THE MODERN CHURCH The issue in 1 564 of the canons of the council of Trent marks a very definite epoch in the history of the Christian Church. Up till that time, in spite of the schism of East and West and of innumerable heresies, the idea of the Church as Catholic, not only in its faith but in its organization, had been generally accepted. From this conception the Reformers had, at the outset, no inten tion of departing. Their object had been to purify the Church of mediaeval accretions, and to restore the primitive model in the light of the new learning ; the idea of rival "churches," differing in their fundamental doctrines and in their principles of organization, existing side by side, was as abhorrent to them as to the most rigid partisan of Roman centralization. The actual divisions of Western Christendom are the outcome, less of the purely religious influences of the Reformation period than of the political forces with which they were associated and confused. Thus over a great part of Europe the Catholic Church was split up into territorial or national churches, which, whatever the theoretical ties which bound them together, were in fact separate organizations, tending ever more and more to become isolated and self-contained units with no formal intercommunion, and, as the rivalry of nationalities grew, with increasingly little even of intercommunication.
It was not, indeed, till the settlement of Westphalia in 1648, after the Thirty Years' War, that this territorial division of Christendom became stereotyped, but the process had been going on for i oo years previously; in some States, as in England and Scotland, it had long been completed ; in others, as in S. Germany, Bohemia and Poland, it was defeated by the political and mission ary efforts of the Jesuits and other agents of the counter-Reforma tion. In any case, it received a vast impetus from the action of the council of Trent. With the issue of the Tridentine canons, all hope even of compromise between the "new" and the "old" re ligions was definitely closed. Considered from the standpoint of the world outside, the Roman Church is, no less than the Protes tant communities, merely one of the sects into which Western Christendom has been divided—the most important and wide spread, it is true, but playing in the general life and thought of the world a part immeasurably less important than that filled by the Church before the Reformation, and one in no sense justifying her claim to be considered as the sole inheritor of the tradition of the pre-Reformation Church.
If this be true of the Roman Catholic Church, it is still more so of the other great communities and confessions which emerged from the controversies of the Reformation. Of these the Anglican Church held most closely to the tradition of Catholic organization; but she has never made any higher claim than to be one of "the three branches of the Catholic Church," a claim repudiated by Rome and never formally admitted by the Church of the East. The Protestant churches established on the continent, even where —as in the case of the Lutherans—they approximate more closely than the official Anglican Church to Roman doctrine and practice, make no such claim. The Bible is for them the real source of authority in doctrine ; their organization is part and parcel of that of the State. They are, in fact, the State in its religious aspect, and as such are territorial or national, not Catholic. This tendency has been common in the East also, where with the growth of racial rivalries the Orthodox Church has split into a series of national churches, holding the same faith but independent as to organization.
A yet further development, of comparatively recent growth, has been the formation of what are now commonly called in England the "free churches." These represent a theory of the Church practically unknown to the Reformers, and only reached through the necessity for discovering a logical basis for the communities of conscientious dissidents from the established churches. According to this the Catholic Church is not a visibly organized body, but the sum of all "faithful people" throughout the world, who group themselves in churches modelled according to their convictions or needs. For the organization of these churches no divine sanction is claimed, though all are theoreti cally modelled on the lines laid down in the Scriptures. It follows that, while in the traditional Church, with its claim to an un broken descent from a divine original, the individual is subordi nate to the Church, in the "free churches" the Church is in a cer tain sense secondary to the individual. The believer may pass from one community to another without imperilling his spiritual life, or establish a new church without necessarily incurring the reproach of schism. From this theory, powerful in Great Britain and her colonies, supreme in the United States of America, has resulted an enormous multiplication of sects.
Hence, from the period of the Reformation onward, no histori cal account of the Christian Church as a whole, and considered as a definite institution, is possible. The stream of continuity has been broken, and divides into innumerable channels. The only possible synthesis is that of the Christianity common to all; as institutions, they are divided, though they possess many features in common. The history of the various branches of the Christian Church since the Reformation will therefore be found under their several titles : ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH ; ENGLAND, CHURCH OF ; PRESBYTERIANISM; CONGREGATIONALISM ; METHODISM ; and others. The references given under the titles CHRISTIANITY, HERESY, and REUNION, may be mentioned here also.
The first real Church History was written by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early part of the 4th century. His work was con tinued in the 5th century by Philostorgius, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, and later by Evagrius, Theophanes and others. In the West the history of Eusebius was translated into Latin by Rufinus and continued to the end of the 4th century. In the 6th century Cassiodorus had a translation made of the histories of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, and brought down to 518. It was called Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartita, and during the mid dle ages was the principal textbook of Church History in the West. During the 5th, 6th and following centuries numerous works were produced containing more or less ecclesiastical material: biog raphies, chronicles, cloister annals and especially many local and territorial histories such as Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, and Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England. The Protes tant Reformation led to a new development of historical writing. In 1559 and following years a number of Protestant scholars published the Magdeburg Centuries to prove the primitive char acter of Protestantism, and were followed by Baronius (Annales Ecclesiastici, 1588 ff.) on the Roman Catholic side. Both works became the model for many others.
Church history began to be written in a genuinely scientific spirit in the 18th century under the leadership of Mosheim, whose most important work is his Institutions Historiae Ecclesiasticae (1755), and was carried further through the new historical spirit of the 19th century in a series of works of which the most im portant are those of Gieseler, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte (1826 ff. Eng. tr. by H. B. Smith), with copious citations from the sources, and still valuable; Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte der Christlichen Religion and Kirche (1825 ff., Eng. tr. by Torrey) , with special stress on the religious side of the subject (cf. also Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 5th ed. 1889 ff.) ; Ferdi nand Christian Baur of Tubingen (Das Christenthum and die christliche Kirche, 1853 ff.) whose many historical works were dominated by the principles of the Hegelian philosophy and ex hibit both the merits and defects of that school; and Albrecht Ritschl (Entstehung der alt katholischen Kirche, 2nd ed. who broke away from the Tubingen school and built up new points of view. Among many more recent books may be mentioned that of W. Moeller, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte (1889 ff., 2nd ed. by von Schuberth, 1898 ff., enlarged and improved), the transla tion of the latter being still the most useful textbook in English. Many references to historical works on specific branches of the subject will be found in the relative articles.
There are many editions of the works of the Fathers in the original, the most convenient, in spite of its defects, being that of J. P. Migne (Patrologia Graeca, 166 vols., Paris, 1857 ff.; Patrologia Latina, 22I vols., 1844 ff.) . Of modern critical editions, besides those containing the works of one or another individual, the best are the Berlin edition of the early Greek Fathers (Die griechischen christlichen Schri f tsteller der ersten drei Jahrhun derte, 1897 ff.), and the Vienna edition of the Latin Fathers (Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 1867 ff.), both of first-rate importance. There is a convenient English translation of most of the writings of the ante-Nicene Fathers by Roberts and Donaldson (Ante-Nicene Christian Library, 25 vols., Edinburgh, 1868 ff., American reprint, 9 vols., 1886 ff.) . A continuation of it, containing selected works of the Nicene and post-Nicene period, was edited by Schaff and others under the title A Select Library of Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers (series 1 and 2; 28 vols., Buffalo and N.Y., 1886 ff.).
On early Christian literature, in addition to the works on Church history, see especially the monumental Geschichte der altchrist lichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, by Harnack (1893 ff.). The brief Geschichte der altcjiristlichen Litteratur in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, by G. Kruger (1895, English translation, 1897) is a very convenient summary. Bardenhewer's Patrologie (1894) and his Geschichte der altkirchlichen Litteratur (1902 ff.) should also be mentioned.
Upon the spread of the Church during the early centuries see especially Harnack, Mission and Ausbreitung des Christenthums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, Eng. tr. The Mission and Ex pansion of Christianity (19o7). An interesting parallel to the spread of Christianity in the Roman empire is afforded by the contemporary Mithraism ; see Cumont's Les Mysteres de Mithra (1900, Eng. tr., 1903) . See also Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 189o; Anrich, Das antike Mysterienwesen in seinem Einfluss auf das Christentum, Wobbermin, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien zur Frage der Beein flussung des Urcliristentums durch das antike Mysterienwesen, 1896; and for the organization of the early Church Harnack, Mis sion and Ausbreitung des Christenthums, pp. 337 seq., and to the same writer's Texte and Untersuchungen, ii. 5 (Eng. tr. Sources of the Apostolic Canons, 1895).
(A. C. McG. ; A. HK. ; W. A. P. ; X.)