THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Imperial Rome governed the whole of the Mediterranean world,--a
larger proportion and a greater variety of the human race than has
ever been under one government. So far as numbers go, the Russian
Empire to-day, the Chinese and the British, each far exceed it; for
the population of the world is vastly larger than it was in Rome's
days. But there was a peculiar unity about the Roman Empire, for it
embraced, as men thought, all civilized mankind. It was known that,
far away in the East, there were people called Indians, who had
fought with Alexander the Great, but there was little real knowledge
of them. Beyond India, there were vague rumours of a land where silk
grew on the leaves of the trees. But civilized mankind was under the
control of Rome. It was one rule of many races, many kingdoms,
princedoms, cities, cantons, and tribes--a wise rule, a rule that
allowed the maximum of local government and traditional usage: Rome
not merely conquered but captured men all over the world; ruled
them, as a poet said, like a mother, not a queen, and bound them to
herself. Men were eager, not so much to shake off her yoke, as to be
Romans; and from the Atlantic to the Euphrates men, not of Roman
blood, were proud to bear Roman names and to be Roman citizens. "I
was free born," said St. Paul, not without a touch of satisfaction
(Acts 22:25-28). A general peace prevailed through the Roman
world--a peace that was new to mankind. There was freedom of
intercourse; one of the boasts made by the writers of the Roman
Empire is of this new freedom to travel, to go anywhere one pleased.
Piracy on the sea, brigandage on the land, had been put down, and
there was a very great deal of travel. The Roman became an
inveterate tourist. He went to the famous scenes of Asia Minor, to
Troy above all--to "sunny Rhodes and Mitylene"--to Egypt. Merchants
went everywhere. And there was a fusing of cultures, traditions, and
creeds, all over the Mediterranean world. Centuries before,
Alexander the Great had struck out the splendid idea of the marriage
of East and West. He secured it by breaking down the Persian Empire,
and making one Empire from the Adriatic to this side of the Sutlej
or Bias. He desired to cement this marriage of East and West in a
way of his own. He took three hundred captive princesses and ladies,
and married them in a batch to Macedonian officers--a very
characteristic piece of symbolism. But his idea was greater and
truer than the symbol.
The Roman marriage of the East and West was a more real thing, for
behind it lay three centuries of growing intercourse and knowledge
along Alexander's lines. In the sphere of religion we find it most
clearly. There rises a resultant world-religion--a religion that
embraces all the cults, all the creeds, and at last all the
philosophies, in one great system. That religion held the world. It
is true, there were exceptions. There was a small and objectionable
race called Jews; there were possibly some Druids in Southern
Britain; and here and there was a solitary atheist who represented
no one but himself. These few exceptions were the freaks amongst
mankind. Apart from them mankind was united in its general beliefs
about the gods. The world had one religion.
First of all, let us try to estimate the strength of this old
Mediterranean Paganism. It was strong in its great traditions.
Plutarch, who lived from about 50 A.D. to 117 or so, is our great
exponent of this old religion. To him I shall have to refer
constantly. He was a writer of charm, a man with many gifts.
Plutarch's Lives was the great staple of education in the
Renaissance--and as good a one, perhaps, as we have yet discovered,
even in this age when there are so many theories of education with
foreign names. Plutarch, then, writing about Delphi, the shrine and
oracle of the god Apollo, said that men had been "in anguish and
fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years"--and
Delphi has not lost it. For ninety generations the god has been
giving oracles to the Greek world, to private people, to kings, to
cities, to nations--and on all sorts of subjects, on the foundation
of colonies, the declaration of wars, personal guidance and the hope
of heirs. You may test the god where you will, Plutarch claimed, you
will not find an instance of a false oracle. Readers of Greek
history will remember another great writer of as much charm, five
hundred years before, Herodotus, who was not so sure about all the
oracles. But let us think what it means,--to look back over three
thousand years of one faith, unbroken. Egyptian religion had been
unchallenged for longer still, even if we allow Plutarch's three
thousand years. The oldest remains in Egypt antedate, we are told,
4000 B.C., and all through history, with the exception of the
solitary reign of Amen-Hotep III., Egypt worshipped the same gods,
with additions, as time went on. Again an unbroken tradition. And
how long, under various names, had Cybele, Mother of Gods, been
worshipped in Asia? By our era all these religions were fused into
one religion, of many cults and rites and ancient traditions; and
the incredible weight of old tradition in that world is hard to
overestimate.
The old religion was strong in the splendour of its art and its
architecture. The severe, beautiful lines of the Greek temple are
familiar to us still; and, until I saw the Taj, I think I should
have doubted whether there could be anything more beautiful.
Architecture was consecrated to the gods, and so was art. You go to
Delphi, said Plutarch, and see those wonderful works of the ancient
artists and sculptors, as fresh still as if they had left the chisel
yesterday, and they had stood there for hundreds of years, wonderful
in their beauty. Think of some of the remains of the Greek art--of
that Victory, for instance, which the Messenians set on the temple
at Olympia in 421 B.C. She stood on a block of stone on the temple,
but the block was painted blue, so that, as the spectator came up,
he saw the temple and the angle of its roof, and then a gap of blue
sky and the goddess just alighting on the summit of the temple. From
what is left of her, broken and headless, but still beautiful, we
can picture her flying through the air--the wind has blown her dress
back against her, and you see its folds freshly caught by the
breeze. And all this the artist had disentangled from a rough block
of stone--so vivid was his conception of the goddess, and so sure
his hand. There are those who say that the conventional picture of
God of the great artists is moulded after the Zeus of Pheidias.
Egypt again had other portrayals of the gods--on a pattern of her
own, strange and massive and huge, far older. About six hundred
years before Christ the Egyptian King, Psammetichos (Psem Tek),
hired Greek soldiers and marched them hundreds of miles up the Nile.
The Greek soldiers, one idle day, carved their names on the legs of
the colossal gods seated at Abu Symbel. Their names are found there
to-day. So old are these gods.
The religion was strong in the splendour of its ceremony. Every year
the Athenian people went to Eleusis in splendid procession to
worship, to be initiated into the rites of the Earth-Mother and her
virgin daughter, who had taught men the use of grain and the arts of
farming-rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that gave
men a new hope of eternal life. The Mother of the Gods, from Phrygia
in Asia Minor, had her rites, too; and her cult spread all over the
world. When the Roman poet, Lucretius, wants to describe the wonder
and magic of the pageant of Nature in the spring-time he goes to the
pomp of Cybele. The nearest thing to it which we can imagine is
Botticelli's picture of the Triumph of Spring. Lucretius was a poet
to whom the gods were idle and irrelevant; yet to that pageant he
goes for a picture of the miraculous life of nature. More splendid
still were the rites of the Egyptian Isis, celebrated all over the
world. Her priests, shaven and linen-clad, carried symbols of an
unguessed antiquity and magical power. They launched a boat with a
flame upon it--on the river in Egypt, on the sea in Greece. All
these cults made deep impressions on the worshippers, as our records
tell us. The appeal of religious emotion was noticed by Aristotle,
who remarked, however, that it was rather feeling than intellect
that was touched--a shrewd criticism that deserves to be remembered
still.
The gods were strong in their actual manifestations of themselves.
Apollo for ninety generations had spoken in Delphi. At Epidauros
there was a shrine of Asclepias. Its monuments have been collected
and edited by Dr. Caton of Liverpool. There sick men and women came,
lived a quiet life of diet and religious ceremony, preparing for the
night on which they should sleep in the temple. On that night the
god came to them, they said, in that mood or state where they lay
"between asleep and awake, sometimes as in a dream and then as in a
waking vision--one's hair stood on end, but one shed tears of joy
and felt light-hearted." Others said they definitely saw him. He
came and told them what to do; on waking they did it and were
healed; or he touched them then and there, and cured them as they
lay. Some of the cures recorded on the monuments are perhaps strange
to our ideas of medicine. One records how the god came to man
dreadfully afflicted with dropsy, cut off his head, turned him
upside down and let the fluid run out, and then replaced his head
with a neat join. Some modern readers may doubt this story; but that
the god did heal people, men firmly believed. We, too, may believe
that people were healed, perhaps by living a healthy life in a quiet
place, a life of regimen and diet; and perhaps faith-healing or
suggestion played as strong a part as anything else. Even the
Christians believed that these gods had a certain power; they were
evil spirits.
Not only the gods of the temples would manifest themselves of their
grace. Every man had a guardian spirit, a "genius"; and by proper
means he could be "compelled" to show himself visibly. The pupils of
Plotinus conjured up his "genius", and it came--not a daemon, but a
god. The right formula ("mantram") and the right stone in the
hand--and a man had a wonderful power over the gods themselves. This
was called "theurgy".
But the great strength of this old religion was its infinite
adaptability. It made peace with every god and goddess that it met.
It adopted them all. As a French scholar has said, where there is
polytheism there are no false gods. All the religions were fused and
the gods were blended. The Roman went to Greece and identified
Jupiter with Zeus; he went to Egypt and found him in Amun (Ammon);
he went to Syria and found him in Baal. If the Jew had not been so
foolish and awkward, there might have been a Jupiter Jehovah as
well. It was a catholic faith, embracing everything--cult and creed
and philosophy--strong in all the ways we have surveyed and in many
more, above all because it was unchallenged.
And yet, where is that religion to-day? That, to me, is one of the
most significant questions in history--more so, the longer I stay in
India. Men knew that that religion of Greece and Rome was eternal;
yet it is utterly gone. Why? How _could_ it go? What conceivable
power was there, I do not say, to bring it down, but to abolish it
so thoroughly, that not a soul in Egypt worships Isis--how many even
know her name?--not a soul in Italy thinks of Jove but as a fancy,
and Pallas Athene in Athens itself is a mere memory? That is the
problem, the historical problem, with which we have now to deal.
First of all, let us look again, and more closely, at that old
religion--we shall find in it at least four cardinal weaknesses.
First, it stands for "the unexamined life," as Plato called it. "The
unexamined life," he says, "is not liveable for a human being." A
man, who is a man, must cross-examine life, must make life face up
to him and yield its secrets. He must know what it means, the
significance of every relation of life--father and child, man and
wife, citizen and city, subject and king, man and the world--above
all, man and God. We must examine and know. But this old religion
stood by tradition and not reflection. There was no deep sense of
truth. Plutarch admired his father, and he describes, with warm
approval, how his father once said to a man: "That is a dangerous
question, not to be discussed at all--when you question the opinion
we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstration for
everything." Such an attitude means mistrust, it means at bottom a
fundamental unfaith. The house is beautiful; do not touch it; it is
riddled by white ants, by dry rot, and it would fall. That is not
faith; it is a strange confession; but all who hesitate at changes,
I think, make that confession sooner or later. There is a line of
Kabir which puts the essence of this: "Penance is not equal to
truth, nor is there any sin like untruth." This was one of the
essential weaknesses of that old religion--its fear, and the absence
of a deep sense of truth.
In the next place, there is no real association of morals with
religion. The old stories were full of the adventures of Jupiter, or
Zeus, with the heroines, mortal women, whom he loved. Of some 1900
wall paintings at Pompeii, examined by a German scholar and
antiquary, some 1400 represent mythological subjects, largely the
stories of the loves of Jupiter. The Latin dramatist Terence
pictures the young man looking at one of these paintings and saying
to himself, "If Jupiter did it, why should not I?" Centuries later
we find Augustine quoting that sentence. It has been said that few
things tended more strongly against morality than the stories of the
gods preserved by Homer and Hesiod. Plato loved Homer; so much the
more striking is his resolve that in his "Republic" there should be
no Homer. Men said: "Ah, but you don't understand; those stories are
allegories. They do not mean what they say; they mean something
deeper." But Plato said we must speak of God always as he is; we
must in no case tell lies about God "whether they are allegories or
whether they are not allegories." Plato, like every real thinker,
sees that this pretence of allegory is a sham. The story did its
mischief whether it was allegory or not; it stood between man and
God, and headed men on to wrong lines, turned men away from the
moral standard.
There was more. Every year, as we saw, men went to be initiated into
the rites of Demeter at Eleusis, a few miles from Athens. And we
read how one of the great Athenian orators, Lysias, went there and
took with him to be initiated a harlot, with whom he was living, and
the woman's proprietress--a squalid party; and they were initiated.
Their morals made no difference; the priests and the goddesses
offered no objection. In the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth there
were women slaves dedicated to the goddess, who owned them, and who
received the wages of their shame. With what voice could religion
speak for morality in Corinth? At Comana in Syria (we read in Strabo
the geographer, about the time of Christ) there was a temple where
there were six thousand of these temple slaves. I say again, that is
the unexamined life. God and goddess have nothing to say about some
of the most sacred relations in life. God, goddess, priest,
worshipper, never gave a thought to these poor creatures, dedicated,
not by themselves, to this awful life--human natures with the
craving of the real woman for husband and child, for the love of
home, but never to know it. That was associated with religion; that
was religion. There was always a minimum of protest from the Greek
temples against wrong or for right. It is remarked, again and again,
that all the great lessons came, not from the temples, not from the
priests, but from the poets and philosophers, from the thinkers in
revolt against the religion of their people. Curiously enough, even
in Homer himself, it is plain that the heroes, the men, are on a
higher moral plane than the gods; and all through Greek history the
gods are a drag on morality. What a weakness in religion! The sense
of wrong and right is innate in man; it may be undeveloped, or it
may be deadened, but it is instinctive; and a religion which does
not know it, or which finds the difference between right and wrong
to lie in matters of taboo or ceremonial defilement, cannot speak to
one of the deepest needs of the human heart, the need of
forgiveness. There is no righteousness, in the long run, about these
gods.
In the third place, the religion has the common weakness of all
polytheism. Men were afraid of the gods; there were thousands and
thousands, hosts of them. At every turn you ran into one, a new one;
you could never be certain that you would not offend some unknown
god or goddess. Superstition was the curse of the day. You had to
make peace with all these gods and goddesses--and not with them
alone. For there was another class of supernatural beings, dangerous
if unpropitiated, the daemons, the spirits that inhabited the air,
that presided over life and its stages, that helped or hated the
human soul, spiteful and evil half-divine beings, that sent illness,
bad luck, madness, that stole the honours of the gods themselves and
insisted on rituals and worship, often unclean, often cruel, but
inevitable. A man must watch himself closely if he was to be safe
from them all, if he was to keep wife and child and home safe.
Superstition, men said, was the one curse of life that made no truce
with sleep. A famous Christian writer of the second century, Tatian,
speaks of the enormous relief that he found in getting away from the
tyranny of ten thousand gods to be under a monarchy of One. A modern
Japanese, Uchimura, said the same thing: "One God, not eight
millions; that was joyful news to me."
Fourthly, this religion took from the grave none of its terrors.
There might be a world beyond, and there might not. At any rate, "be
initiated," said the priests; "you will have to pay us something,
but it is worth it." Prophets and quacks, said Plato, came to rich
men's doors and made them believe that they could rid them of all
alarm for the next world, by incantations and charms and other
things, by a series of feasts and jollifications. So they said, and
men did what they were told; but it did not take away the fear of
death.
From the first century onwards men began systematically to defend
this old paganism. Plutarch wrote a series of books in its behalf.
He brings in something like love of god for man. He speaks of "the
friendly Apollo." But the weakness of Plutarch as an apologist is
his weakness as biographer--he never really gets at the bottom of
anything. In biography he gives us the characteristic rather than
the character. Here he never faces the real issue. It is all
defence, apology, ingenuity; but he defends far too much. He admits
there are obscene rites; there had been human sacrifices; but the
gods cannot have ordained them; daemons, who stole the names of
gods, imposed these on men--not the gods; men practised them to
avert the anger of daemons. The gods are good. Waiving the fact that
he had not much evidence for this in the mythology, how was a man to
distinguish god from daemon, to know which is which? He does not
tell us. Again he speaks of the image of Osiris with three
"lingams". He apologizes for it; he defends it; for the triplicity
is a symbol of godhead, and it means that God is the origin of all
life. Yes, but what that religion needed was a great reformer, who
should have cut the religion clear adrift from idols of every kind,
from the old mythology, from obscenity. It may very well be that
such a reformer was unthinkable; even if he had appeared, he would
have been foredoomed to fail, as the compromise of the Stoics shows.
Plutarch and his kind did not attempt this. They loved the past and
the old ways. At heart they were afraid of the gods and were afraid
of tradition. Culture and charm will do a great deal, but they do
not suffice for a religion--either to make one or to redeem it.
The Stoics reached, I think, the highest moral level in that Roman
world--great men, great teachers of morals, great characters; but as
for the crowd, they said, let them go on in the religions of their
own cities; what they had learnt from their fathers, let them do. So
much for the ignorant; for us, of course, something else. That seems
to be a fundamentally wrong defence of religion. It gets the
proportions wrong. It means that we, who are people of culture, are
a great deal nearer to God than the crowd. But if we realize God at
all, we feel that we are none of us very far apart down here. The
most brilliant men are amenable to the temptations of the savage and
of the dock labourer. There was a further danger, little noticed at
first, that life is apt to be overborne by the vulgar, the ignorant,
if there is not a steady campaign to enlighten every man. The Roman
house was full of slaves; they taught the children--taught them
about gods and goddesses, from Syria, from Egypt, and kept thought
and life and morals on a low plane. An ignorant public is, an
unspeakable danger everywhere, but especially in religion.
The last great system of defence was the New Platonism. It had not
very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him
as a great authority. The Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato
did. They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great
thinkers as some of them were. They pictured the universe as one
vast unity. Far beyond all things is God. Of God man can form no
conception. Think, they would say, of all the exalted and wonderful
and beautiful concepts you can imagine; then deny them. God is
beyond. God is beyond being; you can conceive of being, and
therefore to predicate being of God is to limit him. You cannot
think of God; for, if you could think of God, God would be in
relation with you; God is insusceptible of relation with man. He
neither wills, nor thinks of man, nor can man think of him. A modern
philosopher has summed up their God as the deification of the word
"not." This God, then, who is not, willed--no! not "willed"; he
could not will; but whether he willed or did not will, in some way
or other there was an emanation; not God, but very much of God; very
divine, but not all God; from this another and another in a
descending series, down to the daemons, and down to men. All that
is, is God; evil is not-being. One of the great features of the
system was that it guaranteed all the old religions--for the crowd;
while for the initiated, for the esoteric, it had something more--it
had mystic trance, mystic vision, mystic comprehension. Twice or
three times, Plotinus, by a great leap away from all mortal things,
saw God. In the meantime, the philosophy justified all the old
rites.
Side by side with this great defence were what are known as the
Christian heresies. They are not exactly Christian. Groups of people
endeavoured to combine Christianity with the old thought, with
philosophy, theosophy, theurgy, and magic. They were eclectics; they
compromised. The German thinker, Novalis, said very justly that all
eclectics are sceptics, and the more eclectic the more sceptic.
These mixtures could not prevail.
But religions have, historically, a wonderful way of living in spite
of their weaknesses--yes, and in spite of their apologetics. A
religion may be stained with all sorts of evil, and may communicate
it; and yet it will survive, until there is an alternative with more
truth and more dynamic. The old paganism outlived Plato's criticisms
and Plutarch's defences. For the great masses of people neither
might have written.
Into this world came the Christian Church. I have tried to draw the
picture of the great pagan religion, with its enormous strength, its
universal acceptance, its great traditions, its splendours of art
and ceremony, its manifest proofs of its gods--everything that, to
the ordinary mind, could make for reality and for power; to show how
absolutely inconceivable it was that it could ever pass away. Then
comes the Christian Church--a ludicrous collection of trivial
people, very ignorant and very common; fishermen and publicans, as
the Gospels show us, "the baker and the fuller," as Celsus said with
a sneer. Yes, and every kind of unclean and disreputable person they
urged to join them, quite unlike all decent and established
religions. And they took the children and women of the family away
into a corner, and whispered to them and misled them--"Only
believe!" was their one great word. The whole thing was incredibly
silly. Paul went to Athens, and they asked him there about his
religion; and when he spoke to them about Jesus rising from the
dead, they sniggered, and the more polite suggested "another day."
Everybody knew that dead men do not rise. It was a silly religion.
Celsus pictured the frogs in symposium round a swamp, croaking to
one another how God forsakes the whole universe, the spheres of
heaven, to dwell with us; we frogs are so like God; he never ceases
to seek how we may dwell with him for ever; but some of us are
sinners, so God will come--or send his son--and burn them up; and
the rest of us will live with him for eternity. Is not that very
like the Christian religion? Celsus asked. It has been replied that,
if the frogs really could say this and did say this, then their
statement might be quite reasonable. But our main purpose for the
moment is to realize the utterly inconceivable absurdity of this
bunch of Galilean fishermen--and fools and rascals and
maniacs--setting out to capture the world. One of them wrote an
Apocalypse. He was in a penal settlement on Patmos, when he wrote
it. The sect was in a fair way of being stamped out in blood, as a
matter of fact; but this dreamer saw a triumphant Church of ten
thousand times ten thousand--and thousands of thousands--there were
hardly as many people in the world at that time; the great Rome had
fallen and the "Lamb" ruled. Imagine the amusement of a Roman pagan
of 100 A.D. who read the absurd book. Yet the dream has come true;
that Church has triumphed. Where is the old religion? Christ has
conquered, and all the gods have gone, utterly gone--they are
memories now, and nothing more. Why did they go? The Christian
Church refused to compromise. A pagan could have seen no real reason
why Jesus should not be a demi-god like Herakles or Dionysos; no
reason, either, why a man should not worship Jesus as well as these.
One of the Roman Emperors, a little after 200 A.D., had in his
private sanctuary four or five statues of gods, and one of them was
Jesus. Why not? The Roman world had open arms for Jesus as well as
any other god or demi-god, if people would be sensible; but the
Christian said, No. He would not allow Jesus to be put into that
pantheon, nor would he worship the gods himself, not even the
"genius" of the Emperor, his guardian spirit. The Christian
proclaimed a war of religion in which there shall be no compromise
and no peace, till Christ is lord of all; the thing shall be fought
out to the bitter end. And it has been. He was resolved that the old
gods should go; and they have gone. How was it done?
Here we touch what I think one of the greatest wonders that history
has to show. How did the Church do it? If I may invent or adapt
three words, the Christian "out-lived" the pagan, "out-died" him,
and "out-thought" him. He came into the world and lived a great deal
better than the pagan; he beat him hollow in living. Paul's Epistles
to the Corinthians do not indicate a high standard of life at
Corinth. The Corinthians were a very poor sort of Christians. But
another Epistle, written to the Corinthians a generation later,
speaks of their passion for being kind to men, and of a broadened
and deeper life, in spite of their weaknesses. Here and there one
recognizes failure all along the line--yes, but the line advances.
The old world had had morals, plenty of morals--the Stoics
overflowed with morals. But the Christian came into the world, not
with a system of morality--he had rules, indeed--"which," asks
Tertullian, "is the ampler rule, Thou shalt not commit adultery, or
the rule that forbids a single lustful look?"--but it was not rules
so much that he brought into the world as a great passion. "The Son
of God," he said, "loved me and gave himself for me. That man--Jesus
Christ loved him, gave himself for him. He is the friend of my best
Friend. My best Friend loves that man, gave himself for him, died
for him." How it alters all the relations of life! Who can kill or
rob another man, when he remembers whose hands were nailed to the
Cross for that man? See how it bears on another side of morality.
Tertullian strikes out a great phrase, a new idea altogether, when
he speaks of "the victim of the common lust." Christ died for
her--how it safeguards her and uplifts her! Men came into the world
full of this passion for Jesus Christ. They went to the slave and to
the temple-woman and told them: "The Son of God loved you and gave
himself for you"; and they believed it, and rose into a new life. To
be redeemed by the Son of God gave the slave a new self-respect, a
new manhood. He astonished people by his truth, his honesty, his
cleanness; and there was a new brightness and gaiety about him. So
there was about the woman. They sang, they overflowed with good
temper. It seemed as if they had been born again. As Clement of Rome
wrote, the Holy Spirit was a glad spirit. The word used both by him
and by St. Augustine is that which gives us the English word
"hilarious." There was a new gladness and happiness about these
people. "It befits Truth to laugh, because she is glad--to play with
her rivals because she is free from fear," so said Tertullian. Of
course, there were those who broke down, but Julian the Apostate, in
his letters to his heathen priests, is a reluctant witness to the
higher character of Christian life. And it was Jesus who was the
secret of it.
The pagan noticed the new fortitude in the face of death. Tertullian
himself was immensely impressed with it. He had never troubled to
look at the Gospels. Nobody bothered to read them unless they were
converted already, he said. But he seems to have seen these
Christian martyrs die. "Every man," he said, "who sees it, is moved
with some misgiving, and is set on fire to learn the reason; he
inquires and he is taught; and when he has learnt the truth, he
instantly follows it himself as well." "No one would have wished to
be killed, unless he was in possession of the truth." I think that
is autobiography. The intellectual energy of the man is worth
noting--his insistence on understanding, his instant resolution;
such qualities, we saw, had won the admiration of Jesus. Here is a
man who sacrifices a great career--his genius, his wit, his humour,
fire, power, learning, philosophy, everything thrown at Christ's
feet, and Christ uses them all. Then came a day when persecution was
breaking out again. Some Christians were for "fleeing to the next
city"--it was the one text in their Bible, he said. He said: "I stay
here." Any day the mob might get excited and shout: "The Christians
to the lions." They knew the street in which he lived, and they
would drag him--the scholar, the man of letters and of
imagination--naked through the streets; torn and bleeding, they
would tie him to the stake in the middle of the amphitheatre and
pile faggots round him, and there he would stand waiting to be burnt
alive; or, it might be, to be killed by the beasts. Any hour, any
day. "I stay here," he said. What does it cost a man to do that?
People asked what was the magic of it. The magic of it was just
this--on the other side of the fire was the same Friend; "if he
wants me to be burnt alive, I am here." Jesus Christ was the secret
of it.
The Christians out-thought the pagan world. How could they fail to?
"We have peace with God," said Paul. They moved about in a new
world, which was their Father's world. They would go to the shrines
and ask uncomfortable questions. Lucian, who was a pagan and a
scoffer, said that on one side of the shrines the notice was posted:
"Christians outside." The Christians saw too much. The living god in
that shrine was a big snake with a mask tied on--good enough for the
pagan; but the Christian would see the strings. Even the daemons
they dismissed to irrelevance and non-entity. The essence of magic
was to be able to link the name of a daemon with the name of one's
enemy, to set the daemon on the man. "Very well," said the
Christian, "link my name with your daemons. Use my name in any magic
you like. There is a name that is above every name; I am not
afraid." That put the daemons into their right place, and by and by
they vanished, dropped out, died of sheer inanition and neglect.
Wherever Jesus Christ has been, the daemons have gone. "There used
to be fairies," said an old woman in the Highlands of Scotland to a
friend of mine, "but the Gospel came and drove them away." I do not
know what is going to keep them away yet but Jesus Christ. The
Christian read the ancient literature with the same freedom of mind,
and was not in bondage to it; he had a new outlook; he could
criticize more freely. One great principle is given by Clement of
Alexandria: "The beautiful, wherever it is, is ours, because it came
from our God." The Christian read the best books, assimilated them,
and lived the freest intellectual life that the world had. Jesus had
set him to be true to fact. Why had Christian churches to be so much
larger than pagan temples? Why are they so still? Because the sermon
is in the very centre of all Christian worship--clear, definite
Christian teaching about Jesus Christ. There is no place for an
ignorant Christian. From the very start every Christian had to know
and to understand, and he had to read the Gospels; he had to be able
to give the reason for his faith. He was committed to a great
propaganda, to the preaching of Jesus, and he had to preach with
penetration and appeal. There they were loyal to the essential idea
of Jesus--they were "sons of fact." They read about Jesus,[32] and
they knew him, and they knew where they stood. This has been the
essence of the Christian religion. Put that alongside of the pitiful
defence which Plutarch makes of obscene rites, filthy images,
foolish traditions. Who did the thinking in that ancient world?
Again and again it was the Christian. He out-thought the world.
The old religion crumbled and fell, beaten in thought, in morals, in
life, in death. And by and by the only name for it was paganism, the
religion of the back-country village, of the out-of-the-way places.
Christ had conquered. "Dic tropoeum passionis, dic triumphalem
Crucem", sang Prudentius--"Sing the trophy of the Passion; sing the
all-triumphant Cross." The ancients thought that God repeated the
whole history of the universe over and over again, like a cinema
show. Some of them thought the kingdoms rise and fall by pure
chance. No, said Prudentius, God planned; God developed the history
of mankind; he made Rome for his own purposes, for Christ.
What is the explanation of it? We who live in a rational universe,
where real results come from real causes, must ask what is the power
that has carried the Christian Church to victory over that great old
religion. And there is another question: is this story going to be
repeated? What is there about Shiva, Kali, or Shri Krishna that
essentially differentiates them from the gods of Greece and Rome and
Egypt? Tradition, legend, philosophy--point by point, we find the
same thing; and we find the same Christian Church, with the same
ideals, facing the same conflict. What will be the result? The
result will be the same. We have seen in China, in the last two
decades, how the Christian Church is true to its traditions; how men
can die for Jesus Christ. In the Greek Church--a suffering
Church--on the round sacramental wafer there is a cross, and in the
four corners there are the eight letters, IE, XE, NI, KA, "Jesus
Christ conquers." That is the story of the Christian Church in the
Roman Empire. That is the story which, please God, we shall see
again in India. "Jesus Christ conquers."