James

i, 27—ii, 1). Not so speaks the Catholic (or “general”) Church, when demanding baptism, confe ion to a priest, cro es, and candles, Each of the seven or eight “Catholic” Churches calls itself the only true Church, and denounces | outside the fold as heretics, infidels, or atheists, whom she would gladly destroy. Yet St Augustine wrote (about 410 a.c.): “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and was never absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ himself appeared in the flesh; since when the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity.” This is sound history, though the pious father, like others, sometimes we fear forgot it. For there has never been a quite new religion since the world began. All faiths grow according to the universal laws of evolution. All are modified according to locality and surrounding circumstances, depending on the culture of leaders and people, borrowing from and adding to the legendary lore of the past, absorbing ideas, here a little and there a little, here a demi-god, a saint, or a rite, there a custom, doctrine, or emblem. Thus did Christianity also grow gradually in Judea, Syria, Greece, Egypt, Italy and Persia. [Almost from the first we trace three main lines of variation: for, like Buddhism, the history of the Christian faith is one of wide acceptance in the course of some 300 years, followed by corruption, schism, and decay. In Palestine we find the Jewish Ebionite Christians— ‘especially in Bashan—to whom Jesus was a prophet and a “servant lof God” (see Didaché). In the west the school of Paul insisted on the ‘resurrection of the Me iah, and on his atoning sacrifice of self. ‘In Asia Minor, and in Egypt, the great Gnostic sects regarded him as a ‘god, virgin born, and with a divine body (see Clement of Alexandria), |All alike believed that the world would soon come to an end, and that Yesus would return from heaven, as Me iah and judge.-—Ep.] | The Samaritans, as well as the Jews, believed in an “anointed one” (John iv, 25); yet many looked on Jesus as a Hebrew Stoik, Petting Pythagoras, and the Buddhist-like E enes of Judea (see H enes). But when we come to consider the place of Jesus in history, we are confronted by the startling fact that we have no contemporary information. The epistles precede the gospels, and the earliest epistles date not earlier than 20 years after the crucifixion. Though born in the great literary age of Augustus, Jesus is unnoticed by any Greek or Roman poet or historian (see Mr Moncure Conway’s Modern Thought): “There is not a sentence, or a word, on which history can fix as certain evidence that he ever lived at all.” [Tolstoi regards this as une ential, considering that we po e Christ's words, The same fact characterises the history of Buddhism. In each case the monumental evidence begins with texts carved 300 years after the death of the Master, when the faith was first recognised by an emperor—Constantine or Asoka. 461