superstition; it was the imagination of the existence of an unseen
ever-present Master; the bondage of a rule of life, of a continual
responsibility; obligation to attend to little things, the impossibility
of escaping from duty, the inability to choose or change one's religion,
an interference with the enjoyment of life, a melancholy view of the
world, sense of sin, horror at guilt, apprehension of punishment, dread,
self-abasement, depression, anxiety, and endeavor to be at peace with
heaven, and error and absurdity in the methods chosen for the purpose.
Such, too, had been the idea of the Epicurean Velleius, when he shrunk
with horror from the "_sempiternus dominus_" and "_curiosus Deus_" of
the Stoics. Such, surely, was the meaning of Tacitus, Suetonius, and
Pliny. And hence, of course, the frequent reproach cast on Christians as
credulous, weak-minded, and poor-spirited. The heathen objectors in
Minucius and Lactantius speak of their "old-woman's tales." Celsus
accuses them of "assenting at random and without reason," saying, "Do
not inquire, but believe." "They lay it down," he says elsewhere: "Let
no educated man approach, no man of wisdom, no man of sense; but if a
man be unlearned, weak in intellect, an infant, let him come with
confidence. Confessing that these are worthy of their God, they
evidently desire, as they are able, to convert none but fools, and
vulgar, and stupid, and slavish, women and boys." They "take in the
simple and lead him where they will." They address themselves to
"youths, house-servants, and the weak in intellect." They "hurry away
from the educated, as not fit subjects of their imposition, and inveigle
the rustic." "Thou," says the heathen magistrate to the martyr
Fructuosus, "who as a teacher dost disseminate a new fable, that fickle
girls may desert the groves and abandon Jupiter, condemn, if thou art
wise, the anile creed."
Hence the epithets of itinerant, mountebank, conjurer, cheat, sophist,
and sorcerer, heaped upon the teachers of Christianity; sometimes to
account for the report or apparent truth of their miracles, sometimes to
explain their success. Our Lord was said to have learned his miraculous
power in Egypt; "wizard, mediciner, cheat, rogue, conjurer," were the
epithets applied to him by the opponents of Eusebius; they "worship that
crucified sophist," says Lucian; "Paul, who surpasses all the conjurers
and impostors who ever lived," is Julian's account of the apostle. "You
have sent through the whole world," says St. Justin to Trypho, "to
preach that a certain atheistic and lawless sect has sprung from one
Jesus, a Galilean cheat." "We know," says Lucian, speaking of Chaldæans
and magicians, "the Syrian from Palestine, who is the sophist in these
matters, how many lunatics, with eyes distorted and mouth in foam, he
raises and sends away restored, ridding them from the evil at a great
price." "If any conjurer came to them, a man of skill and knowing how to
manage matters," says the same writer, "he made money in no time, with a
broad grin at the simple fellows." The officer who had custody of St.
Perpetua feared her escape from prison "by magical incantations." When
St. Tiburtius had walked barefoot on hot coals, his judge cried out
that Christ had taught him magic. St. Anastasia was thrown into prison
as a mediciner; the populace called out against St. Agnes, "Away with
the witch," _Tolle magam, tolle maleficam_. When St. Bonosus and St.
Maximilian bore the burning pitch without shrinking, Jews and Gentiles
cried out, "_Isti magi et malefici_." "What new delusion," says the
heathen magistrate concerning St. Romanus, "has brought in these
sophists to deny the worship of the gods? How doth this chief sorcerer
mock us, skilled by his Thessalian charm (_carmine_) to laugh at
punishment!"
It explains the phenomenon, which has created so much surprise to
certain moderns--that a grave, well-informed historian like Tacitus
should apply to Christians what sounds like abuse. Yet what is the
difficulty, supposing that Christians were considered _mathematici_ and
_magi_, and these were the secret intriguers against established
government, the allies of desperate politicians, the enemies of the
established religion, the disseminators of lying rumors, the
perpetrators of poisonings and other crimes? "Read this," says Paley,
after quoting some of the most beautiful and subduing passages of St.
Paul, "read this, and then think of _exitiabilis superstitio_"; and he
goes on to express a wish "in contending with heathen authorities, to
produce our books against theirs," as if it were a matter of books.
Public men care very little for books; the finest sentiments, the most
luminous philosophy, the deepest theology, inspiration itself, moves
them but little; they look at facts, and care only for facts. The
question was, What was the worth, what the tendency of the Christian
body in the State? What Christians said, what they thought, was little
to the purpose. They might exhort to peaceableness and passive obedience
as strongly as words could speak; but what did they _do_, what was their
political position? This is what statesmen thought of then, as they do
now. What had men of the world to do with abstract proofs or first
principles? A statesman measures parties and sects and writers by their
bearing upon _him_; and he has a practised eye in this sort of judgment,
and is not likely to be mistaken. "'What is Truth?' said jesting
Pilate." Apologies, however eloquent or true, availed nothing with the
Roman magistrate against the sure instinct which taught him to dread
Christianity. It was a dangerous enemy to any power not built upon
itself; he felt it, and the event justified his apprehension.
We must not forget the well-known character of the Roman State in its
dealings with its subjects. It had had from the first an extreme
jealousy of secret societies; it was prepared to grant a large
toleration and a broad comprehension, but, as is the case with modern
governments, it wished to have jurisdiction and the ultimate authority
in every movement of the body politic and social, and its civil
institutions were based, or essentially depended, on its religion.
Accordingly, every innovation upon the established paganism, except it
was allowed by the law, was rigidly repressed. Hence the professors of
low superstitions, of mysteries, of magic, of astrology, were the
outlaws of society, and were in a condition analogous, if the comparison
may be allowed, to smugglers or poachers among ourselves, or perhaps to
burglars and highwaymen; for the Romans had ever burnt the sorcerer and
banished his consulters for life. It was an ancient custom. And at
mysteries they looked with especial suspicion, because, since the
established religion did not include them in its provisions, they really
did supply what may be called a demand of the age.
We know what opposition had been made in Rome even to the philosophy of
Greece; much greater would be the aversion of constitutional statesmen
and lawyers to the ritual of barbarians. Religion was the Roman point of
honor. "Spaniards might rival them in numbers," says Cicero, "Gauls in
bodily strength, Carthaginians in address, Greeks in the arts, Italians
and Latins in native talent, but the Romans surpassed all nations in
piety and devotion." It was one of their laws, "Let no one have gods by
himself, nor worship in private new gods nor adventitious, unless added
on public authority." Mæcenas in _Dio_ advises Augustus to honor the
gods according to the national custom, because the contempt of the
country's deities leads to civil insubordination, reception of foreign
laws, conspiracies, and secret meetings. "Suffer no one," he adds, "to
deny the gods or to practise sorcery." The civilian Julius Paulus lays
it down as one of the leading principles of Roman law, that those who
introduce new or untried religions should be degraded, and if in the
lower orders put to death. In like manner, it is enacted in one of
Constantine's laws that the haruspices should not exercise their art in
private; and there is a law of Valentinian's against nocturnal
sacrifices or magic. It is more immediately to our purpose that Trajan
had been so earnest in his resistance to _hetæriæ_ or secret societies,
that, when a fire had laid waste Nicomedia, and Pliny proposed to him to
incorporate a body of a hundred and fifty firemen in consequence, he was
afraid of the precedent and forbade it.
What has been said will suggest another point of view in which the
oriental rites were obnoxious to the government--namely, as being
vagrant and proselytizing religions. If it tolerated foreign
superstitions, this would be on the ground that districts or countries
within its jurisdiction held them; to proselytize to a rite hitherto
unknown, to form a new party, and to propagate it through the empire--a
religion not local, but catholic--was an offence against both order and
reason. The State desired peace everywhere, and no change;
"considering," according to Lactantius, "that they were rightly and
deservedly punished who execrated the public religion handed down to
them by their ancestors."
It is impossible, surely, to deny that, in assembling for religious
purposes, the Christians were breaking a solemn law, a vital principle
of the Roman constitution; and this is the light in which their conduct
was regarded by the historians and philosophers of the empire. This was
a very strong act on the part of the disciples of the great apostle, who
had enjoined obedience to the powers that be. Time after time they
resisted the authority of the magistrate; and this is a phenomenon
inexplicable on the theory of private judgment or of the voluntary
principle. The justification of such disobedience lies simply in the
necessity of obeying the higher authority of some divine law; but if
Christianity were in its essence only private and personal, as so many
now think, there was no necessity of their meeting together at all. If,
on the other hand, in assembling for worship and holy communion, they
were fulfilling an indispensable observance, Christianity has imposed a
social law on the world, and formally enters the field of politics.
Gibbon says that, in consequence of Pliny's edict, "the prudence of the
Christians suspended their _agapæ_; but it was _impossible_ for them to
omit the exercise of public worship." We can draw no other conclusion.
At the end of three hundred years a more remarkable violation of law
seems to have been admitted by the Christian body. It shall be given in
the words of Dr. Burton; he has been speaking of Maximin's edict, which
provided for the restitution of any of their lands or buildings which
had been alienated from them. "It is plain," he says, "from the terms of
this edict, that the Christians had for some time been in possession of
property. It speaks of houses and lands which did not belong to
individuals, but to the whole body. Their possession of such property
could hardly have escaped the notice of the government; but it seems to
have been held in direct violation of a law of Diocletian, which
prohibited corporate bodies or associations which were not legally
recognized, from acquiring property. The Christians were certainly not a
body recognized by law at the beginning of the reign of Diocletian, and
it might almost be thought that this enactment was specially directed
against them. But, like other laws which are founded upon tyranny, and
are at variance with the first principles of justice, it is probable
that this law about corporate property was evaded. We must suppose that
the Christians had purchased lands and houses before the law was passed;
and their disregard of the prohibition may be taken as another proof
that their religion had now taken so firm a footing that the executors
of the laws were obliged to connive at their being broken by so numerous
a body."
No wonder that the magistrate who presided at the martyrdom of St.
Romanus calls them in Prudentius "a rebel people"; that Galerius speaks
of them as "a nefarious conspiracy"; the heathen in Minucius, as "men of
a desperate faction"; that others make them guilty of sacrilege and
treason, and call them by those other titles which, more closely
resembling the language of Tacitus, have been noticed above. Hence the
violent accusations against them as the destructors of the empire, the
authors of physical evils, and the cause of the anger of the gods.
"Men cry out," says Tertullian, "that the State is beset, that the
Christians are in their fields, in their forts, in their islands. They
mourn as for a loss that every sex, condition, and now even rank is
going over to this sect. And yet they do not by this very means advance
their minds to the idea of some good therein hidden; they allow not
themselves to conjecture more rightly, they choose not to examine more
closely. The generality run upon a hatred of this name, with eyes so
closed that in bearing favorable testimony to anyone they mingle with it
the reproach of the name. 'A good man Caius Seius, only he is a
Christian.' So another, 'I marvel that that wise man Lucius Titius hath
suddenly become a Christian.' No one reflecteth whether Caius be not
therefore good and Lucius wise because a Christian, or therefore a
Christian because wise and good. They praise that which they know, they
revile that which they know not. Virtue is not in such account as hatred
of the Christians. Now, then, if the hatred be of the name, what guilt
is there in names? What charge against words? Unless it be that any word
which is a name have either a barbarous or ill-omened, or a scurrilous
or an immodest sound. If the Tiber cometh up to the walls, if the Nile
cometh not up to the fields, if the heaven hath stood still, if the
earth hath been moved, if there be any famine, if any pestilence, 'The
Christians to the lions' is forthwith the word."
"Men of a desperate, lawless, reckless faction," says the heathen
Cæcilius, in the passage above referred to, "who collect together out of
the lowest rabble the thoughtless portion, and credulous women seduced
by the weakness of their sex, and form a mob of impure conspirators, of
whom nocturnal assemblies and solemn fastings and unnatural food, no
sacred rite but pollution, is the bond. A tribe lurking and
light-hating, dumb for the public, talkative in corners, they despise
our temples as if graves, spit at our gods, deride our religious forms;
pitiable themselves, they pity, forsooth, our priests; half-naked
themselves, they despise our honors and purple; monstrous folly and
incredible impudence!... Day after day their abandoned morals wind their
serpentine course; over the whole world are those most hideous rites of
an impious association growing into shape;... they recognize each other
by marks and signs, and love each other almost before they recognize;
promiscuous lust is their religion. Thus does their vain and mad
superstition glory in crimes.... The writer who tells the story of a
criminal capitally punished, and of the gibbet (_ligna feralia_) of the
cross being their observance (_ceremonias_), assigns to them thereby an
altar in keeping with the abandoned and wicked, that they may worship
(_colant_) what they merit.... Why their mighty effort to hide and
shroud whatever it is they worship (_colunt_), since things honest ever
like the open day, and crimes are secret? Why have they no altars, no
temples, no images known to us, never speak abroad, never assemble
freely, were it not that what they worship and suppress is subject
either of punishment or of shame?
"What monstrous, what portentous notions do they fabricate! that that
God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see, should be inquiring
diligently into the characters, the acts--nay, the words and secret
thoughts of all men; running to and fro, forsooth, and present
everywhere, troublesome, restless--nay, impudently curious they would
have him; that is, if he is close at every deed, interferes in all
places, while he can neither attend to each as being distracted through
the whole, nor suffice for the whole as being engaged about each. Think,
too, of their threatening fire, meditating destruction to the whole
earth--nay, the world itself with its stars!... Nor content with this
mad opinion, they add and append their old wives' tales about a new
birth after death, ashes and cinders, and by some strange confidence
believe each other's lies.
"Poor creatures! consider what hangs over you after death, while you are
still alive. Lo, the greater part of you, the better, as you say, are in
want, cold, toil, hunger, and your God suffers it; but I omit common
trials. Lo, threats are offered to you, punishments, torments; crosses
to be undergone now, not worshipped (_adorandæ_); fires, too, which ye
predict and fear; where is that God who can recover, but cannot preserve
your life? The answer of Socrates, when he was asked about heavenly
matters, is well known: 'What is above us does not concern us.' My
opinion also is, that points which are doubtful, as are the points in
question, must be left; nor, when so many and such great men are in
controversy on the subject, must judgment be rashly and audaciously
given on either side, lest the consequence be either anile superstition
or the overthrow of all religion."
Such was Christianity in the eyes of those who witnessed its rise and
propagation--one of a number of wild and barbarous rites which were
pouring in upon the empire from the ancient realms of superstition, and
the mother of a progeny of sects which were faithful to the original
they had derived from Egypt or Syria; a religion unworthy of an educated
person, as appealing, not to the intellect, but to the fears and
weaknesses of human nature, and consisting, not in the rational and
cheerful enjoyment, but in a morose rejection of the gifts of
Providence; a horrible religion, as inflicting or enjoining cruel
sufferings, and monstrous and loathsome in its very indulgence of the
passions; a religion leading by reaction to infidelity; a religion of
magic, and of the vulgar arts, real and pretended, with which magic was
accompanied; a secret religion which dared not face the day; an
itinerant, busy, proselytizing religion, forming an extended confederacy
against the State, resisting its authority and breaking its laws. There
may be some exceptions to this general impression, such as Pliny's
discovery of the innocent and virtuous rule of life adopted by the
Christians of Pontus; but this only proves that Christianity was not in
fact the infamous religion which the heathen thought it; it did not
reverse their general belief to that effect.
Now it must be granted that, in some respects, this view of Christianity
depended on the times, and would alter with their alteration. When there
was no persecution, martyrs could not be obstinate; and when the Church
was raised aloft in high places, it was no longer in caves. Still, I
believe, it continued substantially the same in the judgment of the
world external to it while there was an external world to judge of it.
"They thought it enough," says Julian in the fourth century, of our Lord
and his apostles, "to deceive women, servants, and slaves, and by their
means wives and husbands." "A human fabrication," says he elsewhere,
"put together by wickedness, having nothing divine in it, but making a
perverted use of the fable-loving, childish, irrational part of the
soul, and offering a set of wonders to create belief."
"Miserable men," he says elsewhere, "you refuse to worship the ancile,
yet you worship the wood of the cross, and sign it on your foreheads,
and fix it on your doors. Shall one for this hate the intelligent among
you, or pity the less understanding, who in following you have gone to
such an excess of perdition as to leave the everlasting gods and go over
to a dead Jew?" He speaks of their adding other dead men to him who died
so long ago. "You have filled all places with sepulchres and monuments,
though it is nowhere told you in your religion to haunt the tombs and to
attend upon them." Elsewhere he speaks of their "leaving the gods for
corpses and relics." On the other hand, he attributes the growth of
Christianity to its humanity toward strangers, care in burying the dead,
and pretended religiousness of life. In another place he speaks of their
care of the poor.
Libanius, Julian's preceptor in rhetoric, delivers the same testimony,
as far as it goes. He addressed his _Oration for the Temples_ to a
Christian emperor, and would in consequence be guarded in his language;
however it runs in one direction. He speaks of "those black-habited
men," meaning the monks, "who eat more than elephants, and by the number
of their potations trouble those who send them drink in their chantings,
and conceal this by paleness artificially acquired." They "are in good
condition out of the misfortunes of others, while they pretend to serve
God by hunger." Those whom they attack "are like bees, they like
drones." I do not quote this passage to prove that there were monks in
Libanius' days, which no one doubts, but to show his impression of
Christianity, as far as his works betray it.
Numantian in the same century describes in verse his voyage from Rome to
Gaul: one book of the poem is extant; he falls in with Christianity on
two of the islands which lie in his course. He thus describes them as
found on one of these: "The island is in a squalid state, being full of
light-haters. They call themselves monks, because they wish to live
alone without witness. They dread the gifts, from fearing the reverses,
of fortune." He meets on the other island a Christian, whom he had
known, of good family and fortune, and happy in his marriage, who
"impelled by the Furies had left men and gods, and, credulous exile,
was living in base concealment. Is not this herd," he continues, "worse
than Circean poison? then bodies were changed, now minds."
In the _Philopatris_, which is the work of an author of the fourth
century, Critias is introduced pale and wild. His friend asks him if he
has seen Cerberus or Hecate; and he answers that he has heard a
rigmarole from certain "thrice-cursed sophists"; which he thinks would
drive him mad if he heard it again, and was nearly sending him headlong
over some cliff as it was. He retires for relief with his inquirer to a
pleasant place, shadowed by planes, where swallows and nightingales are
singing, and a quiet brook is purling. Triephon, his friend, expresses a
fear lest he has heard some incantation, and is led by the course of the
dialogue, before his friend tells his tale, to give some account of
Christianity, being himself a Christian. After speaking of the creation,
as described by Moses, he falls at once upon that doctrine of a
particular providence which is so distasteful to Plutarch, Velleius in
Cicero, and Cæcilius, and generally to unbelievers. "He is in heaven,"
he says, "looking at just and unjust, and causing actions to be entered
in books; and he will recompense all on a day which he has appointed."
Critias objects that he cannot make this consistent with the received
doctrine about the Fates, "even though he has perhaps been carried aloft
with his master, and initiated in unspeakable mysteries." He also asks
if the deeds of the Scythians are written in heaven for if so there must
be many scribes there.
Such was the language of paganism after Christianity had for fifty years
been exposed to the public gaze; after it had been before the world for
fifty more, St. Augustine had still to defend it against the charge of
being the cause of the calamities of the empire. And for the charge of
magic, when the Arian bishops were in formal disputations with the
Catholic, before Gungebald, Burgundian king of France, at the end of the
fifth century, we find still that they charged the Catholics with being
"_præstigiatores_," and worshipping a number of gods; and when the
Catholics proposed that the King should repair to the shrine of St.
Justus, where both parties might ask him concerning their respective
faiths, the Arians cried out that "they would not seek enchantments
like Saul, for Scripture was enough for them, which was more powerful
than all bewitchments." This was said, not against strangers of whom
they knew nothing, as Ethelbert might be suspicious of St. Augustine and
his brother missionaries, but against a body of men who lived among
them.
I do not think it can be doubted then that, had Tacitus, Suetonius, and
Pliny, Celsus, Porphyry, and the other opponents of Christianity lived
in the fourth century, their evidence concerning Christianity would be
very much the same as it has come down to us from the centuries before
it. In either case, a man of the world and a philosopher would have been
disgusted at the gloom and sadness of its profession, its
mysteriousness, its claim of miracles, the want of good sense imputable
to its rule of life, and the unsettlement and discord it was introducing
into the social and political world.