Origin of Christianity and its relation with other religions

Christianity is the name given to that definite system of religious belief and practice which was
taught by Jesus Christ in the country of Palestine, during the reign of the Roman Emperor,
Tiberius, and was promulgated, after its Founder's death, for the acceptance of the whole world,
by certain chosen men among His followers.
According to the accepted chronology, these began their mission on the day of Pentecost, A.D.
29, which day is regarded, accordingly, as the birthday of the Christian Church. In order the
better to appreciate the meaning of this event, we must first consider the religious influences and
tendencies previously at work in the minds of men, both Jews and Gentiles, which prepared the
way for the spread of Christianity amongst them.
The whole history of the Jews as detailed in the Old Testament is seen, when read in the light of
other events, to be a clear though gradual preparation for the preaching of Christianity. In that
nation alone, the great truths of the existence and unity of God, His providential ruling of His
creatures and their responsibility towards Him, were preserved unimpaired amidst general
corruption. The ancient world was given to Pantheism and creature-worship; Israel only, not
because of its "monotheistic instinct" (Renan), but because of the periodic interposition of God
through His prophets, resisted in the main the general tendency to idolatry. Besides maintaining
those pure conceptions of Deity, the prophets from time to time, and with ever increasing
distinctness until we come to the direct and personal testimony of the Baptist, foreshadowed a
fuller and more universal revelation a time when, and a Man through Whom, God should
bless all the nations of the earth.
We need not here trace the Messianic predictions in detail; their clearness and cogency are such
that St. Augustine does not hesitate to say (Retract., I, xiii, 3): "What we now call the Christian
religion existed amongst the ancients, and was from the beginning of the human race, until Christ
Himself came in the flesh; from which time the already existing true religion began to be styled
Christian". And thus it has been remarked that Israel alone amongst the nations of antiquity
looked forward to glories to come. All peoples alike retained some more or less vague
recollection of a Paradise lost, a remote Golden Age, but only the spirit of Israel kept alive the
definite hope of a world-wide empire of justice, wherein the Fall of Man should be repaired. The
fact that, eventually, the Jews misinterpreted their oracles, and identified the Messianic Kingdom
with a mere temporal sovereignty of Israel, cannot invalidate the testimony of the Scriptures, as
interpreted both by Christ's own life and the teaching of His Apostles, to the gradual evolution of
that conception of which Christianity is the full and perfect expression. Mistaken national pride,
accentuated by their galling subject to Rome led them to read a material significance into the
predictions of the triumph of the Messias, and hence to love their privilege of being God's chosen
people. The wild olive in St. Paul's metaphor (Romans 11:17) was then grafted upon the stock of
the patriarchs in place of those rejected branches, and entered upon their spiritual inheritance.
We may trace, too, in the world at large, apart from the Jewish people, a similar though less
direct preparation. Whether due ultimately to the Old Testament predictions or to the fragments
of the original revelation handed down amongst the Gentile, a certain vague expectation of the
coming of a great conqueror seems to have existed in the East and to a certain extent in the

Roman worlds, in the midst of which the new religion had its birth. But a much more marked
predisposition to Christianity may be noticed in certain prominent features of the Roman religion
after the downfall of the republic. The old gods of Latium had long ceased to reign. In their stead
Greek philosophy occupied the minds of the cultured, whilst the populace were attracted by a
variety of strange cults imported from Egypt and the East. Whatever their corruption, these new
religions, concentrating worship on a single prominent deity, were monotheistic in effect.
Moreover, many of them were characterized by rites of expiation and sacrifice, which
familiarized men's minds with the idea of a mediatorial religion. They combined to destroy the
notion of a nation cultus, and to separate the service of the Deity from the service of the State.
Finally, as a contributory cause to the diffusion of Christianity, we must not fail to mention the
widespread Pax Romana, resulting from the union of the civilized races under one strong central
government.
Thus much may be said with regard to the remote preparation of the world for the reception of
Christianity. What immediately preceded its institution, as it was born in Judaism, concerns the
Jewish race alone, and is comprised in the teaching and miracles of Christ, His death and
resurrection, and the mission of the Holy Spirit.
During his whole mortal life on earth, including the two or three years of His active ministry,
Christ lived as a devout Jew, Himself observing, and insisting on His followers observing, the
injunctions of the Law (Matthew 23:3). The sum of His teaching, as of that of His precursor, was
the approach of the "Kingdom of God", meaning not only the rule of righteousness in the
individual heart ("the kingdom of God is within you" Luke 17:21), but also the Church (as is
plain from many of the parables) which He was about to institute.
Yet, though He often foreshadowed a time when the Law as such would cease to bind, and
though He Himself in proof of His Messiahship occasionally set aside its provisions ("For the
Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath", Matthew 12:8), yet, as, in spite of His miracles, He did
not win recognition of that Messiahship, still less of His Divinity, from the Jews at large. He
confined His explicit teaching about the Church to His immediate followers, and left it to them,
when the time came, openly to pronounce the abrogation of the Law. (Acts 15:5-11, 18;
Galatians 3:19; 24-28; Ephesians 2:2, 14-15; Colossians 2:16-17; Hebrews 7:12)
It was not so much, then, by propounding the dogmas of Christianity as by informing the Old
Law with the spirit of Christian ethics that Christ found Himself able to prepare Jewish hearts for
the religion to come. Again, the faith which He failed to arouse by the numerous miracles He
wrought, He sought to provide with a further and stronger incentive by dying under every
circumstance of pain, disgrace, and defeat, and then raising Himself from the dead in triumph
and glory. It was to this fact rather than to the wonders He worked in His lifetime that His
accredited witnesses always appealed in their teaching. On the marvel of the Resurrection is
based in the counsels of God the faith of Christianity. "If Christ is not risen again, your faith is
vain", declares the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15:17), who says no word of the other wonders
Christ performed. By His death, therefore, and His return from the dead, Christ, as the event
proved, furnished the strongest means for the effective preaching of the religion He came to
found.

The third antecedent condition to the birth of Christianity, as we learn from the sacred records,
was a special participation of the Holy Spirit given to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost.
According to Christ's promise, the function of this Divine gift was to teach them all truth and
bring back to their remembrance all that [Christ] had said to them (John 14:26; 16:13). "I send
the Promised of my Father upon you, but remain ye in the city till ye shall be clothed with power
from on high" (Luke 24:49). "John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the
Holy Ghost, not many days hence" (Acts 1:5). As a result of that Divine visitation we find the
Apostles preaching the Gospel with wonderful courage, persuasiveness, and assurance in the face
of hostile Jews and indifferent Gentiles, "the Lord working with them and confirming their
words by the signs that followed" (Mark 16:20).
We have now to consider the circumstances of Christianity at the outset, and to estimate to what
extent it was affected by the already existing religious beliefs of the time.
It took its rise, as we have seen, in Judaism: its founder and His disciples were orthodox Jews,
and the latter maintained their Jewish practices, at least for a time, even after the day of
Pentecost. The Jews themselves looked upon the followers of Christ as a mere Israelitish sect
(airesis) like the Sadducees or the Essenes, styling St. Paul "the instigator of the revolt of the sect
of the Nazarenes" (Acts 24:5). The new religion was at first wholly confined to the synagogue,
and it votaries had still a large share of Jewish exclusiveness; they read the Law, they practised
circumcision, and they worshipped in the Temple, as well as in the upper room at Jerusalem. We
need not wonder, then, that some modern rationalists, who reject its supernatural origin and
ignore the operation of the Holy Spirit in its first missionaries, see in early Christianity Judaism
pure and simple, and find the explanation of its character and growth in the pre-existing religious
environment. But this theory of natural development does not fit the facts as narrated in the New
Testament, which is full of indications that Christ's doctrines were new, and His spirit strange.
Consequently, the records have to be mutilated to suit the theory. We cannot pretend to follow,
there or in other places, the rationalists in their New Testament criticism. There is the less need
of doing so that their theories are often mutually destructive. A dozen years ago an observer
computed that since 1850 there had been published 747 theories regarding the Old and New
Testaments, of which 608 were by that time defunct (see Hastings, "Higher Criticism"). The
effect of these random hypotheses has been greatly to strengthen the orthodox view, which we
now proceed to state.
Christianity is developed from Judaism in the sense that it embodies the Divine revelation
contained in the latter creed, somewhat as a finished painting embodies the original rough sketch.
The same hand was employed in the production of both religions, and by type and promise and
prophecy the Old Dispensation points clearly to the New.
But type, and promise, and prophecy as clearly indicate that the New will be something very
different from the Old. No mere organic evolution connects the two. A fuller revelation, a more
perfect morality, a wider distribution was to mark the Kingdom of the Messias. "The end [or
object] of the Law is Christ", says St. Paul (Romans 10:4), meaning that the Law was given to
the Jews to excite their faith in the Christ to come. "Wherefore", he says again (Galatians 3:24),
"the law was our pedagogue unto Christ", leading the Jews to Christianity as the slave brought
his charges to the school door.

Christ reproached the Jews for not reading their Scriptures aright. "For if you believed Moses,
you would perhaps believe me also; for he wrote of me" (John 5:46). And St. Augustine sums the
whole matter up in the striking words: "In the Old Testament, the New lies hidden; in the New,
the Old is made manifest" (On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, 4.8). But Christ claimed to
fulfil the Law by substituting the substance for the shadow and the gift for the promise, and, the
end having been reached, all that was temporary and provisional in Judaism came to a
conclusion. Still, a direct divine intervention was necessary to bring this about, just as, in any
rational account of the theory of evolution, recourse must be had to supernatural power to bridge
the gulf between being and non-being, life and non-life, reason and non-reason. "God, who, at
sundry times and in divers manner, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, least of all
in these days has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1, 2), the message growing in clearness
and in content with each successive utterance till it reached completion in the Incarnation of the
Word.
The Christianity, then, which the Apostles preached on the day of Pentecost was entirely distinct
from Judaism, especially as understood by the Jews of the time; it was a new religion, new in its
Founder, new in much of its creed, new in its attitude towards both God and man, new in the
spirit of its moral code. "The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ"
(John 1:17).
St. Paul, as was to be expected, is our clearest witness on this point. "If any man be in Christ", he
says, "he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold all things are new" (2 Corinthians
5:17). How new Christianity was, the Jews themselves showed by putting its Author to death and
persecuting His adherents. Renan himself, who is not always consistent, admits that "far from
Jesus being the continuer of Judaism, what characterizes His work is its breach with the Jewish
spirit" (Vie de Jsus, c. xxviii).
It may be granted that there is a certain resemblance between the Essene communities and the
earliest Christian assemblies. But the resemblance is only on the outside. The spirit of the
Essenes was intensely national; except in the matter of worship in the Temple, they were ultraJewish in their observance of external forms, ablutions, the Sabbath, etc., and their mode of life
and discouragement of marriage were essentially anti-social. Harnack himself owns that Christ
had no relations with this rigoristic sect, as was shown by His mixing freely with sinners, etc.
(Das Wesen des Christenthums, Lect. Ii, p. 33, tr.). But Christianity did not reject anything in
Judaism that was of permanent value, and so the Jewish converts on the day of Pentecost could
not have felt that they were abjuring their ancient faith, but rather that they were then for the first
time entering upon the full understanding of it. More will be said on this point when we come to
consider what is the essence of Christianity, but we may notice that the Church very early found
it necessary to emphasize her distinctness from Judaism by abandoning the essentially Jewish
rites of circumcision, Temple-worship, and observance of the Sabbath.
Judaism is not the only religious system that has been requisitioned by rationalistic writers to
account for the appearance of Christianity. Points of similarity between the teaching of Christ
and His Apostles and the great religions of the East have been taken to indicated a derivation of
the latter system from the earlier, and the elaborate eschatology of the Egyptian religion has been
quoted to account for certain Christian dogmas about the future life.

It were a long and not very profitable task to state and refute these various theories in detail.
Underlying all of them is the rationalistic postulate which denies the fact and even the possibility
of Divine intervention in the evolution of religion. In virtue of that attitude rationalism is
confronted with the impossible task of explaining how a universal religion like Christianity, with
an extensive yet logical system of dogma, could have been evolved by a process of promiscuous
borrowings from existing cults and yet preserve everywhere its unity and coherence. If the
selection were made by Christ and His adherents, rationalists must tell us how these "ignorant
and unlettered men" (Acts 4:13; cf. Matthew 13:54; Mark 6:2) knew the religions of the East,
when it was a matter of astonishment to their contemporaries that they knew their own.
Or, if the dogmas and practices under consideration were the additions of a later age, the
questions arise, first, how to reconcile this statement with the fact that the essence of Christianity
is discoverable in the earliest Christian witnesses and, secondly, how scattered communities
composed of various nationalities and living under different conditions could have united in
selecting and maintaining the same dogmas and rules of conduct.
We may ask, furthermore, why Christianity which, on this hypothesis, only selected pre-existing
doctrines, excited everywhere such bitter hostility and persecution. "About this sect", said the
Roman Jews to St. Paul in prison, "we are informed that it meets with opposition everywhere"
(Acts 28:22)k.
Immense erudition has been wasted in the attempt to show that Buddhism in particular is the
prototype of Christianity, but, apart from the difficulty of distinguishing the original creed of
Gautama from later and possibly post-Christian accretions, it may be briefly objected that
Buddhism is at best only an ethical system, not a religion, for it recognizes no God and no
responsibility, that in so far as it emphasizes the comparative worthlessness of earthly things and
the insufficiency of earthly delights it is in accord with the Christian spirit, but that in aim it is
essentially diverse. The supreme aim of Christianity is eternal happiness in a state involving the
employment of all the soul's activities, that of Buddhism the ultimate loss of conscious existence.
Let us grant, once and for all, that God's intercourse with His creatures is not confined to the old
and New Covenants, and that Christianity includes many doctrines accessible to the unaided
human reason, and advocates many practices which are the natural outcome of ordinary human
activities. We thus expect to find that, human nature being the same everywhere, the various
expressions of the religious sense will take similar shapes amongst all peoples. Accordingly,
false religions may very well inculcate ascetic practices and possess the idea of sacrifice and
sacrificial banquets, of a priesthood, of sin and confession, of sacramental rites like baptism, of
the accessories of worship such as images, hymns, lights, incense, etc. Not everything in false
religion is false, nor is everything in the true religion (or Christianity) supernatural. "We must
not look", says M. Mller, "in the original belief of mankind for [distinctively] Christian ideas
but for the fundamental religious ideas on which Christianity is built, without which as its natural
and historical support, Christianity could not have become what it is" (Wissenschaft der Sprache,
II, 395).
These remarks apply not only to the religious systems which are alleged to have influenced the
conception of Christianity, but to those which it met as soon as it issued from Judaism, its cradle.

Here, we are face to face with history, and not with mere hypothesis and assumption. For
Christianity, on its first essaying to realize its destiny as the universal religion, did actually come
in contact with two mighty religious systems, the religion of Rome, and the widespread body of
thought, more of a philosophy than a creed, prevalent in the Greek-speaking world.
The effect of the national religion of pagan Rome on early Christianity concerned rites and
ceremonies rather than points of doctrine, and was due to the general causes just mentioned.
With Greek philosophy, on the other hand, representing the highest efforts of the human intellect
to explain life and experience, and to reach the Absolute, Christianity, which professes to solve
all these problems, had, naturally and necessarily, many points of contact.
It is on this connection that modern rationalists have brought all their learning and research to
bear in the effort to show that the whole later intellectual system of Christianity is something
more or less alien to its original conception. It was the transference of Christianity from a
Semitic to a Greek soil that explains, according to Dr. Hatch (Hibbert Lectures, 1888), "why an
ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus, and a metaphysical creed in the
forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century". Professor Harnack states the problem and
solves it in similar fashion. He ascribes the change, as he conceives it, from a simple code of
conduct to the Nicene Creed, to the three following causes:

The universal law in all development of religion, that when the first generation of
converts who have been in contact, more or less immediate, with the founder, and
endowed with his spirit, have passed away, their successors, having no personal grasp of
their creed, must depend on formul and dogmas
the union of the Gospel with the Greek spirit (a) due to the conquests of Alexander and
the consequent mingling of Jew and Gentile, (b) further strengthened about A.D. 130,
when Greek converts brought into Christianity the philosophy in which they were
educated, (c) again, about a century later, when Greek mysteries and Greek civilization in
its widest range were admitted, and finally, (d) about the middle of the fourth century,
when the Greek spirit finally prevailed and polytheism and mythology (i.e. the worship of
the saints) were admitted
the internal struggles with Gnosticism, which aimed at a synthesis of all existing creeds.
"The struggle with Gnosticism compelled the Church to put its teaching, its worship, and
its discipline into fixed forms and ordinances, and to exclude everyone who would not
yield them obedience" (Das Wesen des Christenthums, Lect. Xi, p. 210).

It is the second of these reasons for the birth and growth of dogma that concerns us immediately;
but we may remark in regard to the first that it ignores the direct working of God on the soul of
the individual, the perpetual renewal of fervour through prayer and the use of the sacraments,
that have always marked the course of Christianity. Herein, the spirit of its first days is seen still
to be energetic, notwithstanding the comparative elaborateness of creed and ritual of modern
Christianity. The saints are admitted to be the most perfect exponents of practical Christianity;
they are not exceptions or accidents or by-products of the system; yet they did not find dogma
any hindrance to their perfect service of God and man.

As regards the third cause above mentioned, we may grant that it has always been the
providential function of heresy to bring about a clearer definition of the Christian creed, and that
Gnosticism in its many varieties undoubtedly had this effect. But long before Gnosticism had
sufficiently developed to necessitate the safeguarding of doctrine by conciliar definition, we find
traces of an organized Church with a very definite creed. Not to mention the traditional "for of
doctrine" spoken of by St. Paul (Romans 6:17) and the act of faith required by Philip from the
eunuch (Acts 8:37), many critics, including the Protestants Zahn and Kattenbusch (Das
Apostolische Symbol., Leipzig, 1894-1900), agree that the present Apostles' Creed represents a
formula which took shape in the Apostolic Age and was uninfluenced by Gnosticism, which
Protean heresy first became formidable about A.D. 130. And as regards organization, we know
that the episcopate was a fully recognized institution in the time of Ignatius (c. 110), whilst the
Canon of New Testament Scripture, the final establishment of which was undoubtedly helped by
Gnosticism, was in process of recognition even in Apostolic times. St. Peter (assuming the
Second epistle to be his) classifies St. Paul's Epistles with the "other Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:16),
and St. Polycarp, early in the second century, quotes as Scripture nine of those thirteen Pauline
documents.
Concerning the "union of the Gospel with the Greek spirit" which, according to Hatch and
Harnack, resulted in such profound modification so the former, we may admit many of the
statements made, without drawing from them the rationalistic inferences. We readily grant that
Greek thought and Greek culture had thoroughly permeated the society into which Christianity
was born. Alexander's conquests had brought about a diffusion of Greek ideals throughout the
East. The Jews were dispersed westwards, both from Palestine and from the towns of the
Captivity, and established in colonies in the chief cities of the empire, especially in Alexandria.
The extent of this dispersion may be gathered from Acts 2:9-11), Greek became the language of
commerce and social intercourse, and Palestine itself, more particularly Galilee, was to a great
extent hellenized. The Jewish Scriptures were best known in a Greek version, and the last
additions to the Old Testament the Book of Wisdom and the Second Book of Machabees
were entirely composed in that tongue. In addition to this peaceful permeation of the Hebraic by
the Greek genius, formal efforts were made from time to time, both in the political and the
philosophical sphere to hellenize the Jews altogether.
It is with the latter attempt that we are concerned; for the writings of Philo, its chief and earliest
advocate, coincided with the birth of Christianity. Philo was a Jew of Alexandria, well versed in
Greek philosophy and literature, and at the same time a devout believer in the Old Testament
revelation. The general purpose of his principal writings was to show that the admirable wisdom
of the Greeks was contained in substance in the Jewish Scriptures, and his method was to read
allegory into the simple narratives of the Pentateuch. To the pure and certain monotheism of
Judaism he wedded various ideas taken from Plato and the Stoics, trying thus to solve the
problem, with which all philosophy is ultimately confronted, how to bridge the gulf between
mind and matter, the infinite and the finite, the absolute and the conditioned. Philo's writings
were, no doubt, widely known amongst the Jews, both at home and abroad, at the time when the
Apostles began to preach, but it is extremely unlikely that the latter, who were not educated men,
were acquainted with them.

Not until the conversion of St. Paul and the beginning of his apostolate can Christianity be said
to have come, in the mind of one of its chief exponents, into immediate contact with Greek
religious and philosophical theories. St. Paul was learned, not only in Hebrew, but also in
Hellenistic lore, and a singularly apt instrument in the design of Providence, on account of his
Jewish origin and education, his Greek learning, and his Roman citizenship, to aid Christianity to
throw off the swaddling-bands of its infancy and go forth to the conquest of the nations.
But whilst recognizing this providential dispensation in the election of St. Paul, we cannot, in
face of his own express and emphatic testimony, go on to assert that he universalized
Christianity, as Philo attempted to universalize Judaism, by adding to its ethical content the
merely natural religion of the Greek thinkers of his own more sublime and pure conceptions. In
one of his earliest letters, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul rebukes their factious
spirit, whereby some of them had styled themselves partisans of Apollos, a learned Alexandrian,
and repudiates again and again that very attempt to make Christianity plausible by tricking it out
in the garb of current speculations. "But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a
stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:23; see chaps. 1 and 2, and
Colossians 2:8). St. Paul, at any rate, was not indebted for his Christology to Philo or his school,
and any similarity of terminology which may occur in the works of the two authors may quite
reasonably be ascribed to the metaphors already embodied in the language they both used.
More insistence has been laid, perhaps, on the resemblance between the Christology set forth by
St. John in the opening chapters of his Gospel and in the Apocalypse, and the Logos theories
which Philo elaborated, and which he is said to have taken from Greek sources. If he did so, we
may remark, he neglected others older and nearer to hand, for the conception of a Divine Word
of God, by which the Deity enters into relation with the created universe, is by no means
exclusively or originally Greek. The idea, expressed in the opening verses of Genesis, is
frequently repeated in the rest of the Old Testament (see Psalms 32:6; 147:15; Proverbs 8:22;
Wisdom 7:24-30, etc.). Philo, therefore, was not compelled to seek in the Platonic Nous, which
is merely the directive cause of creation, or the Stoic Logos, as the rational soul of the universe,
the foundation of his doctrine. His Logos theory is not at all clear or consistent, but, apparently,
he conceives the Word to be a quasi-personal, subordinate, intermediate being between God and
the world, enabling the Creator to come into contact with matter. He calls this Logos "the eldest"
and the "first-born" son of God, and uses phrases that suggest the Fourth Gospel; but there is no
resemblance in substance between the bold, clear, categoric statements of the inspired Apostle,
and the misty, if poetical, conceptions of the Alexandrian philosopher. We may conjecture that
St. John chose his language so as to impress the cultivated Greek mind with the true doctrine of
the Divine Logos, thus connecting his teaching with the older revelation, and, at the same time,
putting a check upon the Gnostic errors to which Philoism was already giving birth.
Abandoning the Apostolic Age, Harnack, in his "History of Dogma", ascribes the hellenization
of Christianity to the apologists of the second century (1st German edit., p. 253). This contention
can best be refuted by showing that the essential doctrines of Christianity are contained already
in the New Testament Scriptures, while giving, at the same time, their due force to the traditions
of corporate Christianity. If the Nicene Creed cannot be proved article by article from the sacred
records, interpreted by the tradition that preceded them and determined their canon, then the
rationalist assertion will have some support.

But the point of comparison with the Creed must be not only the Sermon on the Mount, as Hatch
desires, nor the merely verbal teaching of Christ, but the whole New Testament record. Christ
taught by His life no less than by His words, and it was His actions and sufferings as well as His
oral lessons that His Apostles preached. For the fuller exposition of this, see REVELATION.
Here it suffices to note that Christian theology became, in the hands of the apologists, the
synthesis of all speculative truth. It met and conquered the various imperfect systems that
possessed men's minds at its birth and arose after that event.
The early heresies Sabellianism, Arianism, and the rest were but attempts to make
Christianity one of a number of philosophies; the attempts failed, but the scattered truths that
those philosophies contained were shown, as time went on, to exist and find their fulfilment in
Christianity as well. "The Church", says Newman,
has been ever 'sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing and asking them questions';
claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects,
completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them
enlarging the range and refining the sense of her teaching. (Development of Doctrine, viii)
In the same section Newman thus summarizes the battle and the triumph:
such was the conflict of Christianity with the old established Paganism, which was almost dead
before Christianity appeared; with the Oriental Mysteries, flitting widely to and fro like spectres;
with the Gnostics, who made Knowledge all in all, despised the many, and called Catholics mere
children in the Truth: with the Neo-Platonists, men of literature, pedants, visionaries, or
courtiers; with the Manichees, who professed to seek truth by Reason, not by Faith; with the
fluctuating teachers of the school of Antioch, the time-serving Eusebians, and the reckless
versatile Arians; with the fanatic Montanists and harsh Novatians, who shrank from the Catholic
doctrine, without power to propagate their own. These sects had no stay or consistence, yet they
contained elements of truth amid their error, and had Christianity been as they, it might have
resolved into them; but it had that hold of the truth which gave its teaching a gravity, a
directness, a consistency, a sternness, and a force to which its rivals, for the most part, were
strangers. (ibid., viii)

The essentials of Christianity

We have so far seen, in its origin and growth, the essential independence of Christianity of all
other religious systems, except that of Judaism, with which, however, its relation was merely that
of substance to shadow. It is now time to point out its distinctive doctrines.
In early Christianity there was much that was transitory and exceptional. It was not presented
full-grown to the world, but left to develop in accordance with the forces and tendencies that
were implanted in it from the first by its Founder. And we, having His assurance that His Spirit
would abide with it for all time, to inspire and regulate its human elements, can see in its
subsequent history the working out of His design. Hence, it does not trouble us to find in
primitive Christianity qualities which did not survive after they had served their purpose. Natural
causes and the course of events, always under the Divine guidance, resulted in Christianity

taking on the form which would best secure its permanence and efficiency. In Apostolic times,
supreme authority as to faith and morals was vested in twelve representatives of Christ, each of
whom was commissioned to proclaim and infallibly interpret His Gospel. The hierarchy was in
an inchoate condition. Special charismata, like the gifts of prophecy and tongues, were bestowed
on individuals outside the official teaching body. The Church was in process of organization, and
the various Christian communities, united, doubtless, in a strong bond of charity, and in the sense
that they had one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, were to a large extent independent of one
another in the matter of government.
Such was the fashion in which Christ allowed His Church to be established. It has greatly
changed in outward appearances during the ages. Has there been any corresponding change in
substance? Are the essentials of Christianity the same now as they were then? We affirm that
they are, and we prove our assertion by examining the main points of the teaching, both of Christ
and His Apostles. We must look upon the matter as a whole. We cannot judge of Christianity
properly before the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Gospels describe a process which was not
consummated till after Pentecost. The Apostles themselves were not fully Christians till they
knew through faith all that Christ was their God and their Redeemer as well as their Master.
And as Christianity furnishes a regulative principle for both mind and will, teaching us what to
believe and what to do, faith no less than works must characterize the perfect Christian.

The teaching of Christ

Taking, then, first of all, Christ's own dogmatic and moral teaching, we may divide it into (a)
what He did not reveal but only reaffirmed, (b) what He drew from obscurity, and (c) what He
added to the sum total of belief and practice.
(a) The Jews, at the time of Christ, however worldly-minded, were at any rate free from their
ancestral tendency to idolatry. They were strict monotheists, believing in the unity, power, and
holiness of the Supreme Deity. Christ reaffirmed, purified, and confirmed the Jewish theology,
both moral and dogmatic. He asserted the spiritual nature of the Godhead (John 1:18; 4:24), and
insisted on the importance of worshipping Him in spirit, i.e. with more than merely external rites.
And he exacted the same right dispositions of heart in the whole of God's service, showing how
both guilt and merit depend on the will and intention (Matthew 5:28; 15:18). He recalled the
original unity and indissolubility of the marriage-tie. He brought into prominence the
immortality, and hence the transcendent importance, of the human soul (Matthew 16:26), as
against the heresy of the Sadducees and the worldliness of the Jews in general. In all these points
He fulfilled the Law by showing its real and full significance.
(b) But He did not stop here. Taking the great central precept of the Old Dispensation the love
of God He pointed out all its implications and made clear that the doctrine of the Fatherhood
of God, so imperfectly grasped under the law of fear, was the immediate source of the doctrine
of the brotherhood of men, which the Jews had never realized at all. He never tired of dwelling
on the loving kindness and the tender providence of His Father, and He insisted equally on the
duty of loving all men, summing up the whole of His ethical teaching in the observance of the
law of love (Matthew 5:43; 22:40). This universal charity He designed to be the mark of His true
followers (John 13:45), and in it, therefore, we must see the genuine Christian spirit, so distinct

from everything that had hitherto been seen on earth that the precept which inspired it He called
"new" (John 13:34). Christ's clear and definite teaching, moreover, about the life to come, the
final judgment resulting in an eternity of happiness or misery, the strict responsibility which
attaches to the smallest human actions, is in great contrast to the current Jewish eschatology. By
substituting eternal sanctions for earthly rewards and punishments, He raised and ennobled the
motives for the practice of virtue, and set before human ambition an object wholly worthy of the
adopted sons of God, the extension of their Father's Kingdom in their own souls and in the souls
of others.
(c) Among the doctrines added by Christ to the Jewish faith, the chief, of course, are those
concerning Himself, including the central dogma of the whole Christian system, the Incarnation
of God the Son. In regard to Himself, Christ made two claims, though not with equal insistence.
He asserted that He was the Messias of Jews, the expected of the nations, Whose mission it was
to undo the effects of the Fall and to reconcile man with God; and He claimed to be Himself
God, equal to, and one with, the Father. In support of this double claim, He pointed to the
fulfilment of the prophecies, and He worked many miracles. His claim to be the Messias was not
admitted by the leaders of His nation; had it been admitted, He would doubtless have manifested
His Divinity more clearly. Most modern rationalists (Harnack, Wellhausen, and others)
acknowledge that Christ from the beginning of His preaching knew Himself as the Messias, and
accepted the various titles which belong in the Scripture to that personage Son of David, Son
of Man (Daniel 7:13), the Christ (see John 14:24; Matthew 16:16; Mark 14:61-62). In one
passage and very significant one He applies the name to Himself "But this is eternal
life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John
17:3).
In regard to His Divinity, His claim is clear, but not emphasized. We cannot say that the title
"Son of God", which is repeatedly given to Him in the Gospels (John 1:34; Matthew 27:40;
Mark 3:12; 15:39, etc.), and which He is described as taking to Himself (Matthew 27:43; John
10:36), necessarily of itself connotes a Divine personality; and in the mouths of several of the
speakers, e.g. in the exclamation of Nathaniel, "Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God", it presumably
does not. But in the confession of St. Peter (Matthew 16:16) the circumstances point to more
than a mere amplification of the Messianic title. That title was at that time in habitual use in
regard to Jesus, and there would have been nothing significant in Peter's expression and in
Christ's glad acceptance of it, if it had not gone further than the common belief. Christ hailed St.
Peter's confession as a special revelation, not as a mere deduction from external facts. When we
compare this with that other declaration narrated in the same Gospel (Matthew 26:62-66), where,
in answer to the high-priest's adjuration, 'I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us if thou
be the Christ the Son of God", Jesus replied, "Thou has said it" (i.e., "I am"; see Mark 14:62), we
cannot reasonably doubt that Christ claimed to be Divine. The Jews so understood this and put
Him to death as a blasphemer.
Another prominent feature in the theology of Christ was His doctrine about the Paraclete. When,
in St. John's gospel (14:16-17), He says; "And I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another
Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever, the spirit of truth", it is impossible to believe that
what He promises is a mere abstraction, not a person like Himself. In verse 26, the personality is
still more marked: "And the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father shall send in my name,

He will teach you all things". (Cf. 15:26, "But when the Paraclete shall come whom I shall send
you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth who proceeds from the Father" etc.) It may be that the
full meaning of those words was not realized till the Spirit did actually come; moreover, the
revelation was made, of course, only to His immediate followers; still, no unbiased mind can
deny that Christ here speaks of a personal influence as a distinct Divine entity; a distinction and a
Divinity which is further implied in the baptismal formula He afterwards instituted (Matthew
28:19).
Christ took up the burden of the preaching of His precursor and proclaimed the advent of the
Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, a conception already familiar in the Old Testament
[Psalm 144:11-13], but furnished with a wider and more varied content in the words of Christ. It
may be taken to mean, according to the context, the Messianic Kingdom in its true spiritual
sense, i.e. the Church of God which Christ came to found, wherein to store up and perpetuate the
benefits of the Incarnation (cf. The parables of the wheat and the tares, the dragnet, and the
wedding feast), or the reign of God in the heart that submits to His sovereignty (Luke 16:21), or
the abode of the blessed (Matthew 5:20 etc.). It was the main topic of His preaching, which was
occupied in showing what dispositions of mind and heart and will, were necessary for entrance
into "the Kingdom", what, in other words, was the Christian ideal. Regarded as the Church, He
preached the Kingdom to the multitude in parables only, reserving fuller explanations to private
intercourse with His Apostles (Acts 1:3).
The last great dogma which we learn from the life, preaching, and death of Christ is the doctrine
of Redemption. "For the Son of Man also came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to
give His life a redemption for many" (Mark 10:45). The sacrificial character of His death is
clearly stated at the Last Supper: "This is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for
many unto remission of sins" (Matthew 26:28). And He ordained the perpetuation of that
Sacrifice by His Disciples in the words: "Do this in commemoration of me" (Luke 22:19). Christ,
knowing the counsels of His Father, deliberately set Himself to realize in His own person the
portrait of the suffering servant of Jahveh, so vividly painted by Isaias (chapter 53), a Messias
Who should triumph through death and defeat. This was a strange revelation to Israel and the
world. What wonder that so novel an idea could not enter the Apostles' minds till it had actually
been realized and further explained by the Divine Victim himself (Luke 24:27, 45). Thus, first of
all in action, Christ preached the great doctrine of the Atonement, and, by raising Himself from
the dead, He added another proof to those establishing His Divine mission and His Divine
personality. But, naturally enough, He left the more explicit teaching on these points to His
chosen witnesses, whose presentment of Christianity we shall presently examine.
To turn now to what is new in the moral teachings of Christ, we may say, once for all, that it
embodied ethical perfection. There may be development of doctrine, but, after the Sermon on the
Mount, there can be no further evolution of morals. God's own perfection is set as the standard
(Matthew 5:48). Duty was the principal motive in the Old Dispensation; in the New this was
sublimated into love. Men were taught to serve not on account of the penal ties attached to nonservice, but on principles of generosity. Before, God's will was to be the aim of the creature's
performance; now, His good pleasure also was to be sought. "What things are pleasing to Him,
these do I always" (John 8:29), and by action even more than by word Christ taught the lesson of
voluntary self-sacrifice. Never till His time were the Evangelical counsels voluntary poverty,

perpetual chastity, and entire obedience preached or practised. From no previous moral code,
however, exalted, could the Beatitudes have been evolved. Meekness and humility were
unknown as virtues to the heathen, and despised by the Jew. Christ made them the ground-work
of the whole moral edifice. To realize what new thing Christ's ethical teaching brought into the
world and put within the grasp of everyone, we have only to think of the great host of the
Christian saints. For they are the true disciples of the Cross, those who imbibed and expressed
His spirit best, who had the courage to test the truth of that Divine paradox which forms the
substance of Christ's moral message; "He that shall wish to save his soul shall lose it, but he that
shall lose his soul on my account shall find it" (Matthew 16:25; cf. Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; 17:33;
John 12:25). That was the course He Himself adopted the way of the Cross and His
disciples were not above their Master. Self-conquest as a preliminary to conquering the world of
God that was the lesson taught by Christ's life, and still more by His passion and death.

The teaching of the Apostles

Does the Christianity presented to us in the rest of the writings of the New Testament differ from
that described in the Gospels? And if so, is the difference one of kind or one of degree? We have
seen that Christianity must not be judged in the making, but as a finished product. It was never
meant to be fully set forth in the Gospels, where it is presented mainly in action. "I have yet
many things to say to you: but you cannot bear them now", said Christ in His last discourse. "But
when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all truth . . . and the things that are to come
he shall show you" (John 16:12, 13). We may presume that Christ Himself told them these many
things when "He showed himself alive after his passion, by many proofs, for forty days
appearing to them, and speaking of the kingdom of God" (Acts 1:3), and that they were rendered
permanent in the minds of the Apostles by the indwelling of the Spirit of Truth after Pentecost.
Accordingly, we must expect to find in their teaching a more formal, more theoretic, and more
dogmatic exposition of Christianity than in the drama of Christ's life. But what we have no right
to expect, and what rationalists always do expect, is to find the whole of Christianity in its
written records. Christ nowhere prescribed writing as a means of promulgating His gospel. It was
comparatively late in the Apostolic Age, and apparently in obedience to no preconceived plan,
that the sacred books began to appear. Many Christians must have lived and died before those
books existed, or without knowledge of them. And so we cannot argue from the non-appearance
of any particular tenet to its non-existence, nor from its first mention to its first invention
fallacies which often vitiate the erudite researches of the rationalists.
The main heads of the Apostolic preaching, as far as we can gather from the records, vary with
the character of the audiences they addressed. To the Jews they dwelt upon the marvellous
fulfilment of the prophesies in Christ, showing that, in spite of the manner of His life and death,
He was actually the Messias, and that their redemption from sin had really been accomplished by
His sacrifice on the Cross. This was the burden of St. Peter's discourses (Acts 2 and 3) and those
of St. Stephen and all who addressed the Jews in their synagogues (cf. Acts 26:22-23). Once
convinced of the reality of Christ's mission and the seal God set upon it by His Resurrection,
they were received into the Christian body to discover more at leisure all the implications of their
belief. In regard to the Gentiles, the same striking fact of the Resurrection was in the forefront of
the Apostolic teaching, but more stress was laid upon the divinity of Christ. Still, St. Paul, whose
peculiar mission it was to approve the new revelation to those that sat in darkness and had no

common ground of belief with the Jews, did not consider that his Gospel was anything different
from that of the others. "I have laboured more abundantly than all they: yet not I, but the grace of
God with me: for, whether I, or they, so we preach, and you have believed" (1 Corinthians 15:1011).
This definiteness and uniformity of content in the Apostolic message, and this sense of
responsibility in regard to its character, is still more strikingly emphasized by the same Apostle
in the next Epistle, wherein, rebuking the Galatians for giving heed to innovators "who would
pervert the Gospel of Christ", he exclaims: 'Yet, though we ourselves or an angel from heaven
preach a gospel other than that we have preached to you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:7, 8).
There is no trace here of uncertainty or ignorance as to what Christianity meant, or of any
tentative groping in search of truth. Even then, when theological science was in its infancy, we
find the Apostle exhorting Timothy to keep to the very phrases in which he has received the
Faith, "the form of sound words", avoiding "profane novelties of expression" (1 Timothy 6:20; 2
Timothy 1:13). Once again "Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you
have learned, whether by word or by our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:14). And those traditions
were directly communicated by Christ Himself to His Apostle, as he tells us in many passages
"For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you" (1 Corinthians 11:23), and
again "For I delivered unto you first of all what I received" (1 Corinthians 15:3).
Many rationalists have professed to discover in the apostolic writings various kinds of
Christianity mutually antagonistic and all alike illegitimate developments of the original Gospel.
We have Pauline, Petrine, Joannine Christianity, as distinguished from the Christianity of Christ.
But those theories which ignore Catholic tradition and supernatural guidance, and rest on the
written records alone, are gradually being abandoned, helped to their disappearance by the critics
themselves, who have little respect for each others' hypotheses. We may take the Apostolic
messages as one self-consistent whole, any apparent discrepancies or want of coherence being
amply accounted for by the different circumstances of their deliverance.
This preaching, therefore, reduced to its simplest form, was: The Resurrection of Christ as a
proof of His Divinity and Incarnation, a guarantee of His teaching and a pledge of man's
salvation.
On the historic fact of the Resurrection the whole of Christianity is based. If He was not truly
slain, Christ cannot have been man; if he did not rise again, He cannot have been God. St. Paul
does not hesitate to stake everything on the truth of this fact: If Christ be not risen again, then is
our preaching vain, and your faith also is vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God" (1
Corinthians 15:14-15). Consequently, God's providence has so arranged matters that the proofs
of Christ's Resurrection place the fact beyond all reasonable doubt.
But if St. Paul is so emphatic about the foundation of the Christian Faith, he is also careful to
erect the edifice upon it. It is to him that we owe the statement of the doctrine of grace, that
wonderful gift of God to regenerate man. Christ had already taught, in the allegory of the vine
and the branches (John 15:1-17), that there can be no salutary action on the part of the faithful
without vital communication with Him. This great truth is expanded in many passages by St.
Paul (Philippians 2:13; Romans 8:9-11; 1 Corinthians 15:10; 2 Corinthians 3:5; Galatians 4:5-6)

wherein regenerate man learns that he is God's adopted son and united with Him by the
indwelling of His Holy Spirit. This privilege is what man gains by Christ's redemption, the
benefits of which are applied to his soul by baptism and other sacraments. And St. Paul is not
only the chief exponent of this doctrine, but he alone of the Apostles promulgates anew the
mystery of the Blessed Eucharist, the principal fountain of grace (1 Corinthians 11:23, 24; cf.
John 4:13-14).
We need not pursue farther the development of doctrine amongst the Apostles. The Christianity
they preached was received from Christ Himself, and His Spirit prevented them from
misconceiving or misinterpreting it. On the strength of His commission they insisted on the
obedience of faith, they denounced heresy, and with skill, incredible had it not been Divine, they
preserved the truth committed to them in the midst of a perverse, subtle and corrupt civilization.
That same Divine skill has remained with Christianity ever since; heresy after heresy has
attacked the Faith and been defeated, leaving the fortress all the more impregnable for its onset.
The Christianity we profess today is the Christianity of Christ and His Apostles. Just as they
were more explicit than He in its verbal formulation, so the Apostolic Church has ever since
laboured to express more and more clearly the treasures of doctrine originally committed to her
charge. In a sense, we may believe more than our first Christian ancestors, inasmuch as we have
a more complete knowledge of the contents of our Faith; in a sense, they believed all that we do,
for they accepted as we the principle of a Divinely-commissioned teaching authority, to whose
dogmatic utterances they were ever prepared to give assent. The same essential oneness of faith
and the same variety in its content for the individual exist side by side in the Church today. The
trained theologian, deeply versed in the wonders of revelation, and the young or the uneducated
who know explicitly little more than the bare essentials of Christianity, knowing the One True
God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, believing in the Incarnation, the Atonement, the
Church, are equally Christians, equally possessed of the integrity of faith.

The divine purpose in Christianity

It remains now to set forth, as far as we can determine it from the sacred records and from the
course of history itself, the purpose of God in establishing Christianity. We gather that the
Divine founder meant Christianity to be (1) a universal religion, (2) a perfect religion, (3) a
visibly organized religion.

Universality includes both space and time

As regards space, we see that Christianity is intended for the whole world

from the prophecies that foreshadowed it in the Old Testament. Among these were the
promises made to Abraham and his descendants, the constantly recurring note of which is
that in them "all the nations of the earth shall be blessed".
From the plainly expressed purpose of Christ Himself, who, while proclaiming that His
personal mission concerned only the "lost sheep of the House of Israel" (Matthew 15:24),
announced the future extension of His Kingdom: "Other sheep I have who are not of this
fold" (John 10:16); "Many from the east and the west shall come and shall recline with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 8:11); "And this Gospel

of the Kingdom shall be preached throughout the whole world in testimony to all nations"
(Matthew 28:19).
From the actual conduct of the Apostles, who, though they required the special
inspiration of the Holy Spirit to bring home to them the practical bearing of this
commission, did finally leave the synagogue and proclaim the Faith to all without
distinction of race or country.

The universality of Christianity, in time as well as space, is implied in Christ's promise, "Behold,
I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (Matthew 28:20). It follows,
furthermore, from the next element in God's purpose to be considered.

Christianity is meant to be a perfect religion

A priori, we should expect that a religious system which was revealed and instituted, not by a
prophet or even an angel, but by the personal action of God Himself, and was designed,
moreover, to supplant an imperfect and provisional form of religion, would lack nothing of
possible perfection in end or means. Christ's own teaching satisfied this expectation, and
precludes the notion entertained by some early heretics, and still alive in the minds of men, of a
fuller and more perfect revelation to come.

First of all, He, its Founder, is God, and therefore had all the knowledge and all the
power requisite to establish a perfect religion.
Secondly, He promised His Apostles the abiding presence of the Spirit of Truth, who
should teach them all truth.
Thirdly, He promised that the body enshrining this deposit should never be vitiated by
error "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18; cf. Ephesians
5:27).
Fourthly, the same truth is insinuated by St. Paul's words: "God, who at sundry times . .
.last of all . . .hath spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:1), and by the expression, the
fulness of time, used in Galatians 4:4, to indicate the epoch of the Incarnation.
Fifthly, by the character of the Christian revelation itself and the Christian ethical ideal
which is the imitation of Christ, the Perfect Being. No possible development of mankind
can be thought of which should not find all that it needs in Christ.

We are compelled, therefore, to believe that the Christian revelation closed with the death of the
last of those originally commissioned to set it forth. We are thus brought counter to a modern
view regarding revelation which has lately been condemned as heretical by Pius X (Encyclical,
"Pascendi Gregis", Sept., 1907). It is to the effect that revelation is nothing external, but a clearer
and closer apprehension of things Divine by the Christian consciousness, which in each
particular age is the expression of the experience of the best men of that age. Consequently,
revelation grows, like a material organism, by waste and renewed supply, and therefore what is
truth for one age maybe quite different from what is truth for another. The error which has these
developments is ultimately philosophical, being based on the false assumption that the finite
mind can know only the phenomenal and can have no certainty of what is beyond experience.
Were that so, any external revelation would be impossible, for its guarantees miracle and
prophecy could not be grasped by human intelligence. These errors were long ago exposed

and condemned by the Vatican Council. The most casual glance at the history of Christianity
shows that there has been development of doctrine; the Creed grew only gradually; but that
development is merely logical, produced by analysis of the content of the original deposit. (See
DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE.)

God intended, in the third place, that Christianity should be a visible

organization
Christ established a Church and, in a variety of parables, sketched many of the features of its
character and history, all of which point to something external and perceptible by the senses. It is
the "house built upon a rock" (Matthew 7:24), showing the security and permanence of its
foundation, and "the city set upon a hill" (Matthew 5:14) indicating its visibility. Its doctrine
works in the three great races descended from Noe's sons like the leaven hidden in three
measures of meal, silently, irresistibly (Matthew 13:33). It grows great from humble beginnings,
like the mustard seed (Luke 13:19). It is a vineyard, a sheep-fold, and finally a kingdom, all of
which images are unintelligible if the bond that unites Christians is merely the invisible bond of
charity.
The old distinction between the body and soul of the Church is useful to prevent confusion of
ideas. Christian baptism constitutes membership in the Visible Church; the state of grace,
membership in the Invisible. It is obvious that one membership does not necessarily connote the
other. Some of these parables apply only to the Church fully developed, and so they indicate
Christ's ultimate purpose. History shows us that, in establishing Christianity as an institution, He
was content that on its human side its organization should be subject to the same laws of growth
and development as other human institutions. He did not give His Apostles a draft scheme of the
Church's constitution beforehand, to be worked out in the course of ages, prescribing the various
stages of progress, and indicating the final term. But the organization which existed in germ in
the consecrated hierarchy of the apostles was left to unfold itself under the guidance of the
abiding Spirit, according to the needs of time and place. The presence of the Holy Ghost and
Christ's promise sufficiently guarantee that the result, however obtained, is in accordance with
the original design. It may well be that the development was very largely natural, modelled, first
of all, on the synagogue, and then on the existing civil government; its progress may have been
hastened or retarded by the passions of individuals, but any account of it that ignores the
directing finger of Providence cannot be true.
This, then, is Christianity, a supernatural religion and the only absolute one; in a sense
(developed in the Epistle to the Hebrews), the oldest, for the Church is not an afterthought, but
instituted by God in the fullness of time, and containing a revelation of Himself, which all to
whom it has been adequately presented are bound under pain of eternal loss to accept (Mark
16:16), offering to all, who are sincere in seeking, the solution of all the world's problems;
enabling human nature to rise to the sublimest heights and "to play the immortal"; full itself of
mysteries and Divine paradoxes, as bringing the Infinite into contact with the finite; the one bond
of civilization, the one condition of progress, the one hope of humanity. Its fortunes have been
the fortunes of its Founder; "not all obey the gospel" (Romans 10:16). The Jews rejected Christ
in spite of the evidence of prophecy and miracle; the world rejects the Church of Christ, the "city
set upon a hill", conspicuous though she be through the notes that proclaim her Divine. What

men call the failure of Christianity is no proof that it is not God's final revelation. It only makes
evident how real is human liberty and how grave human responsibility. Christianity is furnished
with all the necessary evidence to create conviction of its truth, given goodwill. "He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear".