We cannot fix with any accuracy the precise field of missions occupied by the apostles and their immediate successors. The traditions of St. James's visit to Spain, St. Paul's to Britain, St. Thomas going to India, and others beyond the wall of China, are of course among the many lively flights of patristic imagination. It is certain that at a very early period Christianity had been preached over a wide area of the then known world; but beyond that, let no man ask a question with any hope of a credible reply. Authentic history stops with the Acts of the Apostles. The men who followed did their work, but did not record it; and before a recorder came, a great mist swept over Christendom, and only the dimmest vision of that work can now be gained. But we may gather from St. Luke's narrative some hints as to the way in which mission work was done by St. Paul. Perhaps indeed his process was affected, more or less, by the kind of people among whom he laboured. No doubt it was; for St. Paul, unlike most Jews, had a very pliant kind of mind that shaped itself wonderfully to its circumstances, and became "all things to all men," consistently with its staple belief. Now, as the gospel originated with a people less civilized than those of Greece or Rome, its primary mission work differed, so far, from that of all later ages, and is not necessarily a rule to other times. Christianity, since then, has always been identified with the higher civilisation, and its conflicts with Gentilism have therefore been the struggles of intellectual and material progress with Pagan corruption and decay. But it was not so at the beginning. The first mission work of the Church was carried on under peculiar conditions, never precisely repeated at any later period; a people in some respects less civilized having to do their work of moral regeneration among men proud of their splendid trophies in letters and science and government.

Yet it may be worth while to note how St. Paul went about his work in Antioch, or Ephesus, or Corinth, or imperial Rome. Not that this fixes the law of missionary operations in other times and under other conditions; but that it shows how a man of rare wisdom adapted himself to the world in which he found himself placed. Of course, the "weapons of his warfare were not carnal but spiritual." Of course, it was the power of the truth, and "demonstration of the Holy Ghost," that really vanquished the heathen. Of course, too, it was the loving self-sacrifice of the apostle that "commended the truth to men's consciences in the sight of God." This last, among human means, we shall always find to be the great power of conversion; not logic, not "evidences of Christianity;" but always the faith and love and sacrifice of the Christian. If,

however, there is anything which, more than another, distinguishes the apostolic missions, it is the new social life which was then established. St. Paul was not a mere teacher of a religious system. He did not settle down to spend a lifetime in the vain attempt to train a small band of converts up to the level of his own spiritual consciousness. His gospel was very brief; not therefore superficial, but necessarily rudimentary, and pregnant with a wisdom which time would ripen and reveal. It was a true "preaching" or herald's proclamation of the kingdom of God; and, at least in the first instance, it was chiefly addressed to the poor-the slaves and the craftsmen, the weary and heavy-laden. These, on their profession of a very simple creed, were at once baptized, and afterwards brought under more careful instruction, a process which was by and by reversed, when men came to have "more understanding than all their teachers." Thus the Church was organized, and left very much to edify and increase itself, getting only occasional visits and letters from the apostles, according as circumstances required. We apprehend therefore, that, in order to understand the rapid growth of Christianity, special attention should be given to the nature of the church-the new social organization which the gospel had created.

In many respects, the primitive Christian was nowise distinguishable from any other citizen. He traded in the market, and paid his taxes, and visited his neighbours, like other people. There was no parallelogram, or phalanstère, where a theorizing communism experimented on its votaries. At Jerusalem, for a while, "they had all things in common;" but it was not an enforced rule, nor does St. Paul seem ever to have followed their example. The Christian converts, then, formed a new social organization, but it was one of a very spontaneous kind, quite unlike some others which we shall come across in later times. In point of fact, the Church, instead of having any communistic tendencies, was rather a protest against them. Christianity specially respected the rights of the individual and the institution of home. Then, too, Christians did not go to law, but decided all disputes among themselves. They had officials appointed to care for the widows and orphans. Without attempting the formal abolition of slavery, the Helot, in virtue of his brotherhood with Jesus, was raised to a moral level with his Christian master. And at least once a week, high and low, rich and poor, met on a footing of equality, and realized it in "the fellowship of breaking of bread and of prayer." We have comparatively few special ordinances or regulations on this subject; but any one, even slightly acquainted with the social life of Greece or Rome, may

easily imagine how the moral principles of the gospel would inevitably embody themselves in "a kingdom"-a social system radically and intensely different from all its surroundings. Slaves and men of the lowest caste became beautiful in their lives, and grand in their death. What was almost as strange, the few "wise and prudent" among them were no longer contemptuous of those beneath, for they had learnt that "he that would be lord in the church must become a servant." Thus the Pariah rose, for moral worth, to a level with the Brahmin, and the Brahmin, in virtue of his Christian ministry, became truly a son of God; and the gospel triumphed, not simply as an idea by mere force of logic, but rather as a fact, whose evidence was its own faith, hope, and charity. Such, to our minds, was the primary mission-action of the Church. First, the loving selfsacrifice of the apostles caused "God to be admired in his saints," and kindled a fine enthusiasm which was, in due time, to burn up the selfishness of heathenism. This power, acting mainly from beneath upward-beginning, i.e., at the basement storey of the social edifice gradually elevated the poorest to a moral level above the wise and great. Organized now into a social institution, the influence of Christianity became, not merely the power of a new doctrine, but the power of a new life. The social organization was simple, natural, and spontaneous, but on that very account, markedly different from the elaborate state and caste institutions of the Gentiles. Gradually, therefore, the apostles and their miraculous powers faded away, and the apostolic communities alone remained, like the central nucleus in the fire-mist, gathering together, by moral attraction, the loose elements of spiritual yearning and unrest among the heathen, and making them "to shine as the stars for ever and ever." In this way, Christian missions would seem at first to have made progress--by means of truth embodied in a free, spontaneous community of love and good works. All could see it. All were bettered by it. All might enter it. And so, ere the last of the twelve was in his grave, the little "seed" was already a great tree, and the birds of the air were nestling in its branches.

The age of the apostles, then, was intensely missionary; but that which succeeded was rather theological. Readers of Church history will find this succession frequently repeated in after years; an era of progress followed by an apparent arrest, during which religious thought is deepening and consolidating. So in the growth of a plant the vital force is first expended in simply enlarging its dimensions, with texture feeble and pulpy; but by and by, the same power, neglecting mere size, achieves firmness and consistency. It was impossible, then, that the primi

tive creed could remain in its original simplicity. A religion, sooner or later, demands a theology. The Christian intellect must adjust itself to the Christian consciousness. This had been partly done by the apostolic epistles; but as various errors arose in those years,--Arian, Sabellian, and others, chiefly ontological, the Church, perhaps inevitably, became more anxious to save the truth than to save souls. Moving also for a while only among the lower classes, it had ignored the higher thought of the age, and was, in its turn, contemptuously ignored. But now its relations with philosophy had to be adjusted; and the force which had erewhile increased its dimensions, was expended in giving fulness and clearness to its creed. In the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, however, the old mission spirit of the Church revived, at least in the West. With the Greek Churches it was different. What with hair-splitting theology, and artificial rhetoric, and frantic ascetism, their heart and strength had been destroyed. There was no missionary spirit in Ephesus and Antioch and Alexandria when the Crescent hurled its hordes upon them. The salt had lost its savour, and was henceforth good for nothing but to be trodden under foot of men. A very different spectacle, however, was presented about the same time in Western Europe, as one may see even in the general Church histories, but with more detail in such books as that of Dr. Maclear, or in Professor Ebrard's papers on The Church of the Culdees," in the German Journal of Historical Theology (1863). Those times have been called "dark ages" by one class of writers; and "ages of faith" by another; each having seized only on one aspect of them, and each having a certain basis of truth in their idea. For they were dark ages in so far as their notion of Christian truth was clouded by heavy masses of superstition and confused ignorance. But they were also "ages of faith" in respect of their genuine, earnest, and vigorous belief. The critical intellect may despise their opinions; but the Christian must needs honour their work. For when that mysterious impulse seized on the Teutonic nations to leave the steppes of the Don and the forests of the Danube, and to hurl themselves, by tribes and nations, on the crumbling Roman Empire, holy men came forth to meet them from Irish cells and cloistered monasteries and lonely island chapels among the sea-girt Hebrides, and with uplifted cross and heroic self-devotion, did battle with Thor and Odin, and the long-haired Druid, and their rites of blood and gloom. This grand mission enterprise was almost as strange as the migration of barbarism which it overcame. There were no societies, or committees, or subscriptions, or bazaars, or other financial arrangements;

but there lacked not men, with apostolic heart, careless of purse and scrip.

An immense amount of missionary zeal arose in those times. Probably the missionaries numbered ten to one in proportion to our present staff-many of them also men of the very highest heroical type. But their way of going to work differed considerably from that of the apostles. Already the monastic idea of protected and regulated societies, afterwards elaborated in South America, had established itself, especially among the Culdees. When we read of the 4000 monks at the one abbey of Fulda, we must understand that this was more properly an establishment, in connexion with the monastery, for drilling Christian converts after their pattern. The Romish missions were under a bishop, and their social life therefore was of a more spontaneous kind. But the Culdees were essentially monastic, and the taint of an artificial socialism pervaded all their labours. In general also the order of procedure seems to have been reversed, since the apostolic age. Instead of acting from beneath upwards, Christianity now rather affected the high places, beginning with the prince and not the peasant, and disseminating itself rather by authority of the chief, than by persuasion of the truth. No doubt Augustine and Boniface and Alcuin repudiated forced conversions, and wrote words of good counsel on the subject to German Dietrichs and Saxon Ethelberts and Mayors of the Frankish palace. Yet it is certain the work went on nevertheless mainly in the way we have said. Kings were converted by means of supposed or pretended miracles. Ör they were married to Christian maidens, pious and beautiful, who by and by brought them over to the faith. Thereupon, the clan or nation was baptized by strict order; and all peoples conquered by the sword of the convert, must choose between the gospel or death. So the fierce Frisian got his baptism from the fiery Frank. So the Norwegian Olaf sailed up his beautiful fiords with a great cross at the prow of his war-galley, and forced his lendermen and bondermen, under fierce penalties, to overthrow the temples, and build the white kirk among the pinecovered hills. Such was the rough and round conversion of Northern Europe; yet under it Thor and Odin and Valhalla and Ygdrasil and the mead-feasts of the heroes disappeared before the Cross, leaving scarce a trace of their existence, save in the names of our week-days, in the Yule log, in the sacred mistletoe, and the lonely "standing-stones" upon the desolate heath. Fuller tells us that the early wild Irish let all their bodies be baptized except their right arm, which they kept unsained for dealing a good devil's blow; and it must be confessed those middle ages did reserve a wild, unconsecrated hand for