Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: borne every month; and there are yet many nations needing to be healed by the leaves of it: yet diversity is no longer opposition: the revelation of the central Truth reconciles differences which, without that revelation, had been contradictions. The restoration to man of this central knowledge is the work of Pentecost. Men knew God; and in the knowledge of God was found the clue to the knowledge of God’s works, especially the knowledge of man?his nature, his purpose, his duty, his end. The diverse nations of men, with their divergences of habit, language, needs, were reconciled by the outpouring of that Holy Spirit who revealed God. At the Baptism of our Saviour, the initial point of His ministry for men was the revelation of God the Holy Trinity, when the Father approved, the Son was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended. The Church’s ministry in like manner took its rise from the revelation of God on Whitsunday. 3. The first subject which engrossed the thoughts of the Church was not man, but God. If Christianity had been but a new school of ethics she would have moved in a contrary direction: she would have proposed her code of morals, and moulded her conception of God to suit it. As a matter of fact, she began with a very clear conception of God, though it needed four centuries of controversy to express it in satisfactory terms; then she turned her attention to the serious consideration of ethics. And now let us consider the effect on the Church’s life of her early concern with the mysteries of the Godhead. 4. We are accustomed to regard the earliest ages of the Church as the ages of the greatest piety. No doubt there is much exaggeration in this notion: the rebukes of preachers, the ordinances of councils, testify that ignorance and vice were to be found within th…
