church: “Christ did not hand down to us the teaching to celebrate the mystery of the offering of the bread in church, but in an ordinary house, and sitting at a common table. So then let them not sacrifice the offering of bread in churches. It was after supper, when his disciples were thoroughly sated, that Christ gave them of his own body to eat. Therefore let them first eat meats and be sated, and then let them partake of the mysteries.” These old canons are adduced by way of ridiculing the Armenians, yet they reflect old usage. They are given in the Historia Monothelitarum of Combefisius, col. 317. Older MSS. of the Greek Euchologion contain numerous prayers to be offered over animals sacrificed; and in the form of agapē such sacrifices were common in Italy and Gaul on the natalis dies of a saint, and Paulinus of Nola, the friend of Augustine, in his Latin poems, describes them (c. 400) in detail. Gregory the Great sent to Mellitus, bishop of London, a written rite of sacrificing bulls for use in the English church of the early 7th century. In Augustine’s work against Faustus the Manichean (xx. 4), the latter taxes the Catholics with having turned the sacrifices of the heathen into agapēs, their idols into martyrs, whom they worship with similar rites. “You appease,” he says, “the shades of the dead with wines and banquets, you celebrate the feast-days of the heathen along with them . . . in their way of living you have certainly changed nothing.” This was true enough, but there is truth also in the remark of Prof. Sanday (“Eucharist” in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible) that Providence even in its revolutions is conservative. The world could only be christianized on condition that old holy days and customs were continued. The early Christian agapē admitted of adaptation to the older funeral and sacrificial feasts, and was so adapted. The association in the synoptics of the earliest eucharist with the paschal sacrifice provided a model, and long after the eucharist was separated with the agapē on other days of the year, we still find celebrated on the evening of Maundy Thursday the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, immediately followed by an eucharist. The 41st canon of the council of Carthage enacted that the sacraments of the altar should be received fasting, except on the anniversary of the Lord’s supper. It is clear that at an earlier date the agapē preceded the eucharist.
Pagan Analogues.—In ancient states common meals called sussitia (συσσίτια) were instituted, particularly in the Doric states, e.g. in Lacaedemon and in Crete. Plato advocated them, and perhaps the later Jews imitated the Spartan community. Trade and other gilds in antiquity held subscription suppers or ἔρανοι, similar to those of the early Corinthian church, usually to support the needs of the poorer members. These hetairiae or clubs were forbidden (except in cities formally allied to Rome) by Trajan and other emperors, as being likely to be centres of disaffection; and on this ground Pliny forbade the agapē of the Bithynian churches, Christianity not being a lawful religion licensed for such gatherings. The custom which most resembles the eucharist and agapē was that known as charistia described by Valerius Maximus ii. 1. 8. It was a solemn feast attended only by members of one clan, at which those who had quarrelled were at the sacrament of the table (apud sacra mensae) reconciled. It was held on the 20th of February. Ovid in his Fasti, ii. 617, alludes to it—
Proxima cognati dixere charistia cari,
Et venit ad socios turba propinqua deos.
Authorities.—“The Canons of Hippolytus,” in Duchesne’s Origines du culte chrétien (Paris, 1898); A. Allen, Christian Institutions (London, 1898); P. Batiffol, Etudes d’histoire (Paris, 1902 and 1905); F. X. Funk, “L’Agapé,” in the Revue di l’histoire ecclésiastique (Louvain, Jan. 1903); Ad. Harnack, “Brod und Wasser” (Texts und Untersuch. vii. 2, Leipzig, 1891); J. F. Keating, The Agapé and the Eucharist (London, 1901); F. X. Kraus, arts. “Agapen” and “Mahie” in the Realencyklop. d. christl. Altertümer; P. Ladeuze, “L’Eucharistie et les repas communs” in the Revue de l’orient chrétien, No. 3, 1902; Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire (London, 1894); A. Spitta, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur (Göttingen, 1893); E. von der Goltz, Das Gebet in ältesten Christianheit (Leipzig, 1901); F. E. Warren, The Liturgy and Ritual of the Antenicene Church (London, 1697); T. Zahn, art. “Agapen” in Hauck’s Realencyklop.; F. C. Conybeare, Rituale Armenorum (Oxford, 1905; it contains the oldest Latin and Greek forms), The Key of Truth (Oxford, 1898), and art. on “The Survival of Animal Sacrifices” in the American Journal of Theology (Chicago, Jan. 1903); F. X. Funk, Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum Paderborn, 1906); V. Ermoni, L’Agape (Paris, 1904); G. Horner, The Statutes of the Apostles, translated from Ethiopic and Arabic MSS. (London, 1904); Thefr. Drescher, Diss. de vet. Christianorum Agapis (Giesse, 1824); L. A. Muratori, Anecdota Graeca, “De agapis sublatis” (Patavii, 1709); I. A. Fabricius, Bibliogr. Ant. p. 587; Muenter, Primord. Eccl. Afr. p. 111; Walafrid Strabo, De Rebus Eccles. capita 18, 19; Gregory of Tours, De miraculis S. Juliani, xxxi.; Paulini Nolani Carmen xii. in S. Felicem. (F. C. C.)
AGAPEMONITES, or Community of the Son of Man. This sect, based upon the theories of various German religious mystics, and having for its primary object the spiritualization of the matrimonial state, was founded in 1846 by the Rev. Henry James Prince, a clergyman of the Church of England (1811–1899). He studied medicine, obtained his qualifications in 1832 and was appointed medical officer to the General Hospital in Bath, his native city. Compelled by ill-health to abandon his profession, he entered himself in 1837 as a student at St. David’s Theological College, Lampeter, where he gathered about him a band of earnest religious enthusiasts, known as the Lampeter Brethren, and was eventually ordained to the curacy of Charlinch in Somerset, where he had sole charge in the illness and absence of the rector, the Rev. Samuel Starkey. By that time he had contracted his first “spiritual marriage,” and had persuaded himself that he had been absorbed into the personality of God and had become a visible embodiment of the Holy Spirit. During his illness Mr. Starkey read one of his curate’s sermons; and was not only “cured” forthwith, but embraced his strange doctrines, and together they procured many conversions in the countryside and the neighbouring towns. In the end the rector was deprived of his living and Prince’s licence withdrawn, and together, with a few disciples they started the Charlinch Free Church, which had a very brief existence. Prince shortly afterwards became curate of Stoke in Suffolk, where, however, the character of his revivalist zeal caused his departure at the end of twelve months. It was now decided that Prince, Starkey (whose sister Prince had married as his second wife) and the Rev. Lewis Prince should leave the Church of England and preach their own gospel; Prince opened Adullam Chapel, Brighton, and Starkey established himself at Weymouth. The chief success lay in the latter town, and thither Prince soon migrated. A number of followers, estimated by Prince at 500, but by his critics at one-fifth of the number, were got together, and it was given out by “Beloved” or “The Lamb”—the names by which the Agapemonites designated their leader—that his disciples must divest themselves of their possessions and throw them into the common stock. This was done, even by the poor or ill-furnished, all of whom looked forward to the speedy end of the present dispensation, and were content, for the short remainder of this world, to live in common, and, while not repudiating earthly ties, to treat them as purely spiritual. With the money thus obtained the house at Spaxton, which was to become the “Abode of Love,” was enlarged and furnished luxuriously, and three sisters, who contributed £6000 each, were immediately married to three of Prince’s nearest disciples. Despite the purely spiritual ideas which underlay the Agapemonite view of marriage, a son was born to one of these couples, and when the father endeavoured to carry it away an action was brought which resulted in the affirmation of the mother’s right to its custody. The circumstance in which a fourth sister who joined the community was abducted by her brothers led to an inquiry in lunacy and to her final settlement at Spaxton. A few years after the establishment of the “Abode of Love,” a peculiarly gross scandal, in which Prince and one of his female followers were involved, led to the secession of some of his most faithful friends, who were unable any longer to endure what they regarded as the amazing mixture of blasphemy and immorality offered for their acceptance. The most prominent of those who remained received such titles as the “Anointed Ones,” the “Angel of the Last Trumpet,” the “Seven Witnesses” and so forth. In 1862 “Brother Prince” sent “to the kings and people of the earth” letters “making known to all men that flesh is saved
