grave: 'I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord!'



A FOURFOLD CORD

'And they continued stedfastly in the Apostles' doctrine and
fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.'
--ACTS ii. 42.

The Early Church was not a pattern for us, and the idea of its
greatly superior purity is very largely a delusion. But still, though
that be true, the occasional glimpses that we get at intervals in the
early chapters of this Book of the Acts of the Apostles do present a
very instructive and beautiful picture of what a Christian society
may be, and therefore of what Christian Churches and Christian
individuals ought to be.

The words that I have read, however, are not the description of the
demeanour of the whole community, but of that portion of it which had
been added so swiftly to the original nucleus on the Day of
Pentecost. Think, on the morning of that day 'the number of the names
was one hundred and twenty,' on the evening of that day it was three
thousand over that number--a sufficiently swift and large increase to
have swamped the original nucleus, unless there had been a great
power of assimilation to itself lodged in that little body. These new
converts held to the Apostolic 'doctrine' and 'fellowship,' and to
'breaking of bread' and to 'prayers,' and so became homogeneous with
the others, and all worked to one end.