for the larger society or kingdom of God, first among the Jews, secondly among the Gentiles. In each case we see the effort to organize a society complete in all its parts, or at least preparing for completeness. There are no limits prescribed for its functions, such as would certainly have been set with the greatest care if the society had been meant to exist only for prayer, and teaching, and beneficence; unless, indeed, we take beneficence as including all mutual well-doing, in which case the goal of a universal society is reached directly, for we then include in the scope of the Christian Church the whole social and political life.

The first event is the organization of the Church after the Day of Pentecost. The life of the little society, 'the number of whose names was a hundred and twenty1,' was not changed at once. It was still almost a family life. But the family is a microcosm, and contains in itself the rudiments of the general and national society. The believers ate at a common table, where, at the common ineal, they commemorated the death and resurrection of their Lord 2. Into the fund for the support of this common table they cast their whole living3; and by doing so they gave themselves up completely to the society. They were, of course, outwardly amenable to the Jewish law; but they felt that the existing fabric of society was tottering around them. The great day of the Lord announced by the prophet Joel had come. It is true that the change to the new social state, the new world of Christendom, did not come in a moment but the first believers were, as little as possible, members of the

1 Acts i. 15.

2 Acts ii. 46; 1 Cor. xi. 26.

3 Acts iv. 34, 35.

Jewish state, as much as possible citizens of the new kingdom.

This state of things, a kingdom within a kingdom, was not unknown in the East. The organization of society has there been always much less thorough than in the West. The Jewish state itself was a kind of enclave, an 'imperium in imperio,' first under the Persian, then under the Macedonian, and later under the Roman dominion. As now we see in Syria communities which are to a certain extent autonomous, such as the Druses and Maronites in Lebanon, and indeed throughout the Turkish empire the religious communities have also a civil organization, and the taxation is made through their heads; so, to some extent, it was in the first century. It was easier therefore than it would be with us for an infant community to manage its own affairs as a nation within a nation, having no settled boundary line between its own attributes and those of the larger society by which it was surrounded. The administration of the common fund, when this fund was the whole living of the society, must have embraced almost all the functions of government. The story of Ananias and Sapphira1 exhibits the faithful bringing their offerings to the feet of the Apostles, and the Apostles sitting as a permanent council for the management of affairs and for judgment, the Sanhedrin of the new Israel, realizing already the promise, 'Ye shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel 2.'

Of the great change that was coming the first believers were dimly conscious. They clung, indeed,

1 Acts v. 1, 2.

2 Matt. xix. 28.

to the hope that the Jewish nation would by a corporate acceptance of Christ become the Church; and this might seem adverse to the hope of universalism. Yet the demand for baptism into the name of Jesus, if complied with by the nation, would of itself have made Christian universalism, and not Jewish restriction, the law of the national life. This demand was therefore felt by the blind leaders of the nation to be subversive; and the people as a mass went with their leaders. There were, no doubt, those who still conceived of the new community as a Jewish sect. This was its legal position, of which St. Paul availed himself in his defence. before Felix, when he said, 'After the way that they call heresy,' that is a sect (a way perfectly legitimate and understood), 'so worship I the God of my fathers'.' There were also, up to the taking of Jerusalem, the Jacobean and hyper-Jacobean party, who were all of them zealous for the law 2,' that is the law as taught by the Rabbis. But as early as Stephen's time the more far-seeing had begun to take a bolder attitude. They perceived that much, or rather all, in the fabric of Judaism must undergo a change. On the other side, to the Jewish leaders and the mass of the nation, the idea of founding a community, not on positive institutions and peculiar customs, but upon the principles of faith and love and justice which are common to all men, and in the presence of which Jew and Gentile were equal, seemed not only the height of infatuation but positive treason, a speaking against Moses and the temple and the law. This feeling had, no doubt, underlain their hatred to

1 Acts xxiv. 14.

2 Acts xxi. 20.

Christ Himself, and had been the cause of His death. At a later time, St. Paul, in his oration on the temple stairs, which was arranged with so much tact, gained a hearing till he spoke of being sent to the Gentiles, but at that word they cried out, Away with such a fellow from the earth'.' Stephen vindicated himself at his trial, not by denying that great changes were at hand, but by appealing to the changes which had confessedly taken place before, from Ur to Charran, from Charran to Palestine, from Palestine to Egypt; from the patriarchs to the law, from the tabernacle to the temple. Yet even Stephen did not give up the hope that the Jewish nation as a nation might be saved: and we find the same feeling 2, half hope, half regret, in St. Paul, who, however, shews early in his career a prophetic foresight of the destruction of Jerusalem 3. It was not fully made clear that the Church must undertake by itself, independently of the Jewish organization, the task of forming a righteous community in which Judaism had failed. It is in connexion with these hopes and fears that we may best understand the disputes in the Apostolic Church concerning the keeping of the law. Those who supposed the Christian Church to be only a Jewish sect, desired that every part of the law should be kept as a fixed matter of obligation. Those who, like St. Paul, understood it to be a new creation, might yet be willing, with him, to observe the customs so as to keep the door open to the last for the entrance of the Jewish nation into the Church. But, as the cup of Jewish obstinacy was filled to the

brim, it became

3 1 Thess. ii. 14-16.

evident that the Church must no more be hampered by a regard to Jewish traditions; and the fall of Jerusalem finally set it free.

Christendom, then, as a distinct attempt to realize the kingdom of God on earth begins with the communities founded by St. Paul. It is in them that we find the Christian principle of life developing itself into relations, laws, institutions. All therefore that relates to their constitution and their action upon the world is of primary interest for our subject. It is evident that they took their shape at first from the synagogue; and so far they perpetuated the Jewish traditions and the law of just relations which lay at their centre. But, existing as they did in the cities of the Roman Empire, they had also the form of the Hetæriæ or clubs with which those cities teemed, and so took in something of the secular life of the empire and its associations. To the first of these origins belongs the name of elders given to their officers, to the second that of 'bishops,' and these were used interchangeably throughout the Apostolic age1. The word 'Eккλŋσía, by which they called themselves, is associated with both origins. It is the equivalent for ovvaywyn in the dialect of the Septuagint. But it also recalls the assemblies of the Greek Republics.

What then, we ask, was the object proposed by these Societies? Was it simply teaching and prayer, or was it the conduct of the general life? If we look back at their Judaic origin, it is evident that the synagogue

1 See Titus i. 5-7: 'That thou shouldest . . . ordain elders in every city . . . if any be blameless... for a bishop must be blameless.' Acts xx. 17: 'He called the elders of the church, and ... said unto them... Take heed to... all the flock over which the Holy Ghost hath made you bishops.'