376 DEATH OF HEROD. BOOK II. its next victims, obtained, as it were, a temporary respite. Death of The death of Herod, during the same year, delivered the Christians from their determined enemy. Herod. In its terrific and repulsive circumstances they could not but behold the hand of their protecting God. In this respect alone differ the Jewish and the Christian historian, Josephus and the writer of the Acts. In the appalling suddenness of his seizure in the midst of his splendour and the impious adulations of his court, and in the loathsome nature of the disease, their accounts fully coincide. CHAP. K. CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM. 377 CHAPTER II. Christianity and Judaism. Chris CHRISTIANITY had now made rapid and extensive progress throughout the Jewish world. The Progress of death and resurrection of Jesus; the rise of a tianity. new religious community, which proclaimed the Son of Mary to be the Messiah, taking place on a scene so public as the metropolis, and at the period of the general concourse of the nation, must have been rumoured, more or less obscurely, in the most remote parts of the Roman Empire, and eastward as far as the extreme settlements of the Jews. If the religion may not have been actually embraced by any of those pilgrims from the more distant provinces who happened to be present during the great festivals, yet its seeds. may have been already widely scattered. The dispersion of the community during the persecution after the death of Stephen, carried many zealous and ardent converts into the adjacent regions of Syria and the island of Cyprus. It had obtained a permanent establishment at Antioch, the chief city of Syria, where the community first received the distinctive appellation of Christians. Christianity however, as yet, was but an expanded Judaism; it was preached by Jews; it was addressed to Jews. It was limited, national, exclusive. The race of Israel gradually recognising in Jesus of Nazareth the promised Messiah; superinducing, as it were, the ex 378 PROGRESS OF CHRISTIANITY. BOOK II. quisite purity of Evangelic morality upon the strict performance of the moral law; redeemed from the sins of their fathers and from their own by Christ; assured of the resurrection to eternal life; the children of Abraham were still, according to the general notion, to stand alone and separate from the rest of mankind, sole possessors of the divine favour, sole inheritors of God's everlasting promises. There can be no doubt that most Christians still looked for the speedy, if not the immediate, consummation of all things; the Messiah had as yet performed but part of his office; he was to come again, at no distant period, to accomplish all which was wanting to the established belief in his mission. His visible, his worldly kingdom was to commence; he had passed his ordeal of trial, of suffering, and of sacrifice ; the same age, and the same people, were to behold him in his triumph, in his glory, and even, some self-deemed and self-named Christians would not hesitate to aver, in his revenge. At the head of his elect of Israel, he was to assume his dominion; and if his dominion was to be founded upon a still more rigid principle of exclusion than that of one favoured race, it entered not into the most remote expectation that it could be formed on a wider plan, unless, perhaps, in favour of the few who should previously have acknowledged the divine legislation of Moses, and sued for and obtained admission among the hereditary descendants of Abraham. Nothing is more remarkable than to see the Gradual enlargement of the horizon of the Apostles gradually receding, and, instead of resting on the borders of the views of the Holy Land, comprehending at length the whole world; barrier after barrier falling down before the superior wisdom which was infused into their minds; first the proselytes of the Gate. the foreign Apostles. CHAP. II. STRUGGLES OF THE INFANT CHURCH. 379 conformists to Judaism, and ere long the Gentiles themselves admitted within the pale; until Christianity stood forth, demanded the homage, and promised its rewards to the faith of the whole human race; pro claimed itself in language which the world had as yet never heard, the one, true, universal religion. an universal As an universal religion, aspiring to the complete moral conquest of the world, Christianity had Christianity to encounter three antagonists, Judaism, Pagan- religion. ism, and Orientalism. It is my design successively to exhibit the conflict with these opposing forces, its final triumph not without detriment to its own native purity and its divine simplicity, from the interworking of the yet unsubdued elements of the former systems into the Christian mind; until each, at successive periods, and in different parts of the world, formed a modification of Christianity equally removed from its unmingled and unsullied original: the Judeo-Christianity of Palestine, of which the Ebionites appear to have been the last representatives; the Platonic Christianity of Alexandria, as, at least at this early period, the new religion could coalesce only with the sublimer and more philosophical principles of Paganism; and, lastly, the Gnostic Christianity of the East. External conflict of Christianity with Ju daism; With Judaism Christianity had to maintain a double conflict; one external, with the Judaism of the Temple, the Synagogue, the Sanhedrin; a contest of authority on one side, and the irrepressible spirit of moral and religious liberty on the other; of fierce intolerance against the stubborn endurance of conscientious faith; of relentless persecution against the calm and death-despising, and inor often death-seeking, heroism of martyrdom: ternal. the other, more dangerous and destructive, the 380 INFLUX OF GENTILE CONVERTS. BOOK IL Judaism of the infant Church; the old prejudices and opinions, which even Christianity could not altogether extirpate or correct in the earlier Jewish proselytes; the perpetual tendency to contract again the expanding circle; the enslavement of Christianity to the provisions of the Mosaic Law, and to the spirit of the antiquated religion of Palestine. Until the first steps. were taken to throw open the new religion to mankind at large; until Christianity, it may be said without disparagement, from a Jewish sect assumed the dignity of an independent religion, even the external animosity of Judaism had not reached its height. But the successive admission of the proselytes of the Gate, and at length of the idolatrous Gentiles, into an equal participation in the privileges of the faith, showed that the breach was altogether irreparable. From that period the two systems stood in direct and irreconcileable opposition. To the eye of the Jew the Christian became, from a rebellious and heretical son, an irreclaimable apostate; and to the Christian the temporary designation of Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, was merged in the more sublime title, the Redeemer of the world. The same measures rendered the internal conflict with the lingering Judaism within the Church more violent and desperate. Its dying struggles, as it were, to maintain its ground, rent, for some time, the infant community with civil divisions. But the predominant influx of Gentile converts gradually obtained the ascendancy; Judaism slowly died out in the great body of the Church, and the Judeo-Christian sects in the East languished, and at length expired in obscurity. Divine Providence had armed the religion of Christ with new powers adapted to the change in its situation |