CHAPTER VII.

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.

_The Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Mode of Positive Teaching and in her Mode of Resisting Error._

The Church is the Body of Christ as it moves through the centuries from His first to His second coming. We have been tracing the course through the first three of these centuries. Let us recur for a moment to the beginning, when we behold our Lord, at the head of His Apostles, passing through the towns and villages of Galilee, preaching that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, imparting, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the principles of that divine kingdom, healing every infirmity and disease; then sending out His Apostles, and afterwards His disciples, by two and two, as His heralds and messengers. This was the prelude, the type and germ, of what was to come. Then, after His Passion and Resurrection, we see the first stadium in the mission of the Apostles. They speak in His name; they manifest His power; His Person is in the midst of them; His Spirit upon them. The Apostle who once denied Him stands at their head, and speaks with authority, declaring the mission intrusted to him. Forthwith three thousand, who speedily become five thousand, accede to the voice of his preaching. In twelve years Judæa and Palestine and Antioch have had the new doctrine planted among them, and then it is set up in Rome, the sceptred head of heathendom. The forty years of that first mission are crowned by the destruction of the deicide city, after that, by the hands of the Apostles and the fellow-labourers whom they have chosen, the suckers of the Vine have been laid in all the chief places of the Roman world. A kingdom had been preached and a kingdom had been founded; and its basis had been laid in authority--that of a crucified Head, transmitted to His Apostles.

The whole of this forty years' work is a Tradition or Delivery, to translate literally the Greek title. Its bearers gave what they had received. It was intrusted to them, to their truthfulness and their accuracy; and those who received their message did not question it, but accepted it as they gave it. From first to last the Tradition rested on the one principle of authority, which had its fountain-head in the Person of our Lord. He spoke as one having authority in Himself, not as the Scribes and Pharisees, who interpreted an existing law; and they whom He had deputed to follow Him claimed a delegation from that authority, and spoke in virtue of it.

But if this was so in the lifetime of the Apostles, who had seen and touched and handled the Word of Life, it was no less the case in the teachers who immediately followed them. We have seen a most striking instance in St. Clement, who claimed for the decision of the Roman Church in an important matter, and that during the lifetime of the Apostle John, that the words uttered by it were the words of the Holy Ghost, and asserted that those who did not listen to them refused to listen to God Himself. But this language represents the language and the conduct of those who succeeded to the place of the Apostles in the whole three hundred years. There is no break and no change in this respect. The Nicene Council in its decisions has the same tone as the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem; it is no other than "it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us."

For in truth, from first to last, all success in the divine kingdom is the work of the Spirit of Christ. Ho is the one power who gives life to the whole. In Him lies the secret of its unity, whereby the Body of Christians, or the Christian nation,[145] is one and the same at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and a thousand other places; for Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, male and female, have all been made to drink into one Spirit.

Thus a living God will have a living Church; and in this first great period--instinct with a character of its own, as the conflict between the new Christian nation and the mightiest offspring of the old civilisation, that heir of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Greece, which transcended its ancestors--the great charter lies in the words, "As My Father sent Me, so also send I you." It is this ever-living mission which perpetuates "the Tradition or Delivery." Thus it is the accordant witness of all that we have hitherto said, from the testimony of the sacred writings to that of the first fathers and teachers, exhibited in all their conduct, that the living apostolic succession is the one thing instituted by God to carry on His revelation and to maintain His kingdom. This succession it is which bears in its hands the various records forming the treasury of the kingdom, whether they be the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, or the sacraments which communicate a divine life, or the majestic liturgy which expresses the divine worship, or the daily praxis of the Church, which is, in fact, the embodiment of its unwritten tradition: in all these, and through them in all ages, the apostolic succession works. And the mission through which it works is as living, real, and present, as immediate and efficacious now, as when the words first dropped from the lips of our Lord in the Body in which He rose again, "As My Father sent Me, so also send I you."

We may divide the consideration of the manner in which the Apostles proclaimed the divine kingdom into two heads, the first of which will be the whole work of positive promulgation, and the second the whole defence against error.

As to the first, I will touch on five points--the system of catechesis, the employment of a creed, the dispensing of sacraments, the system of penance, and the Scriptures carried in the Church's hand. And I am considering these especially in one point of view, as illustrating the method of teaching pursued by a body which was intrusted with a divine message.

1. Converts were admitted into the Church after a process of oral instruction of more or less duration; for I am not here concerned with the extent of that duration, but with the fact that such instruction was invariably given by word of mouth, not by placing a book in the hands of those who came to be taught. What the Christian doctrine was it belonged to its teachers to say, and the system by which it was learnt was termed catechesis, _i.e._, instruction by word of mouth, by question and answer. This is the word applied by St. Luke in the beginning of his Gospel to Theophilus, to whom he addressed it; and the opening verses of the Gospel describe the thing itself with an accuracy which leaves nothing to be desired; for the Evangelist speaks "of the things that have been accomplished among us, according as they have _delivered_[146] them unto us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word;"[147] and adds, "It seemed good to me also, having diligently attained to all things from the beginning, to write to thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mayest know the verity of those things in which thou hast been instructed by word of mouth." By which we see that it was not a book which had been put into the hands of Theophilus to teach him Christian truth, but a doctrine delivered by personal teachers, and derived from those who were eye-witnesses, and administered to others what they knew. But after Theophilus had become a full Christian, a Gospel might be addressed to him for confirmation of his faith.

The Church of which we know most as to its method of converting Gentiles is the Alexandrine Church, in which, from very early time, there was a famous catechetical school, founded, it is said, by St. Mark himself, the names of whose after teachers, Athenagoras, Pantænus, and still more Clement and Origen, have distinguished it.[148] Its method has been thus described:--

"In the system of the early catechetical schools the _perfect_, or men in Christ, were such as had deliberately taken on them the profession of believers, had made the vows and received the grace of baptism, and were admitted to all the privileges and the revelations of which the Church had been constituted the dispenser. But before reception into this full discipleship, a previous season of preparation, from two to three years, was enjoined, in order to try their obedience and instruct them in the principles of revealed truth. During this introductory discipline they were called _catechumens_, and the teaching itself _catechetical_, from the careful and systematic examination by which their grounding in the faith was effected. The matter of the instruction thus communicated to them varied with the time of their discipleship, advancing from the most simple principles of natural religion to the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, from moral truths to the Christian mysteries. On their first admission they were denominated _hearers_, from the leave granted them to attend the reading of the Scriptures and sermons in the church. Afterwards, being allowed to stay during the prayers, and receiving the imposition of hands as the sign of their progress in spiritual knowledge, they were called _worshippers_. Lastly, some short time before their baptism, they were taught the Lord's Prayer (the peculiar privilege of the regenerate), were intrusted with the knowledge of the Creed, and, as destined for incorporation into the body of believers, received the titles of _competent_ or _elect_.[149] Even to the last they were granted nothing beyond a formal and general account of the articles of the Christian faith, the exact and fully developed doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and, still more, the doctrine of the Atonement, as once made upon the cross, and commemorated and appropriated in the Eucharist, being the exclusive possession of the serious and practical Christian. On the other hand, the chief subjects of catechisings, as we learn from Cyril, were the doctrines of repentance and pardon, of the necessity of good works, of the nature and use of baptism, and the immortality of the soul, as the Apostle had determined them."[150]

It is not needful for our present purpose to go further into the "Discipline of the Secret." It is enough to point out how this whole method, which belonged to the Church everywhere, though carried out no doubt in various degrees of perfectness according to the endowments and zeal of individuals and the energy of pastoral care, testified throughout the magistral character of the Church, and that those who came into her fold must come in the spirit of little children, according to our Lord's saying. Those certainly who so came could not question the doctrines which they received, nor the authority of which they were not judges, but disciples.

2. But the use of a Creed,[151] communicated at a certain advanced period of the instruction given, and as a prelude to the rite which admitted into the Body, was a further token of authority. Nor indeed can any greater act of authority be well imagined than the summing up what is to be believed as the doctrine of salvation in a few sentences. This is not done in the Scriptures themselves, whether of the Old or New Testament, or both together. And how great an act of authority it was in the mind of the Christian people is well expressed in the tradition which not only called the first creed the Creed of the Apostles, but represented them before their separation not again to be reunited, as contributing each one to the twelve propositions forming it. Such a tradition, even if it be not true, is not only a picturesque but a most powerful and emphatic exhibition of the feeling which Christians entertained as to the act of authority implied in creating the instrument which conveyed the Christian faith. For if each separate article of the Creed may be attested by the Christian Scriptures, yet the selection of such and such doctrines, their arrangement and force when put together, indicate something quite other than the existence or expression of such doctrines scattered about Scripture, just as the faggot is something much more than the sticks which compose it. And in accordance with this judgment upon the authority of a creed as such, we find that enlargements or explanations of the first Creed have only been made by the highest authority in the Church, and on rare occasions, as a defence against heresies which threatened the very being of the Church, or as the more complete expression of doctrines in which the Church felt her life to be enshrined. But it was a Creed which from the beginning bore the title of the Rule of Faith. The Creed was recited by the baptized, as a token of their acceptance and incorporation into the Church; repeated as a daily prayer of singular power and efficacy; renewed by the dying as a confession of faith and passport to the tribunal of the great Judge. St. Augustine,[152] in a sermon to catechumens, said, even in his time, "You must by no means write down the words of the Creed in order to remember them, but you must learn them by hearing them; nor when you have learnt them must you write them, but hold them ever in your memory and ruminate on them."

Nor, though the doctrines contained in the original Creed may be attested by the Scriptures, was the authority of the Creed and of the power which imposed it derived from the testimony of the Scriptures. It was antecedent in time to such testimony, and it was derived from those who were authors of the Scriptures, and who were at least as infallible in such an act as in the account which they might communicate to the churches of what they had seen and heard.[153]

To the method of catechesis, therefore, as the means of instruction, we add the employment of the Creed, which is the Church's oriflamme, round which her host gathers, and to which it looks in the ever-during struggle of the faith.

3. Next consider the daily life into which the convert was introduced when his course of catechetical instruction was concluded and he was put in possession of the Creed.

The first sacrament, that of baptism, administered with the utmost solemnity at certain times of the year, the one being the eve of the Lord's resurrection, the other the eve of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, was "an enlightening" which opened to him the wonders of the spiritual world. In virtue of it he became a member of "the household of God," he entered into brotherhood with his Redeemer, he shared in the gift of the Almighty Spirit, the Author and Giver of all grace. At the same time, or shortly after, the chrism of confirmation added to his strength for the perpetual conflict of the Christian life. And here by the imposition of episcopal hands the same sevenfold Spirit of grace descended upon him, marking by the rite itself how the Christian society was inhabited by that Spirit, whose power the bishop bestowed upon the newly born Christian. But both baptism and confirmation were sacraments, however enduring in their effects, yet given once and never to be repeated; whereas for the perpetual sustenance of spiritual life a tree was needed which should bear perpetual fruit. And here the Lord Himself was at hand; for the baptized and confirmed Christian was forthwith fed with the Bread of Angels; and that majestic altar was disclosed to his sight on which daily lay the Body of the Lord of Angels, offered for him in mystical sacrifice; and he heard the accents of that divine liturgy which called upon heaven and earth to rejoice together in the great glory of God. It was impossible for any faithful heart to hear the glowing words in which the sacrificant described the mercy of God in bestowing His Son upon men as their Deliverer and their daily food without being kindled into an unspeakable joy, "while the angels praise, the dominations adore, the powers tremble, the heavens, the heavenly virtues, and the blessed Seraphim with common jubilee glorify" that majesty so shown forth in mercy. In the eucharistic service he felt himself at once the citizen of a heavenly kingdom, for the divine polity breathed in all around him. Sight and touch, language and every sense, testified a divine presence, and religion became to all participants a living thing. This was a permanent, not a fleeting gift; the endowment of a life, the supersubstantial daily Bread.

But the heavenly blessing encircled every act. It joined the sexes in a consecration which ennobled while it sanctified that lifelong treaty on which rests the whole existence of a home for family and children; it supported the infirmities of the dying with a special strength; it recruited the ministers of the Church in rites which imaged out in most expressive formulas the power from on high, that delegation from the Saviour's Person which was the whole ground of authority.

4. But there is yet another institution, which in as forcible a way as any of the six just mentioned exhibits the Christian Church as a polity; for the one enemy against which a perpetual watchfulness needed to be maintained was the frailty of the human heart itself. Even from the beginning there never was a time in which Christians did not fall, and so from the beginning there was a system of penance to meet that case of their fall, and to provide for restoration. The Apostle Paul found the evil among his converts at Corinth, and used the remedy. But that remedy powerfully illustrates the control of a living society over its members. Those who fell in any way from the Christian profession could only be restored by a double action; the inward repentance of the individual sinning was required on the one hand, but this did not of itself suffice; the outward action of the society itself was needed, and this society imposed such rules as it thought good for the granting of pardon. It is not to my point to go into any details on the subject, because it is the principle itself contained in the system of penance which I wish to dwell upon alone. Sins of infidelity, impurity, idolatry, as a rule excluded for long periods of years, or even for the whole course of life, from the Church. The bishop dispensed this discipline either in person or through his priests, in a tribunal in which he represented Christ Himself, and exerted His authority, the greatest given to man upon earth, an authority belonging to God alone, the power to remit or retain sins. From the beginning the Church exercised this authority, and in it ruled a kingdom, the kingdom of man's innermost thoughts, the hopes and the fears of an eternal world. They whose lives were not safe a moment from the persecuting powers of heathen magistrates, wielded a much more awful power over their fellow-Christians, subject to them by the bond of a divine hierarchy which had its source, its centre, and its crown in our Lord Himself, which was His gift to the world, which He left behind Him to carry on His kingdom. This power was an essential part of the priesthood borne by the episcopate, in no sense derived from the particular community wherein it was exercised, but descending from above.

5. If we put together the constant action of these divine institutions, which we term sacraments, we gain from the contemplation a picture of the entire Christian life, the daily course of the Christian citizen in his citizenship, subsisting by the force of the Tradition above spoken of. But there is another point to be exhibited. When St. Luke wrote to Theophilus that the intention of his Gospel was to confirm him in the certainty of those things which he had been taught by word of mouth, he disclosed to us the position which the Scriptures held in this period of the Ante-Nicene Church. They were not the immediate instrument of teaching, and far less were they put in the hands of the neophyte in order that, by an act of his private judgment, he might compare the doctrine which he supposed to be contained in them with the doctrine taught to him by his instructors. The Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testaments, were carried in the Church's hand, and presented to the faithful as documents beyond the reach of their criticism, guaranteed by the authority through which they themselves became Christians. This is a totally different presentment from that of a book which exists without credentials external to itself. The notion of treating the narratives of our Lord's actions and words as common books, subject, like any ordinary history, to the judgments of their readers, would have struck with horror those who had a special name for such weak or unfaithful Christians as in times of danger delivered up their sacred books to the heathens. They called them Traditores, whence we derive the most loathsome appellation which can be applied to a man who disregards the dictates of conscience and the pledges of fidelity. It would have been _treason_ indeed to their minds to question the truth of a miracle recorded by St. Matthew or a doctrine set forth by St. John. But why? Because behind the Holy Scriptures lay the whole authority of that living Church in virtue of which they themselves had the privilege of knowing the Scriptures at all. That the Spirit of God dictated these Scriptures they knew only from the Church. The kingdom of which these Scriptures spoke was the Church herself. The Scriptures were _part_ of her. They did not produce the hierarchy by which she was governed, nor the sacraments on which her people lived, nor that whole daily discipline in and through which the Christian people existed. Even had they constituted, which they did not, a code of laws, a code is an unexerted power without those who administer it.

But the Church from the beginning literally _dispensed_ the Scriptures; she selected portions of the Gospels and Epistles for recitation in her eucharistic liturgy; she referred to them in her daily teaching. They were a treasury out of which she brought perpetually things old and new. The parables of our Lord became in her hands the structure of a living kingdom; she herself was the fulfilment of that great series of prophecies. In her the Sower went forth to sow His seed, and the field in which He sowed was the world, and the time of the sowing the last age--the time between the first and the second coming of the King. She herself was the net which gathered a multitude of fish, "which when it was filled they drew out, and sitting by the shore they chose out the good into vessels, but the bad they cast forth." She herself was "the grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which is indeed the least of all seeds, but when it is grown up it is greater than all herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and dwell in the branches thereof." And especially in all this process she was "the leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened," whether we regard those three measures as the corporeal, animal, and spiritual nature of the individual man, or as the family, the social, and the political life of the collective man.

And this continued to be the relation between the Church and the Scriptures which were committed to her charge, and which she dispensed to her people, not merely by reading them in her liturgies and the devotions of her clergy and her religious orders, but in the realising and acting them out in her own life during full fifteen centuries. During this vast period of time the Holy Scriptures were received throughout the whole extent of Christendom as the unquestioned Word of God, with an entire faith in their inspiration. The faithful mind was not prone to analyse the basis on which this belief rested, which was the Church's attestation. They had been copied out by the unwearied labours of innumerable hands in religious houses scattered throughout the world, to whose occupants it was the most pious of toils to multiply the sacred books. It was not the paid work of hirelings, indifferent to their contents, which, up to the invention of printing, wrought this multiplication. How many a monk spent his life in adorning a copy of the Gospels not with pen only but with pencil, so that the loving service of years was enshrined in the leaves he wrought! It followed of course, that down to the time in which printing became common, copies of the Sacred Scriptures were costly, and the reading of them never could have been popular. Thus it was physically impossible, if it had not been besides contrary to all Christian practice and principle, that they should be the immediate instrument of teaching. Only when the Church had been for long ages in possession of men's minds, and had built up one harmonious structure of doctrine and practice by the work of a uniform hierarchy in many lands, and when, besides, a new invention had multiplied with a great economy of manual labour copies of the Scriptures, so that they could be produced in thousands and sold as an ordinary book, a notion, until then unheard of, was set up. A man arose who maintained that the Church in her ministers was not the teacher to whom God had committed the propagation of His gospel, but that each Christian was to teach himself by personal study of the written Word. This notion rested upon the assertion that the Holy Spirit coalesces with the written Word in such a manner as to act immediately on the mind of the reader. To those who could embrace such a notion the written Word came to stand to the reader in exactly that relation to divine truth which up to that time the Church herself had occupied. There seems to have been a real confusion in the mind of the man who devised this notion, and in the minds of his followers, between the outward material Word, which they read and construed, and its true sense, or the inward Word. Thus they argued from the possession of the former to that of the latter, and supposed that unity of belief would follow from the individual's study of the same documents. They always refused to see the conclusion which all of the old belief set before them, that they were substituting their own private and subjective interpretation of the Bible for the Church's public and authorised one. They opposed instead what they called the Word of God, that is, the real sense of Holy Scripture, to the word of man, which they called the Church's interpretation of it.

It is true that this notion contained in it something very flattering to the human mind and the natural feelings, for it supposed an immediate relation between Christ and the individual, and an illumination of the readers mind by the influence of the Holy Spirit, the sole instrument of which was the reading of the Scripture. Thus this notion got rid at one stroke of Church, sacraments, discipline, and all spiritual rule.

The objections to it at once apparent were: First, it was not only without warrant from Scripture itself, but directly opposed to its plainest statement, such as "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," and all those other passages in which the foundation of spiritual authority is set forth. Secondly, it was directly opposed to the historical fact in the way in which the Church was actually instituted. Thirdly, it was no less opposed to the way in which the Church had been carried on in every age and every country through the fifteen centuries. A fourth objection was made to it as soon as it was set up, but only the actual experience of three centuries and a half could adequately express its force. It has been found to produce not unity of belief, but every possible variety and opposition, until at last the final point has been reached, that this variety and opposition are viewed as being a good in themselves, and an assurance of the mind's freedom; and the possession of one faith, which was the glory of all Christians, and viewed by the Fathers as a sensible token of Christ's Godhead, has ceased, by those who received and transmitted Luther's notion, to be deemed practicable or even desirable. In other words, those who deserted the unity of the supernatural kingdom have been broken without hands into a shapeless anarchy.

If, then, we consider as a whole the work of positive promulgation carried on by the Church from the Day of Pentecost to the bestowal of civil liberty upon it by Constantine, we find it to consist in the action of the Spirit of Christ animating that teaching Body which began with the Apostles and was continued in their living succession. We find the method of internal promulgation which that teaching Body pursued was the creation everywhere of a Christian polity. Of this the main parts were the discipline and direction of the whole spiritual being which the sacraments embraced. One of them contained the great central act of daily worship and the supersubstantial bread of daily life. Into this polity men were admitted after careful probation and instruction of each individual by word of mouth, and the chief articles of belief were delivered to him upon his admission by an act of supreme authority. The Creed was the soldier's oath of fidelity when he entered into the sacred army. The censure and restoration of sinning members were provided for by other acts of supreme authority. Nor did it only impart to the incoming disciple what he should believe summed up in the Creed, but it presented to its members collectively the Sacred Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Thus the living society carried both the written and unwritten Word, not as separate and disjointed, but as one treasure-house of truth committed to its perpetual guardianship. For all these means were comprehended in a divine unity which excluded partition. That unity was the mystical Body of Christ, and these means subsisted in and by force of the Body of Christ; for just as the human soul[154] is the life of the human body, without which its members would cease to be an organism and fall back into dust, so the Spirit of God animated this Body of Christ, binding together in one life those manifestations of doctrine, worship, and government the system of which we have been trying to follow.

We proceed to consider the dangers which beset that unity.

What during this period was the defence of the Church against errors of belief?

We may subdivide our answer into two heads: first, the question of the _principle_ which actuated the Church in all her conduct of promulgating her faith; and, secondly, the question of _fact_, or a review of the errors themselves which she had to oppose.

The principle of the Church was, in one word, that which defines her own being--a divine authority establishing a kingdom, Jesus Christ, her Lord and Founder, living and acting in her. The consideration of the faith which she promulgated cannot be severed from that of her government and her worship. If we put together that which we have been observing, we find a hierarchy stretching over the whole earth, developing itself in councils, hearing and deciding causes both in an exterior and an interior forum, having a fourfold gradation, the Bishop in the diocese, the Metropolitan in the province, the Primate in the larger circle of several provinces, the Pope in the whole Church. But, further, the whole of this authoritative government rests upon an identical worship, in which dwells, in a wonderful manner, the very Person of Him who is the Founder and Maintainer of the kingdom, and which exhibits daily to the hearts and minds of His people the sublime truths upon which His presence rests. Again, this worship itself is a part of that daily discipline of life in which the people live, and by which they are subjects of their sovereign in the spiritual world of thought and action. The administration of sacraments, which belongs to practice, embraces a whole world of doctrine. It is also the carrying out and application to daily life of the Scriptures which the Church holds in her hands, and presents to her people under the guarantee of her authority.

Again, in all that we are enumerating, in the whole system of government, worship, and teaching, is comprised _the Word_ of God committed to the Church, a word partly written and partly unwritten, but in both its parts equally the word of God, not human thought or inference; and the teaching office is exercised in the living administration of the one and the other part, which cannot in practice be divided.[155]

Again, the knowledge of revealed truth as a whole, and of the system in which it should be enshrined and perpetuated on the earth among men, was a special gift communicated to the Apostolic Body. They could not propagate a religion without this special gift of understanding what they were to propagate. This was part of their endowment as Apostles, a point in which they were superior to all who should come after them, who would have to continue and hand on that which they had established.[156]

Further, from this gift followed the consciousness from the beginning that the revelation made by Christ to His Apostles was complete as to its substance.[157] He was the Teacher whose word was final: they were those whom He _sent_ to convey it to men. Their name expressed their office--_the sent_. They transmitted what they had received. Those who followed, even the greatest who sat in Peter's seat, watched over the maintenance of what the Apostles had transmitted. They were _overseers_. The name of predilection which stands at the head of documents declaring the faith, re-establishing discipline, terminating disputes, is, as it may be, Gregory, Leo, Pius, but always _Bishop_; and the whole plenitude of spiritual power is conveyed in the word "Bishop of the Catholic Church."

Since all that we have been so long saying is an illustration of this principle of the Church,--her own divine authority in promulgating her Lord's message,--we need not dwell on it further, but turn at once to a review of those combats which she actually underwent, in order to see how her liberty and spiritual power are manifested during the period of persecution, by the issue of the conflict in which, from the beginning, she was engaged with various enemies.

The first of these conflicts is with unbelieving Judaism, and its period is chiefly from the Day of Pentecost to the destruction of the temple and city of Jerusalem by Roman arms.

When the Apostles went forth to their work, they first addressed themselves to their own brethren, the people of Israel; and for twelve years they addressed themselves to their brethren alone. The great point to which they had to win Jewish consent was that Jesus was the Christ. Those to whom they preached were well convinced that there would be a Christ, and many of them also that the time for His coming was at hand. The work of the Apostles was to show that the life and death of Jesus corresponded to the manifold prophecies concerning the Messiah contained in the books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and that He had done "the works of the Christ." In this first period of their preaching a considerable number, even of the priests, listened to their call; but a much greater number rejected it. In Jerusalem itself the Sanhedrim began the long list of Christian persecutions, and those who had slain the Lord commanded His disciples not to preach in His name. We cannot doubt that the enmity of those Jews who rejected a suffering Christ was very bitter against their countrymen who proclaimed Him.

But as soon as the Apostles embraced the Gentiles in their teaching this bitterness would greatly increase; for then, besides proclaiming One who had suffered the death of the cross at the hands of His own people to be the appointed Head and Deliverer of that people, the Apostles opened all the benefits of His Headship to the very nations in the midst of which the Jews lived with the proudest sense of their own superior claim to the favour of God. We see, by the example of St. Paul and St. Barnabas, how the Apostles addressed themselves in each city to their brethren in the synagogue, and through them to the Gentile proselytes, male and female, who frequented it; how they received into the communion of the Church such as accepted their message, and these not only when they were Jews, but the Gentiles also; and how, by the decision of the Council at Jerusalem, the Gentiles so entering were not bound to accept the ceremonial law of Moses nor the rite of circumcision. If it was a grievous offence to Jewish pride that a crucified man should be propounded as the son of David and King of Israel, how intense was the anger excited by the fact that the children of the hated and despised nations were allowed to enter into possession of the divine inheritance of Israel's race without receiving circumcision, the pledge of the Jewish covenant, the mark of the children of Abraham!

Such was the double cause of indignation which led the Jews continually to plot against the life of St. Paul, to cut off St. James by the sword of Agrippa, to attempt at the same time the life of St. Peter, and during the whole period of apostolic preaching to set the Roman magistrates against the Christians.

We must add another cause of Jewish enmity, which, coming upon the two great causes already indicated, must have still more inflamed it.

For a considerable time, perhaps down to the persecution of Nero in the year 64,[158] the Christian faith appeared to the Romans to be what Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, and the brother, be it observed, of Seneca, called it, "a question of a word and names, and of your," that is, the Jewish, "law;" so that practically, in this first time, to use the well-known expression of Tertullian, the apostolic preaching "was sheltered under the profession of a most famous, at least a licensed religion."[159] This means that whereas by the laws existing at Rome before the coming of our Lord, the setting up of religions not authorised by the Senate was strictly forbidden; and whereas the profession of their own religion was everywhere allowed to the Jews as subjects of the empire, who were not called upon to renounce their ancestral belief, and whose synagogues were much frequented, as we know from Horace, even in his time; the first teachers of the Christian faith being Jews, and using the synagogue itself as a means of propagating their message, were covered by the protection extended to the Jewish religion. To the unbelieving Jews this protection, thus enjoyed by those whom they considered not only teachers of a false Messiah, but surrenderers of the special privileges and promises of the Jewish race, must have been very galling. Were apostates to be saved by their Jewish character from the very punishment which the Roman law itself imposed on religious innovators? Were they who overturned the very foundation of Jewish distinction to preach their sect under cover of the Jewish name? Accordingly they set themselves to kindle Roman enmity against the Christian faith by every means in their power. In the whole period between the conversion of Cornelius and the destruction of their own temple and city they were sleepless enemies, so that they fulfilled to the utmost the divine prediction, "Therefore, behold I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes: and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city: that upon you may come all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the just even unto the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen. I say unto you all these things shall come upon this generation."[160]

Poppæa is said by Josephus to have been a Jewish proselyte, and to have used her influence with Nero in favour of the Jews; and Tacitus[161] records her to have been surrounded with fortune-tellers, which would include Jewish diviners of the future; and the combination of these statements has led to the conclusion by some that Nero was moved by her to those acts which resulted, not only in the sacrifice of that "vast multitude" recorded by Tacitus as suffering in the persecution raised against them for the burning of Rome imputed to them, but in removing for ever from the Christian religion the protection of being "licit," as a part of an allowed religion. If this be so, all the subsequent persecutions were contained as in germ in the decision of Nero. The special cruelties of the punishments inflicted by Nero might cease upon his deposition, but the decision that the Christian faith was not a part of the Jewish, and therefore not "licit," would remain as a principle of imperial legislation,[162] as appears, in fact, in the conduct of Trajan when Pliny appealed to him for guidance. For it should not be forgotten that Pliny had already treated the profession of Christianity as in itself a capital crime, inasmuch as he ordered those who were guilty of it to be executed before he applied to Trajan for directions as to how he should treat them in future, on account of the difficulty which arose from their number. This evidence is complete so far as to show that it was not Trajan's answer to Pliny which made the Christian religion illicit, but that it was already of itself a capital crime.

When St. Peter and St. Paul had crowned the Roman Church with their joint martyrdom under the authority of Nero, that Jewish revolt had already begun the issue of which was the accomplishment of the divine prediction that their "house should be left to them desolate." But the stroke of Nero's sword, wielded by his deputies,[163] was but the final act of Jewish enmity to St. Paul; what his life had been at their hands we have vividly described in his own words: "Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once I was stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea."[164] And as to St. Peter, they for whom Herod Agrippa, seeing that the slaughter of St. James pleased the Jews, proceeded to imprison Peter, intending after the Pasch to bring him forth to the people for public execution, would pursue him with their enmity all the rest of his life. And what happened to the chiefs, St. Peter and St. Paul, happened in their measure to the other first teachers of the new faith: they gained their crown of martyrdom through the perpetual enmity of the unbelieving Jews stirring up the Roman power against them.

The position of bitter enmity to the Christian religion taken up by the unbelieving Jews was far from terminating with the destruction of Jerusalem. As the nation, with its imperishable vitality, survived that blow, and the further severe punishment dealt upon it after the insurrection headed, in the reign of Hadrian, by the false Messiah Barcochba, who inflicted upon the Christians in Judæa fearful torments, so through the whole period of persecution which the Church suffered from the Roman empire, the Jews fanned by every means in their power the heathen hatred of the Christian people. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, represents them as not possessing an inch of land which they could call their own, yet at the same time as propagating every vile report against Christians. He gives this specimen: "Report has introduced a new calumny respecting our God. Not so long ago a most abandoned wretch in that city of yours (Rome), a man who had deserted indeed his own religion--a Jew, in fact, who had only lost his skin, flayed of course by wild beasts, against which he enters the lists for hire day after day with a sound body, and so in a condition to lose his skin--carried about in public a caricature of us with this label, An ass of a priest. This had ass's ears, and was dressed in a toga, with a book, having a hoof on one of his feet. And the crowd believed this infamous Jew. For what other set of men is the seed-plot of all the calumny against us?"[165]

Jewish hatred of the Christian faith stopped as little with Constantine's edict of toleration as it had with the destruction of the temple by Titus or the banishment of the people by Hadrian; but here we have only to consider it in the first period of the forty years.

This is one aspect of that first conflict with Judaism, but there is likewise another, of which the issue was the gradual severance of the Christian Church from the synagogue. As the first struggle came from the enmity of those who rejected Jesus as the Christ, so the second came from those who received Him, but at the same time clung to the Jewish law and its observances.

The problem of the first twelve years' teaching was, whether the Jewish nation would, as a nation, receive the faith of Him whom its rulers had crucified. An ardent longing for the salvation of their people as a whole must have lain deep in the heart of those first Jewish converts. But even after it became plain that only a remnant would accept the faith, and after a great number of Gentile converts had been received throughout the empire, on conditions which exempted them from the practice of the law of Moses, when St. Paul, at a late period of his ministry, went up to Jerusalem, he was entreated, because there were many thousands among the Jews that had believed who were all zealots for the law,[166] to perform in his own person publicly in the temple a vow according to the law, with which he complied.

No doubt one of the greatest difficulties experienced in these first forty years was the amalgamation of Jewish and Gentile converts in the one Christian Church; but I would draw attention only to the completeness of the result. Among the questions then settled[167] were the meaning of the Old Testament law in regard to the faith in Christ, the relation of our Lord to the Jewish prophets, His superiority to them, His divine nature, and thus His relation to God the Father. I pass over the consideration of all these to make one remark. The ultimate result is the proof of power, and by the time the Jewish temple and the public worship carried on in it were destroyed by the Roman avenger of the God he did not know, the Christian Church was seen to emerge in its character of a religion for all mankind. The association of St. Paul with St. Peter in the patronage of the Roman Church is the most conclusive refutation of theories as to their enmity and rivalry. The one Christian community, ruled by one Episcopate, derived from the Person of Christ, and containing Jews and Gentiles in the one Body of Christ, is the best proof that the force of that divine unity prevailed over zeal for the law and national privileges on the one hand, as over all the errors and confusions of heathen life on the other. Jewish persecution had its completion in the ruin of the deicide city. Those thousands of believers, zealots for the law, were in a few short years merged in the ever-increasing number of the Gentile converts. That great mother Church of Jerusalem, mindful of her Lord's prophecy dwelling in her thoughts, was warned by the Roman standards encompassing the city to migrate to Pella, beyond the Jordan, and thus the centre of Jewish influence in the Church was dissipated beyond recall. The Christian Church took over the inheritance of the synagogue, displaced and destroyed, without being confined to its rites and ceremonies. The high priest, the priest, and the levite of the old covenant, touched with the life-giving flesh of Christ, passed into the ministry of the new; and while the lamb ceased to be offered for the daily sacrifice in the temple, the Lamb of God on every Christian altar became the Sacrifice and the Food of the one Christian people.

Thus the providence of God, offering to His chosen people their Saviour, had, when they rejected Him, worked a double result of their unbelief: one, the destruction of their city and polity; the other, the coming forth in unity and independence of the true Israel, "the nation of Christ."

In all this the Divine Kingdom accomplished its first stage, being founded by Jewish teachers in spite of the enmity of unbelieving Judaism without, and blending the Jew and the Gentile convert within by the force of its potent unity.

The contest with Judaism in both its phases had but a restricted scope, if we compare it with that manifold contest with error which filled the whole history of the Church from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council. It is not easy to realise the circumstances under which that contest was waged. First, from the persecution begun under Nero in the year 64, to the edicts of Constantine in 311-313, the Christian Church lay under the ban of the Empire as an illicit religion. It is indeed true that the whole of this long period of two hundred and fifty years is not a time of active persecution. There are intervals throughout, of considerable length, in which the Church carried on her silent course of conversion, without the law being executed against her, with at least anything like a general intention to destroy her. Still, even in these intervals, she was in the condition of a society in opposition at all points to the powers of the world, and, to say the least, discouraged by the spirit of the time. She could not unfold and publish her constitution. The thing of all others which she could least venture to disclose was her _polity_, that episcopate with its centre in Rome which was the bond of her strength as a regimen. In spite of herself, Roman law forced her into the position, in many respects at least, of a secret society; secret, not because her doctrines in themselves required concealment; secret, not because her polity was in itself an infringement of the Empire's civil rights, but because both doctrine and polity involved a change in the religious, social, and civil relations of the world which the Roman Empire was not prepared to concede, and which, had it divined, not Nero alone, or Domitian, "a portion of Nero in his cruelty,"[168] but every Roman emperor, with Trajan at their head, would have stamped out. Again, it is difficult to realise the condition of a religious society which could not carry out its worship under the protection which publicity confers. Yet as to this we have no authority to show that there were public Christian churches before the reign of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after the Church began. Her eucharistic liturgy was a secret; her sacred books were kept out of the sight of the heathen; but even so the language and the treatment of subjects in these books, not to speak of the choice of those subjects, betoken that they belonged to a society which needed not only the harmlessness of the dove but the wisdom of the serpent. It had need to keep its head under cover. To take one instance out of many. I do not know a more remarkable example of reticence than that passage in the Acts of the Apostles wherein it is said of Peter, that when delivered by the angel from prison, he sent a message to James and the brethren, and then "went out and departed into another place." Here St. Luke, writing in a time of active persecution, rather more than twenty years after the event which he was recording, and when Nero had broken out against the Church, carefully abstains from saying that the place to which St. Peter went was Rome, and that he went to found the Church there, for such foundation was the thing above all others which Roman law looked upon with most suspicion, in its confusion of temporal with spiritual rule. Now we have to bear in mind, in order to realise the condition of the Church in this whole period, that all her work of promulgation, her daily administration of sacraments, her worship, her defence of the truth which she had received and which she was to guard, were carried on under this state of compression, a perpetual outlawry in the letter of the law, which might be put into exercise at the will of a local magistrate or the rising of a discontented populace, and which on many occasions was actually enforced by the supreme authority of the emperor. And it is not a little to be borne in mind what the political condition of the empire then was. The rights of the citizen, as opposed to the government, were overborne by a tremendous despotism, which only allowed light and air to its subjects so far as the science of government had not reached the complete development of modern times. The Roman emperors were not enabled to wield a secret police, because such an instrument of servitude had not yet been invented, nor had they reached an universal military conscription, because the Roman peace rendered such a sacrifice unnecessary; they had only the supreme power of life and death in their hands without restriction. Into the midst of such a despotism the Christian religion was cast. The seed silently deposited in each city in the episcopal germ grew with its individual life, which was yet the life of one tree; but how little was that secret unity of root apparent to the world, at least in the first half of this time! How truly, indeed, was the prophecy of the Lord fulfilled: "Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves;"[169] and how apposite the warning, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves!"

But as the Episcopate was a tree growing upon one root, so the faith on which it lived was one sap. Yet to what danger of isolation, especially in those first times, were small communities of Christians in so many several cities exposed. The Sees, it is true, were not crystallised units, but associated in provinces under Metropolitans. Yet their bishops did not possess the civil liberty of meeting when they chose. Upon the whole action of the Church there was a perpetual constraint from without. The two forces which held the Church together were the Episcopate viewed as one body, and the directing, controlling, regulating authority of St. Peter's See at its centre. Yet not once in the well-nigh three hundred years could the Episcopate meet in universal councils, and the action of the Roman Church, an action which of all others within the bosom of the Christian society the Roman State would regard with the most jealousy, could only be exercised with a due respect to that jealousy, and in conjunction with that large measure of autonomy which the condition of a compressed and often-persecuted society, sprinkled over a vast number of provinces, imposed.

One of the most effective means for maintaining unity and overcoming error was the regular meeting of Councils. In ante-Nicene times these took place in various provinces of the Church, but did not extend to the whole Church. The first Western General Council was held at Arles in 314, and it needed the permission of the Emperor Constantine to take place. Before the peace of the Church its various provinces stand out in groups, under the presiding influence of the greater Sees. Thus, Alexandria unites all the Churches of Egypt and Libya, and the great See of Antioch serves as a centre for the numerous Sees of the East. Ephesus collects the churches of Asia Minor, and Carthage those of Africa. A certain local spirit and certain tendencies of thought would grow up. Perhaps a certain school of teaching may be said to characterise each of these groups. Even the natural temperament[170] of the African, the Egyptian, the Asiatic, and the Oriental character, receiving the one seed of Christian doctrine, would show itself in their several developments. The correction of such local tendencies lay in the free and unfettered intercourse and relation with St. Peter's See; but it was this precisely which the above-noted circumstances of the times rendered difficult.

For all these reasons we may look upon the period stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council as one whole, in which the contest between the faith of the Church and the various forms of emergent or antagonistic error was carried on under trials which tested to the utmost her inherent vigour.

We may approach the subject by reflecting that the first condition of Christians was one of simple faith. The Son of God had come upon earth, and being found in fashion as a man, had taught, worked miracles, suffered, died, and risen again. He had thus delivered a divine truth to His Apostles for communication to the world. It was not the result of human inquiry, but the working of a new life derived from the Person of the Incarnate God. A new knowledge formed part of this life, and a new speculation was thus begun. But the complete thing was the life, that is, the Church as an institution, with her sacrifice, her sacraments, her daily discipline, her hierarchy; Jesus Christ dwelling in His people, perpetuating in that people the life which He had begun on earth.

This life was received by an act of faith. It was based upon authority, continued by a tradition which carried in its bosom all the things just enumerated. Such a state is borne witness to in the letters of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, and again in the letters of St. Ignatius and in the Epistle to Diognetus. Its force lay in the strength, simplicity, and earnestness of the faith received as a divine revelation. It is vividly expressed by St. John in his opening words: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life; for the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal which was with the Father, and hath appeared to us: that which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ."

The fulness of truth had thus appeared corporally in the Word become flesh, and by this appearance a new epoch had begun to man,[171] and henceforth there were only two attitudes of the human spirit possible towards the truth thus revealed. On the one hand, it might recognise the revelation as truth given by God, and make it the standard and guiding principle of speculation. On the other hand, it might use its freedom to assume an independent standing-point over against this revelation, which it might subject to its private reason. In the former case revelation would be primary and reason secondary; in the latter case the position would be reversed. Reason would take what it liked and reject what it disliked in revelation. In the former, reason, using the natural powers of the human mind in subordination to revealed truth, and accepting the Christian mysteries as data, would proceed by profound meditation upon them, would connect doctrine with doctrine, and come to the perception of the harmony contained in the structure of the revelation made in Christ; to a system, in fine, of speculative theology. In the latter, following its particular bias, according to the spirit of the time in each period, it would attempt to subject revelation to itself, to alter some parts, to discard others, to improve or reject according to its own inward attraction.

The one is the principle of orthodoxy, the other that of heresy.

As a matter of fact, we find from the institution of the Christian Church--that is, the entrance of Christ's Person into the world--a spiritual war commence, which runs through all the ages, and of which the time from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council is only the first period. But in that period the combatants are already well defined, the two standing-points definitely taken up, and the battle waged even upon the most important of all truth, the existence and the character of God Himself. The Christian God is carried through three centuries, and impressed upon the belief of men by the Christian Church; the philosophic god is set up against Him by those who subjected faith to reason; and in the collision between the two the pantheon of false gods is dispersed and shattered, and dissolved in the pure light of the Christian heaven.

That first condition of the Christian Church, during which it lived on pure faith--I mean the simple historical transmission of its worship, its sacraments, its discipline, and its government, as they were instituted--lasted for several generations; it may be said quite to the end of the second century. During this whole time the attacks of human reason acting upon the principle of heresy were incessant, and it was to defend themselves against these attacks that those who stood entirely upon the ground of faith and tradition in the first instance gradually betook themselves to the arms of reason, reflection, and learning superadded to the faith.

But before passing to any intellectual defence of the faith, it is well to remark that the only adequate defence against error in doctrine consisted in the Church's own life diffused amongst its members; that is, the ordinary teaching office, comprehended in worship, sacraments, discipline, and government, including therein the dispensing of the Scriptures, whether of the Old or New Testaments. Wherever error appeared, this was the power which met it first, met it continuously, and in the end met it successfully; and part of this teaching office was the unity of the Episcopate and the uniformity of its teaching, while error was ever various and changing.

Now let us proceed to the assaults of innovators or one-sided thinkers upon this institution of the Church and her faith. No sooner was the Church in action than the attack began. We have a proof of this in the constant warning against false teachers which occurs in the Apostolic writings. It would be hard to say whether St. Peter, St. Paul, or St. John is the stronger in this warning. It shows us that great as the authority of the Apostles was, and built as the Church was upon their living word, transmitting the charge of their Lord intrusted to them, there was full freedom as to the manner in which it would be received. If Hymeneus and Philetus afflicted St. Paul, "and were delivered by him up to Satan, that they might learn not to blaspheme;" if their "speech spread like a cancer;" if St. Peter, using against error words as strong as any used by his successors in the Papal chair, denounced false teachers as "fountains without water and clouds tossed with whirlwinds, to whom the mist of darkness is reserved;" if St. John even wrote his Gospel against Gnostic errors, and in his first chapter attested the Godhead of the Eternal Word, with His relation to the Father and His assumption of human flesh, in the face of their imaginary æons, and their placing the seat of evil in matter--this is but the first page of the never-ending conflict between truth and error; between "the men of good will" on the one hand, and "the children of malediction" on the other, "who left the right way and went astray."[172]

We possess very few written remnants of the time immediately succeeding the Apostles. The writers are St. Clement of Rome, St. Barnabas, Hermas, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp, Papias, and the writer of the letter to Diognetus. With the exception of the "Pastor," these are all in the form of letters, conveying strong feelings expressed in few words, short and touching exhortations, simple narratives of joys and sorrows. These first Christians were anything but literary; they were only conscious of possessing a divine truth which had incomparable value above all earthly things. Nevertheless it deserves to be remarked, that short as these writings are, we have in them the first outlines of all future learned teaching.[173] In the letter to Diognetus we have a sketch of the course which Christian apology against heathens afterwards took; in the letters of St. Ignatius, the first features of the Church's defence against heretics; in the letter of Barnabas, an approach to speculative theology; in the "Pastor," the first attempt at a Christian science of morals; in the letter of Pope St. Clement, the first development of the government which afterwards produced the Canon Law; and in the Acts of St. Ignatius' martyrdom, the earliest historical production. In these, as it were, infantine movements of His first disciples, the Divine Child was manifesting the future conquests which He would achieve in leading His people through the whole range of the divine science.

In the second century the Church vastly increased in the number of her faithful and in her influence; at the same time she was exposed to much severer attacks from within and without. Through the whole century the false Gnosis afflicted her. The Greek and the Oriental philosophy had fully detected the presence of a great enemy, and fought against her with all the arms of learning, the brilliance of Eastern imagination, the fire of religious zeal. It is said that in the first fifteen hundred years no sect has pushed the Church more hardly than Gnosticism, which through the brilliant talent of its leaders in Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and other great cities gained many adherents. The attacks from the heathen and the defacements which Christian doctrine received through heretics formed thus the strongest challenge to Christians to defend themselves with the arms of learning and science on their own side.

There were great difficulties in the way. The mass of Christians was still drawn from the lower ranks, and was accordingly unlettered. All, too, that were of higher rank had no other than the heathen schools to frequent, and were thus in great danger themselves from the force of heathen culture. A remarkable result ensued: for, one after another, champions of the Christian cause arose from among the heathen themselves who were converted to the Christian faith. Justin, we are told, sought for truth about the being of God and the soul's immortality in the schools of the Greek philosophy. He tried successively the Stoic, the Peripatetic, the Pythagorean, and the Platonic, and thought that he had found truth in the last; when, in the midst of these dreams, walking out one day in a lonely place by the sea-shore, he met with an old man with whom he entered into conversation. This man, pointing out the futility of his past search, directed him to the Christian teaching. Justin says that he felt a fire in his heart kindled by the old man's words; he followed his advice, and found here what he had in vain sought elsewhere--the only true philosophy. He became a Christian in middle age, dedicated his life to propagate the faith which he had embraced, and died a martyr for it.

His pupil, Tatian, seems to repeat this history. An Assyrian by birth, he was instructed in all branches of Grecian literature, and had tried every shade of the old heathen wisdom. But the corruption of the heathen world inspired him with abhorrence; he was converted by Justin, and found in the Christian doctrine the ideal which he sought. Yet afterwards certain rigorous views led him into error, and he became the head of a Gnostic sect.

Athenagoras of Athens supplies us with another like conversion. He was an adept in the Greek, especially the Platonic philosophy, and was devoted to heathendom. With the intention of writing against Christians he studied the Holy Scriptures, and in doing so was converted. He has left us two brilliant writings, one an apology in defence of Christians, addressed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and another setting forth the doctrine of the resurrection with admirable skill.

Theophilus of Antioch continues the list of converts. The study of the Holy Scripture led him to become a Christian, and he afterwards rose to the great See of Antioch, and has left learned writings in defence of the faith.

More brilliant than all these, the first as well as the greatest Latin writer in the West of the whole ante-nicene period, Tertullian, born of heathen parents, studied philosophy and literature, was converted about the age of thirty, became a priest, and dedicated himself by word and writing to the defence of the faith. Every subsequent age has admired the force of his reason. It amounted to genius, yet a rigoristic spirit led him to fall off to a sect.

Pantænus, who became head of the catechetical school at Alexandria about 180, had been a Stoic. His conversion repeats that of Justin. A man of the highest renown for his Grecian learning, he became equally distinguished as a Christian. He devoted himself to preaching. He was also noted as the first who not only commented by word of mouth on the Sacred Scriptures, but wrote his commentaries against Gnostic commentators of the day. For it is remarkable that, in their zeal to get the Scriptures on their side, the Gnostics had preceded the Christians in the explanation of Scripture, which they treated with the utmost latitude of private judgment.

Still more distinguished was Clemens, the pupil as well as the successor of Pantænus. Born about the middle of the second century at Alexandria or Athens, and endowed with great ability, he searched all the systems of Greek philosophy. He was full of learning when grace made him a Christian, and from that time he devoted all his powers to deepen his knowledge of the Christian faith, and to convey that knowledge to others, by drawing out a true Gnosis against the false, a main seat of which was at Alexandria, over the school of which he presided.

I have taken the seven great converts, Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Tertullian, Pantænus, Clemens, who all became apologists of the Church after their conversion, as specimens of the power which she exercised in the second century of drawing the higher spirits among the heathen into her fold. That power did not diminish but increase in the third century. It exerted itself with great effect through the establishment in the course of the second century of a system of learned instruction in the great catechetical schools. The chief of these was at Alexandria; for where the munificence of the Ptolemies had planted and richly endowed a seat of Greek learning, science, and philosophy, which had been enlarged by Tiberius, so that youth thronged to it from all parts of the Roman Empire, now the Christian Church, which probably from its beginning had there the usual school for instruction of catechumens, by degrees enlarged the instruction given in that school, and introduced learned lectures upon the Christian faith. Before long a complete learned education, all that we mean by an university, was set up. The object was not only to instruct Christian youths, but likewise to attract cultured heathen, especially the young, to prepare them gradually, and gain them to the Christian faith. Explanation of the Sacred Scriptures formed the chief point, but likewise grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and philosophy were studied. The exact point of time when all this took effect cannot be assigned; it is probable that it took time to perfect the system. Athenagoras is the first named president, who was followed from the year 170 to 312 by Pantænus, Clemens, Origen, Heraclas, Dionysius, Pierius, Theognostus, Serapion, Peter the Martyr. Each of these had fellow-workers under him, who increased in number as time went on. A crowd of learned men, bishops, saints, and martyrs, came out of this school. The envy and hatred of the heathens were so incited by it, that they often surrounded the house with soldiers, seized upon students, and led them away to execution. The renown of the school was so great in the middle of the third century, that Anatolius, a pupil of it, was sought by the heathen themselves to succeed Aristoteles in the headship of the Alexandrian university.

Another school of the like kind was set up by Origen at Cæsarea in Palestine, and became famous. Rome also possessed a learned school, founded by Justin, concerning which, however, we know very little.[174] Edessa and Antioch possessed the like. It is apparent how important such schools must have been for the formation of a learned clergy. The more the Christian Church increased, and spread to all ranks of society, the more need there became for learning in its defenders.

But great as was the renown won by these schools, and important as were the services rendered by them to the Christian Church in the advance of learning, in building up that progress from faith to knowledge--that growth of knowledge founded upon faith which marks the whole ante-nicene period--nevertheless the development of the sacred science was connected not so much with a regular course of teaching in the schools as with the vehement struggle for life which the Church was then waging on the one hand against Judaism and heathendom, on the other hand against the great heresies which successively attacked all the main truths of religion and the chief mysteries of Christianity.[175] Also, it must ever be remembered that the gift of infallible teaching, derived from the assistance of the Holy Spirit, is lodged, not in science, even not in theological science, but in the magisterium of the Church.[176] The most accomplished defence during all this period of the Church against the attacks of heathenism is, by common consent, allotted to the work of Origen in reply to Celsus. There is also a like consent that the same author's work upon Principles is the first attempt at systematic theology; but with all its ability, learning, and acuteness, it is not free from great errors. The one is a pure success, the other shows that the contact with Platonic philosophy had led the author in certain points astray. Again, all his genius and all his zeal did not save Tertullian from falling into Montanism, nor from discharging upon the chief ruler of the Church the sarcasm which he had so often employed against its enemies. In inquiring closely into the belief of some of those whose conversion from heathenism I have above instanced, an illustrious writer says: "It must be considered that the authors whom I have above cited whatever be the authority of some of them, cannot be said to speak _ex cathedra_, even if they had the right to do so, and do not speak as a Council may speak. When a certain number of men meet together, one of them corrects another, and what is personal and peculiar in each, what is local or belongs to schools, is eliminated."[177]

But if, as seems to be fully admitted, theology was not treated as an organic body of doctrine up to the Nicene Council, and even much beyond it, and yet, if in this period the Church maintained, as she did maintain, her faith against three great foes, the Jews, the many-sided influence of the Gentile world arrayed with all its powers against her, and the manifold attacks of false doctrines rising from within in the shape of heresies, or in the shape of antichristian systems which simulated Christianity, how was her work accomplished?

I proceed to give as definite an answer as I can to this question.

I have traced above the transmission of spiritual power from the Person of Christ to the College of Apostles presided over by St. Peter, and the planting of bishops throughout the world by the Apostles as a further transmission of that power. The episcopate so appointed formed, instructed, taught, and governed the Christian people, one and identical in itself. This people, with the hierarchy which governed it, the sacraments which contained and dispensed its inward life, most of all the sacrifice wherein was the Lord Himself, made a polity; and the Christian doctrine was, so to say, to that polity what blood is to the body. From the beginning, then, the office of teaching was lodged in those who governed; they conserved, handed down from age to age, all that which constituted the polity, of which doctrine was the life-blood.

Now, I will take as an exponent of this whole belief one who came forth into active life just at the time of the Nicene Council, and whose name has been ever since identified with the defence of that especial doctrine upon which the whole fabric of the Christian faith rested, namely, the Godhead of Christ. St. Athanasius may well stand as the representative of those principles in virtue of which the Church maintained her faith when she could not meet freely in council, when her theology was contained in the form of simple faith rather than drawn out as an organic structure, when her bishops everywhere had to meet the brunt of persecution, when the action of her central and presiding Bishop was hampered by the perpetual jealousy of a hostile government; when, for all these reasons, the unity and impact of the whole body, as one people, were exposed to a severer strain than at any other period.

I take this account of the mind of St. Athanasius from one who has studied his writings with peculiar care, not to say with the affection of a kindred spirit:--

"This renowned Father is in ecclesiastical history the special doctor of the sacred truth which Arius denied, bringing it out into shape and system so fully and luminously, that he may be said to have exhausted his subject, as far as it lies open to the human intellect. But, besides this, writing as a controversialist, not primarily as a priest and teacher, he accompanies his exposition of doctrine with manifestations of character which are of great interest and value.

"The fundamental idea with which he starts in the controversy is a deep sense of the authority of tradition, which he considers to have a definitive jurisdiction even in the interpretation of Scripture, though at the same time he seems to consider that Scripture, thus interpreted, is a document of final appeal in inquiry and in disputation. Hence, in his view of religion, is the magnitude of the evil which he is combating, and which exists prior to that extreme aggravation of it (about which no Catholic can doubt) involved in the characteristic tenet of Arianism itself. According to him, opposition to the witness of the Church, separation from its communion, private judgment overbearing the authorised catechetical teaching, the fact of a denomination, as men now speak,--this is a self-condemnation; and the heretical tenet, whatever it may happen to be, which is its formal life, is a spiritual poison and nothing else, the sowing of the evil one upon the good seed, in whatever age and place it is found; and he applies to all separatists the Apostle's words, 'They went out from us, for they were not of us,' Accordingly, speaking of one Rhetorius, an Egyptian, who, as St. Austin tells us, taught that 'all heresies were in the right path and spoke truth,' he says that the impiety of such doctrine is frightful to mention.

"This is the explanation of the fierceness of his language when speaking of the Arians; they were simply, as Elymas, 'full of all guile and of all deceit, children of the devil, enemies of all justice,' theomachoi--by court influence, by violent persecution, by sophistry, seducing, unsettling, perverting the people of God.

"Athanasius considers Scripture sufficient for the proof of such fundamental doctrines as came into controversy during the Arian troubles; but while in consequence he ever appeals to Scripture (and, indeed, has scarcely any other authoritative document to quote), he ever speaks against interpreting it by a private rule instead of adhering to ecclesiastical tradition. Tradition is with him of supreme authority, including therein catechetical instruction, the teaching of the _schola_, ecumenical belief, the phronêma of Catholics, the ecclesiastical scope, the analogy of faith, &c.

"In interpreting Scripture, Athanasius always assumes that the Catholic teaching is true, and the Scripture must be explained by it. The great and essential difference between Catholics and non-Catholics was, that Catholics interpreted Scripture by tradition, and non-Catholics by their own private judgment. That not only Arians, but heretics generally, professed to be guided by Scripture, we know from many witnesses.

"What is strange to ears accustomed to Protestant modes of arguing, St. Athanasius does not simply expound Scripture, rather he vindicates it from the imputation of its teaching any but true doctrine. It is ever orthos, he says, that is, orthodox; I mean, he takes it for granted that a tradition exists as a standard, with which Scripture must, and with which it doubtless does agree, and of which it is the written confirmation and record.

"The recognition of this rule of faith is the basis of St. Athanasius's method of arguing against Arianism. It is not his aim ordinarily to _prove_ doctrine by Scripture, nor does he appeal to the private judgment of the individual Christian in order to determine what Scripture means; but he assumes that there is a tradition substantive, independent, and authoritative, such as to supply for us the true sense of Scripture in doctrinal matters--a tradition carried on from generation to generation by the practice of catechising, and by the other ministrations of Holy Church. He does not care to contend that no other meaning of certain passages of Scripture besides this traditional Catholic sense is possible or is plausible, whether true or not, but simply that any sense inconsistent with the Catholic is untrue--untrue because the traditional sense is apostolic and decisive. What he was instructed in at school and in church, the voice of the Christian people, the analogy of faith, the ecclesiastical phronêma, the writings of saints,--these are enough for him. He is in no sense an inquirer, nor a mere disputant; he has received and he transmits. Such is his position, though the expressions and turn of sentences which indicate it are so delicate and indirect, and so scattered about his pages, that it is difficult to collect them and to analyse what they imply.

"The two phrases by which Athanasius denotes private judgment on religious matters, and his estimate of it, are 'their own views' and 'what they preferred;' as, for instance, 'laying down their private impiety as some sort of rule, they wrest all the divine oracles into accordance with it,' and 'they make the language of Scripture their pretence, but instead of the true sense, sowing upon it the private poison of their heresy,' and 'he who speaketh of his own speaketh a lie.' This is a common phrase with Athanasius, 'as he chose,' 'what they chose,' 'when they choose,' 'whom they chose;' the proceedings of the heretics being self-willed from first to last.

"Revealed truth, to be what it professes, must have an uninterrupted descent from the Apostles; its teachers must be unanimous, and persistent in their unanimity; and it must bear no human master's name as its designation. On the other hand, first novelty, next discordance, vacillation, change, thirdly, sectarianism, are consequences and tokens of religious error. These tests stand to reason, for what is over and above nature must come from divine revelation; and if so, it must descend from the very date when it was revealed, else it is but matter of opinion, and opinions vary, and have no warrant of permanence, but depend upon the relative ability and success of individual teachers, one with another, from whom they take their names. The Fathers abound in passages which illustrate these three tests.

"From the first the Church had the power, by its divinely appointed representatives, to declare the truth upon such matters in the revealed message or gospel tidings as from time to time came into controversy; for unless it had this power, how could it be 'the pillar and ground of the truth;' and these representatives, of course, were the rulers of the Christian people, who received as a legacy the depositum of doctrine from the Apostles, and by means of it, as need arose, exercised their office of teaching. Each bishop was in his own place the Doctor Ecclesiæ for his people; there was an appeal, of course, from his decision to higher courts, to the bishops of a province, of a nation, of a patriarchate, to the Roman Church, to the Holy See, as the case might be; and thus at length a final determination was arrived at, which in consequence was the formal teaching of the Church, and, as far as it was direct and categorical, was from the reason of the case the word of God. And being such, was certain, irreversible, obligatory on the inward belief and reception of all subjects of the Church, or what is called _de fide_.

"All this could not be otherwise if Christianity was to teach divine truth in contrast to the vague opinions and unstable conjectures of human philosophers and moralists, and if as a plain consequence it must have authoritative organs of teaching, and if true doctrines never can be false, but what is once true is always true. What the Church proclaims as true never can be put aside or altered, and therefore such truths are called _definitions_, as being boundaries or landmarks."

From all the above "it would appear that the two main sources of revelation are Scripture and Tradition, that these constitute one Rule of Faith, and that sometimes as a composite rule, sometimes as a double and co-ordinate, sometimes as an alternative, under the _magisterium_, of course, of the Church, and without an appeal to the private judgment of individuals."[178]

Now I conceive that the picture thus drawn from the writings and the practice of Athanasius gives us, in fact, a palpable embodiment of that spiritual power by which the Church defended and carried on her faith from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council; for the principles and practice of Athanasius were the principles and practice of the whole Church, and nothing short of the continuous action of the Holy Spirit could have created and maintained a polity whose subjects were instinct with such a loyalty of mind, heart, and action. It was not a gift of learning; it was not philosophic power of thought; it was not the scientific labour of theology, as in after medieval times, arranging in a luminous system the results of the Church's doctrine through ages of spiritual warfare and trials of every kind. It is true that in all this period, as well as in the succeeding four hundred years, the armour of theology was wrought out bit by bit through the blows of heresy, and not before St. John of Damascus did any one work the separate pieces into a panoply. The great mind and nobler heart of Origen even failed in the attempt. But from the beginning the Church moved on, filled with a divine consciousness that it was the Body of Christ, carrying the truth in its bosom. Each bishop, each father, each writer, and in a far higher degree the Councils, were conscious of this; but most of all in the Apostolic See, the centre of the whole body, was such a conviction living and active, and exhibited in all the various functions of spiritual rule.

It is not possible from existing documents to form a continuous and detailed history of the ante-nicene Church. Thus, if any will not accept the Church at the Nicene Council as an evidence of what the Church was in preceding times as to its constitution, principles of action, and faith, it is possible, through the mere absence of written proof, to make denials of those very things without which the Nicene Council could never have come together. The spirit of negation luxuriates in that absence of documents which more than anything else the state of persecution caused. On the other hand, to the eyes of faith the grain of mustard seed planted by our Lord on Calvary is become, at the end of three hundred years, a tree which covers the Roman world, and gives its fruits for the healing of the nations.

The writer just quoted says elsewhere, in treating the point how far an accurate presentation of the doctrine respecting the Holy Trinity is found in the apologists of those times, that "it is a great misfortune to us that we have not had preserved to us the dogmatic utterances of the ante-nicene Popes."[179] But I would draw attention to a remarkable proof actually existing of the completeness with which the hierarchic principle had worked itself out in the days of persecution. This testimony is the more valuable because it belongs to the very first year of the Church's freedom, the year 314. In that year, at the instance of the Emperor Constantine, the Council of Arles was convoked as a representative Council of all the West. Up to this time the Council of Antioch, which deposed Paul of Samosata, had been the most important and general. That of Arles was in a much greater degree a Council in which the bishops who sat represented their respective provinces, as, for instance, from the remote Britain the bishops of York and London and another British See were present.

The Council of Arles then addresses in these terms Pope Sylvester:--"We who, by the desire of the most religious Emperor, have been assembled in the city of Arles, bound together by the common bond of charity and the unity of the Church our Mother, salute you, most glorious Pope, with the befitting reverence. We have endured here men grievous and pernicious to our law and tradition, men of unbridled mind. Both the present authority of our God, and the tradition and rule of the truth have rejected them, for there was in them no reasonable ground for pleading, no limit or proof for their accusations. Therefore, by the judgment of God and our Mother the Church, who knows and approves her own, they have either been condemned or repudiated; and would, most beloved brother, that you could have been present at so great a spectacle; we believe, indeed, that our sentence would then have been more severe, and had your judgment been united with ours, our assembly would have rejoiced with a greater joy. But you were not able to leave that place in which the Apostles daily sit, and their blood without intermission testifies the glory of God." Then sending to him the subjects of their decrees, they preface them with the words, "It was our pleasure that knowledge of this should be communicated to all by you who hold the greater dioceses. What we have decreed by common counsel we signify to your charity, that all may know what in future they are bound to observe. And, first, as to the observation of the Lord's Pasch, that it may be kept on one day and at one time through the whole world, and that according to custom you direct letters to all to this effect."

But the Emperor, neither a Christian nor a catechumen for many long years to come, writes to the Fathers of the Council: "They (the Donatists) ask for my judgment, who am myself awaiting the judgment of Christ. For I say, as the truth is, the judgment of bishops ought to be considered as if the Lord Himself were present and judging. For these may have no other mind and no other judgment but what they have been taught by the teaching of Christ.[180] What, then, do those malignant men want, instruments, us I truly call them, of the devil? They desert heavenly in their search for earthly things. Oh, the rabid audacity of maniacs! they interpose an appeal, as is customary in secular matters."[181]

The Council recognised the authority of the Apostles Peter and Paul ruling for ever in the See of Rome, as the Pope at the present day attests in solemn documents that same rule when he uses the words, "By the authority of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul," adding to them, "and by our own;" and the Emperor clearly understands the distinction between secular and ecclesiastical judgments. In the former he knows himself to be the judge of ultimate appeal. In the latter he recognises the bishops as holding the magisterium of Christ Himself, and that their judgments are His, as if He were present among them. What stronger attestation of the Church's freedom in her ecclesiastical and dogmatic judgments from the State's control could be given than this spontaneous declaration by the head of the Roman empire? And it is to be noted that he places the ground of that freedom and the force of its authority in the magisterium of Christ transmitted to the rulers of the Church.

How did the successor of Nero, Domitian, Trajan, and Decius come to this knowledge? That is a subject which requires special consideration.

FOOTNOTES:

[145] Corpus Christianorum: to ethnos Christianon.

[146] paredosan, in which is signified that the whole was a paradosis, _traditio_, delivery. On the two meanings of the word _tradition_, the one the unwritten word of God, the other the whole doctrine of salvation as handed down by the Fathers, see Kleutgen's Theologie der Vorzeit, tom. i. p. 73, and v. p. 405.

[147] hupêretai tou logou.

[148] Origen was followed by his pupil Heraclas; then the great Dionysius, afterwards bishop; Pierius, Achillas, Theognostus, Serapion, Peter the Martyr (Reischl in Möhler, i. 377).

[149] teleioi; akroômenoi, or _audientes_; gonuklinontes or euchomenoi; _competentes_, _electi_, or phôtizomenoi. Bingham, Antiq., B. x.; Suicer, Thes. in verb. katêcheô.

[150] Newman's Arians, pp. 45, 46.

[151] See upon this use of the Creed, Möhler, Kirchengeschichte, i. 343-347.

[152] Sermon 212.

[153] On this subject see Newman's Arians, pp. 137-142.

[154] As St. Irenæus says, 3, 24, and Origen, Contr. Celsus, 6, 48.

[155] See Kleutgen's Theologie der Vorzeit, v. 404-409.

[156] Ibid., pp. 395-404.

[157] For which see Franzelin, De Traditione, pp. 228-237.

[158] Baur observes, p. 432: "Erst die Regierung Nero's führte auf ihrer würdigen Weise die Christen in die Geschichte ein."

[159] Tertullian, Apol. 21.

[160] Matt. xxiii. 34-36.

[161] Joseph. Antiq., viii. 8; Tacitus, Hist. i. 22.

[162] Baur remarks, p. 433: "Die neronische Verfolgung war der erste Anfang alles dessen, was das Christenthum von dem römischen Staat, so lange er keine andere Ansicht von ihm hatte, bei jeder Gelegenheit auf's Neue erwarten musste."

[163] marturêsas epi tôn hêgoumenôn.--St. Clem. 5.

[164] 2 Cor. xi. 24.

[165] Tertullian, Ad Nationes, 14, translation in Clarke's edition.

[166] Acts xxi. 20.

[167] See Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, i. 68.

[168] Tertull. Apol., 5.

[169] Matt. x. 16.

[170] See this learnedly brought out by Hagemann in his introduction to "Die römische Kirche."

[171] See Stöckl, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 244.

[172] 2 Peter ii. 14.

[173] Möhler, Patrologie, p. 51.

[174] See Möhler, Patrologie, p. 423.

[175] Heinrich, Dogmatische Theologie, i. 71.

[176] Ibid., i. 70.

[177] Newman, Causes of Success of Arianism, pp. 215, 216.

[178] Newman, Notes on St. Athanasius, pp. 51, 261, 264, 452, 250, 247, 150, 82, 312.

[179] Newman, "Causes of the Rise and Successes of Arianism," p. 252, a treatise which I have found a storehouse of information respecting the Church of the first three centuries.

[180] Magisterio.

[181] Mansi, tom. ii. pp. 469-477.