however, was preserved a
portion of the earliest Christianity which was to exercise its effects
far beyond the time of Augustine.

Finally, we have still to treat of the altered conceptions regarding the
Old Testament which the creation of the New produced among the
early-Catholic Fathers. In the case of Barnabas and the Apologists we
became acquainted with a theory of the Old Testament which represented
it as the Christian book of revelation and accordingly subjected it
throughout to an allegorical process. Here nothing specifically new
could be pointed out as having been brought by Christ. Sharply opposed
to this conception was that of Marcion, according to which the whole Old
Testament was regarded as the proclamation of a Jewish God hostile to
the God of redemption. The views of the majority of the Gnostics
occupied a middle position between the two notions. These distinguished
different components of the Old Testament, some of which they traced to
the supreme God himself and others to intermediate and malevolent
beings. In this way they both established a connection between the Old
Testament, and the Christian revelation and contrived to show that the
latter contained a specific novelty. This historico-critical conception,
such as we specially see it in the epistle of Ptolemy to Flora, could
not be accepted by the Church because it abolished strict monotheism and
endangered the proof from prophecy. No doubt, however, we already find
in Justin and others the beginning of a compromise, in so far as a
distinction was made between the moral law of nature contained in the
Old Testament--the Decalogue--and the ceremonial law; and in so far as
the literal interpretation of the latter, for which a pedagogic
significance was claimed, was allowed in addition to its typical or
Christian sense. With this theory it was possible, on the one hand, to
do some sort of justice to the historical position of the Jewish people,
and on the other, though indeed in a meagre fashion, to give expression
to the novelty of Christianity. The latter now appears as the _new_ law
or the law of freedom, in so far as the moral law of nature had been
restored in its full purity without the burden of ceremonies, and a
particular historical relation to God was allowed to the Jewish nation,
though indeed more a wrathful than a covenant one. For the ceremonial
regulations were conceived partly as tokens of the judgment on Israel,
partly as concessions t