the period that followed. But that Christ would
set up the kingdom in Jerusalem, and that it would be an earthly kingdom
with sensuous enjoyments--these and other notions contend on the one
hand with the vigorous antijudaism of the communities, and on the other
with the moralistic spiritualism, in the pure carrying out of which the
Gentile Christians in the East at least increasingly recognised the
essence of Christianity. Only the vigorous world renouncing enthusiasm
which did not permit the rise of moralistic spiritualism and mysticism,
and the longing for a time of joy and dominion that was born of it,
protected for a long time a series of ideas which corresponded to the
spiritual disposition of the great multitude of converts only at times
of special oppression. Moreover the Christians in opposition to Judaism
were, as a rule, instructed to obey magistrates whose establishment
directly contradicted the judgment of the state contained in the
Apocalypses. In such a conflict however that judgment necessarily
conquers at last which makes as little change as possible in the
existing forms of life. A history of the gradual attenuation and
subsidence of eschatologlcal hopes in the II.-IV. centuries can only be
written in fragments. They have rarely--at best by fits and
starts--marked out the course. On the contrary if I may say so they only
gave the smoke, for the course was pointed out by the abiding elements
of the Gospel, trust in God and the Lord Christ, the resolution to a
holy life, and a firm bond of brotherhood. The quiet gradual change, in
which the eschatologlcal hopes passed away fell into the background or
lost important parts, was on the other hand a result of deep reaching
changes in the faith and life of Christendom. Chiliasm as a power was
broken up by speculative mysticism and on that account very much later
in the West than in the East. But speculative mysticism has its centre
in christology. In the earliest period this as a theory belonged more to
the defence of religion than to religion itself. Ignatius alone was able
to reflect on that transference of power from Christ which Paul had
experienced. The disguises in which the apocalyptic eschatologlcal
prophecies were set forth belonged in part to the form of this
literature (in so far as one could easily be given the lie if he became
too plain or in so far as the prophet really saw the future only in
large outline) partly it had to be chosen in order not