nd dogmatic,
belief in the supreme personal rank and office of Christ, as the
only means of admission to the kingdom of heaven. The one
peculiarity which most sharply and broadly contrasted the early
Christians with the rest of the world was unquestionably their
belief in the miraculous mission of Jesus, a belief growing
deeper, higher, intenser, until it actually identified him with
the omnipotent God. There was an inevitable tendency, it was a
perfectly natural and necessary process, for them to make this
point of contrast the central condition on which depended the
possession of all the special privileges supposed to be promised
to its disciples by the new religion. The result is well expressed
by Polycarp in these words: "Whosoever confesses not that Christ
is come in the flesh, is an Antichrist; and whosoever acknowledges
not the martyrdom of the cross, is of the Devil; and whosoever
says that there is no resurrection nor judgment, is the first born
of Satan." This extract strikes the key note of the Orthodox
Church all through Christendom from the second century to the
present hour. In place of the true condition of salvation
announced by Jesus, personal and practical goodness, it
inaugurates the false ecclesiastic standard, soundness of dogmatic
belief in relation to Jesus himself! Those who hold this are the
elect, and shall stand in heaven with white robes and palms and a
new song, while all the rest of the world apostate and detested
enemies of God and his saints shall be trampled down in merciless
slaughter, and flung into the pit whence the smoking signal of
their torment shall ascend for ever and ever. It is a transformation
of the bigoted scorn and hate of the covenanted Jew for his
Gentile foes into the intensified horror of the Orthodox
believer for the reprobate infidel. And it finally culminated in
the following frightful picture which still lowers and blazes in
the imagination of ecclesiastical Christendom as a veritable
revelation of what is to take place at the end of the world:

While the stars are falling, the firmament dissolving, the dead
swarming from their graves, and the nations assembling, Christ
will come in the clouds of heaven with a host of angels and sit in
judgment on collected mankind. All who submissively believed in
his Divinity, and have the seal of his blood on their foreheads,
he will approve and accept; all others he will condemn and reject.
No matter for the natural goodness