THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO
CONSTANTINE.
_The Church's Battle for Independence over against the Roman Empire._
In the period before Christ, the two Powers, as well in every polity over
the earth as in the vast conglomerate called the Roman Empire, beginning
together, grew up in fast alliance. Such a thing as the Civil Power in
any particular polity putting under ban and persecuting the religion of
its people was unknown. In the Roman city, as originally constituted, the
union with religion, as an everyday work of life, was especially intimate
and strong. It subsisted no less when Rome ruled from Newcastle to
Babylon; for under the supremacy of the Emperor as Pontifex Maximus all
the various nations were allowed the free exercise of their ancestral
rites. Such was the state of the relation between the two Powers at the
Day of Pentecost; such it had been from the first creation of human
society. A foreign conqueror might, it is true, persecute the gods and
the priests of a nation which he conquered, as Cambyses, when, with the
zeal of a Persian worshipper of the single Sun-god, he burst upon the
gods of Egypt; but this state of things usually passed away, when
conquest became settled into possession; and in the Roman Peace each
country and city was in stable possession of its gods, its rites, its
temples, and among the rest the Jew might everywhere have his synagogue
for his own people and worship God.
Close and permanent as the alliance between the two powers of civil
government and religious worship, founded in the original constitution of
human things, had been up to the time of Christ, yet in the minds of the
people the two functions of civil government and of worship had ever been
distinct. It is true that in matter of practice the ever growing moral
corruption of Gentilism had tended to subordinate worship to government,
the priest to the ruler. Nevertheless, though the Emperor was Imperator
to his army, the possessor of tribunitial and consular power in the
State, and likewise Pontifex Maximus in religion, such a concentration of
distinct powers in his single person did not efface in the minds of the
many peoples subjected to his sway the distinction itself of the powers
wielded by him. A vast number of various priesthoods subsisted in the
different countries untouched and unmeddled with by him. He was, in fact,
by virtue of his religious pontificate, annexed to his civil principate,
the conservator of all these rites, religious customs, and priesthoods.
The meddling with them was a violation of his pontificate. Anubis in
Egypt, Astarte in Syria, Cybele in Phrygia, Minerva at Athens, no less
than Jupiter on the capitol, found their defender and guardian on the
Palatine Mount, while Augustus did not disdain to have a daily sacrifice
offered for him in the temple at Jerusalem, for the Jewish worship was
part of the Roman constitution. He was patron as well as suppliant.
Thus at the time the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles on the Day of
Pentecost there was strict alliance in all the provinces of the
world-empire between secular rule and religious worship; an alliance in
which worship was, it is true, subordinate to secular rule, but fostered
and guarded by it. The eye of a Trajan would, no doubt, discern a common
element in all the religions of which he was the official guardian, and
it was even for the security of the immortal gods at Rome that Anubis
should bark in Egypt, though he would not be allowed with impunity to
deceive the matrons of Rome,[182] and that Astarte, under the public
authority, should have trains of female priestesses in Syria. The fixed
idea of the Roman Emperors might be said to have been to keep these
party-coloured provinces, with their ancestral gods and rites, in due and
legitimate enjoyment of their own property, without encroaching on that
of their neighbours. And Marcus Aurelius was not deterred by his
philosophic pantheism from offering multitudes of white oxen for the
success of the Roman arms, but he sanctioned the perpetration of the most
fearful tortures upon Christian confessors in the arena of Lyons, and
imputed their patience of death to a sort of Galilean obstinacy. Why did
he, who sacrificed to Jupiter, while he was an outspoken Positivist,
persecute belief in Christ?
Let us endeavour to give a distinct and adequate answer to this question.
The subsisting alliance between civil authority and religious worship,
which existed in the Roman world, whatever the particular gods
worshipped, and rites and customs practised in the various countries
composing it might be, was interrupted and snapped asunder by the
proclamation of the Gospel as an universal religion. It is true that in
the first twelve years, while the Apostles addressed themselves to the
Jewish people, wherever they might be, inviting them to accept Jesus as
the Christ, the liberty to do this, within the various synagogues, might
be covered by the liberty accorded to the Jewish race everywhere on Roman
soil to practise their own religion as a thing handed down to them from
their ancestors. So long as it was a question of Jewish law--in the words
of the Roman proprætor, the brother of Seneca, at Corinth--the protection
of an undoubtedly sanctioned religion, to use the phrase of Tertullian,
would veil from censure the action of the Apostles; but as soon as, and
in proportion as the kingdom of Christ came forth to the Gentiles as an
universal religion--so soon as Christ was declared to them to be the Son
of God, the Saviour of the world--so soon as men were distinguished as
Christians, as they were already at Antioch, that is, recognised to be
not a Jewish sect, but the adherents of a substantive religion with
distinct belief, which was repudiated by the mass of Jews, a religion of
universal import, which was founded on the Person of a Redeemer, the
God-man who had come into the world, lived as a man, died, and risen
again, and who called upon all men to be His followers, whether Jews or
Gentiles, it became evident that the toleration, nay more, the support
and guarantee for all religions which were subsisting equally for the
various peoples of the Roman Empire, did not apply to the followers of
the new religion. St. Paul, for instance, as a ringleader of the Galilean
sect, was punishable and was punished by the Jewish Sanhedrim, as
infringing what they considered the orthodox Jewish belief, and this
conduct of the Jewish authority, everywhere pursued towards the
Christians, drew upon them the attention of the Roman magistrates. The
culmination of this conduct and policy was seen as to its result in the
persecution set on foot by Nero, under Jewish instigation, and the act of
Nero seems to have had the permanent effect of establishing the
illicitness of the Christian faith, in the sight of Roman law. The
destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, as the seat of Jewish worship,
completely established the severance of the Christian people from the
Jews, and gave them religious independence with all its honour and all
its perils.
For what was their position towards that universal heathendom which
surrounded them on all sides?
Take the three great constituents of belief, of worship, and of
government, which we been have considering in their several departments,
in their relations with each other, and in their co-inherence.
Heathendom, under the sway of Tiberius, lay stretched out over the vast
regions of the empire in numberless varieties of costume which covered an
identity of substance. The dark mysterious forms of Egyptian gods, the
gods of Greece arrayed in human shapes of consummate loveliness, the
voluptuous rites of Syrian goddesses, the sober and homely deities of
ancient Rome vested somewhat awkwardly in the robes of their Grecian
congeners, the local deities, mountain oreads and river naiads, which had
their seat in every city and district of civilised or semi-barbarous
provinces, the representatives of oriental traditions, philosophies, and
religions,--all these had part in a worship offered by some or other
subjects of Rome. And now went forth from city to city preachers who
proclaimed to all who would hear them that there was one God alone who
had made out of nothing, by an act of the purest free-will, the heavens
and the earth, and that He made also of one blood the human inhabitants
of this earth. And they declared that this one God was not only the
Creator of all matter and of all spirit, of all men in all nations, but
that in order to redeem them from a terrible slavery into which they had
fallen, He had sent His own Son, one in nature with Himself, in human
form among them, to die the death of a malefactor upon the cross, which
was the legal punishment of the slave in the Roman law for capital
crimes; nor only to die, but by rising again in the same body in which He
had died, to attest the truth of His mission, and to gather all men
together, the freeman and the slave, the Roman conqueror and the most
abject of his serfs, in one religious community. Thus the same one God
who was Creator, was proclaimed to be Redeemer. And, further, the name of
this God, communicated in the very rite which admitted into membership
with the religion, disclosed a third Divine Person, whose work was
pre-eminently a work belonging to the one God alone, for it was to
sanctify, by His presence in their hearts, all its members.
Thus these preachers proclaimed, as the basis of all they taught to their
hearers, belief in a God who was One[183] and who was Three; who was
single and alone, but outside the conception of number, and who was at
once Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier altogether.
And they proclaimed this to peoples who had every conceivable variety of
gods, male and female, to whom various functions, down to the lowest
employments in the service of mankind, were assigned, according to the
caprice or the inherited traditions of their worshippers.
What was the position of these preachers towards the various deities and
their worshippers who occupied the Roman empire? It is obvious that it
was one of an absolute uncompromising hostility. And it is plain that, on
the other side, all who did not closely and impartially examine their
doctrine, would count them to be "godless," and treat them accordingly.
This, the barest outline of the primary and fundamental belief as to the
all-important being of God, on which all further development of teaching
rested, is sufficient to exhibit the intense opposition between
Christianity and that which it was attempting to displace in the matter
of belief.
But belief becomes concrete and actual in worship. What was the worship
offered by the nations of the Roman empire to their various gods? From
end to end this vast region was covered with magnificent temples, rich
with the offerings of successive generations, wherein day by day and
often many times a day sacrifices of living animals were offered by
priests appointed to that end. I only refer here to this rite of
sacrifice, because I have dwelt sufficiently upon it in a former place.
The varieties of the worship accompanying it were great, but the
substance of the rite identical; the number and names and offices of the
deities to whom it was offered were bewildering.[184] The customs and
traditions which encircled these various temples and the rites offered in
them struck their roots into the family, the social, and the political
life of the various peoples among which they stood.
What, as over against this "palpable array of sense," was the Christian
worship which the new teachers brought with them?
It was withdrawn into the innermost recess of the Christian society
itself. For many generations they had not public churches, but were
reduced to meet in secret. And those who shared the Christian membership
received, in assemblies held in the silence of the early morning, under
cover of some private house, a victim which they adored as the very Body
and Blood of the God who for their sakes had become incarnate, for their
sakes also had suffered His Body to be broken, and His Blood poured out.
Instead of the sacrifices of slain animals, whose blood was sprinkled
upon the worshippers, the Christian received the Immaculate Lamb of God,
offered upon a mystical altar, in commemoration of that one Sacrifice by
virtue of which he was a Christian.
If the contrast in belief between the one Christian God and the many gods
of heathendom was great, the contrast between heathen sacrifices and the
one Christian Sacrifice was at least as great--perhaps the more wonderful
in this, that while natural reason fought in every human breast for the
doctrine of the Divine Unity, no reason nor thought of man could ever
have imagined a Sacrifice at once so tremendous and so gracious as that
which the Christian worshipped, wherein the Victim which received his
homage contained and imparted his life.
But if the doctrine of the Divine Unity destroyed the heathen gods, and
so rendered its adherents liable to be called "godless" by their
worshippers, no less did the doctrine of the Christian Sacrifice, which
abolished at a stroke the whole worship of heathendom, create the keenest
antagonism; they who were without gods were said to be without altars;
they who never presented themselves at the heathen sacrifices were
accounted as outcasts and sacrilegious men who renounced all piety.
Yet complete and thorough as the antagonism drawn forth in these two
great points of belief and worship, perhaps the third constituent element
of the Christian society, its government, was even more calculated to
awaken the jealousy and excite the resentment, if not of the various
peoples which composed the empire, at least of the Roman rulers.
The priests who ministered in the multitudinous temples to the various
deities of the Roman world, were as various as the objects of their
worship. No common hierarchy held together the priests of Egyptian,
Asiatic, Hellenic, Roman gods, and all the intermediate gradations. But
far more than this, there was an absence of hierarchy in the particular
or national gods of each several country; the priest of Jupiter had
nothing to do with the priest of Apollo, the priest of Juno, and the
rest. The conception of many gods had introduced unnumbered weaknesses,
anomalies, and incongruities into the arrangements of their ministers.
When that which was worshipped was divided, the ministers of the several
parts became rivals, with this grand result, as it affected the civil
power, that it stood in one great mass of solid unity over against
different religions, varying in their objects, crossing each other,
contradicting each other. Thus it was that the original independence of
divine worship had been lost; no one of these various priesthoods could
maintain any real opposition to the civil ruler; no one of them
presented any body of concordant doctrine which man's mind could
approve, or his heart accept. That which ought to be most sacred among
men was by internal contradictions become weak and contemptible.
How, on the other hand, stood the case of the Christian society as to
government?
And here as for a long time the Christian altar lay concealed from the
sight of the heathen, and they knew not Him who was offered on it, so for
a long time the Christian ruler was withdrawn from recognition. They did
not even surmise that which grew up gradually and silently in the midst
of them: the establishment, that is, of a _new_ spiritual power, of _one_
power for all nations, of a spiritual governor in every city, a member of
this one power. It may safely be said that while Trajan did not apprehend
the existence of any such power in his empire, Decius had come to the
knowledge of it, and he liked it so little that it was said of him by an
eye-witness how he would rather hear of a competitor for his throne than
of a Bishop being set at Rome in the See of Peter.
But from the beginning the power was there, concealed in the humility of
the mustard seed, while it rested upon the authority of Him who had
dropped the seed into the soil.
This power of spiritual government was _new_, in that it sprung from the
Person of our Lord Himself, and until He communicated the charge
contained in it, did not exist. It was pointed out in type and prophecy
to Adam, to Noah, and to Moses, but realised in Him at His resurrection.
Thus, whereas these priesthoods which it came to displace were the
ultimate form of corruption into which the original worship instituted by
God when man fell had sunk, the Redeemer, in the work of His
dispensation, sent forth this pastorship of spiritual rule afresh from
Himself, gave it to Peter and His Apostles, and propagated it through
them upon earth.
For this reason, as coming from one who was Lord of all, it was one for
all nations. Corresponding to the unity of the Triune God, and the unity
of the Christian Sacrifice, it was one in its origin, its duration, its
effect. What greater contrast could there possibly be than between the
diversity and contradiction of heathen priests ministering in numberless
religions, and the unity of the Christian priesthood, a replication in
every instance of Christ's person, between worships varying with every
country in their bearers and their rites, and the unity of the Christian
episcopate, a replication of His charge to feed His sheep, resting on one
Sacrifice as unique as its own rule.
And, again, that which was one in origin, duration, and effect, stretched
itself forth and dilated itself to embrace every city, placing at its
head a spiritual ruler, who was distinct but not separate from his
fellows; who preached one doctrine and ministered to one worship, as he
also participated in one power.
If we embrace in one view the three constituents on which we have
touched--belief, worship, and government--and contemplate the Christian
people which is its outcome, how total a contrast does it present in the
Christian habit of life to that of the heathen. The Christian worships a
single God, who by the greatest of mysteries is at once one and three;
who has a triple personality; he partakes of a worship in which that God,
offered first as a Victim for him, becomes his Food; he is governed by
one who bears the person of that God, whose priesthood is the foundation
of his rule, and whose teaching is bound up with both rule and worship.
That which the heathen called nature was to the Christian the ever-living
operation of a creative hand hiding under shapes which met the senses an
illimitable power, wisdom, and goodness; and the majesty of the God whom
he thus adored was presented to him in the holiest rite of his worship as
the Victim who redeemed him, and the Food which nourished his spiritual
life. Greek and Egyptian, Syrian and African, Roman and barbarian, it was
difficult to say from which he was most removed in all his thoughts of
God and man, and the world around.
But to the whole body of people thus created it was the shifting of the
basis on which the heathen State rested, because it was the discovery of
the one Lord from whom all rule descended, and in whose name it was
administered. The Roman ruled not in virtue of the principle that one God
had made all the nations of the earth of one blood, and partitioned the
kingdoms of the earth among them, but by virtue of the fact that the
children of the wolf-cub had been the strongest in fight and the firmest
in discipline, and had reduced a hundred peoples beneath their sway. The
Roman himself worshipped and protected in others the worship of
ancestral, that is, national gods, and the God of the Christians claimed
not to be national, and to dethrone them all. The Roman, and the nations
he held in subjection, believed in a multitude of traditionary doctrines
respecting the earth and its inhabitants, and the powers presiding over
them, some true and some false, mixed up in each case with peculiar and
national interests, and all these the Christian swept away in the sublime
belief, austere at once and tender, of a single Being who created,
sustained, and ruled all, with the love of a Creator for all, while He
kept watch over every thought, word, and action of every rational
creature; that is, who was Judge and Rewarder, as well as Creator. And,
lastly, this new Christian people held as the very bond of its existence
that being the Body of Christ, it was to embrace all nations, and be
co-extensive with the earth, co-enduring with man's race.
This was the people and the power which, having been more or less
concealed during five generations from the watchful eyes of Roman
statesmen, may be said to have come forth and shown itself by the
multiplication of its numbers and the tenacity of its purpose, and the
fixity of its doctrines in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and which five
more generations of Romans, until the time of Constantine, either watched
with ever-increasing anxiety, or tolerated in the mistaken hope of
assimilating, or finally contended with for life or death in fearful
persecutions.
And this was the people and power before which the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, when he saw it in the persons of women and slaves and aged men,
who sacrificed their lives for their belief, lost his philosophic
indifference, and persecuted it as if he had been a voluptuous profligate
like Nero, or a cruel tyrant like Domitian.
That the belief, the worship, and the spiritual government which carried
both, had been from their first appearance in the reign of Tiberius
independent of the imperial rule, whose officer crucified their Founder,
under the title of the King of the Jews, we have seen in all the
preceding chapters. But how was this independence actually acquired and
maintained? By what talisman did the Christians compel the emperors to
acknowledge that there were things of God to be rendered to God, as well
as things of Cæsar to be rendered to Cæsar? For when this fight began the
Emperor claimed all things, the things of Cæsar as Emperor, and the
things of God as Pontifex Maximus.
Melito, Bishop of Sardis, addressing an apology for the Christian faith
to Marcus Aurelius, besought him to "protect a philosophy which was
nurtured together and began together with Augustus;"[185] and, in fact,
it was at the moment when Augustus closed the temple of Janus, and
proclaimed that there was peace in the Roman world, that our Lord was
born at Bethlehem. Thirty-three years after, He was crucified by the
governor of a province who represented the person of the Emperor
Tiberius, and on the ground that he had infringed the rights of that
emperor by calling Himself King of the Jews. Forthwith, when "Peter rose
up in the midst of the brethren" to propose the appointment of a twelfth
apostle, that he might take the place of the traitor who had betrayed his
Master to death, we are told the number of the persons together was about
a hundred and twenty. This number, then, indicated those disciples of our
Lord who had been gained during His ministry, and were then at Jerusalem.
We have another indication of numbers, where it is said that our Lord,
before His ascension, was seen by "more than five hundred brethren at
once,"[186] which would indicate the larger number of His adherents in
Galilee.
These two statements give a notion as to the extent to which the teaching
of our Lord had been accepted when the event of His public execution took
place, which was intended by those who brought it about to effect the
destruction of His claim to teach the world, and which was calculated,
according to all human judgment, to produce the effect intended.
The empire of Augustus, and "the philosophy nurtured and begun together
with it," took their several courses, and at the end of three hundred
years the greatest man who had sat upon the throne of Augustus in all
that interval came to the conclusion that the Christian Church was become
the power of the time. What makes the greatness of Constantine, we have
been told, makes him one of those characters in the world's history who
are the individual expression of the spirit of their time, is, that he
understood his time, that he perceived the weakness and powerlessness of
the heathen world, the inward dissolution of the old beliefs; that the
Christian faith was alone the substantial power of the time, the
Christian faith, as the Corpus Christianorum, in the strong, flexible,
and yet compact organisation of the Catholic Church, as seen in its one
episcopate. Constantine knew Christianity only in this form; and the
majestic unity into which the episcopate of the Church had already grown
was for him so imposing that he saw in the Christian Church[187] the
power through which the Roman empire, greatly needing a regeneration,
could alone be made capable of it. That was the real power which could
give a new basis to the State when it was falling into self-dissolution.
To indicate the greatness of the change involved in the action of the
Roman emperor, we may here use the words of St. Gregory the Great to the
Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbert, when he wrote to him at the end of the sixth
century: "Illustrious Son, guard carefully the grace which thou hast
received by a divine gift; hasten to extend the Christian faith among the
peoples subject to thee, for He will render the name of your glory yet
more glorious to your posterity, whose honour you seek and preserve in
the world. For so Constantine, most pious emperor of old, calling back
the Roman commonwealth from the perverted worship of idols, subjected it
with himself to Jesus Christ, our omnipotent Lord God."[188]
But what had passed in the interval, since the officer of Tiberius
crucified the Head, that the successor of Tiberius, Constantine, should
recognise the Body as the only power which could hold together his
tottering State?
What had happened was such facts as these.
After the Jews had spent their utmost malice in persecuting the Christian
messengers, first at Jerusalem, upon St. Stephen's death, and then
throughout the empire, wherever the authority of the Sanhedrim could
reach them, Nero, the last emperor of the family of Augustus, moved by
Jewish instigation, turned upon Christians the accusation of burning
Rome, and slew what the Roman historian calls a "huge multitude" of them,
with torments so atrocious that pity for them began to arise even among
those who hated them.
Secondly, at the distance of another generation, Domitian slew his
cousin, even while he held the consulate, and an unknown number of other
Christians, on the imputed charge of impiety, that is, of deserting the
heathen gods.
Thirdly, twenty years later, in the time of Trajan, we learn, by his
correspondence with Pliny, that the mere profession of the Christian
faith was a capital crime; and the punishment of Ignatius, in the Roman
amphitheatre, made his name famous to all future generations. We know not
to how many in the reign of Trajan the profession of the Christian faith
was the sacrifice of life. But the Bishop of Antioch, if the most
illustrious, was far from the only victim.
Fourthly, an abundance of martyrs in the reign of his successor, Hadrian,
testifies the continuance and the exercise of this law proscribing the
Christian profession. The noble Roman matron who witnessed the execution
of her seven children is an instance how savage a man of letters and
curious taste could be, when there was a question of Christian realities
crossing his feelings as a heathen.
Fifthly, the reign of Marcus Aurelius, noblest of heathen rulers, is
conspicuous for the number of its martyrs, in Asia Minor and in Gaul, as
well as at Rome; for the increasing number of the Christians had now
brought the religion into general notice. It is of this time that
Irenæus, an eye-witness, shortly himself to be one of those he
commemorates, writes "that the Church in every place, on account of that
love which she bears to God, sends forward a multitude of martyrs in
every time to the Father; while all the rest (by which he means the
various sects), not only are not able to show this thing among them, but
do not even say that such a martyrdom is necessary.... For the reproach
of those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, and endure all
penalties, and are done to death for their affection towards God and
their confession of His Son, these the Church alone continuously
maintains, often thereby weakened, and straightway increasing its
members, and becoming entire again."[189] Of this time Eusebius writes,
that by the attacks made in various cities through the enmity of the
populace calling upon the magistrates to execute the laws, "martyrs
almost numberless were conspicuous through the whole world."[190]
Sixthly, after another generation, in the time of Septimius Severus,
Eusebius states that there were martyrdoms in every part of the Church.
This is the time of which Tertullian writes that Christians were now
everywhere, and from their numbers would have been able to wage a civil
war with their persecutors, had their religion permitted them. Of this
also an eye-witness, Clement of Alexandria, says, "It was a good remark
of Zeno about the Indians, that he would rather see one Indian roasted
than hear any number of arguments about the endurance of pain. But we
have every day a rich stream displayed before our eyes of martyrs
roasted, impaled, and beheaded. All these the fear of the law has been a
tutor to lead to Christ, and has wrought them up to show their piety by
shedding their blood. 'God hath stood in the congregation of gods, and
being in the midst of them He judgeth gods.' Who are these? They who are
superior to pleasure; they who conquer sufferings; they who know each
thing which they do; possessors of true knowledge, who have mastered the
world."[191] This was the time when Origen, a youth of seventeen, tried
to share with his father, Leonides, the martyr's crown, while death, as
the result of sufferings undergone in confession, was reserved for him
fifty years later in the persecution under Decius. Many writings of
Tertullian bear witness of the persecution of his own time, respecting
which he says: "You crucify and impale Christians; you tear open their
sides with hooks; we lay down our necks; we are driven before wild
beasts; we are burnt in fires; we are banished into islands."[192]
Again, we pass thirty years, in which, while emperors hold their hands,
yet individual Christians suffer under the law which proscribes their
religion in general, and then we come to a seventh persecution of great
severity under the Emperor Maximinus, which lasts for three years. After
another interval of ten years we reach the great persecution of Decius,
the eighth in number, which aims with decision at the general destruction
of the Christian clergy and people.
The ten years which commence with the reign of Decius contain also two
general persecutions under the Emperors Gallus and Valerianus. It is in
this period that three Popes, Fabian, Lucius, and Stephen, Cyprian,
Bishop of Carthage, and Laurence, Deacon at Rome, are crowned with
martyrdom. The extant letters of Cyprian and Dionysius of Alexandria bear
witness to the wide extent of suffering inflicted upon all classes.
Upon this succeeds the longest period of rest which occurs during the
three centuries, and is terminated by the persecution commenced in the
year 303 by Diocletian, which is likewise the longest, and also the most
universal, and the most severe of all.
No human record preserves the names or assigns the numbers of all those
who sacrificed their lives for the sake of their Master in these ten
persecutions, and in the intervals of comparative peace which lay between
them; in all of which it needed but the execution of the empire's
existing laws to imperil any Christian life. A persecution meant that the
sovereign power called upon the several governors of provinces and
magistrates in cities to execute the law.
Thus the period from the Crucifixion in the year 29, to the Edict of
Toleration in 313, a space of 284 years, bears one character. It is that
of opposition by the great world-empire to the free propagation of the
religion of Christ. Not only is every human motive which can have force
upon the mind of man set against this propagation, but at constantly
recurring times men and women and children give up the joys of home, the
security of civilised life, wealth, peace, social happiness, in order to
maintain and profess their belief in a crucified man as Son of God and
Saviour of the world. To this end a great multitude during ten
generations sacrifice life itself, and that often not by simple death,
but under torments the most severe and prolonged which the ingenuity of
savage enemies can invent.
Martyrdom was the ripe fruit of the Christian mind carried to its highest
degree of excellence; the imitation of a crucified Lord in finished
perfection. The martyr expressed in his own soul and body the truth
uttered concerning his Lord, that "though He was a Son, yet learnt He
obedience through the things that He suffered." The martyrs were the
choice soldiers and champions of the great army of faith which arose
upon the earth between Augustus and Constantine. It was by the sufferings
of these three hundred years that the Church won, over against the
persistent enmity of the Civil Power, the inestimable right of liberty in
her faith, her worship, and her government.
But how did the army itself arise of which the martyrs were the
champions? When I attempt to collect in one view the history of these
first three centuries, what I find most wonderful is, not that they who
believed in a crucified Head were ready as His members to suffer in and
for Him, but that men and women of the most various nations, characters,
and ranks, came to accept a crucified Head. Martyrdom is the outcome of a
perfect faith--but the faith itself, whence was it, and how came it? Hear
the Apostle who laboured more abundantly than all others describe his own
work: "Christ sent me to preach the Gospel, not in wisdom of speech, lest
the cross of Christ should be made void. For the word of the cross to
them indeed that perish is foolishness, but to them that are saved, that
is to us, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the
wisdom of the wise; and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. Where
is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world?
Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For seeing that in
the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the
foolishness of our preaching to save them that believe. For both the Jews
require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ
crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks
foolishness, but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ
the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is
wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For see
your vocation, brethren, that there are not many wise according to the
flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the
world hath God chosen, that He may confound the wise, and the weak things
of the world hath God chosen that He may confound the strong. And the
base things of the world and the things that are contemptible hath God
chosen, and things that are not that He might bring to nought things that
are: that no flesh should glory in His sight. But of Him are you in
Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and justice, and
sanctification and redemption, that, as it is written, he that glorieth
may glory in the Lord. And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not in
loftiness of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of
Christ. For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and
in much trembling; and my speech and my preaching was not in the
persuasive words of human wisdom, but in showing of the spirit and of
power; that your faith might not stand on the wisdom of men, but on the
power of God. Howbeit we speak wisdom among the perfect, yet not the
wisdom of this world, neither of the princes of this world, that come to
nought: but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, a wisdom which is
hidden, which God ordained before the world, unto our glory: which none
of the princes of this world knew, for if they had known it, they would
never have crucified the Lord of Glory. But as it is written, That eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of
man what things God hath prepared for them that love Him. But to us God
hath revealed them by His Spirit."[193]
Thus St. Paul wrote to some of his early converts about the year 50. The
records which would have described by a continuous and detailed history
the labours of the Apostles and their successors in the two centuries and
a half which followed these words, have almost entirely perished. Their
result subsists in the conversion of the Roman world, and the recognition
of the kingdom of Christ by the kingdom of Cæsar. These words describe
the process. We have no more to say than this, and no less. The Church
has not to show in all this period great and renowned men among her
members; she has not to show men distinguished for their science; she has
not to show men who made themselves of mark in public life, who had
wealth, or influential connections, or anything which makes power
according to the natural constitution of the world.[194] Even her great
writers were not yet come; of those whose writings have come down to us,
Tertullian and Origen were her sole men of genius. Among those who sat in
the chair of Peter, there had as yet arisen no one such as the great Leo,
whose word was equal to the power which he swayed. Her schools of
theology scarcely existed; no golden tongue among her preachers had yet
spoken "with lips of flame;" no heathen rhetorician, converted in the
middle of life, had become the great doctor for future ages, a fountain
at once of philosophy and theology. She knew and she preached nothing but
Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and the effect was that no such contrast
exists in all history as that supplied by the weakness of that company,
the number of whose names was about 120, who met to elect a successor to
the traitor apostle, and the grandeur of that body represented by the 318
Fathers at Nicæa, on whom the majesty of the Roman people waited in the
person of Constantine. For behind those Fathers was the Christian people,
converts of every race, from the haughtiest patrician of Cornelian blood
to the humblest slave of Egypt, who had heard and obeyed the call to
believe on Jesus Christ and Him crucified. There had been ten generations
of youths and maidens who had offered to Him the very flower of human
beauty and superhuman purity; mothers who had surrendered their children,
husbands who had lost both wives and children, bishops maimed, or
one-eyed, for the love of Christ, who had laboured in mines, a host of
missionaries who had been treated as "the offscourings of the world," all
for the sake of that Crucified One, who was ever before their eyes, and
in their hearts; to whom they were joined by suffering with Him, and who
promised them, in recompense for those sufferings, that which eye hath
not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive, but God had revealed by His Spirit.
For no greater change can be conceived for man to accept, than to pass
from the life which a Pomponia Græcina or a Callista would lead in her
Roman or her Grecian home, into the life of a Lucina burying martyred
apostles, or the death of a Callista, in a dungeon of the third century;
between the prosperous Cæcilius in the midst of the wealth and luxury of
Carthage, and the Cyprian who, after ten years of apostolic labour,
uttered his _Deo gratias_ upon the Proprætor's sentence of death. Nor
must we take only as samples those who were conspicuous for their work as
Christians, even though it were accompanied by sufferings. We must take
rather the staple of the common Christian life in its opposition to the
discarded heathendom--the life of charity, of poverty, of chastity
pursued by those of humblest position, over against the hatred, the
avarice, the impurity out of which they came. The acceptance of such a
law as the Christian law, founded upon such a belief as the Christian
belief, is in any one case the result of a power quite beyond man,
whatever his learning, eloquence, or persuasiveness from any natural gift
may be, to bring about in his fellow-men. What, then, was that power
shown in instances innumerable--shown when the acceptance of Christ
crucified as the exemplar of life involved the risk of losing life, and
all which made life naturally sweet or even tolerable, involved a living
crucifixion? The state of virginity, confession of any kind, and finally
martyrdom, made the highest point of this life; but we must look upon
the great mass of the Christian people as that which produced such
fruits. The Martyrs, whatever their number, were no doubt relatively few
in comparison with those who were not martyred. They were "the
first-fruits of the threshing-floor which the world would offer to the
Redeemer;" how numerous must have been the grains of wheat out of which
they were chosen? They were "the new leaven and the salt of humanity,
which by the offering of their bodies and the pouring out their blood
would sanctify the whole mass;"[195] but how great was the spiritual
power which had descended into that mass? Surely Chrysostom had good
reason when he selected the creation of the Christian people as that one
miracle of Christ which no heathen gainsayer could deny.
What we find, then, as an ultimate fact in the historical conversion of
the heathen world, is this internal action of the Holy Spirit in the
preaching of the Apostles and their successors, by which the Christian
people was formed in spite of the world around them; in spite of
seductions from the pride of life, the desire of the eyes, the terrible
empire of sensuous beauty; in spite of terrors which involved every
suffering as well us every privation of lawful enjoyments.
All that vast development of doctrine, worship, and government, which we
have been endeavouring to trace out, has been from first to last
originated, accompanied, and maintained by the action of the Holy Spirit
upon each individual heart. Here at last is the power which we seek in
vain to detect as lodged in any natural gift possessed by the preacher.
The heart is that sanctuary of liberty which no human power can invade:
the heart's free acceptance of the belief offered to it is the result
which no human power can win. If the Church's one Episcopate has thrown
the net of Christ over the whole empire, and into regions more or less
barbarous beyond it; if the Church's one doctrine has grown out into
palpable form, scattering the gods of heathendom with the demons who
lurked under their masks, and uplifting the strong personality of the
divine Triad, in spite of pantheism, to universal adoration; if the
Church's one worship has come forth from the catacombs into the light of
day, and the celebration over a martyr's body in an obscure vault to a
celebration in lordly temple, rich with marble and precious stones; the
one adequate cause for all is the manifestation of spirit and of power,
the cross set up in the heart of man before it was applied to living
members of the body: it is a process inexplicable save upon the
supposition of divine power. That world which by wisdom knew not God,
which philosophy had failed to convert, was converted in a great
proportion of its subjects by the foolishness of God which was wiser than
men, and the weakness of God which was stronger than men. A crucified God
was the palmary test of this foolishness and weakness; the army of
martyrs was its witness; the empire's recognition of the Church's freedom
in doctrine, worship, and government, was the victory which it gained.
Those who lived in the midst of this great movement fully recognised its
wonderful character. Thus Clement of Alexandria, in his address to the
Greeks, exclaimed: "The power of God casting its beams upon the earth
with incredible rapidity and most attractive kindness has filled
everything with the seed of salvation. For the Lord could not have
brought about so great a work in so small a time without a divine
goodwill and affection; despicable in appearance, worshipped in deed;
purifier, Saviour, propitious, the Divine Word, the most manifest truly
God, equal to the Lord of the universe, for He was His Son, 'and the Word
was in God.' Nor was He disbelieved when first announced; nor when He
took upon Him human form and fashioned Himself after the flesh, and acted
the saving drama of the manhood, was He ignored. For He was a lawful
combatant and a fellow-combatant with His creature; and when swifter than
the sun He dawned upon us at the Father's will. He was communicated most
speedily to all men, and with the utmost ease caused God to shine upon
us; showing whence He was Himself, and who He was by what He taught and
by what He did; bearer to us of the treaty and the reconciliation, our
Saviour Word, a fountain of life and of peace, poured over the whole face
of the earth; through whom the world has become a very sea of
blessings."[196]
No less were eye-witnesses struck with the impotence of philosophy in
comparison with the doctrine of the cross. Thus the same Clement in
another place says: "The heaven-taught wisdom is that alone which is with
us, from which spring all the sources of wisdom; such, I mean, as lead to
the truth. For certainly when the Lord who was to teach us came to men He
had innumerable pointers of His way, to announce, to prepare, to precede
Him, from the very foundation of the world. They pre-signified Him by
action and by word, they prophesied His coming, the where and the when,
and His signs. From afar off the Law provides for Him, and Prophecy; then
His precursor declares His presence; then the heralds teaching the power
of His appearance signify it. [But philosophers[197]] pleased their own
only, and not all these, for Socrates pleased Plato, and Plato
Xenocrates, and Aristotle Theophrastus, and Zeno Cleanthes. They
persuaded those only who embraced their own sect. But the word of our
Teacher did not remain in Judea alone, as philosophy did in Greece. It
was poured over the whole world, persuading from nation to nation,
village to village, city to city, whole houses of Greeks at once and of
barbarians, and each one of the hearers by himself, and bringing over to
the truth not a few of the philosophers themselves. Now, as for the Greek
philosophy, if any one in authority offers it hindrance, forthwith it
disappears; whereas our doctrine, from its very first announcement, has
been thwarted by kings and tyrants, and magistrates, and governors, with
all their satellites and men innumerable, who make war upon us, and do
their utmost to cut us off. For all which it flourishes the more. For it
does not die out like a human doctrine, nor fade away like a weak gift,
since no gift of God is weak; but it continues unhindered, having the
prophecy that it shall be persecuted to the end."[198]
If such was the marvel of conversion, viewed in itself, it is well also
to listen to another eye-witness of the consequences which this change of
life brought with it. The heathen objected that Christians ought to be
thankful for the sufferings which they wanted. Tertullian replied:
"Well, it is quite true that it is our desire to suffer, but it is in the
way that the soldier longs for war. No one indeed suffers willingly,
since suffering necessarily implies fear and danger. Yet the man who
objected to the conflict both fights with all his strength, and, when
victorious, he rejoices in the battle, because he reaps from it glory and
spoil. It is our battle to be summoned to your tribunals, that there,
under fear of execution, we may battle for the truth. But the day is won
when the object of the struggle is gained. This victory of ours gives us
the glory of pleasing God, and the spoil of life eternal. But we are
overcome--yes, when we have obtained our wishes. Therefore we conquer in
dying: we go forth victorious at the very time we are subdued. Call us,
if you like, Sarmenticii and Semaxii, because, bound to a half-axle
stake, we are burnt in a circle heap of faggots. This is the attitude in
which we conquer; it is our victory-robe; it is for us a sort of
triumphal car. Naturally enough, therefore, we do not please the
vanquished; on account of this, indeed, we are counted a desperate,
reckless race. But the very desperation and recklessness you object to in
us, among yourselves lift high the standard of virtue in the cause of
glory and of fame. Mucius, of his own will, left his right hand on the
altar: what sublimity of mind! Empedocles gave his whole body at Catana
to the fires of Etna: what mental resolution! A certain foundress of
Carthage gave herself away in second marriage to the funeral pile: what a
noble witness of her chastity! Regulus, not wishing that his one life
should count for the lives of many enemies, endured these crosses over
all his frame: how brave a man, even in captivity a conqueror!
Anaxarchus, when he was being beaten to death by a barley-pounder, cried
out, 'Beat on, beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; no stroke falls on
Anaxarchus himself.' O magnanimity of the philosopher, who even in such
an end had jokes upon his lips! I omit all reference to those who with
their own sword, or with any other milder form of death, have bargained
for glory. Nay, see how even torture-contests are crowned by you. The
Athenian courtezan, having wearied out the executioner, at last bit off
her tongue, and spat it in the face of the raging tyrant, that she might
at the same time spit away her power of speech, nor be longer able to
confess her fellow-conspirators, if, even overcome, that might be her
inclination. Zeno, the eleatic, when he was asked by Dionysius what good
philosophy did, on answering that it gave contempt of death, was, all
unquailing, given over to the tyrant's scourge, and sealed his opinion
even to the death. We all know how the Spartan lash, applied with the
utmost cruelty, under the very eyes of friends encouraging, confers on
those who bear it honour proportionate to the blood which the young man
shed. O glory legitimate because it is human, for whose sake it is
reckoned neither reckless fool-hardiness nor desperate obstinacy to
despise death itself and all sorts of savage treatment, for whose sake
you may, for your native place, for the empire, for friendship, endure
all you are forbidden to do for God! And you cast statues in honour of
persons such as these, and you put inscriptions upon images, and cut out
epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never perish. In so far as you
can by your monuments, you yourselves afford a sort of resurrection to
the dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from God is insane if
for God he suffers. But go zealously on, good presidents; you will stand
higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians at their wish.
Kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is the
proof that we are innocent. Therefore it is of God's permitting (not of
your mere will) that we thus suffer. For but very lately, in condemning a
Christian woman to infamy rather than to the lion, you made confession
that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible
than any punishment and any death. Nor does your cruelty, however
exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are
mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is
seed. Many of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and
death, as Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Chances, as Diogenes,
Pyrrhus, Callinicus. And yet their words do not find so many disciples as
Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very
obstinacy you rail against is the preceptress; for who that contemplates
it is not excited to inquire what is at the bottom of it? Who, after
inquiry, does not embrace our doctrines? and when he has embraced them,
desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the fulness of God's
grace, that he may obtain from God complete forgiveness by giving in
exchange his blood? For that secures the remission of all offences. On
this account it is that we return thanks on the very spot for your
sentences. As the divine and human are ever opposed to each other, when
we are condemned by you we are acquitted by the Highest."[199]
Origen, in replying to the attacks of a very subtle and able Platonic
philosopher of the second century, appeals again and again to the divine
power shown forth in the conversion of so many, and among them of those
who had previously been the slaves of sin. Heathen philosophy could boast
of two converts, Phædo and Polemo; on which he says, "We assert that the
whole habitable world contains evidence of the works of Jesus, in the
existence of those churches of God which have been founded through Him by
those who have been converted from the practice of innumerable sins. And
the name of Jesus can still remove distractions from the minds of men,
and expel demons, and also take away diseases, and produce a marvellous
meekness of spirit and complete change of character, and a humanity, and
goodness, and gentleness in those individuals who do not feign themselves
to be Christians for the sake of subsistence or the supply of any mortal
wants, but who have honestly accepted the doctrine concerning God and
Christ and the judgment to come."
Celsus, unable to resist the miracles which Jesus is recorded to have
performed, had on several occasions spoken of them slanderously as works
of sorcery, to which Origen had severally replied. But he also pointed
out how far greater a divine power is manifested in healing the maladies
of the soul than in raising the daughter of Jairus, or the son of the
widow of Nain, or Lazarus four days dead; for indeed these miracles were
the symbols of the greater things which our Lord promised to do by His
Apostles. "I would say that, agreeably to the promise of Jesus, His
disciples performed even greater works than these miracles of Jesus,
which were perceptible only to the senses. For the eyes of those who are
blind in soul are ever opened, and the ears of those who were deaf to
virtuous words listen readily to the doctrine of God and of the blessed
life with Him; and many too who were lame in the feet of the 'inner man,'
as Scripture calls it, having now been healed by the word, do not simply
leap, but leap as the hart, which is an animal hostile to serpents, and
stronger than all the poison of vipers. And these lame who have been
healed received from Jesus power to trample with those feet in which they
were formerly lame upon the serpents and scorpions of wickedness, and
generally upon all the power of the enemy; and though they tread upon it,
they sustain no injury, for they also have become stronger than the
poison of all evil and of demons."
On this point he dwells further. The Jew introduced by Celsus argued that
our Lord was a man. Origen replied: "I do not know whether a man who had
the courage to spread throughout the entire world His doctrine of
religious worship and teaching could accomplish what He wished without
the divine assistance, and could rise superior to all who withstood the
progress of His doctrine--kings and rulers, and the Roman Senate and
governors in all places, and the common people. And how could the nature
of a man possessed of no inherent excellence convert so vast a multitude?
For it would not be wonderful if it were only the wise who were so
converted; but it is the most irrational of men and those devoted to
their passions, and who, by reason of their irrationality, change with
the greater difficulty so as to adopt a more temperate course of life.
And yet it is because Christ was the power of God and the wisdom of the
Father that He accomplished and still accomplishes such results, although
neither the Jews nor Greeks who disbelieved His word will so admit. And,
therefore, we shall not cease to believe in God, according to the
precepts of Jesus Christ, and to seek to convert those who are blind on
the subject of religion, although it is they who are truly blind
themselves that charge us with blindness; and they, whether Jews or
Greeks, who lead astray those that follow them, accuse us of seducing
men--a good seduction, truly, that they may become temperate instead of
dissolute, or at least may make advances to temperance; may become just
instead of unjust, or at least may tend to become so; prudent instead of
foolish, or be on the way to become such; and instead of cowardice,
meanness, and timidity, may exhibit the virtues of fortitude and courage,
especially displayed in the struggles undergone for the sake of their
religion towards God, the Creator of all things."
The wonder of the formation of the Christian community itself was never
absent from the mind of those who were eye-witnesses of the heathendom in
the bosom of which it arose. The place now occupied in the minds of men
by the sins of professing Christians was then occupied by the sins of
heathens in the midst of whom Christians formed so striking a contrast.
Origen refers to the moral miracle as supported and in part explained by
the material miracle, which, like every writer of those centuries, he
presupposed and dwelt upon as a fact which was manifest before the eyes
of every one--a fact which might be ascribed to sorcery, but could not be
denied.
"I think," he says, "the wonders wrought by Jesus are a proof of the Holy
Spirit's having then appeared in the form of a dove; and I shall refer
not only to His miracles, but, as is proper, to those also of the
Apostles of Jesus. For they could not without the help of miracles and
wonders have prevailed on those who heard their new doctrines and new
teachings to abandon their national usages and to accept their
instructions at the danger to themselves even of death." And elsewhere:
"Christians, who have in so wonderful a manner formed themselves into a
community, appear at first to have been more induced by miracles than by
exhortations to forsake the institutions of their fathers and to adopt
others which were quite strange to them. And, indeed, if we were to
reason from what is probable as to the first formation of the Christian
society, we should say that it is incredible that the Apostles of Jesus
Christ, who were unlettered men of humble life, could have been
emboldened to preach Christian truth to men by anything else than the
power which was conferred upon them, and the grace which accompanied
their words and rendered them effective; and those who heard them would
not have renounced the old established usages of their fathers, and been
induced to adopt notions so different from those in which they had been
brought up, unless they had been moved by some extraordinary power and by
the force of miraculous events."[200]
This power of miracles, as inherited by the disciples from their Lord, is
thus recorded by Irenæus:[201]--
"They who are truly His disciples, having received the grace from Him,
effect it in His name for the good of others in proportion as each
individual has received the gift from Him. Some with true and permanent
effect expel demons, so that in many cases the very persons who have been
delivered from the evil spirits believe and are in the Church. Some have
foreknowledge of future events, visions, and prophetic utterances. Others
heal sick people by the imposition of their hands and make them whole.
Dead, too, have been raised to life, and have remained with us many
years. What shall I say? It is impossible to express the number of the
graces which the Church throughout the whole world, having received them
from God, effects every day for the good of the nations in the name of
Jesus Christ who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And in this she
neither seduces any nor works for filthy lucre; for what she has freely
received she freely imparts."
In the time of Irenæus, Clement, Tertullian, and Origen, the proof from
the rapid growth of the Church in spite of the world's opposition was by
no means complete. Moreover, the greatest and most general persecutions,
those of Decius, Gallus, Valerian, and Diocletian, came after this.
Probably the struggle between the Church and the Empire was not
understood in all its bearings before the time of Decius. But we possess
two treatises of Athanasius, composed in his youth, about the year 320.
They are extremely beautiful both in style and matter; and in parts of
them Athanasius contemplates the whole preceding history of the Church
and the effects of her preaching the cross of Christ. I take as a
specimen what he says about certain miraculous effects worked by the name
and the cross of Christ, for the truth of which he appeals to universal
experience.[202]
"When did men begin to desert the worship of idols except from the time
that the true God, the Word of God, appeared among men? When did the
oracles which were everywhere among the Greeks cease and come to nought,
save from the time that the Saviour manifested Himself upon earth? When
did the gods and heroes of the poets begin to be condemned as mere mortal
men, save from the time that the Lord set up His trophy against death,
and preserved incorruptible the body which He had taken by raising it
from the dead? And when was the deceit and madness of demons despised,
save when the Word, the power of God, the Lord of all, and of these among
all, in His condescension for the weakness of men, appeared upon the
earth? When did the art and the schools of magic begin to be trodden
underfoot, save upon the manifestation of the Word among men? In a word,
when did the wisdom of the Greeks become foolish, save when the true
Wisdom of God showed Himself on the earth? For of old the whole world and
every spot in it was filled with the false worship of idols, and men held
that there were no gods but idols. But now through all the world men
desert the superstition of idols and fly to Christ, and worship Him as
God, through whom they recognise the Father whom they knew not. And
observe this wonder. The religions were different and numberless; each
place had its own idol, and he that was invoked as god there could not
pass to the next spot to persuade his neighbours to worship him, but
could only just maintain his own worship; for no one worshipped his
neighbour's god, but kept to his own idol, thinking that he was the lord
of all; whereas the one and same Christ is worshipped everywhere by all;
and what the impotence of idols could not do to persuade its neighbours,
this Christ has done, persuading not only those near, but simply the
whole world to worship one and the same Lord, and through Him God His
Father.
"Of old, also, everything was full of the deceit of oracles, and those in
Delphi, and Dodona, and Boeotia, and Libya, and Egypt, and the Kabiri,
and the Pythia, were admired in men's imagination; but from the time that
Christ is preached everywhere, this their madness also is stopped, and no
one any longer acts the prophet. And of old the demons deceived men with
spectres, taking possession of fountains and rivers, of wood and stones,
and so astonishing the foolish with deceits. All these sights have
vanished since the Divine Epiphany of the Word; for a man using only the
sign of the cross scatters all their tricks. Of old men deemed those whom
the poets called Zeus, and Kronos, and Apollo, and the heroes, to be
gods, and were drawn into error by worshipping them; but now that the
Saviour has appeared among men, these have been reduced to the nakedness
of mortal men, while Christ has been recognised as alone true God, God
the Word of God. What shall I say of the magic which had so much vogue
among them? Before the Word was spread among us, it prevailed and worked
among Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Indians, and astonished the beholders;
but it was convicted and utterly brought to nought by the presence of the
truth and the appearance of the Word. But as to the Grecian wisdom and
the big words of the philosophers, I think it needs no word from us when
the strange sight is before the eyes of all, that all the volumes written
by the Greek wise men were not able to persuade even a few neighbours of
immortality and virtuous life; while Christ, only by a few cheap words in
the mouth of men who had no wisdom of the tongue, has persuaded numerous
assemblies of men throughout the whole world to despise death and to have
immortal longings, to pass by time and see eternity, earth's glory to
esteem as dust and ashes, and grasp instead of it a crown in heaven.
"These are not mere words of ours, but appeal to the test of experience
for their reality. Let any one who will go and see the proof of virtue in
Christian virgins and the youths who cultivate purity, and the assurance
of immortality in the vast multitude of martyrs. He that will try the
truth of what we have said, let him upon the appearance of demons, the
deceit of oracles, and magic wonders, use the sign of the cross which
they mock at, with the mere name of Christ, and he will see how the
demons fly, the oracles stop, the whole array of magic and trickery
disappears. Who, then, and how great is this Christ who has by His mere
name and presence cast His shade over and annihilated all these things
everywhere, who prevails over all alone, and has filled the whole world
with His teaching? Let the Greeks who mock and blush not say. Is He a
man? how then has one man been too much for the power of all their gods,
and convicted them by His own power of being nothing? Do they call Him a
magician? but how can all magic be destroyed by a magician, and not
rather be confirmed? For if He prevailed over some magicians, or was
superior to one only, He might well be deemed by them to have surpassed
the others by greater art; but if His cross carried off the victory over
all magic absolutely, and the very name of the thing, it is plain that
the Saviour is not a magician, since the demons invoked by other
magicians fly from Him as their Lord. If He only drove away some demons,
He might be thought to have power over the inferior by the chief of the
demons, as the Jews mocking said of Him. But if all the fury of the
demons is displaced and scattered by naming Him, it is plain they are
wrong, and that our Lord and Saviour Christ is not, as they think, some
demoniacal power. If, then, the Saviour is neither simple man, nor
magician, nor a demon, but by His own Godhead has annulled and frustrated
all the imagination of poets, the display of demons, and the wisdom of
Greeks, it must be plain and confessed by all that He is truly the Son of
God, the Word, and Wisdom, and Power of the Father. Hence His works are
not human, but above man's range, and are recognised to be the works of
God in truth by their manifest effects, and by the comparison of them
with the works of man."
Athanasius speaks in these words for the whole period preceding him. The
apologists of the early Church before him[203] lay the most stress in
proving her divine character upon five things--the predictions of the Old
Testament, the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles, the miraculous power
continuing on in Christians, the rapid propagation of the Church, and the
steadfast endurance of confessors under persecution. Our Lord Himself
laid the greatest weight upon the proof arising from prophecy, and from
the works of power, themselves announced in prophecy, which He did, "the
works of the Christ." His answer to the disciples of John the Baptist
included both. In fact, He came among a people possessing a divinely
appointed priesthood and office of teaching, which He expressly
acknowledged when He said, "The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in the
chair of Moses; all things, therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you,
observe and do." But He did not in any way attach Himself to this
authority, much less submit to it in His office of teaching. If we
reflect on the fact that He did not submit Himself to the authority which
He acknowledged to be divine, yet claimed supreme authority, it is
obvious that without miracles He could claim no authority as the Christ.
And He said so most plainly Himself when He summed up, as it were, the
whole bearing of His ministry towards the Jewish authorities in the
words, "If I had not done among them such works as no man ever did, they
should not have sin; but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My
Father."
Thus, as in His own life, so likewise in the life of His people, miracles
and prophecy were of necessity the double external witness to His
mission, as martyrdom, including under it every degree of confessorship,
was the great internal witness.
And every ancient Christian writer alleges the existence and the exercise
of miraculous power in the Church. But there is also another fact; not
only all Christians, but Jews and heathens of every class, the bitterest
opponents of the Christian faith, agreed in one point, namely, that
superhuman[204] power was at work in the world, and in the whole life of
man, by which works exceeding man's ability, and often transgressing the
laws of nature, were wrought. They were eye-witnesses of these works.
About a great number of them, so far at least as the fact was concerned,
they could not be deceived, though they might be deceived as to the
nature of the cause.
Without martyrdom and also without miracles the conversion which took
place between the Day of Pentecost and the Edict of Toleration in 313 was
not even conceivable. Let us consider the bond which connects the two
together.
The Christian faith itself rests upon two miracles. The first is the
assumption of human nature by the Divine Word, the Second Person in the
Blessed Trinity, in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This act of the divine
condescension is so transcendent in all its bearings as not merely to
surpass the order of nature, but to be, as it were, the parent of
miraculous power in all that supernatural order which it creates and
maintains. It is the fontal source of grace to man, of his first creation
in grace, the first Adam himself being the image of the Second who was to
be, and for whose sake the whole creation was made. Take away from the
Christian faith that "Gospel of Mary" which St. Luke has recorded in the
mission of the Angel Gabriel to her, and that faith is not only altered,
but it ceases to be. Everything which the Christian believes and hopes
depends, in fact, upon that miracle of miracles, the union of the divine
nature with the human in the Person of Jesus Christ. Therefore all His
children are born of a miracle, nurtured upon a miracle, live and hope
and suffer and die in faith of a miracle, so great, so peculiar, so
inconceivable beforehand, that all other miracles are but its progeny.
But, secondly, the very existence of this first miracle was guaranteed
and made known by another--the resurrection of Jesus Christ in that very
Body bearing the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear in which
He was crucified. It was faith in this resurrection which sent forth a
College of twelve unlettered men to convert the world, and by that faith
they converted it, so far at least that the diadem of its emperors was
surmounted by the cross of Christ. They and their successors who went
forth in the same faith were misused, calumniated, persecuted, tormented
to death in every shape and fashion, until Constantine saw the token in
the sky and placed it on his banner.
What, then, we have said as to the Incarnation we may also say as to the
Resurrection of Christ; take it away, and the Christian people have no
longer a foundation on which to rest. They would simply cease to be.
They are, therefore, doubly the children of miracle.
They were thus from the beginning--and they could not but be--instinct
with the sense of miracle.
But these two miracles were no less the ground of martyrdom and of all
that life, consisting in the endurance and even choice of suffering,
hardship, privation of every kind, of which martyrdom is the seal and
crown. The connection between miracle and martyrdom seems to be this: The
Incarnation of our Lord is the very reason of miraculous power being
exhibited in the world, just as His assumption of human nature is itself
the miracle of miracles. The purpose of all miracle is to bring home to
the creature a special action of the Creator as Governor of the world,
but the head and crown as well as the starting-point of such special
action is, in our actual world, the miracle of the Incarnation.
Again, the original need of miraculous action springs from the moral
darkness superinduced by the Fall, which the Incarnation repairs. The
angelic world, while under probation, or any world of rational creatures
unfallen, needs no miracles. And all miracles anterior to Christ are part
of a chain of events leading on to Him, just as all martyrs before Christ
have their reason of existence in Him alone. The occasion of martyrdom is
the enmity between the seed of the serpent and the Seed of the Woman, and
miracle is from beginning to end the hand of God showing itself in the
contest. "All the just," says St. Augustine,[205] "who have been from the
beginning of the world have Christ for their Head. For they believed in
the future coming of that One whom we believe to have come, and they were
healed by faith in the same One by faith in whom we are healed, that He
might be head of the whole city Jerusalem." And the most inspired of
Christian poets, when he beheld the great rose of Paradise flowering with
the saints of all times, divided them by their preceding or following the
coming of Christ: