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THE PULPIT.
A SCHOLARLY SUNDAY SERMON BY
DEAN HODGES.
Theme: Defense of the Faith.
Brooklyn, N. Y.—Sunday evening,
at. Holy Trinity P. E. Church, the
Very flev.-George Hodge 3, dean of the
Cambridge Theological School, deliv
ered a lecture on the early church.
The subject was "The Defense of the
Faith.” Dean Hodges said:
The first antagonist of the faith
■was prejudice, crowned in ignorance,
growing up into contempt and then
into hatred, and resulting in preju
dice whereby the Christians were ac
cused of atheism and sedition, and of
immorality. <3f atheism, because
they had no images in their sanctu
aries and because they worshiped in
a fashion unknown among the relig
ious of their time; of sedition be
cause they refused to acknowledge
the divinity of the Roman Empire;
and of immorality because they held
secret meetings, and not knowing
what took place at these meetings,
everybody might guess what he chose
—and the mind of man is so consti
tuted that under such circumstances
some people will guess very unpleas
ant things. So, by virtue of ignor
ance, in almost entire absence of
facts, there grew up around the
a thick atmosphere of prej
udice. It is astonishing, remember
ing all that afterward happened, that
Christianity should have existed for
one or two centuries almost unno
ticed, and then only with derision and
antagonism. There was Lucian the
satirist, who makes one of his char
acters, Perigrinus Proteus, profess
to be a Christian, and when he is put
in prison is visited by prominent
Christians, who reverence him be
cause he is in danger of martyrdom,
and then says of them: “These mis
guided creatures have so persuaded
themselvps that they are going to live
forever that they have lost all fear
of death;” and he says, again, that
“they have been taught by their
Master that they are all brothers, and
they love one another in an amazing
manner.” It is a friendly comment,
but mingled with contempt. There
was Celsus, the critic, who wrote a
long and substantial book against
the Christian religion, in which he
decried it first on the ground of his
tory. He says it is not historical be
cause it is filled with accounts of mir
acles, and miracles cannot happen;
and so he begins with the virgin
birth and the resurrection, and dis
credits miracles, which he says
Christ was able to do by meais of
tricks He learned in Egypt. And,
second, of philosophy. He says the
incarnation is impossible because
Cod is intangible, and unnecessary
because God is good. It is absurd, he
says, to think that God cares for any
little company of people and services
on this planet, and he praises the
Greeks, who put their trust in reason
over against the Christians, who put
their trust in faith.
There was Marcus Aurelius, em
peror, philosopher, moralist, the one
man in the pagan world whom we
would have said beforehand would
have appreciated the Christian relig
ion and would have gone out to meet
it. He views them with a far-off
contempt and refers with some de
rision to the alacrity with which
Christians go to martyrdom. This
religion, which wilhin a few centur
ies was to take possession of the
Roman world, which was to bo the
most nptable fact in the history of
the race, began in obscurity, an ob
scurity amazing to us. When Chris
tianity came to be a little known
there came in its defense against its
antagonists the Apologists, chief of
whom was Justin Martyr. Born at
Sychar, in Palestine, of pagan par
entage, at au early age Justin devoted
himself to philosophy. In his desire
to learn the relation between Cod
and the world, he in turn sought this
knowledge from the Stoics, the peri
patetics and the Pythagorians, and
finally turned to Christianity and died
martyr at Rome. From some writ
ings of his we learn that in the mid
dle of the second century the Chris
tians had no creed and no recitation
•of the creed, and no formulation of
the truths of their religion. Justin
made some inferences from the Bible i
in the direction of faith. He laid j
great stress upon the argument from
prophecy, and had much to say about .
de*ils. with whom he identifies the
gods of the Pagan world, and he be
lieved in a literal millenium. There
was a lack or order and formality in
the church, but they took collections,
he says, and describes a service at
which there was a reading of the
Bible, a long prayer, a hymn and a
sacramental feast of bread and wine.
The second antagonist of the
Christian faith was Heresy. The time
came when men of education and
learning began to be attracted toward
the Christian religion, and there was
a natural desire on the part of Chris
tian teachers to prove the Christian
religion to those persons, to make it
reasonable to their cultivated minds,
and the result was sometimes heresy.
Heresy, I suppose, is almost always
the result of that kind of purpose.
These heretics were the Gnostics,
whose aim it was to make some kind
of a combination between Christian
truth and the other kinds of truths
floating about in the minds of men.
Gnostics found two great difficulties
in religion: One, the difficulty of re
conciling the New Testament with the
Old Testament, partly on the ground
of morality, which is taught from so
much higher a plane in the New
Testament than in the Old Testament,
the difficulty emphasized by the
teaching of St. Paul, wherein he
seemed to set a new system of grace
over against the old system of works.
How to reconcile these discrepancies
between the Old and New Testaments
perplexed them. And the other per
plexity was, how to reconcile the bad
world with the good and mighty God.
These they met w ith a series of prop
ositions.
They said there are two antagon
istic facts. “There is matter which
is essentially evil, and there is a spir
it which is essentially divine.” They
also said, “There are two worlds:
the lower world, in which we live,
crothed in matter, and thereby hav
ing our spirit hindered by this envir
onment of evil; and a higher world,
where God dwells, remotely distant
and having between Him and us a
long series of spiritual being, ema
nations from Him, called aeons, and
at the end of this long line of aeons
reaching down is the Demiurge, a
pretty poor kind of aeon.” The Dem
iurge was the maker of the world,
and he was responsible for all this
evil matter, and the Demiurge was
the God of the Old Testament. Every
thing that takes place in the Old
Testament is under the control of the
Demiurge, not of the Supreme God,
and we may deal with it with all the
freedom Ave like . The Supreme Aeon,
they said, was the Christ who came
to redeem man from the tyranny of
the Demiurge; and Christ redeemed
man, not hv the sacrifice of His death
upon the cross, because, matter being
evil, Christ had no body. That was
only an appearance. There was no
incarnation, no resurrection, or any
of the rest of it. He saves man, not
by the death of the cross, but by
illumination, by the shining in of
His Spirit upon the spirit of man.
The third antagonist of the faith
was Competition. There came into
existence two great new religions, on
tifie one side the religion of Plato (a
revival of philosophy), and on the
other side the religion of Mithras (a
revival of Paganism). These came
in the way of a revolt from the pro
saic religion of the Roman Empire.
It had in it no emotion. It was a
hare contract between man and God.
wherein man said, up and down, “I
will give you a certain amount of
ritual if you will give me a corres
ponding amount of protection.” It
had in it no sense of mystery. It
was just as commonplace as the mor
ality. Now, the world was longing
for some appeal to emotion, for some
satisfaction of its sense of mystery,
and these two religions came at the
place to do that work. Neoplaton
ism, a revival of philosophy, found
its exponent in Plotinus. From frag
ments of books he wrote we get some
Idea how he tried to hind together
all the truth there was Into one sys
tem, except the truth of Christianity.
And then opposed to Neoplatonism
was an ideal, an ideal and not a per
son. Mithraism was the most for
midable competitor that Christianity
ever had. It seemed at one time as
if it were likely to become the relig
ion of Europe. It entered very little
Into literature, and scarcely anything
was known about it until men began
to study the ruins of Mithraic shrines
and read the inscriptions and gradu
ally to find bow far spread it was and
what it ipeant. It came from Persia
and its supreme god was Mithras,
who was the representative of the in
visable and eternal deity behind and
the mediator between Him and us.
He was supernaturally born, and His
first apnearance was to shepherds.
He fought with a wild hoar that was
ravaging the country which He killed
whose blood became a vine and whose
marrow sown in the earth became the
wheat. After His victorious battle
He dined with the sun. He was to
come again in a second advent and
hold a general judgment of all man
kind in which the good went one way
and the had another —into heaven or
hell. They had a baptism of blood
and water for newness of life followed
hv a ■sealing an anointing of confirm
ation. and after that a holy commun
ion of bread and wine. They had
sanctuaries in which liturgies were
charted by vested priests
at altars adorned with lights.
This day on which we meet is
called Sunday because of Mithras.
When Constantine gave out his edict
in the days -when the empire became
Christian he decreed that the first
day of the week should he kept as. a
dav of rest and they called it by its
Mithraistic name, the venerable day
of the sun. Why is Christmas kent
on the twenty-fifth of December? No
body knows when our Lord w r as horn.
Even the season of the year has to
tally departed from the memory of
man. The only indications of the
time of year noint to the summer
when the 'sheoherds were abiding in
the fields. Christmas is kept on the
twenty-fifth of December because it
was Mithras’ birthday.
That was Mithras’ birthday kept ns
a day of rejoicing among the votaries
of this religion scattered all over from
the desert of Sahara to the glens of
Scotland, where shrines of Mithra
have been found. When Christianity
became victorious over this religion
she found it wise to say to the con
verts. “Keep on with your domestic
rejoicing on December 25, but do all
these joyful things in remembrance
of Jesus Christ, our Saviour.” The
essential defect, however, in this re
ligion of Mithra was that there was
no Mithra; he was only a Mith. Nns
ticism was founded on an idea; not
a oerson. Mithraism was founded on
allegory, not a person. But the hu
man soul cries out for some manifes
tation of God in the form of actual,
historic personality.
There were the four men who de
fended the faith nre-eminently in the
second and fourth centuries: Justin,
the apologist: Ironaeus, the theolo
gian: Clement, the instructor, and
briger. the commentator. These
were the men who defended the faith
against the three agrostics—preju
dice. heresv and competition.
Condemnation of Sin.
Sin against the body roust be con
demned as severely as sin against the
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