Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE FIRST AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.181new, so the term to which it reaches is the creationof something in both these things correlativeto that Person, the creation of a Kingdom, a Temple,a Body, a Mother, a Race, in which respectalso the term is as new as that from which itsprings. That He is the Truth and the Life isshown in this creation, which has a distinctivecharacter, as He has, an unique existence, and anorganic unity with Him.The subject on which we are now employed isto describe as an historic fact how the duty ofmaintaining, propagating, and dying for the truthand conduct thus identified with the Person ofChrist, was carried out through many generationsand under difficulties which seemed to precludethe possibility of its success ; and to show themeans by which this great creation, starting fromthe day of Pentecost, made a home and establisheditself in the Roman empire, by which, after a conflictof nearly three hundred years, it was finallyrecognised.The worship of the one true God had beenfixed in the children of Abraham, Isaac, andJacob, as the faith which made them a nation, *that is, as the dogma on which their national ex-istence was so based, that through maintaining itthey were to continue a people. The Jewishlity lived in and by this belief, and, as a nwas its prophet. Certainly, this was the noblestform which nationalism has ever assumed. Yet it