Christianity Sentence Examples

Christianity is a prophetic religion.

As Christianity wins the day, a new objection is raised to it.

We are at first inclined to think of Christianity itself, but it is certainly most improbable that at the time of the rise of Christianity the Babylonian teaching about the seven planet-deities governing the world should have played so great a part throughout all Syria, Asia Minor and Egypt, that the most varying sections of syncretic Christianity should over and over again adopt this doctrine and work it up into their system.

The Consolatio affords conclusive proof that the author was not a practical believer in Christianity.

But, further still, philosophy offered a vehicle which could be applied to the contents of Christianity.

Rashdall - we surely cut down Christianity to the limits of theism.

Still, it is not certain that the shock of Copernicanism on supernatural Christianity is exhausted.

But if evolution is to be the whole truth regarding Christianity, we should have to surrender both supernatural revelation and divine redemption.

Even in the middle ages there were not wanting those - the St Victors, Bonaventura - who sought to vindicate mystical if not moral redemption as the central thought of Christianity.

His Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) is the thesis of " a whole century " of theologians.

His Letters on the Evidences of Christianity (1815) have been several times reprinted, and an abridgment was published by the Religious Tract Society in 1853.

Of an enthusiastic temperament, accomplished in classical literature, he seems while a pagan to have courted discussion with the converts to Christianity.

Those of Bishop Watson and Lord Hailes were the best, but simply because they contented themselves with a dispassionate exposition of the general argument in favour of Christianity.

The account of the causes of the expansion of Christianity is chiefly to be criticized for its omissions.

And he did not realize the importance of the kinship between Christian doctrine and Hellenistic syncretism, which helped to promote the reception of Christianity.

They gave up their property and travelled to Soissons (Noviodunum, Augusta Suessionum), where they supported themselves by shoemaking and made many converts to Christianity.

On that occasion the court reaffirmed the dictum of Chief Justice Hale, that Christianity is part of the laws of England.

Such tenets were destructive not only of Catholicism but of Christianity of any kind and of civil society itself; and for this reason so unecclesiastical a person as the emperor Frederick II.

The real turning-point had been reached earlier, when Christianity became the state religion under Constantine I.

In Spain and North Africa persecution created that strange and significant phenomenon Maranism or crypto-Judaism, a public acceptance of Islam or Christianity combined with a private fidelity to the rites of Judaism.

Their prior conversion to Christianity gave the people from Tonga several advantages over their neighbors.

It appears, therefore, contemporaneously with Christianity, and is a sign of the world-weariness and deep religious need that mark the decay of the old world.

The doctrines of Christianity were by that time so firmly established that the Church could look upon a symbolical or mystical interpretation of them without anxiety.

The freedom with which Eckhart treats historical Christianity allies him much more to the German idealists of the 19th century than to his scholastic predecessors.

On the other hand Christianity, though Asiatic in its origin and essential ideas, has to a large extent taken its present form on European soil, and some of its most important manifestations - notably the Roman Church - are European reconstructions in which little of the Asiatic element remains.

Christianity has made little way farther east then Asia Minor.

Two of the greatest religions of the world, Christianity and Islam, are Semitic in origin, as well as Judaism.

All ideas of external conquest were abandoned, Christianity was forbidden, and Japan closed to foreigners, only the Dutch being allowed a strictly limited commerce.

From choice or compulsion large numbers settled in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and added an appreciable element to Alexandrine culture, while gradual voluntary emigration established Jewish communities in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, who facilitated the first spread of Christianity.

The resemblances between primitive Christianity and Buddhism appear to be coincidences, and though both early Greek philosophy and later Alexandrine ideas suggest Indian affinities, there is no clear connexion such as there is between certain aspects of Chinese thought and India.

Somewhat later the Crusades kept up communication with the Levant, and established there the power of the Roman Church, somewhat to the detriment of oriental Christianity, but intercourse with farther Asia was limited to the voyages of a few travellers.

Christianity was introduced in the 12, th century, a bishopric. being founded in the Island of Wollin, and its advance went rapidly hand in hand with the Germanizing of the district.

Of the former class the most conspicuous was the Holy Roman Empire; but in Europe all monarchies were, within certain limits, originally elective; and, after the introduction of Christianity, the essential condition of the assumption of sovereign power was not so much kinship with the reigning family as the "sacring" by the divine authority of the Church.

He made an eloquent plea for Christianity, but his case was weak in law, and the court sustained the will.

The advent of Christianity, with its categorical assertion of future happiness for the good, to a large extent did away with pessimism in the true sense.

A very charming piece of work of a lighter kind was inspired by a question from his friend, Mrs Katherine Phillips (the "matchless Orinda"), asking "How far is a dear and perfect friendship authorized by the principles of Christianity?"

Particularly under the grand master Winrich of Kniprode (1351-1382) it was the school of northern chivalry, engaged in unceasing struggle to defend and extend Christianity against the heathen Lithuanian.

He sentenced to death his own cousin and nephew by marriage, Flavius Clemens, whose wife he banished for her supposed leaning towards Judaism (Christianity).

He could not have been what he was unless two generations before him had laboured at the problem of finding an intellectual expression and a philosophic basis for Christianity (Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Pantaenus, Clement).

Alexandria had been, since the days of the Ptolemies, a centre for the interchange of ideas between East and West - between Egypt, Syria, Greece and Italy; and, as it had furnished Judaism with an Hellenic philosophy, so it also brought about the alliance of Christianity with Greek philosophy.

This work is invaluable as a source for the history and situation of the church in the 2nd century; for it contains nearly the whole of the famous work of Celsus (Abyos angs) against Christianity.

Origen's apologetic is most effective when he appeals to the spirit and power of Christianity as an evidence of its truth.

In such propositions historical Christianity is stripped off as a mere husk.

In two works of this period, Pierre Bayle (1838) and Philosophie and Christentum (1839), which deal largely with theology, he held that he had proved "that Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea" in flagrant contradiction to the distinctive features of contemporary civilization.

In spite of many admirable quanlities both of style and matter the Essence of Christianity has never Made much impression upon British thought.

But it is equally plain that the Ophite nucleus has from time to time received very numerous and often curiously perverted accretions from Babylonian Judaism, Oriental Christianity and Parsism, exhibiting a striking example of religious syncretism.

The celebrations are directly traceable to the pagan Saturnalia of ancient Rome, which in spite of the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, and of the denunciation of bishops and ecclesiastical councils, continued to be celebrated by the people on the Kalends of January with all their old licence.

As the main support of his proof of the truth of Christianity appears his detailed demonstration that the prophecies of the old dispensation, which are older than the Pagan poets and philosophers, have found their fulfilment in Christianity.

Christianity consists for him in the doctrines, guaranteed by the manifestation of the Logos in the person of Christ, of God, righteousness and immortality, truths which have been to a certain extent foreshadowed in the monotheistic religious philosophies.

Thus Justin may give the impression of having rationalized Christianity, and of not having given it its full value as a religion of salvation.

It must not, however, be forgotten that Justin is here speaking as the apologist of Christianity to an educated Pagan public, on whose philosophical view of life he had to base his arguments, and from whom he could not expect an intimate comprehension of the religious position of Christians.

Here, where he had to deal with the Judaism that believed in a Messiah, he was far better able to do justice to Christianity as a revelation; and so we find that the arguments of this work are much more completely in harmony with primitive Christian theology than those of the Apology.

With this idea went the notions that Christianity had been diffused throughout the whole earth by the apostles, and that only what was found everywhere throughout the church could be true.

Erskine had little interest in the "historical criticism" of Christianity, and regarded as the only proper criterion of its truth its conformity or nonconformity with man's spiritual nature, and its adaptability or non-adaptability to man's spiritual needs.

The town was so heavily taxed by the Hamdanid princes at Mosul that the Arab tribe of the Banu Habib, although blood relations of the Hamdanids, migrated into Byzantine territory, where they were well received, accepted Christianity, attracted other emigrants from Nisibis, and at last began to avenge themselves by yearly raids upon their old home.

His chief theological and philosophical works were Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (3 vols., 1772-1774); History of the Corruption of Christianity (2 vols., 1782); General History of the Christian Church to the Fall of the Western Empire, vols.

When Augustine proposed this task he had already planned and made some progress with his own De civitate Dei; it is the same argument that is elaborated by his disciple, namely, the evidence from history that the circumstances of the world had not really become worse since the introduction of Christianity.

The term is particularly associated with the supernatural factors in Christianity.

The functions of Caesar's Druids we here find distributed amongst Druids, bards and poets (fili), but even in very early times the poet has usurped many of the duties of the Druid and finally supplants him with the spread of Christianity.

Characteristically meditative, he rested with a secure footing on the great central truths of Christianity, and recognized strongly their essential reasonableness and harmony.

His guiding principle in treating both of the history and of the present condition of the church was - that Christianity has room for the various tendencies of human nature, and aims at permeating and glorifying them all; that according to the divine plan these various tendencies are to occur successively and simultaneously and to counterbalance each other, so that the freedom and variety of the development of the spiritual life ought not to be forced into a single dogmatic form" (Otto Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 280).

He considers that in its earliest origins Christian faith and the methods of Greek thought were so closely intermingled that much that is not essential to Christianity found its way into the resultant system.

His distinctive characteristics are his claim for absolute freedom in the study of church history and the New Testament; his distrust of speculative theology, whether orthodox or liberal; his interest in practical Christianity as a religious life and not a system of theology.

It was thus natural, for these reasons, that the conquest of the Holy Land should gradually become an object for the ambition of Western Christianity - an object which the papacy, eager to realize its dream of a universal Church subject to its sway, would naturally cherish and attempt to advance.

When a power arose in Mosul, about 1130, which was able to unify Syria - when, again, in the hands of Saladin, unified Syria was in turn united to Egypt - the cause of Latin Christianity in the East was doomed.

At the end of 1099 any contemporary observer must have believed that the capital of Latin Christianity in the East was destined to be Antioch.

Europe had sinned in the face of God; otherwise Jerusalem would never have fallen; and the idea of a spiritual reform from within, as the necessary corollary and accompaniment of the expedition of Christianity without, breathes in some of the papal letters, just as, during the conciliar movement, the causa reformationis was blended with the causa unionis.

This last fact in particular caused western Europe to dream of an alliance with the great khan "Prester John," who should aid in the reconquest of Jerusalem and the final conversion to Christianity of the whole continent of Asia.

Some of them lay the blame on the papacy; and it is true that the papacy had contributed towards the decay of the Crusades when it had allowed its own particular interests to overbear the general welfare of Christianity, and had dignified with the name and the benefits of a Crusade its own political war against the Hohenstaufen.

Others again find in the princes of Europe the authors of the ruin of the Crusades; they too had preferred their own national or dynastic interests to the cause of a common Christianity.

In the 13th century the whole of Europe was Christian; part of Asia Minor still belonged to Greek Christianity, and there was a Christian kingdom in Palestine.

But a Mahommedan reaction came, thanks in large measure to the zeal of Timur; and central Asia was lost to Christianity.

Through them the popes had deposed the emperors of the West from their headship of the world, partly because through the Crusades the popes were able to direct the common Christianity of Europe in a foreign policy of their own without consultation with the emperor, partly because in the 13th century they were ultimately able to direct the Crusade itself against the empire.

The ages were not dark in which Christianity could gather itself together in a common cause, and carry the flag of its faith to the grave of its Redeemer; nor can we but give thanks for their memory, even if for us religion is of the spirit, and Jerusalem in the heart of every man who believes in Christ.

Its medieval importance as an intermediary of trade between Europe and the East was greatly impaired by the opening of the Red Sea route, and finally abolished by the Suez Canal; and Syria is at present important mainly for the sentimental reason that it contains the holiest places of Judaism and Christianity, and for the strategic reason that it lies on the flank of the greatest traderoute of the eastern hemisphere.

Many Basuto profess Christianity and have adopted European clothing.

Under the Romans Quercy was part of Aquitania prima, and Christianity was introduced therein during the 4th century.

Nothing is more likely than that Christianity gained adherents among the Therapeutae, and that their institutions were adapted to the new religion, just as they seem to have been borrowed by the Jews from the Egyptians.

The ascetic orders resemble the Franciscans of Christianity.

He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1682, and after ten years' residence obtained a fellowship. In 1699 he was made provost of the college, and in the same year published his Letter in answer to a Book entitled "Christianity not Mysterious," which was recognized as the ablest reply yet written to Toland.

The chief result of the alliance with the latter was the conversion of the Moravians to Christianity by two Greek monks, Cyril and Methodius, despatched from Constantinople (863).

The reference to affranchisement in ecclesia shows that it was composed at a period subsequent to the conversion of the Alamanni to Christianity.

The law established the ancient customs, at the same time eliminating anything that was contrary to the spirit of Christianity; it proclaimed the peace of the churches, whose possessions it guaranteed and whose right of asylum it recognized.

Among other matters reference is made to the introduction of Christianity in the reign of Tiberius; the persecution under Diocletian; the spread of the Arian heresy; the election of Maximus as emperor by the legions in Britain, and his subsequent death at Aquileia; the incursions of the Picts and Scots into the southern part of the island; the temporary assistance rendered to the harassed Britons by the Romans; the final abandonment of the island by the latter; the coming of the Saxons and their reception by Guortigern (Vortigern); and, finally, the conflicts between the Britons, led by a noble Roman, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and the new invaders.

During the conflict between Paganism and Christianity when many Christians "testified" to the truth of their convictions by sacrificing their lives, the word assumed its modern technical sense.

The Hessians were converted to Christianity mainly through the efforts of St Boniface; their land was included in the archbishopric of Mainz; and religion and culture were kept alive among them largely owing to the foundation of the Benedictine abbeys of Fulda and Hersfeld.

Accepting the Jewish apocalypses as sacred books of venerable antiquity, they read them eagerly, and transferred their contents bodily to Christianity.

To the student of ecclesiastical history it is remarkable as exhibiting a form of Christianity widely divergent from the prevalent types, being a religious fellowship which has no formulated creed demanding definite subscription, and no liturgy, priesthood or outward sacrament, and which gives to women an equal place with men in church organization.

Impressed by the formalism and deadness of contemporary Christianity (of which there is much evidence in the confessions of the Puritan writers themselves) he emphasized the importance of repentance and personal striving after the truth.

On the contrary, they see that a manifest blessing has rested on women's preaching, and they regard its almost universal prohibition as a relic of the seclusion of women which was customary in the countries where Christianity took its rise.

This ancient civilization is supposed to have been swept away by Mahommedan conquerors; before that event the people, in the opinion of several travellers, professed a degraded form of Christianity, which they had acquired from their Abyssinian neighbours.

But he had little success, and soon concluded a treaty by which both empires promised toleration to the worshippers of the two rival religions, Christianity and Zoroastrianism.

Society, he earnestly pleaded, can only find salvation by a return to Christianity and to the fold of the Roman Catholic Church.

The rise of Christianity in the Roman world still further improved the condition of the slave.

But a stronger influence of Christianity appears in Theodosius, and this influence is at the highest in the legislation of Justinian.

English Christianity seemed to have no power to uplift the people.

It had been the dream of this man's whole life to supersede both forms of Christianity by a semi-pagan theosophy deduced from the writings of the later Pythagoreans and Platonists.

Ficino differed from the majority of his contemporaries in this that, while he felt the influence of antiquity no less strongly than they did, he never lost his faith in Christianity, or contaminated his morals by contact with paganism.

He maintained that the Platonic doctrine was providentially made to harmonize with Christianity, in order that by its means speculative intellects might be led to Christ.

The islanders were converted to Christianity in the 6th and 7th centuries by Irish missionaries, in commemoration of whose zeal several isles bear the name of Papa or "priest."

When the storms of persecution ceased and Christianity had become the imperial faith, the evil fruits of prosperity were not slow to appear.

The question of his Christianity seems settled by the discovery of the sepulchre of these Christian Acilii.

As early as 1450 a company of Jewish converts in Spain, at the head of which were Paul de Heredia, Vidal de Saragossa de Aragon, and Davila, published compilations of Kabbalistic treatises to prove from them the doctrines of Christianity.'

Mirandola so convinced Pope Sixtus of the paramount importance of the Kabbalah as an auxiliary to Christianity that his holiness exerted himself to have Kabbalistic writings translated into Latin for the use of divinity students.

Judged by its influence on Bosnian politics, the Orthodox community was relatively unimportant at the Turkish conquest; and its subsequent growth is perhaps due to the official recognition of the Greek Church, as the representative of Christianity in Turkey.

According to Christian writers, he was a convert to Christianity.

Law's Case of Reason (1732), in answer to Tindal's Christianity as old as the Creation is to a great extent an anticipation of Bishop Butler's famous argument in the Analogy.

All hope seemed lost, when by a brilliant feat of arms John Sobieski, king of Poland, drove away the besiegers in hopeless confusion and saved the cause of Christianity, 1683.

We know nothing of his conversion except that he passed from heathenism to Christianity.

The first three form together a progressive introduction to Christianity corresponding to the stages through which the Aim7ns passed at Eleusis - purification, initiation, revelation.

Clement occupies a profoundly interesting position in the history of Christianity.

In fact Clement regarded Christianity as a philosophy.

The ancient philosophers sought through their philosophy to attain to a nobler and holier life, and this also was the aim of Christianity.

The difference between the two, in Clement's judgment, was that the Greek philosophers had only glimpses of the truth, that they attained only to fragments of the truth, while Christianity revealed in Christ the absolute and perfect truth.

Clement thus looks entirely at the enlightened moral elevation to which Christianity raises man.

Allenlightenment tended to lead up to the truths of Christianity, and hence knowledge of every kind not evil was its handmaid.

The world went through various stages in preparation for Christianity.

His mode of viewing Christianity does not fit into any classification.

Christianity was introduced by Leif Ericsson at the instance of Olaf Trygvasson, king of Norway, in r000 and following years.

They profess Christianity, and speak a language closely resembling that of the Sagai Tatars.

The pope, no longer possessing any more power than other bishops (though Marsilius recognizes that the supremacy of the Church of Rome goes back to the earliest times of Christianity), is to content himself with a pre-eminence mainly of an honorary kind, without claiming to interpret the Holy Scriptures, define dogmas or distribute benefices; moreover, he is to be elected by the Christian people, or by the delegates of the people, i.e.

There were many Jewish settlers in Melos in the beginning of the Christian era, and Christianity was early introduced.

In 811 Charlemagne founded a church here, perhaps on the site of a Saxon place of sacrifice, and this became a great centre for the evangelization of the north of Europe, missionaries from Hamburg introducing Christianity into Jutland and the Danish islands and even into Sweden and Norway.

The reign of Gratian forms an important epoch in ecclesiastical history, since during that period orthodox Christianity for the first time became dominant throughout the empire.

Christianity was early introduced, and in the third century Tipasa was a bishop's see.

Bohemia, which had first received Christianity from the East, was from geographical and other causes long but very loosely connected with the Church of Rome.

In spite of the phrase renatus in aeternum, there is no reason to suppose that the ceremony was in any way borrowed from Christianity.

On the r4th of February Mgr Amette, the new archbishop of Paris, prohibited his diocesans to read or defend the two books, which "attack and deny several fundamental dogmas of Christianity," under pain of excommunication.

Christianity swept the whole discussion on to a higher plane.

When he entered the divinity school he was an orthodox Unitarian; when he left it, he entertained strong doubts about the infallibility of the Bible, the possibility of miracles, and the exclusive claims of Christianity and the Church.

But on the 19th of May 1841 he preached at Boston a sermon on "the transient and permanent in Christianity," which presented in embryo the main principles and ideas of his final theological position, and the preaching of which determined his subsequent relations to the churches with which he was connected and to the whole ecclesiastical world.

We shall therefore enter at once on a short account of the origin of this literature in Judaism, of its adoption by early Christianity, of the various meanings which the term " apocryphal " assumed in the course of its history, and having so done we shall proceed to classify and deal with the books that belong to this literature.

But as Christianity took its origin from Judaism, it is not unnatural that a large body of Jewish ideas was incorporated in the system of Christian thought.

The bulk of these in due course underwent transformation either complete or partial, but there was always a residuum of incongruous and inconsistent elements existing side by side with the essential truths of Christianity.

Christianity, moreover, moved by the same apocalyptic tendency as Judaism, gave birth to new Christian apocryphs, though, in the case of most of them, the subject matter was to a large extent traditional and derived from Jewish sources.

The object of the writer is to embody in St Paul the model ideal of the popular Christianity of the 2nd century.

The charge of heathenism we find in Suidas is probable enough; that is to say, Tribonian may well have been a crypto-pagan, like many other eminent courtiers and litterateurs of the time (including Procopius himself), a person who, while professing Christianity, was at least indifferent to its dogmas and rites, cherishing a sentimental recollection of the older and more glorious days of the empire.

The aggression of Christianity also was now more effective.

Mithraism courted the favour of Roman paganism and combined monotheism with polytheism, while Christianity was uncompromising.

Its eminence, however, was so largely based upon dalliance with Roman society, its weakness so great in having only a mythical character, instead of a personality, as an object of adoration, and in excluding women from its privileges, that it fell rapidly before the assaults of Christianity.

Manichaeism, which combined the adoration of Zoroaster and Christ, became the refuge of those supporters of Mithraism who were inclined to compromise, while many found the transition to orthodox Christianity easy because of its very resemblance to their old faith.

Few memorials of the Roman era 2 or of the first centuries of Christianity have been preserved (except the legend of St Ansanus), and none at all of the interval preceding the Lombard period.

In his youth, the excesses of absolutism had made Herculano a Liberal, and the attacks on his history turned this man, full of sentiment and deep religious conviction, into an anti-clerical who began to distinguish between political Catholicism and Christianity.

There are also notices of the leading systems in Milman's History of Latin Christianity; and the same writers are considered from the theological side in many works devoted to theology, and the history of dogma.

The inevitable consequence of this rupture was the Teutonizing of the western branch of the great Slav family, which, no longer able to stand alone, and cut off from both Rome and Constantinople, was forced, in self-defence, to take Christianity, and civilization along with it, from Germany.

Christianity had already begun to percolate Hungary.

The moral superiority of Christianity to paganism was speedily obvious.

The only question was which form of Christianity were the Magyars to adopt, the Eastern or the Western?

Alarmed at the sudden revival of the Eastern Empire, which under the Macedonian dynasty extended once more to the Danube, and thus became the immediate neighbour of Hungary, Duke Geza, who succeeded Taksony in 972, shrewdly resolved to accept Christianity from the more distant and therefore less dangerous emperor of the West.

During his reign, however, Hungarian Christianity did not extend much beyond the limits of his court.

Moreover, by accepting Christianity from Germany, he ran the risk of imperilling the independence of Hungary.

During the four hundred years of the Arpad dominion the nomadic Magyar race had established itself permanently in central Europe, adopted western Christianity and founded a national monarchy on the western model.

At the various churches such elementary schools as existed were to be found, but they did not profess to teach more than a smattering of the three " R's " and the principles of Christianity.

All our historical sources support the view taken above that Edessa, the capital of the kingdom which the Greeks and Romans called Osrhoene, was the earliest seat of Christianity in Mesopotamia and the cradle of Syriac literature.

C. Burkitt (Early Eastern Christianity, p. 14), that Eusebius knew of Christ's promise as part of the letter to Abgar, and purposely suppressed it as inconsistent with historical facts.

In all probability the first king of Osrhoene to adopt Christianity was Abgar IX., son of Ma'nu, who reigned from A.D.

But Christianity must have reached Edessa some thirty to fifty years earlier.

The form of this notice shows, as von Gutschmid and others have remarked, that Christianity was not yet the religion of the state; but it must for some time have had a home in Edessa.

The author is in sympathy with Christianity, but is himself an adherent of the stoic philosophy.

It is also likely enough that they did not consider sensible matter to be a vehicle worthy to contain divine effluence and holy virtues, and knew that such rites were alien to early Christianity.

It is then on the whole probable that the Paulicians who appear in Armenian records as early as 550, and were afterwards= called Thonraki, by the Greeks by the Armenian name Paulikiani, were the remains of a primitive adoptionist Christianity, widely dispersed in the east and already condemned under the name of Pauliani by the council of Nice in 325.

The word "god," on the conversion of the Teutonic races to Christianity, was adopted as the name of the one Supreme Being, the Creator of the universe, and of the Persons of the Trinity.

At that period the urban masses, but recently converted to Christianity, sought in the worship of the martyrs a sort of substitute for polytheism.

In fact the whole Samaj movement is as distinct a product of the contest of Hinduism with Christianity in the 19th century, as the Panth movement was of its contest with Islam 300 years earlier.

It is desultory to a degree; it is a base libel on religion and history; it differs from its model Ariosto in being, not, as Ariosto is, a mixture of romance and burlesque, but a sometimes tedious tissue of burlesque pure and simple; and it is exposed to the objection - often and justly urged - that much of its fun depends simply on the fact that there were and are many people who believe enough in Christianity to make its jokes give pain to them and to make their disgust at such jokes piquant to others.

In this, the earliest period of Saxon history recorded, there appears to be no relic of the Christianity of the Britons, which at one time was well in evidence.

After the driving out of Mellitus London remained without a bishop until the year 656, when Cedda, brother of St Chad of Lichfield, was invited to London by Sigebert, who had been converted to Christianity by Finan, bishop of the Northumbrians.

The writer is more versed than any other New Testament writer except the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and very much more than most of them, in the literary Greek of the period of the rise of Christianity; and he has, also, like other writers, his favourite words, turns of expression and thoughts.

An analysis shows that not quite two in every thousand Burmese profess Christianity, and there are about the same number of Mahommedans among them.

It is admitted by the missionaries themselves that Christianity has progressed very slowly among the Burmese in comparison with the rapid progress made amongst the Karens.

It is amongst the Sgaw Karens that the greatest progress in Christianity has been made, and the number of spirit-worshippers among them is very much smaller.

The forms of Christianity which make most converts in Burma are the Baptist and Roman Catholic faiths.

Of recent years many conversions to Christianity have been made by the American Baptist missionaries amongst the Lahu or Muhso hill tribesmen.

Very few have any reference to Christianity, but they served as indestructible marks for indicating the position of interments in the catacombs.

Sikhism mainly differs from Christianity in that it inculcates the transmigration of the soul, and adopts a belief in predestination, which is universal in the East.

As yet the law is not impregnated with the Christian spirit; this absence of both Christian and Pagan elements is due to the fact that many of the Franks were still heathens, although their king had been converted to Christianity.

The Apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity embraces a considerable period, from the centuries following the exile down to the close of the middle ages.

But though Christianity was in spirit the descendant of ancient Jewish prophecy, it was no less truly the child of that Judaism which had expressed its highest aspirations and ideals in pseudepigraphic and apocalyptic literature.

Hence we shall not be surprised to find that the two tendencies are fully represented in primitive Christianity, and, still more strange as it may appear, that New Testament apocalyptic found a more ready hearing amid the stress and storm of the 1st century than the prophetic side of Christianity, and that the type of the forerunner on the side of its declared asceticism appealed more readily to primitive Christianity than that of Him who came "eating and drinking," declaring both worlds good and both God's.

Early Christianity had thus naturally a special fondness for this class of literature.

It was Christianity that preserved Jewish apocalyptic, when it was abandoned by Judaism as it sank into Rabbinism, and gave it a Christian character either by a forcible exegesis or by a systematic process of interpolation.

When once it had taught men that the next world was God's world, though it did so at the cost of relinquishing the present to Satan, it had achieved its real task, and the time had come for it to quit the stage of history, when Christianity appeared as the heir of this true spiritual achievement.

But Christianity was no less assuredly the heir of ancient prophecy, and thus as spiritual representative of what was true in prophecy and apocalyptic; its essential teaching was as that of its Founder that both worlds were of God and that both should be made God's.

The fourth is pagan, the fifth Christian, Aeizanes having in the interval embraced Christianity.

The preaching of Jesus shows traces of this, and the Fourth Gospel (as well as the Synoptists) displays a marked interest in connecting the Johannine movement with the beginnings of Christianity.

Since Apollos was a Christian and "taught exactly," he could hardly have been acquainted only with John's baptism or have required to be taught Christianity more thoroughly by Aquila and Priscilla.

In 1665 and 1666 he published the second and first volumes respectively of the Exact Chronological Vindication and Historical Demonstration of the supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction exercised by the English kings from the original planting of Christianity to the death of Richard I.

This was partly due to the influence of Christianity, which sought to include as objects of sacrilege all forms of church property, rather than merely those things consecrated in pagan cults, partly to the efforts of the later emperors to surround themselves and everything emanating from them with highest sanctions.

He filled a position intermediate between Jewish and Pauline Christianity - one characteristic of Christian Hellenists generally.

The picture, too, which it gives of the danger lest the Christianity of its readers should be unduly Judaic in feeling and practice, suits well the experiences of a writer living in Alexandria, where Judaism was immensely strong.

The struggle between them and the Abyssinians now became one of Judaism against Christianity.

Five years later the Persians, who had been called in by the opponents of Christianity, succeeded in taking over the rule and in appointing governors over Yemen.

Arabian tradition tells of their prince Jabala ibn Aiham who accepted Islam, after fighting against it, but finding it too democratic, returned to Christianity and exile in the Roman empire.

The first was a Christian of the tribe of Taghlib, whose Christianity enabled him to write many verses which would have been impossible to a professing Moslem.

Pahlavi inscriptions' found on crosses at St Thomas's Mount near Madras and at Kottayam in Travancore, are evidence both of the antiquity of Christianity in these places (7th or 8th century), and for the semi-patripassianism (the apparent identification of all three persons of the Trinity in the sufferer on the cross) which marked the Nestorian teaching.

In the 10th century the Nestorians introduced Christianity into Tartary proper; in 1274 Marco Polo saw two of their churches.

Hase's aim was to reconcile modern culture with historical Christianity in a scientific way.

Indeed, he vigorously attacked rationalism, as distinguished from the rational principle, charging it with being unscientific inasmuch as it ignored the historical significance of Christianity, shut its eyes to individuality and failed to give religious feeling its due.

For several centuries Vienna filled an important role as the most advanced bulwark of Western civilization and Christianity against the Turks, for during the whole of the middle ages Hungary practically retained its Asiatic character.

The main argument for putting it earlier is derived from the admitted affinities between it and Romans, the Colossian and Ephesian epistles containing, it is held, a more advanced christology (so Lightfoot especially, and Hort, Judaistic Christianity, pp. 115-129).

He is important as the historian of early Christianity and of the pre-Reformation period.

In the early history of Latin Christianity Africa holds a more important place than Italy.

Traces of Christianity remained among the Kabyles till after the conquest of Granada (1492),(1492), when the influx of Andalusian Moors from Spain completed the conversion of those tribes.

Here lies a great merit of Hermas's book, his insight into experimental religion and the secret of failure in Christians about him, to many of whom Christianity had come by birth rather than personal conviction.

Indeed the prime value of the Shepherd is the light it casts on Christianity at Rome in the otherwise obscure period c. I10-140, when it had as yet hardly felt the influences converging on it from other centres of tradition and thought.

In middle age he became a convert to Christianity, and about 306 he went to Gaul (Treves) on the invitation of Constantine the Great, and became tutor to his eldest son, Crispus.

The fifth book, De Justitia, maintains that true righteousness is not to be found apart from Christianity, and that it springs from piety which consists in the knowledge of God.

In the Christian Church the tradition of faith healing dates from the earliest days of Christianity; upon the miracles of the New Testament follow cases of healing, first by the Apostles, then by their successors; but faith healing proper is gradually, from the 3rd century onwards, transformed into trust in relics, though faith cures still occur sporadically in later times.

The ecclesiastical organization of Lycaonia and the country round Iconium on all sides was complete in the early 4th century, and monuments of later 3rd and 4th century Christianity are extremely numerous.

However this may be, remnants of their primitive superhuman qualities cling to the Celtic heroes long after they have been transfigured, under the influence of Christianity and chivalry, into the heroes of the medieval Arthurian romance, types - for the most part - of the knightly virtues as these were conceived by the middle ages; while shadowy memories of early myths live on, strangely disguised, in certain of the episodes repeated uncritically by the medieval poets.

Charlemagne is chiefly venerated as the champion of Christianity against the heathen and the Saracens.

Christianity seems to have been introduced into the town at a very early period, and in the 6th century a new Mainz was founded by Bishop Sidonius.

An enemy defined Comtism as Catholicism minus Christianity, to which an able champion retorted by calling it Catholicism plus Science.

His high appreciation of Christianity, which contrasts with the contemptuous estimate of the contemporary rationalists, rested on a firm belief in its essential humanity, to which fact, and not to conscious deception, he attributes its success.

He shared the piety and superstition of the age, and did much for the spread of Christianity.

The doctrine of emanation is thus to be distinguished from the cosmogonic theory of Judaism and Christianity, which explains human existence as due to a single creative act of a moral agent.

The God of Judaism and Christianity is essentially a person in close personal relation to his creatures; emanation is the denial of personality both for God and for man.

As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed " the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection," " the Deity of Christ," " Vicarious Redemption," " Evil," and " Christianity without Priest and without Ritual."' He remained to the end a keen and vigilant apologist of the school in which he had been nursed.

It is impossible to say how much reliance may be placed on these figures, but from the 18th century, when the name of every subject had to be inscribed on the roll of a temple as a measure against his adoption of Christianity, a tolerably trustworthy census could always be taken.

The fact that no traces of it have been discovered in Japan would be easily accounted for, when it is remembered that the examples taken home would almost certainly have been religious pictures, would have been preserved in well-known and accessible places, and would thus have been entirely destroyed in the terrible and minute extermination of Christianity by Hideyoshi at the beginning of the 17th century.

His episcopate, which lasted some thirty years, was characterized by great missionary zeal, and by so much success that, according to the (doubtless somewhat rhetorical) statement of Gregory of Nyssa, whereas at the outset of his labours there were only seventeen Christians in the city, there were at his death only seventeen persons in all who had not embraced Christianity.

He taught rhetoric at Rome (one of his pupils being Jerome), and in his old age became a convert to Christianity.

Apart from his redoubtable powers as a controversialist, Philoxenus deserves commemoration as a scholar, an elegant writer, and an exponent of practical Christianity.

The term is applied article of the Christian faith,"due to the introduction of" foreign elements "and resulting in a perversion of Christianity, and an amalgamation with it of ideas discordant with its nature (Fisher's History of Christian Doctrine, p. 9).

Cyprian was the first to proclaim the identity of heretics and schismatics by making a man's Christianity depend on his belonging to the great episcopal church confederation.

Gnosticism was the result of the attempt to blend with Christianity the religious notions of pagan mythology, mysterology, theosophy and philosophy" (p. 98).

As long as the Christian Church was itself persecuted by the pagan empire, it advocated freedom of conscience, and insisted that religion could be promoted only by instruction and persuasion (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius); but almost immediately after Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman empire the persecution of men for religious opinions began.

It was maintained at the bar that the denial of the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity would not be a lawful cause for such rejection, but the judgment only queries whether a denial of the personality of the devil or eternal punishment is consistent with membership of the church.

Olgierd died in 1377, accepting both Christianity and the tonsure shortly before his death.

They are said to be descendants of Persian tribes; but the fact is very doubtful, and they may be at least as aboriginal as the Maronites, and a remnant of an old Incarnationist population which did not accept Christianity, and kept its heretical Islam free from those influences which modified Druse creed.

In his addresses on the future of the Protestant Church (Reden fiber die Zukunft der evangelischen Kirche, 1849), he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus's conceptions of the heavenly Father, the Son of Man and the kingdom of Heaven.

In his zeal for orthodoxy, indeed, Frederick William outstripped his minister; he even blamed W6llner's "idleness and vanity" for the inevitable failure of the attempt to regulate opinion from above, and in 1794 deprived him of one of his secular offices in order that he might have more time "to devote himself to the things of God"; in edict after edict the king continued to the end of his reign to make regulations "in order to maintain in his states a true and active Christianity, as the path to genuine fear of God."

From the middle of the 2nd century a change began to take place in the outward circumstances of Christianity.

After their separation from the Church, they became narrower and pettier in their conception of Christianity.

Their asceticism degenerated into legalism, their claim to a monopoly of pure Christianity made them arrogant.

As for the popular religion of the larger Church, they scorned it as an adulterated, manipulated Christianity.

The latter wished for more fasting, the prohibition of second marriages, a frank, courageous profession of Christianity in daily life, and entire separation from the world; the bishops, on the other hand, sought to make it as easy as possible to be a Christian, lest they should lose the greater part of their congregations.

It allowed that the bishops were the successors of the apostles, that the Catholic rule of faith was a complete and authoritative exposition of Christianity, and that the New Testament was the supreme rule of the Christian life.

He also wrote Fichte's Science of Knowledge (1884); Poetry, Comedy and Duty (1888); Religions before Christianity (1883); Ethics for Young People (1891); The Gospel of Paul (1892).

If the essence of Christianity is winnowed down to a bare imitation of the Man Jesus, and his religion is accepted as Buddhists accept the religion of Buddha, still it cannot be denied that the early Christians put their trust in Christ rather than his religion.

The missing link which has hitherto been lacking in the evidence has been found by Barns in the influence of Celtic missionaries who streamed across from Europe until they came in touch with the remnants of the Old Latin Christianity of the Danube.

Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (1894), reprinted in Studies in Roman History (1906), pp. 1-162; with the literature quoted in these works and in Schanz, Rom.

These evil tendencies in the popular presentation of Christianity undoubtedly begot in Shaftesbury's mind a certain amount of repugnance and contempt to some of the doctrines of Christianity itself; and, cultivating, almost of set purpose, his sense of the ridiculous, he was too apt to assume towards such doctrines and their teachers a tone of raillery.

Christianity was introduced in the 3rd century of our era.

Gregory did all in his power to promote the spread of Christianity in Germany, and gave special encouragement to the mission of St Boniface, whom he consecrated bishop in 722.

Christianity found its way into Clusium as early as the 3rd century, and the tombstone of a bishop of A.D.

Charlemagne's wars in Italy, Spain and Saxony formed part of the common epic material, and there are references to his wars against the Sla y s; but especially he remained in the popular mind as the great champion of Christianity against the creed of Mahomet, and even his Norman and Saxon enemies became Saracens in current legend.

It marks the transition, from the earlier tolerant attitude of Rome towards Christianity, to its later hostile attitude.

Yet, on the other hand, our author's attitude to the world reflects the temper of Judaism rather than that of Christianity.

There is no evidence of any profession of Christianity on the part of the Gur Khan, though the daughter of the last of his race is recorded to have been a Christian.

It afterwards became the seat of the dukes of Bavaria, and one of the main bulwarks of the East Frankish monarchy; and it was also the focus from which Christianity spread over southern Germany.

Next to Christianity itself he loved the English Church.

No book is fuller of devotion to the Church of England than The Temple, and no poems in our language exhibit more of the spirit of true Christianity.

With its character largely determined by Jewish elements, and even more by contact with the dogmas of Christianity, this second Alexandrian school resulted in the speculative philosophy of the Neo-Platonists and the religious philosophy of the Gnostics and early church fathers.

Clement, as a scholar and a theologian, proposed to unite the mysticism of NeoPlatonism with the practical spirit of Christianity.

The compatibility of Christian and later Neo-Platonic ideas is evidenced by the writings of Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais, and though Neo-Platonism eventually succumbed to Christianity, it had the effect, through the writings of Clement and Origen, of modifying the tyrannical fanaticism and ultradogmatism of the early Christian writers.

He was born of heathen parents at Tabatha near Gaza about 290; he was sent to Alexandria for his education and there became a convert to Christianity; about 306 he visited St Anthony and became his disciple, embracing the eremitical life.

Tylor, asserts itself everywhere in Christianity; and objects thus invested with spiritual or curative powers are called by the Latin doctors sacramentals.

On returning to Wittenberg, he turned to the canon law, and was shocked to find it so completely at variance with his notions of Christianity.

Indeed, he gloried in the inherent and divine unreasonableness of Christianity, and brutally denounced reason as a cunning fool, " a pretty harlot."

The emperor seconded the efforts of his vassals, Albert the Bear, margrave of the Saxon north mark, and Conrad I., margrave of Meissen and Lusatia, to extend the authority of the Germans in the districts east of the Elbe, and assisted Norbert, archbishop of Magdeburg, and Albert I., archbishop of Bremen, to spread Christianity.

Through their efforts Christianity was firmly planted in various parts of England; and after the conversion of the country it was English.

By this lexicon Teller had put himself amongst the most advanced rationalists, and his opponents charged him with the design of overthrowing positive Christianity altogether.

In 409 or 410 Synesius, whose Christianity had until then been by no means very pronounced, was popularly chosen to be bishop of Ptolemais, and, after long hesitation on personal and doctrinal grounds, he ultimately accepted the office thus thrust upon him, being consecrated by Theophilus at Alexandria.

His many-sided activity, as shown especially in his letters, and his loosely mediating position between Neoplatonism and Christianity, make him a subject of fascinating interest.

The Augsburg Confession (1530) is divided into numerous " articles," while Luther's Lesser Catechism gathers Christianity under three " articles "- Creation, Redemption, Sanctification.

In 604 we find Essex in close dependence upon Kent, being ruled by Saberht, sister's son of iEthelberht, under whom the East Saxons received Christianity.

In 861 Michael and Bardas invaded Bulgaria and secured the conversion of the king to Christianity.

About 1530 he appears to have revisited the Spanish court, but on what precise errand is not known; the confusion concerning this period of his life extends to the time when, after visits to Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Guatemala, he undertook an expedition in 1537 into Tuzulutlan, the inhabitants of which were, chiefly through his tact, peaceably converted to Christianity, mass being celebrated for the first time amongst them in the newly founded town of Rabinal in 1538.

As Christianity passed to Gentile soil, the sovereign assembly (ecclesia) of privileged citizens in each Greek city furnished an analogy to the latter usage.

These, the two senses recognized by Congregationalism, remained the only ones known to primitive Christianity.

This remains the working rule of ante-Nicene Christianity.

But his claim for " independent " churches no longer denies that true Christianity exists within parish assemblies.

But it has largely outgrown this, and is addressing itself to the progressive re-interpretation of Christianity, in an essentially constructive spirit.

In 1186 the emissaries of the archbishop of Bremen began to preach Christianity among the Ehsts and Letts, and in 1201 the bishop of Livonia established his residence at Riga.

It was partly rebuilt during the Byzantine occupation and became a centre of Christianity.

Still, cruel experience and the persevering preaching of the missionaries gradually checked the fighting, and by the year 1839 it could be claimed that peace and Christianity were in the ascendant.

He destroyed the remnants of paganism that lingered on here, and by his preaching gained the rustic population to Christianity.

Besides being bad philosophy based on fictitious history, Christianity is not respectable.

Celsus and Porphyry are the two early literary opponents of Christianity who have most claim to consideration, and it is worth noticing that, while they agree alike in high aims, in skilful address and in devoted toil, their religious standpoints are widely dissimilar.

In his antipathy to Christianity, which appears to him barbaric and superstitious, he gives himself up to the scepticism and satire of a man of the world through which he comes in contact with Epicurean tendencies."

Any pagan who wished to understand and criticize Christianity intimately had to begin by learning from the Jews, and this accounts for the opening chapters of his argument.

He is bound to admit that Christianity has been stated reasonably; against the moral teaching of Jesus he can only bring the lame charge of plagiarism, and with the Christian assertion that the Logos is the Son of God he completely accords.

And the Jewish church, within which Christianity had first lived and moved, ceased to have a visible centre.

In spite of their conversion to Christianity, the Samoyedes still regard these piles with superstition.

The inland gods lost importance with the failure of the overland trade, and Judaism and Christianity seem for a time to have contended for the mastery in South Arabia.

In Nejran Syrian missionaries seem to have introduced Christianity (Noldeke).

Butt as the religion of the hostile Ethiopians, Christianity found political obstacles to its adoption in Yemen; and, as heathenism had quite lost its power, it is intelligible that Dhu Nuwas, who was at war with Ethiopia before the last fatal struggle, became a Jew.

The Ethiopian conquest rather hurt than helped Christianity.

The total number of persons in the country professing Christianity was 251,904 or 65%.

Hostages were given, oaths of fealty renewed, while many accepted Christianity, and the rudiments of an ecclesiastical system were established.

Oaths and hostages were exacted; and many Saxon youths were educated in the land of the Franks as Christians, and sent back into Saxony to spread Christianity and Frankish influence.

The conversion of the Saxons to Christianity, which during this time had been steadily progressing, was continued in the reign of the emperor Louis I., the Pious, who, however, took very little interest in this part of his empire.

We find little or no trace of them before Constantine made Christianity the state religion, i.e.

As soon as Christianity made such progress that baptism became the rule, and as soon as immersion gave place to sprinkling, the ancient baptisteries were no longer necessary.

He sought to spread Christianity by introducing the Cistercians, founding bishoprics, and building churches and monasteries.

They are after all personal expressions of Christianity, in which are discernible also specific types of local tradition.

Firstly, it suggests the supernormal level to which the Apostolic consciousness was raised at a bound by the direct influence of the Founder of Christianity, and justifies the marking-off of the Apostolic writings as a Canon, or body of Christian classics of unique religious authority.

He also commissioned Palladius to preach the gospel in Ireland which was beginning to rally to Christianity.

It was religion which first induced ladies, in the earlier centuries of Christianity, to take up the care of the sick as a charitable duty.

In 1888 the tide of persecution turned, and several chiefs embraced Christianity, and on Crowther's return from another visit to England, the large iron church known as "St Stephen's cathedral" was opened.

About this time the conversion of the Thuringians to Christianity was begun by British missionaries and continued by St Boniface, who founded a bishopric at Erfurt.

But there is a vast difference in the relations in which they respectively stood to the church and to Christianity.

It is possible that there may be some ground for the local tradition that Christianity was introduced into this region by Dionysius and Paracodus, who successively occupied the see of Vienne, but another tradition that the first bishop was named St Nazarius rests on a confusion, as that saint belongs to Genoa and not to Geneva.

Augustine's City of God, published in 426, was an apologetic, not an historical work, but it had great influence in our field, for in it he undertook to answer the common heathen accusation that the growing misfortunes of the empire were due to the prevalence of Christianity and the forsaking of the gods of Rome.

In his hands Christianity became a new religion, fitted to meet the needs of all the world, and freed entirely of the local and national meaning which had hitherto attached to it.

Thus Jesus had the same significance for one man as for another, and Christianity was meant as much for Gentiles as for Jews.

It was Christianity in its universal form which won its great.

Christianity, with its one God, and its promise of redemption and a blessed immortality based upon divine revelation, met as no other contemporary faith did the awakening religious needs.

Christianity was essentially a proselytizing religion, not content to appeal simply to one class or race of people, and to be one among many faiths, but believing in the falsity or insufficiency of all others and eager to convert the whole world.

Under his successors, except during the brief reign of Julian (361-363), when the effort was made to reinstate paganism in its former place of supremacy, the Church received growing support, until, under Theodosius the Great (379-395), orthodox Christianity, which stood upon the platform adopted at Nicaea in 325, was finally established as the sole official religion of the state, and heathen worship was put under the ban.

An interesting parallel to the spread of Christianity in the Roman empire is afforded by the contemporary Mithraism.

Two tendencies appeared in the thought of the primitive Church, the one to regard Christianity as a law given by God for the government of men's lives, with the promise of a blessed immortality as a reward for its observance; the other to view it as a means by which the corrupt and mortal nature of man is transformed, so that he becomes a spiritual and holy being.

Christianity is at once a revealed law which a man must keep, and by keeping which he earns salvation, and a supernatural power whereby his nature is transformed and the divine quality of immortality imparted to it.

From both points of view Christianity is a supernatural system without which salvation is impossible, and in the Christian Church it is preserved and mediated to the world.

The effect of the legal view of Christianity was to make Christ an agent of God in the revelation of the divine will and truth, and so a subordinate being between God and the world, the Logos of current Greek thought.

Since the time when the church of eastern Syria had decided, in opposition to the church of the Empire, to cling to the ancient views of Syrian theologians - therefore also to the teaching and person of Nestorius - her relations were broken off with the church in western Syria and in Greek and Latin countries; but the power of Nestorian, or, as it was termed, Chaldaic Christianity, was not thereby diminished.

For, in view of the facts above stated, it was of small significance that in Britain Christianity was driven back into the western portion of the island still held by the Britons, and that in the countries of the Rhine and!Danube a few bishoprics disappeared.

Finally, the dependence of the Swabian and Bavarian peoples on the Frankish empire paved the way for Christianity in those provinces also.