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| | CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Christianity (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-29) |
 | | The new religion was at first wholly confined to the synagogue, and it votaries had still a large share of Jewish exclusiveness; they read the Law, they practised circumcision, and they worshipped in the Temple, as well as in the upper room at Jerusalem. |
 | | First of all, He, its Founder, is God, and therefore had all the knowledge and all the power requisite to establish a perfect religion. |
 | | It may well be that the development was very largely natural, modelled, first of all, on the synagogue, and then on the existing civil government; its progress may have been hastened or retarded by the passions of individuals, but any account of it that ignores the directing finger of Providence cannot be true. |
| www.newadvent.org /cathen/03712a.htm (8642 words) |
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