theory "-the theory that God's justice could be satisfied only by the sacrifice of His Son; it was a plea-founded only on the words and history of our Lord-for the life-long sacrifice of the Son of God as the means of our redemption; using the word redemption in its literal sense of "buying back" from the slavery that followed as a consequence of the grand but misused power that God had, in the beginning, given to Satan; and "The First Millennial Faith" is a concensus of historical evidence to support this-to show that the satisfaction theory originated with the monk Anselm, at the close of the first one thousand years of the Christian church. The Reformation did away with many of the corruptions that originated in the dark period of Christian history; but this satisfaction theory still lives, and is popularly taught to the unsettling of the faith of many. To such, this book is a further plea for the life-long sacrifice of the Son of God as the means of our redemption; a declaration of the unqualified love of God for His creatures, and attributes sin, suffering, and death to the malicious workings of the fallen archangel, the enemy of God and man. Listen, then, to the voice of the Church speaking in her earlier and purer days. The compiler has availed himself of the careful studies of Professor John W. Draper, LL.D., -whose "Intellectual Development of Europe” is largely quoted from-and he acknowledges his obligations to the Rev. William Du Hamel, for his faithful researches into the teachings of the early Christian writers. INTRODUCTION. If, in the impartial presentation of evidence to prove what were the ethical, the intellectual, and the theological conditions of the period that produced the monk Anselm and his theory of the necessity of the Christ sacrifice to appease the justice of God, it became necessary to reproduce some of the dark pages of ecclesiastical history, it is with profound regret that in no other way could the condition of that period be fully understood; and only when the force of those conditions are fully comprehended can we make a just estimate of the First Scholastic and his dogma. Yet, essential as they are, the compiler of these pages would not present those sad records, did he not believe that the day is near when the Universal Church will no longer permit itself to be manacled to a dead and ignoble past, but will be free to restore again the "The First Millennial Faith." |