When the “Catholic” Christian Church becomes politically and socially distinguishable in the second century, it is a much less numerous body than is pretended in the literature of its champions. Formulas such as those used in the Acts of the Apostles (chs. ii, iv, v, vi) greatly falsify the state of the case. The first “churches” in the cities of Asia Minor, like the groups addressed by “Paul” in the epistles, were but small conventicles, meeting in private houses. Even in the fourth century, sixty years after Constantine’s adoption of the faith, the church of Antioch, one of the oldest and most important, appears to have numbered only a fifth part of the population of the city, or about one hundred thousand out of half-a-million. In the extensive diocese of Neo-CÆsarea, in the third century, there were declared to be only seventeen believers; and in the church of Rome itself, in the same century, there were probably not more than fifty thousand members all told out of a population of perhaps a million. In Egypt again there was no church outside Alexandria till about the end of the second century. Thus the language of Justin and Tertullian and other Fathers, echoing the Acts, to the effect that the Christians were everywhere throughout the empire, and that the gospel had been preached and Jesus prayed to in every nation, is mere rhetoric in the oriental taste. Only in the towns of the empire—though often in small towns in the East—did the church exist at all: the pagani or people of the rural districts were so uniformly fixed in their beliefs that their name became for Christians the generic term for the adherents of the old faiths; and though there were some missionary movements in Persia and Arabia, the western provinces were hardly at all reached by the propaganda in the first two centuries. Even in Gaul there were few adherents; while as regards Britain, where there is said to have been a group at York in the third century, there is not to be found a single monumental trace of the presence of Christianity during the four centuries of the Roman occupation, though remains of the Mithraic cult, which flourished in the army, are frequent. At the end of the second century, then, probably not a hundredth part of the population even of the central provinces of the Roman empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces were practically unaffected.

Of the average inner life of the converts at this period it is possible to form some idea by noting at once the current doctrine, the claims of the apologists, the complaints of the apostolic and later epistles, and the tenour and temper of the whole literature of the Church. Something too may be inferred from the fact that the early believers were mainly easterns even in Rome itself. Even on these data, indeed, it would be a mistake to assume that any concrete character type was predominant; but at several points we are entitled to generalize as between the Christian movement and its antecedents and surroundings. It was, for instance, very weakly developed on the intellectual side, avowedly discouraging all use of reason, and limiting the mental life to religious interests. Save for a certain temperamental and moral energy in some of the Pauline epistles, there is nothing in the propagandist literature of the early Church which bears comparison with the best preceding literature of Greece and Rome. The traditions concerning the apostles present men of a narrow and fanatical vision and way of life, without outlook on human possibilities, joyless save by way of religious exaltation, painfully engrossed in theological contention and apocalyptic forecast. The happiest teachers were perhaps the least intelligent. Papias, bishop at Hierapolis, whom Eusebius later presents as having talked with men who had heard the apostles, is pronounced by that historian to have been of small understanding; and his ideas of the millennium, as passed down, justify the criticism. Other traditional figures of the second century, as the bishops Polycarp and Ignatius, are presented mainly in their character of hortatory martyrs, the most advantageous light in which ungifted men can be placed; and not a line ascribed to them is above suspicion. Of the early Christians in general, indeed, a transfiguring ideal has been shaped in terms of the aspect of martyrdom and persecution—trials which, by forcing men and women back on the central virtues of courage and constancy, positively ennoble character. Such a compensating dignity of endurance is found where it is apt to be least expected—in men and women long broken to oriental tyranny; in Egyptian fellaheen, used to the lash; in peasants wont mutely to toil and obey. But the possibility of such a correlation does not alter the facts of normal life for the types in question. Ignorance and fanaticism and superstition yield their normal fruits in normal conditions. And there is Christian record that even among the martyrs there were men of bad character, seeking a short way to Paradise.

Of the early Christian community many were slaves, and perhaps from three to five per cent paupers. The proportion of women was perhaps as large as it is in the churches of to-day; for it was one of the pagan taunts that to women the preachers preferred above all to address themselves, and rich women members seem to have been relatively numerous. All orders alike believed fervently in evil spirits; and the most constant aspect of their faith was as a protection against demoniacal influence. In the service of the Church of Rome in the third century there were forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolythes or clerks, and fifty “readers,” exorcists, and janitors; and the exorcists were at least as hard-worked as any other members of the staff. On the side of morality, much stress was laid on the sins of the flesh, partly because these were the commonest, partly because the idea of an intellectual ethic had not arisen; and while the Church was liable to gusts of persecution its practice was naturally somewhat strict. Men and women who had joined the body mainly for its alms or its agapÆ were not likely to adhere to it in times of trouble; and the very proclamation of an ascetic standard would primarily attract those persons, found in every community, who had a vocation for asceticism. At almost any period, however, such were to be found in the heretical or dissentient groups as well as in the main body, while the testimony of the Pauline epistles is distinct as to the antinomianism of many “apostolic” converts. Some Gnostic sects were stringently ascetic if others were antinomian, the À priori principle lending itself alternately to the doctrines that the spirit must mortify the flesh, and that the deeds of the flesh are nothing to the spirit. Within the main body, the conflicting principles of faith and works, then as later, involved the same divergences of practice. The evidence of Tertullian is emphatic as to the illusoriness of much Christian profession in his day in the churches of Carthage, where zeal was at least as abundant as elsewhere.

Taken individually, then, an average Christian of the second century was likely to be an unlettered person of the “lower-middle” or poorer classes; living in a town; either bitterly averse to “idols,” theatres, the circus, and the public baths, or persuaded that he ought to be; utterly credulous as to demons and miracles; incapable of criticism as to sacred books; neurotic or respectful towards neurosis; readily emotional towards the crucified God and the sacred mystery in which were given the “body and blood”; devoid alike of Æsthetic and of philosophic faculty; without the thought of civic duty or political theory; much given to his ritual; capable of fanatical hatred and of personal malice; but either constitutionally sober and chaste or chronically anxious to be so, and in times of persecution exalted by the passion of self-sacrifice; perhaps then transiently attaining to the professed ideal of love towards enemies. But the effective bonds of union for the community, whether in peace or during persecution, were rather the ruling passion of hostility to pagan beliefs and usages, and the eager hope of “salvation,” than any enthusiasm of humanity, social or even sectarian. And, as an orthodox ecclesiastic has remarked, we cannot “even cursorily read the New Testament without being astonished by the allusions so often made to immoral persons calling themselves Christians.”

Over such worshippers, in the first centuries, presided a clergy of precarious culture, sometimes marked by force of character, never by depth or breadth of thought. To compare the Christian writers of the ancient world with the pagan thinkers who had preceded them by three or more centuries is to have a vivid sense of the intellectual decadence which had accompanied the growth of imperialism. From Plato to Clement of Alexandria, from Aristotle to Tertullian, there is a descent as from a great plateau to arid plains or airless valleys: the disparity is as between different grades of organism. But even between the early Christian fathers and the pagans near their own time the intellectual and Æsthetic contrast is flagrant. Justin Martyr and Clement, put in comparison with either Plutarch or Epictetus, create at once an impression of relative poverty of soul: the higher pagan life is still the richer and the nobler; the Christian temper is more shrill and acrid, even where, as in the case of Clement, it is nourished by learning and pagan metaphysic. Even the cultured and relatively liberal Origen, in his reply to Celsus, is often at a moral disadvantage as against the pagan, who, especially when he passes from mere polemic on Jewish lines to philosophic thought, is distinctly more masculine and penetrating. So far from being less superstitious, the Christian reverts to such vulgar beliefs as that in the magical virtue of certain divine names. Yet Origen, who was born of educated Christian parents, is almost the high-water mark of ancient Christian literature on the side of culture and mental versatility (185–254).

Up to the time of Clement and Origen, then, it may be said, the Christian cult had won from paganism hardly one mind of any signal competence; religious humanists such as Plutarch and fine moralists such as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus having gone to their graves without being even transiently attracted by it. What laughter was left in literature remained aloof from religion; Lucian could have no place in the church, though it is probably his ridicule of pagan deities that has won the preservation of his works at Christian hands. It is only when the disease of empire has invaded all the sources of the higher life, in the third and fourth centuries, that the Christian writers, themselves representing no intellectual recovery, begin to be comparable, mind for mind, with those of contemporary paganism; and even then largeness of vision seems to linger rather with the mystics of the older way of thought, as Porphyry and Plotinus, than with the bitter polemists of the newer faith, as Cyprian and Arnobius. The moral note which in the modern world is supposed to be typically and primordially Christian, that of the Imitatio Christi, is the one note never struck by the Christian Fathers, or, if sounded, never sustained. It is rather a result of medieval brooding, the outcome of many generations of cloister life and of a settled ecclesiastical order, which walled-in an abnormal peace.

During those ages in which the Christian Church was so spreading as to become at length the fit cultus of the decaying State, its history is almost wholly one of internal and external strifes, conflicts between the Church and its pagan persecutors, between its literary champions and pagan criticism, between the champions of orthodoxy and the innovating heretics, between the partisans of dogmas whose life-and-death struggle was to determine what orthodoxy was to be. The central sociological fact is the existence of an organization with a durable economic life—durable because of ministering to an enduring demand—in a society whose institutions were suffering more and more from economic disease. Of this organization the component parts united to resist and survive external hostility when that arose; and for the command of its power and prestige, later, the conflicting sections strove as against each other. In the history of both forms of strife are involved at once that of its dogmas and that of its hierarchic structure.

In the Jesuist groups of the first century, as we have seen, there were “bishops” or overseers, and other “presbyters” or elders, so named in simple imitation of the usages of other Greek-speaking religious societies, Jewish and Gentile, in the eastern parts of the empire. The bishop was at first merely the special supervisor and distributor of the “collection,” whether of money or of other gifts, and was spiritually and socially on the same level with the presbyters and deacons. None was specially ordained, and ordinary members could at need even administer the eucharist. Teaching or preaching was not at first a special function of any member of a group, since any one could be a “prophet” (unless indeed the “prophets” were so named later, after the supervising priest or bishop in certain Egyptian temples, whose function was to distribute revenue); but discourses were for a time given by travelling apostles, who aimed at founding new groups, and who ministered the eucharist wherever they went. It lay in the nature of the case, however, that the function of the bishop should gain in moral authority because of its economic importance; and that the informal exhortations or “prophesyings” of the early days, which were always apt to degenerate into the hysterical glossolalia, or unintelligible “tongues,” should be superseded by the regular preaching of ostensibly qualified men. In the first century these must have been few, and they would usually be made the acting bishops, who would gradually become more and more identified with the administration of the “mysteries,” and would naturally repel “lay” interference. Here again there was pagan precedent, some of the pagan societies having a “theologos,” while in all the “bishop” had a certain precedence and authority.

As congregations grew and services multiplied, however, the bishop would need assistance, and to this end presbyters became officially associated with him as con-celebrants. Only gradually, however, did the sacerdotal spirit take full possession of the cult. Liturgy was long a matter of local choice; and it is probable that the complete mystery-play of the Agony and Crucifixion and Resurrection was never performed save at a few large centres, in competition with special pagan attractions of the same kind; but a eucharist, with varying ritual and hymns, sung by special officials, was the primary function of every church. As numbers and revenue increased, men of an ambitious and administrative turn would inevitably tend to enter the movement; and the second century was not out before the avarice and arrogance of leading bishops were loudly complained of. Nonetheless, their self-assertion promoted the growth of the sect. Such men, in point of fact, tended to build up the Church as warlike nobles later built up the fabric of feudalism, or self-seeking “captains of industry” the special structure of modern commercial societies. Righteousness and gentleness and spirituality could no more create a popular and revenue-yielding Church in the Roman empire than they can to-day create and maintain a “paying” industrial organization. An early bishop, indeed, needed to recommend himself to the congregation in order to get elected; but in a large town, with personal magnetism and a staff of priests, he was certain to become a determining force in church affairs. The aspiring priest looked forward to a bishopric for himself; and in an illiterate congregation there could be no effectual resistance to official assumptions which were made with any tact. Thus were the scribes and Pharisees rapidly duplicated.

In an age of unbounded credulity the invitation to deceit was constant; and, while credulity itself means the faculty for innocent false witness, it could not be but that frauds were common in matters of miracle-working of all kinds. To suppose that all the miracle-stories arose in good faith when the deliberate manufacture of false documents and calculated tamperings with the genuine were a main part of the literary life of the Church, is to ignore all probability. The systematic forgery and interpolation of “Sibylline Books” by way of producing pagan testimonies and prophecies on the side of Christism, is to be regarded as a clerical industry of the second century. A bishop’s business was to forward the fame and interests of his Church; and in Ambrose’s transparent account of his discovery of miracle-working relics of saints at Milan in the fourth century we have a typical instance of the methods by which the prestige of the faith was advanced. Ambrose was above and not below the moral average of previous bishops. To find what might pass for the bones and relics of saints and martyrs, to frame false tales concerning them, to win illiterate and poor pagans to the Church by imitating their festivals and ceremonies—these were, by the grieving admission of many Christian historians, among the common activities of the Church from the second or third century onwards; and the priesthood were the natural agents of the work. By the very fact, however, that there were special reputations for wonder-working, as that of Gregory Thaumaturgus in the third century, we are reminded that the pretence was not universal. Imposture is a variation like another; and there must always have been a proportion of normally honest minds, however unintelligent and uncritical. It was their incapacity that evoked fraud. Some, on the other hand, have recorded how the bones of executed robbers were at times made to do duty as relics of martyrs.

On one side the character of the early as of the later clergy of the “Catholic” Church has suffered severely from their own affirmation of a primitive theory of morals to which they could not conform. In an age of lessening science and freedom, with growing superstition, the barbarian ideal of asceticism gained ground like other delusions. The idea that by physical self-mortification men attain magical or intercessory power in spiritual things—an idea found in all ancient religions, and enforced in numerous pagan priesthoods—was imposed to some extent on Christism from the first, and became more and more coercive as the cult passed out of Jewish hands. The average presbyter of the second century, accordingly, won his repute for sanctity in many cases by professing celibacy, which in a large number of cases was too hard for him to maintain; and between his own unhappy ideal and the demand of the crowd that he should fulfil it, his life became in general a deception. In these matters the multitude is always preposterously righteous. Aztecs in the pre-Christian period, we know, were wont to put to death professed ascetics who lapsed; and the normal denunciation of priestly immorality in Europe in the Middle Ages seems rarely to have been checked by the thought that the priest’s error consisted in taking up a burden he could not bear. That priests ought to be celibate the average priest-taught layman never doubted. Hence a premium on hypocrisy in the period of church-creation. An artificial ethic created an artificial crime, and Christian morality evolved demoralization. In the second century began the practice of open priestly concubinage, often on the naÏve pretence of a purely spiritual union. Denounced periodically by bishops and councils for hundreds of years, it was never even ostensibly checked in the period of the empire; and the later discipline of the Western Church did but drive the symptom beneath the surface to form a worse disorder.

In the Roman period no machinery existed by which celibacy could be enforced. Councils varied in their stringency on the subject, and many bishops were capable of voting for a rule to which they did not in private conform. As for the bishopric of Rome, it had at that time only a ceremonial primacy over the other provinces. In the second century Bishop Victor of Rome is recorded to have passed sentence of excommunication on the easterns who would not conform to his practice in the observation of Easter; but his authority was defied, and his successors do not seem even to have asserted it in any similar degree for centuries. In the third century Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, the first zealous prelatist in the literature of the Church, claimed merely primacy, without superior authority, for the chief bishoprics, and for Rome over the rest. All bishops he held to be spiritually equal—and indeed all presbyters, bishops included. This held good theoretically as late as the fourth and fifth centuries, with the exception that by that time the bishop alone had the right to appoint to Church offices—originally the function of the whole community. But alike the internal and the external conditions made for the creation of a hierarchy. When in the third century the puritan party in the Church at Rome sought to appoint Novatian as its separate bishop, alongside of another, the bishops in the provinces, led by Cyprian, zealously resisted, and secured the principle that no town should have more than one bishop. In other ways the bishops necessarily gathered power. To them had soon to be relegated the right of admitting or refusing new members; and when there arose the question of the treatment of those who lapsed in a time of persecution, there was no way to secure uniformity of method save by leaving the matter to the bishops, who in the main agreed on a rule. For such uniformity they naturally strove in the days of danger; and the Church Synods, which began in the second century and developed in the third, were tolerably unanimous up to the time of the Establishment of the Church under Constantine (313). It was when the Church as a whole had no longer cause to fear the heathen that the worst strifes arose.

In New Testament Greek the same word has to stand for “sect” and “heresy,” a fact premonitory of what must happen to every new idea in religion. Any process of reasoning whatever must have led to differences of opinion among the converts of Paul or of the Pauline epistles; and such differences, leading necessarily, among zealots, to animosities, are among the first phenomena of Christism. As we have seen, the chief “heresies” of the first century, stigmatized as such by the later Church, were really independent cults older than itself; and there is reason to think that the “Nicolitaines” execrated in the Apocalypse were really the followers of Paul. At the beginning of the second century, again, the first heretics on record are the Elcesaites, who, however, as we saw, were obviously not an offshoot from the Jesuists, but a separate body, their Christ being a gigantic spirit and their doctrine a cluster of symbolisms. It is with the so-called Gnostics, the claimants to a higher Gnosis or knowledge, that heresy begins in Gentile Christianity; and as some of these are already in evidence in the Pauline epistles, and had interpolated the synoptics (Mt. xiii, Mk. iv, Lk. xii, 49, sq.), to say nothing of framing the fourth gospel, they may fairly be reckoned among “the first Christians.” Ere long, however, they begin clearly to differentiate from the Christism of the New Testament.

If the early Gnostic systems be compared with that of Paul, they will be found to have rather more in common with it than with the Judaic Jesuism from which he ostensibly broke away. It is thus not unlikely that their Christism, like his, is older than that of the gospels, which is primarily of Jewish manufacture. The “Simonians” of Samaria have every appearance of being non-Jewish Christists “before Christ”; and the later Gnostics have several Samaritan affinities. Like “Paul,” they have no Jesuine biography; but whereas he ostensibly holds by an actual man Jesus, however nondescript, they usually declare outright for a mere divine phantom,1 bearing a human semblance, but uncontaminated by mixture with matter, which was the Gnostic symbol for all evil. They did but attach the name of the Christos, and the hope of salvation, to a general theosophy, as Paul attached it to Judaism; and their great preoccupation was to account formally for the existence of evil, which they commonly figured as either an evil power or an essential quality of matter, forever opposed to the principle of good. Hence the allusion to the “oppositions of science falsely so-called”—that is, “the antithesis of the Gnosis”—in the Pauline epistle. But they varied somewhat in details according to their environment, being roughly divisible into two groups—Asiatic and Egyptian.

At the beginning of the second century those of Syria are identified with the teaching of Saturninus of Antioch, in whose theory a good God had made the seven angels, who in turn made the world and created a low type of animal man in God’s image, whom, however, God compassionately endowed with a reasonable soul. Of the seven angels one was left to rule the world, and figured as God of the Jews; but the others competed with him; and Satan, the chief evil power, made a race of men with an evil soul. Thereupon the Supreme God sent his son as Jesus Christ, human only in seeming, to bring men to the knowledge of the Father and defeat the rebel angels. Another Syrian, Bardesanes, who lived in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, was less anti-Jewish, and made the one God the creator of the world and of man, who was at first ethereal and pure, but seduced and so degraded to the form of flesh by the Adversary; the Christ’s function being to secure a higher future life to those who accept him. From both points of view, mortification of the flesh was a primary duty—all the carnal instincts being evil—and Jesus on the same ground was denied bodily existence. Always the effort is to account for evil as involved in matter, the work not of the Supreme God, but of a subordinate power who will be vanquished. Thus Tatian, a pupil of Justin Martyr and contemporary with Saturninus, makes the world-creator a subordinate God, and seems to have derived Judaism and the gospel similarly from inferior deities. Some, as Bardesanes and Tatian, held by a bodily resurrection; others, as Saturninus and Cerdo (fl. 140), stressed the anti-material principle and denied that the resurrection could be in bodily form. On such an issue, of course, it was easy to compromise in the concept of a “spiritual body” the same to the eye as the real body, but impalpable to touch—in short, the “spirit” of all ages.

It is reasonable to infer that the Gnostic systems were suggested by the spectacle of the earthly Governments around them, no less than by the previous theologies. Even as the Autocrator reigned without governing, and the evils of misgovernment were chargeable on proconsuls, so, it was thought, the head of the universe, the Pantocrator, could not be implicated in the evil wrought under him. Such a conception seems to have first arisen in the great monarchies of the East. It followed, however, that as some satraps and proconsuls governed well, there might be good subordinate deities; and in the system of Basilides the Egyptian, who belonged to the brilliant reign of Hadrian, the attribute of goodness is graded endlessly, down to the angels of the 365th heaven, who made this world and its inhabitants. As in the system of Saturninus, God gives these a reasonable soul, but the angels rebel, and their chief, who becomes God of the Jews, draws on that nation the hatred of all others by his arrogance. Egyptian Gnosticism thus bore the stamp of the old Egyptian pantheism, its every power emanating from the Unbegotten One; while the Asiatic systems embody in some form the Mazdean principle of two opposed powers, of which the worse is only ultimately to be defeated. Egyptian precedent explains also the countless generations of the Gnostic systems of Alexandria. As in Egyptian history dynasty followed on dynasty, and as in the pantheon God was begotten of God, so in the system of Basilides the Unbegotten produces from himself Nous, Mind; which produces the Logos; which produces Phronesis, Judgment; which produces Sophia and Dynamis, Wisdom and Power; and these last in turn produce angels, who in turn reproduce others down to the 365th grade. The system of Valentinus, assigned to the period of Antoninus Pius, frames fresh complications, partly suggestive of an immemorial bureaucracy which had duplicated itself in the heavens, partly of an À priori psychology which sought to explain the universe, now by first principles, after the fashion of the early mythology of Rome, now by adaptations of the current theosophy.

In the hands of Valentinus religion becomes an imbroglio which only an expert could master; and the functions of the Christ in particular are a mere tangle of mystery. Nous, the first of many “Æons,” is the “only begotten” Son, his mother being Ennoia, Thought; yet with him is born Truth; and these three with the Father make a first Tetrad. Then Nous produces the Logos and Life; which beget Man and the Church; which two pairs beget more Æons; and so on. In a later stage, after a “fall,” Nous begets the Christos and the Holy Spirit; while later still the Æons produce the Æon Jesus, Sophia and Horos playing a part in the evolution. Such a maze, though it is said to have had many devotees, could not possibly be the creed of a popular Church, even in Egypt; and wherever the gospels went their ostensibly concrete Jesus held his own against such spectral competition. The systems which made Jesus non-human and those which made of him an elusive abstraction were alike disadvantaged as against that which declared him to have been born of woman and to have suffered the last agony for the sons of men. Women could weep for the crucified Man-God as they had immemorially done for Adonis and Osiris: they could not shed tears for a phantasmagoric series of Nous—Logos—Christ—Æons—Jesus, begetting and begotten.

Other Gnostics, still making mystical pretensions, were content to represent Jesus as a superior human being born of Joseph and Mary in the course of nature. Carpocrates of Alexandria, who so taught in the reign of Hadrian, had a large following. Such tolerance of “materialism,” however, brought on the sect charges of all manner of sensuality; and there is categorical record that, following Plato, they sought to practise community of women. Similarly, the Basilidians were charged with regarding all bodily appetites as indifferent, their founder having set his face against the glorification of virginity, and taught that Jesus was not absolutely sinless, since God could never permit an innocent being to be punished. There is no proof, however, that any sect-founder was openly antinomian; and while license doubtless occurred in many, we have the evidence of the Pauline epistles that it could rise in the heart of the primitive Church as easily as in any sect. In the same way, whatever might be the doctrine of particular sections, it may be taken as certain that the charge of bowing before persecution, cast at some, held partly true of nearly all.

Systems such as the bulk of those above described, drawing as they did on any documents rather than the Old and New Testaments, are obviously not so much Christian schisms as differentiations from historic Christianity—developments, in most cases, of an abstract Christism on lines not merely Gentile but based on Gentile religions, as against the Jewish. Broadly speaking, therefore, they tended to disappear from the Christist field, inasmuch as paganism had other deities better suited to the part of the Gnostic Logos. The intermediate type, bodiless at best, must die out. Gnosticism had not only no canon of its own, but no thought of one: while the fashion lasted every decade saw a new system, refining on the last and multiplying its abstractions, till the very term gnosis must have become a byword. Success, as has been said above, must remain with the simple and concrete system, especially if that were organized; and the Gnostics of the second century attempted no general organization. Yet Gnosticism left a lasting impress on Christianity. In its earlier stages, as we have seen, it modified the gospels; and after it had evolved away from the gospel basis it left an influence on the more philosophically-minded writers of the Church, notably Clement of Alexandria, who is as openly anxious to approve himself a “good Gnostic” as to found on the accepted sacred books of the Church. Deriving as it partly did from the Jewish Platonist Philo, it brought into the Church his fashion of reducing Biblical narratives to allegories—a course much resorted to not only by Origen but by Augustine, and very necessary for the defence of Hebrew tales against pagan criticism. Further, the regular practice of the Church in the matter of separating catechumens from initiates was an adoption of the Gnostic principle of esoteric knowledge.

In yet other ways, however, Gnosticism influenced early Christianity. It was the Gnostics who first set up in it literary habits: they were the first to multiply documents of all kinds; and it is not unlikely that their early additions to the gospels gave a stimulus to its expansion on other lines. They were, in short, the first to introduce a tincture of letters and art into the cult; and it was their spirit that shaped the fourth gospel, which gave to Christism the only philosophical elements it ever possessed. They are not indeed to be regarded as having cultivated philosophy to any good purpose, though they passed on some of the philosophic impulse to the later Platonists. Rather the average Gnostic is to be conceived as a leisured dilettante in an age of learned ignorance and foiled intelligence, lending an eager ear to new mysticisms, as so many half-cultured idlers are seen still doing in our own day. They cared as much for abracadabral amulets, apparently, as for theories; and their zeal for secret knowledge had in it something of the spirit of class exclusiveness, and even of personal arrogance. It would seem as if, when tyrannies in the ancient world made an end of the old moral distinctions of classes, men instinctively caught at new ways of being superior to their fellows—for the spirit of Gnosticism arose among the later Greek pagans, who here followed the lead of Egyptian priests, as well as among Samaritans and Grecized Jews. At most we may say of the Gnostics that they were much more concerned than the orthodox to frame a complete and consistent theistic theory of things, and that in their learned-ignorant way they sought to walk by reason as well as by faith. Necessarily they were in a minority. It was, however, their theoretic bent, surviving in the gospel-reading Church, that determined the dogmatic development of the Christist creed. Their recoil from the conception of a Saviour-God in a human body comes out in the later debates and creeds as in the fourth gospel; and if the final doctrine of the Trinity be not truly Gnostic, it is because the Gnostics showed more concern for plausibility, and never aimed at tying thought down forever to a plainly self-contradictory formula. Much of their movement probably survived in ManichÆism, which, though sufficiently dogmatic, never flaunted such propositions as those of the Nicene creed, and was a critical thorn in the flesh of the Church. Even their amulets seem to have had a Christian vogue; and the worship of angels, which began to flourish among Catholics in the fourth century, seems to have been a reflex of their teaching.

In some respects, finally, the modern Church has confusedly reverted to their view of a future state. While the “orthodox” Christians of the second century believed that souls at death went to the under-world, to be raised with the body for the approaching millennium, or thousand-years reign of Christ, the Gnostics, scouting the millennium as a grossly materialistic conception, held that at death the soul ascended to heaven. That appears to be the prevailing fancy among Protestants at the present day, though men have grown cautious of formal dicta on the subject.

Apart from Gnosticism, the Church of the second century was affected by certain heretical or sectarian movements which centred round single teachers of an influential sort, in particular Marcion of Sinope and Montanus, who became the founders of something like separate churches. Montanus, like ManichÆus, has mythical aspects; and it is impossible to be sure of the historicity of either;2 but Marcionism sets up no such difficulty. Marcion, who was a disciple of the Gnostic Cerdo, and like him flourished in the reign of Antoninus Pius, held by some of the main Gnostic theories, but differed from the Gnostics in general in that he founded solely on New Testament writings and did not absolutely oppose Judaism. In his system the Supreme God, who is Good, creates a Demiurge or world-maker, who is merely Just or legalist, the God of the Jews; while Satan, the offspring of Matter, governs the heathens. Only the Christians are ruled by the Good God, who is first revealed to men solely by the Christ. It was in this way that he applied the Gnostic principle of “oppositions” or “antitheses,” in a work bearing that title. His ethic appears to have been a sectarian version of that of Bardesanes, who had defined the good as those who did good even to the wicked; the just as those who did good only to the good; and the wicked as those who did evil even to the good. It does not seem to have occurred to Marcion that in classing all pagans as outside of the pale of goodness he was stultifying his own avowed principle of divine love and mercy; but in this respect at least he was not heretical, for all who bore the Christian name agreed in limiting salvation to Christists, and dooming all other men to hell-fire.

That he was a fanatic of exceptional force of character is proved by the facts that (1) it was he who forced on the Church the problem of a canon, he being the first to form one, by way, as he explained, of excluding Jewish documents and Jewish interpolations in the gospel and the Pauline epistles; and that (2) he was able to form a separate organization, which subsisted for centuries, with some variations in doctrine, alongside of the “catholic” Church, being heard of as late as the eighth century. The controversies he set up affected the whole literature of the Church for generations; and though it was a point of honour with the orthodox to accuse him of corrupting the texts as well as the faith, it is finally held that some of his readings of the third gospel, which he specially favoured, are really the original ones. Inasmuch, however, as he laid stress on asceticism, to the extent of prohibiting marriage, he necessarily failed to attract the multitude, though his was one of the influences which fostered ascetic ideas within the Church from his time onwards.

The movement of Montanus, known also as the Cataphrygian heresy, has two aspects—that of a sect apparently founded by a zealot of strong personality, who felt that he had special inner light and claimed (or was claimed) to be inspired by the Paraclete promised in the gospel, and that of a general reaction against officialism in the Church, somewhat in the spirit of the Quakers of the Reformation period. It stressed all the extremer social tendencies of the early Church, the prediction of the end of the world, the impropriety of marriage and child-bearing in prospect of the catastrophe, the multiplication of fasts, the absolute condemnation of second marriages, the renunciation of earthly joys in general. Christ, said Montanus, had withdrawn the indulgences granted by Moses; and through himself, the Paraclete, cancelled those given by Paul. Thus true religion, having had its infancy under Judaism, and its youth under the gospel, had reached maturity under the Holy Spirit (an idea revived a thousand years later in Catholic Europe). Hardness of heart had reigned till Christ; weakness of flesh till the Paraclete. A special feature of the Montanist schism—which spread far, and ultimately absorbed Tertullian, who for a time had opposed it—was the association of the founder with two wealthy women of rank, Maximilla and Priscilla, who endowed the movement. It is noteworthy that this special growth of asceticism took its rise in Phrygia, one of the regions specially associated in pagan antiquity with sensuous and orgiastic worship. It would seem as if an age of indulgence led in natural course to a neurotic recoil. In any case it is neurosis that speaks in the ascetic polemic of Tertullian, who became a typical Montanist.

Montanism, it has been said, was “all but victorious”; but its victory was really impossible in the circumstances. It would have meant arresting the growth of Christism to the form of a moribund State Church by depriving it of all popular attraction; and the vested interests were too great to permit of such a renunciation. The movement may be loosely compared to the secession of more rigid bodies from the relaxing sects of Methodism and Calvinism in our own time: voluntary austerity must always be in a minority. A Church which absolutely refused to retain or readmit any who committed a cardinal sin or lapsed during persecution—saying they might be saved by God’s grace, but must not be allowed human forgiveness—was doomed to the background. But Montanism, appealing as it did to an ideal of holiness which the average Christian dared not repudiate, influenced the main body, especially through the writings of such a valued polemist as Tertullian, who taunted them with being inferior even to many pagans in the matter of chastity and monogamy. The main body was not to be metamorphosed; but it read the lesson as inculcating the need for at least nominal priestly celibacy. Every notable “heresy” so-called seems thus to have left its mark on the Church.

What above all is proved by the movements of Marcion and Montanus is the power of organization in that period to maintain a sect with sacred books of any kind. They had learned the lesson taken from Judaism by the first Christists, and proceeded to show that just as organized Jesuism could live apart from Judaism in the Gentile field, so new Christist sects could live apart from the orthodox Church when once separation was forced on them. Montanism, like Marcionism, survived for centuries, and seems to have been at length suppressed only by sheer violence on the part of the Christian emperors, who could persecute far more effectually than pagans ever did, having the Church as an instrument. In the face of such developments, and still more in view of the later success of ManichÆism, which, as we shall see, applied still better the principle of organization, there can be no longer any difficulty in accounting for the rise of Christism on purely natural grounds. Given the recognition of a few essential conditions, the creation of a sect was a very simple and facile matter. Montanism and ManichÆism successively endured more persecution, pagan and Christian, than the Christian Church ever did; and it was only the essential unpopularity of the ideals of Montanism that permitted of its suppression as a sect even by the persecuting established Church. ManichÆism, as we shall see, was almost insuppressible, even when political changes had given the Church a power of centralization and coercion which otherwise could never have been developed. At the end of the third century, in short, the Church of its own nature was rapidly approaching disruption into new and irreconcilable organizations.

Apart from the habit of doctrinal discussion, derived from Judaism, the Christianity of the third century had distinctly become as much a matter of ritual and ceremonial as any of the older pagan cults. Churches built for worship, rare in the second century, had become common, and images had already begun to appear in them, while incense was coming into general use, despite the earlier detestation of it as a feature of idolatry. In the wealthier churches gold and silver medals were often seen. Pagan example had proved irresistible in this as in other matters.

By this time baptism and the eucharist had alike become virtual “mysteries,” to which new-comers were initiated as in the pagan cults. Baptism was administered only twice a year, and then only to those who had undergone a long preparation. The first proceeding was a solemn exorcism, which was supposed to free the initiates from the power of the evil spirit or spirits. Then, after they had repeated a creed (which in the Western Churches had to be recited both in Greek and Latin, the Greek being in the nature of a magic formula), they were completely immersed, signed with the cross, prayed over, and touched ceremonially with the hands of the officiating bishop or presbyter; finally they partook of milk and honey, and returned home decorated with a white robe and a crown.

The eucharist, commonly administered on Sundays, was regarded as absolutely necessary to salvation and resurrection; and on that account infants were made to partake of it, this before baptism had been declared to be essential in their case. Only the baptized were allowed to be present at the celebration; but portions of the consecrated bread and wine were taken away for sick members, and believed to have a curative virtue. The sign of the cross was now constantly used in the same spirit, being held potent against physical and spiritual evil alike, insofar as any such distinction was drawn. But diseases, as among savages in all ages, were commonly regarded as the work of evil spirits, and medical science was generally disowned, the preferred treatment being exorcism. A baptized person might further use the Lord’s Prayer, with its appeal against the Evil One—a privilege denied to the catechumen or seeker for membership.

The nucleus for a theistic-Christist creed, as we have seen, was given to the Church in the fourth gospel. The first Jewish Jesuists were simple Unitarians; and the Jesus of Paul, so far as can be safely inferred from epistles indefinitely interpolated, was certainly no part of a trinity in unity. At the beginning of the second century the “orthodox” Christists had no more definite theology than had the unlettered believers in any pagan Saviour-God; and at most the gospels taught them to regard the supernaturally-born Christ as having ascended to heaven, to sit in visible form at the right hand of the Father, as Herakles or Dionysos or Apollo might sit by his Father Zeus. At the middle of the century Justin Martyr speaks of the Logos not as a personal form of deity, but as the inspiration given by God to men in different degrees at different times. It is after him that the fourth gospel begins to do its work. Christian apologists, deriding the beliefs of the pagans, had to meet the charge that they too were polytheists, and the old pagan challenge, put to pagans: If the suffering Saviour were a man, why worship him? if he were a God, why weep for his sufferings?

An attempt to meet the difficulty was made in the heresy of Praxeas, a member of the Church who, coming from Asia to Rome late in the century, seems to have taught that the Son and the Holy Spirit were not distinct from the Father, but simply functions of the One God, the Father having descended into the Virgin and been born as Jesus Christ. At once he was accused of “making the Father suffer” on the cross, and his sect accordingly seem to have been among the first called Patripassians. In the same or the next century NoËtus of Smyrna is found preaching the same doctrine; and in the hands of Sabellius of Libya, whose name was given to it by his opponents, the teaching became one of the most influential heresies of the age. Sabellius in fact formulated that theory of the Trinity which alone gives it formal plausibility: the three personÆ were for him (as they could etymologically be in Latin and in the Greek term first used, prosopon) not persons, but aspects or modes of the deity, as power, wisdom, and goodness; or law, mercy, and guidance—a kind of solution which in later times has captivated many theologians, including Servetus and Coleridge. But Sabellius, like his predecessors, had to meet the epithet of “Patripassian,” and he appears to have parried it with the formula that only a certain energy proceeding from the Divine Nature had been united to the man Jesus. In the way of rationalizing the irrational and giving consistency to contradictories, the Church could never do better than this. Under such a theorem, however, the Man-God as such theoretically disappeared; and as that was precisely the side of the creed which identified the cult, gave it popularity, and won it revenue, Sabellianism, though accepted by many, even by many bishops, could not become the official doctrine. It persistently remained, nevertheless, in the background, the idea taking new forms and names in succeeding generations, as new men arose with courage and energy enough to reopen the insoluble strife, during a period of four hundred years.

A solution by a different approach was offered by such second-century teachers as Theodotus of Byzantium, a learned tanner living in Rome; another of the same name, a banker; and Artemon, all founders of sects by whom Jesus was regarded as merely a superior man, supernaturally born. As this form of the Unitarian doctrine struck directly at the essential element of the Christ’s deity, in respect of which the cult vied with others of the same type, it was no more generally acceptable than the Sabellian; and it is more than likely that the mere odium theologicum gave rise to the story that Theodotus had first denied Christ under persecution, and then framed a theology for his predicament. Yet such doctrines as his must have gone on gaining ground among the more stirring minds; for when in the next century Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, began to restate the Unitarian thesis, he found an extensive following. The Logos, he taught, was not a person distinct from the Father, but merely his wisdom, which descended into but was not united with Jesus. Given forth about the year 260, Paul’s teaching was condemned by a council at Antioch in 264, he giving a promise of “reformation” which he did not keep. Another council, which met in 269 or 270, deposed and excommunicated him; but he refused to obey, and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, who then ruled Antioch, protected him. Not till 272, when Antioch was retaken by Aurelian, did the majority succeed in ousting him, by the emperor’s express intervention. And still the “heresy” persisted, and the theological hatreds grew. It belonged to the nature of the religion, a pyramid poised on its apex, to be in unstable equilibrium wherever any breath of reason could blow.

The development of the councils in the third century is a proof at once of the growth of organization in the Church and of the need for it. It is not to be supposed that all orthodox Churchmen looked practically to the main chance; it is clear, on the contrary, that many were moved by the conservative zeal of the Bibliolater of all ages, as the heretics were presumably moved by a spirit of reason; but the bishops must at all times have included many who looked at questions of creed from the standpoint of finance, like so many members of modern political parties; and they would be apt to turn the scale in every serious dispute. Even they, however, with whatever aid from polemical propaganda, could not long have availed to preserve anything like a preponderating main body if the Church were left to itself. The polemical writers, broadly speaking, converted nobody, but merely inflamed those already convinced; and party strife was becoming more and more comprehensive, more furious, more menacing, when the Church was saved from itself by the State.