“This, therefore, should take the place of every other pleasure, the consciousness of obeying God. Think what it is to be able to say, ‘What others preach, I am doing: their praise of virtue is a praise of me: God has sent me into the world to be His soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and fears are vain, that to a good man no evil can happen whether he live or die. He sends me at one time here, at another time there: He disciplines me by poverty and by prison, that I may be the better witness to mankind. With such a ministry committed to me, can I any longer care in what place I am, or who my companions are, or what they say about me: nay, rather, does not my whole nature strain after God, His laws and His commandments?’”[291]
Between the current ethics of the Greek world and the ethics of the earliest forms of Christianity were many points both of difference and of contact.
The main point of difference was that Christianity rested morality on a divine command. It took over the fundamental idea of the Jewish theocracy.[292] Its ultimate appeal was not to the reasonableness of the moral law in itself, but to the fact that God had enacted it. Greek morality, on the contrary, was “independent.” The idea that the moral laws are laws of God is, no doubt, found in the Stoics; but they are so in another than either the Jewish or the Christian sense: they are laws of God, not as being expressions of His personal will, but as being laws of nature, part of the whole constitution of the world.
Consequent upon the conception of the moral law as a positive enactment of God, the breach of moral law was conceived as sin. Into the early Christian conception of sin several elements entered. It was probably not in the popular mind what it was in the mind of St. Paul, still less what it became in the mind of St. Augustine. But one element was constant. It was a trespass against God. As such, it was on the one hand something for which God must be appeased, and on the other hand something which He could forgive. To the Stoics it was shortcoming, failure, and loss: the chief sufferer was the man himself: amendment was possible for the future, but there was no forgiveness for the past.
Beyond these and other points of difference there was a wide area of agreement. The former became accentuated as time went on: it was by virtue of the latter that in the earliest ages the minds of many persons had been predisposed to accept Christianity, and that, having accepted it, they tended to fuse some elements of the new teaching with some elements of the old. The agreement is most conspicuous in those respects which were the chief aims of the contemporary moral reformation; and above all in the importance which was attached to moral conduct. This importance was overshadowed in the later Christian communities by the importance which came to be attached to doctrine: its existence in the earliest communities is shown by two classes of proofs.
1. The first of these proofs is the place which moral conduct holds in the earliest Christian writers. The documents which deal with the Christian life are almost wholly moral. They enforce the ancient code of the Ten Words. They raise those Ten Words from being the lowest and most necessary level of a legal code, to being the expression of the highest moral ideal, expanding and amplifying them so as to make them embrace thoughts and desires as well as words and actions. The most interesting of such documents is that which is known as the “Two Ways.”[293] It has recently acquired a fresh significance by having been found as part of the Teaching of the Apostles. It is there prefixed to the regulations for ceremonial and discipline which constitute the new part of that work. It proves to be a manual of instruction to be taught to those who were to be admitted as members of a Christian community. It may thus be considered to express the current ideal of Christian practice. In the “Way of Life” which it sets forth, doctrine has no place. It is summed up in the two commandments: “First, thou shalt love God who made thee; secondly, thy neighbour as thyself: whatsoever things thou wouldest not have done to thyself, do not thou to another.”[294] These commandments are amplified in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. “Thou shalt not forswear thyself: thou shalt not bear false witness: thou shalt not speak evil: thou shalt not bear malice: thou shalt not be double-minded nor double-tongued, for double-tonguedness is a snare of death. Thy speech shall not be false or hollow, but filled to the full with deed. Thou shalt not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor evilly disposed, nor haughty: thou shalt not take mischievous counsel against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not hate any man, but some thou shalt rebuke, and for some thou shalt pray, and some thou shalt love more than thine own soul.[295]... My child, be not a murmurer, for murmuring is on the path to blasphemy: nor self-willed nor evil-minded, for from all these things blasphemies are born. But be thou meek, for the meek shall inherit the earth: be long-suffering, and pitiful, and guileless, and quiet, and kind, and trembling continually at the words which thou hast heard.[296]... Thou shalt not hesitate to give, nor in giving shalt thou murmur; for thou shalt know who is the good paymaster of what thou hast earned. Thou shalt not turn away him that needeth, but thou shalt share all things with thy brother and shalt not say that they are thine own; for if ye be fellow-sharers in that which is immortal, how much more in mortal things.”[297]
Another such document is the first book of the collection known as the Apostolical Constitutions: it begins at once with an exhortation to morality.
“Listen to holy teaching, ye who lay hold on His promise, in accordance with the command of the Saviour, in harmony with his glorious utterances. Take heed, ye sons of God, to do all things so as to be obedient to God and to be well-pleasing in all things to the Lord our God. For if any one follow after wickedness and do things contrary to the will of God, such a one will be counted as a nation that transgresses against God. Abstain then from all covetousness and unrighteousness.”[298]
2. The second proof is afforded by the place which discipline held in contemporary Christian life. The Christians were drawn together into communities. Isolation was discouraged and soon passed away. To be a Christian was to be a member of a community. The basis of the community was not only a common belief, but also a common practice. It was the task of the community as an organization to keep itself pure. The offences against which it had to guard were not only the open crimes which fell within the cognizance of public law, but also and more especially sins of moral conduct and of the inner life. The qualifications which in later times were the ideal standard for church officers, were also in the earliest times the ideal standard for ordinary members. “If any man who has sinned sees the bishop and the deacons free from fault, and the flock abiding pure, first of all he will not venture to enter into the assembly of God, being smitten by his own conscience: but if, secondly, setting lightly by his sin he should venture to enter, he will forthwith be taken to task ... and either be punished, or being admonished by the pastor will be drawn to repentance. For looking round upon the assembly one by one, and finding no blemish either in the bishop or in the ranks of the people under him, with shame and many tears he will go out in peace, pricked in heart, and the flock will have been cleansed, and he will cry with tears to God and will repent of his sin, and will have hope: and the whole flock beholding his tears will be admonished that he who has sinned and repented is not lost.”[299] In other cases expulsion was a solemn and formal act: the sinful member was cast into outer darkness: re-admission was accompanied with the same rites as the original admission. In other words, the earliest communities endeavoured, both in the theory which they embodied in their manuals of Christian life, and in the practice which they enforced by discipline, to realize what has since been known as the Puritan ideal. Each one of them was a community of saints. “Passing their days upon earth, they were in reality citizens of heaven.”[300] The earthly community reflected in all but its glory and its everlastingness the life of the “new Jerusalem.” Its bishop was the visible representative of Jesus Christ himself sitting on the throne of heaven, with the white-robed elders round him: its members were the “elect,” the “holy ones,” the “saved.” “Without were the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the murderers, and the idolators, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie:” within were “they which were written in the Lamb’s book of life.” To be a member of the community was to be in reality, and not merely in conception, a child of God and heir of everlasting salvation: to be excluded from the community was to pass again into the outer darkness, the realm of Satan and eternal death.