Highland said:
But I will do as the early church did. I will not deny my LORD for the sake of my own comfort.
Praise the Lord!
Many in the early church stood guard against the advesary of our souls. They knew one simple fact that the apostles taught both in oral and written form that it would be false Christ's and false prophets and teachers who would be the instigaters of the apostacy. Even Jesus had said this on Olivet. Such an apostacy would prevail when somehow, in some way because of iniquity our Christian 'agape' would grow cold.(Matthew 24:12)
The Didache (Teaching) of the Twelve Apostles (50-120 AD) also reflects the closeness to which God's Word was held:
"Watchfulness; the Coming of the Lord.
Watch for your life's sake. Let not your lamps be quenched, nor your loins unloosed; but be ready, for you know not the hour in which our Lord will come. But come together often, seeking the things which are befitting to your souls: for the whole time of your faith will not profit you, if you are not made perfect in the last time. For in the last days false prophets and corrupters shall be multiplied, and the sheep shall be turned into wolves, and love shall be turned into hate; for when lawlessness increases, they shall hate and persecute and betray one another, and then shall appear the world-deceiver as Son of God, and shall do signs and wonders, and the earth shall be delivered into his hands, and he shall do iniquitous things which have never yet come to pass since the beginning."
Notice the allusions to both the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
In still clearer light, even Jerome gave this warning:
"Yet it behoves us to know that the enemy is wont to counterfeit this salutary advent of Christ with cunning fraud in order to deceive the faithful, and in the place of the Son of Man, Who is looked for as coming in the majesty of His Father, to prepare the Son of Perdition with prodigies and lying signs, that instead of Christ he may introduce Antichrist into the world; of whom the Lord Himself warned the Jews beforehand in the Gospels, "Because I am come in My Father's Name, and ye received Me not, another will come in his own name, and him ye will receive."
The early church is full of such warning. It would be adventageous for everybody to view the history of the church and the things that were handed down through the word of mouth by the apostles.
Gundry has rightly written:
"The antiquity of a view ways in its favor, especially when that antiquity reaches back to the apostolic age. For those who received their doctrine first hand from the apostles and from those who heard them stood in a better position to judge what was apostolic doctrine than we who are many centuries removed."
I encourage everyone to study the early church history before the formation of Roman Catholicism.