The Formation of Christendom, Volume IIAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Christianity; Christianity -- Miscellanea
From these words of our Lord, as from the whole previous argument, we
gather that while the Truth which Christ imparted to His Apostles was one
and complete, its development in its various relations was designedly left
as the proper work of such a Body as He created. He Himself spoke as God
in human flesh, uttering, that is, creative words, which gathered up in a
sentence a germ of truth capable of a long series of applications, and
requiring them in order to be understood. And the aptitude to make these
applications, so that the truth proclaimed by Him and committed to His
Apostles should penetrate through and leaven the whole human society, He
gave to His mystical Body. Let us take an instance of this. The Pharisees
approached Him one day to entangle Him by their words, and proposed to Him
a dilemma from which they thought that He could not escape save by ruining
His influence with one great party, or by encountering the danger of being
charged with seditious teaching by another. They put to Him the question
whether it was lawful to give tribute to Cæsar or not. Whereupon He asked
them to show Him the tribute-money, and pointing to the image of the
emperor upon it, uttered those famous words, “Render therefore to Cæsar
the things which are Cæsar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.” Now
these words were laid up in the treasury of His Church, and by them she
has had to determine the relation between the civil and the spiritual
powers in the society created by Him who spake them. Here is a vast
development from a small seed: but it is a seed cast by the world’s
Creator and the Body’s Head. And His teaching is full of such seeds, as
the history of His Church is one great process of developing and
harmonising and conveying to man the truth thus cast into the fallows of
her soil. It is not new truth, for He gave the germ, and no power in man
could have developed it without the germ, any more than it could produce
the oak without the acorn. It is the same truth, as He taught it, but with
that process passed upon it which He intended when He gave it in such a
form, and when He made a living Body, to be called by His name, to
propagate His teaching, to collect His members into one, and to fill the
earth with the knowledge which He brought.
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