and further in the attainment of the meaning of Christianity, and
realized it more and more in life.

The longer mankind lived, the clearer and clearer became the
meaning of Christianity, as must always be the case with every
theory of life.

Succeeding generations corrected the errors of their predecessors,
and grew ever nearer and nearer to a comprehension of the true
meaning. It was thus from the very earliest times of
Christianity. And so, too, from the earliest times of
Christianity there were men who began to assert on their own
authority that the meaning they attribute to the doctrine is the
only true one, and as proof bring forward supernatural occurrences
in support of the correctness of their interpretation.

This was the principal cause at first of the misunderstanding of
the doctrine, and afterward of the complete distortion of it.

It was supposed that Christ's teaching was transmitted to men not
like every other truth, but in a special miraculous way. Thus the
truth of the teaching was not proved by its correspondence with
the needs of the mind and the whole nature of man, but by the
miraculous manner of its transmission, which was advanced as an
irrefutable proof of the truth of the interpretation put on it.
This hypothesis originated from misunderstanding of the teaching,
and its result was to make it impossible to understand it rightly.

And this happened first in the earliest times, when the doctrine
was still not so fully understood and often interpreted wrongly,