SIMON PETER, and ANDREW his brother,
JAMES, and JOHN, the sons of Zebedee,
PHILIP, and BARTHOLOMEW,
MATTHEW, and THOMAS,
JAMES, the son of Alpheus, and SIMON ZELOTES,
JUDE, the brother of James, and JUDAS ISCARIOT, in whose
place was afterwards chosen by the apostles, MATTHIAS.
II. The Hellenist apostles, namely, PAUL and BARNABAS, with whom are
included their companions, MARK and LUKE, the evangelists.
These two classes of Apostles are distinguished from each other, mainly,
by the circumstances of the appointment of each; the former being all
directly appointed by Jesus himself, (excepting Matthias, who took the
forfeited commission of Judas Iscariot,) while the latter were summoned
to the duties of the apostleship after the ascension of Christ; so
that they, however highly equipped for the labors of the office, had
never enjoyed his personal instructions; and however well-assured of
the divine summons to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, theirs was
not a distinct personal and bodily commission, formally given to them,
and repeatedly enforced and renewed, as it was to the chosen ones of
Christ’s own appointment. These later apostles, too, with hardly one
exception, were foreign Jews, born and brought up beyond the bounds of
the land of Israel, while the twelve were all Galileans, whose homes
were within the holy precincts of their fathers’ ancient heritage.
Yet if the extent of their labors be regarded, the later commissioned
must rank far above the twelve. Almost two thirds of the New Testament
were written by Paul and his companions; and before one of those
commissioned by Jesus to go into all the world on their great errand,
had ever gone beyond the boundary of Palestine, Paul, accompanied
either by Barnabas, Mark, Silas, or Luke, had gone over Syria and Asia,
traversed the sea into Greece, Macedonia, and Illyria, bringing the
knowledge of the word of truth to tens of thousands, who would never
have heard of it, if they had been made to wait for its communication
by the twelve. This he did through constant toils, dangers and
sufferings, which as far transcended all which the Galilean Apostles
had endured, as the mighty results of his labors did the immediate
effects of theirs. And afterwards, while they were struggling with
the paltry and vexatious, though not very dangerous tyranny of the
Sanhedrim, within the walls of Jerusalem, Paul was uttering the solemn
truths of his high commission before governors and a king, making them
to tremble with doubt and awe at his words; and, at last, bearing,
first of all, the name of Jesus to the capital of the world, he sounded
the call of the gospel at the gates of Cæsar. The Galilean apostles
were indued with no natural advantages for communicating freely with
foreigners; their language, habits, customs and modes of instruction,
were all hindrances in the way of a rapid and successful progress in
such a labor, and they with great willingness gave up this vast field
to the Hellenist preachers, while they occupied themselves, for the
most part, with the still immense labor which their Lord had himself
begun. For all the subtleties and mysticisms of their solemn foes, they
were abundantly provided; the whole training, which they had received,
under the personal instruction of their master, had fitted them mainly
for this very warfare; and they had seen him, times without number,
sweep away all these refuges of lies. But, with the polished and truly
learned philosophers of Athens, or the majestic lords of Rome, they
would have felt the want of that minute knowledge of the characters and
manners of both Greeks and Romans, with which Paul was so familiar, by
the circumstances of his birth and education, in a city highly favored
by Roman laws and Grecian philosophy. Thus was it wisely ordained, for
the complete foundation and rapid extension of the gospel cause, that
for each great field of labor there should be a distinct set of men,
each peculiarly well fitted for their own department of the mighty work.
And by such divinely sagacious appointments, the certain and resistless
advance of the faith of Christ was so secured, and so wonderfully
extended beyond the deepest knowledge, and above the brightest hopes of
its chief apostles, that at this distant day, in this distant land, far
beyond the view even of the prophetic eye of that age, millions of a
race unknown to them, place their names above all others, but one, on
earth and in heaven; and to spread the knowledge of the minute details
of their toils and triumphs, the laborious scholar should search the
recorded learning of eighteen hundred years, and bring forth the fruits
in the story of their lives.
With such limitations and expansions of the term, then, this book
attempts to give the history of the lives of the apostles. Of some who
are thus designated, little else than their names being known, they can
have no claim for a large space on these pages; while to a few, whose
actions determined the destiny of millions, and mainly effected the
establishment of the Christian faith, the far greater part of the work
will be given.
The MATERIALS of this work should be found in all that has been written
on the subject of New Testament history, since the scriptural canon
was completed. But “who is sufficient for these things?” A long life
might find abundant employment in searching a thousand libraries, and
compiling from a hundred thousand volumes, the facts and illustrations
of this immense and noble subject; and then the best energies of
another long life would be needed to bring the mighty masses into form,
and give them in a narrative for the mind of the unlearned. What, then,
is here attempted, as a substitute for this immensity? To give a clear
distinct narrative of each apostle’s life, with such illustrations of
the character of the era, and the scene in which the incidents occurred,
and such explanations of the terms in which they are recorded, as may,
consistently with the limits of this work, be drawn from the labors of
the learned of ancient and modern times, which are within the writer’s
reach. Various and numerous are the books that swell the list of
faithful and honest references; many and weighty the volumes that
have been turned over, in the long course of research; ancient and
venerable the dust, which has been shaken into suffocating clouds
about the searcher’s head, and have obscured his vision, as he dragged
many a forgotten folio from the slumber of ages, to array the modern
plunderer in the shreds and patches of antique lore. Histories, travels,
geographies, maps, commentaries, criticisms, introductions, and
lexicons, have been “daily and nightly turned in the hand;” and of this
labor some fruit is offered on every page. But the unstained source of
sacred history! the pure well-spring, at which the wearied searcher
always refreshed himself, after unrequited toils, through dry masses
of erudition, was the simple story of the Apostles and Evangelists,
told by themselves. In this same simple story, indeed, were found the
points on which the longest labor was required; yet these, at best only
illustrated, not improved, by all the labors of the learned of various
ages, were the _materials_ of the work. These are the preparations of
months and years; the execution must decide on their real value,――and
that is yet to come.
A list of the various works which have furnished the materials
for this book might be proper here; but in order to insure its
completeness and accuracy, it is deferred to the end of the
volume.
A VIEW OF THE WORLD, _as it was at the when the apostles began the work
of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ_, may be convenient to remind
some readers, and necessary to inform others, in what way its political
organization operated to aid or hinder the progress of the faith. The
peculiarities of the government of the regions of civilization, were
closely involved in the results of this religious revolution, and may
be considered as having been, on the whole, most desirably disposed for
the triumphant establishment of the dominion of Christ.
From the shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the Euphrates, the sway
of the Roman Caesar was acknowledged, by the millions of Western and
Southern Europe, Northern Africa and South-western Asia. The strong
grasp of warlike power was a bond which held together in peace many
nations, who, but for that constraint, would, as their previous and
subsequent history shows, have been arrayed against each other, in
contests, destructive alike of the happiness of the contending parties
and the comfort of their neighbors. The mighty force of Roman genius
had overcome the thousand barriers which nature and art had reared
between the different nations of the three continents in which it ruled,
and the passage from one end of that vast empire to the other, was
without any hindrance to those who traveled on errands of peace. The
bloody strife which once distracted the tribes of Gaul, Germany and
Britain, had rendered those grand sections of Europe impassable, and
shut up each paltry tribe within a narrow boundary, which could never
be crossed but with fire and sword. The deadly and furious contests
among the nations of South-western Asia and South-eastern Europe, had
long discouraged the philosophical and commercial enterprise, once of
old so rife and free among them, and offered a serious hindrance to
the traveler, whether journeying for information or trade; thus greatly
checking the spread of knowledge, and limiting each nation, in a great
measure, to its own resources in science and art. The Roman conquest,
burying in one wide tomb all the jealousies and strifes of aspiring
national ambition, thus put an end at once to all these causes of
separation; it brought long-divided nations into close union and
acquaintance, and produced a more extensive and equal diffusion of
knowledge, as well as greater facilities for commercial intercourse,
than had ever been enjoyed before. The rapid result of the conquerors’
policy was the consolidation of the various nations of that vast empire
into one people,――peaceful, prosperous, and for the most part protected
in their personal and domestic rights. The savage was tamed, the
wanderers were reclaimed from the forest, which fell before the march
of civilization, or from the desert, which soon rejoiced and blossomed
under the mighty beneficence of Roman power.
The fierce Gaul forsook his savage hut and dress together, robing
himself in the graceful toga of the Roman citizen, or the light tunic
of the colonial cultivator, and reared his solid and lofty dwelling in
clustering cities or villages, whose deep laid foundations yet endure,
in lasting testimony of the nature of Roman conquest and civilization.
Under his Roman rulers and patrons, he raised piles of art, unequaled
in grandeur, beauty and durability, by any similar works in the world.
Aqueducts and theaters, still only in incipient ruin, proclaim, in
their slow decay, the greatness of those who reared them, in a land so
lately savage.
The Pont du gard, at Nismes, and the amphitheaters, temples,
arches, gates, baths, bridges, and mausolea, which still adorn
that city and Arles, Vienne, Rheims, Besancon, Autun and Metz,
are the instances, to which I direct those whose knowledge of
antiquity is not sufficient to suggest these splendid remains.
Almost any well-written book of travels in France will give the
striking details of their present condition. Malte-Brun also
slightly alludes to them, and may be consulted by those who
wish to learn more of the proofs of my assertion than this brief
notice can give.
The warlike Numidian and the wild Mauritanian, under the same
iron instruction, had long ago learned to robe their primitive
half-nakedness in the decent garments of civilized man. Even the
distant Getulian found the high range of Atlas no sure barrier, against
the wave of triumphant arms and arts, which rolled resistlessly over
him, and spent itself only on the pathless sands of wide Sahara. So far
did that all-subduing genius spread its work, and so deeply did it make
its marks, beyond the most distant and impervious boundary of modern
civilization, that the latest march of discovery has found far older
adventurers before it, even in the great desert; and within a dozen
years, European travelers have brought to our knowledge walls and
inscriptions, which, after mouldering unknown in the dry, lonely waste,
for ages, at last met the astonished eyes of these gazers, with the
still striking witness of Roman power.
The travels of Denham and Clapperton across the desert, from
Tripoli to Bornou,――of Ritchie and Lyon, to Fezzan,――of Horneman
and others, will abundantly illustrate this passage.
Egypt, already twice classic, and renowned through two mighty and
distant series of ages, renewed her fading glories under new conquerors,
no less worthy to possess and adorn the land of the Pharaohs, than were
the Ptolemies. In that ancient home of art, the new conquerors achieved
works, inferior indeed to the still lasting monuments of earlier
greatness, but no less effectual in securing the ornament and defense
of the land. With a warlike genius far surpassing the most triumphant
energy of former rulers, the legionaries of Rome made the valley of
the Nile, from its mouth to the eighth cataract, safe and wealthy. The
desert wanderers, whose hordes had once overwhelmed the throne of the
Pharaohs, and baffled the revenge of the Macedonian monarchs, were now
crushed, curbed, or driven into the wilds; while the peaceful tiller
of the ground, secure against their lawless attacks, brought his rich
harvests to a fair and certain market, through the ports and million
ships of the Mediterranean, to the gate of his noble conquerors, within
the capital of the world.
The grinding tyranny of the cruel despots of Pontus, Armenia and Syria,
had, one after another, been swept away before the republican hosts
of Sylla, Lucullus and Pompey; and the remorseless, stupid selfishness
that has always characterized oriental despotism, even to this day,
had been followed by the mild and generous exercise of that almost
omnipotent sway, which the condition of the people, in most cases,
showed to have been administered, in the main, for the good of its
subjects.
The case of Verres will perhaps rise to the minds of some of my
readers, as opposed to this favorable view of Roman government;
but the whole account of this and similar tyranny shows that
such cases were looked on as most remarkable enormities, and
they are recorded and noticed in such terms of abhorrence, as to
justify us in quoting with peculiar force, the maxim, “Exceptio
probat regulam.”
Towards the farthest eastern boundary of the empire, the Parthian,
fighting as he fled, held out against the advance of the western
conquerors, in a harassing and harassed independence. The mountains
and forests of central Europe, and of North Britain, too, were still
manfully defended by their savage owners; yet, when they at last met
the iron hosts of Germanicus, Trajan, and Agricola, they, in their turn,
fell under the last triumphs of the Roman eagle. But the peace and
prosperity of the empire, and even of provinces near the scene, were
not moved by these disturbances. And thus, in a longitudinal line of
four thousand miles, and within a circuit of ten thousand, the energies
of Roman genius had hushed all wars, and stilled the nations into a
long, unbroken peace, which secured the universal good. So nearly true
was the lyric description, given by Milton, of the universal peace
which attended the coming of the Messiah:
“No war or battle sound,
Was heard the world around;
The idle spear and shield were high uphung;
The hooked chariot stood,
Unstained with hostile blood,
The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;
And kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovran lord was by.”
The efforts of the conquerors did not cease with the mere military
subjugation of a country, but were extended far beyond the extinction
of the hostile force. The Roman soldier was not a mere fighter,
nor were his labors, out of the conflict, confined to the erection
of military works only. The stern discipline, which made his arms
triumphant in the day of battle, had also taught him cheerfully to
exchange those triumphant arms for the tools of peaceful labor, that he
might insure the solid permanency of his conquests, by the perfection
of such works as would make tranquillity desirable to the conquered,
and soothe them to repose under a dominion which so effectually secured
their good. Roads, that have made Roman _ways_ proverbial, and which
the perfection of modern art has never equaled in more than one or
two instances, reached from the capital to the farthest bounds of the
empire. Seas, long dangerous and almost impassable for the trader and
enterprising voyager, were swept of every piratical vessel; and the
most distant channels of the Aegean and Levant, where the corsair
long ruled triumphant, both before and since, became as safe as the
porches of the capitol. Regions, to which nature had furnished the
indispensable gift of water, neither in abundance nor purity, were soon
blessed with artificial rivers, flowing over mighty arches, that will
crumble only with the pyramids. In the dry places of Africa and Asia,
as well as in distant Gaul, mighty aqueducts and gushing fountains
refreshed the feverish traveler, and gave reality to the poetical
prophecy, that
“In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams
in the desert.”
_Roads._――I was at first disposed to make some few exceptions to
this sweeping commendation of the excellence of Roman roads, by
referring simply to my general impressions of the comparative
perfection of these and modern works of the same character;
but on revising the facts by an examination of authorities, I
have been led to strike out the exceptions. Napoleon’s great
road over the Simplon, the great northern road from London to
Edinburgh, and some similar works in Austria, seemed, before
comparison, in extent, durability, and in their triumphs over
nature, to equal, if not surpass, the famed Roman WAYS; but a
reference to the minute descriptions of these mighty works, sets
the ancient far above the modern art. The Via Appia, “_regina
viarum_,” (_Papinius Statius in Surrentino Pollii_,) stretching
three hundred and seventy miles from Rome to the bounds of Italy,
built of squared stone, as hard as flints, and brought from
a great distance, so laid together that for miles they seemed
but a single stone, and so solidly fixed, that at this day, the
road is as entire in many places as when first made,――the Via
Flaminia, built in the same solid manner,――the Via Aemilia, five
hundred and twenty-seven miles long,――the Via Portuensis, with
its enormous double cause-way,――the vaulted roads of Puzzuoli
and Baiae, hewn half a league through the solid rock, and the
thousand remains of similar and contemporaneous works in various
parts of the world, where some are in use even to this day, as
far better than any modern highway,――all these are enough to
show the inquirer, that the commendation given to these works in
the text, is not over-wrought nor unmerited. The minute details
of the construction of these extraordinary works, with many
other interesting particulars, may be much more fully learned in
Rees’s Cyclopædia, Articles _Way_, _Via_, _Road_, _Appian_, &c.
_Aqueducts._――The common authorities on this subject, refer to
none of these mighty Roman works, except those around the city
of Rome itself. Those of Nismes and Metz, in Gaul, and that of
Segovia, in Spain, are sometimes mentioned; but the reader would
be led to suppose, that other portions of the Roman empire were
not blessed with these noble works. Rees’s Cyclopædia is very
full on this head, in respect to the aqueducts of the great
city itself, but conveys the impression that they were not known
in many distant parts of the empire. Montfaucon gives no more
satisfactory information on the subject. But a reference to
books of travels or topography, which describe the remains of
Roman art in its ancient provinces in Africa and Asia, will
at once give a vivid impression of the extent and frequency of
these works. Shaw’s travels in northern Africa, give accounts
of aqueducts, cisterns, fountains, and reservoirs, along through
all the ancient Roman dominions in that region. The Modern
Traveler (by Conder) will give abundant accounts of the remains
of these works, in this and various other countries alluded to
in the text; and some of them, still so perfect, as to serve the
common uses of the inhabitants to this day.
All these mighty influences, working for the peace and comfort of
mankind, and so favorable to the spread of religious knowledge, had
been further secured by the triumphant and firm establishment of
the throne of the Caesars. Under the fitful sway of the capricious
democracy of Rome, conquest had indeed steadily stretched east, west,
north and south, alike over barbarian and Greek, through the wilderness
and the city. A long line of illustrious consuls, such as Marcellus,
the Scipios, Aemilius, Marius, Sylla, Lucullus and Pompey, had, during
the last two centuries of the republic, added triumph to triumph, in
bright succession, thronging the streets of the seven-hilled city with
captive kings, and more than quadrupling her dominion. But while the
corruption of conquest was fast preparing the dissipated people to
make a willing exchange of their political privileges, for “bread and
amusements;” the enlightened portion of the citizens were getting tired
of the distracting and often bloody changes of popular favoritism, and
were ready to receive as a welcome deliverer, any man who could give
them a calm and rational despotism, in place of the remorseless and
ferocious tyranny of a brutal mob. In this turn of the world’s destiny,
there arose one, in all points equal to the task of sealing both
justice and peace to the vanquished nations, by wringing from the hands
of a haughty people, the same political power which they had caused
so many to give up to their unsparing gripe. He was one who, while,
to common eyes, he seemed devoting the flower of his youth and the
strength of his manhood to idleness and debauchery, was learning
such wisdom as could never have been learned in the lessons of the
sage,――wisdom in the characters, the capabilities, the corruption and
venality of his plebeian sovrans. And yet he was not one who scorned
the lessons of the learned, nor turned away from the records of others’
knowledge. In the schools of Rhodes, he sat a patient student of the
art and science of the orator, and searched deeply into the stored
treasures of Grecian philosophy. Resplendent in arms as in arts, he
devoted to swift and deserved destruction the pirates of the Aegean,
while yet only a raw student; and with the same energy and rapidity, in
Rome, attained the peaceful triumphs of the eloquence which had so long
been his study. The flight of years passed over him, alike victorious
in the factious strife of the capital, and in the deadly struggle
with the Celtic savages of North-western Europe. Ruling long-conquered
Spain in peace, and subjugating still barbarous Gaul, he showed
the same ascendent genius which made the greatest minds of Rome his
willing and despised tools, and crushed them when they at last dreamed
of independence or resistance. In the art military, supreme and
unconquered, whether met by the desperate savage of the forest or
desert, or by the veteran legions of republican Rome,――in the arts of
intrigue, more than a match for the subtlest deceivers of a jealous
democracy,――as an orator, winning the hearts and turning the thoughts
of those who were the hearers of Cicero,――as a writer, unmatched
even in that Ciceronian age, for strength and flowing ease, though
writing in a camp, amid the fatigues of a savage warfare,――in all the
accomplishments that adorn and soften, and in all the manly exercises
that ennoble and strengthen, alike complete,――in battle, in storm, on
the ocean and on land, in the collected fury of the charge, and the
sudden shock of the surprise, always dauntless and cool, showing a
courage never shaken, though so often tried,――to his friends kind and
generous,――to his vanquished foes, without exception, merciful and
forgiving,――beloved by the former, respected by the latter, and adored
by the people,――a scholar, an astronomer, a poet, a wit, a gallant,
an orator, a statesman, a warrior, a governor, a monarch,――his vast
and various attainments, so wonderful in that wonderful age, have
secured to him, from the great of his own and all following ages, the
undeniable name of THE MOST PERFECT CHARACTER OF ALL ANTIQUITY. Such
a man was CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR. He saved the people from themselves;
he freed them from their own tyranny, and ended forever, in Rome,
the power of the populace to meddle with the disposal of the great
interests of the consolidated nations of the empire. It was necessary
that it should be so. The empire was too vast for an ignorant and
stupid democracy to govern. The safety and comfort of the world
required a better rule; and never was any man, in the course of
Providence, more wonderfully prepared as the instrument of a mighty
work, than was Julius Caesar, as the founder of a power which was to
last till the fall of Rome. For the accomplishment of this wonderful
purpose, every one of his countless excellences seems to have done
something; and nothing less than he, could have thus achieved a task,
which prepared the way for the advance of a power, that was to outlast
his throne and the Eternal city. Under the controlling influence of
his genius, the world was so calmed, subjugated and arranged, that
the gates of all nations were opened for the peaceful entrance of the
preachers of the gospel. So solidly did he lay the foundation of his
dominion, that even his own murder, by the objects of his undeserved
clemency, made not the slightest change in the fate of Rome; for the
paltry intrigues and fights of a few years ended in placing the power,
which Caesar had won, in the hands of his heir and namesake, whose most
glorious triumphs were but straws on the mighty stream of events, which
Julius had set in motion.
_Caesar._――Those who are accustomed merely to the common cant
of many would-be philanthropists, about the destruction of
the liberties of Rome, and the bloody-minded atrocity of their
destroyer, will doubtless feel shocked at the favorable view
taken of his character, above. The truth is, there was no
liberty in Rome for Caesar to destroy; the question of political
freedom having been long before settled in the triumphant
ascendency of faction, the only choice was between one tyrant
and ten thousand. No one can question that Caesar was the fair
choice of the great mass of the people. They were always on
his side, in opposition to the aristocracy, who sought his ruin
because they considered him dangerous to their privileges, and
_their_ liberty (to tyrannize;) and their fears were grounded on
the very circumstance that the vast majority of the people were
for him. This was the condition of parties until Caesar’s death,
and long after, to the time of the final triumph of Octavius.
Not one of Caesar’s friends among the people ever became his
enemy, or considered him as having betrayed their affection by
his assumptions of power. Those who murdered him, and plunged
the world from a happy, universal peace, into the devastating
horrors of a wide spread and protracted civil war, were not
the patriotic avengers of an oppressed people; they were the
jealous supporters of a haughty aristocracy, who saw their
powers and dignity diminished, in being shared with vast numbers
of the lower orders, added to the senate by Caesar, whose steady
determination to humble them they saw in his refusal to pay
them homage by rising, when the hereditary aristocracy of Rome
took their seats in senate. It was to redeem the failing powers
of their privileged order, that these aristocratic assassins
murdered the man, whose mercy had triumphed over his prudence,
in sparing the forfeited lives of these hereditary, dangerous
foes of popular rights. Nor could they for a moment blind the
people to the nature and object of their action; for as soon as
the murder had been committed, the universal cry for justice,
which rose at once from the whole mass of the people, indignant
at the butchery of their friend, drove the gang of conspirators
from Rome and from Italy, which they were never permitted again
to enter. Those who thronged to the standards of the heir and
friend of Caesar, were the hosts of democracy, who never rested
till they had crushed and exterminated the miserable faction
of aristocrats, who had hoped to triumph over the mass of the
people, by the death of the people’s great friend. Now if the
people of Rome chose to give up their whole power, and the
disposal of their political affairs, into the hands of a great,
a talented, a generous and heroic man, like Caesar, who had so
effectually vindicated and secured their freedom against the
claims of a domineering aristocracy, and if they afterwards
remained so well satisfied with the use which he made of
this power, as never to make the slightest effort, nor on any
occasion to express the least wish, to resume it, I would like
to know who had any business to hinder the sovran people from so
doing, or what blame can in any way be laid to Caesar’s charge,
for accepting, and for nobly and generously using the power so
freely and heartily given up to him.
The protracted detail of his mental and physical greatness,
given in the sketch of his character above, would need for its
full defense and illustration, the mention of such numerous
particulars, that I must be content with challenging any doubter,
to a reference to the record of the actions of his life, and
such a reference will abundantly confirm every particular of the
description. The steady and unanimous decision of the learned
and the truly great of different ages, since his time, is enough
to show his solid claims to the highest praise here given.
Passing over the glory so uniformly yielded to him by the
learned and eloquent of ancient days, we have among moderns the
disinterested opinions of such men as the immortal Lord Verulam,
from whom came the sentence given above, pronouncing him “the
most perfect character of all antiquity;” a sentiment which,
probably, no man of minute historical knowledge ever read,
without a hearty acquiescence. This opinion has been quoted with
approbation by our own greatest statesman, Alexander Hamilton,
than whom none knew better how to appreciate real greatness.
Lord Byron (Note 47 on Canto IV. of Childe Harold,) also quotes
this sentence approvingly, and in the same passage gives a
most interesting view of Caesar’s versatile genius and varied
accomplishments, entering more fully into some particulars than
that here given. The sentence of the Roman historian, Suetonius,
(_Jure_ caesus existimetur,) seems to me to refer, not to
the moral fitness or actual _right_ of his murder, but to
the common law or ancient usage of Rome, by which any person
of great influence, who was considered powerful enough to be
dangerous to the ascendency of the patrician rank, or to the
established order of things in any way, might be killed by
any self-constituted executioner, even though the person thus
murdered on bare suspicion of a liability to become dangerous,
should really be innocent of the charge of aspiring to supreme
power. (“Melium _jure_ caesum pronuntiavit, _etiam si regni
crimine insons fuerit_.” Livy book iv. chapter 48.) The idea,
that such an abominable outrage on the claim of an innocent man
to his own life, could ever be seriously defended as morally
_right_, is too palpably preposterous to bear a consideration.
Such a principle of policy must have originated in a
republicanism, somewhat similar to that which sanctions those
exertions of democratic power, which have lately become famous
under the name of Lynch law. It was a principle which in Rome
enabled the patrician order to secure the destruction of any
popular man of genius and intelligence, who, being able, might
become willing to effect a revolution which would humble the
power of the patrician aristocracy. The murder of the Gracchi,
also, may be taken as a fair manifestation of the way in which
the aristocracy were disposed to check the spirit of reform.
The work of Caesar, then, was twofold, like the tyranny which
he was to subvert; and well did he achieve both objects of his
mighty efforts. Having first brought down the pride and the
power of an overbearing aristocracy, he next, by the force
of the same dominant genius, wrested the ill-wielded dominion
from the unsteady hands of the fickle democracy, making
them willingly subservient to the great purpose of their own
subjugation, and acquiescent in the generous sway of one, whom
a sort of political instinct taught them to fix on, as the man
destined to rule them.
Thus were the complicated and contradictory principles of Roman
government exchanged for the simplicity of monarchical rule;
an exchange most desirable for the peace and security of the
subjects of the government. The empire was no longer shaken
with the constant vacillations of supremacy from the aristocracy
to the democracy, and from the democracy to the demagogues,
alternately their tyrants and their slaves. The solitary tyranny
of an emperor was occasionally found terrible in some of its
details, but the worst of these could never outgo the republican
cruelties of Marius and Sylla, and there was, at least, this one
advantage on the side of those suffering under the monarchical
tyranny, which would not be available in the case of the victims
of mob-despotism. This was the ease with which a single stroke
with a well-aimed dagger could remove the evil at once, and
secure some chance of a change for the better, as was the case
with Caligula, Nero, and Domitian; and though the advantages of
the change were much more manifest in the two latter cases than
in the former, yet, even in that, the relief experienced was
worth the effort. But a whole tyrannical populace could not be
so easily and summarily disposed of; and those who suffered by
such despotism, could only wait till the horrible butcheries of
civil strife, or the wasting carnage of foreign warfare, had
used up the energies and the superfluous blood of the populace,
and swept the flower of the democracy, by legions, to a wide and
quiet grave. The remedy of the evil was therefore much slower,
and more undesirable in its operation, in this case, than in the
other; while the evil itself was actually more widely injurious.
For, on the one hand, what imperial tyrant ever sacrificed so
many victims in Rome, or produced such wide-wasting ruin, as
either of those republican chiefs, Marius and Sylla? And on the
other hand, when, in the most glorious and peaceful days of the
aristocratic or democratic sway, did military glory, literature,
science, art, commerce, and the whole common weal, so flourish
and advance, as under the imperial Augustus, the sage Vespasian
and the amiable Titus, the heroic Trajan, the polished Adrian,
or the wise and philosophic Antonines? Never did Rome wear
the aspect of a truly majestic city, till the imperial pride
of her long line of Caesars had filled her with the temples,
amphitheaters, circuses, aqueducts, baths, triumphal columns
and arches, which to this day perpetuate the solid glory of the
founders, and make her the wonder of the world, while not one
surviving great work of art claims a republican for its author.
To such a glory did the Caesars raise her, and from such a
splendor did she fade, as now.
“Such is the moral of all human tales;
’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,――
First freedom, and then glory――when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption,――barbarism at last,
And history, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page.”
An allusion to such a man, in such a book as this, could not be
justified, but on this satisfactory ground;――that the changes which he
wrought in the Roman government, and the conquests by which he spread
and secured the influence of Roman civilization, seem to have done
more than any other political action could do, to effect the general
diffusion, and the perpetuity of the Christian faith. A glance at these
great events, in this light, will show to us the first imperial Caesar,
as Christ’s most mighty precursor, unwittingly preparing the way for
the advance of the Messiah,――a bloody and all-crushing warrior, opening
the path for the equally resistless triumphs of the Prince of Peace.
Even this striking characteristic, of cool and unscrupulous ambition,
became a most glorious means for the production of this strange result.
This same moral obtuseness, too, about the right of conquest, so
heinous in the light of modern ethics, but so blameless, and even
praise-worthy in the eyes of the good and great of Caesar’s days,
shows us how low was the world’s standard of right before the coming
of Christ; and yet this insensibility became, in the hands of the God
who causes the wrath of man to praise him, a doubly powerful means of
spreading that faith, whose essence is love to man.
Look over the world, then, as it was before the Roman conquest, and see
the difficulties, both physical and moral, that would have attended the
universal diffusion of a new and peaceful religious faith. Barbarous
nations, all over the three continents, warring with each other,
and with the failing outworks of civilization,――besotted tyranny,
wearing out the energies of its subjects, by selfish and all-grasping
folly,――sea and land swarming with marauders, and every wheel of
science and commerce rolling backward or breaking down. Such was the
seemingly resistless course of events, when the star of Roman fortune
rose on the world, under whose influence, at once destructive and
benign, the advancing hosts of barbarity were checked and overthrown,
and their triumphs stayed for five hundred years; the elegance of
Grecian refinement was transplanted from the unworthy land of its birth,
to Italian soil, and the most ancient tracks of commerce, as well as
many new ones, were made as safe as they are at this peaceful day.
The mighty Caesar, last of all, casting down all thrones but his, and
laying the deep basis of its lasting dominion in the solid good of
millions, filled up the valleys, leveled the mountains, and smoothed
the plains, for the march of that monarch, whose kingdom is without end.
The connection of such a political change with the success of the
Christian enterprise, and with the perfect development and triumph
of our peaceful faith, depends on the simple truth, that Christianity
always flourishes best in the most highly civilized communities, and
can never be so developed as to do full justice to its capabilities,
in any state of society, short of the highest point of civilization.
It never has been received, and held uncorrupt, by mere savages
or wanderers; and it never can be. Thus and therefore it was, that
wherever Roman conquest spread, and secured the lasting triumphs of
civilization, thither Christianity followed, and flourished, as on a
congenial soil, till at last not one land was left in the whole empire,
where the eagle and the dove did not spread their wings in harmonious
triumph. In all these lands, where Roman civilization prepared the way,
Christian churches rose, and gathered within them the noble and the
refined, as well as the humble and the poor. Spain, Gaul, Britain and
Africa, as well as the ancient homes of knowledge, Egypt, Greece and
Asia, are instances of this kind. And in every one of these, the reign
of the true faith became coeval with civilization, yielding in some
instances, it is true, on the advance of modern barbarism, but only
when the Arabian prophet made them bow before his sword. Yet while
within the pale of Roman conquest, Christianity supplanted polytheism,
beyond that wide circle, heathenism remained long undisturbed, till
the victorious march of the barbarian conquerors, over the empire of
the Caesars, secured the extension of the gospel to them also;――the
vanquished, in one sense, triumphing in turn over the victors, by
making them the submissive subjects of Roman civilization, language,
and religion;――so that, for the first five hundred years of the
Christian era, the dominion of the Caesars was the most efficient
earthly instrument for the extension of the faith. The persecution
which the followers of the new faith occasionally suffered, were the
results of aberrations from the general principles of tolerance, which
characterized the religious policy of the empire; and after a few such
acts of insane cruelty, the natural course of reaction brought the
persecuted religion into fast increasing and finally universal favor.
If the religion, thus widely and lastingly diffused, was corrupted from
the simplicity of the truth as it was in Jesus, this corruption is to
be charged, not against the Romans, but against the unworthy successors
of the apostles and ancient fathers, who sought to make the severe
beauty of the naked truth more acceptable to the heathenish fancies
of the people, by robing it in the borrowed finery of mythology. Yet,
though thus humiliated in its triumph, the victory of Christianity over
that complex and dazzling religion, was most complete. The faith to
which Italians and Greeks had been devoted for ages,――which had drawn
its first and noblest principles from the mysterious sources of the
antique Etruscan, Egyptian and Phoenician, and had enriched its dark
and boundless plan with all that the varied superstitions of every
conquered people could furnish,――the faith which had rooted itself so
deeply in the poetry, the patriotism, and the language of the Roman,
and had so twined itself with every scene of his nation’s glory,
from the days of Romulus,――now gave way before the simple word of
the carpenter of Nazareth, and was so torn up and swept away from its
strong holds, that the very places which through twenty generations its
triumphs had hallowed, were now turned into shrines for the worship of
the God of despised Judah. So utterly was the Olympian Jove unseated,
and cast down from his long-dreaded throne, that his name passed away
forever from the worship of mankind, and has never been recalled, but
with contempt. He, and all his motley train of gods and goddesses,
are remembered no more with reverence, but vanishing from even the
knowledge of the mass of the people, are
“Gone glimmering through the dream of things that were,”――
“A school-boy’s tale.”
Every ancient device for the perpetuation of the long established faith,
disappeared in the advancing light of the gospel. Temples, statues,
oracles, festivals, and all the solemn paraphernalia of superstition,
were swept to oblivion, or, changing their names only, were made the
instruments of recommending the new faith to the eyes of the common
people. But, however the pliant spirit of the degenerate successors of
the early fathers might bend to the vulgar superstitions of the day,
the establishment of the Christian religion, upon the ruins of Roman
heathenism, was effected with a completeness that left not a name to
live behind them, nor the vestige of a form, to keep alive in the minds
of the people, the memory of the ancient religion. The words applied
by our great poet to the time of Christ’s birth, have something more
than poetical force, as a description of the absolute extermination of
these superstitions, both public and domestic, on the final triumph of
Christianity:
“The oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Rolls through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.”
* * * * *
“In consecrated earth
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;
In urns and altars round,
A drear and dying sound,
Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.”
Thus were the mighty labors of human ambition made subservient to
the still greater achievements of divine benevolence; thus did the
unholy triumphs of the hosts of heathenism become, in the hands of
the All-wise, the surest means of spreading the holy and peace-making
truths of Christianity, to the ends of the earth,――otherwise
unapproachable without a miracle. The dominion which thus grew upon
and over the vast empire of Rome, though growing with her growth and
strengthening with her strength, sunk not with her weakness, but,
stretching abroad fresh branches, whose leaves were for the healing
of nations then unknown, showed its divine origin by its immortality;
while, alas! its human modifications betrayed themselves in its
diminished grace and ill-preserved symmetry. Yet in spite of these,
rather than by means of them, it rose still mightier above the ruins of
the empire, under whose shadow it had grown, till, at last, supplanting
Roman and Goth alike, it fixed its roots on the seven hills of the
Eternal city; where, thenceforth, for hundreds of years, the head of
Christendom, ruling with a power more absolute than her imperial sway,
saw more than the Roman world beneath him. Even to this day, vast and
countless “regions, Caesar never knew,” own him of Rome as “the center
of unity;” and lands
“farther west
Than the Greek’s islands of the blest,”
and farther east than the long unpassed bounds of Roman conquest, turn,
with an adoration and awe immeasurably greater than the most exalted of
the apotheosized Caesars ever received, to him who claims the name of
the successor of the poor fisherman of Galilee.
* * * * *
Such, and so vast, was the revolution, to the achievement of which,
the lives and deeds of the apostles most essentially contributed,――a
revolution which, even if looked on as the result of mere human effort,
must appear the most wonderful ever effected by such humble human means,
as these narratives will show to have been used. The character of the
men first chosen by the founder of the faith, as the instruments of
spreading the lasting conquests of his gospel,――their birth, their
country, their provincial peculiarities,――all marked them as most
unlikely persons to undertake the overthrow of the religious prejudices
even of their own countrymen; and still less groundless must have been
the hope that any of Jewish race, however well taught in the wisdom of
the world, could so far overcome the universal feeling of dislike, with
which this peculiar nation were regarded, as to bring the learned, the
powerful and the great of Rome and Greece, and of Eastern lands, to
own a low-born Galilean workman as their guide to truth,――the author
of their hopes of life eternal. Yet went they forth even to this task,
whose achievement was so far beyond the range of human hopes; and with
a zeal as far above the inspiration of human ambition, they gave their
energies and their lives to this desperate commission. Without a hope
of an earthly triumph or an earthly reward,――without even a prospect
of a peaceful death or an honored grave, while they lived, they spent
their strength fearlessly for him who SENT them forth; and when they
died, their last breath went out in triumph at the near prospect of
their lasting gain.
In giving the lives of these men, many incidents will require notice,
in which no individual apostle was concerned alone, but the whole
company to which he belonged. In each class of the apostles, these
incidents will be given under the head of the principal person in that
class, whose life is placed before the rest. Thus, those matters in
which all the twelve had a common interest, and in which no particular
apostle is named, will find a place in the life of Peter, their great
leader; and among the later apostles, the distinct pre-eminence of Paul
will, of course, cause all matters of common interest to be absorbed
in his life, while of his companions nothing farther need be recorded,
than those things which immediately concern them.