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 CHRISTIANITY

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CHRISTIANITY

by his Son" (Heb., i, 1, 2), the message growing in clearness and in content with each successive utter- ance till it reached completion in the Incarnation of the Word. The Christianity, then, which the Apos- tles preached on the day of Pentecost was entirely distinct from Judaism, especially as understood by the Jews of the time; it was a new religion, new in its Founder, new in much of its creed, new in its attitude to- wards both God ami man, new in the spirit of its moral code. "The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" (John, i, 17). St. Paul, as was to be expected, is our clearest witness on this point. "If any man be in Christ", he says, "he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold all things are new" (II Cor., v, 17). How new Chris- tianity was, the Jews themselves showed by putting its Author to death and persecuting His adherents. Renan himself, who is not always consistent, admits that "far from Jesus being the eontinuer of Judaism, what characterizes His work is its breach with the Jewish spirit" (Vie de Jesus, c. xxviii). It may be granted that there is a certain resemblance between the Essene communities and the earliest Christian assemblies. But the resemblance is only on the out- side. The spirit of the Essenes was intensely na- tional ; except in the matter of worship in the Temple, they were ultra-Jewish in their observance of external forms, ablutions, the Sabbath, etc., and their mode of life and discouragement of marriage were essentially anti-social. Harnack himself owns that Christ had no relations with this rigoristic sect, as was shown by His mixing freely with sinners, etc. (Das Wesen des Christenthums, Lect. ii, p. 33, tr.). But Christianity did not reject anything in Judaism that was of perma- nent value, and so the Jewish converts on the day of Pentecost could not have felt that they were abjuring their ancient faith, but rather that they were then for the first time entering upon the full understanding of it. More will be said on this point when we come to consider what is the essence of Christianity, but we may notice that the Church very early found it neces- sary to emphasize her distinctness from Judaism by abandoning the essentially Jewish rites of circumci- sion, Temple-worship, and observance of the Sabbath. Judaism is not the only religious system that has been requisitioned by rationalistic writers to account for the appearance of Cliristianity. Points of simi- larity between the teaching of Christ and His Apostles and the great religions of the East have been taken to indicate a derivation of the latter system from the earlier, and the elaborate eschatology of the Egyptian religion has been quoted to account for certain Chris- tian dogmas about the future life. It were a long and not very profitable task to state and refute these vari- ous theories in detail. Underlying all of them is the rationalistic postulate which denies the fact and even the possibility of Divine intervention in the evolution of religion. In virtue of that attitude rationalism is confronted with the impossible task of explaining how a universal religion like Christianity, with an exten- sive yet logical system of dogma, could have been evolved by a process of promiscuous borrowings from existing cults and yet preserve everywhere its unity and coherence. If the selection were made by Christ and His adherents, rationalists must tell us how these "ignorant and unlettered men" (Acts, iv, 13; cf. Matt., xiii, .54; Mark, vi, 2) knew the religions of the East, when it was a matter of astonishment to their contemporaries that tiny knew their own. Or, if the dogmas and practices under consideration were the additions of a later age, the questions arise, first, D.OW to reconcile this statement with the fact that the essence nf Christianity is discoverable in the earliest ( 'hristian witnesses and, secondly, how scattered com- munities composed of various nationalities and living under different conditions could have united in select- ing and maintaining the same dogmas and rules of

conduct. We may ask, furthermore, why Chris- tianity which, on this hypothesis, only selected pre- existing doctrines, excited everywhere such bitter hostility and persecution. "About this sect", said the Roman Jews to St. Paul in prison, "we are in- formed that it meets with opposition everywhere" (Acts, xxviii, 22). Immense erudition has been wasted in the attempt to show that Buddhism (q. v.) in particular is the prototype of Christianity, but, apart from the difficulty of distinguishing the original creed of Gautama from later and possibly post-Chris- tian accretions, it maybe briefly objected that Buddh- ism is at best only an ethical system, not a religion, for it recognizes no God and no responsibility, that in so far as it emphasizes the comparative worthless- ness of earthly things and the insufficiency of earthly delights it is in accord with the Christian spirit, but that in aim it is essentially diverse. The supreme aim of Christianity is eternal happiness in a state involving the employment of all the soul's activities, that of Buddhism the ultimate loss of conscious existence.

Let us grant, once for all, that God's intercourse with His creatures is not confined to the Old and New Covenants, and that Christianity includes many doc- trines accessible to the unaided human reason, and advocates many practices which are the natural out- come of ordinary human activities. We thus expect to find that, human nature being the same every- where, the various expressions of the religious sense will take similar shapes amongst all peoples. Accord- ingly, false religions may very well inculcate ascetic practices and possess the idea of sacrifice and sacrifi- cial banquets, of a priesthood, of sin and confession, of sacramental rites like baptism, of the accessories of worship such as images, hymns, lights, incense, etc. Not everything in false religion is false, nor is every- thing in the true religion (or Christianity) superna- tural. "We must not look", says M. Miiller. "in the original belief of mankind for [distinctively] Christian ideas but for the fundamental religious ideas on which Christianity is built, without which as its natural and historical support, Christianity could not have become what it is" (Wissenschaft der Sprache, II. 395).

These remarks apply not only to the religious sys- tems which are alleged to have influenced the concep- tion of Christianity, but to those which it met as soon as it issued from Judaism, its cradle. Here, we are face to face with history, and not with mere hypothe- sis and assumption. For Christianity, on its first essaying to realize its destiny as the universal religion, did actually come in contact with two mighty relig- ious systems, the religion of Rome, and the wide- spread body of thought, more of a philosophy than a creed, prevalent in the Greek-speaking world. The effect of the national religion of pagan Rome on early Christianity concerned rites and ceremonies rather than points of doctrine, and was due to the general causes just mentioned. With Greek philosophy, on the other hand, representing the highest efforts of the human intellect to explain life and experience, and to reach the Absolute. Christianity, which professes to solve all these problems, had, naturally and necessa- rily, many points of contact. It is on this connexion that modern rationalists have brought all their learn- ing and research to bear in their effort to show that the whole later intellectual system of Christianity is something more or less alien to its original conception. It was the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil that explains, according to Dr. Hatch (Hibberl 'Lectures. 1SSS). "why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus, and a

metaphysical creed in the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century". Professor Harnack states the

problem and solves it in similar fashion, lie ascribes the change, as he conceives it, from a simple code of conduct to the Nicene Creed, to the three following causes: (1) The universal law in all development of