Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/176

 reader. But this vast and unostentatious movement of charity, operating in the village hamlets and in the lonely hospital, staunching the widow's tears and following all the windings of the poor man's griefs, presents few features the imagination can grasp, and leaves no deep impression upon the mind. The greatest things are those which are most imperfectly realized; and surely no achievements of the Christian Church are more truly great than those which it has effected in the sphere of charity. For the first time in the history of the world it has inspired many thousands of men and women, at the sacrifice of all worldly interests, and often under circumstances of extreme discomfort or danger, to devote their entire lives to the single object of assuaging the sufferings of humanity. It has covered the globe with countless institutions of mercy, absolutely unknown to the whole pagan world. It has indissolubly united in the minds of men the idea of supreme goodness with that of active and constant benevolence."

The foundation stories of all this vast movement of charity and altruistic love were laid in the early years of Christianity.

The assemblies—the meetings together of the Christians of the first days—constructed and developed, as we have seen, the laws of charity; indicating the persons who were to be assisted, suggesting, too, the means and resources out of which the sufferers—the forlorn and needy—might be helped and comforted in life and in death.

All that happened subsequently—the mighty organizing work of great masters of charity, such as Basil of Cappadocian Cæsarea, and later of members of the monastic orders—was simply the development, the expansion, the application to individual needs of the primitive ordinances of the first days which we have been sketching out,—ordinances all founded upon the advice, the injunctions, the commands which we find in early Christian writings such as the Didaché, the 1st Epistle of Clement of Rome, the Apology of Aristides, the Shepherd of Hermas, the writings of Justin Martyr and Minucius Felix, and a very little later in the more elaborate works of Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, and repeated in the first half of the third century