Chapter III: God as the Supreme Being (3)

2. Side by side with this question of the standard or authentic minimum of traditional teaching, and growing necessarily with it and out of it, was the question of the sources from which that teaching could be drawn, and of the materials by which the standard might be interpreted. The greater part of apostolic teaching had been oral. The tradition was mostly oral. But as the generations of men receded farther from the apostolic age, and as the oral tradition which was delivered came necessarily to vary, it became more and more uncertain what was the true form and content of the tradition. Written records came to be of more importance than oral tradition. They had at first only the authority which attached to tradition. Their elevation to an independent rank was due to the influence of the Old Testament. There had been already a series of revelations of God to men, which having once been oral had become written. The revelation consisted of what was then known as the Scriptures, and what we now know as the Old Testament. The proofs of Christianity consisted to a large extent in its consonance with those Scriptures. But the term Holy Scriptures was less strictly used than is sometimes supposed. The hedge round them had gaps, and there were patches lying outside what has since come to be its line. It was partly the indefiniteness of the Old Testament canon which caused the term Scripture to be applied to some writings of the apostolic age. But the question, Which writings? was only answered gradually. The spirit of prophecy had only gradually passed away. It was the common ground for the reception of the Old Testament and the New Testament; as the spirit of prophecy was common to both, it was but natural that both should have the same attributes. But prophecy was not in the first instance conceived as having suddenly ceased in the Church. The term Scripture (ἡ γραφή) is applied to the Shepherd of Hermas by Irenæus.[687] The delimitation of the body of writings that could be so denoted was connected with the necessity of being sure about the _apostolical_ teaching—the παράδοσις.[688] The term Scripture was applied to the recorded sayings of Jesus Christ (the λόγια) without demur.[689] It came to be applied also to the records which the apostles had left of the facts of the life of Christ. Then, finally, it tended more gradually to be applied to the writings of the apostles and of apostolic men.

But questions arose in regard to all these classes, which were not immediately answered. There were several recensions current both of the sayings of Jesus Christ and of the memoirs of the apostles. There were many writings attributed to apostles and apostolic men which were of doubtful authority. But the determination was slow, and the date when a general settlement was made is uncertain.[690] There is no distinction between canonical and uncanonical books either in Justin Martyr or in Irenæus. The first Biblical critic was Marcion: the controversy with his followers, which reaches its height in Tertullian, forced on the Church the first serious consideration of the question,—Which recensions of the words and memoirs of Christ, and which of the letters and other writings of the apostles and apostolic men, should be accepted? There came to be a recognized list of the writings of the new revelations, as there came to be—though it is doubtful whether there had yet come to be—a list of the writings of the earlier revelations to the Jews. Writings on the recognized list came in as the voices of the Holy Ghost.[691] They were, as the writings of the prophets had been, the revelation of the Father to His children. Hence faith or belief came to take in the Christian world the sense that it had in Philo—of assent not only to the great conceptions which were contained in the notion of God, but also to the divine revelation which was recorded in the two Testaments.

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3. It might have been well if the Christian Church had been content to rest with this first stage in the transformation of the idea of belief, and to take as its intellectual basis only the simple statements of the primitive creed interpreted by the New Testament. But the conflict of speculations which had compelled the middle party in the Christian churches to adopt a standard of belief and a limitation of the sources from which the belief might be interpreted, had also had the effect of bringing into the Church the philosophical temper.[692] In the creed of the end of the second century, the age of Tertullian, there are already philosophical ideas—the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the relation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father, and of both to men. The Creed, as given in the treatise against Praxeas, is equally elaborate.[693] With that Creed—traditional as he believed it to be—Tertullian himself was satisfied. He deprecates the “curiositas” of the brethren no less than the “scrupulositas” of the heretics. He denies the applicability of the text, “Seek and ye shall find,” to research into the content of Christian doctrine: it relates only to the traditional teaching: when a man has found that, he has all that he needs: further “seeking” is incompatible with having found. In other words, as among modern Ultramontanes, faith must rest not on search but on tradition (authority).[694] The absolute freedom of speculation was checked, but the tendency to speculate remained, and it had in the “rule of faith” a vantage-ground within the Church. There grew up within the lines that had been marked out a tendency which, accepting the rule of faith, and accepting also, with possibly slight variations, the canonical Scriptures, tried to build theories out of them: γνῶσις took its place side by side with πίστις.[695] It grew up in several parts of Christendom. In Cappadocia, in Asia, in Edessa, in Palestine, in Alexandria, were different small groups of men who within the recognized lines were working out philosophical theories of Christianity.[696] We know most about Alexandria. There was a recognized school—on the type of the existing philosophical schools—for the study of philosophical Christianity. Its first great teacher was Clement. He was the first to construct a large philosophy of Christian doctrine, with a recognition of the conventional limits, but by the help and in the domain of Greek thought. But he is of less importance than his great disciple Origen. In the _De Principiis_ of the latter we have the first complete system of dogma; and I recommend the study of it, of its omissions as well as of its assertions, of the strange fact that the features of it which are in strongest contrast to later dogmatics are in fact its most archaic and conservative elements.

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It is not to my present purpose to state the results of these speculations. The two points to which I wish to draw your attention in reference to this tendency to philosophize, are these:

(1) The distinction between what was either an original and ground belief or a historical fact of which a trustworthy tradition had come down, and speculations in regard to such primary beliefs and historical facts, tended to disappear in the strong philosophical current of the time. It did not disappear without a struggle. Tertullian, among others, gives indications of it. The doctrine of the Divine Word had begun in his time to make its way into the Creed: it was known as the “dispensation” (_œconomia_). “The simpler-minded men,” he remarks, “not to say ignorant and uneducated, who always constitute the majority of believers—since the rule of faith itself transfers us from the belief in polytheism to the belief in one only true God—not understanding that though God be one, yet His oneness is to be understood as involving a dispensation, are frightened at this idea of dispensation.”[697] But the ancient conservatism was crushed. It came to be considered as important to have the right belief in the speculation as it confessedly was to have it in the fact.

(2) The result of the fading away of this distinction, and of the consequent growth in importance of the speculative element, was a tendency to check individual speculations, and to fuse all speculation in the average speculations of the majority. The battle of the second century had been a battle between those who asserted that there was a single and final tradition of truth, and those who claimed that the Holy Spirit spoke to them as truly as He had spoken to men in the days of the apostles. The victorious opinion had been that the revelation was final, and that what was contained in the records of the apostles was the sufficient sum of Christian teaching: hence the stress laid upon _apostolic_ doctrine.

The battle of the third century was between those who claimed, as Marcion claimed, that inspired documents were to be taken in their literal sense, and those who claimed that they needed a philosophical interpretation,[698]—that while these monuments of the apostolic age required interpretation,[699] yet they were of no private interpretation, and that theories based upon them must be the theories of the apostolical churches. In other words, the contention that Christianity rested upon the basis of a traditional doctrine and a traditional standard, was necessarily supplemented by the contention that the doctrine and standard must have a traditional interpretation. A rule of faith and a canon were comparatively useless, and were felt to be so, without a traditionally authoritative interpretation. The Gnostics were prepared to accept all but this. They also appealed to tradition and to the Scriptures.[700] So far it was an even battle: each side in such a controversy might retort upon the other, and did so.[701] If it were allowed to each side to argue on the same bases and by the same methods, each side might claim a victory. A new principle had to be introduced—the denial of the right of private interpretation. In regard both to the primary articles of belief and to the majority of apostolic writings, no serious difference of opinion had existed among the apostolical churches. It was otherwise with the speculations that were based upon the rule of faith and the canon. They required discussion. The Christological ideas that were growing up on all sides had much in common with the Gnostic opinions. They needed a limitation and a check. The check was conterminous with the sources of the tradition itself; the meaning of the canon, as well as the canon itself, was deposited with the bishops of apostolical churches; and their method of enforcing the check was the holding of meetings and the framing of resolutions. Such meetings had long been held to ensure unity on points of discipline. They came now to be held to ensure unity on that which had come to be no less important—the interpretation of the recognized standard of belief. They were meetings of bishops. Bishops had added to their original functions the function of teachers (διδάσκαλοι) and interpreters of the will of God (προφῆται).[702] Accordingly meetings of bishops were held, and through the operation of political rather than of religious causes their decisions were held to be final. Two important results followed.

(i.) The first result was the formulating of the speculations in definite propositions, and the insertion of such propositions in the Creed. The theory was that such insertions were of the nature of definitions and interpretations of the original belief. The mass of communities have never wandered from the belief that they rest upon an original revelation preserved by a continuous tradition. But a definition of what has hitherto been undefined is necessarily of the nature of an addition. Perhaps the earliest instance which has come down to us of such an expansion of the Creed, is in the letter sent by Hymenæus, Bishop of Jerusalem, and his colleagues to Paul of Samosata.[703] The faith which had been handed down from the beginning is “that God is unbegotten, one, without beginning, unseen, unchangeable, whom no man hath seen nor can see, whose glory and greatness it is impossible for human nature to trace out adequately; but we must be content to have a moderate conception of Him: His Son reveals Him ... as he himself says, ‘No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son revealeth Him.’ We confess and proclaim His begotten Son, the only begotten, the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature, the wisdom and word and power of God, being before the worlds, God not by foreknowledge but by essence and substance.”

They had passed into the realm of metaphysics. The historical facts of the earlier creed were altogether obscured. Belief was belief in certain speculations. The conception of the nature of belief had travelled round a wide circuit. It will be noted that there had been a change in the meaning of the word which has lasted until our own day. The belief in the veracity of a witness, or in facts of which we are cognizant through our senses, or the primary convictions of our minds—in which I may include the belief in God—admit of a degree of certainty which cannot attach to the belief in deductions from metaphysical premises.[704] Belief came to mean, not the highest form of conviction, but something lower than conviction, and it tends to have that meaning still. But with this change in the nature of belief, there had been no change in the importance which was attached to it. The acceptance of these philosophical speculations was as important as the belief in God and in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The tendency developed, and we find it developing all through the fourth century. In the Nicene Council the tendency was politically more important, but it was not theologically different from what had gone before. The habit of defining and of making inferences from definitions, grew the more as the philosophers passed over into the Christian lines, and logicians and metaphysicians presided over Christian churches. The speculations which were then agreed upon became stamped as a body of truth, and with the still deeper speculations of the Councils of Constantinople and Chalcedon, the resolutions of the Nicene Fathers have come to be looked upon as almost a new revelation, and the rejection of them as a greater bar to Christian fellowship than the rejection of the New Testament itself.

(ii.) The second result was the creation of a distinction between what was accepted by the majority at a meeting and what was accepted only by a minority. The distinction had long been growing. There had been parties in the Christian communities from the first. And the existence of such parties was admissible.[705] They broke the concord of the brethren, but they did not break the unity of the faith. Now heretics and schismatics were identified; difference in speculative belief was followed by political penalty. The original contention, still preserved in Tertullian,[706] that every man should worship God according to his own conviction, that one man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man, was exchanged for the contention that the officers of Christian communities were the guardians of the faith. Controversy on these lines, and with these assumptions, soon began to breed its offspring of venom and abuse. But I will not pain your ears by quoting, though I have them at hand, the torrents of abuse which one saint poured upon another, because the one assented to the speculations of a majority, and the other had speculations of his own.[707]

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It was by these stages, which passed one into the other by a slow evolution, that the idea of trust in God, which is the basis of all religion, changed into the idea of a creed, blending theory with fact, and metaphysical speculation with spiritual truth.

It began by being (1) a simple trust in God; then followed (2) a simple expansion of that trust into the assent to the proposition that God is good, and (3) a simple acceptance of the proposition that Jesus Christ was His Son; then (4) came in the definition of terms, and each definition of terms involved a new theory; finally, (5) the theories were gathered together into systems, and the martyrs and witnesses of Christ died for their faith, not outside but inside the Christian sphere; and instead of a world of religious belief, which resembled the world of actual fact in the sublime unsymmetry of its foliage and the deep harmony of its discords, there prevailed the most fatal assumption of all, that the symmetry of a system is the test of its truth and a proof thereof.

I am far from saying that those theories are not true. The point to which I would draw attention is, first, that they are speculations; secondly, that their place in Christian thought arises from the fact that they are the speculations of a majority at certain meetings. The importance which attaches to the whole subject with which we are dealing, lies less in the history of the formation of a body of doctrine, than in the growth and permanence of the conceptions which underlie that formation.

(1) The first conception comes from the antecedent belief which was rooted in the Greek mind, that, given certain primary beliefs which are admitted on all sides to be necessary, it is requisite that a man should define those beliefs[708]—that it is as necessary that a man should be able to say with minute exactness what he means by God, as that he should say, I believe in God. It is purely philosophical. A philosopher cannot be satisfied with unanalyzed ideas.

(2) The second conception comes rather from politics than from philosophy. It is the belief in a majority of a meeting. It is the conception that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which are made by the majority of church officers assembled under certain conditions, are in all cases and so certainly true, that the duty of the individual is, not to endeavour, by whatever light of nature or whatever illumination of the Holy Spirit may be given to him, to understand them, but to acquiesce in the verdict of the majority. The theory assumes that God never speaks to men except through the voice of the majority. It is a large assumption. It is a transference to the transcendental sphere in which the highest conceptions of the Divine Nature move, of what is a convenient practical rule for conducting the business of human society: “Let the majority decide.” I do not say that it is untrue, or that it has not some arguments in its favour; but I do venture to point out that the fact of its being an assumption must at least be recognized.

(3) The third conception is, that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which were made by the majority, or even by the unanimous voice of a church assembly, in a particular age, and which were both relative to the dominant mental tendencies of that age and adequately expressed them, are not only true but final. It is a conceivable view that once, and once only, did God speak to men, and that the revelation of Himself in the Gospels is a unique fact in the history of the universe. It is also a conceivable view that God is continually speaking to men, and that now, no less than in the early ages of Christianity, there is a divine Voice that whispers in men’s souls, and a divine interpretation of the meaning of the Gospel history. The difficulty is in the assumption which is sometimes made, that the interpretation of the divine Voice was developed gradually through three centuries, and that it was then suddenly arrested. The difficulty has sometimes been evaded by the further assumption that there was no development of the truth, and that the Nicene theology was part of the original revelation—a theology divinely communicated to the apostles by Jesus Christ himself. The point of most importance in the line of study which we have been following together, is the demonstration which it affords that this latter assumption is wholly untenable. We have been able to see, not only that the several elements of what is distinctive in the Nicene theology were gradually formed, but also that the whole temper and frame of mind which led to the formation of those elements were extraneous to the first form of Christianity, and were added to it by the operation of causes which can be traced. If this be so, the assumption of the finality of the Nicene theology is the hypothesis of a development which went on for three centuries, and was then suddenly and for ever arrested. Such a hypothesis, even if it be _à priori_ conceivable, would require an overwhelming amount of positive testimony. Of such testimony there is absolutely none. But it may be that the time has come in which, instead of travelling once more along the beaten tracks of these ancient controversies as to particular speculations, we should rather consider the prior question of the place which speculation as such should occupy in the economy of religion and of the criterion by which speculations are to be judged. We have to learn also that although for the needs of this life, for the solace of its sorrow, for the development of its possibilities, we must combine into societies and frame our rules of conduct, and possibly our articles of belief, by striking an average, yet for the highest knowledge we must go alone upon the mountain-top; and that though the moral law is thundered forth so that even the deaf may hear, the deepest secrets of God’s nature and of our own are whispered still in the silence of the night to the individual soul.

It may be that too much time has been spent upon speculations about Christianity, whether true or false, and that that which is essential consists not of speculations but of facts, and not in technical accuracy on questions of metaphysics, but in the attitude of mind in which we regard them. It would be a cold world in which no sun shone until the inhabitants thereof had arrived at a true chemical analysis of sunlight. And it may be that the knowledge and thought of our time, which is drawing us away from the speculative elements in religion to that conception of it which builds it upon the character and not only upon the intellect, is drawing us thereby to that conception of it which the life of Christ was intended to set forth, and which will yet regenerate the world.

LECTURE XII.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN UNION: DOCTRINE IN THE PLACE OF CONDUCT.

I spoke in the last Lecture of the gradual formation under Greek influence of a body of doctrine. I propose to speak in the present Lecture of that enormous change in the Christian communities by which an assent to that body of doctrine became the basis of union. I shall have to speak less of the direct influence of Greece than in previous Lectures: but it is necessary to show not only the separate causes and the separate effects, but also their general sum in the changed basis of Christian communion.

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There is no adequate evidence that, in the first age of Christianity, association was other than voluntary. It was profoundly individual. It assumed for the first time in human history the infinite worth of the individual soul. The ground of that individual worth was a divine sonship. And the sons of God were brethren. They were drawn together by the constraining force of love. But the clustering together under that constraining force was not necessarily the formation of an association. There was not necessarily any organization.[709] The tendency to organization came partly from the tendency of the Jewish colonies in the great cities of the empire to combine, and to a far greater extent from the large tendency of the Greek and Roman world to form societies for both religious and social purposes.

But though there is no evidence that associations were in the first instance universal, there is ample evidence that, when once they began to be formed, they were formed on a basis which was less intellectual than moral and spiritual. An intellectual element existed: but it existed as an element, not by itself but as an essential ingredient in the whole spiritual life. It was not separable from the spiritual element. Of the same spiritual element, “faith” and “works” were two sides. The associations, like the primitive clusters which were not yet crystallized into associations, were held together by faith and love and hope, and fused, as it were, by a common enthusiasm. They were baptized, not only into one body, but also by one spirit, by the common belief in Jesus Christ as their Saviour, by the overpowering sense of brotherhood, by the common hope of immortality. Their individual members were the saints, that is, the holy ones. The collective unity which they formed—the Church of God—was holy. It was regarded as holy before it was regarded as catholic. The order of the attributes in the creed is historically correct—the holy Catholic Church. The pictures which remain of the earliest Christian communities show that there was a real effort to justify their name. The earliest complete picture of a Christian community is that of the “Two Ways.” There are fragments elsewhere. From the Acts of the Apostles and the canonical Epistles, and the extra-canonical writings of the sub-apostolic age, it is possible to put together a mosaic.

But in the “Two Ways” we have a primitive manual of Christian teaching, and the teaching is wholly moral. It professes to be a short exposition (διδαχὴ) of the two commandments of love to God and love to one’s neighbour. The exposition is partly a quotation from and partly an expansion of the Sermon on the Mount. “Bless those that curse you, and pray for your enemies.” “If any one give thee a blow on the one cheek, turn to him the other also.” “Give to every one that asketh thee, and ask not back.” “Thou shalt not be double-minded nor double-tongued.” “Thou shalt not be covetous nor grasping.” “Thou shalt not be angry nor envious.” “Thou shalt not be lustful nor filthy-tongued.” “But thou shalt be meek and long-suffering and quiet and guileless and considerate.”[710] The ideal was not merely moral, but it was also that of an internal morality, of a new heart, of a change of character.

The book which is probably nearest in date, and which is certainly most alike in character to this simple manual, is the first book of the collection of documents known as the Apostolical Constitutions. It pictures the aim of the Christian life as being to please God by obeying His will and keeping His commandments. “Take heed, O sons of God, to do everything in obedience to God, and to become well-pleasing in all things to the Lord our God.”[711] “If thou wilt please God, abstain from all that He hates, and do none of those things that are displeasing to Him.”[712] Individual Christians are spoken of as servants and sons of God, as fellow-heirs and fellow-partakers with His Son, as believers, i.e., as the phrase is expanded, “those who have believed on His unerring religion.”[713] The rule of life is the Ten Commandments, expanded as Christ expanded them, so as to comprehend sins of thought as well as of deed. It was a fellowship of a common ideal and a common enthusiasm of goodness, of neighbourliness and of mutual service, of abstinence from all that would rouse the evil passions of human nature, of the effort to crush the lower part of us in the endeavour to reach after God.[714]

It is even possible that the baptismal formula may have consisted, not in an assertion of belief, but in a promise of amendment; for a conservative sect made the candidate promise—“I call these seven witnesses to witness that I will sin no more, I will commit adultery no more, I will not steal, I will not act unjustly, I will not covet, I will not hate, I will not despise, nor will I have pleasure in any evil.”[715]

The Christian communities were based not only on the fellowship of a common ideal, but also on the fellowship of a common hope. In baptism they were born again, and born to immortality. There was the sublime conception that the ideal society which they were endeavouring to realize would be actually realized on earth. The Son of Man would come again, and the regenerated would die no more. The kingdoms of this world would become the kingdom of the Messiah. The lust and hate, the strife and conflict, the iniquity and vice, which dominated in current society, would be cast out for ever; and over the new earth there would be the arching spheres of a new heaven, into which the saints, like the angels, might ascend. But as the generations passed, and all things continued as they had been, and the sign of the Son of Man sent no premonitory ray from the far-off heaven, this hope of a new earth, without changing its force, began to change its form. It was no longer conceived as sudden, but as gradual. The nations of the world were to be brought one by one into the vast communion. There grew up the magnificent conception of a universal assembly, a καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία.[716] There would be a universal religion and a universal society, and not until then would the end come: it would be a transformed and holy world.

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The first point which I will ask you to note is, that this very transformation of the idea of a particular religion into that of a universal religion—this conception of an all-embracing human society, naturally, if unconsciously, carried with it a relaxation of the bonds of discipline. The very earnestness which led men to preach the Gospel and to hasten the Kingdom, led them also to gather into the net fish of every kind. There was always a test, but the rigour of the test was softened. The old Adam asserted itself. There were social influences, and weakness of character in the officers, and a condonation by the community. It became less and less practicable to eject every offender against the Christian code. It was against this whole tendency that Montanism was a rebellion—not only against the officialism of Christianity, but also against its worldliness.[717] The earlier conception of that code, in which it embraced sins of thought, came to be narrowed. The first narrowing was the limitation to open sins. The Christian societies fell under the common law which governs all human organizations, that no cognizance can be taken of the secret thoughts of the heart. The second limitation was, that even when a man had committed an open sin, and had been therefore excluded from the community, he might be re-admitted. The limitation was not accepted without a controversy which lasted over a great part of two centuries, and which at one time threatened to rend the whole Christian communities into fragments. The Church was gradually transformed from being a community of saints—of men who were bound together by the bond of a holy life, separated from the mass of society, and in antagonism to it—to a community of men whose moral ideal and moral practice differed in but few respects from those of their Gentile neighbours. The Church of Christ, which floated upon the waves of this troublesome world was a Noah’s ark, in which there were unclean as well as clean.

Side by side with this diminution in the strictness of the moral tests of admission and of continued membership, was a growth in the importance of the intellectual elements, of which I spoke in a previous Lecture. The idea of holiness and purity came to include in early times the idea of sound doctrine. Hegesippus,[718] in speaking of a church as a virgin, gives as his reason, not its moral purity, but the fact that it was not corrupted by foolish doctrines. The growth, both within the Church and on its outskirts, of opinions which were not the opinions of the majority—the tendency of all majorities to assert their power—the flocking into the Christian fold of the educated Greeks and Romans, who brought with them the intellectual habits of mind which dominated in the age—gave to the intellectual element an importance which it had not previously possessed. Knowledge, which had always been in some sort an element in Christianity, though not as a basis of association, came to assert its place side by side with love. Agreement in opinion, which had been the basis of union in the Greek philosophical schools, and later in the Gnostic societies, now came to form a new element in the bond of union within and between the Churches.[719] But the practical necessity, when once an intellectual element was admitted, of giving some limitations to that element by establishing a rule of faith and a standard list of apostolic documents, caused stress to be laid at once upon the intellect and the region within which it moved. It was, that is to say, necessary to ensure that the intellectual element was of the right kind, and this of itself gave emphasis to the new temper and tendency. The profession of belief in Christ which had been in the first instance subordinate to love and hope, and which had consisted in a simple recognition of him as the Son of God, became enucleated and elaborated into an explicit creed; and assent to that creed became the condition, or, so to speak, the contract of membership. The profession of faith must be in the words of the Christian rule.[720] The teaching of the catechumens was no longer that which we find in the “Two Ways”—the inculcation of the higher morality; it was the _traditio symboli_, the teaching of the pass-word and of its meaning. The creed and teaching were the creed and teaching of the average members of the communities. In religion, as in society, it is the average that rules. The law of life is compromise.

There were two collateral causes which contributed to the change and gave emphasis to it.

(1) The one arose from the importance which was attached to baptism. There is no doubt that baptism was conceived to have in itself an efficacy which in later times has been rarely attached to it. The expressions which the more literary ages have tended to construe metaphorically were taken literally. It was a real washing away of sins; it was a real birth into a new life; it was a real adoption into a divine sonship. The _renunciatio diaboli_—the abjuring of false gods and their wicked worship—was also an important element.[721] These elements were indeed even more strongly emphasized by certain Gnostic societies than by the more orthodox writers; but they directly suggested a question which soon became vital, viz. whether all baptism had this efficacy. Was the mere act or ceremonial enough, or did it depend on the place where, the person by whom, and the ritual with which it was administered? In particular, the question of the minister of baptism became important. It came to be doubted whether baptism had its awful efficacy, if the baptizer were cut off from the general society of Christians on the ground of either his teaching or his practice. It became important to ensure that those who baptized held the right faith, lest the baptism they administered should be invalid, and should carry with it all the evil consequences of a vitiated baptism. The rules which were laid down were minute. There were grave controversies as to the precise amount of difference of opinion which vitiated baptism, and the very fact of the controversies about opinion accentuated the stress which was laid upon such opinion. It drew away attention from a man’s character to his mental attitude towards the general average of beliefs.

(2) There was another feature of early Christian life which probably contributed more than anything else to strengthen this tendency. It was the habit of intercourse and intercommunion. Christians, like Jews, travelled widely—more for trade and commerce than for pleasure. The new brotherhood of Christians, like the ancient brotherhood of the Jews, gave to all the travelling brethren a welcome and hospitality. A test had been necessary in the earliest times in regard to the prophets and teachers. It is mentioned in the Teaching of the Apostles. But the test was of moral rather than of intellectual teaching. “Whoever comes to you and teaches you all these things” (i.e. the moral precepts of the “Two Ways”), “receive him. But in case he who teaches, himself turns and teaches you another teaching[722] so as to destroy (this teaching), listen not to him: but if he teaches you so as to add to your righteousness and knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord.”[723] So of the prophets: “Not every one who speaks in the spirit is a prophet, but only he who has the moral ways of the Lord (τοὺς τρόπους Κυρίου): by these ways shall be known the false prophet and the true prophet.... Every prophet who teaches the truth, if he does not what he teaches, is a false prophet.”[724] So also of the travelling brethren: “Let every one who comes in the name of the Lord be received; afterwards ye shall test him and find out.... If he wish to settle among you and is a craftsman, let him work and so eat. If he be not a craftsman, provide some way of his living among you as a Christian, but not being idle. If he be unwilling so to do, he is χριστέμπορος—making a gain of godliness.”[725]

The test here also is a test of character and not of belief. But when the intellectual elements had asserted a prominence in Christianity, and when the acceptance of the baptismal formula had been made a test of admission to a Christian community, it gradually became a custom to make the acceptance of that formula also a condition of admission to hospitality.[726] It was, so to speak, a _tessera_ or pass-word. By being a pass-word to hospitality, it became also a form which a man might easily strain his conscience to accept, and in religion no less than in politics there are no such strenuous upholders of current opinion as those who are hypocrites. The importance of the formula as a passport attached not only to individuals, but also to whole communities.[727] The fact that the Teaching of the Apostles makes the test personal and individual, shows that in the country and at the time when that book was written the later system had not yet begun to prevail. This later system was for a community to furnish its travelling members with a circular letter of recommendation. Such a letter served as a passport. The travelling Christian who brought it received an immediate and ungrudging hospitality. But when churches had wide points of difference, they would not receive each other’s letters. The points of difference which thus led to the renunciation of fellowship, related in the first instance to discipline or practice. They came to relate to belief. Points of doctrine, no less than points of discipline, came to be discussed at the meetings of the representatives of the churches in a district, concerning which I spoke in the last Lecture. Doctrine came to be thus co-ordinate with character as the basis on which the churches joined together in local or general confederations, and accepted each other’s certificates. The hierarchical tendency grew with it and out of it. The position of the bishops, which had grown out of the assumed desirability of guarding the tradition of truth, tended to emphasize that tradition. It gave to tradition not only a new importance, but also a new sanction. It rested belief upon living authority. Men were no longer free to interpret for themselves.

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This elevation of doctrine to a co-ordinate position with life in the Christian communities was the effect of causes internal to those communities. Those causes were in themselves the effects of other causes, the influence of which I have traced in previous Lectures: but in their direct operation within the churches they were altogether internal. But that which gave importance to their operation was not internal, but external. It was the interposition of the State. The first instance of that interposition was in the days of Aurelian, in the case of Paul of Samosata. The principle which was then established has been of enormous importance to the Christian communities ever since. It is clear that confederation of churches was so far established in Syria in the middle of the third century, that the bishops of a district claimed a right to interfere in the affairs of a neighbouring church. There was not yet the complete confederation, on the basis of the organization of the Empire, which we find after the Nicene Council; it was a question only of neighbourhood. The Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who was a statesman as well as a theologian, had a difference of opinion with the leading bishops of Syria on one of the new questions of the metaphysical theology, which was forcing its way into the Christian churches. Meetings were held, at the first of which there appears to have been a compromise. At the second, Paul was condemned. He was formally deposed from his see. He refused to recognize the authority of the meeting, and probably with the support of his people, remained in possession of the church-buildings. An appeal as of “civil right” was made by his opponents to the Emperor. The answer of the Emperor determined the principle already referred to. The tenant of the buildings held them on condition of being a Christian. The Emperor did not determine what Christianity was. But he determined that whatever was taught by the bishops of Italy might be properly taken as the standard. This determined Roman policy, and it went far to determine Christian doctrine for the future.

When Christianity came to be recognized by the State, Constantine adopted the plan of assembling the bishops on his own authority, and of giving whatever sanction the State could give to their resolutions. He said in effect, “I, as Emperor, cannot determine what Christian doctrine is, but I will take the opinion of the majority, and I will so far recognize that opinion that no one shall have the privileges of Christians, a right to hold property and an exemption from civil burdens, who does not assent to that opinion.” The succeeding Christian Emperors followed in his track. The test of being a Christian was conformity to the resolutions of the Councils. One who accepted them received immunity and privileges. One who did not was liable to confiscation, to banishment, to death. I need hardly draw out for you, who know what human nature is, the importance which those resolutions of the Councils assumed.

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Against this whole transformation of the basis of union there were two great lines of reaction.

1. The one was the reaction of the Puritan party in the Church—the conservative party, which was always smouldering, and sometimes burst forth into flame. The most important of such reactionary outbursts were those of the Novatians in the third century, and of the Donatists in the fourth. I will speak now only of the former. Its first cause was the action of the Roman bishop, Callistus, who allowed the return to the Church of those who had been excluded on account of sins of the flesh, and of return to idolatry. The policy was continued. In 250, a determined stand was made against it. The election of a bishop who belonged to the lax party forced on a schism. The schism was strong. It had sympathizers all over the Christian world—in Egypt, in Armenia, in Asia Minor, in Italy and Spain. It involved the whole theory of the Church—the power of the Keys. It lasted long. It was so strong that the State had to recognize it. It did not die out until at least five centuries after its birth. It lingered on in detached communities, but it ceased to be a power. The majority, with the support not only of the State, but also of human nature, dominated the Christian world.

2. The other reaction was stronger and even more permanent. It consisted of the formation within the Christian community of an inner class, who framed for themselves and endeavoured to realize a higher than the common ideal. They stood to the rest of the community as the community itself stood to the rest of the world. The tendency itself came, as I have tried to point out in a previous Lecture,[728] mainly from the Greek philosophical schools, and was fostered to a large extent by the influence on the main body of Christians of the philosophic parties upon its borders. But it asserted its place as a permanent element in the Christian world mainly as a reaction against the change of the basis of the Christian communities, and the lowering of the current standard of their morality. Henceforward there was, side by side with the τάγμα τῶν κληρικῶν and the τάγμα τῶν λαϊκῶν, a third rank, τάγμα τῶν ἀσκητῶν. The ideal has been obscured by its history: but that ideal was sublime. It was impracticable and undesirable; and yet sometimes in human life room must be found for impossible ideals. And the blurred and blotted picture of it which has survived to our own times, cannot take the place of the historical fact that it began as a reaction against Christianity as it was and as it is—an effort to regenerate human society. But Monachism, by the very fact of its separation, did not leaven the Church and raise the current morality. The Church became, not an assembly of devout men, grimly earnest about living a holy life—its bishops were statesmen; its officers were men of the world; its members were of the world, basing their conduct on the current maxims of society, held together by the loose bond of a common name, and of a creed which they did not understand. In such a society, an intellectual basis is the only possible basis. In such a society also, in which officialism must necessarily have an important place, the insistence on that intellectual basis comes from the instinct of self-preservation. But it checked the progress of Christianity. Christianity has won no great victories since its basis was changed. The victories that it has won, it has won by preaching, not Greek metaphysics, but the love of God and the love of man. Its darkest pages are those which record the story of its endeavouring to force its transformed Greek metaphysics upon men or upon races to whom they were alien. The only ground of despair in those who accept Christianity now, is the fear—which I for one cannot entertain—that the dominance of the metaphysical element in it will be perpetual.

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I have now brought these Lectures to a close. The net result is the introduction into Christianity of the three chief products of the Greek mind—Rhetoric, Logic, and Metaphysics. I venture to claim to have shown that a large part of what are sometimes called Christian doctrines, and many usages which have prevailed and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in reality Greek theories and Greek usages changed in form and colour by the influence of primitive Christianity, but in their essence Greek still. Greece lives; not only its dying life in the lecture-rooms of Universities, but also with a more vigorous growth in the Christian Churches. It lives there, not by virtue of the survival within them of this or that fragment of ancient teaching, and this or that fragment of an ancient usage, but by the continuance in them of great modes and phases of thought, of great drifts and tendencies, of large assumptions. Its ethics of right and duty, rather than of love and self-sacrifice; its theology, whose God is more metaphysical than spiritual—whose essence it is important to define; its creation of a class of men whose main duty in life is that of moral exhortation, and whose utterances are not the spontaneous outflow of a prophet’s soul, but the artistic periods of a rhetorician; its religious ceremonial, with the darkness and the light, the initiation and the solemn enactment of a symbolic drama; its conception of intellectual assent rather than of moral earnestness as the basis of religious society—in all these, and the ideas that underlie them, Greece lives.

It is an argument for the divine life of Christianity that it has been able to assimilate so much that was at first alien to it. It is an argument for the truth of much of that which has been assimilated, that it has been strong enough to oust many of the earlier elements. But the question which forces itself upon our attention as the phenomena pass before us in review, is the question of the relation of these Greek elements in Christianity to the nature of Christianity itself. The question is vital. Its importance can hardly be over-estimated. It claims a foremost place in the consideration of earnest men. The theories which rise out of it are two in number. It is possible to urge, on the one hand, that Christianity, which began without them—which grew on a soil whereon metaphysics never throve—which won its first victories over the world by the simple moral force of the Sermon on the Mount, and by the sublime influence of the life and death of Jesus Christ, may throw off Hellenism and be none the loser, but rather stand out again before the world in the uncoloured majesty of the Gospels. It is possible to urge that what was absent from the early form cannot be essential, and that the Sermon on the Mount is not an outlying part of the Gospel, but its sum. It is possible to urge, on the other hand, that the tree of life, which was planted by the hand of God Himself in the soil of human society, was intended from the first to grow by assimilating to itself whatever elements it found there. It is possible to maintain that Christianity was intended to be a development, and that its successive growths are for the time at which they exist integral and essential. It is possible to hold that it is the duty of each succeeding age at once to accept the developments of the past, and to do its part in bringing on the developments of the future.