One of the greatest of German theologians, Richard Rothe, looked forward to what he called the passing over (Aufgehen) of the Church into the world. By this he meant not that the religious element in life should be merged in the secular-nothing was farther from his mindbut that society should rise to a fuller sense of its origin, course, and destiny, and so occupy itself with that department of life of which the Church is too apt to claim a monopoly. It would seem as if his anticipation was in a fair way to be realised. We have come to believe that the conscience of the community as a whole is a safer guide than that of any section of the community; that the general is to be trusted before the particular, even the clerical mind. Indifference to formula and neglect of observance are on the increase; hence a certain loss which, we believe, is temporary and will be balanced by gain in other directions, but the effect of which is, and cannot but be, felt. Scepticism claims, and, it is to be feared, will continue to claim, its victims, particularly in the Latin countries, where the Church, instead of representing, as among ourselves, the average religious sense of the community, has fallen into the hands of an extreme faction bent at all costs on regaining its lost supremacy and on enforcing its impossible creed. Tragic, however, as is the situation for individuals, we need not, we may not, despair. The large map, the law of progress, forbid it. The Church, the world, religion, have passed through greater extremities and come out stronger for the ordeal. Individuals, generations, suffersuch is the law of life-but they count for little in the history of humanity; there is a loftier range, a larger view.' If this be ours we may, as Dr. Pfleiderer hopes

look forward confidently to the future, certain that in this twentieth century Christianity will make good progress towards the goal to which its whole history has been one long endeavour-the realisation of the God-Manhood, the penetration of the whole mind and life of mankind by the Divine Spirit of Freedom, Truth, and Love.1

1 Pfleiderer, Christentum und Religion, ii. 270.

X. DEVELOPMENT

THAT the theory of evolution should have been received with hostility, and should still be regarded with suspicion, by theologians is a striking instance of the extent to which judgment may be obscured by prejudice. For it is only by a liberal use of this theory that the beliefs and institutions of the Churches of to-day can be defended: the primary admission incumbent on the historian faced by the problem of the relation of later Christianity to that of the first ages is, that in the beginning it was not so.' The first name that will occur to English readers in this connexion is that of John Henry Newman. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine' this eminent divine found himself under the necessity of dealing with this delicate and at the time (1845) novel position. The book was epoch-making it was the bridge between Tractarianism and Rome. It helps us to understand the epidemic of atavism which in the middle of the last century led so many Englishmen to revert from the somewhat jejune Protestantism of the period to the fuller beliefs and more picturesque observances of medieval religion.

The author was gravitating surely, and no longer slowly, Romeward he was bound, he felt, to justify his action to himself and to others; he was a considerable patristic scholar, and he was one of the most consummate advocates who ever lived. He was aware that there were certain specifically Roman doctrines and practices which it was difficult to bring under the famous Vincentian Canon: and he met the difficulty, first, by an effective tu quoque, ‘Whatever be historical Christianity, it is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this'; and, secondly, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, p. 5. T 2

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by pointing out that the canon, taken literally, was fatal to the dogmatic position-which he and his opponents alike took for granted as such; since it was notorious that fundamental beliefs common to England and Rome had been ignored, ambiguously expressed, and even denied by early writers. This, indeed, was no new position; it had been triumphantly upheld in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit Petavius against Bull and Bossuet. Tertullian's 'Fuit tempus cum Filius non fuit' was Arianism pure and simple; the teaching of St. Basil and the Gregories on original sin was scarcely to be distinguished from that of Pelagius; Hooker's apology for them amounts to no more than a plea in mitigation of judgment: 'Shall we give sentence of death inevitable against all those Fathers in the Greek Church which, being mispersuaded, died in the error of free will?' But the controversy, famous in its day, had, after the manner of controversies, been forgotten; Newman's book burst like a bombshell on the religious world. On the one hand it cut away the Perpétuité de la Foi '-the keystone, it was believed, of orthodoxy; on the other it opened the door to uncertainty and error of every description; if it justified the Athanasian theology, it justified also the creed of Pius IV. He proposed to account for the facts by a theory which he called that of 'Developments '-namely:

that the increase and expansion of the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart and has any wide or extended dominion; that, from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.1

1 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, p. 29.

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But the theory was too subtle to command general acceptance. First, it was a hypothesis to account for a difficulty,' and orthodoxy does not readily recognise difficulties; secondly, such catchwords as ' Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,' or the 'unanimus consensus patrum,' empty as they were of any real content, were more effective, because more easily understood. Protestants distrusted it because it was devised in the interests of Catholicism; Catholics, because it represented Catholicism as another Gospel,' an aftergrowth contained only implicitly in the Gospel of Christ. It is impossible to suppose that so acute a mind as Newman's was blind to the applications of which his theory was capable, or to the results to which, when thus applied, it led. But it was no business of his to indicate them; he used it for a particular purpose, and no farther. His conception of it, indeed, oscillates between that of an evolution properly so called-which, valid as it is, is foreign to the antiquity on which he relied and which he desired to re-establish-and that of a mere explication, 'a development of distinctness of analysis.' And, under the guidance of the idea which inspired the book throughout, he lays down certain skilfully chosen tests of a true development '-preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, early anticipation, logical sequence, preservative additions, chronic continuance of which it is not too much to say that it is impossible to conceive a corruption of the Gospel which could not be brought under one or other of them. Brilliant as the argument is, it is advocacy, not science. Catholicism is on trial, and we are listening to counsel for the defence.

Since then much water has flowed under the bridges. During the last half-century the historical sense has developed to such an extent as to transform our outlook over the past. Before, taking names for things, we construed it in the terms of the present, attributing to men of remote ages the conceptions, the standpoints, the institutions of to-day. The Church of which we read in the New Testament suggested an organised society like the Church of Rome or the Church of England; a 'deacon,'

a newly ordained curate fresh from Oxford; a 'bishop,' a dignitary living in a palace and wearing lawn sleeves. Human nature, it is true, is much the same at all times; its elemental needs, instincts, and passions sway, as they have swayed and will always sway, men. But this identity is

fundamental, and subsists under an almost infinite diversity of setting and detail. Hence, over and above a knowledge of the facts and the power of weighing evidence, the faculty of historical imagination is part of the equipment of the student. This faculty is characteristic of the writer of romance: Scott possessed a double portion of it. And the qualities that made him great in romance made him great in history; others speak, and we listen; Scott opens our eyes, and we see. The historian must live in the past; he must look at men of a former age from their own point of view and judge them by their own standards; he must put himself in the place of the characters he describes. In religious origins, as elsewhere, the Where and When are vital; it is hopeless to attempt to understand primitive Christianity till we have ceased to regard it from the standpoint of the Christianity of to-day. The thoughts of the Christians of the first generation were not our thoughts; their reading of experience, their canons of belief, their modes of consciousness and expression, all were other than ours. They were neither Catholic nor Protestant, neither Anglican nor Puritan, neither High nor Low nor Broad Church. If we think we find the tenets of modern sects or parties among them, we deceive ourselves; they belong to earlier strata, which, with their fauna and flora, have long since disappeared. Religious enthusiasm, to take one instance out of many, has, for good or evil, become foreign to us; we pass it over, when we meet with it in the lives of the saints, or among the Anabaptists or the Scottish Covenanters, with a shrug of impatience, or even of contempt. But this attitude is an absolute disqualification for the historian of early Christianity; for the Christianity of the first days was nothing if not enthusiastic; its adherents were enthusiasts to a man. They spoke with tongues, they prophesied, they worked and experienced wonders, they