A Source Book for Ancient Church History - Mirrors

Period IV. The Age Of The ConsolidationOf The Church: 200 to 324 A. D.[141]In the fourth period of the Church under the heathen Empire,or the period of the consolidation of the Church, the number ofChristians increased so rapidly that the relation of the RomanState to the Church became a matter of the gravest importance(ch. 1). During a period of comparative peace and prosperitythe Church developed its doctrinal system and its constitution(ch. 2). Although the school of Asia Minor became isolated andtemporarily ceased to affect the bulk of the Church elsewhere, theschool of the apologists was brilliantly continued at Alexandriaunder Clement and Origen, and later under Origen at Cæsarea inPalestine. Meanwhile the foundations were laid in North Africafor a distinctive type of Western theology, inaugurated by Tertullianand developed by Cyprian. After years of alternating favorand local persecutions, the first general persecution (ch. 3) brokeupon the Church, rudely testing its organization and ultimatelystrengthening and furthering its tendencies toward a strictly hierarchicalconstitution. In the long period of peace that followed(ch. 4), the discussions that had arisen within the Church as tothe relation of the divine unity to the divinity of Christ reached atemporary conclusion, the cultus was elaborated and assumed theessentials of its permanent form, and the episcopate was madesupreme over rival authorities within the Church, becoming atonce the expression and organ of ecclesiastical unity. At thesame time new problems arose; within the Church there was theappearance of an organized asceticism which appeared for a timeto be a rival to the Church's system, and outside the Church theappearance of a hostile rival in the rapidly spreading Manichæansystem, in which was revived, in a better organized and thereforemore dangerous form, the expelled Gnosticism. The period endswith the last general persecution (ch. 5).