Page:Early Christianity outside the Roman empire.djvu/44

34 And that a man should believe in the coming to life of the dead, And believe also in the mystery of Baptism: This is the Faith of the Church of God. And that a man should separate himself from observing hours and sabbaths and months and seasons, and enchantments and divinations and Chaldaism and magic, and from fornication and from revelling and from vain doctrines, the weapons of the Evil One, and from the blandishment of honeyed words, and from blasphemy and from adultery, And that no man should bear false witness, and that none should speak with double tongues: 'These are the works of the Faith that is laid on the true Rock, which is the Messiah, upon Whom all the building doth rise."

You will recognise at once the spirit of this Creed. It is familiar to us all; it has been familiar to us for nearly twenty years, for it is the spirit which pervades the Didache. To Aphraates Christianity was the revelation of a Divine Spirit dwelling in man and fighting against moral evil, not first and foremost a tissue of philosophical speculation about the nature of the Divinity in