ART. XI. CHRISTIAN LIFE IN THE EARLY AGES.*

THE work of Neander, the title of which stands first at the foot of this page, and which was the first in the order of publication, brings down his history to the end of the third century, and we cordially thank the publisher for placing it before the American reader in so neat and economical a form. The republication, in one volume, embraces the two volumes of Mr. Rose's translation, the first published in England, in 1831,† and the second recently issued.

The character and merit of the work are too well known to need any commendation from us. Minute criticism may, no doubt, detect some faults, but a fairer and more impartial work, on the whole, we are not prepared soon to look for, on the history of the Church. The translator finds fault with some parts as not sufficiently favorable to the modern Church system of polity and doctrine. But this, in our view, is no blemish in the work. He that can find

this system in the writings of primitive antiquity, must have sharper eyes than are accorded to most mortals. The truth is, the writer is honest, and does not attempt, with some, to make history, but only to write it.

It is not so easy, we think, to defend the author from the charge of a little occasional mistiness of thought; or perhaps mysticism would be a better word. But this is not so apparent as very materially to impair the value of the work. It can never, however, be a popular book. The periods are often long and unwieldy, never moving easily and gracefully. The author, too, is a little given to theorising; a propensity, however, more decidedly developed in his "History of the Planting and Training of the Christian

* 1. The History of the Christian Religion and Church during the three first Centuries. By Dr. AUGUSTUS NEANDER. Translated from the German, by HENRY JOHN ROSE, B. D., Rector of Houghton Conquest, and late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Philadelphia: James M. Campbell & Co. 1843. 8vo. pp. 466.

2. History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church by the Apostles. By Dr AUGUSTUS NEANDER, Ordinary Professor of Theology in the University of Berlin, Consistorial Counsellor, &c. Translated from the third edition of the original German, by J. E. RYLAND. Philadelphia: James M. Campbell & Co. 1844. 8vo. pp. 330.

† See Christian Examiner, Vol. VII., New Series.

Church," a work of which we shall only say, that we consider it inferior in interest and value to that on the "History of the Christian Religion and Church." Then what he gives as quotations are often paraphrases rather. What is presented as a continuous quotation will be sometimes in vain sought in the original in the same form, but will be found to consist of sentences taken here and there from the passage referred to. On the whole we must say, that he quotes rather loosely.

Neander disclaims the name of pietist, as the term is frequently used, but freely pleads guilty of super-naturalism, if that be any crime. His views of Christianity are eminently spiritual, and this, in our opinion, constitutes one peculiar qualification for a Church historian, for a cold rationalistic way of viewing the subject we consider as hardly compatible with a due appreciation of the spirit and piety of the early ages. The primitive Christians had faith, and that faith was warm, and instinct with life and love, and he who would draw a faithful portrait of them must have something in his own breast with which such faith has an affinity, and from which it meets a response.

The author, says Mr. Rose, "appears to be chiefly solicitous about the improvement of the heart and affections by Christianity." It is this circumstance, we think, which gives to his work on the Christian Religion and Church its peculiar value and charm. We like him, if we may use the expression, for entering so much into the life and affections of the early Christians. This relieves his work from the harshness and dryness, which mark too many Christian histories, and render them all but unreadable. We mean not that he avoids treating of doctrines, controversies, and sects; of Bardesanes, Valentinus, and the rest, Gnostics and Manicheans, those old giants, who attempted to grapple with the great problem of human life, and the existence of evil; but he gives us something besides them. He conducts us to many green spots, where the air is redolent with flowers, and the ear is greeted with pleasant voices.

We will try to glean from him and from other sources, from the writings of antiquity especially, a few scattered

* Preface to the Third Part.

VOL. XXXVI. 4TH S. VOL. I. NO. I.

10

facts relating to Christian life and worship in the early ages.

We pass by the Apostolic age, or period embraced by the writings of the New Testament, and ending about the close of the first century, when the last surviving Apostle, John, was withdrawn from the world. We take the period immediately subsequent, the second and part of the third centuries. What were the private life and social position of Christians? What was their worship? What festivals and rites did they celebrate? How was the Communion rite observed ? What is its history viewed especially as a rite of the affections, and as connecting the dead with the living?

In the present article we shall confine ourselves to the first of these questions. We shall speak of Christian life, strictly so called, in the early ages, leaving rites and worship to a future number.

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Christianity infused into the great mass of believers a principle of new interior life; and this could not but manifest itself in external acts, and it gave, in truth, a new coloring to the whole of existence. Of this principle of the inner life of the Christian, it is not our purpose to speak. From the nature of the case, we can judge of it only by its external manifestations. The ancient Christians were fond of describing the change which occurred in the passage from heathenism to Christianity, in the figurative language of Paul, as a "rising with Christ." It was to them the introduction to a new life, the dawning of a new hope; the coming out of a region of darkness, sin, and despair, and the entrance on an existence filled with joy and illuminated by those truths which had risen on the world, never to set. It was a true resurrection. It was a change, we may add, of which they who have been born and bred within the sound of the "church going bell," who have never known how desolate the world is without faith, find it difficult to form an adequate conception.

Christianity has been long secretly feeding the channels of human thought. It has created around us a new moral atmosphere; made devout mothers, and pious teachers; it has been silently acting on the human intellect for eighteen hundred years; it has given to the world a new civilization, and stamped a character on the literature which amuses

our childish fancy, and solaces the weary hours of decaying years. Hence we can hardly imagine the struggle of a heathen mind groping amid the darkness of contending systems for light and hope, -seeking at shrines, and oracles, and in pilgrimages to distant lands, the solution of doubts which filled the soul with inward torment; nor the joy which sprang up in the heart when Christianity had taken root there.

Some of the early Fathers have left on record the process by which they became Christian, and the inward peace which followed. Of these, Justin Martyr, the earliest Christian writer after the Apostles, of whom we have any pure and undisputed remains,* is one. Justin lived in the earlier part of the second century, and wrote two Apologies for Christianity and Christians. These, and his Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew, have come down to us little mutilated. In the last mentioned treatise he describes, in earnest language, his wanderings among different sects of philosophers, the Stoics, Pythagorians, the Peripatetics, and lastly the Platonists, in search of truth; the little satisfaction he found in them, and the happiness of which he was conscious, when through the agency of an aged man, whom he accidentally met on the sea-shore, he was led to Christianity, which he regarded, to use his own language, as “the only safe and useful philosophy."

But we are not, as we said, to speak of the interior life of believers, nor we add, of their opinions and doctrines, and we leave, therefore, the philosophical Christians, and proceed to consider the position, conduct, usages, and morality of the great body of converts.

Whatever were the moral defects of the early Christians, and however imperfect their conceptions of some parts of Christian truth-and we are not contending for any golden age in the past-there was certainly a marked, and very broadly marked, distinction, and, in many respects, a clear contrast, between their lives and the lives of their heathen contemporaries; else all records deceive us, and the gravest

*The writings attributed to the Apostolic Fathers, as they are called, that is, the disciples or companions of the Apostles, are all of them either lost or interpolated. We possess none of their genuine remains in an unadulterated state. The hierarchical party cling to them, the Epistles of Ignatius especially, but the parts on which they rely bear incontestable evidence of a later hand, and are manifest forgeries. What is called the ecclesiastical period begins with Justin.

testimonies, delivered under circumstances which would seem to entitle them to implicit confidence, prove false. The two great principles of Christianity, holiness and love, were often carried out in their lives to an extent which may well cause surprise in the cold, skeptical mind; which the keen intellect of Gibbon tortures itself in vain to explain consistently with his infidel philosophy, and which cannot certainly be set down to mere vulgar fanaticism. Enthusiasts and mystics there might have been, and were, among them; it could not be otherwise; crude thinkers, too, many of them were; but in their lives they were generally sober and rational. Their faith was warm, glowing with its first fires; presenting a flame, "at which descending ages might light their exhausted lamps;" occasionally running into what some would pronounce unnecessary scruples; sometimes causing them to lay stress on what appear to us trifles; but still, in the main, we say, they were perfectly sober and rational.

Then it is to be considered, that their position was so different from ours, surrounded as they were, with all the fascinations of Paganism, and all the allurements of pleasure,

with the gorgeous pageantry of the old worship, and the thousand forms in which infidelity, garlanded with flowers, sought to win them back to the altars of their fathers, that what we might deem innocent compliance, they might think dangerous concession, and where we might pronounce them over-nice, maintaining a strictness seemingly bordering on austerity, they were only true to the religion of the Cross. Truth is uncompromising, and they thought, and thought justly, that the Saviour's precepts of self-denial had a meaning. It became not them, they thought, to seek crowns of myrtle or the rose, when he wore one of thorns. "A crown of amaranth," said they, "is reserved for him who leads a holy life, a flower which earth is not capable of bearing, and heaven alone produces."

But what was the external, visible life of Christians of the second and earlier part of the third centuries? The first circumstance which arrests our attention is the highly practical character of their religion—its strict morality, and the importance it led them to ascribe to right action in all the relations of private and social life. The thoroughness of the moral reform produced by Christianity, and its