Essays by Ministers of the Free Church of Scotland (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: TERTULLIAN. BY THE REV. JAMES WALKER, MINISTER OF FRRE CHURCH, CARNWATH. TERTULLIAN. Under the influence of geographical tradition or ethnographical feeling, we do historical injustice to one of the great divisions of our world. Africa has had its share in directing and shaping the destinies of mankind. The first of the great ancient civilisations was African, and it is hard to estimate what, through the Greek and the Jew, has been the influence of the Egyptian. Alexandria, once the literary capital of the civilized world, in which arose that famous school of speculative theology, which from the days of Clement to our own has never wanted its representatives in the Christian Church, was an African city, and must have been more than merely geographically so. It was among the native Copts, not distantly related to the Negro, ethnologists inform us, and at least nearer to the Negro than to the so-called Semitic races, ?it was among the native Copts of the Heptanome, the great monastic movement took its rise. Cyprian, the most distinguished ecclesiastic of the ante-Nicene age, to whom the honour or dishonour belongs of thoroughly developing ecclesiasticism, was an African bishop; so, too, was Augustine, the illustrious founder of Puritan theology, who may be said to have done more than any uninspired man, to form the character of the great Anglo-Saxon race, with whose life and power and progress Augustinianism is inseparably bound. The literature and theology of Alexandria were indeed rather Grecian than Egyptian, ?of Carthage, rather Latin than Libyan; yet is it not of strange interest that so much that is great in the history of man, should even be geographically connected with regions over whose vast extent (save where a few colonies are beginning to root themselves)...