is better to worship Jesus than to worship kings and emperors. He adds that Christ has called us sons, making us His brothers. This is altogether aside from the Homoousian doctrine; it indicates a free handling of the problem untrammelled by the phrases of fixed creeds or the pronouncements of authoritative counsels. And yet, as Mr. Burkitt points out, "on the one hand, he was wholly penetrated by the Monotheism of the Catholic religion; on the other, his loyalty and devotion to his Lord assured him that no title or homage was too exalted for Christians to .give to Jesus Christ, through whom they had union with the Divine nature."[1] Nevertheless there is one point at which Aphraates is not only freer and therefore fresher than the standard orthodoxy of the Greeks, but glaringly at variance with Catholic usage and doctrine. This is in his treatment of marriage in relation to baptism. He will only allow celibates to be baptised. He does not regard marriage as a sacrament, nor does it appear that he permits any religious sanction for it. Thus with Aphraates, only virgins, widows, and widowers, or husbands and wives who have separated from one another, may be admitted to the full privilege of the Church, since only the baptised are allowed to come to the communion. Married people then must remain in the outer court of the catechumens, as mere "adherents." He has two grades of Christians; but only the upper grade is really in the Church. This is just like the position taken up by the Marcionites, and later that of the Manichæans. Mr. Burkitt even puts forth the startling theory that at this time it was held by the Church of Edessa as a whole. But we know too little about that church to take its silence as an evidence of its agreement with Aphraates. On the other hand, the silence of Antioch on the subject affords a powerful argument against the hypothesis. Surely the Edessene Christians would have been denounced in no
- ↑ Burkitt, Early Eastern Christianity, to which book, and also its author's Evangelion da Mepharreshe, this sketch of earlier Syrian literature is largely indebted.
