may have been misled by the remarkable tendencies to error amongst the
ancients, from their want of public journals, combined with territorial
grandeur of empire. The greatest possible defect of harmony arises
naturally in this way amongst ancient authors, locally remote from each
other; but more especially in the post-christian periods, when reporting
any aspects of change, or any results from a revolution variable and
advancing under the vast varieties of the Roman empire. Having no
newspapers to effect a level amongst the inequalities and anomalies
of their public experience in regard to the Christian revolution,
when collected from innumerable tribes so widely differing as to
civilization, knowledge, superstition, &c.; hence it happened that
one writer could report with truth a change as having occurred within
periods of ten to sixty years, which for some other province would
demand a circuit of six hundred. For example, in Asia Minor, all the way
from the sea coast to the Euphrates, towns were scattered having a dense
population of Jews. Sometimes these were the most malignant opponents of
Christianity; that is, wherever they happened to rest in the _letter_ of
their peculiar religion. But, on the other hand, where there happened to
be a majority (or, if not numerically a majority, yet influentially an
overbalance) in that section of the Jews who were docile children of
their own preparatory faith and discipline, no bigots, and looking
anxiously for the fulfilment of their prophecies (an expectation at that
time generally diffused),--under those circumstances, the Jews were such
ready converts as to account naturally for sudden local transitions,
which in other circumstances or places might not have been credible.
This single consideration may serve to explain the apparent
contradictions, the irreconcilable discrepancies, between the statements
of contemporary Christian bishops, locally at a vast distance from each
other, or (which is even more important) reporting from communities
occupying different stages of civilization. There was no harmonizing
organ of interpretation, in Christian or in Pagan newspapers, to bridge
over the chasms that divided different provinces. A devout Jew, already
possessed by the purest idea of the Supreme Being, stood on the very
threshold of conversion: he might, by one hour's conversation with an
apostle, be transfigured into an enlightened Christian; whereas a
Pagan could seldom in one generation pass beyond the infirmity of his
novitiate. His heart and affections, his will and the habits of his
understanding, were too deeply diseased to be suddenly transmuted. And
hence arises a phenomenon, which has too languidly arrested the notice
of historians; namely, that already, and for centuries before the time
of Constantine, wherever the Jews had been thickly sown as colonists,
the most potent body of Christian zeal stood ready to kindle under
the first impulse of encouragement from the state; whilst in the
great capitals of Rome and Alexandria, where the Jews were hated and
neutralized politically by Pagan forces, not for a hundred years later
than Constantine durst the whole power of the government lay hands on
the Pagan machinery, except with timid precautions, and by graduations
so remarkably adjusted to the circumstances, that sometimes they wear
the shape of compromises with idolatry. We must know the ground, the
quality of the population, concerned in any particular report of
the fathers, before we can judge of its probabilities. Under local
advantages, insulated cases of Oracles suddenly silenced, of temples and
their idol-worship overthrown, as by a rupture of new-born zeal, were
not less certain to arise as rare accidents from rare privileges, or
from rare coincidences of unanimity in the leaders of the place, than
on the other hand they were certain _not_ to arise in that unconditional
universality pretended by the fathers. Wheresoever Paganism was
interwoven with the whole moral being of a people, as it was in Egypt,
or with the political tenure and hopes of a people, as it was in Rome,
_there_ a long struggle was inevitable before the revolution could
be effected. Briefly, as against the fathers, we find a sufficient
refutation in what _followed_ Christianity. If, at a period five, or
even six hundred years after the birth of Christ, you find people still
consulting the local Oracles of Egypt, in places sheltered from the
point-blank range of the state artillery,--there is an end, once
and forever, to the delusive superstition that, merely by its silent
presence in the world, Christianity must instantaneously come into
fierce activity as a reägency of destruction to all forms of idolatrous
error. That argument is multiplied beyond all power of calculation; and
to have missed it is the most eminent instance of wilful blindness which
the records of human folly can furnish. But there is another refutation
lying in an opposite direction, which presses the fathers even more
urgently in the rear than this presses them in front; any author
posterior to Christianity, who should point to the decay of Oracles,
they would claim on their own side. But what would they have said
to Cicero,--by what resource of despair would they have parried his
authority, when insisting (as many times he does insist), forty and even
fifty years before the birth of Christ, on the languishing condition of
the Delphic Oracle? What evasion could they imagine here? How could that
languor be due to Christianity, which far anticipated the very birth of
Christianity? For, as to Cicero, who did not "far anticipate the
birth of Christianity." we allege _him_ rather because his work _De
Divinatione_ is so readily accessible, and because his testimony on
any subject is so full of weight, than because other and much older
authorities cannot be produced to the same effect. The Oracles of Greece
had lost their vigor and their palmy pride full two centuries before
the Christian era. Historical records show this _à posteriori_, whatever
were the cause; and the cause, which we will state hereafter, shows it
_à priori_, apart from the records.
Surely, therefore, Van Dale needed not to have pressed his victory over
the helpless fathers so unrelentingly, and after the first ten pages by
cases and proofs that are quite needless and _ex abundanti_; simply
the survival of any one distinguished Oracle upwards of four centuries
_after_ Christ--that is sufficient. But if with this fact we combine
the other fact, that all the principal Oracles had already begun to
languish, more than two centuries _before_ Christianity, there can be no
opening for a whisper of dissent upon any real question between Van Dale
and his opponents; namely, both as to the possibility of Christianity
coexisting with such forms of error, and the possibility that oracles
should be overthrown by merely Pagan, or internal changes. The less
plausible, however, that we find this error of the fathers, the more
curiosity we naturally feel about the source of that error; and the more
so, because Van Dale never turns his eyes in that direction.
This source lay (to speak the simple truth) in abject superstition. The
fathers conceived of the enmity between Christianity and Paganism,
as though it resembled that between certain chemical poisons and the
Venetian wine-glass, which (according to the belief [Footnote: Which
belief we can see no reason for rejecting so summarily as is usually
done in modern times. It would be absurd, indeed, to suppose a kind of
glass qualified to expose all poisons indifferently, considering the
vast range of their chemical differences. But, surely, as against
that one poison then familiarly used for domestic murders, a chemical
reagency might have been devised in the quality of the glass. At least,
there is no _prima facie_ absurdity in such a supposition.] of three
centuries back) no sooner received any poisonous fluid, than immediately
it shivered into crystal splinters. They thought to honor Christianity,
by imaging it as some exotic animal of more powerful breed, such as we
English have witnessed in a domestic case, coming into instant collision
with the native race, and exterminating it everywhere upon the first
conflict. In this conceit they substituted a foul fiction of their own,
fashioned on the very model of Pagan fictions, for the unvarying analogy
of the divine procedure. Christianity, as the last and consummate of
revelations, had the high destination of working out its victory
through what was greatest in a man--through his reason, his will,
his affections. But, to satisfy the fathers, it must operate like a
drug--like sympathetic powders--like an amulet--or like a conjurer's
charm. Precisely the monkish effect of a Bible when hurled at an evil
spirit--not the true rational effect of that profound oracle read,
studied, and laid to heart--was that which the fathers ascribed to the
mere proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the atmosphere
circumjacent to any oracle; and, in fact, to their gross appreciations,
Christian truth was like the scavenger bird in Eastern climates, or the
stork in Holland, which signalizes its presence by devouring all
the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as fast as they reproduce
themselves under local distemperatures of climate or soil.
It is interesting to pursue the same ignoble superstition, which, in
fact, under Romish hands, soon crept like a parasitical plant over
Christianity itself, until it had nearly strangled its natural vigor,
back into times far preceding that of the fathers. Spite of all that
could be wrought by Heaven, for the purpose of continually confounding
the local vestiges of popular reverence which might have gathered round
stocks and stones, so obstinate is the hankering after this mode of
superstition in man that his heart returns to it with an elastic recoil
as often as the openings are restored. Agreeably to this infatuation,
the temple of the true God--even its awful _adytum_--the holy of
holies--or the places where the ark of the covenant had rested in its
migrations--all were conceived to have an eternal and a self-vindicating
sanctity. So thought man: but God himself, though to man's folly pledged
to the vindication of his own sanctities, thought far otherwise; as we
know by numerous profanations of all holy places in Judea, triumphantly
carried through, and avenged by no plausible judgments. To speak only
of the latter temple, three men are memorable as having polluted its
holiest recesses: Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey about a century later, and
Titus pretty nearly by the same exact interval later than Pompey. Upon
which of these three did any judgment descend? Attempts have been made
to impress that coloring of the sequel in two of these cases, indeed,
but without effect upon _any_ man's mind. Possibly in the case of
Antiochus, who seems to have moved under a burning hatred, not so
much of the insurgent Jews as of the true faith which prompted their
resistance, there is some colorable argument for viewing him in his
miserable death as a monument of divine wrath. But the two others had
no such malignant spirit; they were tolerant, and even merciful; were
authorized instruments for executing the purposes of Providence; and no
calamity in the life of either can be reasonably traced to his dealings
with Palestine. Yet, if Christianity could not brook for an instant
the mere coëxistence of a Pagan oracle, how came it that the Author of
Christianity had thus brooked (nay, by many signs of coöperation, had
promoted) that ultimate desecration, which planted "the abomination
of desolation" as a victorious crest of Paganism upon his own solitary
altar? The institution of the Sabbath, again--what part of the Mosaic
economy could it more plausibly have been expected that God should
vindicate by some memorable interference, since of all the Jewish
institutions it was that one which only and which frequently became the
occasion of wholesale butchery to the pious (however erring) Jews? The
scruple of the Jews to fight, or even to resist an assassin, on the
Sabbath, was not the less pious in its motive because erroneous in
principle; yet no miracle interfered to save them from the consequences
of their infatuation. And this seemed the more remarkable in the case
of their war with Antiochus, because _that_ (if any that history has
recorded) was a holy war. But, after one tragical experience, which cost
the lives of a thousand martyrs, the Maccabees--quite as much on a level
with their scrupulous brethren in piety as they were superior in good
sense--began to reflect that they had no shadow of a warrant from
Scripture for counting upon any miraculous aid; that the whole
expectation, from first to last, had been human and presumptuous; and
that the obligation of fighting valiantly against idolatrous compliances
was, at all events, paramount to the obligation of the Sabbath. In one
hour, after unyoking themselves from this monstrous millstone of their
own forging, about their own necks, the cause rose buoyantly aloft as
upon wings of victory; and, as their very earliest reward--as the first
fruits from thus disabusing their minds of windy presumptions--they
found the very case itself melting away which had furnished the scruple;
since their cowardly enemies, now finding that they would fight on all
days alike, had no longer any motive for attacking them on the Sabbath;
besides that their own astonishing victories henceforward secured to
them often the choice of the day not less than of the ground.
But, without lingering on these outworks of the true religion, namely,
1st, the Temple of Jerusalem; 2dly, the Sabbath,--both of which the
divine wisdom often saw fit to lay prostrate before the presumption
of idolatrous assaults, on principles utterly irreconcilable with the
Oracle doctrine of the fathers,--there is a still more flagrant argument
against the fathers, which it is perfectly confounding to find both them
and their confuter overlooking. It is this. Oracles, take them at the
very worst, were no otherwise hostile to Christianity than as a branch
of Paganism. If, for instance, the Delphic establishment were hateful
(as doubtless it was) to the holy spirit of truth which burned in the
mind of an apostle, _why_ was it hateful? Not primarily in its character
of Oracle, but in its universal character of Pagan temple; not as an
authentic distributor of counsels adapted to the infinite situations of
its clients--often very wise counsels; but as being ultimately engrafted
on the stem of idolatrous religion--as deriving, in the last resort,
their sanctions from Pagan deities, and, therefore, as sharing
_constructively_ in all the pollutions of that tainted source. Now,
therefore, if Christianity, according to the fancy of the fathers, could
not tolerate the co-presence of so much evil as resided in the Oracle
superstition,--that is, in the derivative, in the secondary, in the
not unfrequently neutralized or even redundantly compensated mode of
error,--then, _à fortiori_, Christianity could not have tolerated for an
hour the parent superstition, the larger evil, the fontal error, which
diseased the very organ of vision--which not merely distorted a few
objects on the road, but spread darkness over the road itself. Yet what
is the fact? So far from any mysterious repulsion _externally_ between
idolatrous errors and Christianity, as though the two schemes of belief
could no more coexist in the same society than two queen-bees in a
hive,--as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable
_concursus_,--do but open a child's epitome of history, and you find it
to have required four entire centuries before the destroyer's hammer and
crowbar began to ring loudly against the temples of idolatrous worship;
and not before five, nay, locally six, or even seven centuries had
elapsed, could the better angel of mankind have sung gratulations
announcing that the great strife was over--that man was inoculated with
the truth; or have adopted the impressive language of a Latin father,
that "the owls were to be heard in _every_ village hooting from the
dismantled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt wolf disturbing the sleep
of peasants as he yelled in winter from the cold, dilapidated altars."
Even this victorious consummation was true only for the southern world
of civilization. The forests of Germany, though pierced already to
the south in the third and fourth centuries by the torch of
missionaries,--though already at that time illuminated by the immortal
Gothic version of the New Testament preceding Ulppilas, and still
surviving,--sheltered through ages in the north and east vast tribes
of idolaters, some awaiting the baptism of Charlemagne in the eighth
century and the ninth, others actually resuming a fierce countenance of
heathenism for the martial zeal of crusading knights in the thirteenth
and fourteenth. The history of Constantine has grossly misled the world.
It was very early in the fourth century (313 A. D.) that Constantine
found himself strong enough to take his _earliest_ steps for raising
Christianity to a privileged station; which station was not merely an
effect and monument of its progress, but a further cause of progress.
In this latter light, as a power advancing and moving, but politically
still militant, Christianity required exactly one other century to carry
out and accomplish even its eastern triumph. Dating from the era of
the very inaugurating and merely local acts of Constantine, we shall
be sufficiently accurate in saying that the corresponding period in
the fifth century (namely, from about 404 to 420 A. D.) first witnessed
those uproars of ruin in Egypt and Alexandria--fire racing along the old
carious timbers, battering-rams thundering against the ancient walls
of the most horrid temples--which rang so searchingly in the ears of
Zosimus, extorting, at every blow, a howl of Pagan sympathy from that
ignorant calumniator of Christianity. So far from the fact being,
according to the general prejudice, as though Constantine had found
himself able to destroy Paganism, and to replace it by Christianity;
on the contrary, it was both because he happened to be far too weak,
in fact, for such a mighty revolution, and because he _knew_ his own
weakness, that he fixed his new capital, as a preliminary caution, upon
the Propontis.