Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/156

 The above "Catena Aurea" (golden chain) of passages is taken from the works we possess of the earliest teachers of Christianity who wrote in the fifty years immediately following the passing of S. John the beloved apostle, and they tell us exactly what was the doctrine pressed home to the Brotherhood in the early assemblies of Christians of which we are here speaking.

There were other dogmas, no doubt, included in the teaching of these early assemblies and meetings, such as the resurrection of the flesh; the great reckoning before the Judge, at which even the just would tremble were it not that the Judge was at the same time their Redeemer and loving Friend. The unspeakable joys of Paradise, the garden of their God and Saviour, were constantly dwelt upon, and the good glad tidings would fall like dew from heaven upon the world-weary, sad-eyed listeners.

But the great doctrine of the "Atonement," at once simple and sublime, so repeatedly pressed home in the above quoted words of the earliest teachers, was no doubt the strongest inducement which drew the Christian folk to meet often together—was the link which bound them into one brotherhood, and knit them at the same time to the loving Master.

It was a new preaching, this secret of the great love of God which passeth understanding, and one that excited wonderful and soul-stirring fears and hopes, and which filled the small dark corridors and low-browed chapels of the Roman catacombs which the faithful often used as meeting-homes for teaching and for prayer, with what seemed to the groups of worshippers verily a Divine light; and to these early Christian worshippers, the gloomy rough-hewn sleeping-places of the dead, through which the pilgrim traveller now wanders and wonders, seemed to them the very ante-chambers of heaven.

We have dwelt with some insistence upon the dogmatic teaching which without doubt formed a part, and that by no means an inconsiderable part, of the procedure of the primitive gatherings of Christians; for it is often urged that the great bond which united the brethren of the very early Church