Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Rome, as It as Under Paganism, and as It Became Under the Popes, Vol. 2
But the fall of the empire, at this crisis, would have entailed irreparable injury on the church.
Persecuted for three centuries without being over come or disheartened; gaining force from its own losses, and established with immovable firmness, by the very means which, if it had been a mere human institution, were the best calculated to subvert it it is true, that Christianity had come out resplendent from every species of trial that could put its divinity to the test but it is equally true, that it was not yet prepared to meet the anarchical transition-state, in which the destruction of the Roman world was to involve it. To complete the equipment of this ark, to be burdened not only with the treasures of redemp tion, with the pledges and hopes of immortality, but also with the principles by which the new social universe that was to Spring up under its auspices was to be formed on the ruins of that old incorrigible one, so soon and completely to be swept away, an interval of tranquillity and freedom was requisite and indis pensable.
Not that the deposite of the faith required to be augmented; no, St. John, the last of the apostles, had left it complete; after his demise, not an apex or iota could be added to it, without Violating its in tegrity. But to bar the success of forgeries in after ages, and to secure the currency of the great dogmas of Christianity, when the mere local monuments and reminiscences of its Divine origin should have passed away; it was expedient that they should be stamped by the authority of the assembled churches that the dispersed traditions should be collected while the echoes of the apostolic preaching was, as it were, still audible, and the succession of witnesses, ordained, and instituted, and initiated by them, was still unbroken in so many provinces where it was soon to be interrupted. The canon of the sacred Scriptures was to be determined amidst an incredible mass of adulterated and apocry phal copies; their meaning, where litigated, to be defined; their genuine spirit to be illustrated by the writings of saints, formed in the hereditary schools of the apostles. The principles of church government, and of general discipline, but little needed, or called into Operation during the rudimental epoch, when all was fervour and devotedness amongst pastors and peo ple, the majority of whom had made the most trying sacrifices in embracing Christianity, were now to be thoroughly ascertained, and set in full activity. What ever had hitherto been left loose, or exposed to doubt or discussion, was now to be made fast by definitions, and bound up and secured in creeds - that nothing might perish in the tremendous concussions that were at hand, or be swept away during the dark and tem pestuous time that was before the church.
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