The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive ChristianityFrothingham, Octavius Brooks
Religion
The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Christianity -- Controversial literature
Leading protestant minds, without making so much concession as the
church of Rome, have practically accepted the position here maintained.
It is becoming less common, every day, to base the claims of
Christianity on the New Testament. The most learned, earnest, and
intelligent commend their faith on its reasonableness, confronting
modern problems in a modern way. St. George Mivart quotes no scripture
against the doctrine of evolution. No one reading Dr. McCosh on the
development hypothesis, would suppose him to be a believer in the
inspiration of the bible. He reasons like a reasonable man, meeting
argument with argument, feeling disposed to confront facts with
something harder than texts. The well instructed christian, if he enters
the arena of scientific discussion at all, uses scientific weapons, and
follows the rules of scientific warfare. The problems laid before the
modern world are new; scarcely one of them was propounded during the
first two centuries of our era; not one was propounded in modern terms.
The most universal of them, like poverty, vice, the relations of the
strong and the weak, present an aspect which neither church, Father, nor
Apostle would recognize. Whatever bearing Christianity has on these
questions must be timely if it is to be efficacious.
The doctrine of christian development, as it is held now by
distinguished teachers of the christian church, implying as it does
incompleteness and therefore defect in the antecedent stages of progress
points clearly to the apostolic and post apostolic times as ages of
rudimental experience, tentative and crude. Why should not the
entertainers of this doctrine calmly surrender the records and remains
of the preparatory generations to antiquarian scholars who are willing
to investigate their character? No discovery they can make will alter
the results which the centuries have matured. They will simply more
clearly exhibit the process whereby the results have been reached.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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