the Church was in no way inconsistent with a strict insistence on its corporate authority and discipline. Although the eyes of the Christian were fixed on the future glory of the Kingdom of Christ rather than on the present order of things, this future kingdom was organically connected with the visible hierarchical Church, in the same way that the Messianic kingdom of prophecy was associated with the historic Israel. Indeed the Church was itself the future kingdom in embryo. In the vision of Hernias it is a tower, which is being built of living stones brought from every quarter of the earth and thus the process of its construction is, in Newman’s phrase, the measure of the duration of the world.
This faith in a holy society and in a historical process of redemption distinguished Christianity from all its religious rivals in the ancient world, and gave it the militant and unyielding quality that enabled it to triumph in its struggle with secular civilisation. But this is not sufficient to explain its religious appeal. If it had been nothing more than this, it would have merely a Jewish heresy or an apocalyptic sect of the type that we actually find in Ebionism or Montanism. But in addition to the social and historical side of its teaching, Christianity also brought a new 84