The Historians' History of the World 06

Even in the first century brief writings, gospels, epistles, and apocalypses, had been drawn up for the edification of the congregation, but, being regarded as memorabilia

to keep the truth in remembrance and in a measure as a gift of the Holy Ghost, they differed in plan and style from what was known as “literature.” Now, however, works began to be composed in which Christianity was endued with the garment of literature. Between the years 140 and 170 the smaller Christian party which is known as the Gnostic party all at once began to avail itself of every literary form, scientific monograph, commentary, systematic statement, scientific dialogue, didactic epistle, polemic, historical description, the novel, the tale, the ode, the hymn, etc. The great church, less apt and more cautious, gave place to this development slowly and hesitatingly. She was fully conscious of her responsibility; she was not blind to the lurking danger—the danger, that is, of the profanation of religion; nevertheless she gradually admitted one literary form after another, until, at the beginning of the third century, she also had a Christian literature, with every means of expression that Greek art and learning had created at command. But the fact that she was thus equipped with literary forms could not but have some bearing on the relations between state and church, for no state can persist in regarding a movement which has taken literature into its service as a negligible quantity. Through the medium of literature it influences all political conditions, and in so far as the state itself is the exponent of culture, and not merely of law and authority, such a spiritual movement becomes a part of it by the mere fact of its literary existence.

(5) Though public worship is essentially esoteric and the private concern of any particular religion, yet we must here take its development into consideration. As long as Christian worship consisted only in homely prayers, rude psalmody, and preaching, and in the simple celebration of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, it differed so widely from other forms of worship that the adversaries of Christianity did not regard it as worship at all. A few Greeks, it is true, were impressed by this purely spiritual worship, but the great multitude despised it. They saw no images, and consequently concluded that the Christians were “atheists”; they saw no priests, and felt that their worship lacked legitimate authority, solemnity, and dignity; they saw no sacrifice, and consequently doubted its efficacy with the Deity. Many of them held that the Christians had other religious services which they carefully concealed from other men, and that there they exhibited the secret “Sacra,” held wild orgies, and feasted at horrible banquets. There were, as a matter of fact, a few small Christian communities which practised evil rites in secret. But it is unlikely that these constituted the starting-point of the vile aspersions cast upon all Christians; they arose rather from the evil tendency, prevalent in all ages, to regard adherents of an alien faith as persons of evil life and to say the worst that can be said concerning both them and their assemblies. The populace takes every religion which differs from its own and which it does not understand for devil worship.

This view of Christian worship underwent no great change in the second century, but towards the end of that period the preliminary signs of change set in, and the development of Christian worship met the change halfway. Three great alterations were made in the services, and brought it nearer to the comprehension of the Græco-Roman mind: (1) after circa 190 a separate class of priests arose (under that title) in the Christian church; (2) the Lord’s Supper was elaborated into a solemn sacrificial rite; (3) the Lord’s Supper and certain other acts of public worship were invested with the glamour of mysteries. By these developments, which are to be accounted for by the unconscious influence of the world around, Christian worship approximated to the ceremonials of the Greeks and Romans. The absence of image worship, it is true, still marked the distinction between them, but there was no lack of pictures of saints and symbols of holy things. Already there began to grow up about the sacramental elements, the water of baptism, the sign of the cross, etc., a superstition second to none of the fancies of the heathen, and the sensuous element steadily encroached upon the spiritual. These changes were likewise bound to exercise a certain though indirect influence on the relations between state and church, the Christian religion adapted itself to conditions in which it could act upon the widest possible circle, and in the process modified the exclusiveness it had resolved to maintain.