FORMS OF UNBELIEF. CHAPTER I. 42 INTRODUCTION. the faith predicted. THE Conflicts of the faith furnish no ground for distrust or despondency. They are not beyond the prediction of Christ, nor have the issues failed to vindicate the truth of his promise. The condition of the church on earth has been a warfare from the beginning; but it is no more than its Founder gave reason to expect from the day when He appointed his disciples to go "as sheep among wolves," and declared that He came "not to send peace on the earth but a sword." As long as two contending Conflicts of principles partition the world between them, the strife must continue. The Christian creed was for centuries contested point by point; Judaism first, and then heathenism, tried the effect of resistance and compromise. Sometimes philosophy in its most intellectual form, and sometimes the influence of a degenerate age, seemed to bring the church into the utmost peril. There were periods when its destruction seemed inevitable; as in the confusions consequent on the falling to pieces of the Roman Empire; and afterwards when there followed the harder trial of corrupting prosperity; but it lived through all dangers to be the blessing of the world. Its pre B Similar objections from an early period. servation under so many hazards is not less wonderful than its original establishment. There was We find The history of one period is the record by anticipation of many which followed. The heretics of primitive ages were occupied about questions which have risen to the surface from time to time, and are still as fiercely debated as ever. Their methods were the same which are in present use, and for the most part their objects. the same premature triumph, and the same ever-repeated prediction of a new era just about to commence. passages in Porphyry which might have been written by an English deist of the seventeenth century, or by a German critic of an advanced school in the present. There was nothing to prevent the anti-Christian writers of those days from dealing unfairly with Scripture. They invented and exaggerated difficulties, in order to destroy the authority which was conclusive against them. They knew that they could produce little effect against the Christian faith unless they first destroyed the character of the volume which contains its record, and therefore they laboured to prove that the Old Testament and the New are contradictory to each other, and that both are spurious or corrupted.1 A champion of the Christian faith, meanwhile, was never wanting. It might be the fiery African, or the subtle Greek; Epiphanius, Basil, or Gregory among the Orientals, or Ambrose or Jerome the offspring and the guides of the Latin church. All forms of thought and character, of education and training and national influence were laid under contribution. Whatever the needs of 1 In the words of Dean Trench, Scripture in the last century pursued, who did not venture to lay profane hands on the New Testament for long after they had renounced their faith in the Old it is exactly that which we shall see repeated in England."Expos. of Sermon on the Mount, c. iii. P. 44. |