CHAPTER X

TERTULLIAN

In his most famous chapter Gibbon speaks at one point of the

affirmation of the early church that those who persisted in the worship

of the daemons "neither deserved nor could expect a pardon from the

irritated justice of the Deity." Oppressed in this world by the power

of the Pagans, Christians "were sometimes seduced by resentment and

spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph.

'You are fond of spectacles,' exclaims the stern Tertullian, 'expect

the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the

universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when

I behold so many proud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the

lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name

of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against

the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames

with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before

the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians more

tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers----'

But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the

rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in

a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms."[1]

The passage is a magnificent example of Gibbon's style and

method,--more useful, however, as an index to the mind of Gibbon than

to that of Tertullian. He has abridged his translation, and in one or

two clauses he has missed Tertullian's points; finally he has drawn his

veil over the rest of the infernal description exactly when he knew

there was little or nothing more to be quoted that would serve his

purpose. He has made no attempt to understand the man he quotes, nor

the {306} mood in which he spoke, nor the circumstances which gave rise

to that mood. Yet on the evidence of this passage and a sonnet of

Matthew Arnold's, English readers pass a swift judgment on "the stern

Tertullian" and his "unpitying Phrygian sect." But to the historian of

human thought, and to the student of human character, there are few

figures of more significance in Latin literature. Of the men who

moulded Western Christendom few have stamped themselves and their ideas

upon it with anything approaching the clearness and the effect of

Tertullian. He first turned the currents of Christian thought in the

West into channels in which they have never yet ceased to flow and will

probably long continue to flow. He was the first Latin churchman, and

his genius helped to shape Latin Christianity. He, too, was the first

great Puritan of the West, precursor alike of Augustine and of the

Reformation. The Catholic Church left him unread throughout the Middle

Ages, but at the Renaissance he began once more to be studied, and

simultaneously there also began the great movement for the purification

of the church and the deepening of Christian life, which were the

causes to which he had given himself and his genius.

Such a man may be open to criticism on many sides. He may be

permanently or fitfully wrong in thought or speech or conduct; but it

is clear that an influence so great rests upon something more profound

than irritability however brilliant in expression. There must be

somewhere in the man something that corresponds with the enduring

thoughts of mankind--something that engages the mind or that wins the

friendship of men--something that is true and valid. And this,

whatever it is, is the outcome of many confluent elements--of

temperament, environment and experience, perhaps, in chief. The man

must be seen as his personal friends saw him and as his enemies saw

him; what is more, they--both sets of them--must be seen as he saw

them. The critic must himself, by dint of study and imagination, be

played upon by as many of the factors of the man's experience as he can

re-capture. Impressions, pleasures, doubts, hopes, convictions,

friendships, inspirations--everything that goes to shape a man is

relevant to that study of character without which, in the case of {307}

formative men, history itself becomes pedantry and illusion.

Particularly in the case of such a man as Tertullian is it needful to

repeat this caution. The impetuous dogmatism in which his mind and,

quite as often, his mood express themselves, and his hard words, harder

a great deal than his heart, no less than his impulsive convictions,

"seem," as Gibbon put it, "to offend the reason and the humanity of the

present age." On the other side, the church, which the historian in a

footnote saddles with the responsibility of sharing Tertullian's most

harsh beliefs, is at one with "the present age" in repudiating him on

grounds of her own. Yet, questioned or condemned, Tertullian played

his part, and that no little one, in the conflict of religions; he

stood for truth as he saw it, and wrote and spoke with little thought

of the praise or blame of his contemporaries or of posterity--all

_that_ he had abandoned once for all, when he made the great choice of

his life. Questioned or condemned, he is representative, and he is

individual, the first man of genius of the Latin race to follow Jesus

Christ, and to re-set his ideas in the language native to that race.

[Sidenote: Carthage]

Tertullian was born about the middle of the second century A.D. at

Carthage, or in its neighbourhood. The city at all events is the scene

of his life--a great city with a great history. "Tyre in Africa" is

one of his phrases for Carthage and her "sister-cities," and he quotes

Virgil's description of Dido's town _studiis asperrima belli_.[2] But

his Carthage was not that of Dido and Hannibal. It was the re-founded

city of Julius Caesar, now itself two hundred years old--a place with a

character of its own familiar to the reader of Apuleius and of

Augustine's _Confessions_,--a character confirmed by the references of

Tertullian to its amusements and its daily sights. "What sea-captain

is there that does not carry his mirth even to the point of shame?

Every day we see the frolics in which sailors take their pleasure."[3]

Scholars have played with the fancy that they could trace in

Tertullian's work the influence of some Semitic strain, as others with

equal reason have found {308} traces of the Celt in Virgil and Livy.

Tertullian himself has perhaps even fewer references to Punic speech

and people than Apuleius, while, like Apuleius, he wrote in both Greek

and Latin,[4] and it is possible that, like Apuleius, and Perpetua the

martyr, he spoke both.

Jerome tells us that Tertullian was the son of a centurion.[5] He tells

us himself, incidentally and by implication, that he was the child of

heathen parents. "Idolatry," he says, "is the midwife that brings all

men into the world;" and he gives a very curious picture of the pagan

ceremonies that went with child-birth, the fillet on the mother's womb,

the cries to Lucina, the table spread for Juno, the horoscope, and

finally the dedication of a hair of the child, or of all his hair

together, as the rites of clan or family may require.[6] Thus from the

very first the boy is dedicated to a genius, and to the evil he

inherits through the transmission of his bodily nature is added the

influence of a false daemon--"though there still is good innate in the

soul, the archetypal good, divine and germane, essentially natural; for

what comes from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed."[7]

The children of Christian parents have so far, he indicates, a better

beginning; they are holy in virtue of their stock and of their

upbringing.[8] With himself it had not been so. It is curious to find

the great controversialist of later days recalling nursery tales, how

"amid the difficulties of sleep one heard from one's nurse about the

witch's towers and the combs of the sun"--recalling too the children's

witticisms about the apples that grow in the sea and the fishes that

grow on the tree.[9] They come back into his mind as he thinks of the

speculations of Valentinus and his followers.

[Sidenote: His training]

His education was that of his day,--lavish rhetoric, and knowledge of

that very wide character which in all his contemporaries is perhaps too

suggestive of manual and {309} cyclopaedia[10]--works never so abundant

in antiquity as then. But he was well taught, as a brilliant boy

deserved, and his range of interests is remarkable. Nor is he

overwhelmed by miscellaneous erudition, like Aulus Gellius for

instance, or like Clement of Alexandria, to come to a man more on his

own level. He is master of the great literature of Rome; he has read

the historians and Cicero; he can quote Virgil with telling effect.

_Usque adeone mori miserum est?_ he asks of the Christian who hesitates

to be martyred;[11] "a hint from the world" he says. Sooner or later,

he read Varro's books, the armoury of every Latin Christian against

polytheism.

He "looked into medicine," he tells us, and a good many passages in his

treatises remind us of the fact.[12] It may help to explain an

explicitness in the use of terms more usual in the physician perhaps

than in the layman.

But his career lay not in medicine but in law, and he caught the spirit

of his profession. It has been debated whether the Tertullian, whose

treatise _de castrensi peculio_ is quoted in the Digest, is the

apologist or another, but no legal treatises are needed to convince the

reader how thoroughly a lawyer was the author of the theological works.

He has every art and every artifice of his trade. He can reason

quietly and soundly, he can declaim, he can do both together. He is a

master of logic, delighting in huge chains of alternatives. He can

quibble and wrest the obvious meaning of a document to perfection,

browbeat an opponent, argue _ad hominem_,[13] evade a clear issue, and

anticipate and escape an obvious objection, as well as any lawyer that

ever practised. Again and again he impresses us as a special pleader,

and we feel that he is forcing us away from the evidence of our own

sense and intelligence to a conclusion which he prefers on other

grounds. His {310} epigrams rival Tacitus, and there is even in his

rhetoric a conviction and a passion which Cicero never reaches. The

suddenness of his questions, and the amazing readiness of his jests,

savage, subtle, ironic, good-natured, brilliant or commonplace,[14]

impress the reader again and again, however well he knows him. Yet

Tertullian never loses sight of his object, whatever the flights of

rhetoric or humour on which he ventures. In one case, he plainly says

that his end will best be achieved by ridicule. "Put it down, reader,

as a sham fight before the battle. I will show how to deal wounds, but

I will not deal them. If there shall be laughter, the matter itself

shall be the apology. There are many things that deserve so to be

refuted; gravity would be too high a compliment. Vanity and mirth may

go together. Yes, and it becomes Truth to laugh, because she is glad,

to play with her rivals, because she is free from fear."[15] Then,

with a caution as to becoming laughter, he launches into his most

amusing book--that against the Valentinians.

[Sidenote: His style]

Tertullian rivals Apuleius in brilliant mastery of the elaborate and

artificial rhetoric of the day. He has the same tricks of rhyming

clauses and balancing phrases. Thus: _attente custoditur quod tarde

invenitur_;[16] or more fully: _spiritus enim dominatur, caro

famulatur; tamen utrumque inter se communicant reatum, spiritus ob

imperium, caro ob ministerium_.[17] Here the vanities of his pagan

training subserve true thought. Elsewhere they are more playful, as

when he suggests to those, who like the pagans took off their cloaks to

pray, that God heard the three saints in the fiery furnace of the

Babylonian king though they prayed _cum sarabaris et tiaris suis_--in

turbans and trousers.[18] But when he gives us such a string of

phrases as _aut Platonis honor, aut Zenonis vigor, aut Aristotelis

tenor, aut Epicuri stupor, aut Heracliti moeror, aut Empedoclis

furor,_[19] one feels that he is for the moment little better than one

of the wicked. At the beginning of his tract on Baptism, after

speaking {311} of water he pulls himself up abruptly--he is afraid, he

says, that the reader may fancy he is composing _laudes aquae_ (in the

manner of rhetorical adoxography) rather than discussing the principles

of baptism.[20] His tract _de Pallio_ is frankly a humorous excursion

into old methods, in which the elderly Montanist, who has left off

wearing the _toga_, justifies himself for his highly conservative and

entirely suitable conduct in adopting the _pallium_. The "stern"

Tertullian appears here in the character that his pagan friends had

long ago known, and that his Christian readers might feel somewhere or

other in everything that he writes. There is a good-tempered

playfulness about the piece, a fund of splendid nonsense, which suggest

the fellow-citizen of Apuleius rather than the presbyter.[21] But

earnestness, which is not incompatible with humour, is his strong

characteristic, and when it arms itself with an irony so powerful as

that of Tertullian, the result is amazing. Sometimes he exceeds all

bounds, as when in his _Ad Nationes_ he turns that irony upon the

horrible charges, which the pagans, knowing them to be false, bring

against the Christians, while he, pretending for the moment that they

are true, invites his antagonists to think them out to their

consequences and to act upon them.[22] Or again take the speech of

Christ on the judgment day, in which the Lord is pictured as saying

that he had indeed entrusted the Gospel once for all to the Apostles,

but had thought better of it and made some changes--as of course,

Tertullian suggests, he really would have to say, if it could be

supposed that the latest heretics were right after all.[23]

But, whatever be said or thought of the rhetoric, playful or earnest,

it has another character than it wears in his contemporaries. For here

was a far more powerful brain, strong, clear and well-trained, and a

heart whose tenderness and sensibility have never had justice. In some

ways he very much suggests Thomas Carlyle--he has the same passion, the

same vivid imagination and keen sensibility, the same earnestness and

the same loyalty to truth as he sees it regardless of {312} consequence

and compromise,--and alas! the same "natural faculty for being in a

hurry," which Carlyle deplored, and Tertullian before him--"I, poor

wretch, always sick with the fever of impatience"[24]--the same fatal

gift for pungent phrase, and the same burning and indignant sympathy

for the victim of wrong and cruelty.[25] The beautiful feeling, which

he shows in handling the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal

son, in setting forth from them the loving fatherhood of God,[26] might

surprise some of his critics. Nor has every great Christian of later

and more humane days been capable of writing as he wrote of victory in

battle against foreigners--"Is the laurel of triumph made of leaves--or

the dead bodies of men? With ribbons is it adorned--or with graves?

Is it bedewed with unguents, or the tears of wives and

mothers?--perhaps too of some who are Christians, for even among the

barbarians is Christ."[27] There are again among his books some which

have an appeal and a tender charm throughout that haunt the

reader--that is, if he has himself passed through any such experience

as will enable him to enter into what was in Tertullian's mind and

heart as he wrote. So truly and intimately does he know and with such

sympathy does he express some of the deepest religious emotions.[28]

[Sidenote: His early life]

From time to time Tertullian drops a stray allusion to his earlier

years. He was a pagan--_de vestris sumus_--"one of yourselves"

(_Apol._ 18); "the kind of man I was myself once, blind and without the

light of the Lord."[29] A Roman city, and Carthage perhaps in

particular, offered to a gifted youth of Roman ways of thinking endless

opportunities of self-indulgence. Tertullian speaks of what he had

seen in the arena--the condemned criminal, dressed as some hero or god

of the mythology, mutilated or burned alive, for the amusement of a

shouting {313} audience,[30] "exulting in human blood."[31] "We have

laughed, amid the mocking cruelties of noonday, at Mercury as he

examined the bodies of the dead with his burning iron; we have seen

Jove's brother too, with his mallet, hauling out the corpses of

gladiators."[32] In later days when he speaks of such things, he

shudders and leaves the subject rather than remember what he has

seen--_malo non implere quam meminisse_.[33] He knew the theatre of

the Roman city--"the consistory of all uncleanness" he calls it. "Why

should it be lawful (for a Christian)," he asked, "to see what it is

sin to do? Why should the things, which 'coming out of the mouth

defile a man,' seem not to defile a man when he takes them in through

eyes and ears?"[34] He speaks of Tragedies and Comedies, teaching

guilt and lust, bloody and wanton; and the reader of the _Golden Ass_

can recall from fiction cases wonderfully illuminative of what could

have been seen in fact. When he apostrophizes the sinner, he speaks of

himself. "You," he cries, "you, the sinner, like me--no! less sinner

than I, for I recognize my own pre-eminence in guilt."[35] He is, he

says, "a sinner of every brand, born for nothing but repentance."[36]

To say, with Professor Hort, on the evidence of such passages that

Tertullian was "apparently a man of vicious life" might involve a

similar condemnation of Bunyan and St Paul; while to find the charge

"painfully" confirmed by "the foulness which ever afterwards infested

his mind" is to exaggerate absurdly in the first place, and in the

second to forget such parallels as Swift and Carlyle, who both carried

explicit speech to a point beyond ordinary men, while neither is open

to such a suggestion as that brought against Tertullian. With such

cases as Apuleius, Hadrian or even Julius Caesar before us, it is

impossible to maintain that Tertullian's early life must have been

spotless, but it is possible to fancy more wrong than there was. The

excesses of a man of genius are generally touched by the {314}

imagination, and therein lies at once their peculiar danger, and also

something redemptive that promises another future.

Tertullian at any rate married--when, we cannot say; but, as a

Christian and a Montanist, he addressed a book to his wife, and in his

_De Anima_ he twice alludes to the ways of small infants in a manner

which suggests personal knowledge. In the one he speaks with curious

observation of the sense-perception of very young babies; in the other

he appeals to their movements in sleep, their tremors and smiles, as

evidence that they also have dreams. Such passages if met in

Augustine's pages would not so much surprise us. They suggest that the

depth and tenderness of Tertullian's nature have not been fully

understood.[37]

[Sidenote: The evidence of nature]

Meanwhile, whatever his amusements, the young lawyer had his serious

interests. If he was already acquiring the arts of a successful

pleader, the more real aspects of Law were making their impression upon

him. The great and ordered conceptions of principle and harmony, which

fill the minds of reflective students of law in all ages, were then

reinforced by the Stoic teaching of the unity of Nature in the

indwelling of the Spermaticos Logos with its universal scope and power.

Law and Stoicism, in this union, formed the mind and character of

Tertullian. In later days, under the stress of controversy (which he

always enjoyed) he could find points in which to criticize his Stoic

teachers; but the contrast between the language he uses of Plato and

his friendliness (for instance) for _Seneca saepe noster_[38] is

suggestive. But that is not all. A Roman lawyer could hardly

speculate except in the terms of Stoicism--it was his natural and

predestined language. Above all, the constant citation of Nature by

Tertullian shows who had taught him in the first instance to think.

When, years after, in 212 A.D., he told Scapula that "it is a

fundamental human right, a privilege of Nature, that any and every man

should worship what he thinks right," he had sub-consciously gone back

to the great Stoic _Jus Naturae_.[39] {315} Nature is the original

authority--side by side, he would say in his later years, with the

inspired word of God,--yet even so "it was not the pen of Moses that

initiated the knowledge of the Creator.... The vast majority of

mankind, though they have never heard the name of Moses--to say nothing

of his book--know the God of Moses none the less."[40] One of his

favourite arguments rests on what he calls the _testimonium animae

naturaliter Christianae_--the testimony of the soul which in its

ultimate and true nature is essentially Christian; and this argument

rests on his general conception of Nature. Let a man "reflect on the

majesty of Nature, for it is from Nature that the authority of the soul

comes. What you give to the teacher, you must allow to the pupil.

Nature is the teacher, the soul the pupil. And whatever the one has

taught or the other learnt, comes from God, who is the teacher of the

teacher (_i.e._ Nature)";[41] and neither God nor Nature can lie.[42]

An extension of this is to be found in his remark, in a much more

homely connexion, that if the "common consciousness" (_conscientia

communis_) be consulted, we shall find "Nature itself" teaching us that

mind and soul are livelier and more intelligent when the stomach is not

heavily loaded.[43] The appeal to the _consensus_ of men, as the

expression of the universal and the natural, and therefore as evidence

to truth, is essentially Stoic.

Over and over he lays stress upon natural law. "All things are fixed

in the truth of God,"[44] he says, and "our God is the God of

Nature."[45] He identifies the natural and the rational--"all the

properties of God must be rational just as they are natural," that is a

clear principle (_regula_);[46] "the rational element must be counted

natural because it is native to the soul from the beginning--coming as

it does from a rational author (_auctore_)."[47] He objects to Marcion

that everything is so "sudden"--so spasmodic--in his scheme of

things.[48] For himself, he holds with Paul ("doth not Nature teach

you?") that "law is natural and Nature legal," that {316} God's law is

published in the universe, and written on the natural tables of the

heart.[49]

This clear and strong conception of Nature gives him a sure ground for

dealing with antagonists. There were those who denied the reality of

Christ's body, and declaimed upon the ugly and polluting features in

child-birth--could the incarnation of God have been subjected to

this?[50] But Nature needs no blush--_Natura veneranda est non

erubescenda_; there is nothing shameful in birth or procreation, unless

there is lust.[51] On the contrary, the travailing woman should be

honoured for her peril, and counted holy as Nature suggests.[52] Here

once more we have an instance of Tertullian's sympathy and tenderness

for woman, whom he perhaps never includes in his most sweeping attacks

and condemnations. Similarly, he is not carried away by the extreme

asceticism of the religions of his day into contempt for the flesh. It

is the setting in which God has placed "the shadow of his own soul, the

breath of his own spirit"--can it really be so vile? Yet is the soul

_set_, or not rather blended and mingled with the flesh, "so that it

may be questioned whether the flesh carries the soul or the soul the

flesh, whether the flesh serves the soul, or the soul serves the

flesh.... What use of Nature, what enjoyment of the universe, what

savour of the elements, does the soul not enjoy by the agency of the

flesh?" Think, he says, of the services rendered to the soul by the

senses, by speech, by all the arts, interests and ingenuities dependent

on the flesh; think of what the flesh does by living and dying.[53]

The Jove of Phidias is not the world's great deity, because the ivory

is so much, but because Phidias is so great; and did God give less of

hand and thought, of providence and love, to the matter of which he

made man? Whatever shape the clay took, Christ was in his mind as the

future man.[54]

Some of these passages come from works of Tertullian's later years,

when he was evidently leaning more than of old to ascetic theory. They

are therefore the more significant. {317} If he wrote as a pagan at

all, what he wrote is lost; but it is not pushing conjecture too far to

suggest that his interest in Stoicism precedes his Christian period,

when such an interest is so clearly more akin to the bent of the Roman

lawyer than the Christian of the second century.

[Sidenote: The goodness of the Creator]

The rationality and the order of the Universe are commonplaces of Stoic

teachers, and, in measure, its beauty. Of this last Tertullian shows

in a remarkable passage how sensible he was. Marcion condemns the God

who created this world. But, says Tertullian, "one flower of the

hedge-row by itself, I think--I do not say a flower of the meadows; one

shell of any sea you like,--I do not say the Red Sea; one feather of a

moor-fowl--to say nothing of a peacock,--will they speak to you of a

mean Creator?" "Copy if you can the buildings of the bee, the barns of

the ant, the webs of the spider." What of sky, earth and sea? "If I

offer you a rose, you will not scorn its Creator!"[55] It is surely

possible to feel more than the controversialist here. "It was Goodness

that spoke the word; Goodness that formed man from the clay into this

consistency of flesh, furnished out of one material with so many

qualities; Goodness that breathed into him a soul, not dead, but alive;

Goodness that set him over all things, to enjoy them, to rule them,

even to give them their names; Goodness, too, that went further and

added delight to man ... and provided a helpmeet for him."[56]

Of his conceptions of law something will be said at a later point. It

should be clear however that a man with such interests in a profession,

in speculation, in the beauty and the law of Nature, could hardly at

any time be a careless hedonist, even if, like most men converted in

mid-life, he knows regret and repentance.

On the side of religion, little perhaps can be said. He had laughed at

the gods burlesqued in the arena. To Mithras perhaps he gave more

attention. In discussing the soldier's crown he is able to quote an

analogy from the rites of Mithras, in which a crown was rejected, and

in which one grade of {318} initiates were known as "soldiers."[57]

Elsewhere he speaks of the oblation of bread and the symbol of

resurrection in those rites, "and, if I still remember, Mithras there

seals his soldiers on the brow."[58] _Si memini_ is a colloquialism,

which should not be pressed, but the _adhuc_ inserted may make it a

more real and personal record.

To Christian ideas he gave little attention. There were Christians

round about him, no doubt in numbers, but they did not greatly interest

him. He seems, however, to have looked somewhat carelessly into their

teaching, but he laughed at resurrection, at judgment and retribution

in an eternal life.[59] He was far from studying the

Scriptures--"nobody," he said later on, "comes to them unless he is

already a Christian."[60] Justin devoted about a half of his _Apology_

to prove the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in the life of

Jesus--an _Apology_ addressed to a pagan Emperor. Tertullian, in his

_Apology_, gives four chapters to the subject, and one of these seems

to be an alternative draft. The difference is explained by Justin's

narrative of his conversion, in which he tells us how it was by the

path of the Scriptures and Judaism that he, like Tatian and Theophilus,

came to the church. Tertullian's story is different, and, not

expecting pagans to pay attention to a work in such deplorable

style[61] as the Latin Bible, which he had himself ignored, he used

other arguments, the weight of which he knew from experience. In his

_de Pallio_, addressed to a pagan audience, as we have seen, he alludes

to Adam and the fig-leaves, but he does not mention Adam's name and

rapidly passes on--"But this is esoteric--nor is it everybody's to know

it."[62]

[Sidenote: The martyrs]

Tertullian is never autobiographical except by accident, yet it is

possible to gather from his allusions how he became a Christian. In

his address to Scapula[63] he says that the first governor to draw the

sword on the Christians of Africa was Vigellius Saturninus. Dr

Armitage Robinson's discovery of the original Latin text of the _Acts

of the Scillitan Martyrs_, who {319} suffered under Saturninus, has

enabled us to put a date to the event, for we read that it took place

in the Consulship of Praesens (his second term) and of Claudianus--that

is in 180 A.D., the year of the death of Marcus Aurelius. These _Acts_

are of the briefest and most perfunctory character. One after another,

a batch of quite obscure Christians in the fewest possible words

confess their faith, are condemned, say _Deo Gratias_, and then--"so

all of them were crowned together in martyrdom and reign with the

Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen." That

is all. They were men and women, some of them perhaps of Punic

extraction--Nartzalus and Cittinus have not a Roman sound. After this,

it would seem that in Africa, as elsewhere, persecution recurred

intermittently; it might be the governor who began it, or the chance

cry of an unknown person in a mob, and then the people, wild and sudden

as the Gadarene swine and for the same reason (Christians said),[64]

would fling themselves into unspeakable orgies of bloodshed and

destruction. What was more, no one could foretell the hour--it might

be years before it happened again; it might be now. And the Christians

were surprisingly ready, whenever it came.

Sometimes they argued a little, sometimes they said hardly anything.

_Christiana sum_, was all that one of the Scillitan women said. But

one thing struck everybody--their firmness, _obstinatio_.[65] Some,

like the philosophic Emperor, might call it perversity; he, as we have

seen, found it thin and theatrical, and contrasted it with "the

readiness" that "proceeded from inward conviction, of a temper rational

and grave"[66]--an interesting judgment from the most self-conscious

and virtuous of men. On other men it made a very different

impression--on men, that is, more open than the Caesar of the

passionless face[67] to impression, men of a more sensitive and

imaginative make, quicker in penetrating the feeling of others.

Tertullian, in two short passages, written at different dates, shows

how the martyrs--perhaps these very Scillitan {320} martyrs--moved him.

"That very obstinacy with which you taunt us, is your teacher. For who

is not stirred up by the contemplation of it to find out what there is

in the thing within? who, when he has found out, does not draw near?

and then, when he has drawn near, desire to suffer, that he may gain

the whole grace of God, that he may receive all forgiveness from him in

exchange for his blood?"[68] So he wrote in 197-8 A.D., and fourteen

years later his last words to Scapula were in the same tenor--"None the

less this school (_secta_) will never fail--no! you must learn that

then it is built up the more, when it seems to be cut down. Every man,

who witnesses this great endurance, is struck with some misgiving and

is set on fire to look into it, to find what is its cause; and when he

has learnt the truth, he instantly follows it himself as well."[69] It

would be hard to put into a sentence so much history and so much

character. _Et ipse statim sequitur_.

The martyrs made him uneasy (_scrupulo_). There must be more behind

than he had fancied from the little he had seen and heard of their

teaching. "No one would have wished to be killed unless in possession

of the truth," he says.[70] In spite of his laughter at resurrection

and judgment, he was not sure about them. When he speaks in later life

of the _naturalis timor animae in deum_[71]--that instinctive fear of

God which Nature has set in the soul--he is probably not himself

without consciousness of sharing here too the common experience of men;

and this is amply confirmed by the frequency and earnestness with which

he speaks of things to come after death. Here however were men who had

not this fear. Their obstinacy was his teacher. He looked for the

reason, he learned the truth and he followed it at once. That energy

is his character--to be read in all he does. Like Carlyle's his

writings have "the signature of the writer in every word." {321} "It is

the idlest thing in the world," he says, "for a man to say, 'I wished

it and yet I did not do it.' You ought to carry it through

(_perficere_) because you wish it, or else not to wish it at all

because you do not carry it through."[72] And again: "Why debate? God

commands."[73] Tertullian obeyed, and ever after he felt that men had

only to look into the matter, to learn and to obey. "All who like you

were ignorant in time past, and like you hated,--as soon as it falls to

their lot to know, they cease to hate who cease to be ignorant."[74]

[Sidenote: Idolatry]

Tertullian's tract _On Idolatry_ illustrates his mind upon this

decisive change. There he deals with Christians who earn their living

by making idols--statuaries, painters, gilders, and the like; and when

the plea is suggested that they _must_ live and have no other way of

living, he indignantly retorts that they should have thought this out

before. _Vivere ergo habes?_[75] _Must_ you live? he asks. Elsewhere

he says "there are no musts where faith is concerned."[76] The man who

claims to be _condidonalis_,[77] to serve God on terms, Tertullian

cannot tolerate. "Christ our Master called himself Truth--not

Convention."[78] Every form of idolatry must be renounced, and

idolatry took many forms. The schoolmaster and the _professor

litterarum_ were almost bound to be disloyal to Christ; all their

holidays were heathen festivals, and their very fees in part due to

Minerva; while their business was to instruct the youth in the

literature and the scandals of Olympus. But might not one study pagan

literature? and, if so, why not teach it? Because, in teaching it, a

man is bound, by his position, to drive heathenism deep into the minds

of the young; in personal study he deals with no one but himself, and

can judge and omit as he sees fit.[79] The dilemma of choosing between

literature and Christ was a painful thing for men of letters for

centuries after this.[80] So Tertullian lays down the law for others;

what for himself?

{322}

Under the Empire there were two ways to eminence, the bar and the camp,

and Tertullian had chosen the former. His rhetoric, his wit, his force

of mind, and his strong grasp of legal principles in general and the

issue of the moment in particular, might have carried him far. He

might have risen as high as a civilian could. It was a tempting

prospect,--the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them--and he

renounced it; and never once in all the books that have come down to

us, does he give any hint of looking back, never so much as suggests

that he had given up anything. Official life was full of religious

usage, full too of minor duties of ritual which a Christian might not

discharge. Tertullian was not the first to see this. A century

earlier Flavius Clemens, the cousin of Domitian, seems to have been a

Christian--Dio Cassius speaks of his atheism and Jewish practices, and

Suetonius remarks upon his "contemptible inertia," though he was

consul.[81] In other words, the Emperor's cousin found that public

life meant compromise at every step. This is Tertullian's decision of

the case--it has the note of his profession about it. "Let us grant

that it is possible for a man successfully to manage that, whatever

office it be, he bears merely the title of that office; that he does

not sacrifice, nor lend his authority to sacrifices, nor make contracts

as to victims, nor delegate the charge of temples, nor look after their

tributes; that he does not give shows (_spectacula_) at his own or the

public cost, nor preside over them when being given; that he makes no

proclamation or edict dealing with a festival; that he takes no oath;

that--and these are the duties of a magistrate--he does not sit in

judgment on any man's life or honour (for you might bear with his

judging in matters of money); that he pronounces no sentence of

condemnation nor any [as legislator] that should tend to condemnation;

that he binds no man, imprisons no man, tortures[82] no man"--if all

this can be managed, a Christian may be a magistrate.[83] Tertullian

made his renunciation and held no magistracy. It may be said that, as

he held none, it was easy to renounce it; but hopes are often harder to

renounce than realities. So Tertullian left the law and the Stoics, to

study {323} the Scriptures, Justin and Irenaeus[84]--the Bible and the

_regula fidei_ his new code, and the others his commentators. The

Christian is "a stranger in this world, a citizen of the city above, of

Jerusalem"; his ranks, his magistracies, his senate are the Church of

Christ; his purple the blood of his Lord, his _laticlave_ in His

cross.[85]

But Tertullian could speak, on occasion, of what he had done. "We have

no fear or terror of what we may suffer from those who do not know," he

wrote to Scapula, "for we have joined this school (_sectam_) fully

accepting the terms of our agreement; so that we come into these

conflicts with no further right to our own souls."[86] The contest

was, as he says elsewhere, "against the institutions of our ancestors,

the authority of usage, the laws of rulers, the arguments of the wise;

against antiquity, custom, necessity; against precedents, prodigies and

miracles,"[87] and he did not need Celsus to remind him what form the

resistance of the enemy might take. He knew, for he had seen, and that

was why he stood where he did. But it is worth our while to understand

how vividly he realized the possibilities before him.

There were the private risks of informers and blackmailers, Jews[88]

and soldiers, to which the Christians were exposed.[89] They were

always liable to be trapped in their meetings--"every day we are

besieged; every day we are betrayed; most of all in our actual

gatherings and congregations are we surprised."[90] How are we to meet

at all, asks the anxious Christian, unless we buy off the soldiers? By

night, says Tertullian, "or let three be your church."[91] Then came

the appearance before the magistrate, where everything turned on the

character or the mood of the official. Tertullian quotes to Scapula

several instances of kindness on the bench, rough and ready, or

high-principled.[92] Anything might {324} happen--"then," wrote

Perpetua, "he had all our names recited together and condemned us to

the beasts."[93]

What followed in the arena may be read in various Acts of Martyrdom--in

the story of Perpetua herself, as told in tense and quiet language by

Tertullian. He, it is generally agreed, edited her visions, preserving

what she wrote as she left it, and adding in a postscript what happened

when she had laid down her pen for ever. The scene with the beasts is

not easy to abridge, and though not long in itself it is too long to

quote here; but no one who has read it will forget the episode of

Saturus drenched in his own blood from the leopard's bite, amid the

yells of the spectators, _Salvum lotum! salvum lotum!_ nor that of

Perpetua and Felicitas, mothers both, one a month or so, the other

three days, stripped naked to be tossed by a wild cow. And here comes

a curious touch; the mob, with a superficial delicacy, suggested

clothing; rough cloths were put over the women, and the cow was let

loose; they were tossed, and then all were put to the sword.

[Sidenote: On martyrdom]

"At this present moment," writes Tertullian, "it is the very middle of

the heat, the very dog-days of persecution--as you would expect, from

the dog-headed himself, of course. Some Christians have been tested by

the fire, some by the sword, some by the beasts; some, lashed and torn

with hooks, have just tasted martyrdom, and lie hungering for it in

prison."[94] Cross, hook, and beasts[95]--the circus, the prison, the

rack[96]--the _vivicomburium_,[97] burning alive--and meanwhile the

renegade Jew is there with his placard of the "god of the Christians,"

an ugly caricature with the ears and one hoof of an ass, clad in a

toga, book in hand[98]--the Gnostic and the nervous Christian are

asking whether the text "flee ye to the next" may not be God's present

counsel--and meantime "faith glows and the church is burning like the

bush."[99] Yet, says Tertullian to the heathen, "we say, and we say it

openly,--while you are torturing us, torn and bleeding, we cry aloud

'We worship God through Christ.'"[100] To {325} the Christian he says:

"The command is given to me to name no other God, whether by act of

hand, or word of tongue ... save the One alone, whom I am bidden to

fear, lest he forsake me; whom I am bidden to love with all my being,

so as to die for him. I am his soldier, sworn to his service, and the

enemy challenge me. I am as they are, if I surrender to them. In

defence of my allegiance I fight it out to the end in the battle-line,

I am wounded, I fall, I am killed. Who wished this end for his

soldier--who but he who sealed him with such an oath of enlistment?

There you have the will of my God."[101] "And therefore the Paraclete

is needed, to guide into all truth, to animate for all endurance.

Those, who receive him, know not to flee persecution, nor to buy

themselves off; they have him who will be with us, to speak for us when

we are questioned, to help us when we suffer."[102a] "He who fears to

suffer cannot be his who suffered."[102b] The tracts _On Flight in

Persecution_ and _The Antidote for the Scorpion_ are among his most

impressive pieces. They must have been read by his friends with a

strange stirring of the blood. Even to-day they bring back the

situation--living as only genius can make it live.

But what of the man of genius who wrote them? At what cost were they

written? "Picture the martyr," he writes, "with his head under the

sword already poised, picture him on the gibbet his body just

outspread, picture him tied to the stake when the lion has just been

granted, on the wheel with the faggots piled about him"[103]--and no

doubt Tertullian saw these things often enough, with that close

realization of each detail of shame and pain which is only possible to

so vivid and sensitive an imagination. He saw _himself_ tied to the

stake--heard the governor in response to the cry _Christiana

leonem_[104] concede the lion--and then had to wait, how long? How

long would it take to bring and to let loose the lion? How long would

it seem? Through all this he went, in his mind, not once, nor twice.

And meanwhile, what was the audience doing, while he stood there tied,

{326} waiting interminably for the lion? He knew what they would be

doing, for he had seen it, and in the passage at the end of _de

Spectaculis_, which Gibbon quotes, every item of the description of the

spectator is taken in irony from the actual circus. No man, trained,

as the public speaker or pleader must be, to respond intimately and at

once to the feelings and thoughts, expressed or unexpressed, of the

audience, could escape realizing in heightened tension every

possibility of anguish in such a crowd of hostile faces, full of

frantic hatred,[105] cruelty and noise. To this Tertullian looked

forward, as we have seen, and went onward--as another did who

"steadfastly set his face for Jerusalem." The test of emotion is what

it has survived, and Tertullian's faith in Christ and his peace of mind

survived this martyrdom through the imagination. Whatever criticism

has to be passed upon his work and spirit, to some of his critics he

might reply "_Ye_ have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against

sin."

So much did martyrdom mean to the individual, yet it was not merely a

personal affair. It was God's chosen way to propagate his church--so

it had been foretold, and so it was fulfilled. "Nothing whatever is

achieved," says Tertullian to the heathen, "by each more exquisite

cruelty you invent;[106] on the contrary, it wins men for our school.

We are made more as often as you mow us down; the blood of Christians

is seed."[107]

Sixteen centuries or so later, Thoreau in his _Plea for Captain John

Brown_, a work not unlike Tertullian's own in its force, its surprises,

its desperate energy and high conviction, wrote similarly of the

opponents of another great movement. "Such do not know that like the

seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world, when good seed is

planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering

and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a

crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such {327}

force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."

[Sidenote: On baptism]

There were yet other possibilities in martyrdom. It was believed by

Christians that in baptism the sins of the earlier life were washed

away; but what of sins after baptism? They involved a terrible

risk--"the world is destined to fire like the man who after baptism

renews his sins"[108]--and it was often felt safer to defer baptism to

the last moment in consequence. Constantine was baptized on his

death-bed. "The postponement of baptism is more serviceable especially

in the case of children;" says Tertullian, "let them become Christians

when they shall be able to know Christ. Why should the innocent age

hasten to the remission of sins?"[109] As to sins committed after

baptism, different views were held. In general, as the church grew

larger and more comprehensive, it took a lighter view of sin, but

Tertullian and his Montanist friends did not, and for this they have

been well abused, in their own day and since. They held that adultery

and apostasy were not venial matters, to be forgiven by a bishop

issuing an "edict," like a _Pontifex Maximus_, in the legal style, "I

forgive the sins of adultery and fornication to such as have done

penance, _paenitentia functis_."[110] The Montanist alternative was not

so easy; God, they held, permitted a second baptism, which should be

final--a baptism of blood. "God had foreseen the weaknesses of

humanity, the strategems of the enemy, the deceitfulness of affairs,

the snares of the world--that faith even after baptism would be

imperilled, that many would be lost again after being saved--who should

soil the wedding dress, and provide no oil for their lamps, who should

yet have to be sought over mountain and forest, and carried home on the

shoulders. He therefore appointed a second consolation, a last

resource, the fight of martyrdom and the baptism of blood, thereafter

secure."[111] This view may not appeal to us to-day; it did not appeal

to Gnostic, time-server and coward. The philosophy of sin involved is

hardly deep enough, but {328} this doctrine of the second baptism

cannot be said to lack virility.

But Tertullian himself did not receive the first baptism with any idea

of looking for a second. Like men who are baptized of their own motion

and understanding, he was greatly impressed by baptism. "There is

nothing," he says, "which more hardens the minds of men than the

simplicity of God's works, which appears in the doing, and the

magnificence, which is promised in the effect. Here too, because, with

such simplicity, without pomp, without any novel apparatus, and without

cost, a man is sent down into the water and baptized, while but a few

words are spoken, and rises again little or nothing cleaner, on that

account his attainment of eternity is thought incredible."[112] It

must be felt that the illustration declines from the principle. It may

also be remarked that this is a more magical view of baptism than would

have appealed to Seneca or to his contemporaries in the Christian

movement, and that, as it is developed, it becomes even stranger.

Tertullian's description of baptism is of interest in the history of

the rite. The candidate prepares himself with prayer, watching and the

confession of sin.[113] "The waters receive the mystery

(_sacramentum_) of sanctification, when God has been called upon. The

Spirit comes at once from heaven and is upon the waters, sanctifying

them from himself, and so sanctified they receive (_combibunt_) the

power of sanctifying."[114] This is due to what to-day we should call

physical causes. The underlying matter, he says, must of necessity

absorb the quality of the overlying, especially when the latter is

spiritual, and therefore by the subtlety of its substance more

penetrative.[115] We may compare "the enthusiastic spirit," which,

Plutarch tells us, came up as a gas from the chasm at Delphi,[116] and

further the general teaching of Tertullian (Stoic in origin) of the

corporeity of the soul and of similar spiritual beings. He illustrates

the influence of the Spirit in thus affecting the waters of baptism by

the analogy of the unclean spirits that haunt streams and fountains,

natural and artificial, and similarly affect men, though for

evil--"lest any should think it a hard thing that God's holy angel

should be present to temper {329} waters for man's salvation."[117]

Thus when the candidate has solemnly "renounced the devil, his pomp and

his angels,"[118] he is thrice plunged,[119] his spirit is washed

corporeally by the waters "medicated" and his flesh spiritually is

purified.[120] "It is not that in the waters we receive the Holy

Spirit, but purified in water under the angel, we are prepared for the

Holy Spirit.... The angel, that is arbiter of baptism, prepares the

way for the Spirit that shall come."[121] On leaving the water the

Christian is anointed (_signaculum_). The hand of blessing is laid

upon him, and in response to prayer the Holy Spirit descends with joy

from the Father to rest upon the purified and blest.[122]

[Sidenote: Renouncing the world]

Tertullian never forgot the baptismal pledge in which he renounced the

devil, his pomp and his angels; and, for his part, he never showed any

tendency to make compromise with them--when he recognized them, for

sometimes he seems not to have penetrated their disguises. Again and

again his pledge comes back to him. What has the Christian to do with

circus or theatre, who has renounced the devil, his pomp and his

angels, when both places are specially consecrated to these, when

there, above all, wickedness, lust and cruelty reign without

reserve?[123] How can the maker of idols, the temple-painter, etc., be

said to have renounced the devil and his angels, if they make their

living by them?[124] We have seen the difficulty of the schoolmaster

here. The general question of trade troubles Tertullian--its cupidity,

the lie that ministers to cupidity, to say nothing of perjury.[125] Of

astrologers, he would have thought, nothing needed to be said--but that

he had "within these few days" heard some one claim the right to

continue in the profession. He reminds him of the source of his

magical information--the fallen angels.[126] One must not even name

them--to say _Meditis fidius_ is idolatry, for it is a prayer; but to

say "I live in the street of Isis" is not sin--it is sense.[127] Many

inventions were attributed by pagans to their gods. If every implement

of life is set down to some god, "yet I still must recognize Christ

lying on a couch--or when he brings a basin {330} to his disciples'

feet, or pours water from the jug, and is girded with linen--Osiris'

own peculiar garb."[128] In fact, common utility, and the service of

ordinary needs and comforts, may lead us to look upon things (to

whomsoever attributed) as really due to the inspiration of God himself

"who foresees, instructs and gives pleasure to man, who is after all

His own."[129] Thus common sense and his doctrine of Nature come to his

aid. "So amid rocks and bays, amid the shoals and breakers of

idolatry, faith steers her course, her sails filled by the Spirit of

God."[130]

[Sidenote: The _Apology_]

Tertullian had been a lawyer and a pleader, as we are reminded in many

a page, where the man of letters is overridden by the man of codes and

arguments; and a lawyer he remained. The Gospel, for instance, bade

that, if any man take the tunic, he should be allowed to take the cloak

also. Yes, says Tertullian, if he asks--"if he threatens, I will ask

for the tunic back."[131] A man, with such habits of mind, will not

take violent measures to repel injustice, but he may be counted upon to

defend himself in his own way. Tertullian, accordingly, when

persecution broke out in the autumn of 197 in Carthage, addressed to

the governor of the province an Apology for the Christians. It is one

of his greatest works. It was translated into Greek, and Eusebius

quotes the translation in several places. It is a most brilliant book.

All his wit and warmth, his pungency and directness, his knowledge and

his solid sense come into play. As a piece of rhetoric, as a lawyer's

speech, it is inimitable. But it is more than that, for it is as full

of his finest qualities as of his other gifts of dexterity and humour.

It shows the full grown and developed man, every faculty at its highest

and all consecrated, and the book glows with the passion of a dedicated

spirit.

He begins with the ironical suggestion that, if the governors of

provinces are not permitted in their judicial capacity to examine in

public the case of the Christians, if this type of action alone their

authority is afraid--or blushes--to investigate in the interests of

justice, he yet hopes that Truth by the {331} silent path of letters

may reach their ears. Truth makes no excuse--she knows she is a

stranger here, while her race, home, hope, grace and dignity are in

heaven. All her eagerness is not to be condemned unheard.

Condemnation without trial is invidious, it suggests injustice and

wakes suspicion. It is in the interests of Christianity, too, that it

should be examined--that is how the numbers of the Christians have

grown to such a height. They are not ashamed--unless it be of having

become Christians so late. The natural characteristics of evil are

fear, shame, tergiversation, regret; yet the Christian criminal is glad

to be accused, prays to be condemned and is happy to suffer. You

cannot call it madness, when you are shown to be ignorant of what it is.

Christians are condemned for the name's sake, though such condemnation,

irrespective of the proving of guilt or innocence, is outrage. Others

are tortured to confess their guilt, Christians to deny it. Trajan's

famous letter to Pliny, he tears to shreds; Christians are not to be

hunted down--that is, they are innocent; but they are to be

punished--that is, they are guilty. If the one, why not hunt them

down? If the other, why punish? Of course Trajan's plan was a

compromise, and Tertullian is not a man of compromises. If a founder's

name is guilt for a school, look around! Schools of philosophers and

schools of cooks bear their founders' names with impunity. But about

the Founder of the Christian school curiosity ceases to be inquisitive.

But the "authority of laws" is invoked against truth--_non licet esse

vos!_ is the cry. What if laws do forbid Christians to be? "If your

law has made a mistake, well, I suppose, it was a human brain that

conceived it; for it did not come down from heaven." Laws are always

being changed, and have been. "Are you not yourselves every day, as

experiment illumines the darkness of antiquity, engaged in felling and

cutting the whole of that ancient and ugly forest of laws with the new

axes of imperial rescripts and edicts?"[132] Roman laws once forbade

extravagance, theatres, divorce--they forbade the religions of Bacchus,

Serapis and Isis. Where are those laws now? "You are always praising

antiquity, and you improvise your life from day to day."[133]

In passing, one remark may be made in view of what is {332} said

sometimes of Tertullian and his conception of religion. "To Tertullian

the revelation through the Christ is no more than a law."[134] There

is truth in this criticism, of course; but unless it is clearly

understood that Tertullian drew the distinction, which this passage of

the _Apology_ and others suggest, between Natural law, as conceived by

the Stoics, and civil law as regarded by a Propraetor, he is likely to

be misjudged. He constantly slips into the lawyer's way of handling

law, for like all lawyers he is apt to think in terms of paper and

parchment; but he draws a great distinction, not so familiar to judges

and lawyers--as English daily papers abundantly reveal--between the

laws of God or Nature and the laws of human convention or human

legislatures. The weak spot was his belief in the text of the

Scriptures as the ultimate and irrefragable word and will of God,

though even here, in his happier hours, when he is not under stress of

argument, he will interpret the divine and infallible code, not by the

letter, but by the general principles to be observed at once in Nature

and the book. _Legis injustae honor nullus est_[135] is not the

ordinary language of a lawyer.

The odious charges brought by the vulgar against the Christians then,

as now in China, and used for their own purposes by men who really knew

better, he shows to be incredible. No one has the least evidence of

any kind for them, and yet Christian meetings are constantly surprised.

What a triumph would await the spy or the traitor who could prove them!

But they are not believed, or men would harry the Christians from the

face of the earth (c. 8). As to the idea that Christians eat children

to gain eternal life--who would think it worth the price? No! if such

things _are_ done, by whom are they done? He reminds his

fellow-countrymen that in the reign of Tiberius priests of Saturn were

crucified in Africa on the sacred trees around their temple--for the

sacrifice of children. And then who are those who practise abortion?

"how many of those who crowd around and gape for Christian blood?" And

the gladiatorial shows? is it the Christians who frequent them?

Atheism and treason were more serious charges. "You do {333} not

worship the gods." What gods? He cannot mention them all--"new, old,

barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adoptive, special, common,

male, female, rustic, urban, nautical and military"--but Saturn at any

rate was a man, as the historians know. But they were made gods after

they died. Now, that implies "a God more sublime, true owner

(_mancipem_), so to speak, of divinity," who made them into gods, for

they could not of course have done it themselves; and meanwhile you

abolish the only one who could have. But why should he?--"unless the

great God needed their ministry and aid in his divine tasks"--dead

men's aid! (c. 11). No, the whole universe is the work of Reason;

nothing was left for Saturn to do, or his family. It rained from the

beginning, stars shone, thunders roared, and "Jove himself shuddered at

the living bolts which you put in his hand." Ask the spiders what they

think of your gods and their webs tell you (c. 12). To-day a god,

to-morrow a pan, as domestic necessity melts and casts the metal. And

the gods are carried round and alms begged for them--_religio

mendicans_--"hold out your hand, Jupiter, if you want me to give you

anything!"[136] Does Homer's poetry do honour to the gods (c. 14)--do

the actors on the stage (c. 15)?

Christians are not atheists. They worship one God, Creator, true,

great, whose very greatness makes him known of men and unknown.[137]

Who he is, and that he is one, the human soul knows full well--_O

testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae_! But God has other

evidence--_instrumentum litteraturae_. He sent into the world men

"inundated with the divine spirit" to proclaim the one God, who framed

all things, who made man, who one day will raise man from the dead for

eternal judgment. These writings of the prophets are not secret books.

Anyone can read them in the Greek version, which was made by the

seventy elders for Ptolemy Philadelphus. To this book he appeals,--to

the majesty of Scripture, to the fulfilment of prophecy.

Zeno called the Logos the maker of all things--and named him Fate, God,

mind of Jove, Necessity. Cleanthes described him as permeating all

things. This the Christians also hold to {334} be God's Word, Reason

and Power--and his Son, one with him in being, Spirit as He is Spirit.

This was born of a Virgin, became man, was crucified and rose again.

Even the Caesars would have believed on Christ, if Caesars were not

needful to the world, or if there could be Christian Caesars.[138] As

for the pagan gods, they are daemons, daily exorcised into the

confession of Christ.

But the charge of Atheism may be retorted. Are not the pagans guilty

of Atheism, at once in not worshipping the true God and in persecuting

those who do? As a rule they conceive, with Plato, of a great Jove in

heaven surrounded by a hierarchy of gods and daemons.[139] But, as in

the Roman Empire, with its Emperor and its procurators and prefects, it

is a capital offence to turn from the supreme ruler to the subordinate,

so "may it not involve a charge of irreligion to take away freedom of

religion, to forbid free choice of divinity, that I may not worship

whom I will?" Every one else may; but "we are not counted Romans, who

do not worship the god of the Romans. It is well that God is God of

all, whose we are, whether we will or no. But with you it is lawful to

worship anything whatever--except the true God."

But the gods raised Rome to be what she is. Which gods? Sterculus?

Larentina? Did Jove forget Crete for Rome's sake--Crete, where he was

born, where he lies buried?[140] No, look to it lest God prove to be

the dispenser of kingdoms, to whom belong both the world that is ruled

and the man who rules. Some are surprised that Christians prefer

"obstinacy to deliverance"--but Christians know from whom _that_

suggestion comes, and they know the malevolence of the daemon ranks, who

are now beginning to despair since "they recognize they are not a match

for us" (c. 27).

For the Emperor Christians invoke God, the eternal, the true, the

living. They look up, with hands outspread, heads bared, and from

their hearts, without a form of words, they pray for long life for the

Emperor, an Empire free from alarms, a safe home, brave armies, a

faithful senate, an honest people and a quiet world (c. 30). They do

this, for the Empire stands {335} between them and the world's end.

(It was a common thought that the world and Rome would end together.)

Christians however honour Caesar as God's vice-gerent; he is theirs more

than any one's, for he is set up by the Christians' God. They make no

plots and have no recourse to magic to inquire into his "health" (c.

35).[141] In fact "we are the same to the Emperors as to our next-door

neighbours. We are equally forbidden to wish evil, to do evil, to

speak evil, to think evil of anyone." So much for being enemies of the

state (c. 36).

Christians do not retaliate on the mob for its violence, though, if

they did, their numbers would be serious. "We are but of yesterday,

and we have filled everything, cities, islands, camps, palace, forum,"

etc.; "all we have left you is the temples." But "far be it that a

divine school should vindicate itself with human fire, or grieve to

suffer that wherein it is proved" (c. 37). Christians make no

disturbances and aspire to no offices. They are content to follow

their religion and look after the poor, the shipwrecked, and men in

mines and prisons. "See how they love each other!" say the

heathen.[142] They are not, as alleged, the cause of public disasters;

though if the Nile do not overflow, or if the Tiber do, it is at once

_Christianos ad leonem_! But they are "unprofitable in business!"

Yes, to pimps, poisoners and mathematicians; still they are not

Brahmans or solitaries of the woods, exiles from life, and they refuse

no gift of God. "We sail with you, take the field with you, share your

country life, and know all the intercourse of arts and business" (cc.

42, 43). They are innocent, for they fear God and not the proconsul.

If they were a philosophic school, they would have toleration--"who

compels a philosopher to sacrifice, to renounce, or to set out lamps at

midday to no purpose?" Yet the philosophers openly destroy your gods

and your superstitions in their books, and win your applause for

it--and they "bark at your princes." He then points out how much there

is in common to Christians and philosophers, and yet (in a burst of

temper) how unlike they are. No, "where is the likeness between the

philosopher and the Christian? the disciple of Greece and of heaven?

the trafficker in fame and in life? the friend and the foe of error?"

(c. 46). {336} The Christian artisan knows God better than Plato did.

And yet what is knowledge and genius in philosopher and poet, is

"presumption" in a Christian! "Say the things are false that protect

you--mere presumption! yet necessary. Silly! yet useful. For those

who believe them are compelled to become better men, for fear of

eternal punishment and hope of eternal refreshment. So it is

inexpedient to call that false or count that silly, which it is

expedient should be presumed true. On no plea can you condemn what

does good" (c. 49).

Yet, whatever their treatment, Christians would rather be condemned

than fall from God. Their death is their victory; their "obstinacy"

educates the world; and while men condemn them, God acquits them. That

is his last word--_a deo absolvimur_ (c. 50).

Such, in rough outline, is the great Apology--not quite the work of the

fuller or baker at whom Celsus sneered. Yet it has not the accent of

the conventional Greek or Latin gentleman, nor that of the philosophic

Greek Christian. The style is unlike anything of the age. Everything

in it is individual; there is hardly a quotation in the piece.

Everything again is centripetal; Tertullian is too much in earnest to

lose himself in the endless periods of the rhetorician, or in the

charming fancies dear to the eclectic and especially to contemporary

Platonists. Indeed his tone toward literature and philosophy is

startlingly contemptuous, not least so when contrasted with that of

Clement.

For this there are several reasons. First of all, like Carlyle,

Tertullian has "to write with his nerves in a kind of blaze," and, like

Carlyle, he says things strongly and sweepingly. It is partly

temperament, partly the ingrown habit of the pleader. Something must

be allowed to the man of moods, whose way it is to utter strongly what

he feels for the moment. Such men do a service for which they have

little thanks. Many moods go in them to the making of the mind, moods

not peculiar to themselves. In most men feelings rarely find full and

living expression, and something is gained when they are so expressed,

even at the cost of apparent exaggeration. The sweeping half-truth at

once suggests its complement to the man who utters it, and may stir

very wholesome processes of thought in the milder person who hears it.

{337}

[Sidenote: The philosophers]

In the next place the philosophers may have deserved the criticism.

Fine talk and idle talk, in philosophic terms, had disgusted

Epictetus;[143] and for few has Lucian more mockery than for the

philosophers of his day--Tertullian's day--with their platitudes and

their beards, their flunkeyism and love of gain. Clement of

Alexandria, who loved philosophy, had occasional hard words for the

vanity of its professors.[144] For a man of Tertullian's earnestness

they were too little serious. _Gloriae animal_[145] is one of his

phrases--a creature of vainglory was not likely to appeal to a man who

lived in full view of the lion and the circus. He had made a root and

branch cleavage with idolatry, because no men could die like the

Christians unless they had the truth. The philosophers--to say nothing

of their part now and then in stirring the people against the

Christians--had made terms with polytheism, beast-worship, magic, all

that was worst and falsest in paganism, "lovers of wisdom" and seekers

after truth as they professed themselves to be. Ancient Philosophy

suggests to the modern student the name of Heraclitus or Plato; but

Tertullian lived in the same streets with Apuleius, philosopher and

Platonist, humorist and _gloriae animal_. But even Plato vexed

Tertullian.[146] The "cock to be offered to AEsculapius" was too

available a quotation in a world where the miracles of the great Healer

were everywhere famous. The triflers and the dogmatists of the day

used Plato's myths to confute the Christian doctrine of the

resurrection. And of course Plato and Tertullian are in temperament so

far apart, that an antipathy provoked by such causes was hardly to be

overcome.

Again, Tertullian remarks frequently that heresy has the closest

connexion with philosophy. Both handle the same questions: "Whence is

evil, and why? and whence is man and how? and whence is God?"[147]

Marcion, for instance, is "sick (like so many nowadays and, most of

all, the heretics) with the question of evil, whence is evil?"[148] and

turns to dualism. Or else "the heretics begin with questions of the

resurrection, for the resurrection of the flesh they find harder to

believe than the unity of the Godhead."[149] What Celsus, a typical

product of {338} contemporary philosophy, thought of the resurrection

of the flesh we have seen--a "hope of worms!" Lastly, there was a

strong tendency in the church at large for re-statement of the gospel

in the terms of philosophy; and in such endeavours, as we know, there

is always the danger of supposing the terms and the philosophy of the

day to be more permanent and more valid than the experience which they

are supposed to express. In Tertullian's century there seemed some

prospect that every characteristic feature of the gospel would be so

"re-stated" as to leave the gospel entirely indistinguishable from any

other eclectic system of the moment. Jesus became a phantom, or an

aeon; his body, sidereal substance, which offered, Clement himself said,

no material resistance to the touch of St John's hand. God divided,

heaven gone, no hope or faith left possible in a non-real Christ even

in this life--Christians would be indeed of all men most miserable, and

morality would have no longer any basis nor any motive. What in all

this could tempt a man to face the lions? It was not for this that

Christians shed their blood--no, the Gnostics recommended flight in

persecution. It is easy to understand the sweeping

_Viderint_--Tertullian's usual phrase for dismissing people and ideas

on whom no more is to be said--"Let them look to it who have produced a

Stoic and Platonic and dialectic Christianity. We need no curiosity

who have Jesus Christ, no inquiry who have the gospel."[150]

It was natural for Clement and his school to try to bring the gospel

and philosophy to a common basis--a natural impulse, which all must

share who speculate. The mistake has been that the church took their

conclusions so readily and has continued to believe them. For

Tertullian is, on his side, right, and we know in fact a great deal

more about Jesus than we can know about the Logos.

[Sidenote: The _Praescription of heretics_]

Accordingly a large part of Tertullian's work, as a Christian, was the

writing of treatises against heresy. He has in one book--_de

Praescriptionibus Haereticorum_--dealt with all heretics together. The

_Regula Fidei_, which is a short creed,[151] was instituted, he says,

by Christ, and is held among Christians without questions, "save those

which heretics raise and which make heretics." On that _Regula_ rests

the Christian faith. To know nothing against it, is to know

everything. But appeal is {339} made to Scripture. We must then see

who has the title to Scripture (_possessio_),[152] and whence it comes.

Jesus Christ while on earth taught the twelve, and they went into the

world and promulgated "the same doctrine of the same faith," founding

churches in every city, from which other churches have taken faith and

doctrine--he uses the metaphors of seed and of layers (_tradux_) from

plants. Every day churches are so formed and duly counted Apostolic.

Thus the immense numbers of churches may be reckoned equivalent to the

one first church. No other than the Apostles are to be received, as no

others were taught by Christ. "Thus it is established that every

doctrine which agrees with those Apostolic mother-churches, the

originals of the faith, is to be set down to truth, as in accordance

with what the churches have received from the apostles, the apostles

from Christ, and Christ from God."[153] But have the churches been

faithful in the transmission of this body of doctrine? Suppose them

all to have gone wrong, suppose the Holy Spirit to have been so

negligent--is it likely that so vast a number should have wandered away

into _one_ faith? Again let Marcion and others show the history of

their churches. Let their doctrines be compared with the Apostolic,

and their varieties and contradictions will show they are not

Apostolic. If then Truth be adjudged to those who walk by the

_Regula_, duly transmitted through the church, the Apostles and Christ

from God, then heretics have no right of appeal to the Scriptures which

are not theirs. If they are heretics, they cannot be Christians; if

they are not Christians, they have no right (_ius_) to Christian

literature. "With what right (_iure_) Marcion, do you cut down my

wood? By what licence, Valentinus, do you divert my springs? ... This

is my estate; I have long held it; I am first in occupation; I trace my

sure descent from the founders to whom the thing belonged. I am the

heir of the Apostles."[154]

In this, as in most human arguments, there are strands of different

value. The legal analogy gave a name to the book--_praescriptio_ was

the barring of a claim--but it is not {340} the strongest line. Law

rarely is. But Tertullian was not content to rule his opponents out of

court. He used legal methods and manners too freely, but he knew well

enough that these settled nothing. As a rule he had much stronger

grounds for his attack. He wrote five books against Marcion to

maintain the unity of the Godhead and the identity of the Father of

Jesus, the God of the Old Testament and the God of Nature. His book

against the Valentinians has a large element of humour in it--perhaps

the best rejoinder to the framers of a cosmogony of so many aeons, none

demonstrable, all fanciful,--the thirty of them suggest to him the

famous Latin sow of the _AEneid_.[155] Against Hermogenes he maintains

the doctrine of the creation of the world from nothing. The hypothesis

that God used pre-existing matter, makes matter antecedent and more or

less equal to God. And then, in legal vein, he asks a question. How

did God come to use matter? "These are the three ways in which

another's property may be taken,--by right, by benefit, by assault,

that is by title, by request, by violence." Hermogenes denies God's

title in this case; which then of the other means does he prefer?[156]

[Sidenote: The incarnation of Christ]

His best work in the controversial field is in his treatises, _On the

Flesh of Christ_, _On the Resurrection of the Flesh_, and _On the

Soul_. The first of these, above all, will appeal to any reader to

whom the historic Jesus is significant. Much has changed in outlook

and preconceptions since Tertullian wrote, but his language on the

reality of Jesus, as an actual human being and no sidereal or celestial

semblance of a man, on the incarnation, and the love of God, still

glows and still finds a response. "Away," he pictures Marcion saying,

"Away with those census-rolls of Caesar, always tiresome, away with the

cramped inns, the soiled rags, the hard stall. Let the angelic host

look to it!"[157] And then he rejoins, Do you think nativity

impossible--or unsuitable--for God? Declaim as you like on the

ugliness of the circumstances; yet Christ _did_ love men (born, if you

like, just as you say); for man he descended, for man he preached, for

man he lowered himself with every humiliation down to death, and the

death of the cross. Yes, {341} he loved him whom he redeemed at so

high a price. And with man he loved man's nativity, even his flesh.

The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of

error, the discipline of justice, of purity, of pity, of patience, of

all innocence--these are not folly, and they are bound up with the

truth of the Gospel. Is it unworthy of God? "Spare the one hope of

all the world, thou, who wouldst do away with the disgrace of faith.

Whatever is unworthy of God is all to my good."[158] The Son of God

also died--"It is credible because it is foolish. He was buried and

rose again; it is certain because it is impossible." And how could all

this be, if his body were not true? "You bisect Christ with a lie.

The _whole_ of him was Truth."[159] The gospel narrative from

beginning to end implies that Christ's body was like ours--"he hungered

under the devil, thirsted under the Samaritan woman, shed tears over

Lazarus, was troubled[160] at death (for, the flesh, he said, is weak),

last of all he shed his blood." How could men have spat in a face

radiant with "celestial grandeur"? Wait! Christ has not yet subdued

his enemies that he may triumph with his friends.

Jesus is to come again, as he was, as he is, sitting at the Father's

right hand, God and man, flesh and blood, the same in essence and form

as when he ascended; so he shall come.[161] And men will be raised in

the flesh to receive judgment. A storm overhangs the world.[162] What

the treasure-house of eternal fire will be, may be guessed from the

petty vents men see in Etna and elsewhere.[163] There will be white

robes for martyrs; for the timid a little portion in the lake of fire

and sulphur.[164] All that Gibbon thought would "offend the reason and

humanity of the present age" in the last chapter of the _de

Spectacutis_ may recur to the reader. But, continues Tertullian in

that passage, my gaze will be upon those who let loose their fury on

the Lord himself--"'This,' I shall say, 'is he, the son of the

carpenter or the harlot, Sabbath-breaker, Samaritan, demoniac. This is

he whom you bought from {342} Judas; this is he, whom you beat with the

reed and the palms of your hands, whom you disfigured with your

spittle, to whom you gave gall and vinegar. This is he whom his

disciples stole away, that it might be said he had risen,--or the

gardener took him away, that his lettuces might not be trodden by the

crowds that came.'" "A long variety of affected and unfeeling

witticisms," is Gibbon's judgment.

A mind less intent on polemic will judge otherwise of Tertullian and

his controversies. There is, first of all, much more of the

philosophic temper than is commonly supposed. He does not, like

Clement and other Greeks, revel in cosmological speculations as to the

Logos, nor does he loosely adopt the abstract methods of later Greek

philosophy. But in his treatment of the Soul, of moral order and

disorder, and of responsibility, he shows no mean powers of mind. He

argues from experience, and from the two sources, from which he could

best hope to learn most directly the mind of God, Nature and the

Scriptures. The infallibility of the Scriptures is of course a

limitation to freedom of speculation, but it was an axiom of the early

church, and a man of experience might accept it, bound up as it was

with sound results in the martyr-death and the changed life.

Tertullian will get back to the facts, if he can; and if he judges too

swiftly of Nature and too swiftly accepts the literal truth of

Scripture,--while these are drawbacks to our acceptance of his

conclusions, there is still to be seen in him more independence of mind

than in those Greek Fathers for whom Greek philosophy had spoken the

last word in metaphysics. It is psychology that interests Tertullian

more, and moral questions, and these he handles more deeply than the

Stoics. He stands in line with Augustine and Calvin, his spiritual

descendants.

If he speaks more of hell than certain Greeks do, it is not unnatural.

The man, who saw such deaths in the amphitheatre as he describes in the

_Passion of Perpetua_, who remembered the expressions he had then seen

on the faces of the spectators, who knew too well the cruelty that went

with Roman lust, could hardly help believing in hell. What was the

origin of evil? asked philosopher and heretic. What is its destiny?

and what are you to do with it now? asked Tertullian; and, in all

seriousness, the answer to the former {343} question is more likely to

be found when the answers of the latter are reached. At any rate the

latter are more practical, and that adjective, with what it suggests of

drawback and of gain, belongs to Tertullian.

[Sidenote: On conduct]

His application of the test of utility to belief is obviously open to

criticism. "It is expedient," said Varro, "for men to be deceived in

religion." No, Tertullian would have said, it is more expedient for

them to know the truth; and he backed his conviction by his appeal to

Nature, on the one hand, Nature, rational through and through, and ever

loyal to law, to fixity of principle, and on the other hand by

reference to the verification of his position yielded by

experience--once more the martyr-death and the transformed character.

These fundamental ideas he may have misused in particulars, if not in

matters more essential; but, if he is wrong from the beginning in

holding them, human knowledge, progress and conduct become fortuitous

and desultory at once. Nature and verification from life are

substantially all we have. To these of course Tertullian added

revelation in a sense distinct.

From the question of conduct we pass naturally to the great cleavage of

Tertullian with the church. A change had come in church practice and

government since the days when the _Teaching of the Apostles_

represented actual present fact,--perhaps even since the _Apology of

Aristides_. The church had grown larger, it had developed its

organization, and it was relying more on the practical men with a turn

for administration, who always appear when a movement, begun by

idealists, seems to show signs of success. The situation creates them,

and they cannot be avoided. They have their place, but they do not

care for ideas. Thus in the church the ministry of the Spirit, the

ministry of gifts, was succeeded by the ministry of office, with its

lower ideals of the practical and the expedient. The numbers of the

church swelled, and a theory began to spread, which Cyprian took up

later on, and which was almost inevitable on his principles, that the

church was an ark, with beasts clean and beasts unclean within it.

This theory answered to the actual facts, hardly to the ideal, and

Tertullian rejected it.[165] Conduct at once suggested the theory,

{344} and responded to it. Christians fell into adultery and apostasy,

and while at first this meant "delivery to Satan," restoration became

progressively easy. The _Shepherd_ of Hermas extended second chances,

till Tertullian fiercely spoke of "that apocryphal shepherd of

adulterers.[166]"

From Phrygia came the suggestion of reformation. Our evidence as to

the history of Montanism in its native land is derived from hostile

sources, and the value of it must partly depend on the truth of the

witnesses and partly on their intelligence, and of neither have we any

guarantee at all. That they are clearly hostile is plain from the

fragments in Eusebius. That they understood the inner meaning of what

they condemned, we have no indication. Montanus, however, asserted

Christ's promise of the Paraclete--his enemies allege that he

identified himself with the Paraclete, a statement which might be used

to show how quotation may lead to _suggestio falsi_. But the coming of

the Paraclete was not in fact a synonym for fanaticism and the

collection of money, as the enemies of Montanus hinted. It meant the

bracing of Christian life and character, and the restoration of

prophecy, new revelation of truth, power and progress. It appealed to

the Christian world, and the movement spread--probably with

modifications as it spread. The oracles of Montanus and of two women,

Prisca and Maximilla, became widely known, and they inculcated a stern

insistence on conduct, which was really needed, while they showed how

reformation was to be reached. To use language of more modern times,

involves risk of misconception; but if it may be done with caution, we

may roughly say that the Montanists stood for what the Friends call the

Inner Light, and for progressive revelation--or, at any rate, for

something in this direction. The indwelling of God was not consistent

with low living; and earnest souls, all over the world, were invested

with greater power and courage to battle with the growing lightness in

the church and to meet the never-ceasing hostility of the world--the

lion and the cruel faces of the amphitheatre.

[Sidenote: Ecstacy]

Yet Montanism failed for want of a clear conception of the real

character of primitive Christianity. Aiming at morals, Montanists

conceived of life and the human mind and God in a {345} way very far

from that of Jesus. They laid a stress, which is not his, on

asceticism and on penance, and they cultivated ecstasy--in both regions

renouncing the essentially spiritual conception of religion, and

turning to a non-Christian view of matter. They thus aimed at

obtaining or keeping the indwelling spirit of Jesus, known so well in

the early church, but by mechanical means; and this, though the later

church in this particular followed them for generations, is not to be

done. Still, whatever their methods and their expedients, they stood

for righteousness, and here lay the fascination of Montanism for

Tertullian.

Throughout his later life Tertullian, then, was a Montanist, though the

change was not so great as might be expected. Some of his works, such

as that _On Monogamy_, bear the stamp of Montanism, for re-marriage was

condemned by the Montanists. Elsewhere his citation of the oracles of

Prisca suggests that a book belongs to the Montanist period; or we

deduce it from such a passage as that in the work _On the Soul_ where

he describes a vision. The passage is short and it is suggestive.

"We have to-day among us a sister who has received gifts (_charismata_)

of the nature of revelations, which she undergoes (_patitur_) in spirit

in the church amid the rites of the Lord's day falling into ecstasy

(_per ecstasin_). She converses with angels, sometimes even with the

Lord, and sees and hears mysteries, and reads the hearts of certain

persons, and brings healings to those who ask. According to what

Scriptures are read, or psalms sung, or addresses made, or prayers

offered up, the matter of her visions is supplied. It happened that we

had spoken something of the soul, when this sister was in the spirit.

When all was over, and the people had gone, she--for it is her practice

to report what she has seen, and it is most carefully examined that it

may be proved--'amongst other things,' she said, 'a soul was shown to

me in bodily form and it seemed to be a spirit, but not empty, nor a

thing of vacuity; on the contrary, it seemed as if it might be touched,

soft, lucid, of the colour of air, and of human form in every

detail."[167]

Such a story explains itself. The corporeity of the soul {346} was a

tenet of Stoicism, essential to Tertullian, for without it he could not

conceive of what was to follow the resurrection. He spoke of it and we

can imagine how. It would hardly take a vision to see anything of

which he spoke. The sister however was, what in modern phrase is

called, psychopathic, and the vision occurred, controlled by the

suggestion that preceded it.

[Sidenote: Conclusion]

It must be admitted that there is in some of his Montanist treatises,

particularly where he is handling matters of less importance, such as

re-marriage, fasting, and the like, a bitterness of tone which is not

pleasant. As long as his humour and his strong sense control his

irony, it is no bad adjunct of his style, it is a great resource. But

it declines into sarcasm, and "sarcasm," as Teufelsdroeckh put it, "is

the language of the devil"; and we find Tertullian, pleading for God

and righteousness, in a tone and a temper little likely to win men.

But the main ideas that dominate him still prevail--conduct, obedience,

God's law in Nature and in the book, the value of the martyr-death.

Little is to be got by dwelling on his outbursts of ill temper; they

hardly do more than illustrate what we knew already, his intensity, his

sensibility, his passion. They form the negative side of the great

positive qualities. Let me gather up a few scattered thoughts which

come from his heart and are better and truer illustrations of the man,

and with them let chapter and book have an end.

Conduct is the test of creed (_de Praescr. Haer._ 43). To lie about God

is in a sense idolatry (_de Praescr._ 40). Security in sin means love

of it (_de Pudic._ 9). Whatever darkness you pile above your deeds,

God is light (_de Paenit._ 6). What we are forbidden to do, the soul

pictures to itself at its peril (_de Paenit._ 3). Truth persuades by

teaching, it does not teach by making things plausible (_adv. Valent._

1). Faith is patience with its lamp lit--_illuminata_ (_de Pat._ 6).

Patience is the very nature of God. The recognition of God understands

well enough the duty laid upon it. Let wrong-doing be wearied by your

patience (_de Pat._ 3, 4, 8). There is no greater incitement to

despise money than that the Lord himself had no wealth (_de Pat._ 7).

Love is 'the supreme mystery (_sacramentum_) of faith (_de Pat._ 12).

Faith fears no famine {347} (_de Idol._ 12). Prayer is the wall of

faith (_de Or._ 29). Every day, every moment, prayer is necessary to

men.... Prayer comes from conscience. If conscience blush, prayer

blushes (_de exh. cast._ 10). Good things scandalize none but the bad

mind (_de virg. vel._ 3). Give to Caesar what is Caesar's--his image on

the coin; give to God what is God's--his image in man, yourself (_de

Idol._ 15).

But to this there is no end, and an end there must be. By his

expression of Christian ideas in the natural language of Roman thought,

by his insistence on the reality of the historic Jesus and on the

inevitable consequences of human conduct, by his reference of all

matters of life and controversy to the will of God manifested in

Nature, in inspiration and in experience, Tertullian laid Western

Christendom under a great debt, never very generously acknowledged.

For us it may be as profitable to go behind the writings till we find

the man, and to think of the manhood, with every power and every

endowment, sensibility, imagination, energy, flung with passionate

enthusiasm on the side of purity and righteousness, of God and Truth;

to think of the silent self-sacrifice freely and generously made for a

despised cause, of a life-long readiness for martyrdom, of a spirit,

unable to compromise, unable in its love of Christ to see His work

undone by cowardice, indulgence and unfaith, and of a nature in all its

fulness surrendered. That the Gospel could capture such a man as

Tertullian, and, with all his faults of mind and temper, make of him

what it did, was a measure of its power to transform the old world and

a prophecy of its power to hold the modern world, too, and to make more

of it as the ideas of Jesus find fuller realization and verification in

every generation of Christian character and experience.