Secondly, since Christ also gave the promise of universal dominion, we need never doubt that we are fulfilling His will by opening wide the gates of the city which were to be shut neither day nor night, and embracing within its hospitable area more and more of the organisms which make up the complete humanity.

LECTURE IV.

THE IMPERIAL AND MEDIEVAL CHURCH.

REVELATION Vi. 2. And I saw, and behold a white horse and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

THE Christian Church, at the close of the Apostolic age, went forth to conquer the world, and it was armed for this vast enterprise with all that was essential. First, it had a body of authoritative documents; for though the New Testament Scriptures were not gathered in a volume receiving general consent till the later part of the second century 1, the Old Testament, understood in the sense which Christ and the Apostles had given to it, was in the hands of all, and the various documents which afterwards made up the New Testament were sufficiently known to present to any inquirer a clear embodiment of the Christian scheme. Secondly, the Christian Church had the rudiments of a complete society. It contained within itself a principle of life which was at once a close bond between its members and an expansive force; and it had a perfectly free constitution, which rendered it capable of growing into

1 The Muratorian fragment, which shows that the Canon of the New Testament was at Rome at that date substantially as we have it now, is believed to have been written about the year A.D. 170. Westcott's Hist. New Test. Canon, p. 185.

a State, an Empire. Thirdly, it had an organization, and officers, whose duty it was both to keep alive the Christian traditions by a worship and teaching centred in the personality of Christ, and to exercise discipline and minister to the wants of all classes of the community, especially the poor. Lastly, it had, what is far the most important, the ideal of the life and spirit of Christ, the inspiring power of the whole organism. This ideal was partly derived from the Scriptures, both of the Old Testament read in a Christian sense, and of the New as recording the life of Christ; it was also partly a matter of tradition; but it was most of all to be seen in the life of the Church itself. Christians were themselves the living epistles, known and read of all men1. For the promise to which they appealed was not that a certain defined type should be impressed on them, and through them on mankind, but that the Spirit, which blows where it lists, should guide them and convince the world. The design of the Christian community was not to substitute itself for the organized society then existing, but to blend with it, to breathe a new spirit into it, and finally to be so fused with it as to transform it into the body of Christ.

The first thing which had to be done, and which was accomplished in the first three centuries, was to produce conviction, to impress upon the conscience of mankind the belief that the spiritual power which wrought in the Christian Church was divine and therefore supreme. There was no design of outward conquest, but of persuasion. The conviction, when

1 2 Cor. iii. 2.

once thoroughly impressed, was capable of renewing the whole life, first of the individual, then of the community. It was capable of rebuilding the whole of human society; it drew in its train all that is needed for society, the establishment of just relations, systems of law, political constitutions, a strict and peremptory discipline. Indeed this discipline was from the first unhesitatingly and impartially applied to all the members of the Christian society. But as regards those without, persuasion was the sole legitimate agency. Of what then was it designed to persuade men? Of this above all, that the moral ideal presented in the life of Christ was supreme. For this, as we have said, is the centre of the whole organism. All else may change, but, so long as the moral and spiritual supremacy of the Life and Spirit of Christ remain, Christianity is living, and whatever is necessary for its full expansion will follow in due time.

It is true the Christian faith has often been set forth by means both of ordinances and of statements which may easily be divorced from the moral ideal to which they relate when thus divorced they lose their power over the conscience, and provoke wonder at the contrast between the greatness of the work to be done and the triviality of the means by which it is sought to compass it. But the moral centre is always discernible, to those who are patient enough to watch for it, in the forms and the teaching which have held fast the Church and convinced the world. The Sacraments are designed to perpetuate the memory and realize the indwelling of Christ, to make His life

the life of the community; and all the Church-ordinances to bind men in the brotherly relations which flow from union in righteousness. The early Christians, as Pliny's letter shows 1, bound themselves in the Sacrament not to swear falsely, or to commit theft, or adultery, or withhold money that was entrusted to them. And the teaching, when its symbolical expressions are rightly understood, always represents the supremacy of the moral ideal. If it was asserted that Christ rose from the dead, and the doctrine of the resurrection was the foundation of the Church, this was based on the conviction of the sovereign nature of His holiness. The Holy One, it was said, could not be held by the chains of death: the resurrection was the assurance that the divine righteousness which was manifested in the life of Christ was supreme in the world. If the immortality of the soul was taught, this was grounded on the assurance that the principle in man which is capable of righteousness and of redemption is divine, and therefore destined to endure. If the divinity of Christ was asserted, this was the assertion that He was morally supreme, the true image in humanity of the eternal power of love. If, again, faith was proclaimed as the saving power, it was a moral faith, a union of the heart and life with Christ. The whole Christian teaching is the presentation by various means of the moral ideal of the life of Christ to mankind2.

1 See the words quoted in Lect. III, p. 134.

? There is a tendency, especially in Germany, to take these doctrinal conceptions as something ultimate in the minds of the writers who first gave them expression. But it is truer to regard them as presentations of the central and underlying moral

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