| ### CHAPTER 3: THE FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE PAGAN RELIGIOUS WORLD ###  |

| #### 1. THE RELIGIOUS WORLD OF THE SECOND CENTURY |

| #### #### THE history of the first contacts of the new religion with the religious thought of the Romano-hellenic world is only imperfectly known to us. The Acts of the Apostles relates, of course, the story of the conversion of the Roman officer Cornelius in the first years after Our Lord's Ascension, and describes St. Paul’s varied success with the pagans of the Roman East. The Acts is, in a large part, the story of the origins of Gentile Christianity. Nevertheless it is not until the next century that we begin to have evidence in detail about the way the new religion affected the religious gentiles who occupied themselves with its teaching and promises; or the like evidence about the way the Church reacted to its contact with the world outside it. #### That world outside was not, in the second century, by any means unconcerned with religious theories and practice. Religion was all important to it, and though the religious restoration of the first of the Roman emperors had not developed, as he had hoped, into a rebirth of the old classical Paganism, religion a hundred years after his death was flourishing and promised to flourish yet more. Development since Augustus had not, indeed, taken the direction he would have willed. It had left the Paganism of the classic pantheon to its inevitable end. It showed itself rather in the appearance of new cults, particularly in the cult of personified abstractions. Such were the new religions which worshipped Honour, Piety, Peace and -- the most popular cult of all -- Fortune. These new fast-spreading cults were free of the mythological foulness which had disfigured the older religion they displaced; but the gods they honoured remained, for the popular imagination, little more than abstractions before which the only attitude possible was the resignation of fatalism. Fortune might be worshipped as the supreme goddess, but Fortune was inexorable unchangeable destiny, Fate -- and before Fate what use to pray or beseech? #### A like fatalistic attitude to life was bred by another series of new cults now in full emigration from the East, the cult of the Sun, of the Moon and of the Stars. According to the positions of the stars at the moment of birth, so must every man's life be; and the adepts of these cults set themselves to work out astrological codes by which each man's future and fate might be told. The emperors enacted the severest laws against these mischievous superstitions, but without any great success. The promise of this religious astrology was too much for human anxiety to resist, and the very emperors in whose name the laws were published were themselves the first to break them. #### But the most important feature of the century's religious history was undoubtedly the progress of the ancient cults of the old pre-hellenic culture of the East. Below the veneer of Hellenism which had covered it now for generations, the East still remained the East. Egypt, Asia and Syria still retained their ancient identities, their ancient sensual and bloodthirsty gods. Slowly, now, that older East was coming to life again; and, in a kind of revenge for the Hellenistic centuries, its old religions seeped through the surface, steadily, increasingly, until by the middle of the third century they had done much everywhere to transform the religion of the city populations. These cults were popular now for the same reasons that the mystery religions had been popular in ancient Greece. They offered to their clients guarantees of special protection -- very notably they offered protection against the powers of evil, against Fate itself. They gained a hold on the imagination by the splendour of their rites, their secret initiations, the spectacle of their sanctifying sacred dramas. In the assemblies which were the scene of these rites a mad enthusiasm spread through the crowd. Men stabbed themselves and each other, feeling nothing; in sheer religious exultation mutilated themselves publicly and shamelessly, passed through fire, leapt unbridgeable gulfs, gave themselves to actions of unbelievable impudicity. But more potent than the attraction of these often misunderstood aberrations was the novelty of the god's familiarity with his client. The gods of the classic Olympus had been aloof. Familiarity with them was perilous. Their company no man could hope to survive. But Isis, Mithra, the Syrian Goddess, offered familiarity, friendship: offered this, even, as the very means of their protection, as the medium through which they wished to be worshipped. #### As these cults slowly established themselves in the West, they underwent more than one important modification. The Syrian goddess, patron of reproduction, was seen by the Greeks as another Aphrodite, by the Romans as a Venus. With the identification a more open sensuality often crept into the old Paganism of the West, a new brutal bloodthirstiness. From Rome the new cults crossed the Alps, and revived by their presence the superstitions and the horrors of the old pre-Roman religion of the Celts. Always there is the fantasy of the legend, never exactly the same in any two places; always the rough and ready identification of the new and the old; the attraction of sensual novelty in the ritual, the promise of the god's intimacy, of his special protection and of a happy eternity. The man who has given himself to the god or goddess and is accepted has no more to fear. Though Fate dog his life Isis will effectually protect him. #### These religions introduced, too, a new kind of priesthood. Their priests were a caste apart, men whose lives were wholly given to the service of the god, and who were set apart for that service in a definite ritual, often indeed of a brutal and obscene character. They had their prophets, they had their magicians, sorcerers, soothsayers; and their establishment presented the nascent religion of Christ with yet another obstacle to overcome in its mission of winning the populace to the good tidings of the Kingdom of God. Under the working of these new influences the popular inert dislike of the Christian turns to passionate, active hatred -- a hatred which skilful calumny intensifies. And as with the third century, the Eastern cults gain a hold among the aristocracy, and can claim the emperor himself as a devotee, the possibilities of the anti- Christian influence know no limit. It is, for instance, the magician, Macrian, who converts the emperor, Valerian (253-259), from his sympathy for the Christians and makes of him one of the bloodiest of persecutors. #### The mystery religions, as they developed in the century between Nero and Marcus Aurelius, were to influence the pace of the Church's development in another way. Two features they all shared -- the initiation reserved to the select few and the special revelation of the god to the initiated. It was only after a laborious novitiate, and a series of tests and partial initiations, that the candidate was in the end admitted to the heart of the mystery. In every mystery religion, then, the disciples, at any given moment, were arranged in a hierarchy of knowledge, and of perfection, according to the degree of their initiation. And as knowledge of the divine secret and intimacy with the god developed together, the perfectly initiated into knowledge was alone perfectly holy, stainless and saved. This idea of a hierarchy of virtue based on degrees of knowledge was to play its part in the Church, too, once the Church came into contact with Gnosticism. #### The perfection to which the initiate few thus attained was of course wholly unconcerned with moral goodness. In the dramas of the mysteries, even of the more restrained Hellenic mysteries, the subjects of the splendid spectacle were all too often the sexual relations of the god and goddess with one another and with mankind. Moral teaching they held none; nor anything of instruction about the gods except the interminable, meaningless genealogies. And if the early Christian writers used all their eloquence to denounce the mysteries for the traps they were, the Pagans were equally outspoken. Plutarch, for example, ends his description of the myth of Isis and Osiris with the comment that to those who really believe that the gods give themselves to such a way of life there is no more to be said but what Aeschylus advises, "Spit it out and rinse your mouth." Nothing in this latest development of Paganism brought it nearer to the chance of giving the world what the Gospel promised to give. It was no rival gospel that the Church had to fear in the mystery religions, or in these new cults from the East. The danger was more simple -- that the mixture of charlatanry and sensuality would find so ready a response in the weakest parts of human nature that there would not even remain a beginning of natural virtue to which the super-natural could make an appeal. "The mysteries never raised man to a belief more worthy of the divinity. Rather it was man who by his interpretation of the mysteries gave them a meaning more worthy of the gods." #### Such as they were, however, these religions flourished. The army, the imperial functionaries, the officials of the civil service spread them from one end of the empire to the other. The century that begins with Marcus Aurelius and ends with Aurelian (161-275) is their golden age. The old Paganism of classical times, as a force influencing men’s lives, is dead. As a ritual, as a part of the day’s public life, a religious consecration of the State and its institutions, it still continues. But it has long since ceased to shape men’s activities. In its place are the oriental religions just described and, for the elite who think, the religious philosophies. In the Paganism of the second century these two things alone are alive. #### The religious philosophy of the day made, of itself, no appeal whatever to the senses, nor to the imagination. It attempted a reasonable explanation of religion and of the mythologies, and, more than that, it presented itself as a reasoned teaching in religious matters, offering a reasoned system of morality. The philosophers were the guides and spiritual directors of that minority who wished to live an ordered, reasonable, and, as we should say, religious life. In their teaching such souls found illumination and encouragement, and it was from the philosophers of this generation that the Church recruited those converts who were to be pioneers in the work of expounding her doctrine rationally to the intellect of the non-Christian world. The philosophy fashionable in the second century is, then, not only an important element in the non-Christian life of that time, but it has its effect within the Church itself thanks to the conversion to Christianity of so many of its devotees. Two schools of this second-century philosophic thought call principally for notice -- the Stoics and the #### For the Stoic all things had their origin in one single living principle, and this principle is material. From this first material principle -- the purest and most subtle matter conceivable, a kind of fiery air -- all other existing things have come, and will continue to come, by a process of continual degrading, a process inevitable and necessitated. In all these derived existing things, no matter how low the degree of their existence, there remains always some spark of that principle whence they first derive -- whether the things be, as we should say, animate or inanimate. "This fire" the definition classic among the Stoics explained "is skilled and travels a fixed road since the world's beginning. Locked up within it are all the seminal logoi in accordance with which all things necessarily come into being." From this fire all things come, to it all things return; and the evolutionary process is fixed, inevitable from the nature of the fire. Returning to the original fire, they issue forth yet again -- always in the same way, bound to the same evolution in the future which has shaped their history in the past; things, animals, men, the gods themselves, except Zeus whom the Stoics identify with the imperishable fire. All is governed by this unescapable law of necessity. Even the least of human actions necessarily follows from causes outside man's control, is fixed by the nature of things, is shaped by the one soul of the universe. "Man," said the Stoics, "is a dog tied to a car. He has no choice but to run in its wake." #### This necessity, constraining human action, is and is not a slavery, for the soul of all things whence the necessity comes is man's soul too, and the necessity which constrains him is not the violence of another to which perforce he must submit, but the necessity of his own nature's deepest need. "Secure in his autonomy, why should the Stoic sigh for liberty?" The theory worked out in practice in very different ways. First of all it set man on an equality with the gods, for it is the one same divine soul that gives life to all. Whence a valuation of human personality among the Stoics higher than any other of the ancient philosophies ever accorded it. Whence, too, those beginnings of a care for personality in legislation, and the humanitarianism of which Cicero is a leading example. Whence also, on the other hand, a pride and self-exaltation that could end in mania. #### Again, although the theory of the divine origin of all things could, and did, in Seneca for example, develop into a belief in something like Providence, the other half of the theory -- the necessary evolution, the unescapable force, the inevitable, individual destruction and re-absorption, -- is the very negation of Providence. This god who is in us all, who is ourselves, as he is everything, is yet unknown and unknowable, and research as to his nature can only end in ever greater obscurity. Prayer, supplication can find no place in the system -- for all things that happen must happen as they happen. No effort can change them, no flight escape them. If one type of character was helped and encouraged by the system's Pantheism, braced or consoled by the belief in fellowship with the rest of creation, assuredly there were others crushed in despair by its fatalism. #### The two great names among the Stoics of the second century are Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus is no fashionable philosopher with the entertainment of a leisured audience as his highest aim. He is a man with a mission, and his hearers were earnest and devoted seekers after a higher life. He set before them an ideal of austere detachment from the chances of life. Sickness, old age, misfortune, death itself should have no power over the Stoic; no power to disturb the calm, happy freedom of this man whom reason controlled. Such ills, when they threatened his peace, should be looked in the face, understood for what they were, and, their whole power for ill thus reasonably examined, they would cease to trouble. Was not man his own only master? containing within himself the only real good? and did he not live as part of a great universe of existence? What matter if his role in that great plan was meaner than another's. #### To the whole it was equally necessary, and in this consideration of his contribution to the need and welfare of the whole the reasonable man would find compensation and consolation for the chances of life. Should this Pantheism fail to console, a further solution still remained. “There is one who provides me with food and with raiment. . . when he no longer gives he signifies to me that it is time to depart, he opens the door and calls. Whither does he call me? Towards a term which cannot affright thee, for it is thence thou didst originally proceed, towards friends and kinsfolk and the elements of things. What in thee is fire, to fire will return; what in thee is earth, to earth; what air, to air; what is water, to water yet again. There is no Hades, no Acheron, no Cocytus, no Periphlegethon, but everywhere is filled with gods and with daemons." But suicide is only for the weakling, blessed even as Epictetus blesses it. The ideal is acceptance of life in an indifference to its chance, an acceptance buttressed by the belief that man, too, is divine. God is in us, we are part of God and we should be loyal to what in us is divine for so we are most truly loyal to ourselves. "As the soldier swears he will prefer Caesar before all others, the Stoic swears so to prefer himself." Prayer and theories of divine assistance can have no place in the system, and the basis of the exalted sentiments that still move whoever studies these ancient writings is self-exaltation. Epictetus presents us with a meditation on death in which the dying man reviews his life and thanks his god for all it has been. It is no act of thanksgiving for mercies and favours, still less is it a confession; and if its underlying self-satisfaction recalls anything in the Gospel it is the famous prayer of the Pharisee. #### Stoicism was never popular. Its theories, no doubt, broke too soon at the contact with reality. And it had too much scorn for the unenlightened herd to make their conversion a possibility. It remained the privilege of an elite, and even there its success was not such as to encourage its prophets. "Show me a Stoic if you know one," said Epictetus. "You will show me thousands who speak like Stoics. Show me at least some one who shows promise of realising this ideal. Let my old age gaze on what so far it has never been my lot to know. Show me one at least. You cannot." #### Such an one we see perhaps in Marcus Aurelius. Under Domitian Epictetus had been banished from Rome as a philosopher. Now philosophy itself was on the throne. In his Meditations Marcus Aurelius admits us to the innermost workings of his mind. We see the Stoic theory shaping his response to the demands of life. We see the progress of self-knowledge, self- discipline, the continual examination and analysis of action and motive pursued faithfully day by day in search of truth ever more profound. All the traditional Stoic theory is here, not set out in theory for a class, but in its practical application to life. Man's share in the universal life, the common logos, is to Marcus Aurelius a familiar, a personal daemon. He reveres it, serves it, obeys it and for its sake will keep his life spotless. He shares, of course, the fatalist resignation to life which is the aim of the school, though the thought of the extinction which is death moves him to angry resentment. On the other hand he believes in prayer, prayer not to the gods of the classic pantheon, but to Fortune, the Sun, the Stars, Asclepios. Inevitably he is the victim of superstition, dreams and omens playing their part in his life. And the whole life is built on a foundation that is ever in movement, on hypotheses and alternatives and the uncertainty of doubt, of sentiment and guesswork. It is the end of happiness, the end of life, and from it derives that "infinite boredom" which Renan noted as characteristic of the famous work. "Infinite boredom", in life as in the Meditations, and "an analysis of life which leaves life little better than death." #### The second great school of religious philosophy was that of the Platonists, and this, unlike the school of Epictetus was not only popular, but as the century went on, grew to be one of the greatest forces in its religious life. For the Platonists there is a dual principle at the origin of things -- spirit and matter. God is not only not identical with the world, as the Stoics proclaimed, but so transcends the world as to be beyond all power of our knowing him. In ecstasy alone can man reach to the divine. This dualism, and the doctrine of the divine transcendence, go back to Plato himself. It was his immediate successor Xenocrates who developed the system's dualism, and Plutarch derived from it the other notion of the divine inaccessibility to human reason. In the succeeding centuries these two ideas came to dominate the whole teaching of the school, and thereby inevitably lowered the system's intellectual appeal and bequeathed to it the continual menace of scepticism. #### Since God was inaccessible, and since all things owed to God their origin and their continuance in being, the Platonist postulated as the medium of the divine action one or more beings intermediate between God and man, beings who shared indeed in the divine nature but who were yet subordinate to God their first origin. These are the daemons, powers, spirits, the logos. For the Stoics the logos was the immanent necessary law of things. For the new Platonists, it was the divine agent, and the pattern by which all things were; it was the divine element by which the other necessary element of the universal duality was corrected -- all things being subject to the double law, i.e. of influences deriving from a thing's nature, and of influences deriving from the divine. This duality obtained in things inanimate, in man's soul too. Logos and nature, one for the Stoic, are for the Platonist rival contending forces. #### Platonism had borrowed a term from the Stoics to express itself. It had borrowed elsewhere, and notably from the East. From its conception of spirit and matter as forces inevitably in conflict, a whole train of consequences were to follow. That conception was to enter the Church, to cause endless trouble in the heresies it provoked, and to be the cause, too, of more than one set-back in the development of thinkers otherwise orthodox. #### These ideas of the dual principle in all reality, of a hierarchy of perfection, and of the radical opposition of matter and spirit, the Platonists popularised as Stoicism never was popularised. Around this philosophical core other doctrines gathered taken from the teachings ascribed to Pythagoras, and with them there passed to the Platonists something of that spirit which turned philosophy into a cult, with devotees, holy men, religious practices, rites and -- by no means its least important feature -- itinerant missionaries who gave their lives to the work of propaganda. There gathered, too, around the core of philosophy and idealism, something of the superstition and the magical practices which always attached to the self- styled disciples of Pythagoras. If such features detracted from the dignity of the philosophy they were, on the other hand, its very life as a force in public affairs. It was not long before Platonism, as a cult, absorbed the neo-Pythagoreans and quite ousted the Stoics. Later it was to inspire the bitterest and most skilful of all the attempts to destroy Christianity. Meanwhile, in that second century which at the moment occupies us, its leading figure, after Plutarch (50-125) was the lecturer, Maximus of Tyre. #### The subjects of the lectures which gained him fame are the questions which the public of his day debated. Is revenge noble? Is activity a higher life than contemplation? Should we pray to the gods? What is Plato's notion of God? How can we reconcile human liberty and sorcery? His theological teaching is a mixture of superstitious credulity and scepticism. Between God and man there is an intermediate hierarchy of daemons, demi-gods, who though they are passable are yet immortal. They are the companions of mankind, guiding and inspiring its life. "Some of them," he said, "cure sickness, or they tender advice in difficulties. They make known things otherwise hidden, they inspire the masterpieces of art. Some dwell in towns, others in the country, others in the sea. . . . They are sometimes the guests of human bodies, as in the case of Socrates, of Plato, of Pythagoras. . . . Some of them are scourges, others humane. . . . There is as great a diversity in the dispositions of the daemons as in those of men themselves." All the gods of the ancient mythology are seen now to be daemons, and Zeus identified with the supreme divine monarch. Prayer -- the habit of petitioning the gods-Maximus condemns as useless. If God is Providence these things will come unsought. If God is Chance prayer cannot move it. As for the desire to possess greater virtue, no god can do more here than man can do for himself, for the source of virtue is within man himself. This last point recalls Epictetus and the Stoics, and is one of the many evidences of the eclectic character of the new Platonism of the time. Its adepts borrowed as willingly from contemporaries as from the past, borrowed ideas and terminology no less readily than ritual. #### The one supreme God transcends sense. The soul is raised to communication with him by contemplation and love, and the condition of this ascent is an increasing detachment from all else. The perfection of this intellectual vision of God is indeed impossible in this life. Yet, by meditation and a life of detachment, great heights may be attained even here on earth. Not all men it is true can so raise themselves. For those who are unable there remains in consolation the contemplation of the hierarchy of semi-divine intermediaries. #### "How then will you escape, how come to see God? In a word, you will see him when he calls you to come. Nor will he long delay to call. Only await his invitation. Old age is at hand which will lead you; Death, whose approach affrights the coward to tears but whom the lover of God looks for with joy, receives with courage. But, if you wish, even in this present, to know his nature how shall I explain it? God is no doubt beautiful, of all beauteous things the fairest. But it is not the beauty of a body. He is what gives the body its beauty. It is not the beauty of a field, but again that whence comes the field's beauty. Beauty of streams, beauty of sea and sky, it is from the gods who dwell in the sky that all this beauty flows, running over from a spring pure and eternal. And in the measure of their sharing this eternal stream, all things are beautiful, ordered, saved. In the measure they turn from it there remains for them only shame, death, corruption. If this satisfies, you have seen God. If not, how can you be made to understand? Do not picture to yourself size, nor colour, nor form, nor indeed any material quality, but, like a lover stripping of its varied clothing the beautiful body thus hidden from his gaze, strip away with your thought all these material imaginings. There will remain, and you shall gaze upon it, what you desire to see. But if you are too weak thus to arrive at the vision of the Father -- the Demiurge, it will suffice that you actually see their works and adore their offspring in all their rich diversity. . . . Imagine a great empire, a powerful kingdom where every creature depends, and willingly, on the good will of one soul, the soul of the King, venerable, excelling in virtue. . . imagine then this King himself, immovable as law itself, communicating to those who serve, the salvation which is his. See all those who share in his power, the innumerable gods, visible some and others yet unseen. Some there are who, like guards of honour, at his side share his table and his food. Others serve them, and others there are of yet lower degree. See you not this chain, this hierarchy descending from God down to the very earth?" [ ] #### The charm of the vision so described, its poetry, the communication of religious emotion between master and student explain much of the system's appeal. It brought about, in the end, and made generally acceptable, an idea of the infinite that grew ever vaguer, ever more indistinct; an instinctive suspicion, indeed, of distinctness and definition and reason in religious speculation; the idea of an opposition between "mysticism" and "dogma " necessary and fundamental; an exaltation of " mysticism " at the expense of " dogma," and a surrender of reason for emotion. Closely allied to this school of Platonists were those other practical philosophers who pass under the name of neo-Pythagoreans. Little as we know of them, we know that for them also matter was a principle of death, that the perfect reality was transcendent and unknowable. Between God and man, once again, there is this world of intermediaries, and one chief mediator, daemons and the Logos. The Logos again is at once God's idea or pattern according to which all things are, and the divine instrument. But it was the neo-Pythagorean school which did most, apparently, to build upon these philosophical theories a working religion. And it did so by borrowing from the East magical rites and incantations, rites of expiation and purification, mutilations and sacrifices. #### All through the second century, and increasingly as the second century passed into the third, the missionaries of these new religions moved through the empire, lecturing, explaining and translating their theories into act. They consoled souls broken with sorrow and pain, they prepared for death the unfortunate whom the tyranny of the emperors condemned to suicide. "By word and example they showed to all the way of salvation." #### Religions from the East offering salvation, astral religions, new cults of Fortune and the Fates, the pantheism and magic of the philosophers, mysteries dazzling by their splendour, initiations attracting by their exclusiveness, with all this rich and active diversity we have not, even yet, come to the end of the catalogue of the second century's religious activities. More important than any one of them individually is a movement which runs through them all, drawing something from each, offering something in return -- a deeper insight, a truer vision, Knowledge in fact where, so far, no more has been possible than to see as in a glass darkly. This movement that claims to reveal to the religious themselves Knowledge, is the much discussed Gnosticism, and the history of the Church in the second century is very largely the history of its relation to Gnosticism. #### Gnosticism is pre-Christian in its origins. It set itself to reinterpret Paganism and to re-interpret Judaism, and in the course of the interpretation it altered them radically. It offered Knowledge, the vision of God, actual communication with the divine here on earth. Like the philosophies, it made ecstasy the means of the most perfect knowledge and the ultimate aim of religious life. Like the mystery religions, it promised salvation. To all the thousands who sought security, in one or other of the myriad cults, it suggested a better understanding of those cults, the revelation of a deeper meaning in what they already believed or practised. It varied enormously, inevitably, from one exponent to another, varied according to whether it set itself to work on Paganism or Judaism or the religion of the Church; and it added new hybrid gnostic-inspired cults to those hundreds it found in possession. There were Gnostic-Pagan cults, and Gnostic-Jewish cults and ultimately Gnostic- Christian cults. But in all these amalgams we can trace some common features, can discover at work forces allied in character. There is for example, the claim that the Gnostic teaching is of divine origin, handed down through a secret chain of initiated disciples. There is a marked insistence on the dual origin of existence, and a hatred and scorn for the material world as a thing necessarily evil. God is of course transcendent, and so removed from the material world that creation is necessarily the work of intermediary powers. There is a preoccupation with theories about the creation, the end of creation, and the divine genealogies that borders on mania. There are rites, symbols, a mystical arithmetic, and exotic cults. Finally Knowledge is always presented as the privilege of the few. It is to an elite only that the real meaning of religion is offered. #### It was simply a matter of time before the religion of the Church attracted the attention of Gnostics, and before Christians themselves began to turn to Gnosticism to explain the mysteries in their beliefs. With that, and the beginnings, inside the Church, of attempts to explain its belief "gnostically," the Church enters upon the first great crisis of its history #### A rich and confused amalgam of rites and beliefs and magical practices, theories to explain the origin of evil, human destiny, the relations between matter and spirit, between God and his creation, between God and Jesus Christ -- the Gnostic movement within the Church was to win from the tradition some of the Church's first theologians and scholars, Tatian for example and Bardesanes. It also provoked a strong traditional reaction, and one of the great masterpieces of Catholic writing, the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus. In studying the history of this second century we are watching the first attempts of Christians to explain rationally their beliefs and mysteries and, in the story of the Gnostic crisis, can observe the natural, spontaneous reaction of the Church to its first great danger. The manner of that reaction throws an interesting light on the nature of the Church's organisation, and on second century theories about the Church's constitution and its powers. ####  |