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Untitled Article
curiosity and inquiry on the Christian faith , together with the degree in which good or ill proceeded from the endeavour to compromise and reconcile the new opinions with the retention of philosophic habits of speculation ; the process by which speculation became interwoven in doctrine , and error in the latter , to be treated as crime ; the degree in which the Christians in their sacerdotal observances imitated the Jewish rites ; the causes and intrigues which led to the treatment first of Christianized Jews , and then of Christians in
general , as political rebels by the Romans ; the character and history of some of the earliest fathers , and the caution with which their accounts of the professors of rival opinions are always to be received ; the habits and ecclesiastical discipline of the early Christian professors ; the degree of diffusion among them of the canonical and apocryphal books , and the degree in which their use for the purposes of worship was affected by analogy to that of the Hebrew Scriptures ; the early Christian libraries and literary institutions of
which we have scattered notices ;—ail these are topics on which much information could be given , and given in such a form as to fix a real and faithful general impression on the mind . What we often feel in pursuing inquiries and investigating facts arising out of a state of society utterly opposed to what we have any previous notion or conception of , is not merely to learn facts , but to know how to apply them—how the general frame of society affected , or was affected by , them ; and no greater mistakes have , in our
opinion , arisen in early ecclesiastical history , than in confounding states , circumstances and ideas , which external relations render totally dissimilar . We should wish to see drawn , in the history and probable progress of an inquiring and observing mind in the age to which we allude , as accurate and graphic a detail as history will furnish . That a good deal must , of course , be filled up by the judgment arid conception of the writer , reasoning
from the analogies and deductions which he would draw from scanty materials , must be admitted ; but the necessity of this inferential and analogic filling up of the picture , at the same time that it increases the difficulty , shews the importance of the design to a fair and perfect view of the state of society . As to doctrine , the periods we should propose would , we conceive , offer less of difficulty than might be at first imagined ; we should not wish to see such a work take much of a controversial character , and one result
of the impression which we should expect to derive from it would be , a conviction of the insignificant position which is occupied in early history by points that afterwards distracted the church , —of their inapplicableness to the early state of the Christian communities , —and of the necessity , therefore , for the conclusion that they owe the very grounds of their existence to any thing rather than primitive principles . The period we should be inclined to select for the narrative , would be from the first siege of Jerusalem , A . D . 70 , a sufficiently remote period to avoid any irreverent collision with the apostolic writings , to its final destruction , A . D .
137 . Of one thing we are certain , that if the object which we contemplate should fail , of fixing in an engaging and connected form , a great deal of matter which is necessary to right conceptions , but which now forms the dry burden of scholastic theology ; still an opportunity would be offered of drawing some of the noblest portraitures of self-devotion , piety , simplicity and virtue ; of the practical effects of the beautiful precepts of the gospel in softening and humanizing the mind ; of inculcating many a practical lesson of humility and simplicity in faith and practice , and many a warning against the evil consequences which have resulted from adding to divine truth the traditions and commandments of men . 7-
Untitled Article
Review . — Cavfs Primitive Christianity . 439
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1827, page 439, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1797/page/47/
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