cold speculations. They bore characteristic fruits in humanity of every
kind. The brotherhood was not a sentiment, it was a principle of wide
beneficence. The charities of this gospel attested the presence of a
warm heart in the metropolis of the heathen world. Of this there can no
longer be any doubt. Works like that of Denis' "Histoire des Theories et
des Idees Morales dans l'Antiquite," reveal a condition of becoming in
the Roman Empire that might dispel the fears of the most skeptical in
regard to the continuous moral progress of the race. The immense popular
distributions of corn which from being occasional had become habitual in
Rome, were as a rule prompted by no humane feeling, were not designed to
mitigate suffering or express compassion. They were in the main, devices
for gaining popularity. Caius Gracchus, who, more than a century before
Christ, carried a law making compulsory the sale of corn to the poor at
a nominal price, was perhaps actuated by a worthier motive; but it is
doubtful whether his successors were. Cato of Utica was not. Clodius
Pulcher was not. The emperors were obliged to purchase popularity by
these enormous bribes. It is said that Augustus caused the monthly
distribution to be made to two hundred thousand people. Half a million
claimed the bounty under the Antonines. The addition of a ration of oil
to the corn; the substitution of bread for the corn; the supplementing
of this by an allowance of pork; a subsequent supply of the article of
salt to the poor on similarly easy terms; the distribution of portions
of land; the imperial legacies, donations, gratuities, mentioned as
bestowed on occasion; the public baths provided and thrown open to all
at a trifling expense, were also means of winning or retaining the good
will of a fickle and turbulent populace. They neither expressed a humane
sentiment nor produced a humane result. They were suggested by ambition,
no better sometimes than that of the demagogue, and they begot idleness,
and demoralization. But some part of the beneficence must have sprung
from a more generous motive. The interest manifested by several emperors
in public education, and the appropriation made for the maintenance of
the children of the poor, five thousand of whom are said, by Pliny, to
have been supported by the government, under Trajan, who presume never
heard of Christianity,--cannot fairly be ascribed to political motives.
The private charities of the younger Pliny, who devoted a small
patrimony to the maintenance of poor children in Como, his native place;
of Coelia Macrina, who founded a charity for one hundred at
Terracina; Hadrian's, bounties to poor women; Antonine's loans of money
to the poor at reduced rates of interest; the institutions dedicated to
the support of girls by Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius; the private
infirmaries for slaves; the military hospitals, certainly owed their
existence to a humane feeling. Pliny is responsible for the statement
that both in Greece and Rome the poor had mutual insurance societies
which provided for their sick and infirm members. Tacitus expatiates on
the generosity of the rich, who, on occasion of a catastrophe near Rome,
threw open their houses and taxed their resources to relieve the
suffering.[8]
[Footnote 8: For references, see Lecky's "European Morals," II., p.
79-81.]
Such acts attest a genuine kindness. The protests of the best citizens
against the bloody gladiatorial shows,--a protest so eager and
persistent that the trade of the gladiator was seriously injured--must
have been in the highest degree unpopular, for the populace found in
these shows their favorite amusement. The remonstrances of philanthropic
men against the barbarities of the penal code; the call for the
abolishment of the death penalty; the pity for the woes of neglected
children; the indignation at the crime of infanticide; the earnest
interest taken in the problems of prostitution and the most revolting
aspects of pauperism were such as might have proceeded from nineteenth
century people.[9] Stronger words were never spoken by American
abolitionists than were uttered by pagan lips against the slavery that
was pulling down the Roman State.
[Footnote 9: See Denis, II., p. 55-218.]
That beneficence in the Roman Empire during the latter half of the first
century and the first half of the second was fitful, formal, limited,
and unimpassioned, as compared with the charities of Christians in their
communities, need not be said; of course it was. The Christians
succeeded to the legacies of kindness left by the pagans; they were
comparatively few in number, and were bound to one another by peculiar
ties; they were themselves of the great family of the poor; they were
obliged to help one another in the only way they could, by personal
effort and sacrifice. Their traditions, too, of beneficence were
oriental. The difference in spirit between Roman and Christian charity
cannot be fairly described as a difference between heathen charity and
christian; it is more just to call it a difference between Eastern
charity and Western. The Orientals, including the Jews, made beneficence
in its various forms, an individual duty. Kindness to the sick, the
unfortunate, the poor, compassion with the sorrowful, almsgiving to the
destitute, hospitality to the stranger, are virtues characteristic of
all eastern people. The New Testament chiefly echoes the sentiment of
the Old on this matter, and the Old Testament chimes in with the voices
of eastern teachers. In the West, government undertook responsibilities
which in oriental lands, were assumed by individuals; people were to a
much greater degree massed in orders and classes; the distance was wider
between the governors and the governed, and considerations of state more
gravely affected the actions which elsewhere seemed to concern only the
private conscience and heart. The question of advantage between these
two systems is still an open one. In every generation there have been
some, christians too, who preferred the western method to the eastern,
as being less costly, and more methodical; the debate on the relative
advantages and disadvantages of the personal and the impersonal methods
still goes on in modern communities; neither system prevails exclusively
in any christian land; the Latin races still, as a rule, prefer the
Roman way, France for example, where charity is a matter of public
rather than of private concern.
The mischiefs of the oriental method were apparent before Christianity
appeared, and its zealous adoption of them early awakened misgivings.
The indiscriminate almsgiving, the elevation of poverty to the rank of a
privilege, the glorification of self-impoverishment, the acceptance of
feeling as a divine monitor, and of emotion as a heavenly instinct, the
substitution of the worship of the heart for deference to reason, the
loose compassion, the practical and professed communism--for some of the
fathers maintained that all property was based on usurpation, that all
men had a common right in the earth, and that none was entitled to hold
wealth except as a trust for others--soon disclosed disastrous results.
Against the evils that are fairly chargeable upon the wholesale measures
of the imperial bounty, must be offset the equally grave, and in some
respects, not dissimilar evils incident to the unprincipled practice of
loving kindness on the part of the bishops and their flocks, the
increase of the dependent, the encouragement of pauperism, the waste of
wealth, the worse waste of humanity. National philanthropy in London and
New York finds no more serious obstacle to its advance than the
benevolence that is inculcated in the name of Christ, and by authority
of the New Testament. It is the battle of science against sentiment.
The increased devoutness that showed itself in the empire, about the
beginning of the second century, the pious passion that broke out, is
attributable to natural causes, that have been mentioned by every author
who has written on the subject. It is familiar knowledge that the decay
of institutions, the disintegration of social bonds, the general
decline of positive religious faith, a decline partly due, possibly, to
the tolerance which placed all faiths side by side, was followed, or we
might say accompanied by a longing after divine things that was wild in
the fervor of its impulse. The complacent reign of skepticism was
succeeded by a volcanic outbreak of superstition. What has been called
"a storm of supernaturalism" burst forth, with the usual accompaniments
of frenzy, and took possession of all classes. Only general causes of
this can be assigned. That it was due to any special influence cannot be
alleged. That it was due to any "supernatural" interposition of heaven,
is an unnecessary supposition. The cursory reader of the history of the
empire, as written by intelligent modern scholars, of whatever school,
sees plainly enough the pass that things had come to and how they came
to it. Christianity came in on the wave of this movement, felt its
force, struck into its channel, was borne aloft on its bosom. It is
customary to speak of all this spiritual ferment as a preparation for
Christianity; it was such a preparation as left Christianity little of a
peculiar kind to do. What new element it introduced, it would be hard to
say now, however easy it seemed half a century ago. The desert land of
heathenism has been explored, and the result is a discovery of fertile
plains instead of barrenness. The distinction between the ante-Christian
and the post-christian eras is, if not obliterated, yet so far effaced,
that the transition from one to the other is natural and facile.
The longing for spiritual satisfaction that stirred in the heart of the
empire, found neither its source nor its gratification exclusively in
the religion that afterwards became the professed faith of Rome. It
slaked its thirst at older fountains. Such longings will, at need, open
fountains of living water for their own supply. Passing through the
valley of Baca they create a well, the streams whereof fill the pools.
The smitten rock pours out its torrents. The hungry soul creates its
harvest as it goes along, feeding itself by the way with food that seems
to fall miraculously from the sky. It makes a religion if there be none
at hand. A new heaven peopled with angels; a new earth full of
providences come into being at its call. But in this emergency the
religion was extant in the world, already venerable, already proved. It
was the religion of Israel, with all that was necessary to attract
attention and command reverence; a holy God, an immediate providence, a
solemn history, a glorious prophecy, an inspiring hope, traditions,
institutions, a temple, a priesthood, sacrifices, a code of laws,
ceremonial and moral, poetry, learning, music, mystery, stately forms of
men and women, judges, kings, heroes, martyrs, saints, a superb
literature, legends of virtue, festivals of joy, visions of
resurrection and judgment, precepts of righteousness, promises of
peace, songs of victory and of sorrow, dreams of a heavenly kingdom to
be won by obedience to divine law, tender lessons of charity, stern
lessons of denial, fascinating attractions and yet more fascinating
fears, gentle persuasions and awful menaces, calculated to lay hold on
every mood, to thrill and to satisfy every human emotion. The religion
of Israel lacked little but outward prestige of power and wealth to make
it precisely what the time required; and in times of real earnestness
the prestige of power and wealth is readily dispensed with. The
unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their
first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is
then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves
before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces
of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation,
contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the
repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism,
heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers.
Its very dogmatism, its proud exclusiveness and intolerance, were in its
favor. Its haughty reserve assisted it; its superb disdain of other
faiths, its boast of antiquity, its claim to a monopoly of the future of
the race, exerted a weird spell over the dazed and decrepit minds of
the superstitious, high and low. Its lofty belief in miracle and sign,
fairly constrained the skeptical to bow the head.
The interest felt in Judaism, and its influence on society in its high
places, have already been alluded to, and need not be further insisted
on. The testimony of Juvenal--the testimony of sarcasm and complaint--is
enough to establish the fact that a curiosity amounting to infatuation
had taken possession especially of the women of Rome.
If it be asked why Judaism, then, was not made the religion of the
empire, instead of Christianity, which it hated with all the fervor of
close relationship, the answer is at hand: _Judaism laid no emphasis on
its cosmopolitan features, and discouraged belief in the historical
fulfilment of its own prophecy_. The charge that it was a _national_
religion, the religion of a race, it was at no pains to repel; on the
contrary, it seems to have exaggerated this claim to distinction,
standing on its dignity, despising the arts of propagandism and
demanding the submission of other creeds. This attitude alone might have
recommended the religion in some quarters, and would not have seriously
embarrassed it in any, supposing it to have been loftily and worthily
sustained. A graver cause of its unpopularity was its failure to lay
stress on its Messianic idea. It would abate nothing of its monotheistic
grandeur. Its God was the everlasting, the infinite, the formless, the
invisible. The command to make of Him no image whatever, either animal
or human, to associate Him with neither place nor time, was obeyed to
the letter. Among a people extremely sensitive to grace of form and
beauty of color, the Jews had no art; they set up no statue; they
painted no picture; they allowed no emblem that could be worshipped.
Their Holy Spirit was an influence; their Messiah was a distant hope;
their kingdom of heaven was a dream. The Christians of both schools--the
conservative and the liberal--thrust into the foreground the conceptions
which their co-religionists kept in the shadow of anticipation. In their
belief, prophecy was fulfilled. The Messiah had come; he had taken on
human shape; he had passed through an earthly career; he had ascended in
visible form to the skies; he sat there at the right hand of the Majesty
on high; he was active in his care for his own, suffering and sorrowing
on earth; he sent the Holy Spirit, the comforter and guide to his
friends in their affliction; he was the immediate God; he heard and
answered prayer; he pardoned sin; he opened the gates of heaven to
believers. They did not scruple to make images of him; to represent him
in emblems; to eke out their own rude art by adopting the art which the
heathen had ceased to venerate, and, where they could, re-dedicating
statues of Apollo and Jupiter to their Christ. They were eager to have
legendary portraits accepted as faithful likenesses of their Lord.
Fables were invented, like that of Veronica's napkin, to give currency
to certain heads as the Christ's own image of himself miraculously
imprinted on a cloth. They claimed to have seen him, in moments of
ecstasy; they ascribed to his prompting, states of feeling, purposes and
courses of action. By every means they created and deepened the
impression that the Divinity they worshipped was a real God, and no
intellectual abstraction.
This was the very thing the pagan world wanted--a _personal_ Deity,
Providence, Saviour. Through their acquiescence in this demand, other
oriental faiths, without a tithe of Israel's grandeur--mythological,
superstitious, sensual even--gained a popularity that Judaism could not
attain. The strange Egyptian divinities drew many to their shrines.
Three emperors--Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus--are said to have
been devoted to the mysteries of Isis and Serapis. Juvenal describes
Roman women as breaking the ice on the frozen Tiber, at the dawn of day,
and plunging thrice into the stream of purification; as painfully
dragging themselves on bleeding knees around the field of Tarquin; as
projecting pilgrimages to Egypt, expeditions in search of the holy water
required at the shrine of the goddess. The Persian Mithras had his
throngs of adoring devotees. The prominence given at this period to the
statues of Mithras, the existence of temples to Isis and Serapis,
attest the power that these divinities exerted over the imagination of
the Italian people. These people demanded deities human in shape and
attributes. So clamorous were they for images, that they would
consecrate them at any cost of decency. The emperor Augustus was
deified. His statue on the public square, his insignia on a banner, his
name on a shield excited veneration. The noblest religion without a
human centre was less prized than the ignoblest with one, and the faith
of Israel was compelled to yield to the degrading fascinations of the
Bona Dea.
The Christian Jews, with their Messiah, took the popular desire at its
best, and satisfied it. The image they presented, though to the mind's
eye only, was so much more gracious than the loveliest that eastern or
western art furnished that its acceptance was assured. Early in the
fourth century the impression made was too deep to be overlooked by the
controllers of public opinion. The politic Constantine, seeking a
spiritual ally, and finding none among the faiths of his own land,
called in the Nazarene to aid him in establishing an empire over the
souls of his subjects. Christ was king in fact before he was formally
crowned.
But the true history of his reign began with the ceremony of his
coronation; the history of Christianity as a distinct religion commences
with the so-called "conversion" of Constantine. Latin Christianity was
the first, some think the consummate, in fact the only, Christianity.
The adoption of the religion as the State Church, was for it a new
creation. From that moment, began the efforts to complete its dogmatical
system by a succession of councils, the first one, that of Nicaea, being
held A. D. 325, about twelve years after the imperial "conversion;" that
of Sardica--ecclesiastically of great importance--in 347, and the
councils of Arles and of Milan in 352.
Once seated on a throne of power, a crown on his head, a sceptre in his
hand, clothed with authority, protected by armies, girded with law,
instigator of policies, chief of ceremonies, the Christ in heaven
rapidly completed the structure whereof Constantine had placed the
corner-stone. The materials he gathered right and left, wherever they
were to be found. Right of supremacy made them his. Judaism gave temple,
and synagogue, the organization of its priesthood, the distinction
between priest and layman, its worship, music, scripture, litany,
sentiment and usage of prayer, its ascetic spirit, its doctrines of
resurrection and judgment, its code of righteousness, its altar forms,
its history, and its prophecy. Paganism was laid under contribution for
its military spirit. The "stations" of the Passion, were copied from
army usage, so were its practical temper, its regard for precedent law
and policy, its rules of obedience, its distrust of speculation, its
horror of schism, its passion for unity, its skill in diplomacy, its
solid respect for authority. Quietly, without leave asked, or apology
offered, the insignia of the old faiths were transferred to the new. The
title of Sovereign Pontifex, or bridgemaker--given originally to the
chief of the guild of mechanics, passed along from the period of the
earliest kings through persons of consular dignity, and finally bestowed
on the Roman emperors; a title given at first, in commemoration of the
_pons Janicularis_, which joined the city to the highest of the
surrounding hills--was conferred on the bishops or popes whose office it
was to bridge over the gulf between the earth and the celestial
mountains. The statues of Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, Orpheus, did duty
for the Christ. The Thames river god officiates at the baptism of Jesus
in the Jordan. Peter holds the keys of Janus. Moses wears the horns of
Jove. Ceres, Cybele, Demeter, assume new names as "Queen of Heaven,"
"Star of the Sea," "Maria Illuminatrix;" Dionysius is St. Denis; Cosmos
is St. Cosmo; Pluto and Proserpine resign their seats in the hall of
final judgment, to the Christ and his mother. The Parcae depute one of
their number, Lachesis, the disposer of lots, to set the stamp of
destiny upon the deaths of Christian believers. The _aura placida_ of
the poets, the gentle breeze, is personified as Aura and Placida. The
_perpetua felicitas_ of the devotee becomes a lovely presence in the
forms of St. Perpetua and St. Felicitas, guardian angels of the pious
soul. No relic of Paganism was permitted to remain in its casket. The
depositories were all ransacked. The shadowy hands of Egyptian priests
placed the urn of holy water at the porch of the basilica, which stood
ready to be converted into a temple. Priests of the most ancient faiths
of Palestine, Assyria, Babylon, Thebes, Persia, were permitted to erect
the altar at the point where the transverse beam of the cross meets the
main stem. The hands that constructed the temple in cruciform shape had
long become too attenuated to cast the faintest shadow. There Devaki
with the infant Crishna, Maya with the babe Boodha, Juno with the child
Mars, represent Mary with Jesus in her arms. Coarse emblems are not
rejected; the Assyrian dove is a tender symbol of the Holy Ghost. The
rag bags and toy boxes were explored. A bauble which the Roman
school-boy had thrown away was picked up and called an "agnus dei." The
musty wardrobes of forgotten hierarchies furnished costumes for the
officers of the new prince. Alb and chasuble recalled the fashions of
Numa's day. The cast off purple habits and shoes of pagan emperors
beautified the august persons of christian Popes. The cardinal must be
contented with the robes once worn by senators. Zoroaster bound about
the monks the girdle he invented as a protection against evil spirits,
and clothed them in the frocks he had found convenient for his ritual.
The Pope thrust out his foot to be kissed, as Caligula, Heliogabalus,
and Julius Caesar had thrust out theirs. Nothing came amiss to the faith
that was to discharge henceforth the offices of spiritual impression.
Stoles, veils, croziers, were all in requisition without too close
scrutiny of their antecedents. A complete investigation of this subject
will probably reveal the fact that Christianity owes its entire
wardrobe, ecclesiastical, symbolical, dogmatical, to the religions that
preceded it. The point of difficulty to decide is in what respect
Christianity differs from the elder faiths. This is the next task its
apologists have to perform.
But this question does not concern us here. Having indicated the source
whence the religion proceeded, and the process by which the successive
stages in its development were reached, we have done all that was
purposed. We have tried to make it clear that the Messianic conception
from which it started, and from which its life was derived at each
period of its growth, presided over its destiny in the western world,
and introduced it to the place of honor it was afterwards called to
fill.
What that place was and how the Church filled it has been told in a
multitude of historical books. The history of Christianity is not the
story of a developing idea, but a record of the achievements of an idea
developed, organized, instituted. From the date of the established
religion, the writings of the New Testament became the literature of the
earliest period. In the western world the mind of Christendom expanded
to deeper and wider thoughts, a new literature was originated of great
richness, affluence and beauty, and gave expression to ideas which, in
the primitive period could not have been formed. The Greek and Latin
Fathers, the schoolmen, the catholic theologians, Italian, Spanish,
French, the German mystical writers, the Protestant divines and
preachers, have produced writings unsurpassed in intellectual strength
and spiritual discernment. The possibilities of speculation have been
exhausted; the abysses of reflection have been sounded; the heights of
meditation have been scaled. The christian idea of salvation has been
applied to every phase of human experience, and to every problem of
social life. The rudimental conceptions have been distanced; the
original limitations have been overpassed. Rites have been charged with
new significance, symbols loaded with new meanings, doctrines
interpreted in new senses. Christianity as the modern world knows it, is
a new creation. The name of Messiah is spoken, but with feelings unknown
to the Jews of the first and second century. The New Testament is
regarded as a store house of germs, a magazine of texts to be
interpreted by the light of the full orbed spirit, and unfolded to meet
the needs of an older world. The cord which connected the religion with
the mother faith of Israel was broken and the faith entered on an
independent existence. To the cradle succeeds the cathedral.
IX.
JESUS.