If we ask what the thoughts of early Christianity were in regard to this matter, we need remain in no uncertainty as to the reply. Recent discovery of documents and the critical study of the primitive liturgies have given us a great deal of knowledge as to the religious conceptions of those who met for Christian worship in the centuries after the Apostles. At first it was with reluctance that they committed their most sacred formularies to writing. Even as late as the time of Athanasius the precise nature of the liturgy was kept as a secret, to be revealed only to those who would be certain to regard it with reverence and understanding. ‘It is not permitted,’ he wrote, ‘to describe the mysteries to those who are not initiated.’[106] Not until this discipline of secrecy was gradually abandoned, as Christianity came to be accepted throughout the empire, were the actual forms of service allowed to become public property. From these we are able to gather much as to the place which the Eucharist held in the life of the Church, and as to the hopes that were centred in it. These hopes, without question, were primarily of a spiritual sort. Intercession was offered with a fulness and intensity which witness to a wonderful power of sustained devotion and a boundless range of sympathy. There were many and various prayers for the peace and perfecting of the Church and the enlightenment of the world, for the spread of true knowledge, for the sanctification of all estates of believers, and above all, and most of all, for the exaltation and glory of God in earth as in heaven. But no one can so much as glance over these liturgies without being strongly impressed by the fact that those who framed them and used them had no notion of drawing any sharp line of distinction between the spiritual and the material, between the blessing of the soul and the good to be desired for the body. If they made intercession for the Church that it might be ‘kept sheltered from storms’ and be ‘preserved founded upon the rock until the consummation of the world,’ and were careful to remember the higher needs of all classes of Christian people, they were quick to add, ‘Let us pray for our brethren exercised by sickness, that the Lord may deliver them from every disease and from every infirmity, and may restore them whole to His Holy Church.’[107] In the prayer of Consecration they would ask that the Bread and the Wine might be made to all who received them a means of ‘faith, and watchfulness, and healing, and sober-mindedness, and sanctification, and renovation of soul and body and spirit.’[108] When they had partaken of the elements they implored that these might ‘not be unto condemnation but to salvation, for the benefit of soul and body.’[109] [106] _Apol. contra Arianos_, ii. [107] Clementine Liturgy. [108] Liturgy of St. Mark. [109] Clementine Liturgy.