Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CHURCH. Gentlemen:? The Church is the unique creation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing in all ancient heathendom answers to it in constitution or in institution. Such a thing as a congregation of faithful men was not known. Only the telesterion,1 the hall of the initiation of the mystai at Eleusis, corresponded to a modern church building. The ancient temple was a shrine, naos, for the abiding divinity, or a precinct marked off on ground and sky, temenos and templum, for the observation of auspices, or simply a sacred spot, hieron. It was not for the people. The Parthenon could in its entirety have been set down inside the nave of Cologne Cathedral. A single boulder or isolated rock in Hindustan often served to carve out a complete temple. The vast temples of Egypt were for priests, pomps, and sacred beasts, and not for the laity. But the Stoic sects in the West, and northern Buddhism in the East, were at an early date so impressed with the methods oforganisation of the Christian Church, that they adopted some of its external features. Every attempt at tracing the evolution of the Christian Church from the synagogue and theocracy of Israel will have to be abandoned; for the inner principle of the Church, as I expect to show, is distinctly different from the kahal of Israel1 and from the Levitical hierarchy. While the origin of the Christian Church may not be discovered in ancient folk-faith and customs, it is nevertheless evident that precedent conditions did at the beginning limit the reception of the Church-idea and shape the development thereof. 1 Dyer, Gods in Greece, 189. I. a. In primitive culture the church is the priesthood, the shamans or medicine men of the tribes; and religion consists in performing ceremonial acts.2 Thence flow down, glacier-like, int...
Synopsis
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