The Christians
by Bamber Gascoigne
(New York, Granada, 1978)
The Christians treats the subject differently from a conventional book on Christian history. It is about people, events ad places, rather than theory or theology.
Page 7.
For the first fifty years of what we now call the Christian era, not a word survives in any document about Christ or his followers. During the next fifty years, the Christians themselves wrote down most of the books that now make up the New Testament. … And then in the second century, Roman authors began to comment.
Page 9.
The Essenes were in the desert for the same reason as John the Baptist. They too were awaiting a Messiah.
Page 10.
Each age has been able to find in the Nativity the elements which most appeal to it.
Page 13.
If Jesus was a man and yet was the Son of God, then God can by extension be seen as father to every man.
Page 14.
His background was that of hard-working country people. Members of his on family are mentioned in Christian documents up to the third century. They seem t have remained fairly humble peasant farmers.
Page 14.
No type of miracle is more persuasive than healing miracle. Perhaps it requires faith to be healed: certainly it creates faith to see someone healed.
Page 14.
What Jesus did was attractive; what he said was equally so, especially to the poor. Nothing in the Sermon on the Mount is exclusively original to Christ, for this was a tine when religious sects were proliferating under the distress of the Roman occupation of Palestine, and other teachers or rabbis were offering similar consolation.
Page 15.
Jesus preached the same message as John the Baptist. So did Paul. Repent, and trust to God’s mercy, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Page 15.
In political terms Galilee was well known as the centre of resistance to Roman rule and to the Jewish authorities who collaborated with Rome.
Page 15.
Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central event the suffering and degradation of its god. Crucifixion was a barbarous death.
Page 16.
Christianity was to have its most lasting success moving westwards; converting people in the cities; and using European languages, first Greek and then Latin. For that a different type of apostle was needed, and Christianity found precisely the man in St. Paul.
Page21.
Christians, throughout history, have always persecuted each new Christian sect. The Jews were only doing the same to a new Jewish sect.
Page 22.
In the year 70, Palestine arose against Roman rule and Roman soldiers destroyed the Jewish city. With Jerusalem gone, Christians would increasingly look to Rome and would come to think Peter as the first pope.
Page 26.
The early Christians in Rome spoke Greek - it remained the language of the Roman church until the third century - and they were almost all from the poorest classes, many of them slaves. They ran a tiny welfare state among themselves, looking after widows and orphans.
Page 27.
Gradually three religions pulled ahead of the field, all of them form the east. From Persia, the god Mithras who killed and ate a sacred bull; from Syria, the worship of Sol, the sun; and from a little farther west, Jesus Christ. By the third century it seemed certain that if Rome adopted a new state religion it would be one of these - or a combination of elements from all three.
Page 29.
The Romans had a collector’s attitude to religion and every aspiring ruler was on the look-out for any new god powerful enough to help him grab and them hold on to the throng.
Page 29.
The god that Constantine chose to help him in battle was the Christian god. With his conversion Christianity turned the crucial corner from heresy to orthodoxy. The peculiar people were about to become normal, and some regret it to this day (in that it involved the religion becoming ‘official’).
Page 31.
The link between Christianity and the state, between God and Caesar, began with Constantine.
Page 33.
Along with its new religion, Constantine provided the roman world with a new capital city.
Page 33.
The first part of a community to adopt the new ideology is the Civil Service. With Constantine’s conversion, Christianity became for the first time a positive advantage in furthering a career.
Page 34.
Constantine offered special concessions t Christians. Soon the rich were flocking into the church for the sake of tax concessions.
Page 35.
By 380 rewards for Christians had given way to penalties for non-Christians.
Page 35.
Churches of the Christian empire were carefully designed to emphasize the new hierarchy of Christ and emperor.
Page 38.
With the capital of the empire established in the eat, Ravenna became a place of importance as the chief seaport on the journey from Rome to Constantinople.
Page 38.
Christianity has made more use of images than any other religion, and in the early centuries they were specifically used to emphasize the majesty of the emperor and of his powerful colleague above.
Page 38.
Roman emperors had called themselves Cosmocrator and had been seen with haloes long before they were Christian.
Pages 39-40.
The Christian empire, where politics and religion were almost the same thing, heresy became a form of treason.
Page 42.
The difficulty was that the gospels mention the Father, the son and the Holy Spirit, but not the concept of the Trinity. That was developed later to answer criticisms that Christianity seemed to have more than one god.
Page 44.
The fourth century produced the basic formula that there were three divine persons in one divine essence.
Page 44.
Heresy was the regionalism of a theological age.
Page 45.
Each sect naturally regarded itself as orthodox, and the central orthodoxy was that of the centre of empire - Greek Orthodoxy.
Page 45.
After 1453 the patriarchs were acknowledged by both Muslims and Christians as the leaders of the Christian community.
Page 47.
Gradually Moscow began to see herself as the leader of the Orthodox world. A theory grew up that there had been one Rome, in Italy, which had fallen to the barbarians and to the Roman Catholic heresy. There had been a second Roma: Constantinople. And when that fell to the Turks, there was a third Rome: Moscow.
Page 48.
The real contribution of monks in Christian history was to come not form individual hermits, however dramatic their particular form of isolation, but from monks gathered together in monasteries.
Page 51.
What the Greek Orthodox monks did preserve from the original tradition was a grater separation from the everyday world than became common among monks in western Europe.
Page 54.
The climate of the snowbound north bred the toughest people in Europe and gave them the strongest possible reason for moving elsewhere. Goths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings or Normans - all of Europe’s most ferocious migrants came from in or near Scandinavia.
Page 57.
The two places in Europe where Christianity did manage to hang on are still the fervent Catholic extremities of the Common Market: Italy and Ireland.
Page 59.
The Irish have a habit of leaving Ireland.
Page 62.
It would be St. Benedict’s monks who would unify the new Europe: in 1964 Pope Paul declared him the patron saint of Europe.
Page 63.
Gregory appointed Augustine head of the Christians in England, but nobody had consulted the Christians in England. They didn’t take kindly to a stranger who arrived and announced that he was their leader: and the Romans were equally horrified to find themselves disobeyed.
Page 64.
Again and again, in the early history of Christianity, it was women who showed the way.
Page 65.
Christian missionaries ere not eliminating magic. They were offering to replace it with a superior magic. … It was the chance of a miracle, or of success in battle, which converted people in those days.
Pages 68-69.
Sometimes Christianity came to terms with pagan customs by absorbing them. … Or the Christians merely appropriated the pagan shrine.
Page 70.
Refusing to be baptized carried the death penalty in Charlemagne’s book of laws.
Page 72.
It was not until Charlemagne that any ruler had the strength or the conviction to spread Christianity through Europe as a matter of policy. Charlemagne was by nature an empire-builder. The bricks of his empire were the usual ones, imperial solders: but the mortar was Christianity, a Civil Service of Christian clerics and monks. Church and state were hand in hand again.
Page 72.
Though the legal emperor was still the one in Constantinople, Charlemagne’s title did reflect the realities of power.
Page 74.
Charlemagne appears in later medieval art as the ideal ruler, and his legend grew accordingly. You have to go back a thousand years to Alexander, or some forward a thousand years to Napoleon, to find any European figure of comparable stature.
Page 74.
Monasteries were easy plunder for this new wave of se-going barbarians. They were full of valuable objects and of fat harmless monks: and their favourite position, on islands or on the coast, now made them more rather than less vulnerable.
Page 76.
The barbarian love of movement continued in the form of pilgrimage. Along the great pilgrim routes Benedictine monasteries sprang up to cater for both the bodies and souls of travellers.
Page 79.
St. Bernard, the most influential monk in the entire Middle Ages.
Page 79.
St. Bernard was a white monk, a Cistercian. It is his order which today occupies the ancient monastery on the island of Lérins. The Cistercians were the last great reforming movement from within the Benedictine order, and with the final brick fell into place in the building of medieval Europe. They believed that hard work was part of a monk’s holy calling. They planted new monasteries in the wild and uncultivated parts of Europe, and largely though them the land was tamed.
Page 79.
St. Bernard’s fame did mu h to spread the medieval cult of the Virgin, though he himself notably lacked her qualities of understanding and patience. He was aggressive, he was abusive … He had all the vices of a man who is tireless in a cause which he knows to be right.
Page 80.
The remarkable fact was that from the most distant parts of Europe the descendants of Celts and Goths and Franks and Vikings were writing in one language, Latin, to one place, Rome. The language was that of the old Roman empire, the city had been its capital. The barbarians and Rome, through the medium of Christianity, had come to a fruitful compromise. And Rome had a new kind of empire.
Page 81.
You can see the great cathedral as a work of faith, rising serene and confident above a world of superstition and cruelty: or as an astonishingly rich institution diverting the pennies of the people to the greater glory of God.
Page 85.
For the people who lived in those cities the building of a cathedral was more than a matter of pride, or even faith. It was an attempt to appease God. Enthusiasm and a sense of guilt were almost inseparable. People’s sense of guilt gave them the energy t build their cathedral. And the cathedral gave them hope.
Pages 85-86.
The medieval cathedral was in every sense the centre of the community. As well as being a place for worship, it was somewhere to meet, to hold a discussion, or to transact business. It could even be a labour exchange.
Page 88.
Most of the people coming to church in the Middle Ages couldn’t ready: sculpture and paintings were described as ‘books for the illiterate’.
Page 91.
It was believed that one of the pleasures of the blessed in heaven would be to behold the torment of the damned.
Page 92.
Demons and devils were everywhere in the Middle Ages.
Page 92.
The suffering of Jesus for mankind is the central theme of Christianity, but the medieval fascination with every last detail gave a gory emphasis to the ‘Passion’ of Jesus, which it never had in the earlier centuries.
Page 94.
Nowadays a place becomes a tourist resort if it has a good beach, or famous buildings and works of arty. In the Middle Ages, when every tourist was a pilgrim, what mattered was relics - fragments of saints, which could range form a tiny splinter of bone to a whole skeleton.
Page 95.
To a modern pilgrim the stained glass of Chartres comes s a revelation. In the thirteenth century, when the cathedral was built, it must have seemed even more amazing, for such a vast expanse of colour was something entirely new.
Page 96.
At the height of the Middle Ages there were no less than fifteen foreskins of Jesus being worshipped in various churches around Europe.
Page 97.
There were always some who rejected the grandeur and wealth of the medieval church. Most of them Rome branded as heretics and persecuted.
Page 98.
The spirit introduced by St. Francis was something new in the medieval church. It was humble, but without a neurotic sense of self-mortification.
Page 98.
It was the climax of a series of catastrophes in the 1340s. First, many banks in Florence and Siena had failed. Then 1346 and 1347 brought disastrous harvests, and in 1348 came the Black Death. Nowadays we would talk of depression, famine, disaster. In the Middle Ages the hand of God was sufficient explanation. In an orgy of guilt and repentance bands of flagellants wandered the countryside, whipping themselves to appease the Almighty.
Page 101.
The more intolerable life on earth becomes, the more people turn to the promises of heaven.
Page 102.
All Christian churches would in later centuries condemn the traffic in indulgences. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of an indulgence - if properly earned - remains a part of present-day Roman Catholic dogma, though less and less emphasis is placed on it.
Page 103.
The bell that tolls for death, for plague, for famine, is also the bell that peals for girth, for marriage, for Easter morning.
Page 104.
Islam, meaning submission to the will of God, began among merchants. Muhammad was one himself. He had married a wealthy widow and was looking after her business affairs, when Gabriel first spoke to him.
Page 105.
When Islam began to spread from the cities to the desert tribesmen, the Koran provided them with a code well suited to their way of life. Instead of the complicated mysteries of Christian worship, a Muslim needs only his prayer mat to carry out his devotions. Instead of a hierarchy of priests, he relies for advice on individual holy men whose influence comes only from their knowledge of the Koran.
Page 106.
The greater simplicity of Islam was to prove one of its advantages.
Page 106.
One of the chief causes of friction between the people of the book has been that so many of their holy places are the same.
Page 107.
When the Arab s captured Jerusalem in 638 this whole temple platform was a derelict site in the middle of a Christian city.
Page 107.
Throughout history new religions have moved, like hermit crabs, into the shells left by their predecessors.
Page 109.
The crusades sere based on a powerful combination: idealism and greed. Both inspired violent feelings. … Religious minds are adept at seeing totally opposing events as equal evidence of God’s perfect intentions.
Page 113.
Christians who died would go to heaven - the pope had promised that. Christians who lived could hope for anew life in the east.
Page 113.
All the important crusader castles belonged to two great military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers.
Page 115.
The crusades had been expeditions across and around the Mediterranean. That meant there was another side to them: trade with the east. And it was this, rather than Christianity, which interested Venice.
Page 118.
The crusaders had caused a developing interest in the details of Islam. The twelfth century saw the first European translation of the Koran and the first European biographies of the Prophet Muhammad.
Page 122.
It was in the field of scholarship that the Christians had most to learn from the Muslims.
Page 126.
Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, a black friary. The order had been founded in 1216 by a Spaniard, St. Dominic, who was a contemporary of St. Francis. Francis brought a much needed simplicity back into Christianity, Dominic a new intellectual energy.
Page 127.
The papacy was moving towards a high tide of temporal splendour and the lowest ebb of its spiritual authority.
Page 131.
To walk up the steps of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence is like going into church. It is the library which Michelangelo designed to house the Medici collection of manuscripts, and the activity inside it must have had something of the high seriousness of church-going. We think of burrowing in the classics as a slightly dusty occupation but at that time it was a matter of the greatest excitement. Ancient Rome was thought of as the land of heroes. Greek was the language of philosophy, but also of early Christianity - of Plato, the gospels, St. Paul. Studying the original texts was like rediscovering humanity before the clutter of the Middle Ages.
Page 138.
God could be honoured in the beauty of his most superb creation: man.
Page 138.
Intelligence as well as beauty was a Renaissance passion.
Page 139.
Martin V had found the city overgrown by weeds. A century later Michelangelo and Raphael were only the two leaders among a galaxy of talent working to glorify Rome and the papacy.
Page 144.
Erasmus’s chief reason for mastering Greek was so as to edit the Greek New Testament and the works of the early father.
Page 151.
The whore-mongering Rome of the Renaissance popes had long been identified with the Bible’s scarlet woman, the Whore of Babylon.
Page 155.
On the eve of All Saints’ Day Martin Luther nailed a list of ninety-five theses or propositions to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg. The document criticized many aspects of current church practice, of which the sale of indulgences was only one, and nailing it to the door was a conventional way of inviting the town and university to public discussion of the matter. No doubt Luther was as surprised as anyone else by the explosive results.
Page 160.
The speed of Europe’s reaction was made possible by the spread of printing. The technology was already sixty years old, but the first printed books had been expensive rarities, cheaper than manuscripts but nevertheless luxuries. Only recently had the craft become equipped for r4apid production of pamphlets, with all the exciting potential of a gutter press. Someone in Wittenberg printed the ninety-five theses. It was said that in two weeks all Germany had read them, and in four the whole of Europe. Soon there was a full-scale pamphlet war between those who supported Luther and those who opposed him.
Page 160.
His voice was part of a chorus, deriving from the ‘Devotion Moderna’ and the long-standing demand for a more personal religion than Rome had provided
Page 162.
Man was so sinful, said Paul, that only through God’s mercy could he be saved. Therefore his only merit was to have faith in that mercy. … Justification by faith was to become the central theme of Luther’s teaching. It undercut the entire code of discipline of the medieval church, which was much like that of an old-fashioned school - with a recording angel awarding bad marks for sin and good ones for merit.
Page 163.
Luther disregarded every order from Rome that he should recant, and he would certainly have been burnt as a heretic if Frederick had handed him over.
Page 163.
Frederick had founded the university of Wittenberg in 1502 and was intensely proud of his creation. Luther, its most distinguished member, had suddenly become famous throughout Europe. Frederick was in no hurry to deliver such a man to certain death at the hands of an Italian pope.
Page 163.
Scripture, he said, had given him his idea of Christianity.
Page 164.
In Protestant countries today, where the Bible has long been listed as the world’s gest-selling book and can be found free in every hotel bedroom, it is hard for us to imagine the excitement of being among the first generation of ordinary Christians able to read it for themselves.
Pages 164-165.
Germany was ruled by many independent princes, some of whom had allowed their local churches to adopt Luther’s reforms while others remained faithful to Rome. Charles V had outlawed Luther at Worms and regarded his ideas as heretical, but he needed a united Germany to support him in defending the east of the empire against the Turks.
Page 166.
After the initial shock Luther came to see raising of children as enhancing a priest’s spiritual life.
Page 169.
The Peace of Augsburg had recognized only one Protestant church, the Lutheran, but form the earliest years of the Reformation there had been several varieties of reformed Christianity arguing almost as much with each other as with Rome. It was the beginning of the growth of sects, which became inevitable once truth was agreed to be in the Bible and the Bible made available to everyone.
Page 170.
All truth was in the scriptures, but the scriptures were capable of almost infinitely varied interpretation.
Page 171.
Calvinism rapidly became more international than either of the other Protestant churches of the Reformation, the Lutheran or the Anglican.
Page 174.
The notion that the people could assert themselves against their ruler was a triumph for the ideas of one man, John Knox.
Page 174.
Mary’s present-day descendant, Queen Elizabeth II, is defender of two varieties of faith - an episcopal church south of the border and a Presbyterian one north of it. It is an arrangement which would have horrified Elizabeth I
Page 175.
The Church of England was the last of the three great Protestant groups of the Reformation to find its own identity, and - in true English fashion - it found it in a compromise between the many different pressures of the century. Henry VIII, its ostensible founder, had intended to do little more than replace the pope with himself: he wanted an English Catholic church instead of a Roman Catholic one. But during his reign the various influences of the continental Reformation were surreptitiously circulating and competing for favour among the people of England.
Page 175.
With the Act of Supremacy, in 1534, Henry repudiated the authority of the pope and declared himself head of the Church of England.
Page 177.
Henry had no interest in reform for its own sake.
Page 177.
Probably no two generations had had to adjust to so many religious surprises as the people of England between 1521 and 1571.
Pages 178-179.
It has been calculated that the income of the religious houses was more than three times that of the crown, a fact which provided Henry’s real motive for closing them down.
Page 179.
Another local excitement at much the same time was the arrival of the Great Bible, the first authorized English translation, which was ordered to be placed in every church.
Page 179.
Spanish Christianity was the most gory in all Europe. It positively indulged in the more lurid aspects of Christ’s ordeal on the cross.
Page 191.
The new puritanism was not purely in response to the Protestant example: there had been the beginnings of moral re form, particularly in Spain, long before Luther.
Page 195.
The strong position taken by the Council of Trent established the battle lines for the future, between Catholics and Protestants. The struggle against the break-away sects was seen as a holy war.
Page 198.
The lasting success of the Catholic Reformation was not the military but the spiritual battle.
Page 198.
The baroque style increasingly came to express the almost operatic self-confidence of the Catholic Reformation: that joyful indulgence in the maximum number of gilded saints in every conceivable posture of sentimental ecstasy, as if in deliberate contrast to the severity insisted on by the Protestants.
Page 198.
Their policy for Asia was the very sensible one of trying to convert the rulers - who, like Constantine, might formally bring their empires into the fold.
Page 199.
Four centuries after the great missionary effort of the Catholic Reformation, both east and west, the balance sheet seems to show a total contrast Utter failure in the east, where a handful of Roman Catholics in Goa and Macao are all that remain from the heroic endeavours of Francis Xavier and those who followed him. Complete success in the west, with the Christians of Latin American now forming the largest single group in the Church of Rome.
Page 205.
With a new god forced upon them, of whose powers they were still uncertain, many Mexicans took the elementary precaution of hiding a trusted idol or two behind the Christian altar - so that they could at least pray to everyone at once. … The process of merging the two religions, hoping for benefits from each, has continued in more subtle ways ever since.
Page 205.
A major difficulty in accepting Jesus Christ was hid identification as the god of the alien and white race of Europeans, the conquerors.
Page 206.
One of the great strengths of a religion as intrinsically mysterious as Christianity is its ability to adapt, to be most things to most men. And one of the paradoxes of the Catholic Reformation is that the same energy which put an end to so many of the abuses of medieval Christianity in Europe was fostering something remarkably similar in a new continent.
Pages 207-209.
This Mennonite world is precisely the Utopia which ecologists now preach. The wheel has come full circle. It is the reactionary Mennonites who find themselves most up to date.
Page 211.
It is only one sect in of the Mennonite community, the Old Order Amish, which keeps to these ways. The majority of Mennonites look like any other American. What identifies them as one group with the Amish is a shared system of values and beliefs which dates back to the beginning of Anabaptism in the 1520s: a strong sense of community (capable of strikingly modern innovations, such as a church in Pennsylvania which holds services entirely in sign language for the deaf); and insistence on the right of the individual to resist unacceptable demands by the state, such as conscription to carry arms; and an emphasis on personal religion, centred on the family and on study of the Bible.
Page 211.
During the sixteenth century three Protestant groups won for themselves the position of established churches in different parts of Europe: the Lutherans, the Calvinists, and the Anglicans. From the start the Anabaptists were the outsiders, the radical wing of the Reformation, persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike.
Page 212.
Anabaptism had its origins in Zurich, in 1525, when a group of ordinary people studying the Bible decided to baptize each other.
Page 212.
As the Catholics have always known, nothing leads to such a variety of opinion as reading the Bible
Page 213.
A larger proportion of Anabaptists were martyred for their faith than any other Christian group in history - including even the early Christians on whom they modelled themselves.
Pages 213-214.
To their contemporaries they appeared a threat to the very fabric of society. To us they seem to have made a more simple demand: man’s right to his own beliefs.
Page 214.
There was one Protestant minority in the sixteenth century powerful enough to demand tolerance. For a while it seemed perfectly possible that the Huguenots would win France for the Protestant cause, just as England, Sweden, Holland and many parts of Germany and Switzerland were won - at the level of affairs of state, or by warfare. They failed. But in the attempt they gained the first official guarantee of religious tolerance, the Edict of Nantes.
Page 215.
The power of the Huguenots was far greater than their numbers (at their peak about one million out of twenty million in France), because a very high proportion of the nobility and middle classes were converted to the cause.
Page 215.
No city has such a barbarous record of butchering its own citizens as Paris.
Page 217.
In those days a licence was required to leave England.
Page 218.
Improvidently, the pilgrims had chosen mid-November to land, without any means of shelter, in a district now famous for its hard winters. What with exploring the coast, and hunting for food, it was December 20th before they had fixed upon a site for their village.
Pages 220-221.
The sense of being God’s elect, so useful in times of hardship, turned all too easily to Puritan self-righteousness.
Page 221.
Highly theatrical preaching of Judgment Day was to remain for a while a Quaker characteristic.
Page 227.
At the centre of George Fox’s vision was an idea which was also at the heart of the Reformation, but which had never been carried through to its logical conclusion. Luther had proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, a religion in while each man’s personal relationship with God was his first concern: yet all the great churches of the Reformation, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Anglican, had their official pastors to guide the flock.
Page 228.
His followers were called Quakers by their enemies because of their visionary antics, bidding others tremble before the Lord and themselves shaking in ecstasy. But their own name for themselves was and still is the Society of Friends.
Page 228.
In an age of rapid scientific advance, the scientists saw each new discovery as further proof of God’s guiding hand in the universe.
Page 238.
The great inventor, the landscape gardener of the universe, was the god of the English Deists.
Page 238.
Signs in the sky which had once shown the mystery of God now proved his skill as a mechanic.
Page 239.
The threat of hell the promise of heaven; these two have always provided the most powerful impetus for religion.
Page 241.
It was as shocking to respectable eighteenth-century Christians that a man should preach emotional sermons in the fields, as it is to many Europeans today that a preacher should sob on television, inviting the viewer to kneel with him in from of the set and accept Jesus now, at this very moment.
Page 242.
The moral affront of the slavery had been only one of the many impulses to missionary work ab road. … Christianity was the highest expression of Europe’s civilization, and cheap manufactured goods were a measure of her practical achievements. It seemed obvious that both would be of use to the savages, and exporting them could benefit the pocket as well as the soul of Europe.
Pages 257-259.
It had long been clear that the industrial working classes had slipped out of reach of the churches. It was a process which became inevitable with the growth of the cities. People moved form villages where, however poor, they had formed part of a conventionally church-going community - one small enough for absentees from church to be identifiable, and for aquaintanceship with a good vicar to be a potential source of comfort. They came instead to a city so vast that different classes could live in separate districts and never see each other.
Page 263.
It was hardly surprising that the working classes, after six exhausting days in the factory, did not spend Sunday in church.
Page 263.
People considered the problem one of sin as much as poverty.
Page 266.
The slums were morally as well as physically poisonous.
Page 266.
The Salvation Army combined two distinct elements, the military and the theatrical - a powerful combination.
Page 268.
The role which booth was now suggesting for the missions, seen at its very simplest level in the famous Salvation Army soup kitchens, was one which the state would eventually take over in developed countries under the gradual influence of Socialism - the protection of all citizens from the worst effects of poverty.
Page 269.
History has shown that it is almost impossible to run a successful mission which offers nothing but the Truth. Some ore concrete benefits must be provided as well, whether it be soup, soap, education, agricultural know-how, a bed for the night, medical assistance or even freedom from slavery.
Page 269.
Since the nineteenth century western societies have become increasingly irreligious, and yet the extent of mission work - on the face of it more needed than ever - has declined dramatically.
Page 269.
It seemed an almost impossible task in the nineteenth century to reach the Home Heathen and the Poor. It has proved even harder to say anything meaningful to the indifferent and the not so poor.
Page 271.
The independent African churches which have developed from European missionary effort over the past hundred and fifty years are now referred to internationally as the Younger Churches, and are widely regarded as having more of the fire of early Christianity than many of their senior colleagues in the Christian fold.
Page 272.
However much different religions may vary they all fulfil these two basic purposes - answering questions about the universe, and providing a structure for society.
Page 275.
The two sciences which were to clash most severely with biblical authority had their beginnings in the eighteenth century: geology, which would unearth from the rock strata a long succession of fossilized creatures, many of them extinct; and modern zoology, in which the first serious attempts to classify animals as species would soon lead to theories of evolution.
Page 277.
The Origin of Species arrived late on the scene, but no previous work had offered such a wealth of argument and it turned the debate into a subject of ferocious public controversy.
Page 279.
Believers in any religion naturally need to feel that they are right, and they prefer to be uniquely right. But the richness of any one religion implies the wrongness of all the others, ad the more that is known about the others the harder this becomes to maintain.
Page 283.
The movement known as Secularism, which laid the basis for our modern largely secular societies, was dedicated to ending the control exercised by official religion over everyday life.
Page 284.
The type of modern Christianity referred to as Fundamentalist began specifically as a response to the threat of scientific discoveries.
Page 288.
In Vatican One the papacy had dictated; in Vatican Two it would listen, and there was a great deal to listen to.
Page 291.
The Protestant Reformation refused to stop where Luther intended: the new sense of inquiry and of self-responsibility led inevitably to the hundreds of Protestant sects with which we are familiar today.
Page 291.
Change, once it is in the air, will always be too fast for some, too slow for others.
Page 291.
The nineteenth-century pressures towards disbelief, which have prompted new defensive theologies and re-alignments within the churches, have also removed the unworthy reasons for professing Christianity. For the first time since Constantine, Christianity is now no advantage in anyone’s career, or the lack of it no drawback. Social disapproval of those who do not go to church has vanished n most western communities.
Page 293.
The Victorians were convinced that atheism would spell the end of all morality, but it would be a bold man who claimed today that the average Christian was more moral than the average atheist.
Page 293.
Greater familiarity with other religions has largely removed Christ’s monopoly on his ethical precepts.
Page 294.
The Middle Ages were the period when Europe had seemed to be a single Christian nation, and the medieval yearnings of the Romantic \movement played a large part in the political dreams of the right.
Page 299.
Marx himself saw different religions as ‘nothing more than different stages in the development of the human spirit, s snake-skins cast off by history, and man as the snake which wore them’.
Page 303.
The simplest way of shoring up society with a Christian buttress was to emphasize that God had intended the obscene inequalities of nineteenth-century life.
Page 304.
The nearest thing that Marx and Engels ever saw to Communism in practice was the Paris Commune of 1871. It emerged accidentally from the Franco-Prussian war.
Page 306.
For most of his life Marx expected the revolution to occur in an industrialized country (at first he had high hopes of France, then later of Germany),but in the even the first country to adopt the red flag was the most backward in Europe, one which was just clambering out of the Middle Ages and in which the serfs had been freed only as recently as 1861. In the chaos of world war, the Bolsheviks - a handful of dedicated revolutionaries - were able to seize power in 1917 in the vast peasant empire of Holy Russia, a country which was fervently Christian and in which the Church was closely identified with the emperor.
Pages 307-309.
Christian countries, throughout history, have not been famous for tolerating other religions in their midst.
Page 309.
The Soviet Union was the first state in the history of the world to make a dogma of the non-existence of God, but its leaders rushed in to fill the gap - as if admitting that society abhors a theological vacuum.
Page 310.
Christianity and Communism share many of the same ideals.
Page 312.
It is the strength of any great religion that it is capable of finding within itself an almost infinite variety of new forms. They are not necessarily true to the origins of the religion, nor are they inevitable results of those origins. They are reflections of their own times.
Pages 312-313.
In recent years, when the western world has made almost an alternative religion of personal relationships, we have emphasized - with justification, but more than any age before us - that the message of the gospel is Love.
Page 314.
To be able to adapt is strength in a religion as much as in a species. It is something which two thousand years of Christianity have amply proved.
Page 314.