of the bishop. which has ever, in strict unison with every other part of Christian history, preserved the names of many successors of the Apostles, the first bishops in most of the larger cities in which Christianity was first established. But the authority of the bishop was that of in- Authority fluence, rather than of power. After the first nomination by the Apostle (if such nomination, as we suppose, generally took place), his successor was elective by that kind of acclamation which raised at once the individual most eminent for his piety and virtue to the post, which was that of danger, as well as of distinction. For a long period, the suffrages of the community ratified the appointment. Episcopal government was thus, as long as Christianity remained unleavened by worldly passions and interests, essentially popular. The principle of subordination was inseparable from the humility of the first converts. Rights are never clearly defined till they are contested; nor is authority limited as long as it rests upon general reverence. When, on the one side, aggression, on the other, jealousy and mistrust, begin, then it must be fenced by usage and defined by law. Thus while we are inclined to consider the succession of bishops from the Apostolic times to be undeniable, the nature and extent of authority which they derived from the Apostles is altogether uncertain. The ordination or consecration, whatever it might be to that office, of itself conveyed neither inspiration nor the power of working miracles, which, with the direct commission from the Lord himself, distinguished and set apart the primary Apostles from the rest of mankind. It was only in a very limited and imperfect sense that they could, even in the sees founded by the Apostles, be called the successors of the Apostles. The presbyters were, in their origin, the ruling powers of the young communities; but in a society founded solely on a religious basis, religious qualifications would be almost exclusively considered. In the absence, therefore, of the primary teacher, they would assume that office likewise. In this they would differ from the Jewish elders. As the most eminent in piety and Christian attainments, they would be advanced by, or at least with, the general consent, to their dignified station. The same piety and attainments would designate them The byters. as best qualified to keep up and to extend the general system of instruction. They would be the regular and perpetual expositors of the Christian law (1); the reciters of the life, the doctrines, the death, the resurrection of Christ; till the Gospels were written, and generally received, they would be the living Evangelists, the oral Scriptures, the spoken Gospel. They would not merely regulate and (1) Here, likewise, the possessors of the Xapiopiara would be the casual and subsidiary instructors, or rather the gifted promoters of Christian piety cach in his separate sphere, according to his distinctive grace. But besides these, even if they were found in all churches, which is by no means clear, regular and syste matic teachers would be necessary to a religion pres lead the devotions, administer the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper, but repeat again and again, for the further confirmation of the believers, and the conversion of Jews and Heathens, the facts and the tenets of the new religion. The government, in fact, in communities bound together by Christian brotherhood (such as we may suppose to have been the first Christian churches, which were happily undistracted by the disputes arising out of the Judaical controversy) would be an easy office, and entirely subordinate to that of instruction and edification. The communities would be almost self-governed by the principle of Christian love which first drew them together. The deacons were from the first an inferior order, and exercised a purely ministerial office; distributing the common fund to the poorer members, though the administration of the pecuniary concerns of the church soon became of such importance as to require the superintendence of the higher rulers. The other functions of the deacons were altogether of a subordinate character. Such would be the ordinary development of a Christian communily, in the first case, monarchical, as founded by an individual Apostle or recognised teacher of Christianity; subsequently, in the absence of that teacher, aristocratical, under a senate formed according to Jewish usage, though not precisely on Jewish principles; until the place of the Apostle being supplied by a bishop, in a certain sense, his representative or successor, it would revert to a monarchical form, limited rather by the religion itself than by any appointed controlling power. As long as the same holy spirit of love and charity actuated the whole body, the result would be an harmony, not from the counteracting powers of opposing forces, but from the consentient will of the general body; and the will of the government would be the expression of the universal popular sentiment (1). Where, however, from the first, the Christian community was formed of conflicting parties, or where conflicting principles began to operate immediately upon the foundation of the society, no individual would be generally recognised as the authoritative teacher, and the assumption and recognition of the episcopate would be more slow; or, indeed, would not take place at all till the final triumph of one of the conflicting parties. They retained, of necessity, the republican form. Such was the state of Church of the Corinthian church, which was formed from its origin, or alexception. most immediately divided into three separate parties, with a leading Corinth an (1) Such is the theory of episcopal government in a pleasing passage in the Epistles of Ignatius. Ὅθεν πρέπει ὑμῖν συντρέχειν τῇ του ἐπισκόπου γνώμη. Ὅπερ καὶ ποιεῖτε. Τὸ γὰρ ἀξιονόμαστιν ὑμῶν πρεσβυτέριον, οὕτως συνήρμοσται τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ ὡς χορδαὶ κιθάρα διὰ τοῦτο ἐν τῇ ὁμο voiᾳ ὑμῶν, καὶ συμφωνῳ ἀγάπη Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἄδεται καὶ οἱ κατ ̓ ἄνδρα δὲ χορὸς γίνεσθε, ἵνα σύμφωνοι ὄντες ἐν ὁμονοία, χρῶμα θεοῦ λαβόντες ἐν ἐνότη Th ἔδετε ἐν φωνῇ μια διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τῷ πατρὶ, etc. Ad Ephes. p. 12. edit. Cotel. I speak of these epistles in a subsequent note. teacher or teachers at the head of each (1). The Petrine, or the ultra Judaic, the Apolline, or more moderate Jewish party, contested the supremacy with the followers of St. Paul. Different individuals possessed, exercised, and even abused different gifts. The authority of Paul himself appears clearly, by his elaborate vindication of his apostolic office, by no means to have been generally recognised. No apostolic head, therefore, would assume an uncontested supremacy, nor would the parties coalesce in the choice of a superior. Corinth, probably, was the last community which settled down under the general episcopal constitution. The manner and the period of the separation of a distinct class, an hierarchy, from the general body of the community; and the progress of the great division between the clergy and the laity (2), are equally obscure with the primitive constitution of the church. Like the Judaism of the provinces, Christianity had no sacerdotal order. But as the more eminent members of the community were admitted to take the lead, on account of their acknowledged religious superiority, from their zeal, their talents, their gifts, their sanctity, the general reverence would, of itself, speedily set them apart as of a higher order; they would form the purest aristocracy, and soon be divided by a distinct line of demarcation from the rest of the community. Whatever the ordination might be which designated them for their peculiar function, whatever power or authorily might be communicated by the "imposition of hands," it would add little to the reverence with which they were invested. It was at first the Christian who sanctified the function, afterwards the function sanctified the man. But the civil and religious concerns of the church were so moulded up together, or rather, the temporal were so absorbed by the spiritual, that not merely the teacher, but the governor, not merely the bishop properly so called, but the presbyter in his character of ruler, as well as of teacher, shared in the same peculiar veneration. The bishop would be necessarily mingled up in the few secular affairs of the community, the governors bear their part in the religious ceremonial. In this respect, again, they differed from their prototypes, or elders of the synagogue. Their office was, of necessity, more religious. The admission of members in the Jewish synagogue, except in the case of proselytes of righteousness, was a matter of hereditary right circumcision was a domestic, not a public ceremony. But baptism, (1) I was led to conjecture that the distracted state of the church of Corinth might induce the Apostles to establish elsewhere a more firm and vigorous authority, before I remembered the passage of St. Jerome quoted above, which coincides with this view. Corinth has been generally taken as the model of the early Christian constitution; I suspect, that it was rather an anomaly. (2) Already the λaixo are a distinct class in the Epistle of Clemens to the Corinthians (c. xl. p. 170. edit. Coteler.). This epistle is confidently appealed to by both parties in the controversy about church government, and altogether satisfies neither. It is clear, however, from the tone of the whole epistle, that the church at Corinth was any thing rather than a model of church government: it had been rent with schisms ever since the days of the Apostle. or the initiation into the Christian community, was a solemn ceremonial, requiring previous examination and probation. The governing power would possess and exercise the authority to admit into the community. They would perform, or at all events superintend, the initiatory rite of baptism. The other distinctive rite of Christianity, the celebration of the Lord's Supper, would require a more active interference and co-operation on the part of those who presided over the community. To this there was nothing analogous in the office of the Jewish elder. Order would require that this ceremony should be administered by certain individuals. If the bishop presided, after his appointment, both at the Lord's Supper itself and in the agape or feast which followed it, the elders would assist, not merely in maintaining order, but would officiate throughout the ceremony. In proportion to the reverence for the consecrated elements would be the respect towards those under whose especial prayers, and in whose hands, probably from the earliest period, they were sanctified for the use of the assembly. The presbyters would likewise possess the chief voice, a practical initiative, in the nomination of the bishop. From all these different functions, the presbyters, and at length the deacons, became, as well as the bishop, a sacred order. But the exclusive or sacerdotal principle once admitted in a religious community, its own corporate spirit, and the public reverence, would cause it to recede further and further, and draw the line of demarcation with greater rigour and depth. They would more and more insulate themselves from the commonalty of the Christian republic; they would become a senate, a patrician, or privileged order; and this secession into their peculiar sphere would be greatly facilitated by the regular gradations of the faithful and the catechumen, the perfect and the imperfect, the initiate and half-initiate, Christians. The greater the variety, the more strict the subordination of ranks. Thus the bishop gradually assumed the title of pontiff; the presbyters became a sacerdotal order. From the Old Testament, and even from paganism, the Christians, at first as ennobling metaphors, adopted their sacred appellations. Insensibly the meaning of these significant titles worked into the Christian system. They assumed, as it were, a privilege of nearer approach to the Deity; and a priestly caste grew rapidly up in a religion which, in its primary institution, acknowledged only one mediator between earth and heaven. We shall subsequently trace the growth of the sacerdotal principle, and the universal establishment of the hierarchy. CHAPTER V. CHRISTIANITY AND ORIENTALISM. CHRISTIANITY had not only to contend with the Judaism of its Oriental native region, and the Paganism of the Western world, but likewise religions. with the Asiatic religions, which, in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, maintained their ground, or mingled themselves with the Grecian Polytheism, and had even penetrated into Palestine. In the silence of its authentic records, the direct progress of Christianity in the East can neither be accurately traced nor clearly estimated; its conflict with Orientalism is chiefly visible in the influence of the latter upon the general system of Christianity, and in the tenets of the different sects which, from Simon Magus to Manes, attempted to reconcile the doctrines of the Gospel with the theogonical systems of Asia. In the West, Christianity advanced with gradual, but unobstructed and unreceding, progress, till, first the Roman empire, and successively the barbarous nations who occupied or subdued the rest of Europe, were brought within its pale. No new religion arose to dispute its supremacy; and the feeble attempt of Julian to raise up a Platonic Paganism in opposition to the religion of Christ must have failed, even if it had not been cut short in its first growth by the death of its imperial patron. In Asia, the progess of Christianity was suddenly arrested by the revival of Zoroastrianism, after the restoration of the Persian kingdom upon the ruins of the Parthian monarchy; and, at a later period, the vestiges of its former success were almost entirely obliterated by the desolating and all-absorbing conquests of Mahometanism. The Armenian was the only national church which resisted alike the persecuting edicts of the Sassanian fire-worshippers, and, submitting to the yoke of the Mahometan conqueror, rejected the worship of the Prophet. The other scattered communities of Christians, disseminated through various parts of Asia, on the coast of Malabar, perhaps in China, have no satisfactory evidence of Apostolic or even of very early date: they are so deeply impregnated with the Nestorian system of Christianity, which, during the interval between the decline of the reformed Zoroastrianism and the first outburst of Islamism, spread to a great extent throughout every part of the Eastern continent (1), that there is every reason to suppose them Nestorian in their origin (2). The contest, then, of Chris (1) There is an extremely good view of the origin and history of the Christian communities in India, in Bohlen, das alte Indien. (2) Compare the new edition of Gibbon with the editor's note on the Nestorian Christians and the famous inscription of Siganfu, viii. 347, |