Page:Early Christianity outside the Roman empire.djvu/94

84 it is for the High Anglican of our day to make out a case for the apostolical succession of the English bishops. With the Gnostics, unless I am mistaken, the position of things was not quite the same. Early Catholicism was a historical religion, proved by texts out of the Old Testament and by the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth: Gnosticism, on the other hand, was what we call natural religion, a philosophy. The philosophy might be illustrated from the Old Testament or the New, but it was really independent of the Bible. It was not the application of the old promises of God that troubled the author of the Acts of Thomas but the aimlessness of men's lives, which to him appeared to be filled with care and sorrow about that which must quickly pass away for ever.

In the conception of the Church—that is, the organised body of believers,—as a thing in itself to be worked for and fostered, lies, I think, the point of difference between Catholicism and Gnosticism, between Aphraates and the Acts of Thomas. To the convert of Judas Thomas there was literally