The theologians of Protestantism arrived by another road at an analagous conclusion. Under the influence of the dogma of the verbal inspiration of the New Testament, they were led to make of apostolic Christianity an ideal and abstract type which all the ages ought to force themselves to imitate and reproduce. And, as they profess to have returned to this type both in regard to ideas and to institutions and morals, they have made of this apostolic period the first chapter of the history of Protestantism, just as the Catholics have made of it the first chapter of the history of Catholicism. In both cases, it loses all distinct physiognomy and all reality.
By dissipating these prejudices, historical criticism has completely resuscitated that first form of Christianity. It is no longer possible to confound it with any other. It had its contrasts, its passions, its storms. Neither Jesus nor the apostles lived in the ideal or in paradisiacal peace. They quarrelled and were divided in the Church of Jerusalem as in our own. The subjects of the quarrels were different, but they did not consider them less grave than those which vex and trouble us. Peter, James, and Paul were not less divided in the first century over the question of circumcision and of the relations between Jews and Gentiles, than were Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin in the sixteenth over the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. From both camps, then as now, they sent forth pamphlets and anathemas. There were two opposite parties. There were the stubborn holders of tradition and its authority, and there were the innovators, or the partisans, sometimes as rash as they, of liberty of faith and individual inspiration; and between the two there were the men of conciliation and the golden mean who were preoccupied especially in preventing schisms and arranging truces and treaties of peace, to be followed in their turn by new crises and fresh storms.
In this first form of Christianity, as in all that have followed it, there was a certain dualism, a mixture of heterogeneous and soon hostile elements. The struggle was bound to arise between the Christian principle and Jewish tradition. The new seed sown in that ancient soil could not germinate without rising in it and in places breaking up the thick hard crust. In the books of the New Testament that have preserved to us the picture of that first and powerful germination, side by side with the principle to which belongs the future we necessarily find old things which are on the way to death. It will be seen what an error they commit and what a wrong they do themselves who, misconceiving this historical complexity, sanctify and deify both these opposite elements, and place on the same level the eternally fruitful grain, and the chaff to-day dried up and utterly inert, a mere remnant of the Jewish stalk that bore it.