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threatened in Corinth and other centres. Party feeling ran high in those days, we know;
and one of the most sorrowful trials the great-hearted St. Paul had to endure . . . . . was
the knowledge that his name and teaching no longer was held in honour by some of those
Asian churches so dear to him."
The argument that history records no large defection from Paul's teaching carries little
weight when one remembers the scanty knowledge we have of sub-apostolic times. It
seems evident that the Apostle lived to see a large falling away from the truth committed
to him by the Lord Jesus, and which he had so faithfully made known. No wonder he
warned Timothy of those who would "turn away their ears from the truth, and turn aside
unto fables" (II Tim. 4: 4 R.V.). If they turned away from him whom Christ had
appointed as the ministry of the church which is His Body (Col. 1: 24-26), and through
whom the teaching was made known and vitally connected, then a forsaking of truth and
apostasy was bound to result, the effect of which must have been felt at the end of the
first century and thereafter. Had the truth for which Paul lived and died, been held
faithfully by all the churches he founded, and kept by the succeeding members, the
ignorance of the basic teaching of the gospel of grace amongst the Apostolic Fathers
would have been impossible.
We once encountered an objection to the doctrine of the Mystery of Ephesians and
Colossians with the statement that, if this was true, it would be reflected in the beliefs of
the early Christians. This sounds reasonable on the surface, but it fails to take into
account the apostasy of II Tim. 1: 15. As we have seen, there is not even a clear
conception of salvation by grace in the earliest sub-apostolic writings, and of the truth of
the Mystery there is absolutely none, nor could there be, for, if the foundation was not
understood, the top-stone was impossible of comprehension or witness. Neither is the
situation much improved when we come to the later and Greek Fathers. Augustine
(354-430A.D.) was probably the first one who had any real conception of grace as
revealed in the N.T., but he gives no indication that he knew or rejoiced in the glories of
the great Secret of Eph. 3: Outstanding man that he was, his conception of the church
was always along the lines of the medieval identification of the kingdom of God with the
outward ecclesiastical organization and Roman Catholicism of his day, and he held there
was no salvation outside it. His stress on sacraments as vehicles of grace, his belief in
purgatory and the use of the relics, and his allegorization of the Scriptures all combine to
make an understanding of the Mystery impossible. Paul's aim ". . . . . to make all men
see what is the dispensation of the Mystery" (secret, Eph. 3: 9 R.V.), was unknown to
the early Christians. Turning away from him, they lost the key to the truth for this age,
and until the last century, it has never been recovered in anything like its fullness.
Constantine.
Going back to the first centuries, there is no doubt that the conversion of the Emperor
Constantine (died 337A.D.) played an important part in the evolution of Christendom.
Up to his day, the professing church had endured great persecutions, through which it had
survived. The story of his professed conversion is well known. Before the battle of the
Milvian Bridge, October 27, 312A.D., when he defeated Maxentius, he passed through a
remarkable experience. The story goes that he saw in the sky a flaming cross with the