In every step of the inquiry, we are compelled to feel and acknowledge the immeasurable disproportion between the size of the object and the capacity of the human mind. We may try to abstract the notions of time, of space, and of matter, which so closely adhere to all the perceptions of our experimental knowledge; but as soon as we presume to reason of infinite substance, or spiritual generation; as often as we deduce any positive conclusions from a negative idea, we are involved in darkness, perplexity, and inevitable contradiction.[[180]]

Recurrence to the New Testament doctrine of God, and a comparison of it with the doctrine of Deity set forth in the Nicean and Athanasian creeds, will exhibit the wide departure—the absolute apostasy—that has taken place in respect of this most fundamental of all doctrines of religion—the doctrine of God. Truly "Christians" have denied the Lord that bought them,[[181]] and turned literally to fables. They have enthroned a conception of a negative idea of "being," which can stand in no possible relationship to man, nor man to it; and to this they ascribe divine attributes and give it title, knee and adoration which belong to God alone. Small wonder that the angel whom John saw flying in the midst of heaven having the everlasting Gospel to commit to the earth in the hour of God's judgment, in the last days, should cry aloud to the inhabitants of the earth, saying, "Fear God and give glory to Him; * * * * and worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters"[[182]]—small wonder, I repeat, that such should be part of this great message, for truly the whole world had departed from the worship of the true and living God.

The Church of Christ Displaced by the Churches of Men.

The departure from the form and spirit of church government was no less marked than the moral and spiritual declension among the Christians of the early centuries of the era, or the departure from the true doctrine of Deity. Beyond filling the vacancy in the council of the Twelve Apostles, occasioned by the fall of Judas, there is no clear and satisfactory evidence that other successors of the Apostles were ever chosen, though the fair implication is that the organization of the Church with Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Seventies, Bishops, Teachers, etc., was to be perpetuated as at first established. At least this organization was given for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, until the saints should come to a unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God;[[183]] so that the plain inference is that as long as there are saints to be perfected, or edified, or united, or brought to the knowledge of God; so long as there is work for a ministry, or the necessity of a Church through the agency of which the truth is to be taught to the world, so long as it will be necessary to perpetuate the organization given of God for the achievement of those high purposes. To say that man could devise a better organization for the accomplishment of these several objects would be to challenge the wisdom of God. To say that any of these means provided in the Church organization could be dispensed with, would be to contradict the plain teaching of scripture, which, in this very connection forbids the eye to say to the hand, I have no need of thee; or the head to the feet, I have no need of you; that is, one officer of the Church may not say to another officer, I have no need of thee.[[184]] The doctrine of scripture is that all the officers of the Church together with their several gifts are essential to the Church of Christ; essential to its perfection; essential to the performance of the sacred functions assigned to it. Yet it must be conceded that the organization described in the New Testament did not survive the last of the Apostles; or preserve much beyond that time, the spirit which the Master had impressed upon it.[[185]]

The Apostles, while they lived, exercised a general jurisdiction over the Church, to which all submitted without question. In the exercise of their general authority they organized branches of the Church, appointed Elders or Bishops to take the oversight of them, and instructed them in Church government, and discipline, and doctrine. After the demise of the Apostles, there seems to have been left no central authority to exercise the functions of general supervision or presidency over the entire Church, such as the Twelve had exercised. That center of unity, together with the power thereof, seems to have vanished from the Church with the Apostles. The bishops and some subordinate officers remained, it is true, but these were local, not general authorities. The Church in each city or district of country after the Apostolic age, seems to have been regarded as a sort of independent republic of itself, without any bond of consociation with any other church beyond that which was the result of possessing a common faith in Christianity, which bond was one of sympathy merely, not of hierarchal association. The rise of the hierarchy with the centralization of its powers in the bishop of Rome, and which ultimately dominated the whole Church, and not only the Church but, directly or indirectly, the western civilized world, came later, and was of gradual development; and when it was finally established, it was not the organization described in the New Testament, the Church with an inspired priesthood of Apostles, and Prophets, Evangelists, Seventies, and Pastors, etc., but a hierarchy fashioned by man out of such remnants of Church organization as survived Apostolic times. As the number of Christians increased, the bishops of large cities organized new branches of the Church in the suburbs of their cities, and in the towns and villages adjacent, and ordained for them a ministry. It was but natural perhaps that the officers of these new branches of the Church, both the bishops and the subordinate clergy, should look to the one who had brought them into existence as a sort of general presiding authority over them. And hence, in time arose what were called metropolitan bishops, bishops who had under their direction the bishops of neighboring towns and villages—bishops of the "suburbs and the fields," they were sometimes called—and perhaps of the entire province of which the metropolitan city was recognized as the center. As the bishops of the metropolis of a province, in the manner described, became the center of ecclesiastical unity for that province, so, too, in time, the bishops of cities which were the capitals of the three great divisions of the empire—Antioch, Alexandria and Rome—asserted a superior dignity over metropolitan bishops. It was in these cities that the exarchs of the empire resided, and if we may trust the authority of Neander, the bishops of these cities also, at first, took that title, but later made choice of the more ecclesiastical name of Patriarch.[[186]] In addition to the importance attached to these cities as the capitals of the great divisions of the empire, a superior dignity in the minds of Christians attached to the Churches founded by the Apostles as the surest depositories of the Apostolic teaching and doctrine; and as Apostolic origin could be claimed for the churches in the three cities named, it is not surprising, when their political importance is added, that the bishops of those cities claimed superior dignity for their office, and united under their jurisdiction the metropolitan bishops of the respective three great divisions of the empire. Subsequently the same title was granted to the bishop of Jerusalem, and to the bishop of Constantinople; to the former it was granted in virtue of the peculiar sanctity which attaches to Jerusalem, and the fact that the first Christian Church was planted there; to the latter, because it was made the capital of the empire, "New Rome;" and because also it was peculiarly the city of the first imperial patron of Christianity. Thus five patriarchates were established.

Through circumstances too numerous and intricate to detail here, the bishops of Rome changed the primacy of mere precedence which had been accorded them among associated brethren, to a primacy of power and jurisdiction, which resulted in the bishops of Rome becoming recognized as the supreme head of the Christian Church; and the papacy entered upon that marvelous career which by the impartial can but be regarded as the shame of the Christian name.

Attention has already been called to the corruptions which prevailed in that period of peace in the closing decades of the third century, where bishops are represented as being full of pride and ostentation; as deserting the law of piety and being inflamed against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating quarrels, threats, rivalships, hostilities, hatred towards each other, and only anxious to assert the Church government as a kind of sovereignty for themselves.[[187]] And all this when Christianity was a proscribed religion; and when the Church, and especially its leaders, the bishops, were liable to severest persecution. Reason and a due consideration of human nature both combined to fix upon us the conviction that the bitterness of rivalry, of hatred, of ambition, must have greatly increased when metropolitan and patriarchal bishops, formerly proscribed and hunted like wild beasts, rose to the dignity of civil princes, and took upon them more and ever more of the spirit of worldliness as wealth and honor and popular applause were made the accompaniments of their ecclesiastical offices. History confirms what reason and a knowledge of human nature suggests; for the history of the Church after the elevation of proscribed Christianity to the dignity of the state religion of the Roman empire, is but the melancholy history of unholy ambitions, jealousies, strifes, contentions, murders, and wars between rival bishops and their adherents on the one hand; and equally unholy struggles for worldly advantages with kings and rulers of this world, on the other. The spirit that actuated the bishops of the Church after their elevation through the policy of Constantine is admirably illustrated by a remark of Gregory of Nazianzus, made in Constantinople, 380 A. D., when deploring the evils of the Church. He says:

Would to heaven there were no primacy, no eminence of place, and no tyrannical precedence of rank; that we might be known by eminence of virtue alone! But, as the case now stands, the distinction of a seat at the right hand or the left, or in the middle; at a higher or a lower place; of going before or aside of each other, has given rise to many disorders among us, to no salutary purpose whatsoever and plunged multitudes in ruin.[[188]]

Matters in Church government did not mend with time, but grew worse and worse. Pride increased; rivalship between contending prelates grew more embittered; ambition mounted higher and ever higher in the breasts of the shepherds of the flock of Christ. In his association with his Apostles—to whom he committed the keys of His kingdom—the Master had discouraged ambition and had said that he who would be great among his followers must be their minister; and whosoever would be chief among them, was to be their servant; and the government of His Church was to be distinct in these particulars from the governments of this world.[[189]] But all in vain were the instructions of Messiah to the worldly, ambitious prelates of an apostate Christianity which had gradually supplanted the religion of Jesus Christ; and henceforth we may see in that hierarchy which usurped the place of the Church of Christ from the time of Constantine, all the spirit of pride, envy, jealousy, contention, strife, selfishness, bitterness, and unholy ambition which characterized the princes and rulers of this world; attended, too, with all the evils that wait upon these passions of rulers when once let loose, viz., secret plottings, usurpations of authority, corrupt elections, cruel imprisonments, banishments, secret and public murders, and wars; all undertaken, of course, in the interest of the gentle religion of Jesus Christ, and the maintenance of that authority which is based on love, and whose control over men is through the means of persuasion and the teaching of true knowledge. Is it not evident that the kingdom of peace, wherein was to dwell righteousness and truth, had become merely one of the kingdoms of this world? And were not the Fratriceli of the thirteenth century, though denounced as heretics, right when they loudly proclaimed their conviction that "the fatal gift of a Christian emperor had been the doom of the true Christian religion?"

The Testimony of Prophecy to the Universal Apostasy.