1 I ! i urn ! H llili I" iiO llililil'iilli ii Slli'l ! ! S II '!j ¦ I ¦ii :i!:,'!i- II II iii 111B "I give theft Bioki: for the founding if it College ir^thif Colony? ¦ EJiiBiiyTOr • 1Q0H SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS c SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS WITH A TREATISE ON THE OEIGIN OF THE EEADEESHIP AND OTHEE LOWEE OEDEES By PEOFESSOE ADOLF HAENACK '•i (translated from the German) WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON THE OEGANISATION OF THE EAELY CHUECH AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE EEADEE By the Eev. JOHN OWEN AUTHOR OF 'EVENINGS WITH THE SKEPTICS ' ' THE SKEPTICS OF THE ITALIAN AND FRENCH RENAISSANCE ' 'VERSE MUSINGS ON NATURE, FAITH, AND FREEDOM,' ETC., ETC. LONDON: F. NOECATE AND CO. 44 SHAFTESBURY AVENUE EDINBUKGH AND GLASGOW : JOHN MENZIES AND CO. 1895 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE There is no need of apology in bringing before our readers a work of Professor Harnack's. His fame is now in ' all the Churches,' and by his writings a great light has been thrown on early Church History. In the German title the expression ' so-called ' occurs ; this I have omitted, as I can hardly imagine that any one will think that by using the phrase ' Apostolic Canons ' I believe them to be of Apostolic origin. Dr. Harnack in the present work gives little attention to them, referring his readers to his edition of the Didache. This work was out of print at the time our translation was made, so it was considered necessary to have some introduction, and the Rev. John Owen kindly consented to write one. I regret that his continued ill-health, which all must deplore, prevented his accomplishment of the task until now. I take this opportunity to sincerely thank Mr. Frederic Norgate and Mr. Archibald Constable for much assist ance and advice. L. A. W. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ix Chap. I. Work of the Editor 2 Chap. II. The Sources forming the Bases of Chapters 16 to 18 of the Apostolic Canons reviewed and explained 7 Chap. III. The Church Government according to Source A of the Apostolic Canons — 1. The Order of Rank of the Offices . 28 2. The Government of the Congregation : the Bishop and College of Presbyters . . 28 3. The Reader .... 38 4. The Deacons . 39 5. The Widows . . .41 Chap. IV. Historical Contents of Source B . .43 Chap. V. The Sources serving as a Basis to Documents A and b with special consideration of the Pastoral Epistles 46 Chap. VI. The Date of the Composition of Documents A and B 52 Supplement on the Origin of the Readership and of the other Lower Orders 54 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON THE ORGANISATION OF THE EARLY CHURCH AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE READER INTRODUCTION If it were required to describe in one word, cumulative and comprehensive, the prevailing and characteristic energy of the nineteenth century, it would be difficult to find a better or more descriptive term than Disintegration. Every human in stitution, political or religious ; every scheme of thought, philosophical, theological, or scientific ; every fabric of long- accredited belief, or tradition ; whatever product of human reason or practical exigency, in short, that can claim appar ently or really characteristics of growth and fixity, has either undergone or is in process of undergoing the most searching investigation and vivisection. These solvent energies are, of course, of the most diversified kind. Heterogeneous in origin and object, they differ no less in modes of application. Where they chiefly resemble each other is in sharing a kind of mutual affinity — a contagiousness of opportunity — by means of which activities of varying kinds seem dominated by a concurrence, more or less accidental and unaccountable, of times and seasons. Now it is obvious that disintegration must have been pre ceded by a prior process — that of integration : the accretion and gradual consolidation of the varying elements and materials which resulted in the ultimate formation. It is not less obvious that this integration may — nay in some cases must — have been a long and protracted process ; that, like cer tain geological processes — e.g., the accumulation of globigerina b X SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS ooze in the bed of the Atlantic — human growths and beliefs of a certain type have taken centuries for their evolution and formation. This fact has, it is needless to observe, an important bearing on subsequent processes of disintegra tion and analysis. Not unfrequently integration implies stagnation. It may even mean the plethora which betokens and announces disease. The fabric which it has taken centuries to build may be constructed, at least in part, of the hay, stubble, and other facile but unworthy materials which go to the formation of so many human erections. Besides, disinte gration does not necessarily imply destruction. It may mean only reconstruction. Probably there have been few movements in human history — few examples, i.e., of disintegration and rein tegration — in which what seemed the best and most durable materials of the old dismantled and demolished structure have not been utilised for the new building. Confining our attention to special forms and directions of this disintegrating energy we note its activity and extreme importance in two departments of human inquiry. 1. It is impossible not to be struck by the disintegration — the relaxing of cohesive elements and ties of all kinds — which has manifested itself in Christian theology, — I mean the accredited and traditional body of Christian doctrine and belief which has obtained in most Christian churches since the time of the Eeformation. 2. Allied with this, yet only partially dependent upon it, has been the corresponding upheaval in traditional and commonly accepted beliefs as to the organisation of the early church. This has been so great as to create almost a reversal of the ecclesiastical theory once current among all the great churches of Christendom. INTRODUCTION xi Two characteristics are common to these two movements. 1. Both are in the direction of freedom, liberty of doctrinal thought and of ecclesiastical action, — freedom in the expres sion of Christian truth, freedom in the choice and arrange ment of those external forms best adapted for its diffusion. 2. Both have been, though not originated, yet largely quickened and sustained, by a continuous current of documen tary and similar discoveries. In no age since the formation of the New Testament Canon have so many original writings, new versions and recensions of older documents, etc., come to light. The importance of this fact is further enhanced by their indis putable genuineness. They form a series of unimpeachable wit nesses unexpectedly called to give evidence in a difficult and long tried case, and, though differing in age, origin, and character, uniting in a testimony more or less corroborative and consentient. Now whether we regard it as a mere historical coincidence, or as a kind of providential " pre-established harmony," it is undeniably true that similar epochs of intellectual excitation — the vehement energising of opposed but mutually interact ing forces — have been marked by a succession of events foreign and extraneous in origin, and stimulating in character and tendency. Thus in the great revival of Hellenic thought that marked and glorified the " age of Pericles," the intellectual ex citation that pulsated and throbbed in Athenian life was due in no small measure to the succession of foreign teachers and thinkers that came from Elea or other Greek colonies, and roused the best Athenian intellects to a fermentation destined to mature in noble effort, and with results on the speculation of civilised humanity conterminous only with its existence. Or aoo? fiov) and aimed directly at the edification of the hearers, than a thousand words prompted by the gift of tongues, but not necessarily adapted to convey instruction to their hearers (1 Cor. xiv. 19). The difficulty of St. Paul's position, and the need of his determined stand against the doctrinal and devotional extravagances of his more enthusiastic converts, are capable of large historical illustration. All the sober-minded leaders of every great religious movement have found the need of restraining the mischievous excesses, and regulating even the more innocent divagations, of an impulsive and unreasoning inspiration. Luther, Calvin, St. Cyran and the Jansenist leaders, the Quaker Barclay, John Wesley, etc., all preferred, like St. Paul, the " gift " of interpretation as distinct from and superior to that of prophecy ; and all applied that gift to restrain the exuberant prophetical zeal of their followers. The scenes that were inevitably enacted in some of those early Christian assemblies before the ferment of conver sion and fresh religious enthusiasm had sobered down into the gravity of a calm reason-guided persuasion are not difficult to imagine. We may, e.g., picture a church of St. Paul's found ing—at all events imbued with his principles on the sub ject of Christian worship — wherein the Eeader or Interpreter — possibly the Apostle himself (1 Cor. xii.) — exercised his vocation. We can readily imagine the tact, the sound common sense, the calm, judicial discrimination — combined, however, with caution in not too severely repressing enthusiasms and energies which might be turned into other and more useful directions — which the Apostle would have employed on such an occasion. We can realise how fittingly such an Interpreter would have INTRODUCTION xix endeavoured to reduce to a solid residuum of edification and practical common sense the frothy declamation or devotional rapture of some young and fanatical convert. Like the severe impartiality of some -enrnrent judge following on the reckless and ex parte rhetoric of an unscrupulous advocate, his reading and interpretation would be directed to extorting what amount of logical coherence and sound sense might haply exist in the impassioned utterances on which it was his duty to comment. We shall have to return to this subject later on, as a characteristic of churches either founded by St. Paul or accepting his free teaching as to the organisation of Christian communities and his entire indifference both as to officials and to ritual, provided only that his first precept on these subjects was duly observed : Ilavra Be eucr^/ioixw? Kai Kara, rd^tv lytveadco. Turning now to those causes and precedent considerations which gave the Eeader, with other officials discharging allied functions, the importance which they clearly enjoyed in most of the early Christian communities, we note first : That the true starting- point of the Christian Minis terial Office must be looked for in the Mission and Character of Christ Himself. One advantage in the restoration of the historical Christ, in the gradual disentanglement of His person and offices from the hierarchical prepossessions with which ecclesiasticism has invested them, in the stress on the essential attributes of His teaching which mark the age in which we live, is that it renders a direct appeal to Himself, to His work and mission, inevitable. With the lessened stress on ecclesiastical and XX SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS dogmatic development now extending itself among thoughtful and reasonable men, we are able to ask, not what names, offices, and functions the church ordained, when towards the end of the second century a kind of dogmatic homogeneousness began to assimilate the creeds and organisations of the various Christian communities, but what offices were a priori likely to be fitting and acceptable for the primary purpose of Christ's mission. The issue thus raised can be solved in more than one way. Thus it might be asked whether Christ in His original beneficent activity was most a Bishop, or Priest, or Deacon ; in other words, whether his rdle of self-enjoined duties resembled in any especial manner that discharged by any one of these functionaries. Curiously enough, one of the first representa tions of Him in any public capacity is as a Eeader in the ordinary service of the synagogue, while references to the Mosaic law, to the Prophetical and other writings of the Old Testament, and to the necessity of their study occur more than once in His parables. Perhaps the true answer might be that Christ united in His own functions the more humane semi- secular and kindly aspects of the three offices. At any rate — and this is a point beyond question or controversy — Christ put Himself in a position of entire equality with His Apostles, and taught them to cherish similar democratic and fraternal relations with those whom they instructed. This was one distinction between the Apostles and the seventy disciples as commissioned by Him and the teachers of and rulers over the Gentiles, that the latter arrogated an authority which the former were forbidden to claim. Their office and functions were ministerial, beneficent, self-sacrificing and subordinate. Their official designation, whose signification survives as well in the Servus Servoruni Dei of Popes as in the plain Minister of Pres- INTRODUCTION xxi byterian and Congregational churches, started with a connota tion of equality, and this, moreover, not of a mere levelling kind, but one that implied subordination and subservience, self-sacri fice and self-effacement. The method and warrant of the Teacher's office as laid down by Christ in precept and example was the experiential persuasion or conviction by which every sane or wise man conceives himself qualified to guide those less sane or wise than himself. It postulated a training into doctrines of a certain import and vitality, and an insight by continued personal communication into a particular spirit and life. Similarly the power and authority of the Healer presupposed a recognition of the Evil which presented itself now as a spiritual ailment, now as a physical infirmity, as well as some power to counteract its maleficent agency in either case. In short, during the earlier and by far the greater half of Christ's mission- work — the portion to which the sending out of the twelve and the subsequent mission of the seventy clearly belong, the conception of ministerial authority was allied with ministerial fitness, and the sole position claimed by Christ with His fellow missionaries was fraternal. This indeed was the tie which bound together not only Christ and His min isters, but all the early Christian missionaries and their hearers ; for it was no mere rhetoric or figure of speech that was conveyed by the words, ' Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother.' If tradition records a subsequent period, when Christ was addressed by His disciples and followers by titles of reverence implying an authority extrinsic and independent of considerations of fitness, etc., the fact may be explained in connection with the correlated and increasing conviction of the Apostles that their master was the Messias, and was thus entitled to those distinctive titles XXU SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS and appellations by which that great and mystical potentate was commonly described by the Jews in the time of Christ. We are now in a position to summarise what may be most fittingly described as partly the missionary rdle, partly the Royal Messianic claims, of Jesus of Nazareth ; and, basing our inferences on what we described as two successive stages of the same spiritual energy, we seem compelled to conclude that Christ's mission was rather to establish a kingdom than to found a church, to construct or set moving, on the lines and with the spontaneous self- determining impulses of reasoning men, an Ethico-Religious society. The object of his labour was in other words not to gather men — first of all, His nation, and secondly, the portions of outlying humanity that might be reached by the Jews — into an ecclesiastical society having special laws or distinctive marks or badges of a doctrinal kind, but into a self-constituted community, owning no other ties or duties than those proceeding from righteous ness and mutual benevolence. The watchword of His mission — the informal condition of entry into His kingdom — was Eeform yourselves (fieravoetTe), which implies much more than the sentiment of penitence or repentance, besides connoting the exercise of volitional energy, which ren dered equally superfluous reliance on extraneous powers or ministrations as well as on any sanctions or considerations of religious or ritualistic acts. Doubtless it had, with other significations, especial reference to the requirements of Messianic times, for it seems to have been employed largely to indicate the permanent change and amelioration of Thought, which according to the best Eabbinical teaching was to mark the advent of the Messias. The sway of a Potentate whose claims to sovereignty were based on justice and righteousness INTRODUCTION XXlll presupposed similar moral conditions on the part of those whom he claimed to rule. Indeed the gradual substitution of ethical for racial and national virtues — such as we find indicated in the later prophets — is one of the most significant marks of progress in the later evolution of Messianic aspiration. But there was nothing in these qualities which imparted a dis tinctive, ecclesiastical or sectarian condition of membership or citizenship, so to speak, to those who possessed them. The requirements were not Jewish or national in any exclusive sense of the term. They were conditions pertaining to humanity rendered obligatory by the elementary needs of social and political life. The requirement, e.g., that men should do to others as they would have others do to them, though obviously transcending the enforcement or compulsion of secular political systems, had nothing of a religiously sec tarian character. The brotherhood — the just reciprocity of human interests and duties of which it formed the principle- was the largest and most profoundly grounded of all the motives to human conduct. It was that of man to man, not of Jew to Jew, still less of religionist to religionist, or sectarian to sectarian.Nor again were these requirements of such a kind as to render necessary an hierarchical guarantee or sacerdotal consecration. Many have regarded with a wonderment falling but a little short of consternation the little stress which in the ministry of Christ is placed upon common worship, or ritual, or any other tie of a religious or doctrinal kind. The prayer He inculcated was the private devotion which harmonised so well with the immediate personal relation which He similarly advocated as that existing between man and God, between the child and his father. It seems doubtful even, whether the XXIV SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS knowledge or use of it was common among the twelve, or that it was ever employed by them as either a private or public ritual. The only religious service, so far as we have any record, in which Christ and His Apostles joined together, was the Hymn with which they concluded their celebration of the Passover, though this was probably no more than the chanted Psalms with which the Paschal feast was concluded in every Jewish household. But it is evident that such an ignoring of congregational union, of doctrinal and devotional bonds, rendered the intervention of ministers or superintendent officers less needful. Christ Himself taught assembled crowds in the open air by the sea shore, or on the mountain side, just as opportunities presented themselves, and we are justified in supposing that the same informal means of instruction were adopted by the Apostles. Indeed it would seem that just as Christ's own method was largely individual istic, so the beginnings of Christian teaching on the part of the Apostles were neither ecclesiastical nor congregational. It was the teaching of separate households, or rather of that person or those members of the family whom the missionary Apostle might judge to be most worthy of his efforts. But if Christ's own rdle and ministry, and that committed by Him to his Apostles, had nothing of the constituent elements of sacerdotalism — was wholly, i.e., free from the ideas and tendencies which are involved in and are likely to develop into systematic ecclesiasticism — the same conclusions are forced upon us by a consideration of the main teachings and methods which are commonly summarised as Christ's ministerial work. At some risk of intruding a subject which a few may deem desultory, while most will regard it as trite, it may be well to glance briefly and comprehensively at the nature of Christ's INTRODUCTION XXV mission. Nothing less than this seems needed, in order to determine the place and functions which the Eeader and similar officials might claim to possess in a community supposed to be founded and organised by Christ, Taking, then, the constituent elements of that work in what we may reasonably regard the order of their importance, we may say that the primary object of His teaching was the inculcation of those qualities and virtues especially needed by the ethical monarchianism which He proclaimed. With the insight of the genuine Eeformer into the thought-tendencies, the aspirations, political, religious, or social, of those who needed reforming — the raw material, so to speak, of the pas sionate enthusiasm which craved not so much suppression as guidance — He took possession of the more vehement impulses of His nation and time, and remoulded and directed them into the motive energies of His own cause. The method He employed, the conditions of its employment, were like those adopted by other great religious teachers — e.g., St. Francis and the great Friar movement, Luther, and Wesley. Here also we find a stir and commotion, based upon a widely diffused and profoundly implanted feeling, which it only needed a prophet or inspired teacher to rouse into action. What the general terror of Christendom at the apprehended nearness of the end of the world effected for the coming of the Friars — what the anti-Papal enthusiasm of Germany did for Luther's mission, and the Pietistic reaction of England against the cold secularism of the eighteenth century accomplished for the work of Wesley and his evangelical allies — that the popular Messianic hope and excitation did for the mission ary work of Christ. How strong that hope was, how fervently that aspiration glowed, is indirectly demonstrated xxvi SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS in the pages of Josephus. The passionate intensity that culminated in the blind and ruthless fanaticism therein recorded is but the religious hopes and national aspira tions to which Christ appealed in the synagogues and popular assemblies of Galilee perversely evolved and too narrowly circumscribed. It is to this large mass of theocratic and patriotic sympathy that we must look for whatever amount of popularity that attended Christ's own preaching and teach ing — the spontaneous parable or discourse, and the comment on accepted traditional texts from Psalms and Prophets, which He compares to the wise steward's " bringing forth from his treasury things new and old." Doubtless, the first aim of His mission work was the spiritual awakening which, based upon ethical and humane duties, imparted to the founding of the new Messianic kingdom a fresh semi-secular stimulus, alto gether new in its concentrated emphasis, to Jewish religious culture. His was no appeal to those principles and motives of religious and moral duty which came into force and rapid maturity after the close of the Maccabaean epoch — the intense and fanatical patriotism, e.g., fostered by the ambitious and rival dynasties of high-priests; the appeal to a Mosaism which had either become a narrow and intolerant ecclesias- ticism, or, taking the Law at earlier stages of its development, laid stress only on its ritual and sacrificial aspects. The reliance on a prophetical call and authority which left little room for individual independence in the sphere of religion or ethics — in a word, all those principles of popular Judaism which aimed mainly at the fixing of some extraneous arbitrary authority, some intervention between the human conscience and its Author, were deliberately and emphatically laid on one side. For the first time as an article of popular Jewish INTRODUCTION xxvii religionism, the subject and the worshipper were placed in im mediate juxtaposition with the supreme object of their allegiance and adoration. That such a position had been achieved by many a psalmist and prophet may be granted ; but this was probably an unusual exotic product of rare individual predis positions cultivated and matured into a culmination of the highest spiritual excellencies. The new standpoint laid down by Christ is evidenced by His new teachings of God and Moses, and by the antagonism of those teachings to the doctrines then current. Probably not the least ineffective method of inferring the main drift of Christ's teachings in cases where direct information might seem inadequate would be to collect and arrange all the propositions, principles, motives, rules of con duct, etc., antithetical to the Pharisaism — the creed of the high-priests, Mosaic legists, and scribes — then current. Thus a summary of all the main points of Christ's teaching might be Teadily compiled by a juxtaposition of the Sermon on the Mount and the chief of the parables with the animadversions, e.g., of the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew. No one who has made such an experiment can fail to be struck by the vigorous, persistent denunciation of all principles, ideas, and dogmas which are the natural and inevitable outgrowths of absolutism in politics and sacerdotalism in religion. Never in the sacred interests of human freedom and equality was there a more explicit and emphatic definition of man's rightful position before God and his fellow-man. Children of a com mon Father — the very idea proclaimed an equality of relation which rendered hierarchical rule on the one hand, or spiritual subordination on the other, sheer impossibilities. Similarly the spiritual enlightenment gradually accruing to the disciples of the New Faith, and through them to the world at large, by XXVUl SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS personal contact with the thought and life of Jesus of Nazareth, was a force which, experience has demonstrated, was not only capable of indefinite advance, but contained in itself the germs of a diversiform and prolific fruitage. The Future of Christ's Christianity. Little is said in the best authenticated teachings of Christ of His own anticipations of the future of His religion. Apart from the mystical, strangely and profoundly suggestive sig nificance of some of His rarer utterances — especially the need of His baptism of fire, or His final lifting up before the gaze of all men — utterances which stood in the same relation to His discourses as the Transfiguration scene did to the ordinary incidents of life — apart also from the spiritualised Messianic form and spirit of His kingdom, we have little to indicate the ultimate shaping and brilliant crystallisation of His Gospel. He seems to have been almost indifferent to every merely external outcome of His teaching regarded as a product of pre-arranged plan and organisation. He never considers the effect of His doctrines on the various creeds and nationalities among which they were destined to circulate. He is wholly unanxious as to connecting links and ties of an external and formal kind by which the Divine and spiritual brother hood of Christians — sons of a common Father — might be formed and sustained. The tree being in its very nature good, its bearing of leafage and fruitage, as well in the pre sent as the future, was unalterably fixed and imperishably perfect. A common collocation of all that was simply noble and ethically great from the first consecration of humanity to God, which was the truth intended to be taught by the call of Abraham and the homely anthropomorphic devotion of the INTRODUCTION xxix patriarchs, constituted what He especially recognised as the main history of the past ; while a common sederunt of all ethically and religiously disposed men of every race and creed with the same Jewish patriarchs was His simple forecast of and aspiration for the future of Christianity. The traditional consecration of the Jewish nation in Abraham and Moses indicated His view of the religious commencement of time ; the final reunion of humanity in a broader spiritualised and Mes- sianised religious and moral culture furnished His conception Of ETERNITY.1 It is partly the result of this commingled simplicity and severity — the spiritual depth and purity of Christ's Gospel combined with its instinctive insight into the essential needs of mankind — that, though it has already come into contact with forms of civilisation, of ethical, philosophical, and religious systems of every conceivable type, its natural effect has been not so much to destroy, to contravene, to antagonise and falsify what had originally been born of human ideas and instincts, as to reconstruct and re-establish that moiety of them which might justly claim to be heaven-born and Divine, to transform and hallow what was corrupt, to strengthen and corroborate what was weak, to terrestrialise what was ethereal, to humanise what was transcendental; in a word, to affiliate human wishes ideas, and interests to what had hitherto been conceived as exclusively and altogether Divine and celestial — a kind of Kevaxrt.'i of the universal Divine into the universal Human. It is instructive to note that this conception of the universal regeneration of the world through Christianity closely assimi lates its object to the divine task of philosophy as that was 1 Something of this kind seems also to have been the opinion of St. Paul with reference to the final renovation of Judaism as the ultimate consumma tion of all things. See below. XXX SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS conceived and defined by the great teacher of ancient Greece — I mean Socrates — who described the true object of human knowledge and research as the bringing down philosophy from heaven to earth. So far as this object has been energised for, whether by pagan philosophers or Christian teachers, so far has the great aim of philosophical and religious culture — the object of truth inquiry — rightly asserted itself as its noblest, divinest consecration ; and it is because men of either type, philosophers or religionists, scientists or Christians, have for gotten or neglected this true end of their mission, that they have deviated from their true course, and misinterpreted the reasons and conclusions of which they claimed to be the masters and teachers. On the other hand, this accepted and unquestionable fact supplies us with grounds for hope that the God-given task of Christianity in the past gives us an earnest of its best work in the future. We must remember that the correlation of causes and effects is unaffected, other things being equal, by differences in time or variations in space. As a condition of mental evolu tion, of progressive change, the latitude and longitude of Palestine have no advantages over those of Italy or Greece. Eegarded as a primary law of matter, of light e.g., the phe nomena presented by its varied manifestations must needs be ever and always the same. Let us suppose, for example, that in the gradual processes of creation, of the different manifesta tions of light— sun, moon, and starlight — each was at first only occasional and temporary, observers would have to determine its qualities and results by inferring ulterior and probable effects from those already experienced, to conclude, in other words, future results from those actually and finally ascertained of the past. Such an inductive observation would soon deter- INTRODUCTION XXxi mine that the nature of light, in relation, let us say, to the visual organs of sentient creatures, was necessarily always and ever the same. Similarly the nature and energy of Truth, or the religious and spiritual enlightenment of humanity, as to which Christ's Gospel might be comprehensively defined as its supreme culminating point, manifested itself ever as possessing the same form and growth, the same nature and essential characteristics. There are, however, some remarks deserving notice in our present consideration of Christ's actual Eevelation in relation — I. to the Christianity of the past— that commonly identified with and historically described as the Christianity of the Church ; and II. to whatever modifications, ecclesiastical or mainly secu lar, it may appear likely to undergo in the future. I. Summarising the evolution of the Gospel in relation to its organisation, official character, and Divine intention, by estimating the result of its activities and operations from the standpoint of Christ Himself, we must allow that it was not successful ; that it failed to fulfil, in a straight, undeviating course, the anticipations of Christ Himself. Doubtless, an organisation founded on a community of belief and aspiration — belief in the speedy evanishment of the present age Judaism ; aspiration for the new world and dynasty of the Messias — gradually evolved itself. A church, if we can only divest the term of most of its ecclesiastical connotations, came into being. A centre point, with centrifugal and centripetal forces, like one of our solar planets, assumed a position of fixity, around which circulated fitfully and irregularly new life and thought and energy ; and it would be worse than foolish to suppose that these slowly engendered activities operated irrespectively XXXII SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS of the natural laws that govern the world. They were con ditioned and stimulated by causes which, in all such periods of religious excitation, come to the forefront of speculation. There is, in short, an undeniable commixture of what is ordi nary, natural, and commonplace, and what is marvellous and mysterious, in the origin of the Christian Church. Nominally a kingdom has become founded, with the opportune advantages, at such a critical period, of ideas and institutions which har monised with all that was dearest to Jewish thought and feel ing. The kingdom, e.g., must have a king. Its qualifications are permanently religious and spiritual on the one hand, broadly and humanely ethical on the other. As long as these primary conditions are observed, nothing more is required. The form of the universal monarchy is purposely left. free. Its detailed organisation is a matter of small importance ; the act of worship, the religious rite, the verbal form of prayer, are matters of no importance. The spread of its doctrine, its influence and power — all are left to its own self-determination, and to the forces in natural operation at the time, moving along the line of least resistance. Its best teachers are charged to bring forth from their treasury things new and old. The world-history will, in other words, furnish examples and illus trations in ample number of the wholesome effect of freedom and tolerance in the domain of thought and belief. By the selfsame principles the world of humanity will become regene rated. A new heaven and a new earth will gradually disclose and mould themselves on the ruins of the old. The apoca lypse towards which Christianity has been advancing for twenty centuries will by degrees unfold its varied glories, its perennial beauty and majesty, and, more than aught else, the calm and serenity which comes from the conviction that man- INTRODUCTION XXX111 kind has attained finally and for ever the supreme altitude of devout piety, the conviction of the noblest human duty of which it is, by reason of its highest instincts and energies, rendered capable of reaching. II. We may hence conclude that whatever progress thought or speculation is destined to make in the future, whatever extent of amplitude, expansion, and profundity may await physical science or metaphysical philosophy, this will remain unaffected by the relation which the primary principles and precepts of Christianity have always borne to extraneous departments of human speculative theory and practical conduct. The constitution of the universe on the one hand, and of man's faculties, broadly interpreted,on the other, can never be nullified, nor indeed can they be even modified so as to alter their mutual relations. The duties men owe to the eternal beneficent Power which they entitle God, as well as to those immovably suggested by their spiritual instincts and the voice of conscience, must ever remain in essentials permanent and indestructible, and the fundamental basis of Christianity must for the self-same reason be regarded as Eternal. The fuller recognition, the ampler expansion, of this Truth will form the coming of Christ's Kingdom. Such a recogni tion in the future development as in the earliest youth of the Gospel will be independent of any particular organisation or official arrangement of the Christian churches. The Christian world is becoming, let us say, too old and grey-headed to be moved by questions which concern only the expediency of adopting one kind of organisation or one set of officials instead pf another. Controversies on the subject of bishops, priests, and deacons are becoming almost as antiquated as those on the solar systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus. But the position xxxiv SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS of the Eeader in the early Christian church will ever retain some portion of interest for those " on whom the ends of the world are come." Since Christianity as long as it is a creed, as long as it is connected by ties of the most tenacious kind with the history of the past, must always need an instruction, there may, for that reason, be in the office of Eeader and Preacher — in the instruction which it is their primary object to convey — a resuscitation of an earlier state of things, and the primary duty of the Christian teacher may become — more in the future than what it has been in the past — a vast and varied instruction, truthfully and impartially selected from every field of human knowledge, science, and intelligence, so that the Christian teacher will be exercising his highest functions when he draws from a treasury, growing with appalling speed and opulence into something like an Immensity, things new and old. The Commission of the Twelve and its relation to the subsequent official organisation of the church, especially to the office of eeader. Eeturning now to our historical survey, and assuming for the time being that a part of Christ's mission work was an arrangement of officials or ministerial functionaries adapted for its continuance and extension, it is important to ascertain the direction of qualification — the disposition and temperament, intellectual, moral, and social, which commended itself to Christ as especially suitable for His purpose. Here, it is obvious, our starting-point must be the call of the Twelve, and the charge of grace and duty committed to their keeping. Such a charge must, we may feel well assured, have been preceded by some measure of preliminary training. The INTRODUCTION XXXV method and substance of Christ's own teaching had to be reproduced by the Apostles. What they had seen Him do when He took part in the religious services of the synagogue in Galilee and elsewhere they must imitate. Especially the office of the Eeader had to be discharged. Favourite texts and passages from the Psalms, the Deutero-Isaiah,the later prophets, most of them with a traditionally Messianic significance, were adduced after the manner of theii Master. Emphasis had to be laid on the new acceptation of God's relation to man. The Universal Father instead of the Theocratic Euler of the Jews ; the equality and fraternity of men of every race ; the near approach of the new kingdom based on the fundamental truth of this new brotherhood, together with the initial mark of individual fitness — " Be self-reformed, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand " — constituted a starting-point and stimulus common to the Twelve as to their divine Teacher. The humane and semi-secular character of Christ's own work was reflected in the mission of the apostolate as well as signified in the charge by which that mission was authoritatively assigned. In point of fact, Christ's own description of His mission as given to the Baptist is, almost word for word, a recapitulation of His charges to the twelve apostles and the "seventy others": "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have the Gospel preached to them," the principal difference being the especial power Christ bestowed on the Twelve of casting out unclean spirits — the exorcism which formed so large a part of Jewish therapeutics. In all these charges and descriptions we discern . 1. The true character of the ministry of human beneficence of the highest type. XXXVI SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS 2. The revelation incidentally made of the dual source of man's health and general well-being, and the capacity of pro moting by the self-same sanitary measures the health of body as of mind and spirit. No words could better describe the mission of the Twelve than the homely, pithy account of Christ's own work and its inspiring source : " He went about doing good, for God was with Him." The activity thus implied was the imparting, by means of persuasive power and spiritual vigour and earnest ness, a conviction founded on the double grounds of reason and feeling, and inducing a calm and yet stern spirit of self-determination and equanimity. Without such stable foundations the advice to self-reformation, the preparation for the citizenship of the Messianic kingdom, would have been nugatory and idle. We may assent to this without forgetting that the fervid yearning for the expected kingdom as a terrestrial dominion in which patriotism and the warm glow of national feeling varied occasionally with the lurid flames of religious exclusiveness and intolerance, was in most cases the doubtful motive to M'hich the twelve apostles were forced to appeal. In the passionate intensity of Messianic hopes, stimulated by the perpetually increasing dread of foreign subjugation, every principle or motive impulse that stirred the mind from its lethargy was found to be efficacious, no matter how extravagant or ideal were the objects held out before it as of possible attainment. Eegarded as a question of official organisation, the mission of the Twelve is important for more than one reason : (1) it proves beyond question or cavil the semi-secular character of the first missionaries of Christianity. All their appeals to their authority founded on the name of Christ, as well as their INTRODUCTION xxxvii methods of instruction, were removed as far as might be from those of sacerdotalism as it was presented either by the well- matured development of the Jewish synagogue or by the still more formidable ritual of the Christian Church of the second century. We have no record of any system of doctrinal teach ing employed by the twelve, nor of any forms of liturgical or Christian worship adopted in their popular ministrations. We are not even certain, as already remarked, whether the Lord's Prayer was ever used on public occasions ; — indeed, it would almost seem, both by the terms in which its use was enjoined, together with the stress generally laid on private prayer, that this especial form was limited to the disciples just as a similar model of devotion was taught by the Baptist to his own private circle of followers. But in the absence of any pre scribed authoritative or exclusive usages, whether in the way of teaching or acts of worship, the function of the Twelve becomes essentially non-ecclesiastical, and the office in the Jewish synagogue and among the earlier communities of Christianity to which it chiefly approximates is that of the Eeader, i.e., not the original teacher, but the commentator on already prepared and received texts and teachings. The apostles were also applied to in all cases of infirmity in the fullest sense of the term. Powerlessness, torpidity, whether moral or physical, — incapacity, in short, of whatever kind, or from what soever cause arising, — was the weakness or inability for good which these physicians essayed to convert into virile vigour and ethical manliness, the new spiritual health and sanity of those who hitherto had been diseased. No distinction was recognised, such at least as would have required an entire difference of treatment between the mental and spiritual ailment on the one hand and the physical disease on the other. A spirit of xxxviii SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS infirmity was a feebleness which might possess and weaken either mind or body. Indeed, if the possession of an unclean or decrepit spirit was diagnosed, it mattered little whether its presence and the resultant need of exorcism was expressed in terms of matter or in terms of spirit. The spirit of infirmity, e.g., which had for many years bound down a victim to debility, was but the physical synonym of Satan, who had manifested his customary malevolence against a daughter of Abraham for the same period. Exorcism as practised by Jewish medici, who in this respect were imitated by the Christian apostles, Was resolvable into one single indivisible operation. The casting out of the evil spirit, if it entailed a moral regeneration, a strange and mysterious new birth, was also attended by the repair of the physical defect, the renewal of the bodily senses which had been lost by disease. " When the devil was gone out the dumb man spake " is the authenticated report of a case which is described as the casting forth of a deaf and dumb spirit. Conversely, leprosy, blindness, palsy, lunacy, etc., were names of diseases manifested by physical symptoms but reputed to be spiritually curable by exorcism. All nervous diseases or ailments characterised by debility, torpor, defective vitality, etc., were the supposed malign energies of evil spirits, and undoubtedly formed the sphere of therapeutics in which the Christ-trained activities of the Twelve were most actively employed. " Eaise the dead " was the most remarkable injunc tion in the apostolic charge, and if there were only one well attested instance of the success of such a thaumaturgic commission the Evidences of Christianity would have occupied a very different position to-day from that in which they are placed by reasonable and thoughtful men. But this notorious absence of any one such instance, combined with the meta- INTRODUCTION xxxix phorical usage of the word " death " for all kinds of spiritual torpidity (exemplified especially in the words " Let the dead bury their dead ") reflects a flood of light not only on this par ticular passage but on the generally metaphorical method of describing the beneficent wonder-working of the twelve apostles. This, however, does not exhaust the whole of the semi- secular activity of the twelve apostles. Besides their labours of healing, especially their task of imparting new mental and spiritual strength to those who had need, they exercised their office of direct instruction. We may assume, without fear of contradiction, that this function consisted largely in reproducing the teachings of their Master. The parables, the \6yia they had heard him deliver in the synagogues, the reproductions of Messianic texts, together with His own comments on them, and especially the spiritualising of their sensuous content and meaning, — in short, the function of the Twelve, both in their first mission and in any subsequent mission of which we have no record, was closely akin to that of the Eeader in the Jewish synagogue, and the same office as it became gradually differentiated in the Christian communi ties during the latter half of the second century. We shall see a little further on how much the diaconate contributed to this differentiation by its own semi-secular character — by that aspect of Christian beneficence which gave particular attention to the sick and needy, as well as by that feature of Christian instruction which was content to interpret already received texts and traditions rather than require spontaneous and perpetual novelties in Christian doctrine. Briefly, so far as the mission of the Twelve may be regarded, exceptis excipiendis, as affording a precedent for the official xl SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS organisation of the church in after times, the standpoint of office, the analogies of interests and duties, point to the official status and occupations of the Eeader much more closely than to those of the Overseer, the Sacrificing Presbyter, the Prophet or Inspired Teacher, or any other among the various offices which different Christian churches and communities evolved for the satisfaction of their different needs. The Mission of the " Seventy Others." Few incidents in the traditional life and teaching of Christ — especially in reference to its missionary character — are more puzzling than the sending forth of the seventy disciples, the " seventy others," as they are called — perhaps more in subordina tion of rank than of any other kind of distinction from the twelve. Independently of the fact that the passage occurs nowhere else in the Synoptics, and that there is no overt allusion to it in the Acts of the Apostles, the alleged event is surrounded by difficulties of the most formidable kind. These are, generally speaking, indirect and circumstantial. Given the whole of the data, in the amplest possible manner, and with as great an approach to exactitude as would be attainable in the most bewildering complexity of various and inconsistent pro babilities and semi-likelihoods — and we are no nearer historical truth, attained by the customary laws of historical evidence, at the end of a long investigation than we were at starting. Given, e.g., Christ's own ministerial activity from His baptism, the environment in the way of popular culture and Messianic enthusiasm which formed the seed-plot of His Gospel, the opposition which the spiritualisation of Mosaism would work among the more educated classes ; the appeal which Christ had for that very reason been compelled to make to the un- INTRODUCTION xl educated and half-superstitious, etc. etc., — to discover, train, discipline and establish some eighty-two teachers (twelve apostles plus seventy others) competent to instruct the rude denizens of Galilean villages and country towns in the rudi ments of a system of ethics and religion capable of becoming by natural evolution and expansion the sublimest scheme of culture — divine and human — which had ever been presented for the consideration and acceptance of mankind. We may imagine in some supposed given instance the coming of a pair of these itinerant preachers, like a brace of Franciscan monks some centuries afterwards ; or like a couple of Quaker minis ters or Methodist ' locals ' in still more modern times placidly confronting the excitable natives of an English village in the Midlands somewhere about the middle of the eighteenth cen tury. If the fame of Jesus of Nazareth had preceded them, they would have found their task easier. That there was an active circulation of rumours when these pertained to religious and political topics is abundantly shown by Josephus, and on no subject was the hearing of the Jewish or Eoman patriot more acute than the reported rising of a new claimant to Messianic honour and power. Any fresh arrivals from among the seventy might therefore make sure of a good audience who announced their intention of introducing to their notice the new and superior claims of this same Jesus of Nazareth, whose wonderful cures and exorcisms had long been the objects of country-side gossip. Granted the possibility of this large body of more or less trained teachers, the difficulty of finding audiences — multitudes that pressed upon them to hear the ' Word of God ' — would not have been very great. The indebtedness of Christ to fame and rumour, notwithstanding His own injunctions to preserve His marvellous works in the d xiii SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS strictest secrecy, forms a remarkable feature of His mission work. But this concession of eighty-two itinerant advocates of the Messianic claims of Jesus Christ and the genuinely miraculous character of His works involves us in difficulties so great as to be wellnigh insuperable. It seems therefore not unreasonable to look about us for some theory that would at least help to lessen the strain on probability that it must be said to entail. In harmony with similar exegetical adjust ments which have been successfully applied to meet corre sponding difficulties in the Old Testament, we might even venture to suggest that we have here a retrospective reference to the Acts of the Apostles and to the account there given of the institution of the Seven Deacons. That the two books came from the same pen has always been an undenied accept ance of Ecclesiastical History. That the books manifest traces of a mutual relation,. and occasionally of a mutual adjustment and dove-tailing of incidents, statements, etc., partially corre spondent each with the other, has also been admitted by later critics. Hence there is the less difficulty in conceding that the mission of the seventy in the Gospel is not the primary but the secondary form of the crude bare assertion that the Diaconate with its seven members was an institution founded in the lifetime of Christ himself with — as the customary numerical enhancement so common to the Jews — the multiplica tion of the original number by ten. The latter increase was further suggested and facilitated by the fact that the sum thus obtained brought up the total number of the seventy disciples of Christ to the seventy or seventy-two which had long since become a kind of sacred sum total in the case of any aggregate of remarkable personages or assemblies. We must, however, bear in mind that the suggestion thus INTRODUCTION xliii indicated need not be taken for more than it stands for. It merely sets forth as a possible hypothesis that the narrative of the mission of the seventy as we find it in St. Luke may be a retrospective evolution of or allusion to the early story of the institution of the Diaconate. After some kind of organ isation had been established in the early church with some thing like a subordination of functionaries, it was only natural to search for a lower office which should constitute the first step in the ministerial order as supposedly arranged by Christ. This could only have been an inferior grade of disciples, such as the disciples, and especially the seventy, ostensibly was. A crude distinction of this kind seems hinted at in the difference continually suggested between the apostles and the unqualified disciples, as well as in the overt assertion that the apostles were chosen from the general mass of the disciples, and that they had in especial cases certain names conferred upon them typifying qualities or functions. The subsequent stress upon these names, as, e.g., in the case of Peter, must be accepted with caution, both as being incon sistent with contemporaneous circumstances, and as indicating tendential attributes and designs too markedly ecclesiastical to be received without circumspection. What is however to be noted in reference to this mission of the seventy, and which will again reappear when we come to the formal institution of the Diaconate and similar subordi nate grades in the ministerial organisation of the church, is that the functions of the seventy were of a semi-lay character ; that these disciples did not exercise sacerdotal or priestly functions of any kind ; that their duties were rather of a didactic instructive kind ; that, in other words, their duties were largely those of Readers, whether in the synagogue or in xliv SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS the early Christian churches. They would not have presumed to start new doctrines or formulate new liturgical usages. They were merely commentators on traditional texts, or books or forms. The Master's injunction, especially the cardinal precept : " Eeform yourselves, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," constituted itself the prime condition of admission. When this was accompanied by every needed kind of general beneficence or charity, forming a general tie of goodness, grati tude, and reciprocity among men, and a profound and devout acknowledgment towards God as the Universal Father of all men, every condition of thought and activity seemed satisfied on which a man's Christianity could be made to depend. No more elaborate organisation of ministers, no greater or fuller systematisation of dogmas, no mere aesthetic artistic symbolism of liturgical forms, no other moulding or shapement of word or thing, earthly or heavenly, human or divine, could be set forward as the highest possible conception of the supremest religion. What the future of Christianity might have been, with only the starting points of the missions of the twelve and the seventy to give it vitality and sustaining power, it is not worth while guessing, but with these germs naturally developed, as we might in imagination conceive them, we should have escaped some of the dire evils to which an elabo rate sacerdotalism consigned Christendom for some centuries of its greatest perversion and darkness. The Post - Eesurrection Commission of Hierarchical Supremacy on the one hand and Submission on the other. No consideration of the institution of the Christian minis try would be complete that did not take into account the well- INTRODUCTION xlv known injunction, " Go ye into all the world," etc. etc. Its importance consists in the liturgical and dogmatic additions to the general precept of preaching the Gospel, a command ment which we dare not say includes more than the injunction to reformation in preparation for the kingdom of Christianity. But in regarding the passage as a whole, and bearing in mind (1) the stress that sacerdotalists have in every age of Chris tianity placed upon it as containing the central principle of their faith ; and (2) the strange, ominous, and even fatal con trast between its spirit and the general spirit of the thought and teaching of Christ, we seem suddenly confronted by a dilemma of the most startling kind : viz., either the injunction is genuine and its mode of presentation authentic, or the teaching of Christ as contained in the other portions of the Synoptics is false and inconsistent in the highest possible degree. The change, e.g., from some notable passages in the Synoptics is like that which we experience when we pass from the cool breezy hillside of a Scotch mountain to the heated sickly clammy atmosphere of a house built for the forcing of exotics. No doubt the spirit of the post-resurrection commission is one that we are destined to meet in subsequent years of Church History ; but it is one which we discover when Ecclesiasti- cism has grown rampant, when the neglect, however in advertent, of some ritual usage is marked with punishment of the most cruel kind — the death accorded to the unbaptized in the decisions of all patristic Ehadamanthuses being always eternal. It is difficult to express in language of adequate strength the absolute unqualified contradiction between the spirit of extreme intolerance, the reliance upon a superficial yite as a condition of salvation, and on a state of non-belief in Christian doctrines as involving a penalty of eternal damna- xlvi SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS tion,— in short, the essential principles of sacerdotalism, and the generous tolerance and forbearance which accepted moral conduct, and virtual belief in all forms of goodness (i.e. Christianity) — in brief, the genuine articles of the best creed of cultured non-sacerdotal humanity. So great, indeed, is the contradiction, so overpowering the difficulty, of allowing these utterances of one human voice or exponents of one ostensibly single human life-conduct to remain in such flagrant dis sonance, that the suggestion has been made more than once to get rid of the incompatibility by destroying its most aggressive member. Here again we have only to read the after history of the Christian Church into its alleged contemporaneous record. We have only to bear in mind the sacerdotalism of the second or third centuries — and earlier than this we cannot trace our Gospels as connected documents — to enable us to recognise in the supposed post-resurrection commission a law of a church dominated by ecclesiasticism, where the due confession of faith preceded in every case the initiatory rite, where the non-acceptance of the Christian creed involved eternal damna tion, where the ritual act was held to override the conduct or the life of the Christian, and where the authority of the priest was absolute over the life and death of the people. At all events, and this we must deem to be a matter of con gratulation, less and less stress is now being laid on this post- resurrection commission and the unqualified authority it is supposed to commit to the Christian ministry either in the way of formulating creeds or in promulgating authoritative ecclesiastical punishment for the non-acceptance, or only partial acceptance, of the creeds in the way that Church authorities or Councils have thought fit to impose them. Gradually the contradiction between the thought and ten- INTRODUCTION xlvii dencies which animated the work of Christ, and those which permeate this alleged commission, is disclosing itself, and at last men feel that there is an irrconcileable discrepancy be tween the unconsciously revealed spirit of the life and a tradi tion biassed by hierarchical evolution between the Christism of the Founder and the ecclesiasticism of the Church. The Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles on the Ministerial Organisation of the Early Church. The critical value of a book or document is often obscured by its excessive familiarity. Although it is known to have a function of enlightenment, its illustrative power is the less because too great for the organs or uses employing it. On the question, e.g., of ministerial organisation in the earliest Christian communities, the New Testament books which transcend in importance all the rest are the Acts of the Apostles and the chiefest and best accredited of the Pauline epistles, and yet it is but rarely that these are referred to — at least with a full recognition of their authority — as decisive of the question. Hence, supposing that all Christendom knew of ecclesiastical history, especially in reference to the official organisation of the Christian Church, had been the period covered by the church councils, what a curious revulsion of feeling would be caused by the discovery of some document em bodying the church history of the Acts of the Apostles and the mission work of St. Paul ! Instead of finding a pre-ordained threefold order of ministers which had from the beginning been established by Christ and held rule in the Church, we should discover only one order which could in any legitimate manner claim to be instituted by Christ, i.e. the apostolate of the xlviii SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS twelve. This had no other or diviner control than might be implied in the providential rule over such terrestrial chances as casting lots. Doubtless we might believe in a divine con summation of terrestrial events when the data for their accom plishment are more or less of a gambling kind, and the choice of the earliest successor to Judas by casting lots might have as strong an element of chance as any of the other gambling methods by which his later successors have been chosen — as, e.g., the political party that happened to be in power — when some bishop of the English Church had to be appointed. Besides the Twelve, the other order was that of the Diaconate. Seven were chosen for lay or mixed duties in connection with the Church — not improbably, as we have already suggested — with an eye to the seventy disciples of St. Luke. Probably the duties of the Eeader, as they afterwards came to be defined, belonged more to the functions of the Twelve than to those of the Seven, i.e., the ministry of the word and prayer, though there is an obvious danger of dogmatising on the point. The offices of the Eeader's attendance on and instruc tion of the sick made the reading of and commenting on certain passages duties of primary importance. But the chief point of general diagnosis in this general conspectus is the entire absence of anything like an universally accepted order or arrangement of Christian ministers. The traveller bent on investigating the chief centre points of Christian growth or progress such as they existed in the churches of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Upper Egypt, might journey from one rising Christian community to another without scarcely a single reminder that there was anything like a systematising either of Christian doctrines, or modes of worship, or minis terial order. Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, Joppa, Tyre, INTRODUCTION xlix Sidon, Corinth, Ephesus, Athens, Eome, Alexandria, etc., were in each case independent centres of Christian thought and Christian life. The only points of contact were : (1) a community, often vague and vacillating, of Christian tradition ; (2) some recognised association with one of the twelve ; (3) a persuasion more or less lively of the approach of the Messianic kingdom and of the expectation that Jesus himself would shortly come to judgment ; (4) a feeling largely derived from the oral and traditional teachings of Christ of primary Christian truths, such as, e.g., the universal fatherhood of God, his equal acceptance of all goodness as constituting a claim on His fatherly regard, the need for all men of repentance and self-reformation — such teachings as, in a word, we know to have been retailed from one church to another, just, as in point of fact, St. Paul's epistles were similarly trans mitted until in due process of sifting and collection each main church had its own especial anthology, its own choice selection of logia, oral sayings, parables, discourses, and sentences, which became its own ethical and doctrinal basis, and constituted its contribution to one or other of the Synoptic Gospels when these came to be arranged in a documentary form. There was thus, as we may readily see, a free interchange of opinion on all points connected with Christianity, whether regarded as a doctrinal scheme or a tradition of history. Further, room was left for the expansion of Christian opinion on most points of doctrine in harmony with peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of individual churches. Thus, to take the most prominent example of all : the Palestinian churches remained until after the fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews under the influence if not actual domination of the twelve. Some of the Syrian churches were similarly allied with those of Palestine 1 SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS for reasons of community of race, language, or commerce. On the other hand, the Christian churches which were surrounded and influenced by Gentile opinion as, e.g., Eome, Athens, and Corinth, assimilated those elements in Christian tradition which were less removed from ideas which they had already dis covered in their Gentile training. As an example of this freedom of Christian teaching as well as an illustration of the autonomy and self-dependence of early Christianity in the arrrangement of its officials, we have the striking instance of St. Paul. Unconnected with the twelve ; knowing nothing of the seven deacons but as objects and partial victims of his fanatical and murderous hatred ; unversed in Christian teaching whether at the lips of Christ or of His apostles ; instructed only in just those elements of Pharisaic Judaism which were most opposed to the characteristic teachings of the gospel, Paul had all the qualities of spontaneity and self-centred freedom that any man could have. So far, indeed, as human external authority was concerned, or conformity to a pre-arranged system of ministerial order or gradation, nothing could be further from him than a submissive recognition of either. It is impossible to over estimate the value of a precedent like St. Paul on the side of freedom, of religious activities in vigorous automatic operation, and strong individual idiosyncrasies acting proprio motu with out any human coercive influence from without, especially when dogmatic forces were exercising an unduly hardening power over the religious thought and life. St. Paul, as has often been pointed out, is the compeer of those self-impelled eccentric spirits whose spontaneous energies have from time to time given new life to Christianity — however perverted that life may have occasionally been — such men, e.g., as Ignatius Loyola, St. Benedict and St. Francis, Luther, George Fox, and INTRODUCTION li Wesley. Especially great is St. Paul's influence on the ques tion of the Christian ministry. We have already glanced at this point, without however doing more than touching the fringe of the subject. Self-impelled as St. Paul was, at least in respect of human and objectively cognoscible agencies.it is easy to see that there was in reality no limit to the freedom he was prepared to grant in respect of the ministerial order of the Church. From his own standpoint of Christian liberty, and with his final standard of expediency and utilitarianism, there was no unbending rule in the names and functions of officials, in the order they were required to maintain, in their mutual agree ment as respects modes of worship, etc. The only mode of government which he recognised was congregational — each church consisting of a community of Christians, most of them baptized, but including a number of catechumens and candi dates who shared only a general agreement with the worship and government of the church. With these ideas of essentials in respect of church government and discipline, we cannot be surprised to find, as already remarked, different catalogues of ecclesiastical officers and functions, each list being mainly determined, so far as we can see, by circumstances and condi tions of a special and local kind. The cosmopolitan suscepti bilities which rendered the apostle on the intellectual and spiritual side of his character so ready to become " all things to all men if by any means he might gain some " found a point of support and alliance in the physical temperament which so largely prompted his missionary enterprise. It is rare that the genuine geographer, in whom universalist instincts and foreign humanitarian sympathies have been fully aroused, permits the induration or limitation of one side or aspect of his "travelled Iii SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS heart." The enlightenment of half-secular sensibilities and a generally informing culture refuse to exclude the religious attributes and spiritual affinities from the sum total of geographical information. Conversant as St. Paul was with the race, history, development of Athens, Eome, Ephesus, it was inevitable that he should compare points of general interest, for purposes of harmony or the reverse, with the salient features of the nascent Christianity. What doctrines or characteristics in the new creed, e.g., would be especially acceptable to men who had been nurtured on such different phases of Gentile culture as would have been presented, to take a few selected instances, from such well-known types as Eome, Corinth, and Antioch \ Not only would there be preferences or repulsions with respect to intellectual aptitudes and idiosyncrasies, but varieties of aesthetic, artistic, and sentimental tastes would have to be consulted and provided for. In other words, not only would the essentials of Christ's teaching — or doctrines that were so understood by St. Paul — have to be considered, allocated, and adjusted with reference to already existing differences and intellectual specialisations, but even the petty externalities, the lightly woven fringe of delicate outward adornment, as pre sented in the modes and graces of liturgical forms and usages, the gradations, dress, and vessels of duly appointed officials, were arranged in accordance with recognised proclivities partly inherent partly acquired. It is needless to add that whether considered in reference to doctrine, to official organisation and arrangements, to liturgical usages and forms of worship, there was no definite limit, no rigid rule in theoretical fittingness or customary practice, which gave to one ministerial order or function any essential superiority over the rest. In all the Pauline churches — those that were founded by St. Paul or INTRODUCTION liii some one of his confidential ministers, or lastly, those which could claim to be ruled by the principles laid down in a recognised epistle of the great apostle of the Gentiles, there existed therefore an absolutely unrestricted liberty in respect of grades of ministers and forms and rules of worship, while the sole restriction left — that in doctrinal teaching — was conceived in such a form, with a wholesome stress on ethical rather than on purely speculative requirements, that the general result was to impart to his interpretation, of Christianity a harmony sometimes strange and unexpected with certain aspects of Gentile teaching. Indeed the analogies and affinities between certain of the ideas and aspirations of the apostle, and the more penetrative and profounder conceptions — intellectual and spiritual — of the best Greek thinkers from Plato to Plotinus, are among St. Paul's most remarkable characteristics, and even now await a much ampler investiga tion than has hitherto been bestowed upon them. Con fining ourselves to our special subject — St. Paul's relation to ministerial or official organisation as it existed in the Christian communities of his time we may bear in mind : — I. The apostle's own idiosyncrasy. The basis of his mental character was intellectual and spiritual idealisation; the motive-force of his mental energy was a direct vis viva of mystical religious insight. Inwardness and introspection were the criteria of every system or scheme of thought that pre sented itself for his criticism or acceptance. Christianity thus came before him less as a narrative of historical facts observing historical sequence than as a golden thread on which were suspended gems and precious stones of spiritual senti ment, thought and aspirations. Conceived largely as a scheme Judaic and national in its starting-point, and world-embracing liv SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS in its objects, he regarded it less as a systematisation of dogmas in the sense of beliefs, than as a perennial source of inspiring reformative energy. Christ was less Jesus of Nazareth than the Divine centre — at once the point of starting and concentration — of all religious and moral energy. The Church was not a corporation held together by ties formal and external in their origin and operation, but a spiritual body based upon the freedom which pertains inherently to all spiritual activities and aspirations. Nothing could be further from such a scheme than a system, dead, mechanical and formal, of hierarchical domination. When each individual member was a centre, possibly, of spiritual enlightenment and inspiration, nothing could be more deadening than a pre arranged order of teachers and ministers, sometimes exercising the function of instructors in thought and knowledge, at others of ministers taking the lead in sacrificial or ritual worship. We have already seen that the threefold order of bishops, priests, and deacons, even granting its existence under certain circumstances and in certain fitting localities, was never re garded by him as anything else than an accidental arrange ment, determined wholly by convenience. The arrangement was no more a fixity than any prescribed form or routine of liturgical rite. To have laid stress upon such an order as exist ing by means of a divine and prescribed guarantee, such as would, e.g., have been presented by a distinct institution by Christ Himself, would have been little else than a forfeiture of that grace of selection by which he claimed to have been appointed an apostle. The supreme authority of Christ, the omnipotency of that divine influx of grace or the Holy Spirit which was the one source of goodness or divine power, would have been directly invalidated by an external ordinance or a INTRODUCTION lv mechanical conveyance of a supposed spiritual power. The argument operated the more irresistibly on account of the dis sensions among the apostles themselves. From the Apostolic conclave at Jerusalem, and especially from its confessed leaders, St. Peter and St. James, St. Paul stood for the greater part of his life in a serene and determined aloofness. The principles and guarantees on which they relied as conveying the mark of their apostleship he not only ignored, but partially even despised. Probably the privilege on which most stress was laid by the earliest apostolic society was the claim of having seen and conversed with Jesus both before and after His resurrection. In the election, e.g., of Matthias it was made a sine qua non on the part of the candidates that they were men who had gone in and out among the apostles during the lifetime of Jesus, beginning at John's baptism ; but even this personal converse was claimed by St. Paul on more than one occasion, and this with the greater confidence, because the apostle claimed a con verse as with a visible being with the first resurrection form of Jesus. In a word, all his own experiences, all the guarantees of his mission, all the spiritual influences and sentiments by which he was so readily and profoundly moved united in in ducing a disregard for a systematic organisation of a Christian society such as subsequent evolution and gradual consolidation under other and different influences imparted to the Church. II. In harmony with these idiosyncrasies, intellectual and spiritual, were the influences arising from Paul's own education, and his long acquaintance as an earnest Jewish Pharisee with the religious services of the synagogues. If the former rendered him regardless of a formal hierarchical organisation among Christian churches, the latter could not but have had the tendency of laying stress on the office and function of the lvi SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS Reader. In the synagogue service this was certainly an office of prime importance. The very fact that the religious instruc tion of the Jews consisted of the Law, the Hagiographa, the Prophets, etc., together with the comments of Eabbis and other duly attested expositors of these sacred writings, imparted to the Eeader an authority which no other minister of the synagogue durst claim. Not only was a common Lectionary employed, so that, among the Palestinian and Babylonian synagogues at least, a certain community of scriptural lessons, etc., was in use, but even the stated sermons appointed for certain seasons and days were directed to be read. Now, bearing in mind the use which the Christian apostles made of the Jewish synagogues, and how closely they copied the order of their teaching and worship, it is evident that, whether assigned or not to a minister duly set apart for the office, the function of the Eeader must have found a place very early in the history of the Christian Church. It is true, and the argument must be allowed its fair weight, without permitting it to minimise, still less to ignore altogether, the influence of the synagogue worship on the usages of the Christian churches, that the Christian teacher was not possessed of that affluence of scriptural records which the Jewish Eeader possessed. We shall, perhaps, not be wrong in supposing that the traditional sayings and parables of Christ (such collections of \6yta as were, e.g., ascribed to St. Matthew), were employed as Haggadah to comment upon the reading of a selected portion, e.g., of the LXX. Still, with due allowance made for the sources of the Law and the Gospel, there was a sufficiency of Hagiographical and Prophetical writing extant, and claiming a quasi- divine author ity, among Christians, to allow for and justify the functions of Eeaders in most Christian communities. Moreover, in addition INTRODUCTION lvii to these distinctively Jewish records there were among the literary treasures of various Palestinian churches, especially those wherein the leading Judaeo-Christians happened to be wealthy, a greater store than usual of genuine and well authenticated Christian records. Such were, e.g., translations of parts of the LXX. to the Syro-Hebraic of North Palestine, collections of \6yia, or sayings of Jesus, which certain itinerant members of the Church had brought together from some of the Christian centres of South Palestine. These were mostly identified by the names of the Christian communities to which they belonged, as, e.g., the \6yta of the church at Joppa, Capernaum, Antioch, Tyre. Besides, there were certain letters of apostles or men of apostolic rank, as, e.g., of Peter, Apollos, Barnabas, and Paul, addressed either as private letters to prominent members of the Church or encyclical letters addressed to the Church. Then, again, there were visions of an apocalyptic kind communicated to the separate churches for purposes, as it would seem, of attestation. In short, the materials at the disposal of the Eeader in Pauline churches, in which translations of portions of Hagiographa, expositions of Hebrew prophet, or Eabbi law doctor, spontaneous and impul sive deliverances of prophecy, deliberate narrations of sacred visions especially in relation to the coming day of the Lord, were set forth without any prescribed order, the sole obliga tions being deference to the Presbyter, Eeader, Apostle, or Prophet who had been chosen to rule the proceedings, and observance of the universally recognised Pauline rule : — ndvra Be eva-yi)v6va><; Kai Kara rd^iv yeveadco. III. But there remains one more consideration in the evolu tion of Pauline culture which would make the apostle's deference to Jewish usages and his sympathy with Jewish aspirations all lviii SOURCES OF THE APOSTOLIC CANONS the more natural. The consummation of all things to which he looked and for which he laboured was, in a large sense of the term, Jewish. This alone would induce him to regard Jewish worship and the usages thereunto pertaining with a peculiar tenderness and consideration. The function of Eeader — to take a single but important example — imported a continuity of office, didactic purpose, unhierarchical significance, which esta blished the usages of Jewish worship, their methods of im parting and receiving religious instruction, which so far was a propaedeutic of the same usages and methods, to be restored at the ultimate consummation of all things. For St. Paul, we must remember, never left for any length of time out of the purview of his religious foresight and the earnest craving of his Judaeo- Christian aspiration the ultimate destiny of the great universal Israel of God. Lord Beaconsfield once said, in reference to the great heroes of his race, that an arrest of decay was more realisable as an object of patriotic energy than a further ance of development. It is certain that this formed the especial object of the most discriminating patriotism of the noblest Jewish patriots. " If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong to thy -peace" is an utterance which might be paired off as possessing an identity of outlook and aspiration with such objects as "The Hope of Israel," until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in, and so all Israel shall be saved, etc. It would not be difficult to realise this magnificent apocalyptic vision as it practically disclosed itself to the vivid imagination and impassioned feeling of the great universalist Judaeo-Gentile apostle. The central standpoint of the apostle was the sub lime reunion in the person and work of Christ of all the great teachings, all the sublimest exemplars of the continuous reve- INTRODUCTION lix lation with which God had blessed humanity. How high the Eeader, the inspired instructor, the most highly qualified teacher, or the imparter of religious and moral truth, must needs have stood in every such scheme need not here be insisted on. St. Paul could not have laid emphasis on such a scheme without a wise disregard of the organisation of the Church and its entire uniformity in every example, nor without acknowledging the importance for teaching purposes, and with the object of a free liberal expansion in every direction of Christian liberty, of any such office as the Eeader. A Typical Lord's Day Service at a Pauline Church in the North of Palestine, about the end of the First Century. Tt, ovv ea-Ttv, dBe\