Period Iv The Age Of The Consoli


In the fourth period of the Church under the heathen Empire, or the period

of the consolidation of the Church, the number of Christians increased so

rapidly that the relation of the Roman State to the Church became a matter

of the gravest importance (ch. 1). During a period of comparative peace

and prosperity the Church developed its doctrinal system and its

constitution (ch. 2). Although the school of Asia Minor became isolated
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and temporarily ceased to affect the bulk of the Church elsewhere, the

school of the apologists was brilliantly continued at Alexandria under

Clement and Origen, and later under Origen at Caesarea in Palestine.

Meanwhile the foundations were laid in North Africa for a distinctive type

of Western theology, inaugurated by Tertullian and developed by Cyprian.

After years of alternating favor and local persecutions, the first general

persecution (ch. 3) broke upon the Church, rudely testing its organization

and ultimately strengthening and furthering its tendencies toward a

strictly hierarchical constitution. In the long period of peace that

followed (ch. 4), the discussions that had arisen within the Church as to

the relation of the divine unity to the divinity of Christ reached a

temporary conclusion, the cultus was elaborated and assumed the essentials

of its permanent form, and the episcopate was made supreme over rival

authorities within the Church, becoming at once the expression and organ

of ecclesiastical unity. At the same time new problems arose; within the

Church there was the appearance of an organized asceticism which appeared

for a time to be a rival to the Church's system, and outside the Church

the appearance of a hostile rival in the rapidly spreading Manichaean

system, in which was revived, in a better organized and therefore more

dangerous form, the expelled Gnosticism. The period ends with the last

general persecution (ch. 5).



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