Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The History of Christianity, From the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire
The title given to this work does not distinctly indicate its peculiar design or object. It may be said to promise more than the book con tains, and also matter of a different kind. According to established usage, this common and well-known title would include the more theological and Spiritual part of Ecclesiastical History. But it is not so in the work be fore us. Of this, however, distinct notice is given in the author's preface.
Christianity, it is there said, may be viewed either in a strictly reli gious, or, rather, in a temporal, social, and political light. In the former case the writer will dwell almost exclusively on the religious doctrines, and will bear continual reference to the new relation established between man and the Supreme Being: the prominent character will be that of the Theologian. In the latter, although he may not altogether decline the examination of the religious doctrines, their development and their vari ations, his leading object will be to trace the eject of Christianity on the individual and social happiness of man, its in?uence on the Polity, the Laws and Institutions, the opinions, the manners, even on the Arts and the Literature of the Christian world: he will write rather as an historian than as a religious instructer. So, at the close of his first chapter, where he again states the design of his work, he says: The History of Christianity has usually assumed the form of a History of the Church, more or less controversial, and confined itself to annals of the internal feuds and divisions in the Christian community, and the variations in doc. Trine and discipline, rather than to its political and social influences. Our attention, on the other hand, will be chie?y directed to its ejects on the social and even political condition of man. It is the author's object, the difficulty of which he himself fully appreciates, to portray the genius of the Christianity of each successive age in connexion with that of the age itself; in short, to exhibit the reciprocal in?uence of civilization on Christianity, of Christianity on civilization. This work, then, was not intended to be an Ecclesiastical History, in the ordinary sense of the term. The author assumes the character, less of an ecclesiastical his. Torian than of a philosopher and a politician; he treats of Christianity, considered as an element of civil society, or as affecting the social, civil, and secular condition of man.
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