not identified with the hierarchy. The real catholic church, embracing
the whole spiritual brotherhood, is therefore something else.

[Sidenote: Main source of ecclesiasticism]

But we have not yet reached in this discussion the tap-root of the
evil tree of human ecclesiasticism. The fundamental error underlying
all other errors on this subject, was the idea of an absent Christ.
Notwithstanding the definite assertions of our Lord, "I am with you
alway, even unto the end of the world" and "Where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of
them"--notwithstanding these reassuring promises and the definite
statements of the apostles which represent Christ as the ever-living
and ever-acting head of the church, soon after the apostolic period
men lost the consciousness of the divine presence and began to think
and to act as if Christ were indeed absent and would not return again
for thousands of years. The presence of gigantic evils in the world
with no apparent available means of redressing them, the dead weight
of heathenism, and the disturbing influences of speculative Oriental
philosophies impressed upon the conscience of the world a despairing
pessimism. In the midst of this trial there was a revival of the
Platonic philosophy. The treatise of Plato that made the most profound
impression upon the religious thought of the second century was the
"Timaeus," wherein the Deity is pictured as withdrawn from the world
into a distant heaven separated from all creation because of the evil
with which matter is essentially connected. With God withdrawn from
the world and Christ absent on a long journey, what was man to do?
What was the hope of the world?

Here ecclesiasticism found its real opportunity. Here human authority