THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT
The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used
as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine
origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest
that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans
were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest
missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.
Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the
soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate
folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the
Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere
along the bay of Naples.
But they were only part of the story.
Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence
of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the
Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.
There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking
tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an
uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and
women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village
beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own
hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore had
been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very
real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis
and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and
thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by
hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of
years ago.
Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the anointed, as the
Greek missionaries called him, had been on this earth only a short time
ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to
him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the
Emperor Tiberius.
And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from
the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken
with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had
actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon
when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the
Roman governor.
We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular
appeal of this new faith.
It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy
and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage
over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly
expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which
radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the
exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The
slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the
high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives
beheld the rays of a new hope.
At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free.
No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the
great of this world.
On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father.
They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.
They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters
who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas.
For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity was the
first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance.
Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the
soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in
a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with
the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon
rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of
private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures
have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies,
brotherhoods and federations; when they have begun to obey a single
directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes
and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest,
then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers
and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the
early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true
founders of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early
development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in
all history.
The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the ancient empire
was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side
it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and
charity which the Master himself had taught. But on the other side it
found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism
which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart
from the rest of the world.
In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance
and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men
which was as efficient as it was illogical.
To understand how this could have happened, we must go back once more to
the days of Paul and to the first fifty years after the death of Christ,
and we must firmly grasp the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform
movement within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely
nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened the rulers
of the Jewish state and no one else.
The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when Jesus lived had
understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally they had feared the
ultimate consequences of an agitation which boldly threatened to question
a spiritual monopoly which was based upon nothing more substantial than
brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they had been forced
to act in a spirit of panic and had sent their enemy to the gallows
before the Roman authorities had had time to intervene and deprive them
of their victim.
What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible to say. He was
killed long before he was able to organize his disciples into a special
sect nor did he leave a single word of writing from which his followers
could conclude what he wanted them to do.
In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in disguise.
The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection of
ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free to follow the
spirit of their master’s words rather than the letter of his law. Had
they been bound by a book, they would very likely have devoted all their
energies to a theological discussion upon the ever enticing subject of
commas and semi-colons.
In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional scholars
could have possibly shown the slightest interest in the new faith and
Christianity would have gone the way of so many other sects which begin
with elaborate written programs and end when the police are called upon
to throw the haggling theologians into the street.
At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize what
tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman Empire, it is a matter
of surprise that the authorities took practically no steps to quell a
movement which was fully as dangerous to the safety of the state as an
invasion by Huns or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this
eastern prophet had caused great excitement among their house slaves,
that the women were forever telling each other about the imminent
reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that quite a number of old men
had solemnly predicted the impending destruction of this world by a ball
of fire.
But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had gone into
hysterics about some new religious hero. Most likely it would not be the
last time, either. Meanwhile the police would see to it that these poor,
frenzied fanatics did not disturb the peace of the realm.
And that was that.
The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act. The
followers of the new mystery went about their business in a most
exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow the government. At
first, several slaves had expected that the common fatherhood of God and
the common brotherhood of man would imply a cessation of the old relation
between master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had hastened
to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was an invisible and
intangible kingdom of the soul and that people on this earth had better
take things as they found them, in expectation of the final reward which
awaited them in Heaven.
Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of matrimony as
established by the harsh laws of Rome, had rushed to the conclusion that
Christianity was synonymous with emancipation and full equality of rights
between men and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a number
of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to refrain from all
those extremes which would make their church suspect in the eyes of the
more conservative pagans and had persuaded them to continue in that state
of semi-slavery which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and Eve had
been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most commendable respect
for the law and as far as the authorities were concerned, the Christian
missionaries could therefore come and go at will and preach as best
suited their own individual tastes and preferences.
But as has happened so often in history, the masses had shown themselves
less tolerant than their rulers. Just because people are poor it does
not necessarily follow that they are high-minded citizens who could be
prosperous and happy if their conscience would only permit them to make
those compromises which are held to be necessary for the accumulation of
wealth.
And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by free meals and
free prize-fights, was no exception to this rule. At first it derived a
great deal of rough pleasure from those sober-faced groups of men and
women who with rapt attention listened to the weird stories about a God
who had ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal,
and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for the hoodlums who
pelted their gatherings with stones and dirt.
The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a detached view of
this new development.
The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted of certain
solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified occasions and paid for in
cash. This money went toward the support of the church officers. When
thousands of people began to desert the old shrines and went to another
church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests were faced
by a very serious reduction in their salary. This of course did not
please them at all, and soon they were loud in their abuse of the godless
heretics who turned their backs upon the Gods of their fathers and burned
incense to the memory of a foreign prophet.
But there was another class of people in the city who had even better
reason to hate the Christians. Those were the fakirs, who as Indian Yogis
and Pooughies and hierophants of the great and only mysteries of Isis
and Ishtar and Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and
easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle classes. If the
Christians had set up a rival establishment and had charged a handsome
price for their own particular revelations, the guild of spook-doctors
and palmists and necromancers would have had no reason for complaint.
Business was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not mind if a
bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a plague upon
their silly notions!—refused to take any reward. Yea, they even gave
away what they had, fed the hungry and shared their own roof with the
homeless. And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and
they never could have done this unless they were possessed of certain
hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no one thus far had been
able to discover.
Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers. It was
the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited
peasants from all parts of the empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious
laws that rule the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those
who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no
apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The
hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay
for one is a fine neighbor and a good fellow. But the man who holds
himself aloof and refuses to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum,
who does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being dragged
through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a spoil-sport and an enemy
of the community at large.
When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that part of Rome
inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was set for the first
organized attacks upon the Christians.
At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of drunken
conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire that he might get rid
of the slums and rebuild the city according to his own plans. The crowd,
however, knew better. It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who
were forever telling each other about the happy day when large balls of
fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the wicked would go up in
flames.
Once this story had been successfully started, others followed in rapid
succession. One old woman had heard the Christians talk with the dead.
Another knew that they stole little children and cut their throats and
smeared their blood upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course,
no one had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous
practices, but that was only because they were so terribly clever and had
bribed the police. But now at last they had been caught red-handed and
they would be made to suffer for their vile deeds.
Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this occasion, we
know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems, were among the victims for
thereafter their names are never heard again.
That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished nothing, it
is needless to state. The noble dignity with which the martyrs accepted
their fate was the best possible propaganda for the new ideas and for
every Christian who perished, there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager
to take his place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act
of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year 68), the
Christians returned to their old haunts and everything was as it had been
before.
By this time the Roman authorities were making a great discovery. They
began to suspect that a Christian was not exactly the same thing as a Jew.
We can hardly blame them for having committed this error. The historical
researches of the last hundred years have made it increasingly clear that
the Synagogue was the clearing-house through which the new faith was
passed on to the rest of the world.
Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had always been most
careful in observing the ancient laws of his fathers and that he had
addressed himself almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. Once, and then
only for a short time, had he left his native country, but the task
which he had set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his
fellow-Jews. Nor was there anything in what he had ever said which could
have given the average Roman the impression that there was a deliberate
difference between Christianity and Judaism.
What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had clearly seen the
terrible abuses which had entered the church of his fathers. He had
loudly and sometimes successfully protested against them. But he had
fought his battles for reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned
upon him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some one had
mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he would have rejected
the idea as preposterous. But like many a reformer before his day and
after, he had gradually been forced into a position where compromise
was no longer possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a
fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of reform, who
were deeply perplexed when they suddenly found themselves at the head
of a brand new party “outside” the organization to which they belonged,
whereas they were merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”
For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity (to use the name
long before it had been coined) was the religion of a small Jewish sect
which had a few adherents in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and
Galilee and which had never been heard of outside of the province of
Syria.
It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen of Jewish
descent, who had first recognized the possibilities of the new doctrine
as a religion for all the world. The story of his suffering tells us
how bitterly the Jewish Christians had been opposed to the idea of a
universal religion instead of a purely national denomination, membership
to which should only be open to people of their own race. They had hated
the man who dared preach salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly
that on his last visit to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered
the fate of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the fury
of his enraged compatriots.
But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman soldiers to
protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal town from where he
could be shipped to Rome for that famous trial which never took place.
A few years after his death, that which he had so often feared during his
lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold actually occurred.
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place of the temple of
Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor of Jupiter. The name of the
city was changed to Aelia Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of
the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they were
either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed to live within
several miles of the ruins on pain of death.
It was the final destruction of their holy city which had been so
disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several centuries afterwards,
in the little villages of the Judaean hinterland colonies might have
been found of strange people who called themselves “poor men” and who
waited with great patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end
of the world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the old
Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time to time we hear them
mentioned in books written during the fifth and sixth centuries. Far away
from civilization, they developed certain strange doctrines of their own
in which hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After the
seventh century however we no longer find any trace of these so-called
Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious Mohammedans had killed them all.
And, anyway, if they had managed to exist a few hundred years longer,
they would not have been able to avert the inevitable.
Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into one large
political union, had made the world ready for the idea of a universal
religion. Christianity, because it was both simple and practical and
full of a direct appeal, was predestined to succeed where Judaism and
Mithraism and all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail.
But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of certain
rather unpleasant characteristics which only too clearly betrayed its
origin.
The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe
had carried a message of hope and mercy.
But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.
He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.
But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.
And his name was Religious Intolerance.