The book which is probably nearest in date, and which is certainly most alike in character to this simple manual, is the first book of the collection of documents known as the Apostolical Constitutions. It pictures the aim of the Christian life as being to please God by obeying His will and keeping His commandments. “Take heed, O sons of God, to do everything in obedience to God, and to become well-pleasing in all things to the Lord our God.”[711] “If thou wilt please God, abstain from all that He hates, and do none of those things that are displeasing to Him.”[712] Individual Christians are spoken of as servants and sons of God, as fellow-heirs and fellow-partakers with His Son, as believers, i.e., as the phrase is expanded, “those who have believed on His unerring religion.”[713] The rule of life is the Ten Commandments, expanded as Christ expanded them, so as to comprehend sins of thought as well as of deed. It was a fellowship of a common ideal and a common enthusiasm of goodness, of neighbourliness and of mutual service, of abstinence from all that would rouse the evil passions of human nature, of the effort to crush the lower part of us in the endeavour to reach after God.[714]
It is even possible that the baptismal formula may have consisted, not in an assertion of belief, but in a promise of amendment; for a conservative sect made the candidate promise—“I call these seven witnesses to witness that I will sin no more, I will commit adultery no more, I will not steal, I will not act unjustly, I will not covet, I will not hate, I will not despise, nor will I have pleasure in any evil.”[715]
The Christian communities were based not only on the fellowship of a common ideal, but also on the fellowship of a common hope. In baptism they were born again, and born to immortality. There was the sublime conception that the ideal society which they were endeavouring to realize would be actually realized on earth. The Son of Man would come again, and the regenerated would die no more. The kingdoms of this world would become the kingdom of the Messiah. The lust and hate, the strife and conflict, the iniquity and vice, which dominated in current society, would be cast out for ever; and over the new earth there would be the arching spheres of a new heaven, into which the saints, like the angels, might ascend. But as the generations passed, and all things continued as they had been, and the sign of the Son of Man sent no premonitory ray from the far-off heaven, this hope of a new earth, without changing its force, began to change its form. It was no longer conceived as sudden, but as gradual. The nations of the world were to be brought one by one into the vast communion. There grew up the magnificent conception of a universal assembly, a καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία.[716] There would be a universal religion and a universal society, and not until then would the end come: it would be a transformed and holy world.
The first point which I will ask you to note is, that this very transformation of the idea of a particular religion into that of a universal religion—this conception of an all-embracing human society, naturally, if unconsciously, carried with it a relaxation of the bonds of discipline. The very earnestness which led men to preach the Gospel and to hasten the Kingdom, led them also to gather into the net fish of every kind. There was always a test, but the rigour of the test was softened. The old Adam asserted itself. There were social influences, and weakness of character in the officers, and a condonation by the community. It became less and less practicable to eject every offender against the Christian code. It was against this whole tendency that Montanism was a rebellion—not only against the officialism of Christianity, but also against its worldliness.[717] The earlier conception of that code, in which it embraced sins of thought, came to be narrowed. The first narrowing was the limitation to open sins. The Christian societies fell under the common law which governs all human organizations, that no cognizance can be taken of the secret thoughts of the heart. The second limitation was, that even when a man had committed an open sin, and had been therefore excluded from the community, he might be re-admitted. The limitation was not accepted without a controversy which lasted over a great part of two centuries, and which at one time threatened to rend the whole Christian communities into fragments. The Church was gradually transformed from being a community of saints—of men who were bound together by the bond of a holy life, separated from the mass of society, and in antagonism to it—to a community of men whose moral ideal and moral practice differed in but few respects from those of their Gentile neighbours. The Church of Christ, which floated upon the waves of this troublesome world was a Noah’s ark, in which there were unclean as well as clean.
Side by side with this diminution in the strictness of the moral tests of admission and of continued membership, was a growth in the importance of the intellectual elements, of which I spoke in a previous Lecture. The idea of holiness and purity came to include in early times the idea of sound doctrine. Hegesippus,[718] in speaking of a church as a virgin, gives as his reason, not its moral purity, but the fact that it was not corrupted by foolish doctrines. The growth, both within the Church and on its outskirts, of opinions which were not the opinions of the majority—the tendency of all majorities to assert their power—the flocking into the Christian fold of the educated Greeks and Romans, who brought with them the intellectual habits of mind which dominated in the age—gave to the intellectual element an importance which it had not previously possessed. Knowledge, which had always been in some sort an element in Christianity, though not as a basis of association, came to assert its place side by side with love. Agreement in opinion, which had been the basis of union in the Greek philosophical schools, and later in the Gnostic societies, now came to form a new element in the bond of union within and between the Churches.[719] But the practical necessity, when once an intellectual element was admitted, of giving some limitations to that element by establishing a rule of faith and a standard list of apostolic documents, caused stress to be laid at once upon the intellect and the region within which it moved. It was, that is to say, necessary to ensure that the intellectual element was of the right kind, and this of itself gave emphasis to the new temper and tendency. The profession of belief in Christ which had been in the first instance subordinate to love and hope, and which had consisted in a simple recognition of him as the Son of God, became enucleated and elaborated into an explicit creed; and assent to that creed became the condition, or, so to speak, the contract of membership. The profession of faith must be in the words of the Christian rule.[720] The teaching of the catechumens was no longer that which we find in the “Two Ways”—the inculcation of the higher morality; it was the traditio symboli, the teaching of the pass-word and of its meaning. The creed and teaching were the creed and teaching of the average members of the communities. In religion, as in society, it is the average that rules. The law of life is compromise.
There were two collateral causes which contributed to the change and gave emphasis to it.
(1) The one arose from the importance which was attached to baptism. There is no doubt that baptism was conceived to have in itself an efficacy which in later times has been rarely attached to it. The expressions which the more literary ages have tended to construe metaphorically were taken literally. It was a real washing away of sins; it was a real birth into a new life; it was a real adoption into a divine sonship. The renunciatio diaboli—the abjuring of false gods and their wicked worship—was also an important element.[721] These elements were indeed even more strongly emphasized by certain Gnostic societies than by the more orthodox writers; but they directly suggested a question which soon became vital, viz. whether all baptism had this efficacy. Was the mere act or ceremonial enough, or did it depend on the place where, the person by whom, and the ritual with which it was administered? In particular, the question of the minister of baptism became important. It came to be doubted whether baptism had its awful efficacy, if the baptizer were cut off from the general society of Christians on the ground of either his teaching or his practice. It became important to ensure that those who baptized held the right faith, lest the baptism they administered should be invalid, and should carry with it all the evil consequences of a vitiated baptism. The rules which were laid down were minute. There were grave controversies as to the precise amount of difference of opinion which vitiated baptism, and the very fact of the controversies about opinion accentuated the stress which was laid upon such opinion. It drew away attention from a man’s character to his mental attitude towards the general average of beliefs.