(1) Causes of the decline. — (a) The recollection of
our Lord's teaching. — If, as we have contended, the eschatology of our Lord was wider and deeper than the apostolic interpretation of it, it was natural that some of the half-understood sayings of the Master — particularly the parting commis- sions, Mt 28-", Ac V- ®, which are so notably non- eschatological — should remain in the memory of the apostles, and that in cour.se of time a fuller meaning should dawn upon their minds. So it would come to pass that the moral and spiritual aspects of the gospel, and the world-wide scope of its mission, would claim an increasing pre-eminence in the apostolic preaching. (For the influence of our Lord's teaching on St. Paul, see Kennedy, St. Paul's Conceptions of the Last Things, pp. 96-101.)
(b) A keen sense of moral values. — ' Practical morality' was from the first held in the highest esteem in the Judseo-Christian communities (see, e.g., the Epistle of James), and this tended to draw the centre of Christian interest away from escha- tology to morality. It is difficult to illustrate this by detailed quotations ; perhaps the best proof may be obtained by a rapid perusal of Acts, by means of which the steady diminution of the eschatological expectation as the narrative proceeds is readily noticed. In the later speeches of St. Paul, at Miletus (Ac 2Q^^-'^) or at Jerusalem (Ac 22), escha- tology is almost ignored ; and St. Paul before Felix reasons of ' righteousness and temperance ' as well as of 'judgment to come' (Ac 24^). Also the teaching of 1 Peter, and most of all of James, suggests that moral and spiritual values are far more es- teemed than eschatological problems.
(c) The charismata. — The spiritual gifts, e.g. of healing or of tongues, while originally regarded hy Je\vish Christians as ' signs of the end ' (see above, I. 3 (2)), soon began to acquire an intrinsic value of their own in the eyes of the Christian community. Men knew, as a fact of Christian experience, that they had heen freed from the power of sin and from the sense of guilt before God ; and so they hegan to use the terms ' salvation,' 'justi- fication,' etc., to describe their own spiritual experi- ences rather than purely eschatological hopes. (In Ac 16^', e.g., 'salvation' scarcely seems eschato- logical ; and in Ac 10^ our Lord is described simply as 'one who went about doing good and healing.')
It will be noticed that the influences we have been considering tended to alter the proportions of Christian teaching by emphasizing nc?i-eschato- logical factors at the expense of eschatology. But there were also other influences at work, directly tending to break up the primitive doctrine of the Last Things.
(d) The delay in the Return. — This was the most potent of all the factors which changed the ' tone of Christian eschatology. As the days and months passed, and the Son of Man did not appear on the clouds of heaven, it was impossible to repeat with the same assurance the old message : ' The time is at hand.' Yet the old hope persisted long in Judseo-Christian circles, not only in the earlier writings, e.g. Ja 5*, 1 P 4'', but until the close of the 1st cent., e.g. 1 Jn 2^^ Didache 16, and even in the Apology of Aristides.
But we see the change of 'tone' in St. Paul's charge to the Ephesian elders (Ac 20^-^^), which, so far from anticipating an immediate Return of the Lord, looks forward to a period of apostasy, and to an extended ministry in the Church. We see it even more plainly in 2 P ^^^-f where the mocking question, 'Where is the promise of His coming ?' is met by the old answer of Jewish apoca- lyptists : ' One day is with the Lord as a thou- sand years, and a thousand years as one day ' (2 P 3^ ; cf. Slavonic Enoch, § 32). Such an argument vir- tually implies that the primitive confidence in an im- mediate Return had been surrendered. The gradual
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weakening of that confidence will come before us again in St. Paul's Epistles [see below]. In Didache, 16, the Return, though near, is to be preceded by the rule of Antichrist ; and the rise of ' Chiliasm ' in the 2nd cent, thrust the final consummation still further into the future.
(e) The problem of sin in the Christian community. — Tliis, though not at first sight an eschatological question, indirectly lielped to modify tlie primitive doctrine of the Last Things. Tlie early Christian conception of final destinies was simple and con- sistent : those who believed and repented would be saved ; those wlio believed not would be condemned. This view assumed that Christian practice would always be in complete accord with Christian pro- fession ; and, so long as this was the case, it was not open to objection. But in practice it was soon found that professing Christians were not always consistent in their lives ( Ja 3^ 4^* - ; cf. Ac 20^"). So the simple two-fold division of mankind into ' saved ' and ' not-saved ' became unsatisfactory to man's sense of justice, for it did not correspond to the facts of experience ; and similarly the two-fold division of final destinies into ' eternal bliss ' and ' eternal woe ' became open to the charge that it imputed to God a line of action not wholly just.