The Ministry of Grace Author:John Wordsworth 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: DIFFERENT VIEWS OF CHURCH HISTORY 8 mention what these partial views are, so far as they have come to my knowledge. Some writers very properly recommend t... more »he study of Church history as a wholesome influence on personal character. This is the view of one whom I love to think of as a tried and ever-helpful friend, the late Professor Samuel Berger, of the Protestant Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, whose labours on the Latin Bible have been of great benefit to Mr. White and myself in our edition of the New Testament of St. Jerome. He has put this view of Church history forward (in a recent opening lecture delivered 3 November, 1899) with his usual clearness and power of illustration.1 How little did his friends in England suppose that it would be almost the last literary product of his blameless and useful life! Others insist, upon the connection of Church history with the course of general history, and point out, often with great pertinency, the influence of environment upon the development of Christian institutions. This is the line taken in considerable detail by the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, of Oxford, in his Introductory Lecture delivered as Reader hi this subject in 1885, and in his three books bearing upon different parts of the great field which he desired to cover.2 His 1 Des ttudes d'histoire ecclesiastique (Paris : Fischbacher, 1899). 8 Introductory Lecture on the Study of Church History, 23 April, 1885, Rivingtons; The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches, Hampton Lectures for 1880, Rivingtons, 1881; The Growth of Church Institutions (Preface dated 16 March, 1887), 3rd ed., Hodder« less