The Beginnings of Christianity

THE studies and discourses that are herein offered to the public deal with some general conditions of Christian life in the first three centuries of our era. Though already printed, at intervals and amid the pressure of grave academic duties, it is hoped that a certain unity of doctrine, purpose, and interest will not be found wanting to their collection as a series. In one way or another they illustrate certain phases and circumstances of those wonderful centuries before Constantine the Great, when the constitution and the institutions of the new religious society were developing on all sides within the vast Empire of Rome. The teachings of Jesus Christ were the pure, sweet leaven that permeated the decaying and unhappy society of antiquity, saved from its mass of corruption some germs of goodness and truth, of beauty and justice, and strengthened the State against those shocks that would otherwise have reduced it to primeval barbarism. A perennial charm must therefore attach to any narrative of the problems and vicissitudes of this era. This is particularly true of the sufferings of the infant churches, and the social changes their rapid growth could not fail to work in the Roman society that seemed to contain them, but of which, unknown to it, they were themselves the containing and sustaining soul, according to an admirable saying of the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetus. It is not without some diffidence and a clear sense of the shortcomings of these pages that the author commits them to the indulgence of his readers.