APOSTACY OF THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH.
The Gospel dispensation inaugurated by our Savior, while on his earthly mission, was not a gathering one. Israel had already been widely scattered. That scattering was soon to result in the complete desolation of the land of Palestine.
Wherever the people received the Gospel through the preaching of the apostles, they were organized into churches. They not only had their old traditions and customs to contend with, but there was no relief from the general pagan influences under which they had been educated. Add to these things, the persecutions the early Saints were exposed to, and it could not well be otherwise than that many of them should be weak in the faith.
The epistles of the apostles inform us that they had often contended with false teachers and doctrines in the primitive churches. "Even now," said the apostle John, "are there many anti-Christs." 1 John 2. 18. The apostle Paul, in his second epistle to Timothy, informs us, that "In the last days perilous times shall come;" 2 Tim. 3. 1.
In the following three verses he enumerates all manner of wickedness which shall be prevalent in the latter times. He evidently means in the Christian churches, or among those who profess godliness, for in the fifth verse of the same chapter, he speaks of their having "A form of godliness, but denying the power thereof."
The apostle Paul exhorted the Colossians to "be not moved away from the hope of the Gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven;" Col. 1. 23.
About fifty-seven years after the Savior had closed his earthly mission, if we are correctly informed in the second and third chapters of the Revelations of St. John, there were but seven churches in Asia whom the Lord considered worthy of notice. This, coupled with the assertion of Paul, that the Gospel had, in his day, been preached to every creature, proves that its light only faintly glimmered, in the otherwise universal darkness, which existed at the time John had his vision on the isle of Patmos.
John the Revelator saw Rome in all her glory, in his day, reigning over the kings of the earth, full of riches and all manner of abominations, and drunken with the blood of the Saints and of the martyrs of Jesus; Rev. 17. This great power, drenched in the blood of the martyrs, about 325 A.D., in the reign of Constantine, adopted what was then known as Christianity, as the religion of the empire.
It was not possible that such a wicked, corrupt element and the Gospel of Jesus could have any affinity. Rather, is it not evident that the antagonism of Christianity and paganism had measurably ceased? that they had assimilated? that they had both so nearly found the same level, that with a slight pressure of governmental policy they readily amalgamated?
Not only prophecy but general history, and especially the history of Christianity by its learned professors, furnish abundant evidence of its early departure from the pure principles of the Gospel.