628 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 



standings and confusions if we do not attend to the place which the 

 old material held and the new meaning which it received in the 

 Christian Church from the very beginning. It is no doubt true that 

 the seven great Angels came from Babylon, the Devil from Persia, 

 the Logos from Greece. But in the gospel and the apostolic writings 

 the Devil means something different from Ahriman, and the Logos of 

 John and Ignatius is not the Logos of Philo. We can only desire with 

 all our hearts that not only in regard to the Old Testament, but also 

 in regard to the New, the investigation of religious history shall go 

 on; but we must just as earnestly insist that in this process the great 

 changes in the meaning of ideas and conceptions shall be clearly 

 kept in view. Even where the dependence of Christian ideas and 

 practices on pagan is particularly evident I mean in the case of the 

 sacraments we must not be content with merely pointing out this 

 dependence; for the Christian doctrine of the sacraments has char- 

 acteristic features of its own; as is proved, for example, by Justin 

 Martyr's account of baptism. 



There is another reason, too, why we must study the history of 

 religion in general. We must study it not only because the history of 

 the church in nearly all its stages has acted on other religions and 

 been itself affected by them, but also because a complete understand- 

 ing of one religion cannot possibly be obtained without a knowledge 

 of others. It is true that the historian of the Christian Church is here 

 at an advantage compared with the historian of any other religion; 

 for Christianity together with its precursor, Judaism is, in space 

 and time, content and development, something so universal that 

 almost all conceivable religious phenomena are to be found in its 

 history. Nevertheless we cannot hope to obtain a definitive know- 

 ledge of Christianity unless we compare it with other religions. We 

 run too great a risk of taking what is important for what is unim- 

 portant, what is primary for what is secondary, and vice versa, if we 

 do not compare so far as comparisons are at all possible. Here, 

 too, the words of the poet apply: 



Ehe es sich riindet in einem Kreis 

 1st kein Wissen vorhanden; 

 Ehe nicht Einer Alles weiss 

 1st die Welt nicht verstanden. 



I do not, of course, mean that our Faculties of Christian Theology 

 should be turned into Faculties of the General History of Religion - 

 we are not here concerned with any merely academic question but 

 still I am quite sure that the student must not separate the history of 

 Christianity from this wider history, and that the progress of know- 

 ledge depends on observing the connection of both. 



