The book which is probably nearest in date, and which is certainly most alike in character to this simple manual, is the first book of the collection of documents known as the Apostolical Constitutions. It pictures the aim of the Christian life as being to please God by obeying His will and keeping His commandments. “Take heed, O sons of God, to do everything in obedience to God, and to become well-pleasing in all things to the Lord our God.”[711] “If thou wilt please God, abstain from all that He hates, and do none of those things that are displeasing to Him.”[712] Individual Christians are spoken of as servants and sons of God, as fellow-heirs and fellow-partakers with His Son, as believers, i.e., as the phrase is expanded, “those who have believed on His unerring religion.”[713] The rule of life is the Ten Commandments, expanded as Christ expanded them, so as to comprehend sins of thought as well as of deed. It was a fellowship of a common ideal and a common enthusiasm of goodness, of neighbourliness and of mutual service, of abstinence from all that would rouse the evil passions of human nature, of the effort to crush the lower part of us in the endeavour to reach after God.[714] It is even possible that the baptismal formula may have consisted, not in an assertion of belief, but in a promise of amendment; for a conservative sect made the candidate promise—“I call these seven witnesses to witness that I will sin no more, I will commit adultery no more, I will not steal, I will not act unjustly, I will not covet, I will not hate, I will not despise, nor will I have pleasure in any evil.”[715] The Christian communities were based not only on the fellowship of a common ideal, but also on the fellowship of a common hope. In baptism they were born again, and born to immortality. There was the sublime conception that the ideal society which they were endeavouring to realize would be actually realized on earth. The Son of Man would come again, and the regenerated would die no more. The kingdoms of this world would become the kingdom of the Messiah. The lust and hate, the strife and conflict, the iniquity and vice, which dominated in current society, would be cast out for ever; and over the new earth there would be the arching spheres of a new heaven, into which the saints, like the angels, might ascend. But as the generations passed, and all things continued as they had been, and the sign of the Son of Man sent no premonitory ray from the far-off heaven, this hope of a new earth, without changing its force, began to change its form. It was no longer conceived as sudden, but as gradual. The nations of the world were to be brought one by one into the vast communion. There grew up the magnificent conception of a universal assembly, a καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία.[716] There would be a universal religion and a universal society, and not until then would the end come: it would be a transformed and holy world. * * * * *