The Acts of the Apostles

^0 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
and to restore to it its rightful position. If the verbal
sense were to be finally given up by the Church, the
consequence that would be drawn by her dangerous
opponents—namely, the rejection of the whole book
—was too obvious. But when the Church again re-
quired of its members that they should attend to the
verbal sense, indeed even regard it as divine, and
seeing that they could not appropriate to themselves
the difficult teaching of St. Paul, St. Lukes way of
thinking came again to their aid. In fact, we see
that the great early Fathers of the Church—above
all, Irenaeus in the long chapters of Book iii., where
he follows the Acts—walk in the very footsteps of
St. Luke ; with them the religion of the Old Testament
is holy and good, the Law even in its verbal
sense, and although it was a legislatio in servitutem, is
right and good ; the saints of the Old Testament are
worthy of reverence, &c. Of course the high esteem
in which St. Luke held the Jewish Christians as the
ancient people of God never returned—the time for
this had passed away ; but in all other directions it
was St. Luke, the Hellene of the first ages, who
marked out the paths by which the theologians and
historians of the Church approached the problem
of the relation between Universalism and the Old
Testament.
EXCURSUS V
THE DATE OF THE ACTS
The following remarks are not intended actually to
commend the earliest date for the composition of the