Fragments of Christian History to the Foundation of the Holy Roman Empire

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SAINT PAUL. THEEE is nowhere a finer challenge to the historical imagination ? that is, to our power of seeing things in a former time just as they really were ? than that offered by the very beginnings of Christianity as an organized power, as a social force. Let us try to take up that challenge as if the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SAINT PAUL. THEEE is nowhere a finer challenge to the historical imagination ? that is, to our power of seeing things in a former time just as they really were ? than that offered by the very beginnings of Christianity as an organized power, as a social force. Let us try to take up that challenge as if the facts were all new to us, and we had to study them for the first time. First of all, what was the source of the indomitable faith, the' victorious moral force, which made that little company of disciples the corner-stone of a new order of civilization ? How was it that the inconspicuous gathering of about a hundred and twenty in the upper chamber at Jerusalem had in it the seed of a great growth, which spread its roots amidst the decay of the old order of things, and flourished most abundantly when all that splendid structure of art and empire was a mass of mouldering ruin ? A full answer to this question would cover the whole ground of the early Christian history. Without attempting so much as that, it is enough to say that every great political or social revolution will have its type in the life, the character, the work, of some one man; and that the great moral and spiritual force we are considering is typified, more than anywhere else, in the vehement conviction, the ardent temper, the impassioned eloquence, the organizing skill, the personal experience, and the vivid religious imagination of the Apostle Paul. He is the man of genius and the man of power of the first Christian age. Comte calls him, frankly, the real founder of Christianity, holding the legend of Jesus to be a pale and ineffectual myth. But in Jesus himself, as already seen, there were ? besides the indefinable something which resides in personality ? at least two elements, one of vast personal fo...