It was as their Lord that the primitive community of Christians believed in Jesus. They thus expressed their absolute devotion to, and confidence in, him as the Prince of Life. As every individual Christian stood in an immediate relation to God through the Spirit, priests and mediations were no longer wanted. Finally, these “holy” people were drawn together into societies, which bound themselves to a strictly moral life in purity and brotherly fellowship. On the last point let me add a few words.
It is a proof of the inwardness and moral power of the new message that, in spite of the enthusiasm arising from personal experience of religion, there were relatively seldom any extravagant outbursts and violent movements to be combated. Such movements may have been more frequent than the direct declarations of our authorities allow us to suppose, but they did not form the rule; and when they arose Paul was certainly not the only one who was concerned to put them down. He had certainly no wish to quench the “Spirit,” but when enthusiasm threatened to lead to a repugnance to work, as in Thessalonica, or when, as in Corinth, there was a superabundance of ecstatic talk, he uttered some sober warnings: “If any would not work, neither should he eat,” and “I bad rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Still more plainly are the concentrated repose and power of the leaders shown in the moral admonitions, such as we get not only in the Pauline Epistles but also, for example, in the first epistle of Peter and in the general epistle of James. Christian character is to show itself in the essential circumstances of human life, and that life is to be invigorated, supported and illumined by the Spirit. In the relation of husband to wife and of wife to husband, of parents to children, of masters to servants; further, in the individual’s relation to constituted authority, to the surrounding heathen world, and, again, to the widow and the orphan, is “the service of God” to be proved and tested. Where have we another example in history of a religion intervening with such a robust supernatural consciousness, and at the same time laying the moral foundations of the earthly life of the community so firmly as this message? If a man fails to be inwardly affected by the faith proclaimed by the New Testament writers, he must certainly be stirred to the depths by the purity, the wealth, the power, and the delicacy of the moral knowledge which invests their exhortations with such incomparable value.
There is another feature of the life of the earliest Christians which also deserves notice in this connexion. They lived in the expectation of Christ’s near return. This hope supplied them with an extraordinarily strong motive for disregarding earthly things, and the joys and sufferings of this world. That they were mistaken in their expectations we must freely grant; but nevertheless it was a highly efficacious lever for raising them above the world, and teaching them to make little of small things and much of great things, and to distinguish between what is of time and what is of eternity. “For a new and powerful religious impulse, which effects its own influence, to be associated with a co-efficient which enhances and strengthens that influence, is what we see constantly happening in the history of religion. With every renewal of the religious experience of sin and grace since Augustine’s day, what a lever has been supplied by the idea of predestination, and yet it is an idea which is in no way derived from that experience itself. How much enthusiasm was inspired in Cromwell’s troops, and how greatly were the Puritans on both sides of the ocean strengthened by the consciousness of-adoption, although this consciousness, too, was only a co-efficient. When the religious experiences of St. Francis developed in the Middle Ages into a new form of devotion, how much assistance it received from the doctrine of poverty, and yet this doctrine was an independent force. The conviction which obtained in the apostolic age that the Lord had really appeared after his death on the cross may also be regarded as a co-efficient. These coefficients teach us that the most inward of all possessions, namely, religion, does not struggle up into life free and isolated, but grows, so to speak, in coverings of bark and cannot grow without them. In studying the apostolic age, however, it is important to observe that, not only in spite of the religious enthusiasm but even in spite of the intense eschatological hopes which prevailed, the task of making earthly life holy was not neglected.
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