Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 3.djvu/803

 CHRISTIANITY

719

CHRISTIANITY

tate to stake everything on the truth of this fact: " If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith also is vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God " (I Cor., xv, 14, 15). Consequently, God's providence has so arranged matters that the proofs of Christ's Resurrection place the fact beyond all reasonable doubt.

But if St. Paul is so emphatic about the foundation of the Christian Faith, he is also careful to erect the edifice upon it. It is to him that we owe the state- ment of the doctrine of grace, that wonderful gift of God to regenerate man. Christ had already taught, in the allegory of the vine and the branches (John, xv, 1-17), that there can be no salutary action on the part of the faithful without vital communication with Him. This great truth is expanded in many passages by St. Paul (Phil., ii, 13; Rom., viii, 9-11; I Cor., xv, 10; II Cor., iii, 5; Gal., iv, 5, 6) wherein regenerate man learns that he is God's adopted son and united with Him by the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. This privilege is what man gains by Christ's redemption, the benefits of which are applied to his soul by bap- tism and the other sacraments. And St. Paul is not only the chief exponent of this doctrine, but he alone of the Apostles promulgates anew the mystery of the Blessed Eucharist, the principal fountain of grace (I Cor., xi, 23, 24; cf. John, iv, 13, 14).

We need not pursue farther the development of doc- trine amongst the Apostles. The Christianity they preached was received from Christ Himself, and His Spirit prevented them from misconceiving or misin- terpreting it. On the strength of His commission they insisted on the obedience of faith, they de- nounced heresy, and with skill, incredible had it not been Divine, they preserved the truth committed to them in the midst of a perverse, subtle, and corrupt civilization. That same Divine skill has remained with Christianity ever since; heresy after heresy has attacked the Faith and been defeated, leaving the fortress all the more impregnable for its onset. The Christianity we profess to-day is the Christianity of Christ and His Apostles. Just as they were more ex- plicit than He in its verbal formulation, so the Apos- tolic Church has ever since laboured to express more and more clearly the treasures of doctrine originally committed to her charge. In a sense, we may believe more than our first Christian ancestors, inasmuch as we have a more complete knowledge of the contents of our Faith ; in a sense, they believed all that we do, for they a ■[ «t c< 1 as we the principle of a Divinely- commissioned teaching authority, to whose dogmatic utterances they were ever prepared to give assent. The same essential oneness of faith and the same variety in its content for the individual exist side by side in the Church to-day. The trained theologian, deeply versed in the wonders of revelation, and the young or the uneducated who know explicitly little more than the bare essentials of Christianity, know- ing the One True < lod, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, believing in the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Church, are equally Christians, equally possessed of the integrity of faith.

III. The Divine Purpose in Christianity. — It remains now to set forth, as far as we can determine it from the sacred records and from the course of history itself, the purpose of God in establishing Christianity. We gather that the Divine Founder meant Christianity to be (1) a universal religion,

2 a perfect religion, (3) a visibly organized religion.

I I'niversality includes both space and time.

As regards space, we Bee that Christianity is intended

for the whole World (a) from the prophecies that fore- shadowed it in the * Hd Testament. Among these were the promises made to Abraham and his de- scendants, the constantly recurring note of which is that in them "all the nations of the earth shall be blessed", (b) From the plainly expressed purpose

of Christ Himself, who, while proclaiming that His personal mission concerned only the "lost sheep of the House of Israel" (Matt., xv, 24), announced the future extension of His Kingdom: "Other sheep I have who are not of this fold" (John, x, 16); "Many from the east and the west shall come and shall re- cline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the king- dom of heaven" (Matt., viii, 11); "And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached throughout the whole world in testimony to all nations" (Matt., xxiv, 14); "Go ye and teach ail nations" (Matt., xxviii, 19). (c) From the actual conduct of the Apostles, who, though they required the special inspiration of the Holy Spirit to bring home to them the practical bear- ing of this commission, did finally leave the synagogue and proclaim the Faith to all without distinction of race or country. The universality of Christianity, in time as well as space, is implied in Christ's promise, "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consum- mation of the world" (Matt., xxviii, 20). It follows, furthermore, from the next element in God's purpose to be considered.

(2) Christianity is meant to be a perfect religion. A priori, we should expect that a religious system which was revealed and instituted, not by a prophet or even an angel, but by the personal action of God Himself, and was designed, moreover, to supplant an imperfect and provisional form of religion, would lack nothing of possible perfection in end or means. Christ's own teaching satisfied this expectation, and precludes the notion entertained by some early here- tics, and still alive in the minds of men, of a fuller and more perfect revelation to come. First of all, He, its Founder, is God, and therefore had all the knowledge and all the power requisite to establish a perfect religion. Secondly, He promised His Apostles the abiding presence of the Spirit of Truth, who should teach them all truth. Thirdly, He promised that the body enshrining this deposit should never be vitiated by error — "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt., xvi, 18; cf. Ephes., v, 27). Fourthly, the same truth is insinuated by St. Paul's words: "God, who at sundry times . . . last of all . . . hath spoken to us by His Son" (Heb., i, 1), and by the expression, the fulness nj time, used in Gal., iv, 4, to indicate the epoch of the Incarnation. Fifthly, by the character of the Christian revelation itself and the Christian ethical ideal which is the imitation of Christ, the Perfect Being. No possible development of man- kind can be thought of which should not find all that it needs in Christ.

We are compelled, therefore, to believe that the Christian revelation closed with the death of the last of those originally commissioned to set it forth. We are thus brought counter to a modern view regarding revelation which has lately been condemned as heret- ical by Pius X (Encyclical, "Pascendi Gregis", Sept., 1907). It is to the effect that revelation is nothing external, but a clearer and closer apprehension of tilings Divine by the Christian consciousness, which in each particular age is the expression of the experi- ence of the best men of that age. Consequently, revelation grows, like a material organism, by waste and renewed supply, and therefore what is truth for one age may be quite different from what is truth for another. The error which has these developments is ultimately philosophical, being based on the false assumption that the finite mind can know only the phenomenal and can have no certainty of what is be- yond experience. Were that so. any external revela- tion would be impossible, for it- guarantees — mira- cle and prophecy — could not be grasped by human intelligence, 'rinse errors wen- lone ago exposed and condemned by the Vatican Council. The most casual glance at the history of Christianity shows that il en development of doctrine; the

grew only gradually; but that development is