h religious community to the
abyss of hell. It might appear, then, as though the basis for the
further development of Christianity as a church was completely given
from the moment in which the first breach of believers with the
synagogue and the formation of independent Christian communities took
place. The problem, the solution of which will always exercise this
church, so far as it reflects upon its faith, will be to turn the
Old Testament more completely to account in its own sense, so as to
condemn the Jewish Church with its particular and national forms.

5. But the rule even for the Christian use of the Old Testament lay
originally in the living connection in which one stood with the Jewish
people and its traditions, and a new religious community, a religious
commonwealth, was not yet realised, although it existed for faith and
thought. If again we compare the Church about the middle of the third
century with the condition of Christendom 150 or 200 years before, we
shall find that there is now a real religious commonwealth, while at the
earlier period there were only communities who believed in a heavenly
Church, whose earthly image they were, endeavoured to give it expression
with the simplest means, and lived in the future as strangers and
pilgrims on the earth, hastening to meet the Kingdom of whose existence
they had the surest guarantee. We now really find a new commonwealth,
politically formed and equipped with fixed forms of all kinds. We
recognise in these forms few Jewish, but many Graeco-Roman features, and
finally, we perceive also in the doctrine of faith on which this
commonwealth is based, the philosophic spirit of the Greeks. We find a
Church as a political union and worship institute, a formulated faith
and a sacred learning; but one thing we no longer find, the old
enthusiasm and individualism which had not felt itself fettered by
subjection to the authority of the Old Testament. Instead of
enthusiastic independent Christians, we find a new literature of
revelation, the New Testament, and Christian priests. When did these
formations begin? How and by what influence was the living faith
transformed into the creed to be believed, the surrender to Christ into
a philosophic Christology, the Holy Church into the _corpus permixtum_,
the glowing hope of the Kingdom of heaven into a doctrine of immortality
and deification, prophecy into a learned exegesis and theological
science, the bearers of the spirit