A Concise History of Religion Volume 3 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: gathered in from field and cottage. Let the Saints take heed and watch and pray. Such, in substance, is the message of the apocalypse which has been preserved by the first three gospels, though a comparison of the three versions reveals curious variations, as if later hands had added or subtracted a word here or a sentence there. The supposed prophecy clearly enough reflects the terror and uncertainty of the final days of the Jewish War, when the Saints looked upon the impending fall of Jerusalem as a signal for the descent of Messiah and the triumph of his followers. 4. Organisation and Customs of the New People.?If the reader appreciates the use of the term, "The New People," he will allow that the religious innovators whom we have seen at Jerusalem, at Rome, or at Pella, represented an evolution which had as yet little consistency or definition. Their organisation, their doctrines, their literature, had not yet taken clear and peculiar forms. In the present section we shall somewhat anticipate the course of history, and trace the early growth and government and customs of Christian societies, in order to understand whither the embryo religion of the first century was tending. Having, so to speak, viewed the apparatus through which the New Movement worked, we shall be better able to approach the difficult problem of the essential character of the Gospel in which that Movement embodied itself. For many years the New Movement propagated itself through small local societies, which gradually took the name of Churches. Celsus, with a smile, noticed that the Christians he met were mostly weavers, cobblers, tanners, and the like. These humble artisans, shopkeepers, and slaves met in rooms in private houses. The book of Acts shows us how a hundred ] and twenty Saints held praye...