CHRISTIANITY IN SICCA.
The revellers went on their way; Agellius went on his, and made for his
lowly and lonely cottage. He was the elder of the two sons of a Roman
legionary of the Secunda Italica, who had settled with them in Sicca,
where he lost their mother, and died, having in his old age become a
Christian. The fortitude of some confessors at Carthage in the persecution
of Severus had been the initial cause of his conversion. He had been
posted as one of their guards, and had attended them to the scene of their
martyrdom, in addition to the civil force, to whom in the proconsulate the
administration of the law was committed. Therefore, happily for him, it
could not fall to his duty to be their executioner, a function which,
however revolting to his feelings, he might not have had courage to
decline. He remained a pagan, though he could not shake off the impression
which the martyrs had made upon him; and, after completing his time of
service, he retired to the protection of some great friends in Sicca, his
brother’s home already. Here he took a second wife of the old Numidian
stock, and supported himself by the produce of a small piece of land which
had been given to him for life by the imperial government. If trial were
necessary in order to keep alive the good seed which had been sown in his
heart, he found a never-failing supply of that article in the companion of
his declining years. In the hey-day of her youth she might have been
fitted to throw a sort of sunshine, or rather torchlight, on a military
carouse; but now, when poor Strabo, a man well to do in the world, looking
for peace, had fallen under her arts, he found he had surrendered his
freedom to a malignant, profligate woman, whose passions made her better
company for evil spirits than for an invalided soldier. Indeed, as time
went on, the popular belief, which she rather encouraged, went to the
extent that she actually did hold an intercourse with the unseen world;
and certainly she matured in a hatred towards God and man, which would
naturally follow, and not unnaturally betoken, such intercourse. The more,
then, she inflicted on him her proficiency in these amiable
characteristics, the more he looked out for some consolation elsewhere;
and the more she involved herself in the guilt or the repute of unlawful
arts, the more was he drawn to that religion, where alone to commune with
the invisible is to hold intercourse with heaven, not with hell. Whether
so great a trial supplied a more human inducement for looking towards
Christianity, it is impossible to say. Most men, certainly Roman soldiers,
may be considered to act on mixed motives; but so it was in fact, that, on
his becoming in his last years a Christian, he found, perhaps discovered,
to his great satisfaction, that the Church did not oblige him to continue
or renew a tie which bound him to so much misery, and that he might end
his days in a tranquillity which his past life required, and his wife’s
presence would have precluded. He made a good end; he had been allowed to
take the blessed sacrament from the altar to his own home on the last time
he had been able to attend a _synaxis_ of the faithful, and thus had
communicated at least six months within his decease; and the priest who
anointed him at the beginning of his last illness also took his
confession. He died, begging forgiveness of all whom he had injured, and
giving large alms to the poor. This was about the year 236, in the midst
of that long peace of the Church, which was broken at length by the Decian
persecution.
This peace of well-nigh fifty years had necessarily a peculiar, and not a
happy effect upon the Christians of the proconsulate. They multiplied in
the greater and the maritime cities, and made their way into positions of
importance, whether in trade or the governmental departments; they
extended their family connections, and were on good terms with the
heathen. Whatever jealousy might be still cherished against the Christian
name, nevertheless, individual Christians were treated with civility, and
recognised as citizens; though among the populace there would be
occasions, at the time of the more solemn pagan feasts, when accidental
outbursts might be expected of the antipathy latent in the community, as
we have been recording in the foregoing chapter. Men of sense, however,
began to understand them better, and to be more just to the reasonableness
of their faith. This would lead them to scorn Christianity less, but it
would lead them to fear it more. It was no longer a matter merely for the
populace to insult, but for government deliberately to put down. The
prevailing and still growing unbelief among the lower classes of the
population did but make a religion more formidable, which, as heathen
statesmen felt, was able to wield the weapons of enthusiasm and zeal with
a force and success unknown even to the most fortunate impostors among the
Oriental or Egyptian hierophants. The philosophical schools were impressed
with similar apprehensions, and had now for fifty years been employed in
creating and systematising a new intellectual basis for the received
paganism.
But, while the signs of the times led to the anticipation that a struggle
was impending between the heads of the state religion and of the new
worship which was taking its place, the great body of Christians, laymen
and ecclesiastics, were on better and better terms, individually, with the
members of society, or what is now called the public; and without losing
their faith or those embers of charity which favourable circumstances
would promptly rekindle, were, it must be confessed, in a state of
considerable relaxation; they often were on the brink of deplorable sins,
and sometimes fell over the brink. And many would join the Church on
inferior motives as soon as no great temporal disadvantage attached to the
act; or the families of Christian parents might grow up with so little of
moral or religious education as to make it difficult to say why they
called themselves members of a divine religion. Mixed marriages would
increase both the scandal and the confusion.
“A long repose,” says St. Cyprian, speaking of this very period, “had
corrupted the discipline which had come down to us. Every one was applying
himself to the increase of wealth; and, forgetting both the conduct of the
faithful under the Apostles, and what ought to be their conduct in every
age, with insatiable eagerness for gain devoted himself to the multiplying
of possessions. The priests were wanting in religious devotedness, the
ministers in entireness of faith; there was no mercy in works, no
discipline in manners. Men wore their beards disfigured, and woman dyed
their faces. Their eyes were changed from what God made them, and a lying
colour was passed upon the hair. The hearts of the simple were misled by
treacherous artifices, and brethren became entangled in seductive snares.
Ties of marriage were formed with unbelievers; members of Christ abandoned
to the heathen. Not only rash swearing was heard, but even false; persons
in high place were swollen with contemptuousness; poisoned reproaches fell
from their mouths, and men were sundered by unabating quarrels. Numerous
bishops, who ought to be an encouragement and example to others, despising
their sacred calling, engaged themselves in secular vocations,
relinquished their sees, deserted their people, strayed among foreign
provinces, hunted the markets for mercantile profits, and tried to amass
large sums of money, while they had brethren starving within the Church;
took possession of estates by fraudulent proceedings, and multiplied their
gains by accumulated usuries.”(1)
The relaxation which would extend the profession of Christianity in the
larger cities would contract or extinguish it in remote or country places.
There would be little zeal to keep up Churches, which could not be served
without an effort or without secular loss. Carthage, Utica, Hippo,
Milevis, or Curubis, was a more attractive residence than the towns with
uncouth African names, which amaze the ecclesiastical student in the Acts
of the Councils. Vocations became scarce; sees remained vacant;
congregations died out. This was pretty much the case with the Church and
see of Sicca. At the time of which we write, history preserves no record
of any bishop as exercising his pastoral functions in that city. In matter
of fact there was none. The last bishop, an amiable old man, had in the
course of years acquired a considerable extent of arable land, and
employed himself principally, for lack of more spiritual occupation, in
reaping, stacking, selling, and sending off his wheat for the Roman
market. His deacon had been celebrated in early youth for his boldness in
the chase, and took part in the capture of lions and panthers (an act of
charity towards the peasants round Sicca) for the Roman amphitheatre. No
priests were to be found, and the bishop became _parochus_ till his death.
Afterwards infants and catechumens lost baptism; parents lost faith, or at
least love; wanderers lost repentance and conversion. For a while there
was a flourishing meeting-house of Tertullianists, who had scared more
humble minds by pronouncing the eternal perdition of every Catholic; there
had also been various descriptions of Gnostics, who had carried off the
clever youths and restless speculators; and then there had been the lapse
of time, gradually consuming the generation which had survived the
flourishing old days of the African Church. And the result was, that in
the year 250 it was difficult to say of whom the Church of Sicca
consisted. There was no bishop, no priest, no deacon. There was the old
_mansionarius_ or sacristan; there were two or three pious women, married
or single, who owed their religion to good mothers; there were some slaves
who kept to their faith, no one knew how or why; there were a vast many
persons who ought to be Catholics, but were heretics, or nothing at all,
or all but pagans, and sure to become pagans on the asking; there were
Agellius and his brother Juba, and how far these two had a claim to the
Christian name we now proceed to explain.
They were about the ages of seven and eight when their father died, and
they fell under the guardianship of their uncle, whose residence at Sicca
had been one of the reasons which determined Strabo to settle there. This
man, being possessed of some capital, drove a thriving trade in idols,
large and small, amulets, and the like instruments of the established
superstition. His father had come to Carthage in the service of one of the
assessors of the proconsul of the day; and his son, finding competition
ran too high to give him prospect of remuneration in the metropolis, had
opened his statue-shop in Sicca. Those modern arts which enable an English
town in this day to be so fertile in the production of ware of this
description for the markets of the pagan East, were then unknown; and
Jucundus depended on certain artists whom he imported, especially on two
Greeks, brother and sister, who came from some isle on the Asian coast,
for the supply of his trade. He was a good-natured man, self-indulgent,
positive, and warmly attached to the reigning paganism, both as being the
law of the land and the vital principle of the state; and, while he was
really kind to his orphan nephews, he simply abominated, as in duty bound,
the idiotic cant and impudent fee-fa-fum, to which, in his infallible
judgment, poor old Strabo had betrayed his children. He would have
restored them, you may be quite sure, to their country and to their
country’s gods, had they acquiesced in the restoration: but in different
ways these little chaps, and he shook his head as he said it, were
difficult to deal with. Agellius had a very positive opinion of his own on
the matter; and as for Juba, though he had no opinion at all, yet he had
an equally positive aversion to have thrust on him by another any opinion
at all, even in favour of paganism. He had remained in his catechumen
state since he grew up, because he found himself in it; and though nothing
would make him go forward in his profession of Christianity, no earthly
power would be able to make him go back. So there he was, like a mule,
struck fast in the door of the Church, and feeling a gratification in his
independence of mind. However, whatever his profession might be, still, as
time went on, he plainly took after his step-mother, renewed his
intercourse with her after his father’s death, and at length went so far
as to avow that he believed in nothing but the devil, if even he believed
in him. It was scarcely safe, however, to affirm that the senses of this
hopeful lad were his own.
Agellius, on the other hand, when a boy of six years old, had insisted on
receiving baptism; had perplexed his father by a manifestation of zeal to
which the old man was a stranger; and had made the good bishop lose the
corn-fleet which was starting for Italy from his importunity to learn the
Catechism. Baptized he was, confirmed, communicated; but a boy’s nature is
variable, and by the time Agellius had reached adolescence, the gracious
impulses of his childhood had in some measure faded away, though he still
retained his faith in its first keenness and vigour. But he had no one to
keep him up to his duty; no exhortations, no example, no sympathy. His
father’s friends had taken him up so far as this, that by an extraordinary
favour they had got him a lease for some years of the property which
Strabo, a veteran soldier, had held of the imperial government. The care
of this small property fell upon him, and another and more serious charge
was added to it. The long prosperity of the province had increased the
opulence and enlarged the upper class of Sicca. Officials, contractors,
and servants of the government had made fortunes, and raised villas in the
neighbourhood of the city. Natives of the place, returning from Rome, or
from provincial service elsewhere, had invested their gains in long leases
of state lands, or of the farms belonging to the imperial _res privata_ or
privy purse, and had become virtual proprietors of the rich fields or
beautiful gardens in which they had played as children. One of such
persons, who had had a place in the _officium_ of the quæstor, or rather
procurator, as he began to be called, was the employer of Agellius. His
property adjoined the cottage of the latter; and, having first employed
the youth from recollection of his father, he confided to him the place of
under-bailiff from the talents he showed for farm-business.
Such was his position at the early age of twenty-two; but honourable as it
was in itself, and from the mode in which it was obtained, no one would
consider it adapted, under the circumstances, to counteract the religious
languor and coldness which had grown upon him. And in truth he did not
know where he stood further than that he was firm in faith, as we have
said, and had shrunk from a boy upwards, from the vice and immorality
which was the very atmosphere of Sicca. He might any day be betrayed into
some fatal inconsistency, which would either lead him into sin, or oblige
him abruptly to retrace his steps, and find a truer and safer position. He
was not generally known to be a Christian, at least for certain, though he
was seen to keep clear of the established religion. It was not that he
hid, so much as that the world did not care to know, what he believed. In
that day there were many rites and worships which kept to themselves—many
forms of moroseness or misanthropy, as they were considered, which
withdrew their votaries from the public ceremonial. The Catholic faith
seemed to the multitude to be one of these; it was only in critical times,
when some idolatrous act was insisted on by the magistrate, that the
specific nature of Christianity was tested and detected. Then at length it
was seen to differ from all other religious varieties by that irrational
and disgusting obstinacy, as it was felt to be, which had rather suffer
torments and lose life than submit to some graceful, or touching, or at
least trifling observance which the tradition of ages had sanctioned.