II.

So early as the beginning of the second century, a motley crowd of enquirers and believers began to knock at the doors of the 21Christian churches. Among them were men—usually called Gnostics—who were nourished and bewildered by the old and newest wisdom of the mysteries, but who were at the same time captivated by the evangelical message, and by the purity of the Christian life. They sought to define wherein consisted the essence of the Christian religion as a cognition of God and of the world; and they imagined they had established the true meaning of the Gospel—a meaning unknown to the common herd—God as the Lord and Creator of spirits, but over against Him from all eternity the realm of matter, of the finite and sensuous, which as such is evil: the human spirit a spark of the divine, but fatally enveloped by its enemy, the material world; the redemption by Christ a release of the spirit from the body, and the restoration of pure .spirituality. Hence the moral task—perfect asceticism, flight from daemonic nature, union with the original source of spirit by gnosis and knowledge. In the strife with this doctrine, 22which was Greek, but endeavoured to naturalise itself as Christian, and in the strife with Marcionism, which in its practical teachings was closely allied with Gnosticism, the Church passed through the first great crisis in her history. She was victorious. This apparently attractive attempt to find a philosophic basis for her own criticism of the present world she rejected as false and foreign to herself. She recognised in these doctrines the recurrence of daemonic, that is, of heathen conceptions; and condemned us secular Gnostic Christianity, with its asceticism and its lofty proclamations of the nobility and value of the Spirit. Nor only this, but she refused to know anything of a pretended higher esoteric Christianity for the ‘spiritual’: as against the Gnostic distinction of two Christian ideals, she took her stand, though with some hesitation, on the demand of a single and universally attainable Christian order of life. From the end of the second century it was for ever established in the Church that 23the belief in an essential dualism of God and the World, Spirit and Nature, was irreconcilable with Christianity, and that therefore all asceticism which rests on that dualism was equally irreconcilable therewith. The doctrine, indeed, continued to be taught that the present course of the world and the future time stand in opposition, that the earth has fallen under the dominion of demons. But it was God himself that made the surrender, and yielded the world to the devil. Yet He will show His omnipotence at the Last Judgment: nay, He shows it already in the victory of the faithful over the demons. The earth is the Lord’s, but it is temporarily governed by the wicked angels; the world is good, but the life of the world is bad. It was thus that the theory of dualism was overthrown; by decrying it in ‘theology,’ and by seeking the explanation of evil in the freedom of the creature, which was a necessity in God’s plan. Nevertheless the enemy that lurks here may indeed be defeated, but he cannot be annihilated. 24He found secret allies even in many theologians of authority, who knew how in subtle fashion to combine dualism with a belief in God the Almighty Creator. Under the most various disguises he again and again appears in the history of Christianity; but he has been obliged to mask his features. As an open enemy he is seen no more.

Before this first crisis was at an end, a second arose to confront the Church. From the middle of the second century the conditions of the external position of Christendom began to alter more and more. Hitherto it had been scattered over the Roman Empire in a few small communities. These had been provided only with the most necessary forms of political organisation, as few and loose as were required by a religious union based on superhuman hopes, strict discipline, and brotherly affection. But a change was at hand. The Church received large multitudes which stood in need as much of a belated discipline—education and forbearance—as of 25a political guidance. The prospect of an approaching end of the world no longer, as of old, dominated all hearts. In place of the original enthusiasm there arose more and more a sober conviction or, perhaps, even a mere theoretical belief and a submissive acceptance. There were many who did not become Christians, but, finding themselves Christians, remained so. They were too strongly impressed by Christianity to leave it, and too little impressed to be Christian indeed. Pure religious enthusiasm began to wane, old ideals received a new form, and the self-reliance and responsibility of individuals grew weaker. The ‘priests and kings of God’ began to clamour for priests, and to come to terms with the kings of the earth. Those who once had prided themselves on being filled with the Spirit, no longer traced that Spirit so actively in themselves, and sought to recognise it in symbols of faith, in holy books, in mysteries, and in forms of Church order. The differences, again, in the 26social status of the ‘brethren’ began to assert themselves. Christians were already to be found in all callings—in the Emperor’s palace, among the officials, in the workshops of the handicraftsmen, and in the studies of the learned, among the free, and among the enslaved. Were all these to continue in their occupations? Should the Church make the decisive stride into the world, enter into its relations, comply with its forms, recognise, as far as anyhow possible, its ordinances, meet its requirements; or should she remain, as she had been at first, a congregation of religious enthusiasts, separate and distinct from the world, and influencing the world only by a direct missionary propaganda? From the latter half of the second century the Church found herself confronted with the dilemma, either to begin a world-mission on a grand scale by effectively entering the Roman social system—of course, to the rejection of her original equipment and force—or to retain these, to keep the original 27forms of life, but remain a small and insignificant sect, scarcely intelligible to one in a thousand, incapable of saving and educating whole nations. This was the question—thus much we can assert to-day, obscurely as it could then be perceived. It was a great crisis, and—it was not the worst Christians who cried a halt. Now for the first time were voices heard in the Church, warning bishops and congregations against the advancing secularisation, holding up to the secular Christian those well-known sentences about the imitation of Christ in their literal sternness, and demanding a return to pristine simplicity and purity. Then once again arose, loud and penetrating, the cry to establish life on the ground of the expectation of the Lord’s speedy return. There were congregations which, led by their bishops, withdrew to the desert; there were congregations which sold all their possessions in order to be able to meet the coming Christ, having laid aside every weight; there 28were voices that cried that Christians should forsake the broad way and seek the narrow way and the strait gate. The Church herself, impelled rather by circumstances than by a free movement, decided otherwise. She entered the world-state by the open door in order to establish herself permanently in it, to preach Christianity in its streets, to bring it the word of the Gospel, but—to leave it in possession of all except its gods. And she equipped herself with all the good things she could get from it, without marring the elasticity of the structure within which she was now establishing herself. With the aid of its philosophy she created her new Christian theology; its constitution she exploited in order to give herself a firm organisation; its jurisprudence, trade, intercourse, art, handicraft she pressed into her service; even from its ritual she learned to profit. Thus it is that at the middle of the third century we find the Church furnished with all the forces that a State and its culture could offer her, 29entering on all the relations of life, and ready for any concession which did not concern her creed. With this equipment she undertook and carried through a world-mission on a large scale. And those old-fashioned, those more serious believers, who protested against this secularised Church in the name of the Gospel, who aimed at gathering for their God a holy congregation, regardless of numbers and of circumstances? These could no longer remain in the great Church; and the majority of them, to provide a foundation for their stricter demands, claimed to have received a new and final revelation of God in Phrygia, and thus hastened the breach. They severed themselves, or were severed, from the Church. But, as usually happens, they had in the very struggle grown narrower and more one-sided. If, in the earlier times, a lofty enthusiasm had called forth as of itself stern forms of life, these now, minutely regulated, were to conserve and beget that original life. They became formalists in the direction of their lives, which after 30all were but little stricter than those of their adversaries, and they became haughty in their assertion of a ‘pure’ Christianity. Secular Christianity they despised as a mongrel, mechanical, unspiritual Christianity. In this ‘sect’ of the Montanists of the Empire, and in the related but older and yet more uncompromising Encratites, with their shrinking from the world, their more strictly ordered fasts and prayers, their distrust of the priestly office, of Church polity, of all property, and even of marriage, some have seen the forerunners of later monasticism. Nor is this view incorrect, if we look merely at the motives of the two movements; but in other respects there remains a great difference. Monasticism presupposes the comparative legitimacy of the secular Church; these Montanists denied it altogether. The device of a double morality in the Church may have existed in embryo; but it did not, at the beginning of the third century, dominate the entire conception of the Christian life, as is shown by the very 31fact that Montanism severed itself from the Church. True, the Church set a value on its ‘confessors,’ its ‘virgins,’ its celibates, its God-serving widows—provided they remained true to her communion—and that value became higher the oftener she discovered by experience that they tended to grow distrustful of the ‘great society.’ But these spiritual aristocrats were as yet no more monks than were the Montanists. Again, monasticism raised a way of life into a principle, which in the first instance was based, not on the prospect of the impending revelation of the kingdom of Christ, but on the idea of a perfect enjoyment of God here and of immortality yonder. Monasticism had necessarily to make an effort to fly from the world; Montanism did not expressly require a flight from that which its enthusiastic hope regarded as a thing already overcome.