strated, in many instances, how true it is, that, “to the pure, all things are pure.” But the
Gospel proscribes everything like presumption and “leading into temptation.” The Church,
in dealing with social evils, often encouraged a recourse to monasticism, in its pure form;
but this also tended to corruption. To charge Christianity, however, with rash experiments
of living which it never tolerated, is neither just nor philosophical. We have in it an example
of the struggles of individuals out of heathenism,—by no means an institution of Christianity
itself. It was a struggle, which, in its spirit, demands sympathy and respect. The Gospel has
taught us to nauseate what even a regenerated heathen conceived to be praiseworthy, until
the Christian family had become a developed product of the Church.419
The Gospel arms its enemies against itself, by elevating them infinitely above what they
would have been without its influences. Refined by its social atmosphere, but refusing its
sanctifying power, they gloat over the failures and falls of those with whom their own
emancipation was begun. Let us rather admire those whom she lifted out of an abyss of
moral degradation, but whose struggles to reach the high levels of her precepts were not al-
ways successful. Yet these very struggles were heroic; for all their original habits, and all
their surroundings, were of the sort “which hardens all within, and petrifies the feeling.”
The American editor has devoted more than his usual amount of annotation to Hermas,
and he affectionately asks the student not to overlook the notes, in which he has condensed
rather than amplified exposition. It has been a labour of love to contribute something to a
just conception of The Shepherd, because the Primitive Age has often been reproached with
its good repute in the early churches. So little does one generation comprehend another!
When Christians conscientiously rejected the books of the heathen, and had as yet none of
their own, save the Sacred Scriptures, or such scanty portions of the New Testament as were
the treasures of the churches, is it wonderful that the first effort at Christian allegory was
welcomed, especially in a time of need and perilous temptation?
419 See Vision iii. cap. 8, for the relation of encraty to faith, in the view of Hermas; also (cap. 7 and passim)
note his uncompromising reproofs of lust, and his beautiful delineations of chastity. The third canon of the
Nicene Synod proscribed the syneisactæ, and also the nineteenth of Ancyra, adopted at Chalcedon into the
Catholic discipline.
115
Elucidations