During the period now under consideration there were great fluctuations, growths, changes, of opinion on three subjects in regard to which the public creeds did not prevent all freedom of thought by laying down definite propositions. We refer to baptism, the millennium, and purgatory. Christian baptism was first simply a rite of initiation into the Christian religion. Then it became more distinctly a symbol of faith in Christ and in his gospel, and an emblem of a new birth. Next it was imagined to be literally efficacious to personal salvation, solving the chains of the devil, washing off original sin, and opening the door of heaven.20 To trace the doctrine through its historical variations and its logical windings would require a large volume, and is not requisite for our present purpose. Almost all the early Fathers believingly looked for a millennium, a reign of Christ on earth with his saints for a thousand years. Daillé has shown that this belief was generally held, though with great diversities of conception as to the form and features of the doctrine." It was a Jewish notion which crept among the Christians of the first century and has been transmitted even to the present day. Some supposed the millennium would precede the destruction of the world, others that it would follow that terrible event, after a general renovation. None but the faithful would have part in it; and at its close they would pass up to heaven. Irenæus quotes a tradition, delivered by Papias, that "in the millennium each vine will bear ten thousand branches, each branch ten thousand twigs, each twig ten thousand clusters, each cluster ten thousand grapes, each grape yielding a hogshead of wine; and if any one plucks a grape its neighbors will cry, Take me: I am better!" This, of course, was a metaphor to show what the plenty and the joy of those times would be. According to the heretics Cerinthus and Marcion, the millennium was to consist in an abundance of all sorts of sensual riches and delights. Many of the orthodox Fathers held the same view, but less grossly; while others made its splendors and its pleasures mental and moral. Origen attacked the whole doctrine with vehemence and cogency. His admirers continued the warfare after him, and the belief in this celestial Cocaigne suffered much damage and sank into comparative neglect. The subject rose into importance again at the approaching close of the first chiliad of Christianity, but soon died away as the excitement of that ominous epoch passed with equal disappointment to the hopes and the fears of the believers. A galvanized controversy has been carried on about it again in the present century, chiefly excited by the modern sect of Second-Adventists. Large volumes have recently appeared, principally aiming to decide whether the millennium is to pre 20 Neander, Planting and Training, Eng. trans. p. 102. 21 De Usu Patrum, lib. ii. cap. 4. 22 Münscher, Entwickelung der Lehre vom Tausendjährigen Reiche in den Drei Ersten Jahrhunderten. In Henke's Magaz. b. vi. ss. 233–254. cede or to follow the second coming of Christ! The doctrine itself is a Jewish-Christian figment supported only by a shadowy basis of fancy. The truth contained in it, though mutilated and disguised, is that when the religion of Christ is truly enthroned over the earth, when his real teachings and life are followed, the kingdom of God will indeed cover the world, and not for a thousand years only, but unimaginable glory and happiness shall fill the dwellings of the successive generations of men forever.24 The doctrine of a purgatory-a place intermediate between Paradise and hell, where souls not too sinful were temporarily punished, and where their condition and stay were in the power of the Church on earth, a doctrine which in the Middle Age became practically the foremost instrument of ecclesiastical influence and income-was through the age of the Fathers gradually assuming shape and firmness. It seems to have been first openly avowed as a Church-dogma and effectively organized as a working power by Pope Gregory the Great, in the latter part of the sixth century.25 No more needs to be said here, as the subject more properly belongs to the next chapter. It but remains in close to notice those opinions relating to the future life which were generally condemned as heresies by the Fathers. One of the earliest of these was the destruction of the intermediate state and the denial of the general judgment by the assertion, which Paul charges so early as in his day upon Hymeneus and Philetus, "that the resurrection has passed already;" that is, that the soul, when it leaves the body, passes immediately to its final destination. This opinion reappeared faintly at intervals, but obtained very little prevalence in the early ages of the Church. Hierax, an author who lived at Leontopolis in Egypt early in the fourth century, denied the resurrection of the body, and excluded from the kingdom of heaven all who were married and all who died before becoming moral agents. Another heretical notion which attracted some attention was the opposite extreme from the foregoing,—namely, that the soul totally dies with the body, and will be restored to life with it in the general resurrection at the end of the world; an opinion held by an Arabian sect of Christians, who were vanquished in debate upon it by Origen, and renounced it.26 Still another doctrine known among the Fathers was the belief that Christ, when he descended into the under-world, saved and led away in triumph all who were there,-Jews, pagans, good, bad, all, indiscriminately. This is number seventy-nine in Augustine's list of the heresies. 23 See e. g. The End, by Dr. Cumming. The Second Advent, by D. Brown. 24 Bush, On the Millennium. Bishop Russell, Discourses on the Millennium. Corrodi, Geschichte des Chiliasmus. 25 Flügge, Geschichte der Lehre vom Zustande des Menschen nach dem Tode in der Christlichen Kirche, absch. v. ss. 320-352. 26 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. lib. vi. cap. 37. And there is now extant among the writings of Pope Boniface VI., of the ninth century, a letter furiously assailing a man who had recently maintained this "damnable doctrine." The numerous Gnostic sects represented by Valentinus, Cerinthus, Marcion, Basilides, and other less prominent names, held a system of speculation copious, complex, and of intensely Oriental character. That portion of it directly connected with our subject may be stated in few words. They taught that all souls pre-existed in a world of pure light, but, sinning through the instigation and craft of demons, they fell, were mixed with darkness and matter, and bound in bodies. Through sensual lusts and ignorance, they were doomed to suffer after death in hell for various periods, and then to be born again. Jehovah was the enemy of the true God, and was the builder of this' world and of hell, wherein he contrives to keep his victims imprisoned by deceiving them to worship him and to live in errors and indulgences. Christ came, they said, to reveal the true God, unmask the infernal character and wiles of. Jehovah, rescue those whom he had cruelly shut up in hell, and teach men the real way of salvation. Accordingly, Marcion declared that when Christ descended into the under-world he released and took into his own kingdom Cain, and the Sodomites, and all the Gentiles who had refused to obey the demon worshipped by the Jews, but left there, unsaved, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and the other patriarchs, together with all the prophets.27 The Gnostics agreed in attributing evil to matter, and made the means of redemption to consist in fastings and scourgings of the flesh, with denial of all its eravings, and in lofty spiritual contemplations. Of course, with one accord they vehemently assailed the dogma of the resurrection of the flesh. Their views, too, were inconsistent with the strict eternity of future hell-punishments. The fundamental basis of their system was the same as that of nearly all the Oriental philosophies and religions, requiring an ascetic war against the world of sense.. The notion that the body is evil, and the cause of evil, was rife even among the orthodox Fathers; but they stopped guardedly far short of the extreme to which the Gnostics carried it, and indignantly rejected all the strange imaginations which those heretics had devised to explain the subject of evil in a systematic manner. Augustine said, "If we say all sin comes from the flesh, we make the fleshless devil sinless!" Hermogenes, some of whose views at least were tinged with Gnosticism, believed the abyss of hell was formed by the confluence of matter, and that the devil and all his demons would at last be utterly resolved into matter.29 28 The theological system of the Manichæan sect was in some of its cardinal principles almost identical with those of the Gnostics, but it was 27 Irenæus, Adv. Hæres., lib. i. cap. 22. 28 Account of the Gnostic Sects, in Mosheim's Comm., II. Century, sect. 65. still more imaginative and elaborate.30 It started with the Persian doctrine of two antagonist deities, one dwelling with good spirits in a world of light and love, the other with demons in a realm of darkness and horror. Upon a time the latter, sallying forth, discovered, far away in the vastness of space, the world of light. They immediately assailed it. They were conquered after a terrible struggle and driven back; but they bore with them captive a multitude of the celestial souls, whom they instantly mixed with darkness and gross matter. The good God built this world of mingled light and darkness to afford these imprisoned souls an opportunity to purge themselves and be restored to him. In arranging the material substances to form the earth, a mass of evil fire, with no particle of good in it, was found. It had been left in their flight by the vanquished princes of darkness. This was cast out of the world and shut up somewhere in the dark air, and is the Manichæan hell, presided over by the king of the demons. If a soul, while in the body, mortify the flesh, observe a severe ascetic moral discipline, fix its thoughts, affections, and prayers on God and its native home, it will on leaving the body return to the celestial light. But if it neglect these duties and become more deeply entangled in the toils of depraved matter, it is cast into the awful fire of hell, where the cleansing flames of torture partially purify it; and then it is born again and put on a new trial. If after ten successive births-twice in each of five different forms-the soul be still unreclaimed, then it is permanently remanded to the furnace of hell. At last, when all the celestial souls seized by the princes of darkness have returned to God, save those just mentioned, this world will be burned. Then the children of God will lead a life of everlasting blessedness with him in their native land of light; the prince of evil, with his fiends, will exist wretchedly in their original realm of darkness. Then all those souls whose salvation is hopeless shall be drawn out of hell and be placed as a cordon of watchmen and a phalanx of soldiers entirely around the world of darkness, to guard its frontiers forever and to see that its miserable inhabitants never again come forth to invade the kingdom of light.31 The Christian after Christ's own pattern, trusting that when the soul left the body it would find a home in some other realm of God's universe where its experience would be according to its deserts, capacity, and fittedness, sought to do the Father's will in the present, and for the future committed himself in faith and love to the Father's disposal. The apostolic Christian, conceiving that Christ would soon return to raise the dead and reward his own, eagerly looked for the arrival of that day, and strove that he might be among the saints who, delivered or exempt from the Hadean imprisonment, should reign with the triumphant Messiah on earth and accompany him back to heaven. The patristic 30 Baur, Das Manichäische Religionssystem. Christian, looking forward to the divided under-world where all the dead must spend the interval from their decease to the general resurrection, shuddered at the thought of Gehenna, and wrestled and prayed that his tarrying might be in Paradise until Christ should summon his chosen ones, justified from the great tribunal, to the Father's presence. The Manichæan Christian, believing the soul to be imprisoned in matter by demons who fought against God in a previous life, struggled, by fasting, thought, prayer, and penance, to rescue the spirit from its fleshly entanglements, from all worldly snares and illusions, that it might be freed from the necessity of any further abode in a material body, and, on the dissolution of its present tabernacle, might soar to its native light in the blissful pleroma of eternal being. CHAPTER II. MEDIEVAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. 66 THE period of time covered by the present chapter reaches from the close of the tenth century to the middle of the sixteenth,-from the first full establishment of the Roman Catholic theology and the last general expectation of the immediate end of the world to the commencing decline of medieval faith and the successful inauguration of the Protestant Reformation. The principal mental characteristic of that age, especially in regard to the subject of the future life, was fear. "Never," says Michelet, "can we know in what terrors the Middle Age lived." There was all abroad a living fear of men, fear of the State, fear of the Church, fear of God, fear of the devil, fear of hell, fear of death. Preaching consisted very much in the invitation, "Submit to the guidance of the Church while you live," enforced by the threat, or you shall go to hell when you die." Christianity was practically reduced to some cruel metaphysical dogmas, a mechanical device for rescuing the devil's captives from him, and a system of ritual magic in the hands of a priesthood who wielded an authority of supernatural terrors over a credulous and shuddering laity. It is true that the genuine spirit and contents of Christianity were never wholly suppressed. The love of God, the blessed mediation of the benignant Jesus, the lowly delights of the Beatitudes, the redeeming assurance of pardon, the consoling, triumphant expectation of heaven, were never utterly banished even from the believers of the Dark Age. Undoubtedly many a guilty but repentant soul found forgiveness and rest, many a meek and spotless breast was filled with pious rapture, many a dying disciple was comforted and inspired, by the good tidings proclaimed from priestly lips even then. No doubt the |