mind must needs seek to assign to the Master his true place
and relation as between God and man. Here were the germs of hierarchy,
ceremonial, and dogma. Internal order, self-protection against
persecuting emperors and then against barbarian invaders, led to a
gradual strengthening and perfecting of the organization. The craving
for intellectual consistency and symmetry urged on the elaboration of the
creed.

That development of the Christian creed,--in one view, how natural and
inevitable a process; yet what enormous waste of intellect, what
diversion from sound inquiry! The original hypothesis being pure fancy,
all the ingenious deductions are mere excursions into cloudland.

We need not follow in any detail these speculations. A certain purity
and loftiness marks their early stages, in which the Greek theologians
were occupied in blending a sort of Platonic theory of deity with the
historic fact of a noble human personality. With the emergence of the
church from persecution to power, we see that the intellectual degeneracy
has set in along with the moral. The first great council, that of
Nicaea, occupied itself in settling by a majority of votes whether Christ
was of _like_ substance with the Father or of the _same_ substance with
the Father. The assertion of his full equality was in due time followed
by a similar definition of the personality and equality of the Holy
Spirit, with the full doctrine of the Trinity; the double nature of
Christ; the rank of the Virgin Mary. The authoritative interpretation of
human nature had its source in the personal experience and later
theorizing of Augustine. Himself emergent after long struggles from the
tyranny of evil desire, by a transcendent experience in which he saw the
hand of God,--he in effect generalized from this to the inherent and
utter depravity of all mankind, and its entire dependence on a divine
grace which might with equal justice be given or withheld. The lurid
hell which had always shared with a radiant heaven the imagination of the
church took from Augustine a grimmer horror: in the fearful thought of
men, its foundations were now deep sunk in eternal justice, man being
himself from birth a wretch so abominable that hell was his natural
destiny, save as mercy might by inscrutable selection deliver some
portion of mankind.

Later ages brought their own problems. What was the nature of the
atonement,--a compact between God and the Devil, by which C