EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
Divine service in the catacombs, and added to the victims of the Roman power. A few weeks later Cyprian, too, was imprisoned. Not far from his city he met death manfully and nobly after a hearing marked by lapidary questions and answers. The fame of Cyprian, the martyr, and the writings of Cyprian, the Father of the Church, endure. They have been read almost as much as the Latin Bible. The Papacy owed to this great defender of episcopal authority no mere weak justifica- tion of its position but a doctrine of the Church which proved, in part as result of the conflict between Africa and Rome, that the Papacy was absolutely necessary. For the Church of Cyprian was no longer a community held together by sacred enthusiasm. The rushing wind of the primitive Christian Pentecost could still be heard in the dis- tance, but it now beat against a structure that was as firmly welded as a state. The growing body needed a stronger skeleton; the rhythm of feeling required the static element of discipline in ecclesiastical practice. The anarchical urge of the soul hearkening to itself stood in need of association with a leadership from without. Finally, the opposition of a powerful Empire sufficed to compel the masses, which partly or wholly separated from it to join a community based on new ideals, to look upon the Church as a structure formed like the Empire. Cyprian declared that not only was the bishop in the Church, but that the Church was also in the bishop. Justice, law and office be- come for the people of God a kind of skeleton supporting a Kingdom not of this world but nevertheless destined to realization in this world. Unless all the witnesses err, the strength of the best men in the Church consisted in these things: faith, deep awareness of the Kingdom of God, and personal possession of the new reality which dispelled the old as morning ends a dream. Cyprian and countless others round about him went to the place of judgment knowing that the sun was setting for them over the Empire and all earthly things, but confident within that theirs was a universe having neither beginning nor ending and resting upon itself as firmly as the ground over which a stream flows. The Church of the Kyrios was "from above." It enshrined God's way with man, it knew the meaning of yesterday, today and tomorrow. In order to bring about the fulfilment of that Church, the order of eternity would have to be implanted in a world of time
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