But this is not all. Primitive Christianity was not only a summons to
turn one's heart and mind away from a corrupt world; it was a summons
to do so under pain of instant and terrible punishment. It was the
conviction of pious Jews since the days of the Prophets that
mercilessness, avarice, and disobedience to revealed law were the
direct path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against
which St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of
destruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the
ancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend
on it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be
overthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the
remnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life
in the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to
fast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the
kingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take
thought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a
new earth--far more worthy of study--would be unrolled before that
very generation.
There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,
and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism
possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,
pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.
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