CHAPTER XI. THE SECOND AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.

“Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.

Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.

Ingredere, O magnos, aderit jam tempus, honores,

Cara Dei soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum.”

There is a moment in the history of the Roman empire when it comes before

us with the most imposing grandeur. The imperial rule has been

definitively accepted by that proud old aristocracy under which the city

of the seven hills was built up from a robber fortress to be the centre of

a world-wide confederation; while on their side the nations all round the

Mediterranean bow with an almost voluntary homage before the sceptre of

their queen. If the north be still untameable, it has learnt to dread the

talons of the Roman eagle, and cowers murmuring in its forests and

morasses; if the Parthian still shoot as he flies from the western Cæsar’s

hosts, he has at least expiated in the ruin of Ctesiphon the capture of

Crassus and the dishonour of Mark Antony. But far more than this. On the

Cæsar in his undisputed greatness has dawned the real sublimity of the

task which Providence had assigned to him; to mould, that is, under one

rule of equal beneficence the many tongues and many nations which a course

of conquest often the most unjust had brought to own his sway. And this

point of time is when after the great warrior Trajan comes Hadrian the man

of culture; in whom seems implanted the most restless curiosity, carrying

him with the speed of a soldier and the power of a prince over every

climate from Carlisle to Alexandria, from Morocco to Armenia, in order

that he may see in each the good of which so many varying races of men are

capable, and use them all for his grand design. To him Rome is still the

head; but he has learnt to esteem at their due value the members of her

great body. The first fifteen years of his reign are almost entirely spent

away from Rome, in those truly imperial progresses wherein the master of

this mighty realm, when he would relieve himself of his helmet, walks like

the simple legionary,(195) bareheaded in front of his soldiers, under the

suns of the south, examining, wherever he comes, the whole civil and

military organisation, promoting the capable and censuring the unworthy,

scattering benefits with unsparing hand. York has known him as a

protecting genius; Athens blends his name with that of her own Theseus as

a second founder; wayward Alexandria exalts him, at least for the time, as

a granter of privileges; the extreme north and utmost south acknowledge

alike the unsparing zeal and majestic presence of their ruler. At that

moment Rome is still Roman. While the Augustan discipline still animates

her legions, the sense of the subordination of the military power to the

civil spirit of a free state is not wholly lost; her proconsuls and

præfects have passed out of those plundering magnates, who replenished in

the tyranny of a year or two from a drained province the treasures they

had squandered in a life of corruption at Rome, into the orderly and yet

dignified magistrates accountable to the Republic’s life-president(196)

for their high delegated power. Perhaps the world had never yet seen

anything at once so great and so beneficent as the government of Hadrian.

But one thing was wanting to the many-tongued and many-tempered peoples

ruled by him, that they should of their own will accept the worship of one

God, and so the matchless empire receive the only true principle of

coherence and permanence in the common possession of one religion. And the

thoughtful student of history can hardly restrain himself from indulging

his fancy as to what might then have been the result, and into how great a

structure provinces worthy of being kingdoms might then have grown by the

process of an unbroken civilisation instinct with the principles of the

pure Christian Faith. Then the northern flood of barbarism and the eastern

tempest of a false religion, which together were to break up the fabric of

a thousand years, might have been beaten back from its boundaries, and

from them the messengers of light have so penetrated the world in all

directions that the advance of the truth should not have been impeded by

any great civil destruction, but the nations of Europe have developed

themselves from their Roman cradle by a continuous growth, in which there

had been no ages of conquest, violence, and confusion, no relapse into

chaos, no struggle back into an intricate and yet imperfect order, but the

serene advance from dawn to day.

So, however, it was not to be. The time of probation in the reigns of

Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, wherein a sort of toleration had seemed to be

allowed to Christians, passed away, and the beginning of a far different

destiny broke upon the empire. With the accession of Marcus Aurelius the

great old enemies, the North and the East, awoke from their trance in

fresh vigour. A Parthian war of four years, a German war of twelve, with

pestilence, earthquakes, and famines through a large part of the empire,

try to the utmost the vigour and temper of one of the most upright

sovereigns known to heathenism. Marcus Aurelius meets both enemies with

equal courage and ability, but he dies prematurely, and leaves the rule

carried so temperately by four great sovereigns successively adopted to

empire at mature age, in the untried hands of the heir of his blood, a

youth of nineteen, born in the purple. In this at least the great Roman

was wanting both to Stoic greatness and to Roman duty. And it was a fatal

error. During thirteen years this son of the most virtuous heathen shows

himself the most vicious of tyrants. At a single bound Rome passes from a

ruler more just than Trajan to a ruler more abandoned than Nero; and in

the palace of Marcus Aurelius endures an emperor who has a double harem of

three hundred victims;(197) who spares the blood of no senator, and

respects the worth of no officer.

When a revolution, similar to that which swept away Domitian, has removed

Commodus, the Roman world is not so fortunate as to find a second Trajan

to take his place. Three great officers who command in Syria, Illyricum,

and Britain, contend for the prize, and when victory has determined in

favour of Septimius Severus, he rules for eighteen years with a force and

capacity which may indeed be compared with Trajan’s, but with a deceit and

remorseless severity all his own. At one time forty senators are

slaughtered for the crime of having looked with favour upon that pretender

to the empire who did not succeed. Nor is this a passing cruelty, but the

fixed spirit of his reign. The sway of the sword is openly proclaimed.

That the army is everything is not only acted on, but laid down as a

guiding principle of state to his children. The unbroken discipline of her

legionaries had hitherto indeed proved the salvation of the state; but

this Septimius fatally tampers with, and in so doing sows the seeds of

future anarchy and dissolution.

His death in 211 places the empire in the hands of a youth of

twenty-three, all but born in the purple, like Commodus, and his rival in

tyranny and dissoluteness of every kind. Caracalla is endured for six

years, and being killed by a plot in the camp, is succeeded by his

murderer Macrinus. He again, after a year, gives place to a Syrian boy of

fourteen, who took at his accession the honoured name of Marcus Aurelius

Antoninus, but is known to posterity as Heliogabalus. Once more during a

space of four years the crimes of Commodus and Caracalla are repeated, or

even exceeded. Indeed in these years from 218 to 222 the story of shame

and degradation reaches its lowest point. But the soldiers of the

prætorian camp themselves rise against Heliogabalus, massacre him with his

mother, and place on the throne his cousin Alexander Severus, at the age

of fourteen. Now Alexander has for his mother Mammæa, if not a Christian,

at least a hearer of Origen, who gives her son from his earliest youth a

virtuous education, who surrounds him on the perilous height of the Roman

throne with the arms of her affection and her practical wisdom. Alexander

rules for thirteen years, a period equal to that of Commodus, and little

less than that of Nero. Younger than both at his accession and his death,

his reign offers the most striking contrast to theirs. Of all heathen

rulers he stands forth as the most blameless. It is a reign which, after

the obscene domination of Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, with the

savagery between them of Septimius Severus immediately preceding it, seems

like a romance of goodness. Simple and admirable in his private life, he

rivals Marcus Aurelius in his zeal for the administration of justice, for

the choice of good governors, for devotion to the public service; and,

happier than Marcus Aurelius, on his name rests no stain of persecution.

“He suffered the Christians to be,”(198) are the emphatic words of his

biographer; concerning which it has been well remarked that little as this

seems to say, it had been said of no one of his predecessors, though

several had not persecuted the Church.(199) And therefore this expression

must mean that he left them in an entire liberty as to religion. It is

indeed the exact contradiction of what, thirty years before, Tertullian

had stated respecting the law in the time of Septimius Severus; for one of

his complaints in pleading for Christians was, “your harsh sentence ‘that

we are not allowed to exist,’ is an open appeal to brute force.”(200)

Alexander Severus, the darling of his people, perished by the hands of

some treacherous soldiers suborned by his successor Maximin; and with him

ends this period of seventy-four years, which we will consider together,

in order to estimate the progress of the Christian Faith. A time of more

remarkable contrasts in rulers cannot be found. It begins with Marcus

Aurelius, and it ends with Alexander Severus, the two most virtuous of

heathen princes; between them it contains Commodus, Caracalla, and

Heliogabalus, the three generally reputed the most vicious; while the

definitive course which the history of the empire took is given to it by

another, Septimius Severus, of great abilities and mixed character, who

gained the empire as a successful soldier, and was true to his origin in

that he established the ultimate victory of pure force over every

restriction of a civil constitution: an African unsparing of blood, who

sat on the throne of Augustus, and worked out the problem of government

which the founder of the empire had started by preparing the result of

Diocletian.

The rule of Commodus and his successors fully revealed the fatal truth,

that the five princes who from the accession of Nerva had governed as if

they were really responsible to the senate, had only been a fortunate

chance; that this time of prosperity rested upon no legal limitation of

rights between those things wont to exist only in severance,(201) the

sovereign’s power and the subject’s freedom; that it was no result of a

constitution which had grown up under a mutual sense of benefit arising

from authority exercised conscientiously, and obedience cordially

rendered. The age which Tacitus(202) at its commencement had called “most

blessed” was indeed over, and as soon as the second Antonine left the

scene, a state of things ensued in which tyranny and cruelty were as

unchecked as under Nero or Domitian at their worst. It became evident that

all had depended on the sovereign’s personal character. From Marcus to

Commodus the leap was instantaneous; and so, again, afterwards the

short-lived serenity and order of Alexander’s rule passed at his death

into a confusion lasting for more than forty years, which threatened to

break up the very existence of the empire.

But in Rome from the accession of Commodus in 180 to the death of

Heliogabalus in 222 we find a profound corruption of morals, an excess of

cruelty, and a disregard of civil rights, which could scarcely be

exceeded. Tacitus, at the beginning of Trajan’s reign, burst forth into

indignation at the thought that it had cost Rusticus and Senecio their

lives, in Domitian’s time, to have praised Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus,

and that their very writings had been publicly burned, as if that fire

could extinguish the voice of the Roman people, the liberty of the senate,

and the conscience of mankind. “Truly great,” he cried, “was the specimen

of patient endurance which we exhibited.”(203) What words, then, would he

have found to express the degradation of servile spirit in that selfsame

city a hundred years later, when Plautianus, the favourite minister of

Septimius Severus, at the marriage of his daughter with Caracalla, caused

a hundred persons of good family, some of them already fathers, secretly

to be made eunuchs, in order that they might serve as chamberlains to the

imperial bride.(204) Or to take another example; as Quintillus, one of the

chiefs of the senate, both by birth and by the employments which he had

held, a man of advanced years and living retired in the country, was

seized in order to be put to death, he declared that his only surprise was

that he had been suffered to live so long, and that he had made every

preparation for his burial. A third incident will show both the sort of

crimes for which men were punished, the protection given by the law to the

individual, and the spirit and temper of the senate. It had condemned

Apronianus, proconsul of Asia, without giving him a hearing, because his

nurse had dreamt that he was one day to reign, concerning which he was

reported to have consulted a magician. Now, in reading the informations

laid against him, it was found that a witness deposed that during the

consultation some senator who was bald had stretched out his head to

listen. Upon this all the bald senators, even those who had never gone to

the house of Apronianus, began to tremble, while the rest put their hands

to their heads to make sure that they had still their hair. However, a

certain Marcellinus fell under special suspicion, whereupon he demanded

that the witness should be brought in, who could not fail to recognise him

if guilty. The witness looked round upon them all for a long time without

saying a word, until upon a sign that a certain senator made him, he

declared it was Marcellinus, who forthwith was hurried out of the senate

to be beheaded, before Severus was even informed of it. As he went to

execution he met four of his children, to whom he said that his greatest

grief was to leave them living after him in so miserable a time.(205) It

was not without reason that Tertullian at this very moment encouraged the

martyrs to be constant, with the reflection that there was no one who

might not, for the cause of man, be made to suffer whatever nature would

most shrink from suffering in the cause of God. “The times we live in are

proofs,” he cried, “of this. How many and how great are the instances we

have seen, in which no height of birth, no degree of rank, no personal

dignity, no time of life, have saved men from coming to the most

unexpected end, for some man’s cause, either at his own hands, if they

stood against him, or if for him, by the hands of his adversaries.”(206)

It was a time at which the extremes of reckless cruelty, of profuse

luxury, of shameless dissoluteness, met together; in which women were

forbidden by an express law to expose themselves on the arena as

gladiators; in which, when the emperor Severus would legislate against

adultery, a memorial was handed to him with the names of three thousand

persons whom his law would touch.(207) Such was the character of the time

which followed at once on the empire’s golden age; the time in which the

Church of God was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes, and

building up her divine polity amid the worthlessness of the world’s

greatest empire, and the instability of all earthly things.

II. In the last review which we took of her material progress we said that

to the eye of Pius Antoninus she would not yet appear from her multitude

as a power in the state. But before the end of the seventy-four years

which we are here considering as one period, it was otherwise. Already in

the reign of Commodus, Eusebius states that the word of salvation was

bringing to the worship of the one God men out of every race, so that in

Rome itself many distinguished for wealth and rank embraced it with their

whole families.(208) A few years later, when Tertullian writes his

apology, he makes the heathen complain “that the state is overrun with us,

that Christians are found in the country, in forts, in islands; that every

sex and age and condition and rank come over to them.”(209) And again; “we

are of yesterday, and have already filled every place you have, your

cities, islands, forts, boroughs, councils, your very camps, tribes,

corporations, the palace, senate, and forum. Your temples only we leave

you. For what war should we not be equal, we who are so ready to be

slaughtered, if our religion did not command us rather to suffer death

than to inflict it.” Elsewhere he speaks of Christians as “so great a

multitude of men as to be almost the majority in every city.” Now make

whatsoever allowance we will for Tertullian’s vehemence, such statements,

laid before adversaries, if they had not a great amount of truth in them,

would bring ridicule on his cause rather than strengthen it. Tertullian

besides wrote at the time of the general persecution set on foot by

Septimius Severus against the Christian Faith, which itself was a proof of

what importance it had assumed. We may perhaps put the first twenty years

of the third century as the point at which, having passed through the

period when it was embraced by individuals with a several choice, it was

become the faith of families, and one step only remained, that it should

become the faith of nations.(210)

Let us consider a moment the mode of its increase. It was twofold. The

plant of which a root was fixed by the Apostles and their successors in

each of the cities of the empire grew, gathering to itself in every place

the better minds of heathenism, and exercising from the beginning a marked

attraction upon the more religious sex and upon the most down-trodden

portion of society; women were ever won to it by the purity which its

doctrines inculcated, slaves by its tender charity: it gave a moral

emancipation to both. If we possessed a continuous and detailed history of

the Christian Faith in any one city, say Rome, or Alexandria, or Antioch,

or Ephesus, or Carthage, or Corinth, for the first three centuries, what a

wonderful exhibition of spiritual power and material weakness it would

offer. By fixing the mind on Christianity as merely one object, as an

abstraction, we lose in large part the sense of the moral force to which

its propagation bears witness. It was in each city a community,(211) which

had its centre and representative in its Bishop, which had its worship,

discipline, and rule of life presided over by him; its presbytery,

diaconate, and deaconesses; its sisterhoods and works of charity,

spiritual and temporal: a complete government and a complete society held

together by purely spiritual bonds, which the state sometimes ignored, not

unfrequently persecuted, but never favoured. Such was the grain of

mustard-seed, from north to south, from east to west, in presence of the

political Roman, the sensitive and lettered Greek, the sensuous African,

the volatile and disputatious Alexandrian, the corrupt Antiochene. It had

one sort of population to deal with at Rome, quite another in the capital

of Egypt, a third at Ephesus, which belonged to the great goddess Diana,

and the statue which had fallen down from heaven, a fourth at Carthage,

where the hot Numidian blood came in contact with the civilisation of

Rome, a fifth at Corinth, the mistress of all art and luxury. And so on.

Now in each and all of these cities and a hundred others the divine plant

met with various soils and temperatures; but in them all it grew. It had

its distinct experiences, encountering many a withering heat and many a

stormy blast, and watered full oft with blood, but in them all the seed,

dropped so imperceptibly that the mightiest and most jealous of empires

was unconscious of what was cast into its bosom, became a tree. It was an

organic growth of vital power. Christianity, during the ten ages of

persecution, is the upspringing of several hundred such communities,

distinct as we see here, and as described above by S. Ignatius, but at the

same time coinherent, as we saw in the beginning, and as we shall find

presently. As, then, all the cities of the Roman empire had a secular

political and social life, and a municipal government of their own, so had

the Christian Faith in each of them a corresponding life of spiritual

government and inward thought; and if we had the materials to construct

the history of this Faith in any one, it would give us a wonderful insight

into the course of that prodigious victory over the world which the whole

result presents. We cannot do so. The data for it do not exist, and

because they do not, we allude here to this first mode of growth made by

the Christian Faith.

Its second mode was thus. The Apostolical Churches, as they severally

grew, scattered from their bosoms a seed as prolific as their own. They

sent out those who founded communities such as their own. Thus the

Christian plant was communicated from Rome to all the west. With every

decade of years it crept silently over the vast regions of Gaul and Spain,

advancing further west and north. This extension was not a chance

springing up of Christians in different localities. It always took place

by the founding(212) of sees, with the apostolic authority, after the

apostolic model. If the Roman colonia had its rites of inauguration, and

was a transcript of the great city, its senate and its forum, so much more

the Christian city had its prototype and derived its authority from the

great citadel of the Faith, wherein Peter’s prerogative was stored

up,(213) and whence it had a derivation wider in extent and more ample in

character than that of Rome the natural city. But we will take from

another quarter what is as perfect a specimen of this extension as any

that can be found. In the great city of Alexandria, the centre of

intellectual and commercial life to all the East and the whole Greek name,

S. Peter set up the chair of his disciple Mark. There the evangelist

taught and there in due time suffered. Dragged by an infuriated populace

through the streets he thus gave up his soul. But the plant which he so

watered with his blood was of extraordinary vigour. It not only grew amid

the intensest intellectual rivalry of Greek and Jew in the capital, but

likewise in course of time occupied the whole civil government which

obeyed the præfect of Egypt. From Alexandria, Egypt and the Pentapolis of

Cyrene derived their Christian faith and government; and so powerful was

this bond that the bishop of the capital exercised control over all the

bishops of the civil diocese, as it was then termed. He was in power a

patriarch long before he had that name, or even the name of archbishop.

How great and strict this rule was we may judge from an incident preserved

by Photius,(214) which occurred in the very last year of the period we are

considering, in 235. Heraclas, bishop of Alexandria, a former pupil of

Origen, had inflicted upon that great writer a second expulsion from the

Church for his erroneous teaching. Origen on his way to Syria came to the

city of Thmuis, where bishop Ammonius allowed him, in spite of the

above-mentioned censure of Heraclas, to preach. When Heraclas heard this,

he came to Thmuis and deposed Ammonius, and appointed in his stead

Philippus as bishop. Afterwards, on the earnest request of the people of

the city, he restored Ammonius to the office of bishop, and ordained that

he and Philippus should be bishops together. The latter, however,

voluntarily gave way to Ammonius, and succeeded him at his death. Such,

ninety years before the Nicene Council, which recognised and approved

these powers of the bishop of Alexandria, as being after the model of

those exercised by the bishop of Rome,(215) was his authority by the

natural force of the hierarchic principle which built up the Church. And

so little were these Christian communities, which we have seen so complete

in their own organic growth, independent of the bond which held the whole

Church together, and of which the authority of the Egyptian primate was

itself a derivation.

These, then, were the two modes in which the Christian Faith pursued and

attained its orderly increase; as a seed it grew to a plant in each city,

and as a plant it ramified, or as Tertullian says, carried “the vine-layer

of the faith”(216) from city to city, from province to province. In the

meantime the last disciples of the Apostles, those who from the especial

veneration with which they were regarded as teachers of the Faith and

“second links in the chain of tradition,” were termed Presbyters,(217) had

died out. S. Polycarp, at the time of his martyrdom in 167, was probably

the sole remaining one, though his pupil S. Irenæus had known others. When

the latter, upon the martyrdom of S. Pothinus in 177, is raised to the

government of the See of Lyons, we may consider that no one survived in

possession of that great personal authority which belonged to those who

had themselves been taught by Apostles; and so at the third generation

from the last of these the Church throughout the world stood without any

such support, simply upon that basis of the tradition and teaching of the

truth, and of the succession of rulers, on which the Apostles had placed

it, to last for ever. Now in this position it had already, throughout the

whole course of the second century, been violently assaulted by a family

of heresies, which growing upon one root—a natural philosophy confusing

the being of God with the world—burst forth into an astonishing variety of

outward forms. Gnosticism completely altered and defaced Christian

doctrine under each of the four great heads, the Being of God, the Person

of Christ, the nature of man, the office and function of the Church. Into

the Godhead it introduced a dualism, recognising with the absolute good an

absolute evil represented by matter: it denied the reality of the

Incarnation; it made the body a principle of evil in man’s nature: but we

will here limit ourselves to the characteristic and formal principle of

the system from which it derived its name, to Gnosis as the means of

acquiring divine truth. Now the Christian religion taught that revealed

truth was to be attained by the individual through receiving, upon the

ground of the divine veracity, those mysterious doctrines superior but not

contrary to reason which it unfolded; and that the communication of such

doctrines might continue unimpaired and unchanging, it taught that our

Lord had established a never-failing authority charged with the execution

of this office, and assisted by the perpetual presence of His Spirit with

it to the end. But the Gnostics admitted only in the case of the imperfect

or natural man that faith was the means for acquiring religious truth; to

the spiritual, the proper gnostic, gnosis should take the place of faith:

for to many a heathen, accustomed to unlimited philosophical speculation,

the absolute subjection of the intellect to divine authority, required by

the principle of faith, was repugnant. Now this Gnosis was in their mind

not knowledge grounded upon faith, but either philosophic science, or a

supposed intuition of truth, which was not only to replace faith, but the

whole moral life, inasmuch as the completion and sanctification of man

were to be wrought by it. And thus instead of an external authority the

individual reason was set up as the highest standard of religious truth,

the issue of which could only be rationalism in belief and sectarianism in

practice.

This formal principle of Gnosticism when duly carried out would deny the

idea of the Church, its divine institution, its properties and

prerogatives. For the gnostic mode of attaining divine truth, as above

stated, contains in it such a denial. Besides this, the gnostic doctrine

that matter was the seat of evil, destroyed the belief that Christ had

assumed a body: the gnostic doctrine that the supreme God could enter into

no communion with man made their Æon Christ no member of human society,

but a phantom which had enlightened the man Jesus, and then returned back

to the “Light-realm.” Not being really the Son of God, he could have no

Church which was his body: not really redeeming, for sin to the gnostic

had only a physical, not a moral cause, he was but a teacher, and

therefore had created no institution to convey grace; which, moreover, was

superfluous, for whatever elements of good human nature had were derived

from creation and not from redemption. Nor was such an universal

institution wanted, since not all men but only the spiritual were capable

of being drawn up to the Light-realm. The Gnostic therefore required

neither hierarchy nor priesthood, since the soul of this system was the

gnosis of the individual. For this a body enjoying infallibility through

the assistance of the Holy Ghost was not needed. It was enough for

enthusiasts and dreamers to pursue their speculations without any limit to

free inquiry, save what themselves chose to impose as the interpretation

of such scriptures as they acknowledged, or as the exhibition of a private

tradition with which they held themselves to be favoured.

Lastly, the idea of Sacraments, as conveying grace under a covering of

sense, would be superfluous to the gnostic, inasmuch as the spiritual

elements in man belong to him by nature, and are not communicated by a

Redeemer, and would be repulsive to him because matter is a product of the

evil principle, and cannot be the channel of grace from out the

Light-realm.(218)

My purpose here has only been to say just so much of Gnosticism as may

show how the whole Christian truth was attacked by it, and especially the

existence and functions of the Church.

And this may indeed be termed the first heresy in that it struck its roots

right up into Apostolic times. Irenæus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius account

Simon Magus to be its father, and the father of all heresy. As such it is

not without significance that he encountered the first of the Apostles in

Samaria, endeavouring to purchase from him the gifts of grace and

miraculous power, and that he likewise afterwards encountered him at Rome.

To this the first manifestation of Gnosticism succeed heretical doctrines

concerning the Person of our Lord, which sprung out of Judaism; but no

sooner are these overcome than Gnosticism in its later forms spreads from

Syria and Alexandria over the whole empire, everywhere confronting the

Church, seducing her members, and tempting especially speculative minds

within her. A mixture itself of Platonic, Philonic, Pythagorean, and

Parsic philosophy, affecting to gather the best out of all philosophies

and religions, in which it exactly represented the eclectic spirit of its

age, arraying itself in the most fantastic garb of imagination, but at the

bottom no dubious product of the old heathen pantheism, it set itself to

the work, while it assumed Christian names, of confusing and distracting

Christian truth. From the beginning of the second century it was the great

enemy which beset the Church. It may, then, well represent to us the

principle of heresy itself, and as such let us consider on what principles

it was met by the Church’s teachers.

Now to form a correct notion of the danger to which the Christian people

at this time was exposed, we must have before us that it was contained in

several hundred communities, each of them forming a complete spiritual

society and government. These had arisen under the pressure of such

hostility on the part of the empire that it is only in the time of the

last emperor during this period, Alexander Severus, that churches are

known to have publicly existed at Rome.(219) For a very long time all

meetings of Christians and all celebration of their worship was secret. It

is obvious what an absolute freedom of choice on the part of all those who

became Christians this fact involved. Nor did that freedom cease when they

had been initiated into the new religion. Their fidelity to the Christian

faith was all through their subsequent life solicited by the danger in

which as Christians they stood. Only a continuous freedom of choice on

their part could maintain it. And not only did every temporal interest

turn against it, but in the case at least of the more intellectual

converts the activity of thought implied in their voluntary acceptance of

a new belief served as a material on which the seductions of false

teachers might afterwards act, unless it was controlled by an everliving

faith, and penetrated by an active charity. The more these Christian

communities multiplied, the more it was to be expected that some of them

would yield to the assaults of false teachers. It is in just such a state

of things that a great dogmatic treatise was written against Gnosticism by

one who stood at only a single remove from the Apostle John, being the

disciple of his disciple Polycarp. Irenæus, by birth a native of lesser

Asia, enjoyed when young the instructions and intimate friendship of the

bishop of Smyrna. In his old age he delighted to remember how Polycarp had

described his intercourse with John, and with those who had seen the Lord:

how he repeated their discourse, and what he had heard from them

respecting the teaching and the miracles of that Word of life whom they

had seen with their own eyes. “These things,” says Irenæus, “through the

mercy of God I then diligently listened to, writing them down not on

paper, but on my heart, and by His grace I ruminate upon them

perpetually.”(220) Later in life he left Smyrna, and settled in Lyons, of

which Church he was a presbyter when the terrible persecution of 177 broke

out there. Elected thereupon to succeed a martyr as bishop, he crowned an

episcopate of twenty-five years with a similar martyrdom. He wrote, as he

says, during the episcopate of Eleutherius, who was the twelfth bishop of

Rome from Peter, and sat from 177 to 192. After describing at length the

Gnostic errors concerning the divine nature, he sets forth in contrast the

unity of the truth as declared by the Church in the following words:

“The Church, though she be spread abroad through the whole world unto the

ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and their disciples

faith in one God;” and he proceeds to recite her creed, in substance the

same as that now held: then he adds, dwelling with emphasis on the very

point which I have been noting, the sprinkling about, that is, of distinct

communities so widely dispersed, which yet are one in their belief.

“This proclamation and this faith the Church having received, though she

be disseminated through the whole world, carefully guards, as the

inhabitant of one house, and equally believes these things as having one

soul and the same heart, and in exact agreement these things she proclaims

and teaches and hands down, as having one mouth. For, though the languages

through the world be dissimilar, the power of the tradition is one and the

same. Nor have the churches founded in Germany otherwise believed or

otherwise handed down, nor those in Spain, nor in Gaul, nor in the East,

nor in Egypt, nor those in the middle of the world. But as the sun, God’s

creature, in all the world is one and the same, so too the proclamation of

the truth shines everywhere, and lights all men that are willing to come

to the knowledge of the truth. Nor will he among the Church’s rulers who

is most powerful in word say other than this, for no one is above his

teacher;(221) nor will he that is weak in word diminish the tradition, for

the Faith being one and the same, neither he that can say much on it has

gathered too much, nor he that can say little is deficient.”

Against the gnostic claim to possess a private tradition, in virtue of

which each of them “depraving the rule of the truth was not ashamed to

preach himself,” he sets forth the one original tradition which the

Apostles,(222) only “when they had first been invested with the power of

the Holy Ghost coming down on them, and endued with perfect knowledge,”

delivered to the churches founded by them. “And this tradition of the

Apostles, manifested in the whole world, may be seen in every church by

all who have the will to see what is true, and we can give the chain of

those who by the Apostles were appointed bishops in the churches, and

their successors down to our time, who have neither taught nor known any

such delirious dream as these imagine. For, had the Apostles known any

reserved mysteries, which they taught to the perfect separately and

secretly from the rest, assuredly they would have delivered them to those

especially to whom they intrusted the churches themselves. For very

perfect and irreprehensible in all respects did they wish those to be whom

they left for their own successors,(223) delivering over to them their own

office of teaching, by correct conduct on whose part great advantage would

accrue, as from their fall the utmost calamity. But since it were very

long, in a volume like this, to enumerate the succession of all the

churches, we take the church the greatest, the most ancient, and known to

all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles

Peter and Paul, and pointing out the tradition which it has received from

the Apostles, and the faith which it has announced to men, reaching down

to us by the succession of its bishops, we confound all those who form

societies other than they ought, in any way, whether for the sake of

self-fancied doctrines, or through blindness and an evil mind. For, with

this church, on account of its superior principate, it is necessary that

every church agree, that is, the faithful everywhere (every church) in

which by the (faithful) everywhere, the apostolic tradition is preserved.

“The blessed Apostles, then, having founded and built up the church,

committed to Linus the administration of its episcopate.... Anencletus

succeeds him, from whom in the third place from the Apostles Clemens

inherits the episcopate.... He is succeeded by Evaristus; Evaristus by

Alexander, who is followed by Xystus sixth from the Apostles. Then

Telesphorus, who was gloriously martyred; next Hyginus; then Pius; after

whom Anicetus. Soter followed Anicetus; and now in the twelfth degree from

the Apostles Eleutherius holds the place of bishop. By this order and

succession the tradition from the Apostles in the Church and the teaching

of the truth have come down to us. And this proof is most complete that it

is one and the same life-giving Faith which has been preserved in the

Church from the Apostles up to this time, and handed down in truth....

With such proofs, then, before us, we ought not still to search among

others for the truth, which it is easy to take from the Church, since the

Apostles most fully committed unto this, as unto a rich storehouse, all

which is of the truth, so that everyone, whoever will, may draw from it

the draught of life. For this is the gate of life: all the rest are

thieves and robbers. They must therefore be avoided; but whatever is of

the Church we must love with the utmost diligence, and lay hold of the

tradition of the truth. For how? if on any small matter question arose,

ought we not to recur to the most ancient churches in which the Apostles

lived, and take from them on the matter in hand what is certain and plain.

And suppose the Apostles had not even left us writings, ought we not to

follow that order of tradition which they delivered to those to whom they

intrusted the churches? To this order many barbarous nations of believers

in Christ assent, having salvation written upon their hearts by the Holy

Spirit without paper and ink, and diligently guarding the old

tradition.”(224)

This capital point of the ever-living teaching office he further dwells

on:

“The Faith received in the Church we guard in it, which being always from

the Spirit of God, like an admirable deposit in a good vessel, is young

itself, and makes young the vessel in which it is. For this office on the

part of God(225) is intrusted to the Church, as the breath of life was

given to the body, in order that all the members receiving may be

quickened, and in this is placed the communication of Christ, that is, the

Holy Spirit, the earnest of incorruption, the confirmation of our faith,

and the ladder by which we ascend to God. For, says he, in the Church God

has placed Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, and all the remaining operation

of the Spirit; of whom all those are not partakers who do not run to the

Church, but deprive themselves of life by an evil opinion and a still

worse conduct. For where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God:

and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the

Spirit is Truth. Wherefore they who are not partakers of Him are neither

nourished unto life from the breasts of the mother, nor receive that most

pure fountain which proceeds from the Body of Christ, but dig out for

themselves broken cisterns from earthly ditches, and from the filth drink

foul water, avoiding the Faith of the Church lest they be brought back,

and rejecting the Spirit that they may not be taught. So estranged from

the truth they deservedly wallow in every error, tossed about by it,

having different opinions on the same subjects at different times, and

never holding one firm mind, choosing rather to be sophists of words than

disciples of the truth; for they are not founded upon the one rock, but on

the sand, which has in it a multitude of pebbles.”(226)

And he elsewhere contrasts the certainty within, and the uncertainty

without, this teaching power:

“The said heretics, then, being blind to the truth, cannot help walking

out of the track into one path after another, and hence it is that the

vestiges of their doctrine are scattered about without any rule or

sequence. Whereas the road of those who are of the Church goes round the

whole world, because it possesses a firm tradition from the Apostles, and

gives us to see that all have one and the same faith, where all enjoin one

and the same God the Father, believe one disposition of the Son of God’s

incarnation, know the same gift of the Spirit, meditate on the same

precepts, guard the same regimen of ecclesiastical rule, await the same

advent of the Lord, and support the same salvation of the whole man, body

and soul alike. Now the Church’s preaching is true and firm, in whom one

and the same way of salvation is shown through the whole world. For to her

is intrusted the light of God; and hence the wisdom of God, by which He

saves all men, ‘is sung at her entrance, acts with confidence in her

streets, is proclaimed on her walls, and speaks ever in the gates of the

city.’ For everywhere the Church proclaims the truth: she is the

seven-branched candlestick bearing Christ’s light.”(227)

It has been necessary to give at considerable length the very words of S.

Irenæus, because they are stronger and more perspicuous than any summary

of them can be, and because they exhibit a complete answer not to this

particular heresy only, but to all heresy for ever. Such an answer, coming

from one who stood at the second generation from S. John, is of the

highest value. Thus he meets the gnostic principle that divine truth is

acquired by the individual through some process of his own mind, which in

this particular case is termed gnosis, but which may bear many other

names, by appealing to an external standard, the Rule of Faith in the

Church from the beginning, which by its unity points to its origin and

lineage from the apostles and Christ. And this serves to bring out the

central idea which rules his whole mind, that “where the Church is, there

also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the

Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth.” The deposit of which he

spoke is not a dead mass, or lump of ore, requiring only safe custody, but

a living Spirit dwelling in the Church, the source within her of unity,

truth, and grace, using her teaching office, which is set up in her

episcopate, for the drawing out and propagation of the deposit from the

double fountain of Tradition and Scripture, for these her teachers as such

have a divine gift of truth.(228) It is thus that he expands without

altering the doctrine of his teacher Polycarp’s fellow-disciple, “Where

Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”(229) And from it he

proceeds to what follows necessarily on such a conception, that this

Church must have a visible point of unity. As then he appeals to the

churches founded by Apostles as the principal centres of living tradition,

so before yet one of these churches had fallen into possession of

heretics,(230) before yet there was any disagreement between them, he

singles out one for its superior principate, on account of which it was

necessary for every church to agree with it, which he grounds on its

descent from S. Peter and S. Paul, giving every link in the chain of

succession during the hundred and ten years which had elapsed between

their martyrdom and his own episcopate. He sees an especial prerogative

lodged in that church as the means of securing the whole Church’s organic

unity; and this prerogative is, that it is among churches what S. Peter

and S. Paul were among Apostles;(231) as the first general western council

expressed it, “in it the Apostles sit daily, and their blood without

intermission bears witness to the glory of God.”(232)

Thus the conception expressed by Irenæus, with the greatest emphasis and

continual repetition, in order to refute heresy, is that all truth and

grace are stored up in the one body of the Church; to which his doctrine

of the Roman Primacy is as the keystone to the arch. For everything in his

view depends on the unity, the intrinsic harmony, of the truth which he is

describing as lodged in the episcopate: the means therefore of securing

that unity are part of its conception. Accordingly, to see in its due

force his statement that every church must agree with the Roman Church, it

must not be severed from the context and taken by itself, but viewed in

connexion with the argument as part of which it stands. If the Church is

to speak one truth with one mouth, which is his main idea, she must have

an organic provision for such a result, which he places in the necessary

agreement of all churches with one: and this is his second idea,

subsidiary to the first, and completing it.

Irenæus by birth and education represents in all this the witness of the

Asiatic churches; as bishop of Lyons, the churches of Gaul.

A few years after Irenæus, Tertullian in a professed treatise against

heresy lays down exactly the same principles. With him, too, the main idea

is the possession of all truth and grace by the one Body which Christ

formed and the Apostles established. This he thus exhibits:

“We must not appeal to the Scriptures, nor try the issue on points on

which the victory is either none, or doubtful, or too little doubtful. For

though the debate on the Scriptures should not so turn out as to place

each party on an equal footing, the order of things requires that that

question should be first proposed which is the only one now to be

discussed, To whom does the Faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures?

From whom and through whom, when and to whom, was that discipline by which

men become Christians delivered? For wherever the truth of that which is

the Christian discipline at once and faith be shown to be, there will be

the truth of the Scriptures, of their exposition, and of all Christian

traditions. Our Lord Jesus Christ (may He suffer me so to speak for the

present), whoever He is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance

God and Man, of whatever reward the promiser, Himself declared so long as

He was on earth, whether to the people openly, or to the disciples apart,

what He was, what He had been, what will of the Father He administered,

what duty of man He laid down. Of whom He had attached to his own side

twelve in chief, the destined teachers of the nations. One of these having

fallen off from Him, He bade the other eleven, on his departure to the

Father after the resurrection, go and teach the nations, who were to be

baptised into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. The

Apostles then forthwith, the meaning of their title being the Sent,

assuming by lot Matthias as a twelfth into the place of Judas, by the

authority of the prophecy in the psalm of David, when they had obtained

the promised power of the Holy Ghost for miracles and utterance, first

through Judea bore witness to the Faith in Christ Jesus, and established

churches, thence proceeding into the world promulgated the same doctrine

of the same Faith to the nations, and thereupon founded churches in every

city, from which the other churches thenceforth borrowed the vine-layer of

the Faith and the seeds of the doctrine, and are daily borrowing them that

they may become churches. And for this cause they are themselves also

counted apostolical, as being the offspring of apostolical churches. The

whole kind must be classed under its original. And thus these churches so

many and so great are that one first from the Apostles, whence they all

spring. Thus all are the first, and all apostolical, while all being the

one prove unity: whilst there is between them communication of peace, and

the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality.(233) And no other

principle rules these rights than the one tradition of the same

sacrament.”(234)

Here is the summing up of what Irenæus had said with the force, brevity,

and incisiveness which characterise Tertullian. Further on he rejects any

appeal on the part of heretics to scripture:

“If the truth be in our possession, as many as walk by the rule which the

Church has handed down from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and

Christ from God, the reasonableness of our proposition is manifest, which

lays down that heretics are not to be allowed to enter an appeal to

scriptures, since without scriptures we prove them to have no concern with

scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, inasmuch

as they do not hold from Christ what they follow by their own choice, and

in consequence admit the name of heretics.(235) Therefore not being

Christians, they have no right to Christian writings. To whom we may well

say, Who are you? when did you come? and whence? What are you, who are not

mine, doing in my property? By what right dost thou, Marcion, cut down my

wood? By what license dost thou, Valentinus, turn the course of my waters?

By what power remove my landmarks? This is my possession: how are you

sowing it and feeding on it at your pleasure? It is mine, I repeat: I had

it of old; I had it first: I have the unquestioned title-deeds from the

first proprietors. I am the heir of the Apostles. According to their will,

according to their trust, according to the oath I took from them, I hold

it. You, assuredly, they have ever disinherited and renounced, as aliens,

as enemies. But why are heretics aliens and enemies to Apostles, save from

difference of doctrine, which each at his own pleasure has either brought

forward or received against Apostles?”(236)

Thus Tertullian adds the witness of the African church to that of the

Asiatic and Gallic churches in Irenæus.

We have noted the great church of Alexandria as a most complete instance

of the growth whereby from the mother see the hierarchy took possession of

a land. But the principle of such growth was the ecclesiastical rule, and

its strength the energy with which that rule was preserved. This rule was

twofold: the rule of discipline, or outward regimen, what we now call a

constitution; and the rule of Faith. What the church of Alexandria was in

discipline has been seen above: and now just at this time we have in the

first great teacher of this church, who has come down to us, the most

decisive exhibition of this rule as a defence against this same gnostic

heresy. “As,” says Clement, “a man like those under the enchantment of

Circe should become a beast, so whoever has kicked against the tradition

of the Church, and started aside into the opinions of human heresies, has

ceased to be a man of God, and faithful to the Lord.” ... “There are three

states of the soul, ignorance, opinion, knowledge. Those who are in

ignorance, are the Gentiles; those in knowledge, the true Church; those in

opinion, the adherents of heresies.” ... “We have learnt that bodily

pleasure is one thing, which we give to the Gentiles; strife a second,

which we adjudge to heresies; joy a third, which is the property of the

Church.” Again, he speaks of those who “not using the divine words well,

but perversely, neither enter themselves into the kingdom of heaven, nor

suffer those whom they have deceived to attain the truth. They have not

indeed the key to the entrance, but rather a false key, whereby they do

not enter as we do through the Lord’s tradition, drawing back the veil,

but cutting out a side way, and secretly digging through the Church’s

wall, they transgress the truth, and initiate into rites of error the soul

of the irreligious. For that they have made their human associations later

than the Catholic Church, it needs not many words to show.” Then, after

referring to the origin and propagation “of the Lord’s teaching,”(237)

exactly after the mode of Irenæus and Tertullian, he concludes, “So it is

clear from the most ancient and true Church, that these heresies coming in

subsequently to it, and others still later, are innovations from it, as

coins of adulterate stamp. From what has been said, then, I consider it

manifest that the true Church, the really ancient Church, is one, in which

are enrolled all who are just according to (God’s) purpose. For inasmuch

as there is one God and one Lord, therefore that which is most highly

precious is praised for being alone, since it is an imitation of the one

Principle. The one Church, then, which they try by force to cut up into

many heresies, falls under the same category as the nature of the One. So

then we assert that the ancient and Catholic Church is one alone in its

foundation, in its idea, in its origin, and in its excellence, collecting

by the will of the one God, through the one Lord, into the unity of one

Faith, according to the peculiar covenants, or rather to the one covenant

at different times, the preordained whom God predestined, having known

before the foundation of the world that they would be just. But the

excellence of the Church, as the principle of the whole construction, is

in unity, surpassing all other things, and having nothing similar or equal

to itself.”(238)

One other writer remains, the larger part of whose life falls within this

period, greater in renown than either of the foregoing; and into whatever

particular errors Origen may have fallen, he did not swerve from their

doctrine as to the mode of meeting error itself. “Since,” says he, “there

are many who think that they hold the tenets of Christ, while some of them

hold different tenets from those who went before them, let the

ecclesiastical preaching as handed down by the order of succession from

the Apostles, and maintained even to the present time in the churches, be

preserved: that alone is to be believed as truth which in nothing is

discordant from the ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition.”(239) And

the ground for such a principle he has given elsewhere:

“The divine words assert that the whole Church of God is the Body of

Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body as a

whole are particular believers: since as the soul quickens and moves the

body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so

the Word moving to what is fitting, and working in, the whole body, the

Church, moves likewise each member of the Church, who does nothing without

the Word.”(240)

The four great writers, then, of this period, Irenæus, Tertullian,

Clement, and Origen, none of them indeed from Rome, but representing the

churches of Asia, Gaul, Africa, and Egypt, exactly concur in the principle

by which they refuted heresy, the propagation, that is, of the rule of

Faith in its purity and integrity, by those who possessed the succession

of the Apostles and their office of teaching, in which lay a divine gift

of the truth.

But to those who proceeded from this basis it was a further labour to set

forth the true knowledge against the false. And we may trace the following

results of heresy, quite unintended by itself, in its operation on the

Church.

1. In the first place, S. Augustine continually remarks that the more

accurate enucleation of true doctrine usually proceeded from the attacks

of heresy; and this happened so continually that it seems to him a special

instance of that law of divine Providence which educes good from evil. “If

the truth,” says he, “had not lying adversaries, it would be examined with

less carefulness,” and so “a question started by an opponent becomes to

the disciple an occasion of learning.”(241) And he observes that “we have

found by experience that every heresy has brought into the Church its own

questions, against which the divine Scripture was defended with greater

care than if no such necessity had existed.”(242) Thus the doctrine of the

Trinity owed its perfect treatment to the Arian assault on it; the

doctrine of penance to that of Novatian; the doctrine of baptism to those

who wished to introduce the practice of rebaptising; even the unity of

Christ was brought out with greater clearness by the attempt to rend it,

and the doctrine of one Catholic Church diffused through the whole world

cleared from its objectors by showing that the mixture of evil men in it

does not prejudice the good.(243) And he illustrates his meaning by a very

picturesque image: “When heretics calumniate, the young of the flock are

disturbed; in their disturbance they inquire; so the young lamb butts its

mother’s udder till it gets sufficient nutriment for its thirst.”(244) For

the doctors of the Church being called upon for an answer supply the truth

which before was latent. And there is no more signal instance of the great

writer’s remark than himself; for the attacks of the most various heresies

led him during forty years of unwearied mental activity into almost every

question of theology.

The gnostic heresy, then, presents us with the first instance of a law

which will run all through the Church’s history. Peter, the first Apostle,

meets and refutes Simon Magus, the first propagator of falsehood, who

receives divine sacraments and then claims against the giver to be “the

great power of God.” This fact is likewise the symbol of a long line of

action, wherein it is part of the divine plan to make the perpetual

restlessness of error subserve the complete exhibition of truth. The

Gnostics denied the divine monarchy; at once mutilated and misinterpreted

Scripture; claimed to themselves a secret tradition of truth. We owe to

them in consequence the treatises of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement, and

a written exhibition of the Church’s divine order, succession, and unity,

as well as a specific mention of the tie which held that unity together;

and the mention of this tie at so early a period might otherwise have been

wanting to us. But these three writers do but represent to us partially an

universal result. The danger which from gnostic influence beset all the

chief centres of ecclesiastical teaching marks the transition from the

first state of simple faith to that of human learning, inquiry, and

thought, turned upon the objects of Christian belief. The Gnostics had a

merit which they little imagined for themselves. They formed the first

doctors of post-apostolic times. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement are a

great advance upon the more simple and external exhibition of Christianity

which we find in the apologists. In them the Church is preparing to

encounter the deepest questions moved against her by Greek philosophy.

They are her first champions in that contest with Hellenic culture which

was a real combat of mind, not a mere massacre of unresisting victims, and

which lasted for five hundred years.

2. Secondly, when the gnostic attack began, the canon of the New Testament

was still unfixed. Nothing can be more certain than that the Apostles did

not set forth any official collection of their writings, and that no such

collection existed shortly after their death. This fact most plainly shows

that the Christian religion at their departure did not rest for its

maintenance upon writings. Not only had our Lord written no word Himself,

but He left no command to His Apostles to write. His command was to

propagate His Gospel and to found His kingdom by oral teaching; and His

promise was that the Holy Ghost should accompany, follow upon, and

continue with, this their action. What we find is, that they did this, and

that the writings which besides they left, being from the first kept and

venerated by the several churches to which they were addressed, gradually

became known through the whole body of the Church. With the lapse of time

they would become more and more valuable. Moreover, when the Gnostics set

themselves to interpolate and corrupt them, and to fabricate false

writings, the need of a genuine collection became more and more urgent. It

is from the three writers above mentioned, towards the end of the second

century, that we learn that such a collection existed, in forming which

these principles were followed: only to admit writings which tradition

attested to spring from an Apostle or a witness of our Lord’s life,(245)

among whom Paul was specially counted: secondly, only such writings as

were attested by some church of apostolical foundation: and thirdly, only

such writings the doctrine contained in which did not differ from the rule

of faith orally handed down in the churches of apostolic origin, or in the

one Catholic Church, excluding all such as were at variance with the

doctrine hitherto received. Thus in the settlement of the Canon authority

as well as tradition intervened; an authority which felt itself in secure

possession of the same Holy Spirit who had inspired the Apostles, and of

the same doctrine which they had taught.(246)

With the reception of a book into the Canon of Scripture was joined a

belief in its inspiration, which rested on what was a part of oral

tradition, that is, that the Apostles as well in their oral as in their

written teaching had enjoyed the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It is evident that such a tradition reposes, in the last instance, upon

the authority of the Church.(247)

If by means of the gnostic attacks the Canon of the New Testament, as we

now possess it, was not absolutely completed, it had at least advanced a

very great way towards that completion, which we have finally attested as

of long standing in a Council held at Carthage in 397.(248)

3. Another result of the gnostic attack was the setting forth the

tradition of the Faith, seated and maintained in the apostolic churches,

as the rule for interpreting Scripture. The Gnostics in two ways impeached

this rule, by claiming a private tradition of their own, and by

interpreting such scripture as they chose to acknowledge after their own

pleasure. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement found an adequate answer to

both errors by showing that the Faith which the Apostles had set forth in

their writings could not contradict the Faith which they had established

in the Church. These were two sources of the same doctrine; but it is by

the permanent connection and interpenetration of the two that the truth is

maintained; and that which holds both together, that which utters and

propagates the truth which they jointly contain, is the Teaching office,

the mouth of the Church. Hence the force of the appeal in Irenæus to the

succession of the episcopate, and to the divine gift of truth which the

Apostles had handed down therein with their teaching office. Hence

Tertullian’s exclusion of heretics from the right to possess scriptures

which belong only to the Church. Hence Clement’s description of the only

true Gnostic, as “one who has grown old in the study of the Scriptures,

while he preserves the apostolic and ecclesiastical standard of

doctrine.”(249) For neither in founding churches, nor in teaching orally,

nor in writing, did the Apostles exhaust or resign the authority committed

to them.(250) The authority itself, which was the source of all this their

action, after all that they had founded, taught, or written, continued

complete and entire in them, and was transmitted on to their successors,

for the maintenance of the work assigned to it. It is this perpetual

living power which Irenæus so strongly testifies,(251) to which he

attaches the gift of the Spirit, not scripture, nor tradition, but that

which carries both scripture and tradition through the ages, which is “as

the breath of life to the body, which is always from the Spirit of God,

wherein is placed the communication of Christ, which is always young, and

makes young the vessel in which it is.”(252) The writings which the Holy

Ghost has inspired, and the tradition of the Faith which He has

established, would be subject, the one to misinterpretation, the other to

alteration and corruption, without that particular presence of His, in

which consists the divine gift of truth, the teaching office, “the making

disciples all nations.”

4. And the action of heresy, which was so effective in bringing out the

function of the teaching church, was not without force in extending and

corroborating the function of the ruling church. The first synods of which

we have mention are those assembled in Asia Minor towards the end of the

second century against the diffusion of Montanism.(253) But what through

the loss of records has been mentioned only in this one case must have

taken place generally, since it is obvious that as soon as erroneous

doctrines spread from one diocese to another, they would call forth joint

action against them. Since then heresies have been the frequent, almost

the exclusive, cause of councils. The parallel is fruitful in thought,

which is suggested between the action of error in eliciting the more

precise expression of the truth which it abhors, and its action in

strengthening the governing power of the body which it assaults. In the

one case and in the other the result is that which it least desires and

intends; heresy, disbelieving and disobeying, is made to perfect the faith

and build up the hierarchy.

Now to sum up our sketch of the internal history of the Christian Faith in

the seventy-four years which elapse from the accession of Marcus Aurelius

to the death of Alexander Severus. At the first-named date we find that it

had spread beyond the confines of the Roman empire, and taken incipient

possession of all the great centres of human intercourse by founding its

hierarchy in them. At the second date it has subdued the powerful and

widespread family of heresies which threatened to distort and corrupt its

doctrines, and has done this by the vigour of its teaching office, which

combined in one expression the yet fresh apostolic tradition stored up in

its churches, and the doctrine of its sacred scriptures; while it has

well-nigh determined the number and genuineness of these, severing them

off from all other writings. The episcopate in which its teaching office

resides appears not as a number of bishops, each independent and severed,

and merely governing his diocese upon a similar rule, but with a bond

recognised among them, the superior principate of the Roman See. That is,

as the teaching office itself is in them all the voice of living teachers,

so its highest expression is the voice of the living Peter in his see. And

this bond as discerned and recognised by the Asiatic disciple of S.

Polycarp, the bishop of the chief city of Gaul, is so strong that he uses

for it rather the term denoting physical necessity than moral

fitness:(254) as if he would say: As Christ has made the Church, it must

agree from one end to the other in doctrine and communion with the

doctrine and communion of the Church in which Peter, to whom He has

committed His sheep, speaks and rules. And so powerful is the derivation

of this authority that he who sits in the place of Mark, whom Peter sent,

punishes by degradation a bishop who disregards his sentence in the case

of a great writer, the brightest genius of the Church in that day. And

when we look at the spiritual state of the world at the commencement of

the third century, we find that Christianity, having formed and made its

place in human society, is penetrating through it more and more in every

direction. It is then that we discern the first beginnings of that great

spiritual creation, in which Reason has been applied to Faith under the

guidance of Authority, which the Christian Church, alone being in

possession of these three constituents, could alone produce, and has

carried on from that day to this. Alexandria was at this time the seat of

a Jewish religious philosophy; it had just become the seat likewise of a

heathen religious philosophy; there was within its church a great

catechetical school, in which the Faith as taught by the apostolical and

ecclesiastical tradition according to the scriptures was communicated. It

was to be expected that its teachers, such men as Pantænus, Clement, and

Origen, would be led on from the more elementary work of imparting the

rudiments of the Faith to the scientific consideration of its deeper

mysteries; and even the sight of what was going on around them among Jews

and Greeks would invite them to attempt the construction of a Christian

religious philosophy.

Moreover Gnosticism, of which Alexandria was the chief focus, had raised

the question of the unity and nature of the Godhead, and professed a false

gnosis as the perfection of religion. By this also thoughtful minds were

led to consider the true relation of knowledge to faith, and hence to

attempt the first rudiments of a Theology, the Science of Faith.

To refute heathenism both as a Philosophy and as a Religion, and to set

forth Christianity as the absolute truth, was the very function of such

men as Clement and Origen; and the former in his work entitled _The

Pedagogue_ exhibits the conduct of life according to the principles and

doctrines of Christianity; while his Stromata, or Tapestries, exhibit the

building up of science on the foundation of faith.(255) We can hardly

realise now the difficulties which beset his great pupil Origen, when,

carrying on the master’s thought, he endeavoured to found a theology. The

fact that he was among the first to venture on such a deep, is the best

excuse that can be made for those speculative errors into which he fell.

III. And now we turn to the conduct of the empire towards this religion

which has grown up in its bosom.

At once with the accession of Marcus Aurelius a temper of greater severity

to Christians is shown. The sort of toleration expressed in the rescript

of Pius to the province of Asia is withdrawn. No new law about them is

enacted, for none is needed, but the old law is let loose. The almost

sublime clemency of Marcus towards his revolted general Cassius, his reign

of nineteen years unstained with senatorial blood, and the campaigns

prolonged from year to year of one who loved his philosophic studies above

all things, and yet at the call of imperial duty gave up night and day to

the rudest toils of a weary conflict with barbarous tribes on the

frontier, have won for him immortal honour: his regard for his subjects in

general has sometimes given him in Christian estimation the place of

predilection among all princes ancient and modern.(256) It is well, then,

to consider his bearing towards Christians. Now among his teachers was

that Junius Rusticus, grandson of the man who perished for the sake of

liberty in Domitian’s time, and in his day no doubt a perfect specimen of

the Roman gentleman and noble, a blending of all that was best in Cicero,

Lælius, and Cato, whom Marcus made Prefect of Rome, and to whom when

bearing that office he addressed a rescript containing the words, “to

Junius Rusticus, Prefect of the city, our friend.” And what this friend of

Marcus thought on the most important subjects we may judge from the

sentiments of another friend and fellow-teacher of the emperor, Maximus of

Tyre, who has left written, “how God rules a mighty and stable kingdom

having for its limits not river or lake or shore or ocean, but the heaven

above and the earth beneath, in which He, impassive as law, bestows on

those who obey him the security of which He is the fountain: and the gods

his children need not images any more than good men statues. But just as

our vocal speech requires not in itself any particular characters, yet

human weakness has invented the alphabetical signs whereby to give

expression to its remembrance, so the nature of the gods needs not images,

but man, removed from them as far as heaven from earth, has devised these

signs, by which to give them names. There may be those strong enough to do

without these helps, but they are rare, and as schoolmasters guide their

scholars to write by first pencilling letters for them, so legislators

have invented these images as signs of the divine honour, and helps to

human memory. But God is the father and framer of all things, older than

heaven, superior to time and all fleeting nature, legislator ineffable,

unexpressed by voice, unseen by eye; and we who cannot grasp his essence

rest upon words and names, and forms of gold, ivory, and silver, in our

longing to conceive Him, giving to His nature what is fair among

ourselves. But fix Him only in the mind; I care not whether the Greek is

kindled into remembrance of Him by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptian by

the worship of animals, that fire is his symbol to these, and water to

those; only let them understand, let them love, let them remember Him

alone.”(257)

I doubt not that Junius Rusticus was familiar with such thoughts as these,

and as a matter of philosophic reflection assented to them. And now let us

study the scene which was enacted in his presence and by his command.(258)

“At a time when the defenders of idolatry had proposed edicts in every

city and region to compel Christians to sacrifice, Justin and his

companions were seized and brought before the Prefect of Rome, Rusticus.

When they stood before his tribunal, the Prefect Rusticus said: Well, be

obedient to the gods and the emperor’s edicts. Justin answered: No man can

ever be blamed or condemned who obeys the precepts of our Saviour Jesus

Christ. Then the Prefect Rusticus asked: In what sect’s learning or

discipline are you versed? Justin replied: I endeavoured to learn every

sort of sect, and tried every kind of instruction; but at last I adhered

to the Christian discipline, though that is not acceptable to those who

are led by the error of a false opinion. Rusticus said: Wretch, is that

the sect in which you take delight? Assuredly, said Justin; since together

with a right belief I follow the example of Christians. What belief is

that, I pray? said the Prefect. Justin replied: The right belief which we

as Christians join with piety is this, to hold that there is one God, the

Maker and Creator of all things which are seen and which are not seen by

the body’s eyes, and to confess one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God,

foretold of old by the prophets, who will also come to judge the human

race, and who is the herald of salvation and the teacher of those who

learn of Him well. I indeed as a man am feeble, and far too little to say

anything great of His infinite Godhead: this I confess to be the office of

prophets, who many ages ago by inspiration foretold the advent upon earth

of the same whom I have called the Son of God.

“The Prefect inquired where the Christians met. Justin answered: Each

where he will and can. Do you suppose that we are accustomed all to meet

in the same place? By no means, since the God of the Christians is not

circumscribed by place, but being invisible fills heaven and earth, and is

everywhere adored, and His glory praised by the faithful. The Prefect

said: Come, tell me where you meet and assemble your disciples. Justin

answered: For myself I have hitherto lodged near the house of a certain

Martin, by the Timiotine bath. It is the second time I have come to Rome,

and I know no other place than the one mentioned. And if anyone chose to

come to me, I communicated to him the doctrine of truth. You are, then, a

Christian, said Rusticus. Assuredly, said Justin, I am.

“Then the Prefect asked Charito: Are you too a Christian? Charito replied:

By God’s help I am a Christian. The Prefect asked the woman Charitana

whether she too followed the Faith of Christ. She replied: I also by the

gift of God am a Christian. Then Rusticus said to Evelpistus: And who are

you? He replied: I am Cæsar’s slave, but a Christian to whom Christ has

given liberty, and by His favour and grace made partaker of the same hope

with those whom you see. The Prefect then asked Hierax whether he too was

a Christian; and he replied: Certainly I am a Christian, since I worship

and adore the same God. The Prefect inquired: Was it Justin who made you

Christians? I, said Hierax, both was and will be a Christian. Pæon

likewise stood before him and said: I too am a Christian. Who taught you?

said the Prefect. He replied: I received this good confession from my

parents. Then Evelpistus said: I also was accustomed to hear with great

delight Justin’s discourses, but it was from my parents that I learnt to

be a Christian. Then the Prefect: And where are your parents? In

Cappadocia, said Evelpistus. The Prefect likewise asked Hierax where his

parents were, and Hierax replied: Our true Father is Christ, and our

mother the Faith, by which we believe on Him. But my earthly parents are

dead. It was, however, from Iconium in Phrygia that I was brought hither.

The Prefect asked Liberianus whether he too was a Christian and without

piety towards the gods. He said: I also am a Christian, for I worship and

adore the only true God.

“Then the Prefect turned to Justin and said: You fellow, who are said to

be eloquent, and think you hold the true discipline. If you are beaten

from head to foot, is it your persuasion that you will go up to heaven?

Justin answered: I hope if I suffer what you say, that I shall have what

those have who have kept the commands of Christ. For I know that to all

who live thus the divine grace is preserved until the whole world have its

consummation. The Prefect Rusticus replied: It is, then, your opinion that

you will go up to heaven to receive some reward? I do not opine, said

Justin, but I know, and am so certain of this that I am incapable of

doubt. Rusticus said: Let us come at length to what is before us and

urgent. Agree together and with one mind sacrifice to the gods. Justin

replied: No one of right mind deserts piety to fall into error and

impiety. The Prefect Rusticus said: Unless you be willing to obey our

commands, you will suffer torments without mercy. Justin answered: What we

most desire is to suffer torments for our Lord Jesus Christ and to be

saved: for this will procure for us salvation and confidence before that

terrible tribunal of the same our Lord and Saviour, at which by divine

command the whole world shall attend. The same likewise said all the other

martyrs, adding: What thou wilt do, do quickly; for we are Christians and

sacrifice not to idols.

“The Prefect hearing this pronounced the following sentence: Let those who

have refused to sacrifice to the gods, and to obey the emperor’s edict, be

beaten with rods, and led away to capital punishment, as the laws enjoin.

And so the holy martyrs praising God were led to the accustomed place, and

after being beaten were struck with the axe, and consummated their

martyrdom in the confession of the Saviour. After which certain of the

faithful took away their bodies, and laid them in a suitable place, by the

help of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and

ever.”

As the pillars of Trajan and Antonine faithfully record the deeds of those

whose names they bear, and stand before posterity as a visible history,

so, I conceive, the judgment of Ignatius by Trajan, and that of Justin by

Rusticus, under the eye as it were of Marcus Aurelius and in his name,

embody to us perfectly the mind and conduct of those great emperors

towards Christians. The marble of Phidias could present no more perfect

sculpture, the pencil of Apelles no more breathing picture, than the

simple transcription of the judicial record given above. In the mind of

Marcus the jealousy of the old Roman for his country’s worship joined with

the philosopher’s dislike of Christian principles to move him from that

more equable temper which dictated the later moderation of his immediate

predecessor. It scarcely needed the spirit which ruled at Rome to kindle

passionate outbreaks against Christians in the various cities of the

empire. We have just seen the impassive majesty of Roman law declaring at

the chief seat of power that to be a Christian is a capital crime. If we

go at the same time to Smyrna, there the voices of a furious populace are

demanding that an aged man venerable through the whole region for his

innocent life and his virtues, be cast to the lions, because he is “the

teacher of impiety, the father of the Christians, the destroyer of our

gods, who has instructed many not to sacrifice to them or adore them.” No

grander scene among all the deeds of men is preserved to us, as described

by his own church at the time, than the martyrdom of Polycarp, as after

eighty-six years of Christian service he stood bound at the stake before

the raging multitude in the theatre, and uttered his last prayer: “I thank

thee, O God of angels and powers, and all the generation of the just who

live before thee, that thou hast thought me worthy of this day and hour to

receive a portion in the number of thy martyrs, in the chalice of thy

Christ.” Ten years later, in the great city of Lyons a similar spectacle

was offered on a far larger scale. The Bishop Pothinus, more than ninety

years old, is carried before the tribunal, “the magistrates of the city

following him, and all the multitude pursuing him with cries as if he were

Christ.” But the triumph of the bishop is accompanied by that of many

among his flock, of whom while all were admirable, yet the slave Blandina,

poor and contemptible in appearance, surpassed the rest. “She was exposed

to the beasts raised as it were upon a cross, and so praying most

contentedly to God, she inspired the utmost ardour in her fellow

combatants, who with the eyes of the body saw in this their sister’s

person Him who had been crucified for them in order to persuade those who

should believe in Him that whoever suffers for the glory of Christ shall

obtain companionship with the living God.”(259) Since the wild beasts

refused to touch her, Blandina and the survivors among her

fellow-sufferers were remanded to prison, in order that the pleasure of

the emperor might be taken, one of them being a Roman citizen. For this

persecution had arisen without any command of his, and the punishments

were inflicted in virtue of the ordinary law. After an interval, as it

would seem, of two months, a rescript was received from Marcus Aurelius

which ordered that those who confessed should be punished ignominiously,

those who denied, be dismissed. “And so at the time of our great fair,

when a vast multitude from the various provinces flock thither, the

governor ordered the most blessed martyrs to be brought before his

tribunal, exhibiting them to the people as in theatric pomp; and after a

last interrogation those who were Roman citizens were beheaded, and the

rest given to the wild beasts.”(260) But Blandina, after being every day

brought to behold the sufferings of her companions, “the last of all, like

a noble mother who had kindled her children to the combat, and sent them

forward as conquerors to the king,—was eager to follow them, rejoicing and

exulting over her departure, as if invited to a nuptial banquet, not cast

before wild beasts. At length, after scourging and tearing and burning,

she was put in a net and exposed to the bull. Tossed again and again by

him, yet feeling now nothing which was done to her, both from the

intensity of hope with which she grasped the rewards of faith, and from

her intimate intercourse in prayer with Christ, in the end she had her

throat cut, as a victim, while the heathen themselves confessed that never

had they seen a woman who had borne so much and so long.”(261)

These three scenes of martyrdom at Rome, at Smyrna, and at Lyons, will

give a notion of the grounds upon which Eusebius asserts that in the reign

of Marcus Aurelius innumerable martyrs suffered(262) throughout the world

through popular persecutions. Respecting the following reign of Commodus

he says, on the contrary, that the Church enjoyed peace, for while the law

which considered Christianity an illicit religion had not been revoked, it

was made capital to inform against any one as Christian; and yet if the

information took place, and the crime was proved, the punishment of death

ensued, as in the case of the senator Apollonius recorded by him.(263)

This state of things would seem to have lasted about seventeen years,

until the year 197, when Severus, some time after his accession, became

unfavourable to Christians. And it brings us to Tertullian, whose writings

are full of testimonies to the sufferings endured by Christians for their

Faith. For some time these sufferings would seem to fall under the same

sort of intermittent popular persecution, which we have seen prevailing in

the time of Marcus: but in the year 202 Severus published an edict

forbidding any to become Jews or Christians. And forthwith a persecution

broke out so severe and terrible, that many thought the time of Antichrist

was come. It was no longer the mere action of an original law against all

unauthorised religions, but an assault led on by the emperor himself, who

turned directly the imperial power against Christianity as a whole. It

raged especially at Alexandria, where the master of the catechetical

school writes: “we have before our eyes every day abundant instances of

martyrs, tortured by fire, impaled, beheaded: they are superior to

pleasure; they conquer suffering; they overcome the world.”(264) Then it

was that Origen, a youth of seventeen, desired to share the martyrdom of

his father Leonides, and that seven whom he had himself instructed, gained

this crown. Then it was that the slave Potamiæna, in the bloom of youth

and beauty, not only rejected every blandishment of corruption, but

suffered the extremest torture of fire to preserve her innocence and

faith, and gained at Alexandria such a name as St. Lawrence afterwards

gained at Rome. So at Carthage Perpetua and Felicitas, young mothers, with

their companions repeated the example of those whom we have seen suffering

at Lyons; in which city a second persecution as vehement as the first

breaking out numbered Irenæus with his predecessor Pothinus, his people in

this case as in the other accompanying the pastor’s sacrifice with their

own.

This state of suffering continued during the life of Severus for nine

years: and splendid examples of Christian championship were shown in all

the churches.(265) It is only with the accession of Caracalla that peace

is restored, and then ensues a period of comparative repose: that is,

while the ordinary law against the Christian Faith as an illicit religion

still continues, it is understood that the emperor does not wish it to be

put in action. In such intervals that Faith, strengthened by the conflicts

it had undergone, and admired by those before whose eyes it had enabled

its adherents to brave and endure every sort of suffering, sprung up and

shot out with redoubled vigour, and the seed which the blood of the

martyrs had shed abroad found time to grow.

The summary of the seventy-four years is this. From 161 to 180 there are

nineteen years of irregular but severe persecution, followed by seventeen,

from 180 to 197, wherein the denouncing of Christians is forbidden, though

if brought to trial, they are punishable with death. Five years succeed,

from 197 to 202, in which the favour of Severus seems lost, and the state

of intermittent persecution takes effect. Then breaks out a general

persecution, set on foot by the emperor himself, and we may judge if he

who slaughtered his senate spared Christians. This lasts for nine years

until his death in 211, whereon a time of peace returns, which is most

complete during the reign of Alexander, but continues more or less from

211 to the end of his reign in 235.

On a review of the whole period it is evident that the Church has passed

from its state of concealment into almost full light. The fiery trial

which it met at the beginning of the third century from the hand of

Severus is the best proof that can be given how greatly it had increased,

how it could no longer be ignored or despised; how its organisation which

was hidden from Trajan was at least partially revealed to Severus, and how

he saw and attempted to meet the danger which the earlier emperor would

have tried to stamp out, had he divined it. But it is evident also that in

proportion as the Christian Faith had grown, the heathen empire had been

shaken in its foundations. Its period of just government was over; its

imperial power was to fall henceforth into the hands of adventurers, with

whom it would be more and more the symbol of force alone, and not of law:

henceforth they would seldom even in blood be Roman, and more seldom still

in principles. Marcus was well nigh the last zealot for the Jupiter of the

Capitol: within a generation after him Heliogabalus will think of a fusion

of all religions in his god the sun, and Alexander Severus of a religious

syncretism wherein Orpheus, Abraham, and Christ testify together to the

divine unity.(266) Nor is this a fancy of the prince alone. All the

thinking minds of his time have become ashamed of Olympus and its gods.

The cross has wounded them to death. A new philosophy—the last fortress

into which retreating heathenism throws itself—while it breaks up Roman

life, prepares the way for the Christian Faith which it strenuously

combats. The Emperor Severus, fixing the eye of a statesman and a soldier

on that Faith, contemplates its grasp upon society, and decrees from the

height of the throne a general assault upon it; while his wife encourages

a writer(267) to draw an ideal heathen portrait as a counterpart to the

character of Christ, tacitly subtracting from the gospels an imitation

which is to supply the place of the reality. The time was not far distant

when Origen would already discern and prophesy the complete triumph of the

religion thus assailed; and if Celsus had objected, that were all to do as

Christians did, the emperor would be deserted, and his power fall into the

hands of the most savage and lawless barbarians, would reply: “If all did

as I do, men would honour the emperor as a divine command, and the

barbarians drawing nigh to the word of God would become most law-loving

and most civilised; their worship would be dissolved, and that of the

Christians alone prevail, as one day it will alone prevail, by means of

that Word gathering to itself more and more souls.”(268)

But before such a goal be reached, many a martyr’s crown has yet to be

won, and more than barbarian lawlessness and cruelty have to be overcome.