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THE tendency of life, to "spread sheaf-like" from each new point of vantage gained; to fritter its first great dower of momentum amongst innumerable variations of the original type, to turn upon itself, break down and fall back from the first, spontaneous impulse to easy and quickly-crystallising habits, is nowhere better seen than in the primitive history of the Christian Church. So quick was this development that Harnack is able to enumerate eight independent factors of the primitive religion as preached in the second century, each one of which was responsible for a certain number of conversions, and was accepted by a certain group as the "essence" of Christianity.(1) Though several of these factors — the "gospel of salvation," the idea of a New People, or "Third Race," and the cult of the Christian mysteries — have their origin in the mystical consciousness, only one, the gift of the "Spirit and Power," really represents that consciousness; and this was already by no means the most prominent aspect of the Christian "Way."
The origin of that Way — the outbreak of life in a new direction, its saltatory ascent to freedom — was rooted in the unique personality of Jesus, the balance and wholeness of His spirit, His perfect fruition of Reality. We have seen that this exalted life was inherited to a less extent yet still under forms of great richness and power, by Paul and John; that it was known, according to their measure, by many of the first generation of converts, who, orientat-
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ing themselves anew to the Transcendent Order,"changing their minds," became conscious of that strange enhancement of vitality, that alteration in the rhythm and meaning of life, that inflowing power and peace which they called "the gift of the Spirit." (2) Soon, however, this very gift became itself amenable to the inexorable law of movement, variation, and change: for it was a living thing. Under the pressure of environment, and under the spur of altered conditions which brought fresh opportunities, limitations, and necessities in their wake, it tended to the production of new species, clothed itself in many different forms. Primitive characters became atrophied and disappeared. New features were called into existence. The wholeness of the original type split up, and was recaptured only in isolated individuals, whose deep reality, and virile power of transcending circumstances, allowed them to repeat the curve of the life of Christ.
So far as the totality of the Christian body is concerned, the mystical impulse which was inherent in its origin appeared in the four centuries generally called primitive under four chief forms.
First, in the claim to the possession of "more abundant life," which showed itself both in prophetic and ecstatic phenomena, and in the spontaneous exhibition of power and newness: the poetic inspiration of prophets, the God-intoxicated courage of martyrs. This was a direct development and continuance ef the "charismatic" or enthusiastic period.
Secondly, as that fresh period of youthfulness passed away, in the selection from the Christian body af an inner circle capable of living the "Higher" or mystical life; and in the art of contemplation, as taught by the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries and practised by these
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spiritual Christians. This phase made of mysticism pre-eminently the quest of the Vision of God: an unbalanced development of one side of the life of Jesus, its outward swing towards fruition of the Absolute.
Thirdly, in the birth of monasticism, the complementary quest of personal sanctity asserted itself : the love-impelled struggle to rebuild character in conformity with the Divine World. This, a new and genuine effort of spirit to cut a thoroughfare to its home, descends from the ethical and psychological side of the Christian gospel, with its emphasis on the need of regeneration.
Fourthly, the mystic tendency expressed itself in the drama of the Sacraments, which tended as they developed to recapitulate the interior facts of the Mystic Way, and to give the secret laws of spirit a symbolic and artistic form.
These four streams of development — the inspirational, the contemplative, the ascetic, the sacramental — though they arose in the order in which I have given them, are but the various manifestations of one tendency: the mystical tendency to transcendence inherent in humanity. They originate, one and all, in the spiritual consciousness; in Pauline language, are the "fruits" of one Spirit — the urgent, unresting Spirit of Life. Often they interpenetrated each other, as happened especially with the ascetic and contemplative ideals. Often they reacted upon each other. Sometimes one seems to disappear, as happened frequently with the prophetic and inspirational type; but it always breaks out again when circumstances open a door. In the great and perfect mystic — St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Teresa, Boehme, Fox — all four strands are plaited together; the eager, romantic, spontaneous impulse, the disciplined power of attending to Reality, the passion for holiness, the sacramental vision of the world. Each contributes its part to the "fulness of the stature of Christ."
These four strands then — these four paths cut by the new tendency of life — I propose to consider in order, as
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they appeared during the first four Christian centuries. In each of these centuries, we see that though one may be dominant, yet all are present. Prophecy, conternplation, asceticism, sacrarnentalism, are permanent characters of the Christian type. First of them in time comes that great, uplifting sense of novelty which expressed itself under the forms of charismatic gifts and prophetic enthusiasm, and which inspired the idea of Christians as a "new " or "third" race.
One of the strongest marks of the primitive Church is the steady conviction, founded on experience, that some unknown powerful life transcending the known natural order energised humanity; especially that section of humanity — that "New Race," as it was not afraid to call itself — which had accepted the Christian "revelation" and set in hand the Christian process of growth. This conviction, already prominent in the writer of Acts, at last crystallised in the "belief in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life," which found a place in the Nicene Creed: but this formula is merely a memorial raised over the sepulchre of vital experiences — experiences in which that which we should now call the elan vital in its highest form of expression was felt and known, energising the "little flock," breaking out sheaf-like into the " many fruits" of the "one Spirit," and producing fresh effects within the temporal world.
This "Spirit," this new, abundant, enthusiastic life, took in experience a two-fold form. As turned towards Transcendent Reality, in its purely religious aspect, it expressed itself in a deep, permanent, inward conviction of mystical union with God, a "sonship," which included the brotherly relation of charity with all other twice-born men. These, the "New Race," were the members of a divine family, already living Eternal Life: and their elder brother was the exalted Christ. As a secondary condition of consciousness, possession of the "Spirit'' showed itself in new strange powers, those alterations and enhancements
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of personality and often bizarre psychic phenomena which mark all great epochs of spiritual vitality. These phenomena represent, as it were, the lowest common measure of mystical consciousness existing in the primitive communities: the extent to which the contagious quality of that fresh life, enjoyed and freely imparted by the Christian leaders, was felt by the crowd, dragged up in the wake of these stronger spirits to fresh levels of experience, and made to move in "worlds not realised."
In the fourteenth century, during the mystical revival of the Friends of God(3), in the fifteenth amongst the Anabaptists (4),and in the seventeenth, when the Quaker movement was in its first enthusiastic stage,(5) such collective experiences of mystic phenomena, and such general, sometimes disorderly exhibitions of psychic "gifts," under the influence of leaders of great spiritual genius, were common; and help us to understand the conditions which brought about the "charismatic" period in the Early Church. A social life of close sympathy and enthusiasm then welded the small communities together; a common passion and belief, a common concentration upon spiritual interests, created an atmosphere peculiarly favourable to the development of the transcendental sense. Each little Christian church, in so far as it remained true to its mission, was a forcing-house for the latent mystic faculty in man. The principles which govern the psychology of crowds apply as well to religious as to secular assemblies (6): but here it is the buried craving for supersensual satisfaction, the instinct for Eternity, the stifled sense of a duty towards an Appellant Love, rather than the primitive and savage aspects of human personality, which emerge in response to the changed rhythm of the surrounding life and impose themselves upon the general consciousness.
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A corporate condition of receptivity, of eager and convinced attentiveness to Reality, may thus be produced, which stings to a temporary alertness the spiritual "spark" that is present in every soul. Thus in the early Christian gatherings profound alterations af tension were felt, resulting in abnormal and sometimes undisciplined outbursts of psychic energy. Men were suddenly caught up to new levels of life, filled with celestial enthusiasm, and discerned powers in themselves which they did not know that they possessed. Thbroughfares — though seldom perfect thoroughfares — were opened for that strange inspiring power which Paul and John learned by long discipline to exhibit in orderly splendour; but which often broke out in crude psychic automatisms in those whose "conversion" had not passed on from the enthusiastic to the purgative and educative stage, and who remained — as Paul indeed names them — " children in mind."(7) Paul's letters and the book of Acts show how violently and frequently such collective "manifestations of the Spirit" were felt in the primitive congregations of the first century: uprushes of supernal enthusiasm, abrupt dilatations of consciousness resulting sometimes in prophetic utterance, sometimes in ecstatic but unintelligible speech, sometimes experienced as a sudden, exultant consciousness of the Presence of Gad, when "the Spirit fell on them." (8)
That they were a " new people," a Third Race, a special variation of the human species destined to "inherit eternal life" and possessing as none others did the seed of immortality — this notion, interwoven with crudely realistic expectations of a Second Coming, when there should be "a resurrection of the dead but not of all,"(9) was central
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for the Christian consciousness. This sense of special life at work in them and a special destiny at hand — of a true difference in kind between the "new creature" and the normal man — shown in the steady persistence of visions, ecstacies and apocalyptic writings, also inspires the peculiar reverence felt for the prophet, the mystical teacher, the God-intoxicated man, as being of special value to the community. These prophets seem to have gone to and fro amongst the earlier churches like knights-errant, wrapped round with their romantic visions of a wider universe, a more exalted life. veritable "minnesingers of the Holy Ghost," they kept alive the wild, free poetic quality of the Christian revelation; were a perpetual check on life's tendency to lag behind. They were received everywhere with respect; a respect which soon created the need of some standard whereby the false prophet might be separated from the true. We see the beginning of this development even in the Johannine period.(10) In that enigmatic book the Teaching of the Apostles, the false prophet — the imitation mystic — has become a recognised danger; though the true prophet, who is evidently still looked upon as a permanent and not uncommon feature of Christian life, has lost none of his prestige. His acts and utterances are sacred; he is not amenable to ordinary rules. "Any prophet speaking in the Spirit ye shall not try, neither discern; for every sin shall be forgiven, but this sin shall not be forgiven." One rule only, and that the hardest, may be enforced against him: his life must tally with the vision he proclaims. "Every prophet teaching the truth, if he doeth not what he teacheth, is a false prophet," (11)
The " prophet " was the man in whom the " Spirit", the new dower of vitality, the higher consciousness, which animated in theory the whole Church, broke out with special power. But the essentially mystical hope of a new life, which
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the Epistle of Barnabas calls "the beginning and end of our faith,"(12) was the hope held out to every initiate of the primitive time. This profound conviction of novelty it is which inspires the first mission preaching. It runs like a thread of fire through the Christian Apocalypse. " Him that overcometh . . . I will write upon him my new name," "they sung a new song," "I saw a new heaven and a new earth," and so to the last awful declaration, "He that sat upon the throne said, Behold! I make all things new." (13) The Pauline conviction "to every one of us is given grace" (14) — a dower of transcendent vitality — was the official belief, if not the universal experience. It has left its mark upon the ceremonies and sacraments of the Church; it crops up constantly in the writings of the early Apologists. It made of the real Christian someone set apart, not by his creed — one amongst the myriad beliefs of the later Empire — but by the tendency of his life, the depth, richness, and infinite possibillties of the universe in which he lived. "Christians," says Swete, "were readily distinguished by it, not only from their heathen neighbours, but from the Jews, with whom they had been at first confused. They were seen to form a third class or type (tertius genus) living amongst Pagans and Jews, but incapable of rningling with either, or losing their identity." (15)
This strong collective consciousness of power and newness, the persistent exhibition of "charismatic" gifts, the exultant courage of the martyrs, the sense of separation from the world, continued to a certain extent — though with ever-decreasing radiance — through the first three centuries of the Christian era. At first these characters were so common as to be taken for granted: the normal marks of the "new" or "peculiar" people,(16) the "God-loving and
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God-fearing Race."(17) Thus Irenaeus says, writing in the second centurv, " We hear many brethren in the Church who possess prophetic gifts, and through the Spirit speak all kinds of languages, and bring to light for the general benefit the hidden things of men, and declare the mysteries of God."(18) With the passing of time, however, these "gifts" died out amongst the laity; though they long survived in the professionally religious class, to which the more ardent and spiritual natures — possessed of an instinct for reality, and capable of discipline and growth — inevitably tended to belong.
The primitive idea of Christianity as a supra-normal life, the achievement of a complete humanity "in Christ", an appropriation of the "Spirit" and of "power," the acquirement of perfect freedom, was never wholly lost. It appeared in all its old strength in sporadic outbursts of enthusiasm, such as that which is known as the "Montanist" movement of the second century. This Montanist movement, which seems to have originated in the strong but undisciplined mystical power of Montanus and his prophetess daughters, and attracted many of his most spiritually minded contemporaries, was really an attempt to check the rapid toning-down and secularisation of Christianity, the rapid disappearance of mystical ideals, and give practical expression to the Johannine doctrine of the "Paraclete," the actual, divine life dwelling in and energising the Christian Church. It was founded on a clear personal recognition of an inspiring spirit — a transcendent life-force — working like leaven in human personality; changing it, leading it on and up, and sometimes breaking through into the field of consciousness in ecstatic intuitions of spiritual things. It restored to their primitive position the old romantic fervour, the Pauline sense of being " God-possessed." For Montanus, as for the poet of the Odes of Solomon, the mind of the Christian prophet is a lyre, and the Spirit is the plectrum which plays
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thereon.(19) The aim of the Montanists was the establishment of a "spiritual church of spiritual men": and they did, as a fact, revive for a time in their comrr unities the chief charismatic phenornena af the Pauline churches. Ecstatics of various grades — prophets, visionaries, and clairvoyants — were common in the Montanist church(20). Tertullian, its greatest convert, often refers to thern: and composed a long treatise, now lost, upon ecstacy.
Nor did the manifestation of abnormal power, the instinct for a great spiritual destiny, die with the fall of the Montanists. It represented one of the fundamental principles of the Christian family; though as that family enlarged its boundaries and psychological conversion was more and more often replaced by mere formal belief, it tended inevitably to become an unrealised dream for the average Christian, who had changed his religion indeed but not his mind. Tormented by the vision of a "more abundant life" needed but not attained, the promise of renewal was soon identified by such Christians, not with any present possession of vitalitv and joy, any first-hand adjustment to a Perfection awaiting them in the Here-and-Now, but with the old eschatological hope of a coming "millenium and resurrection of the flesh" — the mystery of the Kingdom and of New Creatures reduced to crudest and most concrete terms. It was easy to find authoritv for such doctrines in the Synoptic gospels, which presented the apocalyptic vision of Jesus on its most definitely eschatological side, and in the swarm of Jewish and Christian prophetic writings, many of which possessed almost canonical authority. We have in the New Testament canon a superb example of such literature at its best : its passion, vividness, and rugged splendour, its impressive power. So popular were these ideas, says Harnack,
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that " they soon appeared to the pagans to be the distinguishing features of this silly religion!''(21)
Yet behind this popular travesty of the secret of transcendence, this vulgar and materialistic eschatology, the deep human instinct for a consummation of all things in God, some final attainment of Absolute Life, which is the motive power of all apocalyptic speculation, persisted. The "little secret love" went on, and with it, the secret, powerful growth; the deeply-hidden leaven did not fail. In the steady stiffening of the Christian body, the growth of theology and ceremonial, the "organisation of the Church," the branching coral soon begins to seem more important than the scrap of Eternal Life which it hides: but that life is there, and those who know where to look may trace its operations, its passionate attention to Reality, its steady onward push towards expression. Here and there a phrase in the writings of the Fathers, a significant detail in sorne rite, hints at the presence below the threshold of the vital spirit of growth.
Though the Church as it developed showed ever more strongly the tendency of all organised groups to fall back from the spontaneous to the mechanical, the instinct for novelty, for regeneration and growth the sense of movement towards a more complete life — a higher level of being — never ceased. In the few, it continued to produce the original "charismatic" effects, though this became more and more the rarely-observed mark of a peculiar sanctity. "There are still preserved amongst Christians," says Origen, writing in the third century, " traces of that holy Spirit which appeared in the form of a dove. They expel evil spirits and foresee certain events, according to the will of the Logos." (22) A century later, however, when Christianity had becorne the State religion and a comfortable security had taken the place of the sufferings and enthusiasm of the past, Theodore of Antioch (23) observes
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that these special gifts "have ceased long ago to find a place amongst us. If you insist that they have nat ceased, because there are persons who can do wonders by the power of prayer (though this does not often happen) I reply, that in this sense wonders will never cease, for the saints can never wholly fail us." (24)
Thanks to this unfailing family of saints, the Interior Church of mystic souls, who acted within the Christian body as the intuitive faculty acts within the individual man, the central features of the gospel of New Life were given ceremonial expression in the organised cult; and remain to us as memorials of the life which was destined to be the "light of rnen." A more detailed consideration of the Christian liturgy(25) will make it clear that the ritual and sacramental life of the Church, as we now possess it, is a drama of the deification of the soul: of the "making of Christs," to use the strong blunt language of Methodius. The twin mystic facts of rebirth and of union — the emergence of the separated spirit lnto the transcendental world, and a growth conditioned by its feeding on the substance of Reality — are the focal points of the developed cult: and the beginnings of this development — most clearly seen, perhaps, in regard to baptism — are discernible in the primitive times.
Already in the Fourth Gospel we see the germ of an identification of the biological fact of 'new birth" with baptism, the sacrarnental rite of initiation: the coupling together of "water'' and "spirit." (26) In all probability this idea reflects back to the baptismal experience of Jesus Himself, which was recognised in the earliest times as a vital condition of His career. Certainly it indicates the direction in which the "Mind of the Church" was to move. For the earliest converts, living in a world familiar with the idea af initiatory rites, and particularly of ceremonial washing or purification as a preliminary to being
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" saved,"(27) it must often have happened that the deeply significant drama which admitted them to membership of the "new race" did coincide with a certain enhancement of consciousness, a flooding of the personality with a conviction of new lifa and light. There is every probability that the psychological phenomena of conversion were often witnessed. It is at any rate certain that in the primitive time the baptised Christian was looked upon, not as a person who had changed his beliefs, but as a person who was definitely re-born: thrust into another universe. The Johannine figure of "new birth," the Pauline language abaut 'new creation" was accepted in its literal sense, because it was still a description of experience for many of the neophytes. The so-called "Odes" of Solomon, probably our oldest collection of Christian hymns, bears abundant witness to this point of view.(28) Many of these odes seem to have been composed for use at baptismal ceremonies; and the sense of regeneration, of an actual change and newness, is their constant theme.
" The Spirit brought me forth before the face of the Lord.
And although a son of man, I was named the Illuminate, the son of God.(29)
For according to the Greatness of the Most High, so He made me, and like His own newness, He renewed me. And He anointed me for His own perfection, and I became one of His neighbours. (30)
Again:
" I received the face and the fashion of a new person, and I walked in it and was saved. . . .
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And all that have seen me were amazed, and I was regarded by them as a new person. . . .
Nothing appeared closed to me, because I was the door of everything.(31)
The most ancient baptismal frescoes of the catacombs express this same idea of a veritable renovation, or new birth. The giving of new power to the paralytic in the pool of Bethesda, and of sight to the man blind from birth, are here the common symbols of baptism. In the rare pictures which represent the actual administration of the sacrament, the catechumen appears as a little child: whilst in the inscriptions the newly baptised are called "infants" and re-born — "renati, neophyti, pueri, puellae." (32) They were called "infants," says St. Augustine, who must often have seen the catacomb frescoes, "because they were regenerate, had entered on a new life, and were re-born into Eternal Life": and this language persisted till his own day. "That aged man," he says, describing the conversion and baptism of Victorinus, "did not blush to become the child of Thy Christ — the babe of Thy font." (33)
The early liturgies tell the sarne tale. In the Gothic rite, the priest prays that the baptised be "regenerate, to grow and be strengthened evermore in the inner man." In the Mozarabic, that they may be " restored to a new infancy." (34) The mass for the newly baptised in the Gelasian sacramentary invokes the Deity as "Thou who dost receive into the heavenly kingdom only those re-born." (35) Further, in this respect the belief of the catacombs remains the belief of the living Church. The sublime invocation for the blessing of the waters of the font in the Roman Missal gathers up into one great prayer the whole cycle of mystical ideas connected with new birth.
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May the Holy Spirit, by the secret intermingling of His divine power, make fruitful this water, prepared for the regeneration of men; that, holiness having been conceived from the immaculate womb of the Divine Fountain, a celestial offspring may came forth, born again, transformed into a new creature. And may all those distinguished either by sex in the body, or by age in time, be brought forth into one infancy by Grace, their mother." (36)
Moreover throughout the primitive time — as if to emphasise the reality of this fresh start, this spiritual infancy — after his baptism milk and horey were given to the neophyte, as they were in the antique world to newborn infants: honey to quicken and milk to feed. (37) "What, then," says the second-century writer of the Epistle of Barnabas, "mean the milk and honey? This: that as the infant is kept alive first by honey, and then by milk, so also we, being quickened and kept alive by the faith of the promise, and by the Lord, shall live ruling over the earth." (38)
As experience stiffened into creed, and the little concentrated Church of the Saints became the great diluted Church of the State, there was an inevitable transference of emphasis from interior fact to dramatic expression. Magic, which everywhere dogs the footsteps of religion
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as automatism dogs the footsteps of life, seized on the Christian sacraments, and identified the exterior rite of baptisrn with the interior and psychological fact of "regeneration." The springing up of the divine seed in the soul, the change of consciousness, the emergence of the tendency to Reality which begins the Mystic Way, was at last supposed to be conditioned by the external sign: as the interior feeding upon the Divine Nature was supposed to be conditioned by Eucharistic communion. As the exterior Church grew in numbers and popularity the collective vision became dim, and the mystical experience rare: the majority of those swept into the Christian net were capable at most of a temporary exaltation af consciousness, under the influence of those dramatic ceremonies which are like poignant and suggestive pictures of the private adventures of the soul. These ceremonies did, and do, snatch up the attentive mind to heightened rhythms of being. They make it aware, according to its measure, of the supernal worid; as the antique mysteries conferred on their initiates a temporary exaltation of consciousness. Hence they soon imposed themselves upon the crowd, as a part of the actual body, instead of the outward vesture of the " Bride." Yet their value, as fixing and making objective the meaning of the Christian life — dramatising it as a birth into, and a growth within a new and higher order of Reality, a treading of the Mystic Way — cannot be over-rated. The whole biological secret of Jesus, the ascent of human personality to complete fruition of the Eternal Order — the progressive deification of the soul, by the dual action of an inflowing energy from without, and organic growth from within — is still implied in the two sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist; though hidden beneath an elaborate magical apparatus of exorcism, lustration, and invocation, occult gestures and " Words of Power."
Moreover, these sacraments were often from the first veritable "means of grace," bridges flung out towards
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the Spiritual Order, for selves capable of receiving the messages of Reality. By their interweaving of the sensual with the supersensual, they brought the Eternal into time, translated the Song of Angels into a dialect that man could understand. They focussed, as great rituals can, the attentive will in the new direction; and conditioned a true change in the quality of consciousness. Thus St. Cyprian says of his own baptism: " After the stain of my early life had been washed away bv the birth-wave, and a light from above poured into my purified and reconciled breast, and after I had drunk the Spirit from heaven and a second birth had restored and made me a new man — at once in a marvellous fashion my doubts began to be set at rest, doors which had been shut against me were thrown open, dark places grew light, what had seemed hard before was now easy of accomplishment, and what I had thought impossible was now seen to be within my power. So that I could now recognise that . . . that thing in me which the Holy Spirit was quickening had begun to be of God." (39)This is a real conversion: not a magical act but a veritable "change of mind," a quickening of the higher centres which begins, as Cyprian himself recognises, a new growth towards Reality. So too the martyr Methodius, though in common with the whole church of his day he identities initiation into the spiritual life with the sacramental act, says that those who so participate in the Divine Order are "made Christs"; and adds that in the experience of each such re-born soul, the growth of Christ, the essential mystic movement from incarnation to passion, must repeat itself.(40)
Notes
1. The Mission and Expansion of Christianity, Vol. I. p. 84.
2. The temper of Paul's later epistles and the first letter of John shows that these mystics did not feel themselves to be the solitary possessors of the secret of new life, but wrote in full confidence that some at least of those whom they addressed would be able to understand.
3. Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 257.
4. J.O. Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, p. 14.
5. Many examples in Fox's Journal.
6. Cf. Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules.
7. 1 Cor.xiv. 20.
8. 1 Cor. xiv; Acts viii 15-20, x. 44, xi. 15, xiii. 2 and 52, xix. 6
9. The Didache, or Teaching of the Apostles, § 16 (good translation in Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers, pp 216-253) the date and provenance of this treatise are still a matter of controversy; but it undoubtedly represents a tone of mind common in the primitive period.
10. 1 John iv. 1
11. The Teaching of the Apostles, § 11
12. The Epistle of Barnabus, cap. 1 (Migne, Pat. Graec. T. I). Translation in Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers, pp. 239-288.
13. Rev. iii. 12, v. 9. xxi. 1 and 5
14. Eph. iv. 7
15. The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, p. 401.
16. I Clement, lviii
17. Martyrdom of Polycarp, III.
18. Contra Haer., V. 6.
19. Epiphanius, Panarion (Migne, Pat Graec., T. XLI).
20.Cf. Swete, op. cit., pp 77 - 83; Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, pp. 60-70; and Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, pp. 39-49. For another view Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. II. pp 95-100.
21. Harnack, op. cit., Vol. I. p. 92
22. Contra celsum, I. 46
23. A.D. 350-428.
24. Com. on 1 Thess. v. 19, and 2 Thess. ii. 6.
25. Vide infra, Cap. VI
26. John iii. 5
27. 1 Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., V. ii. " It is not without reason that in the mysteries which obtain amongst the Greeks, purifications hold the first place; as also the laver amongst the Barbarians."
28. The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, edited by J. Rendel Harris. It seems to me clear that many of these odes, which Mr. Harris supposes to be Messianic declarations put into the mouth of Christ, are really the birth-songs of the Christian neophyte.
29. The "illuminate" was one of the commonest of all names for the neophyte. Cf. Justin Martyr, Apology, I. 61; Fortescue, The Mass, p. 29. As to the "son of God," St. Paul and the Johannine mystic are sufficient evidence of its propriety as a description of the Christian soul
30. Op. cit., Ode xxxvi.
31. Op. cit., Ode xvii
32. Cf Wilpert, Le Pitture delle Catacombe Romane, 1910, Vol. II. pp. 235-240, where a full description of all known examples will be found
33. Augustine, Serm. 266, and Conf., Bk. VIII. cap. 2.
34. Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, articles "Baptism" and "Neophyte"
35. Wilpert, op. cit., p236.
36. Missale Romanum—Benedictio fontis. the idea of Grace, or of its personification the Holy Spirit, as the "Mother" of the new creature is of great antiquity, and is found amongst other places in the writings of St Macarius the Great of Egypt.
37. Cf. Cabrol, origines Liturgiques, p. 66, and Duchesne, Origines du culte chretien, 3rd edition, pp. 183, 535. the Leonine Sacramentary gives the prayer with which the milk and honey were blessed—"Benedic Domine, et has tuas creaturas fontis mellis, et lactis, et pota famulos tuos ex hoc fonte aquae vitae perennis qui est Spiritus veritatis, et enutri eos de hoc lacte et melle." Cf Duchesne, op. cit., p. 183. On the image of milk as a spiritual food of the "babes in Christ" cf Clement of Alexandria, Paed., I. 6; the Odes of Solomon, Ode xix; Tertullian, De Corona, cap. 3. the pail of milk, no doubt with this same significance, appears amongst the frescoes of the catacombs. Cf Wilpert, op. cit.
38. Epistle of Barnabus, cap. 6.
39. Cyprian, Ad Donat., iv. Given by Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, p. 115.
40. Cf. Swete, op. cit., p. 148.
