grace. All these moralists are really good disciples of Jesus, and take part in the work of the real—not the theological redemption. For he that holds fast the Christian hope and walks in the path of love and obedience, with his eyes firmly fixed on the great goal, has entered into the new life, whether he talks piously about it or not.

It was in another direction altogether that the sub-apostolic Christians went astray. Their real mistake was that they laboured under a misconception as to the sources of the new life. They gave up the reality and attached themselves to the shadow. Christian redemption is after all something exclusively personal, something effected by means of persons. It began when Jesus led His disciples to an unshaken hope, moral power, the comfort of God’s love, victory over the world—even over death—by His words and the impression that He made upon them. It continued to flow on from this source through the founding of the Church which was inspired by Jesus Spirit, in which, therefore, every new member came into touch with Jesus Himself. All Christian life in the future derives from the true disciples of Jesus, who hand on their impression of Jesus to the Church and present something of His divine life in their own persons. Here are the two bed-rocks of our salvation—Jesus and His living disciples; these are proof against every trial, they are the great and comforting realities, the mediators of God’s love. Here, too, was the source of all real redemption in the sub-apostolic age; it matters not whether Christians realized the fact or not. But for those realities they substituted imaginary objects—the blood of Christ, the sacraments—and made the certainty of their new life depend on them. The ignorance of Jesus that prevailed in the earliest missionary epoch is chiefly to blame for this. St Paul limited his preaching so uniformly and persistently to the death and resurrection of the Son of God that no impression of the historic Christ could be obtained from it. At the same time he attached a theological signification to the signs of membership which caused them to appear to be more important than the membership itself. The theory of the blood of Christ and of the sacraments was ready to hand; it had grown up along with the growth of the Christian consciousness when the written Gospels began to be spread abroad in the great Church of the Gentiles, and Jesus Himself became better known to all Christians. And so in spite of the new impression of the person of Jesus they cling to the old theory, their inheritance from St Paul. The writings of St John afford a striking confirmation of this statement. The Synoptic Gospels formed the author’s spiritual food. He was compelled by them himself to put down his impressions of the future conveyed by the Gospel in the shape of a Gospel, so that the person of Jesus—the person and not His death alone—should become endeared to and revered by the whole world. This same man plainly shows us in his letter that he practically continues to derive all his comfort from the old formulae of the blood and the sacrifice. If this applies to a giant like John, how much more to Christians of smaller stature. A second decisive reason may be added. Men want to have something external as a guarantee for their salvation, and hence they eagerly take hold of facts—of historical occurrences and material things. Blood, water, wine and bread, possess the great advantage of being tangible and visible: they bulk larger than the invisible impression made by persons. The low level of culture which characterized the first age favoured this superstitious tendency. The age was not yet ripe for the understanding of purely personal greatness and nobility. The Gospels themselves, with their myths and their apparatus of miracles, lead us to this conclusion. A lofty ethical education is needed to reach even the theoretical certainty that persons and not things are that which is truly real. Hence it is that Christians have set up as the guarantees of their salvation, instead of the person of Christ, His blood, i.e., its theological interpretation; and instead of the fellowship of Christian persons, the sacraments.

Hereby our religion has suffered grievous loss. In consequence of this transposition, the ethical element has been removed to the circumference, and superstition has been enthroned in the centre. He that has experienced the personal impression of Jesus and His disciples has received more than blood and the sacraments can ever impart to the fancy: he has come into touch with the living God, and that alone can uplift us into the eternal. By contact with these realities, the substance, he experiences a joy and a gladness which he would like to impart to all those who are yet under the bondage of the shadow.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

If the presence of great men was the chief characteristic of the first, the creative period, then the want of them marks the second. St Paul has no successor, no one who attains to his level. The itinerant preachers, the apostles and prophets, degenerate, and have to hand over the guidance of the congregations to the bishops and teachers. Amongst these there are many powerful characters who keep their aim steadily in view, but no man inspired to open up new paths and acknowledged to be leader by a divine call. The fact that the ecclesiastical authors write anonymously or pseudonymously proves to us more than all else that even the leading persons feel themselves fallen on degenerate days and are no longer conscious of being personally called by God.

A great ecclesiastical organization now takes the place of the great men. The Church itself dates from the earliest period. St Paul was one of the founders. But it is only in our period that it quite comes to occupy its dominating position. The creative spirit, hitherto free and untrammelled, is now confined within ecclesiastical forms and institutions which acquire their great power for the very reason that the Spirit of Jesus and His apostles is counted as their origin. Almost within the lifetime of disciples of Jesus, the past comes to be surrounded with a halo of sanctity, whereby, as ever on such occasions, creations of a very late date are uncritically ascribed to earlier days. We may even say that we have here the main characteristic of the development of churches: the thoroughgoing depreciation of the present, while the past is idealized and artificially extolled, and the period of inspiration is sharply distinguished from the period of tradition. Genuine and true feelings and reflections have driven men to take up this position, but also a certain want of faith in the living God. The most important characteristics of this Church, now ante-dated and ascribed to the earliest days, were orthodoxy and the episcopal constitution. Both were derived from the apostles, but wrongly so, for none cared less for just these things than the apostles themselves. Adhesion to the Christian religion is now determined by assent to the orthodox faith and by subordination to the bishop. All other marks of Christianity are only accepted as such when the ecclesiastical conditions have been fulfilled.

It is a characteristic feature of the intellectual development of Christianity, which finds expression in theology, that a powerful progressive impulse is kept in check by a sound appreciation of the value of the original Gospel. Christianity steps forth into the great world and assimilates all that appears to be compatible with its own peculiar nature. It is continually deriving fresh increment even from old Judaistic sources, in its apocalyptic, its ethics, and its ecclesiastical ideas. But it is to Hellenism that it especially directs its attention, and that in an increasing measure. It preaches Jesus as the new God and transforms the badges of Christian membership into mysteries. It concludes an alliance with Greek philosophy, at first tentatively and cautiously, bases its apologetic upon the ideas of the logos and the moral law, speaks even of God Himself in philosophic language. Even as early as this we can trace the first beginnings of intellectualism, of the transformation of Christianity into a philosophy of religion. But when the Gnostic movement began and the Gospel threatened to be sacrificed, not only to Hellenism but to the whole intermingling of religions in the chaos of peoples, when it threatened to disappear altogether in speculations, mysteries, asceticisms, superstitions of every kind, then the majority of the Christian teachers and bishops at once cried out, “Thus far but no further.”

And so instead of promoting its dissolution the Gnostic movement is a powerful factor in the preservation of the distinctive features of the Christian religion and in the defence of the old faith with its hope and ethics. Even though the victory over the mighty enemy was only completely won at the cost of the introduction of forcible ecclesiastical measures, yet the old Gospel remained unimpaired. In this spiritual struggle for existence Jesus Himself reacts against the corruption of the work of His life. And therewith the decree goes forth that in future the measure of all Christian theology is to be found in the Gospel.

The picture presented to us by the examination of Christian piety is altogether lacking in unity, according as we look at the dark or the light side. A merely average Christianity prevails throughout the congregations, while at the same time the ascetic ideal begins to vie for the mastery with that of the Gospel. Documents such as the Epistle of St James and the “Shepherd” of Hermas give one a really terrible idea of the moral and religious level of many congregations. It would often seem as though the Gospel had lost much of its old power through its alliance with the world. And yet such an impression would be incomplete. There can be no doubt that even in this age the congregations are better than their surroundings, that through the preaching of Jesus and the presence of living Christians in their midst they possess and can offer something which the whole world lacks. But everything depends upon the individuals. In many writings of our age we can trace, not merely the Christian ideal, but its realization in individuals. We may venture to say that men and women existed in all congregations whose lives mightily inspired their fellow-Christians in times of weakness as well as in the day of strife, inspired them with hope and moral grandeur, with brotherly love and trust in God. Where such lives are lived there is Jesus with His redemption, and there is the living God: there, too, is the bright promise of the future, hope for the progress of Christianity through out the world’s history.