Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/709

CHRISTIANITY 695 the Jew the Mosaic Law aud the Old Testament Scriptures generally did not so much mean a series of commandments or prescriptions as a mode of life. No doubt when they thought of the Old Testament their minds were full of laws and commandments, but still the most prominent idea was that their fathers had lived and had been enjoined to live a particular mode of life. To the Jew the Old Testament was the past covenant life of his fathers in which he might share, and it showed him God much more as the covenant God with whom Israel had lived in communion than as a mere Lawgiver. But it was more difficult for the Gentile to feel this. He could not easily feel that the covenant life described in the Old Testament was the life into which Christ had brought him, and he felt as much outside of it as the Jew felt within it. And so to him the Old Testament was not so much a haven of religious fellowship as a series of commandments which he might understand and at least could obey. "When the Gnostics drew false inferences from statements in the Old Testament, and when the church theologians corrected these in creeds, this forced making of creeds intensified the tendency to look at the Bible Old Testament and New Testament rather as a storehouse of theological weapons, than as the medium of personal intercourse between a covenant God and His people. One of the main characteristics of the Biblical idea of the kingdom of God was lost the thought of personal intercourse with the King through His word realized in an act of personal trust, and the idea of faith lost its sense of trust with personal com munion and took the character of assent to intellectual truths. But as the life can never be fed upon abstract truths and their comprehension, and must have some support, Christian life became gradually divorced from any relation to the Word, and became rooted on a system of observances, of which the sacrament of the Supper became the centre. The efforts of the church to realize its relation to the Scriptures were in this way partly successful, because it recognized its duty to set forth the truth of God ; but from the way taken the result was to displace Christianity from its position of rest upon the Old Testament church and the Scriptures, and to send it to its own machinery for life and strength. The iuflu- One other phase of early Christianity ought to be referred ence of to, as it illustrates another side of the same great problem pietism. which was presented for solution. Both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament conceptions of the kingdom of Heaven the idea of a new life, or at least of a separate consecrated life, is a conspicuous element. The kingdom of God implies that those who are within the kingdom live a life different from those without. In all ages of Christianity this new and separate life has been an object of speculation, and many various ideas of its true nature have been promulgated. The very conception of a life which is new is sufficient of itself to produce strange conjectures respecting its nature, and in the epistles of St Paul we find evidence that many of the Gentile Christians were disposed to think of the new life of Christianity as one entirely outside of the realm of ordinary moral law. This lawless or immoral tendency was sternly checked in the Christian church, and only gained head in sects outside of it ; but traces of the tendency were not infrequent. The function of the Holy Spirit in the church was always made a ground of conjecture concerning the real nature of the new Christian life, and it was from mistaken views of the character of the Spirit s influence and work that dis turbing pietist theories perplexed early Christianity. These pietist theories gained distinctive form and acquired great power in what has been called Montanism, and the church s efforts to rid herself of this incubus, while well intentioned, led to permanent results by no means satisfactory. One of the chief characteristics of this early pietism was the idea that the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit rendered possible a continuous revelation, and it was believed that the prophetic gift was permanent in the Church. The Montanist prophets presumed to add to revelation, and to overturn ecclesiastical laws and jurisdiction by means of infallible utterances disclosed to them. The practical effect would have been to reduce the organization of Christianity and the intercourse between Christians to a precarious dependence upon the dictates of self-constituted prophets, whose ideas of revelation resembled the heathen soothsaying much more closely than the Old Testament prophecy or the New Testament inspiration, and this led the church to adopt a severer discipline and more monarchical consti tution. But this must be afterwards referred to. To sum up, then, early Christianity, in working out the problem of its connection with Judaism and the Old Testament Scriptures, achieved success in four great direc tions, but at the same time made four great mistakes. It insisted rightly on the fact that in order to be a develop ment of Judaism Christians did not require to become Jews first, but it erred in attempting to make Christianity the exact counterpart and rival of Judaism. It insisted rightly that the kingdom of heaven was a kingdom to be set up on earth and so all-embracing as to include the whole earth within its boundaries, but it erred when it conceived it to be a kingdom which in any way could be compared with the Roman empire, and when it began to translate spiritual power and possession into physical and temporal domi nion. It insisted, rightly, that the church was the custodier of truth, but it erred when it made faith intellectual assent, when it gave to the Bible an entirely intellectual aspect, and laid the foundations for infallible creeds. It rightly expelled from its midst a false pietist prophecy, which in course of time would have undermined alike scriptural and ecclesiastical authority, but it erred when it conferred on a consecrated privileged caste the sole authority to interpret scripture and regulate ecclesiastical discipline. These attempts and failures in early Christianity have been so often repeated that they may be looked upon as true and false principles ol development inherent in it. The history of the world presents no phenomenon so Early pro- striking as the rise and early progress of Christianity, g^ess of Originating in a country not remarkable for any political, S hn -f commercial, or literary influence, emanating from One who occupied a humble sphere in the community amidst which He appeared, and announced in the first instance by men of mean extraction, of no literary culture, and not endowed with any surpassing gifts of intellect, it nevertheless spread so rapidly that in an incredibly short period of time it had been diffused throughout the whole civilized world, and in the fourth century of its existence became the recognized and established religion of the Roman empire. When it is remembered that this result was achieved not only without the aid of any worldly influence, but in the face of the keenest opposition on the part of all the learning, wealth, wit, and power of the most enlightened and mightiest nations of the earth, the conclusion is strongly forced upon us that a power beyond that of man was concerned in its success, and that its early and unexampled triumphs afford an incontestable proof of its inherent truth and its divine origin, Nor has the rapid advance of Christianity been confined to its earlier years. "After a revolution of fourteen or fifteen centuries that religion is still professed by the nations of Europe, the most distinguished portion of human kind in art and learning as well as in arms. By tha industry and zeal of Europeans, it has been widely diffused to the most distant shores of Asia and Africa, and by means of their colonies has been firmly established

from Canada to Chili in a land unknown to the ancients."