Page:Early Christianity outside the Roman empire.djvu/63

Rh and Cathars of a later day. So also, I suppose, Buddhism is a community of monks: the people are adherents, not members of the body.

It is very difficult to pass a true judgement upon Aphraates' conception of the Christian life. So much depends on the amount of influence which the inner community had upon the mass of the people, or, looking at the matter from another point of view, how much the unbaptised lay Christian felt himself to be a member of Christ. Unfortunately we have very little evidence on these points.

One thing at least is certain. We who live in a sacramental system of Christianity, whether we be Catholics or Protestants, ought to be deeply grateful to the true instinct which produced the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. It is not by chance that Dom Parisot in his ingenious Introduction to the writings of Aphraates was unable to find any reference to this institution, for I suspect that our Persian Sage would have recoiled from the thought