CHAPTER VII

VI.

VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE AND BELIEF

Jerusalem, like Mecca today, was a pilgrimage centre to which, especially at the great feasts, came Jews from all parts of the known world. This was, at the start, a great asset to the Church. To the pilgrim, especially if he be a poor man and lives in a far country, a visit to the Holy City is an event for which he has been hoping and saving for years; he arrives in a state of religious exaltation. The majority carried away by the contagious enthusiasm of multitudes would depart satisfied; but there must have been many who felt strangely disappointed at the contrast between the ideal Jerusalem of their dreams and the Jerusalem of actual fact, with the crowd of swindling parasites which infests all pilgrim centres, its money-changers and sellers of beasts in the Temple courts and the crude details of a sacrificial ritual which the religious sense of the more ethically sensitive had already outgrown. In such a mood a pilgrim would be peculiarly receptive to the message of the Christian preacher. At many a Passover or Pentecost, a Jew or proselyte of the Dispersion will have caught the fire of the new religion, and returning to his distant home, become a centre for spreading the message. Often, no doubt, then as now, small parties of pilgrims from the same place travelled together; and sometimes such a group would have been converted as a whole, and so, at once on its return, there would be the nucleus of a local church. That perhaps is how it came about that already before the conversion of Paul there was a church as far afield as Damascus. But the converts who thus became founders of churches had commonly received very little instruction; and there was no New Testament, no Creed, no written manual of theology, no accepted liturgy, which they could take with them. It is not surprising, then, that a century after the Crucifixion we discover a great diversity among persons claiming the name Christian; that is only what we should expect. What demands explanation is rather the large measure of agreement that persisted within the main body—the more so since by that time most of them were Gentiles converted from many and various types of paganism.

The continued existence of a central party, able to resist the centrifugal tendency inherent in the conditions of the first century, was due in the main to the wide circulation of, and the authority ascribed to, certain writings: (1) the Old Testament, with its emphasis on the unity of God, and on the moral standard which God requires of man; (2) collections of sayings of Christ; of which, it would seem, the oldest and most widely known was the document Q embodied in the First and Third Gospels; (3) the Gospel of Mark, whose wide circulation is proved by the fact that it formed the basis, not only of the canonical Gospels, but of the gnosticizing Gospel of Peter and perhaps of other Apocryphal Gospels; (4) certain epistles of Paul. Of these, I Corinthians seems to have been the most read, and to have got into general circulation before the rest, either alone or with Romans, and perhaps Ephesians.

In the course of time the weight and effectiveness of these documents—and therefore their influence on the Church as a co-ordinating factor—was progressively enhanced by (1) the re­organization by Matthew and Luke of the biographical material of Mark along with the teaching preserved in Q and other documents; (2) the clarification of the relation of Christianity to the Old Testament by the elaboration of the argument from prophecy. This was worked out by Matthew, Luke–Acts, and the epistle to the Hebrews in three different ways, which may respectively be named the mechanical, the historico-evolutionary, and the allegorical; (3) the increased impressiveness lent to the epistles of Paul by the fact of their being gathered into a single corpus, and then read against the background provided by the Acts, which gave definiteness to his personality and impressed upon the Church his immense services to the Christian mission.

But though this further body of literature was mainly produced between 80-95, it did not at once become authoritative in all parts of the Church. Hardly earlier than 120 would it have secured a recognition sufficiently wide to make it a powerful centripetal force. Indeed the ascription to Matthew, Mark and Luke of a co-equal and quasi-canonical authority was quite possibly the outcome of a conference held in Rome as late as 119. The Fourth Gospel, though probably written before AD 100, was slow in securing acceptance—especially in Rome. But by 180 it had become possible with general consent to ascribe plenary inspiration to the Four Gospels, Acts, and a selection of epistles (which varied, but only slightly, from church to church) and in most churches the book of Revelation. Thus a New Testament came into being over against the Old, but organically related to it.

The canonization of the New Testament was a precondition of the development of the Catholic Church into a kind of inner world-state within that of the Roman Empire; for the theoretical basis of its law, discipline and philosophy was belief in a Divine Revelation contained in the sacred books. It was therefore taken for granted that the theological views of the authors of these books must be identical. That assumption is seen to be untenable once they are studied historically. It is, however, a little unfortunate that their individuality and variety is usually presented to the student under the title of New Testament Theology. The questions which the historian will most desire to raise are psychological rather than doctrinal. Why did people wish to join the Church? What was it that made this new religion a source of comfort, power and inspiration to those who turned to it? The answer is that different people were appealed to by different aspects. No less than seven main types of approach can be illustrated by the documents included in the New Testament; and, since the followers of any religious or political leader always include many who reproduce his views in a one-sided and exaggerated form, we may reasonably infer that the characteristic features of each of these seven types were to be found in a far more accentuated form in different parts of the sub-apostolic Church.

I. Even at the present day the majority of mankind is perpetually haunted by dread of malignant spiritual powers. In India, China and Africa, a magician may put a spell with withering and devastating effects on a man's person, child or beast; a demon may possess his wife or daughter; or one of the innumerable gods may take offence at some neglect and punish it with misfortune or disease. The religion of the Old Testament, without any assistance from scientific knowledge or rationalistic philosophy, but by the sheer potency of religious and ethical insight, had broken the power of magic and witchcraft and, where possible, eliminated its professors; it had affirmed a unity of God which made pointless the fear of any god but one; and, by making His character predominantly Righteousness, it had removed that kind of fear of the divine which necessarily results from belief in deities who are essentially non-moral. But the Gentile world—outside highly educated circles—was obsessed by the need of propitiating gods many and capricious, convinced that the destinies of the individual are controlled (often in a malign way) by the spiritual powers inherent in the planets, trembling before the astrologer and the magician, and familiar in daily life with cases of insanity or neurosis raised to an intenser pitch, and given a destructive and malicious direction, by the belief that the cause was the possession of the patient by an evil spirit. The early Christian was unable to counter these beliefs with weapons drawn from the armory of science; he did so by maintaining that Christ, sitting on the right hand of God, yet permeating the personality of the believer as a re-invigorating and fortifying power, was ever waging a victorious war with all and every spiritual power of evil—in the planetary spheres, in the middle air where demons roam, and in the cities and villages of earth. In Christ's power, therefore, his follower could be sure of victory, whether his warfare was against principalities and powers and malign spirits in exalted spheres, against the spells of the local magician, or against wandering demons seeking an opportunity to enter his body and possess his mind.

Demon-possession was common even in Palestine; and contact with a personality like that of Jesus might well result in a cure in certain cases where a psycho-neurotic disorder was diagnosed as demon-possession. But what the historian has to explain is, not how Christ might have cured demoniacs, but the relatively large proportion of space given to such cures in the very brief account which Mark gives of his career antecedent to the last week at Jerusalem. The proportion is explained by the obsession of the Gentile world with the fear of evil spirits. A similar motive explains the recounting in Acts of cases where Apostles by sheer force of spiritual personality vanquish magicians. So Paul himself refers more than once “to signs and wonders, which Christ wrought through me ... by the power of the Holy Spirit'”.

II. To many converts the essence of the good news lay in the words “The Kingdom of God is at hand”. The present world-order is doomed, the Messianic age is about to dawn; only in order to participate in that glorious age, the individual must repent. This message was a gospel of hope and deliverance, not merely to Jews—who resented the domination of the 'holy people' by pagan Rome—but to the poor and oppressed, especially to slaves, in the Gentile world. Of the first Christians many, like the Communists of the present day, confidently expected themselves to live to see the mighty put down from their seats and the exaltation of the humble and meek—only this would happen, not as the result of political insurrection, but through the direct act of God in the hour of Judgment.

In Thessalonians the hope of an immediate return of Christ to end the present world-order is central even in the thought of Paul; in subsequent epistles, though never abandoned, it gradually recedes to the circumference of interest. The Lucan writings carry this process a stage further. Luke believes that Christ will return, but at a date which is vaguely postponed, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled; and the belief scarcely affects the heart of his religion. In the Fourth Gospel the doctrine of the sending of the Spirit, the Comforter, is for all practical purposes substituted for the expectation of a visible Return. But pari passu with this spiritualization of the Apocalyptic hope, there went on in other circles an intensification and a progressively concrete dramatization of it. Matthew lays more stress on the Return than Mark, and adds picturesque details like the Last Trumpet; and Mark has more of this than Q. But the book which consists of nothing else is the Revelation of John, one of the latest, and at the time most influential, in the New Testament. Few things more clearly illustrate the diversity in the early Church than the development side by side of tendencies so contrary to one another.

III. Paul’s religion has been described as a Christocentric mysticism; that is, as one which seeks union, not like Greek or Indian mysticism, with the Absolute, but with the Divine Christ—a heavenly spiritual Being who somehow mediates or represents God Himself, in a way which Paul seems to have felt small necessity to represent in philosophical terms.

Paul shares with Jewish Christians the belief that the End is at hand, and that Christ will shortly come to judge the world. It is the problem of repentance that he conceives differently. To many, perhaps to most, religious Jews the Law was not merely an object of veneration but a source of comfort. “Lord, what love have I unto thy law; all the day long is my study in it”. Similarly, the author of the Imitatio Christi found inspiration in the theology and discipline of the Catholic cloister. But the Law was to Paul what monkery was to Luther; each felt that the system in which he had been bred had utterly failed him, and that the Endeavour to achieve righteousness by the effort of the will is futile. But there had come to Paul, as later on to Luther, an experience—interpreted as a personal relationship to the living Christ—so vivid as to be capable of description by the metaphor of “Christ born in me”. With this came a complete change in the orientation and inward quality of his whole personality which made the doing of the will of God no longer the grudging fulfillment of an external command, but the expression of an inward passion. Since, then, for Paul redemption is an inward change which turns what was once an irksome duty into a passionate desire, the Gospel is (from one point of view) essentially a state of mind which consists in freedom from the Law. The Law, though ordained of God for a good purpose, has now by the divine act been abrogated. Paul, theoretically at least, does not distinguish between the ceremonial and the moral law, or even between Jewish and Gentile ethic. All law, gull rule to be obeyed, has been abrogated. The converted man is so completely a new man that, if he does what he likes, he will necessarily do that which is pleasing to God, for it is no longer he that acts but the spiritual Christ that dwells in him.

To express the attitude of the believer which results in this mystical union with Christ Paul uses the word “faith”. By it he does not mean intellectual acceptance of a creed or proposition, but loyalty, love and devotion something like what in Indian religion is known as bhakti. Like bhakti it is capable of being expressed in hymns of praise. Paul and Silas burst out into singing at midnight in the prison at Philippi—in the light of which incident we should read: “Be filled with thanksgiving. Let the presence of Christ dwell in you, a well-spring of abounding wisdom; teach and encourage one another with psalms, with hymns, and with songs of the spiritual life; making music in your hearts in gratitude to God. Indeed, whatever you say and do, let all be resting on the Lord Jesus, and through him giving thanks to God the Father”. In the historic phrase, “justification by Faith”, Paul unduly strains the ordinary connotation of the word 'faith' in the hope to make it cover the bhakti quality in the attitude to Christ described above as that of the Christocentric mystic.

But the idea of justification by faith was one likely to lead to practical difficulties when the doctrine expressed by it was taught to persons whose conversion had been less thorough than Paul’s own. That, no doubt, is why in every epistle we find him piling up exhortations to practical morality. Nor was the precaution unnecessary. In the epistle of James—not by the brother of the Lord but by a 'teacher,' perhaps originally anonymous—there is an elaborate discussion of the faith of Abraham. This is evidently intended to rebut the inference drawn from Romans—and no doubt acted upon—by certain professing Christians, that, so long as you believe rightly, conduct does not matter. It is easy to see how certain schools of Gnostics could quote the authority of Paul for an antinomianism which justified grave immorality. Well might the second-century author of II Peter write of his epistles: “Wherein are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unstedfast wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction”.

Paul’s teaching in regard to the Law, as developed in Galatians and Romans, might seem a gospel of deliverance to one brought up a Pharisee; it could have little meaning to the ordinary Gentile. At that time the Gentile world and the Jewish were suffering from opposite diseases. If the Jew had too much law, the Gentile had too little; for the old local religions, and the moral sanctions associated with them, were collapsing in the cosmopolitan scepticism of the Graeco-Roman Empire. The task of the Church was to build up a new moral law; that is why “Paulinism”, in the Lutheran sense, simply disappears from Christian teaching until something of it was revived by Augustine. The discourses in the Fourth Gospel constantly develop Pauline themes; but the main theme of Romans is compressed into a single sentence: “For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ”. What is far more remarkable, it has accorded to it only one sentence in all the speeches ascribed in the Acts to Paul himself: “And by him every one that believeth is justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the Law of Moses”. For practical reasons it was essential for the Gentile churches to be rid of the burden of circumcision and the petty detail of the Law; it was valuable therefore to be able to point to an elaborate demonstration by a great Apostle of the abrogation of the Law. They canonized Romans, but did not understand it.

The abrogation of the Law and the rebirth of the Christian into a new and freer life, liberated from the bondage of sin and from the inward struggle of a “divided self”, is closely associated by Paul with the Death of Christ; but it is not easy to say exactly how. He produces no theological theory, but is content to use metaphors derived from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. Hence the exact significance which he attached to the sacrificial quality in the Death of Christ has for centuries been a matter of controversy. Much of this controversy has been beside the mark through failure to realize that his approach to the subject was not, like that of Anselm and later Western theologians, primarily scholastic and legalistic; it was rather mystical and emotional. If a rationalistic account is to be given of it, this must be sought mainly on psychological lines. It must be related to the specifically Hebrew consciousness of sin and guilt, and also to the emotional appeal made by the ancient Temple ritual to an orthodox Jew—an appeal which the mind of the twentieth century finds it peculiarly hard to approach with sympathetic insight. For that reason it would seem that Paul's meaning is far better reflected in the popular preaching of a Wesley, or in the hymns of a Toplady, than in the language of the theologians.

Paul was an educated, half-hellenized Jew like Philo, nurtured on the monotheism of the Old Testament. To retain that monotheism he needed some kind of intellectualized concept of the relation to the One God of that Heavenly Christ, whose claim to a devotion, absolute and religious in character, he gave his life to preaching; nor indeed could he, without some such conception, have answered the questions which the more intelligent Gentile converts would continually be asking. Such a concept Paul seems to have found in a combination of the apocalyptic picture of the pre-existent Son of Man, already found in Enoch, with an idea derived, directly or indirectly, from Philo. Philo interpreted the statement in Genesis that God 'made man in his own image' in the light of Plato's doctrine of archetypal patterns or ideas. God had created man after the pattern which Plato would have named Idea of Man. Paul's allusion to Christ as being “the man from heaven”, or “in the form of God”, is thus a kind of hasty Platonization of that apocalyptic picture of the Son of Man, which could be taken quite literally by the less sophisticated Jewish Christian. The conception is one which asserts with emphasis the idea of the pre-existence of Christ. In Colossians it is given an expression far more elaborate than anything to be found in the earlier epistles, “Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him; and he is before all things, and in him all things consist”. But even here the phrase the firstborn of creation' shows that Paul had never faced the philosophical difficulties which forced the Nicene Church to define the pre-existence as eternal.

The question what, if any, influence the “mystery religions”, which were at that time spreading over the Roman world, may have had on the language and thought of Paul is too large to be discussed here. Probably Paul's own views were very slightly so influenced, those of his converts very considerably. How far, for example, was the meaning for him of the Lord's Supper influenced by analogies derived from similar rites in the mystery cults in which the par­taking of a sacred cake was held to be both a means to, and a guarantee of, immortality? Of this there is no hint in Paul; but by the time of Ignatius the idea has become naturalized in the Church. Ignatius speaks quite simply of “breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ”.

IV. A distinctive type of religious emphasis is found in the Lucan writings. Luke goes further even than Paul in his pro-Gentile sympathies; for he does not understand the Jewish case.

He insists no less on the centrality of the life 'in the spirit' which issues in love, joy and peace—which he takes for granted is only to be realized in and through the experience of fellowship found in the Christian brotherhood. Indeed, for him this fellowship, with God and with man, which accompanies the indwelling of the Spirit, would seem to be the best part of the “good news”. His Gospel is as notable as the Acts for the abundance of its references to the Spirit; and it would seem that in his version of the Lord's Prayer the words, “Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us”, originally stood in place of, “Thy Kingdom come”.

Luke is named by Dante scriba mansuetudinis Christi. He stresses the message of the graciousness and loving kindness of the Divine, which is the new and the characteristic element of that which Paul the Pharisee had learnt from Christ. Luke tones down the element of Pharisaic theology which survives in the predestinarian teaching of Romans, with its subordination of the “fatherhood” to the “sovereignty” of God, and its sense of the need for some propitiatory sacrifice. It is often argued that the Acts could not have been written by a pupil of Paul; a pupil would have understood better “the Augustinian” strain in Paul. Alternatively it may be suggested that Augustine largely reared his system of theology on just that element in Paul which represents a survival in the Apostle's mind of a pre-Christian conception of God. A pupil may misunderstand his master; he may also outgrow him.

At any rate, the Gospel most closely related to the standpoint of Paul is not that of Luke, but Mark. The church for which Mark wrote may have already possessed (in Q, or some other document) a summary of the ethical teaching of Christ; even so, it is still significant that Mark should make “the Gospel” to consist, not in the teaching, but in the person of Christ, the wonder-working Son of God, and that he assigns what, from the purely biographical point of view, is such a disproportionate space to the story of the Passion. Moreover, on two occasions words of Christ are given which indicate that Mark, like Paul, saw a sacrificial meaning in his death. “The Son of man came ... to give his life a ransom for many”. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many”.

Without doubt Luke read these words in the copy of Mark from which he derived about half of the content of his own Gospel; why then does he leave them out? The second of these sayings does occur in the ordinary text of Luke; but the ‘Western’ text, Westcott and Hort argue, is clearly right in omitting Luke XXII, 19-20, as an interpolation from I Corinthians. In the un-interpolated text of Luke, Christ gives the disciples the Cup before he gives them the Bread (thus reversing the order of Mark); while the sacrificial words “given for you” or “shed for you” are omitted. That this is not an accident, but represents an alternative ritual tradition, is shown by the fact that in the Didache also the Cup and the Bread appear in the Lucan order, and the forms of thanksgiving prescribed do not associate the rite with the death of Christi.

Luke’s view is made still clearer by the way in which the death of Christ is, so to speak, apologized for in the speeches attributed to Peter in the early chapters of Acts. In these speeches the death of Christ, so far from being of the essence of the Gospel, is represented as an unfortunate incident which has happily been cancelled—indeed more than cancelled—by the glorious miracle of the Resurrection. Theologians frequently explain this feature in the early speeches in Acts on the hypothesis, that, at the moment of speaking, Peter had not yet had time to reflect on the real meaning of the death of Christ. Such an explanation ignores the practice of ancient historians in regard to speeches. Peter’s speeches were not taken down at the time by a shorthand writer; they were either composed by Luke himself (after the universal custom of ancient historians) or they were derived by him from a written source. But whoever first committed them to writing would have done so because he regarded them as representing Peter's mature views. The Acts was written to help the spread of what its author regarded as the actual truth about Christianity; the early Christians were interested, not in the mental development of individual Apostles, but in the Gospel which they taught. A speech attributed to an Apostle is meant to be read as a summary of apostolic doctrine.

Again, the idea of the death of Christ as a sacrifice is curiously inconspicuous even in the speeches attributed to Paul in the Acts; it occurs once only, in a single phrase where he exhorts the Ephesian Elders “to feed the Church of the Lord, which he purchased with his own blood”. The Gospel and Acts were obviously intended to present the case for Christianity to the Gentile world. If Luke had himself felt this doctrine to be essential, he could not have represented the Apostolic preaching as so little concerned with it. And that a large section of the Church in the sub-apostolic Age did not regard this doctrine as essential, is proved by the fact that it is entirely ignored by Ignatius of Antioch —who may almost be called the father of orthodoxy.

Along with this—from the Pauline standpoint inadequate—interpretation of the death of Christ, Luke exhibits an equally elementary Christology. This is recognized by all the commentators so far as concerns the speeches attributed to Peter. But the Christology of the speeches attributed to Paul is no more advanced. Thus the speech to the Areopagus—the most philosophical utterance attributed to Paul—ends with the proclamation of a final judgment “by the man whom he hath ordained”. Luke was not a theologian; but, unless his general thought of Christ had approximated to what later ages would have condemned as adoptionist it is hard to explain why, in a set of speeches presumably intended to be representative of apostolic doctrine, the pre-existence of Christ is never even hinted at.

V. The epistles of Paul give not so much theology, as the raw materials out of which the theology of the Church was gradually developed. Christian theology, in the sense of an attempt to state systematically and in due proportion the intellectual content of religion, begins with the epistle to the Hebrews; only it is theology lifted to the level of religious adoration, as in the Confessions of Augustine. The author addresses himself at once to what was the main problem for a thoughtful Christian. The Church accepted as axiomatic both monotheism and the belief that the Old Testa­ment was an inspired revelation; but it offered to Christ a loyalty and adoration which amounted to religious “worship”, and (by the force of circumstances and under the leadership of Paul) had become in the main a Gentile community, which could not observe the Law of Moses (the most sacred part of the inspired revelation) and had no desire to do so.

The author of Hebrews adopts, but in a more precise and clearly thought-out form, the Pauline identification of the pre-existent Christ with the Philonic conception of a divine emanation through whom the primaeval God created the Universe: “his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds; who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power” (Heb.). The problem of the obligation of the Law he solves, in a way totally different from that of Paul, by the use of the method of allegorical interpretation—a method equally familiar to the Greek and to the Jew and one which in that age enjoyed high intellectual repute.

But his most original contribution to theological thinking derives from the fact that, once an attempt is being made to get rid of the binding obligation of the Law of Moses by calling it an allegory, it becomes clear that the most conspicuous feature in that Law is the elaborate sacrificial system of the Levitical Code. When Paul discusses the Law, he is thinking of it subjectively, as a set of rules which the individual is asked to obey; the author of Hebrews is compelled by his method to view it objectively, and must therefore address his interpretation in the first place to the imposing system of sacrifices of which the Temple at Jerusalem was the centre. He probably wrote after the Temple had been destroyed by the Romans; but the books of Moses still remained. The destruction, however, of the material Temple only made the more plausible his argument that its impermanence was of the essence of the divine intention. The death of Christ was the real and eternally valid sacrifice; the offering of the blood of bulls and goats had always been, as it were, a shadow in the world of seeming of a reality of which the death of Christ revealed the substance. Look below the surface to catch the author's meaning, and it appears that in the last resort the significance of the death of Christ for him resides, not in the physical shedding of blood, but in the complete surrender of self to the divine will: “Then said I, lo, I am come. . . to do Thy will, 0 God”(Heb. X, 4-9).

Actually this way of looking at it is a refinement upon, one might even say a spiritualization of, the view of Paul, at any rate as that view is expressed in some passages. Nevertheless, later theology has been more influenced by the abundance of Jewish sacrificial imagery in the epistle than by the real thought of the writer. Its sum total effect has been to exaggerate the primitive Hebraic elements which survive in the language, if not also in the thought, of the New Testament in regard to the propitiatory character of the death of Christ.

A further point should be noted. Though the author goes further than Paul in his systematic identification of Christ with an eternal creative principle primaevally emanating from the Father, he emphasizes more than any other writer in the New Testament, more even than Luke, the reality of the human nature of Christ, who was “made like unto us in all things, sin only excepted”; and whom God did not bring to the full maturity of his moral personality except through the experience of suffering. Strange as it may appear to a modern mind the reality of Christ's humanity and of his suffering was flatly denied by many Christians. Such teaching is already glanced at in I John; and this docetism is one of the most formidable of the heresies which Ignatius is concerned to refute. “He suffered truly, as also he raised himself truly; not as certain unbelievers say, that He suffered in semblance”.

In the prologue of the Fourth Gospel the problem of combining monotheism with belief in the divine nature of Christ is solved by the doctrine of an eternally existing Logos who was in him made flesh. On this foundation was built the theology of the developed Catholic Church. It has been noted that the prologue reads like a hymn—it is written in the rhythmical prose used in hymns of the period—and that the same thing holds of Philippians II, 12. It is, perhaps, not accidental that the two passages in Paul and John which come nearest to being a theology of the Person of Christ have this almost lyric ring. Thomas Arnold said that the Creed should not be recited but sung as a hymn of praise; and, in the New Testament, theology is never found save as the impassioned expression of religion. John, a Christocentric mystic of high intellectual power, had need of a thought-out religion; he knew that others had the same need; and there is more concentrated thought in the few verses of his prologue than in many whole treatises. But to John theology is the gateway to a temple; inside the temple is religion—the religion which in the rest of his Gospel he strives to unfold and which it is not the purpose of this chapter to obscure under the pretext of expounding it. The point of the Gospel will be missed by a reader who approaches it primarily as a historical authority. It should be read as a book of devotion, as one would the Imitatio Christi; and the writer's attitude of mystic adoration may at times be better apprehended by a change of pronouns in the great discourses ascribed to Christ: “Thou art the vine, we are the branches”; or “Thou art the Resurrection and the Life”.

The Fourth Gospel marks the end of the great age of Christianity; it is by the last of the giants in the greatest religious revival in the history of man. To turn from this Gospel to the Epistle of Jude is to feel a big drop, spiritually and intellectually. This Epistle reads as if it were a 'charge' sent out by the bishop of an important church, possibly Judas (son) of James, who, according to the Apostolic Constitutions, succeeded Symeon (martyred under Trajan) as the third bishop of Jerusalem. The writer, one feels, is a good old man profoundly shocked by the appearance within the Church of the teaching of an immoralism, which claims to be an expression of superior enlightenment—seemingly by Gnostics who held a docetic view of Christ. His remedy (apart from mere denunciation) is to encourage old-fashioned goodness by recalling the Church to “the words which have been spoken before by the Apostles”. Above all he exhorts “to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”. These words might almost be called the 'slogan' of the central section of the Church during the next hundred years. In them the writer of this, otherwise rather commonplace, little note defined what shortly came to be the accepted policy of the Church throughout the second century. Doubtless that is why his was one of the first of the epistles other than Paul's to be almost everywhere accepted into the Canon. For Jude was right. In the first century the main task for a community limited by its Palestinian origins was liberation, moral and intellectual; in the second century it was consolidation and defense. The Church might no longer create, it could still conserve.

VII.

PROPHET, PRESBYTER AND BISHOP