Apostolic Christianity.
And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers.— Acts ii. 42.
1. In these words are set forth the characteristic marks of the new Christian life to which the converts of Pentecost were pledged by their Baptism. The Apostles stand out as the core of the Church. About them the new disciples are gathered ; from them the doctrine and discipline of the infant society proceed ; they constitute a visible centre of unity.
2. The Church was not only holy, catholic, and apostolic, but it was also one. The world recognized that unity, and felt its power. A bishop of the Church in Ephesus was a bishop of the Church in Lyons, and a member of the Church in Alexandria was a member of the Church in Aries. The Church newly planted in Armenia was immediately brought into relation with the Church wherever it was already existing. There was a principle as real in the Church which was producing this unity, as the principle of gravity in the solar system which is binding it into unity and harmony. It is not difficult to discover that principle. If we turn to the inspired history of the Church, we shall find that principle of unity clearly stated. " They continued steadfastly in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers." Here are four things — the teaching, the fellow- ship, the sacrament, and the worship.
T[ We greet one another cordially as brethren, and we meet in committees and on platforms and in various other ways. Some of us have become members of the Evangelical Alliance, and we have various ways of expressing the unity that remains to us across the divided lines of our Churches. Ah, but there was a time, gone by long, long ago, when all those who in any place confessed a common Lord exercised their unity around the same communion table, and in the courts which Christ had set up, and not in such committees and alliances as we have been compelled
48 APOSTOLIC CHRISTIANITY
to plan because we had fallen from the others. There was a time when it entered into no Christian mind that, in any place, those who confessed our common Lord were to sit down contented with a unity that was not expressed and could not be in Christ's ordinances and Christ's institutions. There was a time when, if anything fell out to break it, men were grieved and humbled and Apostles wrote moving letters to the Churches concerned; and after the Apostles were gone, the Church of Eome sent her letter to the Church of Corinth to entreat them to be visibly one in the institutions and ordinances which Christ gave them to express and to exercise their unity. There was such a time, and if since post-apostolic times the Church has gained something — and I think it has gained much — yet surely it has lost something too. There was something they had in the early Church, when they met around the same communion table and in the same institutions just as naturally as they went to one martyr-death together — there was something then which we have not now. Therefore we are bound to aim at it — we are bound to seek it as
we can.1
T[ There are two notions of unity in men's minds. One of them is really the notion of uniformity. It has no place for diversity. It wants almost complete identity between the things which it compares. The other rejoices in diversity, and finds its unifying principle in the common motive or purpose out of which an infinite diversity of many actions may proceed. How vain the search for any unity but this ! It is the unity of nature. The budding, bursting spring is full of it; a thousand trees all different from one another are all one in the oneness of the great life-power which throbs and pulsates in them all. And souls the most unlike, most widely separated from each other, are one in Christ. Christ is their principle of unity. The thinker ponder- ing deep problems, the workman struggling with the obstinacy of material, the worshipper lost in his adoration, the men of all centuries, the men of all lands, — they are all one, if all their lives are utterances of the same Christ. It is beautiful, the way in which each new Christian strikes into this unity and becomes a part of it immediately. A man has been living by himself, seeming to find all his sources of activity in his own life. By and by the change comes and he is Christ's. The pulse of universal Christian life begins to beat through him. Now he is one with all men who, anywhere, are doing anything oy Christ for Christ ! How he lays hold of and comprehends the ages ! 2
1 R. Rainy, in The Life of Principal Eainy, i. 168.
2 Phillips Brooks.
ACTS ii. 42 49
The text names four elements as expressive of the variety in unity of primitive Christian life. They continued steadfastly —
I. In the Apostles' Teaching. II. In the Fellowship.
III. In the Breaking of Bread.
IV. In the Prayers.
TJ The great Christian thinker and preacher of Protestant Lausanne, as he compared the splendour and enthusiasm of the Koman Benediction with the shorn and meagre rite of Genevan Calvinism, exclaimed in melancholy tones, "Borne has worship without the word, we have the word without worship." But the earliest Church, as delineated by its great historian, combines all these elements, and appeals to man through all his faculties. It appeals to his intellect by its doctrine. It awakens his social feelings — whether towards contemporary Christians, or spirits waiting in the world unseen, or great predecessors in the faith ; nay, something higher still — " And truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his son Jesus Christ." It deals with the soul in its most mysterious depths by the consciousness of a Presence at once awful and blessed. It has treasures, and it opens for every one of its children a language of sobs and rapture, of penitence and joy — a wealth of words that set themselves to some far-off music, which linger along fretted roofs, yet nestle in our hearts, and in our last hours sing us into the sleep of death as if with the lullaby of God. Thus, as in the description of her first structure, the Church is doctrinal, social, sacramental, liturgical. She is a school of teaching, a centre of social unity, a shrine of sacraments, a home of worship. The child of heaven, destined to an inheritance so splendid, was strong and radiant in her cradle. All the possibilities of her history and her being lay folded in her heart from the very first.1