The Formation of Christendom
Volume II
By
Thomas William Allies
London:
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.
1869
CONTENTS
Preface.
Chapter VII. The Gods Of The Nations When Christ Appeared.
Chapter VIII. The First And The Second Man.
Chapter IX. The Second Man Verified In History.
Chapter X. The First Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XI. The Second Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XII. The Third Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XIII. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part I.
Chapter XIV. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part II.
Index.
Footnotes
PREFACE.
In the six chapters forming the first volume of this work I was engaged in
describing the operation of Christianity, as it took the individual human
soul for its unit, purified it, and wrought in it a supernatural life. I
began with the consummation of the old world in its state of the highest
civilisation united with the utmost moral degeneracy; I proceeded thence
to the new creation of individual man; compared heathen with Christian man
in the persons of Cicero and St. Augustine; drew out certain effects upon
the world around of Christian life, as seen in those professing it, and
viewed Christian marriage as restoring the primary relation between man
and woman, and thus remaking the basis of human society, while the
Virginal Life exhibited the crown and efflorescence of the most
distinctive Christian grace in the soul.
I had thus, beginning with the stones of which the building is formed,
reached the building itself; and the next thing was to consider the
Christian Church in its historical development as the Kingdom of Truth and
Grace: for while the soul of man is the unit with which it works, the word
“Christendom” betokens a society founded in Christ, made by Christ,
stamped with the image of Christ. It is the first great epoch of such a
Kingdom of Truth and Grace, proceeding from the Person of its Founder,
which I here attempt to delineate.
But not merely is the volume which I now publish a part only of a
projected design; even as a part it is incomplete. It was my wish to
finish this portion of my subject in one volume, which should reach to the
great Nicene Council. But the treatment of the Greek Philosophy was too
large for my limits, and so the last two chapters serve but as an
introduction to the actual contact of that Philosophy with the Christian
Church, which remains to be considered before I can complete my view of
the Formation of Christendom in the ante-Nicene period.
CHAPTER VII. THE GODS OF THE NATIONS WHEN CHRIST APPEARED.
“Emmanuel, Rex et Legifer noster, Expectatio gentium, et Salvator
earum, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster.”
Under the sceptre of the imperial unity were brought together a hundred
different lands occupied by as many different races. That rule of Rome
which had grown for many centuries with out, as it seemed, any presiding
thought, by the casual accretions of conquest, may be said to assume under
the hands of Augustus, about the year of Rome 750, certain definite and
deliberately chosen limits, and to be governed by a fixed Idea, more and
more developed in the imperial policy. The limits which the most fortunate
of Roman emperors, nay the creator of the empire itself, put to it, were
the Rhine and Danube, with the Euxine Sea, on the north; the deserts of
Africa on the south; the Euphrates on the east; the ocean on the west. The
Idea, which may indeed have been conceived by Julius, but was certainly
first embodied by Augustus, was to change the constitution of a conquering
city, ruled by an aristocratic senate, into a commonwealth governed by one
man, the representative of the whole people; and the effect of this
change, an effect no doubt unforeseen, at least in its extent, by its
framer, was gradually to absorb the manifold races inhabiting these vast
regions into the majesty of the Roman law, order, and citizenship. The
three centuries which follow Augustus are occupied in working out the
drama of this unity. During this time the provinces appear to come out
more and more as parts of one whole. Some which at its commencement had
only just entered the circle of Roman power and thought, as Gaul, become
entirely interpenetrated with the law, language, customs, and civilisation
of the sovereign city. Spain was nearly as much, and northern Africa
perhaps even more Latinised: in all, local inequalities, and the
dissimilarity arising from conflicting races, customs, and languages, are
more and more softened down, though never entirely removed; and while
throughout this period the great city continues the head, yet the body
assumes an ever-increasing importance, until at length its members engage
the equal solicitude of that central potentate to whom all equally belong.
In the times of so-called Roman liberty, the plunder of lands which
received pro-consuls for their annual rulers, served to replenish the
fortunes of nobles exhausted by the corruption requisite to gain high
office; but if the dominion of one at Rome seemed an evil exchange to a
nobility which deemed itself born to enjoy a conquered world, at least it
served as a protection to those many millions for whom the equality of law
and order, the fair administration of justice, and the undisturbed
possession of property, constituted the chief goods of life. Cicero and
his peers might grieve over the extinction of what they termed liberty,
but Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia exulted in deliverance from the
oppression of a Verres, a Fonteius, a Gabinius, a Piso, or a Clodius, in
the communication of citizenship, and in the peace of a common
civilisation.
I. With a passing glance at the progress of this unity, which, great and
magnificent as it is, is yet external, let us turn to an object filling
the whole of this vast empire with its varied manifestations: for this
object leads us to the consideration of another unity, wholly internal,
without which that of government, law, and order must be apparent rather
than real, or at best, however seemingly imposing, be deprived of the
greater part of its efficacy.
1. It has been said that the empire contained in it many lands and many
races, but these likewise worshipped their own distinct gods, which were
acknowledged and sanctioned as national divinities for the several
countries wherein they were locally established. Had Augustus ordered an
enrolment not only of the numbers, the landed property, and the wealth of
his subjects, but of their gods, his public register, or Breviarium, would
have included at least ten distinct systems of idolatrous worship. First
of all, there would be the proper gods of Rome, then those of the Hellenic
race; and these, though the most similar to each other, yet refused a
complete amalgamation. But besides these there were on the west the
Etrurian, the Iberian, the Gallic, and the Germanic gods; on the east, the
Carian and Phrygian, the Syrian, the Assyrian, the Arabian; on the south,
the Phœnician, Libyan, and Egyptian. All these different races, inasmuch
as they were subjects of the empire, enjoyed undisturbed the right of
worshipping their ancestral gods,(1) who, so long as they did not overstep
their local boundaries, were recognised; they possessed priests, rites,
temples, estates, and self-government; they held the soil, and their
worship was legal. It was a matter of Roman policy not to interfere with
them. Nay, their several worshippers could carry their rites along with
them in their various sojourns and settlements, and even in Rome build
altars, and adore Egyptian, Asiatic, African, or Gallic gods. These
various systems agreed all in one point, that they were systems of
polytheistic idolatry: they all divided the attributes of the godhead,
assigning them to more or fewer objects, and worshipping all these by
visible symbols which the power worshipped was deemed to inhabit:(2) but
they did not make the same division with a mere difference of name; on the
contrary, they ran into and across each other with the most bewildering
multiplicity, variation, and contradiction. Even in the same system, if we
may give this name to any of the various mythologies, the several
divinities were perpetually interfering with each other’s province. When
the Roman made vows for the removal of his ailments, in his uncertainty to
which god the ailment belonged, or who was most proper to remove it, he
addressed his vow to several together; or in public supplications, being
often uncertain to whom exactly the prayer or offering should be made, he
cautiously expressed himself, “whether it be a god or a goddess.” And the
various Hellenic, Asiatic, or Egyptian cities often possessed local gods,
whose worship was supreme there, while they exercised far less influence,
or were even scarcely known elsewhere.(3)
Now merely as a specimen of what this worship was all over the Roman
empire, let us take the brilliant Athens, Greece’s eye, the world’s
university. First of all ruled in her the worship of Pallas-Athené: she
was the lady of the land, who had won it for her own after a hard contest
with Poseidon. Her chief sanctuaries were the temple of Athené, guardian
of the city, with its old statue fallen down from heaven on the Acropolis.
On the Acropolis likewise the Parthenon, built expressly for the gorgeous
Panathenaic festival; and in the lower city the Palladium with the statue
of the goddess supposed to have been brought from Troy. Yet the worship of
the “high goddesses,” Demeter and Persephoné, was also richly endowed with
shrines and festivals, and affected scarcely less the feelings of the
Athenians. Then Jupiter, as “supreme,” was honoured with unbloody offering
before the Erechtheium, dedicated to Athené: whilst as “Olympian” he had
the colossal temple begun by Peisistratus and finished after many hundred
years by Hadrian, and as “guardian of the city” distinct festivals. Yet
more manifold was the invocation of Apollo, as the Pythian, the Delphic,
the Lycian, as the ancestral god of the Ionians. The multiform Artemis had
her temples and worshippers as the Tauric, by the name Brauronia; as the
port-goddess, by the name Munychia; as the goddess of the hunt, by the
name Agrotera, who had the credit of the victory won at Marathon; as
presiding over birth, she was called Chitone, while Themistocles had built
a temple to her as the Counsellor. Heré had only a doorless and roofless
temple on the road to Phalerum; but the god of fire was worshipped in
Athens abundantly. Hermes had his peculiar statues in every street,
irreverence to which might be fatal even to an Alcibiades, the city’s
darling; while Aphrodité had a crowd of temples and shrines whose unchaste
worship found but too many frequenters. Poseidon had to content himself
with a single altar in his rival’s city, and with games in its harbour;
but Dionysos had three temples, with brilliant festivals; Mars was not
without one; Hestia was throned in the Prytaneum; the Earth, Kronos, and
Rhea had their temples and festivals, as also the Erinnyes, who were
worshipped only in two other places in Greece. Here alone in Greece was a
sanctuary and a rite to Prometheus; while the Asiatic mother of the gods
had a splendid temple where the archives of the state were kept. Besides,
there was the worship of the Hours and the Graces, of Eileithyia, goddess
of victory and of birth, of Æsculapius and Themis, of the Kabirian Anakes,
the Arcadian Pan, the Thracian Cotytto and Bendis, the Egyptian Serapis.
Mercy and Shame, Fame and Endeavour had their altars; and the hero-worship
numbered Theseus, Codrus, Academus, Solon, the tyrant-slayers Harmodius
and Aristogeiton; and Hercules, originally a hero, but here and elsewhere
widely honoured as a god.(4)
Athens, if the most superstitious as well as the most intellectual of
cities, may be taken as the type of a thousand others of Hellenic race
scattered over the Roman empire from Marseilles to Antioch. Say that she
had twice as many deities and festivals as her sister cities, enough will
remain for them wherewith to occupy the soil with their temples and to
fill the year’s cycle with their rites.
The lively Grecian imagination impregnated not with stern notions of duty,
nor with reverential devotion to those whom it worshipped, but regarding
them as objects of æsthetical satisfaction,(5) and yearning for a serene
and confidential exchange of relations with them, had in process of time
spun out a complete web of idolatrous worship which encompassed heaven and
earth, the whole domain of nature, every state and act of human life. Rain
and sunshine and the weather stood under the ordering of Zeus; the
fruitfulness of the soil was Demeter’s care; countless nymphs of field, of
fountain, and of river, offered to men their gifts; the vine and its juice
was under the protection of Dionysos, and Poseidon was lord of the sea.
The flocks had their defenders in Hermes and Pan; the Fates ruled the lot
of men. Kings and magistrates had in Zeus their prototype and guardian.
Athené held her shield over cities; the hearth of each private home and
the public hearth of the city were in Hestia’s charge. Marriage was secure
under Heré’s care. Demeter was entrusted with legislation; the pains of
childbirth were recommended to Eileithyia, or Artemis. Music, archery,
divination, were Apollo’s attributes; the art of healing claimed him and
his son Æsculapius as patrons. Athené and Ares swayed the issue of war;
the chase was the domain of Artemis; smiths and all workers in fire saw in
Hephæstus their patron; whilst Athené the Worker protected the gentler
trades, and Hecate watched over the roads.(6)
Yet Rome itself, whose own Capitoline Jupiter claimed a certain
superiority over all these gods, would scarcely have yielded to any
Grecian city, even were it Athens, in the number or variety of her
deities, the frequency and solemnity of her festivals; while in the
costliness of victims offered to her gods, and in the strictness of her
ceremonies, she probably far surpassed that and all other cities. Her
sterner worship of originally shapeless gods, presiding over the labours
of a simple agricultural life, had long yielded to the seductions of her
dangerous Grecian captive. The rude block Terminus, and Jupiter the Stone,
ceased to satisfy those who had beheld the majesty of the father of gods
and men embodied by the genius of a Phidias; and she had ended by going
farther in breaking up the conception of one god, and in the
personification of particular powers, operations, physical functions, and
qualities, than any nation of antiquity.(7) But though the beautiful forms
of the Hellenic gods, as expressed by the skill of unrivalled sculptors,
had carried her away, yet the nature of her worship was in strong contrast
with that of Greece. Her religion had rested originally on two ideas, the
might of the gods friendly to Rome, and the force of ceremonial over these
gods;(8) and still when she accepted the gods of conquered nations for her
own, it was to secure the possession of their might, and to have them for
friends instead of foes; while her own worship was a matter of routine and
habit jealously guarded by unchanging ceremonies, and prosecuted not out
of affection, but for the material security of daily life, which,
according to the deeply-rooted feeling of the people, could not go on
without it.
The individualised and humanised Latin and Hellenic gods, if they had much
in common, still could not be thoroughly amalgamated; but Rome, as the
mistress of Western Asia and Egypt, came upon Oriental religions of a very
different stamp. Instead of this wide Pantheon of gods, each of whom had
his occupation, these Asiatics generally regarded the deity in a sexual
relationship, as one male and one female god, representing the active and
passive forms of nature,(9) and worshipped with a mixture of fear and
voluptuousness. Such were Bel and Mylitta, Moloch and Astarte, and by
whatever different names the same idea was presented. The worship of the
great mother Cybele, so widely spread through Asia Minor, approached in
many respects in character to that of this female goddess. But it is
needless to go farther into the specific differences of these various
idolatries; only bear in mind that they in their several countries
occupied the domain of public and private life, as the worship of which I
have given the details did at Athens. So it was before the influence of
external conquerors reached them. After this a certain change ensues. The
Roman empire was accomplishing in the west as well as in the east what the
progress of Grecian rule and thought had commenced three hundred years
before(10) under Alexander and his successors, the bringing together and
in some sort fusing the multiform and often contradictory worship of the
nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Not merely in Rome, but in all
the chief cities of the Empire, the Asiatic, the Egyptian, the Libyan
deities, and many others of subject nations under the Roman sway, were
worshipped side by side. Accordingly, in the time of Augustus, and at the
year of Rome 750, where we are taking our stand, there prevailed all over
the hundred millions of men ruled by him a polytheistic idolatry
bewildering by its multiplicity, internal contradictions, fluctuations,
and mixtures, yet imposing by its universal extent and prevalence. The
only exception seems to have been the Jewish worship of one God, whether
in its chief seat, the small province of Judæa, or as it was seen in the
lives of Jewish settlers scattered throughout the empire. It must be
remarked that this Jewish worship of the true God was sanctioned as that
of a national god belonging to the Jews, and sacrifice was perpetually
offered for Augustus in the Temple at Jerusalem. But the Jews did not, as
a rule, make efforts to convert the Gentiles to their religion, nor seek
to exhibit it as antagonistic to the prevailing idolatry, and as claiming
to subdue and cast it out. They were content to keep their own worship to
themselves, and with the toleration which the Roman law thus allowed them.
Yet even so in every place where they dwelt in any numbers some of the
better heathens were found to be attracted to their worship by the
intrinsic beauty of their belief in one God.
2. But such an exception as this hardly made a perceptible break in that
continuous mass of evil and falsehood which then surrounded young and old,
learned and ignorant, rich and poor, in its grasp. The sea stands in Holy
Writ as the well-known image of the world’s disobedience to the divine
promptings, of its impetuosity and lawlessness. What image is there in
nature so striking and awful as the long waves of the Atlantic bearing
down in storm upon a helpless ship, and sweeping it upon an iron-bound
coast! So broke that wild sea of human error over the individual mind of
man. The observer looked round upon all the nations, and it was everywhere
the same—a multiplicity of gods filling up the whole circle of human life,
many-named, many-natured, but all without truth, purity, and justice; full
of violent and sensual deeds, and still viler imaginations. What stay was
there for the spirit of man against that universal flood? Its vastness was
everywhere. Who was strong enough, who wise enough, to resist what all his
fellows accepted? And the struggle of a single soul against it might seem
like that of “some strong swimmer in his agony” alone at night amid the
waste of waters.
3. For this polytheism was no dormant, otiose power withdrawn into the
background and crouching apart from the actions and feelings of daily
life. Its presence was indicated in every home by the little images of the
Lares; homage was done to it at every table by libations; every house had
its consecrated emblems; every street its statues of Hermes and serpents;
in the forum there were feasts in honour of the gods; the shops, taverns,
and manufactories had little altars on which wine and incense were offered
to them; there were idolatrous emblems on the foreheads of the dead, on
their funeral pyre, on their tombs. The places of amusement were specially
dedicated to the gods; the theatres had representations in honour of them;
the circus had their images, chairs, carriages, robes borne in procession;
the amphitheatre was consecrated to them, and as being so Tertullian
called it “the temple of all demons.” So much for private and social life.
But not only so. All political acts were bound up with a crowd of
religious formalities, and outward signs of divine concurrence; and were
carried on with a ceremonial, every part of which was prescribed as having
an exact inward meaning. Then there were continually recurring vows to the
gods made for the great, made for private individuals, made for the
emperor and his family. Three special ceremonies were used to obtain
favours from them or to deprecate calamities, feasts, the solemnly bearing
their images on cushions, processions with naked feet.(11) To this we must
add the priestly colleges, pontifices, flamines, augurs, and magistrates,
whether distinct or co-ordinated. Then, besides, consider the magical
character of the prayers, and the strict use of formularies without
mistake, omission, or addition, which were supposed to insure success
apart from the intention of those offering them. Thus the whole life of
the Romans was filled with invocations, propitiations, purifications, and
even in any small matter a whole string of gods had prayer and service
offered to them, and no one of their names might be omitted. Consider
again the great frequency of the offerings, whether propitiative or
consultatory; and, further, how particular beasts belonged to particular
gods. The mere expense of victims was felt as a great burden. It was
reckoned that on the accession of Caligula 160,000 animals, chiefly oxen
and calves, were sacrificed in the Roman Empire in token of the general
joy; and Augustus and Marcus Aurelius devoted such a multitude of beasts
to their sacrifices that what had been said of the former was repeated as
to the latter, how the white oxen had written to him, saying, “If you
conquer, we are lost.” Indications of the will of the gods were to be
taken on all occasions; nothing was to be done in public or private
without consulting the auspices. Then there was the institution of the
Haruspices, in its two branches of examining the entrails of the victims,
and divining the meaning of all prodigies. One is still amazed at the
ever-untiring solicitude which the senate showed to have all these things
carefully watched—eclipses, rainbows of unusual colours, shooting stars,
misbirths human or bestial; showers of earth, stones, chalk, or ashes;
mice gnawing the golden vessels of a temple, bees swarming on a public
place, but especially a shrine touched by lightning. Such things struck
senate and people with consternation; special supplications were ordered
to appease the causers of them.(12)
These are the external manifestations of polytheism which struck every
eye, and affected the mind by their constant recurrence. But if we go
beneath the surface and examine the root, we shall find an universal sense
in the minds of all men in that day of unseen power over and above the
material operations of nature. It was too strong as well as too general
and invariable to be called an opinion, and it so acted on the nerves and
feelings of men that I term it not so much a logical conviction as a sense
of the close contact between man and nature, or rather an unseen power
behind the veil of nature and working through it. Various as the forms of
idolatry were—Egyptian, Asiatic, Libyan, Greek, or Roman; or, again,
Iberian, Gallic, German,—all teemed with this sense. To the adherents of
these religions, one and all, the world was very far from being a mere
system of nature governed by general laws;(13) it may rather be said that
this was precisely what it was not. They looked upon nature in all its
forms as an expression of the divine will, and therefore the unusual
productions of nature became to them intimations respecting that will. And
having lost the guidance of a fixed moral and religious teaching, they
were ruled by an ever-watchful anxiety to gain acquaintance with that
will. On this sense rested the universal belief that it was in man’s power
to hold intercourse by means of charms, spells, adjurations, with spirits
of greater might and knowledge than his own—that is, magic or witchcraft.
Hence the evocation of the spirits of the dead to reveal secrets of their
prison-house, or necromancy. Hence the recurrence to oracles, running
through all pagan history, of which there were many scattered through the
Roman world, and which, after a temporary discredit, rose again into name
in the time of Hadrian. Not less general was the belief that men and women
might be possessed by spirits who ruled their words and actions according
to an overmastering will. Then divination existed in endlessly various
forms; and of its force we can gather a notion by Cicero’s remark that it
lay like an oppressive burden on the minds of men, so that even sleep,
which should be the refuge from anxieties, became through the meaning
attached to dreams the cause of a multitude of cares.(14) To this must be
added the use of sortileges, amulets, and talismans, in countless number
and variety; and the belief that the actions and fortune of men were
swayed by the course of the stars—that is, astrology. It was not the
vulgar and ignorant merely whose minds were filled with these things.
Scarcely a philosopher, scarcely a statesman, scarcely a ruler can be
found whose mind, even if proof against a genuine devotion to a divine
providence, was not open to one or more manifestations of the dark
mysterious power pressing upon the confines of human life, and every now
and then breaking through the veil of visible things with evidences of
malignant might. A more determined and unscrupulous conqueror than Sylla,
a more genuine philosopher than Marcus Aurelius, a more sagacious user of
religion than Augustus, we shall not easily find; yet each of these, like
their ordinary countrymen, had this sense of the supernatural and
intangible above, beneath, and around them. Sylla, on the eve of any
battle, would, in the sight of his soldiers, embrace a small statue of
Apollo, which he had taken from Delphi, and entreat it to give an early
fulfilment of its promises.(15) Marcus Aurelius, in his war with the
Marcomanni, collected priests from all quarters to Rome, and was so long
occupied in offering rites to their various foreign gods that he kept his
army waiting for him. And Augustus watched carefully the most trivial
signs, and was distressed if in the morning his left shoe was given to him
for his right. Even that Julius before whose genius all men quailed, and
whose disbelief of a future state stands recorded at a notable point of
Roman history, never mounted a chariot without uttering certain words for
good luck and preservation against calamity.(16) We shall therefore judge
most inadequately of the force which the innumerable rites, temples,
festivals, pomps, ceremonies, prayers, invocations, priesthoods,
sodalities, initiations, and mysteries of polytheism exercised upon the
minds of men, unless we take into full account that remarkable sense of
contact and sympathy between the external world and man—of invisible power
betraying itself through palpable agents, whether in reasoning or
unreasoning productions, whether in the animal or vegetable world—which
served as its basis. The line between religion and superstition in
paganism no eye can trace; but at least the foundation of true worship
plunged deep out of sight into the secret recesses of abject fear.
4. But what was the moral influence of this multiform, universal,
all-embracing, and all-penetrating worship?
Varro, whom Cicero calls the most acute and learned of writers, and whose
great work in forty-one books he praises as containing the names, classes,
offices, and causes of all divine and human things, divided theology into
the fabulous, the natural, and the civil. In the first, he said, are many
fictions unworthy of the nature and dignity of immortal beings: such as
that one god sprang from the head, another from the thigh, another from
drops of blood; such, again, as that gods were thieves or adulterers, or
became slaves to men. In fact, this fabulous theology attributed
everything to them which might happen not merely to a man, but to the most
contemptible of men.(17) Let us leave what he calls natural theology,
which is the discussion of philosophers concerning the physical nature of
the gods, and proceed to the third, which he calls civil, and which is
that which the citizens, and especially the priests of human communities,
are bound to know and administer. This treats of what gods are to be
worshipped, and with what rites and sacrifices. The first theology, he
says, belongs to the theatre, the second to the universe, the third to the
city. S. Augustine, commenting at length upon his division, proves that
the first and the third, the fabulous and the civil, are, in fact,
identical, since the universe is a divine work, but the theatre and the
city works of men. The theatre is indeed made for the city, and the very
same gods are ridiculed on the stage who are adored in the temple; the
same have games exhibited in their honour and victims sacrificed to them.
The images, features, ages, sexes, bearing of the gods in the one and in
the other are the same. Thus this fabulous, theatrical, and scenic
theology, full of everything vile and criminal, is actually a part of the
civil, cohering with it as limb with limb in the same body.(18)
Conceive, then, every revolting detail of adultery, prostitution, incest,
or of dishonesty, or of violence, which the perverted invention of modern
writers has ever dressed up for the theatres of great cities in this and
other countries. They will perhaps yield in turpitude to that which the
theatres of the Roman empire exhibited. But what these theatres
represented in mimic action was the exact image, as reflected in a mirror,
of what was transacted at the solemn service of the gods in unnumbered
temples.(19) The exact image so far as it went, yet stopping short in some
respects, for our eye-witness above cited declares that gratitude was due
to the actors, inasmuch as they spared the eyes of men, and did not lay
bare upon the theatre all that was hidden within the walls of temples. It
was not enough, then, that all the many games and spectacles in which such
things were represented were dedicated to the gods, acted under their
especial sanction, even enjoined by them as means of gaining their favour
or averting their wrath, which alone would have made them answerable for
the immorality so portrayed; not enough, even, that actions of this
quality were in the theatres ascribed to the gods who presided over them;
but these acts of immorality were not the fictions of poets or the acting
of players, but the very substance of the theology itself in which the
worship of all these nations was embodied. Priapus appeared to make a
laugh on the stage exactly in the costume in which he was worshipped in
the temples, or in which he entered into the rites of marriage; a costume
of indescribable turpitude, the shame of our human nature. The players on
the stage and the statues in the temples equally exhibited Jove bearded
and Mercury beardless, Saturn in decrepitude and Apollo in youthful
beauty. In the rites of Juno, of Ceres, of Venus, of the mother of the
gods, words were uttered and scenes acted such as no decent person would
suffer to be spoken or acted before his own mother; or rather they
contained, as a portion of themselves, the worst crimes which the theatres
represented; nay, crimes which they stopped short of acting, and persons
so infamous that they were not tolerated even on the stage, where yet to
take part was a civil dishonour. What, then, was the nature of those rites
wherein those were chosen to take part whom the utmost license of the
stage banished from its boards?(20) Let us conceive—if such a conception
can be adequately represented to the mind—that the vilest drama ever acted
upon a modern theatre was being daily carried on in all the churches of
Christendom by troops of priests and priestesses, with all the
paraphernalia of costliest worship, with prayers, invocation, and
sacrifices, as a service acceptable to the Ruler of man’s lot, and as an
account of what that ruler had Himself done, and of what He loved to be
imitated by others. That would be a picture of heathen worship in the time
of Augustus; that would be the moral food on which was nurtured that crowd
of nations which acknowledged Cæsar’s sway; that the conception of divine
things wrought into the minds of the hundred millions of men who formed
the Roman empire.
Was it surprising that all worshippers of the gods should look for their
example rather in Jupiter’s actions than in Plato’s teaching or the moral
judgments of Cato?(21) A nature subject in itself to the sway of passion
was stimulated by an authority supposed to be divine to the commission of
every criminal excess; and herein lay a strong proof of the malignant and
impure character of these gods.
On the other hand, the same eye-witness challenges the defenders of the
pagan gods to produce a single instance wherein moral precepts of living
were delivered to their worshippers upon divine authority. True, indeed,
there were here and there whispers of secret rites in which a pure and
chaste life was recommended, but where were the buildings dedicated to the
public preaching of such truths? Places there were in abundance
consecrated to the celebration of infamous games, rightly termed
“Fugalia,” since they put modesty and decency to flight, but none where
the people might listen to divine commands repressing avarice, ambition,
or unchaste desire. Thus with the positive inculcation of all evil, under
cover of their own example, was united the negative absence of all moral
teaching.(22)
For even the prayers which accompanied these sacrifices and this
ceremonial, and this lavish exhibition of every human wickedness under
divine names, were not addressed for moral goods, but for wealth, bodily
strength, temporal prosperity. Horace but expresses the general mind when
he says:
“Sed satis est orare Jovem quæ donat et anfert;
Det vitam, det opes, æquum mi animum ipse parabo.”
(_Epist._ i. 18, 111.)
They were moreover viewed as carrying with them a sort of physical force,
not as prevailing through purity of intention in those who offered them.
In fact, the gods to whom they were addressed were powers of nature, or
malignant and impure powers, but in neither case beings who looked for a
moral service from rational creatures.
One other turpitude the Asiatic idolatry added to the Greek and Roman
forms. By consecrating the sexual relations themselves in one male and one
female god, they effected this crowning connection of idolatry with
immorality that unchaste acts became themselves acts of sacrifice, and so
of worship.(23) This is the strange perversion borne witness to by
Herodotus, and corroborated by the prophet Jeremiah. A great seat of this
worship was the city of Hierapolis, in Syria, where was one of the most
magnificent temples of the ancient world, dedicated to Derketo, and rich
with the offerings of Arabians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians,
Cilicians, Cappadocians, and all nations of the Semitic tongue. Nor was
this worship confined to the East, for hence, as from a centre, the
adherents of the Syrian goddess spread themselves in begging troops over
the provinces of the empire. And the worship of Venus at Eryx, and other
places in the West, with the thousands of female priestesses dedicated to
it, reproduced the same abomination.
As the great result of all that we have said, we find the notion of
sanctifying the human will absent from the religious rites of the
polytheistic idolatry in all its forms. To this corresponded the absence
of the notion of holiness in the gods. And this leads us finally to the
remarkable character which defines it as a whole. This worship was
throughout a corruption,(24) the spoiling, that is, of something good; a
turning away from the better to the worse. The worship itself had been
originally good. The corruption lay in the alteration of the quality and
the object of the worship. Worship had been implanted in man, and
prescribed to him. It was at once the need of his nature and the command
of Him who gave that nature. It had for it, first, positive institution,
and then tradition and custom, and throughout, the conscience, the reason,
and the heart of man. The reason of man ever bore powerful witness to the
unity of the Godhead; the breaking up of that unity, as exhibited by this
idolatrous polytheism, in contradiction to the original prompting and
continued witness of the reason, is a very strong proof of that moral
corruption in the will which first generated it, which continued its
existence, and which, while multiplying, degraded its forms from age to
age. But man was free to decline from the good in which he had been
placed. The corruption which was left in his power he exerted; he changed
the quality of the service, and the person served. The productive cause of
idolatry on the part of man was the soul of man turning away from the
notion of a good and holy Creator, the contemplation of whom was its
present support and future reward, to visible things. Of these things the
chief were bodily pleasures. Thus this corruption of the soul, in process
of time, and continually becoming worse, produced this whole pantheon of
gods, originally the creation of its own lusts, and subsisting as a
perpetual food and support of those lusts. For this cause it had broken up
the one perfect idea of God the Creator and Ruler of all persons and
things into a multitude of gods, whose functions became more and more
divided, until the ether, the air, the earth, and the water swarmed with
these supposed beings, which took possession even of wood and stone,
dwelling in the statues erected to them; and every desire which the soul
in its corruption could entertain had its corresponding patron, helper,
and exemplar. In this descending course cause and effect were perpetually
reacting on each other, and as the corruption of the human soul had
generated these gods, so their multiplication and degradation intensified
its corruption from age to age.(25)
5. But this was not all. If corrupt affection in man himself, if the charm
of representing the unseen objects of worship in visible characters of
wood or stone, if, finally, the ignorance of the true God, together with
the beauty of the creature substituted for Him,(26) were the disposing
causes within man to idolatry, there was a cause outside of him which must
not be forgotten. When we look upon this idolatry, occupying not one
country or race, but all; not merely bewildering savage or uncivilised
man, but throned in the chief seats of the world’s choicest civilisation;
when we look upon its endlessly divergent forms, its palpable
contradictions, its cherished or commanded immoralities, its crowd of
debasing, irrational, heterogeneous superstitions, its cruelty,
sensuality, and fearfulness, all these being no less an insult to man’s
reason than a derogation from God’s majesty, who is there that does not
feel this to be the strangest and most astonishing sight which history
presents to man? And yet there is a unity which runs through it all, and
stamps it with a double mark. Not only is it a service due from man to
God, which is paid by him to the creature rather than to the Creator,(27)
but more especially it is that service paid by man to God’s enemies, the
fallen angels. These it is who have assumed the mask of dead men; these it
is who within the sculptured forms of Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Venus, of
Baal and Derketo and Mylitta, of Anubis and Serapis, of Thor and Woden,
and so many more, receive man’s adoration, and rejoice above all things in
possessing his heart. These it is who have seduced him by exhibitions of
visible beauty, have lain in wait for him by fountain, forest, and field,
and filled the groves and high places with the charms which best pleased
him under the name of worship; or have promised to disclose future things
to him; or, again, have harrowed his soul with phantasms and terrors of
the unseen world. These incoherent systems; these deities, whose functions
ran into and athwart each other; these investing of human passions, and
even unnatural and monstrous vices, with immortality and terrible power;
these rivals ever quarrelling with each other, and jealous for the
possession of man’s homage, all serve the purpose of those behind the
scenes, are puppets under their command, and have a common end and result
in the captivity of their victim. More even than this; while they seem
disunited and contradictory, they are really one, marshalled by the power,
directed by the mind, held in the hand of him who is called “the ruler of
this world,” “the power of darkness,” “the might of the enemy,” who “holds
the power of death,” “the ancient serpent, who leads into error the whole
world,” “that malignant one in whom the whole world is lying,” “the prince
of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the children of
disobedience,” who musters “the principalities, the powers, the
world-rulers of this life’s darkness, the spirits of wickedness in
ethereal places,” to serve him in his conflict with man’s flesh and blood;
in fine, for S. Paul’s language goes one point even beyond that of his
Master, and terms him not merely the ruler, but “the God of this
world;”(28) that is to say, this manifold idolatry is the establishment of
his kingdom, the enthronement of his godhead over men, the mark of their
captivity and prostration before him.
The statements of our Lord and his apostles being so express and definite
as to the existence of this diabolic kingdom, and as to the personal sway
of a sovereign over it, let us look once more at this idolatry itself by
the light thus shed upon it.
And first, whether we regard men as made to be members of a well-ordered
society, enjoying temporal prosperity in this life, or as further intended
for happiness in a future life, resulting from their present actions,(29)
the condition in which the heathen nations are actually found at our
Lord’s coming is quite unintelligible unless we suppose the reality of a
diabolic power exercised upon them. The polytheism which we have witnessed
holding all human life in its grasp, while it did not teach and uphold the
great laws of morality, did, on the other hand, actively inculcate the
violation of those laws by continually representing to the minds and eyes
of men such a violation in the acts of the deities worshipped. It was a
perpetual incitement of men to crimes, as well against social order as
against all the sanctities of private life; it fostered the savageness of
slavery, and the utmost cruelty in carrying on war, because its deities,
being diverse for every nation, and belonging exclusively to the nation,
had obliterated the idea that all men were of one blood, and thus
delivered over the captive and the slave to the pitiless hatred or equally
pitiless luxury of their fellow-men. So much for its action on human
society as terminating with this life, while for a life to come it had no
doctrine and made no preparation, but had suffered the earlier teaching of
a future retribution to be considered as a fable fit for children and old
women. Looking at such a condition of human society from the moral point
of view, we may conclude with certainty that man would never, if left to
himself, have devised it.
Secondly, regarding this polytheism as an object presented to the human
intellect, nothing more unreasonable and monstrous than this crowd of
deities can even be conceived. The human reason demands imperatively the
unity of the godhead, since infinite power at least enters into the
conception of the godhead, and to divide or limit infinity is an unreason.
All the great works and order of the world bore witness likewise to this
unity of the godhead, and were sufficient to prove it;(30) and even in the
worst times of paganism we find this proof exhibited with a force and
lucidity to which even now little can be added. And in the worst times,
again, we find the natural witness of the human soul breaking out in
moments of sudden trial or great anguish, and calling upon the one God for
help.(31) Yet in spite of this we see whole nations renowned for their
intellectual productions, and men among them in whom the force of reason
has rarely or never been surpassed, bowing their necks to this yoke of
polytheism, and accepting this tissue of monstrous error, paying homage to
it in their life, and dying with it on their lips; as Socrates offering
the cock to Æsculapius, and Seneca the libation to Jove the liberator. We
know not how to account for this, were man’s reason left alone. We can see
an adequate ground for it only in “men having been made unreasonable, and
in the demoniacal error overshadowing the earth, and concealing the
knowledge of the true God.”(32)
Let us take a third view of it, neither the moral nor the logical, but the
view of it as an existing fact, as something which for many hundred years
occupied the earth, ruled nations, moulded the institutions and characters
of men. Here we do not speak merely of the multitude of temples, of
priests or priestesses serving in them, of sacrifices offered by these, of
prayers, vows, festivals in honour of the gods—because all these enter
into the notion of a service rendered by man to the power superior to him,
and in their utmost perversion there is nothing which may not be accounted
for by a simply human corruption stealing into and spoiling an originally
good institution; but all these in the actual condition of paganism were
mixed up with and penetrated by other elements, and accompanied by effects
not to be so accounted for. Let us take the universal persuasion that the
statues of the gods were inhabited by the deities which they represented,
as bodies by souls.(33) Here was the notion of a spiritual power taking
possession of material forms. But how was this notion introduced,
propagated, and maintained in men’s minds? By certain visible and palpable
effects,(34) of which those who were eye-witnesses give us many details.
Take again the oracles which existed throughout the heathen world, and, as
dealing with the same subject-matter, divination in all its forms. However
much of deceit there might be here, was there not also, in many instances,
an exhibition of power and knowledge beyond that of man, which no mere
deceit could produce? Take again magic, the invocation, adjuration, and
compacting with spirits, which ran through heathen society in numberless
shapes; and take lastly the fact of spirits seizing upon and possessing
the bodies of men, speaking by their voice, and controlling their minds.
The four classes which we have just given comprehend in themselves an
innumerable multitude of facts which are apparent in pagan history, in all
which the corruption of the human soul is an agent or patient, but for
which that corruption by itself supplies no adequate cause. A spiritual
power is behind, laying hold of and acting upon this corruption, and by
fault of the human will making an inroad into the visible world, and
partially mastering it, bending it to an evil purpose, and making it serve
as an agent to man’s captivity. Let us briefly cite as to the reality of
this spiritual power the witness of its victims and the witness of its
opponents.
First, as to its victims. Scarcely a writer, whether poet, historian,
philosopher, or biographer, can be found among the heathens of Greece and
Rome who does not attest facts belonging to one or more of these four
classes which surpass human power, and suggest an invisible spiritual
agency. The poet who writes expressly to deny such an agency speaks of the
whole world as bowed beneath the fear of it; another poet,(35) referring
tacitly to this very passage, felicitates the man not who has a pure
conscience, but who through knowledge of natural things has trampled these
fears under his feet. Nor is such a belief confined to the vulgar; but
scarcely a man of eminence, a soldier, or a statesman can be cited who
does not in his life and actions acknowledge it, shrink from it, or cower
beneath it. It is too powerful for Alexander or even Julius to escape; and
the philosophers who affect to deny it in their systems exhibit it in
their conduct. They have all the conviction of an evil power beyond and
above nature, but taking hold of natural forms, and ever lying in wait to
burst forth from them upon human life. The Greek name for superstition is
fear of the demons; and what S. Paul said of the Athenians, that he found
them in all things too fearful of the demons, might be applied to the
whole circle of nations surrounding the midland sea.
Secondly, as to the opponents of this power. Now they offer a triple
witness to its existence. The first of these is in the facts mentioned in
the New Testament. The strongest, most terrible, and most inexplicable
instance of this power lies in those diabolical possessions with which so
many of our Lord’s miracles are concerned. Again, as to the reality of
divining powers arising from the presence of a demon in a human form, we
have the evil spirit in the girl at Philippi acknowledging in S. Paul a
servant of the most high God, and, when cast out by the Apostle in the
name of Christ, leaving his victim destitute of those powers which had
brought gain to her masters, who forthwith try to avenge themselves for
their loss by exciting a persecution against the Apostle.(36)
A second witness is found in the rites and offices of the very power set
up to dethrone and abolish this other power. The Church called upon every
one who was received into her bosom to begin by renouncing the usurpation
of this great enemy, which was thus declared to be universal. She provided
forms for exorcising him. One of her Apostles warned those to whom he
wrote that men could not partake at once of the Christian sacrifice and
the heathen; for as truly as one was the chalice of the Lord, the other
was the chalice of devils; as one was the table of the Lord, the other was
the table of devils.(37)
A third witness is found in the unanimous testimony of all Christian
writers as to the reality of the demoniacal powers with which they were
waging war; as to their perpetual interference with human life; as to the
open and palpable effects which they produced; as to their unwilling
retirement in the face of that Stronger One who was come upon them. It was
not merely the fervid Tertullian who offered to rest the truth of
Christianity and the life of any ordinary Christian upon his power
publicly to expel a demon. Athanasius, who weighs every word he utters,
says also, “Let him who will, try the truth of what we have said, and in
the very presence of the spectral illusion of the demons, of the deceit of
oracles and the wonders of magic, let him use the sign of the cross
derided by them, only naming the name of Christ, and he shall see how by
him the demons fly, the oracles cease, and every sort of magic and
witchcraft is annulled.” No less express is S. Augustine in acknowledging
the reality of these dark powers, and the wonders worked by them.(38)
Resuming then for a moment our view of heathenism as a whole, with regard
to the exhibition of diabolic power in it, let us bear in mind, joined to
the absence of moral teaching, its flagrantly immoral disposition;
secondly, its illogical character, by which it is an insult to human
reason while yet accepted by the human will; and thirdly, the superhuman
effects noted in it and attached to its rites, ceremonies, and practices,
attested by many generations alike of its victims as of its opponents.
These proofs have each their own separate force, but they have likewise as
to our conclusion a cumulative force; and its result is, that the
existence of a diabolic kingdom and sovereign throned in heathenism,
pervading its rites and directing its operations, which is so expressly
declared in Holy Writ, is no less strongly proved by the facts of history.
6. Now, having sketched in four main points the substance of this
polytheism, its multiplicity, its universality, its hold upon daily life,
and its moral corruption, to all which a consummating force is added by
the indwelling of diabolic power, it remains to give a glance at certain
conditions and circumstances under which it was acting on the minds of
men. We have here taken it and examined it by itself, abstracting it from
those circumstances, but it never so appeared to those who lived under it.
The wonderful error which so enfolded these widespread nations never
exhibited itself to them bare and naked. On the contrary, it came to them
interwoven with the dearest claims of the family, the city, the country,
with the force of habit and tradition, with the dread of change, with the
past history and future hopes of their fatherland, coloured moreover with
the radiant dress of a rich and ever-advancing civilisation.
To judge of its power, vitality, and chance of permanence, we must look at
it under these conditions. And if, when we regard this idolatrous
polytheism in itself, one is lost in wonder at its ever having arisen, at
its existence, at its continuance, so, when one regards it as throned in
the customs, feelings, convictions, and interests of society, one wonders
how any moral force could ever overthrow it. At the present time not only
are there religions outside of Christianity, but there are also sects
within it, so irrational, so devoid of the witness given by internal truth
and harmony, so unable to render any account of themselves and their
claims which will satisfy a mind looking for consistency, that, regarding
them merely as facts, one cannot account for them, yet notwithstanding
they may have existed for several hundred years, and had a large share in
forming national habits of thought, or even national character; nay,
perhaps their secret strength lies in some fold of this character itself.
And because they are never seen by themselves, their intrinsic absurdity
does not come before their adherents, and the last thing which these think
of examining is the foundation of their sect, inasmuch as in fact it has
never approached them otherwise than as a condition of their daily life.
So we shall understand paganism better by considering it as interwoven
with civilisation, polity, and national feelings. We will treat of it
briefly under these three heads.
1. First, the whole eastern part of the Roman empire was made up of many
various nations having a long and sometimes renowned history, kingdoms,
and politics much anterior to Rome herself, of which the Romans had taken
violent possession, but wherein remained still the fruits of a rich and
undisturbed civilisation. And this word comprehends all the natural life
of man, all the discoveries gained by his invention or experience, and
accumulated by wealth descending from age to age, all the manifold ties of
social intercourse, all the pleasures of the intellect, united, moreover,
in their case with an art even now unrivalled in portraying the beauty of
the human figure, and in the elegance with which it adapted material forms
to the conveniences of life. So rich and varied an inheritance unfolded
itself in a thousand Hellenic cities studding the shores of the
Mediterranean. The culture itself since the time of Alexander might be
termed Hellenic, but it embraced Egypt, and Syria, and all Western Asia.
And so completely was idolatrous polytheism interwoven with culture, so
inextricably was it blended with the bulk, so gradually had it grown with
the growth, and wound its fibres about the tree and the branches, that the
worship might be absolutely identified with the civilisation. The gods of
Greece were the heads of the most illustrious Grecian families; their
hero-worship consecrated every city, every grove, every field. The gods of
Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every
Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the
gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These
deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the
sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. They had
their mementos in every street of busy traffic; they watched over the
Acropolis; not a fountain but laid claim to their patronage, nor a field
which was fruitful but by their supposed influence. These countries had
lost their political independence, but the material ease of life under the
majesty of the Roman name they retained. There was a passionate love for
this world’s goods, comforts, and enjoyments in the Greek, Syrian,
Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan races, all of them more or less worn, and
effete, and deeply sensualised; but their glory was this great Hellenic
civilisation, with which polytheism might be termed one and the same
thing.
2. When we turn to the West, the seat of the sovereign city and of the
empire itself, we find that from the very beginning and through many
centuries the political constitution of the city had been indissolubly
blended with the worship of the Roman gods. The religion of Rome was much
more than national; her polity seemed only another name for her worship.
Her temples were as much a part of her political life as her forum. So far
at least she had embodied in her whole structure the legend of her
Etruscan teacher, wherein the dwarf Tages sprung from the soil to
communicate the worship claimed by the gods.(39) Her soil and her worship
were indivisible. And even after seven centuries, when the city was
embracing the world in its arms, this union practically existed. Rome
indeed admitted, as we have said, the gods of the conquered nations into
her pantheon, but it was on the same tenure as the nations themselves
shared her civic rights. Jupiter Capitolinus was a sort of suzerain not
only to the gods of the Grecian Olympus, but to the dark forms of the Nile
deities, to the Syrian, the Libyan, the Gallic, the Germanic, the
Sarmatian Valhalla. When the greatest of her poets would express unending
duration, he joins together the race of Æneas enthroned on the Capitol
with the god who dwelt there:
“Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo,
Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.”
The Roman father is the Capitoline Jupiter. I am not a king; the only king
of the Romans is Jupiter, said the most royal of the race, and the founder
of her empire, when, seeing all prostrate at his feet, he put away
reluctantly the diadem offered by his creature. Thus even he who had
seized the reality of power, who would have omens when he pleased, and
whose will was his law, left the crown on the head of Jupiter. In Rome,
all through her history “piety and patriotism were the same feeling.”(40)
When her empire became world-wide, this sort of devotion did not cease.
Rome had long been deified; and the double import of her name(41)
expressed strength against the foe without, and nourishment to the child
within. She was at once a warrior-goddess clothed in mail to meet the
enemy, and a mother offering her bosom to her citizens clustered around
her. And so in her new constitution, adapted for the world, her emperor
too was deified, as the first of her children, her living representative,
the embodiment of her force and love, the visible wielder of her unseen
power. All that is sacred in home and country to us the Roman signified
when he swore by the genius of the emperor. Nothing could be more tolerant
than this polytheism, if the innovation extended only to the borrowing or
creating a new divinity, to reforming a rite or a ceremony,(42) or to
suchlike modifications of worship which admitted that on which it rested;
but nothing more intolerant than the same polytheism when the worship
itself was attacked. A movement against the Capitoline Jupiter would be
not only sacrilege but high treason, and the refusal to call to witness
the emperor’s genius was in fact to deny his imperial authority. The
worship of the gods was as much identified with the empire of Rome in the
West as with the civilisation of Greece throughout the East.
3. But as if these two powers were not ties sufficiently strong to hold
polytheism together, there was another feeling distinct from both, which
formed its last bulwark. The iron hand which held in its grasp these vast
countries, many of them so large that by themselves they might have been
empires, was strong enough to prevent or crush insurrection, but provided
only the majesty of the Roman peace was accepted, did not seek to disturb
a large remnant of local feeling and interest still representing the
former life and polity of the several provinces. Now whatever of national,
tribe, or race feeling existed, was grouped everywhere about the worship
of the native gods.(43) The Nile-land had ceased to be a royal seat, and
was governed by a simple Roman knight as prefect of the emperor; but not
for this had the Nile gods abdicated their dark sway over their votaries.
In them the Egyptians still felt that they had something which was their
own. Thus, whatever force of patriotism still lurked in the several parts
of the empire was nurtured by its own form of polytheism, which it in turn
invested with the memories dearest and most ineradicable in man, of past
independence or renown. Not only the Egyptians, but the various Asiatic
and Libyan races, the Gauls and Germans under Roman sway, were thus
attached to their native gods with a feeling no doubt akin to that of the
English towards “Old England,” or the Russians towards “Holy Russia.”
4. Two more conditions of society throughout the whole empire we have yet
to consider in their bearing on the maintenance of polytheism: first, the
concentration of the vast power of the state—in itself an acknowledged
omnipotence, without the restriction or reservation of individual
rights—in one hand, the hand of the emperor, the sole representative of
the people. By this it would seem that all the upper classes of society,
the classes at ease as to their maintenance, the classes who have leisure
to think and will to act in political matters, were deprived of so much of
their freedom, and such deprivation would tend to support an existing
institution. Secondly, the despotism above was met by a corresponding
despotism below. The rights of the slaveholder over the human labourer
left as little margin of freedom to daily toil as the right of the
imperial autocrat to the freedom of conscience in the rich. The servants
throughout the world of Rome being slaves, were as much in the hand of
their masters as those masters were in the hand of the prince.
We can now take a prospect of human society in reference to the polytheism
of the empire from the standing-point of Augustus in the last twenty years
of his reign. The worship of her gods was so intertwined with the
political constitution of Rome from her birth through seven centuries and
a half, that it might be said to be one thing with it. Almost as close was
the identification of the several religious systems of the East with the
enjoyments of civilised life which they prized so highly, and which the
empire of Rome secured to them. Further in the background the national
gods of the many races included in the empire were the last inheritance of
their former independent life. Again, not only was the emperor as Pontifex
Maximus the official head of this polytheism, but as representing the
whole power of the state, he was its guardian, and whatever assailed it
was an insult to the majesty which he embodied; while the slavery in which
the masses were lying seemed to represent in human society the chances of
war which had all ended in the dominion of Rome and the subjection of the
whole pantheon of incongruous gods to the sovereignty of the Capitoline
Jupiter. These were general conditions to that multifarious whole of
nations and races. Then if Augustus sought to examine more narrowly the
society of Roman citizens spread through his empire, he would find it
divided very unequally as to numbers into two classes. The vast majority
were those who take things as they find them, and who belonged with more
or less fidelity and heartiness to the idolatrous polytheism. The worship
which came to them as part and parcel of the empire, of civilised and of
national life, they accepted without thought. To all these an indefinite
number of immoral gods was throned in possession of Olympus; to all these
the result of such worship was, as we have seen described by S. Augustine,
the utter perversion of morality, the consecration of fables equalling in
turpitude the utmost license of the theatres. But everywhere among the
educated classes were to be found a small number of sceptical minds:
philosophers they termed themselves: it was fashionable to follow some
philosophic system or sect, and these fell mainly into two. Now the
Epicureans and the Stoics, while they left the existing polytheism in
practical possession, as a matter of custom and state religion, and so
delivered themselves from any unpleasant consequences of denying the
prevailing worship, concurred entirely in this, that the one by the way of
atheism, the other by that of pantheism, destroyed all religion of the
heart and inner conduct; because they equally removed the notion of a
personal God, and its corresponding notion of a personal being in man
outliving the body and the world of sense, and meeting with a personal
retribution. Whether the power they acknowledge be nature, as in
Lucretius, or a hidden physical force running through all nature, which
might be called Jupiter, Juno, Hercules, or the name of any other god, as
in Marcus Aurelius, the notion of a personal Creator, provident and
rewarding, was equally destroyed. Nor before the preaching of the Gospel
does there appear a single individual who drew out of the existing
polytheism such a conclusion. On the contrary, in Augustus and his
successors the imperial idea of unity in religion was to make out that all
these systems of polytheism, running into and athwart each other, came
practically to the same thing, differing in name only. Their obedience to
Jupiter of the Capitol was the only bond of unity, and pledge of the
empire’s duration, conceived by the Roman rulers.
II. Thus in the time of Augustus no human eye, whether we look at the mass
of mankind or the thinking few, could see any sign either that the
dominant polytheism was about to fall, or that the lost doctrine of the
divine Unity and Personality could be extricated from the bewildering mass
of error and superstition which had grown over, disguised, and distorted
it. Darker still, if possible, became the prospect under his successor,
Tiberius, whose reign had reached the climax of moral debasement, when
Sejanus was all-powerful at Rome. Hope for the human race there appeared
none, when such an emperor devolved his omnipotence on such a prime
minister. Then in the judgment-hall of a procurator in a small and distant
eastern province, there passed the following dialogue between an accused
criminal and his judge:—“Pilate went into the prætorium again, and called
Jesus, and said to him, ‘Art thou the king of the Jews?’ Jesus answered
him, ‘Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or have others told it thee of
me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests
have delivered thee up to me: what hast thou done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My
kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my
servants would strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now
my kingdom is not from hence.’ Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Art thou a
king, then?’ Jesus answered, ‘Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I
born, and for this came I into the world, that I should bear witness to
the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.’ Pilate saith
to him, ‘What is truth?’ ” He who thus declared himself to be a king, the
cause of whose birth and advent into the world, the function of whose
royalty, was to bear witness to the truth, received from the power which
then ruled the world the punishment allotted to the slave who was worthy
of death. For many ages a false worship had overshadowed the earth, hiding
the true God from men, and setting up instead a multitude of demons for
gods. And during this time the thinkers of Greek and Roman society had
been asking, What is truth? And now the officer who asked that question of
the Truth Himself, replied to it by crucifying Him. And when the body of
that Crucified One was the same day taken down from the cross and laid in
its sepulchre, the power which reigned in polytheism and spoke by the
mouth of the judge, seemed to have given the final answer of triumphant
force to its question, What is truth? and falsehood might be thought to
reign supreme and victorious in the world.
It was with the resurrection of that Body, in which Truth was enshrined,
that the resurrection of truth among men began. He had said to His
disciples a few hours before, not “I show the truth,” but “I am the
Truth.” His birth and His advent took place that His witness might be
given to it, the witness to it being that very birth and advent, His
appearance among men, and the reception He would meet with. The
crucifixion itself—the reply of triumphant force to its own unanswered
question—was the witness which, first in Him, and then in His followers,
should make itself heard over the earth, now held in captivity by
falsehood. And since Truth is His proper Name and His personal Being from
eternity, and by being the Truth He who spoke is the second Person in the
Godhead, the perfect Image of all Truth, let us consider the import of His
Name as the summing-up of the great antagonism which He then planted on
the earth.
For He named Himself the Truth because He is the Son and the Word of the
Father. “Thus the Father, as it were uttering Himself, begot His Word,
equal to Himself in all things. For He would not fully and perfectly have
uttered Himself, if there were anything less or anything more in His Word
than in Himself.... And therefore this Word is truly the Truth; inasmuch
as whatever is in that knowledge of which He is begotten, is also in
Himself; and whatsoever is not in it, is not in Himself.... The Father and
the Son know each other, the one by generating, the other by being
generated.”(44) Thus it is that He is the perfect Word, the absolute Image
of God; and being the Image of God He created man in the beginning a copy
of that Image, and according to its resemblance, in that He created him in
the indivisible unity of a soul intelligent and willing—a created copy of
the Trinity in Unity. But though by the original constitution of the soul
this copy could not be destroyed, being the very essence of the soul, yet
the resemblance might be marred, and the harmony which reigned in the
original man between the soul, its intellect, and will, through the
indwelling of God’s Spirit, was broken by the act of sin; whereupon that
Spirit withdrew from him, and left the copy of the divine Image defaced
and disordered. All the heathenism we have been considering is the
sequence of that disorder, part of which is the grievous obscuration of
truth, that is, of the whole relation between God and man, of which
idolatrous polytheism is the perversion. It was the exact representation
of the soul’s own disorder, being the distortion but not the extinction of
worship; the fear of many demons, instead of the fear of one God; slavish
instead of filial fear.
But as the Truth of the Father is beheld and expressed in generating His
Son, His Word, His perfect Image, so truth to man is the resemblance of
created things to the archetypal idea of them in God; the resemblance of
the works of the divine art to the Artificer’s intention. In this long act
of heathenism we see the work of the divine Artificer marred and obscured,
and the marring and obscuration seem to have gone as far as was possible
without touching the essence of the soul. Who, then, should restore, but
He who had first created? Who should give back to the copy the lost
harmony, and reimprint the defaced resemblance, save the perfect Image of
God? Thus, when the corruption had run its course, and the original
disobedience had reproduced itself all over the earth in a harvest of evil
and disorder, the time for the work of reparation was come, and the Divine
Word, the Image of the Father, took flesh.
Magnificent as had been the dower of the First Man, and wonderful the
grace which held his soul in harmony with itself, and his bodily
affections in obedience to his soul, incomparably more magnificent was the
dower of human nature in its reparation, inconceivably grander the grace
which ruled the Soul and Body of the Restorer. For whereas the First Man’s
person had been simply human, the Person of the Second Man was the Divine
Word Himself, the perfect Image of the Father; and whereas the grace of
the First Man was such that he was able not to sin, the grace which had
assumed the nature of the Second Man was a Person who could not sin, the
fountain of grace itself, measureless, absolute, and personal. The Image
of God Himself came to restore the copy of that Image in Man; his
appearance as man among men was the reconveying of the Truth to them,
because He was the Truth Himself. The Truth in all its extent; the Truth
in the whole moral order and every relation which belongs to it; the Truth
by which all the rational creation of God corresponds to the Idea of its
Creator, was the gift which He brought to man in His Incarnation.
But this truth is not merely external to man. In order to be received and
appropriated by him, he must become capable of it. The Restorer works his
restoration by an inward act upon the soul, its intellect and will. The
Image of God sets up His seat within His work, the copy. Man is sealed by
the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father’s Face,
the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul
to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after
God.(45) The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on
human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of
the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the
Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth.
And this restoration is itself the witness to the Truth of which He spoke
before Pilate as the object of His birth and advent. But to make the
witness operative and fruitful, the greatest wonder in this list of
wonders is required, the suffering of the Truth Himself. He said of the
corn of wheat, which was to bear fruit in unnumbered hearts, that it would
remain alone unless it fell into the ground and died. And so His
crucifixion in the nature which He had assumed was the act from which the
renewal of truth went forth; and not only in His Person, but likewise in
His chosen witnesses this special mode of vivifying the truth, and making
it fruitful, should be repeated. Not only must the absolute Truth of God
appear in our nature itself in order to be accepted, but the nature in
which it appeared should offer the sacrifice of itself; and this
particular mode of propagating the truth should be observed in that chosen
band whom He termed specially His witnesses. Their witness should be their
suffering; in them too the Truth should be crucified, and so become
fruitful.
And as man in his original creation had been a copy, however faint, of the
eternal relations of the Godhead in itself, so his restoration springs
from those same eternal relations. In it the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit are seen working.(46) It springs from the Father, in that He is the
Father of the only-begotten Son, the Original of the Image, and so the
Father of all those who are the copies of that Image. It springs from the
Son, in that He is the perfect Image of the Father, and by dwelling in a
created nature has raised it to the dignity of His Person, from which the
grace of Sonship comes. It springs from the Holy Spirit, whose work as the
Spirit of the Father and the Son is to imprint the copy of the Son on man.
He performs in every one of the redeemed by communicating to them a
participation of the divine nature, by dwelling in them, by contact and
coherence with them, a work infinitely less in degree, but yet of the same
order with that work of His whereby all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt
by personal unity in our Lord’s Manhood.(47)
But we left our Lord before Pilate, bearing witness to the truth. It
remains to see how that truth became impressed on the world.