Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the PREFACE:
In submitting this TRANSLATION to the Public, I may be permitted to say, in the first place, a few words as to the Testament itself, and the principles which have guided its present Translators; and I feel bound, in the second place, to indicate the respective parts which Canon Maclean and I, while jointly responsible for the work as a whole, have taken in producing it.
The Testament is one, and not the least interesting, of a series of writings, whereof the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles is the first, and the so-called Apostolic Constitutions one of the last, whose aim seems to have been to provide the clergy of the Early Church with a manual of their duties, and especially with directions for the proper fulfillment of the offices of Public Worship. None of these books is authoritative in the sense of having been issued by those who had public authority given them in the Church to do so; nor did any of them succeed by their own merits in obtaining such acceptance as was won by the Great Liturgies. But they certainly helped to prepare the way for the Great Liturgies, and the Testament in particular became influential in the process which led to the formation of the Ethiopic and Coptic service books. The fact that they were not themselves accepted is proof sufficient that they never quite represented the mind or embodied the ideals of the Church, or of any considerable local section of it. They are coloured, no doubt, by the private idiosyncrasies of their unknown authors. But at least they exhibit to us ideas that were entertained among Christians at the time when they were severally written, and they show how, in the formative period of the Church's worship, the minds of those professionally interested in the subject were working.
The Testament possesses the special interest of being the production of the very period - the very moment, we may say - when the great transition in the Church's fortunes, from Imperial persecution to Imperial favour, was leading to the inevitable transformation of her buildings and her services to suit her altered circumstances. She was not going to break with the past: far from it. There was a great deal still in the Empire - in the Government offices, in the Army, in society, that rendered it spiritually unsafe for her members to have much to do with them; and made it needful for her still to take precautions against casting her pearls before swine. There might even be, if Julian's reign was to be prolonged, a recrudescence of pagan persecution. All the same, the Church breathed more freely. She could build for herself churches, baptisteries, clergy-houses, hospices, according to her own ideas of what these ought to be; and she could so order her services, that if those who were not Christians attended them, they might be impressed by their dignity and holiness. At the same time, it was eminently needful that the discipline and order of the Church should be preserved, and that there should be no lowering of the spiritual tone of her ministers and office-bearers.
The Testament reflects this state of things as in a mirror. It vibrates, moreover, with the pulsation of the great controversies - Arian, Macedonian, Apollinarian - through which the Church was passing, or into which she was just about to pass. The volume is thus far more than a mere antiquarian curiosity. It had a message to its own time: it has a message to all time, and very distinctly to the time now present....
