grown continually clearer and clearer, as it freed itself from the admixture of falsehood which had overlaid it. Men went further

grown continually clearer and clearer, as it freed itself from the

admixture of falsehood which had overlaid it.  Men went further

and further in the attainment of the meaning of Christianity, and

realized it more and more in life.

The longer mankind lived, the clearer and clearer became the

meaning of Christianity, as must always be the case with every

theory of life.

Succeeding generations corrected the errors of their predecessors,

and grew ever nearer and nearer to a comprehension of the true

meaning.  It was thus from the very earliest times of

Christianity.  And so, too, from the earliest times of

Christianity there were men who began to assert on their own

authority that the meaning they attribute to the doctrine is the

only true one, and as proof bring forward supernatural occurrences

in support of the correctness of their interpretation.

This was the principal cause at first of the misunderstanding of

the doctrine, and afterward of the complete distortion of it.

It was supposed that Christ's teaching was transmitted to men not

like every other truth, but in a special miraculous way.  Thus the

truth of the teaching was not proved by its correspondence with

the needs of the mind and the whole nature of man, but by the

miraculous manner of its transmission, which was advanced as an

irrefutable proof of the truth of the interpretation put on it.

This hypothesis originated from misunderstanding of the teaching,

and its result was to make it impossible to understand it rightly.

And this happened first in the earliest times, when the doctrine

was still not so fully understood and often interpreted wrongly,

as we see by the Gospels and the Acts.  The less the doctrine was

understood, the more obscure it appeared and the more necessary

were external proofs of its truth.  The proposition that we ought

not to do unto others as we would not they should do unto us, did

not need to be proved by miracles and needed no exercise of faith,

because this proposition is in itself convincing and in harmony

with man's mind and nature; but the proposition that Christ was

God had to be proved by miracles completely beyond our

comprehension.

The more the understanding of Christ's teaching was obscured, the

more the miraculous was introduced into it; and the more the

miraculous was introduced into it, the more the doctrine was

strained from its meaning and the more obscure it became; and the

more it was strained from its meaning and the more obscure it

became, the more strongly its infallibility had to be asserted,

and the less comprehensible the doctrine became.

One can see by the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles how from

the earliest times the non-comprehension of the doctrine called

forth the need for proofs through the miraculous and

incomprehensible.

The first example in the book of Acts is the assembly which

gathered together in Jerusalem to decide the question which had

arisen, whether to baptize or not the uncircumcised and those who

had eaten of food sacrificed to idols.

The very fact of this question being raised showed that

those who discussed it did not understand the teaching of Christ,

who rejected all outward observances--ablutions, purifications,

fasts, and sabbaths.  It was plainly said, "Not that which goeth

into a man's mouth, but that which cometh out of a man's mouth,

defileth him," and therefore the question of baptizing the

uncircumcised could only have arisen among men who, though they

loved their Master and dimly felt the grandeur of his teaching,

still did not understand the teaching itself very clearly. And

this was the fact.

Just in proportion to the failure of the members of the assembly

to understand the doctrine was their need of external confirmation

of their incomplete interpretation of it.  And then to settle this

question, the very asking of which proved their misunderstanding

of the doctrine, there was uttered in this assembly, as is

described in the Acts, that strange phrase, which was for the

first time found necessary to give external confirmation to

certain assertions, and which has been productive of so much evil.

That is, it was asserted that the correctness of what they had

decided was guaranteed by the miraculous participation of the Holy

Ghost, that is, of God, in their decision.  But the assertion that

the Holy Ghost, that is, God, spoke through the Apostles, in its

turn wanted proof.  And thus it was necessary, to confirm this,

that the Holy Ghost should descend at Pentecost in tongues of fire

upon those who made this assertion.  (In the account of it, the

descent of the Holy Ghost precedes the assembly, but the book of

Acts was written much later than both events.)  But the descent of

the Holy Ghost too had to be proved for those who had not seen the

tongues of fire (though it is not easy to understand why a tongue

of fire burning above a man's head should prove that what that man

is going to say will be infallibly the truth).  And so arose the

necessity for still more miracles and changes, raisings of the

dead to life, and strikings of the living dead, and all those

marvels which have been a stumbling-block to men, of which the

Acts is full, and which, far from ever convincing one of the truth

of the Christian doctrine, can only repel men from it.  The result

of such a means of confirming the truth was that the more these

confirmations of truth by tales of miracles were heaped up one

after another, the more the doctrine was distorted from its

original meaning, aid the more incomprehensible it became.

Thus it was from the earliest times, and so it went on, constantly

increasing, till it reached in our day the logical climax of the

dogmas of transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope, or

of the bishops, or of Scripture, and of requiring a blind faith

rendered incomprehensible and utterly meaningless, not in God, but

in Christ, not in a doctrine, but in a person, as in Catholicism,

or in persons, as in Greek Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in

Protestantism.  The more widely Christianity was diffused, and the

greater the number of people unprepared for it who were brought

under its sway, the less it was understood, the more absolutely

was its infallibility insisted on, and the less possible it became

to understand the true meaning of the doctrine.  In the times of

Constantine the whole interpretation of the doctrine had been

already reduced to a RÉSUMÉ--supported by the temporal authority--

of the disputes that had taken place in the Council--to a creed

which reckoned off--I believe in so and so, and so and so, and so

and so to the end--to one holy, Apostolic Church, which means the

infallibility of those persons who call themselves the Church.  So

that it all amounts to a man no longer believing in God nor

Christ, as they are revealed to him, but believing in what the

Church orders him to believe in.

But the Church is holy; the Church was founded by Christ.  God

could not leave men to interpret his teaching at random--therefore

he founded the Church.  All those statements are so utterly untrue

and unfounded that one is ashamed to refute them.  Nowhere nor in

anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that

God or Christ founded anything like what Churchmen understand by

the Church.  In the Gospels there is a warning against the Church,

as it is an external authority, a warning most clear and obvious

in the passage where it is said that Christ's followers should

"call no man master."  But nowhere is anything said of the

foundation of what Churchmen call the Church.

The word church is used twice in the Gospels--once in the sense of

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