roused the jealousy of the governors of the world. We need not dwell
upon the cruelties with which its votaries were persecuted. Men
clothed in garments smeared with pitch, and then lighted up as living
torches, to add a horrid lustre to the festivities of the Emperor.
Men crucified with their heads downwards. Men thrown to wild beasts.
The heart sickens at the recital of their sufferings, and still more
at the ferocity of their torturers. But nothing stopped them. Every
human power was exerted. Every device was tried. But neither skill
nor force availed. The stream flowed onwards till it became a river;
the river spread out till it became a flood. In the short space of
three centuries from the death of Jesus, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as
far as civilization had reached, owned Him as their sovereign, and
marched under His banner. Not a blow had been struck in His favour,
though thousands and hundreds of thousands had died rather than disown
Him. And then the heathen oracles were silent, the heathen altars
were deserted, the heathen philosophers were changed to Christians;
Christian presbyters ministered where heathen priests had sacrificed;
Christian orators spoke where heathen advocates had pleaded; Christian
judges decreed justice in the seats of the prætors and the proconsuls;
a Christian Emperor sat upon the throne of the Cæsars. It is so still;
the great bulk of the civilized world still retains, and professes to
be guided by, laws, customs, and morals, which are really drawn from
the teaching of Jesus Christ.
* * * * *
(1) It is said that the spread of Christianity is at least partly due
to mere human and common-place causes.[145] It is said for instance,
that the civilization of the heathen empire was effete, that society
was corrupt, that the very world was wearied with its own wickedness.
Very true: yet it was in the Augustan age that Christ lived and taught,
the very climax of ancient art and letters, and refinement, and
philosophy. Very true; but still, that which will be our only refuge
if we are driven out of our faith, had offered everything that it can
ever have to offer. Moral philosophy had done its best. Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Seneca, had done all that could be done
by reasoning and moral teaching, to win men from vice, and to train
them to virtue. And earth, for all that, was wearing the very semblance
of hell. Men, no doubt, were weary of it, and they listened the more
readily to Him who promised to the weary rest. Is it no mark of design
and wisdom, that the remedy was offered at that very time when it was
the most needed, and when the need was the most keenly felt?
(2) It is said, that the world then, in its deep dissatisfied
restlessness and inquietude, was turning right and left for
satisfaction, and that thus it readily lent an ear to the superstitious
and the supernatural. It may have been so. It had apparently given up
all faith; and the unbeliever passes readily into the credulous. But
I cannot think it reasonable to conclude, that an age of philosophical
scepticism, of unbridled licentiousness, even though it might combine
with these some disposition in favour of the marvellous, would be
likely to admit the pretensions of Christianity without careful
investigation; when Christianity bore with it requirements of the most
rigid morality, offered in exchange for its philosophy simple faith, in
exchange for its licentiousness the sternest self-denial, and gave it
no promise in this life, but of contempt and suffering, and very likely
martyrdom.
(3) It is said once more, that the unequalled organization of the
Primitive Church made it a firm phalanx sure to win its way through the
ranks of the fiercest foes. Very true. The economy of the Primitive
Church, with its bishops, priests, deacons, and deaconesses in every
city and suburb, with its strict and unbroken unity throughout the
world which it had won and was winning, was, no doubt, an organization,
a freemasonry, a secret society if you will, which constituted the best
possible machinery for preserving and propagating its faith. Is it no
sign of the superhuman wisdom of its Founder, that He not only taught
the great secret of life; but that He devised means whereby that secret
should be guarded and handed on to men?
I must here consider for a moment one of the gravest questions which
arises in many minds about the progress of Christianity. Granted that
its speed was rapid at the first, why has it ever stagnated since? If
it be the great remedy for human woes, and the great prompter of human
virtue and morality, why did not its Divine Author, if Divine He be,
ordain that it should at once find its way everywhere, and should never
fail anywhere? I am ready to admit the gravity of the question. I doubt
if there be any greater mystery connected with the faith of Christ. It
was objected to that faith by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, perhaps the
most eminent of the deists of the last century, and it has tried many a
believing, as well as many a doubting spirit, since. We naturally feel,
that a religion meant to save all men ought to be made known to all
men. In the few words I can say on it now, I do not pretend to clear
up all the mystery. I cannot clear up all the mystery of God's actions
or of God's will. I would only remind you first, that this is at all
events but one specimen of the working of that general law, which seems
to rule in creation, in Providence, and in grace. The analogy between
the development of nature and the development of revelation was ably
traced in the lecture of one who preceded me some fortnight or three
weeks back. It certainly seems the principle of the Divine action, that
all things should rise up into maturity by steady gradual progress and
growth. So the infancy of mankind was left in the glimmer of twilight;
then there was a dawning light in the ages of the patriarchs and the
prophets, till the day broke full upon the world in the coming into it
of Jesus Christ. By the same kind of gradual working, that day-spring
from on high has extended its brightness first to one land and then
to another. It is no more marvellous that China and India and Central
Africa should not yet have seen it all, than that for thousands of
years of man's past history, the whole human race, except at most a
very small portion of it, should have known nothing of Christ or even
of God. There has been an infancy of man, as there has been an infancy
of the Universe; and we may well believe, that there may have been a
preparation for Christ's coming, and elsewhere a preparation for the
knowledge of His coming, corresponding with the preparation through
countless ages past for the habitation of man upon the earth.
And as to the imperfect reception of Christianity in some places and
times, and its actual retrogression, as from the Mohammedan conquest,
in others; is it not plain that we have to expect Christianity to
advance by moral means and not by mechanical? Christ left a leaven in
the world, that it might work and leaven mankind. We are apt to expect
that it should work by magic, and not by its own moral influence. Now,
our Lord never so worked on earth. If He worked in His miracles by a
mechanical force on nature, He never applied such a force to human
wills, nor does His Gospel work so now in the world. He called His
church the salt of the earth; but He warned it that the salt might lose
its savour. He said it was a grain of mustard seed, which should grow
into a tree and fill the earth; but He never said that there should
be no blights, no frosts, no tempests which might check its growth,
or nip its leaves or rend off its branches. The apostles themselves
knew that they had the Gospel treasure in earthen vessels, and when
the vessel was injured the treasure could not be safely conveyed by
it. It is very natural to expect that a potent remedy should produce
an instantaneous cure. But we are constantly taught by experience that
maladies are too deep-seated, or constitutions too sickly, for rapid
or perfect restoration. We naturally expect every man under the true
influence of Christianity to become perfect: we expect Christianized
society to exhibit no defects. But, in reality, we only find that both
the man and the people have a new principle, which gradually raises
them, that they become instinct with a new life, which shows itself
sometimes indeed by vigorous action, but which sometimes, too, becomes
languid and feeble. If we make these allowances, there will be nothing
to stagger our faith in the slow progress of the Gospel through the
world. In the beginning, Christianity was thrown into mortal conflict
with heathenism. That heathenism it steadily extirpated, whilst the
sounder philosophy which had lived in the midst of heathenism it
adopted for its own. In the midst of this there came too often an
attempt at compromise. There sprang up a fusion between Christian
verity and philosophy, and philosophy, too, of the corrupter heathen
type, not of the purest or most divine type. Hence the strange forms
of heresy which meet us in the earlier centuries. After the barbarian
conquests, Christendom indeed took its fierce captors captive. They
who had trod down imperial Rome, bowed lowly before Him whom Roman
governors had crucified and Roman emperors had persecuted. Then came a
struggle between barbarism and faith, the faith gradually subduing the
barbarism, but the barbarism still clouding the faith. And I think we
do not enough remember how through the Middle Ages, on which we often
look so contemptuously back, there was ever going on a great mission
work of the church and of the Gospel, the fierce barons and the rude
churls being as hard to win to the obedience of faith as the heathens
with whom the apostles pleaded in the early ages of the faith.
On the whole there has been a constant progress, greatest certainly at
first, but never seriously slackened, till Mohammed devised a great
Christian heresy (for a Christian heresy it was, as much as that of
the Gnostics, or that of the Manichees before him,) thereby blighting
the growth of the Eastern Church for centuries; still, however,
there was progress again in the west, among Germans, and Slaves and
Scandinavians; stagnation for a time from the twelfth to the eighteenth
century, as far at least as visible increase was concerned; and now,
again, progress, through the over-spreading of new continents by
Christian colonists, and the bringing in of newly-known heathen tribes
to the faith of the Church. Unless we insist that the world should
be won by miracle, I do not see that we can ask more evidence to the
winning power of the teaching of Christ.
V. And now for its effect on those taught by it, and on the world
at large through them. I have argued that philosophy failed; has
Christianity succeeded? With the allowances which must be made for
the matter on which it has to work, and with the premised condition
that it was not intended so to act as a spell that man's will would
simply be enslaved by it, his moral responsibility lost, and his state
of probation done away with; then I assert that it has succeeded
incomparably beyond anything else that has ever been devised, or ever
attempted by man.
Let us take great and acknowledged facts. It is confessed that under
the influence of Christianity gladiatorial shows, and the throwing
of prisoners to wild beasts, were given up and done away with. It is
impossible to deny that the worst forms of licentiousness, which were
not only tolerated in Greece and Rome, but indulged in openly by
their heroes, attributed to their deities, and celebrated in verse by
their poets, have been universally reprobated in Christendom, and dare
not now show their heads abroad even in the most corrupted centres of
modern society. The respect paid to woman is due before any other cause
to the honour with which the Great Founder of our faith treated those
women who waited on Him, and to His filial reverence for the mother
that bare Him. The laws of marriage which now rule in Europe are not
heathen, not even Jewish, but pre-eminently Christian. What Christ
spoke concerning marriage and divorce regulated the principles of the
Church, and the first Christian rulers incorporated those principles
into the laws of the empire. Our domestic morals have thus been
governed by a few sentences from the lips of one Man. The existence of
hospitals for the sick and wounded is entirely due to the charity of
the early Christian Church. The softening of the horrors of war, and
the better treatment of prisoners, are equally the result of Christian
influence. Contrast, for instance, the conduct of the most humane of
heathen conquerors with the conduct of any great Christian general. No
one among the ancients is more celebrated for his humanity than Titus;
yet when Titus had taken Jerusalem, he crucified by thousands its
undoubtedly brave defenders, and the historian tells us that "there
lacked crosses for the bodies and room for erecting the crosses."
When Gustavus Adolphus took a city, he so guarded the lives of its
inhabitants, that it is said that no injury passed upon the head of one
of them. In the war we have just witnessed, the German army marched
into Paris, after fierce fights and long sieges, yet the first care
of the invaders was not to slay or torture, but to feed the famished
inhabitants of the city they had taken, the conquering army even giving
up its rations to supply food to their enemies, who might else have
perished for hunger. And as for the prisoners in modern warfare, the
wounded and the sick are tended by the surgeons, and nursed in the
hospitals of those against whom they have been fighting, and against
whom it is possible they may yet live to fight.[146] This regard for
human life is justly regarded by philanthropists as the truest test
of a high civilization; and I confidently ask whether it has ever
come but from the influence of Christian teaching and the effect of
Christian sympathy.
Let us turn to the question of slavery. It is objected by some that
there is no direct denunciation of slavery in the Scriptures. I am
not now concerned with the Old Testament; but I may yet, in passing,
say, that whilst Moses could hardly refuse to recognise slavery as
a prevailing institution, he still gave laws concerning it which
mitigated its horrors to the utmost, and placed the Jewish slave
in a condition, moral, social, and spiritual, utterly unlike to
his condition in any heathen state. As regards the Gospel, we must
remember, once more, that Christ was not a political reformer, not
professedly a social reformer, not even primarily a moral reformer. His
mission was to elevate men's whole spiritual nature; and this He did by
the infusion into society of a new religious or spiritual principle.
It did not fall in with the purposes of that mission to descend
to every detail of social life, still less to regulate political
institutions. So, He never denounces war, nor imperial tyranny, nor
even the political factions of the Jews. It is scarcely a question that
sudden emancipation of a great slave population is never desirable.
And if the first Christians had preached against a deeply-rooted
social institution, they might easily have produced great political
convulsions, and have ultimately rendered less tolerable than ever the
conditions of those whom they desired to befriend. But the principles
of Christ's teaching are directly adverse to slavery, and their
progress has invariably tended to mitigate, and at length to eradicate
it. The principle of the brotherhood of all men, of their common
interest in God, of their common humanity with Christ; the principle
that there was neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither
bond nor free, in the great Christian commonwealth, but that all were
one in Christ--this principle cannot be worked out without destroying
the abject servitude of one man to another. And, as a matter of fact,
this is what it has done. "The change brought about was gradual, but
it was sure. At first monks, especially eastern monks, refused to be
waited on by slaves. Then missionaries never lost an opportunity of
redeeming slaves.... Ecclesiastical legislation declared the slave to
be a _man_, and not a _thing_, or _chattel_; laid it down as a rule
that his life was his own, and could not be taken without public trial;
enforced on a master guilty of involuntary murder of his slave penance
and exclusion from the communion; opened asylums to those who fled
from their master's cruelty; declared the enfranchisement of the serf
a work acceptable to God. The abolition of domestic slavery was one
of the most important duties incumbent on the missionary energies of
the mediæval Church."[149] It is sad, indeed, to think how the plague
of slavery again broke out on the discovery of the West Indies and of
America--slavery, too, in one of its most revolting and debasing forms;
but it still is true that Christianity and Christian missions have
struggled with it from the first, and that now, at length, it seems to
be yielding, and there is good hope that it may ere long be utterly
subdued.
In every way Christianity has been the pioneer of civilization, and
the giver of social comfort and peace. Very truly, many colonists from
Christian lands have given to the colonies which they founded not
comfort, nor peace, nor civilization; but it has been because they
have left Christian lands and not carried their Christianity out along
with them. Often, indeed, they have only laid waste heathen lands and
oppressed heathen races; and Christianity following after them, has had
to undo the evil, which apostate Christians had inflicted. Still we
may challenge any one to show a single instance, in which civilization
in modern times has spread to any place to which Christianity has not
first found its way. We may challenge any one to deny, that, where
Christianity has been forsaken or neglected, there have sprung up,
instead of it, as in revolutionary France, cruelty, licentiousness, and
social degradation.
Christianity, once more, has been favourable at least to the
development of mind, the cultivation of letters, the advancement of
science. It is easy, of course, to say that there have often been
efforts among Christians to check the progress of science, still more
frequently panic terrors as to its unexpected discoveries. It is easy
to point to Galileo, easy to speak of the fate of geology in the
earlier days of the present century, of the reception of Mr. Darwin's
theory now. As to Galileo, we may at once disown the Inquisition as
representing the Christian faith. But it is unnecessary to deny that
an appearance of antagonism between faith and science, or faith and
literary criticism, will alarm timid believers, and so may lead to
temporary misunderstandings between Christians and men of science
or of literature. Yet look at past history and say, first, whether
science and philosophy and literature did not for centuries find their
only shelter in the Church, even under the deepest shadows of its
cathedrals and monasteries. When all the world besides was unlettered
and ignorant, learning flourished among the schoolmen, philosophy
and even physical science were pursued, as far as they then could be
pursued, by ecclesiastics and divines. The name of Roger Bacon stands
out conspicuously as one who, in the cell of a convent and under the
garb of a friar, carried inquiries into physical truth to a height
which, considering his date and his difficulties, may compare even with
the great and rapid discoveries of the present day. In short, it may be
said truly and fearlessly, that whilst the only other religious systems
in the world, which deserve consideration, Mohammedanism, Brahminism,
and Buddhism, have either stifled, or at the best stunted science and
made stagnant civilization; Christianity has fostered learning of all
kinds, and has been in itself the highest civilization ever known.
I have naturally dwelt upon the external development of the religious
life of Christians, not upon its inner being. A lecture on evidence,
must of necessity appeal to that which can be known and read of all
men. Yet I might, if there were time, point to the characters of
individual Christians as proof of the elevating, ennobling, purifying,
sanctifying power of the teaching of Christ, of the contemplation of
Christ, and of the love of Christ. I will content myself with quoting
words which many here have read, and read with interest, long ago. The
author of "Ecce Homo" writes: "That Christ's method, when rightly
applied, is really of mighty force, may be shown by an argument
which the severest censor of Christians will hardly refuse to admit.
Compare the ancient with the modern world. 'Look on this picture and
on that.' One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself
into prominence. Among all men of the ancient heathen world, there
were scarcely one or two to whom we may venture to apply the epithet
'holy.' In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any,
who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were possessed with an
unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice,
regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will
deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we
call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it is exceedingly
rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has been scarcely a town in any
Christian country since the time of Christ, where a century has passed
without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence
has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times
like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed?
or can Christianity die?"[150]
Let us apply this test to one or two of the greatest and best of the
heathen philosophers. Take Socrates first. Is it possible to imagine
an apostle of Christ joining, as we know that Socrates joined, in
drinking bouts where many were intoxicated, not himself drinking
willingly, but when pressed making deeper potations than any one
besides, yet never exhibiting symptoms of drunkenness?[151] It cannot
be conceived that the unutterable licentiousness of Alcibiades,
manifested during one of those drinking bouts, could have been so
manifested, I will not say in the presence of St. Paul or St. John, or
in the presence of any Christian clergyman since them, but even in the
lowest assembly of English drunkards.