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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Melanchthon, in sincere humility and utter freedom from jealousy, even acknowledged the superiority of his younger friend as a theologian and disciplinarian, and called him emphatically "the theologian." They had many points of contact. Both were men of uncommon precocity; both excelled, above their contemporaries, in humanistic culture and polished style; both devoted all their learning to the renovation of the Church; they were equally conscientious and unselfish; they agreed in the root of their piety, and in all essential doctrines; they deplored the divisions in the Protestant ranks, and heartily desired unity and harmony consistent with truth. But they were differently constituted. Melanchthon was modest, gentle, sensitive, feminine, irenic, elastic, temporizing, always open to new light; Calvin, though by nature as modest, bashful, and irritable, was in principle and conviction firm, unyielding, fearless of consequences, and opposed to all compromises. They differed also on minor points of doctrine and discipline. Melanchthon, from a conscientious love of truth and peace, and from regard for the demands of practical common sense, had independently changed his views on two important doctrines. He abandoned the Lutheran dogma of a corporal and ubiquitous presence in the eucharist, and approached the theory of Calvin; and he substituted for his earlier fatalistic view of a divine foreordination of evil as well as good the synergistic scheme which ascribes conversion to the co-operation of three causes: the Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the will of man. He conceded to man the freedom of either accepting or rejecting the Gospel salvation, yet without giving any merit to him for accepting the free gift; and on this point he dissented from Calvin’s more rigorous and logical system.549 The sincere and lasting friendship of these two great and good men is therefore all the more remarkable and valuable as a testimony that a deep spiritual union and harmony may co-exist with theological differences.550 Calvin and Melanchthon met at Frankfurt, Worms, and Regensburg under trying circumstances. Melanchthon felt discouraged about the prospects of Protestantism. He deplored the confusion which followed the abolition of the episcopal supervision, the want of discipline, the rapacity of the princes, the bigotry of the theologians. He had allowed himself, with Luther and Bucer, to give his conditional assent to the scandalous bigamy of Philip of Hesse (May, 1540), which was the darkest blot in the history of the German Reformation, and worse than the successive polygamy of Henry VIII. His conscience was so much troubled about his own weakness that, at Weimar, on his way to the Colloquies at Hagenau and Worms, he was brought to the brink of the grave, and would have died if Luther had not prayed him out of the jaws of the king of terrors. What a contrast between Melanchthon at Worms in 1540, and Luther at Worms in 1521! At the Diet of Regensburg, in 1541, he felt no better. His son was sick, and he dreamed that he had died.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  However these testimonies from various men and countries may differ in particular circumstances, they can only be accounted for on the supposition of some fact at the bottom; for they were previous to any use or abuse of this, tradition for heretical or for orthodox and hierarchical purposes. The chief error of the witnesses from Dionysius and Irenaeus onward is that Peter is associated with Paul as "founder" of the church of Rome; but this may be explained from the very probable fact that some of the "strangers from Rome" who witnessed the Pentecostal miracle and heard the sermon of Peter, as also some disciples who were scattered abroad by the persecution after the martyrdom of Stephen, carried the seed of the gospel to Rome, and that these converts of Peter became the real founders of the Jewish-Christian congregation in the metropolis. Thus the indirect agency of Peter was naturally changed into a direct agency by tradition which forgot the names of the pupils in the glorification of the teacher. The time of Peter’s arrival in Rome, and the length of his residence there, cannot possibly be ascertained. The above mentioned silence of the Acts and of Paul’s Epistles allows him only a short period of labor there, after 63. The Roman tradition of a twenty or twenty-five years’ episcopate of Peter in Rome is unquestionably a colossal chronological mistake.290 Nor can we fix the year of his martyrdom, except that it must have taken place after July, 64, when the Neronian persecution broke out (according to Tacitus). It is variously assigned to every year between 64 and 69. We shall return to it again below, and in connection with the martyrdom of Paul, with which it is associated in tradition.291 § 26. The Peter of History and the Peter of Fiction. No character in the New Testament is brought before us in such life-like colors, with all his virtues and faults, as that of Peter. He was frank and transparent, and always gave himself as he was, without any reserve. We may distinguish three stages in his development. In the Gospels, the human nature of Simon appears most prominent the Acts unfold the divine mission of Peter in the founding of the church, with a temporary relapse at Antioch (recorded by Paul); in his Epistles we see the complete triumph of divine grace. He was the strongest and the weakest of the Twelve. He had all the excellences and all the defects of a sanguine temperament. He was kind-hearted, quick, ardent, hopeful, impulsive, changeable, and apt to run from one extreme to another. He received from Christ the highest praise and the severest censure.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The persecuted church had filled its eye with the humble and suffering servant-form of Jesus, and found therein consolation and strength in her tribulation. The victorious church saw the same Lord in heavenly glory on the right hand of the Father, ruling over his enemies. The one conceived Christ in his state of humiliation (but not in his state of exaltation), as even repulsive, or at least "having no form nor comeliness;" taking too literally the description of the suffering servant of God in Is. lii. 14 and liii. 2, 3.1198 The other beheld in him the ideal of human beauty, "fairer than the children of men," with "grace poured into his lips;" after the Messianic interpretation of Ps. xlv. 3.1199 This alone, however, did not warrant images of Christ. For, in the first place, authentic accounts of the personal appearance of Jesus were lacking; and furthermore it seemed incompetent to human art duly to set forth Him in Whom the whole fulness of the Godhead and of perfect sinless humanity dwelt in unity. On this point two opposite tendencies developed themselves, giving occasion in time to the violent and protracted image controversies, until, at the seventh ecumenical council at Nice in 787, the use and adoration of images carried the day in the church. 1. On the one side, the prejudices of the ante-Nicene period against images in painting or sculpture continued alive, through fear of approach to pagan idolatry, or of lowering Christianity into the province of sense. But generally the hostility was directed only against images of Christ; and from it, as Neander justly observes,1200 we are by no means to infer the rejection of all representations of religious subjects; for images of Christ encounter objections peculiar to themselves. The church historian Eusebius declared himself in the strongest manner against images of Christ in a letter to the empress Constantia (the widow of Licinius and sister of Constantine), who had asked him for such an image. Christ, says he, has laid aside His earthly servant-form, and Paul exhorts us to cleave no longer to the sensible;1201 and the transcendent glory of His heavenly body cannot be conceived nor represented by man; besides, the second commandment forbids the making to ourselves any likeness of anything in heaven or in earth. He had taken away from a lady an image of Christ and of Paul, lest it should seem as if Christians, like the idolaters, carried their God about in images.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Literature: Decretum Gratiani emendatum et notationibus illustratum. Una cum glossis, Gregorii XIII. Pont. Max. jussu editum, 6 vols. Rome, 1582.—Corpus juris canonici, ed. J. H. Boehmer, 2 vols. Halle 1747, with Introductions by Boehmer on Gratian’s Decretum, I. 1–42, and the later collections of decretals, II. 1–34.—Best critical ed. by A. L. Richter, 2 vols. Leip., 1839, revised ed. by E. Friedburg Leip., 1879–1881, 2 vols. (vol. I., Decret. Gratiani, vol. II., Decretalium collectiones). —J. Fr. von Schulte (Old-Cath. Prof. in Bonn): D. Gesch. der Quellen und Lit. des kanonischen Rechts von Gratian bis auf die Gegenwart, 3 vols. Stuttg., 1875–1880. —Dodd: Hist. of canon Law, Oxf., 1884. —T. Hinschius: D. Kirchenrecht d. Katholiken und Protestanten, etc., 6 vols. Berl., 1869–1897. —E. Friedberg: Lehrbuch des kath. und evangel. Kirchenrechts, 6th ed., Leip., 1903. —A. von Kirchenheim: Kirchenrecht, Bonn, 1900. —P. Hergenröther (Rom. Cath.): Lehrbuch d. kathol. Rechts, 2d. ed., Freib., 1905. —Other works by Walter, 14th ed., 1877. —Richter-Dove, 8th ed., Leip., Phillimore: The Eccles. Law of the Ch. of Engl., 2 vols. London, 1873, Supplem., 1876.—F. W. Maitland: Rom. Can. Law in the Ch. of Engl., Lond., 1898.—The artt. in Herzog, vol. X. Kanonen-Sammlungen, Kanonisches Rechtsbuch, Kirchenrecht. —Stubbs: Const. Hist. of Engl., II. 170 sqq., III. 295–388.—For extensive list of works on canon Law, see Friedberg: Kirchenrecht, pp. 3–11, and Hergenröther: Kirchenrecht, pp. 15 sqq. Not the least of the characteristic and imposing products of the mediaeval Church was the gigantic fabric of the canon law.1838 It is embodied in a series of collections containing enactments of Councils and papal decretals, beginning with the collection of Gratian in the twelfth century and ending with the decretals of John XXII. in the fourteenth century. The canon law became the legal buttress of the papal theocracy and remained the ruling code till the Reformation. The science of canon law looks back to Gratian as its father, and Bologna was the chief centre for its study. Although works on the subject were produced in other lands, Italy, through her universities, was far in the lead in their production till late in the fifteenth century.1839

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  challenge of engineering buildings which would reach to Heaven with an audacity not swiftly followed by their ignominious collapse. This was the style which ungrateful Italians of the fifteenth-century Renaissance christened ‘Gothic’, connecting it to barbarian peoples who by the age of the cathedrals had of course long vanished among the Catholic faithful.29 Nothing could be further from the Dark Ages than a Gothic cathedral: it is suffused with light, which is designed to speak of the light of Christian truth to all who enter it. Abbot Suger of St-Denis, one of the pioneering patrons of this new style in the early twelfth century, had been seized by enthusiasm for the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, mistaking that carefully obscured Eastern mystic for the martyred Gallo-Roman St Denis, patron of his own abbey. On the bronze doors of his lavish new enlargement of his abbey church, Suger arranged for an inscription of verses which encapsulated the way in which the anonymous Syriac Miaphysite associated the quality of physical light with the experience of spiritual enlightenment. A church of stone could be transformed: Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds so that they may travel, Through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door.30 Light in the churches of the Gothic architectural tradition was filtered through windows which were increasingly themselves huge sequences of pictures in stained glass, telling the divine story from Old and New Testament and beyond into the history of the Church. Stained glass became one of the most compelling though also one of the most vulnerable media for conveying the doctrine of the Western Church (see Plate 30). It has never played such an important role in Orthodoxy or the non-Chalcedonian Churches, whose church architecture never aspired to become a framework for windows in the fashion of the Gothic churches of the Latin West. Gothic windows grew ever greater in expanse and therefore posed ever greater problems for the engineer of a vast bulky building. Intricate schemes of stone buttressing like permanent open scaffolding for walls and ribs for stone-vaulted roofs were devised to take the stresses safely from ceiling, tower and spire to the ground. The semicircular arches of Romanesque architecture gave way (sometimes, all too literally) to arches composed of two arcs meeting at an apex in a point, so that the thrust could be absorbed more efficiently at the point, and arcades and windows could soar ever higher. Above all were the church towers and pointed steeples which rose triumphantly higher than any other man-made structure in Catholic Europe;

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He addressed an Apology or Intercession in behalf of the Christians to the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus.1364 He reminds the rulers that all their subjects are allowed to follow their customs without hindrance except the Christians who are vexed, plundered and killed on no other pretence than that they bear the name of their Lord and Master. We do not object to punishment if we are found guilty, but we demand a fair trial. A name is neither good nor bad in itself, but becomes good or bad according to the character and deeds under it. We are accused of three crimes, atheism, Thyestean banquets (cannibalism), Oedipodean connections (incest). Then he goes on to refute these charges, especially that of atheism and incest. He does it calmly, clearly, eloquently, and conclusively. By a divine law, he says, wickedness is ever fighting against virtue. Thus Socrates was condemned to death, and thus are stories invented against us. We are so far from committing the excesses of which we are accused, that we are not permitted to lust after a woman in thought. We are so particular on this point that we either do not marry at all, or we marry for the sake of children, and only once in the course of our life. Here comes out his ascetic tendency which he shares with his age. He even condemns second marriage as "decent adultery." The Christians are more humane than the heathen, and condemn, as murder, the practices of abortion, infanticide, and gladiatorial shows. Another treatise under his name, "On the Resurrection of the Dead, is a masterly argument drawn from the wisdom, power, and justice of God, as well as from the destiny of man, for this doctrine which was especially offensive to the Greek mind. It was a discourse actually delivered before a philosophical audience. For this reason perhaps he does not appeal to the Scriptures. AlI historians put a high estimate on Athenagoras. "He writes," says Donaldson, "as a man who is determined that the real state of the case should be exactly known. He introduces similes, he occasionally has an antithesis, he quotes poetry but always he has his main object distinctly before his mind, and he neither makes a useless exhibition of his own powers, nor distracts the reader by digressions. His Apology is the best defence of the Christians produced in that age." Spencer Mansel declares him "decidedly superior to most of the Apologists, elegant, free from superfluity of language, forcible in style, and rising occasionally into great powers of description, and in his reasoning remarkable for clearness and cogency." Tillemont found traces of Montanism in the condemnation of second marriage and the view of prophetic inspiration, but the former was common among the Greeks, and the latter was also held by Justin M. and others.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It was only by a happy inconsistency, that Pelagius and his adherents traditionally held to the church doctrines of the Trinity and the person of Christ. Logically their system led to a rationalistic Christology.1785 Pelagianism is a fundamental anthropological heresy, denying man’s need of redemption, and answering to the Ebionistic Christology, which rejects the divinity of Christ. It is the opposite of Manichaeism, which denies man’s capability of redemption, and which corresponds to the Gnostic denial of the true humanity of Christ.1786 § 152. The Augustinian System: The Primitive State of Man, and Free Will. Augustine (354–430) had already in his Confessions, in the year 400, ten years before the commencement of the Pelagian controversy, set forth his, deep and rich experiences of human sin and divine grace. This classical autobiography, which every theological student should read, is of universal application, and in it every Christian may bewail his own wanderings, despair of himself, throw himself unconditionally into the arms of God, and lay hold upon unmerited grace.1787 Augustine had in his own life passed through all the earlier stages of the history of the church, and had overcome in theory and in practice the heresy of Manichaeism, before its opposite, Pelagianism, appeared. By his theological refutation of this latter heresy, and by his clear development of the Biblical anthropology, he has won the noblest and most lasting renown. As in the events recorded in his Confessions he gives views of the evangelical doctrines of sin and of grace, so in the doctrines of his anti-Pelagian writings he sets forth his personal experience. He teaches nothing which he has not felt. In him the philosopher and the living Christian are everywhere fused. His loftiest metaphysical speculation passes unconsciously into adoration. The living aroma of personal experience imparts to his views a double interest, and an irresistible attraction for all earnest minds.1788 Yet his system was not always precisely the same; it became perfect only through personal conflict and practical tests. Many of his earlier views—e.g., respecting the freedom of choice, and respecting faith as a work of man—he himself abandoned in his Retractations;1789 and hence he is by no means to be taken as an infallible guide. He holds, moreover, the evangelical doctrines of sin and grace not in the Protestant sense, but, like his faithful disciples, the Jansenists, in connection with the sacramental and strict churchly system of Catholicism; he taught the necessity of baptismal regeneration and the damnation of all unbaptized children, and identified justification in substance with sanctification, though he made sanctification throughout a work of free grace, and not of human merit. It remains the exclusive prerogative of the inspired apostles to stand above the circumstances of their time, and never, in combating one error, to fall into its opposite.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Among recent divines, Bishop Wordsworth, of Lincoln, who is in full sympathy with the fathers and all their pious exegetical fancies, has thus eloquently reproduced the cherubic symbolism (in his Com. on The New Test., vol. I., p. xli): "The Christian church, looking at the origin of the Four Gospels, and the attributes which God has in rich measure been pleased to bestow upon them by his Holy Spirit, found a prophetic picture of them in the four living cherubim, named from heavenly knowledge, seen by the prophet Ezekiel at the river of Chebar. Like them the Gospels are four in number; like them they are the chariot of God, who sitteth between the cherubim; like them they bear him on a winged throne into all lands; like them they move wherever the Spirit guides them; like them they are marvellously joined together, intertwined with coincidences and differences: wing interwoven with wing, and wheel interwoven with wheel; like them they are full of eyes, and sparkle with heavenly light; like them they sweep from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven, and fly with lightning’s speed and with the noise of many waters. Their sound is gone out into all lands, and the words to the end of the world." Among German divines, Dr. Lange is the most ingenious expounder of this symbolism, but he exchanges the symbols of Matthew and Luke. See his Leben Jesu, I., 156 sqq., and his Bibelkunde (1881), p. 176. (2.) The pictorial representations of the four Evangelists, from the rude beginnings in the catacombs and the mosaics of the basilicas at Rome and Ravenna to modern times, have been well described by Mrs. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, vol. I, 132–175 (Boston ed., 1865). She distinguishes seven steps in the progress of Christian art: 1st, the mere fact, the four scrolls, or books of the Evangelists; 2d, the idea, the four rivers of salvation flowing from on high to fertilize the whole earth; 3d, the prophetic symbol, the winged cherub of fourfold aspect; 4th, the Christian symbol, the four "beasts" (better, "living creatures") in the Apocalypse, with or without the angel-wings; 5th, the combination of the emblematical animal with the human form; 6th, the human personages, each of venerable or inspired aspect, as becomes the teacher and witness, and each attended by the scriptural emblem—no longer an emblem, but an attribute—marking his individual vocation and character; 7th, the human being only, holding his Gospel, i.e., his version of the teaching and example of Christ. (3.) Religious poetry gives expression to the same idea. We find it in Juvencus and Sedulius, and in its perfection in Adam of St. Victor, the greatest Latin poet of the middle ages (about 1172). He made the Evangelists the subject of two musical poems: "Plausu chorus laetabundo," and "Jocundare plebs fidelis." Both are found in Gautier’s edition (1858), and with a good English translation by Digby S. Wrangham in The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  (pp. 322–358). Athanasius is the theological and ecclesiastical centre, as his senior contemporary Constantine is the political and secular, about which the Nicene age revolves. Both bear the title of the Great; the former with the better right, that his greatness was intellectual and moral, and proved itself in suffering, and through years of warfare against mighty, errors and against the imperial court. Athanasius contra mundum, et mundus contra Athanasium, is a well-known sentiment which strikingly expresses his fearless independence and immovable fidelity to his convictions. He seems to stand an unanswerable contradiction to the catholic maxim of authority: Quod sem per, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est, and proves that truth is by no means always on the side of the majority, but may often be very unpopular. The solitary Athanasius even in exile, and under the ban of council and emperor, was the bearer of the truth, and, as he was afterwards named, the "father of orthodoxy."1926 On a martyrs’ day in 313 the bishop Alexander of Alexandria saw a troop of boys imitating the church services in innocent sport, Athanasius playing the part of bishop, and performing baptism by immersion.1927 He caught in this a glimpse of future greatness; took the youth into his care; and appointed him his secretary, and afterwards his archdeacon. Athanasius studied the classics, the Holy Scriptures, and the church fathers, and meantime lived as an ascetic. He already sometimes visited St. Anthony in his solitude. In the year 325 he accompanied his bishop to the council of Nicaea, and at once distinguished himself there by his zeal and ability in refuting Arianism and vindicating the eternal deity of Christ, and incurred the hatred of this heretical party, which raised so many storms about his life. In the year 3281928 he was nominated to the episcopal succession of Alexandria, on the recommendation of the dying Alexander, and by the voice of the people, though not yet of canonical age, and at first disposed to avoid the election by flight; and thus he was raised to the highest ecclesiastical dignity of the East. For the bishop of Alexandria was at the same time metropolitan of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis. But now immediately began the long series of contests with the Arian party, which had obtained influence at the court of Constantine, and had induced the emperor to recall Arius and his adherents from exile. Henceforth the personal fortunes of Athanasius are so inseparably interwoven with the history of the Arian controversy that Nicene and Athanasian are equivalent terms, and the different depositions and restorations of Athanasius denote so many depressions and victories of the Nicene orthodoxy. Five times did the craft and power of his opponents, upon the pretext of all sorts of personal and political offences, but in reality on account of his inexorable opposition to the Arian and Semi-Arian heresy, succeed in deposing and banishing him.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It has destroyed the power of idolatry in Arabia and a large part of Asia and Africa, and raised Tartars and Negroes from the rudest forms of superstition to the belief and worship of the one true God, and to a certain degree of civilization. It should be mentioned, however, that, according to the testimony of missionaries and African travelers, Mohammedanism has inflamed the simple minded African tribes with the impure fire of fanaticism and given them greater power of resistance to Christianity. Sir William Muir, a very competent judge, thinks that Mohammedanism by the poisoning influence of polygamy and slavery, and by crushing all freedom of judgment in religion has interposed the most effectual barrier against the reception of Christianity. "No system," he says, "could have been devised with more consummate skill for shutting out the nations over which it has sway, from the light of truth. Idolatrous Arabs might have been aroused to spiritual life and to the adoption of the faith of Jesus; Mahometan Arabia is, to the human eye, sealed against the benign influences of the gospel .... The sword of Mahomet and the Coran are the most fatal enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth."140 This is no doubt true of the past. But we have not yet seen the end of this historical problem. It is not impossible that Islâm may yet prove to be a necessary condition for the revival of a pure Scriptural religion in the East. Protestant missionaries from England and America enjoy greater liberty under the Mohammedan rule than they would under a Greek or Russian government. The Mohammedan abhorrence of idolatry and image worship, Mohammedan simplicity and temperance are points of contact with the evangelical type of Christianity, which from the extreme West has established flourishing missions in the most important parts of Turkey. The Greek Church can do little or nothing with the Mohammedans; if they are to be converted it must be done by a Christianity which is free from all appearance of idolatry, more simple in worship, and more vigorous in life than that which they have so easily conquered and learned to despise. It is an encouraging fact that Mohammedans have, great respect for the Anglo-Saxon race. They now swear by the word of an Englishman as much as by the beard of Mohammed. Islâm is still a great religious power in the East. It rules supreme in Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, and makes progress among the savage tribes in the interior of the Dark Continent. It is by no means simply, as Schlegel characterized the system, "a prophet without miracles, a faith without mysteries, and a morality without love." It has tenacity, aggressive vitality and intense enthusiasm. Every traveller in the Orient must be struck with the power of its simple monotheism upon its followers. A visit to the Moslem University in the Mosque El Azhar at Cairo is very instructive.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Their sculpture and stained-glass windows, frescoes, and paintings presented scenes from Scripture and the history of the Church. There, kings and queens, warriors, and the men whom the age pronounced godly were laid away in sepulture, a custom continued after the modern period had begun, as in the case of Luther and Melanchthon, whose ashes rest in the Castle Church of Wittenberg. In spite of frequent fires consuming parts of the great churches or the entire buildings, they were restored or reconstructed, often several times, as in the case of the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury, and Norwich. Central towers collapsed, as in the case of Winchester, Peterborough, Lincoln, and other English cathedrals, but they were rebuilt. In the erection of these churches princes and people joined, and to further this object they gave their contributions of material and labor. The women of Ulm gave up all their ornaments to advance the work upon the cathedral of that city, and to the construction of the cathedral in Cologne Germans in all lands contributed. The eleventh century is the beginning of one of the most notable periods of architecture in the world’s history, lasting for nearly three centuries. It has a distinct character of its own and in its service high talent was consecrated. The monks may be said to have led the way by their zeal to erect strong, ample, and beautiful cloistral establishments. These called forth in France the ambition of the bishops to surpass them. Two styles of architecture are usually distinguished in this period, the Romanesque, called in England also the Norman, and the Gothic. Writers on architecture make a number of subdivisions and some have included all the architecture of the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries under the title Gothic, or Christian Pointed. During these centuries Europe, from the South to far Northern Scotland and Sweden, was dotted with imposing structures which on the one hand vied with St. Sophia of Constantinople, and on the other have been imitated but not equalled since. In Rome as late as the thirteenth century, when Honorius III. began the construction of San Lorenzo, the old basilica style continued to rule. The Romanesque style started from Northern Italy and, in the beginning of the eleventh century, crossed the Alps, where it had its most glorious triumphs. In Italy, the cathedral of Pisa represents the blending of the old and the new, the cruciform shape and the dome. In Germany, the cathedrals of Spires, Worms, and Mainz belong to this period, and in England its earlier cathedrals, or portions of them, like Winchester, begun about 1070, Worcester about 1084, Peterborough about 1120, Norwich about 1096, Ely about 1083, Durham about 1099. For the fundamental ground plan of the basilica was substituted the form of the cross. The size of the choir was increased and the choir was elevated.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Now, as the daughter of an humble citizen of Siena, she ministers to the poor and the sick: now, as the prophetess of heaven, she appeals to the conscience of popes and of commonwealths. Her native Sienese have sanctified her with the fragrant name la beata poplana, the blessed daughter of the people. Although much in her career, as it has been handed down by her confessor and biographer, may seem to be legendary, and although the hysterical element may not be altogether wanting from her piety, she yet deserves and will have the admiration of all men who are moved by the sight of a noble enthusiasm. It would require a fanatical severity to read the account of her unwearied efforts and the letters, into which she equally poured the fire of her soul, without feeling that the Sienese saint was a very remarkable woman, the Florence Nightingale of her time or more, "one of the most wonderful women that have ever lived," as her most recent English biographer has pronounced her. Or, shall we join Gregorovius, the thorough student of mediaeval Rome, in saying, "Catherine’s figure flits like that of an angel: through the darkness of her time, over which her gracious genius sheds a soft radiance. Her life is more worthy and assuredly a more human subject for history than the lives of the popes of her age."366 Catherine Benincasa was the twenty-third of a family of twenty-five children. Her twin sister, Giovanna, died in infancy. Her father was a dyer in prosperous circumstances. Her mother, Monna Lapa, survived the daughter. Catherine treated her with filial respect, wrote her letters, several of which are extant, and had her with her on journeys and in Rome during her last days there. Catherine had no school training, and her knowledge of reading and writing she acquired after she was grown up. As a child she was susceptible to religious impressions, and frequented the Dominican church near her father’s home. The miracles of her earlier childhood were reported by her confessor and biographer, Raymund of Capua. At twelve her parents arranged for her a marriage, but to avoid it Catherine cut off her beautiful hair. She joined the tertiary order of the Dominicans, the women adherents being called the mantellate from their black mantles. Raymund declares "that nature had not given her a face over-fair," and her personal appearance was marred by the marks of the smallpox. And yet she had a winning expression, a fund of good spirits, and sang and laughed heartily. Once devoted to a religious life, she practised great austerities, flagellating herself three times a day,—once for herself, once for the living and once for the dead. She wore a hair undergarment and an iron chain. During one Lenten season she lived on the bread taken in communion. These asceticisms were performed in a chamber in her father’s house. She was never an inmate of a convent.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  ballads and good ol’ radio platitudes of Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour merchant whom they first sent to the governor’s mansion, then to the U.S. Senate. It was Lyndon Johnson, in fact, whom the Ohio-reared O’Daniel defeated in the 1941 Senate race. Missouri boasted the only Republican in the bunch, a candidate named Dewey Short. He did not sing, but still earned the affectionate nickname “Hillbilly Demosthenes.” As a philosophy professor, ordained preacher, and congressman, he wore several hats. His style did not borrow from the ancient Greek oratorical tradition, but relied instead on caustic, alliterative adjectives. He creatively called Congress a “supine, subservient, soporific, supercilious, pusillanimous body of nitwits,” and maligned FDR’s vaunted Brain Trust as “professional nincompoops.” Short’s constituency, described in the press as the cornpone crowd, kept reelecting him because he spiced up his prose with a fine assortment of sassy flourishes. 67 Why this fascination with the hillbilly? In 1949, an Australian observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a “democracy of manners,” which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.” 68 The positive mythology about hillbillies suited such appeals to authenticity. Beyond the image of feuding and wasting time fishing, hillbillies also tapped into a set of golden age beliefs: they were isolated, primitive, and rough on the outside yet practiced a kind of genuine democracy. They were once again William Goodell Frost’s rustic Americans of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. The fantasy underwent a revival during the 1940s and 1950s, in the form of stories of plain, honest mountain people with “no respect for money, nor fame, or caste.” But the vaudeville antics never lost their appeal either. Some hillbilly bands became glamorous, and a female performer named Dorothy Shay launched her career in 1950 by playing the “Park Avenue Hillbilly.” She dressed as a city sophisticate while singing “happy-go-lucky” tunes. 69 The quintessential pop icon of the 1950s, Elvis Presley, was, some believed, part hillbilly. One of his earliest performances was billed as “The Hillbilly Jamboree,” and took place at Pontchartrain Beach near New Orleans in 1955, where the “Miss Hillbilly Dumplin’ Contest” was also held. He also toured with Andy Griffith. In the early years, Elvis’s musical style was seen as a mixture between hillbilly singing and rhythm and blues. In 1956, the music reviewer for the Times-Picayune was relieved to discover that the “self-confessed country

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  indeed as bishops. In fact those abbesses presiding over the greatest houses came to wear the headgear worn by abbots and bishops which symbolized authority in the Church: the mitre. The pioneers among royal abbesses actually predated Carolingian monarchy by a century and appeared far beyond the northern border of the Frankish realm. They were Anglo-Saxons, members of the Wuffingas, in the later seventh century the royal family of East Anglia. One of the first, Princess Aethelthryth (Etheldreda or Audrey), managed to remain a virgin through two royal marriages; she was latterly Queen Consort in Northumbria, before she separated from her long-suffering husband after twelve years and returned to her homeland in 673 to found her own double monastery for monks and nuns. She chose an island called Ely, protected by the expanses of fenland which formed the western frontier of her family’s kingdom – maybe her abbey could be seen as part of its border defences – and she became its first abbess. Twenty years after her death, her entombed corpse continued to make its presence felt. Having triggered enough miracles to demonstrate sanctity, it was solemnly reburied in a shrine which attracted a growing stream of pilgrims to her island retreat, and Etheldreda’s memory is still honoured by the Anglican Dean and Chapter who now cherish the magnificent Romanesque cathedral on its bracingly windswept scarp. Such royal princesses were invaluable in bringing a sacred character to their dynasties, now that kings were subject to the Church and could not fully play the role of cultic figures, as they had in pre-Christian religions.80 None of the roles of a Benedictine monastery just described – scholarship, eucharistic intercession or social engineering – had played any part or received any mention in the Rule of St Benedict. Nevertheless, because of them, the ninth to eleventh centuries were a golden age for monasteries of the Rule; the survival of European civilization would have been inconceivable without monasteries and nunneries. One ninth-century manuscript, which survives in its original home in the incomparable library of the Swiss Abbey of Sankt Gallen, contains the plan of an elaborate monastery which was created as an ideal rebuilding of the abbey. In it we see a layout which did indeed become standard for Benedictine houses for centuries: church, dining hall, dormitories and assembly hall (chapter house) grouped round a central cloister yard, with a host of lesser buildings and gardens around them to service the community (see Plate 10).81 It is all very different from the haphazard collection of cells and buildings which formed earlier monastic enclosures such as those still surviving in the west of Ireland. The plan itself speaks of order, just like the Rule of Benedict, and the increasingly elaborate and majestic cycle of liturgy in the monastery church, in the midst of a world which, for very good reasons, neurotically sought order and

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Catholic, orthodox, monastic, ascetic, but independent of the Pope, and differing from Rome in the age of Gregory I. in minor matters of polity and ritual. In his Confession he never mentions Rome or the Pope; he never appeals to tradition, and seems to recognize the Scriptures (including the Apocrypha) as the only authority in matters of faith. He quotes from the canonical Scriptures twenty-five times; three times from the Apocrypha. It has been conjectured that the failure and withdrawal of Palladius was due to Patrick, who had already monopolized this mission-field; but, according to the more probable chronology, the mission of Patrick began about nine years after that of Palladius. From the end of the seventh century, the two persons were confounded, and a part of the history of Palladius, especially his connection with Pope Caelestine, was transferred to Patrick.53 With St. Patrick there is inseparably connected the most renowned female saint of Ireland, St. Bridget (or Brigid, Brigida, Bride), who prepared his winding sheet and survived him many years. She died Feb. 1, 523 (or 525). She is "the Mary of Ireland," and gave her name to innumerable Irish daughters, churches, and convents. She is not to be confounded with her name-sake, the widow-saint of Sweden. Her life is surrounded even by a still thicker cloud of legendary fiction than that of St. Patrick, so that it is impossible to separate the facts from the accretions of a credulous posterity. She was an illegitimate child of a chieftain or bard, and a slave-mother, received holy orders, became deformed in answer to her own prayer, founded the famous nunnery of Kildare (i.e. the Church of the Oak),54 foretold the birth of Columba, and performed all sorts of signs and wonders. Upon her tomb in Kildare arose the inextinguishable flame called "the Light of St. Bridget," which her nuns (like the Vestal Virgins of Rome) kept "Through long ages of darkness and storm" (Moore). Six lives of her were published by Colgan in his Trias Thaumaturgus, and five by the Bollandists in the Acta Sanctorum. Critical Note on St. Patrick. We have only one or two genuine documents from Patrick, both written in semi-barbarous (early Irish) Latin, but breathing an humble, devout and fervent missionary spirit without anything specifically Roman, viz. his autobiographical Confession (in 25 chapters), written shortly before his death (493?), and his Letter of remonstrance to Coroticus (or Ceredig), a British chieftain (nominally Christian), probably of Ceredigion or Cardigan, who had made a raid into Ireland, and sold several of Patrick’s converts into slavery (10 chapters). The Confession, as contained in the "Book of Armagh," is alleged to have been transcribed before A.D. 807 from Patrick’s original autograph, which was then partly illegible. There are four other MSS. of the eleventh century, with sundry additions towards the close, which seem to be independent copies of the same original. See Haddan & Stubbs, note on p. 296.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Logos is the preexistent, absolute, personal Reason, and Christ is the embodiment of it, the Logos incarnate. Whatever is rational is Christian, and whatever is Christian is rational.1356 The Logos endowed all men with reason and freedom, which are not lost by the fall. He scattered seeds ( ) of truth before his incarnation, not only among the Jews but also among the Greeks and barbarians, especially among philosophers and poets, who are the prophets of the heathen. Those who lived reasonably ( ) and virtuously in obedience to this preparatory light were Christians in fact, though not in name; while those who lived unreasonably ( ) were Christless and enemies of Christ.1357 Socrates was a Christian as well as Abraham, though he did not know it. None of the fathers or schoolmen has so widely thrown open the gates of salvation. He was the broadest of broad churchmen. This extremely liberal view of heathenism, however, did not blind him to the prevailing corruption. The mass of the Gentiles are idolaters, and idolatry is under the control of the devil and the demons. The Jews are even worse than the heathen, because they sin against better knowledge. And worst of all are the heretics, because they corrupt the Christian truths. Nor did he overlook the difference between Socrates and Christ, and between the best of heathen and the humblest Christian. "No one trusted Socrates," he says, "so as to die for his doctrine but Christ, who was partially known by Socrates, was trusted not only by philosophers and scholars, but also by artizans and people altogether unlearned." The Christian faith of Justin is faith in God the Creator, and in his Son Jesus Christ the Redeemer, and in the prophetic Spirit. All other doctrines which are revealed through the prophets and apostles, follow as a matter of course. Below the deity are good and bad angels; the former are messengers of God, the latter servants of Satan, who caricature Bible doctrines in heathen mythology, invent slanders, and stir up persecutions against Christians, but will be utterly overthrown at the second coming of Christ. The human soul is a creature, and hence perishable, but receives immortality from God, eternal happiness as a reward of piety, eternal fire as a punishment of wickedness. Man has reason and free will, and is hence responsible for all his actions; he sins by his own act, and hence deserves punishment. Christ came to break the power of sin, to secure forgiveness and regeneration to a new and holy life. Here comes in the practical or ethical side of this Christian philosophy. It is wisdom which emanates from God and leads to God. It is a new law and a new covenant, promised by Isaiah and Jeremiah, and introduced by Christ.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These things produced a change in the opinions of Zosimus, and about the middle of the year 418, he issued an encyclical letter to all the bishops of both East and West, pronouncing the anathema upon Pelagius and Coelestius (who had meanwhile left Rome), and declaring his concurrence with the decisions of the council of Carthage in the doctrines of the corruption of human nature, of baptism, and of grace. Whoever refused to subscribe the encyclical, was to be deposed, banished from his church, and deprived of his property.1742 Eighteen bishops of Italy refused to subscribe, and were deposed. Several of these afterwards recanted, and were restored. The most distinguished one of them, however, the bishop Julian, of Eclanum, a small place near Capua in Campania, remained steadfast till his death, and in banishment vindicated his principles with great ability and zeal against Augustine, to whom he attributed all the misfortunes of his party, and who elaborately confuted him.1743 Julian was the most learned, the most acute, and the most systematic of the Pelagians, and the most formidable opponent of Augustine; deserving respect for his talents, his uprightness of life, and his immovable fidelity to his convictions, but unquestionably censurable for excessive passion and overbearing pride.1744 Julian, Coelestius, and other leaders of the exiled Pelagians, were hospitably received in Constantinople, in 429, by the patriarch Nestorius, who sympathized with their doctrine of the moral competency of the will, though not with their denial of original sin, and who interceded for them with the emperor and with pope Celestine, but in vain. Theodosius, instructed by Marius Mercator in the merits of the case, commanded the heretics to leave the capital (429). Nestorius, in a still extant letter to Coelestius,1745 accords to him the highest titles of honor, and comforts him with the examples of John the Baptist and the persecuted apostles. Theodore of Mopsuestia († 428), the author of the Nestorian Christology, wrote in 419 a book against the Augustinian anthropology, of which fragments only are left.1746 Of the subsequent life of Pelagius and Coelestius we have no account. The time and place of their death are entirely unknown. Julian is said to have ended his life a schoolmaster in Sicily, A.D. 450, after having sacrificed all his property for the poor during a famine. Pelagianism was thus, as early as about the year 430, externally vanquished. It never formed an ecclesiastical sect, but simply a theological school. It continued to have individual adherents in Italy till towards the middle of the fifth century, so that the Roman bishop, Leo the Great, found himself obliged to enjoin on the bishops by no means to receive any Pelagian to the communion of the church without an express recantation. At the third ecumenical council in Ephesus, A.D. 431 (the year after Augustine’s death), Pelagius (or more properly Coelestius) was put in the same category with Nestorius.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  And this is the very soul of evangelical Protestantism.10 Luther assigned to his solifidian doctrine of justification the central position in the Christian system, declared it to be the article of the standing or falling (Lutheran) church, and was unwilling to yield an inch from it, though heaven and earth should collapse.11 This exaggeration is due to his personal experience during his convent life. The central article of the Christian faith on which the church is built, is not any specific dogma of the Protestant, or Roman, or Greek church, but the broader and deeper truth held by all, namely, the divine-human personality and atoning work of Christ, the Lord and Saviour. This was the confession of Peter, the first creed of Christendom. The Protestant doctrine of justification differs from the Roman Catholic, as defined (very circumspectly) by the Council of Trent, chiefly in two points. Justification is conceived as a declaratory and judicial act of God, in distinction from sanctification, which is a gradual growth; and faith is conceived as a fiducial act of the heart and will, in distinction from theoretical belief and blind submission to the church. The Reformers derived their idea from Paul, the Romanists appealed chiefly to James (2:17–26); but Paul suggests the solution of the apparent contradiction by his sentence, that "in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love." Faith, in the biblical and evangelical sense, is a vital force which engages all the powers of man and apprehends and appropriates the very life of Christ and all his benefits. It is the child of grace and the mother of good works. It is the pioneer of all great thoughts and deeds. By faith Abraham became the father of nations; by faith Moses became the liberator and legislator of Israel; by faith the Galilean fishermen became fishers of men; and by faith the noble army of martyrs endured tortures and triumphed in death; without faith in the risen Saviour the church could not have been founded. Faith is a saving power. It unites us to Christ. Whosoever believeth in Christ "hath eternal life." "We believe," said Peter at the Council of Jerusalem, "that we shall be saved through the grace of God," like the Gentiles who come to Christ by faith without the works and ceremonies of the law. "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved," was Paul’s answer to the question of the jailor: "What must I do to be saved?" Protestantism does by no means despise or neglect good works or favor antinomian license; it only subordinates them to faith, and measures their value by quality rather than quantity. They are not the condition, but the necessary evidence of justification; they are not the root, but the fruits of the tree. The same faith which justifies, does also sanctify. It is ever "working through love" (Gal. 5:6). Luther is often charged with indifference to good works, but very unjustly.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  49) 1010 While compulsory conversion of the Jews was forbidden, yet no Jew converted by force was allowed to return to Judaism (c. 57). Very strenuous laws were passed relative to both the baptized and the unbaptized Jews (c. 58–66). The king was upheld in his government and the deposed king and his family perpetually excluded from power. When Isidore’s position is considered it is a probable conjecture that these canons express his opinions and convictions upon the different matters. Warned by disease of death’s approach, Isidore began the distribution of his property. For the last six months of his life he dispensed alms from morn till night. His end was highly edifying. Accompanied by his assembled bishops he had himself carried to the church of St. Vincent the Martyr, and there, having publicly confessed his sins, prayed God for forgiveness. He then asked the pardon and prayers of those present, gave away the last thing he owned, received the Holy Communion, and was carried to his cell, in which he died four days later, Thursday, April 4, 636.1011 He was immediately enrolled among the popular saints and in the 15th council of Toledo (688) is styled "excellent doctor," and by Benedict XIV. (April 25, 1722) made a Doctor of the Church. Isidore of Seville was the greatest scholar of his day. He was well read in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, in profane as well as in sacred and patristic literature. He was also a vigorous and dignified prelate, admired for his wondrous eloquence and beloved for his private virtues. He did much for education, especially of the clergy, and established at Seville a highly successful school, in which he himself taught. But his universal fame rests upon his literary works, which embrace every branch of knowledge then cultivated, and which though almost entirely compilations can not be too highly praised for their ability and usefulness. He performed the inestimable service of perpetuating learning, both sacred and secular. It is a striking testimony to his greatness that works have been attributed to him with which he had nothing to do, as the revision of the Mozarabic Liturgy and of Spanish ecclesiastical, and secular laws, and especially the famous Pseudo-Isidorian decretals. His Works may be divided loosely into six classes. We have two lists of them, one by his friend and colleague Braulio, bishop of Saragossa, and the other by his pupil, Ildefonsus of Toledo. No strict division of these works is possible, because as will be seen several of them belong in parts to different classes. I. Biblical. This class embraces, 1. Scripture Allegorics,1012 allegorical explanations, each in a single sentence, of 129 names and passages in the Old Testament, and of 211 in the New Testament; a curious and, in its way, valuable treatise, compiled from the older commentaries. 2. Lives and Deaths of Biblical Saints.1013 Very brief biographies of sixty-four Old Testament and twenty-one New Testament worthies. 3.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Nevertheless, this forerunner of modern investigation may by common verdict, though unhonored in his own age, come to be placed higher as a benefactor of mankind than the master of metaphysical subtlety, Duns Scotus, who spoke to his age and its immediate successors with authority.