ulous gift to exercise, "a revelation, a tongue, an inter- pretation," as well as "a psalm or a teaching." There is no reason to believe that the infant congregation at Cor- inth was singular in this. The Apostle does not write as if he were describing a marvellous state of affairs peculiar to that church. He even makes the transition to the next item of his advice in the significant words, "as in all the churches of the saints." And the hints in the rest of his letters and in the Book of Acts require us, accordingly, to look upon this beautiful picture of Christian worship as one which would be true to life for any of the numerous congregations planted by the Apostles in the length and breadth of the world visited and preached to by them.
The argument may be extended to those items of the fuller list, given in I Cor. 12, which found less occasion for their exhibition in the formal meetings for worship, but belonged more to life outside the meeting-room. That enumeration includes among the extraordinary items, you will remember, gifts of healings, workings of miracles, prophecy, discernings of spirits, kinds of tongues, the inter- pretation of tongues — all of which, appropriate to the wor- shipping assembly, are repeated in I Cor. 14 : 26 ff. We are justified in considering it characteristic of the Apostolic churches that such miraculous gifts should be displayed in them. The exception would be, not a church with, but a church without, such gifts. Everywhere, the Apostolic Church was marked out as itself a gift from God, by show- ing forth the possession of the Spirit in appropriate works of the Spirit — miracles of healing and miracles of power, miracles of knowledge, whether in the form of prophecy or of the discerning of spirits, miracles of speech, whether of the gift of tongues or of their interpretation. The Apostolic Church was characteristically a miracle-working church.6
How long did this state of things continue? It was the characterizing peculiarity of specifically the Apostolic
6 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
Church, and it belonged therefore exclusively to the Apos- tolic age — although no doubt this designation may be taken with some latitude. These gifts were not the pos- session of the primitive Christian as such;6 nor for that matter of the Apostolic Church or the Apostolic age for themselves; they were distinctively the authentication of the Apostles. They were part of the credentials of the Apostles as the authoritative agents of God in founding the church. Their function thus confined them to distinc- tively the Apostolic Church, and they necessarily passed away with it.7 Of this we may make sure on the ground both of principle and of fact ; that is to say both under the guidance of the New Testament teaching as to their origin and nature, and on the credit of the testimony of later ages as to their cessation. But I shall not stop at this point to adduce the proof of this. It will be sufficiently intimated in the criticism which I purpose to make of certain opposing opinions which have been current among students of the subject. My design is to state and examine the chief views which have been held favorable to the continuance of the charismata beyond the Apostolic age. In the process of this examination occasion will offer for noting whatever is needful to convince us that the possession of the charis- mata was confined to the Apostolic age.
The theologians of the post-Reformation era, a very clear-headed body of men, taught with great distinctness that the charismata ceased with the Apostolic age. But this teaching gradually gave way, pretty generally throughout the Protestant churches, but especially in England, to the view that they continued for a while in the post-Apostolic period, and only slowly died out like a light fading by in- creasing distance from its source.8 The period most com- monly set for their continuance is three centuries ; the date of their cessation is ordinarily said to have been about the time of Constantine. This, as early as the opening of the eighteenth century, had become the leading opinion, at
THEIR DISAPPEARANCE 7
least among theologians of the Anglican school, as Conyers Middleton, writing in the middle of that century, advises us. "The most prevailing opinion," he says in his Intro- ductory Discourse to a famous book to be more fully de- scribed by and by, "is that they subsisted through the first three centuries, and then ceased in the beginning of the fourth, or as soon as Christianity came to be established by the civil power. This, I say, seems to be the most pre- vailing notion at this day among the generality of the Protestants, who think it reasonable to imagine that mir- acles should then cease, when the end of them was obtained and the church no longer in want of them ; being now de- livered from, all danger, and secure of success, under the protection of the greatest power on earth." 9