" And when the Gentiles had
been brought in, what care did the Apostles take lest the new departure
should cause a separation along a line made obsolete by the Cross of
Christ; and with what adoring admiration does St Paul gaze at the
delightful spectacle of Jew and Gentile made one new man in Christ
Jesus--"where," he cries, "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision
and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is
all, and in all."
In matters of rank and race and colour all our denominations retain this
Apostolic Catholicity. How inconsistent to maintain it there, and
repudiate it when we come to such differences as mostly separate us!
These are differences far more of temper than of creed, or even of
worship or government. We say, sometimes, that we are "one in spirit":
not so; it is just in spirit that we have been divided. In creed and
organisation both, and in temper as well, the Church of Apostolic times
was visibly one. "See how these Christians love one another" was the
comment of the heathen onlooker. This state of things continued for a
long time. Gibbon enumerates the Church's "unity and discipline," which
go together, as among the "secondary causes" of that wonderful spread of
the Gospel in the first three centuries.
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