money, clothes and all other things" (ch. xiii.).
Here we have, perhaps, the hint of a transitional stage between the early church of Corinth and the churches of Clement and Ignatius. The prophet [p.44] has the first place of honour and next to him the teacher but all churches have not their prophet, and in these bishops and deacons must act in the place of prophets and teachers, and be honoured as such, while in other churches the prophets and teachers were treated as a sort of Christian priest, and one may see how their work came to be regarded as a regular church office and gradually assimilated, in church after church to the offices customary in the larger congregations like Rome and Antioch. As time passes the place of the prophet is more and more taken by the bishop, and by the end of the second century it would seem, that, for such a bishop of the Church Catholic as Apollinaris of Hierapolis, the prophet was a memory of the distant past.
The Montanist movement in Phrygia had owed its strength to the appeal which it made to the prophetic tradition and the prophetic spirit. In the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Phrygian convert Montanus had gone into prophetic ecstasies which shocked the more orderly members of the church, and a separation ensued, in which Montanus was joined by two prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla; they continued for some time, it would seem, to appeal to those within the greater church to recognise them, for a fragment of Maximilla which is preserved to us, runs thus:
"I am chased like a wolf from the flock; I am wolf, I am utterance, spirit and power." (Eusebius v.§ 16). [p. 45]
Some, like Tertullian, listened; but the Church, as a whole, was frightened at the excesses of their enthusiasm and probably, as a result, prophecy became more than ever suspect. Irenaeus, it is true, mentions amongst the Divine gifts still given to Christians in his day, that some have the knowledge of things to come, as also visions and prophetic communications (Eus. v. § 7), but this certainly does not imply any frequent and general gift like that in the early church of Corinth.
His contemporary Alcibiades, indeed, writes a book to demonstrate the impropriety of a prophet's speaking in ecstasy, which Apollinaris abridged (Eus. v. § 17). The good bishop of Hierapolis was very earnest in his attack against the Montanists: "They will never be able to show," he writes, "that any in the Old or New Testament were thus violently agitated and carried away in spirit. Neither will they be able to boast that Agabus or Judas or Silas or the daughters of Phillip or Ammia, in Philadelphia, or Quadratus or others, that do not belong to them, ever acted in this way." It is very significant that the latest examples of eminent prophets in the Church here named, are Quadratus and Ammia. Ammia appears to be unknown to Eusebius, who alludes to her in this chapter as "one Ammia," but Quadratus he has mentioned in a previous book as a prophet contemporary with Ignatius, in these words: "Of those that flourished in these times Quadratus is said to have been distinguished for his prophetical gifts. There [p.46] were many others also noted in these times who held the first rank in the apostolic succession." (iii. § 37); whether this Quadratus is to be identified with the philosopher who wrote an apology for Christianity to Hadrian (iv.§ 3) is uncertain.
It seems from the words of Apollinaris, which Eusebius goes on to quote (v. § 17), that the Montanists claimed that their prophets and prophetesses were the successors of Ammia and Quadratus, but Maximilla had now been dead for some years, and the bishop challenges his opponents to point to any living prophet who had succeeded her: "And if you have no succession of prophets then," he urges, "you must give up your claim to represent the Christian Church. (For the apostle shows that the gift of prophecy shall be in all the church until the coming of the Lord)." What would have been the bishop's answer if the Montanists had turned on him with the demand that he, too, should produce his living prophets within the pale of the great church? In view of what he has told us, may we not believe that his answer would be somewhat on this wise: "The gift of prophecy has never been removed from the church; though it may be dormant as far as such prophecies as those of Quadratus are concerned, it may be called forth again at any time by the Divine will, and will be recognised at once by the bishops, who are the divinely appointed authorities, without whose approval no true prophet will act. And if there be no such prophets [p.47] now, in any church, the bishop takes their place, expounding as is fit the will of the Lord to the people, and guided himself by the Holy Spirit"? How are we to explain this remarkable change that we have thus witnessed, and was it the necessary and right development of the Church which led to it?
To those who know how, in the seventeenth century, another experiment was begun, which after nearly nine generations, is not yet ended, in the holding together of religious communities of which an essential feature has always been the freedom of prophesying, it may, at first sight, seem easy to reply that the change was no necessary one.
One would not say that they were wrong, for who can say what might not have been, if men had only been faithful to their highest ideals, and been willing always to take the rough and narrow way that leads straight up to the heavenly city? But we shall, perhaps judge more fairly if we think how very much greater were the difficulties that beset the Christian organisms of the first and second centuries, than those, great as they were, with which George Fox had to grapple. He had, it is true, to deal with companies of men and women, amongst whom were enthusiasts or individualistic quietists, who would brook no discipline, and many of them were poor and very ignorant folk; but how different in many cases was a church of the first century. Imagine a [p.48] community of varying nationalities, containing a number of slaves, many of them illiterate people, others degraded by their past life to the lowest depths; men and women rescued from lives of terrible evil and still under constant temptation to fall back; a number of Christian Jews with strange oriental customs and traditions, half- familiar only with the language and civilisation of their adopted town; a few men, possibly, of higher social position and greater education, but the majority only able to communicate with each other by a lingua franca of bad Greek, which was the native tongue only of a small minority. One can see what a babel of confusion might easily arise amongst such a community, especially when we remember that many had but an imperfect knowledge of Christ and His teaching, and very few churches possessed all the works which we have in our New Testament.
Moreover, a great change had come from the days of Paul's letter to the Corinthians. That little church was then still living in the days when the Christians as such were tolerated by the law. Gallio's decision had removed the church at Corinth from any need to observe secrecy.