The distinction between the Christian principle and its successive realisations renders it easy to resolve the question, formerly so much debated, as to the perfectibility of Christianity. It is perfect piety, plenary union with God, consequently the absolute and definitive Religion. But, regarded in its historical evolution, not only is it perfectible, but it must ceaselessly progress, since, for it, to progress is to realise itself. The germ could not be perfected in its essence, as germ and ideal type of the tree that it potentially contains. But the tree itself only comes into existence by the development of the germ. No reform, no progress, no perfecting, could raise Christianity above itself—that is to say, above its principle; for these reforms and this progress only bring it into closer conformity with that principle—that is, make it more Christian. On the other hand, the principle itself must enter into evolution in history in order to manifest its originality and its force, to realise in individual and social life, in the realm of thought and in the realm of action, in a word in the whole of civilisation, all its virtualities and all its consequences. Jesus saw this when He spoke the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Matt. xiii. 31-32).
This distinction has another advantage. It alone permits the Christian thinker to be equitable in his judgments in regard to all religious forms, to place himself at a truly historical point of view, and to reconcile, without weakness and without violence, what is due to truth and what to charity. Every sincere endeavour to express or to realise Christianity in a system or in a church becomes respectable so soon as you know how to discover in it, under formulas however strange and practices however gross, some effects of the Christian principle or some signs of its presence. If disdain and contempt are not permissible with regard to any type of Christianity however different from our own, neither is illusion to be tolerated with regard to our own church or to our personal piety. Perfection is nowhere to be found. Each community may repeat, and the larger, older, and more numerous it becomes the more will it need to repeat, the words of the Apostle Paul: "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended," etc. (Phil. iii. 13, 14). The habit we have got into of putting all the truth on our side and all error on the side of others, of thus opposing light and darkness, not only falsifies the judgment; it sours the heart and poisons piety, it dries up the feeling of fraternity, and is the perpetual sign of individual or collective vanity. Let each examine himself, let him judge his church without complacence in the light and spirit of Christ; he will soon attain to more humility and truth. He will never identify any particular church or its dogma with Christianity itself. However pure its teaching, however generous its deeds, he will reckon that this is, after all, but a commencement of Christianity, a mere nothing compared with what the Christian principle should have accomplished in the world in eighteen centuries.
Such is the feeling with which we should approach the history of Christianity. The field is vast; the vegetation in it is infinite; we must content ourselves with incompleteness. Being neither able nor desirous to say everything, I have been obliged to seek a commanding point of view from which it would be possible to take in that history in its entirety, and to take a bird's-eye view of the course it has followed. Faithful to this idea, namely, that the Christian principle is like leaven or a seed thrown into a gross, heavy mass of anterior traditions which it was meant gradually to raise and to transform, it is this struggle and this progress that I desire especially to describe. I shall endeavour to show how Christianity, always borrowing its forms from the environment in which it realises itself, after enduring them for a time, subsequently frees itself from and triumphs over the inferior and temporary elements which fetter it, and manifests from age to age a greater independence and a purer and higher spirituality. This progress is slow, obscure, oft interrupted, hindered by reactions or by moments of arrest; none the less striking, however, does it appear when, rising above these secondary complications, one measures the distance between the points of departure and arrival. Not only has Christianity never been better understood than in our own day, but never were civilisation or the soul of humanity taken in their entirety more fundamentally Christian. When one follows the history of Christianity from this higher point of view, one sees that it has passed through three very distinct phases and assumed three essentially different forms: the Jewish or Messianic, the Graeco-Roman or Catholic, the Protestant or modern, form. Let us see how it has passed from the one to the other.
2. Jewish, or Messianic Christianity
The first of these periods is usually omitted or suppressed. Being unable to admit that Catholicism is not the work of Christ and the apostles, or that the Church has varied its dogma or its institutions, Catholic theologians naïvely imagine that the first Christian communities of Jerusalem and Antioch resembled those of Rome, Milan, and Lyons in the fourth century; that Peter was the first of the popes and exercised for five-and-twenty years the supreme pontificate; that the apostles appointed bishops everywhere as their successors and the heirs of their power. In this way the history of Christianity became, in the Catholic tradition, a tissue of legends.
The theologians of Protestantism arrived by another road at an analagous conclusion. Under the influence of the dogma of the verbal inspiration of the New Testament, they were led to make of apostolic Christianity an ideal and abstract type which all the ages ought to force themselves to imitate and reproduce. And, as they profess to have returned to this type both in regard to ideas and to institutions and morals, they have made of this apostolic period the first chapter of the history of Protestantism, just as the Catholics have made of it the first chapter of the history of Catholicism. In both cases, it loses all distinct physiognomy and all reality.
By dissipating these prejudices, historical criticism has completely resuscitated that first form of Christianity. It is no longer possible to confound it with any other. It had its contrasts, its passions, its storms. Neither Jesus nor the apostles lived in the ideal or in paradisiacal peace. They quarrelled and were divided in the Church of Jerusalem as in our own. The subjects of the quarrels were different, but they did not consider them less grave than those which vex and trouble us. Peter, James, and Paul were not less divided in the first century over the question of circumcision and of the relations between Jews and Gentiles, than were Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin in the sixteenth over the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. From both camps, then as now, they sent forth pamphlets and anathemas. There were two opposite parties. There were the stubborn holders of tradition and its authority, and there were the innovators, or the partisans, sometimes as rash as they, of liberty of faith and individual inspiration; and between the two there were the men of conciliation and the golden mean who were preoccupied especially in preventing schisms and arranging truces and treaties of peace, to be followed in their turn by new crises and fresh storms.
In this first form of Christianity, as in all that have followed it, there was a certain dualism, a mixture of heterogeneous and soon hostile elements. The struggle was bound to arise between the Christian principle and Jewish tradition. The new seed sown in that ancient soil could not germinate without rising in it and in places breaking up the thick hard crust. In the books of the New Testament that have preserved to us the picture of that first and powerful germination, side by side with the principle to which belongs the future we necessarily find old things which are on the way to death. It will be seen what an error they commit and what a wrong they do themselves who, misconceiving this historical complexity, sanctify and deify both these opposite elements, and place on the same level the eternally fruitful grain, and the chaff to-day dried up and utterly inert, a mere remnant of the Jewish stalk that bore it.
Conceived in this religious matrix of Judaism, the Christian principle, if I may so speak, could only take in it a body essentially Jewish in structure, substance, colour. I only speak, of course, of the body of this primitive Christianity, not of its soul, which, as I have shown, was altogether new. Now, its body was Jewish on two sides and in two aspects: by the persistence of the authority of the Law of Moses, and the practical observance of its precepts, from which the disciples of Jesus did not dream of detaching themselves; and, secondly, by the apocalyptic Messianism which dominated Jewish thought from the time of the Maccabees, and with which the first Christians were perhaps more imbued and more possessed than all the rest of their people.
Faith in the evangel of Jesus, full and joyful communion with the Father, habits of Jewish devotion, Messianic hopes,—all this formed, in the consciousness of the first disciples, a mixture of various elements and of things of very unequal value. These elements, in gradually revealing their disparate nature, could not fail to enter into contradiction and to engender conflicts in the very heart of apostolic Christianity. It was these contradictions and conflicts which set Christian thought in movement, and produced the life and progress of that early age, so that one may always rightly consider it as a creative and classic epoch, and hold it up as a normal example to the churches of all time; on condition, however, that it be not considered as an immutable mass of eternal verities, but taken in its natural movement, in its constant effort of progressive enfranchisement with regard to the past, in its heroic ascent towards religious forms and ideas, freer, more human, more conformed to the universal character, to the spirituality, and to the pure morality of the religion of Jesus.