THE EFFECT OF PEACE, WEALTH AND LUXURY ON CHRISTIANITY.
Disastrous as the persecutions of the early Christian centuries were,
still more mischievous to the church were those periods of tranquility
which intervened between the outbursts of rage that prompted them.
Peace may have her victories, no less renowned than those of war; and
so, too, she has her calamities, and they are not less destructive than
those of war. War may destroy nations, but ease and luxury mankind
corrupt--the body and the mind. Especially is peace dangerous to the
church. Prosperity relaxes the reins of discipline; people feel less
and less the need of a sustaining providence; but in adversity the
spirit of man feels after God, and he is correspondingly more devoted
to the service of religion.
We shall find the early Christians no exception to the operation of
this influence of repose. Whenever it was accorded them, either through
the mercy or the indifference of the emperors, internal dissensions,
the intrigues of aspiring prelates and the rise of heresies
characterized those periods. Even Milner, who wrote his great work to
counteract the influence of the too candid Mosheim; who takes to task
other ecclesiastical writers for making too much of the wickedness
that has existed in the church; who declares in the introduction of
his Church History that genuine piety is the only thing he intends to
celebrate, and announces it to be his purpose to write the history
of those men only, irrespective of the external church to which they
belonged, who have been real not nominally Christians [1]--even Milner,
I say, admits and deplores the mischief wrought by these periods of
peace which came to the church between the storms of persecution which
plagued it; and refers in several places to the marked and steady
declension of the Christian spirit in those centuries with which at
present I am dealing. He admits that a gloomy cloud hung over the
conclusion of the first century; and argues that the first impressions
made by the effusion of the spirit are generally the strongest; that
human depravity, overborn for a time, arises afresh, particularly in
the next generation--hence the disorders of schism and heresy that
arose in the church, the tendency of which was to destroy the work of
God. [2]
The same writer upon the authority of Origen says that the long peace
granted the church in the third century produced a great degree of
luke-warmness and religious indecorum. "Let the reader," says he, "only
notice the indifference which he [Origen] here describes, and the
conduct of the Christians both in the first and second century, and he
will be affected with the greatness of the declension." Then follows
the picture drawn by Origen: "Several come to church only on solemn
festivals; and then not so much for instruction as diversion. Some go
out again as soon as they have heard the lecture, without conferring
or asking the pastors questions. Others stay not till the lecture is
ended; and others hear not so much as a single word; but entertain
themselves in a corner of the church."
Coming to the middle of the third century, just previous to that severe
persecution inaugurated by the Emperor Decius, and speaking of Cyprian,
bishop of Carthage: Milman exclaims: "A star of the first magnitude!
when we consider the times in which he lived. Let us recreate ourselves
with the contemplation of it. _We are fatigued with hunting for
Christian goodness; and we have discovered but little and that little
with much difficulty_. We shall find Cyprian to be a character who
partook indeed of the declension which we have noticed and lamented;
but who was still far superior, I apprehend, in real simplicity and
piety to the Christians of the East." [3] This same Cyprian, in whom
Milner delights, speaking of the effects of the long peace which
preceded the Decian persecution, says: "Each had been bent on improving
his own patrimony; and had forgotten what believers had done under the
apostles, and what they ought always to do. They were brooding over the
arts of amassing wealth; the pastors and the deacons each forgot their
duty; works of mercy were neglected, and discipline was at the lowest
ebb; luxury and effeminacy prevailed; meritricious arts in dress were
cultivated; fraud and deception practiced among brethren. Christians
would unite themselves in matrimony with unbelievers; could swear
not only without reverence but even without veracity. With haughty
asperity they despised their ecclesiastical superiors; they railed
against one another with outrageous acrimony, and conducted quarrels
with determined malice. Even many bishops, who ought to be guides and
patterns to the rest, neglected the peculiar duties of their stations,
gave themselves up to secular pursuits. They deserted their places of
residence and their flocks; they traveled through distant provinces in
quest of pleasure and gain; gave no assistance to the needy brethren;
but were insatiable in their thirst of money. They possessed estates
by fraud and multiplied usury. What have we not deserved to suffer
for such conduct? Even the divine word hath foretold us what we might
expect: 'If his children forsake my law and walk not in my judgments, I
will visit their offenses with the rod and their sins with scourges.'
These things had been denounced and foretold, but in vain. Our sins
had brought our affairs to that pass, that because we had despised
the Lord's directions, we were obliged to undergo a correction of our
multiplied evils and a trial of our faith by severe remedies." [4]
The last forty years of the third century were years of peace to the
church. That period began with the ascension of Gallienius, a man of
taste, indolence, philosophy and toleration, to the throne; and his
example was followed by the emperors to the end of the century. A new
scene this, Christianity tolerated by a pagan government for forty
years! "This new scene did not prove favorable to the growth of grace
and holiness," writes Milner. "In no period since the apostles was
there ever so great a general decay as in this; not even in particular
instances can we discover during this interval, much of lively
Christianity." [5]
Though conscious of having already quoted copiously upon the point
under consideration, I cannot withhold the testimony of Eusebius who
was a witness of the effects of that peace granted the church previous
to the last great pagan persecution, the Diocletian. After describing
the multitudes which flocked into the church before the declension
in the spirit of true Christianity so greatly prevailed, he remarks:
"Nor was any malignant demon able to infatuate, no human machinations
prevent them so long as the providential hand of God superintended and
guarded his people as the worthy subjects of his care. But when by
reason of excessive liberty, we sunk into negligence and sloth, one
envying and reviling another in different ways, and we were almost, as
it were, upon the point of taking up arms against each other with words
as with darts and spears, prelates inveighing against prelates, and
people rising up against people, and hypocrisy and dissimulation had
arisen to the greatest height of malignity, then the divine judgment,
which usually proceeds with a lenient hand, whilst the multitudes were
yet crowding into the church, with gentle and mild visitation began
to afflict the episcopacy; the persecution having begun with those
brethren in the army. But as if destitute of all sensibility, we were
not prompt in measures to appease and propitiate the Deity; some indeed
like atheists, regarding our situation as unheeded and unobserved
by a Providence, we added one wickedness and misery to another. But
some that appeared to be our pastors deserting the law of piety, were
inflamed against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating
quarrels and threats, rivalship, hostility and hatred to each other,
only anxious to assert the government as a kind of sovereignty for
themselves." [6]
Let it be remembered that this is quoted from a writer contemporary
with the events, and who says in the very chapter following the one
from which the foregoing is taken that it was not for him to record the
dissensions and follies which the shepherds of the people exercised
against each other before the persecution. He also adds: "We shall
not make mention of those that were shaken by the persecution, nor of
those that suffered shipwreck in their salvation, and of their own
accord were sunk in the depths of the watery gulf." [7] Then in his
Book of Martyrs, referring to events that occurred between the edicts
ordering the persecution, he says: "But the events that occurred in
the intermediate times, besides those already related, I have thought
proper to pass by; I mean more particularly the circumstances of the
different heads of the churches, who from being shepherds of the
reasonable flocks of Christ, that did not govern in a lawful and
becoming manner, were condemned, by divine justice, as unworthy of
such a charge, to be the keepers of the unreasonable camel, an animal
deformed in the structure of his body; and condemned further to be the
keepers of the imperial horses. * * * Moreover, the ambitious aspirings
of many to office, and the injudicious and unlawful ordinations that
took place, the divisions among the confessors themselves, the great
schisms and difficulties industriously fomented by the factions among
the new members, against the relics of the church, devising one
innovation after another, and unmercifully thrusting them into the
midst of all these calamities, heaping up affliction upon affliction.
All this, I say, I have resolved to pass by, judging it foreign to my
purpose, wishing, as I said in the beginning, to shun and avoid giving
an account of them." [8]
Hence, however bad the condition of the church is represented to be
by ecclesiastical writers, we must know that it was still worse than
that; however numerous the schisms; however unholy the ambition of
aspiring prelates; however frequent and serious the innovations upon
the primitive ordinances of the gospel; however great the confusion
and apostasy in the church is represented to be; we must know that it
is still worse than that, since the church historians contemporaneous
with the events refused to record these things in their fullness lest
it should prove disastrous to the church; just as some of our modern
scholars professing to write church history express their determination
to close their eyes to the corruption and abuses which form the greater
part of the melancholy story of ecclesiastical history, for fear
that relating these things would make it appear that real religion
scarcely had any existence. [9] But it is all in vain. "It is idle,
it is disingenuous," remarks the editor [10] of Gibbon's great work,
"to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its
gradual but rapid departure from its primitive simplicity and purity,
still more from its spirit of universal love." If the intermittent
peace accorded to the church in the first three troubled centuries of
its existence was productive of the evils admitted by the writers who
have felt that the cause of religion demanded that these evils as much
as possible should be covered up, naturally enough one exclaims, what
then must have been the result of that repose which came to the church
after the elevation of Constantine to the imperial throne! When from
a proscribed religion Christianity was exalted to the dignity of the
state religion of the empire; and her prelates and clergy, recalled
from exile and suffering, poverty and disgrace, were loaded with the
wealth and the honors that the lords of the Roman world could bestow!
Let imagination do her best or worst in picturing the rapid decline of
whatever remained of true Christianity, conjecture can scarcely outrun
the facts. If when the office of bishop was attended with danger and
scant revenues it aroused the inordinate ambition of men to possess it,
how infinitely more must it have become the object of envy, strife and
ambition when by the patronage of Constantine it became not only free
from danger but endowed with revenues that a prince might envy, and
accorded an influence in the palace scarcely second to that granted to
the governors of the provinces!
If before the Decian persecution the rivarly between the bishops of
Rome and Carthage prompted a bitter controversy which threatened the
unity of the church, how much more likely were such conflicts to arise
between the bishops of Rome and Constantinople--rival bishops of rival
cities, Rome proud of her past, Constantinople vain of her present
glory; the former jealous of the place she had filled in the world's
history; the latter ambitious of future influence! If heresies were
fomented and schisms created when to be a Christian invited espionage
and perhaps death, what an increase there must have been in these and
other disintegrating influences when it became a reproach rather than
a praise _not_ to be a Christian, and the door of the church stood
wide open to the evil-minded, who sought membership, not to enjoy the
consolation of religion but for worldly advantage!
Footnotes
1. Church History, Vol. i, Introduction. In justification of his
course, in a foot note he argues that "A history of the perversions and
abuses of religion is not properly a history of the church; as absurd
were it to suppose a history of the highwaymen that have infested their
country to be a history of England." He appears oblivious to the fact
that he throws himself open to the retort: A history of the blessedness
and charity of the purely good men alone is not properly a history of
the church; as absurd were it to suppose a history alone of the honest
men of England that have blessed their race to be a history of that
country. Milner's work is more properly a history of piety than of the
church. In every age and country he seeks out the good men who have
nearest conformed their lives to Christian precepts and celebrates them
in his pages. Therefore, whatever admissions we find this author making
as to the corruptions and abuses which found their way into the church:
we shall be justified in considering as of special weight since they
are admitted by him only on compulsion, and when there is no chance of
either denying or excusing them. I have already called attention to the
same disposition in Eusebius, p. 37; and hence his testimony may also
be regarded as of special value in relation to the decline of the true
Christian spirit.
2. Ch. Hist., Vol. i, ch. xv.
3. Milner's Ch. Hist., Vol. i, cent. iii, ch. vi.
4. Milner's Ch. Hist., Vol. i, cent. iii, ch. viii.
5. Milner's Ch. Hist., Vol. i, cent. iii, ch. xvii.
6. Eusebius' Eccl. Hist., Bk. viii, ch. i.
7. Eusebius' Eccl. Hist., Bk. viii, ch. ii.
8. Book of Martyrs, ch. xii.
9. See Milner's Introduction to his Church Hist., Vol. i.
10. This is the Rev. H. H. Milman who edited and annotated Gibbon's
"Decline and Fall." The above quotation will be found in the editor's
preface.