Church and State as Seen in the Formation of ChristendomAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Church and state; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Religion and state
But, by the fall, Adam became likewise the Priest in his family. We learn
from the narrative of Cain and Abel that the worship of God by sacrifice
had been instituted, and it is not obscurely intimated that it was
instituted even before he was cast out of paradise, since God Himself
clothed Adam and Eve with skins of beasts, which, doubtless, were slain
in sacrifice, since they were not used for food.[7]
The rite of bloody sacrifice, utterly unintelligible without the notion
of sin, and inconceivable without a positive divine institution, so
precise in its formularies about the statement of sin, and the need of
expiation, is an everliving prophecy of the great sacrifice which God had
intended "before the foundation of the world," and a token of the
knowledge which He had communicated to Adam before he became a father.
Unfallen man needed to make no sacrifice, but only the triple offering of
adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer. These Adam would have given before
he fell; after his fall he became a priest, and the bloody sacrifice to
God of His own creatures, a mode of propitiating God which man could
never have invented or imagined of himself, is a token of the ritual
enjoined upon him, and of the faith which it symbolised and perpetuated.
Such, then, was the condition of the children of Adam, the first human
society, in those "many days" which passed before Cain rose up against
Abel: the state of a family living in full knowledge of their own
creation, being, and end, in vast security, for who was there to hurt
them? worshipping God the Creator by a rite which He had ordained in
token of a great promise, at their head the Father, the Teacher, and the
Priest, with the triple dignity which emanates from the divine
sovereignty, and makes a perfect government.
The two powers which were to rule the world rested as yet undivided upon
Adam after his fall.
It is evident that nothing could be further from a state of savagery or
barbarism, from a state of defective knowledge of God and man, and his
end, than such a condition as this, which suggests itself necessarily to
any one who considers attentively the sacred narrative.
But as Adam in paradise was left to the exercise of his free-will, and
fell out of the most guarded state of innocence by its misuse, so the
first-born of Adam broke out of this secure condition of patriarchal life
through the same misuse, and begun by fratricide the City of the Devil.
We are told that God remonstrated with him when he fell under the
influence of envy and jealousy, but in vain. He rose against his brother
and slew him; he received in consequence the curse of God; "went out from
his face, and dwelt a fugitive on the earth at the east side of Eden."
There it is said that he built the first city, on which St. Augustine
comments: "It is written of Cain that he built a city; but Abel, as a
stranger and pilgrim, built none."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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