CHAPTER XXXIV.

EARLY CHRISTIANITY.

SECTION 505. The Christian Bible.-Since the beginning of the IVth century of our era, Christianity has been a prominent feature of culture. In ancient and mediæval times it established itself throughout the temperate portions of Europe. For nearly a thousand years it has been the religion of all Euraryan nations. It has accompanied them in their great achievements and shared their political, literary, and artistic triumphs. With them it has occupied all the great centers of enlightenment. It has almost exclusive possession of four continents, Europe, the two Americas, and Australia, and of considerable regions in Asia and Africa. It is "the book" of the progressive nations, of all those countries which, during the last four centuries, have been leading the world in literature, science, industry, and ornamental art, in military power and political freedom, in the accumulation of knowledge, and the rapid increase of population. Its only great rivals-Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Confucianism—are the religions of barbarous, ignorant, superstitious, oppressed, and stationary nations.

Palfrey claims that Christianity "has imparted the idea of the nobleness of virtue, an idea which can never be buried. In particular, it has given birth to the before

undreamed-of conceptions of a filial piety, of an unlimited enterprising philanthropy, of a strenuous selfcontrol, of the dignity of a pure life, of the efficiency and loveliness of a pure heart. It has formed some characters such as the ancient world had absolutely, not to say no specimens, but no notions of."1

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The Christian Bible, which is the foundation of Christianity, has been praised by many great authors as no other book has been. Theodore Parker says of it: "This collection of books has taken such hold of the world as no other. It enters men's closets, mingles in all the grief and cheerfulness of life. The Bible attends men in sickness, when the fever of the world is on them. It is the better part of our sermons; it lifts man above himself. The timid man about to wake from his dream of life, looks through the glass of Scripture, and his eye grows bright; he does not fear to stand alone, to tread the way unknown and distant, to take the death angel by the hand, and bid farewell to wife, and babes, and home."2

Here is the opinion of T. H. Huxley: “I have always been strongly in favor of secular education, in the sense of education without theology; but I must confess that I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible. Take the Bible

as a whole and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills in, like themselves,

the interval between two eternities and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work." "In the Bible," as Coleridge observes, "there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together;

the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and whatever finds me brings with it irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit." Elsewhere the same author writes: "In every generation and wherever the light of revelation has shone, men of all ranks, conditions, and states of mind, have found in this volume a correspondent for every movement towards the better felt in their own hearts. The needy soul has found supply, the feeble a help, the sorrowful a comfort; yea, be the recipiency the least that can consist with moral life, there is an answering grace ready to enter. The Bible has been found a spiritual world-spiritual and yet at the same time outward and common to all." "It is no slight testimony to the adaptation and comprehensiveness of the religious contents of the Bible," according to Henry Rogers, "that so many millions have declared that all the moods and necessities of their moral and spiritual life are exhaustively expressed there. As there is scarcely any condition in human life but may find its parallel in the scenes of the Scripture history, so may it be truly said that all the phenomena of religious experience are there described with incomparable force. The devout mind finds every shade of emotion,-of penitence, faith, hope, devout aspiration,—and every variation of spiritual consciousness, already expressed to his hand, in words better than his own, and as if by one who knew man better than man

knows himself. His whole nature is reflected, as it were, in that faithful mirror. This is especially the case in the psalms, gospels, and epistles, which have made so many say that they found in the Bible the vivid expression of what, till they read it there, was hardly known to themselves, or could be uttered only in faltering accents and with a stammering tongue."

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In the opinion of Max Muller, Christianity as a religious system based on the Bible "has proved itself the mightiest of all civilizers and the constant champion of the rights and dignity of men." W. Robertson Smith declares that by its "power of touching the heart and lifting the soul into converse with heaven," "the Bible approves itself the pure and perfect word of God, a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path of every Christian." The development of constitutional liberty in modern Europe is attributed by Guizot to the influence of the New Testament."

Among the most intelligent of our time the opinion in reference to Christianity is common and perhaps dominant that its ecclesiastical organization has become the foundation and the controlling agency of many beneficent social influences which could not be transferred suddenly to any other management; and that therefore, whether the historical statements on which the accepted creeds are based be true or not, an abrupt abandonment of these creeds is not desirable. They have much more faith in the political and social value of Christianity than in its philosophical and historical soundness.

SEC. 506. Creeds.-The Christianity of our time is a group of creeds, each of which, through its adherents, claims to be the doctrine taught by Jesus, and denies the divine authority of the others. The most notable of

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these creeds are that of the Roman Catholics, that of the Greek Catholics, that of the Trinitarian Protestants, and that of the Unitarian Protestants. According to the Roman Catholic creed, Jesus, while on earth, was entirely human in his body and entirely divine in his soul, a part of the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient triune God, from all eternity. He assumed a human form and lived on earth as a man among men, for the purposes of redeeming mankind from the sin of Adam, and of establishing a new and universal religion, the ultimate and highest possible form of divine truth, a development of the Mosaic law which had been given to man when he was in a barbarous condition and not yet prepared to appreciate a spiritual faith. The divine character and mission of Jesus are proved by his miracles, which are recorded in the New Testament, an inspired record of his life and teachings and of the growth of his church in apostolic times. This record, however, is later in its. origin, less complete, less clear, and less authoritative than the tradition of the church. The books of the New Testament were written in apostolic times by the persons whose names they bear. By the appointment of Jesus, the apostle Peter was made the supreme head of the church, with the order that his supremacy should be transmitted to his successors in his episcopal office, which he established first in Jerusalem, then in Antioch, and finally and permanently in Rome. The supremacy of this bishop of bishops is accompanied by an absolute control over the discipline of the church, and authority to render infallible decisions in all questions of faith and morals. In the domain of religion, all men owe obedience to him; and he has exclusive jurisdiction to define the bounds of that domain. There is an eternal future