While the Star of Empire was thus moving toward the West, another and
brighter star was about to arise in the East. So accustomed are we to
the story, that we lose all sense of wonder at its recital.
Julius Caesar's brief triumph was over. Marc Antony had recited his
virtues over his bier, Rome had wept, and then forgotten him in the
absorbing splendors of his nephew Augustus. In an obscure village of
an obscure country in Asia Minor, the young wife of a peasant finds
shelter in a stable, and gives birth to a son, who is cradled in the
straw of a manger, from which the cattle are feeding.
Can the mind conceive of human circumstances more lowly? The child
grew to manhood, and in his thirty-three years of life was never lifted
above the obscure sphere into which he was born; never spoke from the
vantage-ground of worldly elevation,--simply moving among people of his
own station in life, mechanics, fishermen, and peasants, he told of a
religion of love, a gospel of peace, for which he was willing to die.
Who would have dreamed that this was the germ of the most potent, the
most regenerative force the world had ever known? That thrones,
empires, principalities, and powers would melt and crumble before his
name? Of all miracles, is not this the greatest?
The passionate ardor with which this religion was propagated in the
first two centuries had no motive but the yearning to make others share
in its benefits and hopes; and to this end to accept the belief that
Jesus Christ had come in fulfilment of a long-promised Saviour,--who
should be sent to this world clothed with divine authority to establish
a spiritual kingdom, in which he was King of Kings, Lord of Lords,
Mediator between us and the Father, of whom he was the "only begotten
Son."
The religion in its essence was absolutely simple. Its founder summed
it up in two sentences,--expressing the duty of man to man, and of man
to God. That was all the Theology he formulated.
For two centuries the religion of Christ was an elementary spiritual
force. It appealed only to the highest attributes and longings of the
human soul, and under its sustaining influence frail women, men, and
even children were able to endure tortures, of which we cannot read
even now without shuddering horror.
Nature's method of gardening is very beautiful. She carefully guards
the seed until it is ripe, then she bursts the imprisoning walls and
gives it to the winds to distribute. Precisely such method was used in
disseminating Christianity. It was not for one people--it was for the
healing of the nations, and its home was wherever man abides.
Nearly five decades after Christ's death upon the cross, Jerusalem was
destroyed by Titus. The home of Christianity was effaced. At just the
right moment the enclosing walls had broken, and freed to the winds the
germs in all their primitive purity.
Imperial favor had not tarnished it, human ambitions had not employed
and degraded it, nor had it been made into complex system by ingenious
casuists. The pure spiritual truth, unsullied as it came from the hand
of its founder, was scattered broadcast, as the band of Christians
dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, naturally forming into
communities here and there, which became the centres of Christian
propagandism. Lyons in Gaul was such a centre.
The fires of persecution had been lighted here and there throughout the
Empire, and the Emperor Nero, under whom the Apostles Peter and Paul
are said to have suffered martyrdom, had amused himself by making
torches of the Christians at Rome. But until 177 A.D. Gaul was exempt
from such horrors.
Marcus Aurelius--that peerless pagan,--large in intelligence, exalted
in character, and guided by a conscientious rectitude which has made
his name shine like a star in the lurid light of Roman history, still
failed utterly to comprehend the significance of this spiritual kingdom
established by Christ on earth. He it was who ordered the first
persecution in Gaul. In pursuance of his command, horrible tortures
were inflicted at Lyons upon those who would not abjure the new faith.
A letter, written by an eye-witness, pictures with terrible vividness
the scenes which followed. Many cases are described with harrowing
detail, and of one Blandina it is said: "From morn till eve they put
her to all manner of torture, marvelling that she still lived with her
body pierced through and through and torn piecemeal by so many tortures
of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her, to which she
only replied, 'I am a Christian.'"
The recital goes on to tell how she was then cast into a dungeon,--her
feet compressed and dragged out to the utmost tension of the
muscles,--then left alone in darkness, until new methods of torture
could be devised.
Finally she was brought, with other Christians, into the amphitheatre,
hanging from a cross to which she was tied, and there thrown to the
beasts. As the beasts refused to touch her she was taken back to the
dungeon to be reserved for another occasion, being brought out daily to
witness the fate and suffering of her friends and fellow-martyrs; still
answering the oft-repeated question--"I am a Christian."
The writer goes on to say, "After she had undergone fire, the talons of
beasts, and every agony which could be thought of, she was wrapped in a
network and thrown to a bull, who tossed her in the air"--and her
sufferings were ended.
Truly it cost something to say "I am a Christian" in those days.
Marcus Aurelius probably gave orders for the persecution at Lyons, with
little knowledge of what would be the nature of those persecutions, or
of the religion he was trying to exterminate. Some of the hours spent
in writing introspective essays would have been well employed in
studying the period in which he lived, and the Empire he ruled.
Paganism and Druidism, those twin monsters, receded before the
advancing light of Christianity. Neither contained anything which
could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of
nationality.
Druidism was the last stronghold of independent Gallic life. It was a
mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis, coarse,
mystical, and cruel. The Roman paganism which was superimposed by the
conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital religion. Educated
men had long ceased to believe in the gods and divinities of Greece,
and it is said that the Roman augurs, while giving their solemn
prophetic utterances, could not look at each other without laughing.
In the year 312, alas for Christianity, it was espoused by imperial
power. When the Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian,
there was no doubt rejoicing among the saints; but it was the beginning
of the degeneracy of the religion of Christ. The faith of the humble
was to be raised to a throne; its lowly garb to be exchanged for purple
and scarlet, the gospel of peace to be enforced by the sword.
The Empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and
social conditions of modern times were forming. Paganism and Druidism
would have been an impossibility. Christianity even with its lustre
dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with
scholasticism, was better than these. The miracle had been
accomplished. The great Roman Empire had said: "I am Christian."