Excerpt from The Church of the Apostles: An Historical Inquiry

It is with no slight regret that I find my task completed, and nothing now remaining for me but to add a few sentences of farewell to my readers, to be prefixed, according to custom, to my little book. In my opening chapter I have so fully explained the object of the present inquiry, that I have now only to point out the singular value of the Epistles of the New Testament as a storehouse of materials for the study of the life of the first Christians when they were formed into communities after our Lord had left this world.

Every one knows the importance of contemporary documents in the study of the history of any period of the past, and it is the meagreness of such documents in connection with the second century which makes it so difficult for the ecclesiastical historian to trace the stages by which the Christianity of the apostolic period was modified or developed into the Christianity of the patristic period and of the Council of Nice.

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