Western writers are apt, through their patriotic predispositions, to

overestimate the organization, civilizing work, and security of the

absolute monarchy that established itself in Rome after the accession of

Augustus Cæsar. From it we derive the political traditions of Britain,

France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, and these countries loom big in the

perspectives of European writers. By the scale of a world history the

Roman Empire ceases to seem so overwhelmingly important. It lasted about

four centuries in all before it was completely shattered. The Byzantine

Empire was no genuine continuation of it; it was a resumption of the

Hellenic Empire of Alexander; it spoke Greek; its monarch had a Roman

title no doubt, but so for that matter had the late Tsar of Bulgaria.

During its four centuries of life the empire of Rome had phases of

division and complete chaos; its prosperous years, if they are gathered

together and added up, do not amount in all to a couple of centuries.

Compared with the quiet steady expansion, the security, and the

civilizing task of the contemporary Chinese Empire, or with Egypt

between 4000 and 1000 B.C., orwith Sumeria before the Semitic conquest,

this amounts to a mere incident in history. The Persian Empire of

Cyrus, again, which reached from the Hellespont to the Indus, had as

high a standard of civilization; and its homelands remained unconquered

and fairly prosperous for over two hundred years. Its predecessor, the

Median Empire, had endured for half a century. After a brief submergence

by Alexander the Great, it rose again as the Seleucid Empire, which

endured for some centuries. The Seleucid dominion shrank at last to the

west of the Euphrates, and became a part of the Roman Empire; but

Persia, revived by the Parthians as a new Persian Empire, first under

the Arsacids and then under the Sassanids, outlived the empire of Rome.

The Sassanids repeatedly carried war into the Byzantine Empire, and held

the line of the Euphrates steadfastly. In 616 A.D. under Chosroes II,

they were holding Damascus, Jerusalem, and Egypt, and threatening the

Hellespont. But there has been no tradition to keep alive the glories of

the Sassanids. The reputation of Rome has flourished through the

prosperity of her heirs. The tradition of Rome is greater than its

reality.

History distinguishes two chief groups of Roman emperors who were great

administrators. The first of these groups began with:--

Augustus Cæsar (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.), the Octavian of the previous

section, who worked hard at the reorganization of the provincial

governments and at financial reform. He established a certain tradition

of lawfulness and honesty in the bureaucracy, and he restrained the more

monstrous corruptions and tyrannies by giving the provincial citizen the

right to appeal to Cæsar. But he fixed the European boundaries of the

empire along the Rhine and Danube, so leaving Germany, which is the

necessary backbone of a safe and prosperous Europe, to barbarism; and he

made a similar limitation in the east at the Euphrates, leaving Armenia

independent, to be a constant bone of contention with the Arsacids and

Sassanids. It is doubtful whether he considered that he was fixing the

final boundaries of the empire along these lines, or whether he thought

it desirable to consolidate for some years before any further attempts

at expansion.

[Illustration: The EMPIRE in the time of TRAJAN]

Tiberius (14 to 37 A.D.) is also described as a capable ruler, but he

became intensely unpopular in Rome, and it would seem that he was

addicted to gross and abominable vices. But his indulgence in these and

his personal tyrannies and cruelties did not interfere with the general

prosperity of the empire. It is difficult to judge him; nearly all our

sources of information are manifestly hostile to him.

Caligula (37 to 41 A.D.) was insane, but the empire carried on during

four years of eccentricity at its head. Finally he was murdered in his

palace by his servants, and there seems to have been an attempt to

restore the senatorial government, an attempt which was promptly

suppressed by the household legions.

Claudius (41 to 54 A.D.), the uncle of Caligula, upon whom the choice of

the soldiers fell, was personally uncouth, but he seems to have been a

hardworking and fairly capable administrator. He advanced the westward

boundary of the empire by annexing the southern half of Britain. He was

poisoned by Agrippina, the mother of his adopted son, Nero, and a woman

of great charm and force of character.

Nero (54 to 68 A.D.), like Tiberius, is credited with monstrous vices

and cruelties, but the empire had acquired sufficient momentum to carry

on through his fourteen years of power. He certainly murdered his

devoted but troublesome mother and his wife, the latter as a mark of

devotion to a lady, Poppæa, who then married him; but the domestic

infelicities of the Cæsars are no part of our present story. The reader

greedy for criminal particulars must go to the classical source,

Suetonius. These various Cæsars and their successors and their womenkind

were probably no worse essentially than most weak and passionate human

beings, but they had no real religion, being themselves gods; they had

no wide knowledge on which to build high ambitions, their women were

fierce and often illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or

custom. They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their

slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impulses into action.

What are mere passing black thoughts and angry impulses with most of us

became therefore deeds with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a

different species of being from himself, he should examine his own

secret thoughts very carefully. Nero became intensely unpopular in Rome,

and it is interesting to note that he became unpopular not because he

murdered and poisoned his intimate relations, but because there was an

insurrection in Britain under a certain Queen Boadicea, and the Roman

forces suffered a great disaster (61 A.D.), and because there was a

destructive earthquake in Southern Italy. The Roman population, true to

its Etruscan streak, never religious and always superstitious, did not

mind a wicked Cæsar, but it did object strongly to an unpropitious one.

The Spanish legions rose in insurrection under an elderly general of

seventy-three, Galba, whom they acclaimed emperor. He advanced upon Rome

carried in a litter. Nero, hopeless of support, committed suicide (68

A.D.).

Galba, however, was only one of a group of would-be emperors. The

generals in command of the Rhine legions, the Palatine troops, and the

eastern armies, each attempted to seize power. Rome saw four emperors in

a year, Galba, Otho, Vitellus, and Vespasian; the fourth, Vespasian

(69-79 A.D.), from the eastern command, had the firmest grip, and held

and kept the prize. But with Nero the line of Cæsars born or adopted

ended. Cæsar ceased to be the family name of the Roman emperors, and

became a title, Divus Cæsar, the Cæsar god. The monarchy took a step

forward towards orientalism by an increased insistence upon the worship

of the ruler.

Vespasian (69 to 79 A.D.) and his sons Titus (79 A.D.) and Domitian (81

A.D.) constitute, as it were, a second dynasty, the Flavian; then after

the assassination of Domitian came a group of emperors related to one

another not by blood, but by adoption, the adoptive emperors. Nerva (96

A.D.) was the first of this line, and Trajan (98 A.D.) the second. They

were followed by the indefatigable Hadrian (117 A.D.), Antoninus Pius

(138 A.D.), and Marcus Aurelius (161 to 180 A.D.). Under both the

Flavians and the Antonines the boundaries of the empire crept forward

again. North Britain was annexed in 84 A.D., the angle of the Rhine and

Danube was filled in, and what is now Transylvania was made into a new

province, Dacia. Trajan also invaded Parthia and annexed Armenia,

Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Under his rule the empire reached its maximum

extent. Hadrian, his successor, was of a cautious and retractile

disposition. He abandoned these new eastern conquests of Trajan’s, and

he also abandoned North Britain. He adopted the Chinese idea of the

limiting wall against barbarism, an excellent idea so long as the

pressure of population on the imperial side of the wall is greater than

the pressure from without, but worthless otherwise. He built Hadrian’s

wall across Britain, and a palisade between the Rhine and the Danube.

The full tide of Roman expansion was past, and in the reign of his

successor the North European frontier was already actively on the

defensive against the aggression of Teutonic and Slavic tribes.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is one of those figures in history about which

men differ widely and intensely. To some critics he seems to have been a

priggish person; he dabbled in religions, and took a pleasure in

conducting priestly ceremonies in priestly garments--a disposition

offensive to common men--and they resent his alleged failure to restrain

the wickedness of his wife Faustina. The stories of his domestic

infelicity, however, rest on no very good foundations, though certainly

his son Commodus was a startling person for a good home to produce. On

the other hand, he was unquestionably a devoted and industrious emperor,

holding social order together through a series of disastrous years of

vile weather, great floods, failing harvests and famine, barbaric raids

and revolts, and at last a terrible universal pestilence. Says F. W.

Farrar, quoted in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, “He regarded himself as

being, in fact, the servant of all. The registry of the citizens, the

suppression of litigation, the elevation of public morals, the care of

minors, the retrenchment of public expenses, the limitation of

gladiatorial games and shows, the care of roads, the restoration of

senatorial privileges, the appointment of none but worthy magistrates,

even the regulation of street traffic, these and numberless other duties

so completely absorbed his attention that, in spite of indifferent

health, they often kept him at severe labour from early morning till

long after midnight. His position, indeed, often necessitated his

presence at games and shows; but on these occasions he occupied himself

either in reading, or being read to, or in writing notes. He was one of

those who held that nothing should be done hastily, and that few crimes

were worse than waste of time.”

But it is not by these industries that he is now remembered. He was one

of the greatest exponents of the Stoical philosophy, and in his

_Meditations_, jotted down in camp and court, he has put so much of a

human soul on record as to raise up for himself in each generation a

fresh series of friends and admirers.

With the death of Marcus Aurelius this phase of unity and comparatively

good government came to an end, and his son Commodus inaugurated an age

of disorder. Practically the empire had been at peace within itself for

two hundred years. Now for a hundred years the student of Roman history

must master the various criminology of a number of inadequate emperors,

while the frontier crumbled and receded under barbarian pressure. One or

two names only seem to be the names of able men: such were Septimius

Severus, Aurelian, and Probus. Septimius Severus was a Carthaginian, and

his sister was never able to master Latin. She conducted her Roman

household in the Punic language, which must have made Cato the elder

turn in his grave. The rest of the emperors of this period were chiefly

adventurers too unimportant to the general scheme of things for us to

note. At times there were separate emperors ruling in different parts of

the distracted empire. From our present point of view the Emperor

Decius, who was defeated and killed during a great raid of the Goths

into Thrace in 251 A.D., and the Emperor Valerian, who, together with

the great city of Antioch, was captured by the Sassanid Shah of Persia

in 260 A.D., are worthy of notice because they mark the insecurity of

the whole Roman system, and the character of the outer pressure upon it.

So too is Claudius, “the Conqueror of the Goths,” because he gained a

great victory over these people at Nish in Serbia (270 A.D.), and

because he died, like Pericles, of the plague.

Through all these centuries intermittent pestilences were playing a part

in weakening races and altering social conditions, a part that has still

to be properly worked out by historians. There was, for instance, a

great plague throughout the empire between the years 164 and 180 A.D. in

the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It probably did much to

disorganize social life and prepare the way for the troubles that

followed the accession of Commodus. This same pestilence devastated

China, as we shall note in § 4 of this chapter. Considerable

fluctuations of climate had also been going on in the first and second

centuries, producing stresses and shiftings of population, whose force

historians have still to appraise. But before we go on to tell of the

irruptions of the barbarians and the attempts of such later emperors as

Diocletian (284 A.D.) and Constantine the Great (312 A.D.) to hold

together the heaving and splitting vessel of the state we must describe

something of the conditions of human life in the Roman Empire during its

two centuries of prosperity.

§ 2

The impatient reader of history may be disposed to count the two

centuries of order between 27 B.C. and 180 A.D. as among the wasted

opportunities of mankind. It was an age of spending rather than of

creation, an age of architecture and trade in which the rich grew richer

and the poor poorer and the soul and spirit of man decayed. Looked at

superficially, as a man might have looked at it from an aeroplane a

couple of thousand feet in the air, there was a considerable flourish of

prosperity. Everywhere, from York to Cyrene and from Lisbon to Antioch,

he would have noted large and well-built cities, with temples, theatres,

amphitheatres, markets, and the like; thousands of such cities, supplied

by great aqueducts and served by splendid high roads, whose stately

remains astonish us to this day. He would have noted an abundant

cultivation, and have soared too high to discover that this cultivation

was the grudging work of slaves. Upon the Mediterranean and the Red Sea

a considerable traffic would be visible; and the sight of two ships

alongside each other would not at that altitude reveal the fact that one

was a pirate and plundering the other.

And even if the observer came down to a closer scrutiny, there would

still be much accumulated improvement to note. There had been a

softening of manners and a general refinement since the days of Julius

Cæsar. With this there had been a real increase of humane feeling.

During the period of the Antonines, laws for the protection of slaves

from extreme cruelty came into existence, and it was no longer

permissible to sell them to the gladiatorial schools. Not only were the

cities outwardly more splendidly built, but within the homes of the

wealthy there had been great advances in the art of decoration. The

gross feasting, animal indulgence, and vulgar display of the earlier

days of Roman prosperity were now tempered by a certain refinement.

Dress had become richer, finer, and more beautiful. There was a great

trade in silk with remote China, for the mulberry tree and the silkworm

had not yet begun to move west. By the time silk had ended its long and

varied journey to Rome it was worth its weight in gold. Yet it was used

abundantly, and there was a steady flow of the precious metals eastward

in exchange. There had been very considerable advances in gastronomy and

the arts of entertainment. Petronius describes a feast given by a

wealthy man under the early Cæsars, a remarkable succession of courses,

some delicious, some amazing, exceeding anything that even the

splendours and imagination of modern New York could produce; and the

festival was varied by music and by displays of tight-rope dancing,

juggling, Homeric recitations, and the like. There was a considerable

amount of what we may describe as “rich men’s culture” throughout the

empire. Books were far more plentiful than they had been before the time

of the Cæsars. Men prided themselves upon their libraries, even when the

cares and responsibilities of property made them too busy to give their

literary treasures much more than a passing examination. The knowledge

of Greek spread eastward and of Latin westward, and if the prominent men

of this or that British or Gallic city lacked any profound Greek culture

themselves, they could always turn to some slave or other, whose

learning had been guaranteed of the highest quality by the slave-dealer,

to supply the deficiency.

The generation of Cato had despised Greeks and the Greek language, but

now all that was changed. The prestige of Greek learning of an approved

and settled type was as high in the Rome of Antoninus Pius as it was in

the Oxford and Cambridge of Victorian England. The Greek scholar

received the same mixture of unintelligent deference and practical

contempt. There was a very considerable amount of Greek scholarship, and

of written criticism and commentary. Indeed there was so great an

admiration for Greek letters as almost completely to destroy the Greek

spirit; and the recorded observations of Aristotle were valued so highly

as to preclude any attempt to imitate his organization of further

inquiry. It is noteworthy that while Aristotle in the original Greek

fell like seed upon stony soil in the Roman world, he was, in Syrian and

Arabic translations, immensely stimulating to the Arabic civilization

of a thousand years later. Nor were the æsthetic claims of Latin

neglected in this heyday of Greek erudition. As Greece had her epics and

so forth, the Romans felt that they too must have their epics. The age

of Augustus was an age of imitative literature. Virgil in the Æneid set

himself modestly but resolutely, and with an elegant sort of

successfulness, to parallel Homer, just as Lord Tennyson, the poet

laureate of Queen Victoria, using the mediæval literature about King

Arthur as his material, did a similar service for Great Britain in his

_Idylls of the King_.

All this wide-spread culture of the wealthy householder is to the credit

of the early Roman Empire, and Gibbon makes the most of it in the sunny

review of the age of the Antonines with which he opens his _Decline and

Fall of the Roman Empire_. His design for that great work demanded a

prelude of splendour and tranquillity. But he was far too shrewd and

subtle not to qualify his apparent approval of the conditions he

describes. “Under the Roman Empire,” he writes, “the labour of an

industrious and ingenious people was variously but incessantly employed

in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses,

and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement

of convenience, of elegance, and of splendour, whatever could soothe

their pride, or gratify their sensuality. Such refinements, under the

odious name of luxury, have been severely arraigned by the moralists of

every age; and it might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well

as happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the

superfluities of life. But in the present imperfect condition of

society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems to be

the only means that can correct the unequal distribution of property.

The diligent mechanic and the skilful artist, who have obtained no share

in the division of the earth, receive a voluntary tax from the

possessors of land; and the latter are prompted, by a sense of interest,

to improve those estates, with whose produce they may purchase

additional pleasure. This operation, the particular effects of which are

felt in every society, acted with much more diffuse energy in the Roman

world. The provinces would soon have been exhausted of their wealth, if

the manufactures and commerce of luxury had not insensibly restored to

the industrious subjects the sums which were exacted from them by the

arms and authority of Rome.” And so on, with a sting of satire in every

fold of the florid description.

If we look a little more widely than a hovering aeroplane can do at the

movement of races upon the earth, or a little more closely than an

inspection of streets, amphitheatres, and banquets goes, into the souls

and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of

material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to

things without and things within, and blind to the future. If, for

instance, we compare the two centuries of Roman ascendancy and

opportunity, the first and second centuries A.D., with the two centuries

of Greek and Hellenic life beginning about 466 B.C. with the supremacy

of Pericles in Athens, we are amazed by--we cannot call it an

inferiority, it is a complete absence of science. The incuriousness of

the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even

than their architecture.

In one field of knowledge particularly we might have expected the Romans

to have been alert and enterprising, and that was geography. Their

political interests demanded a steadfast inquiry into the state of

affairs beyond their frontiers, and yet that inquiry was never made.

There is practically no literature of Roman travel beyond the imperial

limits, no such keen and curious accounts as Herodotus gives of the

Scythians, the Africans, and the like. There is nothing in Latin to

compare with the early descriptions of India and Siberia that are to be

found in Chinese. The Roman legions went at one time into Scotland, yet

there remains no really intelligent account of Picts or Scots, much less

any glance at the seas beyond. Such explorations as those of Hanno or

Pharaoh Necho seem to have been altogether beyond the scope of the Roman

imagination. It is probable that after the destruction of Carthage the

amount of shipping that went out into the Atlantic through the Straits

of Gibraltar fell to inconsiderable proportions. Still more impossible

in this world of vulgar wealth, enslaved intelligence, and bureaucratic

rule was any further development of the astronomy and physiography of

Alexandria. The Romans do not seem even to have inquired what manner of

men wove the silk and prepared the spices or collected the amber and the

pearls that came into their markets. Yet the channels of inquiry were

open and easy; pathways led in every direction to the most convenient

“jumping-off places” for explorers it is possible to imagine.

“The most remote countries of the ancient world were ransacked to supply

the pomp and delicacy of Rome. The forests of Scythia afforded some

valuable furs. Amber was brought overland from the shores of the Baltic

to the Danube, and the barbarians were astonished at the price which

they received in exchange for so useless a commodity. There was a

considerable demand for Babylonian carpets and other manufactures of the

East; but the most important branch of foreign trade was carried on with

Arabia and India. Every year, about the time of the summer solstice, a

fleet of a hundred and twenty vessels sailed from Myos-hormos, a port of

Egypt on the Red Sea. By the periodical assistance of the monsoons, they

traversed the ocean in about forty days. The coast of Malabar, or the

island of Ceylon, was the usual term of their navigation, and it was in

those markets that the merchants from the more remote countries of Asia

expected their arrival. The return of the fleet to Egypt was fixed to

the months of December or January, and as soon as their rich cargo had

been transported, on the backs of camels, from the Red Sea to the Nile,

and had descended that river as far as Alexandria, it was poured,

without delay, into the capital of the empire.”[257]

Yet Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its

gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of

India, China, Persia or Scythia, Buddha or Zoroaster, or about the Huns,

the Negroes, the people of Scandinavia, or the secrets of the western

sea.

When we realize the uninspiring quality of the social atmosphere which

made this indifference possible, we are able to account for the failure

of Rome during its age of opportunity to develop any physical or

chemical science, and as a consequence to gain any increased control

over matter. Most of the physicians in Rome were Greeks and many of them

slaves--for the Roman wealthy did not even understand that a bought mind

is a spoilt mind. Yet this was not due to any want of natural genius

among the Roman people; it was due entirely to their social and economic

conditions. From the Middle Ages to the present day Italy has produced

a great number of brilliant scientific men. And one of the most shrewd

and inspired of scientific writers was an Italian, Lucretius, who lived

between the time of Marius and Julius Cæsar (about 100 B.C. to about 55

B.C.). This amazing man was of the quality of Leonardo da Vinci (also an

Italian) or Newton. He wrote a long Latin poem about the processes of

Nature, _De Rerum Natura_, in which he guessed with astonishing insight

about the constitution of matter and about the early history of mankind.

Osborn in his _Old Stone Age_ quotes with admiration long passages from

Lucretius about primitive man, so good and true are they to-day. But

this was an individual display, a seed that bore no fruit. Roman science

was stillborn, into a suffocating atmosphere of vile wealth and military

oppression. The true figure to represent the classical Roman attitude to

science is not Lucretius, but that Roman soldier who hacked Archimedes

to death at the storming of Syracuse.

And if physical and biological science wilted and died on the stony soil

of Roman prosperity, political and social science never had a chance to

germinate. Political discussion would have been treason to the emperor,

social or economic inquiry would have threatened the rich. So Rome,

until disaster fell upon her, never examined into her own social health,

never questioned the ultimate value of her hard officialism.

Consequently, there was no one who realized the gravity of her failure

to develop any intellectual imagination to hold her empire together, any

general education in common ideas that would make men fight and work for

the empire as men will fight and work for a dear possession. But the

rulers of the Roman Empire did not want their citizens to fight for

anything in any spirit at all. The rich had eaten the heart out of their

general population, and they were content with the meal they had made.

The legions were filled with Germans, Britons, Numidians, and the like;

and until the very end the wealthy Romans thought they could go on

buying barbarians to defend them against the enemy without and the rebel

poor within. How little was done in education by the Romans is shown by

an account of what was done. Says Mr. H. Stuart Jones,[258] “Julius

Cæsar bestowed Roman citizenship on ‘teachers of the liberal arts’;

Vespasian endowed professorships of Greek and Latin oratory at Rome; and

later emperors, especially Antoninus Pius, extended the same benefits to

the provinces. Local enterprise and munificence were also devoted to the

cause of education; we learn from the correspondence of the younger

Pliny that public schools were founded in the towns of Northern Italy.

But though there was a wide diffusion of knowledge under the empire,

there was no true intellectual progress. Augustus, it is true, gathered

about him;the most brilliant writers of his time, and the début of the

new monarchy coincided with the Golden Age of Roman literature; but this

was of brief duration, and the beginnings of the Christian era saw the

triumph of classicism and the first steps in the decline which awaits

all literary movements which look to the past rather than the future.”

There is a diagnosis of the intellectual decadence of the age in a

treatise upon the sublime by a Greek writer who wrote somewhen in the

second, third, or fourth century A.D., and who may possibly have been

Longinus Philologus,[259] which states very distinctly one manifest

factor in the mental sickness of the Roman world. He is cited by Gibbon:

“The sublime Longinus, who, in somewhat a later period and in the court

of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and

laments the degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their

sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. ‘In

the same manner,’ says he, ‘as some children always remain pigmies,

whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender

minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are

unable to expand themselves or to attain that well-proportioned

greatness which we admire in the ancients; who, living under a popular

government, wrote with all the same freedom as they acted.’”

But this critic grasped only one aspect of the restraints upon mental

activity. The leading-strings that kept the Roman mind in a permanent

state of infantilism constituted a double servitude; they were economic

as well as political. The account Gibbon gives of the life and

activities of a certain Herodes Atticus, who lived in the time of

Hadrian, shows just how little was the share of the ordinary citizen in

the outward magnificence of the time. This Atticus had an immense

fortune, and he amused himself by huge architectural benefactions to

various cities. Athens was given a racecourse and a theatre of cedar,

curiously carved, was set up there to the memory of his wife; a theatre

was built at Corinth, a racecourse was given to Delphi, baths to

Thermopylæ, an aqueduct to Canusium, and so on and so on. One is struck

by the spectacle of a world of slaves and common people who were not

consulted and over whose heads, without any participation on their part,

this rich man indulged in his displays of “taste.”[260] Numerous

inscriptions in Greece and Asia still preserve the name of Herodes

Atticus, “patron and benefactor,” who ranged about the empire as though

it was his private garden, commemorating himself by these

embellishments. He did not confine himself to splendid buildings. He was

also a philosopher, though none of his wisdom has survived. He had a

large villa near Athens, and there philosophers were welcome guests so

long as they convinced their patron of the soundness of their

pretensions, received his discourses with respect, and did not offend

him by insolent controversy.

The world, it is evident, was not progressing during these two centuries

of Roman prosperity. But was it happy in its stagnation? There are signs

of a very unmistakable sort that the great mass of human beings in the

empire, a mass numbering something between a hundred and a hundred and

fifty millions, was not happy, was probably very acutely miserable,

beneath its outward magnificence. True there were no great wars and

conquests within the empire, little of famine or fire or sword to

afflict mankind; but, on the other hand, there was a terrible restraint

by government, and still more by the property of the rich, upon the free

activities of nearly everyone. Life for the great majority who were

neither rich nor official, nor the womankind and the parasites of the

rich and official, must have been laborious, tedious, and lacking in

interest and freedom to a degree that a modern mind can scarcely

imagine.

Three things in particular may be cited to sustain the opinion that

this period was a period of widespread unhappiness. The first of these

is the extraordinary apathy of the population to political events. They

saw one upstart pretender to empire succeed another with complete

indifference. Such things did not seem to matter to them; hope had gone.

When presently the barbarians poured into the empire, there was nothing

but the legions to face them. There was no popular uprising against them

at all. Everywhere the barbarians must have been outnumbered if only the

people had resisted. But the people did not resist. It is manifest that

to the bulk of its inhabitants the Roman Empire did not seem to be a

thing worth fighting for. To the slaves and common people the barbarian

probably seemed to promise more freedom and less indignity than the

pompous rule of the imperial official and grinding employment by the

rich. The looting and burning of palaces and an occasional massacre did

not shock the folk of the Roman underworld as it shocked the wealthy and

cultured people to whom we owe such accounts as we have of the breaking

down of the imperial system. Great numbers of slaves and common people

probably joined the barbarians, who knew little of racial or patriotic

prejudices, and were openhanded to any promising recruit. No doubt in

many cases the population found that the barbarian was a worse

infliction even than the tax-gatherer and the slave-driver. But that

discovery came too late for resistance or the restoration of the old

order.

And as a second symptom that points to the same conclusion that life was

hardly worth living for the poor and the slaves and the majority of

people during the age of the Antonines, we must reckon the steady

depopulation of the empire. People refused to have children. They did

so, we suggest, because their homes were not safe from oppression,

because in the case of slaves there was no security that the husband and

wife would not be separated, because there was no pride nor reasonable

hope in children any more. In modern states the great breeding-ground

has always been the agricultural countryside where there is a more or

less secure peasantry; but under the Roman Empire the peasant and the

small cultivator was either a worried debtor, or he was held in a

network of restraints that made him a spiritless serf, or he had been

ousted altogether by the gang production of slaves.

A third indication that this outwardly flourishing period was one of

deep unhappiness and mental distress for vast multitudes, is to be found

in the spread of new religious movements throughout the population. We

have seen how in the case of the little country of Judea a whole nation

may be infected by the persuasion that life is unsatisfactory and

_wrong_, and that something is needed to set it right. The mind of the

Jews, as we know, had crystallized about the idea of the Promise of the

One True God and the coming of a Saviour or Messiah. Rather different

ideas from these were spreading through the Roman Empire. They were but

varying answers to one universal question: “What must we do for

salvation?” A frequent and natural consequence of disgust with life as

it is, is to throw the imagination forward to an after-life, which is to

redeem all the miseries and injustices of this one. The belief in such

compensation is a great opiate for present miseries. Egyptian religion

had long been saturated with anticipations of immortality, and we have

seen how central was that idea to the cult of Serapis and Isis at

Alexandria. The ancient mysteries of Demeter and Orpheus, the mysteries

of the Mediterranean race, revived and made a sort of _theocrasia_ with

these new cults.

A second great religious movement was Mithraism, a development of

Zoroastrianism, a religion of very ancient Aryan origin, traceable back

to the Indo-Iranian people before they split into Persians and Hindus.

We cannot here examine its mysteries in any detail.[261] Mithras was a

god of light, a Sun of Righteousness, and in the shrines of the cult he

was always represented as slaying a sacred bull whose blood was the seed

of life. Suffice it that, complicated with many added ingredients, this

worship of Mithras came into the Roman Empire about the time of Pompey

the Great, and began to spread very widely under the Cæsars and

Antonines. Like the Isis religion, it promised immortality. Its

followers were mainly slaves, soldiers, and distressed people. In its

methods of worship, in the burning of candles before the altar and so

forth, it had a certain superficial resemblance to the later

developments of the ritual of the third great religious movement in the

Roman world, Christianity.

Christianity also was a doctrine of immortality and salvation, and it

too spread at first chiefly among the lowly and unhappy. Christianity

has been denounced by modern writers as a “slave religion.” It was. It

took the slaves and the downtrodden, and it gave them hope and restored

their self-respect, so that they stood up for righteousness like men and

faced persecution and torment. But of the origins and quality of

Christianity we will tell more fully in a later chapter.

§ 3

We have already shown reason for our statement that the Roman imperial

system was a very unsound political growth indeed. It is absurd to write

of its statecraft; it had none. At its best it had a bureaucratic

administration which kept the peace of the world for a time and failed

altogether to secure it.

Let us note here the main factors in its failure.

The clue to all its failure lies in the absence of any free mental

activity and any organization for the increase, development, and

application of knowledge. It respected wealth and it despised science.

It gave government to the rich, and imagined that wise men could be

bought and bargained for in the slave markets when they were needed. It

was, therefore, a colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire. It

foresaw nothing.

It had no strategic foresight, because it was blankly ignorant of

geography and ethnology. It knew nothing of the conditions of Russia,

Central Asia, and the East. It was content to keep the Rhine and Danube

as its boundaries, and to make no effort to Romanize Germany. But we

need only look at the map of Europe and Asia showing the Roman Empire to

see that a willing and incorporated Germany was absolutely essential to

the life and security of Western Europe. Excluded, Germany became a

wedge that needed only the impact of the Hunnish hammer to split up the

whole system.

Moreover, this neglect to push the boundaries northward to the Baltic

left that sea and the North Sea as a region of experiment and training

and instruction in seamanship for the Northmen of Scandinavia, Denmark,

and the Frisian coast. But Rome went on its way quite stupidly,

oblivious to the growth of a newer and more powerful piracy in the

north.

The same unimaginative quality made the Romans leave the seaways of the

Mediterranean undeveloped. When presently the barbarians pressed down to

the warm water, we read of no swift transport of armies from Spain or

Africa or Asia to the rescue of Italy and the Adriatic coasts. Instead,

we see the Vandals becoming masters of the western Mediterranean without

so much as a naval battle.

The Romans had been held at the Euphrates by an array of mounted

archers. It was clear that as the legion was organized it was useless in

wide open country, and it should have been equally clear that sooner or

later the mounted nomads of east Germany, south Russia, or Parthia were

bound to try conclusions with the empire. But the Romans, two hundred

years after Cæsar’s time, were still marching about, the same drilled

and clanking cohorts they had always been, easily ridden round and shot

to pieces. The empire had learnt nothing even from Carrhæ.

The incapacity of the Roman imperialism for novelty in methods of

transport again is amazing. It was patent that their power and unity

depended upon the swift movement of troops and supplies from one part of

the empire to another. The republic made magnificent roads; the empire

never improved upon them. Four hundred years before the Antonines, Hero

of Alexandria had made the first steam-engine. Beautiful records of such

beginnings of science were among the neglected treasures of the rich

men’s libraries throughout the imperial domains. They were seed lying on

stony ground. The armies and couriers of Marcus Aurelius drudged along

the roads exactly as the armies of Scipio Africanus had done three

centuries before them.

The Roman writers were always lamenting the effeminacy of the age. It

was their favourite cant. They recognized that the free men of the

forest and steppes and desert were harder and more desperate fighters

than their citizens, but the natural corollary of developing the

industrial power of their accumulations of population to make a

countervailing equipment never entered their heads. Instead they took

the barbarians into their legions, taught them the arts of war, marched

them about the empire, and returned them, with their lesson well learnt,

to their own people.

In view of these obvious negligences, it is no wonder that the Romans

disregarded that more subtle thing, the soul of the empire altogether,

and made no effort to teach or train or win its common people into any

conscious participation with its life. Such teaching or training would

indeed have run counter to all the ideas of the rich men and the

imperial officials. They had made a tool of religion; science,

literature, and education they had entrusted to the care of slaves, who

were bred and trained and sold like dogs or horses; ignorant, pompous,

and base, the Roman adventurers of finance and property who created the

empire lorded it with a sense of the utmost security while their

destruction gathered without the empire and within.

By the second and third centuries A.D. the overtaxed and overstrained

imperial machine was already staggering towards its downfall.

§ 4[262]

And now it is necessary, if we are to understand clearly the true

situation of the Roman Empire, to turn our eyes to the world beyond its

northern and eastern borders, the world of the plains, that stretches,

with scarcely a break, from Holland across Germany and Russia to the

mountains of Central Asia and Mongolia, and to give a little attention

to the parallel empire in China that was now consolidating and

developing a far tougher and more enduring moral and intellectual unity

than the Romans ever achieved.

“It is the practice,” says Mr. E. H. Parker, “even amongst our most

highly educated men in Europe, to deliver sonorous sentences about being

‘masters of the world,’ ‘bringing all nations of the earth under her

sway,’ and so on, when in reality only some corner of the Mediterranean

is involved, or some ephemeral sally into Persia and Gaul. Cyrus and

Alexander, Darius and Xerxes, Cæsar and Pompey, all made very

interesting excursions, but they were certainly not on a larger scale or

charged with greater human interest than the campaigns which were going

on at the other end of Asia. Western civilization possessed much in art

and science for which China never cared, but, on the other hand, the

Chinese developed a historical and critical literature, a courtesy of

demeanour, a luxury of clothing, and an administrative system of which

Europe might have been proud. In one word, the history of the Far East

is quite as interesting as that of the Far West. It only requires to be

able to read it. When we brush away contemptuously from our notice the

tremendous events which took place on the plains of Tartary, we must not

blame the Chinese too much for declining to interest themselves in the

doings of what to them appear insignificant states dotted round the

Mediterranean and Caspian, which, at this time, was practically all the

world of which we knew in Europe.”[263]

We have already mentioned (in chap. xvi. and elsewhere) the name of

Shi-Hwang-ti, who consolidated an empire much smaller, indeed, than the

present limits of China, but still very great and populous, spreading

from the valleys of the Hwang-ho and the Yang Tse. He became king of

Ch’in in 246 B.C. and emperor in 220 B.C., and he reigned until 210

B.C., and during this third of a century he effected much the same work

of consolidation that Augustus Cæsar carried out in Rome two centuries

later. At his death there was dynastic trouble for four years, and then

(206 B.C.) a fresh dynasty, the Han, established itself and ruled for

two hundred and twenty-nine years. The opening quarter century of the

Christian era was troubled by a usurper; then what is called the Later

Han Dynasty recovered power and ruled for another century and a half,

until China, in the time of the Antonines, was so devastated by an

eleven-year pestilence as to fall into disorder. This same pestilence,

we may note, also helped to produce a century of confusion in the

Western world (see § 1). But altogether, until this happened, for more

than four hundred years Central China was generally at peace, and on

the whole well governed, a cycle of strength and prosperity unparalleled

by anything in the experience of the Western world.

Only the first of the Han monarchs continued the policy of Shi-Hwang-ti

against the _literati_. His successor restored the classics, for the old

separatist tradition was broken, and in the uniformity of learning

throughout the empire lay, he saw, the cement of Chinese unity. While

the Roman world was still blind to the need of any universal mental

organization, the Han emperors were setting up a uniform system of

education and of literary degrees throughout China that has maintained

the intellectual solidarity of that great and always expanding country

into modern times. The bureaucrats of Rome were of the most

miscellaneous origins and traditions; the bureaucrats of China were, and

are still, made in the same mould, all members of one tradition. Since

the Han days China has experienced great vicissitudes of political

fortune, but they have never changed her fundamental character; she has

been divided, but she has always recovered her unity; she has been

conquered, and she has always absorbed and assimilated her conquerors.

But from our present point of view, the most important consequences of

this consolidation of China under Shi-Hwang-ti and the Hans was in its

reaction upon the unsettled tribes of the northern and western border of

China. Throughout the disordered centuries before the time of

Shi-Hwang-ti, the Hiung-nu or Huns had occupied Mongolia and large

portions of northern China, and had raided freely into China and

interfered freely in Chinese politics. The new power and organization of

the Chinese civilization began to change this state of affairs for good

and all.

[Illustration: Map of ASIA (with EUROPE) to illustrate the general

conditions of life during the Historical Period.]

We have already, in our first account of Chinese beginnings, noted the

existence of these Huns. It is necessary now to explain briefly who and

what they were. Even in using this word Hun as a general equivalent for

the Hiung-nu, we step on to controversial ground. In our accounts of the

development of the Western world we have had occasion to name the

Scythians, and to explain the difficulty of distinguishing clearly

between Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Medes, Persians, Parthians, Goths, and

other more or less nomadic, more or less Aryan peoples who drifted to

and fro in a great arc between the Danube and Central Asia. While

sections of the Aryans were moving south and acquiring and developing

civilization, these other Aryan peoples were developing mobility and

nomadism; they were learning the life of the tent, the wagon, and the

herd. They were learning also to use milk as a food basis, and were

probably becoming less agricultural, less disposed to take even snatch

crops, than they had been. Their development was being aided by a slow

change in climate that was replacing the swamps and forests and

parklands of South Russia and Central Asia by steppes, by wide grazing

lands that is, which favoured a healthy, unsettled life, and

necessitated an annual movement between summer and winter pasture. These

peoples had only the lowest political forms; they split up, they mingled

together; the various races had identical social habits; and so it is

that the difficulty, the impossibility of sharp distinctions between

them arises. Now the case of the Mongolian races to the north and

north-west of the Chinese civilization is very parallel. There can be

little doubt that the Hiung-nu, the Huns, and the later people called

the Mongols, were all very much the same people, and that the Turks and

Tartars presently branched off from this same drifting Mongolian

population. Kalmucks and Buriats are later developments of the same

strain. Here we shall favour the use of the word “Hun” as a sort of

general term for these tribes, just as we have been free and wide in our

use of “Scythian” in the West.

The consolidation of China was a very serious matter for these Hunnish

peoples. Hitherto their overflow of population had gone adventuring

southward into the disorders of divided China as water goes into a

sponge. Now they found a wall built against them, a firm government, and

disciplined armies cutting them off from the grass plains. And though

the wall held them back, it did not hold back the Chinese. They were

increasing and multiplying through these centuries of peace, and as they

increased and multiplied, they spread steadily with house and plough

wherever the soil permitted. They spread westward into Tibet and

northward and north-westwardly, perhaps to the edge of the Gobi desert.

They spread into the homes and pasturing and hunting-grounds of the

Hunnish nomads, exactly as the white people of the United States spread

westward into the hunting-grounds of the Red Indians. And in spite of

raid and massacre they were just as invincible because they had the

pressure of numbers and a strong avenging government behind them. Even

without the latter support the cultivating civilization of China has

enormous powers of permeation and extension. It has spread slowly and

continuously for three thousand years. It is spreading in Manchuria and

Siberia to-day. It roots deeply where it spreads.

Partly the Huns were civilized and assimilated by the Chinese. The more

northerly Huns were checked and their super-abundant energies were

turned westward. The southern Huns were merged into the imperial

population.

If the reader will examine the map of Central Asia, he will see that

very great mountain barriers separate the Southern, Western, and Eastern

peoples of Asia. (But he should be wary of forming his ideas from a map

upon Mercator’s projection, which enormously exaggerates the areas and

distances of Northern Asia and Siberia.) He will find that from the

central mountain masses three great mountain systems radiate eastward;

the Himalayas going south-eastward, south of Tibet, the Kuen Lun

eastward, north of Tibet, and the Thien Shan north-eastward to join the

Altai mountains. Further to the north is the great plain, still steadily

thawing and drying. Between the Thien Shan and the Kuen Lun is an area,

the Tarim Basin (= roughly Eastern Turkestan), of rivers that never

reach the sea, but end in swamps and intermittent lakes. This basin was

much more fertile in the past than it is now. The mountain barrier to

the west of this Tarim Basin is high, but not forbidding; there are many

practicable routes downward into Western Turkestan, and it is possible

to travel either along the northern foothills of the Kuen Lun or by the

Tarim valley westward from China to Kashgar (where the roads converge),

and so over the mountains to Kokand, Samarkand, and Bokhara. Here then

is the natural meeting-place in history of Aryan and Mongolian. Here or

round by the sea.

[Illustration: Map of CENTRAL ASIA in the 2nd & 1st Centuries

B.C.]

We have already noted how Alexander the Great came to one side of the

barrier in 329 B.C. High among the mountains of Turkestan a lake

preserves his name. Indeed, so living is the tradition of his great

raid, that almost any stone ruin in Central Asia is still ascribed to

“Iskander.” After this brief glimpse, the light of history upon this

region fades again, and when it becomes bright once more it is on the

eastern and not upon the western side. Far away to the east Shi-Hwang-ti

had routed the Huns and walled them out of China proper. A portion of

these people remained in the north of China, a remnant which was

destined to amalgamate with Chinese life under the Hans, but a

considerable section had turned westward and (second and first centuries

B.C.) driven before them a kindred people called the Yueh-Chi, driving

them from the eastern to the western extremity of the Kuen Lun, and at

last right over the barrier into the once Aryan region of Western

Turkestan.[264] These Yueh-Chi conquered the slightly Hellenized kingdom

of Bactria, and mixed with Aryan people there. Later on these Yueh-Chi

became, or were merged with Aryan elements into, a people called the

Indo-Scythians, who went on down the Khyber Pass and conquered northern

portions of India as far as Benares (100-150 A.D.), wiping out the last

vestiges of Hellenic rule in India. This big splash over of the

Mongolian races westward was probably not the first of such splashes,

but it is the first recorded splash. In the rear of the Yueh-Chi were

the Huns, and in the rear of the Huns and turning them now northward was

the vigorous Han Dynasty of China. In the reign of the greatest of the

Han monarchs, Wu-Ti (140-86 B.C.), the Huns had been driven northward

out of the whole of Eastern Turkestan or subjugated, the Tarim Basin

swarmed with Chinese settlers, and caravans were going over westward

with silk and lacquer and jade to trade for the gold and silver of

Armenia and Rome.

The splash over of the Yueh-Chi is recorded, but it is fairly evident

that much westward movement of sections of the Hunnish peoples is not

recorded. From 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. the Chinese Empire maintained a

hard, resolute, advancing front towards nomadism, and the surplus of

the nomads drifted steadily west. There was no such settling down behind

a final frontier on the part of the Chinese as we see in the case of the

Romans at the Rhine and Danube. The drift of the nomads before this

Chinese thrust, century by century, turned southward at first towards

Bactria. The Parthians of the first century B.C. probably mingled

Scythian and Mongolian elements. The “singing arrows” that destroyed the

army of Crassus came, it would seem, originally from the Altai and the

Tian Shan. After the first century B.C. the line of greater attraction

and least resistance lay for a time towards the north of the Caspian. In

a century or so all the country known as Western Turkestan was

“Mongolized,” and so it remains to this day. A second great thrust by

China began about 75 A.D., and accelerated the westward drift of the

nomads. In 102, Pan Chau, a great Chinese general, was sending explorers

from his advanced camp upon the Caspian (or, as some authorities say,

the Persian Gulf) to learn particulars of the Roman power. But their

reports decided him not to proceed.

By the first century A.D. nomadic Mongolian peoples are in evidence upon

the eastern boundaries of Europe, already greatly mixed with Aryan

nomads and with uprooted Aryan elements from the Caspian-Pamir region.

There are Hunnish peoples established between the Caspian Sea and the

Urals. West of them were the Alans, probably also a Mongolian people

with Aryan elements; they had fought against Pompey the Great when he

was in Armenia in 65 B.C. These are as yet the furthest westward peoples

of the new Mongolian advance, and they made no further westward push

until the fourth century A.D. To the north-west the Finns, a Mongolian

people, had long been established as far west as the Baltic.

West of the Huns, beyond the Don, there were Aryan tribes, the Goths.

These Goths had spread south-eastward from their region of origin in

Scandinavia. They were a Teutonic people, and we have already marked

them crossing the Baltic in the map on page 301. They continued to move

south-eastward across Russia, using the rivers and never forgetting

their Baltic watercraft. No doubt they assimilated much Scythian

population as they spread down to the Black Sea. In the first century

A.D. they were in two main divisions, the Ostrogoths, the East Goths,

who were between the Don and the Dnieper, and the Visigoths, or West

Goths, west of the Dnieper. During the first century there was an air of

quiescence over the great plains, but population was accumulating and

the tribes were fermenting. The second and third centuries seem to have

been a phase of comparatively moist seasons and abundant grass.

Presently in the fourth and fifth centuries the weather grew drier and

the grass became scanty, and the nomads stirred afresh.

But it is interesting to note that in the opening century of the

Christian era, the Chinese Empire was strong enough to expel and push

off from itself the surplus of this Mongolian nomadism to the north of

it which presently conquered North India and gathered force and mingled

with Aryan nomadism, and fell at last like an avalanche upon the

weak-backed Roman Empire.

Before we go on to tell of the blows that now began to fall upon the

Roman Empire and of the efforts of one or two great men to arrest the

collapse, we may say a few words about the habits and quality of these

westward-drifting barbaric Mongolian peoples who were now spreading from

the limits of China towards the Black and Baltic Seas. It is still the

European custom to follow the lead of the Roman writers and write of

these Huns and their associates as of something incredibly destructive

and cruel. But such accounts as we have from the Romans were written in

periods of panic, and the Roman could lie about his enemies with a

freedom and vigour that must arouse the envy even of the modern

propagandist. He could talk of “Punic faith” as a byword for perfidy

while committing the most abominable treacheries against Carthage, and

his railing accusations of systematic cruelty against this people or

that were usually the prelude and excuse for some frightful massacre or

enslavement or robbery on his own part. He had quite a modern passion

for self-justification. We must remember that these accounts of the

savagery and frightfulness of the Huns came from a people whose chief

amusement was gladiatorial shows, and whose chief method of dealing with

insurrection and sedition was nailing the offender to a cross to die.

From first to last the Roman Empire must have killed hundreds of

thousands of men in that way. A large portion of the population of this

empire that could complain of the barbarism of its assailants consisted

of slaves subject practically to almost any lust or caprice at the hands

of their owners. It is well to bear these facts in mind before we mourn

the swamping of the Roman Empire by the barbarians as though it was an

extinction of all that is fine in life by all that is black and ugly.

The facts seem to be that the Hunnish peoples were the eastern

equivalent of the primitive Aryans of whom we have given an account in

Chapter XV, and that, in spite of their profound racial and linguistic

differences, they mixed with the nomadic and semi-nomadic residuum of

the Aryan races north of the Danube and Persia very easily and

successfully. Instead of killing, they enlisted and intermarried with

the peoples they invaded. They had that necessary gift for all peoples

destined to political predominance, tolerant assimilation. They came

rather later in time, and their nomadic life was more highly developed

than that of the primitive Aryans. The primitive Aryans were a forest

and ox-wagon people who took to the horse later. The Hunnish peoples had

grown up with the horse. Somewhen about 1200 or 1000 years B.C. they

began to ride the horse. The bit, the saddle, the stirrup, these are not

primitive things, but they are necessary if man and horse are to keep

going for long stretches. It is well to bear in mind how modern a thing

is riding. Altogether man has not been in the saddle for much more than

three thousand years.[265] We have already noted the gradual appearance

of the war-chariot, the mounted man, and finally of disciplined cavalry

in this history. It was from the Mongolian regions of Asia that these

things came. To this day men in Central Asia go rather in the saddle

than on their proper feet. Says Ratzel,[266] “Strong, longnecked horses

are found in enormous numbers on the steppes. For Mongols and Turcomans

riding is not a luxury; even the Mongol shepherds tend their flocks on

horseback. Children are taught to ride in early youth; and the boy of

three years old often takes his first riding-lesson on a safe child’s

saddle and makes quick progress.”

It is impossible to suppose that the Huns and the Alans could have

differed very widely in character from the present nomads of the steppe

regions, and nearly all observers are agreed in describing these latter

as open and pleasant people. They are thoroughly honest and

free-spirited. “The character of the herdsmen of Central Asia,” says

Ratzel,[267] “when unadulterated, is ponderous eloquence, frankness,

rough good-nature, pride, but also indolence, irritability, and a

tendency to vindictiveness. Their faces show a considerable share of

frankness combined with amusing naïveté.... Their courage is rather a

sudden blaze of pugnacity than cold boldness. Religious fanaticism they

have none. Hospitality is universal.” This is not an entirely

disagreeable picture. Their personal bearing, he says further, is

quieter and more dignified than that of the townsmen of Turkestan and

Persia. Add to this that the nomadic life prevents any great class

inequalities or any extensive development of slavery.

Of course these peoples out of Asia were totally illiterate and

artistically undeveloped. But we must not suppose, on that account, that

they were primitive barbarians, and that their state of life was at the

level from which the agricultural civilization had long ago arisen. It

was not. They too had developed, but they had developed along a

different line, a line with less intellectual complication, more

personal dignity perhaps, and certainly with a more intimate contact

with wind and sky.

§ 5

The first serious irruptions of the German tribes into the Roman Empire

began in the third century with the decay of the central power.[268] We

will not entangle the reader here with the vexed and intricate question

of the names, identity, and inter-relationships of the various Germanic

tribes. Historians find great difficulties in keeping them distinct, and

these difficulties are enhanced by the fact that they themselves took

little care to keep themselves distinct. We find in 236 A.D. a people

called the Franks breaking bounds upon the Lower Rhine, and another,

the Alamanni, pouring into Alsace. A much more serious push southward

was that of the Goths. We have already noted the presence of these

people in South Russia, and their division by the Dnieper into Western

and Eastern Goths. They had become a maritime people again upon the

Black Sea--probably their traditional migration from Sweden was along

the waterways, for it is still possible to row a boat, with only a few

quite practicable portages, from the Baltic right across Russia to

either the Black or Caspian Sea--and they had wrested the command of the

eastern seas from the control of Rome. They were presently raiding the

shores of Greece. They also crossed the Danube in a great land raid in

247, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in what is now Serbia.

The province of Dacia vanished from Roman history. In 270 they were

defeated at Nish in Serbia by Claudius, and in 276 they were raiding

Pontus. It is characteristic of the invertebrate nature of the empire

that the legions of Gaul found that the most effective method of dealing

with the Franks and the Alamanni at this time was by setting up a

separate emperor in Gaul and doing the job by themselves.

Then for a while the barbarians were held, and the Emperor Probus in 276

forced the Franks and the Alamanni back over the Rhine. But it is

significant of the general atmosphere of insecurity created by these

raids that Aurelian (270-275) fortified Rome, which had been an open and

secure city for all the earlier years of the empire.

In 321 A.D. the Goths were again over the Danube, plundering what is now

Serbia and Bulgaria. They were driven back by Constantine the Great, of

whom we shall have more to tell in the next chapter. About the end of

his reign (337 A.D.) the Vandals, a people closely kindred to the Goths,

being pressed by them, obtained permission to cross the Danube into

Pannonia, which is now that part of Hungary west of the river.

But by the middle of the fourth century the Hunnish people to the east

were becoming aggressive again. They had long subjugated the Alani, and

now they made the Ostrogoths, the east Goths, tributary. The Visigoths

(or West Goths) followed the example of the Vandals, and made

arrangements to cross the Danube into Roman territory. There was some

dispute upon the terms of this settlement, and the Visigoths, growing

fierce, assumed the offensive, and at Adrianople defeated the Emperor

Valens, who was killed in this battle. They were then allowed to settle

in what is now Bulgaria, and their army became nominally a Roman army,

though they retained their own chiefs, the foremost of whom was Alaric.

It exhibits the complete “barbarization” of the Roman empire that had

already occurred, that the chief opponent of Alaric the Goth, Stilicho,

was a Pannonian Vandal. The legions in Gaul were under the command of a

Frank, and the Emperor Theodosius I (emp. 379-395) was a Spaniard

chiefly supported by Gothic auxiliaries.

The empire was now splitting finally into an eastern (Greek-speaking)

and a western (Latin-speaking) half. Theodosius the Great was succeeded

by his sons Arcadius at Constantinople and Honorius at Ravenna. Alaric

made a puppet of the eastern monarch and Stilicho of the western. Huns

now first appear within the empire as auxiliary troops enlisted under

Stilicho. In this struggle of East and West, the frontier--if we can

still speak of a frontier between the unauthorized barbarian without and

the barbarian in possession within--gave way. Fresh Vandals, more Goths,

Alans, Suevi, marched freely westward, living upon the country. Amidst

this confusion occurred a crowning event. Alaric and Goth marched down

Italy, and after a short siege captured Rome (410).

By 425 or so, the Vandals (whom originally we noted in East Germany) and

a portion of the Alani (whom we first mentioned in South-east Russia)

had traversed Gaul and the Pyrenees, and had amalgamated and settled in

the south of Spain. There were Huns in possession of Pannonia and Goths

in Dalmatia. Into Bohemia and Moravia came and settled a Slavic people,

the Czechs (451). In Portugal and north of the Vandals in Spain were

Visigoths and Suevi. Gaul was divided among Visigoths, Franks, and

Burgundians. Britain was being invaded by Low German tribes, the Jutes,

Angles, and Saxons, before whom the Keltic British of the south-west

were flying across the sea to what is now Brittany in France. The usual

date given for this invasion is 449, but it was probably earlier.[269]

And as the result of intrigues between two imperial politicians, the

Vandals of the south of Spain, under their king Genseric, embarked _en

masse_ for North Africa (429), became masters of Carthage (439), secured

the mastery of the sea, raided, captured, and pillaged Rome (455),

crossed into Sicily, and set up a kingdom in West Sicily, which endured

there for a hundred years (up to 534). At the time of its greatest

extent (477) this Vandal kingdom included also Corsica, Sardinia, and

the Balearic Isles, as well as much of North Africa.

[Illustration: The TRACKS of various MIGRATING & RAIDING PEOPLES between

1 A.D. and 700 A.D.]

About this Vandal kingdom facts and figures are given that show very

clearly the true nature of these barbarian irruptions. They were not

really the conquest and replacement of one people or race by another;

what happened was something very different, it was a social revolution

started and masked by a superficial foreign conquest. The whole Vandal

nation, men, women, and children, that came from Spain to Africa, for

example, did not number more than eighty thousand souls. We know this

because we have particulars of the transport problem. In their struggle

for North Africa, Dr. Schurtz tells us,[270] “there is no trace of any

serious resistance offered by the inhabitants; Boniface (the Roman

governor of North Africa) had defended Hippo with Gothic mercenaries,

while the native population lent no appreciable assistance, and the

nomad tribes of the country either adopted a dubious attitude or availed

themselves of the difficulties of the Roman governor to make attacks and

engage in predatory expeditions. This demoralization resulted from

social conditions, which had perhaps developed more unfavourably in

Africa than in other parts of the Roman Empire. The free peasants had

long ago become the serfs of the great landed proprietors, and were

little superior in position to the masses of slaves who were everywhere

to be found. And the great landowners had become in their turn easy

victims of the policy of extortion followed by unscrupulous governors to

an increasingly unprecedented extent in proportion as the dignity of the

imperial power sank lower. No man who had anything to lose would now

take a place in the senate of the large towns, which had once been the

goal of the ambitious, for the senators were required to make up all

deficiencies in the revenue, and such deficiencies were now frequent

and considerable.... Bloody insurrections repeatedly broke out, always

traceable ultimately to the pressure of taxation....”

Manifestly the Vandals came in as a positive relief to such a

system.[271] They exterminated the great landowners, wiped out all debts

to Roman money-lenders, and abolished the last vestiges of military

service. The cultivators found themselves better off; the minor

officials kept their places; it was not so much a conquest as a

liberation from an intolerable deadlock.

It was while the Vandals were still in Africa that a great leader,

Attila, arose among the Huns. The seat of his government was in the

plains east of the Danube. For a time he swayed a considerable empire of

Hunnish and Germanic tribes, and his rule stretched from the Rhine into

Central Asia. He negotiated on equal terms with the Chinese emperor. He

bullied Ravenna and Constantinople for ten years. Honoria, the

grand-daughter of Theodosius II, Emperor of the Eastern empire, one of

those passionate young ladies who cause so much trouble in the world,

having been put under restraint because of a love affair with a court

chamberlain, sent her ring to Attila and called upon him to be her

husband and deliverer. He was also urged to attack the Eastern empire by

Genseric the Vandal, who was faced by an alliance of the Western and

Eastern emperors. He raided southward to the very walls of

Constantinople, completely destroying, says Gibbon, seventy cities in

his progress, and forcing upon the emperor an onerous peace, which

apparently did not involve the liberation of Honoria to her hero.

At this distance of time we are unable to guess at the motives for this

omission. Attila continued to speak of her as his affianced bride, and

to use the relationship as a pretext for aggressions. In the subsequent

negotiations a certain Priscus accompanied an embassy to the camp of the

Hunnish monarch, and the fragments that still survive of the narrative

he wrote give us a glimpse of the camp and way of living of the great

conqueror.

The embassy was itself a curiously constituted body. Its head was

Maximin, an honest diplomatist who went in good faith, Quite unknown to

him and, at the time, to Priscus, Vigilius, the interpreter of the

expedition, had also a secret mission from the court of Theodosius which

was to secure by bribery the assassination of Attila. The little

expedition went by way of Nish; it crossed the Danube in canoes, dug out

of a single tree, and it was fed by contributions from the villages on

the route. Differences in dietary soon attracted the attention of the

envoys. Priscus mentions mead in the place of wine, millet for corn, and

a drink either distilled[272] or brewed from barley. The journey through

Hungary will remind the reader in many of its incidents of the journeys

of travellers in Central Africa during the Victorian period. The

travellers were politely offered temporary wives.

Attila’s capital was rather a vast camp and village than a town. There

was only one building of stone, a bath constructed on the Roman model.

The mass of the people were in huts and tents; Attila and his leading

men lived in timber palaces in great stockaded enclosures with their

numerous wives and ministers about them. There was a vast display of

loot, but Attila himself affected a nomadic simplicity; he was served in

wooden cups and platters, and never touched bread. He worked hard, kept

open court before the gate of his palace, and was commonly in the

saddle. The primitive custom of both Aryans and Mongols of holding great

feasts in halls still held good, and there was much hard drinking.

Priscus describes how bards chanted before Attila. They “recited the

verses which they had composed, to celebrate his valour and his

victories. A profound silence prevailed in the hall, and the attention

of the guests was captivated by the vocal harmony, which revived and

perpetuated the memory of their own exploits; a martial ardour flashed

from the eyes of the warriors, who were impatient for battle; and the

tears of the old men expressed their generous despair, that they could

no longer partake the danger and glory of the field. This entertainment,

which might be considered as a school of military virtue, was succeeded

by a farce that debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and

Scythian buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators

by their deformed figures, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd

speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the

Gothic, and the Hunnish languages, and the hall resounded with loud and

licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot,

Attila alone, without change of countenance, maintained his steadfast

and inflexible gravity.”[273]

Although Attila was aware, through the confession of the proposed

assassin, of the secret work of Vigilius, he allowed this embassy to

return in safety, with presents of numerous horses and the like, to

Constantinople. Then he despatched an ambassador to Theodosius II to

give that monarch, as people say, a piece of his mind. “Theodosius,”

said the envoy, “is the son of an illustrious and respectable parent;

Attila, likewise, is descended from a noble race; and _he_ has

supported, by his actions, the dignity which he inherited from his

father Munzuk. But Theodosius has forfeited his parental honours, and,

by consenting to pay tribute, has degraded himself to the condition of a

slave. It is therefore just that he should reverence the man whom

fortune and merit have placed above him; instead of attempting, like a

wicked slave, clandestinely to conspire against his master.”

This straightforward bullying was met by abject submission. The emperor

sued for pardon, and paid a great ransom.

In 451 Attila declared war on the western empire. He invaded Gaul. So

far as the imperial forces were concerned, he had things all his own

way, and he sacked most of the towns of France as far south as Orleans.

Then the Franks and Visigoths and the imperial forces united against

him, and a great and obstinate battle at Troyes (451), in which over

150,000 men were killed on both sides, ended in his repulse and saved

Europe from a Mongolian overlord. This disaster by no means exhausted

Attila’s resources. He turned his attention southward, and overran North

Italy. He burnt Aquileia and Padua, and looted Milan, but he made peace

at the entreaty of Pope Leo I. He died in 453....

Hereafter the Huns, so far as that name goes in Europe, the Huns of

Attila, disappeared out of history. They dissolved into the surrounding

populations. They were probably already much mixed, and rather Aryan

than Mongolian. They did not become, as one might suppose, the

inhabitants of Hungary, though they have probably left many descendants

there. About a hundred years after came another Hunnish or mixed people,

the Avars, out of the east into Hungary, but these were driven out

eastward again by Charlemagne in 791-5. The Magyars, the modern

Hungarians, came westward later. They were a Turko-Finnish people. The

Magyar is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugrian division of the

Ural-Altaic tongues. The Magyars were on the Volga about 550. They

settled in Hungary about 900.... But we are getting too far on in our

story, and we must return to Rome.

In 493 Theodoric, a Goth, became King of Rome, but already for seventeen

years there had been no Roman emperor. So it was in utter social decay

and collapse that the great slave-holding “world-ascendancy” of the

God-Cæsars and the rich men of Rome came to an end.

§ 6

But though throughout the whole of Western Europe and North Africa the

Roman imperial system had collapsed, though credit had vanished, luxury

production had ceased, and money was hidden, though creditors were going

unpaid and slaves masterless, the tradition of the Cæsars was still

being carried on in Constantinople. We have already had occasion to

mention as two outstanding figures among the late Cæsars, Diocletian

(284) and Constantine the Great (312), and it was to the latter of these

that the world owes the setting up of a fresh imperial centre at

Constantinople. Very early during the imperial period the unsuitability

of the position of Rome as a world capital, due to the Roman failure to

use the sea, was felt. The destruction of Carthage and Corinth had

killed the shipping of the main Mediterranean sea-routes. For a people

who did not use the sea properly, having the administrative centre at

Rome meant that every legion, every draft of officials, every order, had

to travel northward for half the length of Italy before it could turn

east or west. Consequently nearly all the more capable emperors set up

their headquarters at some subordinate centre in a more convenient

position. Sirmium (on the River Save), Milan, Lyons, and Nicomedia (in

Bithynia) were among such supplementary capitals. For a time under

Diocletian, Durazzo was the imperial capital. Ravenna, near the head of

the Adriatic, was the capital of the last Roman emperors in the time of

Alaric and Stilicho.

[Illustration: The EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE circa 500 A.D.]

It was Constantine the Great who determined upon the permanent transfer

of the centre of imperial power to the Bosphorus. We have already noted

the existence of the city of Byzantium, which Constantine chose to

develop into his new capital. It played a part in the story of the

intricate Histiæus (chap. xxii, § 4); it repulsed Philip of Macedon

(chap. xxiv, § 3). If the reader will examine its position, he will see

that in the hands of a line of capable emperors, and as the centre of a

people with some solidarity and spirit and seacraft (neither of which

things were vouchsafed to it), it was extraordinarily well placed. Its

galleys could have penetrated up the rivers to the heart of Russia and

outflanked every barbarian advance. It commanded practicable trade

routes to the east, and it was within a reasonable striking distance of

Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and all the more prosperous and civilized

regions of the world at that period. And even under the rule of a

series of inept monarchs and under demoralized social conditions, the

remains of the Roman Empire centring at Constantinople held out for

nearly a thousand years.

It was the manifest intention of Constantine the Great that

Constantinople should be the centre of an undivided empire. But having

regard to the methods of travel and transport available at the time, the

geographical conditions of Europe and Western Asia do not point to any

one necessary centre of government. If Rome faced westward instead of

eastward, and so failed to reach out beyond the Euphrates,

Constantinople on the other hand was hopelessly remote from Gaul. The

enfeebled Mediterranean civilization, after a certain struggle for

Italy, did in fact let go of the west altogether and concentrated upon

what were practically the central vestiges, the stump, of the empire of

Alexander. The Greek language resumed its sway, which had never been

very seriously undermined by the official use of Latin. This “Eastern”

or Byzantine empire is generally spoken of as if it were a continuation

of the Roman tradition. It is really far more like a resumption of

Alexander’s.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the geographical advantages of

CONSTANTINOPLE]

The Latin language had not the intellectual vigour behind it, it had not

the literature and the science, to make it a necessity to intelligent

men and so to maintain an ascendancy over the Greek. For no language,

whatever officialdom may do, can impose itself in competition with

another that can offer the advantages of a great literature or

encyclopædic information. Aggressive languages must bring gifts, and the

gifts of Greek were incomparably greater than the gifts of Latin. The

Eastern empire was from the beginnings of its separation Greek-speaking,

and a continuation, though a degenerate continuation, of the Hellenic

tradition. Its intellectual centre was no longer in Greece, but

Alexandria. Its mentality was no longer the mentality of free-minded

plain-speaking citizens, of the Stagirite Aristotle and the Greek Plato;

its mentality was the mentality of the pedants and of men politically

impotent; its philosophy was a pompous evasion of real things, and its

scientific impulse was dead. Nevertheless, it was Hellenic. The Roman

had come, and he had gone again. Indeed he had gone very extensively

from the west also. By the sixth century A.D. the populations of Europe

and North Africa had been stirred up like sediment. When presently in

the seventh and eighth centuries the sediment begins to settle down

again and populations begin to take on a definite localized character,

the Roman is only to be found by name in the region about Rome. Over

large parts of his Western empire we find changed and changing

modifications of his Latin speech; in Gaul, where the Frank is learning

a Gallic form of Latin and evolving French in the process; in Italy,

where, under the influence of Teutonic invaders, the Lombards and Goths,

Latin is being modified into various Italian dialects; in Spain and

Portugal, where it is becoming Spanish and Portuguese. The fundamental

Latinity of the languages in these regions serves to remind us of the

numerical unimportance of the various Frankish, Vandal, Avar, Gothic,

and the like German-speaking invaders, and serves to justify our

statement that what happened to the Western empire was not so much

conquest and the replacement of one population by another as a political

and social revolution. The district of Valais in South Switzerland also

retained a fundamentally Latin speech and so did the Canton Grisons;

and, what is more curious and interesting, is that in Dacia and Mœsia

Inferior, large parts of which to the north of the Danube became the

modern Roumania (= Romania), although these regions were added late to

the empire and lost soon, the Latin speech also remained.

In Britain Latin was practically wiped out by the conquering

Anglo-Saxons, from among whose various dialects the root stock of

English presently grew.

But while the smashing of the Roman social and political structure was

thus complete, while in the east it was thrown off by the older and

stronger Hellenic tradition, and while in the west it was broken up into

fragments that began to take on a new and separate life of their own,

there was one thing that did not perish, but grew, and that was the

tradition of the world empire of Rome and of the supremacy of the

Cæsars. When the reality was destroyed, the legend had freedom to

expand. Removed from the possibility of verification, the idea of a

serene and splendid Roman world-supremacy grew up in the imagination of

mankind, and still holds it to this day.

Ever since the time of Alexander, human thought has been haunted by the

possible political unity of the race. All the sturdy chiefs and leaders

and kings of the barbarians, who raided through the prostrate but vast

disorder of the decayed empire, were capable of conceiving of some

mighty king of kings greater than themselves and giving a real law for

all men, and they were ready to believe that elsewhere in space and time

and capable of returning presently to resume his supremacy, Cæsar had

been such a king of kings. Far above their own titles, therefore, they

esteemed and envied the title of Cæsar. The international history of

Europe from this time henceforth is largely the story of kings and

adventurers setting up to be Cæsar and Imperator (Emperor). We shall

tell of some of them in their places. So universal did this “Cæsaring”

become, that the Great War of 1914-18 mowed down no fewer than four

Cæsars, the German Kaiser (= Cæsar), the Austrian Kaiser, the Tsar (=

Cæsar) of Russia, and that fantastic figure, the Tsar of Bulgaria. The

French “Imperator” (Napoleon III) had already fallen in 1871. There is

now (1920) no one left in the world to carry on the Imperial title or

the tradition of Divus Cæsar except the Turkish Sultan and the British

monarch. The former commemorates his lordship over Constantinople as

Kaisar-i-Roum[274]; the latter is called the Cæsar of India (a country

no real Cæsar ever looked upon), Kaisar-i-Hind.

BOOK VI

CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

XXX

THE BEGINNINGS, THE RISE, AND THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTIANITY

§ 1. _Judea at the Christian Era._ § 2. _The Teachings of Jesus of

Nazareth._ § 3. _The New Universal Religions._ § 4. _The

Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth._ § 5. _Doctrines added to the

Teachings of Jesus._ § 6. _The Struggles and Persecutions of

Christianity._ § 7. _Constantine the Great._ § 8. _The

Establishment of Official Christianity._ § 9. _The Map of Europe,

A.D. 500._ § 10. _The Salvation of Learning by Christianity._

§ 1

Before we can understand the qualities of Christianity, which must now

play a large part in our history, and which opened men’s eyes to fresh

aspects of the possibility of a unified world, we must go back some

centuries and tell of the condition of affairs in Palestine and Syria,

in which countries Christianity arose. We have already told in Chapter

XXI the main facts about the origin of the Jewish nation and tradition,

about the Diaspora, about the fundamentally scattered nature of Jewry

even from the beginning, and the gradual development of the idea of one

just God ruling the earth and bound by a special promise to preserve and

bring to honour the Jewish people. The Jewish idea was and is a curious

combination of theological breadth and an intense racial patriotism. The

Jews looked for a special saviour, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind

by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and

Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the benevolent but

firm Jewish heel. As the political power of the Semitic peoples

declined, as Carthage followed Tyre into the darkness and Spain became

a Roman province, this dream grew and spread. There can be little doubt

that the scattered Phœnicians in Spain and Africa and throughout the

Mediterranean, speaking as they did a language closely akin to Hebrew

and being deprived of their authentic political rights, became

proselytes to Judaism. For phases of vigorous proselytism alternated

with phases of exclusive jealousy in Jewish history. On one occasion the

Idumeans, being conquered, were all forcibly made Jews.[275] There were

Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkish people

who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is

indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered

peoples--mainly Semitic. It is to the Phœnician contingent and to

Aramean accessions in Babylon that the financial and commercial

tradition of the Jews is to be ascribed. But as a result of these

coalescences and assimilations, almost everywhere in the towns

throughout the Roman Empire, and far beyond it in the east, Jewish

communities traded and flourished, and were kept in touch through the

Bible and through a religious and educational organization. The main

part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.

Manifestly this intercommunicating series of Judaized communities had

very great financial and political facilities. They could assemble

resources, they could stir up, they could allay. They were neither so

abundant nor so civilized as the still more widely diffused Greeks, but

they had a tradition of greater solidarity. Greek was hostile to Greek;

Jew stood by Jew. Wherever a Jew went, he found men of like mind and

like tradition with himself. He could get shelter, food, loans, and

legal help. And by reason of this solidarity rulers had everywhere to

take account of this people as a help, as a source of loans, or as a

source of trouble. So it is that the Jews have persisted as a people

while Hellenism has become a universal light for mankind.

We cannot tell here in any detail the history of that smaller part of

Jewry that lived in Judea. These Jews had returned to their old position

of danger; again they were seeking peace in, so to speak, the middle of

a highway. In the old time they had been between Syria and Assyria to

the north and Egypt to the south; now they had the Seleucids to the

north and the Ptolemys to the south, and when the Seleucids went, then

down came the Roman power upon them. The independence of Judea was

always a qualified and precarious thing. The reader must go to the

_Antiquities_ and the _Wars of the Jews_ of Flavius Josephus, a copious,

tedious, and maddeningly patriotic writer, to learn of the succession of

their rulers, of their high-priest monarchs, and of the Maccabæans, the

Herods, and the like. These rulers were for the most part of the

ordinary eastern type, cunning, treacherous, and blood-stained. Thrice

Jerusalem was taken and twice the temple was destroyed. It was the

support of the far more powerful Diaspora that prevented the little

country from being wiped out altogether, until 70 A.D., when Titus, the

adopted son and successor of the Emperor Vespasian, after a siege that

ranks in bitterness and horror with that of Tyre and Carthage, took

Jerusalem and destroyed city and temple altogether. He did this in an

attempt to destroy Jewry, but indeed he made Jewry stronger by

destroying its one sensitive and vulnerable point.

[Illustration: GALILEE and surrounding provinces.]

Throughout a history of five centuries of war and civil commotion

between the return from captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem,

certain constant features of the Jew persisted. He remained obstinately

monotheistic; he would have none other gods but the one true God. In

Rome, as in Jerusalem, he stood out manfully against the worship of any

god-Cæsar. And to the best of his ability he held to his covenants with

his God. No graven images could enter Jerusalem; even the Roman

standards with their eagles had to stay outside.

Two divergent lines of thought are traceable in Jewish affairs during

these five hundred years. On the right, so to speak, are the high and

narrow Jews, the Pharisees, very orthodox, very punctilious upon even

the minutest details of the law, intensely patriotic and exclusive.

Jerusalem on one occasion fell to the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV

because the Jews would not defend it on the Sabbath day, when it is

forbidden to work; and it was because the Jews made no effort to destroy

his siege train on the Sabbath that Pompey the Great was able to take

Jerusalem. But against these narrow Jews were pitted the broad Jews, the

Jews of the left, who were Hellenizers, among whom are to be ranked the

Sadducees, who did not believe in immortality. These latter Jews, the

broad Jews, were all more or less disposed to mingle with and assimilate

themselves to the Greeks and Hellenized peoples about them. They were

ready to accept proselytes, and so to share God and his promise with all

mankind. But what they gained in generosity they lost in rectitude. They

were the worldlings of Judea. We have already noted how the Hellenized

Jews of Egypt lost their Hebrew, and had to have their Bible translated

into Greek.

In the reign of Tiberius Cæsar a great teacher arose out of Judea who

was to liberate the intense realization of the righteousness and

unchallengeable oneness of God, and of man’s moral obligation to God,

which was the strength of orthodox Judaism, from that greedy and

exclusive narrowness with which it was so extraordinarily intermingled

in the Jewish mind. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the seed rather than the

founder of Christianity.

§ 2

The audience to which this book will first be presented will be largely

an audience of Christians, with perhaps a sprinkling of Jewish readers,

and the former at least will regard Jesus of Nazareth as being much more

than a human teacher, and his appearance in the world not as a natural

event in history, but as something of a supernatural sort interrupting

and changing that steady development of life towards a common

consciousness and a common will, which we have hitherto been tracing in

this book. But these persuasions, dominant as they are in Europe and

America, are nevertheless not the persuasions of all men or of the great

majority of mankind, and we are writing this outline of the story of

life with as complete an avoidance of controversial matter as may be. We

are trying to write as if this book was to be read as much by Hindus or

Moslems or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans. We shall

therefore hold closely to the apparent facts, and avoid, without any

disputation or denial, the theological interpretations that have been

imposed upon them. We shall tell what men have believed about Jesus of

Nazareth, but him we shall treat as being what he appeared to be, a man,

just as a painter must needs paint him as a man. The documents that

testify to his acts and teachings we shall treat as ordinary human

documents. If the light of divinity shine through our recital, we will

neither help nor hinder it. This is what we have already done in the

case of Buddha, and what we shall do later with Muhammad. About Jesus we

have to write not theology but history, and our concern is not with the

spiritual and theological significance of his life, but with its effects

upon the political and everyday life of men.

Almost our only sources of information about the personality of Jesus

are derived from the four gospels, all of which were certainly in

existence a few decades after his death, and from allusions to his life

in the letters (epistles) of the early Christian propagandists. The

first three gospels, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, many

suppose to be derived from some earlier documents; the gospel of St.

John has more idiosyncrasy and is coloured by theology of a strongly

Hellenic type. Critics are disposed to regard the gospel of St. Mark as

being the most trustworthy account of the personality and actual words

of Jesus.[276] But all four agree in giving us a picture of a very

definite personality; they carry the same conviction of reality that the

early accounts of Buddha do. In spite of miraculous and incredible

additions, one is obliged to say, “Here was a man. This part of the tale

could not have been invented.”

But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been distorted and

obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of later

Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous personality of Jesus

is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that a mistaken

reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was

a penniless teacher, who wandered about the dusty sun-lit country of

Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented

clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something

motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This

alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot

distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise

additions of the unintelligently devout.

And it may be that the early parts of the gospels are accretions of the

same nature. The miraculous circumstances of the birth of Jesus, the

great star that brought wise men from the east to worship at his manger

cradle, the massacre of the male infant children in the region of

Bethlehem by Herod as a consequence of these portents, and the flight

into Egypt, are all supposed to be such accretionary matter by many

authorities. At the best they are events unnecessary to the teaching,

and they rob it of much of the strength and power it possesses when we

strip it of such accompaniment. So, too, do the discrepant genealogies

given by Matthew and Luke, in which there is an endeavour to trace the

direct descent of Joseph, his father, from King David, as though it was

any honour to Jesus or to anyone to have such a man as an ancestor. The

insertion of these genealogies is the more peculiar and unreasonable,

because, according to the legend, Jesus was not the son of Joseph at

all, but miraculously conceived.

We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories,

with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and passionate,

capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and simple and profound

doctrine--namely, the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the coming

of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person--to use a common

phrase--of intense personal magnetism. He attracted followers and filled

them with love and courage. Weak and ailing people were heartened and

healed by his presence. Yet he was probably of a delicate physique,

because of the swiftness with which he died under the pains of

crucifixion. There is a tradition that he fainted when, according to the

custom, he was made to bear his cross to the place of execution. When he

first appeared as a teacher he was a man of about thirty. He went about

the country for three years spreading his doctrine, and then he came to

Jerusalem and was accused of trying to set up a strange kingdom in

Judea; he was tried upon this charge, and crucified together with two

thieves. Long before they were dead, his sufferings were over.

Now it is a matter of fact that in the gospels all that body of

theological assertion which constitutes Christianity finds little

support. There is, as the reader may see for himself, no clear and

emphatic assertion in these books of the doctrines which Christian

teachers of all denominations find generally necessary to salvation. It

is difficult to get any words that actually came from Jesus in which he

claimed to be the Jewish Messiah (rendered in Greek by “the Christ”) or

to be a part of the godhead, or in which he explained the doctrine of

the Atonement or urged any sacrifices or sacraments (that is to say,

priestly offices) upon his followers. We shall see presently how later

on all Christendom was torn by disputes about the Trinity. There is no

evidence that the apostles of Jesus ever heard of the Trinity--at any

rate from him. The observance of the Jewish Sabbath, again, transferred

to the Mithraic Sun-day, is an important feature of many Christian

cults; but Jesus deliberately broke the Sabbath, and said that it was

made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Nor did he say a word about

the worship of his mother Mary, in the guise of Isis, the Queen of

Heaven. All that is most characteristically Christian in worship and

usage, he ignored. Sceptical writers have had the temerity to deny that

Jesus can be called a Christian at all. For light upon these

extraordinary gaps in his teaching, each reader must go to his own

religious guides. Here we are bound to mention these gaps on account of

the difficulties and controversies that arose out of them, and we are

equally bound not to enlarge upon them.

As remarkable is the enormous prominence given by Jesus to the teaching

of what he called the Kingdom of Heaven, and its comparative

insignificance in the procedure and teaching of most of the Christian

churches.

This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of

Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Christian creeds, is

certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and

changed human thought. It is small wonder if the world of that time

failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay from even

a half apprehension of its tremendous challenges to the established

habits and institutions of mankind. It is small wonder if the hesitating

convert and disciple presently went back to the old familiar ideas of

temple and altar, of fierce deity and propitiatory observance, of

consecrated priest and magic blessing, and--these things being attended

to--reverted then to the dear old habitual life of hates and profits and

competition and pride. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as

Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and

uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of

our struggling race, an utter cleansing, without and within. To the

gospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous

teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon

established ideas.

The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole world, was a

righteous god, but they also thought of him as a trading god who had

made a bargain with their Father Abraham about them, a very good bargain

indeed for them, to bring them at last to predominance in the earth.

With dismay and anger they heard Jesus sweeping away their dear

securities. God, he taught, was no bargainer; there were no chosen

people and no favourites in the Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving

father of all life, as incapable of showing favour as the universal sun.

And all men were brothers--sinners alike and beloved sons alike of this

divine father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus cast scorn

upon that natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own people and to

minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other races. In the

parable of the labourers he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the Jews

to have a sort of first mortgage upon God. All whom God takes into the

kingdom, he taught, God serves alike; there is no distinction in his

treatment, because there is no measure to his bounty. From all,

moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses, and as the

incident of the widow’s mite enforces, he demands the utmost. There are

no privileges, no rebates, and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But it was not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that Jesus

outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and he would

have swept away all the narrow and restrictive family affections in the

great flood of the love of God. The whole Kingdom of Heaven was to be

the family of his followers. We are told that, “While he yet talked to

the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring

to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy

brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and

said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?

And he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples, and said, Behold

my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father

which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and

mother.”[277]

And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of family

loyalty in the name of God’s universal fatherhood and the brotherhood of

all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching condemned all the

gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and personal

advantages. All men belonged to the kingdom; all their possessions

belonged to the kingdom; the righteous life for all men, the only

righteous life, was the service of God’s will with all that we had, with

all that we were. Again and again he denounced private riches and the

reservation of any private life.

“And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and

kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may

inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good?

there is none good but one, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments,

Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false

witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and

said unto him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth.

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou

lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,

and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and

follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he

had great possessions.

“And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly

shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the

disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answered again, and

saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches

to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through

the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of

God.”[278]

Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom which was to make

all men one together in God, Jesus had small patience for the bargaining

righteousness of formal religion. Another large part of his recorded

utterances is aimed against the meticulous observance of the rules of

the pious career. “Then came together unto him the Pharisees, and

certain of the scribes, which came from Jerusalem. And when they saw

some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with

unwashen, hands, they found fault. For the Pharisees, and all the Jews,

except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the

elders. And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat

not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold,

as the washing of cups, and pots, brazen vessels, and of tables. Then

the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples

according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen

hands? He answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah prophesied of

you hypocrites, as it is written,

“This people honoureth me with their lips,

“But their heart is far from me.

“Howbeit in vain do they worship me,

“Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

“For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men,

as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such things ye do. And

he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye

may keep your own tradition.”[279]

So, too, we may note a score of places in which he flouted that darling

virtue of the formalist, the observance of the Sabbath.

It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus proclaimed;

it is clear from a score of indications that his teaching had a

political bent of the plainest sort. It is true that he said his kingdom

was not of this world, that it was in the hearts of men and not upon a

throne; but it is equally clear that wherever and in what measure his

kingdom was set up in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in

that measure revolutionized and made new.

Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have missed

in his utterances, it is plain that they did not miss his resolve to

revolutionize the world. Some of the questions that were brought to

Jesus and the answers he gave enable us to guess at the drift of much of

his unrecorded teaching. The directness of his political attack is

manifest by such an incident as that of the coin--

“And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians,

to catch him in his words. And when they were come, they say unto him,

Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou

regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth:

Is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar, or not? Shall we give, or shall

we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt

ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. And they brought it. And he

saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said

unto him, Cæsar’s. And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Cæsar

the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are

God’s”[280]--which in view of all else that he had taught, left very

little of a man or his possessions for Cæsar.

The whole tenor of the opposition to him and the circumstances of his

trial and execution show clearly that to his contemporaries he seemed to

propose plainly, and did propose plainly to change and fuse and enlarge

all human life. But even his disciples did not grasp the profound and

comprehensive significance of that proposal. They were ridden by the old

Jewish dream of a king, a Messiah to overthrow the Hellenized Herods and

the Roman overlord, and restore the fabled glories of David. They

disregarded the substance of his teaching, plain and direct though it

was; evidently they thought it was merely his mysterious and singular

way of setting about the adventure that would at last put him on the

throne of Jerusalem. They thought he was just another king among the

endless succession of kings, but of a quasi-magic kind, and making

quasi-magic professions of an impossible virtue.

“And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come unto him, saying Master,

we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire. And

he said unto them, What would ye that I should do for you? They said

unto him, Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the

other on thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said unto them, Ye know

not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be

baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? And they said unto

him, We can. And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup

that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye

be baptized: but to sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine

to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared. And when

the ten heard it, they began to be much displeased with James and John.

But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know that they

which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over

them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it

not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your

minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of

all. For even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to

minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”[281]

This was cold comfort for those who looked for a due reward for their

services and hardships in his train. They could not believe this hard

doctrine of a kingdom of service which was its own exceeding great

reward. Even after his death upon the cross, they could still, after

their first dismay, revert to the belief that he was nevertheless in the

vein of the ancient world of pomps and privileges, that presently by

some amazing miracle he would become undead again and return, and set up

his throne with much splendour and graciousness in Jerusalem. They

thought his life was a stratagem and his death a trick.

He was too great for his disciples. And in view of what he plainly said,

is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of

strange things, a swimming of their world at his teaching? Perhaps the

priests and the rulers and the rich men understood him better than his

followers. He was dragging out all the little private reservations they

had made from social service into the light of a universal religious

life. He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of

the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of

this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride

and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love. Is it any

wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even

his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it

any wonder that the priests realized that between this man and

themselves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should perish?

Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted and amazed by

something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all their

disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter, and crown him with

thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock Cæsar of him? For to take

him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon

habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible

happiness....

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our

small hearts?[282]

§ 3

Yet be it noted that while there was much in the real teachings of Jesus

that a rich man or a priest or a trader or an imperial official or any

ordinary respectable citizen could not accept without the most

revolutionary changes in his way of living, yet there was nothing that a

follower of the actual teaching of Gautama Sakya might not receive very

readily, nothing to prevent a primitive Buddhist from being also a

Nazarene, and nothing to prevent a personal disciple of Jesus from

accepting all the recorded teachings of Buddha.

Again consider the tone of this extract from the writings of a Chinaman,

Mo Ti, who lived somewhere in the fourth century B.C., when the

doctrines of Confucius and Lao Tse prevailed in China, before the advent

of Buddhism to that country, and note how “Nazarene” it is.

“The mutual attacks of state on state; the mutual usurpations of family

on family; the mutual robberies of man on man; the want of kindness on

the part of the sovereign and of loyalty on the part of the minister;

the want of tenderness and filial duty between father and son--these,

and such as these, are the things injurious to the empire. All this has

arisen from want of mutual love. If but that one virtue could be made

universal, the princes loving one another would have no battle-fields;

the chiefs of families would attempt no usurpations; men would commit no

robberies; rulers and ministers would be gracious and loyal; fathers and

sons would be kind and filial; brothers would be harmonious and easily

reconciled. Men in general loving one another, the strong would not make

prey of the weak; the many would not plunder the few, the rich would not

insult the poor, the noble would not be insolent to the mean; and the

deceitful would not impose upon the simple.”[283]

This is extraordinarily like the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth cast into

political terms. The thoughts of Mo Ti came close to the Kingdom of

Heaven.

This essential identity is the most important historical aspect of these

great world religions. They were in their beginnings quite unlike the

priest, altar and temple cults, those cults for the worship of definite

finite gods that played so great and so essential a part in the earlier

stages of man’s development between 15000 B.C. and 600 B.C. These new

world religions, from 600 B.C. onward, were essentially religions of the

heart and of the universal sky. They swept away all those various and

limited gods that had served the turn of human needs since the first

communities were welded together by fear and hope. And presently when we

come to Islam we shall find that for a third time the same fundamental

new doctrine of the need of a universal devotion of all men to one Will

reappears. Islam indeed is marred, as Judaism is marred, by a streak of

primitive exclusiveness; its founder was manifestly of a commoner clay

than either Jesus or Gautama, and he had to tack on to his assertion of

the supremacy of God an assertion that Muhammad was in especial his

prophet, a queer little lapse into proprietorship, a touchingly baseless

claim for the copyright of an idea which, as a matter of fact, he had

picked up from the Jews and Christians about him. Yet, warned by the

experiences of Christianity, Muhammad was very emphatic in insisting

that he himself was merely a man. And the broad idea of human

brotherhood under God that he preached, and the spirit in which his

followers have carried it among black and fallen races, puts his

essential teaching little lower than that of its two greater but far

more abundantly corrupted and misrepresented rivals.

We speak of these great religions of mankind which arose between the

Persian conquest of Babylon and the break-up of the Roman empire as

rivals; but it is their defects, their accumulations and excrescences,

their differences of language and phrase, that cause the rivalry; and it

is not to one overcoming the other or to any new variant replacing them

that we must look, but to the white truth in each being burnt free from

its dross, and becoming manifestly the same truth--namely, that the

hearts of men, and therewith all the lives and institutions of men, must

be subdued to one common Will, ruling them all.[284]

And though much has been written foolishly about the antagonism of

science and religion, there is indeed no such antagonism. What all these

world religions declare by inspiration and insight, history as it grows

clearer and science as its range extends display, as a reasonable and

demonstrable fact, that men form one universal brotherhood, that they

spring from one common origin, that their individual lives, their

nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last

in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst the stars.

And the psychologist can now stand beside the preacher and assure us

that there is no reasoned peace of heart, no balance and no safety in

the soul, until a man in losing his life has found it, and has schooled

and disciplined his interests and will beyond greeds, rivalries, fears,

instincts, and narrow affections. The history of our race and personal

religious experience run so closely parallel as to seem to a modern

observer almost the same thing; both tell of a being at first scattered

and blind and utterly confused, feeling its way slowly to the serenity

and salvation of an ordered and coherent purpose. That, in the simplest,

is the outline of history; whether one have a religious purpose or

disavow a religious purpose altogether, the lines of the outline remain

the same.

§ 4

In the year 30 A.D.,[285] while Tiberius, the second emperor, was

Emperor of Rome and Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea, a little

while before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus of Nazareth came into

Jerusalem. Probably he came then for the first time. Hitherto he had

been preaching chiefly in Galilee, and for the most part round and about

the town of Capernaum. In Capernaum he had preached in the synagogue.

His entry into Jerusalem was a pacific triumph. He had gathered a great

following in Galilee--he had sometimes to preach from a boat upon the

Lake of Galilee, because of the pressure of the crowd upon the

shore--and his fame had spread before him to the capital. Great crowds

came out to greet him. It is clear they did not understand the drift of

his teaching, and that they shared the general persuasion that by some

magic of righteousness he was going to overthrow the established order.

He rode into the city upon the foal of an ass that had been borrowed by

his disciples. The crowd accompanied him with cries of triumph and

shouts of “Hosanna,” a word of rejoicing.

He went to the temple. Its outer courts were cumbered with the tables of

money-changers and with the stalls of those who sold doves to be

liberated by pious visitors to the temple. These traders upon religion

he and his followers cast out, overturning the tables. It was almost his

only act of positive rule.

Then for a week he taught in Jerusalem, surrounded by a crowd of

followers who made his arrest by the authorities difficult. Then

officialdom gathered itself together against this astonishing intruder.

One of his disciples, Judas, dismayed and disappointed at the apparent

ineffectiveness of this capture of Jerusalem, went to the Jewish priests

to give them his advice and help in the arrest of Jesus. For this

service he was rewarded with thirty pieces of silver. The high priest

and the Jews generally had many reasons for dismay at this gentle

insurrection that was filling the streets with excited crowds; for

example, the Romans might misunderstand it or use it as an occasion to

do some mischief to the whole Jewish people. Accordingly the high priest

Caiaphas, in his anxiety to show his loyalty to the Roman overlord, was

the leader in the proceedings against this unarmed Messiah, and the

priests and the orthodox mob of Jerusalem the chief accusers of Jesus.

How he was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, how he was tried and

sentenced by Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, how he was scourged

and mocked by the Roman soldiers and crucified upon the hill called

Golgotha, is told with unsurpassable simplicity and dignity in the

gospels.

The revolution collapsed utterly. The disciples of Jesus with one accord

deserted him, and Peter, being taxed as one of them, said, “I know not

the man.” This was not the end they had anticipated in their great

coming to Jerusalem. His last hours of aching pain and thirst upon the

cross were watched only by a few women and near friends. Towards the end

of the long day of suffering this abandoned leader roused himself to one

supreme effort, cried out with a loud voice, “My God! my God! why hast

thou forsaken me?” and, leaving these words to echo down the ages, a

perpetual riddle to the faithful, died.

It was inevitable that simple believers should have tried to enhance the

stark terrors of this tragedy by foolish stories of physical

disturbances similar to those which had been invented to emphasize the

conversion of Gautama. We are told that a great darkness fell upon the

earth, and that the veil of the temple was rent in twain; but if indeed

these things occurred, they produced not the slightest effect upon the

minds of people in Jerusalem at that time. It is difficult to believe

nowadays that the order of nature indulged in any such meaningless

comments. Far more tremendous is it to suppose a world apparently

indifferent to those three crosses in the red evening twilight, and to

the little group of perplexed and desolated watchers. The darkness

closed upon the hill; the distant city set about its preparations for

the Passover; scarcely anyone but that knot of mourners on the way to

their homes troubled whether Jesus of Nazareth was still dying or

already dead....

The souls of the disciples were plunged for a time into utter darkness.

Then presently came a whisper among them and stories, rather discrepant

stories, that the body of Jesus was not in the tomb in which it had been

placed, and that first one and then another had seen him alive. Soon

they were consoling themselves with the conviction that he had risen

from the dead, that he had shown himself to many, and had ascended

visibly into heaven. Witnesses were found to declare that they had

positively seen him go up, visibly in his body. He had gone through the

blue--to God. Soon they had convinced themselves that he would presently

come again, in power and glory, to judge all mankind. In a little while,

they said, he would come back to them; and in these bright revivals of

their old-time dream of an assertive and temporal splendour they forgot

the greater measure, the giant measure, he had given them of the Kingdom

of God.

§ 5[286]

The story of the early beginnings of Christianity is the story of the

struggle between the real teachings and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth and

the limitations, amplifications, and misunderstandings of the very

inferior men who had loved and followed him from Galilee, and who were

now the bearers and custodians of his message to mankind. The gospels

and the Acts of the Apostles present a patched and uneven record, but

there can be little question that on the whole it is a quite honest

record of those early days.

The early Nazarenes, as the followers of Jesus were called, present from

the first a spectacle of a great confusion between these two strands,

his teaching on the one hand, and the glosses and interpretations of the

disciples on the other. They continued for a time his disciplines of the

complete subjugation of self; they had their goods in common, they had

no bond but love. Nevertheless, they built their faith upon the stories

that were told of his resurrection and magical ascension, and the

promised return. Few of them understood that the renunciation of self is

its own reward, that it is itself the Kingdom of Heaven; they regarded

it as a sacrifice that entitled them to the compensation of power and

dominion when presently the second coming occurred. They had now all

identified Jesus with the promised Christ, the Messiah so long expected

by the Jewish people. They found out prophecies of the crucifixion in

the prophets--the Gospel of Matthew is particularly insistent upon these

prophecies. Revived by these hopes, enforced by the sweet and pure lives

of many of the believers, the Nazarene doctrine began to spread very

rapidly in Judea and Syria.

And presently there arose a second great teacher, whom many modern

authorities regard as the real founder of Christianity, Saul of Tarsus,

or Paul. Saul apparently was his Jewish and Paul his Roman name; he was

a Roman citizen, and a man of much wider education and a much narrower

intellectuality than Jesus seems to have been. By birth he was probably

a Jew, though some Jewish writers deny this; he had certainly studied

under Jewish teachers. But he was well versed in the Hellenic theologies

of Alexandria, and his language was Greek. Some classical scholars

profess to find his Greek unsatisfactory; he did not use the Greek of

Athens, but the Greek of Alexandria; but he used it with power and

freedom.[287] He was a religious theorist and teacher long before he

heard of Jesus of Nazareth, and he appears in the New Testament

narrative at first as the bitter critic and antagonist of the Nazarenes.

The present writer has been unable to find any discussion of the

religious ideas of Paul before he became a follower of Jesus. There must

have been a basis, if only a basis of departure, for his new views, and

their phraseology certainly supplied the colour of his new doctrines. We

are almost equally in the dark as to the teachings of Gamaliel, who is

named as the Jewish teacher at whose feet he sat. Nor do we know what

Gentile teachings had reached him. It is highly probable that he had

been influenced by Mithraism. He uses phrases curiously like Mithraistic

phrases. What will be clear to anyone who reads his various Epistles,

side by side with the Gospels, is that his mind was saturated by an idea

which does not appear at all prominently in the reported sayings and

teaching of Jesus, the idea of a sacrificial person, who is offered up

to God as an atonement for sin. What Jesus preached was a new birth of

the human soul; what Paul preached was the ancient religion of priest

and altar and propitiatory bloodshed. Jesus was to him the Easter lamb,

that traditional human victim without spot or blemish who haunts all the

religions of the dark white peoples. Paul came to the Nazarenes with

overwhelming force because he came to them with this completely

satisfactory explanation of the disaster of the crucifixion. It was a

brilliant elucidation of what had been utterly perplexing.

Paul had never seen Jesus. His knowledge of Jesus and his teaching must

have been derived from the hearsay of the original disciples. It is

clear that he apprehended much of the spirit of Jesus and his doctrine

of a new birth, but he built this into a theological system, a very

subtle and ingenious system, whose appeal to this day is chiefly

intellectual. And it is clear that the faith of the Nazarenes, which he

found as a doctrine of motive and a way of living, he made into a

doctrine of _belief_. He found the Nazarenes with a spirit and hope, and

he left them Christians with the beginning of a creed.

But we must refer the reader to the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline

Epistles for an account of Paul’s mission and teaching. He was a man of

enormous energy, and he taught at Jerusalem, Antioch, Athens, Corinth,

Ephesus, and Rome.

Possibly he went into Spain. The manner of his death is not certainly

known, but it is said that he was killed in Rome during the reign of

Nero. A great fire had burnt a large part of Rome, and the new sect was

accused of causing this. The rapid spread of Christian teaching

certainly owes more to Paul than to any other single man. Within two

decades of the crucifixion this new religion was already attracting the

attention of the Roman rulers in several provinces. If it had acquired a

theology in the hands of Saint Paul, it still retained much of the

revolutionary and elementary quality of the teachings of Jesus. It had

become somewhat more tolerant of private property; it would accept

wealthy adherents without insisting upon the communization of their

riches, and Saint Paul has condoned the institution of slavery (“Slaves,

be obedient to your masters”),[288] but it still set its face like flint

against certain fundamental institutions of the Roman world. It would

not tolerate the godhead of Cæsar; not even by a mute gesture at the

altar would the Christians consent to worship the Emperor, though their

lives were at stake in the matter. It denounced the gladiatorial shows.

Unarmed, but possessing enormous powers of passive resistance,

Christianity thus appeared at the outset plainly as rebellion, striking

at the political if not at the economic essentials of the imperial

system. The first evidences of Christianity in non-Christian literature

we find when perplexed Roman officials began to write to one another and

exchange views upon the strange problem presented by this infectious

rebellion of otherwise harmless people.

Much of the history of the Christians in the first two centuries of the

Christian era is very obscure. They spread far and wide throughout the

world, but we know very little of their ideas or their ceremonies and

methods during that time. As yet they had no settled creeds, and there

can be little doubt that there were wide local variations in their

beliefs and disciplines during this formless period. But whatever their

local differences, everywhere they seem to have carried much of the

spirit of Jesus; and though everywhere they aroused bitter enmity and

active counter-propaganda, the very charges made against them witness to

the general goodness of their lives.

During this indefinite time a considerable amount of a sort of

theocrasia seems to have gone on between the Christian cult and the

almost equally popular and widely diffused Mithraic cult, and the cult

of Serapis[289]-Isis-Horus. From the former it would seem the Christians

adopted Sun-day as their chief day of worship instead of the Jewish

Sabbath, the abundant use of candles in religious ceremonies, the legend

of the adoration by the shepherds, and probably also those ideas and

phrases, so distinctive of certain sects to this day, about being

“washed in the blood” of Christ, and of Christ being a blood sacrifice.

For we have to remember that a death by crucifixion is hardly a more

bloody death than hanging; to speak of Jesus shedding his blood for

mankind is really a most inaccurate expression. But Mithraism centred

upon some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras sacrificing a sacred and

benevolent bull; all the Mithraic shrines seem to have contained a

figure of Mithras killing this bull, which bleeds copiously, and from

this blood a new life sprang. The Mithraist votary actually bathed in

the blood of the sacrificial bull, and was “born again” thereby. At his

initiation he went beneath a scaffolding on which the bull was killed,

and the blood ran down on him.[290]

The contributions of the Alexandrine cult to Christian thought and

practices were even more considerable. In the personality of Horus, who

was at once the son of Serapis and identical with Serapis, it was

natural for the Christians to find an illuminating analogue in their

struggles with the Pauline mysteries. From that to the identification of

Mary with Isis, and her elevation to a rank quasi-divine--in spite of

the saying of Jesus about his mother and his brothers that we have

already quoted--was also a very natural step. Natural, too, was it for

Christianity to adopt, almost insensibly, the practical methods of the

popular religions of the time. Its priests took on the head-shaving and

the characteristic garments of the Egyptian priests, because that sort

of thing seemed to be the right way of distinguishing a priest. One

accretion followed another. Almost insensibly the originally

revolutionary teaching was buried under these customary acquisitions. We

have already tried to imagine Gautama Buddha returning to Tibet, and his

amazement at the worship of his own image in Lhassa. We will but suggest

the parallel amazement of some earnest Nazarene who had known and

followed his dusty and travel-worn Master through the dry sunlight of

Galilee, restored suddenly to this world and visiting, let us say, a

mass in St. Peter’s at Rome, at learning that the consecrated wafer upon

the altar was none other than his crucified teacher.[291]

Religion in a world community is not many things but one thing, and it

was inevitable that all the living religious faiths in the world at the

time, and all the philosophy and religious thought that came into

contact with Christianity, should come to an account with Christianity

and exchange phrases and ideas. The hopes of the early Nazarenes had

identified Jesus with the Christ; the brilliant mind of Paul had

surrounded his career with mystical significance. Jesus had called men

and women to a giant undertaking, to the renunciation of self, to the

new birth into the kingdom of love. The line of least resistance for the

flagging convert was to intellectualize himself away from this plain

doctrine, this stark proposition, into complicated theories and

ceremonies--that would leave his essential self alone. How much easier

is it to sprinkle oneself with blood than to purge oneself from malice

and competition; to eat bread and drink wine and pretend one had

absorbed divinity, to give candles rather than the heart, to shave the

head and retain the scheming privacy of the brain inside it! The world

was full of such evasive philosophy and theological stuff in the opening

centuries of the Christian era. It is not for us here to enlarge upon

the distinctive features of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Philonism, and the

like teachings which abounded in the Alexandrian world. But it was all

one world with that in which the early Christians were living. The

writings of such men as Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine witness to the

inevitable give and take of the time.

Jesus called himself the Son of God and also the Son of Man; but he laid

little stress on who he was or what he was, and much upon the teachings

of the Kingdom. In declaring that he was more than a man and divine,

Paul and his other followers, whether they were right or wrong, opened

up a vast field of argument. Was Jesus God? Or had God created him? Was

he identical with God or separate from God? It is not the function of

the historian to answer such questions, but he is bound to note them,

and to note how unavoidable they were, because of the immense influence

they have had upon the whole subsequent life of western mankind. By the

fourth century of the Christian Era we find all the Christian

communities so agitated and exasperated by tortuous and elusive

arguments about the nature of God as to be largely negligent of the

simpler teachings of charity, service, and brotherhood that Jesus had

inculcated.

The chief views that the historian notices are those of the Arians, the

Sabellians, and the Trinitarians. The Arians followed Arius, who taught

that Christ was less than God; the Sabellians taught that he was a mode

or aspect of God; God was Creator, Saviour, and Comforter just as one

man may be father, trustee, and guest; the Trinitarians, of whom

Athanasius was the great leader, taught that the Father, the Son, and

the Holy Ghost were three distinct Persons, but one God. The reader is

referred to the Athanasian Creed[292] for the exact expression of the

latter mystery, and for the alarming consequences to him of any failure

to grasp and believe it. To Gibbon he must go for a derisive statement

of these controversies. The present writer can deal with them neither

with awe nor derision; they seem to him, he must confess, a disastrous

ebullition of the human mind entirely inconsistent with the plain

account of Jesus preserved for us in the gospels. Orthodoxy became a

test not only for Christian office, but for Christian trade and help. A

small point of doctrine might mean affluence or beggary to a man. It is

difficult to read the surviving literature of the time without a strong

sense of the dogmatism, the spites, rivalries, and pedantries of the men

who tore Christianity to pieces for the sake of these theological

refinements. Most of the Trinitarian disputants--for it is chiefly

Trinitarian documents that survive--accuse their antagonists, probably

with truth, of mean and secondary motives, but they do so in a manner

that betrays their own base spirit very clearly. Arius, for example, is

accused of heretical opposition because he was not appointed Bishop of

Alexandria. Riots and excommunications and banishments punctuated these

controversies, and finally came official persecutions. These fine

differences about the constitution of the Deity interwove with politics

and international disputes. Men who quarrelled over business affairs,

wives who wished to annoy their husbands, developed antagonistic views

upon this exalted theme. Most of the barbarian invaders of the empire

were Arians; probably because their simple minds found the Trinitarian

position incomprehensible.

It is easy for the sceptic to mock at these disputes. But even if we

think that these attempts to say exactly how God was related to himself

were presumptuous and intellectually monstrous, nevertheless we are

bound to recognize that beneath these preposterous refinements of

impossible dogmas there lay often a real passion for truth--even if it

was truth ill conceived. Both sides produced genuine martyrs. And the

zeal of these controversies, though it is a base and often malicious

zeal, did at any rate make the Christian sects very energetically

propagandist and educational. Moreover, because the history of the

Christian body in the fourth and fifth centuries is largely a record of

these unhappy disputes, that must not blind us to the fact that the

spirit of Jesus did live and ennoble many lives among the Christians.

The text of the gospels, though it was probably tampered with during

this period, was not destroyed, and Jesus of Nazareth, in his own

manifest inimitable greatness, still taught through that text. Nor did

these unhappy quarrels prevent Christianity from maintaining a united

front against gladiatorial shows and against slavery, and against the

degrading worship of idols and of the god-Cæsar.

§ 6

So far as it challenged the divinity of Cæsar and the characteristic

institutions of the empire, Christianity is to be regarded as a

rebellious and disintegrating movement, and so it was regarded by most

of the emperors before Constantine the Great. It encountered

considerable hostility, and at last systematic attempts to suppress it.

Decius was the first emperor to organize an official persecution, and

the great era of the martyrs was in the time of Diocletian (303 and

following years). The persecution of Diocletian was indeed the crowning

struggle of the old idea of the god-emperor against the already great

and powerful organization that denied his divinity. Diocletian had

reorganized the monarchy upon lines of extreme absolutism; he had

abolished the last vestiges of republican institutions; he was the first

emperor to surround himself completely with the awe-inspiring etiquette

of an eastern monarch. He was forced by the logic of his assumptions to

attempt the complete eradication of a system that flatly denied them.

The test in the persecution was that the Christian was required to offer

sacrifice to the emperor.

“Though Diocletian, still averse to the effusion of blood, had moderated

the fury of Galerius, who proposed that everyone refusing to offer

sacrifice should immediately be burnt alive, the penalties inflicted on

the obstinacy of the Christians might be deemed sufficiently rigorous

and effectual. It was enacted that their churches, in all the provinces

of the empire, should be demolished to their foundations; and the

punishment of death was denounced against all who should presume to hold

any secret assemblies for the purpose of religious worship. The

philosophers, who now assumed the unworthy office of directing the blind

zeal of persecution, had diligently studied the nature and genius of the

Christian religion; and as they were not ignorant that the speculative

doctrines of the faith were supposed to be contained in the writings of

the prophets, of the evangelists, and of the apostles, they most

probably suggested the order, that the bishops and presbyters should

deliver all their sacred books into the hands of the magistrates, who

were commanded, under the severest penalties, to burn them in a public

and solemn manner. By the same edict, the property of the church was at

once confiscated; and the several parts of which it might consist were

either sold to the highest bidder, united to the imperial domain,

bestowed on the cities or corporations, or granted to the solicitations

of rapacious courtiers. After taking such effectual measures to abolish

the worship, and to dissolve the government of the Christians, it was

thought necessary to subject to the most intolerable hardships the

condition of those perverse individuals who should still reject the

religion of nature, of Rome, and of their ancestors. Persons of a

liberal birth were declared incapable of holding any honours or

employments; slaves were for ever deprived of the hopes of freedom; and

the whole body of the Christians were put out of the protection of the

law. The judges were authorized to hear and to determine every action

that was brought against a Christian; but the Christians were not

permitted to complain of any injury which they themselves had suffered;

and those unfortunate sectaries were exposed to the severity, while they

were excluded from the benefits, of public justice.... This edict was

scarcely exhibited to the public view, in the most conspicuous place in

Nicomedia, before it was torn down by the hands of a Christian, who

expressed at the same time, by the bitterest of invectives, his contempt

as well as abhorrence for such impious and tyrannical governors. His

offence, according to the mildest laws, amounted to treason, and

deserved death, and if it be true that he was a person of rank and

education, those circumstances could serve only to aggravate his guilt.

He was burnt, or rather roasted, by a slow fire; and his executioners,

zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been offered to the

emperors, exhausted every refinement of cruelty without being able to

subdue his patience, or to alter the steady and insulting smile which in

his dying agonies he still preserved in his countenance.”[293]