Tian Eucharist

TIAN ; EUCHARIST.) For 3o years after St. Paul's latest epistle we are left without information. The First Epistle of Clement supplies nothing new, but 20 years later the Epistles of Ignatius show a development. The five Churches in Asia which he addresses are equipped with a hierarchy of deacons and presbyters under a chief who bears the old title of E7rialco7ros (bishop) but no longer as a subordinate; he appears to execute in that one Church all the functions of an apostle. It is a disputed question whether his office has grown out of the presbyterate or is a continuation of the apostolate. If he were invariably attached to a single city, the former theory would be strengthened; but it is not so, for Ignatius calls himself "bishop of Syria," and some years later a single bishop is found serving the whole of Gaul north of the Narbonensian province, a truly apostolic charge. The system of city-bishops became general within the Roman empire, but in northern Europe and elsewhere the system of regionary bishops has always prevailed from the earliest times.

In Ignatius we find the important word "Catholic" describing the whole Church as distinct from local Churches. It is evi dently a current term. He relates the bishop to a local Church as Jesus Christ to the Catholic Church (Smyrn. viii. 2) . But in the Martyrium Polycarpi, some years later, the Church of Smyrna is called Catholic, perhaps as locally representing the whole. The word afterwards takes on a much larger content, indicating ad hesion to the Christian religion as a whole, in contrast with the particularities of heresy, and so can be applied even to individual persons.

The First Reasoned Theory.

The 3rd century presents to us for the first time in its history a reasoned theory of the Church in the writings of St. Cyprian. He bases it on the episcopate, which he entirely identifies with the apostolate. Bishops are appointed by Christ himself, as the Apostles were, though the divine appointment is mediated by consecration, and even by some elements of popular election. The episcopate is one, and he illustrates its unity by terms borrowed from the Ro man law of corporations. Nevertheless in each single place there is a single bishop who represents the whole, and of that place those inhabitants who communicate with the bishop, and none else, are in the communion of the Catholic Church. He has been generally followed, except in two particulars. He maintained : (I) that all bishops are precisely equal in authority, and (2) that a bishop is responsible only to God, and can be removed from his place, as he was appointed, only by God. The latter contention was confronted, in his own practice, by the obvious difficulty of ascertaining when the Divine judgment has fallen. A solution was soon found in the obvious inferiority of a single bishop to a council of bishops, which could therefore depose him. The case of Paul of Samosata settled this. Irenaeus had already noted the special weight of authority (potentior principalitas) exerted by the bishop of Rome, and this was equally true of the other great capital cities, Alexandria and Antioch ; Constantinople was after wards added next to Rome, and the honorary addition of the re stored Jerusalem completed the system of the patriarchates which dominated the Church in the eastern half of the Roman empire from Italy to the Euphrates. In the same part of the em pire there was a similar aggrandisement of the bishop seated in the metropolis of each province, who presided over a manageable council of comprovincial bishops, and acquired a commanding influence in their appointment ; a system which with some differ ences, was gradually extended westward, and into the countries beyond the empire.

Such is the working system of the Catholic Church, evolved from elements which we can discern in the first age. From the 5th century onward it has been complicated by claims made for the Church of Rome based on the promise of the Keys to St. Peter in Matt. xvi. 19. This requires separate treatment. It has been complicated also by obstinate schisms. Donatism in Africa was a passing trouble. Such also was the Arianism of the Goths, which for three centuries delayed the settlement of the Church in the new nations carved out of the Western empire. More permanent has been the separation, much more racial than theological, of Nestorians and Monophysites in the East from the orthodoxy of Constantinople. A succession of temporary quarrels between Constantinople and Rome led to the great breach of 1054 still continuing. (See PAPACY.) In the century the Reformation shattered the unity of the Western Church, contrary to the intention of the promoters, who aimed at reforming the whole Church "in head and members." The predestinarianism alike of Luther and of Calvin brought in the theory of the Invisible Church mentioned above, reducing the hierarchy to the level of a not indispensable expedient. Luther, regarding the Visible Church in this light, gave the chief control of it to the civil magistracy, in which he was followed or preceded by the Swiss Reformers and by those of the middle Rhine. Calvin established at Geneva a system of Presbytery, modelled on indi cations drawn from the Pauline Epistles and the Acts, acting in close connection with the magistracy and this was carried by his disciple, Theodore Beza, to the Reformed of France, in complete independence of a hostile State. The Genevan model was extended to the Netherlands, and the independent Presbytery of Beza was planted in Scotland by John Knox, to be afterwards per fected by Andrew Melville. This Presbyterianism followed with some exaggeration the lines of the Cyprianic episcopacy, while dropping the title of bishop, with all the associations which had gathered round it. In the Scandinavian countries the historic epis copate was retained by the reformers, and in England the organ ized administration connected with it also remained almost intact. The doctrinal aspects of the Reformation do not concern us here.

(See REFORMATION.) English Puritanism began as a demand for further reformation on the Swiss model, and with Thomas Cartwright took the form of an assertion of the Divine right of Presbyterianism, but a native development became much more important. Robert Browne, and after him Henry Barrow, deduced from the doctrine of the Invisible Church their conception of the "gathered Church," a group of believers voluntarily associated in complete independ ence, which they declared to be the only true Visible Church of the New Testament. This Independency, dominant during the crisis of the Civil War, survived its political failures, and remains, with various modifications, one of the chief factors in the Protestantism of English-speaking countries, where a "Church" is usually taken to be such an association, whether in its original form of a single congregation or in a close-knit and extensive system like those of the various Methodist connections. These developments will be found severally treated elsewhere. In their mutual antagonisms the idea of the Christian Church as a whole has been almost lost sight of, but it has recently revived in more friendly discussion, and is found to be firmly rooted in history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Hort,

The Christian Ecclesia; Lightfoot, The Bibliography.-Hort, The Christian Ecclesia; Lightfoot, The Christian Ministry; Sohm, Wesen and Ursprung des Katholizismus; Harnack, Enstehung and Entwickelung der Kirchenfassung, etc. (Eng. trans. by Pogson, The Constitution and Law of the Clrurch in the