Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

It must be added that these books were addressed to those who were already Christians, and give directions and advice which could not be rightly understood save by those who had been previously instructed, and, moreover, refer the faithful in express words to the preaching which they had heard and received, and in which they are exhorted to abide. They further also refer to guardians of the deposit, and to a line of authentic teachers who shall continue to hand it on from generation to generation.142

That which had existed from the beginning by the institution of Christ, and that which was to last unaltered to the end, was an apostolic succession of men, in whom He put His power and presence, to whom He promised the perpetual assistance of His Holy Spirit, and to whom He committed the propagation of His faith. It was impossible that this principle of action, the living personal authority, which, as we have seen, did everything in the first two generations of the Christian people, should ever be changed, because Christ appointed it to bear His Word, the Word of God, whether oral or written, to every succeeding generation.

Among the things which preceded in time the publication of the writings of the New Testament, and which, therefore, were not derived from them, were these: The hierarchy, including therein the election, ordination, and jurisdiction of bishops throughout the world, and of the ministers inferior to them; the several sacraments, with the rites which conveyed them; the worship, and herein especially the Eucharist, and all which belongs to it; and fourthly, that daily discipline of life which received men into the Christian body, numbered them in it, imposed penance for faults committed, restored the fallen, and, in fact, which was that atmosphere by breathing which the Christian lived. All this the living succession of men, instinct with the power and presence of the Holy Ghost, the Sanctifier and the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, originally conveyed, as the living succession of men perpetuates it from age to age. These things, the writings of the New Testament, as they were gradually, first one and then another, given to particular churches, or intended for classes of believers, and finally collected in one and made the heirloom of the whole body, found in existence and in full operation. With all the instruments of the divine life thus enumerated these writings did not meddle, except that they alluded to them more or less, usually in few words, attesting them, it is true, but in a manner which those only who were in possession of them would understand aright. The action of the Church as a living Body consisted very largely in these things, and this action, at least in all its details, the Apostles were not directed by any charge of their Lord, nor inspired by the Holy Ghost, to commit to a book. These things, from their nature, formed an essential part of the ecclesiastical tradition; in fact, the Church as a society could not exist without them.

Another part of the ecclesiastical tradition was the announcing to men the words and the acts of Christ. The Christian character was to be formed upon the living example of the Shepherd who had gone before His sheep. For this task men were chosen who had been with Him during the whole time of His ministry. So long as they were on earth they would speak with all the authority of those who had seen what they witnessed; but it is not apparent how an accurate account of our Lord’s words and acts could be transmitted to succeeding generations except by writing. Thus it pleased the Holy Spirit to inspire some of the Apostles and some of their disciples to commit to writing that record of our Lord’s words and actions which we possess in the four Gospels. Inexpressibly dear, indeed, and precious to every Christian, must be the words of the Word; like nothing else upon earth, the sounds which came from the lips of God manifest in the flesh; of untold depth His utterances; of inexhaustible fruitfulness His teaching. And the same may be said of His acts. As a single parable would disclose the nature of His kingdom, so a single act might be rich in endless application to the history of His Church and to the heart of every believer. This most precious part of the ecclesiastical tradition the Evangelists deposited in the bosom of the Church, to be communicated, guarded, interpreted by her for ever to the end of time. It was not the creation of one power to balance another, for a book and a society do not come into competition; it was endowing the society which Christ had created with the breath of His mouth, and investing it with a permanent knowledge of His words and acts – a knowledge to be transmitted under its keeping to all times.

As the Gospels contained words and acts of our Lord, so the Apostolic Epistles contained comments, illustrations, and developments of their personal teaching, bearing witness everywhere to that teaching, and to the society which their own labours had constructed under their Lord’s direction, and only by the power of His Spirit working in themselves who preached, and in the hearers who accepted the faith which they preached. These writings the Church collected and placed in her treasury; they became part of that deposit which St. Irenæus143 celebrates “as being new and fresh in an excellent vessel, and giving perpetual youth to that vessel, which is the divine office intrusted to the Church, as life is given to the body to vivify all the limbs belonging to it.”

If we put together that large mass of teaching above described, which consisted in the government everywhere set up by the Apostles, in the sacraments which they carried into effect according to their Lord’s instructions, in the worship which they established, in the life of faith, the daily discipline of which they set on foot, with that written mass of documents of which by the end of the first century the Church was in possession, we can form an approximate notion of the written and unwritten tradition which it was her abiding office to expound.

That which is primary and essential,144 the very substance of God’s institution, is the perpetual succession of living men from the Apostles. All the rest are means by which that succession acts. These means the providence of God has placed round His own central creation. Such means are the word contained in the Divine Scriptures, the word contained in sacraments, the word contained in worship, the word contained in the most various ecclesiastical monuments, which exhibit the consent and definitive judgment of the successors of the Apostles in past time.

These were the various means which the apostolic succession itself used, under the assistance of the Holy Spirit, to maintain and expound and preserve from error that whole tradition of the truth which Christ in the beginning committed to it. But the subject requires further illustration.

CHAPTER VII

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINEThe Independence of the Ante-Nicene Church shown in her Mode of Positive Teaching and in her Mode of Resisting Error

The Church is the Body of Christ as it moves through the centuries from His first to His second coming. We have been tracing the course through the first three of these centuries. Let us recur for a moment to the beginning, when we behold our Lord, at the head of His Apostles, passing through the towns and villages of Galilee, preaching that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, imparting, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the principles of that divine kingdom, healing every infirmity and disease; then sending out His Apostles, and afterwards His disciples, by two and two, as His heralds and messengers. This was the prelude, the type and germ, of what was to come. Then, after His Passion and Resurrection, we see the first stadium in the mission of the Apostles. They speak in His name; they manifest His power; His Person is in the midst of them; His Spirit upon them. The Apostle who once denied Him stands at their head, and speaks with authority, declaring the mission intrusted to him. Forthwith three thousand, who speedily become five thousand, accede to the voice of his preaching. In twelve years Judæa and Palestine and Antioch have had the new doctrine planted among them, and then it is set up in Rome, the sceptred head of heathendom. The forty years of that first mission are crowned by the destruction of the deicide city, after that, by the hands of the Apostles and the fellow-labourers whom they have chosen, the suckers of the Vine have been laid in all the chief places of the Roman world. A kingdom had been preached and a kingdom had been founded; and its basis had been laid in authority – that of a crucified Head, transmitted to His Apostles.

The whole of this forty years’ work is a Tradition or Delivery, to translate literally the Greek title. Its bearers gave what they had received. It was intrusted to them, to their truthfulness and their accuracy; and those who received their message did not question it, but accepted it as they gave it. From first to last the Tradition rested on the one principle of authority, which had its fountain-head in the Person of our Lord. He spoke as one having authority in Himself, not as the Scribes and Pharisees, who interpreted an existing law; and they whom He had deputed to follow Him claimed a delegation from that authority, and spoke in virtue of it.

But if this was so in the lifetime of the Apostles, who had seen and touched and handled the Word of Life, it was no less the case in the teachers who immediately followed them. We have seen a most striking instance in St. Clement, who claimed for the decision of the Roman Church in an important matter, and that during the lifetime of the Apostle John, that the words uttered by it were the words of the Holy Ghost, and asserted that those who did not listen to them refused to listen to God Himself. But this language represents the language and the conduct of those who succeeded to the place of the Apostles in the whole three hundred years. There is no break and no change in this respect. The Nicene Council in its decisions has the same tone as the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem; it is no other than “it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.”

For in truth, from first to last, all success in the divine kingdom is the work of the Spirit of Christ. Ho is the one power who gives life to the whole. In Him lies the secret of its unity, whereby the Body of Christians, or the Christian nation,145 is one and the same at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and a thousand other places; for Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, male and female, have all been made to drink into one Spirit.

Thus a living God will have a living Church; and in this first great period – instinct with a character of its own, as the conflict between the new Christian nation and the mightiest offspring of the old civilisation, that heir of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Greece, which transcended its ancestors – the great charter lies in the words, “As My Father sent Me, so also send I you.” It is this ever-living mission which perpetuates “the Tradition or Delivery.” Thus it is the accordant witness of all that we have hitherto said, from the testimony of the sacred writings to that of the first fathers and teachers, exhibited in all their conduct, that the living apostolic succession is the one thing instituted by God to carry on His revelation and to maintain His kingdom. This succession it is which bears in its hands the various records forming the treasury of the kingdom, whether they be the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, or the sacraments which communicate a divine life, or the majestic liturgy which expresses the divine worship, or the daily praxis of the Church, which is, in fact, the embodiment of its unwritten tradition: in all these, and through them in all ages, the apostolic succession works. And the mission through which it works is as living, real, and present, as immediate and efficacious now, as when the words first dropped from the lips of our Lord in the Body in which He rose again, “As My Father sent Me, so also send I you.”

We may divide the consideration of the manner in which the Apostles proclaimed the divine kingdom into two heads, the first of which will be the whole work of positive promulgation, and the second the whole defence against error.

As to the first, I will touch on five points – the system of catechesis, the employment of a creed, the dispensing of sacraments, the system of penance, and the Scriptures carried in the Church’s hand. And I am considering these especially in one point of view, as illustrating the method of teaching pursued by a body which was intrusted with a divine message.

1. Converts were admitted into the Church after a process of oral instruction of more or less duration; for I am not here concerned with the extent of that duration, but with the fact that such instruction was invariably given by word of mouth, not by placing a book in the hands of those who came to be taught. What the Christian doctrine was it belonged to its teachers to say, and the system by which it was learnt was termed catechesis, i. e., instruction by word of mouth, by question and answer. This is the word applied by St. Luke in the beginning of his Gospel to Theophilus, to whom he addressed it; and the opening verses of the Gospel describe the thing itself with an accuracy which leaves nothing to be desired; for the Evangelist speaks “of the things that have been accomplished among us, according as they have delivered146 them unto us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word;”147 and adds, “It seemed good to me also, having diligently attained to all things from the beginning, to write to thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mayest know the verity of those things in which thou hast been instructed by word of mouth.” By which we see that it was not a book which had been put into the hands of Theophilus to teach him Christian truth, but a doctrine delivered by personal teachers, and derived from those who were eye-witnesses, and administered to others what they knew. But after Theophilus had become a full Christian, a Gospel might be addressed to him for confirmation of his faith.

The Church of which we know most as to its method of converting Gentiles is the Alexandrine Church, in which, from very early time, there was a famous catechetical school, founded, it is said, by St. Mark himself, the names of whose after teachers, Athenagoras, Pantænus, and still more Clement and Origen, have distinguished it.148 Its method has been thus described: —

“In the system of the early catechetical schools the perfect, or men in Christ, were such as had deliberately taken on them the profession of believers, had made the vows and received the grace of baptism, and were admitted to all the privileges and the revelations of which the Church had been constituted the dispenser. But before reception into this full discipleship, a previous season of preparation, from two to three years, was enjoined, in order to try their obedience and instruct them in the principles of revealed truth. During this introductory discipline they were called catechumens, and the teaching itself catechetical, from the careful and systematic examination by which their grounding in the faith was effected. The matter of the instruction thus communicated to them varied with the time of their discipleship, advancing from the most simple principles of natural religion to the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, from moral truths to the Christian mysteries. On their first admission they were denominated hearers, from the leave granted them to attend the reading of the Scriptures and sermons in the church. Afterwards, being allowed to stay during the prayers, and receiving the imposition of hands as the sign of their progress in spiritual knowledge, they were called worshippers. Lastly, some short time before their baptism, they were taught the Lord’s Prayer (the peculiar privilege of the regenerate), were intrusted with the knowledge of the Creed, and, as destined for incorporation into the body of believers, received the titles of competent or elect.149 Even to the last they were granted nothing beyond a formal and general account of the articles of the Christian faith, the exact and fully developed doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and, still more, the doctrine of the Atonement, as once made upon the cross, and commemorated and appropriated in the Eucharist, being the exclusive possession of the serious and practical Christian. On the other hand, the chief subjects of catechisings, as we learn from Cyril, were the doctrines of repentance and pardon, of the necessity of good works, of the nature and use of baptism, and the immortality of the soul, as the Apostle had determined them.”150

It is not needful for our present purpose to go further into the “Discipline of the Secret.” It is enough to point out how this whole method, which belonged to the Church everywhere, though carried out no doubt in various degrees of perfectness according to the endowments and zeal of individuals and the energy of pastoral care, testified throughout the magistral character of the Church, and that those who came into her fold must come in the spirit of little children, according to our Lord’s saying. Those certainly who so came could not question the doctrines which they received, nor the authority of which they were not judges, but disciples.

2. But the use of a Creed,151 communicated at a certain advanced period of the instruction given, and as a prelude to the rite which admitted into the Body, was a further token of authority. Nor indeed can any greater act of authority be well imagined than the summing up what is to be believed as the doctrine of salvation in a few sentences. This is not done in the Scriptures themselves, whether of the Old or New Testament, or both together. And how great an act of authority it was in the mind of the Christian people is well expressed in the tradition which not only called the first creed the Creed of the Apostles, but represented them before their separation not again to be reunited, as contributing each one to the twelve propositions forming it. Such a tradition, even if it be not true, is not only a picturesque but a most powerful and emphatic exhibition of the feeling which Christians entertained as to the act of authority implied in creating the instrument which conveyed the Christian faith. For if each separate article of the Creed may be attested by the Christian Scriptures, yet the selection of such and such doctrines, their arrangement and force when put together, indicate something quite other than the existence or expression of such doctrines scattered about Scripture, just as the faggot is something much more than the sticks which compose it. And in accordance with this judgment upon the authority of a creed as such, we find that enlargements or explanations of the first Creed have only been made by the highest authority in the Church, and on rare occasions, as a defence against heresies which threatened the very being of the Church, or as the more complete expression of doctrines in which the Church felt her life to be enshrined. But it was a Creed which from the beginning bore the title of the Rule of Faith. The Creed was recited by the baptized, as a token of their acceptance and incorporation into the Church; repeated as a daily prayer of singular power and efficacy; renewed by the dying as a confession of faith and passport to the tribunal of the great Judge. St. Augustine,152 in a sermon to catechumens, said, even in his time, “You must by no means write down the words of the Creed in order to remember them, but you must learn them by hearing them; nor when you have learnt them must you write them, but hold them ever in your memory and ruminate on them.”

Nor, though the doctrines contained in the original Creed may be attested by the Scriptures, was the authority of the Creed and of the power which imposed it derived from the testimony of the Scriptures. It was antecedent in time to such testimony, and it was derived from those who were authors of the Scriptures, and who were at least as infallible in such an act as in the account which they might communicate to the churches of what they had seen and heard.153

To the method of catechesis, therefore, as the means of instruction, we add the employment of the Creed, which is the Church’s oriflamme, round which her host gathers, and to which it looks in the ever-during struggle of the faith.

3. Next consider the daily life into which the convert was introduced when his course of catechetical instruction was concluded and he was put in possession of the Creed.

The first sacrament, that of baptism, administered with the utmost solemnity at certain times of the year, the one being the eve of the Lord’s resurrection, the other the eve of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, was “an enlightening” which opened to him the wonders of the spiritual world. In virtue of it he became a member of “the household of God,” he entered into brotherhood with his Redeemer, he shared in the gift of the Almighty Spirit, the Author and Giver of all grace. At the same time, or shortly after, the chrism of confirmation added to his strength for the perpetual conflict of the Christian life. And here by the imposition of episcopal hands the same sevenfold Spirit of grace descended upon him, marking by the rite itself how the Christian society was inhabited by that Spirit, whose power the bishop bestowed upon the newly born Christian. But both baptism and confirmation were sacraments, however enduring in their effects, yet given once and never to be repeated; whereas for the perpetual sustenance of spiritual life a tree was needed which should bear perpetual fruit. And here the Lord Himself was at hand; for the baptized and confirmed Christian was forthwith fed with the Bread of Angels; and that majestic altar was disclosed to his sight on which daily lay the Body of the Lord of Angels, offered for him in mystical sacrifice; and he heard the accents of that divine liturgy which called upon heaven and earth to rejoice together in the great glory of God. It was impossible for any faithful heart to hear the glowing words in which the sacrificant described the mercy of God in bestowing His Son upon men as their Deliverer and their daily food without being kindled into an unspeakable joy, “while the angels praise, the dominations adore, the powers tremble, the heavens, the heavenly virtues, and the blessed Seraphim with common jubilee glorify” that majesty so shown forth in mercy. In the eucharistic service he felt himself at once the citizen of a heavenly kingdom, for the divine polity breathed in all around him. Sight and touch, language and every sense, testified a divine presence, and religion became to all participants a living thing. This was a permanent, not a fleeting gift; the endowment of a life, the supersubstantial daily Bread.

But the heavenly blessing encircled every act. It joined the sexes in a consecration which ennobled while it sanctified that lifelong treaty on which rests the whole existence of a home for family and children; it supported the infirmities of the dying with a special strength; it recruited the ministers of the Church in rites which imaged out in most expressive formulas the power from on high, that delegation from the Saviour’s Person which was the whole ground of authority.

4. But there is yet another institution, which in as forcible a way as any of the six just mentioned exhibits the Christian Church as a polity; for the one enemy against which a perpetual watchfulness needed to be maintained was the frailty of the human heart itself. Even from the beginning there never was a time in which Christians did not fall, and so from the beginning there was a system of penance to meet that case of their fall, and to provide for restoration. The Apostle Paul found the evil among his converts at Corinth, and used the remedy. But that remedy powerfully illustrates the control of a living society over its members. Those who fell in any way from the Christian profession could only be restored by a double action; the inward repentance of the individual sinning was required on the one hand, but this did not of itself suffice; the outward action of the society itself was needed, and this society imposed such rules as it thought good for the granting of pardon. It is not to my point to go into any details on the subject, because it is the principle itself contained in the system of penance which I wish to dwell upon alone. Sins of infidelity, impurity, idolatry, as a rule excluded for long periods of years, or even for the whole course of life, from the Church. The bishop dispensed this discipline either in person or through his priests, in a tribunal in which he represented Christ Himself, and exerted His authority, the greatest given to man upon earth, an authority belonging to God alone, the power to remit or retain sins. From the beginning the Church exercised this authority, and in it ruled a kingdom, the kingdom of man’s innermost thoughts, the hopes and the fears of an eternal world. They whose lives were not safe a moment from the persecuting powers of heathen magistrates, wielded a much more awful power over their fellow-Christians, subject to them by the bond of a divine hierarchy which had its source, its centre, and its crown in our Lord Himself, which was His gift to the world, which He left behind Him to carry on His kingdom. This power was an essential part of the priesthood borne by the episcopate, in no sense derived from the particular community wherein it was exercised, but descending from above.