The Signs of the Times, Lectures

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE GREEK CHURCH, ITS HISTORY AND CONDITION. BY THE REV. J. P. WRIGHT, CLERICAL SECRETARY OF THE CENTRAL SOCIETY. The notice which our respected Chairman and your pastor has given concerning those reasons which make the consideration of the history and condition of the Greek Church of special importance just at present, has saved me the trouble of entering upon those reasons. It is really of very great importance, and would be, even if these things did not exist?this Russian war, and these assumptions on the part of parties in our own Church to dictate terms to others, or to our own bishops abroad?it would be of very great importance to know what our brethren in the East, from whence the light of Christianity first sprang, are, and what they are doing. I will begin at once by taking up the history of the Greek Church. The history of the Greek Church, in the first age, will be the history of the Church itself? for from thence Christianity sprang. From thence?that is, from the Eastern Church?sprang our own early British Church. We owe our Christianity, as also does Gaul, to the Greek Church, and not to the Roman Church. The controversies that took place at the time of Augustine's landing on the Isle of Thanet, and at thj time of the conversion of the Saxons, who had overrun England, and had swept away the British Church before them, making the British Christians retire into the fastnesses of Wales, prove conclusively that England hail received its Christianity from the East, and observed thacustoms of the East. I need not enter into this perhaps. Suffice it to make the assertion; the proof of it and the details about it belong to quite another subject. Of course, dear friends, I do not for a moment pretend that this is a sufficient sketch of the hist...