i ~ sy BD A f ‘ { Z ro) hy, es 34 . YRTHODOXY AND HERESY IN THE <4 GHRISTIAN CHURCH. 3 3 4a i Alaa EA Las NESS. fs | Ft | a KY if SA PANTY wa ied GAL OLS ve | St om Pak ag eh ipa it cx iy) i pole Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/tenlecturesonortOOhall_ 0 TEN LECTURES ORTHODOXY AND HERESY Nec Eek, CHRISTIAN CHURCH, BY EDWARD Rees. PRIVATELY PRINTED. —_——___.. WORCESTER: PRINTED BY CHARLES HAMILTON, PALLADIUM OFFICE, 1874. NOTE. These lectures, as the dates will show, were delivered on alternate Sunday evenings during the last winter. Although they were written solely for immediate use, yet I cannot regret that the subjects proved interesting, and that some of my hearers wished them to be put in more permanent shape. In response to this request, I take great pleasure in giving the lectures now, under their original form, into the hands of the kind friends who listened to them so indulgently. Worcester, July, 1874. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. PAUL AND THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH.... - LECTURE II. VIEWS OF THE EARLY CHURCH CONCERNING LrecrureE III. ARIANISM AND THE COUNCIL OF NICE... . LEcTuRE IV. THe NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY. ..-=+- > LECTURE Y. THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY... +--+ @ ; LecTuRE VI. rp CArHOlie CHURCH «.« ¢ s . ss « 9% LECTURE YII. Tus LUTHERAN HERESY. -.--+-+-+-+ ss Lecture VIII. T’RINITABIAN HERESIES. - « »-.6 + © 5 2 o » LECTURE IX. TINETARIAN PIERESIBES. «5. 2 sso s 2 « Fes LECTURE X. RELIGION AND DOGMA + 3 » * #6 © = s = CHRIST PAGE. be oe Wael Lo 5 in LAS . 169 2 195 7 = or i ot. 5 et j: LF i ded v8 te J mm LECTURE I. PAUL AND THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH. Tux terms Orthodoxy and Heresy are so familiarly used that it seems to me worth while to attach to them, if possible, a definite signification. Have they any exact meaning in relation to Christianity, and if so, what is it? What is Christian Orthodoxy, and what phases of belief come legitimately under the head of heresy? To answer these questions is the purpose of the present course of lectures. If in accomplishing this purpose the lectures shall also aid in answering the further question, Is Ortho- doxy of faith essential to Christianity? or the question larger still, Is dogma a necessary part of religion? the entire object of the course, as it now lies in my mind, will be attained. The first point to be made, in carrying out this plan, is to determine the meaning of Christian Orthodoxy. The term heresy, as commonly used, has no meaning unless the religion in question has an established and authorized system of doctrines. Had Christianity such a system at the beginning and if not, when did it form one ? To determine this point, we must look first at the very be- ginnings of the Christian Church. I invite you this evening, 4 therefore, to glance with me at Christianity as held by its first disciples ; by the Apostles of Christ themselves. Here are the historical records; very scanty it is true, and often vaguest where we should wish to have them most exact, and yet, scanty as they are, containing far more than is commonly discovered. I propose to look carefully, to- night, at the pages of the New Testament, and will do my best neither to put anything into them, nor to take anything out which is not there. Exactly how soon after the death of Jesus the Apostles gathered again at Jerusalem, we cannot tell, for all the mem- ories of this period, as is quite natural, were vague and con- fused, and the dates in the Book of Acts are as uncertain as the events described are misty and phantom-like. No better illustration could be given of the state of mind common to all who passed through the exciting scenes of Christ’s seizure © and crucifixion, than the conflicting statements as to the time which elapsed before what is called his ascension. This event, unknown to Matthew, to John, and to Mark,’ but mentioned twice by Luke, is described by him in one case” as happening within one day of the Resurrection, ieee. other case® as happening after forty days. In other words, when these two books were written, it was already forgotten whether Jesus was with his disciples after his crucifixion for twenty-four hours or for more than a month. The one thing which is clear in the early chapters of Acts, is that the Apostles were gathered in Jerusalem, and were living in daily expectation of their Master’s return. The crucifixion, as you know, had astonished and scattered them. The last twelve verses of Mark’s gospel are commonly pronounced spurious. Luke xxiv: 1,.18, 36, 51. SActs1: 3. 5 It brought not only terror but despair; for it seemed, at the moment, a final blow to all their hopes. So firmly rooted in their minds was the belief, long traditional among the Jews, that their Messiah would not die, but was to re-estab- lish on earth the Kingdom of Israel, and subject all nations to Jehovah’s sway, that their first feeling was that they had been wholly deceived. “We trusted it had been he” they said “ which should have redeemed Israel.”? The crucifixion thus forced upon them this stern alternative ; either Jesus was not the Messiah, or he had not really or finally died. He had passed up directly into heaven, to return as he had promised, “before that generation should pass” to establish himself on earth as king. Tiga Which side of this alternative they chose, we all know. Their faith in Jesus proved stronger than all their forebod- ings, and they came together again in Jerusalem, as he had bidden them, to await his speedy coming. The state of feeling with which they met, appears plainly from an exami- nation of the language which all the writers of this period employ. With the idea of heaven then prevailing as a local spot above the clouds, inhabited by God and his angels, it was easy for the Jew to conceive of Jesus as having been snatched up into the skies, where he would sit “at the right hand of God,”? until the time arrived when he should come down “in like manner as they had seen him go up into heaven,”® and mount the Messiah’s throne. Everything indicates this expectation. Christ’s coming is not spoken of in these pages as an event which has already occurred, but as something still to be. The tense is not past but EU XRIV E21, 2Acts 1m: 33. 3 Acts 1: 11. 6 e . . e | future. The Messiah has not “come,” he “is coming. “The Lord shall send Jesus Christ which was preached unto you,” says Peter in healing the lame man.’ Such ’ expressions as “ Waiting for the coming of the Lord Jesus,” “* Waiting for the Lord,” “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh,” “ We are that alive and remain unto the com- ing of the Lord,” are constantly met in all the writings of this age. It is an hour of intense expectancy, with all the high-wrought feeling and excited imagination which always characterize such hours. They are waiting for their Lord. Every unusual event seems startling, providential, miracu- lous. Every stir in the elements might be the descent of the Holy Ghost which he had promised; every breath of wind, his coming down from the skies whither he had ascended. The religious organization of this little band of primitive Christians seems to have corresponded wholly with their re- ligious faith. Various sects have been at pains to trace back their ecclesiastical forms to these early days. In reality, I suppose, the simplest organization ever thought of in our own times is far too complicated for the Apostolic age. In- deed, why should we look for any distinct organization at all? ‘The time was short.” “The day of the Lord was to come as a thief in the night.” It might be a few years, it might be a few months, it might be but a few days, ere the Son of Man should appear. What motive was there then for establishing special rites, or ecclesiastical offices, or sacred places, or holy days? | i Plainly nothing of the kind was done. Judging at least from the evidence before us, the disciples of Jesus continued 1 Acts m1: 20. 7 as before, living and worshipping among their fellow Jews, sharing the universal expectation of a Messiah, differing from their fellow countrymen only in considering Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah, and cherishing his glorious image in their hearts. There is no proof that as yet, or until they were forced to do so, they separated themselves openly from other Jews, or showed any disposition to forsake Jewish ob- servances. They still read and quoted the Mosaic Scrip- tures, they still baptized their converts into the Jewish Church, they were found “ daily with one accord in the Tem- ple,” they observed the Jewish Pentecost,’ Passover,’ and Sabbath,’ they performed Jewish vows,° they were faithful to the Jewish hours of prayer,® they “abstained from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things stran- gled,”’ they surrendered with great reluctance, and only in course of time, the rite of circumcision.£ They were as yet a family rather than a church ; a domestic, not an ecclesiasti- cal group. “All that believed were together, and had all things common ;” “breaking bread from house to house, they did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.”’ In later times, when they had ceased longer to ex- pect Jesus, and began only to remember him, this simple ceremony of the “breaking of bread,” assumed a memorial form, and became, after a few years, the Lord’s Supper. But not at first. For a time his followers were wholly ab- sorbed in the hope of his coming; they were looking Pees 46. *Acts 12°); Kx:° 16+ 1 Cor. xvi: 8. °* Acts xx: 6: *Acts xm: 42, 44; xvi: 18; xvu: 2; xvmi: 4. 5Acts xvut: 18; XxI: 23-26. -® Acts Peek wel 9, ACIS Xvi 29.. =? Acts: xwr Es xvi: 3; Gal. yi: 12. ° Acts 1: 44, 46. 8 forward, not backward. They were Jews still, with a fine expectation in their souls. Such was primitive Christianity. Such for the first eight or ten years of its existence, at least, was the Christian Church, if Church it could yet be called. Nor was its doc- trinal faith less primitive than its form. No one who reads the accounts of the first preaching of the Apostles, and no- tices the appeals by which they won their first converts, can fail to be struck by the limited range and extreme simplicity of their discourses. Of the higher thought which Jesus had spoken, no hint is to be found. The single theme, reiterated in many forms, which seems to have covered the whole ground of their ministry, was this: Jesus is the Messiah ; he will speedily come; repent and be baptized in his name. But it was impossible for this state of things to last. Narrow and unspiritual as were these first teachings, still the higher thought was there, for it had certainly been spoken, and was waiting then for further utterance.’ Not every one had forgotten it, or failed to comprehend it. Among those who joined in the Jewish ceremonials, some there must have been who were carrying in their hearts those better words, “ Man is greater than the sabbath,” “ Ye hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise and cummin,” - “ Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” It was only necessary for some soul to appear, responsive to these nobler utterances, and conscious of their inconsistency with the Mosaic faith, and the little Christian community would learn a larger Gos- pel. It was only a question of time when the new truth should come to an open break with the old. 9 The first warning note of the inevitable conflict came from a quarter whence one would least have expected it. While Peter, John and James preached their Gospel among the Jews without exciting hostility, the first serious offence seems to have been caused by one of a little group of subordinates created in somewhat contemptuous spirit, to “serve the tables,” and wait upon the widows, while the Twelve gave themselves “to prayer and the ministry of the word.”? Lowly as was their office, one among their number rose at once above the very apostles who had so haughtily assigned them their work. The fate of Stephen, the first martyr, 1s a familiar story 5 I ask you now simply to notice the exact cause of his violent death. That he preached Jesus as the Messiah could not have been his offence in the eyes of the Jews, for Peter and John had long taught this without being stoned. The charge against him was a more serious one—* We have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered sey eT other words, Stephen was the first to be put to death, be- cause he was the first to catch the more spiritual purport of Jesus’ words, and set them in contrast with the Mosaic cere- monial. Quoting, perhaps, such sayings as these, “Tn this place is one greater than the Temple;”*® quoting from their own scriptures, “The most high dwelleth not in temples made with hands,”! Stephen, like his Master before him,° was charged with blasphemy, and when he bravely refused to retract, he was stoned to death for having spoken ‘Caoainst Moses and against God.” 1 Acts vi: 2-4. 2Acts vi: 14. Matt. xm: 6. 4 Acts vir: 48. 5Matt. xxvi: 61. . 10 Stephen’s death, however, beautiful and heroic as it seems to have been, gains its chief significance from the conse- quences to which it led,.and the impression which its heroism seems to have made upon one greater than himself, or one at least with larger opportunity to carry forward the truth for which Stephen had become a martyr. This is not the place for a full account of Paul’s ministry; yet it is impor- tant to notice, just at this point, the exact circumstances of his actual entrance as a teacher and worker into the Christian community. Paul’s apostleship by no means began with his conversion, nor was his conversion itself the instantaneous thing it might at first appear. Like aJl genuine spiritual changes, it was evidently a gradual process, culminating, no donbt, in one. startling experience, but prepared for, as we have seen, by the incidents of Stephen’s death as well as by a general ac quaintance with Christian teachings, and followed by a long period of apparent solitude and reflection. According to his own account, he first spent three years in Arabia and Damascus, either feeling as yet no call to engage openly in the new cause, or not wholly at home in it, went then to Je- rusalem to consult with the leading Christian Apostles, met with no warm welcome from them, but only with suspicion and fear, and finally retired, as if in discouragement, to his native ‘Tarsus, where he remained until certain new develop- | ments brought him into active service. After the death of Stephen, the little community at Jeru- salem became naturally the object. of greater suspicion on 4 the part of the J ews, and finally of a general persecution, — —--_—_. 1Gal. 1: 17-18; Acts 1x: 26-30. ag which does not seem to have affected the Apostles, but which drove many of the more zealous members abroad “ through- out the regions of Judea and Samaria,”! “as far as Cy- prus and Antioch.”? But here arose at once a new perplexi- ty. Hitherto, as we have seen, the whole movement had been carried on within the Jewish church, nor did any of the Apostles seem to have considered that their mission ex- tended beyond it. Recalling, perhaps, certain words of Jesus himself? they evidently regarded the coming of the Messiah as in consequence of the promise made to the chosen people, and therefore as concerning them alone. Acting on this principle when they first left Jerusalem, they soon found themselves, for the first time, face to face with Greeks, and some of their number ventured to preach the Lord Jesus, and offer the blessings of his Messiahship, even to them. At once rumors of this bold proceeding reached the Apostles at Jerusalem, to whom the action seemed so grave and the moment so critical, that Barnabas, one of the most trustworthy of their followers, was instantly sent to Antioch, where the new movement had begun, to take the matter in charge. Barnabas in turn, with this new and seri- ous responsibility upon him, seems to have bethought him- self of the zealous convert, whom the Apostles had regarded with so much suspicion, but whose worth he had ‘recognized from the first, and who was then in retirement at Tarsus. Saul, visited thus in person by Barnabas, and called to the new field which had opened outside of Jerusalem, en- tered willingly upon the work, and found himself, as events proved, exactly where his help was most needed, and his > 1Acts vir: 1. 2Acts x1: 19. ®Matt. x: 5,6; Matt. xv: 24. ‘Acts ici, 20. 12 powers could be turned to best account." His special mis- sion was obvious at once. ‘ But few years passed after Saul’s entrance upon his labors, 1 before an event occurred which proved how well Barnabas F had chosen, and how sorely the Apostles needed precisely — the element among them which the new convert brought. The new experiment which had been initiated at Antioch, of preaching the gospel to Gentile as well as Jew, and inviting both to enter the heavenly kingdom on equal terms, was — by no means regarded with universal favor. On the contrary, 4 it was held by many to be subversive, as it really was, of the — ancient faith, and caused nowhere greater scandal than in Jerusalem, in the sacred circle of the Apostles themselves. Alarmed at the rumors which reached their ears, they sent messengers to Antioch who were dismayed at discovering an even greater looseness and freedom than they had supposed. They even found that converts were admitted into the church without being circumcised ; and felt called upon to tell the — foilowers of Barnabas and Paul “ Except ye be circumcised — after the manner of Moses ye cannot be saved.”2 The council at Jerusalem which resulted from this visit, and which is so differently narrated in Acts XV, and Gal. I,” was evidently the most important event in the early his- i tory of the church, and the singular asperity with which it | was conducted shows how serious a point was involved in its F discussions. Paul himself, in writing of it to the Galatians, 1 Acts xi: 22-26; Acts ix: 26, 27. 2 Acts xv? 1, * The discrepancy between these two accounts has long been familiar — to Bible students, and has defied all attempts at reconciliation. In choosing between them we are justified, of course, in following: the ~ statements of Paul himself. 4 13 about sixteen years later, betrays plainly enough by the exceptional severity and sarcasm of his tone how deeply he had been wounded, and how angry an opposition he had encountered at the hands of the Jerusalem Apostles. The messengers whom they had sent to Antioch to examine into its affairs, he calls “false brethren, unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage.”? Speaking of the Apostles themselves, he says “those who seemed to be somewhat, (whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no man’s person.)” “James, Cephas, and John who seemed to be pillars ;”? while through- out the whole account Paul is anxious to show the great dif- ference of opinion between himself and the Apostles, and to prove how little he allowed himself to be influenced by them. . The meaning of all this is unmistakable, and the attitude in which Paul appears is admirable. Nothing in his whole career brings out so clearly the strength of his character or the intensity and persistency of his purpose, as this first great triumph over official blindness and bigotry. The picture is a striking one. On the one side were Peter, James and John, the personal followers of Jesus, who had heard his words and been eye-witnesses of his career, who had been chosen to represent him and still bore unchallenged the sacred title of “‘ Apostles,” yet who honestly believed that the gospel was to the Jews, that every one who accepted it must accept also the whole Law of Moses, that the rite of cir- cumcision, the eating of certain meats, and the observance 1Gal. m: 4. 2Gal. m: 6-9. 14 of Sabbaths and feast days, as being part of the Law of Moses, were as incumbent upon the follower of Christ as upon the Jew himself, and that to admit Gentiles into the kingdom on equal terms was to falsify all the promises of the Fathers. On the other side appeared this new and al- most unknown convert, but just now their malignant perse- eutor; this recent comer into their ranks, who had never heard or seen Jesus, who claimed no official authority what- — ever, yet who dared boldly to dispute their word and deny their interpretion of the new faith, to challenge the sanctity of the Mosaie Law, and claim exemption from its “ bond- age”? in the name of Christ, to take open ground against the necessity of circumcision, and to claim for himself the same right to preach to the Gentiles which the Jerusalem Apostles had to preach to the Jews. On the one side, official dignity and traditional authority; on the other, the force of personal conviction. It is proof enough of Paul’s strength, that in the unequal conflict he carried the day. It isa happy thing for Christianity that in this first great strug- gle between the letter and the spirit, the cause of christian | freedom found so resolute a champion. Paul did not win the Apostles over to his belief; but he secured their recognition and endorsement of his work. They consented that the field should be divided between themselves and him. “ When James, Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, per- ceived the grace given to me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the "heathen, ‘and they unto the circumcision.” ! That Ihave not exaggerated either the importance of this — 1Gal. i: 9. 15 event, or the gravity of the dissension between Paul and his opponents, is amply proved by the frequent allusions to these very points in Paul’s several epistles. The danger that his followers would feel themselves still bound by the Jewish Law seemed constantly upon his mind. “Stand fast there- fore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” ‘“ Be- hold, I Paul, say unto you, that if ye be circumcised Christ shall profit you nothing.”* ‘“ Why turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days and months, and times and years.” “One believeth that he may eat all things: another who is weak eateth herbs.” ‘One man esteemeth one day above another; another esteemeth every day alike.”* ‘ He is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circum- cision which is outward in the flesh.”* “ We are the cireum- cision, which worship God in the spirit’? “Let no -man judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of an holy-day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath.”® Other passages prove that sides were early taken on this ereat question, and parties threatened the unity of the young church. “Every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ di- vided.”? “Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and avoid them.”® Equally significant are other passages which prove either that Paul was strangely ‘sensitive as to his official title, or else, as is far more likely, that his opponents strove to lessen ee 1Gal. v: 1,2. 2Gal. tv: 9, 10. ?Rom. XIv: 9-5. *Rom. u: 28. 6 Phil. uz: 3. ©Coloss. mu: 16. 71 Cor. xi: 13. * Rom. Xvi: iT. a 7 5 oh : 16 his authority by denying him the name of Apostle, and taunted him with the fact that he had received no commis sion from Jesus himself. “ Paul, an Apostle, not of men, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father.”* “Am TI not an Apostle? AmI not free? Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?”? “T suppose I was not a whit behind the very chiefest Apostles.” ‘ For in nothing am I behind the very chiefest Apostles.’ The character of the opposition which Paul encountered through life, and the source from which it came, appear in passages like these,—“ His letters, say they, are weighty and powerful; but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.” “ Such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the Apostles of Christ.”4 “JI marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you unto another gospel.” “If any man preach any other gos- pel unto you than that ye have received, let him be ac- cursed.”” “They that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.”® “Ave they Hebrews? so aml. Are they Israelites? so am J. Are they ministers of Christ ? I am more.”? Indeed, the most striking fact connected with Paul’s whole ministry is that which this last passage so explicitly states ; that the hostility which so constantly pursued him, which bafiled his projects and maligned his name, and denounced his doctrines and stole from him the hearts of his followers, arose not from among the Jews whom he had left, but from oe 1Gal.1: 1. 71 Cor.1x: 1. %2 Cor. xt: 5; 2 Cor. xm: 11. 42 or. | X:10; 2Cor. x1: 18. 5Gal.r: 6-9. ®Rom.xvr: 18. 72 Cor. xr: 22; 93 an 17 among the Christians to whom he came. His bitterest foes were within the Church itself. This fact has already ap- _ peared; it is still more clearly proved by his experiences during his last visit to Jerusalem. The other Apostles, as we have seen, had dwelt in Jerusalem for years in perfect quiet and safety. Not even the persecutions connected with Stephen’s death had disturbed them. No sooner, however, did Paul appear than they were filled with alarm for his safety. They reminded him how many Christians there were in Jerusalem who still clung to the Law, and who distrusted him because of his giving up circumcision! They besought him to silence these prejudices by taking upon himself a vow, and shutting himself up for seven days in the Temple, that they might see how faithfully he kept the Law’ Their fears proved well-grounded and their precautions useless. ‘The instant Paul was seen in the Temple he was seized by the multitudes, drawn from the Temple, beaten, and was on the point of being killed, when he was rescued by the Roman . soldiery.2 Seized and beaten, not because he was a Christ- ian, else Peter and James and John would long before have been seized; but because, like Stephen betore him, he “taught the Jews to forsake Moses ;” “because he taught all men everywhere against the people, and the law and this place.”* In other words, Paul was persecuted, if these nar- ratives are correct, not by Jews, but by Jewish Christians. This hostility to Paul and his anti-Jewish teachings, does not seem to have ceased with his death. Indeed, there are some indications that it was more than a century before this early antagonism was forgotten, and the Christian Church 1 Acts xxI: 20,21. 2Acts xxi: 23-26. %Acts XXxI: 27-32. +*Acts 5G SEW Nee 18 admitted Paul to an equal place in its esteem with his fellow- apostles. Among the churches which he had founded, some, we are told, were made to forget his name; among the earlier writers, some allude to him as a “ teacher of error,” while others quietly ignore him. As late as the middle of the second century, a curious book appeared, under the name of the “ Clementine Homilies,” purporting to give a series of disputes between the Apostle Peter and the heretic Si- mon Magus, in which there is little doubt that under the dis- guise of Simon Magus, Paul himself is intended and exposed to reprobation. He is represented as corrupting the teach- ings of Peter, and bringing in false doctrines. ‘ Some there were,” says Peter, “ who rejected my teachings, and followed the unlawful and worthless doctrine of one hostile to me. Even during my life, some undertook, by artificial interpre- tation, to.twist my precepts into the overthrow of the Law.” In another place, as if in allusion to Paul’s claim to have received his inspiration through visions, Peter says, “ Can one become an Apostle through a vision? If thou in a sin- gle hour, couldst be made a teacher by a vision, why then should Christ have remained with his disciples and taught them for an entire year ?”} Indeed, these opponents of Paul and his doctrines became by degrees a sect. In later times, when Paul’s idea of Christianity had won a tardy acceptance, they were pro- nounced heretics under the name of Ebionites. The Ebion- ites were those Christians of the 2d and 3d centuries who regarded Christianity as “Judaism perfected by a few addi- tional precepts ;”” who claimed that the Mosaic Law was still —— Quoted in Baur’s Christenthum der ersten drei Jahrhunderte 1: 80, 81. Comp. also Neander’s History of Christian Church, 1: 353-361. 2Neander 1: 344. 19 in force ; who looked towards Jerusalem when they prayed ; who believed in circumcision ; who kept the Jewish Passo- ver ; who looked upon Jesus as simply a man distinguished above others for legal piety and so becoming Lawgiver and Messiah, and to be classed with Moses and the Prophets ; and finally, who hated the Apostle Paul and rejected his Epistles. In a word, the Ebionites were the legitimate suc- cessors and exact counterparts of the party that arrayed itself against Paul while Paul still lived. In the 4th cen- tury they are heretics ;* in the first century they are the Apostles at Jerusalem. Such then was the first great struggle within the Christian Church. In these days, when Christianity, though still somewhat “entangled with the yoke of bondage,” has yet learned to claim with pride that its message is a universal one, and when no one denies that within Christian limits ‘is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female,” it is difficult for us to carry our im- aginations back to the time when this point was still at issue. Yet it is well for us to remember, this. Leis well for us to remember that for more than a century it was an open question whether Christianity was to be a new Jewish sect, or a new religion. And it is well for us to recall some of the bitter conflicts by which the ques- - tion was decided. The emancipation of Christianity from the bonds of Judaism, the vindication of its separate right to be, was not the work of a day or an hour, but ran with varying and uncertain result through and far beyond the life of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. While he lived the - 1 Baur: 157. 20 question was determined by the sheer weight of his invinci- ble personality ; after his death it was mainly the impulse he ‘had given it, and the noble words he left behind him, which carried the problem to its triumphant conclusion. No one who cares for his Christian faith can refuse his in- terest to the hours when this point was still undecided ; his’ sympathy to those who so valiantly fought for what long seemed a hopeless cause; or his gratitude to the great leader who, against overwhelming odds, maintained the cause of spiritual freedom, and pledged Christianity to the largest service. Pe Ue: 01. ‘JANUARY 4, 1874. VIEWS OF THE EARLY CHURCH CONCERNING CHRIST. My present lecture grows naturally out of the preceding. In glancing at the early church, so far from finding a fixed ecclesiastical form or definite theological doctrines at the start, we found the first generation of believers engaged in a serious controversy. One of the most vital questions that could arise was still undecided, and threatened to divide the infant church in twain; the question whether Christianity was to be merely a modification of Judaism, or a distinct religion addressed to all who would receive it. The imme- diate disciples of Jesus, strongly Jewish in their feelings, as they had been during their Master’s life, regarded Christian- . ity as simply a new development of the Mosaic faith, while - the new-comer, Paul, seeing at once the larger meaning of the truth to which he was converted, insisted upon welcom- ing Gentiles as well as Jews, on the single condition of their belief in Christ. The question was too important to be left unsettled, yet the ‘differences were too great to be reconciled in an hour. In fact, the history of the first century of 4 22 ‘ 4 Christianity is mainly the record of the struggles by which Christianity vindicated its right toa name and a career of its own. But this controversy involved, of course, much more than the one question of admitting Gentiles to the church without circumcision. It involved the nature and character of Jesus himself. According to one of these two parties, Jesus was simply the long-expected Messiah of the Jews; according to the other, he was a religious teacher, and the divine messen- ger of a new faith. We cannot be surprised, therefore, to find this question a very prominent one in those early years, and to find also many conflicting views of Christ’s nature | among his followers before a definite and generally accepted opinion was reached. To trace the more interesting of these early views is my purpose to-night. As I have just intimated, the entire controversy concern- ing Christ’s nature, which has continued unbroken in the Christian Church down to our own day, originated in the twofold conception of his person and his oftice which existed while the church was forming. Indeed, this twofold concep- tion found its way into the Christian Scriptures themselves, written as they were during the first half-century or century of the growth of the church. The generation which first had written Gospels and Epistles in their hands found im- bedded in them at least two distinct views of the nature of Jesus. As this point is of great importance to the further discussion, let me state it as plainly as my space allows. In the first three Gospels, which, although composed later than some of Paul’s Epistles, yet represent in the original material from which they are drawn, the earliest existing narratives and impressions of Christian times, Jesus appears / ’ 23 in strictest sense as the Jewish Messiah. His family register stands upon the first page, proving him an anointed King or Messiah in regular descent from the house of David. As we read on, we find frequent allusions to “the Kingdom,” “the Kingdom of God,” “ the Kingdom of Heaven,” “ King- dom of our father David,” “Children of the Kingdom ;” all these being the current designations of the Kingdom of the Messiah. As we read too, we find such words as these: “ Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”! “Iam not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”?_ “Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets; 1 am not come to destroy bnt to fulfil.”* In these pages too, more than anywhere else, we find full quotations from the Jewish Scriptures to prove that the ancient prophecies found their fulfilment at last in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In the first three Gospels then, especially in Matthew, Jesus appears exclusively as the Jewish Messiah or Christ. And the Jewish Messiah, I need not remind you, was never thought of except asa man. Indeed, to the purely Jewish mind, trained for centuries to think of Jehovah as in absolute isolation from his human subjects, no other thought would pre- sent itself; and certainly none other is found in all the Jew- ish Scriptures, or in the New Testament writings which most reflect the Jewish spirit. According to Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus was a purely human Messiah. They alone, as we have seen, give his human descent, they alone give do- mestic incidents of his life, they alone record his Temptation, 1Matt. x: 5, 6. 2Matt. xv: 24. 3 Matt. v: 17. ? 24 his gradual reconnition of his coming fate, the agony of the garden, the exclamation of despair upon the cross. They represent him-as foretold by the prophets, indeed, but fore- told only as an anointed King. Two of these Gospels speak of a miraculous birth, and descent of the Holy Spirit from Heaven at his baptism; but this would only make him a greater Messiah than any before. He wrought miracles, it is true; but so, according to the Jewish Scriptures, had Moses and Samuel, and Nathan and Elijah, human beings all of them. Indeed, so did many of the Jews still living, by the testimony of Jesus himself. “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them ont?”! It is quite safe to say that throughout the first three Gospels, Jesus is in no single passage ranked above humanity. The moment we turn, however, from these Gospels to the Epistles of Paul, we find ourselves in another region of thought and faith. Paul, as we have already seen, found the strict Messianic view of Jesus as held by the Apostles at Jerusalem too narrow for him, and claimed for his great Teacher a nobler work than simply the reéstablishment of the Jewish Kingdom. And as the mission of Christianity seemed so much nobler, so, to Paul’s thought, the person of Jesus assumed a higher dignity and quite supernatural glory. He does not cease to speak of J esus, and to regard. him as man. “There is one God,” says Paul, “and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”? “Since by man came death, by man came also the resur- rection of the dead.”* “The first man, Adam, was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” 1Matt. x11: 27. 21 Tim. wm: 6. 2) Cor.exV ole 25 . “The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is (the Lord) from heaven.”? “Tf through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.”? “He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained.’ In no passage of Paul’s Epistles is Jesus called God,* yet it is plain that Paul ascribed to him a nature as exalted as was his function. Jesus was man, indeed, but a heavenly and glorified man. Whatever difficulty such a conception may cause to modern theologians, Paul found it easy, as we have already seen, to speak of “the man from heaven,”* Indeed, no words seemed to him too strong to describe the person or the place of this glorious being whose mission was not to any single people, but to universal humanity. Christ ig “the mediator between God and men.”® He is “ the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature.” “ By him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth.” “He is before all things, and by him all things consist.” “He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the first born from the dead.” ‘In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” 11 Cor. xv: 45, 47. 2Rom. v: 15. 8 Acts Xvi: 31. *The only possible exception to this statement is Rom. Ix: 5, where the common version, although contested by the best authorities, is certainly the most natural one; the strongest argument against it be- ing that, if correct, this would be the only place where Paul applies the term God to Christ, or ascribes to him the doxology. The question is one of punctuation; the corrected reading being ‘‘God over all be blessed forever.” 41 Cor. xv: 47. The best readings omit ‘‘ the Lord” from this verse. 6 Baur’s Christenthum 1: 284-290. ®17T.u: 5. ‘Col. 1: 646, 275403 He 9: 26 “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.” “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”? That this is a very exalted and sublimated conception of humanity, no one will deny. To many minds, a being who has existed from the beginning, in whom (or by whom) all things were created, and “in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead,” must be of necessity divine ; and although Paul himself does not suggest this, yet it is quite natural, after meditation upon this point once began, that the further step should be taken, and this supernatural being be lifted altogether above humanity. When the Fourth Gospel was written, this step seems to have been already taken. The date of this Gospel is still uncertain; many critics, with no little reason on their side, placing it as late as the middle of the second century.’ Taking the earliest date commonly given however,’ and supposing John to have been its author, it must have been written nearly fifty years after Christ’s death, thirty years later than Paul’s earliest Epistles,* and twenty years later than his last.2 Time had been given, therefore, for much speculation upon the office and person of Christ ; and who-— ever the writer may have been, he was evidently not averse SBAMeuIT 26, F914. 2Compare Sears’s Heart of Christ; Tayler’s Fourth Gospel. *About A. D. 80. +A.D. 52 or 53. 5A. D. 60 or 63. 27 to speculation, nor one to whom the religious thought of the day would be unknown. What religious ideas were current among the more culti- vated Jews at this period is now pretty well known, and ean be understood by recalling the experience of the nation after.the time of their exile. Upon the destruction of Jeru- salem, while part of the Jewish people were carried captive _ to Babylon, another large portion took refuge in Egypt, _ which became from that time the home of a large Jewish colony. From each of these two sources a perceptible influ- ence was exerted upon the primitive Mosaic faith. According to the religious philosophy of Zoroaster, which became familiar to the Jews in Babylon, Ormuzd, the God of Light, brought everything into being by his Word, which had existed before the world. He spoke, and all good things were created. All understanding, wisdom, virtue, are expressions of this Word. The Chaldaic paraphrases of the Old Testament show that this conception of the divine Word had found its way into Jewish theology before the time of Christ.! In Egypt, the Jews encountered a somewhat similar con- ception and similar phraseology, in the Greek philosophy which had also found a home there, and which had taken the form of a modified Platonism. Plato’s original conception of the divine Idea, or Reason, had become personified by his followers, and endowed with distinct functions. It was the Logos (Word); the first-born Son of God, born before the creation of the world, and itself the agent in creation. The Logos was the image of the divine perfection; the - 1Bretschneider’s Glaubenslehre, (1844), p. 197, 299. 28 mediator between God and man. As the purest reflection of Deity, and sharer in his nature, it was even called a God; never “the God,” but sometimes “God.” Philo, a Jewish writer of Alexandria, born about twenty years before Christ, while insisting constantly that God is One and Supreme, yet says “God, not condescendimg to — come down to external senses, sends his own Words or Angels for the sake of giving assistance to those who love virtue.”* He speaks of “two powers;” “God the benefi- cent power, Lord the royal power.”? He regards the words ‘“ Let ws make man in our image,” as proving that Jehovah had an- assistant, or assistants, in the work of creation.* He points out the difference between God, when preceded by the article, (ho theos), meaning the one absolute being, and God without the article (theos,) meaning “a god;” and speaks of the Logos, not only as the “oldest” and “first- born” Son of God, (presbytatos; protogonos), but also as the “Second God,” (deuteros theos). | That this idea of an intermediate power between the Supreme Deity and his creation, an ‘emanation from the hidden God, taking personal form, had found entrance into the Jewish mind loug before the times of which we are now speaking, is plainly proved by passages both from their Ca- nonical and from their Apocryphal writings. “I, Wisdom, dwell with Prudence.” “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was anointed from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was, &e.”® “Wisdom hath been created before all —_— — 1 Bretschneider, 197, 299. *% Philo’s works—Bohn’s edit. WS SOT eo ai 326. 411: 21. 5Meyer’s Commentary on John’s Gospel, p. 88. Prov. Vi: 12, 22,. &e. : ‘ q 29 things.”! “TI came out of the mouth of the Most High; I alone compassed the circuit of heaven, and walked in the bottom of the deep.” “Come unto me, all ye that be desirous of me, and fill yourselves with my fruits.” ‘ They that eat me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me shall yet be thirsty.”? “I called upon God and the Spirit of Wisdom came unto me.” “In her is a spirit which is wise, holy, the only-born.” “She is a breath from the power of God.” “She is a reflection of the everlasting Light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.”’ “Thine almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne.”* — - Still more evident is the influence of this thought upon the writer of the Fourth Gospel. To his mind it offered not the terms of speech alone, but the very order of religious ideas which best embodied his conception of the spirit and work of Christ. In this Gospel is no longer any suggestion of Jesus as the human Messiah. All human interests are lost from sight. Here is no family life or per- sonal incident ; no vicissitude of emotion or affection ; no temptation or agony; here are no beatitudes, no parables, no moral precepts. We are walking among supernal beings, listening to exalted speech, watching a celestial life. This is not the Christ of the first three Gospels; it is something even less terrestrial than the glorified being of Paul’s Epis- tles. It is “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” It is the “ only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father.” It is “the Word.” “The same was in the beginning with God. . All things were made 1Ecclesiasticus 1: 4. 2xxiv: 3, 5,19, 21. ® Wis. of Solomon, vu: 7, me, 2b,26. *xvur: 1b. ; @ 5 30 by him ; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”?} | To this “Word of God,” so mystic in its nature and source, divine power is given. ‘The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand. He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.”? “The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son, that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father.”* He is of celestial nature. “As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”* “T am the bread of life.” ““} am the living bread which came down from heayen.> “Ye are from beneath; Iam from above: ye are of this world; Iam not of this world.” “Before Abraham was, Lb am.”?® He stands in mysterious relations with the Father. “ No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “Believe me that I | am in the Father and the Father in me.” “He that hath — seen me hath seen the Father.”7 “I and my Father are one,’’® . Does this mean that the Son was God ? The whole tone | of the religious philosophy with which this Gospel is in such entire harmony makes the answer easy. Philo, as we have ; seen, with all the writers of his school, insists that there is but one God, who is an absolute Being coming into no con- ! tact with the universe. From him issues the Logos to dothe work of creation; and this Logos, though not the Infinite _ * 1Johni: 1-18. 2m; 35,36. 8y: 2998, 41. 96. Sv: 48, 51. Pyar: 26, 8e" Fx 6; 9<1t)) 8x ae: al God himself, yet shared the divine nature. To express this they did not hesitate to use the term God, though always without the article. In no simpler way could they indicate identity of nature without identity of person. Taken in this sense, therefore, their language is unequivo- cal. Says the Neo-Platonic philosophy. “ The Word is God” (theos). Says the Fourth Gospel also, “ The Word was God,” (theos én ho Logos)! Such then was the situation at the close of what may be called, somewhat “indefinitely, the Apostolic age. Within the ranks of the Church, and, as soon as Scriptures exist, within the Christian Scriptures themselves, two distinct con- ceptions of the nature of Christ ; the one making him a human and national Messiah; the other, (treating Paul’s view and John’s as in this comparison virtually one), a heavenly being in intimate relations with the Father. That a corres- ponding difference of opinion should appear in the writings of the age which immediately followed, that each of these Bible-views should have its followers, is only natural. Let me try to show this conflict of opinion, and the gradual growth of clearer conceptions, by brief quotations from the earlier Fathers of the Church. First, Justin Martyr, a Greek convert to Christianity,’ the first of the well-known. Christian Fathers, gives us a full account® of a dialogue, real or supposed, between himself and one Trypho, a Jew, in which Justin seems to be combating the very Jewish idea of Christ of which I hawe already spoken. Trypho cannot understand how Jesus “‘ submitted to be born 1See Meyer’s John, p. 40; Baur’s Christenthum 1: 298; Bretschneider, p. 299. *Died A. D. 165. *® Written about 140. 32 and become man, and yet is not man (born) of men.”! “How can you show that beside the Maker of all things there is another God who submitted to be born of a virgin?”? He makes this charge also against the Christians, “ You observe no festivals, or sabbaths, and do not have the rite of circum- cision.”? Justin replies by confessing, “Some there are among ourselves who admit that Jesus is Christ, while hold- ing him to be man of men.”* He afterwards gives his own view ; “God begat before all creatures, a certain rational power, proceeding from himself, called Glory of the Lord, Son, Wisdom, Angel, God, Lord, Logos.”® ‘Moses declares that He who appeared unto ‘Abraham under the oak at Mamre is God; sent with two angels by Another who remains ever in supercelestial places, invisible to all, holding personal intercourse with none, whom we believe to be Father and Maker of all things.”® “God (or Angel, Lord, Christ), wrestled with Jacob.”7 “ He who appeared to Abra- ham, and is called God, is distinct from, Him who ‘made all things ; numerically I mean, not in will.’ “He who has but the smallest intelligence will not venture to assert that the Maker and Father of all things, having left all superce- lestial matters, was visible in a little portion of the earth.”® “You must not imagine that the unbegotten God ‘came down’ and ‘went up.” Justin’s argument in this case is very simple ; if God came down to the earth to do certain things, there would have been no God in heaven, when those things happened.” Indeed, he goes go far as to say in * 1Works, pp. 134, 148. The quotations from the Fathers, given in this lecture, are made from Clarke’s Ante-Nicene Library. ?>p. 151. =p. 09; *Trypho xLtvii. 5p. 170. ep. 158. / T palez: © p. 160) 1? p. eos p. 260. 33 yeference to the “raining fire from heaven,” “One God »l This God on earth was in heaven, another God on earth. was, of course, the God who afterwards appeared in Christ.’ In other words, the Christian mind at this time, taking Justin Martyr as its representative, had got so far as to consider Christ identical with the God who had personal intercourse with the Patriarchs and Prophets, but not with the Absolute Deity. The danger of this direction of thought, however, is apparent. “Tf there is a God on earth (Logos) and another in heaven (Jehovah), why then are there not two Gods % That this conclusion was actually drawn by many is shown, among other places, by a curious passage from Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch from 168 to 188,a Pagan by birth like Justin, and writing soon after him. He refers to the crea- tion of Eve as proving that God is one, not many, and says: “God foreknew that men would call upon a number of gods; ‘lest then it should be supposed that one God made man, another woman, therefore he made them both together, the woman with the man.’® About this time, too, and in the same interest, appeared the “Clementine Homilies,” of which I have already spoken,’ a species of religious romance in which the two disputants, Peter and Simon, stand unquestionably for Peter and Paul, the writer not quite venturing to attack Paul by name. Simon opens the discussion by insisting that the Jewish Scriptures distinctly teach that there are many gods; giving as proofs, “Let ws make man in our image.” “Behold, he is become as one of us.’® “Thou shalt not revile the 1Jus. Martyr’s Works, p. 268. 2p. 158. °p. 98. *Lecture fF: p. 18 SGen. 1: 26; rr: 22. 34 gods.”> “The Lord your God is God of gods.”? Peter teplies by saying with great frankness, “Each one finds in Scripture whatever opinion he wishes in regard to God ;” but, “TI accept no other God but Him who created me.’’? “One is He, who said to his Wisdom, ‘Let us make man.” “Wisdom is united as soul to God.”® Our Lord did not proclaim himself to be God, but proclaimed him blessed who called him Son of God.” “What is begotten cannot be compared with the unbegotten or self-begotten.”7 “Men are of the same substance as God, but not gods.” “What great matter then for Christ to be called God? for he has only what all have.”® “Two things boundless cannot co- exist.” | Trenzeus,” who wrote at about the same period," declares that “Those who assert that Jesus was mere man, begotten by Joseph, are in a state of death.” Treneeus, however, like some other writers of this and the following generation, found his chief opponents, not among the Jewish party, but among the Gnostics ; a sect, or succession of sects, which it is very difficult to characterize, and whose origin is uncertain, yet whose influence upon Christianity during the second and - third centuries is very marked. Originating outside Chris- tianity, containing elements indeed of “Platonic philosophy, Jewish theology, and Oriental theosophy,”” Gnosticism seems to have appropriated the facts and truths of Christ- lanity to itself, and to have come to its full development within the Christian Church.“ Its fundamental principle being, perhaps, the eternal antagonism of spirit and matter, 1EX. Xx: 28. 2Deut. x: 17: ®Clem. Hom. p. 10. ‘pal ae 12. Cpr 2p. bees ep lie °p. 17. 1° Died about 202, u 180. 2°Ireneus | T. 320. 38 Baur’s Chris. 1: 16], 14 Hase’s Hist. of Chris. Church, p. 76. 35 and the complete separation therefore of God from the world, its immediate influence upon Christianity showed itself chiefly in a tendency to melt away the outward cir- cumstances of Christ’s life, and etherialize his word, until, according to the views of the Fathers, nothing specifically Christian remained. It also brought a new interpretation to bear upon the doctrine of the Logos, which threatened, unless resisted, to place God and Christ farther than ever apart. So at least many of the Fathers felt, as we judge from the bitter denunciations contained in the writings of this period against those who teach that there are two gods, not one; and it is to this that Irenzeus refers in the following pas- sage: “John teaches that there is but one God, who made all things by his Word; they allegorize that the Creator was _ one, the Father of the Lord another ; the Son of the Creator one; but Christ from above another.”* To put this Gnostic thought in plain terms; Jesus was the Son of the God who made the earth; but above that God was the Supreme God from whom came the Word, which entered into the visible Jesus and made him Christ. Almost cotemporary with Irenzus was the Carthaginian Tertullian,? who attacked, among other errors, the tendency of Gnosticism, hardly less dangerous than its Dualism, to subordinate the outward form and historical incidents of Christianity to the inward spiritual principle. “To its view,” says Baur,® “reality was little, idea everything.” Hence the sect called the Docetze; who held that there was no real Jesus, but only a seeming person, his body being not flesh and blood, but a phantasm. Some theory of this kind seems | 1<¢ Against Heresies,” 1: 287. * About A. D. 150 to 220. 2 Christen- thum 1: 213. 36 to have been current before the New Testament was finished. “ Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.?! In Ter- tullian’s time the chief representative of this sect seems to have been Marcion, whom’ Tertullian charges with saying, “ Away with that plaguy taxing of Cesar, and the scanty inn, and the squalid swaddling-clothes, and the hard stable. We do not care a jot for that multitude of the heavenly host who praised their God at night. Let the shepherds take better care of their flock, and let the wise men spare their legs so long a journey. Let Herod too mend his man- + ners.”* These jeers are silenced by proving, or declaring, that the “flesh of Christ is precisely as our flesh,” that “Christ is man’s flesh with God’s spirit.”° In defence of which Tertullian quotes Matthew, Romans and Galatians,! and disposes of Marcion, in true theological style, by calling him “ fouler than any Seythian.” According to Tertullian, the greater number of believers still held Christ to be a man, on ithe ground that to call him God was to have two gods. “ ae people,” he says, “think of Christ as a man.”> “The simple, who constitute the majority of the believers, are startled on the ground that their rule of faith withdraws them from the world’s plurality of gods to the one only true God.”* “We wor- ship God through Christ. Count Christ a man if you please.”’? | Tertullian is of chief interest to us, however, as béing the - first (so far as I can find), to introduce the name or idea of 11 J.1v: 2, 3. 2Tertullian m: 165. 2'p.-201.° 4 po 210.) Sr Ola oars 37 a Trinity into Christian theology.”* Many Christian writers before Tertullian, as we have seen, had spoken of the Son as partaking of the divine nature, and being in a certain sense God, though always subordinate to the Supreme Being ; many had spoken of the Holy Spirit; but of a threefold form of Deity, or of any trinity in the divine essence, they had been as silent as are the Scriptures themselves. It is curious too, to see, even when the thought once suggested itself, how incidentally it arose, and how little impression it seemed to make upon the mind that originated it. No one could be less aware than Tertullian that the new word he was using was to be on men’s lips for centuries as the central mystery of the Christian faith. In answer to one Praxeas, who declared that Christ being God, “it was God himself who was born of the Virgin,” Tertullian was led to define his faith more closely. ‘“ We believe there is only one God; That this one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from himself, and by whom all things were made. Him to have been sent by the Father into the Virgin, and to have been born of her, being both man and God, and to have been called by name Jesus Christ. He sent also from heaven the Holy Ghost, sanctifier of those who believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost.”? Soon after he adds, to show that the unity of the divine nature is not disturbed, “ All these areof One, by unity of substance, while the mystery is still guarded which distributes the unity into a trinity, plac- ing in their order the three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”? 1The idea was already familiar to both Oriental and Greek thought. See Neander’s Dogmas, 1: 181,132. ?Advy. Praxeas, II: 836. *®p. 337. 6 38 How far this apparently accidental thought was from taking ~ the full shape of later times, is shown by various passages which follow. “ My assertion is, that the Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that they are distinct from each other ; yet not by way of diversity but by distri- bution.” ‘The Father is entire substance, the Son derived and subordinate.”? “The Father is not Son, as day is not night.” ‘In order to be a husband, I must have a wife ; can never myself be my own wite.”? “TJ and my Father are one,” according to Tertullian, means not one person, but “ one thing.”* As analogies of the trinity of which he speaks, he gives “root, tree and fruit ;” fountain, stream, branch ; sun ray and apex.‘ About A. D. 200, then, the conception of a Trinity found its way into Christian speculation. So far was this, however, from satisfying the Christian mind at once, or making any immediate impression upon religious controversy, that less than fifty years after Tertul- lian wrote, a four-fold conception of the divine’ nature appeared in place of the threefold. For some time it remained doubtful whether the great mystery would find its solution in a trinity or a quaternity. According to Sabel- lius, “the most original and profound thinker among the Monarchians,”* probably a pr esbyter in the church about A. D. 250, and writing with the same authority as Tertullian, behind the Trias (or Trinity), Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the Monas (or Word) itself, of which the Trias is only an expression. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are successive phases of the Supreme Deity. Christ was only a transient 1 Adv. Praxeas, 1: p. 349. 2p. 351, 8p. 888. 4 p. 348. ® Neander 1: 594. 39 form of the manifestation of the Logos; “went forth as a ray and was withdrawn.” In the end the Trias is to resolve itself back into the Monas. The trinity is tran- sient ; the unity permanent.’ Almost contemporary with Sabellius was Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 269, who is interesting to us, as making prominent once more the human personality of Christ, which seemed in so much danger of being wholly forgotten. According to Paul, Christ was a man, and was exalted to peculiar union with the divine nature by the illu- mination of divine Wisdom. “ Wisdom dwelt in Christ as in no other.” ‘The Logos came down to impart itself to Christ, then rose again to the Father.” “Christ was not God by nature, but became so by progressive develop- ment.”2 Paul was deposed in 269, and his name was long the synonym for heresy in the Ghurch. Eusebius, writing in the next century, says of him, “ He entertained low and degrading views of Christ, and taught that he was in nature but a common man.”? As both Paul and Sabellius were after- wards pronounced heretics, very little is known of them, and but few of their works remain. A second champion of the Trinity appeared in Origen, greatest of the Fathers, yet one whom Orthodoxy is very wary in claiming.* Origen seemed to come upon the idea of a trinity as accidentally as Tertullian, and dwelt quite as little upon it, declaring indeed that the position of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and Son “needs to be enquired into.”> The thought seems to have struck him first 1 Neander 1: 594-601; Baur 1: 312-315. 2Neander 1: 601-605. ® Euseb. Ece. Hist. p. 286. 4 Died about 254. 6 Origen’s Works I: 2. 40 in connection with the baptismal formula, of which he says, “Indeed, the person of the Holy Spirit was of such dignity that baptism was not complete but by authority of the most excellent trinity of them all.”! Origen’s view differed from preceding theories in this. The Son, as he conceived, though distinct from the Father and subordinate to him, yet shares his absolute being in having been evolved out of the Father, not at any special time, but eternally. God, whether as Creator or as Father, must be what he is eternally. The eternal necessity of the Father creates the eternal Son2 Without quoting from Origen further, I cannot take leave of him without calling attention to one delightful trait which characterizes him almost alone among ecclesiastical writers. On whatever point he is speaking, the moment he has told us all that Church or Scripture has to say, he adds with the utmost simplicity: “beyond this the church doctrine js not settled,” or “on these matters there is not sufficient clearness in the teachings of the church,” or “here the Scriptures give no light.”® Nor can I refrain form quoting, as I close, this one characteristic and noble passage ; ‘ God is incompre- hensible. Whatever be the knowledge we are able to obtain of him, either by perception or by reflection, we must of necessity believe that he is by many degrees better than what we perceive him to be.’’4 a I stop here abruptly; not because the position or doctrine of Origen constitutes a turning-point in Christian history, but because almost immediately after Origen’s death, and partly in consequence of his teachings, the great contest 1Origen’s Works 1: 34. *Comp. Baur’s Christenthum I: 840. 81; Sis wert i 4] arose which ended in the first formal and authoritative enun- ciation of Christian doctrine. Meantime, I trust that in this somewhat hasty survey of the first three centuries, the fol lowing points have been made clear :— First. That the doctrine of the Christian church con- cerning Christ was not less than three centuries in forming. Second. That during this period the range of beliefs and ideas concerning him was as wide as now, with this difference, that then these beliefs were all equally Orthodox, and one as likely as the other to prevail. Third. That the origin of the controversy is to be found, to go no further back, in the two different views of Christ’s nature to be found in the New Testament itself, and dividing the church at the beginning. Fourth. That in drawing its converts so much more largely from the Gentile than from the Jewish world, Christianity received inevitably the impress of Gentile thought, and that its later growth was, in great measure, determined by this fact. Finally. That in the middle of the third century, two hun- dred years after the death of Christ, it was still doubtful, and only to be settled by an imperial council, whether the Christian Church should regard its founder as a man among men, or as the Lord from Heaven. | Gn lel) -_ FereGriaUe hen DEY. JANUARY 18, 1874. ARIANISM AND THE COUNCIL OF NICE. Tue last lecture, although bringing down the controversy concerning Christ’s nature beyond the middle of the third century, left the great question still undecided. The Christ- ian world, more and more forgetful of its Jewish antecedents, impregnated with Greek thought, and growing familiar with the current ideas and terms of religious philosophy, had learned to call Christ God, but had as yet gone no further. The term God in those days being constantly used to mean simply a divine being, the question still remained in what sense Christ was God, and, if God, in what relation he stood to the Supreme Deity. So far as this question was concerned, the two centuries had been spent, as we have seen, in showing how Christ was God, without on the one hand making him a mere shadow or reflection of Deity ; or, on the other hand making two gods. How serious both these dangers were then considered the quotations already given have amply proved. We are now to see how the con- troversy reached its first solution; and how, out of such conflicting ideas, the first specific doctrine was enunciated concerning the relation of Christ to God. 44 It was quite in character that the agitation which was so protoundly to affect the Christian Church should begin in Alexandria, the source of so much of the philosophical and religious speculation which acted upon early Christianity. As in still remoter ages Egyptian faith profoundly modified and re-created Judaism, so in these later days, the Greek faith, which had planted itself in Egypt, was to profoundly | modify, and almost re-create Christianity. This happened as follows :— In Alexandria, in the year 318, a heated theological con- troversy arose between the Bishop Alexander and one of his - presbyters named Arius, whom he charged, in a public gathering of his clergy, with holding false doctrines concern- ing Christ. Arius retorted by accusing the bishop of Sabel- lianism, and defending his own views as more logical and orthodox. The excitement arising from this dispute became so intense, and the rebellious priest found so many supporters in Egypt, Libya and Palestine, that in 321 Alexander sum- moned a Synod of Egyptian and Libyan bishops, by whom Arius was formally deposed and excommunicated Says Alexander, in writing to the Bishop of Constantinople: “Arius and Achillas have formed a conspiracy ; they deny the divinity of Christ, and declare him on a level with other men, asserting that we also are able to become like him, the mon of Goody’? “And again, in a -eirculamlerreet to the churches, Alexander says, “In our diocese, certain lawless and anti-christian men have arisen teaching apostacy ; fore- runners of anti-Christ.” This is the execrable character of their heresy, &e., &e. 1 Smith’s Dict. of Biography and Mythology, Art. Arius. 2'Theo- doret’s Eccl. History, p. 17. 8 Socrates’ Eccl. History, p. 8. : 45 After this somewhat formidable introduction of the great heretic, we are somewhat surprised, on turning to Arius him- self, to find how innocent both the man and his doctrines seem. Arius, if we may judge from this distance, was not even an agitator; and, so far from wishing to change the belief of the Christian church, he was employed, as he thought, in guarding the Church from the entrance of error. He was a parish priest of ascetic habits and intellectual tastes, who, amid the conflicting and unsettled theological opinions of the day, had adopted those doctrines which seemed to him the most faithful interpretation of Scripture truth, and which, of course, in the absence of any authorita- tive dogmas, had the same title to respect as those of his opponents. So little did he consider himself broaching any new or revolutionary theory that, on the contrary, he charged his bishop, as we have seen, with sharing the errors of Sabel- -lius, and addressed a sympathizing bishop to whom he wrote an account of his troubles, as “most faithful and orthodox Eusebius.” In the same letter, too, he said of certain oppo- nents with conscious or unconscious humor: ‘“ These have embraced heretical opinions. One says the Son is an effu- sion, another that he is an emission, the other that he is unbegotten. These are impieties to which we could not lis- ten though the heretics should threaten us with a thousand deaths.”? Nor to our modern thought would there seem to be anything very dangerous in his doctrines themselves, so far as we can judge them, from the fragmentary remains of his writings which the Church has chosen to preserve. 1Theodoret, p. 27. 46 Like many of his predecessors, whom the Church has judged less harshly, Arius saw the great danger of making Ohrist so absolutely equal with God that there would be two gods; a tendency against which he strug- gled as persistently as had either Tertullian, or Irensus, or Origen before him. His exact feeling in this matter shows itself, and the religious tendency which he was opposing, appears in such passages as these: “We must either suppose two divine original essences, without begin- ning and independent of each other, a Dyarchy, or we must not shrink from asserting that the Logos had a beginning of his existence ; that there was a moment when he did not, as yet exist.”1 “ We are persecuted,” he says in his letter to Eusebius, “ because we say that the Son had a beginning, but that God was without beginning; and that the Son was created out of nothing.”? “ We say and believe that the Son is not unbegotten, but that he has subsisted before all time, and before ages as perfect God, only-begotten and unchangeable, and that he existed not before he was begot- ten.”®? “The bishop has driven us out of the city as Atheists, because we do not concur in what he preaches, viz: that the Son is unbegotten as the Father; that he is always being begotten, without having been begotten.” To put the Arian heresy, with the process of reasoning which led to it, into the fewest words, it seems to have been this: God is unbegotten. He is God because he is unbegot- ten: Whoever is born out of another shares all his quali- ties. If Christ then were born (begotten) of God in literal sense, he would share, among other divine qualities, the 1Neander m: 361. 2Theod. p. 30. *Do. *Do. ‘ye 4 * ie TeSys) 47 quality of unbegottenness ; would be himself unbegotten. Then we should have two Unbegottens; two Absolutes ; which is impossible. Consequently Christ was not begotten, but was created ; created before all time indeed, yet not ‘before eternity; created not out of the Father’s being, but out of the only other thing possible ; out of nothing.” So subtle and purely abstract were the doctrines which convulsed Christendom when doctrines were form- ing, fifteen hundred years ago. So easily could one still speak of Christ as God ‘without being supposed to mean the Absolute God. Nothing would seem more unlikely to divide the christian church than this meta- physical dispute whether the Logos was “ created” or was “eternally born.” What might have resulted from the controversy under ordinary circumstances, we cannot tell. Possibly it would have died of itself within that gen- eration, like the hundred equally important disputes which had preceded it, and would have been remembered in history | simply as the quarrel of two angry priests, but for an entirely new element that entered, just at this juncture, into theological polemics. This was the political element; or, | more exactly, the imperial. For the first time in the history | of Christianity, there was a Christian emperor ; and as it happened, an emperor as ambitious to distinguish himself in the religious as he was in the civil affairs of his realm. Constantine, who succeeded to the western throne in 306, and became sole emperor in 323, on coming to Constantino- ple to make his capital there, and give the city its name, found the Eastern church already divided by the Arian 1Comp. Baur, 1: 344. 48 strife, and the Christian religion, which he had lately adopted with so much pomp, the subject of popular ridicule in the theatres.1 Taking the matter in hand at once, as an affair which it needed but a word from an emperor to settle, he wrote to the two combatants an imperial letter, telling them that the matter in dispute was “of small or scarcely least import- ance ;” that “there was no unvarying standard of judgment in us,” that the Scripture passages in question were ‘“inexph- cable” at best, and that there was nothing “to prevent their communion with each other.”? Wise words, which would have spoken well for his judgment and insight had he not so soon forgotten them. As the quarrel continued to rage in spite of his appeal, the emperor determined to summon together all the bishops of the church to determine the theological questions involved. Hence, in 825, the Council of Nice, not the first Christian council, as local gatherings had already been held in differ- ent dioceses, but the first universal or Cicumenical Council ; as indeed, it was the first moment in the history of the church when any authority had existed competent to con- vene a general council. The church, for the first time, had a head ; and for the first time since Paul and Barnabas were summoned from Antioch to J erusalem, it met to determine its theological beliefs. Indeed, Constantine seems to have been, in very fact, the head of the Nicene Council; was quite conscious of the dignity of his position, and conducted affairs in imperial style throughout. He summoned the bishops, he appointed 1Socrat. p. 11. 2Soc. p. 15. ° , 5 a ee ee ae eee ee Pe eee ey ee ee eee ee eg, ee ne on ee oe ee 49 the place, he assigned a hall in his own palace for their gath- ering, he entertained them during their whole stay, he seated the more conspicuous prelates at his own table, he entered the council-chamber in the full splendor of purple robe and imperial diadem, dazzling the unaccustomed eyes of provin- cial bishops,’ he took constant and active part in the pro- ceedings, he argued the profoundest theological points with the most learned bishops, so explaining away the difficulties of the Nicene creed, as Eusebius of Cesarea himself assures us, that he for one was willing to sign it,’ he produced in the end, a degree of unanimity among the three hundred mem- bers of the council, which it is safe to say never existed among an equal number of excited theologians before or since. Indeed, not even after the council had ended, could the emperor quench his new-born theologic zeal, or surrender the novel delight of debating such lofty themes. No sooner had the bishops scattered to their homes than a series of imperial letters followed them. He wrote to the Bishop of Alexandria, denouncing as “blasphemies against the Savior” the identical doctrines which before the council he had declared “ of small or scarcely least importance;” he wrote a second letter, odering Arius’s books to be burned, and those who read them to be put to death; he wrote a third letter fixing the doctrine concerning Easter; he wrote a fourth letter concerning church-buildings which he feared would fall into neglect ; he wrote a fifth letter expressing his anxiety about Christ’s sepulchre ; he wrote, as Socrates tells us, “other letters of a more oratorical character against Arius, exposing him and his doctrines to ridicule.”? 1Stanley’s East. Church, p. 213. 2p.219. ®Theod.p.45. *Soc. p. 30. *Soc. pp. 30-38. 50 To return to the council itself; the descriptions show it to have been a singular gathering, including all possible shades of culture, training and belief. Some features were evi- dently peculiar to the times, some remind us at once of the theological gatherings of to-day. Here is a description which ~ has a singularly familiar sound. “A man was there of unsophisticated understanding, who reproved the disputants, saying, ‘Christ did not teach us the dialectic art, nor vain subtleties, but simplemindedness.’”* One Ascesius there was also, a Novatian, as tenacious of the doctrines of his sect as any Puritan of the eighteenth century, to whom Con- stantine, after trying in vain to soften his rigor, finally said, “Ho, ho! Ascesius; plant a ladder and climb up into heaven by yourself ;”? an incident which gives Gibbon a chance to remark, “Most of the Christian sects have, by | turns, borrowed the ladder of Ascesius.”? Nor would the description of the council be complete without the mention of Athanasius, the young deacon of the Alexandrian church, who, notwithstanding his subordinate position, was yet from the first the recognized leader of the anti-Arian movement. He had already been the prominent opponent of Arius at Alexandria; and took now a prominent part in framing the creed, while his great theological ability, together with his unyielding hostility to Arianism when afterwards Bishop of Alexandria, has associated his name with the whole controversy as closely as that of Arius him- — self. Of the discussions of the council, and the arguments by which the result was reached, no account remains ; notwith- @ *S0e, p. 18. 4 Stanley, p. 270. Dec. and Fall, 11: 3 note: 51 ; standing the fact that one of the prominent actors in the debate, Eusebius of Caesarea, was the author of an ecclesias- tical history, which he must have finished after these events, but which he brings to a close the very year before the coun- cil was held. Apparenfly there was not much in the debates which an ecclesiastical historian cared to record. The char- acter of the theological debates is indicated in a measure by these passages from Theodoret, who wrote his history before the close of the same century : “ Arius and his friends drew up a creed which was torn in pieces.”? “The formulary of Eusebius was brought forth, which contained undisguised evidences of his blasphemy. he impious writing was torn up.”” The only question with these theologians seemed to be, which creed should remain untorn. This creed of Eusebius, as we learn from his own account, was an inoffensive document, drawn up almost entirely in Scripture phraseology, and brought forward as a compromise measure; asserting positively the divinity of Christ, yet avoiding such expressions as were needlessly offensive to the Arians’ At first, owing to the high honor in which Euse- bius was held, as well as the warm support of the emperor, it seemed likely to succeed. No one objected to it; but unfortunately it was so eagerly accepted by the Arians that their opponents grew suspicious, and concluded, as we have seen, that the document was “impious.” At last a creed was framed that was not torn. It origi- nated in this singular Tay. During the debate over the 1Dec. and Fall, ur: p. 32. 2p. 33. %Nean. m: 373. 52 formulary of Eusebius, a letter from one of the foremost Arians had been produced, containing this expression; ‘ To say that the Son is of one substance with the Father is evidently absurd.”? The letter of course was torn in pieces on the spot; but the objectionable phrase was remembered. ‘“‘ Any expression,” argued the opponents of Arius, “ which is especially offensive to the Arians, is on that very account the word to be embodied in our creed. If to them the phrase ‘of one substance’ is hateful, it is the very phrase we want. It will be sure to expel them from the church.” Such, at least, was the principle upon which the majority “immediately acted. The phrase in question did not cover the actual point of the controversy, or solve the questions so long at issue; it had not been thought of in advance; it expressed the full belief of no single party of the Council ; it was not even a Scripture phrase, nor had it the sanction of any of the Fathers of the Church, but on the contrary, had been pronounced heretical within half a century; but: it was one of the few doctrines on which the majority could unite, it was a term in which both the Sabellian and the tritheistic party could put what meaning they chose, and above all, it had been condemned by the Arians in advance, and therefore it was accepted.2 The term “of one sub- stance” (homoousios) was incorporated into the Nicene creed and became its one characteristic symbol. This being accomplished, the important work of the coun- cil was ended. The emperor’s assent was easily obtained the opponents of Arius, of course, gave their signatures readily, while of the friends of Arius, only five refused 1 Stanley, p. 228. *Gibbon, mr: 21; Stanley, p. 228. ays) their names, and of these five, three were finally persuaded to sign. The discreditable fact speaks for itself, and warns us, if we would search for moral courage and fidelity to con- -vietion, not to go back to the Christian bishops of the fourth century. When out of more than three hundred theologians representing all shades and antagonisms of religious belief, all bnt two give their signatures to a creed which when first proposed was met by a storm of angry dissent, we hardly need the explanation given in the naive confession of Euse- bius: “The Emperor succeeded in bringing them into simi- larity of judgment and conformity of opinion on all contro- ery shy, eee verted points.”? The Nicene Oreed, as adopted by the Council, is as fol- — lows :— ‘‘We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things both visible and invisible: And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the _ Father, only-begotten that is to say, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, both things in heaven and things in earth — who for us men and for our salvation, came down and was made flesh, and was made man, suffered, and rose again on the third day; went up into the heavens, and is come again to judge the quick and dead. And in the Holy Ghost. — But those that say, ‘there was when He was not,’ and ‘before He was begotten He was not,’ and that ‘He came into existence from what _ was not,’ or who profess that the Son of God is of a different person or : substance, or that he is created or changeable, or variable, are MN Be _ matized by the Catholic Church.”? It is idle, of course, to look to this creed for any ultimate _ word concerning the nature of Christ. It was not the last -ereed of Christendom, it was the first of many; a creed which started more questions than it answered; a creed 1Soc. p. 20. 2? Stanley, p. 233, r a4 which did not even answer the one question submitted to it. How purely accidental was the form which the Nicene con- fession finally took could hardly be better shown than by this single fact. The word homoousios, which constitutes the distinctive feature of this creed, is the very term which half a century before,! at a synod held at Antioch to deal with Panl of Samosata, a heretic of another stamp, was formally condemned as unorthodox.? If we wait thirty years longer,? we shall find the same word rejected by another council, on the following singularly rational grounds: “The term homoousios shall not be used, because it is not found in the Holy Scripture, and because it transcends human knowledge, as none but the Father can know how the Son was begotten.” Indeed, so far from effecting conformity or harmony in the Christian Church, the adoption of the Nicene creed was the occasion of more bitter and long-continued strife than Christendom had ever known. The humorous side of the theological condition which followed is well shown in this oft-quoted passage from Gregory of Nyssa, describing what he saw in Constantinople. ‘“ Every corner and nook of the city is full of men who discuss incomprehensible subjects ; the streets, the markets, the people who sell old clothes, those who sit at the tables of the money-changers, those who deal in provisions. Ask a man how many oboli it comes to, he gives you a dogmatic discourse on generated and unre- generated being. Inquire the price of bread, you are — answered, ‘The Father is greater than the Son, and the Son | subordinate to the Father.’ Ask if your bath is ready, you j +A. D. 269. > Baur 1: 337; Gibbon ur: 21. 2A, D. 357. 4 Baur rm: 86. 55 are answered, ‘The Son of God was ereated from noth- ino”! But the matter had a far more serious side. The con- demned doctrines showed themselves too strong to be sup- pressed by a single council, and the events of the following half-century were a constant satire upon the assertion of Athanasius, “The Word of the Lord which was given in the Cicumenical Council of Nicea remaineth forever.” That the doctrines of that council represented on the whole, the dominant sentiment of the Christian. Church, it would be foolish to deny ; for Arianism in the end succumbed, and the Nicene confession survived. But the triumph of that confession at Wice had slight significance, and was by no means accepted at the time as final. It was an imperial rather than a religious victory 5 and the same imperial influence gave to Arianism afterwards a long period of triumph. The decree of the Second Council of Sirmium in 357, from which I have already quoted,> shows the extent to which this reaction went. ‘Let every one,” says that decree, “ hold this as Catholic doctrine, that Father and Son are two persons, and that the Son is subordinate to the Father.” The fifty years immediately following the Council of Nice are dotted with synods; Arian to-day, Athanasian to-morrow ; each claiming final authority, each repudiating or modifying the work of its predecessor. The historian Socrates, enumerates eight of these, with eight distinct creeds, between the years 325 and 329. The victory was not certain, as we shall see, till the time of Theodosius. Athanasius triumphed in the end; nor would I be INean. 11: 388n. %Stanley, p. 242. *p. 20. 4 Baur uw: 86. Ine 16) supposed to represent his triumph as a misfortune to the Church. As between the two men themselves, there is lit- tle for us in these days, as we have seen, to choose. Both speak a theological language foreign to our ears, both deal in subtleties whose importance and interest have long ago been lost. So far as concerns the word itself, however, which divided them, and the deeper import which that word may be made to bear, the world has little reason to regret the triumph of Athanasius. If Arius was right, then is not only the Son, but all humanity as well, essen- tially distinct from the Father. The universe is two-fold, not a unit. The human and the divine have no real unity. If Athanasius was right, then not only the Son, but all humanity as well, is of one essence and spirit with the Father. Then the universe is one throughout, with God as its centre and its whole; and the vision of an absolute and all-embracing unity, embracing God and man, heaven and earth, time and eternity, which have haunted thoughtful minds in every age, are no phantoms, but a fine reality.! One point more and the exact significance of this first Christian Creed will be understood. You have already noticed, probably, that the Nicene Creed contains no men- | tion of a trinity. If you have inferred that because the Holy Spirit was mentioned at the close, therefore a trinity was virtually there, and was intended to be under- stood though not mentioned, a few words will be necessary to put the matter in its true light. The Trinity is not in the Nicene Creed, either in name or reality. It is no more in the Nicene Creed than in the Arian Creed. 1 Compare Baur un: 97, &e. o7 You will remember that in my last lecture, while quoting from Tertullian and Origen, writers of the second and third centuries, passages which alluded to a trinity, I spoke of these allusions as so incidental in their character as to prove that the doctrine, far from being universally accepted, was new and unfamiliar. Even with these Fathers, it was less a doctrine than a passing idea. Of the “Sacred Trinity,” the “Most Holy Trinity,” or of any Trinity which would require a capital letter in writing it, | remember no mention ; still less of any tri-personality. And now, as it to prove that the thought was transient and unformed, three-quarters of a century after the death of Origen, a universal council of the Christian Church met to establish the creed of Christendom, and no mention of a trinity was made. Neither in the discussions of the council, nor in the fierce controversies which sprung from it, did either party seem to have the subject of a trinity on their minds. Exactly what the Nicene Creed did was this: It pro- nounced the Father and Son of one substance, or co-equal ; of the Holy Ghost it simply said, “ We believe in the Holy Ghost.” That this was no accidental omission, but that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was at this time really unde- termined, the writings of the period clearly show. At the Synod of Antioch, in 341, a letter of the Bishops constitut- ing the synod speaks of Christ in these terms: ‘The Son, God the only-begotten, God of God, Whole of Whole, Only of Only, Perfect of Perfect, King of King, Lord of Lord, Living Word, Wisdom, Life, True Light, Way of Truth, Resurrection, Shepherd, Gate, Unalterable image of the Divine substance, Power, Counsel, Glory of the Father ;” while the Holy Spirit is dismissed with a single word. 08 Gregory of Nazianzen, writing about 380, says: “ Some of our theologians consider the Holy Spirit to be a certain mode of the Divine agency, others a creature of God, others God himself. Others say they do not know which of the two opinions they ought to adopt, out of reverence for the Holy Scriptures, which have not clearly explained this point.” Hilary of Poictiers, who spent his life in the midst of the Arian controversy, as one of the supporters of Athanasius, “held it best to remain fast by simple Scrip- ture doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit, which as it seemed to him, furnished no materials for exact logical definition of this doctrine. | Nothing in all history is more obvious than the gradual evolution of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity. As the Christian world was exactly three hundred and twenty- five years in determining that the Father and Son are co-equal and co-substantial, so it was precisely fifty-five years longer in determining that the Holy Spirit is a third factor equal to both the others. In the edict of the Emperor Theodosius, issued on his own authority, in 380, confirmed by the general council of Constantinople in 381, are for the first time these words: “ According to the discipline of the Apostles, and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe the Sole Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, under.an equal majesty and a pious Trinity. We authorize the followers of this doctrine to assume the title of Catholic Christians, and as we judge that all others are extravagant madmen, we brand them with the impious name of Heretics.” ‘Chris. Examiner, March, 1860, p. 249. 2 Chris. Ex. p. 250. o9 Finally, in what was long considered, and what is still called, the Creed of Athanasius, written however, by some unknown hand a full century after Athanasius’s death,* the Trinity received its complete doctrinal statement, and was given in such fulness of detail as to leave no possibility of further misunderstanding. ‘The Catholic faith is, that we adore One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. = * ‘ The Father is one person, the Son is one person, the Holy Ghost is one person, yet the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God. = ° ig The Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, the Holy Ghost is uncreated; the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God; yet are there not three gods but One God. ok as : * * Which faith, except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” It is to be remembered, however, that this creed had no connection either with Athanasius or with Nice, but came more than a century later. Before that century was past, or the definitions of the Athanasian creed were possible, a preliminary question arose, which brought fresh strife into the Church, and could only be answered by a new series of Councils. _ 1Stanley, p. 347. DEOL URE IV. FEBRUARY 1, 1874. THE NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY. Ar the beginning of the fifth century, the doctrine of the Christian Church, so far at least as the nature of its founder was concerned, was to all appearance finally determined. At one General Council in 325, the Son had been pronounced co-equal, even in substance, with the Father; at the Second General Council in 381, the Holy Spirit had been pronounced co-equal with Father and Son; and thus the idea of a Trinity, vaguely present in the second century to the minds of a Tertullian and an Origen, had taken at last complete dogmatic form. What further controversy was possible? “None,” would have been the answer, no doubt, of the actors in each council. In deter- mining the special doctrine which pressed for instant solu- tion, and condemning the special heresy which threatened the unity of the hour, they seemed to themselves, unques- tionably, to be uttering the final decision of the Church. How Athanasius himself regarded the decree of Nice appears from the words which I quoted in my last lecture ; “The Word of the Lord which was given in the Gcumeni- | eal Council of Nicsea remaineth forever.” As a matter of 9 62 fact, however, each of those early doctrinal decisions simply brought new differences to light, and rendered further and more exact decisions necessary. To put New Testament religion into doctrinal form proved no easy task. The First Council necessitated the Second; the Second, as we shall see, called for a Third and a Fourth. The question left unanswered by the first two councils is plain at once. The Son is equal to the Father, said the Synod of Nice; not subordinate, as Origen and the early Fathers, following John and Panl, had said; not of another substance, as Arius claimed, but in all respects God. But what becomes then of the Auman nature of Christ ? He seemed in all respects like a man. He had a human body and mind, human mother, brothers and sisters, was born, lived and died, grew out of infancy and childhood into manhood, increased in wisdom, and was subject to emotion, affection and suffering. Was all this, as the earlier heretics had declared, only apparent, not real? Or if real, how is this humanity in Christ connected with his Deity? In a word, while the dogma of the two councils had determined, however incomprehensibly, the relation of Christ to God, it had left undetermined the relation of the two natures in Christ himself. In making the Son and Father one, it seemed to be making the Son two. Such was the question still to be answered; and such the source of /the fierce disputes which divided the church during the first half of the fitth century. Extending, vir- tually, from the Council of Constantinople in 881, to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and bearing at different periods of its progress, the several names of Nestorian, Eutychian, and Monophysite, it was in reality, one long 63 contest to determine the relation between the divine and human natures in Christ. To use the later phraseology of the church, the doctrine of -the Trinity must be supple- mented by the doctrine of the Incarnation; and the con- struction of this latter doctrine was the problem of the fifth eentury. If the problem seems to us now to have been solved by peculiar methods, and the strife settled by ques- tionable weapons, if the cries of infuriated monks, the yells of hostile parties, or the arms of Imperial soldiery, seem hardly the arguments for determining the subtler relations, or the profounder mysteries of the Divine Being, we can only accept this as a necessary condition of formulating religious doctrines in a half-barbarous age. The controversy began in Constantinople about the year 428, taking at first what seems to us a singularly trivial form. When the exact definition of eternal mysteries is once entered upon, however, the most puerile questions must be answered. If Christ was God, said those who were jealous of his Deity, then it was God who was born in Beth- lehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary. Then Mary was not simply the mother of Jesus, she was in literal fact the “Mother of God.” Whether this phrase, when first spoken, had the same grossly anthropomorphic sound which it bears to our ears, we cannot tell. Apparently, it was employed for a long time without exciting any attention; and certainly, at the begin- ning of the fifth century the phrase was in familiar use, __ being especially in vogue in the Alexandrian Church, where the Athanasian spirit still prevailed, and where for a long time the allegorizing and transcendental school of Christian thought found its home. In Antioch, on the contrary, 64 the old abode of Arianism, where a more critical and rationalistic spirit seems to have gained entrance, and a scientific method of Scripture. interpretation to have won the day against the allegorical, the phrase .gave great offence, and was regarded as a virtual denial of Christ’s humanity.’ A verbal controversy over this question had already begun among the Eastern churches, when in 428, Nestorius, a presbyter of Antioch, in full sympathy with the tenden- cies of that school, was made Patriarch ot Constantinople. Almost immediately after his entrance upon the office, one of his presbyters, alarmed at the spreading heresy, and assured beforehand, perhaps, of his Patriarch’s sympathy, took occasion to say in public discourse, “ Let no one style Mary ‘Mother of God;’ for Mary was human, and it is impossible for God to be born of a human being.”? The excitement caused by this seems to have been intense, and the part taken in it by the new Patriarch is best shown by the language of one of the two earliest historians of these events, Evagrius2 “Then Nestorius, that God-assaulting tongue, that second conclave of Caiaphas, that work-shop of blasphemy, in whose case Christ is again made the sub- ject of bargain and sale, by having his natures divided and torn asunder, x - * * * * * * vomited forth the venom of his soul, avouching ‘I could never be induced to call that God which admitted of being two months old or three months old.’ ”* Reducing this excited rhetoric to simple fact, Nestorius —_—— — 1 Bauer, 1: 108; Neander’s Hist. of Chris. Dogmas, 1: 325. ?Eva- | | grius’s Eccles. Hist. p. 258. % Writing about 570. *Evag. Bohn’s Edit. pp. 257, 258. 65 seems to have met the emergency with singular moderation and dignity, expounding in several discourses,’ the true nature of Christ, by no means denying his divinity, but dis- tincuishing between the Logos and the man Jesus,’ and declaring, in terms hardly distinguishable from those in which the Orthodox doctrine was itself finally framed, that in Christ were two natures, both Deity and Humanity, united together in closest intimacy. As the best escape from the difficulty, he proposed that Mary should be called neither Mother of God, nor Mother of man, but “ Mother of Christ.’”® To quiet the agitation and close the controversy, the Emperor Theodosius followed the example of the first Theodosius, and of Constantine, by summoning a general council, which met at Ephesus in 431, and was styled the Third GEcumenical Council. The council was not directed, as before, by the Emperor in person ; yet, although left entirely to the Ecclesiastics, it bore hardly more the char- acter of a thoughtful assembly, deliberating upon religious themes, than did that at Constantinople or at Nice. The opponent of Nestorius, and leader of the opposite party, was the notorious Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, that zealous defender of a spiritual Christianity whom the church has placed among its saints, but who before the council of Ephesus, had chiefly signalized himself by levelling all the Jewish synagogues in Alexandria with the ground, and by causing the beautiful Pagan maiden, and gifted teacher of Greek philosophy, Hypatia, to be torn from her chariot and brutally murdered in the streets of Alexandria. To 1Nean. Hist. 1: 447. 2 Socrates, p. 371. ° Nean. Hist. 1m: 452. 66 Cyril’s thought, it was equal blasphemy to deny that Mary was “ Mother of God,” and to teach the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle; and he hastened to Ephesus, with a large following of mariners, slaves, and fanatic monks, to overthrow the Nestorian heresy.1. How far he was infln- enced in his action by the desire to remove a rival who, as Patriarch of Constantinople, disputed with him the primacy of the East, we can only conjecture. Of the debates in the Council of Ephesus, as in the case of previous councils, we are told little or nothing. The real question at issue, as we have seen, was between making the Logos and the man Jesus two distinct persons, and making the two so completely one that the humanity became a mere name. The course of theological debate on this theme seems to have been the following: John of Antioch with his attendant bishops, being somewhat belated _ in his journey, Cyril, who was already on the ground, refused to wait for him, called together those who were present and deposed Nestorius, condemning his doctrine. Nestorius, denying Cyril’s authority, withdrew with his friends and deposed Cyril. John of Antioch on arriving five days later, convened his priests at once and finally deposed Cyril once more; whereupon Cyril summoned his bishops again and deposed John: These results were then reported to the Emperor, who, although no enemy to Nesto- rius or his doctrine, was yet persuaded to ratify his deposi- tion, and bring about a reconciliation between John and Cyril. Nestorius, although showing a conciliatory spirit to the end, and even offering to accept the disputed term,” yet 1 Gibbon, vi: 21. 2 Evag. p. 261; Soc. vir: p. 373. “a 67 proved unequal to the combinations made against him in Alexandria, Rome and Antioch, was finally banished and ‘died in exile. The Council of Ephesus thus put the stamp of heresy on the doctrine of two distinct natures in Christ, and sanctioned the phrase “ Mother of God.” The next disturbance of the unity of the church was caused about fifteen years later, by one Eutyches, an arclii- mandrite or abbot of Constantinople. Taking the Council of Ephesus apparently at its word, and so holding Mary to be the Mother of God, he seems to have come to the very natural conclusion, in which he had many earlier theolo- gians of high repute to sustain him, that if it was God who was born of the Virgin, it could not have been man; that from the moment when the Logos entered into the flesh, the human became absorbed in the divine, and had thenceforth no real existence. ‘I allow,” said Eutyches, “that the Lord was produced from two natures before their union, but I confess only one nature after their union.”? Christ then was of one nature only, and that a divine nature. Christ was really and exclusively God.’ | But church doctrines and decrees of councils are not to be taken so literally, or interpreted by such obstinate logic. Although for the purpose of condemning Nestorius, per it might be very well to declare that God himself was born of the Virgin, yet what was to be done with cer- tain embarrassing conclusions — to which that doctrine pointed? If it was God who was born, then it was cer- tainly God who suffered, and God also who died upon the cross. Was the church ready for this confession 4 _ 1Eyagrius, 267. *Baur, mu: 113, 114. 68 Not wholly, it seemed. Indeed, the agitation caused in Constantinople in 448, when Eutyches declared that there was only one nature in Christ, could only be compared with the agitation in Constantinople in 428, when Nestorius declared that there were two natures in Christ. There were not two, it seems; neither was there but one. To common minds the position would seem to be critical; and the religion which consists in verbal definitions to be driven at last to the wall. But to an Imperial church, sustained by the strong arm of military power, everything is possible; and although it required two more councils to do it, the impossible was finally achieved. The position taken by Eutyches, as I have said, caused great excitement in Constantinople, and induced the Patri- arch: Flavian to summon a local synod by which Eutyches was condemned, and the doctrine of one nature declared heresy. Eutyches, however, who happened to have friends at the Imperial court, appealed from this decree to a general council, and another council was therefore sum- moned to meet once more in Ephesus, in 449. The picture of this council, known to history by the significant name of the “ Robber Council,” is so vividly sketched by one of the earlier historians (Evagrius), and is so significant, even in its excesses, of the character of those theological controver- sies out of which church doctrine has been born, that I am led to describe it in as much detail as my space will allow. The leader of the council was the successor of Cyril, the hardly less ferocious Dioscurus of Alexandria. Sympathiz- ing naturally with the views of Eutyches, and holding very justly, that in his condemnation Cyril was himself con- demned, Dioscurus went to Ephesus bent simply upon rein- 69 stating Eutyches at whatever cost, and by whatever methods. He was not unattended; but, like Cyril before _ hin, took with him what Evagrius calls a “ disorderly rab- | ple,”! consisting of Asiatic veterans, a band of archers, and a crowd of turbulent monks, who carried consternation to the hearts of the peaceful inhabitants of Ephesus, and did brave service for their leader throughout the debates.’ The order of proceedings seems to have been: first, to | expel from the chamber all reporters not belonging to the party of Dioscurus ;* then to read the acts of the Synod of Constantinople by which Eutyches had been condemned. _ This reading was constantly interrupted by the howls of - Dioscurus’s Egyptian monks, who took this method of show- ing their horror of heresy, and their zeal for a pure Chris- tianity. Basil, Bishop of Seleucia, being reported as saying “TJ worship the one Lord Jesus Christ * * ‘ in two natures,” the monks shouted ‘Nestorian! Tear him asunder! Burn him alive! Ashe divided so let him be divided!” the most fearful pun, I suppose, on record. When the reading was finished, and condemnation pro- nounced upon the former Synod, these shouts were ‘yedoubled. ‘“ Anathema to him that parts ! Anathema to him that divides! Drive out, burn, tear, cut asunder, mas- sacre all who hold two natures! »4 The noisy monks were not restrained by the presiding officer; on the contrary, those who could not “roar” loud enough to add to the clamor, were besought by Dioscurus himself to “stretch out their hands” in token of assent and encouragement. 1Bvag. p. 290. 2%Gibbon, vi : 26, 28. 3 Robertson’s Hist. of Ch. Church, 1: p. 481. *Evag. p. 320; Robertson I: 481; Gibbon VI: 28. 10 70 Nor were these the only means employed by the politic | Dioscurus to accomplish the restoration of Eutyches. A letter to the council in condemnation of Eutyches, from Leo, Bishop of Rome, instead of being publicly read, was quietly suppressed. Forged passages were introduced into — the acts as finally passed; a fact which was elicited at the next council by an examination of the actors in this, and of — which Stephen, Bishop of Ephesus, gives the following interesting explanation. ‘The notaries of Dioscurus seized the fingers of my notaries, so that they were in danger of most grievous treatment.”? Finally, when the final vote. was to be taken, and the prelates embraced the knees of — Dioscurus, entreating him to spare them the necessity of deposing their Patriarch for condemning Eutyches, Dios- curus exclaimed, ‘ Do you mean to raise a sedition? Where are the officers?” Instantly a furious multitude of monks and soldiers with swords, clubs and chains, burst into the church, driving the terrified bishops into the corners, and under the tables and seats, from which they were not suf-— fered to emerge until they had promised to sign a blank paper, which was afterwards filled out with the deposition of . Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople. The unhappy Fla-— vian, who was present, suffered indignities greater than deposition. According to the testimony of two different — historians, he was so beaten, kicked and stamped upon by | the Patriarch of Alexandria that he died of his injuries. Whoever inflicted the wounds, it is quite certain that within | three days he was dead. Thus ended the second council of Ephesus, by which the __—.. 1Evag. p. 319. 2 Gibbon, vr: 29; Robertson. 71 decrees of the Synod of Constantinople were reversed, and the doctrine of Eutyches, which for a year had been heresy, was pronounced Orthodox. According to the Orthodoxy of 449, Christ had not two natures, he had but one. I take pleasure in closing the narrative with the words of Evag- rius: “Here let not any of the deluded worshippers of idols presume to sneer, as if it were the business of suc- coeding councils to depose their predecessors, and to be ever devising some additions to our faith.”+ This protest becomes even more opportune, two years later, after the Council of Chalcedon. Entire acquiescence in an edict thus procured was hardly to be looked for even in an age accustomed to such methods of religious disputes; still less as immediately after the council, a change in the Imperial household brought about a change in the theological atmosphere of the East. In the year 450 Theodosius died, and Marcion became Emperor ; which means that the Alexandrian church passed out of favor, and Eutychian doctrines were consequently dis- credited at court. After two years of ill-gotten triumph, the Monophysite theory of Christ’s nature must cease to be the Orthodox faith of Christendom. In 451, the influence of Leo, Bishop of Rome, in whom the coming power of the Papacy was already foreshadowed, and whose letter to the previous council had been so arbi- trarily suppressed, caused the Fourth General Council to be summoned at Chalcedon, expressly to reverse the decrees of Ephesus, and end the weary and disgraceful strife over the nature of Christ. os 1 Evag. p. 270. 72 The proceedings of this council do not seem to have | differed essentially from those of its predecessors, and cer- tainly bore no closer resemblance to the acts of a delibera- tive assembly, even if it won no such unenviable name. Not only was it so constituted that its decisions were secure in advance,’ but many of the same furious and intimidating cries were heard which had struck terror to the hearts of the Nestorian prelates at Ephesus. The robbers seemed to be still in council. When the Nicene creed, which this council reafirmed with certain additions, was read, the bishops shouted “This is the faith of the Orthodox! thus we all believe! thus does Pope Leo believe! thus did Christ believe! thus has the Pope expounded.”? When the “Epistle of the divine Cyril” was read, the whole Synod exclaimed, “Thus do we all believe! Anathema to him that divides and to him that confounds! (the theology of these howls had advanced somewhat). This is the faith of Leo! Thus do we all believe! As Cyril believed so do we!”® “But few are exclaiming,” complained one of the prelates, “the Synod is not speaking.” Whereupon the Oriental bishops cried “Egyptians to exile!” Illyrians : “We entreat compassion on all.” Orientals: “ Egyptians to exile!” TIllyrians: “We entreat compassion.” Orien- tals: “ Dioscurus to exile! Egyptians to exile! The heretic to exile!” Tllyrians: “ We have all erred! Indulgence to all! Dioscurus to the Synod! Dioscurus to the churches Ee! Finally, when Dioscurus was deposed: “ Anathema to Dios- curus! Christ has deposed Dioscurus! Cast out such ‘Hase’s Hist. of Church. *Evag. p. 328. %Do. p. 380. 4Do. p: 332. 73 _ persons ! Away with the outrage! Away with the infamy from the Synod! ”* To depose and condemn Dioscurus was comparatively easy, for passion and ambition were strong ; but to prepare a new statement of faith which should meet the views of all ei SA a Dl OE OEE a I IR GER MR PI a AIM go" + a Ee i parties, and steer a clear course between opposing heresies, was not so easy, and seems to have been accomplished only after a hint from the Emperor that “unless the bishops framed a rule of faith they might be assured that the Synod would be held at the West.”? Finally, at the fifth or sixth meeting of the council, the new formula was announced, reaffirming the Edict of Nice, and adding, with a great deal beside, the following words: “Since some reject the term ‘ Mother of God,’ others mould into one the natures of the flesh and of the Godhead : ¢ 7 . we confess one and the same Son, at the same time perfect in ‘manhood, and perfect in Godhead, born of Mary, Mother of God, and made known in two natures without confusion, PPO LPO OE Page iam conversion, severance, separation ; the differences of nature by no means annulled by union, but the peculiar essence of ~ each preserved and conspiring in one person and one subsist- 3 aoe eee SS ee ence, not parted or severed into two. And now what exact doctrine do we find beneath this profusion of words / How did the Council of Chalcedon solve the apparently insoluble problem which, as we have seen, was given it? To say that Christ was of one nature, as you remember, would be Eutychian; to say that he was of two natures would be Nestorian. How did the council escape this Scylla and Charybdis of heresy 4 Se ee lEyag. p. 335. ? Do. p. 386. 3 Do. p. 300. SSS 74 By the simplest process possible. It accepted both state- ments and declared them one. Creating for the purpose a convenient distinction between nature and person: it declared that in Christ were ¢wo natures in one person. Christ is not a mixture of Deity and humanity, no more is he one to the exclusion of the other; he is at once perfect God and perfect man, as divine as Deity, as human as — humanity. Such, since the Council of Chalcedon, has been tue creed of Christian Orthodoxy. In other words, standing between these two heresies, the new creed stretched out loving arms and embraced them both. It escaped each extreme by rushing to the other; it reconciled two opposites by putting them hand in hand; it escaped a palpable inconsistency by calmly declaring that the inconsistency did not exist. The Creed of Chalcedon is _ as Nestorian as Nestorius, it is as Eutychian as Eutyches, it attirms the two natures as broadly as the one, it declares the . one nature (under the name of person), as plainly as the other, and with sublime effrontery, asserts that two doctrines, each of which excludes the other, and each of which in turn had been condemned as heresy, and both of which no human mind has ever succeeded in grasping at once, are both equally true. The lesson thus taught was well learned. The so-called Athanasian Oreed, of which I have already spoken, which was composed after this period, and perhaps grew out of this very controversy, and which stands to-day — as the most complete enunciation of the Trinitarian — J faith, consists of little else than a series of mutually-destruc- 7 tive propositions like the above, made one by solemnly pro- — nouncing them go. * By “ate repetition of positive and negative propositions,” Says an Orthodox historian of 75 doctrines, “its perpetual assertion and then again denial of _ its propositions, the mystery of the doctrine is presented as _ it were in hieroglyphics, as if to confound the understand- ing.”! “As is the Father, so is the Son, so also the Holy Ghost. The Father is not created; the Son is not created ; the Holy Ghost is not created. : - The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Ghost is eternal: yet there are not three Eternals; there is one Eternal. So there are not three Uncreated; there is one Uncreated. In like manner, the Father is almighty, the Son is almighty, the Holy Ghost is almighty ; yet there are not three Almighties, there is one Almighty. In like manner the Father is God, _ the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God; yet are there not three Gods, there is one God. In like manner the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost is Lord; yet are there not three Lords, there is one Lord. It is also the true faith that we confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God is God and man, Perfect God and Perfect man. _ Like the Father in his Deity, less than the Father in his humanity. And although God and man, yet is he not two, put one Christ. One, not by confusion of substance, but in aad A SO alee RT act Gin tee aie ig gp OE ip REET ha _ the unity of Person.”? How entirely arbitrary, and how foreign to New Testa- ment thought is the distinction here made between “ sub- stance ” and “ person,” or between “nature” and “ person,” is proved, not only by the fact that the distinction now for the first time appears, but also by the great difficulty experi- enced in finding words to express the distinction. The Greek word here used for “person” (hypostasis), means 1Hagenbach’s Hist. of Doctrines, 1: 269. *Creed of Athanasius. 76 originally the same as that used for substance (ousia). The true meaning of both is substance, essence, being. The cor- rect translation of Heb. 1: 8, the only passage in the New Testament where hypostasis is found in connection with Christ, is “image of his being.” As late as in the Nicene Creed the two words are placed side by side, as if exact equivalents, “those that say that the Son of God is of a dit- ferent being or substance, &c. &e.,” (hypostasis or onsia). Again, how slightly the word translated “ nature” (physis) originally differed from that translated “ person,” is sufti- ciently proved by the fact that while the Confession of Nice employs the former (physis) to express that which distin- guishes the one nature from the other, and the latter (hypos- tasis) to express that which both have in common, the Con- fession of Chalcedon exactly reverses this use of the two words. Between 325 and 451, the necessities of Christian theology, demanding certain distinctions which had never before been made, had determined that hypostasis should henceforth mean person; physis, nature; ousia, substance ; and that in this distinction of names the doctrine of the Trinity should rest. That the Council of Chalcedon did not end this contro- versy, or that its creed was no more accepted as a finality than were the many which had preceded it, I need hardly assure you. Indeed, the descriptive term Monophysite (“of | one nature”), first came into vogue at this time, to designate the large party in the church, which, following in the steps of Eutyches, still insisted that two natures made two per- sons, and that to call Christ one person was equivalent to 1 Hagenbach, 1: 279; also Stanley’s East. Church, pp. 231, 234. rj assigning him a single nature. I have space here only for names; yet the very titles of the various parties. which ‘sprang up in this same century have a certain significance, as showing through what giddy regions and between what impalpable distinctions, theology was then holding its unsteady course. Among the sects whose names have sur- vived, are the Theopaschites, who declared that ‘ God was crucified,” a doctrine which in 533 was admitted into an Or- thodox Oonfession,! the Aphthartodocetes and Phartolatres, the latter asserting, the former denying that Christ’s body was perishable ; the Actistetes and Ktistolatres, the former asserting, the latter denying that Christ’s body, after the entrance of the Holy Ghost, was uncreated; the Agnoetes who claimed that if Christ was really man like us, he could not have been omniscient.” - The Monophysite faith, as such, can be found to-day, I believe, only in the churches of the East; its followers being called, in Alexandria, Copts, in Armenia, Armenians, in Syria and Mesopotamia, Jacobites.2 Without its formi- dable name, however, it can easily be encountered in any Orthodox community in Christendom; this being the oo form of error, apparently, into which the new convert to Orthodoxy is most liable to fall before his natural reason has learned to thread the intricate path which in Orthodox regions leads between nature on the one hand, and person on the other.* Tam aware how uninviting and how bewildering must seem to many of you these controversies of an age fortu- nately long gone by; nor can I hope that I have made as ‘Baur, m: 118. ?Baur, m: 120. *Gieseler’s Church Hist. 1: 327. *Comp. Chris. Examiner, 1860, p. 265. igi 78 clear to you as I would like the beating which they have upon the faith of Christendom to- day. To show this as plainly as possible, however, let me present once more, in a few words, the ground over which I have just tried to lead you. The doctrine of the Trinity, as half-stated at Nice in 325, and completed at Constantinople in 381, left still undecided — the relation of the divine and human natures in Christ. Two views were possible, and were each in turn held and considered Orthodox; according to the one the divine and the human in Christ were wholly distinct, though intimately united: according to the other, the divine nature alone was real, while the humanity became absorbed and disappeared. To take the one ‘position seemed to make two beings instead of one; to take the other seemed to make the human Jesus a spectre or fiction. | | The church in its Creed of Chalcedon, quietly took both positions at once, as though no incongruity existed. It declared that in Christ were two natures in one person. — LECTURE V. FEBRUARY 16, 1874. THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY. Tuer nature of Christ and his relation to God were not Sat aoe the only questions which troubled the early Church. They ee -aakeTare were the first, as was natural; yet long before they were finally settled, others were pressing for an answer. Not one of the fundamental truths of religion was found to be decided for Christendom in advance. If the nature of God was left undetermined by the Christian Scriptures, no less so, as it proved, was the nature of man. The time came, of course, when the Christian mind descended from regions of _ abstract speculation, and began to consider the problems of actual life. Lite was full of temptation and evil... Human nature itself seemed sinful and perverted. How came it so? Whence did sin come and how was it to be overcome ¢ How far was man himself responsible for it, or capable of | resisting it? How did Christianity help him in overcoming ie | _ So far as the Christian Scriptures were concerned, these - questions stood on the same footing with that in regard to the nature of Christ. When interrogated, the Scriptures eink ae AR — a =e 80 gave an equivocal reply. They presented two distinct theories of human nature. In the Gospels, as you know, althongh no doctrine is laid down on this point more than on others, yet man is repre- sented in the simplest and most natural way, as a responsi- ble moral being, who is to “do the will of his Father in- _ heaven,” to love his neighbor and his enemy alike, to use whatever talents, whether five or ten, were given him, and to win the kingdom of heaven by righteousness. Had the Gospels alone constituted Christianity, this would have been the simple code of Christian morals. In the Epistles of — Paul, however, another theory appears. Unexpected exi- gencies had arisen, as we know, before Paul wrote, and his doctrine shaped itself according to the new necessities. If the Gentiles were to enter the kingdom of heaven on equal — terms with the Jews, and even before them; in other words, if Israel had been promised the Kingdom and the Messiah, as they certainly had, yet had not received them ; why was it? These questions were certainly asked, and Paul found no answer ready but that which he gives so explicitly in the Epistle to the Romans. “ They are not all Israel, which are of Israel.”1 Just as Jehovah, of his own arbitrary choice, had selected one rather than another from the seed of Abraham, saying: “Jacob have I loved, Esau — have I hated,”? so he had again chosen the Gentiles before the Jews. But was this not unjust? No! there is no ~ injustice with God. His will is his law, which no one must — question.” Had he not said to Moses, “TI will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on — Rom. rx: 6. 21x: 13; Mal. r: 2.3. 21x90; 81 1 Nay, had he not hard- whom I will have compassion.” ened Pharaoh’s heart, for the very purpose of showing his own power and glory’? Not only therefore hath he mercy on whom he will, but “whom he will he hardeneth.”® Man’s merit does not come into the question. “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.”* The rejection of the Jew and accept- ance of the Gentile are part of the eternal plan of God. “Bor whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate ; whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified.”® To be sure, there is a “yemnant” of the Jews still to be saved; but, even this is not through their desert, but only because by God’s grace they were elected to be saved. “Even so at the present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then is it no more of works.”® It is God’s grace alone that saves one and condemns another. And God’s grace is won, not by the works of the law, but by faith in Christ. Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness ;” so we, “ being justified by faith, have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”’ Indeed, in Christ the curse of sin and death which came upon the race in Adam, was finally removed. “ As by one ma& sin entered into the world, and death by Sin 5 s 3 . - even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.’ How far Paul would have modified this rigid theory had he undertaken to discuss the general problem of evil, 1Mal. xx: 15; Ex. xxxm: 19. 21x: 17; Ex. ix: saponin ® tray ts Papen Ba Peet: 20,30, 8x1: 5,6. 7 Ch. Iv: v.-1- By: 12, 18. 82 instead of simply meeting an immediate perplexity, we can- not tell; but snch is his reply to his fellow-countrymen who ask him why the teachings of all the prophets have been reversed, and the Jew is cut off while the Gentile is saved. Such being the two views of human nature presented by the Christian Scriptures, we cannot be surprised at finding once more a corresponding difference in the teachings of the Church Fathers. At first the Gospel view seems to have prevailed almost universally; Paul’s doctrines either not being familiarly known, or being considered, as they really were intended for the first century rather than for the sec- ond or third. That man was naturally corrupt, or had lost the power to do right, or, however affected by Adam’s fall, was in any way involved in Adam’s guilt, are thoughts that do not seem to have disturbed the minds of those early generations. There is authority for saying that no Greek Father, no Alexandrian theologian, not even the great father of Orthodoxy, Athanasius himself, admitted any theory of Adam’s sin which robbed man of the power to do right, or touched his moral freedom. | Says Clemens of Alexandria, “Man is the most beautiful hymn to the praise of Deity.”? Says Tertullian, who came as near ag any of the earlier writers to the later thought of Augustine, “ Man, though not naturally good, becomes so by free determination. God gave the law that man might submit his will to the divine, and so exalt himself to the angels.”. “The soul of man springs from the breath of God, intelligent in its own nature, free, rational, supreme.” 1 Comp. Hagenbach’s Hist. of Doctrines, r: 148, 160, &e. 2Coh. p. 78. Quoted by Hagenbach. 83 Even in its state of corruption, “there is a portion of good in the soul of that original, divine and genuine good which is its proper nature. For that which is derived from God is rather obscured than extinguished.” ‘Some men are very good, some very bad; but even in the worst is something good, and in the best something bad.” ‘As no soul is without sin, so none is without the seeds of good.”? The Jewish narrative of the Fall was very differently interpreted by different Church teachers; some taking it literally, others, and I think the greater number, under- standing it as pure allegory. According to Clemens of Alexandria, “Moses, describing allegorically divine pru- dence, called it the tree of life, and placed it in Paradise.”? Origen called the narrative “a type of what takes place in free moral agents everywhere and at all times.”* “ Who that has undérstanding,” says Origen with characteristic frankness, “will suppose that the first, second and third day, evening and morning, existed without sun, moon and stars, and that the first day was without sky ? And who so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a hus- -bandman, planted a paradise and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by bodily teeth, obtained life.”+ “In the Hebrew language, Adam means man, and in those parts of the narrative which appear to refer to Adam as an individual, Moses is discoursing on the nature of man in general.”? But whatever their interpretation of the Scripture Narra- tive, these Fathers were quite agreed that man’s freedom of 1De Anima, xx1I; XLI. ?Strom.v: 11. ?See Hagen. 1: 161. *De _ Prin. iv: 16. ®Ag. Celsus, tv: 40. 84 will and power of excellence remained unimpaired by Adam’s sin. On this point their language was explicit. “ Free-will,” says Ireneeus, “is the mark of the ineffaceable image of God, and the condition of faith.” “Man being endowed with reason, and in this respect like to God, having been made free in his will, and with power over him- self, is himself the cause to himself that sometimes he becomes wheat and sometimes chaff.”? ‘ Punishments and good rewards,” says Justin Martyr, “are rendered according to the merit of each man’s action. For if it be fated that this man be good, and this other evil, neither is the former meritorious nor the latter blamed. For neither would a man be worthy of reward or praise did he not of himself choose good, but were created for this end; nor if he were evil, would he be worthy of punishment, not being evil of himself, but being able to be nothing but what he was made.”* “Entire freedom of will,” says Tertullian, “was conferred on man, so that as master of himself he might constantly encounter good by spontaneous observance of it, and evil by spontaneous avoidance. But reward, neither of good nor of evil, could be paid to man who was good or evil through necessity and not choice.”* “The nature of good,” says Tatian, “is brought to perfection in men through their freedom of choice, in order that the bad man may be justly punished, having become depraved through his own fault, but the just man deservedly praised for virtu- ous deeds, since in the exercise of free-choice he refrained from transgressing the will of God.”> “The end of —___ ] > ‘ ay’ x . ; See Neander’s Dogmas, 1: 183. 2 Ag. Heresies, iv: 4, 3) |? Apola- 43. *Marcion, 1: 6. ®Tatian, vu. philosophy is,” says Clemens, quoting approvingly from the Stoics, “to live agreeably to nature.”! “God will have us ttain bliss by our own exertions.”? “The Creator,” says Origen once more, “gave the power of free and voluntary action; but slothfulness, and neglect of better things fur- nished the beginning of departure from goodness. But to depart from good is nothing else than to be made bad. To want goodness is to be wicked.”*® In other words, sin is simply the absence of virtue; moral evil is a negative quality ; a doctrine in which somewhat later Origen had the concurrence of Athanasius. It is unnecessary to extend these quotations further, as they point for the most part in one direction. Man is free ; his nature though deeply stained is by no means corrupt; ‘the fall of the first man involved’ at worst, but an enfeeble- ment of man’s moral power and a proneness to evil; evil and goodness are alike possible to him, and wholly depend- ent upon his choice; only because they are dependent upon his choice, can he be called a’moral agent: this can unhesi- tatingly be pronounced the prevailing doctrine of the Christian Church at the period when that first serious con- troversy upon the question arose, which is now to occupy your attention.? The controversy took its name from a certain monk, elagius, whose personal history, notwithstanding the 12 86 teaching in Rome with his companion and follower, Celes- tius, early in the fifth century. From the accounts which his opponents give us, we infer that he was a thorough and even learned student of ascetic habits, who attacked the sins of the day with great moral earnestness, and was especially severe against such as were disposed to plead the infirmity or corruption of human nature as an excuse for their frail- ties... Such being the character of the man, we cannot be surprised to find him teaching with great clearness and decision the doctrines which so many of the leaders of Christian thought had taught before him, and which had become more important than ever, in view of a growing ten- dency to rely rather upon divine grace than upon human _ effort. Exactly what Pelagius taught upon these points, we learn chiefly from passages of his writings quoted against him by his adversaries, and from the acts of condemnation passed by the councils. Its main positions seem to have been these. While believing implicitly in the Trinity, and even in eternal punishment,’ Pelagius held; that man is wholly free in action and choice, and able to be pertectly good if he will; that Adam’s sin, which differed from others only in being the first, affected his posterity only as a bad example always incites others to evil, and as evil once begun tends always to become in man a second nature, and to increase by its own momentum; that divine grace is not — an absolute condition of virtue but only a help thereto, and — that it strengthens man, not supernaturally by superseding his own action, but naturally, by reinforcing his endeavors, 1Nean. m1: 572-8. 2See Clarke’s Anti-Pelag. Writings; Pref. xz. 8Nean. 11: 578. 87 by enlightening his mind through Gospel truth, and_ by for- giveness of sin; that Christ was the highest pattern of righteousness, and his function to exalt humanity, not renew . it;1 that those who know nothing of Christ and infants born where baptism is impossible, may yet be saved ;? and finally, that man is good or bad only in so far as his action is | wholly his own, and is not determined by influences beyond __ his control.’ These doctrines, as I have said, differed in no essential point from those which had always prevailed, and had been, up to that time, silently accepted in the Christian Church ; except perhaps, in being more systematically and logically _ earnestness, as well as in being followed more persistently to their ultimate conclusions. Nor does it appear that when _ Pelagius and Celestius first preached those doctrines, they aroused any serious hostility. For several years, they | 4 stated than ever before, in being applied with greater moral , | is labored in Rome, seeking to elevate the moral tone of the Christian community, and openly resisting what they con- sidered a disheartening and paralyzing belief in human cor- ruption; yet the Roman church was not disturbed by their presence, or conscious of their heresy. It was only when in 410, they changed the field of their labors from Rome to | Africa, that they became suspected or that their doctrines were challenged. In Africa, they found themselves suddenly upon the - defensive; yet even here, as is well known, not so much because of any hostile sentiment in the African church, as because of the man who happened to be at its head, and ee 1Nean. m: 617. ? Anti-Pelag. p. 241. * Baur, mu: 124-135. 88 whose presence there seemed to determine, so far as any individual influence can ever determine, the religious history of the age. Certainly, no one personality has left so visible an impress of itself upon the doctrinal faith of Christendom, as has that of Saint Augustine. Augustine, although not the greatest or most learned of the Christian fathers, is probably the most familiarly known_ of them all. Almost every one has heard the story of the wild and passionate African youth, who, after a lite of exces- sive self-indulgence, tempered only by his affection for his pious and devoted mother, Manica, suddenly forsook at once _ his sensual indulgences and his religious heresies, and gave himself to the exclusive service of the Catholic church The main facts in his career are these. He was born in 354, in a lttle town near Carthage, was a college student in Carthage, where he distinguished himself alike by his unli- censed gaiety, and by his admiration of the Latin classics and abomination of the Greek; he was then for many years a teacher of rhetoric and oratory in Carthage and — | Rome, attached himself to the heretical sect of the Manichee- ans, led a life of unscrupulous sensualism, redeemed only by certain higher longings stirred in his soul by the teach- ings of Cicero, was converted by Ambrose at Milan, was. baptized in 387, returned to Carthage, and in 395 was made assistant-bishop of Hippo, an important seaport town near z Carthage, where he died in 430. When Pelagius came to Carthage in 410, to continue there the missionary work in which he had been engaged in Rome, Augustine was the 4 | virtual head of the African church. 1 See Putnam’s Monthly for March, 1856. eer 89 Tf we ask now, after ascribing due influence to the pecu- liar personal experiences through which Augustine had passed, why he so resolutely opposed doctrines which until then had been deemed innocent, there are two facts which are worthy our attention, as helping us to our answer. How much influence they are likely to have had in moulding his theological belief, I leave you to judge. The first of these is, that at just about this period the Church, as an outward organization with doctrines and ordi- nances essential to salvation, was becoming by rapid steps a historic reality. Not even yet a complete hierarchy, with a single papal head, it had already taken ideal shape however in many minds, and Augustine seems to have been one of the first to understand all that its name implied. Indeed, so far did Augustine go in his estimate of the authority of the church, that he declared “he would not believe the Gos- pel itself, unless the Church compelled him to do so.” Now _ the central idea of the Church as a hierarchy lies in its accomplishing for man what he cannot accomplish for him- self ; in its possessing the sole means-of salvation. Through the administration of its ordinances, especially through the rite of baptism, and through this alone, man escapes damna- tion and enters the kingdom of God. It is evident at once, therefore, how this new necessity of Christian thought must modify the old doctrines, especially the doctrine of human freedom. The more man can do for himself, the less the Church need do for him. If under any circumstances, whether by being born in heathen lands, or by dying in early infancy, one can enter heaven unbaptized, the neces- sity, and therefore the majesty, of the church in so far sut- fers. 90 Starting from this point, the motive is apparent, and the very process of reasoning becomes obvious, by which a mind like Augustine’s could be led to his doctrine of total depravity. Baptism alone makes one a member of God’s Church, and thus secures salvation. Baptism however, means the cleansing of the soul from its impurities; in other words, the forgiveness of sins. But the new-born child, which must be baptized as well as others if it is to be saved, has committed no sins; how therefore can baptism have any efficacy in its case? Only by supposing it sinful without sinning; that is, sinful through the sin of its parents. It must have inherited both corruption and guilt. This is arguing backward with a witness, and making the tree spring from its branches rather than its roots; yet it is no unfair statement, so far as we can now judge, of the actual logical process by which the dark doctrife of total and inherited depravity was first reached. In order to have a Church which should be essential to salvation, it was seen that baptism into that Church must somehow be made indis- pensable for all; but baptism cannot be indispensable to the child, unless it is sinful; therefore the child must be sinful; therefore we must declare every soul born corrupt. One of the explicit charges which Augustine made against Pelagius was that he “robbed children of their Savior.” In other words, if the soul is born pure, as Pelagius held, it does not need to be cleansed, and so needs no Savior to cleanse it; if born impure, as Augustine held, then it must be cleansed, and so must have a Savior. Once more, the argument might strike the secular mind as somewhat twisted, 1Comp. Baur, m: 148-6, a eS ag, aOR i ta - ot yet so it stands; not, these little souls are in danger, there- fore they must be saved, but, these little souls must be saved, therefore they are in danger. The necessity of the church must, at all hazards, be vindi ‘ated; and if without inherited guilt there can be no Church, then inherited guilt we must have. The other influence to which I have alluded as possibly modifying Augustine’s theology, is to be found in the Manicheean faith of which he was an adherent for several years before entering the true church. Manicheism is one of those mysterious religious systems, born evidently in foreign soil, which in those early years connected themselves so inti- mately with Christianity that it is almost impossible, at this distance, to determine whether they were Pagan religions or Christian heresies. Originating in Persia in the third cen- tury through the agency of a Persian philosopher, Manes, and offering itself at first apparently as a reformed Zoroastrian movement, Manicheism soon connected itself with Chris- tianity, discovered in Christian doctrines its own fundamental principles, and became, through the superior purity and beauty of its moral code, so fascinating to the Christian mind, that it continued a “thorn in the flesh of the Roman church” from the third century through the Middle Ages. Among its converts was Augustine, who for nearly ten years studied its deep philosophy, and received from it certain intellectual influences from which there is abundant reason to believe that he never wholly freed himself} Manicheism solved the problem of evil in the most direct and simple style, by supposing two primitive powers in the 1 Baur, mw: 157; Putnam, March, 1856, p. 230. v2 universe, an eternal good and an eternal evil; a Prince of Light and a Prince of Darkness; Spirit and Matter ; Soul and Body. In Christ, it saw the Spirit of Light coming down to tree other enchained souls of light. In the Christ- ian process of redemption, it saw the longing and striving of nature to purify itself, and rise out of darkness into light These ideas, notwithstanding the eager disavowals of both Augustine himself and his followers, it is impossible not to trace in those theories of human nature with which, since Augustine forsook Manicheeism and entered the Chris- tian Church, Christendom has grown so familiar. According to Manicheean doctrine, good and evil are eternal; there are two souls in man, a good soul and an evil soul. According to Augustine, good and evil contend in man on equal terms ; sin is a positive and independent power in the universe, divine grace is absolutely good, human nature is absolutely evil. Indeed, Augustine’s ablest opponent, Julian, point- edly declared that Augustine’s master, Manes, differed from his follower only in being more consistent. If man is created evil, his Creator must be the Prince of Evil, or else God must himself be evil; a logical conclusion which Manes would accept, but which Augustine arbitrarily denied? ; Such being the circumstances of Augustine’s life, as well as the character of his mind, we can no longer be surprised to find him drawing his theories of human nature rather from Paul’s Epistles than from the Gospels; or to find him offering stern resistance to. the teachings of Pelagius and Celestus, and throwing his official influence against both . 1 Baur, 11: 66-78. 2 Baur, 1: 158. 93 the men and their doctrines. Pelagius soon left Africa for Jerusalem; but Celestus, who remained in Carthage, was allowed no rest until he was finally summoned before a synod to answer for his errors. The first formal step in this controversy was the action of this synod in 412, by which Celestius was excommunicated for holding these six heresies: 1. Adam would have died even if he had not sinned. 2. Adam’s sin injured himself alone. 3. Infants are born in the state of Adam before he fell. 4. Mankind neither died in Adam nor rose again in Christ. 5. The Law no less than the Gospel brings men to Christ. 6. There were sinless men before Christ.! While these severe measures were taken in Africa, the matter seems to have been viewed in Palestine, whither Pelagius had next gone, in a very different light, and no more alarm to have been felt at his doctrines, than had been felt before in Rome. In 415, at Augustine’s solicitation, a synod was called, which was soon followed by another ; yet so little interest was shown, and so little hostility to Pelagius could be aroused, that no condemnation was secured.” Worse still, Zosimus, Bishop of Rome, whose decision in doctrinal matters, owing to the prominence which the Roman church was fast assuming, was of the utmost importance, could not be induced to discover heresy in either Pelagius or Celestus; but on the contrary in a letter to the bishops of North Africa, took occasion to say “Would that some of you had been present when Pelagius’s letter was read. Scarcely could some refrain from tears to find that a man so thoroughly Orthodox could yet be made the object of suspicion.”® 1 Anti-Pelag. x1. 2Nean. m: 585. ® 1: 589. 13 94 This rendered necessary those decisive measures which the ecclesiastics of earlier days knew so well how to employ when objectionable doctrines were to be condemned. A council was called in North Africa, in 418, at which nine canons were adopted, embodying the Augustinian ideas of free-will and grace, influences were successfully used in Rome to win over the Emperor to the North African side, imperial edicts began to appear against Pelagius and his followers, until finally the Roman bishop, Zosimus, was fairly frightened into withdrawing his former edict, and in 418, accepted the decrees of the North African Council. By these methods of theological debate, somewhat less startling, yet no less conclusive, than those employed at Nice and Ephesus, the final condemnation of Pelagius was secured ; and the Christian Church accepted, at the hands of Augustine, a theory of sin, grace, election, and predestina- tion, at which Origen, Irenzeus, or Tertullian would have - turned pale with dismay. It is mortifying to add, that the disgraceful rule which — ; we have found hitherto to hold wherever refusal to sub- scribe to a new doctrine involved the loss of a bishopric, met with no exception here. The eighteen Italian bishops, who at first stood out on the side of Pelagius, nearly all repented in the end, and saved their sees. The only con- spicuous instance to the contrary was Julian, Bishop of Apulia, whose bold denunciation of his cowardly assgciates, and superb vindication of the condemned heresy, constitute the single element of nobleness in this most ignoble contro- 3 | versy. 3 The theory of human nature which thus became the doc- trine and belief of the Christian Church, has at least the — | 95 merit of great simplicity and consistency. It has in fact, precisely the unity to be expected in the product of a single mind following a single definite purpose, and willing to earry its thoughts to their ultimate consequences ; a mind which was too unfamiliar with Greek, apparently, to know what the previous doctrines of the church on these great themes had been, and certainly too ignorant of both the original tongues in which the Scriptures were written to be deterred from placing upon any passage whatever interpre- tation the argument might need. The main points of the theory are too familiar to need here, even if there were space, any but the briefest statement. Augustine simply took Paul’s explanation of the rejection of the Jews, and - made it, with some enlargements, a universal theory of human nature. Adam, according to Augustine, if he had not sinned, _ “would not have been divested of his body, but would have been clothed’ upon with immortality and incorruption.”* Through his sin, death became the lot of man. Through his sin also, human nature became burdened with infinite guilt; his guilt being imputed to the whole race. The race is wholly corrupt therefore, and incapable of itself of any _ knowledge or any virtue. No effort of its own can help it, for every effort springs from its corrupt nature ; it can only be helped by the free grace of God, offered through Christ. _ This grace is received by baptism, which cleanses the soul of its guilt. Without baptism, no soul can be saved ; and bap- -tism ean be administered only by the Church. The good which man accomplishes, and the salvation he secures, are ' Anti-Pel. p. D: 96 through no merit of his own, but only through the grace of God. Not even all the baptized are saved; but only those who are elected to be saved, while all others, by God’s absolute and arbitrary will, are pre-ordained to condem- nation. No system more complete, or pursuing its consequences with more relentless consistency, was ever devised. But when this is said all is said. ‘To find any basis for the sys- tym either in reason, or in Scripture, outside of Paul’s Epistles, has always proved beyond the power of its most skilful advocates. Indeed, before the death of its author, it had already been riddled through and through by Julian and others, and arguments brought against it which remain to this day unanswered." From its first proposition, which involves the palpable paradox that a finite being committed an infinite sin with infinite consequences, or its second proposition relating to the imputation of Adam’s guilt, which rests upon a false interpretation of Rom. vy: 12,2 to its last assertion, each statement rests for its support solely upon the ingenuity of the mind that devised it. Nevertheless, Augustine’s point was gained. Ecclesiastical doctrines are determined, as it seems, not by the truth or piety that is in them, but simply by the votes that can be counted for them; and the votes of the North African church accepted Augus- tine and rejected Pelagius. At the same time, although my present object is to state doctrines, not to discuss them, it is impossible to turn from this subject without some slight recognition of the deep injury done to the Christian Church by laying upon it the ‘Baur, mw: 147, 148. 2Nean. nm: 609; Anti-Pel. p. 12. 97 needless burden of this most repulsive and demoralizing dogma. No single doctrine of the Orthodox creed has elicited more frequent or emphatic protests from the purer minds of Orthodoxy itself than this; if indeed, the doctrine in its completeness can be said to have ever gained the acceptance of Catholic Christendom. Protestantism has shown itself, on the whole, more hospitable to Augustine than Romanism. Even before Augustine’s death, the natural moral conse- quences of the system began to appear. In 426, Augustine was urged to remonstrate with certain monks of Adrume- tum, who were applying his theories in the following highly objectionable way. “Of what use,” said the artless monks, “are all doctrines or precepts? Human efforts can avail nothing; it is God that worketh in us to will and to do. Nor is it right to reproach or to punish those who are in error or who commit sin; for it is none of their fault that they act thus. Without grace they cannot do otherwise ; nor can they do anything to merit grace.”* The perplexity of the monks of Adrumetum remains a perplexity to the present day. Alas for the church that must live in this constant moral bewilderment! Alas for the church which must teach itself to believe at one and the ‘same moment that good or eyil conduct does not depend on man’s effort, and that man is responsible for his good or evil conduct! Alas for the community that must reconcile with its conscience a dogma which sets conscience at defiance, ‘and must reconcile with reason a system by which all reason is abjured ! 1Nean. 11: 625. 98 den laid “upon it so heavy to be borne, no belief attached to it which so stirs the sorrow of its friends and the con- tempt of its foes, as the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin and Predestination. mmCruRe VI. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Tux preceding lectures have traced the formation, during the first four centuries, of the principal Christian doctrines relating to the nature of Christ and the nature of man. I recur to the point now, to call your attention to the process by which these doctrines have been formed. That process, as you have perbaps noticed, has been in all cases the same ; and would have been found the same had we examined the many other subordinate beliefs which were adopted by Christendom during the same period. Not one, as we have seen, was drawn directly from the Christian Scrip- tures; but each was fixed, in turn, by one or more councils, whose duty it was, in each case, to determine among several existing doctrines which should be accepted as the true belief of Christendom. Had these councils, or something corresponding with them, never been held, we should have to-day no definite or uniform articles of Christian faith. In other words, the belief of Christendom has been created, or determined, by its councils. The question arises at this point, therefore, what were those councils, and where did they find the authority which i they assumed to fix the faith of Christendom? We find 100 them speaking in the name of the Catholic or Universal Church, and purporting to be the mouthpiece of such a Church. What do they mean by this? What is this Catholic Church? When and how did it come into exist- ence, end whence did it receive its authority? It was the final appeal of all those who had the ereation of doctrines in charge; upon its authority, therefore, rests the title of each and every Christian dogma. It becomes of the utmost importance then, to know what and whence this so-called Catholic Church is. As usual, the Scriptures do not help us in this enquiry. The name Catholic Church is not to be found in the Serip- tures; neither is the thing. The word “church” is found twice, it is true, in our translation of the Gospels ;' but even in those cases it might and probably should be otherwise translated. The original term “ecclesia” had at that time no ecclesiastical signification whatever, but was the word commonly employed by the Greeks to denote any general gathering of the people. It meant “assembly ;” and is the same word which in another place? is correctly translated “assembly.” When Jesus used it or its equivalent, therefore, on the occasions mentioned above, the disciples would natu- rally understand him as alluding to the body of his followers in general, whether united in an ecclesiastical organization or not. That Jesus himself created no such organization, does not need to be proved to those who read in Scripture lan- guage only what is there. Not only do the Gospels give no hint of such an act, but they show no such desire on the part of Jesus himself. He seems to have no purpose or 1Matt. xvi: 18; xvur: 17. 2 Acts x1x: 39. 101 anxiety beyond the simple utterance of his lofty thought, and its practical exemplification in a holy life. It is an indisputable fact that no evidence exists of any steps on his part towards separating his followers from the synagogues, or uniting them in a distinct body by themselves. Jesus left his followers, so far as ecclesiastical organization is con- cerned, just as he found them. The testimony of the Gospels on this point is repeated by the Book of Acts. If Jesus founded no church, no more -do his immediate disciples seem to have done so. I have already pointed out the fact that in the only accounts which we have of the disciples who gathered in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death, there is nothing in their outward observances to distinguish them from their fellow Jews. They seem to have continued for some time, not only to read and honor the Jewish Scriptures, but also to frequent, as before, the Jewish Temple and synagogues, to observe the Jewish fasts and feasts, to take upon themselves Jewish vows, and to practice the most distinctive Jewish rites.1 They did not even call themselves by any peculiar: name. They “ were called Christians first in Antioch;”’? and even then did not give themselves the name, but apparently received it from others. Had any visitors in Jerusalem, during the first ten or twenty years after Jesus’ death inquired after his dis- ciples, they would probably have been referred to a group of Jews living together as one large family, and distinguished from other Jews almost exclusively by their firm hope of seeing Jesus return among them as the promised Messiah. While they waited for his coming, and with that coming for s PLecture 1: p. 7. *Acts xi: 26. 14 102 the overthrow of all existing kingdoms and churches, there was slight motive, certainly, for organizing themselves into a permanent religious body. The first approach to separate organization was apparently in the case of the bodies called together in different regions by the preaching of Paul, Barnabas and their companions. Over these, teachers and elders (presbyters) seem to have pre- sided, as over Jewish synagogues; and the relation between apostle and disciple was such that Paul could address his followers as members together with himself, in equal honor, of the one body of Christ.1 The tone in which both Paul and Peter always address their readers, as well as the few facts which appear from the narratives, shows plainly that even they claim no authority over their congregations, but are simply their freely appointed leaders. “Not that we have dominion over your faith,” said Paul to the Corinthi- »2 Such continued to be ans, “but are helpers in your joy. the condition of Christendom down to the close of the Apos- tolic age. Churches there already were at Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica and other spots, but under no single head, and with no further organization evidently than was needed for the simplest church life. Their only officers seem to have been the little band called sometimes “elders” (presbyteroi), sometimes ‘ overseers” (episcopoi),? whose functions corresponded probably with those of the elders of the synagogues. In later days the “overseers” became a dis- tinct body from the “elders” and in course of time became bishops. ——EE 1] Cor. xm. 22 Cor. 1: 24; Comp. Baur’s Christenthum, 4; 242. SAC Ma 17, 20 ell, 3, AGE De EE Pe 103 Of the ecclesiastical condition of Christendom in the age immediately following that of the Apostles, we know of course but little. We can form some idea of it, however, from this passage, found in the First Epistle of Clemens of Rome to the Corinthians, written about the end of the first century, at a time evidently when the Corinthians had been setting aside some church officers who were distasteful to them: “We see how you have put out some who lived respectably among you, from the ministry, which by their innocence they had adorned.” ‘Now we cannot think that these may be justly thrown out of their ministry, who were either appointed by the Apostles or afterwards chosen by other eminent men, with the consent of the whole church.”? “Do ye, therefore, submit yourselves unto your elders.”? From this passage it would appear that at the close of the first century there were no bishops as distinct ‘from elders, and that the separate churches still assumed the privilege of ridding themselves of obnoxious leaders, while at the same time the need of a stricter organization and of a central authority was beginning to be felt. During the second century, as we are not surprised to learn, this simple primitive conception of the Christian Church underwent serious modifications. The perfect equality of elder with elder and people with clergy, the simple recognition of each other as “members together” of Christ’s body, which had been sufticient apparently for earlier times,? could not bear the strain of conflicting doc- trines within and threatening philosophies without. The 1] Cor. xrx: 18, 21. 2Clemens, 1 Cor. xxtv: 15. ®Neander’s Dogmas, rr 219. 104 leaders of the church began to assume higher authority, and the church itself to be viewed with greater reverence. ‘Where the Church is,” said Irenzeus, before the close of the second century, “there is the Spirit of God.” “It is only ut the breast of the Church that one can be nursed to life.” ‘““He who separates himself from this Church, renounces the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”! A. still more signifi- cant word did Ireneeus and his contemporaries use, when they borrowed from Greek philosophy the term applied to its schools or sects, and called the doctrines of their oppo- nents “heresies.”? An established Christian truth there was by this time then, any departure from which could be treated as error. Where did they find this truth? In the Chris- tian Scriptures? Not at all. No one seems to have sought it there. ‘*When heretics are refuted from Scriptures, they accuse these same Scriptures and say they are ambiguous.” Ireneus found it in the spoken traditions of the Apostles, handed down to their successors. ‘Suppose there arise a dispute,” he says, “relative to important questions among us, Should we not have recourse to the most ancient churches, with which the Apostles had intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear?” “It is within the power of all to contemplate clearly the ¢radition of the Apostles ; and we are in position to reckon up those who were by — - Apostles instituted bishops in our churches, and the succes- sion of these to our times.” “Since it would be tedious to reckon up the succession of all churches, we indicate the tradition of our great, very ancient, universally known church, founded and organized at Rome by those two most 1Nean. 1: 209. ? Baur, 1: 233. *®Iren. Ag. Her. . 105 _ glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, as also the faith preached to men which comes down to us by means of the succession of bishops Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Teleophorus, Hyginus, Pius, Arnictus, Soter, Eleu- therius. There is much abundant proof that one and the same faith has been preserved in the Church from the Apos- tles till now and handed down in truth.”? “The Apostles, like rich men in a bank, lodged in the hands of the Church all things pertaining to truth. She is the entrance to life.”” The church then was taking form. It was the depository of truth ; it had a divine succession of bishops; it had a divine tradition ; it could speak of heresies. Let it not be supposed, however, that this view was already universally accepted. ‘Why find fault with Chris- tian heresies ?” said Origen, nearly fitty years later. “ Here- sies are found also in medicine and philosophy. ‘They arise through the earnest desire of many literary men to become acquainted with the doctrines of Christianity.”* Says Ter- —tulion, with delightful freedom: “You say the Church has power of forgiving sins? But whence this right? From the passage,’ ‘I will give unto thee the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven’? &c.?2 But what sort of a man art thou, sub- verting the manifest intention of the Lord, conferring the gift personally on Peter. ‘ On thee, I will build my church. ‘J will give to thee’ the keys, not ‘to the Church.’ Whatso- ever ‘thou, Peter,’ shalt bind, not ‘they.’ What has this to do with the Church! The Church, it is true, will forgive sins, but it will be the Church of the Spirit, by means of a 1Ag. Heresies, ur. ?Do.1v. *®Celsus xu. 4Matt. xvi: 19. 106 spiritual man, not the Church which is made of a number of bishops.” ! f The claims of the Episcopate found fullest assertion, at this period, in the writings of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage from 248 to 258. “There is one God,” he says, “and Christ ; is one and there is one Church, and one chair founded upon arock. Another altar, or new priesthood cannot be made. If any shall join a heretical faction, let him know that he — cannot afterwards return to the Church and communicate with the bishops and people of Christ.2” “Lest they cut and tear the one body of the Catholic Church * * * let them acknowledge and understand that when a bishop is once made another can by no means be appointed.” “Whoever he may be, and whatever he may be, he who is not in the Church of Christ is not a Christian.4’ “We cannot _ be saved but by the one only baptism of the one church.”5 Cyprian seems to have used these words in the most literal sense, and without any thought of the “invisible church,” — which in later times became a favorite conception. “In his — view,” says Neander, “the Church was an outward organ- ism, founded by Christ, of which the bishops were the | pillars.” Outside the Church was no truth whatever. Tt is of no avail what any man teaches; it is enough that he teaches out of the Church.’ | By the middle of the third century then the idea of the Universal Church began to be familiar. But who are the’ members of that church was a question still to be settled. 4 i Does the outward rite of baptism alone constitute one a — 1 Modesty, xxi. *Epis. xxxrx. ®xx. ‘z7; 24, °~xxxi: 11. ®Nean Jay Dogmas, 1: 222. : 107 member of the body of Christ, or must there be some in- ard purity or personal worth as well? This was the ques- tion which arose in the Donatist controversy in the fourth century. On the occasion of the election of a bishop in Carthage, in 311, the party of Donatus refused to recognize ‘the new bishop, on the ground that he had been ordained by one who was morally unworthy to perform the functions of the Church. In other words, they claimed that the Church of Christ demanded purity in its members and worthiness in its officers; that the Church consisted, “not of a certain number of baptized people, but of such as possessed inward holiness.1” ‘ Whoever is shown to be a Christian in a right and lawful manner is to me a Catholic,” said the Donatist. This is high ground certainly, and would seem eminently in keeping with the spiritual temper of Christianity. But to ‘the idea of an outward church, involving of course some in- dubitable badge of membership, it was found to be fatal, and the contest could only result, as it did, in fixing more firmly than before the conception of an organized and divinely insti- tuted hierarchy, the sanctity of whose rites was independent of the character of those who administered them. Donatism was suppressed; and one earnest effort to spiritualize the conception of a Christian Church wholly failed.? “No one attains to salvation and eternal life,’ said Augustine in opposing this schismatic party a century later, “who has not Christ for his head. But no one can have Christ for a head who does not belong to’ his body, which is the Church.”® The true body of Christ, according to Augustine, was the great Catholic Church “spread throughout the world.” No 1Nean. 1: 182-217. 2 Baur, 1: 220-226. *Nean. m: 204. 108 matter what the character of the officiating priests might be, his official act, be it baptism or other sacramental rite, lost none of its innate sanctity. The Church, in all its parts, was divine. Its authority was final, even in questions of revealed truth. The Scriptures themselves, as we have seen, Augustine accepted only because the church sanctioned. them. ? | To close this part of the subject, let me quote once more the edict of Theodosius, issued in 380, to which I have before alluded in another connection: ‘‘ According to the discipline of the Apostles and the doctrine of the Gos- pel, let us believe the sole Deity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, under an equal majesty and a pious Trinity. We authorize the followers of this doctrine to assume the — title of Catholic Christians ; and as we judge that all others are extravagant mad-men, we brand them with the impious ~~ name of heretics; and declare that their conventicles shall no longer usurp the respectable appellation of churches.”? Even at the end of the fourth century, however, the Church was far from complete. One serious difficulty still remained. So long as there were many heads over the Church, whether bishops, archbishops or patriarchs, there was danger, of course, of divided councils. The perfect unity of the Church plainly demanded that one should be exalted above the rest. The logical necessity which out of the primitive idea of an outward authority for Christian faith had already evolved an outward hierarchy, receiving inspiration from the Apostles and so from Christ himself, could not be satisfied until that hierarchy had a single 1Lecture y. .2Gibbon,. ut: 3958. - 109 supreme head. The voice of the Apostolic Church must be distinct and certain. The next historical step, therefore, was clear. Long before the days of the popes it was a fore- gone conclusion that one bishop should rise above his fellows. As early as the third century, each province had its patri- arch. Among the patriarchs one must in time become supreme. Not quite so clear was it, however, to whom this leader- ship should fall. For the first two or three centuries the East seemed the natural home and centre of Christendom. If neither Jerusalem nor Antioch could claim to be the leading see, it might perhaps be Alexandria or Constanti- nople. It was only by degrees that the Roman Church came into prominence, and its claim to an unbroken lineage * from the Apostles themselves was accepted as a sufficient title to eminence. In the second century, it is true, Irenzeus spoke of “our great, very ancient, and universal Roman Church, founded and organized at Rome, by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul.”? Cyprian, too, in the next century, spoke of “The Chair of Peter, the principal Church whence sprang the unity of the priesthood.”? But this was very far from conceding the absolute supremacy of the Roman Church, or indeed grant- ing it any peculiar authority. It was higher than the rest, but not over them. Cyprian himself, in a dispute with the bishop of Rome, wholly refused to be governed by his decision, and insisted that “each bishop must act independ- ently, according to his own conscience.”? The Chair of Peter, although “principal,” was by no means supreme. > 1Ag. Heresies, mt. ?Nean.1: 214. %Nean. Dogmas, [: 293. 15 110 Indeed in the time of Irenzeus, as we have seen, it was not considered the “Chair of Peter,” but of “Peter and Paul.” The Church of Rome had two founders. Origen was far from Orthodox on the point of Peter’s connection with the Church. When Jesus said “Upon this Rock I will build my Church,”! he meant that the Church was founded on all who acknowledged Christ as the Son of God. All true fol- lowers of Christ, according to Origen, are “ Peters” (Petroi) i. e., Rock-men. The Kingdom of God consists of such true disciples; this is the Church against which the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.’ | At the Council of Nice, in 325, among 318 bishops, arch- bishops and patriarchs, no one was considered supreme, nor did any receive other honor than was due to their personal dignity, their years, or the political importance of their sees. The Church of Rome was represented only by deputies. Foremost among those present was the aged Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, the only one in the assembly who bore the office title of Pope; the term pope (papa, or father) being a title of Eastern derivation applied at first to all priests indiscriminately, but afterwards reserved for the chief of the Egyptian church.”® In 325 it seems there was no Pope of Rome, but there was a Pope of Alexandria. The growing influence of the Church of Rome, owing especially to political causes, was very evident at the two councils of Ephesus and Chaleedon,* at which time the sup- port of Leo, the bishop of Rome, was eagerly sought by both parties to the Eutychian controversy. In the Council : ‘Matt. xvi: 18. *Nean. Dogmas, 1: 224. ®Stanley’s Kast. Church, — p. 188 and note. 4449; 451. Dhl of Ephesus the main charge against Dioscurus, its leader, was that he had suppressed a letter of Leo denouncing Euty- ches. In the Council of Chalcedon a letter from Leo was made the basis of the creed which was finally adopted; and the reading of the creed was. interrupted by such shouts as these from the assembled bishops: “ This is the faith of the Orthodox; thus do we all believe; thus does Pope Leo believe; thus did Christ believe; thus has the Pope ex- pounded.”? It is not to be necessarily inferred from these shouts, however, that the bishop of Rome was already recognized as pope of the Christian Church. The title seems to have been given to Leo only by his followers; as it was not until at least a century later that it is known to have become finally attached to the See of Rome.’ In the Greek Church it was retained in its primitive use, as belonging to all members of the priesthood alike. At the same time the entrance of Leo the Great into the bishopric, marks more definitely than any other single event the beginning of the supremacy of the Roman Church! The claim to the successorship of Peter, made by ~ Roman bishops as early as the close of the second century,* and favored more and more by the growing political power of the Roman see, found for the first time in Leo a worthy representative, who not only understood the idea of the Catholic Church, but was determined to win for it practical recognition. The influence of his mere name at the Council of Chalcedon, we have already seen. The importance which later tradition assigned to his career can be best understood _ from Raphael’s well-known fresco of “ Attila,” in the “Stanza 1Evag. p. 328. ?Hase, p. 145. ®Do. 143. 4Nean, Dogmas, I: 223. 112 of the Helidorus” in the Vatican. The picture is based on the following myth: When Attila crossed the Alps, in 452, and held Rome at his mercy, he was turned aside by the appearance of Leo, in his pontifical robes, who came forth to meet him, and over whose head appeared St. Peter and St. Paul, protecting their successor with a brandished sword.! . Leo, as I have said, was not proclaimed pope. Nor is it possible to say which of his successors first assumed that title and became historically the first head of the Catholic Church. Probably there was no such first pope. The claim to primacy which developed itself gradually in the minds of the Roman bishops, developed itself gradually also in outward realization. We can note only a few of its successive stages. When, about the year 476, the German barbarians had finally established themselves in Italy, and destroyed the last vestige of the Western Empire, the metropolitan bish- ops of Rome came to be regarded by the people as their native lords, and gained power enough to free themselves for a time from all lay interference with the affairs of the Church. A century later (590-604), while the Longobards were establishing themselves in Italy, Gregory the Great secured for the Church still greater political independence, and gave the final blow to the allegiance of the popes to the Emperor. Gregory was the first moreover to give to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper the essential character of a sacrifice of the mass, and also to give popular currency to the idea of Purgatory.” 1Hase, 144. # Hase, 145, 6. ee ee ee 113 In 1054 came the excommunication by the Pope of the Patriarch of Constantinople ;* from which time the Eastern Church, once identical with* Christendom, became, as the Greek Church, a schismatic body, while its Western rival, _ having numbers and political power on its side, remained the sole head of Catholic Christianity. The pontificate of Hildebrand (1073-85), was marked by the dramatic and significant spectacle of an emperor appear- ing as a suppliant at the gates of the Pope, and waiting three winter days barefoot, before the haughty ecclesiastic would even receive his submission. From the time of Hilde- brand the emancipation of the papacy from its vassalage to the empire was complete. It would be useless in a discourse like this to attempt to trace in further detail the several steps by which the Catho- _ lie Church advanced towards its present perfect development. Its doctrinal completion is wont to be found in the decrees of the Council of Trent, which was called in 1545-6, in response to the great Protestant movement of the 16th century, and which enunciated formally and finally the dogmas of Catholicism. If any single moment is to be d pointed out, however, when the Catholic Church reached the fulness of its growth, and realized its perfect ideal, it would certainly be that moment in the year 1870, when the General Council of the Vatican pronounced the Pope of Rome the infallible head of the Church. In this act the structure became complete; without it, it would have re- mained forever unfinished. However inconsistent with pre- vious declarations of the Church, or repugnant to many of 1Nean. mr: 585. 114 its present members the doctrine itself may be, it is yet the logical conclusion and the inevitable result of the first assumption on which the Catholic Church rests. When the infallible word, intrusted to the hands of a divine hier- archy, is finally interpreted by one infallible mind, then and only then, perfect security against divided councils is gained, and the last step is taken in the progress of ecclesiastical Christianity. And now, with this account of the Catholic Church before us, the place which the subject takes in our present en- quiries becomes sufliciently plain. The Church came into being, as we have seen, in answer to the demand for a fixed and authoritative standard of doctrinal faith. If such a standard is essential to religious faith, such an institution as this must certainly exist to supply it. If we once grant this necessity, then, we must acknowledge that the succes- sive steps which the Church took in its gradual development were natural and inevitable, and that the ideal of doctrinal unity and ecclesiastical authority could hardly be more legitimately or perfectly realized than in the Roman Catho- lic Church of to-day. Every claim it has made, however arrogant, and each position it has taken, however unscrupu- lous, from the hour when each community made and unmade its bishops at will, to the moment when Pius IX. became the infallible head of an omnipotent hierarchy, has | | been simply an onward step toward the perfect vindication of its title to spiritual authority. However hostile to abstract justice or right many of these proceedings may have been, it would be difficult to show that the Church could have remained a church on any other terms. To ~— accept the vote of a noisy council of angry bishops, acting | 115 under imperial dictation, as deciding the most solemn doc- trines of Christian faith, to declare the administration of religious rites as holy if the priest be wicked as if he be virtuous, to bestow upon a human being the divine attribute of spiritual infallibility, although in the simple light of reason preposterous, yet one and all, as steps towards en- suring uniformity of faith, have the argument wholly on their side. They are the very means whereby the Catholic Church has so brilliantly redeemed its promises, and so triumphantly achieved for Christendom a perfect Orthodoxy. If the Christian world asks for outward authority, it is difh- cult to see what better it can demand than is here offered it. Tracing back its descent to apostolic times, pointing to an unbroken career of eighteen centuries, and to a unity disturbed only by a slight departure from the faith in the fifth century, the schism of the Greek Church in the eleventh century, and the Protestant schism in the sixteenth, the Catholic Church as an ecclesiastical institution, has claims upon the recognition of Christendom which could not well be surpassed. | , And of such churches there can be but one. If two are possible, if Christendom can have two ecclesiastical systems, then neither is supreme. Then doctrinal authority ceases. - Two sourees of authority areas impossible as twenty. If _ there is to be any outward authority in Christianity, it must be single. Christendom cannot have two churches; it can have but one, and that the one which can claim years and numbers on its side. If a Church is necessary to Chris- tianity, then the Roman Church holds that place unchal- Still another point is equally clear. If there is no room 116 in Christendom for two churches, no more is there room for two authorized faiths. Doctrine is simply, as we have seen, the utterance of the Church in matters of religious belief. Doctrines are Church decisions. If there can be but one Christian Church, so there can be but one Christian Ortho- doxy. To suppose two, is to suppose none. The creed of the Roman Church must remain the Orthodoxy of Christen- dom until there is another Church to contest the place of the Church of the Papacy. , I trust that you understand my exact position here. I do not say that the Church of Rome is the legitimate outcome of Christianity; I say it is the legitimate outcome of doctrinal Christianity. Ido not say it holds the only true faith; I say it holds the only faith for those who ask for a verbal creed. I do not say it has rightful authority over the soul; I say that over those who seek outward authority, the Catholic Church should be supreme. I do not say its logical position is invulnerable ; I say its position is invulnerable if its premises are granted. For one, I do not accept its premises. Im my view, a religion is possible without outward authority, and without uniformity of faith. In my view, no true religion is possi- ble with outward authority, or the acceptance of dogmas. As I view Christianity, Christianity was possible without ecclesiasticism, without a hierarchy, without a creed. As I view Christianity, the divine life to which it summoned the soul was not subscription to a verbal belief, but the pur- suit of a truth which is infinite; not the solution of meta- physical subtleties, but the unfolding of spiritual aspirations. As I view Christian truth, the church which lay ideally in the great Founder’s heart, was not a realm of authority 117 where dominion is to be exercised over faith; it was the fellowship of souls in the pursuit of holiness and_ excel- lence, and the leadership of every pure and noble spirit which, with priestly robes or without, can help others to a nearer approach to heaven. As I view our religion, the moment the first priest was invested with authority over -another’s faith, the purity of Christianity was lost, and it could only fall further and further from its abandoned ideal. As I read the Gospels, every confession of a written dogma is treason to their religious simplicity ; and as I read the life of Jesus, is open infidelity to the spirituality of his thought. If Christendom as a whole stood upon this ground, all would be clear; but unfortunately it has chosen to demand a uniform belief, and must therefore accept the conse- quences. In one religion there cannot be two churches, two hierarchies, two orthodoxies,—there can be but one. I beg you to keep this point in view, for it is the central position of this course of lectures; it seems to me the cen- tral point of doctrinal Christianity. We have discovered Christian Orthodoxy. It is the creed of the Catholic ~ Church. Exactly that. If Christendom takes any further _ step, it must be in the career of heresy. 16 ‘es bas — Te GER EeeVeL I. MARCH 15, 1874. THE LUTHERAN HERESY. Tur Catholic Church, as we have seen, was the natural and necessary result of the demand, on the part of the Christian world, for a doctrinal faith. Although not hinted at in the Gospels themselves, although the gradual growth of many centuries, the Church yet lay distinctly prefigured in the first effort to establish an outward uniformity of Christian belief; and the successive features which, from _ generation to generation, it assumed, were but the legiti- - mate steps towards the fulfilment of this purpose. Yet its progress was never undisputed. Heresies lurked within its borders and threatened its peace, from the beginning, and were cast out only by the exercise of that supreme authority in matters of faith which the Church claimed to have received from Christ, and which even heretics rarely questioned. _ At last the time came, however, when this authority was itself challenged. The increasing pretensions of the papacy, together with the growing corruption of the priesthood, excited a deep distrust of the Church, which in the 16th century ripened into a formidable revolt. It is the story of this revolt, called the Protestant Reformation, that we are to follow to-night. First, however, let us look for a moment at the lesser 120 movements of the same kind which preceded the Reforma- tion. Long before the 16th century the claims of the Church had been called in question; not seriously enough to lead to an open rupture, yet enough to show that men’s thoughts were turning in that direction. Nearly two centuries before the Protestant Reformation, at a time when England had become greatly agitated over the question of paying tribute to the pope, an English priest, John Wycliffe (born 1324), not. only stoutly opposed the papal claim, but went so far as to style the pope “¢ Anti- Christ ;” ‘the proud, worldly Priest of Rome, the most cursed of Clippers and Purse-Kervers.”* Several bulls were issued against him, commanding inquiry into his erro- neous doctrines, but the only result was fresh denunciations _ from Wycliffe of monasticism, confession, indulgences, wor- ship of saints and images, and a denial of purgatory and the real-presence. Worse than this, Wycliffe turned his fine learning to account in translating the Scriptures for the first time into the popular tongue, and circulating them among SE ——————— =e a a ee the common people; thus helping to throw upon the preten- 3 sions of the papacy that one light which the papacy can never bear. Wycliffe’s influence was chiefly felt, however, among scholars and men of letters, and his movement never reached popular dimensions. His doctrines were condemned — by the pope in 1377, and at the so-called Earthquake Council in London, in 1382, but he himself was allowed to continue in the discharge of parish duties, and died in 1384 Wycliffe’s influence, however, did not cease with his death, nor was it confined to his own land. Early in the 1Chambers’ Encyclopedia. Art. Wycliffe. ? Hase, p. 346. 121 next century, John Huss (born 1373), a preacher in Prague, stirred by Wycliffe’s writings, began to preach against the worldliness of the clergy and the abuses of the papacy, claimed rights for the congregation as well as the priests, insisted upon administering the cup at the sacrament, and denied that any visible head was needful to the Church. Anticipating the heresy of a later day, when the pope oered indulgences for sale to pay the expenses of a crusade, Huss openly preached against them, and burned the pope’s bull at the public pillory. These open acts of rebellion were dealt with in a summary way. At the Council of Con- stance, in 1415, Huss was declared “obstinately guilty of heresy,” was “degraded from his priesthood, and handed over to the secular power.” ‘He was now clothed in sacer- dotal vestments,” says the Catholic historian, St. Liguori,’ “which were immediately afterwards stripped off him, and a paper cap was put on his head, inscribed: ‘Behold the here- - siarch.’ He was now tied to the stake, and as the executioner 4 applied the torch, the hypocrite was heard to exclaim, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me ;’ words inspired by the vainglorious desire of being considered to 3 have died a martyr’s death; but we should not forget that the devil has martyrs, and infuses into them a false constancy. _ His ashes were cast into the lake, and thus the scene closed upon John Huss.”? His confederate, the scholarly and chiy- —alric Jerome of Prague, met the same fate the following year. By its dealings with those two offenders the Church showed by what means its authority was to be enforced. If 1 Hist. of Heresies, p. 254. 2See also Hase, 347-9. 122 the means seem cruel, we must remember the necessities of the Church. If uniformity of belief is to be secured, it can only be, in any age, by the violent suppression of every heresy. The 15th century was more consistent than the 19th. A reformer of quite another stamp appeared still later in the same century in Florence, and was the instigator of one of the most picturesque as well as impassioned religious revolutions which Christendom has known. In the midst of the classic revival in Italy, when Florence was at the height. of her luxury and splendor, and the Medici had gathered about them the brilliant company of artists that graced the close of the 15th century, a Dominican monk, Jerome Savonarola, began a crusade against the religious abuses and social corruptions which were tainting both church and people. The effect of his fierce Italian eloquence is described as unparalleled. The courtly city was struck dumb with shame, and paralyzed with fear. ‘ Women rose up suddenly,” we are told, “laid aside their splendid garments, and appeared again in modest attire; enemies became reconciled ; illegal gains were voluntarily given back. It even happened that a young and happy married pair separated and went both into the cloister.” * At the carnival of 1496 a pyramid was erected in the streets, formed of “musical instruments, books with love- songs, valuable pictures, dress, perfumes, and other unhal- | lowed superfluities,’ to which the crowd set fire, dancing around it while it burned.? Even artists were seized by the strange frenzy. Fra Bartolomeo threw his choicest paint- ings upon the burning pile, and went into a convent.® 1Grimm’s Life of M. Angelo,1: 118. ?Grimm,1: 156. *Gr. 1: 357. 123, . Perugino, who just at this time lost the fine inspiration of his earlier art, and sunk into a lifeless mannerism, and died a sceptic, felt this cold blight upon his genius and his faith, it has been suggested, when his great religious leader perished at the stake." Even M. Angelo is counted among Savana- rola’s adherents.” For a few years the power of Savanarola in Florence, both civil and religious, seemed boundless ; when suddenly as some of his political predictions failed of fulfil- ment, the fickle populace, joining hands with the rulers of the city against their idol, brought him to the stake. He was burned, in 1498, in front of the Government palace. The Church has never ranked this impetuous preacher among its heretics. His portrait, painted by Bartolomeo, encircled with the halo of sanctity, was offered for sale even in the streets of Rome,’ and hangs in the gallery of St. Mark to the present day.* Such were some of the precursors of the reformers of the sixteenth century. The fact that Huss and Savonarola were silenced only made it the more imperative that some one should speak. The power which the Roman Church places in the hands of its higher clergy cannot be safely borne By unless those who hold it are something more than human. That the popes and bishops of the fifteenth century were not more than human, is best shown, perhaps, by the follow- ing passages from Catholic writers. “The scenes of disorder,” writes the Abbé Darras, “ had necessarily produced a deplorable relaxation in the morals of the clergy. Intrigue, simony, corruption and venality were rending the bosom of the church. The private life of 1Taine’s Italy. 2Grimm,1: 157. *Grimm, 1: 220. ‘ Hase, p. 353. 124 the clergy presented a sad spectacle; the spirit of the world, sensuality and avarice reigned supreme in their hearts. Relaxation of discipline had reached such a pitch that some doctors did not blush to maintain that marriage should be made lawful for the clergy; they thought they could best meet the scandal by making it legitimate.”* D6l- linger, who at the time of writing his history of the church, ~ was a good Catholic in high repute, gives the following account of the four popes who immediately preceded Leo X.; whose pontificates therefore prepared the way for the Reformation. “ After the death of Paul IL., in 1471, began days of woe and scandal for the See of Rome. Men were now raised to the highest ecclesiastical dignities whom the primitive church would not have admitted to the lowest »2 < maintain it,’ was the reply. ‘ Wretched man!” shouted Calvin, stamping his foot, “is this pavement, then, God? Is it God that I trample this moment under foot?” ‘ Unquestionably.” Then,” added Calvin ironically, “in the devils themselves is God?” “Do you doubt it?” replied the unflinching Christian pantheist.* But such heroism as this had no charm for the grim dog- matists of early Protestantism. Least of all for Calvin, every sentiment of whose nature was crossed by this fiery, irreverent, unyielding iconoclast. The mind which cares more to see clearly than to see far, and is impatient of any religious truth that will not yield itself to exact and infallible dogma, can tolerate speculative thought only by the exercise of sheer condescension and magnanimity ; and magnanimity unfortunately was a trait whose meaning, in theological ‘matters, Calvin did not know. When Servetus published, first his “Seven Books on the Errors of the Trinity,” and afterwards his more pronounced and noted work on the “ Restoration of Christianity,” in which he commented on Calvin’s own opinions with daring frankness, his doom, so far as Calvin could compass it, was already sealed. After failing, as we have already seen, to set in motion | against Servetus the machinery of Catholic persecution in 1 Revue. p. 610. 180 Vienne, Calvin secured the still more brilliant triumph of kindling in Geneva the flames of a Protestant Inquisition ; and dismissing into eternity, in frightful agony, the soul that had dared assert the absolute unity of God. After ages have sought to relieve Calvin from the responsibility of this act; but Calvin himself sought no such escape, nor desired it. He did not himself try Servetus nor condemn him ; but he brought him to a trial of which the result was fore- shadowed from the beginning, and expressed no regret at the issue. Not one of the leading reformers grieved over it. Melanchthon, Bullinger, Beza and Farel openly approved of it. Protestantism was well content with the death of the ‘ cursed Spaniard.” From Spain we turn to Italy, where, although the Refor- mation gained no visible foothold, yet Protestantism found itself eagerly welcomed by a little band of scholars who, long before Luther’s appearance, had been trained to the most free and fearless speculative thought." Nowhere were the new ideas carried to greater extremes than by the few who received it in Italy.” About the year 1546, a little knot of forty,men are said to have formed a secret society in Vicenza, in the territory of Venice, for the free discussion of the great religious and philosophical questions which the Reformation had opened. From what we can learn of , their discussions, they seem to have dealt with profounder themes than commonly came within the scope of early Protestantism, and to have drawn from a larger scholarship ; for they not only reached the conclusions that God was the one Supreme Being, and that Jesus, though born indeed of a 1Lecky’s Rationalism, 1: 369. 2 Biographie Generale, 43, Socinus. a 181 Virgin, was but a man ; they also claimed that the popular doctrines of the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the. person- ality of the Spirit, J ustification, and the Imputation of Christ’s merits, were foreign corruptions, “introduced into Christianity by Greek Philosophers.”* One of this interesting band of religious enquirers was Lelius Socinus, of Siena, (1525-1562), heir of a name already eminent in jurisprudence, and destined ‘now, as borne by himself and his more noted nephew, to gain equal eminence in theology? Lelius is described as “a man of rare eloquence, familiar with Biblical languages, and as able a critic as in those times it was possible for a man to be pb but little is to be told of his career, except that on the dis- covery and dispersal of the band of forty, he was forced to flee and ‘found his way to France, to England, to Poland, and finally to Zurich, where he died at the age of thirty- seven. With little of the controversial spirit of Servetus, and showing the tastes of the student rather than the mettle of the reformer, he never sought to disseminate his views beyond the circle of his friends and correspondents, yet left upon others the distinct impress of his own free and original thought. Among these others was his nephew Faustus Soci- nus of Siena,‘ who was the true founder of Socinianism. He -too was a refugee when history first mentions him, having 1Gieseler, Iv: 355; note. 2 Bayle speaks of one Socinus (1401), a distinguished jurisconsult of the fifteenth century, as ‘‘ the most universal man of his age; ” of his grandson, the father of Lelius, as *‘ no less illustrious,” being Doctor of Jurisprudence at twenty-one, and afterwards professor at Padua and Bologna; and of a son of the latter as ‘“‘dying youns with the reputa- tion of a learned jurist.” Dictionaire Historique et Critique, p. 2604. 8 Biog. Generale, Socinus. 4 1539-1604. 24 182 been driven from Italy for his theological opinions before he was twenty, and having escaped to France. Although per- mitted to return to Italy after his uncle’s death, and remain- ing for twelve ycars in the service of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he finally abandoned, of his own accord, the elegant ease of court life, and devoted himself to the study and pro- pagation of a purer theology. His life, unlike that of his uncle, was an active one throughout. On going from Italy to Basle, in 1574, for purposes of study, he excited such theological hostility there that he was forced to leave in 1578, and went next to Transylvania, whither Blandrata had preceded him, and where he found Unitarianism publicly recognized and already firmly established; so firmly, as it proved, that it has maintained its position as a flourishing church, to the present day. From Transylvania, he went, in 1579, to Poland, where his uncle had taught Unitarian- ism more than twenty years before, and where the nephew now preached and disputed with a vigor which made Socin- ianism from that day a great power in the Christian world. Protestantism, Socinus taught, must rest on the single basis of human reason, casting out whatever contradicts reason, and refusing shelter to dogmas which claim acceptance solely as mysteries.? His doctrines proved startling, it is true, even to his own sect, and caused’ his temporary with- drawal from Cracow, at one time even endangering his life ; but he remained in Poland, was married there, lost his Italian property by confiscation, battled bravely for his doc- trines at the Synod of Brest in 1588,.and died in enforced retirement in 1604. 1Faiths of the World, 1: 608. 2Chamb. Encyc. Art. Socinus. 183 In his theological position, Socinus, who was far less specu- lative and more exactly critical than Servetus, recalls in many respects the old and much-condemned heresy of Paul ‘of Samosata ;! who held, as you may remember, that Christ, though pure man by nature, yet received such illumination of divine wisdom that he became God by progressive devel- opment.2 One of the main points in Socinus’s system, and one in which later Unitarianism has hardly followed his leadership, was that Christ, although not preéxisting, is yet a deified man, has been taken up into heaven where he is now reigning, and consequently must be worshipped. This belief he seems to have based upon such passages as John ut: 13; “No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, the Son of man which is in heaven ;” John v1: 38, 46; “I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me;” “Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father ; » all which he interpreted as meaning that Christ had risen repeatedly to heaven to receive divine illumination and guidance, and had come down again to earth to impart them to his followers. So strenuously, indeed, did Socinus insist upon the worship of Christ, that this doctrine led, in 1584, to an open rupture between himself and the Polish Unitarians, and created the * two parties of “ worshippers ” (adorantes), and ‘ non-WOle shippers.” Perhaps I cannot better point out the leading doctrines of this peculiar theology, than by a few quotations from one of the two Polish Catechisms ; both of which have an interest - 1Bishop of Antioch in 260. 2 Neander’s Hist. 1: 601. 184 for us as being, so far as I know, the only official creeds or confessions which Unitarianism has ever given to the world. In 1574, a catechism was published in Cracow, styled, “Catechism and Oonfession of the Congregations gathered in Poland in the name of Jesus Christ, our cruci- fied and risen Lord.” In 1605, after the Polish Unitarians had become Socinian, appeared in Racow, under the auspices of Socinus himself, the “ Racovian Catechism,” arranged under these eight heads. JI. Scripture. JI. Way of Salvation. III. Knowledge of God. IV. Knowledge of Christ. V. Prophetic Office of Christ. VI. Kingly Office of Christ. VII. Priestly Office of Christ. VIII. Church of Christ. Some of the questions and answers, very freely translated from the Cracovian Catechism, are as follows :4 “Whence do we learn the Christian religion?” “From the Sacred Writings; especially the New Testament.” “Are there any Sacred Writings except the New Testa- ment?” ‘There are; the Old Testament; but the truth of the Christian religion is contained only in the New, and that only demands our faith.”? “Do you recognize, beside the human nature of Christ, also a divine?” “Not if we are to understand by divine the same essence as God’s.’? “Who is Christ?” “The only-begotten Son of God, who by divine power has become God, and has received all power in heaven and earth.”* ‘As Christ has received divine power, he must receive divine honor.” “In what does divine honor consist?” “In adoring him, and receiy- ing his aid.”° “Is the Holy Spirit ever called God?” —— —— 1See Gieseler, rv: 367, n.; Winer’s Confessions of Christendom. ?Winer, 45. ®64. *Notin 1st edition. 565. 185 “Never.” “Is it a person?” “No. Since the Holy Spirit is in God; and God is never said to be in the Holy Spirit, it plainly is not a person.” “ Was Adam originally good?” “ No! else he would not have sinned.”* “ What followed from Adam’s fall?” ‘Death (for the whole race), but not corruption, nor loss of free-will.”2 “ What shall we say of Christ's person?” “That he was by nature a true man, ‘and when on earth was mortal, but is now immortal.” ‘Was he a common man?” “No! he was not pure man, but was conceived of the Virgin, having no father but God.2? “Should infants be baptized?” “No, there is no authority for it in Seripture.”* “What is the object of the Lord’s Supper?” “Some call it a sacrifice; some a sacra- ment; some say it is for remission of sins; it is really an institution to commemorate his death.”® ‘ How do we com- memorate his death?” “By giving thanks to Christ, for having shed his blood through ineffable love to us.”® The Unitarianism of to-day would hardly recognize itself in these remarkable doctrines. Indeed, it 1s always singular to see how reluctantly even professed rationalism breaks with venerated notions. Socinus, declaring that Christ “became God” and must be worshipped, Servetus, claiming that Christ is God assuming visible form, and defending against Orthodoxy Christ’s divinity, Arius, calling Christ —* “perfect God,” would not in these days be counted danger- ous heretics. Yet Orthodoxy was quite right in its suspl- The spirit of Protestant rationalism cions and its fears. 7 ere the stammering was there, and these crude dogmas W 1 Winer, 84. 795. %117. 4938, 5264. 264. 186 accents in which the infant heresy was proclaiming its faith. To all appearance, this special form of heresy was stifled at its birth ; for Socinianism, banished from Poland half a century after its founder’s death, has had no recognized existence since that day, except, under a modified form, in Transylvania.’ Yet. it has not died, nor was its influence limited to Poland. Bayle, writing in 1700 of Socinus and his work, said “The sect was driven from Poland in 1658, and has much fallen off in visible estate; but no one’ denies that it has invisibly greatly multiplied, and is growing day by day. Indeed, in the present condition of things, many think that Europe must not be surprised, if only a few princes should adopt it, or even remove its political disabili- ties, to find herself Socinian very soon. Against its pro- gress can only be mentioned the fact that it disapproves of war, and forbids its followers to hold civil office?” Bayle’s prophecy has hardly been fulfilled; perhaps because the “few princes” were not forthcoming, perhaps because this hostility to war and to civil affairs told too severely against the young faith. Socinianism, in its origi- nal form, no more exists to-day than does Arianism, or Athanasianism. Yet it has its legitimate successors, some of which we are now to notice. By a singular historical caprice, the next name to be men- tioned in this connection, is of one who had hardly more leaning towards Unitarianism than had Calvin or Luther, who dissented from Orthodoxy on a wholly different issue, yet on whom an unkind fate has laid the burden of Socinian 1Gieseler, Iv: 370. ?Bayle’s Dict. p. 2609. Sa 187 error, and who, in spite of himself, has to be enumerated among the fathers of our liberal faith. The name by which the early Unitarians of America were known, was Armin- jan; and to many intelligent minds to-day, Arminianism and Socinianism are quite indistinguishable terms. Let us do them both the justice of seeing in what the true con- nection between them lies. Arminius! was the son of a Dutch cutler, received his education partly in Leyden, partly in Geneva, where he was well taught in the doctrines of Calvinism, and was at first settled as a pastor in Amsterdam, in 1588, at a time when Holland was almost equally divided between Lutheranism and Calvinism. The point in controversy between the two churches at that time, and just then coming to open issue, was the doctrine of Predestination. Between the two reformers themselves, there would seem to have been slight room for difference in this doctrine; as Luther said in criti- cising Erasmus, “The human will is like a beast of burden. Tf God mounts it, it works and goes as God wills; if Satan Nor can it ‘] i. ‘mounts it, it works and goes as Satan wills. choose the rider it would prefer, or betake itself to him, but it is the riders who contend for its possession.” “ God fore- knows nothing subject to contingencies, but he foresees, foreordains, and accomplishes all things by an unchanging, eternal and efficacious will.”’ As between their followers, the Lutherans held that each soul was predestined however, on the ground that God foresaw to happiness or misery, that it would deserve the one fate or the other ; following Augustine more closely, regarded while the Calvinists, 11560-1609. 2 Quoted by Lecky, f: 385. 188 Predestination, whether to happiness or misery, as a purely arbitrary act on God’s part, unconditioned by anything in the soul itself. Arminius, who was called upon to take the prominent place in this dispute, and to throw the weight of his rare learning and eloquence on the side of Calvinism, found him- self, to his own great surprise} unable to do so, and ended by accepting the opinions he was expected to refute. His views do not seem to have been, at first, very outspoken; as in 1604 he was made professor in the University of Leyden, and two years afterwards its rector; but his coming to the University was the signal for a renewal of the strife, and after passing through one of the bitterest controversies of even that bitter and controversial age, he finally -proposed, and left behind him at his death in 1609, the series of doc- trines which, with slight modifications by his followers, have since borne his name. — . The tenor of these doctrines, which concern themselves almost exclusively with what seemed to the angry disputants the whole of Christianity, the question of Predestination, can be best judged by these brief extracts from Arminius’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” published the year before his death. “God decreed to save and damn particular persons because he knew from all eternity who would believe and persevere, and who would not believe and persevere.” ‘In his lapsed and sinful state, man is not capable of and by himself either to think, will, or to do what is good; it is necessary for him to be regenerated by God in’ Christ, through thé Holy Spirit.” On this point, especially as it 1Comp. McClin. and Strong’s, Bib. Cyclopedia, 1: 414. - 139 relates to Free Will and Grace, Arminius showed singular anxiety that his Orthodoxy should be understood. “ Grace is essential,” he declared; “I ascribe to Grace the begin- ning, continuation and consummation of all good.”? His nearest approach to heresy was in the doctrine of Christ, in regard to which he was very sensitive, having been made the object, as he said, of “ notorious calumnies.” “ Christ is truly God,” according to Arminius, yet is not “ underived,” or “absolute God;” if that be the exact shade of Deity which Orthodoxy expresses by “ autotheos.” If the Son is in strict sense autotheos, he is the Father. “The ancient Church” he insisted, has always taught that “the Son has his Deity from the Father by eternal generation ;” in other words, is subordinate to the Father? “To be Son and to be God are at perfect agreement.”* After announcing his acceptance of Calvin’s doctrine “that Christ’s merits are the sole cause for which God pardons sins,’ he returns once more to the question of Christ’s nature, and says, “ You know with what deep fear, and with what conscientious solicitude I. treat that sublime doctrine of a Trinity of Per- sons.” “God is from eternity. The Father is from no one. The Son is from the Father.”° This very mild departure from Orthodoxy, which to us seems so trivial and so wearisome, was sufficient to keep the States of Holland in furious agitation for ten years after eminius. At the Synod of Dort, held 1618-19, which, like some of the councils of earlier and holier ages, is charged with having been so made up that its 1Writings of Arminius, Nicholls, 1: 248, 252, 3. *D- 958. *p. 261. #p. 264. © Apology against thirty-one Defamatory Articles, p- 343. * ge 190 decision was secure in advance, Calvinism was proclaimed the doctrine of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, and three hundred of the Arminian or Remonstrant clergy were expelled from the country! A few years later, under more favorable political conditions, the exiles returned; and since that time Arminianism has been fully tolerated in Hol- land, beside going abroad to temper the rigor of Calvinism in other lands. It is -to- day the doctrine of the entire Methodist church, beside having a large following in the Church of England, and among the Lutherans in Germany.? It is quite clear from the above account that, in its primi- tive form, Arminianism had as little connection as possible with Socinianism, either in its dogmas, or in its spirit. Yet one heresy makes another easy. As a simple matter of fact, the Arminian clergy of Holland, though dwindling in numbers, are tending constantly to greater freedom of thought on all religious themes, and are known now to reject all creeds and confessions, and to hold very advanced views on Scripture interpretation, the Trinity and the Sacra- ments. In many sects, Arminianism has proved the step-. ping stone to a larger liber ty and broader faith. One point is still to be touched upon before my subject is complete. I have shown at how early a period of the Reformation, and under how many different forms, Unita- rianism appeared; it remains to be seen how it took the form under which we are familiar with ern England and America. | Socinian doctrines seem to have been somewhat slow in reaching England; yet in 1665, Dr. Owen wrote. of them ; 1 Hase’s History, p. 416. 2 McClintock and Strong, 1: 417. ®Cham- bers’ Encyc. ; Gieseler, Iv: 513. ToL “the evil is at the door; there is not a city, a town, scarce a village in England wherein some of this poison is not poured forth.” The assertion of another writer, in 1705, ‘that there were “troops of Unitarian and Socinian writers and not one dissenter among them,” would indicate that the dogmatic indifference of the established Church had given free entrance to heretical ideas; while Presbyterianism, in refusing to commit itself to any doctrinal system, exposed itself to the same infection, and prepared the way for the avowed Unitarianism of the eighteenth century.’ The formal appearance of what had been so long secretly approaching, was simple and uneventful in the extreme. In 1774, Dr. Lindsey, who had resigned a charge in the Church of England, became pastor of a Unitarian Congrega- tion in Essex Street, London; and thus the Unitarian move- ment, in so far as any single incident constituted its begin- ning, was initiated. A still more important apostle it found, however, in Joseph Priestley, who, in 1755, had become pastor of a small dissenting congregation in Suffolk, and was already conspicuous as a champion of humanitarian theology. Priestley was born in 1733, and had been educa- ted as a Calvinist, but before he was nineteen claimed to be “ypather a believer in the doctrines of Arminius,” adding however, “I had by no means rejected the Doctrine of the Trinity, or that of the Atonement.”? At about the same time he was refused admission to a Calvinist communion, e that “all the human race were ains of hell forever, on 8 After entering the because he could not agre liable to the wrath of God and the p account of the sin of Adam only.” -1Chambers’ Encyc. Art: ‘¢Unitarians.” %Chamb. Encyc. 3 Ware’s «« Priestley’s Views,” Pp. VII. 192 ministry, his views took, as has been said, a distinctively humanitarian form, although, at the same time, he retained positive belief in the New Testament miracles, as the cre- dentials of Christ’s mission. Starting with the assumption that the Bible is a divine revelation, and rejecting carefully what seemed to him merely ecclesiastical interpretations of Bible passages, he rejected Trinity and Atonement as unscriptural, and held that Christ himself claimed to be man and nothing more. Priestley’s theology shows but little spiritual depth, and his highest distinction was won rather in science than in religion ; yet his open advocacy of Unitarian views, and the respectful hearing which he won for them, while they were still hated and condemned, and while bringing upon himself bitter obloquy and persecution as well as loss of scientific preferment, entitle him to a high place among the leaders of our faith. His career, as is well known, was a troubled one, and shows that the days of Protestant per- secution, which began with Luther and Calvin, were not yet wholly past. Like Socinus before him, he lost his books, manuscripts and philosophical instruments, at the hands of a religious mob; and finally, through the combined influence of political and theologic hatred, he was virtually banished from his native land. In 1792, he removed to America, where he was received with great respect, and where he lived long enough to add fresh stimulus to the young Unita- rianism which was just bursting the bonds of New England Episcopacy and Puritanism. Unitarianism in America, as in England, sprang from *Comp. Chamb. Ency. “ Priestley.” 193 several roots. In 1787, the oldest Episcopal Church in New England, King’s Chapel in Boston, erased from its Prayer Book and Articles, all Trinitarian Confessions, and be- came, under James Freeman, the first Unitarian church in America. It retains the Liturgical service to this day. In a letter to Dr. Lindsey in London, whose withdrawal from the established church had occurred but a few years before, Freeman wrote that “there was only one minister in New England who openly preached the “Socinian Scheme,” although there were many churches in which the worship was strictly Unitarian, and some of New England’s most eminent laymen openly avowed that ereed.”' In 1801, the oldest Puritan church in New England or America, the original church of the Mayflower, established in Plymouth ‘in 1620, declared itself, by the vote of a large majority, in sympathy with the new liberal movement, and assumed the Unitarian name. Indeed, its heresy was prepared for it in advance ; for so simple had been the terms of the Covenant adopted by the early colonists, that not a letter had to be changed in taking the Unitarian position. The Church uses to-day the identical statement of faith drawn up by its Pil grim founders. Still earlier than this, in 1786, this society had withdrawn, on the ground of its Arminian faith, from the First Parish of Worcester, and was ready among the first to take part in the schismatic movement which could not be long delayed. Protestant Orthodoxy had learned little from the past. Tt still honestly supposed itself to have a church and dog- matic system of its own, any departure from which was 1Index, Feb. 15, 1873. 194 heresy ; and therefore, instead of welcoming the new theo- logical movement, it forced it into the position of dissent. About the year 1815, the new views had spread so rapidly, and the Orthodox opposition to them had become go deter- mined that no alternative remained but for the congregations which had taken independent position, to separate formally from their sister churches, and call themselves by a dis- tinctive name. The spread of the movement through the State of Massachusetts was instantaneous ; and the lofty eloquence and noble humanity of Channing and other early leaders of the cause, left the question no longer in doubt. whether Unitarianism had a place in the Protestant church. It is no part of my purpose to defend the rights of Unita- rianism, yet I trust that the foregoing statement has shown this simple fact ; that Unitarianism stands on precisely the some footing with the other heretical bodies of Protestant- ism, that, with an origin quite as ancient, and an ancestry quite as noble, it is simply carrying into remoter realms of Christian truth, that independent exercise of human reason, that spirit of rationalism, without which Protestantism itself could have had no being. LECTURE X. APRIL 26, 1874. RELIGION AND DOGMA. Tuk course of lectures now closing, in directly answering one question, has aided indirectly, I trust, in answering another. If it has clearly traced the development of Chris- tian doctrines from the beginning, it has helped us to determine in what relation Christian doctrine in general stands to the Christian religion. As we are now for the first time in a position to consider this point, 1 invite you this evening to take one more glance with me over the ground which weahave traversed, that we may see to what conclusions we are brought. What relation do the doc- trines of Christianity hold to Christianity itself? The point from which we started, you will perhaps remember, was this; that the Scriptures themselves contain two distinct conceptions of Christ’s nature. While the first three Gospels present Christ as simply the Jewish Messiah, and ascribe to him purely human attributes, the Fourth Gospel and Paul’s Epistles present him as a preéxistent and spiritual being, with certain divine attributes, and standing in peculiar relation to God. These two conceptions, which divided the Christian community before the Scriptures were written, introduced naturally an element of disunion into 196 all the early churches; and we accordingly find in the Christian writings of the first three centuries, the most con- flicting views concerning the nature of Christ. On the one - hand, are writers like Justin Martyr, Ireneeus and Tertul- lian, who carry Paul’s thought to much greater lengths, con- sider Christ a subordinate deity, and find much fault with those who call him “a mere man”; on the other hand, writers like Theophilus Bishop of Antioch, and Paul of Samosata, who reproduce the primitive idea of Christ held by the Apostles at Jerusalem, insist that Jesus was born human, even if he became afterwards divine, and charge their opponents, when calling Christ God, with making two gods. How to call Christ man, on the one hand, without robbing him of all spiritual functions and degrading him to the mere office of a Jewish Messiah, how to call him divine, on the other hand, without making two gods, was the main religious problem of the first three centuries. To aid this controversy, or complicate it, came in certain phrases and conceptions, from Oriental and Greek philosophy, concern- ing the “ Word” or “ Logos” as emanating eternally from God; and somewhat later, the Greek idea of a threefold per- sonality in the divine nature, which when once suggested, took strong hold of the Christian imagination, and assumed Yery different forms at the hands of a Tertullian, an Origen and a Sabellins. | The first mention of a trinity in the divine nature, or of any threefold conception in connection with Deity, we found, just at the end of the second century, in the writings of Tertullian. Although the idea of Christ as in some sense a God, had been for some time familiar, yet none of the writers of that period seem to have thought of a third ; 197 _ divine element, until the idea was suggested by Tertullian to meet an obvious difficulty. If Christ was a God, there was danger, of course, of either identifying him with the abso- lute God, and so losing sight of Christ’s personality ; or of ‘so separating the two Gods as to fall into polytheism. Both these results actually followed ; and, whether influenced by this danger or not, it was in answer to a writer who spoke of “God himself as born of the Virgin,” that Tertul- lian, unprepared for so gross a doctrine, first broached the conception of a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who consti- tute what he calls a “unity distributed into a trinity.” These chance words of Tertullian, on which he very briefly dwelt, and to which he gave no complete or systematic form, proved to be the first expression of a theory which, under many modifications, and after prolonged controversy, was finally adopted as the doctrine of Christendom concern- ing the relation of Christ to God. The settlement of the doctrine was reached, and its first official statement made, as we have seen, by a series of “Church Councils, held between the years 325 and 451. The steps toward this end, were the following :— In 325, the First General Council was called at Nice to determine the questions which arose out of the Arian strife. In opposition to Arius, who, while calling Christ God, had yet declared him not begotten out of the substance of the Father, but created by the Father, the Council of Nice pro- nounced the Son consubstantial and. coeternal with the Father; but propounded no doctrine as to the relation of the Holy Spirit to God, or as to the exact nature of Christ. Next came the Second General Council, at Constantinople, in 381, at which, in consequence of controversies which had 26 19s sprung out of the decisions at Nice, it was further declared that the Holy Spirit is co-equal with the Father and the Son. But still one important and very troublesome point had been left undecided by both Nice and Constantinople ; the relation between the human and divine natures in Christ himself. If in being God, Christ ceased to be man, that is, if his human nature was lost in the divine, then it was the Infinite God who was born, suffered, and died. If Christ was both God and man, then were there not two Christs ? After another century of angry controversy, and after two successive councils, in one of which the doctrine of two natures in Christ was pronounced heresy under the name of Nestorianism, in the other of which the doctrine of one nature in Christ was pronounced heresy under the name of Eutychianism, it was finally decided at the Fourth General Council, at Chalcedon, in 451, that although each of these separate doctrines is false, yet both together are true; in other words, that Christ, although not two beings, nor yet one, is both two and one; that he has two natures in one person. These doctrines concerning Christ, of course, although the most important were by no means the only ones in controversy during those early centuries. On the contrary, each Christian dogma was to be found in that period in the process of formation. Prominent among these, and the only other doctrine to which I called your attention, was that relating to human nature. As in regard to the nature of Christ we found, in the pages of the early Fathers, the most varied and conflicting views, so in regard to. the nature of man. That the human race had been in some way corrupted by Adam’s fall, was generally granted ; but ¥gg how it was corrupted, or what share, if any, the race in gen- eral had in Adam’s guilt, was left undecided until the fifth century, when the whole question was brought to an issue by the monk Pelagius, who declared, as most of the Fathers liad done before him, that Adam’s sin acted upon the race only as a bad example, and that every man can be just as good or just as bad as he chooses. Whether this doctrine, even then, would have been pronounced heresy, is more than doubtful, had it not been for the potent influence, just at this juncture, of Augustine; whose Manichwan training and supreme belief in the supernatural efficacy of the Church, led him to frame out of Paul’s language, and out of the old conceptions, the doctrine of man’s natural depravity, and entire inability to escape from sin, except through God’s unmerited grace, working through the miraculous agency of the Church. In the year 418, as we have seen, the Council of Carthage adopted the Augustinian theory of Total Depravity, Free Grace, and Predestination, and pronounced the opposite doctrines, held up to that time by most of the prominent Christian teachers, heretical. From these single instances of the formation of Christian doctrine, we learned the process by which all Christian doc- trine has been formed. What was true of these, was equally true of every other dogma which Christendom confesses. No single dogma being found, as such, in the primitive Scriptures, each one in turn has waited to be moulded by religious controversy, and to receive its final form at the hands of an ecclesiastical Council. Christian doctrines are simply the various decisions of these Councils called from time to time to declare which of two conflicting opimions, 200 held by different Church teachers, was right, and which wrong. | The next question, therefore, which: we had to consider, was this; what were these Councils which, by a mere vote, determined forever the faith of Christendom ? Councils, we found, were simply a gathering of bishops representing what called itself the Catholic Church. Their sole authority lay in their being the mouth-piece of the Church. The question was pushed still further back, therefore. There is a Catholic Church, it seems. What is it? Whence ’ did it come? When begin to exist? The decrees of Nice, Constantinople, Chalcedon, Carthage, are entitled to respect, only as this Catholic Church can prove its claim to authority and its right to speak for Christendom. What then, and whence, is the Catholic Church? Not. an_ institution founded by Jesus, certainly ; as a single glance at the Scrip- tures proved to us. Not part of primitive Christianity, therefore. Not founded by the Apostles either: there were churches in apostolic times, but no Church. As late as the end of the first century, each congregation made and unmade its own officers, and bishops as distinct from elders were still unknown. Hardly before the third century did we find mention of “the one only baptism of the one Church.” Even then its organization was not complete, and many essential features were lacking. At the time of the early Councils, no one bishop was supreme above the rest. Not until the fifth century did the Bishop of Rome claim precedence among his fellows. Not before the seventh century was there a Pope. Not until the nine- teenth century, was there an infallible head of the infallible Church. ee ee a, a + 201 The Church came gradually into being, therefore. It was eighteen hundred and seventy years in reaching its growth. It camé into being expressly to meet the demand for infalli- bility. The Scriptures themselves admitting of various interpretations, and leaving many grave questions in doubt, unity of faith was impossible without some infallible inter- preter of Scripture, and some supreme authority to estab- lish the articles of faith. If there must be doctrines, there must be something to sanction doctrines. Hence the ‘Church; growing constantly more compact as necessity required ; assuming step by step a larger authority, as that authority was needed. If it can be said, as it certainly may, that the necessities of dogma created the Church, it must also be said that the Church alone creates and sanctions dogma. Doctrinal Christianity, therefore, culminates in the Catho- lic Church. Without that Church, as we have seen, there would be no Christian doctrines. Doctrines are the voice of the Church. The two cannot be separated. Insist upon havipg doctrines, and you must have the Catholie Church 5 deny the authority of the Catholic Church, and you remove the basis of all doctrine. _You cannot discriminate between the two, and hold to the one while you disown the other. You cannot accept the Church and discard its doctrines; no more can you retain the doctrines while you renounce the Church. Whatever beliefs you retain on leaving the Church are simply your individual opinions: they are no longer established dogmas. This is a point which the Protestant reformers failed .to see. They thought they could go out of the Church, deny the authority of the Pope, and yet retain the Trinity, 202 Incarnation, and Atonement, as binding doctrines. But this could not be. The doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, rest on precisely the same authority as does the doctrine of the supremacy of the Pope; that is upon decrees of Catholic Councils. To renounce the supremacy of the Pope, therefore, is to renounce the authority on which all doctrines rest, and by which alone doctrinal unity is possible. To leave the Church was to leave unity of faith, and all dogmatic authority behind. To leave the Church and carry off its dogmas with them, was at best to rob the mansion which they were deserting. This is what I meant by saying, in one of my lectures, — that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are synonymous and con- vertible terms. It is literally so. There can be Catholic Orthodoxy; there can be, in the nature of the case, no Protestant Orthodoxy. Protestantism is in itself the denial of the one authority on which Orthodoxy is based; is itself, therefore, the negation of Orthodoxy. Protestantism may amuse itself, if it chooses, with claiming an Orthodoxy of its own; Protestant sects may amuse themselves, if amusement it be, in summoning councils, and chastising rebellious churches, and excommunicating heretics; but it is an idle pastime, which deceives no one, and carries its absurdity on its face. If there be a Protestant Orthodoxy, what is it ? If there be a Protestant Church, where is it? TI, at least, know of neither the one nor the other. JI know of no creed which all Protestantism confesses, I know of no single © article of any creed which all Protestant bodies accepts vl know of no single Protestant confession which all who receive it understand in the same way. The name Protestant Orthodoxy, therefore, is a complete ——— = 203 misnomer; and ought, in all candor, to be quietly laid aside. Protestantism is heresy. Its very essence is heresy. It is rooted in heresy; it is fed by heresy; it bears forever the fruits of heresy. Its very function is to initiate heresy, and legitimate it as the lawful outgrowth of Christianity. Prot- estantism is the authority of the individual soul, as against the authority of the Church; and the authority of the soul is heresy. Heresy is “choice”; the soul choosing its religious belief, and holding it as its own. Behold the end of the whole matter ;—the Church against the Soul; the Pope against human nature ; Orthodoxy against Heresy. All Protestants, then, are heretics. If they are called Servetus or Socinus, they are heretics; if they are called Luther or Calvin, they are heretics as well. If they deny Trinity, Atonement, and Eternal Punishment, they are here- tics; if they accept Trinity, Atonement, and Eternal Pun- ishment, they are heretics as well; for they can accept them only upon the authority of their own reason. In speaking of the several parties into which Protestantism at once and inevitably fell, I have recognized this fact, and classed them “under one head, as so many dissenters from the Orthodox faith. On this common ground all Protestant bodies stand to-day; the only essential distinction between them being that while some frankly accept, others angrily disown, the stigma of heresy. This brings clearly before us the one remaining question which, as I have said, it has been the ulterior purpose of the present course to meet. What is the relation between Christianity itself and Christian doctrines? As we have already seen, if those doctrines are an essential part of our faith, if Orthodoxy of belief is a necessary part of 204 Christianity, then we must have the Catholie Church. Does it not follow then that Catholicism is right and Protestant- ism wrong ? Certainly, I reply: unless we are prepared for the other horn of the dilemma. Let the alternative be stated as sharply as possible, for it must be fairly met. Either Catholicism is right, or doctrine is not essential to Chris- tianity. As true Protestants, of course, our choice is clear. We hold Protestantism to be right ; therefore we must con- clude that doctrine is not essential to Christianity. There can be a pure and true Christian faith without Christian doctrines; without any verbal statements, that is, in which all are forced to unite. I urge this upon you as the legiti- mate meaning of the Protestant Reformation; Doctrine is not an essential part of Christianity, else Catholicism is right and Protestantism wrong. No one will deny that there is a difference between religion and doctrine; between spiritual truths on the one side and mental belief on the other. No one will deny that religion in its purest form can be held without formulating any system of belief. Will any one deny that Christianity is such a religion? No one pretends that primitive Chris- tianity contained any statement of belief. Christianity was content to be a religion, without attempting to become a belief. The Christian Scriptures presented the new faith, and left it, in the form in which it found its first and natural utterance; in the words and acts and lives of. its early apos- tles. ‘Those words and acts might be variously understood, variously felt, variously applied, and might lead to the utmost diversity of thought and belief. They did produce that diversity, among the immediate followers of Jesus 205 themselves. No more vital difference of opinion has ever separated the Christian world, than that which separated Peter from Paul, or Paul from James. Yet no provision was made against this, nor any steps taken against it. The primitive Gospel was left to do its legitimate work; to inspire the souls of men with high purpose and devout aspiration and great longings, and lead them into whatever diversity of thought and interpretation it might. No one can deny that this is so; else, why is it that when Christian doctrines are formed, they are not given us in the words of the Scriptures themselves? Why is it that Chris- tian doctrines and creeds are formed at all? The putting of a single great Christian truth into a doctrine is a confession that the Christian Scriptures contain no doctrine. The sim- ple fact that no single creed, either from the Catholic or from the Protestant side, has ever been drawn bodily from the Scriptures, or couched exclusively in Scripture phrases, is conclusive proof that doctrine is not part of, and therefore not essential to, pure Christianity. Hither Christianity was defective at the start, in a most important point, or doctrine is not an important part of it, but only a superfluous addi- tion. Christian doctrine is a superfluous addition to the Chris- tian religion. It was an afterthought. When the early faith began to bear its legitimate fruits in variety of thought and belief, the leaders of the Church became alarmed. The unity of Christian faith, the authority of the Church, was endangered. That the soul is best employed when it is ‘following its own convictions, and is safest in making its own approaches to God, they could not see. They only felt the immediate danger to outward unity. Hence the specific 27 206 dogma, officially uttered, which all must accept. Hence the addition to the original faith, of a verbal confession, and a command to accept it: At first a smgle doctrine only, to meet a single necessity, it became in time a systematic series of dogmas, involving a complete extra-biblical Scheme of - Salvation. At first the mere vote of a majority of bishops, and carrying simply the weight of numbers, doctrine has become at last the infallible utterance of a divinely-commis- sioned Church: Such was the origin of Christian doctrine; an origin entirely outside of primitive Christianity, and independent of the action of its founders. Christianity itself gives no countenance to this treatment of its truths, offers no prepa- ration for it, supplies no material for it. Christianity itself places every possible obstacle in the way of such treatment. Never was a religious faith harder to formulate; never was the essence of a religion harder to catch and hold; never did specific statements of truth stand in greater need of restatement; never did interpretations more imperatively . demand to be themselves interpreted. Never was the fine spirit of a lofty message more rudely misconceived, than by those who sought to imprison the etherial truths of Chris- tianity in the soulless phrases of a creed. And the endeavor was fruitless after all. Brilliant as seemed at first its success, the hour of, reckoning came, and the pure religion vindicated itself against all its perversions and corruptions. The outburst of the Reformation, and the instant falling asunder of Protestantism into a hundred dif- ferent faiths, meant that the power of dogma is transient, and that there is no permanent religious authority outside the soul. For the wise man no experiment need be twice 207 tried. For fifteen hundred years, the Christian world tried the experiment, under circumstances the most favorable pos- sible, of turning Christianity into a creed; of distrusting reason and providing an infallible authority for the soul; of erasing all theological differences, and effecting unity of belief. The experiment failed disastrously. If we are wise, we shall accept the failure and not repeat the experi- ment. If we are wise, we shall accept the fact and acknowl edge its full significance. It means that dogma is no essen- tial part of religion. It means, not that this doctrine or that is false, but that doctrine as such carries no final authority for the soul. It means that Christianity is really, what it seemed two thousand years ago, not a verbal system, but a religion; and that if it be true religion, it must neces- sarily lead us constantly into new and nobler beliefs. To this conclusion, therefore, we are brought; a conclu- sion which cannot be too succinctly or too simply stated. The future of Protestantism, if future it has, must needs be one of increasing intellectual differences, and constantly multiplying views of spiritual things. The function of Protestantism, if function it has, 1s, once for all and with pride, to accept this diversity of faith as its essential charac- teristic; to forget the terms Orthodox and heretic; to devote itself henceforth to the moral elevation of humanity, and to growth into an ever larger and diviner truth. » ae hs ) pe: ‘: i AS « 4G 0 r) % tay ieee. sa? F bre Sg ¥ Vet ice ae ey +e ; rd oe ee ee ee art yarns aoe wie #-; Hh I ‘ en r ra i NS Py id gy Tihs San Shliilaned 5 ee 1 rile ach>a a aoe” ee oy tae Seve ir > Aa el DP ny oy AA 44... 0) 91 A. YPHA, its personification of ivine attributes, 28. doctrine, 46. ANISM, 186-190. US Views, 188. 50. ulse creed of, 59, 74. BURG, Confession of, 136. STINE, 88. is doctrine of human nature, 95. ic: .4S, his connection with Paul, tment of heretics, 156. 4 . * ee to Ortho- 141, 202. Council of, 71. of, 73, 78. of, among Docete, 35. a Gnostics, 35. in Clem. Homilies, 33. first three Gospels, 22. Fourth Gospel, 26, 29. Ireneus, 34. Justin Martyr, 31. Paul of Samosata,’ 39. -Paul’s Epistles, 24. ae Sabellius 2 38. Tertullian, 36. ions of in New Tes- INDEX. Cuurcn, Carnouic, edict of Theo- dosius concerning, 108. in time of apostles, 7, 101. in time of Augustine, 89, 107. in time of Fathers, 103. its origin, 100. its significance, 114. Cuurcn, only one possible, 115. Cuurcu,; RoMAN, gradual growth of, 109,°110;.118. CLEMENTINE HoMILIES, 18, 33. CONSTANTINE, as head of Nicene Council, 48. CounciILs, Chalcedon, 71. Ephesus (1st), 65. Ephesus (2d), 68. Nice, 48. North African, 94. Sirmium, 55. CRACOVIAN CATECHISM, 184. CYPRIAN, on the Church, 106. D. DocrET#, 35. Doorrinn, not essential to Chris- tianity, 204. DoNATIST CONTROVERSY, 107. Dort, Synod of, 189. E. EBIONITES, 18. ENGLISH CHURCH, 161. Epuesus, First Council of, 65. Second Council of, 68. EUTYCHES, 67. G. GNostics, 34. 210 GosPEL, Fourth, view of Christ in, 26, 29. GOSPELS, first three, view of Christ in, 22. Hy Hoty Spirit, late origin of doc- trine of, 57. Homoousios, how the term came into Nicene Creed, 52. its ideal meaning, 56. once a heretical term, 54. Huss, 121. i INCARNATION, doctrine of, 63: INDULGENCES, 127. IRENZUS, 34. on Church, 104. on human nature, 84. J. JERUSALEM, Council at, 12. JUSTIFICATION BY FaIruH, as the basis of Protestantism, 133. disputes concerning it among Lutherans, 137. JUSTIN MARTYR, 31. his doctrines concerning human nature, 84. ie Lorp’s SuPPER, disputes concerning in Protestant Church, 1388, 149. LUTHER, 125. against the peasants, 135. at Worms, 132. dispute with Zwingli, 148. excommunication of, 131. on the Church, 134. theses against indulgences, 129. LUTHERAN CHURCH, its confessions, —186,-140. its divisions, 137. M. MANICHA&ISM, 91. MAN, nature of, 79. Paul’s doctrine of, 80. views of Fathers concerning, 82, 85. M&ELANCHTHON, 134. MEsSIAH, as presented in first three Gospels, 23. MONOPHYSITE DOCTRINES, 63, 76. "aN. NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY, 63. NESTORIUS, 64. Nice, Council of, 48. NICENE CREED, 58. its character, 57. O. ORIGEN, 39. his views of Church, 105, 110. ce Fall, 83. oe Trinity, 39. ORTHODOXY, equivalent to Catholi- cism, 141, 202. only one possible, 116. Ps PautL, at the Council of Jerusalem, 13. character of his conversion, 6. his view of Christ, 24. parties against him, 15-17. PAUL OF SAMOSATA, 39. . PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY, 86. PELAGIUS, 85. his condemnation, 94. ~** doctrine, 86. PERSECUTION, by Lutheran Church, 140. Protestant theory of, 172. PERSON, nature, substance; arbi- trary distinction between, 75. 211 - Puro, his doctrine of the Word, 28. PrikstTiey, 191. PROTESTANT CHURCH, non-existence of, 144. PROTESTANTISM, equivalent to here- sy, 141, 169, 203. its first doctrinal symbol, 137. R. REFORMATION, beginnings of, 128, 146. in England, 160. eéoitaly, 180. ‘¢ Switzerland, 146. moral character of age preced- ing, 123. — precursors of, 119. REFORMED CHURCH, 156. ROBBER COUNCIL, 68. S. SAaBELLIUS, his doctrine of Trinity, 38. SAVONAROLA, 122. SERVETUS, 156, 158, 174. his religious philosophy, 176. Socrnus, Faustus, 181. his religious system, 183, 184. Lelius, 181. Spirit, Hory, late origin of the doctrine, 57. STEPHEN, cause of his martyrdom, 9. SYNERGISM, 138. he TERTULLIAN, 35. on Church, 105. ‘* human nature, 82, 84. “« Trinity, 36, 38. THEeEODOsIUvS, edict of, 58, 108. THEOPHILUS Of ANTIOCH, 33. TRINITY, arbitrary distinctions its terms, 75. as held by Origen, 39. = Sabellius, 38. Tertullian, 36. first mention of, 36. gradual formation of, 58. not in Nicene Creed, 56. of 66 U. UNITARIANISM, as held by Servetus, 176. ee Socinus, 183. in America, 192. in England, 190. its early appearance, 171. W. Worp, as God, 28, 30. in Apocrypha, 28. ‘¢ Fourth Gospel, 29. ‘¢ Greek Philosophy, 27. Philo’s doctrine of, 28. Zoroastrian doctrine of, 28. WYCLIFFE, 120. Z. ZWINGLI, 147, 178. his relations with Luther, 148. + A iy 3 fi ‘ | ; MMi J ae fi ) eats ; § i hy y . i" Vy A Ryan ony ad $a ay ‘ Tah Ah vol Ae hied MLK Ae i abn h to dest 7 \ Ns Wining : i) CATO MLA ey) yeah) pe) Wl fe jh) y 5 ech Ai Ne iit ie ky} ;: Pe ae ce. 1 neler ys na | ) PRINTED INU-S+A. | DATE DUE GAYLORD it oe 5 ee ats