Chapter 2: THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH

THE FOUNDER

THE new religion whose early history is the subject of this book, has for its origin the attested fact of the birth, at Bethlehem, an unimportant town of the Roman province of Judaea, of Jesus Christ. His mother Mary and her husband Joseph, were of Galilee and it was the business of the imperial census, in the Roman year 749, which brought them travelling at this most unsuitable of times so far from their poor home. The goal of their journey was barely reached when, in an outhouse of one of the overcrowded inns of the little hill town, Mary gave birth to her Son. The life that there began is the foundation of the Church.

The Child's destiny had been foretold to His mother by the angel of Yahweh who announced to her the coming miraculous conception through the direct operation Or the Most High. To Joseph, too, was given like explanatory vision and prophecy. The Child was to save His people from their sins, whence the name Joseph was charged to impose on Him — Jesus.

The documentary sources of our knowledge of that life are the writings of the immediate disciples of Jesus, set down within a generation of the end of His earthly life, the collection which we call compendiously the New Testament. Around the genuineness of these writings, the truthfulness of those who composed them, their value as records, a vast amount of controversy has raged. The study of the questions raised by that controversy belongs properly to a more specialised science than General Church History which must here make its own the findings of Scripture scholarship. The position assumed here is that the New Testament writings are what they propose themselves to be — authentic records of trustworthy contemporary witnesses. What kind of thing is the religion those writings describe? The first difficulty before the enquirer is that the writings do not profess to describe any religion at all, but are supplementary to the basic knowledge which they presuppose. The collection is made up of a variety of things. There are short accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ; there is an account of the spread of His teaching in the first generation after His earthly life ended; there is a book of mysterious prophecy; and a number of letters written by His principal lieutenants explaining particular difficulties or correcting special errors in belief or practice. The New Testament can thus in no sense be regarded as a systematic exposition of the religion taught by Jesus Christ. It provides, none the less, a wealth of information about this new religion and its Founder sufficient for the historian's purpose, sufficient, that is to say, to make clear the new thing's nature.

As a religion it is alone of its kind. It is a revelation; it is a rule of conduct; it is a doctrine; it is an organisation; and in each of these aspects it is something new. This new revelation is the fulfilment of Yahweh's repeated pledge to Israel. Jesus is the long promised Saviour Who shall rout Yahweh's ancient enemy and restore Mankind to its original amity with the Creator. Jesus is the Messias. Finally He through Whom this revelation is made, the Teacher, the Founder, is yet something infinitely beyond. He is the object of His disciple's faith, no mere prophet of Yahweh, even the greatest, but Yahweh's Son, God Himself incarnate. 4

The religion of Jesus Christ is no revolutionary thing, new in all its parts, built up on the ruins of some older thing destroyed to make way for it. It is, by its Founder's express declaration, the perfect fulfilment of the ideas and ideals already foreshadowed in Judaism; and the body of the New Testament religion is built round an idea already so familiar as to be a commonplace of Jewish piety, the Kingdom or Reign of Yahweh. "Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God" is the New Testament's first description of the divine Teacher's activity. But this Preacher of the Kingdom of God has no attachments to any of the contemporary teachers who, interpreting the messianic prophecies in material terms, eagerly dispute the details of the future King's earthly triumph. Such a kingdom has no place in the teaching of Christ. The kingdom as now announced is not the political triumph of Yahweh's chosen people over their Gentile oppressors; it is not even a restoration of the kingdom of David. It is the reign of Yahweh in men's hearts. The citizens of this kingdom are those in whose heart Yahweh reigns, and such citizenship is not a privilege of race, nor the reward of merit. It is offered to all! Repentance, faith, simple childlike humility are the disposing conditions. For the subjects of this new reign of God, the old ideals of holiness and moral goodness revealed by Yahweh to the Jews remain in all their force. The Law is not abolished but, lived in the new spirit — the spirit of the kingdom — is transformed in this its final fulfilment. More important than obedience to the letter of the law is the spirit in which the law is kept, and the new spirit is the spirit of loving dedication of self to Yahweh, the love of all mankind in imitation of Yahweh's universal love and for Yahweh's sake. Yahweh, the King, is revealed as the loving Father of those He rules. It is as "Our Father" that — in the one prayer Jesus taught His followers — the disciple is bidden to address Him. As a father He cannot but give good things to the children who ask. He cares for the birds, the very flowers of the field and His children's every hair. Even His children's ingratitude and rebellion cannot destroy Yahweh's love; and Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son to bring home the supreme truth of this love that only the sinner's own obstinacy can withdraw him from this eternal love's effect. Man's love — of God, of his fellows — must strive to imitate Yahweh's love. It must be complete, selfless, universal, not the product of chance association, of similarity of race, or of the hope of gain. Everything for God, for God's sake from Whom all love has come. The "reign" is necessarily an intimate, interior thing in man's very heart and will, its very existence calling for the continual conscious union of the disciple's soul with Yahweh. On this interior submission all else depends. Obedience to Yahweh's commands, then, is no mere legalist obedience, but, because of the motive which shapes it, of the spirit which gives rise to it, a means of ever closer union. Yahweh's love, which is the foundation of the Kingdom, is, too, its final object and, consummated in eternity, the soul's ultimate reward. It is impossible to exaggerate the part of Love in this revelation of Jesus Christ.

The reign will be established slowly, gradually. Like the leaven in meal, like the seed buried out of sight, it will grow silently in a man's heart, in the world. Its victory is the outcome not of violence, nor of external force, but of Love's slow persuasion. No sudden burst of enthusiasm, then, will suffice for its establishment. A steady, persevering will alone provides the necessary foundation. For the Kingdom will make high demands upon its subjects. It is a treasure hidden, a pearl of surpassing value, to possess which when he hears of it a man will sell all he has. In a matter where anything short of absolute selflessness menaces the whole good work, the disciple must be tested, disciplined, must try himself by surrender, until self be no more. All is asked of him to whom all will be given. Where is this giving up of self to end? For each disciple where Yahweh wills it. The extreme sacrifices — of property, of family life, of life itself — though commended as the perfect thing, are not prescribed as equally necessary to all. There is a way of Precept as well as this higher way of Counsel. But for all, to whichever way Yahweh calls them, there is the same spirit in which they must serve — the spirit of renouncement, self-forgetfulness, service of others, love, humility and all for Yahweh's sake, in conscious imitation of Him. The ideal is summed up in a phrase of startling realism: "If any one will come after me let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me." 5 And for all there is, too, the duty of continuous prayer — for prayer, once more, is no mere external rite but a hidden interior act of union with God, its model the "Our Father." If His demands are far-reaching Yahweh's patience with those who stumble as they strive is revealed as infinite; and for the repentant, no matter what the degree of their offending, His mercy has no limits. So, too, must the disciple forgive those who injure him, forgive them endlessly, love even his enemies, bless them that hate him, pray for his persecutors and those who despoil his good name. So shall he show himself the child of his Father in Heaven.

The disciple's willing acceptance of the reign, his faithfulness to its spirit, are rewarded even in this life by the peace for which man's innermost being yearns, and which is only possible to the man on whose affections self has ceased effectively to make demands, and by an ever-closer union with God. In the world to come there is the consummation of the union with God begun in His Kingdom on earth. Goodness and happiness then go together, and goodness is the renunciation of self and the service of others for Yahweh's sake, in a union with Him inspired by love for Him. This last qualification is all important. The spirit informing the new ideal of conduct raises it above the mere humanitarianism which, sooner or later, calls for human compensation, and can never reach perfect disinterestedness, be perfectly safe in practice for the souls who dedicate themselves to it.

In the nineteen hundred years that have gone by since Jesus preached His gospel, the phrases in which He set it have become the commonplaces of mankind. All men use them, all pay them the homage of lip-service at least. It is, on this account, difficult to understand, unless we meditate historically, how great a novelty such teaching was when it was first given. What are, if too often unpractised, the acknowledged commonplaces of modern moral idealism none the less, were then truths startling in their novelty, and, because alive, disconcerting. Nor can we ever hope to see their effect as it was produced unless we continually bear in mind Who He was that taught — a man truly, but a Man who was God, a man through Whose real Humanity — human body, human soul, human mind, human will, human charm — a Divine Person acted. Only when read with this all important fact in mind — that Jesus Christ is God incarnate — does the story of that earthly life take on the fullness of its meaning, and the reasonableness of the steep ascetic recommendation become clear. It is a share in what He Himself enjoys that He offers to those who will follow Him. Some higher motive than the merely human must inform their allegiance. Only by rallying to His high demands can the disciple become that to which God's high ambitions destines him.

Jesus then teaches, through the new revelation of the Kingdom, a doctrine of social brotherhood which, because it is based on the transcendent truth of Yahweh's essential Love (never before so perfectly revealed), reaches the very heights of idealism. And this divinely ideal spirit is proposed as the normal habit for all mankind. There is no man in whose soul it cannot be realised, no man whose heart it cannot touch, whose life it cannot transform. The philosophers, at their best, spoke only to a tiny minority of trained minds, chosen spirits. Jesus speaks to all. For it is not by mere individual effort that citizenship is first achieved, nor does the Kingdom develop from even the best of human intentions, from the strongest of human wills. As it is more than a human morality, so the Divine shares in every state of its growth. "Without me you can do nothing" are the divine Master's own words to those who accept Him. Their good-will, their faith, are to be informed by a higher, divine life, and transformed thereby, made capable of the supernatural activities which alone can serve and maintain the new life. This new life — which alone makes possible the translation into act of the new rule of conduct — is the divine life by which Jesus lives Himself, and in which, by their new association with Jesus, the disciples mysteriously share. Jesus is the vine, they are its branches. With Him, as the greatest of all His followers is to say a few years later, they form one body, He the head, they the limbs.

The new revelation is not then — for all the universality of its appeal, promise, and plan — intended to achieve its end through individual conversation merely. The individual converted, in allegiance to the new Kingdom, reaches the destined perfection through his new status and in consequence of the association that goes with it, rather than by any virtue of his own individual act of adhesion. It is as the branch of the Vine Who is Christ, as the limb of that body whose head is Christ, that the citizen of the Kingdom is a subject for the new privileges. And that mysterious association with Christ, and hence with all those other limbs his fellow-subjects, receives visible corporate expression in the ecclesia — an actual society. For the Kingdom which is a seed and leaven, is also a field where the weeds grow as surely as the wheat. It is a net of fish, again, both bad and good; a palace (and Jesus names one of His followers as the keeper of its keys); a building (and the same follower Jesus names as its rock-like foundation). It is a flock which wolves can attack; a flock whose shepherd is Jesus, and which again He can commit to the care of that disciple who is key-bearer and foundation rock. Into this actual, visible, corporation the disciple enters by a visible corporal initiation — Baptism. In the Kingdom there is authority, and those to whom its Founder gives that authority are to be obeyed as He Himself is obeyed. Their authority is to teach, to teach indeed all nations, to bind and loose in His name, to forgive sins even and to retain, to admit by Baptism those who believe: and what by His commission they authoritatively decide, that, He promises them, will He finally confirm. The Kingdom will be buffeted. Hell itself will strive against it — but vainly; for He will Himself be with it to the end. The nucleus of that society in which the Kingdom is thus visibly expressed are the twelve disciples whom the record is careful to name — the Apostles; and it is one of these, Simon, who is the shepherd appointed to feed the flock, the key-bearer of the palace, the rock-like foundation and therefore renamed by the Founder Himself, and so to be known ever after, not Simon but Peter.

The Church (ecclesia) is however much more than the association in which the disciples are grouped under an ordered authority. It is in the Church, and through the Church, by means of that authority, that the teaching is to be preserved safe from error, the life to find true guidance. The Church is, too, the means by which the disciple is related to God. Jesus Christ and the Church together constitute the mystical Christ of which, while Jesus Christ is the head, the rest of the disciples are limbs, members. This is not mere metaphor but spiritual reality. All the members live by the life of the whole, and that life is the Divine Life of the Head. Into that living body the disciple is incorporated by the ritual act of Baptism. Thereby and thereafter he shares in the Divine life, entering into a privileged relation with God, into a new relation with the other members of the body. It is through the unity of this mystical body that God has chosen to work out the salvation of mankind. This is the central point, the innermost mystery of the new religion. This is the essence of "the good news about the Kingdom of God," the fulfilment of God's promises to the Jews, the means by which man may share here on earth in the life that is divine. This unity of the mystical body is shown forth, realised and intensified through a second ritual act, the disciple's sharing in the banquet-mystery called the Eucharist, where he is given a Food which, in appearance bread and wine, is in reality Christ Himself. It is to disciples who are members of this mystical body, linked thus with the Divine in a union whence comes to them a real newness of life, a share in the divine life; to disciples illuminated in mind thereby and strengthened in will, that the high demands of conduct are made, that there is proposed the ideal of a life of love of God and of man for God's sake. The disciple, through Baptism member of the Church, member of the mystical body of Christ, is supernaturalised; and through the mystical body Christ lives on for ever in this world.

Even this is not the end of the summary of what that ecclesia is in which Jesus Christ set His revelation, and which He preached in His "good tidings." Jesus was the long-promised Messias. All humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, had through the sin of Adam been ever since estranged from Yahweh, "under the rule of sin." The Reconciler was Jesus Christ, and the redemption of humanity from its enslavement was wrought by His sacrificial death. Through that death came for man the possibility of forgiveness, of restoration. It is, in the Gospel religion, the source of the whole scheme's life. Man's role is not, however, passive. He must take the proffered thing, the new status possible through that death. He takes it by believing — it is not a reward for merit — and by being baptised. The death is for all. The offer is made to all, to Jew and non-Jew alike. Man must believe once he knows it is God Who speaks. And he must become of the Church by Baptism. Baptism, associating the disciple with Christ dying sacrificially on his behalf, associates him with Christ's consequent triumph over sin. It is, once more, as a member of the mystical body that he shares in the triumph as in the death, and thence lives on in Christ, like a branch grafted on to a tree, by the one same vital principle of the Divine life. Baptism then, the rite of initiation, is most strictly bound to the sacrificial death. Equally strictly bound to it is the other great ritual of the Eucharist, which is not only a showing forth of the mystical body's unity, but a renewal of the sacrificial death itself.

The ecclesia then is not a mere aggregation of individual believers, but a spiritual moral person, which continues in concrete, visible fashion the life and work of its Founder — teaching, guiding, sacrificing; which is the means through which men take hold of the gifts of the new fellowship with Yahweh. A new vital principle, a new ideal of living, divinely revealed truth eternally secured, in a living organism ruled by safeguarded teachers with authority and power to dispense supernatural aids — the Catholic Church. Its history we can study as the history of the development of Christ's teaching — the History of Dogma; or as the history of the way in which the new life has shown itself through two thousand years — the History of Christian Spirituality; or as the history of the organism as an organism. But while no study of Church History is complete which leaves out any one of these, it is truer still to say that no Church History can ever really be complete, for the essential Church History is the history of the reign of God in the millions of faithful human hearts throughout two thousand years — and this is known only to God.

The sublime religious idealism of the revelation of Jesus Christ is the teaching for which the world has all these centuries been waiting. His own life is itself the best exemplification of the way in which His teaching must, of its nature, operate. For His life was hidden, remote; unobserved, for all its marvels, beyond its tiny local setting; and the propaganda, which lacked all appeal save what appeal the ideals and truth made of themselves to hearts well disposed, had so little immediate success that by the time of His death scarcely more than a hundred believing souls had given themselves to the cause.

His daily life, for all but the last three years, was apparently the ordinary well-filled day of a workman — a carpenter like Joseph His foster-father — in a small country town, with so little to distinguish it publicly from the life of those around that, on His first appearances as Teacher, those who knew Him best could scornfully point to His ordinary antecedents in final and devastating criticism of His new role. He was to these simply "the carpenter's son," and to His immediate relatives the subject, obviously, of an unfortunate fit of madness! Signs and marvels had accompanied His birth. If, on the one hand, it had come about in circumstances of destitution which foreshadowed the ideal of self-renouncement for God's sake which He was ever to preach, it had yet been heralded by visions of angels; and, led by a mysterious divine star, wise men had come from the East to adore the Newly-born. At the ritual ceremony of His mother's purification the Child had been recognised in prophecy as Israel's saviour; and Divine intervention, again, had saved Him from Herod's jealousy-inspired massacre of all the children of His age. Upon that vision Joseph had fled with Him and with His mother into Egypt and there for ten years, until Herod's death (A.D. 6), they lived. The story of the next twenty years is that of the quiet ordinary life in the house of Joseph and Mary in the town of Nazareth, half way between the Carmel range and the Lake of Genesareth, a quiet of which one incident alone is known to us — the visit to Jerusalem when the Boy was twelve, His disappearance, and His being found instructing the Doctors of the Law in the temple portico.

Twenty miles or so to the north-east of Nazareth is the little heart-shaped stretch of water called sometimes the Sea of Galilee, sometimes the Lake of Genesareth, twelve miles long in its greatest length, seven miles broad. The half-a-dozen little towns that cluster round it were the scene of the greater part of the new Teacher's activities, and it was from their population of fisher-folk that most of His first followers came.

From the beginning that simple teaching provoked opposition and misunderstanding. For the politically-minded zealots who looked for the Messias — as so much contemporary discussion presented him — as Yahweh's warrior-captain, this new teaching was a disappointment. The Pharisees too were alienated by the denunciation of the development which had made the letter of Yahweh's Law the all-important thing in orthodox Palestinian Judaism. Nowhere was He understood immediately and fully. Even the chosen band who, coming to Him in the first days, were the objects of His special instruction, and who remained to the end, whom He chose to be the nucleus of the new institution, were to the last a little impatient of the idealism, a little disappointed at the lack of earthly glamour, at the failure to conform to the hopes of orthodox religious patriotism.

None the less, wherever He went crowds awaited His coming, listened to the teaching, followed the Teacher from one town to another and even into the wilderness when He made thither for retirement. The teaching, the new voice that spoke "as one having authority," the personality, the miracles of healing wrought everywhere in all men's sight, miracles so evident, so numerous, so characteristic that He could Himself quote them as a testimony — "Relate to John the things you have seen, the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the dead rise again" — as evident as that "the poor have the gospel preached to them," all these things bred immense enthusiasm but little, very little, of that solid conviction and change of heart based on belief which alone would serve His purpose.

The passing enthusiasm for novelty, for a thaumaturgus, He refused — the leaven must work according to its nature — refused it even when it would have saved Him from His hostile critics, from His enemies. For by now enemies He assuredly had; and in the later stages of His career as missionary they assist, "lie in wait," set traps to trick Him, now into the expression of some unorthodox opinion in the day's religious casuistry, now into treason against the all-powerful Emperor. The end is only a matter of time. Humanly speaking, sooner or later, should He not prevent it by His divine power, these jealous and wily adversaries will have Him enmeshed. From now on He redoubles the time, and the patience, He expends on the chosen faithful few. He explains to them gradually Who He is, His mission and destiny of suffering and death, their own future role in the ecclesia, the nature of their high vocation and the reception which will be theirs too, once they meet the world He is come to save, the world which knows Him not, wills not to know, and pursues Him to death itself. To the end, though they remain faithful, believing, obedient, the disciples hear all this with reluctance. Human nature in them is not able to reconcile this destiny of vicarious suffering with that other tradition of Yahweh, Lord of Hosts, strikingly triumphant over the wicked whether in Israel's past or in the wild apocalyptic reveries that have, for them, so often drowned the sadness of the insistent present. So with the earthbound material heart of His nation against Him, and the work of formation not yet accomplished in even His faithful few, Jesus comes to the appointed chosen death. Once more, as in the birth, the circumstances make it the supreme act of self-renouncement, once more supernatural signs accompany every phase of His life.

"The Gospel is announced; the Church is founded; the sacrifice of the cross is to confirm the one and the other." Slowly Jesus makes His way south, journeying for the last time to Jerusalem, the religious capital, where for generations now the struggle between the rationalist, Sadducee, aristocracy from whom are chosen the High Priests, and the legalist piety of the patriotic and popular Pharisee is the one absorbing evidence of religious interest. Both Sadducee and Pharisee are, for their own characteristic reasons, opposed to His mission, willing to plot His fall. This He knows, yet "steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem." And He foretold that in the Holy City they would lay hands on Him, mock Him, scourge Him and put Him to death: and that He would rise again the third day. On the first day of the week before the feast of the Pasch, through the streets of the Holy City filled with thousands of pious pilgrims drawn thither by the feast, in a kind of triumph — surrounded by His disciples and acclaimed by the crowd as the Holy One of God — He entered on the time of His passion. One last time the imperfect enthusiasm, which would use Him and His teaching rather than yield and be itself converted to His uses, blazed in an appearance of adhesion.

Four days later, on the eve of the Pasch, He prepared to celebrate the feast for the last time with the twelve disciples of His especial choice. At the ceremonial meal He instituted the new rite of the Eucharist, already foreshadowed and promised in His preaching, and in a long discourse made to the Apostles the revelation of His own most intimate self. From the meal they passed to the olive grove of Gethsemane — the traitor among the Apostles, seduced by the Master's enemies, had already arranged with his enemies for His betrayal and arrest. In the garden they found Him and took Him.

He was led before the High Priests and, proclaiming His Divinity, condemned for blasphemy. But although, in his mockery of a trial, they reviled and insulted Him, more they dared not do-the Roman Authority not consulted. Whence an appeal to the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, and a further trial. Pilate was embarrassed. His Prisoner was innocent, but the influential Jewish leaders insisted. The procurator shifted uneasily — Jesus was of Galilee, so he tried to load with the decision the shoulders of Herod, its nominal ruler. That failing, he tried a last resource — the custom of releasing annually on the feast some criminal condemned to death. But the mob and the priesthood asked in preference a highway robber lying under sentence. Finally, with taunts that affected the procurator's loyalty — "If thou release this man thou art not Caesar's friend" — they prevailed, and Pilate, disclaiming responsibility, made over the Prophet to the priests.

"And they took Jesus and led Him forth. And bearing His own cross He went forth to that place which is called Calvary, where they crucified Him, and with Him two others one on each side, and Jesus in the midst. . . . And Jesus having cried out with a loud voice, gave up the ghost. . . . And the centurion who stood over against Him said 'Indeed this man was the Son of God.'

"Now there was in the place where He was crucified a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid. There they laid Jesus because the sepulchre was nigh at hand. And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled back from the sepulchre. And going in, they found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were astonished in their mind at this, behold, two men stood by them in shining apparel. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their countenance towards the ground, they said to them: 'Why seek you the living with the dead? He is not here but risen. Remember how He spoke unto you, when He was yet in Galilee, saying: The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.' And they remembered His words. And going back to the sepulchre, they told all these things to the eleven, and to all the rest. . . . And these words seemed to them idle tales; and they did not believe them. . . . At length He appeared to the eleven as they were at table; and He upbraided them with their incredulity and hardness of heart, because they did not believe them who had seen Him after He was risen again. . . . To whom also He shewed Himself alive after His passion, by many proofs, for forty days appearing to them, and speaking of the kingdom of God. And eating together with them, He commanded them, that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but should wait for the promise of the Father, which you have heard (saith He) by My mouth. For John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost, not many days hence. They therefore who were come together, asked Him, saying: Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? But he said to them: It is not for you to know the times or moments, which the Father hath put in His own power: But you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth. And when He had said these things, while they looked on, He was raised up: and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they were beholding Him going up to Heaven, behold two men stood by them in white garments. Who also said: Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus Who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen Him going into heaven."

THE FIRST GENERATION

After the Ascension the twelve apostles returned to Jerusalem and, in fear of the Master's powerful enemies, locked themselves away, while in obedience to His last commands they awaited the imminent coming of the Holy Spirit. "Within a few days" He had said; and ten days only after His Ascension the mysterious event took place. The Holy Spirit came in the noise of a mighty wind, appearing over each as a tongue of visible fire. And they began to speak in different tongues according as the Spirit gave them to speak. The seclusion was at an end; and strengthened by the undeniable miracle they went forth to announce themselves to the world.

It was the Jewish feast of Pentecost and the Holy City was filled with pilgrims from every province of the East, from Persia and from Rome itself. The rumour of the heavenly sign spread, the crowds began to collect, and as these pilgrims of a score of tongues understood, each in his own language, what the disciples of Jesus said, bewilderment seized on them, and anti-Christian calumny offered its first curiously futile explanation. . . . "These men are full of new wine." The calumny was the Church's first opportunity, and Peter, using it, preached its first explanatory missionary sermon, gathering in thereby the first converts — "about 2,000 souls." Repentance for past sin, belief in Jesus Christ as God and Saviour, baptism — these are the conditions of membership. For the rest the new group led the life of traditional Jewish piety: prayer, fasting, almsdeeds, attendance at the Temple, adding to this their own private reunion for the new ritual of "the breaking of the bread," and a practice of voluntary poverty. Day by day their number grew, and the miraculous signs which had supported the Master's teaching followed the work of the Apostles. Of Peter especially it is recorded that the sick were brought in their beds to the streets through which he would pass, that his shadow, at any rate, falling on them, they might be healed.

The opposition grew too. It was only a matter of weeks since the religious chiefs of Jewry had successfully pursued the Founder to His death, and here already His teaching was showing itself more successful than in His life. One of Peter's more striking miracles with its accompaniment of missionary sermon and conversions (this time 5,000) gave them their chance. Peter and John were arrested, cross-examined and forbidden further to preach or teach "in the name of Jesus." More at the moment the chief priests dared not do for fear of the people. A second attempt at repression promised to be more successful. All the Apostles were arrested and imprisoned. But an angel of the Lord came by night and released them, bidding them go immediately to the Temple to continue their work. They were re-arrested, re-examined. Once more Peter reasoned with the Council affirming again the divine character of the Master's mission, until the priests "cut to the heart began to cast about how best to slay them." It was one of their own number, Gamaliel, who dissuaded them. The movement, if it were no more than man- inspired, would perish of itself. The Council fell in with his views, had the Apostles flogged, and, with renewed prohibitions, set them free once more.

The peace which followed was short. Around the activities of a new preacher and wonder worker, Stephen, the old hatred flamed yet once again. Stephen drew on himself the hostility of the Greek- speaking Jews of Jerusalem. They challenged him to debate the new belief, and, falling victims where they had promised themselves victory, they roused the mob with the word that Stephen was a blasphemer. He was dragged before the Council and charged. No plea could avail to save one who believed that Jesus was the Messias and God, and who made the proof of this from Jewish history the burden of his defence. Stephen was condemned and, outside the walls of the city, stoned to death. This first martyrdom was the signal for a general persecution which scattered the believers through all Judea and Samaria. The Apostles alone remained at Jerusalem.

Flight however, brought little relief. The persecution was a well- organised affair and its chief agent in Jerusalem — a young zealot of the Pharisees, Saul by name — raided the houses of believers and filled the prisons with his victims. Then, turning his attention to the fugitives, he asked and received from the High Priest a commission to follow and round them up. Damascus was his first objective and thither with an escort he forthwith proceeded, "breathing out threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord." He was nearing the city when, blinded by a sudden light from Heaven, he fell from his horse. A voice spoke "Saul, Saul why dost thou persecute me?" Who said "Who art thou Lord?" And He "I am Jesus Whom thou persecutest." Saul's surrender was immediate and whole-hearted. "Lord what wilt thou that I do?" The chief of the persecutors had become himself a disciple, the most momentous of all conversions had been made. To the Church in that hour was given the personality which more than any other has shaped its thought, its organisation, its spirit; the greatest of converts, the greatest of disciples, greatest of missionaries, thinker, ascetic, mystic, the follower in whom more than in any other is mirrored the Master.

Saul — soon to be known exclusively by his second name Paul — was a subject already marvellously adapted for his new role. By birth he was of the Dispersion, from Greek-speaking Tarsus in Cilicia. But his education had been in Palestine, at Jerusalem, in the school of one of the great men of the day, the rabbi Gamaliel. At Gamaliel's feet Paul had grown up, learned in biblical lore, to be a "Pharisee of the Pharisees." He knew his co-religionists as he knew himself, and, familiar with every phase of the Jewish thought of the day, moved easily in its many idioms. To the end, wherever he is dealing with Jews, whether inside the Church or outside it, he remains in his methods very much the rabbi. But his intellectual formation was not exclusively rabbinical, and though he is by no means a Hellenic type, to Hellenism he was no stranger. To this rich variety of formative influences the further fact should be added that birth in Tarsus made him a Roman citizen, gave him wherever he went within the vast empire a public status still privileged and of importance.

For a time after his conversion he gave himself to the task of explaining his conversion in the different synagogues of Damascus, and then buried himself for some years in the solitude of the Arabian desert. From this period of prayer and study he returned to Damascus with the object, once more, of converting the Jews to his new belief that "Jesus is truly the Messias." The Jews could not refute him, and to silence him they plotted his death, the governor of the city assisting them. Before the combination Paul was helpless. His time, however, was not yet; and he made a dramatic escape, lowered in a basket from the walls while soldiers watched the gates. From Damascus he went now to Jerusalem, to make himself known to Peter and the rest. He was received coldly enough until Barnabas, like himself a convert from the Diaspora, stood bond for his conversion. At Jerusalem he began again his task of explaining his new belief to the Greek-speaking Jews and once again there were plots to make away with him. A vision consoled and directed him. Jesus appeared as he prayed in the Temple, and bade him leave Jerusalem and his present fruitless task "For to the nations that are afar off will I send thee."

That vision is the first hint of what Paul is to be, the Apostle of the non-Jewish world. But not for a few years yet was the promise to be fulfilled. Paul left Jerusalem for a second period of retirement, this time in his native Cilicia. It was at the invitation of Barnabas that he returned thence to his mission of instruction and debate. This sponsor of St. Paul had, for some time now, been in charge of the believers who lived at Antioch, the third greatest city of the empire. It was a mixed congregation, fugitives from Jerusalem, converts from Judaism and, in any number, converts also from Paganism, who had come to the Church directly, without ever passing through any stage of association with the Jews. Here there was no Temple, and the Church was emancipated from any traditional connection with the synagogues. A new type of believer was developing and the town found for them a soubriquet — "at Antioch the disciples were first called Christians." Barnabas, sent from Jerusalem to govern this new community, saw it developing beyond his powers. He needed help, and going to Tarsus, besought Paul to come to him at Antioch. For a year they worked together "making known the Lord Jesus even to the Greeks," until (about A.D. 44) a divine monition bade the governors of the Church at Antioch set them aside for a new special work. St. Paul's ten years' novitiate was over. The promise of the vision in the Temple was to be realised. He was to go to the nations afar off. Henceforward his life is the famous series of missionary journeys: Cyprus, Cilicia, the provinces of Asia, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia; passing and repassing through all these, establishing and organising churches, forming disciples to rule them, St. Paul, in the remaining twenty years of his life, lays the foundation on which is built the greatest part of the Church's later extension.

The procedure of St. Paul and his associates was simple. Arrived in a town, they made themselves known to its Jewish community, assisted at the synagogue service, and, when the opportunity came, explained their teaching that Jesus Christ was the looked-for Messias, the Church He had founded the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, the Gospel the term of the Law. The final proof of this was the Resurrection, and of that historic fact they, the newcomers, were the accredited witnesses. Almost everywhere this exposition provoked violent dissensions, and if a few were converted to it, in the vast majority it bred a bitter hostility to the Christians and their institution. The mission, with its nucleus of converts, then turned to the pagans. Sometimes by disputation in the public places of the city, and again by private discussions, very slowly but persistently, the new religion was brought "to the Greeks also." So in the course of the twenty years 44-62, in all the chief cities along the coasts of the Aegean Sea and in many towns of the interior too, tiny communities of believers were organised. Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, each had its "church," and in these churches the great majority of the brethren were converts from the pagan cults. Whence very soon an important difference of opinion between the two classes of Christians, the Jewish and the Gentile, and a crisis.

The point at issue was the importance and the necessity, in the new Church of Christ, of the old Jewish Law. That the Church was open to the Gentiles no less than to the Jews had very early been made clear in a vision to St. Peter, and it was to preside over a Church made up mainly of Gentiles that the Apostles had dispatched Barnabas to Antioch. But were such Gentiles, converted now to the Church, to live as Jews? The Jewish element in the Church continued to practise all the observances of the Mosaic piety. Must the Gentile convert do as much? Did he come to Christ through Judaism or directly? The question was a practical one. It involved such things as circumcision, an elaborate code of dietary regulations, a whole way of life. But it did not end there. The controversy was, at bottom, a controversy as to the relation of the Church to the old religion of the Jews. In that religion, observance of the Law had been the very means of salvation. The discussion between the two types of Christian was a discussion as to whether the Law had lost its saving power, whether a Christian could be saved through the Church alone — the Law being now abrogated, whether the Church was self-sufficient or, though a better kind of Judaism, still no more than a Jewish sect and, as such, tied to the Law.

The controversy was fierce "some coming down from Judea taught the brethren that except you be circumcised after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved." St. Paul, as the man chiefly responsible for the new Gentile accession, and responsible, too, for the policy which emancipated these converts from the burden of the Law, was attacked bitterly. To still the controversy he and Barnabas came to Jerusalem (A.D. 51) and in a consultation of the Apostles — the so-called Council of Jerusalem — it was hid down that except for the prohibition of certain foods, the Gentile converts were free of the Law. It was a victory for St. Paul, and the circular letter announcing the decision went out of its way to give him praise for the work he had done.

But the opposition was by no means at an end. It survived to harass his work for years yet to come. At Corinth and in Galatia especially, did it trouble the peace of his converts. These Judaisers — the "false brethren" of St. Paul's Epistles, converts from the Pharisees and at heart Pharisees still — could not indeed go behind the decision of 51, but by insisting that the observance of the old Law added to sanctity, and was therefore the mark of the more perfect Christian, they fomented new divisions. The new controversy produced from St. Paul the most vigorous of all his letters — the Epistle to the Galatians — and a general manifesto on the whole question which, that it might have a greater prestige, he addressed "to all those who are at Rome the beloved of God, the chosen ones."

The Mosaic Law, he explained, as a thing useful for salvation is ended: the Sabbath, Circumcision, the whole elaborate code. There is now a new way of reconciliation with God, belief in Christ, union with Christ. The just man now lives not by the Law but by the new thing Faith. From Faith, and not from the Law, does salvation come. The whole theme is elaborately worked out, the relations between the Law and Faith, the role of Faith in the divine plan of salvation. To be in the Church is to be free from the burden of the Law.

Despite St. Paul's logic, and notwithstanding the Council of Jerusalem, the influence of the Judaising faction persisted, and so long as the church of Jerusalem flourished it did not lack a certain prestige. That influence was sufficiently powerful, for example, to intimidate St. Peter when, at Antioch, among the Gentile Christians, he was living with Christian freedom. He went back on his conduct, and the incident was the occasion of a passage-at-arms with St. Paul who, faced with the desertion, "withstood him to the face." Not until the end of his life, in fact, was St. Paul free from these zealots. They followed him wherever he went, sowing dissension, and, to the best of their power, undermining his authority.

Another division which troubled this first generation of Christians must be noted. It arose from the desire of private individuals to supplement and explain the official doctrine, particularly in all that related to Jesus Christ. These various private systems were alike in this that, in order to throw new light on the teaching of the apostles, they made use of Jewish beliefs, of ideas borrowed from current philosophy, and of practices and rites of the different pagan cults, Also, along with their ingenious new presentation of the teaching, they prescribed a new way of life. The Jewish Law was exalted, circumcision practised, and it was from among the Jewish Christians that the movement arose. Among the non-Jewish elements of the system was a denial of the resurrection of the body and — an aberration that will dog the Church's teaching for another twelve hundred years — the prohibition of marriage as a thing that is evil. St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians, his Pastoral Epistles, the Second Epistle of St. Peter, the Epistles of St. John and St. Jude, the Apocalypse are filled with references to the new errors and to the moral disorders they produced wherever they made an entrance.

The writings which make up the New Testament were none of them written to be a primary and sufficient source of information as to what the new religion was. They were all of them evidently addressed to readers already instructed, to recall what they have learnt, to supplement it, to clear up disputes which have arisen since the first instruction. Yet, though none of them profess to describe fully either the teaching or the organisation, we can extract from them valuable information on these two points. Though the facts may be few they are certain, and among these certain facts is the character of the early propaganda and of the primitive organisation.

The new doctrine is not offered to the world as a reasoned philosophy. Its teachers do not seek to convince by any argumentation from principles, by any system of proof and deduction. It is presented as an indivisible body of truth to be received whole from the teacher, as he himself received it: and to be so received, not on any personal judgment of the reasonableness of its detail, but on the authority of the teacher. Nothing is more characteristic of St. Paul's methods, no note is so frequently sounded as this. It is to be, all through the centuries, the one answer of the Church to innovators, its one practical test of truth. This primitive apostolic Christianity is a lesson to be learnt, articles of faith to be believed, moral precepts to be obeyed, a mystery accepted on the divine authority which functions through the Apostle who is teaching. 6

The character of the primitive organisation is no less clear; and from the Epistles of St. Paul especially, and from the Acts, we can make out the main lines of that organisation as a thing already considered traditional within twenty years of the death of Our Lord. They give us the picture of a number of Christian communities with the received- and traditional catechesis just described, an internal liturgical life, a complete ascetic formation and a regular system of government, communities in which the ruler, the teacher, and the liturgical officer are one and the same.

The foundation of the whole organisation is the authority of the Apostles. The Apostle is the official witness to Christ's resurrection; and he is an Apostle by the fact of Christ's commission given to him personally. Not gifts of preaching, of organisation, not any unusual spiritual experience, not personal merit, but the fact of his having been sent by Christ in this special manner is the basis of the Apostle's authority. It is this group, "the Twelve" is Our Lord's own term for them, which, in the days which follow the Ascension, is found exercising a general authority. They are the centre of all the subsequent development, the missionary activities for example, the institution of the order of deacons, the replacing of Judas; and it is to the Apostles that St. Paul submits his claim to be acknowledged as a thirteenth Apostle, "one born out of due time" indeed but none the less of the true lineage.

In the Apostolate, then, the Church is from the very beginning endowed with authority as its principle of unity, and that endowment is recognised as the personal work of Jesus Christ. Before that authority, because it is an Apostle who speaks, everything else must yield. Those who exercise that authority decide but do not discuss (cf. e.g. I Cor. xi, 16). Here we have much in germ — the notion of the Faith as a deposit, a traditional whole handed on as it has been received, the notion of authority as the teacher, and the notion of these as things willed and instituted by Christ Himself. Side by side with this fact of the Apostle's authority we note the believers' realisation that together they form a whole, that they are very truly a new people. In the Old Testament that unity had been the very evident one of race. In the Church the chosen ones are racially, "nationally," of a score of varieties, yet they are, nevertheless, immediately conscious of a unity which transcends these differences, a new spiritual unity no less real however than the old. Race no longer counts. The basis of the new unity is Faith in Christ and incorporation with Him (Gal. ii, 20-21).

The later Epistles of St. Paul add more details to our knowledge, in the regulations they contain for the appointment to other offices not hitherto mentioned, but whose institution these later Epistles certainly presuppose. Thus the Epistle to the Philippians is addressed (Phil. i, 1) to the episcopoi and the deacons of that church. This new term is also used (Acts xx, 28) of men just described (ib. 17) as presbyteroi. Throughout these later Epistles there is continual use of these two new terms, sometimes to describe the same persons (as in Acts xx, 28), sometimes the one term qualifying the other (cf. I Tim. v, 17). But always the term is used in the plural. In the Vulgate translation of the Greek of St. Paul, episcopoi becomes episcopi always, and thence in our English New Testament bishops. The Greek presbyteroi however the Vulgate sometimes renders presbyteri (which in our English becomes priest) sometimes maiores natu (Acts XX, 17) or seniores (Acts v, 6) and this in English becomes elders. Bishop and priest are, of course, and have been for centuries now, technical terms each with a definite unmistakable meaning. What then were the episcopoi and the presbyteroi of the New Testament? In what relation did they stand to the itinerant hierarchy of Apostles and missionaries? And since there were several in each church, how did the system give place to the system of a single bishop which has admittedly been universal since the beginning of the second century? The matter is anything but clear, and it has given rise to much controversy among Catholic and non-Catholic scholars alike. Besides the data of the New Testament writings we have, on this point, a certain amount of evidence from another contemporary document The Teaching of the XII Apostles. 7

The presbyteros was one of the senior members of the community and perhaps, sometimes, nothing more. But sometimes the term undoubtedly describes an official, e.g. St. Paul's instruction to Titus to create presbyteroi for every city. The presbyteroi again sometimes bore the burden of presiding over the community (I Tim. v, 17), or again they labour in the word and doctrine. To such presbyteroi is due a double honour (ib.). Again the body of presbyteroi, considered as a corporate thing (presbyterion) is a channel of grace (I Tim. iv, 14).

These new officers, during the lifetime of the Apostles, are all spoken of as named by the Apostles, either directly (Acts xiv, 22) or through the Apostles' immediate subordinates. In St. Paul's instructions to Timothy and Titus there is no hint that to designate episcopoi or presbyteroi is the business of anyone but the Apostle's delegate. The whole initiative is with Authority. The possession of some special gift of the Holy Ghost — the charismata which were so common a feature of the new religion's first days — tongues, miracles, prophecy or the like, does not of itself give the possessor any authority in the community. Authority only comes by designation of authority already recognised. It is never a charisma. Whatever the relations of these episcopoi and presbyteroi to each other, whatever the extent of their powers during the lifetime of St. Paul (and it is in connection with St. Paul that the question arises) the Apostle, there is no doubt about it, ruled personally his immense conquest, by visits, by letters, through delegates such as Timothy and Titus.

The next stage in the development begins when death removes the Apostles. Their office, status, power was unique. No one ever put in a claim to be an Apostle of the second generation. Because of the fact which constituted them Apostles they were necessarily irreplaceable. To their authority succeeded the new hierarchy of episcopoi and presbyteroi, and as it took their place this new hierarchy itself underwent a change. The college of episcopoi or presbyteroi who, under the Apostles, had ruled the local Church gave place to an arrangement where in each local Church there was but one episcopos whom a number of subordinates, now termed presbyteroi, assisted. By the time of St. Ignatius of Antioch (i.e. the end of the first century, within from thirty to forty years of the death of St. Paul) the new system — the so-called "monarchical episcopate" — is so universal that he takes it for granted as the basis of his exhortations.

The change took place with so little disturbance that it has left no trace at all in history. It passed with so general an agreement that one can only infer that it had behind it what alone could sanction so great a change, what alone could secure it so smooth a passage, the consciousness of all concerned that this was part of the Founder's plan wrought out in detail by the Apostles He had commissioned.

To return finally to the question of the functions of the episcopoi and presbyteroi, and the relations of the two classes to each other, one view (very ably argued by Mgr. Batiffol and the Bollandist Fr. De Smedt), is that the presbyteros was a man to whom was given a title of honour for special service, a distinction which of itself carried with it no power or authority. From among the presbyteroi the episcopoi — whose duty it was, under the Apostle, to rule, to teach — were naturally elected. Whence the fact that not all presbyteroi are also episcopoi. Later the presbyteroi who are not also episcopoi disappear. The name, however, survives and is henceforward used for the subordinate officials of the new system, successors in part of the old episcopoi, but successors with very restricted powers and with no authority independent of the bishop — as we may now call him.

One last important detail the New Testament writings give us. It concerns the inauguration of these different officers. Nomination to the office, even by the Apostle, does not of itself suffice. Before the candidate can act, something more is required. There is mention always of fasting, of prayer, and of the imposition of hands, and always this imposition is the act of those already possessed of authority. As a later, more technical language will describe it, the power of order, like the power of jurisdiction, like the faith itself, is transmitted from one generation to the next through the action of those who already possess it. Nowhere is it spoken of as coming from below as the result of popular determination, nor as deriving from the prestige of superior holiness, ability, or the possession of charismata. Though the word is not yet mentioned, the all-important fact is clear that, for the first generation of Christians, no powers were valid, no teaching guaranteed, no authority was lawful save such as came through the Apostles.

The evidence of two more sources remains to be examined before the study of the Church in its first years is complete — the letter of St. Clement of Rome to the Church of Corinth, and the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch. This is a convenient place to say something of the origins of the Roman Church.

Who were the first members of that Church, how the new religion first came to the Empire's capital, we have absolutely no information. The first fixed date is nineteen or twenty years after the passion of Our Lord — A.D. 49 when, among the Jews expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius (41-54), were the two Jewish Christians Aquila and his wife Priscilla.

This sudden reversal of the imperial favour was due to riots among the Jews themselves; and the riots, says Suetonius, were provoked by a certain Chrestus — which may be literally true or may be the inaccurate fashion in which a none too well informed writer, a generation or more after the event, reports a conflict between Jews who were Christians and Jews who were not. Nine or ten years later the Roman Church is "Known for its faith to all the world", and so St. Paul addresses to it the greatest of his epistles, a public manifesto of his position on the question of the Jewish Law's status in the new religion. When in 61, St. Paul himself at last reaches Rome, as Caesar's prisoner, he finds many brethren there to aid him; and from the lodging where, under guard, he spends the two years until his appeal is heard, he directs through the Church, an active propaganda which results in many conversions. On the eve of Nero's persecution St. Paul is released (63) and undertakes his last pioneer voyage, to Spain it would seem certain, and then once again he returns to the scenes of his earliest labours. Finally he returns to Rome and, still under Nero, he is put to death.

Nowhere, it is true, does St. Paul mention St. Peter as being in Rome during his own sojourn there; nor does the account of St. Paul's arrival in the Acts. But a tradition, universal in the Church a century and a half later, and in whose support documentary evidence can be cited that is contemporary with St. Peter, (his own Epistle for example, Clement of Rome, and St. Ignatius of Antioch) the utter absence of any rival to the Roman claim to possess that Apostle's tomb, and the important fact that to St. Peter's one-time headship of the Roman Church its bishops, henceforward, invariably — and successfully — appeal to justify their own assumption of superior authority; this varied and undoubted evidence, indirect though it may be, leaves the modern scholar in no doubt that St. Peter came to Rome, governed the Roman Church as its first bishop once the Christians there were organised, and, crowning his episcopate by martyrdom, left to that Church as its most treasured possession his body and tomb. As to the details — when St. Peter first came to Rome, for how long he ruled the Roman Church, and, supposing the twenty-five years' episcopate (a tradition which goes back at any rate to Eusebius of Caesarea, born c. 270), at what dates to fix its beginning and end — we know nothing with certainty. 8 St. Peter was succeeded by Linus, and Linus by Anacletus. Of these two — the second and third bishops of Rome — we know absolutely nothing. With the fourth bishop, Clement, the case is far other, and under his direction the Roman Church is revealed in the special role which has characterised it ever since.

Clement was the head of the Church at Rome, the third successor, by the general reckoning, of St. Peter. His famous letter, written probably about the year 96, was directed to the restoration of peace at Corinth where a section of the faithful were in revolt against the rulers of that church. Its importance for the historian lies in the information he can gather from it as to the constitution of this early Christianity, as to the nature of its ruling authority and as to the character of its teaching. The letter makes no mention of the charismata, so familiar a feature in the time of St. Paul, nor of any itinerant missionary authorities. The temporary structures have already disappeared, and the Church is in the first days of the new permanent regime. Unity is essential and the source and means of unity is Authority. Whence obedience to authority is the first duty of all believers. This is the leading idea of the letter. The believers are "a people" (ethnos) divinely set apart. They are an army in which "not all are officers. . . each has his rank, carrying out the orders of the leader." They are a "body", "the body of Christ," a flock. Authority is the source of unity, and unity is achieved by submission to the "tutelage" (paideia) of authority. "Let us submit to the tutelage. . . obey the elders and allow them to tutor you. . . learn to be submissive. It is better to be nothing in the flock of Christ, to be even hungry, than to appear to be great and lack all hope in Christ."

The subject matter of this education or tutelage is the traditional faith and the commandments of the Lord, "the words of the divine tutelage," things already fixed in writing. This fixed and traditional doctrine is the norm by which the believer must be guided, "Let us cease to make vain searches, let us come to the glorious and venerable fixed rule (canona) that has been handed down to us." This notion of determination by a fixed rule, a canon, is found in association with other things than doctrine. In the liturgical reunions, St. Clement reminds the Corinthians, offerings are to be made "not as anyone chooses and without order but as the Master ordained, at fixed and definite times. Where and by whom He Himself has arranged by His sovereign will." Wherefore "each of us, brethren, should keep to his own rank, and not transgress the fixed rule (canona) of his rank."

St. Clement's explanation of the historical origin of the authority he is supporting is simple. It came to its present holders from the Apostles, who received it from Christ, Who received it from God. The Apostles preached the Gospel, and the first-fruits of their preaching they made bishops and deacons. As these died, others took their place inheriting the Apostolic commission and authority. These successors of the bishops nominated by the Apostles are elected by the Church over which they are to preside, but, an important point, it is from other bishops — not from their election — that the elect receive their powers. The powers are received by transmission from one who already possesses them himself. The essence of the Hierarchy is its descent from the Apostles. These things are not the express teaching of the letter. St. Clement does not argue for them, nor make any attempt to prove them. They are facts apparently as well known to his readers as to himself, recalled as the basis for his plea for peace and concord at Corinth. The letter ends on a practical note. A delegation goes with it to explain more fully the mind of the Roman Church.

Such is the first appearance in history of the Roman Church in action — intervening in the domestic affairs of another and distant Church. Was Clement of Rome asked to intervene? Then his letter is the sequel to the first appeal to Rome. Was his letter the fruit of his own spontaneous act? Nothing remains to tell us. But the Roman Church is already acting as though conscious of its superior power; and this, during the lifetime of an Apostle, for St. John was still alive at Ephesus and Ephesus was much nearer to Corinth than was Rome !

This First Letter of St. Clement of Rome witnesses, then, to a general belief in the divine right of the hierarchy, in the divine origin of its power, and to the Roman Church's consciousness of its peculiar superiority. It takes these things as the facts of the situation, and it acts on the supposition that they are facts universally recognised, which do not call for proof.

Can it be said that Clement of Rome is unique, an eccentric? That the views of his letter are the product of any local Roman "legalist" spirit? Side by side with his letter, the letters of his contemporary Ignatius of Antioch should be read.

St. Ignatius, born about the year 60, in all probability a disciple of St. John, was the third Bishop of Antioch. He was one of the victims of the anti-Christian laws under Trajan (98-117), and it was during his journey from the East to Rome, for his martyrdom, that he wrote these seven letters. They are letters of gratitude to the different Christian communities who had come to his assistance, letters of encouragement, advice, and edification. Once more, it is to be noted, their usefulness here is their obiter dicta — incidental references to institutions, offices, beliefs which, the writer evidently assumed, were as familiar to his correspondents as they were to himself. The letters are addressed to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Philadelphia, Smyrna, Rome and to the martyr's disciple, St. Polycarp. The general organisation of the Church as this oriental contemporary of Clement of Rome knows it, the form of its teaching, are much as we find them in the letter of Clement and in the New Testament. St. Ignatius does but confirm, once more, evidence already examined. Like Clement he knows no "itinerant" teaching hierarchy. Like Clement he attaches the utmost importance to internal peace and unity, and his insistence on this as the first necessity is the more striking because it is not provoked, as was St. Clement's plea, by any immediate breach. In each of the churches there is a ruling body, its officers now clearly distinguished, one bishop with several priests and deacons. This one visible bishop is in each church the representative of the invisible bishop, God. Hence obedience to the visible bishop as to God, and obedience to the college of priests as to the Apostles. Again we find the Church likened to a disciplined army; and in another very striking phrase the priests are exhorted to attune themselves to the bishop as the different strings of a harp, so that the whole church will sing as a choir with one voice. Erroneous doctrine cuts off from the Church whoever believes it. The true doctrine is the doctrine handed down. To reject this traditional doctrine, or to receive it otherwise than it has been received, to prefer any other to it, is criminal. Whoever, for example, speaks of Christ otherwise than the Church speaks, should be looked on as dead. The test of a doctrine's truth is its acceptance by the visible Church, and the sole guarantee of faith is to be one in belief with the bishop. Already dissidents are to be found who appeal to Scripture for their justification. St. Ignatius has met them: "If I can't find it in the Gospel" they protest "I won't believe." He does not produce any counter argument in reply. He brushes aside their reasoning, and against their dissidence simply sets the accepted faith. Agreement with that is the measure of the truth of their opinions.

Unity is of the highest importance, is willed by God. Unity in each local church, unity by unity of belief between all the churches of the world. The test of this unity is the belief of the local bishop, obedience to the bishop is its guarantee. There where the bishop is should all believers be gathered too, as where Jesus Christ is there is the universal Church — (katholike ecclesia). St. Ignatius, looking beyond the local churches to the one great Church which in their unity they compose, has found for that unity the name which henceforth it will for ever retain — the Catholic Church.

It is not without significance that, in both these primitive fragments, there is reference to the Roman Church. Clement was himself the third of its bishops, and to it St. Ignatius addressed one of his letters. In his address he adds epithet to epithet, in eastern fashion, to show his sense of its distinction. Not as Clement wrote to Corinth does Ignatius write his exhortation; "I do not give you orders as Peter and Paul were wont to do; they were apostles." He congratulates the Roman Church because "it has taught the others," and because "in the country of the Romans it presides," a curious phrase which is meaningless unless it refers to a presidency of the church over other churches.

St. Ignatius was thrown to the beasts in a Roman circus somewhere about the year 107. In the three quarters of a century which are all that separate his martyrdom from Our Lord's Ascension, the ecclesia is visibly and evidently the Catholic Church. It is spreading throughout the Roman world. It is increasingly a gentile thing; it is a federation of communities united in belief, united in their mode of government, united in their acceptance of the belief as a thing regulated by authority, united, too, in their worship. It has received its historic name-the Catholic Church — and the rule of the Church at Rome is already foreshadowed in writing and in action, the continuation in time of the chieftainship conferred by Christ on Peter. Uniformity of belief has already been challenged, and in these challengers the Church has met the first heretics, has recognised them as such by their refusal to accept her received tradition, by their defiance of the authority of the bishop who, because he is ruler, is also teacher.

Notes

Next Chapter