622 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 



within ordinary history as a history of another kind. This is a view 

 which is in no way affected by putting the beginnings of ecclesiastical 

 history in some sense or other as far back as the beginnings of the 

 human race. Such, indeed, was the attempt which Eusebius, fol- 

 lowing Justin Martyr, tried to make, and which Augustine actually 

 carried out in his great work On the City of God. But by going back 

 to the beginnings of the human race it is obvious that the whole 

 conception of a church and its history may easily be frittered away 

 and destroyed. There were liberal theologians in early times and 

 in the Middle Ages who thus destroyed it Abelard, for instance. 

 This, however, was not the way in which the church itself understood 

 that its history should be carried back. On the contrary, it clings to 

 the belief that within the general course of events there is a sacred 

 history which is supernatural. 



The Protestants of the sixteenth century did not really break with 

 this conception. They did, indeed, deny that the church with its 

 external forms and its government was a divine creation. The whole 

 idea of the church they explained from within. But of the spirit- 

 ualized church, which they often saw only in the form of a small 

 community, they asserted very much the same thing as Catholicism 

 maintains of its big church. They hardly did anything to shake the 

 notion that there were two kinds of events, and the church remained, 

 as before, the scene of a second history. Orthodoxy in the Protestant 

 churches in our own day still persists in this view. Whether there 

 is any fundamental justification for it is a question on which we shall 

 touch at the close; but certain it is that in the form in which ortho- 

 doxy still clings to the idea it is untenable. The very fact that there 

 is absolutely no criterion by which we can distinguish two kinds 

 of history is enough to destroy it. Moreover, it is also shown to be 

 incorrect by the further fact that all the forces which the church was 

 unwilling to recognize as of equal importance with itself, it had to 

 combat as enemies, thus producing a state of permanent unrest. 

 Finally, experience itself refutes this view, for only when belief in 

 a special kind of history was given up did the history of the church 

 begin to be understood. 



It was in the seventeenth century that certain enlightened spirits 

 first shook off this wrong notion. The eighteenth century further 

 developed the knowledge thus won; in the nineteenth it was partly 

 obscured again, but in the end it held its own. We can now say: 

 The history of the church is part and parcel of universal history, and 

 can be understood only in connection with it. 



But if the history of the church is a part of universal history, it is 

 closely bound up with other factors and developments, not as some- 

 thing alien, but as something akin to them; nay, it is only when thus 

 bound up that it exists at all. The more attention we pay to these 



