essential today, and it was no less so then, for without this belief in him as somehow Divine, but nevertheless as essentially Divine, and hence a Saviour, there would have been no Christian church. The Jewish idea of God was inexpressibly more imperfect than the new and yet still imperfect one of the disciples, but God had to be satisfied with the imperfect reception of the knowledge of Him by both Jews and Christians.
The teaching of the Apostles and of their immediate successors evidently confined itself to the simple statement of the facts and prophecies about Jesus. It was a simple Gospel that they preached, despite Paul's eloquent and elaborated arguments in his epistles. The theology involved did not greatly trouble the masses of the early Christians. They worshipped Jesus as a unique person, Divine as men never were and never could be Divine, as essential God. Pliny's letter to the emperor Trajan confirms this when he tells us that "they met before daybreak and sang a hymn to Christ as God." We know, from innumerable testimonies, that they prayed to Christ as God, but we also perceive that they always thought of him as the Son of God. Polycarp, at his martyrdom, exclaims:
