236 



CHURCH DISCIPLINE 



CHURCH HISTORY 



simply on their producing letters of recommenda- 

 tion J libelli pads ) from persons who had confessed 

 Christ. Tne Montamsts, however, maintained 

 that those who had been once excommunicated 

 should pass their whole life in the status poenitentice, 

 and the Novatians denied that the Church possessed 

 the right to assure the Lapsi of the forgiveness of 

 sins, which only God could grant. The Donatists 

 (q.v. ) could not arrest the gradual secularisation 

 of discipline. By the 6th century penances be^an 

 to be commuted for certain fixed taxes. In the 

 Western Church, after public penances had become 

 rare, other punishments took their place, partly 

 derived from the exercises of earlier asceticism, 

 partly from the usages of Prankish law. The 

 episcopal Missi of Charles the Great combined the 

 functions of a civil and ecclesiastical court, and 

 allowed church punishments to be compounded for 

 money. From the time of Gregory the Great the 

 doctrine of Purgatory (q.v.) had been a dogma of 

 the Church ; and Peter Lombard and other 

 scholastics built on it the -theory of Indulgences 

 (q.v.), which was confirmed by Clement VI. in 

 1343. The extreme punishments in the middle 

 ages were the Greater Excommunication (q.v.) for 

 the individual, and Interdict (q.v.) for the com- 

 munity. The churches of the Reformation held 

 that ' the power of the keys ' belonged to the whole 

 Church, by which it was to be intrusted to the 

 regularly called servants of the Word. They 

 rejected Auricular Confession .(q.v.) and the whole 

 system of Satisfactions and Indulgences ; restrict- 

 ing the sphere of their church discipline to matters 

 of social morality, and its enforcement simply to 

 spiritual admonition and partial or complete 

 exclusion from the sacraments and offices of the 

 Church. The Lutheran Church rejected the Greater 

 Excommunication as a merely secular punishment 

 with which the servants of the Church had nothing 

 to do ; but retained the Lesser, simply as a means 

 of moral training. Though Luther and Melanchthon 

 adhered firmly to the participation of the whole 

 congregation in the imposition of excommunica- 

 tion, yet, in consequence of the development of the 

 consistorial system, it passed into the nands of the 

 consistories in the different states. In the 17th 

 and 18th centuries it fell gradually into disuse. 

 The Reformed Church laid greater stress on con- 

 gregational discipline. Zwingli assigned it to the 

 civil magistrate of the Christian state ; Calvin, on 

 the other hand, referred it to the Presbytery (q.v.). 

 In Presbyterian churches it is exercised by the 

 kirk-session an appeal lying to the presbytery, 

 and from that, to tne synod and general assembly. 

 The church discipline provided for by the Canons of 

 the Church of England has almost entirely fallen 

 into disuse. 



Church History. The history of the Chris- 

 tian Church includes its external history, which 

 treats of the extension of the Church, and its 

 relation to the state ; and internal history, which 

 is concerned with the Church's inner life, doctrine, 

 worship, and constitution. With respect to time, 

 the Church's history is usually divided into three 

 periods Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Its 

 Medieval History may be dated from its establish- 

 ment in union with the new empire founded by 

 Charles the Great in 800. Modern Church History 

 begins with the Reformation ( in the view of Roman 

 Catholic historians, with the Humanistic move- 

 ment, or the discovery of America). Each of 

 these periods may be divided into two : Ancient 

 Church History, at the complete victory of Chris- 

 tianity over Greek heathenism under Constantine 

 the Great ; Medieval, at the culmination of the 

 papal power under Innocent III. ; and Modern, at 

 the close of the Thirty Years' War by the Treaty 

 of Westphalia. 



The first of these periods extends from Christ 

 to Constantine. The beginning of the Christian 

 Church dates from the departure of Jesus Christ 

 from the earth and the Pentecostal effusion of the 

 Holy Spirit (about 33 A.D. ), the time when the 

 first confessors of Christ exceeded the limits of a 

 private society, and began to form a public com- 

 munity. Its nucleus was the first Jewish Christian 

 community at Jerusalem under the ' pillar-apostles' 

 James, Cephas, and John. The spiritual concep- 

 tion of the Messiah which the disciples had received 

 from the personal influence of Jesus was sealed 

 on their minds by their faith in his resurrection ; 

 and their comprehension of his gospel is seen in 

 the wide aims of their first missions, in their pro- 

 gressive deliverance from legalism, and in the 

 belief that faith is the essential element of salva- 

 tion. As members were quickly added to the 

 Church, especially from the Jews of the Dispersion 

 (called Hellenists, because they spoke Greek), a 

 beginning of its organisation was made in the 

 appointment of seven deacons, including the 

 Hellenist Stephen, the protomartyr of the Church. 

 The elements of the primitive faith were unified 

 and systematised by the Apostle Paul, the aim 

 of whose life was the conversion of the whole 

 world to Christ. He succeeded in emancipating 

 the Gentile Christian world from the ceremonial 

 law, and in his three great missionary journeys 

 (about 40-58 A.D.) began the evangelisation of 

 Europe. The destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D. } 

 completed the deliverance of Christianity from 

 Judaism, and gave the Church the consciousness of 

 a world-wide mission. The Judaising Christians- 

 were thenceforth an insignificant sect. 



The Roman empire maintained the pre-Christian 

 view that there could be no worship of God apart 

 from the corporate life of the state, and, when the 

 early Christian Church refused to take part in the 

 state worship, it became a religio illicita, and 

 was proscribed and persecuted as dangerous to 

 society. To the distinguished and learned Chris- 

 tianity was a gloomy infatuation, to the populace 

 the Christians' contempt for the gods seemed the 

 cause of every public calamity. The tyrannical 

 caprice of Nero charged them with the burning of 

 Rome (64 A.D..), and persecuted them with revolting 

 cruelty. Under Domitian Christianity was punished 

 as a form of high-treason. The first regular decree 

 for legal procedure against the Christians was issued 

 by Trajan. Under the more tolerant rule of the 

 emperors from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius (117- 

 161 ), the Christian congregations were organised as 

 Collegia tenuiorum ( 'poor men's guilds' ), or Collegia 

 fuiieraticia ( ' funeral societies ' ), and as such en- 

 joyed a sort of legalised existence. The vast cities 

 of their dead in the catacombs of this period no- 

 where preserve memorials of martyrdom or perse- 

 cution. The Christians had to suffer many a local 

 persecution, but, apart from the temporary and 

 thoughtless cruelties of Nero and Donutian who, 

 according to Tertullian, was ' a piece of Nero for 

 cruelty ' they had the toleration, and sometimes 

 the protection, of the emperors. Ranke ascribes 

 such action especially to Antoninus Pius 'the best- 

 intentioned and most peaceable among them, and 

 perhaps not without sympathy for Christianity ' 

 whose reign he regards as the culmination of the 

 Roman empire. A consequence of this tolerant 

 bearing of the imperial power was the peaceful 

 behaviour of the Christians, who in general rejected 

 the principles of Montanus, which aimed at the sub- 

 version of the state. This condition of affairs came 

 to an end under Marcus Aurelius, who, no longer 

 able to resist the popular outcry, suffered a perse- 

 cution to take place in several provinces. 



About the middle of the 2d century the Christian 

 congregations in the Roman empire were consoli- 



