Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/712

Rh 698 CHRISTIANITY of, and because he succeeded he was the first Roman emperor who ruled with something like what we should call &quot; public opinion&quot; at his back. The victory of Constantino was the first instance of the triumph of that mysterious popular force which has given organized freedom to the civilized nations of Europe, and which is equally removed from the civic freedom of the ancient democracy and from the mili tary tyranny of the great empires of antiquity. It is to Christianity that modern Europe owes organized public opinion and representative government. Christi- The silent influence which Christianity has exercised upon auity and the human intellect, and especially upon its scientific science. researches, is too important to be passed over. Anti- Christian writers have combined to show the hostility which they think exists between religion and science, and have painted in glowing colours the hindrances which Christianity places before the advance of scientific ideas ; but suchattempts resemble the effortsof a man to kick down the ladder which has enabled him to reach the elevation on which he stands. Christianity did not create philosophy nor science, and many of the earlier Christian theologians denounced in no measured terms the philosophies of Greece and Rome because of their connection with paganism, while philosophy on its side was the last remnant of the old pagan civilization which withstood the Christian conquest. Soon, however, philosophy and Christianity came to terms, and in the writings of St Augustine we find the noblest Platonism allied with the loftiest Christian theology. The science of paganism has never been on a par with its philo sophical speculations, and whether we examine the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome which have passed away, or those of India and China which remain, we seek in vain science and scientific knowledge in the modern sense of the term. The truth seems to be that science requires to build on a foundation supplied by Christianity, and which paganism is unable to furnish, or at least has never yet furnished. Science presupposes and rests on the idea of the oneness and uniformity of the universe, and this idea is, strictly speaking, a Christian conception. Aristotle, the most scientific of the ancients, was unable to conceive the uniformity of nature or the totality of things in anything like the sense which these phrases have to modern thinkers. His conceptions of matter and form, of potentiality and actuality, and so on, implied a subtle duality which effectually stood in the way of such a thought. The uniformity of nature, the capacity of the ideal to realize itself in actual things, was always apt to be thwarted by an inward stubbornness of matter which declined on occasions to submit itself to law. It was this idea which stood in the way of the modern thoughts of the uniformity of nature and of the totality of things which are so essential to science. But such a stubborn, formless matter as pagan philosophy and science delighted to speculate about was quite foreign to Christian speculation and was opposed to the deepest instincts of the Christian life of trust in the Father who is in Heaven. Christianity did not propose to itself the solution or even the statement of scientific problems, but its yearning to get near God enabled it to see deeper into the problem of the basis of science than the whole of pagan thought had been able to do. The Christian doctrine of creation and the Christian doctrine of provi dence furnish the foundations on which modern science rests. The Christian doctrine of creation states the absolute dependence of all things on God. He made them out of nothing ; and the religious nerve of the doctrine consists in the feeling of absolute dependence on God which this implies. We and all things have our birth and being from God, and from nothing else. Practically God is all in all to us, for on Him all things depend for their origin, and they depend on Him alone. The Christian doctrine of providence presents the same thought in another form The nerve of this doctrine is that God can and does make all things work together for the good of His people. Here again is the idea of the absolute dependence of all things on God, not merely for their origin but also for their existence and endurance. In this way the thought of God as the creator and preserver of all things gives a complete unity to the universe which pagan thought never reached, and gave that basis for the thought of the uniformity of nature which science demands. It was long ere Christianity could force this thought on the human intelligence, but until it had permeated the whole round of man s intellectual work it was vain to look for advances in science. It was the task of the scholastic theology and philosophy to knead into human thought Christian ideas, and among the rest this idea of the unity and uniformity of nature. Anti- Christian critics have spoken of the deadness and uselessness of scholasticism, but its value for science and scientific in quiry can scarcely be over-estimated; for it was scholasticism which worked Christianity into every department of human and intellectual activity, and so leavened them with it, that when its work was done, the intelligence of man was so thoroughly saturated with the Christian view of nature that it could never again forget it. When scholasticism had accomplished its task modern science sprang into being dependent for its very foundation on that Christianity to which it is supposed to be so bitterly hostile. The organization of Christianity belongs more properly to Theconstl- the description of the church, but it is impossible to pass *! ltl( ^ 1, . f the subject without any allusion. Christianity, which has ti ^ e n CQ ^ been described to be a new life which takes an organic form nmnity. and grows like other living things, cannot help taking to itself an external form or organization which approaches perfection in the proportion in which it is adapted to express the life which it contains. On the one hand, the external form of Christianity must not be confounded with Christianity itself, and on the other it must be remembered that Christianity does, and must from its very nature, embody itself in an external organization And a two-fold danger arises from the neglect of this principle, when on the one hand the machinery of Christian worship and discipline is mistaken for Chris tianity itself, and when on the other it is mischievously imagined that the purity of Christianity depends on the realization of an impossible invisibility or absence of organi zation. All the various modes of Christian organization or qhurch government profess to imitate the apostolic model, and to be founded on and agreeable to the New Testament Scriptures, and the comparative scantiness of information therein supplied has led to violent controversies upon the subject into which we need not now enter. Many have supposed The syna- with great probability that the New Testament contains so gogue few positive instructions on this subject, because the apostles did not invent a new organization for Christianity, but simply took over from Judaism that organization for worship and discipline which had no connection with the temple service the synagogue system and that the early Christian worship was simply a reproduction of the synagogue service. We may at all events believe that ths early Christian organization, if not exactly the same, was modelled upon that of the synagogue, and that the reaso-- why we have so few descriptions and instructions in th- New Testament is that the apostles did not require to describe what was so very well known to the Jewish Christians who composed the apostolic church. At first the Christians seem to have shared in the common worship of the Jews and to have engaged at the same time in services which were peculiarly Christian (Acts ii. 46), and in this way they appeared to be and were called