CHAPTER XII. THE THIRD AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.

“Rex pacificus magnificatus est, cujus vultum desiderat universa

terra.”

The third century is that during which the Christian Church was making its

way into every relation of life, and taking possession of human society.

During this period it advances into full light, and becomes a manifest

power. In the second century Celsus had attacked it as disclosed only to

the yearning hearts of slaves, and fostered by the devotion of the weaker

sex. At the distance of three generations Origen answered him, but the

religion which he defended already stood avowed alike before the inquiring

gaze of philosophers, the corrupt crowds of cities, and the jealous fear

of rulers. Even in Rome, the sceptered head of idolatry, whose nobles the

great political traditions of their city, and whose populace their sensual

life, having its root in a false worship, made the most difficult to

convert, the hated faith is known to have had public churches by the time

of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after its first rise.(269) And

much more everywhere else it had planted its foot openly on the soil of

the empire. It is time, then, to view the Church as an institution

offering the strongest contrast to the empire itself, to the barbarism

which surrounded the empire, and to the sectarianism which was everywhere

aspiring to counter-work and supplant that entire body of truth on some

portion of which nevertheless it was all the time feeding.

1. And first the empire during this century presents itself to us in a

most unwonted aspect.

Septimius Severus having destroyed the rivals who competed with him for

what was now become the great object of a successful general’s ambition,

based his power avowedly on the sword. The secret of empire which he

transmitted to his children was to foster and indulge the army, and to

disregard all else. The senate, the representative of legal power, he

despised and decimated. He died in 211, not before his eldest son had

already lifted his hand against him, and the four princes of his house all

perished by the sword, one by the hand of a brother, the other three by

revolted soldiers. In the seventy-three years which elapse from his death

to the accession of Diocletian twenty-five emperors are acknowledged at

Rome, of whom twenty-three come to an end by violent deaths, almost always

by insurrections of soldiers, under instigation of ambitious officers.

Besides these, eight associates of the empire, and nineteen generals who

during the reign of Gallienus assume the purple in various provinces, are

all slain. During eighty-two years Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus,

all at a mature time of life, adopted by the actual ruler to succeed, had

governed a stable empire: but now it passes within a shorter period of

time, the term of a single human life, nay a term in one case embraced by

a single reign,(270) into twenty-five different hands. And indeed it

seemed after the capture of the Emperor Valerian by the Persians, as if

that great confederacy, which had just celebrated the thousandth

anniversary of the imperial city’s foundation, was about to break up and

be resolved into its component parts. At one moment two great princesses,

Victoria and Zenobia, worthy even by the avowal of Romans to wear the

Roman diadem, were on the point of establishing the one an empire of the

Gauls in the West, the other an empire of the East embracing just those

countries which Antony had ruled with Cleopatra at his side. A succession

of great generals, all from the province of Illyricum, at last saves the

empire and reasserts its unity. But the forty-nine years following the

murder of Alexander Severus are filled by the struggles of twenty

sovereigns and nineteen pretenders to sovereignty, scarcely any of whom

reign so much as five years. Many of them are rulers of great ability and

remarkable energy. Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, and Carus, and perhaps

Decius, required but happier circumstances to be emperors whose fame would

have matched that of Trajan or Hadrian: but their short tenure of power,

occupied with the vast effort to restore unity and beat back the

barbarian, prevented their doing more than preserve the imperial power and

the empire itself. This whole time, then, in civil society was one of

fluctuation, anxiety, disaster, alarms from beyond the frontiers and

anarchy within them. The Roman peace seemed departing, and the majesty of

the empire irreparably violated. Men could not tell what the morrow would

bring forth. The fairest cities of the Roman world, Alexandria and

Antioch, narrowly escaped perishing through internal discord or hostile

surprise. Greece and Asia Minor, after reposing for centuries under the

safeguard of the Roman name, found themselves swept through and desolated

by barbarian hordes. Italy itself was in imminent danger of the same lot.

Towards the end of this period the senate by the election of Tacitus seems

to make what may be termed its final effort to assert itself as the

depository of legitimate power, the representative of civil society: and

this time of confusion issues in a rejection of any such claim, and the

establishment of unlimited despotism in the empire as reconstituted by

Diocletian. To these straits, then, the first great and haughty enemy of

the Christian Church was reduced, so that the power which a century before

could look down with proud indifference on the sufferings of Christians

now seemed to tremble for its own existence. And in such a condition of

human society the great advance of the Church was carried on.

2. But beyond the empire to the north, advancing upon it like the

multitudinous waves of the ocean on an exposed coast, lay the

ever-battling legions of the northern tribes in their three great

divisions of the Teutonic, Slavic, and Finnish races. If Roman society

suffered throes of distress, its condition was peace compared with the

instability which may be said to have been the very life of these tribes.

Once at least in every century they gather themselves up for a

concentrated effort against the empire whose rich civilisation lies

stretched out before them as a continual prey. After the failure of

Arminius to construct a German kingdom, and of Marobod to construct a

Suevian, in the time of Augustus, Decebalus, in the time of Trajan, makes

another effort in behalf of his Dacians. But here the great Roman general

forces barbarism to retreat, and plants a fresh citadel in its very

stronghold by establishing a province north of the Danube. Then there is

comparative tranquillity for sixty years. It seems as if these two

generations were offered by divine Providence to the empire yet in its

unbroken strength as a time for its pacific conversion, which if it had

accepted, the eruption of the northern nations might for ever have been

kept back by the unity which religious conviction would have bestowed on

civilisation, and the fresh and living force which it would have imparted

to society not yet exhausted by despotic power. But with Marcus Aurelius

the empire turns definitively away. A new religious revolution under Odin

in Scandinavia had wakened up with redoubled force the destroying energy

of barbarism. The Goths had migrated from Sweden to the Black Sea; all the

tribes in the interval had been displaced and dashed upon each other by

this removal. The war of the Marcomans occupied during eighteen years,

from 162 to 180, the whole forces of the empire; Rome was obliged even to

arm its slaves, and Italy feared an invasion more terrible than that of

the Cimbri, which it cost Marcus Aurelius his life to avert.

Again, during the captivity of Valerian, another grand assault of the

northern tribes takes place. The Franks attack western, the Alamans

eastern Gaul; they pass the Alps and advance to Ravenna, while Alamans and

Sarmatians throw themselves upon Pannonia, and the Goths seize upon Thrace

and Greece. The emperors Claudius, Aurelian, and Probus are the saviours

of Rome from this new flood. Of the last of these it is recorded that he

dealt successively with Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Vandals, the

Bastarnæ, and the whole barbarian brood: and seventy cities raised from

their ruins, and fortifications repaired upon a line of fifteen hundred

miles, were the fruits of his victories.(271)

So much for the north: while on the east the Persian empire, hereditary

foe of the Roman name, had found a new and more vigorous master in the

race of the Sassanidæ, who took the religion of Zoroaster to reanimate the

national spirit. Ardeschir claimed once more the whole realm which Cyrus

and Darius had ruled. Henceforth the Romans had a neighbour more than ever

threatening their eastern frontier, and never to be wholly subdued, until

the empire of Mohammed arose to detach a great part of their dominion, and

to move with redoubled force upon what remained.

To the south of the Roman provinces in Africa were tribes at least as

savage as those of the north. Thus the whole empire was enringed with

enemies: on the east an opposing civilisation and religion; on the north

and south barbarian tribes in perpetual confusion and conflict with each

other. Such was the great realm of disorder which surged and heaved to the

north and south of the empire; and such the second great enemy which in

future times was to occupy the Christian Church, and at present offered

the strongest contrast to that moral polity of peace and goodwill, of

loyal submission, patient endurance, and heroic fortitude, which was

spreading daily in the empire.

3. But there was yet another enemy within the empire itself, which from

the beginning tracked the footsteps of the Church, grew with its increase,

and everywhere attempted to dissolve its organisation and weaken its

influence. The whole second century is occupied with the rise and tangled

growth of the Gnostic sects. But these were not alone. From the very time

of the Apostles we find the evidence of a number of sects, rising and

falling, preying on and devouring each other, none without some portion of

Christian truth, on which it feeds, blended with Jewish, Greek, Oriental,

Egyptian, Libyan notions, prejudices, and errors; domiciled in various

parts of the empire in accordance with the national or local character

which they represent. They reproduce with a Christian colour the sects and

the sect-life of the Greek schools of philosophy. As the wheat has its

proper weed, which springs up in the midst of it and counterfeits it, so

error, everywhere gathering round some portion of truth, forms itself into

an antagonistic life. The force and truth of the Christian Church were

shown not in the absence of these rivals, but in its triumph over their

variety, in its remaining one whilst they diverged endlessly from that

unchanging original type, in its continuous and uniform growth whilst they

rose and fell, domineered in certain times and places, and then

disappeared. In this its course the Church had to master very great

difficulties, which were inherent in the manner of its rise. It had to

remain one society in spite of the isolation and self-government of its

local portions. It possessed in each place but a feeble minority of

members compared with the mass of unbelievers. Against its assimilating

power was ranged the force of national feelings which underlay the Roman

authority throughout the whole empire. It had to deal entirely by moral

means with the full liberty of error to which its adherents were exposed.

Lastly, it had to do all this amid the continual strain of threatened or

actual persecution, a state which at its best was one of insecurity, and

which any local trouble, the ill-will of a mob, the greed or ambition or

fear of provincial rulers, not to speak of the imperial state-policy,

might turn into the pressure of severe suffering.

In the face of such difficulties, if the Christian Church continued one in

its doctrine, organisation, and manner of life, such unity was assuredly

the proof of a divine power residing it.

I shall now proceed to show by the testimony of eye-witnesses that such

unity was its distinguishing characteristic.

Now there was not a race or a religion in all this Roman empire, endless

as the races and religions comprehended in it were, out of which

individuals were not drawn into the bosom of the one great Christian

society; and yet within this there was a perfect union of all hearts and

minds in the conviction that the multitude so collected was one people

apart from all other peoples. And this conviction is itself the great

marvel. How was it wrought? For it was an utterly new thing upon the

earth. The union of race, language, and locality, with which sameness of

religion was usually interwoven, had been hitherto the bond of such

nations as had as yet existed. The great city itself had sprung up and

flourished by the strict union of these four things. After its career of

foreign conquest had substituted for the government of a city the great

Roman confederation, it had indeed, like the preceding world-empires, in

fact disregarded all these, being supported by a force independent of them

all. But that force was material power. The great statue was of iron. It

was a novelty unheard of as yet among the gentiles and unimagined by poet

or philosopher, to create a polity which, disregarding sameness of race,

of language, and of locality, should exist and maintain itself throughout

the whole earth solely by the force of faith and charity.

Such was the idea of Christians about themselves from the beginning. The

idea preceded the fact. The prophets foretold it; the Apostles proclaimed

it:(272) let us observe the fulfilment of the prophecy and the

proclamation. We will take our stand in the middle of the third century,

when seven full generations have passed since the day of Pentecost. In

this time a people has been formed. Already a hundred and fifty years

before an eyewitness among themselves had observed the nature of this

people. “Christians are not distinguished from other men either by

country, or by language, or by customs: for they have no cities peculiar

to themselves, nor any language different from others, nor singularity in

their mode of life.... But they dwell both in Greek and in barbarous

cities, as the lot of each may be, following local customs as to raiment

and food, and the rest of their life, but exhibiting withal a polity of

their own, marvellous and truly incredible. They dwell in their own

country, but it is as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens,

yet suffer everything as strangers. Every foreign land is to them a

country, and every country a foreign land.... In a word, what the soul is

in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul is diffused

through all the limbs of the body, and Christians through all the cities

of the world.... The soul is shut within the body, of which it is the

bond, and Christians are like a garrison in the world, which they hold

together.”(273)

Here a writer, calling himself a disciple of Apostles, describes to us, at

the beginning of the second century, what the apostolic age of seventy

years had wrought. He puts his finger just upon the marvel which we are

contemplating. Fifty years later, at the moment the empire was culminating

under the serene rule of Antoninus, a convert from heathenism, a

philosopher who had spent his life in examining all the sects and races of

the empire, and who afterwards became a martyr, said of Christians that

being “quarried out of the side of Christ, they were the true Israelitic

race,” “altogether being called the body, for both people and church,

being many in number, are called by one name as one thing;” they are in

fact “as one man before the Maker of all things, through the name of His

first-born Son,” the High-priest gathering up first in the prophetical

vision and then in the real fact “the true high-priestly race”(274) in His

own Person. Thus Justin pointed out this conception of the Christian

people to the Jew of his time as both foretold in prophecy and exhibited

in fact. The longer that such a people as this endured, the greater would

be the marvel.

A hundred years after this, Origen uses the same language and points to

the same marvel. He had in the year 249, at the entreaty of a friend and

pupil, set himself in the maturity of life, and of a renown which filled

the Church as no man’s before had filled it, to answer the attack of a

heathen philosopher, Celsus, upon Christianity. He was writing just at the

end of the longest period of peace which is found during those three

centuries. From the death of the Emperor Septimius Severus in 211 to that

of the Emperor Philip in this year 249, there had been, with the exception

of a short attack from Maximin, to which his death put a stop, no general

persecution of Christians. Thus thirty-eight years had passed of such

tranquillity as it was ever in those times the lot of Christians to

obtain. The mother of one emperor had been Origen’s disciple, and the

emperor actually reigning was a Christian, however unworthy of such a

profession. Now in this work Origen speaks of the superiority of the

Christian churches in each several place, as, for instance, at Athens,

Corinth, Alexandria, to the heathen assemblies, and of the Christian

rulers to the heathen. He puts it as a mark of divine power that God

sending His Son, “a God come in human soul and body,”(275) should have

established everywhere churches offering the contrast of their polity to

the assemblies of the superstitious, the impure, and the unjust. He

considers that Christians do a greater benefit to their country than all

other men by teaching them piety to the one God, and “gathering up into a

certain divine and heavenly city those who have lived well in the smallest

cities.”(276) “We,” he says, “knowing that there is in each city another

fabric of a country, founded by the word of God, call those who are

powerful in word and of a virtuous life to the government of churches: we

do not accept the covetous to such a place, but force it against their

will upon those who in their moderation would decline taking on them this

general care of the Church of God.”(277) And the compulsion thus exercised

is that “of the great King, whom we are persuaded to be the Son of God,

God the Word.” But this other form of country which he saw in each city is

“the whole Church of God, which the divine scriptures assert to be the

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

are particular believers; for 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 energising in the whole Body, the

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

Word.”(278) And he completes this view in another beautiful passage

wherein he describes Christ as the high-priest Aaron, who has received

upon his single body the whole chrism, from whom it flows down upon his

beard, the symbol of the complete man, and on to the utmost skirt of his

raiment. Every one who partakes of Him, partakes likewise of his chrism,

because Christ is the head of the Church, and the Church and Christ one

Body.(279) We have here in Origen’s thought one and the same divine power,

proceeding forth from the Incarnation, which forms first the Body of the

Lord, and then gathers into this Body every individual as a copy of the

Christ. The heathen scoffer had objected: why send forth one spirit into

one corner of the earth? It was needed to breathe that spirit into many

bodies, and to send them forth into all the world. Nay, replied Origen,

“the whole Church of God—animated by the Son of God as the soul quickens

and moves the body—was enough. It needed not that there should be many

bodies and many souls, like that of Jesus, in the way you suppose, for the

one Word as the sun of righteousness rising from Judea was sufficient to

send forth rays that should reach every soul that would receive him.” He

has done far more than you suggest: every member of that one Body has

received according to his measure a due portion of anointment: after the

model of the Christ, they too are Christs; “so that beginning in the body

He should dawn in power and in spirit upon the universe of souls which

would no longer be destitute of God.”

In Origen’s mind, then, the greatness of the King lies specifically in

this, that out of confusion He draws unity, out of those who were no

people He forms a people, out of nations and tribes at enmity He moulds an

indivisible kingdom, and from His own Body a Body which shall embrace a

universe of souls, instinct with one life, and that His own. This was

Origen’s view of the work and triumph of Christ, as he saw it before him,

at the eve of the great Decian persecution in 249.

Origen was writing this at a moment of great interest. It was the last

year which preceded those two generations, in the course of which five

great persecutions should be directed by the emperors against the Church.

He was then a man of sixty-four. The son of a martyr, he had when a youth

of eighteen beheld his father imprisoned for the faith, and had encouraged

him to suffer the loss of all his goods, and death itself, without

regarding that large family which must be left in penury, of whom Origen

was the eldest. He was burning himself to share his father’s sufferings.

In the persecution of which this was the opening Eusebius tells us that

seven of his disciples were martyrs: and, lastly, he was to undergo such

cruelties himself in the persecution of Decius, then on the eve of

breaking out, that he is believed to have died of their results. Now it is

in this work that he speaks of the remarkable providence of God in

preserving Christians, who by their religion were bound not to defend

themselves, against the attacks of their enemies, for God, he says, had

fought for them, and from time to time had stopped those who had risen up

with the purpose of destroying them. Few and easily numbered were those

who hitherto had suffered death for the Christian Faith, samples chosen by

God as champions to encourage the rest, while He prevented their whole

nation from being rooted out: for it was His purpose that this nation

should be firmly rooted and consolidated, and the whole world be filled

with its saving doctrine and discipline.(280) Thus it was by His will

alone that He scattered every plot directed against them, so that neither

emperors, nor local governors, nor the people should be able to indulge

their wrath beyond a certain point. Origen, when he thus wrote, could look

back on a period of thirty-eight years, during which, with the exception

of the severe but passing storm raised by the Emperor Maximin, peace had

reigned: years which he had himself employed in unwearied labours of

teaching, writing, and converting; in which he had directed and advised an

emperor’s mother, and seen a Christian emperor; in which he had witnessed

a wonderful increase of the Christian people, and indeed of this increase

his words above cited convey a faithful picture. He knew not the fearful

trials which were to be encountered before that triumph of the truth which

he already anticipated should be attained: or that God was about to accept

from the grayhaired man the sacrifice which the impetuous youth had

affronted without success. For scarcely has he written this book when he

has to fly for his life before the edict of Decius, who will attempt to

destroy the Christian religion, and to whose anger Pope S. Fabian falls a

victim. Amid great peril after long delay the next Pope Cornelius is

chosen. And now for the first time a new danger from within assaults the

Church. Novatian, a Roman presbyter of great repute, attempts after the

due election and consecration of Cornelius to usurp his place, and to

divide the one flock of Christ. Under circumstances so wholly altered from

those in which Origen above was writing, we come to our next witness, the

man in all the Western Church the most renowned, as Origen was in the

Eastern.

For it was on occasion of the first antipope, an effort, that is, within

the See of Peter itself to arm the episcopal power at its very source

against itself, to set an altar up against the legitimate altar, and to

divide the sacraments of the Church from the Bride whose dowry they are,

that S. Cyprian wrote his treatise on the Unity of the Church. “It was for

the purpose of reminding his brethren that unity is the first element of

the Christian state, and that those who break off from the principle of

unity, which is lodged in the episcopate, even though they be confessors

and martyrs, have no portion in the hopes of the gospel.”(281) This

definite purpose, so unlike that state of leisure and tranquillity in

which Origen answered by thought and learning a speculative attack, will

account for the very remarkable precision and force of S. Cyprian’s

language.

“The enemy,” he says, “detected and down-fallen by the advent of Christ,

now that light is come to the nations—seeing his idols left—has made

heresies and schisms, wherewith to subvert faith, to corrupt truth, and to

rend unity.” But this will all be in vain if men will look to the Head,

and keep to the doctrine of the Master. For the truth may be quickly

stated.(282) “The Lord saith unto Peter: I say unto thee that thou art

Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell

shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the

kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound

also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed

in heaven. To him again, after His resurrection, He says: Feed my sheep.

Upon him, being one, He builds His Church; and though He gives to all the

Apostles an equal power, and says: As my Father sent Me, even so send I

you; receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they shall be

remitted to him, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they shall be

retained;—yet in order to manifest unity, He has by His own authority so

placed the source of the same unity as to begin from one. Certainly the

other Apostles also were what Peter was, endued with an equal fellowship

both of honour and power; but a commencement is made from unity, that the

Church may be set before us as one: which one Church in the Canticle of

Canticles doth the Holy Spirit design and name in the Person of our Lord:

My dove, my spotless one is but one; she is the only one of her mother,

elect of her that bare her.

“He who holds not this unity of the Church, does he think that he holds

the faith? He who strives against and resists the Church, is he assured

that he is in the Church? For the blessed Apostle Paul teaches this same

thing, and manifests the sacrament of unity thus speaking: There is one

Body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one Hope of your calling;

one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God. This unity firmly should we

hold and maintain, especially we bishops, presiding in the Church, in

order that we may approve the Episcopate itself to be one and undivided.

Let no one deceive the brotherhood by falsehood; no one corrupt the truth

of our faith by a faithless treachery. The Episcopate is one, of which a

part is held by each without division of the whole. The Church is likewise

one, though she be spread abroad, and multiplies with the increase of her

progeny: even as the sun has rays many, yet one light, and the tree boughs

many, yet its strength is one, seated in the deep-lodged root; and as,

when many streams flow down from one source, though a multiplicity of

waters seems to be diffused from the bountifulness of the overflowing

abundance, unity is preserved in the source itself. Part a ray of the sun

from its orb, and its unity forbids this division of light; break a branch

from the tree, once broken it can bud no more; cut the stream from its

fountain, the remnant will be dried up. Thus the Church, flooded with the

light of the Lord, puts forth her rays through the whole world, with yet

one light, which is spread upon all places, while its unity of body is not

infringed. She stretches forth her branches over the universal earth, in

the riches of plenty, and pours abroad her bountiful and onward streams;

yet is there one head, one source, one mother, abundant in the results of

her fruitfulness.

“It is of her womb that we are born; our nourishing is from her milk, our

quickening from her breath. The Spouse of Christ cannot become adulterate;

she is undefiled and chaste; owning but one home, and guarding with

virtuous modesty the sanctity of one chamber. She it is who keeps us for

God, and appoints unto the kingdom the sons she has borne. Whosoever parts

company with the Church and joins himself to an adulteress, is estranged

from the promises of the Church. He who leaves the Church of Christ,

attains not to Christ’s rewards. He is an alien, an outcast, an enemy. He

can no longer have God for a Father who has not the Church for a mother.

If any man was able to escape who remained without the ark of Noah, then

will that man escape who is out of doors beyond the Church. The Lord warns

us and says: He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who gathereth not

with Me, scattereth. He who breaks the peace and concord of Christ, sets

himself against Christ. He who gathers elsewhere but in the Church,

scatters the Church of Christ. The Lord says: I and the Father are one;

and again of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost it is written: And

these three are one. And does anyone think that oneness, thus proceeding

from the divine immutability, and cohering in heavenly sacraments, admits

of being sundered in the Church, and split by the divorce of antagonist

wills? He who holds not this unity holds not the law of God, holds not the

faith of Father and Son, holds not the truth unto salvation.

“This sacrament of unity, this bond of concord inseparably cohering, is

signified in the place in the Gospel where the coat of our Lord Jesus

Christ is in nowise parted or cut, but is received a whole garment, by

them who cast lots who should rather wear it, and is possessed as an

inviolate and individual robe. The divine scripture thus speaks: But for

the coat, because it was not sewed, but woven from the top throughout,

they said one to another, Let us not rend it, but cast lots whose it shall

be. It has with it a unity descending from above, as coming, that is, from

heaven and from the Father; which it was not for the receiver and owner in

anywise to sunder, but which he received once for all and indivisibly as

one unbroken whole. He cannot own Christ’s garment who splits and divides

Christ’s Church. On the other hand, when on Solomon’s death his kingdom

and people were split in parts, Ahijah the prophet, meeting King Jeroboam

in the field, rent his garment into twelve pieces, saying: Take thee ten

pieces; for thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of

the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee; and two tribes

shall be to him for my servant David’s sake, and for Jerusalem, the city

which I have chosen, to place my name there. When the twelve tribes of

Israel were torn asunder, the prophet Ahijah rent his garment. But because

Christ’s people cannot be rent, His coat, woven and conjoined throughout,

was not divided by those to whom it fell. Individual, conjoined,

coentwined, it shows the coherent concord of our people who put on Christ.

In the sacrament and sign of His garment, He has declared the unity of His

Church.

“Who, then, is the criminal and traitor, who so inflamed by the madness of

discord, as to think aught can rend, or to venture on rending God’s unity,

the Lord’s garment, Christ’s Church? He Himself warns us in His Gospel and

teaches, saying: And there shall be one Fold and one Shepherd.... Think

you that any can stand and live who withdraws from the Church, and forms

for himself new homes and different domiciles?... Believers have no house

but the Church only. This house, this hostelry of unanimity, the Holy

Spirit designs and betokens in the Psalms, thus speaking: God who makes

men to dwell with one mind in a house. In the house of God, in the Church

of Christ, men dwell with one mind, and persevere in concord and

simplicity.” To this he adds: “There is one God, and one Christ, and His

Church one, and the Faith one, and one the people joined into the solid

unity of a body by the cement of concord. Unity cannot be sundered, nor

can one body be divided by a dissolution of its structure, nor be severed

into pieces with torn and lacerated vitals. Parted from the womb nothing

can live and breathe in its separated state: it loses its principle of

health;” for “charity will ever exist in the kingdom; she will abide

evermore in the unity of a brotherhood which entwines itself around her.”

And he is more specific still; for this “one Church is founded by the Lord

Christ upon Peter, having its source and its principle in unity,” “on

whose person He built the Church, and in whom He began and exhibited the

source of unity.”(283)

Certainly if any idea has ever been put forth clearly and definitely, it

would seem to be the idea of organic unity here delineated by Cyprian, as

necessary not merely to the well-being but to the essence of the Church.

Nor does one see what words he could have found more expressly to reject

the notion that the individual bishop in his diocese was the unit on the

aggregation of which the Church was built, and to assert in contradiction

that the Church was built on the Primacy of Peter as its generative,

formative, controlling, and unifying power. According to him the whole

order and government of the Church are bound up in the Lord’s words to

Peter: while as to the Church herself three ideas are in his mind so

compacted together, so running into and pervading each other, that they

cannot be severed; and these ideas are Unity, Grace, and Truth. The

symbols of the Sun, the Tree, and the Fountain, the Lord’s Coat, the one

Flock tethered in one Fold under one Shepherd, the one House as opposed to

sundry self-chosen domiciles, the Mother embracing her whole progeny in

her womb, illustrate and enforce each other, and all contain the three

ideas, of which Grace and Truth are as the warp and woof in which the

substance of the one web consists. For Unity, Truth, and Grace, viewed as

attributes of the Church, are blended together in the light and warmth of

the sun, in the sap which vivifies every branch of the tree, and gives it

fruitfulness from the root, in the fountain of water, under which image

our Lord has so often summed up His whole gift to man, in the flock which

the Shepherd has chosen, and for which He cares, in the house where the

master dwells and collects his family, in the one robe which encompassed

and contained the virtue of the Wearer, in the prolific womb which gives

birth to the whole sacred race. The force of all these images lies in

their unicity: plurality would not modify, but destroy them. Yet even

these symbols are surpassed by that argument from the divine Unity which

he sets forth as the type and cause of the Church’s unity. From created

likenesses—the fairest and choicest which the world presents—he passes to

the uncreated nature, and from the divine immutability, wherewith these

three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the divine Exemplar of

Unity, Truth, and Grace, are one, deduces the Unity of the Church their

dwelling-place.

Cyprian, then, cannot sever the Church of his heart, the Church for which

he lived and died, from Unity, or from Truth, or from Grace: and this

Church is to him founded on the Primacy of Peter, and developed from his

person. The one Episcopate, whose golden chain he looks upon as

surrounding the earth in its embrace, “of which a part is held by each

without division of the whole,” wherein therefore joint possession is

dependent on unity, would have no existence without the bond of the

Primacy, from which it was developed and which keeps it one. Take away

this, and the office of each bishop is crystallised into a separate mass,

having no coherence or impact with its like: bishops so conceived would

hold indeed a similar office, but being detached from each other would not

hold joint possession of one Episcopate. Separate crystals do not make one

body; nor a heap of pebbles a rock. But it was a Rock on which Christ

built and builds His Church, that Rock being His own Person, from which He

communicated this virtue, wherein the cohesion and impact of the whole

Episcopate lies, to the See of him whom He constituted His Vicar. Finally,

Cyprian contrasts pointedly the people of Christ _which cannot be rent_

with the twelve tribes of Israel, which were torn asunder: as if he would

beforehand repudiate that parallel between the Synagogue and the Church,

in the question of unity, which has before now been resorted to as a

refuge by minds in distress, who failed to see the tokens of the Bride of

Christ in the community to which they belonged.

In Origen and in Cyprian we put ourselves back into the middle of the

third century. In the words of the latter we see portrayed to the life

that idea which had filled the hearts of Christians through seven

generations of labours and sorrows from the day of Pentecost down to his

time. But whence arose this perfect union of all hearts and minds in the

early Christians, who were penetrated with the conviction that the Church

was the home of truth and grace? We may answer this question thus: No

catechumen was received into the fold without a clear and distinct belief

in that article of the earliest creed, and part of the baptismal

profession, “the Holy Catholic Church.” A new word was made to express a

new idea, the glorious and unique work of that ever-blessed Trinity whom

the creed recited: the Home and House in which the Triune God, whom the

Christian glorified, by indwelling made the fountain of that grace and

that truth which God had become Man in order to communicate. The

catechumen’s baptism into the one Body was the foundation of all the hope

in which his life consisted;(284) the integrity, duration, sanctity of

that Body being component parts of the hope. And with regard at least to

all gentile converts this precise and definite catechetical instruction

was reinforced by the new sense which at their conversion was impressed on

them of the heathenism out of which they were then taken. In how many of

them was the remembrance of their past life connected with the guilt of

deeds and habits which their new Christian conscience taught them to

regard as fearful sins. Nay, the notion of sin itself—as a transgression

of the eternal law and an offence against the personal Majesty of God—was

a Christian acquisition to the corrupted heathen. Thus the passage into

the one Body and the divine Kingdom was contemporaneous in their case with

a total change of the moral life. It is Cyprian, again, who has given us a

vivid account of this change, which took place at a time of mature manhood

in his own life, and which will serve as a graphic sketch of what had

happened to the great mass of adult converts besides himself.

Let us suppose a man forty-five years of age speaking: “For me, while I

yet lay in darkness and bewildering night, and was tossed to and fro on

the billows of this troublesome world, ignorant of my true life, an

outcast from light and truth, I used to think that second birth, which

divine mercy promised for my salvation, a hard saying according to the

life I then led: as if a man could be so quickened to a new life in the

laver of healing water as to put off his natural self, and keep his former

tabernacle, yet be changed in heart and soul. How is it possible, said I,

for so great a conversion to be accomplished, so that both the obstinate

defilement of our natural substance, and old and ingrained habits, should

suddenly and rapidly be put off; evils whose roots are deeply seated

within? When does he learn frugality, to whom fine feasts and rich

banquets have become a habit? Or he who in gay sumptuous robes glisters

with gold and purple, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple

raiment? Another whose bent is to public distinctions and honours cannot

bear to become a private and unnoticed man; while one who is thronged by a

phalanx of dependents, and retinued by the overflowing attendance of an

obsequious host, thinks it punishment to be alone. The temptation still

unrelaxed, need is it that, as before, wine should entice, pride inflate,

anger inflame, covetousness disquiet, cruelty stimulate, ambition delight,

and lust lead headlong.

“Such were my frequent musings; for whereas I was encumbered with the many

sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so I had

used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of

better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house

and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water succoured me,

washing away the stain of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and

hallowed breast the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in

the heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth,

then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to me, what was

hidden was revealed, what was dark began to shine, what was difficult now

had a way and means, what had seemed impossible now could be achieved,

what was in me of the guilty flesh now confessed that it was earthy, what

was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost now had a growth according to God.

Thou knowest well, thou canst recollect as well as I, what was then taken

from me, and what was given by that death of sin, that quickening power of

holiness. Thou knowest, I name it not; over my own praises it were

unwelcome to boast, though that is ground never for boasting but for

gratitude, which is not ascribed to man’s virtue but is confessed to be

God’s bounty; so that to sin no more has come of faith, as heretofore to

sin had come of human error. From God, I say, from God is all we can be;

from Him we live, from Him we grow, and by that strength which is from Him

accepted and ingathered we learn beforehand, even in this present state,

the foretokens of what is yet to be. Let only fear be a guard upon

innocency, that that Lord who by the influence of His heavenly mercy has

graciously shone into our hearts, may be detained by righteous obedience

in the hostelry of a mind that pleases Him; that the security imparted to

us may not beget slothfulness, nor the former enemy steal upon us

anew.”(285)

Add to this that Christians were marked out as one Body by the Jewish and

heathen persecution which tracked them everywhere. But the sects were not

persecuted. The various schools of the Gnostics all agreed in this, that

it was not necessary or desirable to suffer martyrdom for the faith. Their

view was, that they could believe with their minds whatever they pleased,

though an enemy might force them by threats of suffering to utter with the

mouth what they abhorred; and with this convenient distinction they

escaped imprisonment, poverty, bereavement, and death. But the Christian

was bound—when the fitting circumstances came—to repeat the confession of

his Lord before Pilate. Joined therefore to his baptismal belief, and to

the utter change of life involved in his conversion, was the bond of

common suffering which held together Christians as one Body throughout the

world: whence an old martyr bishop said: “The Church, for that love which

she bears to God, in every place and at every time sends forward a

multitude of martyrs to the Father, whereas all the rest not only have no

such thing among themselves to show, but deem not even such a witness

necessary.”(286)

Moreover, as a fourth cause, the historic origin of their name and belief

led them up to that day of Pentecost when the descent of the Spirit of God

constituted the formation of that body in belonging to which was all their

hope and trust; with the existence of which their faith was identified; in

the communion of which their charity was engendered. As the birth and the

life and the passion of Christ were that subject-matter on which their

whole faith grew, so the creation of their existence as a people was a

definite act in which the Redeemer showed Himself the Father of His Race,

creating them as His children and generating them by His Spirit. The

loving thought of Christians in every age ran along this line to its

source. Nature herself presents us with an image of what this idea of the

Church was to them. As the great river whose water is the symbol of

blessing and the bearer of fertility leaps down a giant birth from its

parent lake, ever blazing under the splendour of a tropical sun, yet ever

fed by sources springing from snow-crowned mountains, and changes in its

course the desert into earth’s fruitfulest region, so the river of God,

welling forth on the day of Pentecost from the central abyss of the divine

love, bore down to all the nations the one water of salvation, and

wheresoever it spread, the desert retreated, and the earth brought forth

corn and wine in abundance. And the idea of this divine stream was from

the beginning as deep as it was clear in every Christian heart. It is one

of a very few doctrines, such as the unity of the Godhead, whereof indeed

it is the image and the result, of which there is not only an implicit

belief but a definite consciousness from the first. For the thought of the

kingdom is inseparable from that of the king: and he could be no divine

Sovereign whose realm was not one and indivisible: and that this realm

should break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms,(287) but itself

stand for ever, was the trust on which the whole Christian life of

endurance and hope was built.

The Christian society through its whole structure was marked with the seal

of that great act on which it grew, the assumption of human nature by a

divine Person. Its whole government, its whole worship, and the whole

moral and spiritual being of its people radiate from that Person as King,

as Priest, and as Prophet. Take first the character of the individual

Christian. It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the

same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and

suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the

one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the

divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is

traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue

is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole

life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. Thus He

is the Prophet not only declaring the whole divine will to men, but

leading them in it by His own example. The divine Painter is but

representing in every one of His children a copy in some sort of that

life, which He set forth in full in the thirty-three years: a thought

which we have seen Origen expressing in the chrism which descended from

the head of Aaron to the utmost skirt of his raiment.

But likewise in His Priesthood a parallel derivation ensues. First He

multiplies Himself in His Apostles: they again in the Bishops whom they

create; while each of these communicates himself in his priests. A triple

transfusion suffices to form the whole hierarchical order. Nothing can be

conceived more simple, yet nothing more efficient supposing that He is

what He proclaimed Himself to be. The victim which He appoints to be

offered by this priesthood is Himself, and His Body so offered is the

food, the life, and the bond of the whole spiritual Body thus created.

That Person with which He took the manhood is the centre of all this

worship, of which the manhood so taken is the instrument. Thus it is that

His second office of Priest, bound up so entirely with Himself, is yet

communicated through His divine manhood to the whole Body which He forms.

And this order remains through all ages, as intimately connected with his

Person now, as eighteen centuries ago, and as it will be when all the

centuries to come are evolved.

One office remains; His office of King. And here, again, the jurisdiction

which He created for His kingdom springs from His Person, and that not

only in its origin but in its perpetual derivation. He was Himself(288)

the Apostle: as such He first multiplied Himself in the Twelve, whom from

Himself He named Apostles. His public life on earth is an image of the

whole mission or government which He would set up after His ascension. He

lives with the Twelve: He teaches them: He is their Instructor, Father,

and Friend. When His Apostles afterwards created Bishops, this form of our

Lord’s life on earth was exactly reproduced in the earliest dioceses. Thus

S. Mark went forth from the side of Peter, and the mode of his living, and

the family which he drew around him at Alexandria was after this pattern.

He, the Bishop, is the image of Christ, and his twelve presbyters of the

Apostles. This model is continually set forth by S. Ignatius as a divine

command and institution, he being himself the occupant of the great Mother

See of the East, the third See of Peter, and that wherein he first

sat.(289) Thus the canonical life was formed by the exactest imitation of

our Lord’s public life, and its reproduction throughout the various

dioceses formed the Church. Such was the life which S. Augustine

afterwards practised and reduced to rule; and those who planted the

Christian Faith throughout the north, Apostles to new and barbarous races,

had this model before them. The diocese was first a family, in which the

Bishop as a father presided over his priests, and sent them forth to their

work. The Eucharist which he consecrated was from the beginning dispensed

from his church to all his flock. The diocese, then, in its earliest form

was an image of our Lord’s intercourse with the Twelve, wherein the Bishop

represents Him, and the priesthood His Apostles.

But the whole Church in its episcopate or mass of dioceses no less

represented that His public life. For as He was the Head, the Living

Teacher and Guide of His Apostles, and as He came to establish one

Kingdom, and one only,(290) wherein the Twelve represented the whole

Episcopate, and contained in themselves its powers, so the Primacy which

He visibly exercised among them, He delegated, when He left them, to one

of their number. Peter, when he received that commission to feed His

sheep, took the place on earth of the great Shepherd, and in him the flock

remains one.

Thus the double power which expresses the divinely-established government

of the Church, the Primacy and the Episcopate, is as close a transcript of

the Lord’s life on earth with His Apostles as the diocese taken by itself.

In His intercourse with His Apostles He is the germ of the Bishop with his

priests; in His Vicariate bestowed upon Peter He repeats or rather

continues His visible Headship on earth.

But spiritual jurisdiction is the expression of Christ’s sovereignty on

earth, and in the order just described it is linked with His Person as

strictly as the worship exercised by means of His Priesthood, and the

spiritual character which every one of His children bears. Surely no

kingdom has ever been so contained in its king, no family in its father,

no worship in its object, as the Christian kingdom, family, and worship,

which together is the Church. Is it, then, any wonder that all Christian

hearts from the first were filled with the blessing of belonging to such a

creation as this, in which to them their Redeemer lived and reigned,

penetrated them with His own life, and gathered them in His kingdom? Are

not the words of S. Cyprian just what we should expect those to utter who

overflowed with this conviction? At the same time that Cyprian was so

writing, Dionysius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, addressed Novatian the

antipope in these words: “It was better to suffer any extremity in order

not to divide the Church of God. And martyrdom endured to prevent schism

were not less glorious than that endured to refuse idolatry, but in my

opinion more so. For in the one case a man suffers martyrdom for his own

single soul, but in the other for the whole Church.”(291)

But let us trace the chronological sequence in history of that great

institution, the real as well as logical coherence of which has just been

set forth. The Church was a fact long before its theory became the subject

of reflection. It came forth from the mind of the divine Architect and

established itself among men through His power; and it is only when this

was done that the creative thought according to which it grew could be

delineated.

The fact, then, exactly agrees with the theory, and history here

interprets dogma.

It is during the great forty days that our Lord founded the Primacy, when

He made S. John and the rest of the Apostles sheep of Peter’s fold. The

period of thirty-eight years which follows is the carrying into effect His

design in the first stage. The Church grows around Peter. First in

Jerusalem he forms a mass of disciples; then for a certain number of years

at Antioch. In the second year of Claudius, the thirteenth after the

Ascension, he lays the foundations of the Roman Church. In the sixtieth

year of our era he sends forth S. Mark to found the Christian society in

Alexandria. Thus he takes possession of the three great cities of the

empire, of east, west, and south. In the mean time the labours of S. Paul

and the other Apostles, in conjunction with those of Peter and in

subordination to them, plant the Christian root in a great number of

cities. As S. Paul toils all round the northern circuit of the empire,

through Asia Minor, Macedonia, Illyricum, to Spain, his work has a

manifest reference to the work of Peter in the metropolis of the east, of

the south, and of the west. In the latter he joins his elder brother, and

the two Princes of the Apostles offer up their lives together on the same

day in that city which was to be the perpetual citadel of the Christian

Faith, the immovable Rock of a divine Capitol. Thus was it Peter, “from

whom the very Episcopate, and all the authority of this title

sprung,”(292) and what Pope Boniface wrote in 422 is a simple fact of

history: that “the formation of the universal Church at its birth took its

beginning from the honour of blessed Peter, in whose person its regimen

and sum consists. For from his fountain the stream of ecclesiastical

discipline flowed forth into all churches, as the culture of religion

progressively advanced.”(293) Thus the whole initial movement was from

above downwards, and S. Cyprian was not only enunciating dogma but

speaking history when he wrote that the Lord built the Church upon Peter.

In one generation the structure rose above the ground, and during all that

time S. Peter’s hand directed the work.

Just at the end of this time, on the point of being thrown into prison,

whence he only emerged to martyrdom, Paul was at Rome with Peter, and he

describes in imperishable words the work which had been already

accomplished. Again it is not only dogma but history, not only that which

was always to be but that which already was, which he set forth as it were

with his dying voice: the one Body, and the one Spirit, the one Lord, one

Faith, and one Baptism, as there is one God. That Body in which Apostles,

Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers were fixed, that the visible

structure might grow up to its final stature, in whose accordant unity was

the perpetual safeguard against error. When Paul so wrote,(294) the Body

was formed, and its headship was incontestably with Peter. He had no need

to remind them of the man with whom he was labouring, of whose work the

whole Church from Rome to Antioch and Alexandria was the fruit. But he

places the maintenance of truth, and the perpetual fountain of grace, in

the unity of the Church, which was before those to whom he wrote an

accomplished fact.

Two generations pass and the aged S. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom,

attests the same fact. “Where is Jesus Christ,” he says, “there is the

Catholic Church.” The King is in His Kingdom; the Master in His House; the

Lord in His Temple. The bishops throughout the world inseparably linked

together are His mind: and the presidency of charity, which is the inner

life of all this spiritual empire, is at Rome. S. Ignatius and the author

of the letter to Diognetus write just after the expiration of the

apostolic period; and they both regard Christians as one mass throughout

the world, living under a divine form of spiritual government. No one who

studies their words can doubt that the one Body and the one Spirit were as

visible to their eyes and as dear to their heart as to S. Paul.

We pass two generations further and S. Irenæus repeats the same testimony.

The interval has been filled by incessant attacks of heresies, and the

Bishop of Lyons dwells upon the fact that the Church speaks with one voice

through all the regions of the earth as being one House of God, and that

the seat of this its unity is in the great See founded by the Princes of

the Apostles at Rome. He reproduces at great length the statements of S.

Paul that the safeguard of truth lies in the one apostolic ministry, for

which he runs up to the fountain-head in Rome. It is in the living voice

and the teaching office of the Church that he sees a perpetual

preservative against whatever error may arise. Thus it has been up to his

time, and thus it will ever be.

Another period of seventy years runs on, and we come to the just-cited

testimony of Cyprian, who therefore said nothing new, nor anything

exaggerated; but when the truth was assailed in its very citadel, he spoke

out and described wherein its strength lay. He gathers up and gives

expression to the two hundred and twenty years between the day of

Pentecost and his own time. Here are the creative words of our Apostle and

High-priest explained and attested and exhibited as having passed into

fact by four witnesses, first S. Paul, then S. Ignatius, thirdly S.

Irenæus, fourthly S. Cyprian. Between all the five there is no shadow of

divergence, between the Master who designed the building and the servants

who described its erection; between the Prophet who foretold and the

historians who recorded. The one said, Upon this rock I will build my

Church; the others pointed out that the work was accomplished.

The original and fundamental conception of all this work is expressed by

S. Matthew and S. Mark when they speak of our Lord at His first going

forth as “proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.” His three years’

ministry is the germ and type of the perpetual mission which He founded.

It was to be from first to last a work of personal ministry, beginning

from above, not spreading from below; its power and virtue descending from

Him through those whom He chose, the people being the work of the Prince,

their government a delegation from Him, as their moral condition lay in

following Him, and their life and support in feeding on Him. And He

declared that the original conception should be carried out to the end,

and that “the gospel of the kingdom” should be proclaimed through the

whole world as a witness to all nations, until the consummation should

come.(295)

The chief events of the third century brought out more and more the unity

of the Church and the Primacy of S. Peter’s See as the power within the

Church by which that unity is produced and maintained.

With this century the great persecutions begin. That of Septimius Severus

arose in the year 202. Now a persecution which assaulted the mass of

Christians was the occasion of fall and apostasy to some, of martyrdom to

others. Hence the question became urgent how those should be treated by

the Christian society who through fear of suffering had failed to maintain

the confession of their faith. It was necessary to lay down more

distinctly rules as to what crimes should be admitted to penance, and what

that penance should be. The practice here involved doctrine; it raised

immediately the question of the power which the society itself had to

grant pardon, and to receive the guilty back into its bosom. And here the

authority of the chief Bishop was at once called out. We find as a matter

of fact Pope Zephyrinus in the first years of this century determining the

rules of penance, and a small party of rigid disciplinarians, among whom

Tertullian was conspicuous, who considered his rules as too indulgent. It

is in the vehement pamphlet with which Tertullian assails the Pope that we

have one of the earliest expressions of the great authority claimed by

him. “I hear,” he exclaims, “that an edict has been set forth, and a

peremptory one. The Pontifex Maximus, in sooth, that is, the Bishop of

Bishops, issues his edict: I pardon to those who have discharged their

penance the sins both of adultery and of fornication.”(296) Twenty years

later Pope Callistus carried the indulgence yet further, receiving to

penance those who had committed murder or idolatry.(297) Once more, after

a period of thirty years, the breaking out of the Decian persecution

raised afresh the question of admitting great sinners to penance, and the

actual discipline of the Roman Church, as established under Zephyrinus and

Callistus, is set forth in a letter to Cyprian by Novatian, then one of

the most esteemed presbyters of that church. By the discipline which these

facts attest it is determined that the Church has lodged in her the power

of pardoning any sin whatsoever according to the rules of the penance

which she imposes. And it is the Roman Church which herein takes the

guidance. She maintained the ancient faith, severity, and discipline, yet

tempered with that consideration which the full possession of the truth

alone bestows.(298) Thus she received back without hesitation those who

returned from heresy or schism, as well as those who had fallen in the

conflict with persecution.

For another question of great importance which her guidance determined was

that concerning the rebaptisation of heretics; and in this she went

against the judgment of Cyprian with his council, of Firmilian, and of

other bishops. It had been the custom that those who had received baptism

among heretics, provided it was with the proper rite, should, when they

sought admission into the Church, be received only by an imposition of

hands, not by the iteration of baptism. And though Cyprian and a great

majority of African bishops, through their horror of schism and heresy,

wished to modify this rule, and to insist that baptism given outside the

Church was invalid, Pope Stephen resisted, and maintained the ancient

rule, with the decision that nothing save what had been handed down should

be done.

It is evident that the question of penance and that of rebaptisation

touched the whole Christian society, and here accordingly we find the

superior Principate of the Roman Church exert itself. In fact, the right

decision as to both these questions involved the right conception of the

Church herself, her constitution, power, and prerogatives. The

rigorism(299) with which some had endeavoured to exclude certain sinners

from the faculty of receiving penance, and the view which led them to

confine the validity itself of baptism to its reception within the one

Church, led when fully developed in the following century to the obstinate

schism and heresy of the Donatists. These dangerous tendencies were

resisted, when they first appeared, by the Roman See, and we owe to such

resistance the application by Tertullian to the Pope of the title of

“Pontifex Maximus” and “Bishop of Bishops,” about the year 202, as the

expression of the power which he then claimed and exercised.

Another question likewise touching the whole Christian society, which the

Roman Pontiff had already decided against the practice of the influential

and ancient churches of Asia Minor, was the time of holding Easter. Pope

Victor insisted that the practice of the Roman Church must be followed,

which kept the day of the Crucifixion invariably on the Friday, and that

of the Resurrection on the Sunday, and not the Jewish practice of the

Asiatics, which took the 14th and the 16th days of the month Nisan, on

whatever days of the week they might fall, for that purpose. And here in

the peremptory tone of Pope Victor, and in the threat of excommunication

which he issued, the consciousness was shown that the right to determine

lay with him, while subsequent times justified his judgment and followed

it. Nor was it of little importance that the greatest festival of the

Church should be celebrated by all her children both on the same day and

in the same spirit.

We have then now traced up to the end of the third century the inner

growth and constituent principles of that great institution, which out of

every language, tribe, and religion in the empire or beyond it had formed

and welded together one people, the bearer of that Truth and that Grace

which the Son of God in assuming manhood had conveyed to the world. It

remains rapidly to review the relations of the empire with this people

during seventy-eight years, from the death of Alexander Severus in 235 to

the edict of toleration in 313.

II. The seizure of the empire by Maximin was accompanied by a violent

attack upon Christians, whom Alexander was held to have favoured. It is on

this occasion that we learn from Origen(300) that churches were burnt, and

thus their existence as public buildings is attested. The clergy were

especially threatened, and amongst them Ambrosius, the friend of Origen,

and Origen himself. But Maximin after reigning three years with

extraordinary cruelty was slain by his own soldiers. And then during

eleven years a period of comparative tranquillity for Christians ensued.

It is with the accession of Decius that the severest trials of the Church

commence. In the sixty-four years which elapse from this to the edict of

toleration, the force of the empire is five times directed by its rulers

against the Christian name. The cause of this is disclosed to us by S.

Cyprian mentioning incidentally the very words of that emperor whose name

is associated with the bitterest hatred to Christians. He praises Pope

Cornelius,(301) who when Pope “Fabian’s place, that is,” he says, “the

place of Peter and the rank of the sacerdotal chair was vacant,” “sat

fearless in that chair at Rome at the moment when the tyrant who hated

God’s priests uttered every horrible threat, and with much more patience

and endurance heard the rise of a rival prince than the appointment of

God’s priest at Rome.” But why should Decius regard with such dislike the

nomination of a Roman Bishop? Why, but that the emperors had now come

clearly to discern the organisation of the Church as a visible kingdom of

Christ, at the head of which the Roman Bishop stood. That kingdom, the

whole moral and religious doctrine of which, together with the life

founded upon it, they felt to be in contradiction with the heathen life

and the maxims of polity on which from time immemorial the empire had been

based, that kingdom Decius saw to be summed up and represented in him who

held, to use the words of Cyprian, “Peter’s place.” With that religious

association which Decius saw extending round him on every side, and

gradually drawing into its bosom the best of the two sexes, there was no

way of dealing but either to yield to those new maxims which it set forth,

or to destroy it. In proportion as the emperors were zealous for the

worship of the Roman gods, and instinct with the old discipline of the

state, they inclined to the latter alternative, and none more decisively

than Decius, who prided himself on following the spirit of Trajan. The

persecution which he set on foot reached and slew Pope Fabian, and caused

the election of a successor to be deferred for sixteen months. When at the

end of that time Cornelius was chosen, Cyprian praises him “as to be

reckoned among the glorious confessors and martyrs, who sat so long

awaiting his butchers, ready either to slay him with the sword, or crucify

him, or burn him, or tear open and maim his body with any unheard-of kind

of punishment.”(302) Decius indeed was slain by the Goths in battle after

less than two years’ reign, but the persecution was renewed by Gallus, and

again by Valerian, so that in ten years no less than five Pontiffs,

holding that place of Peter, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephen, and

Sistus, offered up their lives for the faith. Then it was that the ten

years’ noble episcopate of S. Cyprian after many minor sufferings ended in

martyrdom: and then too the deacon Laurence wore out in the agony of fire

all the malignity of the enemy, and gained his almost matchless

crown.(303)

The state of things which immediately preceded this grand attack of the

empire on the Church is thus described by Cyprian in the interval which

followed the persecution of Decius and preceded that of Gallus; and the

words of one who not only taught but died for his teaching carry with them

no common force. “As long repose had corrupted the discipline which had

come down to us from God, the divine judgment awakened our faith from a

declining, and if I may so speak an almost slumbering state; and whereas

we deserved yet more for our sins, the most merciful Lord has so moderated

all, that what has passed has seemed rather a trial of what we were than

an actual infliction. Everyone was applying himself to the increase of

wealth, and forgetting both what was the conduct of believers under the

Apostles, and what ought to be their conduct in every age, they with

insatiable eagerness for gain devoted themselves to the multiplying of

possessions. The priests were wanting in religious devotedness; the

ministers in entireness of faith; there was no mercy in works, no

discipline in manners. Men wore their beards disfigured, and women stained

their complexion with a dye. The eyes were changed from what God made

them, and a lying colour was passed upon the hair. The hearts of the

simple were misled by treacherous artifices, and brethren became entangled

in seductive snares; ties of marriage were formed with unbelievers;

members of Christ abandoned to the heathen. Not only rash swearing was

heard, but even false; persons in high place were swollen with

contemptuousness; poisoned reproaches fell from their mouths; and men were

sundered by unabating quarrels. Numerous bishops, who ought to be an

encouragement and example to others, despising their sacred calling,

engaged themselves in secular vocations, relinquished their chair,

deserted their people, strayed among foreign provinces, hunted the markets

for mercantile profits, tried to amass large sums of money, while they had

brethren starving within the Church, took possession of estates by

fraudulent proceedings, and multiplied their gains by accumulated

usuries.”(304)

Such was the end of the long peace which succeeded the persecution of

Septimius Severus, and yet it was followed at once by that ten years’

conflict which if stained with apostasies at first, soon became rife in

martyrdoms. And as the former relaxation seems to prove that the third

century among Christians was no ideal time in which moral corruptions and

abuses did not largely exist, so the improvement which trial and suffering

at once produced, calling forth some of the greatest triumphs which the

Faith has ever known, seems to indicate that the divine power of the

Church lies not in forming a community free from imperfections, or even

secured from scandals, but in building up a portion of her children to

sanctity. At all times the wheat and the chaff lie together on her

threshing-floor, and the flail of suffering winnows them. But those who

seek for a time when all professing believers were saints, will find it

neither when the Apostles taught nor afterwards.

The Emperor Valerian, after being during four years more kindly disposed

to Christians than any preceding emperor, and after filling his palace

with them, was instigated by an Egyptian magician into becoming a most

bitter persecutor.(305) This was ended in less than three years through

his capture by the Persian monarch, when his son Gallienus restored the

sacred places to the Christians, and ordered the bishops not to be

disturbed.(306) The empire during the following eight years seemed through

the supineness of Gallienus to be on the point of dissolution; it is the

time when nineteen commanders in various provinces assume the purple, and

successively perish. At last Gallienus is put out of the way by a council

of officers, and the empire is restored by Claudius and by Aurelian. The

latter, after being for some years fair to Christians, ends by persecuting

them. But he too is speedily removed by death. It is remarkable that all

these persecutions, by Maximin, by Decius, by Gallus, by Valerian, and by

Aurelian, are of short duration: none of them continue more than three

years. After Aurelian’s death in 275 a whole generation ensues in which

Christians by the ordinary operation of the empire’s laws, according to

which their religion was illicit, were liable to suffer much in individual

cases. Thus it is in a time not reckoned persecuting, shortly after

Maximianus had been made his colleague in the empire by Diocletian, that

one of the most merciless acts of tyrannical cruelty took place, which

gave an occasion for several thousand men at once to offer up their lives.

Unresisting victims, yet brave soldiers with arms in their hands, they

endured two decimations, and when remonstrance had proved in vain, piled

their arms, and let themselves be massacred to the last man rather than

violate their conscience. The place where they suffered took the name of

their heroic captain, Maurice; the churches of that Alpine valley to this

day bear witness by his figure over their altars to that most illustrious

act of Christian sacrifice: and beside the place of their repose rises

still a monastery which for thirteen hundred and fifty years has guarded

the sepulture of a legion of martyrs, and is become one of the most

ancient Christian houses of prayer.

It cannot be doubted that in the last twenty-five years of the third

century the number of Christians was being largely increased, and moreover

they were daily gaining the higher ranks of society. Diocletian had

reigned for eighteen years, and seemed effectually to have stopped that

incessant succession of soldiers gaining the throne by assassination and

yielding it in turn to their assassins, which for fifty years threatened

to destroy the state. At such a moment it was that Diocletian, belying all

the past conduct of his life, let loose against the Christian Church the

last, the fiercest, and the longest of the heathen persecutions.

It was in truth scarcely less than the rending in pieces the whole social

framework when a proclamation of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, in

the year 303, declared that the Christian Faith should cease to exist. How

entirely that faith had now penetrated all ranks was shown in Diocletian’s

own household, wherein his most trusted(307) chamberlains, beloved as his

children, were cruelly tortured because they refused to worship the

heathen gods, while his wife Prisca and his daughter Valeria purchased

immunity for the present by compliance. We have the emperor described by

an eye-witness of those times as himself sitting in judgment,(308) and

putting men to the torture of fire. The same power was delegated to the

governors throughout the provinces. “It was,” says Eusebius, “the

nineteenth year of Diocletian’s reign, in the month of March, when the

festival of the Lord’s Passion was drawing near, that imperial edicts were

everywhere published, ordering the churches to be levelled, the scriptures

to be burnt, those of rank to be deprived of it, the common people, if

they remained faithful, to be reduced to slavery. This was the first edict

against us; another soon came enjoining that all those who ruled the

churches should first be imprisoned, and then by every means compelled to

sacrifice.”(309) Lactantius adds that every action at law was to proceed

against Christians, while they should not be allowed to claim the law for

any wrong inflicted, or spoliation suffered, or dishonour done to their

wives.(310) Many in consequence of these edicts suffered willingly

terrible torments: many others at first gave way. What these torments were

Eusebius describes: some were beaten; some torn with hooks.(311) “It is

impossible to say how many and how great martyrs of Christ might be seen

in every city and country.” A man of the highest rank in Nicomedia from an

impulse of zeal when the edict first appeared tore it down: he was seized,

and not merely tortured but slowly roasted alive,(312) which he bore with

unflinching patience, preserving joyousness and tranquillity to his last

breath. The emperors polluted the provinces subject to them, by the

slaughter of men and women who worshipped God, as if it had been in a

civil war, with the exception of Constantius,(313) who ruled the Gauls and

Britain, and preserved his soul pure from this stain. But it was so much

worse than a war in which the conquered have only to suffer servitude or

at most death, whereas in this case what was committed against those who

refused to do wrong passes all description. They used against them every

imaginable torture, and thought it little to slay those whom they hated,

unless by cruelty having first exposed their bodies to mockery. If they

could persuade, by terror, any to violate the faith to which they were

bound, and to agree to the fatal sacrifice, these they praised and with

their honours destroyed, but on the others they exhausted the whole

ingenuity of their butchery, calling them desperate as disregarding their

own body.(314) For two years the whole Roman world ruled by Diocletian,

Maximian, and Galerius was exposed to this misery: when on the retirement

of Diocletian and Maximian in 305 Galerius became the chief emperor, the

persecution continued in all its intensity, save in the territory subject

to Constantius. “It is impossible to describe the individual scenes which

took place throughout the world. The several governors having received

their commission carried it out according to their own ferocity. Some

through excess of fear did more than their orders; some were inspired by

personal enmity; some by natural cruelty; some sought to advance

themselves; some were precipitate in the work of destruction, as one in

Phrygia,”(315) where, says Eusebius, the soldiers surrounded a Christian

town and burnt it with all its inhabitants, “men, women, and children

calling upon the name of Christ, the God of all.”(316) “And in devising

various kinds of tortures they aim at gaining a victory. They are well

aware that it is a struggle between champions. I myself saw in Bithynia a

governor beside himself in joy, as if he had subdued some barbarous

nation, because one who for two years had with great virtue resisted was

seen to fail. They inflict therefore exquisite pains, only avoiding to put

the tortured to death, as if it were only death that made them blessed,

and not likewise those torments which in proportion to their severity

produce a greater glory by the virtue which they exhibit.”(317)

Eusebius declares that such cruelties were perpetrated not for a short

time, but during several years; that ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, and as

many as a hundred men, women, and children would be slain in a day by

various tortures. “When I was in Egypt myself I saw a crowd in one day,

some beheaded, some burnt; with my own eyes I beheld the marvellous

ardour, the truly divine virtue and alacrity of those who believed in

Christ. Scarcely was sentence passed against the first, when a fresh

number hastened before the tribunal, professing themselves Christians:

with joy, gaiety, and smiles they received the award of death, singing

hymns, and returning thanks to their last breath.”(318)

Among those distinguished for their learning in all Grecian studies, and

for the universal honour in which they had been held, Eusebius mentions

especially a bishop of Thmuis named Phileas. While he lay in prison under

sentence of death, which was afterwards executed by beheading, he wrote a

letter to his people, detailing the scenes in which he bore a part. This

letter the historian has happily preserved for us. “Inasmuch,” he says,

“as the holy scriptures presented us with so many fair ensamples and

lessons, the blessed martyrs who are with me felt no hesitation. They

fixed their mind’s eye steadily upon the God of all, formed the conception

of death suffered for piety’s sake, and clung firmly to that to which they

were called. For they knew that our Lord Jesus Christ had become man for

our sakes in order to cut up all sin by the root, and to supply us with

food on that journey by which we enter into eternal life. For He thought

it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied Himself by taking the

form of a slave, and being found in fashion as a man humbled Himself to

death, and that death the cross. Hence it was that the martyrs, bearing

Christ within them, in their zeal for the greater gifts endured every

suffering and all the various inventions of torture not once, but some of

them a second time, and all the threats of their guards, which did not

stop with words in their zeal to overcome them, without their resolution

being broken, because perfect charity casts out fear. What words can I

find to enumerate their virtue and their endurance in each particular

trial? Since they were left exposed to anyone’s outrage, some being struck

with clubs, others with rods, others with scourges, some with lashes, some

with ropes. The sight of the tortures presented every variety, but great

suffering throughout. These with hands bound behind them were distended on

the wood, and had every limb stretched by machinery; and thus their

tormentors by command attacked the whole body, tearing them not on the

sides alone as murderers are treated, but on the stomach, the knees, and

the cheeks. Others were hung by one hand from the portico, and this

tension of the sinews and limbs caused a more terrible pain than any.

Others were bound to pillars face to face, the feet not reaching the

ground, but the weight of the body tightening the bonds, and this they

suffered not during the time of examination only, or while the governor

was engaged with them, but almost the whole day. For when he went to

others, he left his officers watching over these, to see if the extremity

of torture should cause any to give way: and he charged them to be bound

without mercy, but when at their last gasp to be let down and dragged

along the ground. For he said that no account at all was to be taken of

us, but we were to be both reputed and treated as non-existent. This last

was a second torture which they superadded to their blows. There were

those also who after their tortures were put in the stocks with their feet

distended to the fourth hole, where they must needs lie down, not being

able to hold themselves up through their wounds gaping over the whole

body. Others flung on the pavement lay there through the repeated violence

of their racking, the many signs of suffering over their body presenting a

more fearful spectacle to those who looked on than the racking itself.

Thus treated, some died under the torture, putting their adversary to

shame by their endurance; some shut up in prison half-dead, after a few

days expired through the extremity of their pains; the rest having

treatment applied became still more resolute through the time spent in

prison. And so when the choice was presented to them either to touch the

abominable sacrifice, and depart unmolested, gaining by this course an

execrable deliverance, or, not sacrificing, to receive sentence of death,

without any doubt they joyfully went to death. For they knew what the

sacred writings enjoin: ‘he that sacrifices to other gods shall be rooted

out,’ and ‘thou shalt have no other gods but me.’ ”(319)

This may suffice as a specimen of what was done during a course of years

throughout the dominion of Galerius, Maximin, and Maxentius. It is in this

persecution especially that the virgin martyrs suffered the extremity of

the heathen malignity in the threatened loss of that purity which they

valued more than life. And here a fellow-Christian at Alexandria

disguising himself as a soldier was to S. Theodora the guardian which her

angel himself became to S. Agnes at Rome. In this persecution also S.

Vincent repeats in Spain the trial and the triumph of S. Laurence at Rome.

The authentic account of his martyrdom shows the utmost point to which the

most ingenious and the most ferocious cruelty could reach on the one side,

and the most enduring patience on the other. But the numberless details

concerning the sufferings of this time preserved to us show that it was

indeed a conflict prolonged during eight years, in which the Roman state

put forth the utmost strength which unlimited power guided by unhesitating

cruelty could exert to destroy the Christian Church and name.

At the end of this time the conflict was terminated by the Emperor

Galerius, the chief mover of the whole persecution, being struck by a

mortal disease, in which reduced to impotence by his sufferings he

withdrew his edicts against the Christian Faith. One after another the

persecuting emperors are taken away by death. Constantine inheriting his

father’s justice towards Christians, and preserving them in his own

territory from these outrages, gradually appears as their champion. It is

when advancing to Rome against Maxentius that he sees in the Cross the

token of victory over all enemies: enrolling it on his banner he rules

with Licinius the Roman world, and by a decree issued at Milan in 313

assures to all Christians the free exercise of their religion.

In the year 64 Nero had declared by initiating a persecution against

Christians that their religion was illicit, and fell under the ban of the

old Roman laws which forbade the exercise of any worship not approved by

the senate. From that time down to the edict of Constantine no Christian

could stand before a Roman tribunal plainly avowing his faith in one God

and one Christ without incurring the liability of capital punishment. In

this period of two hundred and forty-eight years it is true that there

were intervals of comparative peace when the emperors did not themselves

call into action the laws against Christians. During the whole second

century there would seem to be no emperor who set himself to destroy the

Christian name and people as a whole. In the time of Commodus it was even

forbidden to accuse a Christian of his religion; yet even then, if the

accusation was made and proved, it was a capital offence, followed, and

that too in the case of a senator after defence before the senate, by the

infliction of the penalty. Alexander Severus is the first of whom it is

said that “he suffered the Christians to be;” Philip also favoured them;

so again Valerian at first; Gallienus gave back their churches; Diocletian

trusted them and filled his palace with them: but no one of these emperors

ventured to declare the Christian religion to be according to the laws of

Rome a “licit” religion, and no one therefore enabled Christians to avow

it without danger of suffering. The most favourable suspended the action

of the laws either by positive edict, or by letting it be understood that

they did not wish Christians to be disturbed. A change either of the

ruler, or of the ruler’s inclination, as was seen in the cases of

Valerian, Aurelian, and Diocletian, induced at once that full state of

penality under which Christianity was as much forbidden as homicide or

treason, and in virtue of which Roman magistrates could as little refuse

to judge the crime of being a Christian as those other crimes. Thus it is

that we find martyrdoms assigned to times at which there is not known to

have been any general persecution: and in unnumbered cases Christians won

their crown through private enmity or local tumults, when any one of the

thousand motives which awaken ill-will was sufficient to cause an appeal

to that great and unchanged enemy, the Law of Rome, which proscribed them.

To Constantine belongs the glory of having removed this enemy. He made the

profession of Christianity no longer a crime. He accomplished that which

Justin and Tertullian and every Christian apologist had asked for in vain,

that every Christian in the Roman empire might profess and practise the

Christian Faith without suffering punishment for it.

CHAPTER XIII. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY. PART I.

_Socrates._ It is, then, necessary to wait until we learn how we

ought to be disposed towards gods and men.

_Alcibiades._ But when, Socrates, will that time arrive? and who

shall teach us it? For it seems to me that I should with the

greatest pleasure see that man.

_Socrates._ It is he who cares for thee.(320)

_Second Alcib._ § 22.

In the three preceding chapters we have witnessed a great spectacle, a

spectacle in all history unique and without a rival, the encounter, that

is, with the forces of the great world-empire of a voluntary society which

bears in its bosom and propagates a body of truth, and this encounter

carried on without respite during ten generations of men. The elements of

this conflict are, on the one side, power, throned in civilisation, and

defended by that sword before which nothing hitherto had stood; on the

other, a belief testified by suffering and patience, but which moreover

appears only as the possession of a society which is itself dropped as a

seed into the earth’s bosom and silently fills its expanse. Attention must

now be called to another aspect of the same encounter. Rome, as we have

said, preëminently wielded power; not the power of her legions only,

immense as that was, but the power of her laws, and the power of that

many-sided and as it seemed triumphant all-embracing civilisation, of

which she was the golden head. The mind however, the thought of the world

which she ruled, belonged to the great Hellenic race: and it remains to

consider what contest this mind waged with the truth which the Christian

Church sustained and suffered for. The sword hews away limbs; the fire

destroys bodies; and the martyrs offered freely their limbs and their

bodies to sword and flame. But the martyrs were inspired with a mind; they

carried Christ in them; and a mind too was opposed to theirs; the mind

which animated that ancient civilisation; the mind which had erected such

shrines as Diana of Ephesus and the Parthenon at Athens; the mind which

dictated the laws of Solon and Lycurgus; the mind which taught in the

Academus, the Lyceum, the Portico, and the Garden; the mind which built

Alexandria for the world’s emporium and university, and raised Antioch to

be the gorgeous throne of eastern magnificence. We have to consider how

this heathen mind encountered the Christian; in short, how, “after that in

the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased Him through

the folly of Christian preaching to save those that believed.”(321) Let us

trace the encounter of heathen wisdom—that is, Philosophy—with Christian

wisdom, that is, the truth of a God incarnate and crucified, with all its

consequences, as upborne by the Christian Church and planted among men.

Now the system of polytheistic worship which was then in possession of the

Græco-Roman world had been subjected for many ages to all the analytic

power of human reason as exercised by the most gifted of races which have

hitherto embodied their genius in a corresponding civilisation. The

philosophy of Greece is in fact such an analysis, and the rise of this

philosophy is carried back by the ablest inquirers to the time of Thales

and Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ, In the beautiful

climate of Ionia and Southern Italy there arose at this time men who

attempted by the efforts of their own reason to form a physical and a

moral theory of the world which surrounded them. Philosophy is not merely

thought, but methodical thinking, thinking consciously directed upon the

knowledge of things in their connection with each other. Nor is it content

merely with the collecting of observations and the knowledge so derived,

but proceeds to gather the individual instances into a whole, to draw to a

centre what was scattered, and to form a view of the world resting upon

clear conceptions and at unity with itself.(322) This was the nature of

that work which Thales and Pythagoras commenced. Let us give a glance at

the race which bore them, and of which they were representative men.

This race had dwelt for some ages in Greece, and from thence occupied by

emigration the shores of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Southern Italy, with a

part of Africa. Pythagoras, the father of Italian philosophy, had migrated

from Samos to Crotona, having visited Egypt, examined and gathered from

all the stores of its knowledge. A century later Herodotus, the father of

Greek history, migrated likewise from his country Halicarnassus, and after

spending many years in extensive travels through Egypt and Western Asia

settled at Thurii. In the succeeding century Plato travelled in like

manner with similar purposes. He was familiar with Sicily as with his own

Attica, not to speak of Egypt or Phœnicia. These three great men,

Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato, are specimens herein of the cultured

Greek, the gentleman, as we should call him. Thus though Greece proper was

a very small country, the whole region from middle Italy, including

Sicily, and the rich coast-land of Northern Africa from Carthage to Egypt,

with again Phœnicia and Syria, and the continent to the depth of perhaps a

hundred miles round the three sides of Asia Minor watered by the sea, were

in a larger sense the Greek’s country, a field of Grecian thought, and

enterprise, and observation, a sphere in which his mind was enlarged, and

his judgment of men and things matured.(323) Generally speaking these

regions were singularly favoured as to richness of soil and convenience of

situation. Herodotus himself has marked the climate of Ionia as the most

beautiful and best-tempered of the earth; and with a far wider knowledge

of its regions we should not venture to dispute the justness of his

remark. Some modern writers are wont to dwell on the effect which climate

exercises upon man’s mind. However this may be, it is certain that the

race whose energies were diffused over this region was most highly gifted

with natural endowments. When out of the world which Christianity has

mainly formed, and from the bosom of nations which have grown through the

struggle of a thousand years, and with perpetual competition among each

other, into a rich civilisation, we look back on that ancient and simpler

world, we find in Hellenism the most perfect expression of the natural

man, as a plastic, artistic, poetical, philosophical, and generally

intellectual race, wherein matter was most completely permeated by mind.

The language which they used even yet presents a very perfect image of

such a race, as not being formed from the corruption of other idioms, but

a mother tongue, the most brilliant of the Aryan sisters. In its union of

strength with beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense, in its power

to convey the most subtle distinctions of philosophic thought, or the most

radiant images of sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations of law, or

the tenderest dreams of romance, it was well calculated to be the organ of

a people wherein bodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated.

The language which we use ourselves is full of nerve and vigor, with a

certain northern force and a habit of appropriating the material stores of

other languages by incorporating their words, which suits well the

descendants of sea-kings, who have provinces all over the world; but it is

without inflexions, deprived of cases and genders, defective in marking

time, whereas the Greek in all these is most rich and flexible: the one

resembles the torso of a Hercules without its limbs, the other an Apollo

as he touches the earth in his perfect symmetry. Then compare its sound

with that of the old Hellenic tongue, and we seem to hear the poet’s

“stridor ferri tractæque catenæ,” beside the voice of a lute; while as to

texture, it is like the train of a railway matched with the golden

network, fine as the spider’s web, indissoluble as adamant, which the poet

feigns to have been wrought by Vulcan: the English imprisons thought in a

rude and cumbrous iron, while the Greek exhibits it in a rich and ductile

gold. As was the language, so was the people. Fond of society and

intercourse, skilful, crafty, commercial, enterprising, with a most human

and genial intellect, with a keen and critical judgment, and a vivid

imagination. When such a race turned itself to a scientific consideration

of the world, it might well produce what we are now to pass in review, the

Greek philosophy.

And here it is well to lay down first the standing-point of the Greek

mind. The Hellenic religion was a natural religion, inasmuch as according

to it man had no need to raise himself above the surrounding world and his

own nature in order to connect himself with the Deity. As he was

originally constituted, he felt himself related to it: no inward change in

his mode of thought, no struggle with his natural impulses and

inclinations, was required of him for this purpose. All that to him was

humanly natural seemed to him to have its justification in regard to the

Deity likewise; and so the most godlike man was he who worked out most

completely his powers as man, and the essence of religious duty consisted

in that man should do for the honour of the Deity what is in accordance

with his own nature.(324)

But this natural religion of the Greeks differed from that of others in

that neither outward nature as such, nor the sensuous being of man as

such, but human nature in its beauty, as illumined by mind, is its point

of excellence. The Greek did not, like the Eastern, lose his independence

before the powers of nature, nor revel like the northern savage in

boundless liberty, but in the full consciousness of his freedom saw its

highest fulfilment in obedience to the general order as the law of his own

nature. And as the purely Grecian deities are the ideals of human

activity, he thus stands to them in a calm and free relation, such as no

other nation of antiquity felt, because they are the mirror of his own

being, but his being exalted, so that he is drawn to them without

purchasing this at the cost of the pain and toil of an inward

struggle.(325)

How the features of his own land served to image out to his fancy the

Greek’s religious attitude a poet has told us in exquisite verses, worthy

of the beauty which they describe; the apotheosis of nature.

“Where are the Islands of the Blest?

They stud the Ægean sea;

And where the deep Elysian rest?

It haunts the vale where Peneus strong

Pours his incessant stream along,

While craggy ridge and mountain bare

Cut keenly through the liquid air,

And in their own pure tints arrayed,

Scorn earth’s green robes which change and fade,

And stand in beauty undecayed,

Guards of the bold and free.”(326)

It seems to me essential to bear in mind throughout our whole inquiry this

standing-point of the Greek mind, because through all the succession of

schools and the fluctuation of doctrines, it remains, so to say, the

ground-work on which they are embroidered. It is the very texture of

Hellenic thought upon which first Pythagoras, then Plato, Aristotle,

Epicurus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Panætius, and even Plotinus and Porphyrius spin

their web. They vary the decoration, but the substance remains unaltered.

This standing-point rules the conception of virtue, and therefore of the

whole moral world. It reaches also to the final end of man, and determines

it.

Moreover as the intellectual power of man seems to have culminated in the

Hellenic race, so it would seem that a state of things existed among that

people which left the human reason practically more to its own unaided

resources than we find to have been the case elsewhere. No doubt the Greek

mind had lived and brooded for ages upon the remains of original

revelation, nor can any learning now completely unravel the interwoven

threads of tradition and reason so as to distinguish their separate work.

However, it is certain that in the sixth century before Christ the Greeks

were without a hierarchy, and without a definite theology: not indeed

without individual priesthoods, traditionary rites, and an existing

worship, as well as certain mysteries which professed to communicate a

higher and more recondite doctrine than that exposed to the vulgar gaze.

But in the absence of any hierarchy holding this priesthood together, and

teaching anything like a specific doctrine about divine and human things,

a very large range indeed was given to the mind, acting upon this shadowy

religious belief, and reacted upon by it, to form their philosophy. The

Greeks did not, any more than antiquity in general, use the acts of

religious service for instruction by religious discourse.(327) In other

words, there was no such thing as preaching among them. A domain therefore

was open to the philosopher on which he might stand without directly

impeaching the ancestral worship, while he examined its grounds, and

perhaps sapped its foundations. He was therein taking up a position which

their priests, the civil functionaries of religious rites scarcely any

longer retaining a spiritual meaning or a moral cogency, had not occupied.

Thus it was that in the midst of a people who worshipped traditionally a

multitude of gods and goddesses, such as we have them exhibited in the

Homeric and Hesiodic poems, the chief, perhaps the only, and the yet

unwritten literature of that day, beings with a personal character and

will, who were supposed to divide the government of the world between

them, with a more or less recognised sovereignty of one chief, arose men

who set themselves by the light of reason to think steadily and

continuously how that world in which they were living had become what it

was. Such a movement of mind indicated in itself dissatisfaction with the

existing religion, wherein the gods were considered the causes of things,

and their wills the rulers of them, though in the background even here

loomed the idea of fate, the representative, as it were, of brute matter,

from which the Greek mind could never disengage itself. Yet we do not find

that these philosophers set themselves openly to attack the existing

religion; rather leaving it in possession, and themselves usually

complying with its forms, they pursued their own train of thought, as it

were by its side, not choosing to look whither it would lead them.

Such very much appears the position of inquirers in the first period of

Greek philosophy, which is generally made to extend from its rise under

Thales to the time of the Sophists and Socrates. Their thoughts were

mainly occupied with the appearances of the physical world: they

speculated how it could have arisen. Thus Thales, we are told, imagined

its first principle to be water; Anaximander, boundless matter;

Anaximenes, air; the Pythagoreans said, all is number; the Eleatic school,

all is the one unchangeable being.(328) On the contrary Heracleitus

conceived the one Being as ever in motion, involved in perpetual change:

in accordance with which he nowhere finds true knowledge, and thinks the

mass of men have no understanding for eternal truth.(329) Empedocles of

Agrigentum sets forth the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, as

the material principles or roots of things, attaching to these two ideal

principles as moving forces, Love as the unitive, and Hatred as the

severing.(330) Anaxagoras, over and above mechanical causes, to which he

limited himself in the explanation of everything in particular, recognises

a divine spirit, which as the finest of all things is simple, unmixed,

passionless reason, which came upon chaos, forming and ordering the world

out of it.(331) Democritus of Abdera takes for his principles the Full and

the Empty, identifying these with Being and Non-being, or Something and

Nothing. His Full consists of indivisible atoms.(332)

The remarkable thing about all these systems, if we may so call them, is,

that while the existing popular religion teemed over, so to say, with the

idea of a number of personal agents directing human things, these

philosophers nearly all concurred in the attempt to find some one agent,

and that material, from which all should spring. As yet even the radical

distinction of matter and spirit was not clear to their minds:(333) the

soul of the individual man was to them merely a particle of the vital

power which disclosed itself through the universe, the purest portion, but

a portion still, of primal matter. In their conception of the constituent

cause while they advanced towards unity they receded from personality.

Even the world-forming Intelligence of Anaxagoras, who first distinctly

declares that spirit is not mixed with matter, works only as a power of

nature, and is portrayed to us in a semi-sensuous form, as a finer

matter.(334)

After Greek philosophy had run out during about a hundred and fifty years

in this sort of vague and imaginative speculation upon the physical world,

it underwent a great change, which marks the transition to its second

period. These successive opinions of philosophers led a class of men who

arose at Athens about the middle age of Socrates to the conclusion, that

it would be more profitable to turn the course of human thought from such

cosmological reveries to the question of the perception itself of truth by

man. He who accomplished this was Socrates, who turned his reflexion by

preference upon man himself as the subject who thinks and wills.(335) And

herein his character had an influence over Greek philosophy which is

strikingly marked through the whole of its second period. This period

embraces the Sophists, Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle, and the

Stoics and Epicureans; finally those Sceptic and Eclectic schools which

rose naturally from the criticism detecting what is untenable in preceding

systems. During the six hundred years which elapse from the teaching

career of Socrates to the death of Marcus Antoninus we may say that one

great line of inquiry occupied among philosophers the human mind; it was

man himself, as the subject of logical thought and moral will.(336) The

chief endeavour was to form a science of ethics, and a science of

reasoning, to which physical and mathematical studies, though at times

warmly pursued and never wholly neglected, were yet subordinate.(337)

Who is this man of singular ugliness, with a face like a Silenus, with a

body enduring hunger and impervious to heat and cold, who for thirty years

frequents from morning to night the agora, the streets, the porticoes of

Athens; who can drain the wine-cup through the night, and with reason

unimpaired discuss philosophy through the following day; never alone,

ready to converse with all in whom he discerned the germ of inquiry; who

neither courts the high nor despises the low, but beside whom may be found

the reckless beauty of Alcibiades and the staid gravity of Nicias, the

admiring gaze of Plato even in youth majestic, and the sober homage of

plainer Xenophon? Who is this, the man most social of men where the whole

population is a club, the club of Athenian citizenship; whose tongue

arrests the most volatile and inconstant of peoples; whose reason attracts

and by turns draws out or silences the most opposite of characters; whose

whole life is publicity; of spirit at once homely and subtle, simple and

critical, parent both of philosophic certitude and philosophic scepticism?

This is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, to whom Greek philosophy will

look back as on one that had given its bent and directed its course during

a thousand years, until the last of its defenders(338) will fight a

hopeless battle with triumphant Christianity, as the gods of Greece

vanish, never more to return, and the lurid star of a false prophet

teaching a false monotheism appears above the horizon, and takes the

place, which they have left vacant, to be chief foe of the Christian name.

The special principle of Socrates is thus described to us by an historian

of Greek philosophy.(339) “It is not merely an already existing mode of

thought which was further developed by Socrates, but an essentially new

principle and proceeding which were introduced into philosophy. Whilst all

preceding philosophy had been directed immediately on the object, so that

the question of the essence and grounds of natural appearances is in it

the radical question, on which all others depend, Socrates was the first

to give utterance to the conviction that nothing can be known respecting

anything which meets our thought, before its general essence, its

conception, be determined: that accordingly the trial of our own

representations by the standard of the conception is philosophical

self-cognition, the beginning and the condition of all true knowing:

whilst those who preceded him had arrived through the consideration of

things only to distinguishing between the representation of things and the

knowing of them, he, reversing this, makes all cognition of things

dependent on the right view of the nature of knowledge.”

Another(340) says: “It is stated in Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_(341) that

Socrates introduced the method of Induction and Definition, which proceeds

from the individual to the determination of the conception. Aristotle

marks(342) the domain of ethics as that on which Socrates applied this

method. According to him the fundamental view of Socrates was the

indivisible unity of theoretical prudence and practical ability on ethical

ground. Socrates conceived all the virtues to be prudences, inasmuch as

they are sciences.(343) These statements are fully borne out by the

portraits of Xenophon and Plato: Aristotle has only given point to their

expression. Thus Xenophon says,(344) ‘he was ever conversing about human

things, inquiring what was piety and what impiety; what honour and what

turpitude; what just and what unjust; what sobermindedness and what

madness; what courage and what cowardice; what policy and what politician;

what the government of men and who capable of it; and suchlike things; and

those who knew these he esteemed men of honour and goodness, those who

knew them not to be justly called of servile mind.’ ‘Never did he cease

inquiring with those who frequented him about what everything was.’(345)

‘And he did not distinguish between wisdom and temperance, but he asserted

that justice and every other virtue was wisdom.’(346) With this view hang

together the convictions that virtue can be taught, that all virtue in

truth is only one, and that no one is willingly wicked, but only through

ignorance.(347) The good is identical with the beautiful and the

expedient. Right dealing, grounded upon prudence and practice, is better

than good fortune. Self-knowledge, the fulfilment of the Delphic Apollo’s

injunction, ‘Know thyself,’ is the condition of practical ability.

External goods do not advance. To need nothing is godlike; to need the

least possible comes nearest to the divine perfection.(348) Cicero’s

well-known expression is substantially correct,(349) that Socrates called

down philosophy from heaven to earth, introduced it into cities and

houses, and required it to study life, morals, goods and evils, which

constituted a progress from the natural philosophy pursued by his

predecessors to ethics whose province is man. But Socrates possessed no

complete system of ethical doctrines, but only the mainspring of inquiry;

and so it was natural that he could only reach definite ethical statements

in conversation with others. Thus his art was Mental Midwifery,(350) as

Plato designates it. His confessed non-knowledge, resting on the firm

consciousness of the essence of true knowledge, stood higher than the

imagined knowledge of those who conversed with him; and to it was attached

the Socratic Irony; that apparent recognition which is paid to the

superior wisdom and prudence of another until this is dissolved into its

nothingness by the dialectic examination which measures what is maintained

as a generalisation by the fixed point of the particular case. Thus it was

that Socrates exercised the charge of examining men,(351) which he was

convinced had been imposed upon him by the Delphic god in the oracle

elicited by Chærepho, that he was the wisest of men.”

The opinion, practice, and teaching of Socrates concerning the gods and

the godhead are set forth most graphically by his disciple Xenophon in two

chapters of his _Memorabilia_. Scarcely could a Christian moralist exhibit

more lucidly the argument from design in proof of a divine Providence

which has formed and which rules the world; more than this, which has

produced the seasons of the year, the plants, the animals, for the good of

man. In the eyes of Socrates the human body itself is a never-failing

proof of the divine love of man. He details the wisdom with which it is

put together, and forces the opponent, who is introduced as not

sacrificing, nor praying to the gods, nor believing in divination, to

confess: “When I consider this, assuredly these things seem the device of

some wise world-maker, the lover of living things.”(352) Another he

compels by a long enumeration of divine benefits to man to come to a

similar conclusion.(353) “Certainly, Socrates, the gods seem to have a

great care for men. Besides, he replies, when we cannot foresee in the

future what is good for us, they help us by revealing through divination

what is to come, and instructing us as to the best course. Nay, Socrates,

rejoins the other, they seem to treat you even more kindly than other men;

for without being asked by you they signify before to you what you should

do and what leave undone. That I say true, answers Socrates, even you, O

Euthydemus, will acknowledge, if you do not wait until you see the forms

of the gods, but are contented, when you behold their works, to worship

and honour them. And consider that the gods themselves point this out to

you: for not only do the rest of them, when they give us good things, not

exhibit themselves to our senses in so doing, but he(354) who coördinates

and holds together the whole universe, in whom are all beautiful and good

things, and who provides them for the perpetual use of men free from

waste, disease, and old age, so that they help us unfailingly, quicker

than thought, is discerned in the greatness of his operations, but while

he administers these to us, is himself invisible. And take thought that

the sun, who seems to be manifest to all, allows not men to examine him

closely, but should anyone attempt to look at him shamelessly, takes away

his sight. And the ministers of the gods too you will find evading our

senses; the lightning shoots from on high, and is master wherever it

alights, but is seen neither in its approach, nor in its stroke, nor in

its departure. The winds themselves are invisible, but their works are

manifest, and we feel them as they come. Nay and man’s soul too, or if

there be anything else in man participating the divine, manifestly rules

in us as a king, but is not seen. Bearing in thought these things we must

not despise the invisible, but learning their power by their results,

honour that which is divine.(355) Indeed, Socrates, says Euthydemus, for

my part I am quite resolved not the least to neglect what is divine; but

my trouble is, that it seems to me that no single man can ever be duly

thankful for the kindnesses of the gods. Do not let this trouble you,

Euthydemus, for you see the god at Delphi, when anyone asks him how to be

grateful to the gods, answers, By your country’s law. Now it is surely law

everywhere to please the gods by sacrifices, as best you can. How then can

anyone honour the gods better or more piously than by doing what

themselves bid? Only we must not be behind our power: for anyone who is so

behind surely is manifest therein as not honouring the gods. Our duty is

to honour them to the utmost of our power, and then to take heart and hope

from them, the greatest goods: for a man cannot show a sound mind in

hoping from others greater goods than from those who have the power to

give the greatest aid; nor from those in any other way than by pleasing

them. And how can one better please them than by the most unfailing

obedience to them? Now by saying such things, and himself doing them, he

was ever bringing those who were in intercourse with him to piety and a

sound mind.”

The last words of this man to his judges were: “And now it is time that we

depart, I to death, and you to life; but which of us are going unto the

better thing is not clear to anyone save to God.”(356) And when the

hemlock was reaching his heart,(357) he uncovered his head, and said with

his last utterance, “O Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius: pay it, and do

not neglect it.”

I have cited at length these passages because I think that they exhibit

clearly the opinions and convictions of Socrates on the most important of

all subjects. We behold here a man of a very religious mind, holding with

the utmost tenacity the idea of a Providence, the Benefactor of men and

their Judge, since it discriminates between them by reward and punishment:

nor is it an impersonal Providence, an abstract Reason, but “a wise

world-maker,” who loves man and does him good, and whose operations in

this very purpose of doing him good indicate unity of design and

perfection of execution: and yet in his conception of the godhead itself

he halts between unity and plurality, and beside a statement such as we

might read in a Pauline epistle of the one God who orders in harmony the

universe and holds it together, we find him passing to the recognition and

worship of many gods: beside words to his judges most sublime and most

pathetic, concerning the issue of life and of death, we find him with his

last breath directing his friend to discharge the sacrifice of a cock

which he had promised to Æsculapius. He does not attempt to solve either

the rational or the moral antagonism between many gods and one; but

practically he throws himself into the worship of his country, referring

to the law of each place as that which should determine for ever man the

question how the gods are to be honoured. And in this I believe that he is

typical of the whole race of philosophers at whose head he stands. Like

him they spoke of one God, and they offered the cock to Æsculapius. If we

seek the highest expressions concerning the divine unity, wisdom, and

power which are to be found in their writings, they approach S. Paul: if

we consider other expressions, and above all, their practice, it is in the

main that other word of Socrates, Worship according to the law of your

country. In the doctrine attributed to him both by Xenophon and Aristotle,

that he identified virtue and prudence, and believed that no man is

willingly wicked, but only out of ignorance, we have a proof which can

scarcely be exceeded in force how entirely the standing-point of Socrates

was that above attributed to the Greek mind in general, that of a religion

according to nature. It ignores in the most emphatic because in the most

unconscious way the inclination to evil in man. The relation between God

and man is simply that of greater and less. There is a physical affinity

and a numerical proportion between that mighty nature which is ruled

through all its length and breadth by a pervading reason, and the portion

of it contained in man’s body and soul.(358)

It is curious to imagine what would have been the effect of the life and

the death of Socrates had he lived and died just as he did with one sole

exception, that Plato and Xenophon had not been his disciples. Socrates

wrote nothing: oral discourse was his sole instrument of teaching. When

its last memories had faded away, we might have known as little of him as

we really know of Pythagoras. He would still indeed have been the greatest

of heathen names because he died for his moral convictions. This might

have been all, and it would have been very much. This, however, was not to

be. In Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_ we have an accurate life-portrait of the

man, while in the great genius of Plato we have the application of what

may be termed Socratic principles to the formation of an ethical, logical,

and physical system. The Megaric(359) school of Euclides, and Phædo’s

school of Elis, took indeed one side of his doctrine, the dialectic, for

their special subject of inquiry; the Cynic school of Antisthenes and the

Cyrenian school of Aristippus another side, the ethical: but it was Plato

who embraced in one comprehensive scheme the whole grasp of his master’s

thought, as well as the collective approved elements of former systems.

The principle of Socrates concerning the union of knowledge and virtue

invited his followers to work out a system of dialectics and ethics.(360)

And further the dialectic process of induction and definition, which

Aristotle tells us that Socrates introduced, was made by Plato the

foundation of his philosophy.(361) Its central point is the doctrine of

Ideas. Now the Platonic Idea is the object of the conception. As a single

object becomes known by its representation, so the Idea becomes known by

its conception. It is not the essence as such which dwells in many similar

individual objects, but that essence as represented perfectly in its kind,

unalterably, in unity, independence, and self-existence. The Idea points

to the general, but is represented by Plato as an original image of the

individual projected as it were outside of time and space. Conceive

individuals which have a similar being, or belong to the same class,

delivered from the limits of time and space, of materiality and individual

imperfections, and so reduced to that unity which is the groundwork of

their existence, and such unity is the Platonic Idea. The highest Idea is

the Idea of the good,(362) which is as it were the sun in the realm of

Ideas, viewed as the first cause of being and of knowledge. Plato seems to

identify it with the highest godhead. Thus the method to attain the

knowledge of Ideas is dialectics, which comprehend the double path of

rising to the general and returning from the general to the particular.

As to the generation(363) of the doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle states it as

the common product of the doctrine of Heracleitus that everything which

meets the senses is subject to change and flux, and of the Socratic view

of the conception. From Socrates Plato learnt that when once this is

rightly formed, it can be held fast unchangeably: he would not then apply

it to anything which meets the senses, but inferred that there must be

other beings which are the objects of the knowledge acquired by the

conception, and these objects he named Ideas. The filiation,(364) then,

between Socrates and Plato is this: Socrates was the first to require that

all knowledge and all moral dealing should proceed from the knowing of the

conception, and endeavoured to execute this by his inductive process,

while with Plato the same conviction formed the starting-point of a

philosophical system: so that what with Socrates was simply a rule of

scientific procedure was carried out by Plato to an objective intuition,

and when Socrates said, Only the knowing of the conception is true

knowledge, Plato added, Only the being of the conception is true being.