It has been justly said that "if ever there was a manifestation of the Supernatural, it was in the condition of things out of which arose the New Testament. We have only to take up the Epistles of Paul, and we find him surrounded, penetrated, permeated with the Supernatural. It is as it were the very atmosphere which he breathes. He does not assert it, he had no need to assert it."
No thoughtful Christian scholar would be prepared to question this statement. It is, however, generally assumed that as the men who had been personally associated with the Divine Founder of Christianity passed away, open manifestations of the Supernatural became rarer and rarer until they ceased altogether. After the last years of the first century, a date usually given for the death of John, the last survivor of the Apostolic band, few, if any, authentic instances of that open manifestation can be adduced. But the story of the rise and progress of Christianity during the 280 years which elapsed between the Ascension morning, in A. D. 33, and the Peace of the Church secured by the famous Edict of Constantino in A. D. 313, may be emphatically looked upon as the story of a period on the whole permeated with the Supernatural.
Outward manifestations of the Supernatural no doubt soon ceased; but a spirit not belonging to the ordinary course of things still dwelt in the companies of Christians—a spirit which gave the followers of "The Name" a special wisdom, a special power of brave endurance of suffering in the presence of world-wide opposition and hatred, in the presence of angry jealousy and sharp dread of the new unknown power growing up.
In spite of this determined enmity on the part of the world in which they lived and moved, an enmity which frequently flamed up in the form of bitter persecution, these Christians—for by that name at a very early date the followers of Jesus Christ were called—flourished in a strange fashion; their numbers continued, as year followed year, marvelously to increase. Their recruits, it is true, were drawn largely from the stratum composed of the lower classes of Roman society, but they by no means consisted entirely of persons drawn from that stratum. Their converts were to be found in all classes, in the Imperial household on the Palatine, in lordly patrician families, among senators and lawyers, soldiers and merchants, as well as the vast slave population. They included men and women of all ranks, of all ages. One singular characteristic feature was common to them all—they never resisted their oppressors, their persecutors. They were ever the most loyal of subjects; conspiracy, rebellion, discontent with the established state of things—though the established state of things was, as a rule, absolutely inimical to their very existence—were simply unknown among them during the whole period of 280 years of which we are writing.
Their life, their brave patient persistence, their marvelous endurance during these 280 years, tell us that something supernatural dwelt among them, inspired them, blessed them: something, termed in the phraseology of the Christians the "Holy Spirit," which did not belong to this world—which had never, as far as we know, been manifested to the same extent before in any society, and certainly has never been manifested since.
After this first period the Imperial Government gave up distrusting, opposing, persecuting these Christians. It went further. The Empire soon adopted as the "State Religion" the creed of the long persecuted sect, the creed which during those 280 years she had chosen to regard as a pernicious superstition, positively inimical to the State. Thus the History of the Christian Church falls naturally into two great divisions: the first from its foundation A. D. 33 to A. D. 313, the date of the Edict of the Emperor Constantine, which gave peace to the Church; the second from A. D. 313 to the present time.
The first division embraces the chronicle of the prolonged years of struggle, when Christianity not only was not the religion of the civilized world, but was the religion of a sect at first comparatively small and chiefly powerful owing to its earnestness and its unity, though the numbers of the body scattered all over the Empire were after a time considerable. All through this period it was positively an illegal religion, proscribed as such by the laws of the Roman Empire. The nervous words of the famous Carthaginian teacher Tertullian (circa A. D. 200), admirably sum up the position of Christians all through that time—"Non licet esse vos" ("It is not lawful to be you").
The second division of the History of the Church comprises the whole period reaching from A. D. 313 to the present day. Not only did the Edict of Constantine in A. D. 313 make Christianity a lawful religion, but, a few years later, it became the religion of the State, the favored cult, the cult professed by the Emperor.
A great gulf naturally separates these two divisions: for good or for evil, A. D. 313 marks the parting of the ways. In the second period the conditions which colored the story of the Church in the first are completely changed. With the second period the present work does not profess to deal. It is virtually confined to the first period, that of stress and storm, when the confession of "the Name" was simply illegal, when its confessors were liable to the gravest penalties, to imprisonment, confiscation, even to death. These penalties were not always exacted, it is true, but the Christian professor was still liable to them. Roughly speaking.
About half of the 280 years were times of bitter, relentless persecution; but even during the periods of stillness, when the penalties, referred to above, were not generally enforced, the sword of the Law was ever hanging suspended over the heads of Christians, and the cord on which the sword hung was indeed a slender one. At any hour, the caprice of an Emperor, the fanatical zeal of a provincial governor, the unreasoning fury of a mob, excited by passion, greed, jealousy, unexplained uneasiness, might call down on the heads of the Christians resident in the city or province the execution of a law which pronounced them dangerous to the State, enemies of Rome. The story of these early years is one indeed of surpassing interest, for it describes how the Church of Christ in the face of tremendous opposition, with all the forces of the civilized world perpetually arrayed against it, slowly, surely won its way; using in its quiet steady progress no earthly arms, never resisting by force the will of the dominant power represented by the Government; its members only in comparatively rare cases complying with the summons to give up their profession of faith, constantly preferring to submit to any penalties, even to death, rather than deny the Name of the Founder, the Name they loved better than life.
Following a practice very different from that usual among professors of any of the persecuted forms of religion before their time, or even among professors of a persecuted religion after their time, the Christians throughout these years, although conscious of their numbers, their organization and their power, never took up arms against their persecutors; these hated, despised, outlawed men continued to be the most loyal and peaceful subjects of the great world-wide Empire. It is this strange power of passive resistance, to which we have alluded above, and of which we shall speak again, which is one of the principal evidences of a special supernatural assistance being vouchsafed to them.
When we come to write in detail of the inner life of the Church, by which name the Christian sect from the earliest days of its existence styled itself, we shall see what were the sure hopes which lived in the community from the beginning; hopes which inspired them to live the life which seemed so strange to their contemporaries; which gave them courage, in the midst of so many and great perils, serenely and calmly to face the loss of everything dear to man, even to welcome death. Briefly, their adored Founder, whom they justly looked upon as Divine, had supplied them with information respecting what would come after death—a question always of surpassing interest, and one which in the first and second centuries seems to have especially agitated the thoughts of the Roman world.
The Christian in possession of this information was freed from all dread of the hereafter; for him, to die was to depart and be with Christ; this was far better than to remain on here even under the circumstances of a happy earthly environment. The noble, the illustrious by birth or by fortune, was freed from all fear and dread of the Caesar whose arbitrary and fatal power was so often a threatening specter to the wealthy Roman noble. The slave, a member of the enormous sad-eyed caste, as a Christian became at once the freedman of the All-mighty Christ; very short indeed would be his period of slavery, it would terminate with this brief life. Death to the Christian slave signified immediate freedom; and a life of joy and peace too beautiful for human pen to describe would at once follow dissolution. To all faithful Christians, bond or free, patrician or plebeian, rich or poor, the religion of Jesus assured a blissful, restful, endless immortality.
The meetings together of the people who had embraced the faith of Jesus—whether held in some quiet upper chamber in a street of Rome or Antioch, of Ephesus or Carthage, or by some secluded river side, or in the dimly lit corridor of those Cemeteries men have come to call the Catacombs, where their dead were laid to sleep beneath old Rome—must have been strangely joyous; the gatherings where the hopes, the joys, the rewards of the Redeemer were discussed in terms of quiet but impassioned enthusiasm, must have been indeed inspiring. It was at these that they gathered their courage, their brave patience, their sure hope of a blessed, blissful immortality.
Of such meetings, again and again repeated, we catch sight in the well-known words of Pliny, the Roman provincial Governor, in the writings of such teachers as Justin Martyr and Tertullian, in a few of the best authenticated Acts of Martyrs; more vividly perhaps still in the marvelously preserved passages and chambers of the network of cemeteries (termed catacombs) beneath the Appian and other roads hard by Rome: where many a dim and faded painting tells us how these Christians, during nearly three centuries, met together and rehearsed their glorious hopes, their happy outlook, their deathless faith.
It will be seen, as we proceed in this our work, how we have no lack of material out of which to construct the wondrous story of Christianity in the first, second, and third centuries.
These materials out of which our account of the laying of the early stories of Christianity is constructed, are many and various; more ample indeed by far than the ordinary student of Church History guesses. Only for one short period are they, comparatively speaking, scanty, and even for that short period authoritative data do not by any means fail us.
For the first eventful years, that is, from about A. D. 80 to A. D. 33, the materials are ample. They are mainly the Gospels and the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. From A. D. 33 the Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament carry on the story until the deaths of Peter and Paul circa A. D. 67; while the testimony of John in his Gospel, Revelation, and Epistles, written after the deaths of Paul and Peter, tells us much concerning the character of the teaching of the great survivor of the original companions and disciples of Jesus up to the very end of the first century.
Thus, until the close of the first century the testimony of the Books of the New Testament is ever at hand, supplying us with materials which enable us to frame a fairly exhaustive account of the laying of the early stories of the Christian Church; for a tradition which may be said to be unvarying relates how John lived and taught and wrote at Ephesus until the year of our Lord 99 or 100.
In addition to the inspired compositions of John, we possess a few writings put out in the last decade of the first century and in the early years of the second century, by men who were disciples of the Apostles; such as the Epistle of Clement of Rome, a letter addressed about A. D. 96 to the Church of Corinth and universally received by scholars as absolutely authentic; the Epistle of Barnabas which cannot be dated much later; the seven famous Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch, belonging to the year 107, now, in what is generally known as the Rossian Recension, after long controversy accepted as indisputably genuine; the Epistle of Polycarp of Smyrna sent circa A. D. 108; the Letter to Diognetus, the first part of which was evidently put out early in the second century. The recently discovered treatise known as the "Teaching of the Apostles," by an unknown writer, belongs to the same very early period. The "Apology of Aristides," presented to Hadrian, lately brought to light, was composed circa A. D. 124-130. The "Shepherd of Hermas" was written a few years later. The writings (of some considerable length) of Justin Martyr must be roughly dated A. D. 145-150, the varied works of Irenaeus A. D. 170-180 or somewhat earlier; and it must be borne in mind that these early Christian authors were closely connected one with the other. Clement of Rome was the disciple of Peter and probably of Paul; Ignatius was a pupil of the Apostles; Polycarp, the friend of Ignatius, was a hearer of John the Apostle; Irenaeus tells us how, when young, he sat at the feet of Polycarp. Thus an unbroken chain of writers and teachers links the age of John with the latter years of the second century and the earlier years of the third century; when there arose a group of famous Christian teachers, many of whose voluminous writings are preserved to us in so perfect a form that the most ample materials are present to our hand for a history of the struggles and anxieties of this time, lasting from the days of Irenaeus of
Lyons (circa A. D. 170-180) until the middle of the third century. This group of teachers includes Clement of Alexandria (circa A. D. 190), Hippolytus of Rome (A. D. 201, generally quoted as Bishop of Portus), Tertullian of Carthage (circa A. D. 200), Origen of Alexandria (circa A. D. 230), and Cyprian of Carthage (circa A. D. 250). We give the rough dates assigned as the central points in the periods of influence of these great Christian teachers; an influence, of course, usually extending for some years before and after the year named.
Thus, although the list of trustworthy contemporary authorities for our history, for some seventy years after the death of John, is not a long one, still in the providence of God, enough of such writings has been preserved to enable us to form from them a reliable story of the work and progress of Christianity during that all-important period. With great force a modern scholar of the highest rank thus lucidly sums up the reasons why this precious list of writings between A. D. 100 and A. D. 170 is not longer. "Time has pressed with a heavy hand upon such literature as the early Church produced. The unique position of the Apostles and Evangelists might shield their writings from its ravages, but the literature of the succeeding generation had no such immunity. It was too desultory in form, too vague in doctrine, to satisfy the requirements of more literary circles and a more dogmatic age. Hence while Athanasius, Basil and Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose were widely read and frequently transcribed, comparatively little attention was paid to those writings of the first and second centuries which were not included in the sacred Canon. The literary remains of the primitive age of Christianity, which to ourselves are of priceless value, were suffered to perish from neglect, a few fragments here and there alone escaping the general fate."
How much we have lost of these precious early works from which we might have drawn so much, we learn from the references and quotations of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the first half of the fourth century, in his invaluable "Ecclesiastical History." A catalogue of some of the writings belonging to the second century quoted by this eminent scholar and compiler, writings which were available in his day but now have vanished, is sufficient to indicate to us something of the extent of our loss.
1. Papias, the friend of Polycarp, on the very verge of the first age, early in the second century, wrote an "Exposition in the Books of the Oracles of the Lord."
2. Hegesippus, about the middle of the second century, put out an "Ecclesiastical History in five Books."
3. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, also in the middle of the second century, wrote many letters; Eusebius especially makes mention of "his inspired industry."
4. Melito, Bishop of Sardis; Claudius Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis. These two once famous teachers, shortly after A. D. 150, were the authors of many works on Scriptural interpretations, controversial divinity, ecclesiastical order, and other subjects.
5. Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus;
6. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; as writers, were well known in the last quarter of the second century when Eusebius wrote and used their works.
But, except for a few meager fragments, all this voluminous literature quoted and referred to by writers such as Irenaeus, second century, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, third century, Eusebius of Caesarea, fourth century, has been blotted out, has vanished; largely no doubt owing to the causes above detailed.
Very early in the History of Christianity we catch sight of teachers and schools of thought growing up outside the Christian communities commonly classed as heretics and heretical, but for the most part utterly alien from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, although they seem to have introduced the name of Christ into their strange and often purely fanciful systems. They may be roughly divided into two great divisions, the one Judaizing and the other Gnostic. The Judaizing Heretics more or less denied the reality of Christ's sufferings, curiously imagining that the Christ of the Gospel was only a phantom appearance. The other, the Gnostic Heretics, under different names, seem to have introduced some Christian elements into philosophical systems of a different, mostly of an Oriental origin.
The tares grew well-nigh as rapidly as did the wheat, and as Christians were multiplied and began to be numbered by thousands in the different countries of the Roman Empire, so these heretical bodies numbered also their thousands. The term Gnostic is apparently of later origin, and in the second and third centuries the heretics were generally named after the leaders of the special school to which they belonged, such as Valentinians and Marcionites, the names of two of the more conspicuous schools. These Gnostics appeared certainly as early as the close of the first century, and before the middle of the second century were beyond doubt widely spread; all through that century (the second) and the first half of the third, they evidently occupied a conspicuous position, owing to their numbers, their organization, and their learning. After the first half of the third century the early heretical schools appear gradually to have withered away, and their place was filled by new and quite different schools of false teaching.
How numerous and formidable in the early days of Christianity were these heretical groups, we see from the prominence given to the refutation of their strange and perverted tenets in the fragments of primitive Christian literature which have come down to us; notably in the works of Irenaeus of Lyons (second half of the second century), of Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian of Carthage and Origen of Alexandria (end of second century and beginning of third century), and of Hippolytus of Portus and of Rome, who might also be dated as writing circa A. D. 200.
In the ranks of these numerous and widely spread heretical schools of thought were not a few scholars and thinkers, and even voluminous writers, from whose works we might have hoped to derive much knowledge of the teaching, the life, and the history of the early Christians, from whose ranks they had originally sprung in part, and with whom they were pleased to class themselves; but all their original works, writings, histories, expositions of the sacred books, have disappeared. It is believed that only one or two productions of these strange early dissenters from the Catholic faith have come down to us. All our knowledge, alas! of these once famous schools is derived from treatises of their bitter opponents, put out by Christian teachers, such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen; for example, Origen (first half of third century) gives us some forty-eight extracts some of considerable length) from the great Valentinian expositor Heracleon.
From Pagan writers, the compiler of early Christian History gets comparatively little assistance. A few short passages in Tacitus and Suetonius and in the well-known letters of Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan are almost the solitary exceptions.
For a long period Christianity was little known to the majority of Roman literary men. It was by many mistaken for a Jewish sect; the religion of the Jew was despised generally, and when not despised, was feared and dreaded as a pernicious superstition; and when towards the middle and second half of the second century, the religion of the Christians, owing to the increasing numbers, the earnestness and the intense reality of the faith of the Christian communities in all parts of the Empire, compelled a certain recognition from the Government and the Emperor, a studied silence on the part of Pagan writers and thinkers was evidently observed. They would not describe the progress of a religion, or discuss the curious problem of its mighty influence over so many souls. To the thoughtful Roman philosopher its steady advance boded no good to Rome; in his eyes it was rather a menace to the enduring prosperity of the Empire. A good example of this singular studied reticence is the solitary mention by the great and good Emperor Marcus, A. D. 161-180, of his Christian subjects; where he alludes to their fearlessness in the presence of death, to their ready willingness to die. But the Emperor's mention is a depreciatory one, and is colored too evidently by the feelings of dislike and even dread with which he regarded these people who professed a faith he was unable, perhaps cared not, to understand.
Such a compilation as that on which we are at present engaged must include not only the record of the principal historical facts connected with the Christians who lived in the first three centuries, but must embrace also much that belongs to their private life. The effect of that faith, for which the Christians of the days of persecution gave up so much, upon the everyday life of its professors, must be dwelt upon at some length. We possess materials of the highest value for this special part of our work on the everyday life of the Christians.
From the remains of some of the early writers, such as Hermas, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix, Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, we draw much of our knowledge here. These often take us into what we may term the everyday life of the Christians who lived in the first, second, and third centuries; they describe often vividly and graphically the difficulties and temptations, the hindrances and persecutions, to which the Christian was exposed. But besides these writings we possess some other and most important memoranda to which we may refer for such particulars. These are the special accounts of martyrs, and of men and women who suffered for the faith which they professed. Now these precious memoranda are divided into two classes. The first of these, the "Acts" properly so called, are largely copies of the official reports (the proces verbaux) of the proceedings of the Roman Court of Justice before which the accused Christian was summoned, and by which the accused was condemned. Such copies of reports, bearing as they do a purely official character, were sold by the officials of the Court of Justice to friends of the accused, and were preserved by them, or most probably by the Ministers of the Church of which the condemned were members, as a memorial of those persons who, in witnessing a good confession sealed for the most part by the sacrifice of their lives, did honor by their good and noble example to the congregation to which they had belonged.
A few admirable specimens of such official reports, the genuineness of which is undisputed, are, amongst others, the Acts of S. Justin (Martyr), of S. Cyprian, and of the Scillitan martyrs. Only, however, a few of such official reports, most precious relics indeed, have come down to us. The second class, also commonly known as "Acts of the Martyrs," but more properly designated as the "Passions of Martyrs," are very numerous.
These are something more than dry official reports of the interrogations of the Court of Justice, and profess to give at length the story of portions of the life, especially of the imprisonment, trial, and death of the confessors or martyrs. Many of the details of these "Passions of the Martyrs" are improbable, deal largely with supernatural incidents connected with the confessor whose "passion" forms the subject of the narrative, and are evidently the work largely of narrators, or compilers of the lives, writing in many cases long after the events happened which they professed to relate as eye-witnesses; only a very few of these "passions" bear the stamp of genuineness, and have come unharmed through the crucible of criticism. Among these few acknowledged genuine contemporary "Passions " are "The Letter of the Church of Smyrna to the Philomehans which relates the Martyrdom of S. Polycarp," "The Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, which tells the Story of the Martyrs of A. D. 177," "The Passion of S. Perpetua and her Companions." There are besides these a few more such relics which are generally accepted as genuine. But while we must set aside the actual authority of the great majority of these narratives as being mainly compilations of a period more or less removed from the time when the events related were said to have taken place, recent discoveries of archaeologists, such as those of De Rossi and his successors at Rome, have nevertheless shown us that in the case of many of these so-called spurious "passions" a large substructure of truth existed, and that the general character of the recital was often based on events which really took place. Hence our views of much of what has been regarded as spurious and belonging to romance rather than to history, require, in the light of this late investigation by scholars, considerable modification and reconstruction. The importance of these late discoveries for our conceptions of the life led by the Christians roughly between A. D. 34 and 313, will be discussed later.
In such a history as that on which we are now engaged, nothing perhaps is so striking as the fact, demonstrated by abundant evidence drawn from all quarters of the Roman Empire during these 280 years, of the oneness, the identity, of the faith which lived in the countless scattered congregations of Christians in such different national centers as Rome and Corinth, Ephesus and Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, and Lyons; of the oneness of the faith which inspired nobles and slaves, soldiers and traders, men and women, old and young, alike to live changed lives, to undergo unheard of dangers, to brave frightful perils, to endure tortures, to disregard death.
From the beginning the faith was one, absolutely changeless in its essential features. We read it expressed in clear emphatic language in the writings of Peter and Paul, who passed away by violent death in the 'sixties of the first century, and in the Gospel, Apocalypse, and Letters of John, who survived till the last years of the same century; and these had learned it from the Master Himself. We find the fundamental doctrines of the faith in the letters of disciples and pupils, in the Epistles of Clement of Rome, of Ignatius of Antioch, of Polycarp of Smyrna, in the apologies and writings of their younger contemporaries and successors, such as Aristides, the apologist before the tribunal of the Emperor Hadrian; Justin Martyr, the scholarly Greek; and in the next generation Irenaeus Bishop of Lyons, in Gaul. It is repeated by Hippolytus of Rome, by Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of African Carthage, who wrote and preached and taught scarcely a hundred years after the Apostles of the Master had passed away. The same faith was again reiterated by the great teachers of the first half of the third century, by Origen of Alexandria and Cyprian of Carthage. After eighteen centuries the same precious changeless tradition is the heritage of the Christian Church, in all its essential features, alike in Moscow and Constantinople, in Rome and in London.
And the center of all early Catholic teaching was Jesus Christ, His work for men, His love for men. His blood which He shed for men.
Critics who imagine that the lofty conceptions of later ages on the subject of the pre-existence of Jesus Christ, of His Divinity, of His being Very God of Very God, were evoked by the Arian controversies of the fourth century, are strangely ignorant of the letter and spirit of the teaching of primitive Christianity. Indeed, the language used by such writers as Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch— the first of whom was the disciple of Paul and Peter, and the latter a scholar of the Apostles—and even by Hippolytus nearly a century later, in expressing their belief in our Lord's Divinity, while lacking the precision of the terminology determined by the great Church Councils of the fourth century, was occasionally so strong as almost to verge upon Patripassianism.
Patripassian was a name of reproach given at the end of the second century to those theologians who, without careful definition of the sole original Principality of the Father, claimed the Plenary God-head for the Son the Redeemer. The more accurate theologians of that age when the air was charged with speculative controversies, drew an awful conclusion that the loose and somewhat startling phraseology used now and again without due consideration, asserted that the Father, the one primary principle, must have suffered on the cross.
Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, a great teacher of the last quarter of the second century, many of whose writings are preserved to us, singles out Clement of Rome's Letter to the Corinthians as transmitting in its fullness the Christianity taught by the Apostles, more especially by Peter and Paul. This letter exhibits the belief of his Church (that of Rome) as to the true interpretation of the Apostolic records. "To Clement, as to the mass of devout Christians of all ages, Jesus Christ is not a dead man whose memory is reverently cherished by men, or whose precepts are carefully observed, but an ever living, ever active Presence, who enters into all the circumstances of their being."
A similar conception of Jesus Christ is found in Polycarp and Ignatius. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is also plainly taught in each of these very early writers, as are the doctrines of the Atonement and Mediation of Christ. There is absolutely a perfect accord in the teaching respecting these great fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Church in all the writings of the primitive fathers.
To give examples of the remarkable unity in the teaching of the first ages of Christianity:—A general agreement from very early times to keep holy the first day of the week in commemoration of the Resurrection of the Lord was common to all the Churches. The two great Sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, we find repeatedly mentioned in the earliest writings as a necessary part of Christian life. The most careful provision for the due administration of these Sacraments was made in all the Churches without exception.
With a few minor differences, the government and administration of the inner life of all the Christian Churches was the same. Before the middle of the second century each Church or organized Christian community had its three orders of ministers, its bishop, its presbyters, and its deacons; while very early in that century (the second) it is clear that the episcopal office was universally established in all the churches; indeed, "Episcopacy is so inseparably interwoven with all the traditions and beliefs of men like Irenaeus and Tertullian, whose writings are spread over the last thirty years of the second century and the first twenty of the third, that they betray no knowledge of a time when it was not." The repeated and ample testimony of Ignatius here takes us back to the time of John, and although the estimate of the authority of episcopacy seems to have varied as time went on in different Christian centers, historical testimony is unanimous as to its existence even in the first century. There was no divergence here in the various Churches in the question of government.
Lastly, it is perfectly clear whence the Catholic Church of the earliest days derived her faith and drew her teaching. One voice proceeds from the Christian communities of each of the great centers of the ancient Church, from Antioch and Alexandria, from Smyrna and from Rome, in the utterances of Ignatius and Barnabas, of Polycarp and Clement. The more famous early teachers, it is true, appealed rarely to written words, for they had heard the living voice of the Apostles of the Lord. But their teaching is based entirely upon those discourses and actions of the Lord which we find recorded in the Gospels, and upon no others. It is also evident that at least the great majority of the Epistles of Paul, James. Peter, and John contained in our New Testament.
Canon were known to them; and upon these Epistles and no others, and upon the words and acts of the Lord above referred to, they based their teaching and formulated their creed; a changeless teaching, and a creed which from the first days has been the heritage of the Catholic Church.
Thus in its strange grand unity the Christian Church, in each of its important centers in Asia, Africa, and Europe, during the last decade of the first and the early decades of the second century, taught the same faith, told the same wondrous story, basing faith and story upon the same traditions oral and written, the traditions enshrined in the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament.
Just the first little group of Apostolic men, Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp, omitted to quote from the written records by name, because they had heard with their ears the words of the Gospels and the teaching of the Epistles from the lips of the Apostles of the Lord. But by the next generation of teachers, made up of men who had not been privileged to hear the voices of Peter, Paul, and John, while identically the same faith was taught and in almost the same words, the written traditions of these same men were quoted, and with ever greater circumstantiality as the years of the second century wore on. We would instance Papias, Justin, Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, the Christian teachers at Hierapolis and at Rome, at Lyons, Alexandria and Carthage, never varying in the great essential doctrines, never suggesting any novel doctrine, only quoting from the same original records with ever greater accuracy and care as time advanced, teaching the same fundamental truths as did the Apostolic Fathers, Clement, Polycarp, and Ignatius.
The earliest "versions" into which the books of the New Testament were translated from the original Greek in which they were first written, the Syriac and the old Latin, both translations certainly made in the second century, tell the same story of the unity of Catholic Christendom in the all-important matter of the Records of primitive Christianity, received and acknowledged by the Christian Churches of the East and the West. The witness of these earliest translations is most weighty, for while they exhibit the books contained in what is termed the New Testament Canon, they sanction no Apocryphal books whatever. They speak here of the unity of the primitive Church, with the voice of very early Christendom, a voice none can gainsay or dispute.
This wonderful unity of the early Church in its estimate of the Divinity of the Founder, of His ever-presence among each company of those who believed in Him, and of His support of each individual member; in the great doctrines connected with the Founder, in the worship of the Church, in the government of the Church, in its acknowledgment of the one primitive tradition of the Founder's teaching, oral and written; is one of the secrets of its enormous power, which no opposition, no persecution, ever affected or touched. That unity immeasurably helped to secure the eventual triumph of the Church in the first quarter of the fourth century.