Christianity in History Author:James Vernon Bartlet 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: CHAPTER II APOSTOLIC CHRISTIANITY " They sing the song of Moses . . . and . . . of the Lamb." " We have the mind of Christ." The essence of Christianity... more » is Christ: its method the influence of personality upon personality. The secret of its origin, as of its repeated renewal—the most striking fact in its history—is the power of His personality over men. The primitive Church was the broadening out of the circle of disciples which had grown up in the footsteps of Jesus. They had been gathered by the test of religious experience, from nearly every class, social or religious, within contemporary Judaism ; but most of all from the non-official and humbler types, in which the essential spirit of religion was least entangled with the traditional and secondary. The principle of selective affinity was a certain openness to spiritual reality, and a readiness to sacrifice all for it, which Jesus himself spoke of as the child-like spirit and the " single eye." Such were the essential qualities of those who felt themselves " elect " unto membership in the people prepared for God's Messianic reign. For in the coming of Messiah among men, the Kingdom had come in principle, though not " in power " owing to the unreadiness of the nation as a whole, seen in its rejection of Him. Yet even this great anomaly would be annulled, and that right soon, by God's overruling, possibly through a national penitence, when Jesus should return to reign. Such was the form of their faith. But what of Jesus' death by crucifixion ? How could faith survive so crushing a refutation of the claims of the Prophet of Nazareth to be the Messiah it had begun to see in him ? Simply because the Cross, as so read, had itself been refuted by another fact vouchsafed to his followers as a body, their experience of Je...« less