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intelligible for the Christian than for the Jew, in the same way that the man is able to understand the child, while the child can have no proper understanding of himself. Whence Augustine says with full right: Novum Testamentum in vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet.

The objectivity then which the historian is bound to aim at always, though he may never reach it fully in this life, is the truth itself, as it is to be found only in Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. This truth is inseparable at the same time from righteousness, and allows no partiality, no violation of the suum cuique, to come into view.

13. Division of Church History.

The development of the church has different stadia or life-stages, which are styled periods. The close of one period and beginning of another is an epoch, properly a stopping-place (inox). This marks the entrance of a new principle; and an epoch-forming event or idea, is such as introduces a new course of development. So for instance, the first feast of Pentecost; the conversion of St. Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles; the destruction of Jerusalem; the union of church and State under Constantine; the rise of Gregory VII; the posting of his ninety-five theses by Luther; Calvin's appearance in Geneva; the succession of queen Elizabeth to the throne; the landing of the Puritan pilgrims at Plymouth; the appearance of Spener, Zinzendorf, Wesley; the breaking out of the French Revolution; the year 1848, etc. A period is the circuit (epíodos) between two epochs, or the time within which a new idea or view of the world comes to its evolution. Among periods themselves, however, we may distinguish greater and smaller. The greater periods we will style, for the sake of clearness, ages, or if it be preferred, world-ages. A new age we will allow to commence, by a vast scale of productive contemplation, where the church not only passes into an entirely new outward state, but the stream of her inward life also is brought to assume a wholly different direction. Such an age then falls again into a number of sections or periods in the narrower sense, each of which represents and unfolds some particular side of the general principle which rules the age.

We divide now the whole history of the church down to the present time into three ages, and each age again into three periods; from which we derive the following scheme, or universal index, in the way of preliminary survey and preparation.

FIRST AGE: The Primitive church, or the Graeco-Latin (Oriental and Occidental) Universal church, from its foundation on the day of Pentecost, to Gregory the Great, embracing thus the first six centuries (to 590). First Period: The Apostolic church, to the death of the apostles. Second Period: The church under persecution (ecclesia pressa), to the sole sovereignty of Constantine (311).

Third Period: The church in the Graeco-Roman empire, under the barbarian flood, to Gregory the Great (590).

SECOND AGE: The church of the Middle Ages, or the RomanoGermanic church, from Gregory the Great to the Reformation (590—1517).

Fourth Period: Commencement of the Middle Ages, the Planting of the church among the Germanic nations, to the time of Gregory VII. (1073).

Fifth Period: Bloom of the Middle Ages, summit of the papacy, monasticism, scholastic and mystic theology, to Boniface VIII. (1294).

Sixth Period: Dissolution of the Middle Ages and Preparation for the Reformation, to 1517.

THIRD AGE: The Modern church, or the Evangelical Protestant church, over against the Roman, to the present time.

Seventh Period: The Reformation, or Productive Protestantism (16th century).

Eighth Period: Self-consolidating or Scholastic Protestantism (17th century and first part of the 18th).

Ninth Period: Negative Protestantism (Rationalism and sect spirit), and introduction to a new age (from middle of the 18th century to this time).

14. General Character of the Three Ages of Church History.

A full justification of this division, in its details, can be found only in church history itself. It is in place here, however, to establish in some measure the authority of the main division into three ages, by a preliminary exposition of their general character.

I. The Ancient church, from her foundation to the close of the sixth century, has her local theatre in the countries immediately around the Mediterranean sea; namely in Western Asia (particularly Palestine and Asia Minor), in Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, southern Gaul), and in Northern Africa (Egypt, Numidia, etc.), in the very centre, thus, of the old world and its heathen culture. Proceeding

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from the bosom of the Jewish nation, Christianity even in the age of the apostles effected a settlement in the Greek and Roman nationality, and this national basis reaches through the whole first age; which we have good ground thus to style the Graeco-Roman or Oriental and Occidental. In the first place, it has a mighty conflict to sustain with Judaism and Paganism, this too under its most cultivated and powerful form. Hence a weighty part falls to the history of the diffusion of Christianity, and also to the history of the church's persecutions, in part by the Roman sword, in part also by Grecian science and art. In this conflict, however, the church triumphs, through her moral strength displayed in life and death, and her new view of the world. She appropriates the classical language and culture, fills them with Christian contents, and produces the magnificent literature of the fathers, which has been of fruitful force also for all later periods. The Oriental or Greek church occupies the foreground, as the principal bearer of the movement. She unfolds in this age her highest power and fairest blossoms, particularly in the explanation and settlement of the objective fundamental doctrines of Christ's divinity and that of the Holy Ghost, and of the blessed Trinity; the Greek dialectics being made here to do good service; whence her complacency in the title of the orthodox church. Still the Latin church also comes into view, especially the African, from the time of Tertullian, and takes the lead indeed, through Augustine, in the great anthropological controversies.

This age is, in dogma, polity, and worship, fundamental for all following centuries, the common ground, out of which the later main branches of the church have sprung. In it the church presents to our view, even outwardly and visibly, an imposing free unity, which comprises in itself at the same time manifold differences; and commands admiration by the power she has to vanquish, not only outward foes, Judaism and Paganism, but inward foes also, the most dangerous errors and schisms, with the weapons of the Spirit and of truth.

2. The church of the Middle Ages, though in one view the product of the Primitive church, is still very different from this both outwardly and inwardly. In the first place, the theatre changes; it is carried forward towards the west and north, into the heart of Europe, into Italy, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Scandinavia. The unity of the church is split into two great halves. The Eastern church, after her separation from the Western, loses more and more always her own vitality; stiffening in part into dead formalism, and in part making room for a new enemy from without, Mohammedanism, before which also the North African church gives way. This loss in the East however,

is compensated in the richest manner by a new gain in the West. The church here receives into itself an entirely new nationality, barbarians indeed at the start, but highly gifted and of vast native force, namely the Germanic, which descending from the North like an overflowing deluge on the inwardly rotten Roman empire, destroys with rude hand its political institutions and its treasures of learning, but at the same time founds upon its ruins a succession of new States full of energy and big with promise for the future. The church rescued from the rubbish the Roman language and culture, together with her own literature; christianized and civilized these rude tribes, especially from Rome out, which was then her centre; and so created the Middle Ages, in which the pope represented the highest spiritual, the German emperor the highest temporal power, and the church ruled all social relations and every popular movement in the West. This then is the age of Romano-Germanic catholicism. Here we meet the colossal creations of the papacy, in league or conflict with the German imperial power, of the monastic orders, of the scholastic and mystic divinity, of the Gothic architecture and other arts, vying with each other to adorn the worship of the church. But in this activity, the church loses sight more and more of her apostolical foundation, and is overrun with all sorts of human alloy and impure dross. The papacy becomes a despotism over men's minds, the school divinity degenerates into empty forms and useless subtleties, and the entire religious life takes a Pelagian, legal direction towards particular outward works, substituted for living faith in the only Saviour. Against this oppression of the hierarchy, with its human ordinances, reäcts the deeper life of the church, the consciousness of evangelical freedom.

3. So after due preparation, not only without but also within the bosom of the mediaeval Catholicism, we are brought to the Reformation of the sixteenth century; which gives the stream of church history an altogether different direction, opening the way thus for an entirely new age, in whose evolution we ourselves are still comprehended. The Modern church has her theatre primarily in Germany and Switzerland, where the Reformation was born and inwardly matured. This itself impresses upon it, in a national respect, a predominantly German character. It spreads, however, with rapid triumph, into the Scandinavian North, into France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and at last into North America; which continues to unfold itself as a theatre of the kingdom of God, making room in itself for the good and bad powers of the old world, and representing the different tendencies of Protestantism along with the renovated life of Romanism in complicated confusion. As in the second age the Greek and Latin, so with

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the beginning of the third age the Latin church falls asunder into two great halves, the Roman and the Protestant, the last branching into the Lutheran and Reformed confessions. And as in the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic church was the centre of all great movements, while the Greek remained motionless in an earlier position; so also Protestantism forms manifestly the central stream of modern history, and the activity of Romanism itself, though numerically the stronger interest, is conditioned mainly by the impulse it gains from the Protestant side. We have a right then to style this third age, from its leading character, the age of the Evangelical Protestant church.

$ 15. Continuation.

Taking these three ages in their most general relation to one another, we find a difference which may be best described by the philosophical distinction of objectivity and subjectivity.

The first age is the immediate union of objectivity and subjectivity; that is, we find the two great moral principles, on which all individual human life as well as all history turns, the authority of the general and the freedom of the single, in tolerable equipoise, but still in their first stadium only, without any clear sense of a determinate boundary between the two orders of existence. We meet in the ancient church a rich activity and manifoldness of the Christian life and of Christian science, also a great number of unsound excrescences, dangerous heresies and divisions. But over all these individual and national tendencies and views and characters, is felt the sway of the universal church mind, separating with sure instinct the false element, and in oecumenical councils settling doctrines and promulgating ecclesiastical laws, to which single Christians and nations submit.

Afterwards, however, these two principles of objectivity and subjectivity, the outward and the inward, the general and the single, authority and freedom, stand forward onesidedly; and in the nature of the case, the principle of objectivity first prevails. In the Catholic church of the Middle Ages, Christianity appears prevailingly under the character of law, as a power extending itself with outward domination over the whole life. We may call it thus the age of Christian legalism, of ecclesiastical authority. The free personality comes not here to its proper rights; it is bound slavishly in fixed objective rules and forms. The individual subject is of account, only so far as he is the organ and medium of the general spirit of the church; all secular powers, the State, science, art, are under the guardianship of the hierarchy, and must serve its ends throughout. It is the era emphatically of grand,