Lucian (Death of Peregrinus Proteus) says : ' It was imposed upon them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers from the moment that they are converted. . . . An adroit, un- scrupulous fellow, who has seen the world, has only to get among these simple souls, and his fortune is soon made.' By pretending to be a ' brother ' he can get anything out of them.
There is a stronger bond than that of belonging to one and the same society, commonwealth, and brotherhood. Seeing that the brotherhood implies that the Father of the family is God, there would seem to be nothing stronger than that. And yet there is : Christians are members of one Body, the Body of Christ, which is inspired by one Spirit. Just as no one did so much as St. Paul to free the new society from its cramping and stifling connexion with Judaism, so no one did so much as he to develop the idea of a free Christian Church, and of the re- lation of the Spirit to it. The local iKKX-rjala of be- lievers is a temple in which God dwells by His Spirit; it is Christ's Body, of which all become members by being baptized in one Spirit. No differ-
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ences of rank or of spiritual endowments can de- stroy tills fundamental unity, any more than the unity of a building or of the human body is destroyed by the complexity of its structure. In Ephesians, the Apostle looks forward to an iKKK-qala, not local, but including all Christians that anywhere exist. The same Spirit dwells in each soul and makes the multitude of the faithful, irre>^pective of locality or condition, to be one (see Swete, The Holy Spirit in the NT, London, 1909, p. 308). From the ideal point of view, there is only one Church, which is imperfectly, but etiectively, represented and real- ized in the numerous organizations in Christen- dom. Not that Christendom is the whole of which they are the constituent parts — that is a way of looking at it which is not found in the Apostolic Church, and it may easily be misleading. The more accurate view is to regard each member of a Christian organization as a member of the universal Church. The Church consists of duly qualified in- dividuals ; the intermediate groups may be con- venient or inevitable, but they are not essential.
Separate organizations, or local churches, came into existence because bodies of Christians arose at different places and increased. These bodies were independent, no one local church being in subjec- tion to another. The congregations at Ephesus, Thessalonica, Philippi, Corinth, etc., were independ- ent of one another and of the earlier churches of Antioch and Jerusalem. Their chief bond of union was that of the gospel and of membership in Christ. Besides this, the churches just named had the tie of being the product of one and the same founder ; and, as children of the same spiritual father, they were in a special sense ' brethi-en. ' St. Paul appeals to this fact and to their relationship to other churches. But, although he teaches that a church in need has claims upon the liberality of other churches, he nowhere gives one church authority over others. Nevertheless, even in apostolic times, congregations in the same district appear to have been regarded as connected groups, and it is pos- sible that the congregation in the provincial capital had some sort of initiative in virtue of the import- ance of the city where they dwelt. Thus, we have 'the churches of Galatia' (1 Co 16', Gal 1'), 'the churches of Asia' (1 Co 16'^), 'the churches of Judtea' (Gal P-), ' the seven churches of Asia ' (Rev 1^). In this way there arose between the local city church and the universal Church an organization which may be called the provincial Church (A. Harnack, Constitution and Law of the Chtcrch, Eng. tr., London, 1910, p. 160).
IJesides these close ties of relationship and mem- bership, the first Christians wei-e held together by unity of creed. It is true that primitive Christian- ity was an enthusiasm rather than a creed ; but there was a creed. It may be summed u]) in two strong convictions, one negative and the other positive. The negative one united the Christians with the Jews ; the positive one was the chief cause of separation between the two. Both Jew and Christian declared with equal emphasis that the gods of the heathen were no-gods(Dt 32'^, 1 Co 10-") : they were Shedim, nullities. But the Divine nature of the Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen Son of God was what the Christian affirmed as confidently and constantly as the Jew denied it. Here no com-
Eromise was possible. The Divinity of the Cruci- ed, which is such a difficulty to modern thought, appears to have caused little difficulty to the first Christians. It has been suggested that familiarity with polytheistic ideas helped them to believe in the Divinity of the Son. Possibly; but, on the other hand, their rejection of polytheism was ab- solute, and they died rather than make concessions. Heathen philosophers, who saw that polytheism was irrational, had a colourless theism which could
make compromises with popular misbeliefs. Think- ers like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch could talk indifferently of God and gods, of the Divine Being and the deities ; but for the early Christians that was impossible. They were not theologians, and they had only the rudiments of a creed ; but they were quite clear about the necessity of worshipping God and His Christ, and about the follj' and wickedness of worshipping men or idols. Hence, with all their simplicity of doc- trine they had deep convictions which formed a strong bond of union. The heathen mysteries had something of the same kind.