sary to remember that these formed themselves by LECT. I. degrees most naturally, and that, if we are in no danger of falling into their particular habits of thought, we are just as much in danger as they were, of accepting the principle, which gave these habits of thought all their mischief and malignity. If we do, the practical May be results will be the same; we shall not really believe repeated. that Christ has come in the flesh more than they did.

circa A. D.

I shall say nothing more about the Church of Antioch in the second century, except that one of its bishops, Theophilus, wrote a defence of the Christian Theophilus, faith, which is still extant; and that we have a fragment 170. by another, Serapion, in reference to a Gospel, passing Serapion, under the name of St. Peter, which inculcated, he affirms, many false doctrines. On both these subjects I may have to speak to you, when I turn from particular Churches to the Church as forming one Society.

A. D. 181.

LECTURE II.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

Asia

Minor.

CHURCHES IN ASIA MINOR.

LECT. II. I SHALL now pass to the Churches in Asia Minor. One of the Epistles of Ignatius, as I told you, is addressed to the Church of Ephesus. As it is greatly reduced in the Syriac version, I will draw no conclusions from it respecting the character of those to whom it was addressed. But the name Onesimus occurs in both versions. If we may assume,-as most ecclesiastical historians have assumed,-that this Onesimus was he at Ephesus. about whom St. Paul wrote to Philemon, a society in one of the wealthiest cities of the Roman empire must have looked up to a runaway slave as its spiritual overseer and father. There is no reason

Onesimus

Sardis.

to doubt the tradition. Even the existence of it shows how certain it was that a Gospel which was preached by fishermen, and confessed One who was called the Carpenter's Son as the Son of God, would break the chains of the captive, and establish a much more wonderful equality at the root of society than destroyers of ranks, than the most sweeping revolutions, have been ever able to create.

The Church at Sardis, you will remember, was in a very unpromising state when it was addressed by St. John. We may hope that it had recovered its

Aurelius.

of his

ground before the middle of the second century; for LECT. II. at that time we find it under the government of a Meliton man who was, at all events, a voluminous and pains- flourished taking writer. None of his books remain to us, but Marcus you shall have the titles of them; because they will tell you what people were thinking about at this time. He wrote on Easter; on Polity; on Prophets; Subjects on the Church; on the Lord's Day; on the Nature books. of Man; on Creation; on the Obedience of Faith; on the Objects of Sense; on the Soul and Body, or the Higher Mind; on Baptism; on the Origin and Birth of Christ; on Prophecy; on Hospitality;-a book called The Key; on the Devil; on the Apocalypse; on the Incarnate God; and a book addressed to the Emperor Antoninus. You will not understand, at present, the occasions which led him to touch upon some of these topics. I shall tell you immediately about one of them.

The Overseer of the Church of Smyrna during a Smyrna. great part of this century was Polycarp, who is represented, on good evidence, as having been the friend and disciple of St. John. I call him by this name, Overseer, which is a good and venerable name. Yet it describes the office more than the man. If we speak of him as a Father, we shall be much nearer the impression which he made on his contemporaries. If His Letter. his letter to the Philippians is genuine, as it is generally held to be in England, it shows us what the secret of his influence must have been. There are no discussions in it of such subjects as Meliton handled, -not the least speculation of any kind. It consists

LECT. II. mainly of extracts from the Canonical Epistles,-not on questions of debate or doctrine, but on purity, and righteousness, and the love of money. If he wrote to an European Church, it indicates a communion which one likes to think may have existed consciously as well as in the spirit, between those which were at a distance from each other. One who knew and revered him, certainly, became a teacher in Gaul. Still the influence of Polycarp must have mainly been in the regions of Asia Minor. These Churches clung with great tenacity to the customs which Weight of they believed that St. John had observed. I have

Sphere of his influ

ence.

St. John's

authority.

tried to show how earnestly he laboured that the Jewish calling should not be forgotten in the Gentile world, that the new commandment should be felt as the real expansion and interpretation of the old. In this spirit, he may have kept up till his dying day something like an observation of the Jewish Paschal feast, while he taught his disciples how Christ had translated it into a higher, the festival of an accomplished redemption and of a divine life. There would have been nothing inconsisEaster Day. tent in his following the maxims of his youth, as to times and seasons, while he was most possessed with the meaning and power of the Resurrection, as fulfilling all that the Passover had shadowed out. The more the Churches felt the ground on which they were standing, the more wonderful the day of Resurrection appeared to them; the more they hailed it as the new birth-day of the world, which, for the sake of the world, as much as for the sake of their own unity, they were

The Pass

over and

in the

to proclaim by their acts as well as their words. The LECT. II. Apostles had been sent forth to testify of the Resurrection; what had the Church to testify of, that was so glorious a Gospel to mankind, concerning their true King,-concerning the deliverance He had wrought out,-concerning the union He had established between the seen and the unseen world? The connexion Differences of Easter with the Passover was, no doubt, close; but Churches. as Christians began to be more separate from the synagogue, they were more disposed to dwell on the difference than the resemblance between the two dispensations. The Christians in the West eagerly insisted that Easter Day must be kept on the first day of the week; that all other celebrations must regulate themselves by this. With those of Asia Minor St. John's example was mightier than any arguments. The day which they had seen, or supposed him to observe, must be the right one. No authority on earth should induce them to change it. Polycarp seems thoroughly to have shared this feeling. We are told that he made a journey to Rome, and argued the question with Anicetus, who was the Overseer of that Church. They could come to no agreement about the subject in controversy; but they parted with a sense of inward communion, which was stronger than any diversity of customs could break. It was not, we shall find, to be so always.

Polycarp belongs to the same class of men with Ignatius; but there are marked individual differences between them. In the scanty records we have of

Polycarp

and Ani

cetus. Eusebius, book

iv. c. 14.