CHAPTER III. THE CONVERSION OF ROME.

There is no fact in the history of the human mind more remarkable than the

complete unconsciousness of the importance and the destinies of

Christianity, manifested by the Pagan writers before the accession of

Constantine. So large an amount of attention has been bestowed on the ten

or twelve allusions to it they furnish, that we are sometimes apt to

forget how few and meagre those allusions are, and how utterly impossible

it is to construct from them, with any degree of certainty, a history of

the early Church. Plutarch and the elder Pliny, who probably surpass all

other writers of their time in the range of their illustrations, and

Seneca, who was certainly the most illustrious moralist of his age, never

even mention it. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius have each adverted to it

with a passing and contemptuous censure. Tacitus describes in detail the

persecution by Nero, but treats the suffering religion merely as “an

execrable superstition;” while Suetonius, employing the same expression,

reckons the persecution among the acts of the tyrant that were either

laudable or indifferent. Our most important document is the famous letter

of the younger Pliny. Lucian throws some light both on the extent of

Christian charity, and on the aspect in which Christians were regarded by

the religious jugglers of their age, and the long series of Pagans who

wrote the lives of the Emperors in that most critical period from the

accession of Hadrian, almost to the eve of the triumph of the Church,

among a crowd of details concerning the dresses, games, vices, and follies

of the Court, supply us with six or seven short notices of the religion

that was transforming the world.

The general silence of the Pagan writers on this subject did not arise

from any restrictions imposed upon them by authority, for in this field

the widest latitude was conceded, nor yet from the notions of the dignity

of history, or the importance of individual exertions, which have induced

some historians to resolve their task into a catalogue of the achievements

of kings, statesmen, and generals. The conception of history, as the

record and explanation of moral revolutions, though of course not

developed to the same prominence as among some modern writers, was by no

means unknown in antiquity,(634) and in many branches our knowledge of the

social changes of the Roman Empire is extremely copious. The dissolution

of old beliefs, the decomposition of the entire social and moral system

that had arisen under the Republic, engaged in the very highest degree the

attention of the literary classes, and they displayed the most commendable

diligence in tracing its stages. It is very curious and instructive to

contrast the ample information they have furnished us concerning the

growth of Roman luxury, with their almost absolute silence concerning the

growth of Christianity. The moral importance of the former movement they

clearly recognised, and they have accordingly preserved so full a record

of all the changes in dress, banquets, buildings, and spectacles, that it

would be possible to write with the most minute detail the whole history

of Roman luxury, from the day when a censor deprived an elector of his

vote because his garden was negligently cultivated, to the orgies of Nero

or Heliogabalus. The moral importance of the other movement they

altogether overlooked, and their oversight leaves a chasm in history which

can never be supplied.

That the greatest religious change in the history of mankind should have

taken place under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and

historians, who were profoundly conscious of the decomposition around

them, that all of these writers should have utterly failed to predict the

issue of the movement they were observing, and that, during the space of

three centuries, they should have treated as simply contemptible an agency

which all men must now admit to have been, for good or for evil, the most

powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of man, are

facts well worthy of meditation in every period of religious transition.

The explanation is to be found in that broad separation between the

spheres of morals and of positive religion we have considered in the last

chapter. In modern times, men who were examining the probable moral future

of the world, would naturally, and in the first place, direct their

attention to the relative positions and the probable destinies of

religious institutions. In the Stoical period of the Roman Empire,

positive religion had come to be regarded as merely an art for obtaining

preternatural assistance in the affairs of life, and the moral

amelioration of mankind was deemed altogether external to its sphere.

Philosophy had become to the educated most literally a religion. It was

the rule of life, the exposition of the Divine nature, the source of

devotional feeling. The numerous Oriental superstitions that had deluged

the city were regarded as peculiarly pernicious and contemptible, and of

these none was less likely to attract the favour of the philosophers than

that of the Jews,(635) who were notorious as the most sordid, the most

turbulent,(636) and the most unsocial(637) of the Oriental colonists. Of

the ignorance of their tenets, displayed even by the most eminent Romans,

we have a striking illustration in the long series of grotesque fables

concerning their belief, probably derived from some satirical pamphlet,

which Tacitus has gravely inserted in his history.(638) Christianity, in

the eyes of the philosopher, was simply a sect of Judaism.

Although I am anxious in the present work to avoid, as far as possible,

all questions that are purely theological, and to consider Christianity

merely in its aspect as a moral agent, it will be necessary to bestow a

few preliminary pages upon its triumph in the Roman Empire, in order to

ascertain how far that triumph was due to moral causes, and what were its

relations to the prevailing philosophy. There are some writers who have

been so struck with the conformity between some of the doctrines of the

later Stoics and those of Christianity that they have imagined that

Christianity had early obtained a decisive influence over philosophy, and

that the leading teachers of Rome had been in some measure its disciples.

There are others who reduce the conversion of the Roman Empire to a mere

question of evidences, to the overwhelming proofs the Christian teachers

produced of the authenticity of the Gospel narratives. There are others,

again, who deem the triumph of Christianity simply miraculous. Everything,

they tell us, was against it. The course of the Church was like that of a

ship sailing rapidly and steadily to the goal, in direct defiance of both

wind and tide, and the conversion of the Empire was as literally

supernatural as the raising of the dead, or the sudden quelling of the

storm.

On the first of these theories it will not, I think, be necessary, after

the last chapter, to expatiate at length. It is admitted that the greatest

moralists of the Roman Empire either never mentioned Christianity, or

mentioned it with contempt; that they habitually disregarded the many

religions which had arisen among the ignorant; and that we have no direct

evidence of the slightest value of their ever having come in contact with

or favoured the Christians. The supposition that they were influenced by

Christianity rests mainly upon their enforcement of the Christian duty of

self-examination, upon their strong assertion of the universal brotherhood

of mankind, and upon the delicate and expansive humanity they at last

evinced. But although on all these points the later Stoics approximated

much to Christianity, we have already seen that it is easy to discover in

each case the cause of the tendency. The duty of self-examination was

simply a Pythagorean precept, enforced in that school long before the rise

of Christianity, introduced into Stoicism when Pythagoreanism became

popular in Rome, and confessedly borrowed from this source. The doctrine

of the universal brotherhood of mankind was the manifest expression of

those political and social changes which reduced the whole civilised globe

to one great empire, threw open to the most distant tribes the right of

Roman citizenship, and subverted all those class divisions around which

moral theories had been formed. Cicero asserted it as emphatically as

Seneca. The theory of pantheism, representing the entire creation as one

great body, pervaded by one Divine soul, harmonised with it; and it is a

curious fact that the very phraseology concerning the fellow-membership of

all things in God, which has been most confidently adduced by some modern

writers as proving the connection between Seneca and Christianity, was

selected by Lactantius as the clearest illustration of the pantheism of

Stoicism.(639) The humane character of the later Stoical teaching was

obviously due to the infusion of the Greek element into Roman life, which

began before the foundation of the Empire, and received a new impulse in

the reign of Hadrian, and also to the softening influence of a luxurious

civilisation, and of the long peace of the Antonines. While far inferior

to the Greeks in practical and realised humanity, the Romans never

surpassed their masters in theoretical humanity except in one respect. The

humanity of the Greeks, though very earnest, was confined within a narrow

circle. The social and political circumstances of the Roman Empire

destroyed the barrier.

The only case in which any plausible arguments have been urged in favour

of the notion that the writings of the Stoics were influenced by the New

Testament is that of Seneca. This philosopher was regarded by all the

mediæval writers as a Christian, on the ground of a correspondence with

St. Paul, which formed part of a forged account of the martyrdom of St.

Peter and St. Paul, attributed to St. Linus. These letters, which were

absolutely unnoticed during the first three centuries, and are first

mentioned by St. Jerome, are now almost universally abandoned as

forgeries;(640) but many curious coincidences of phraseology have been

pointed out between the writings of Seneca and the epistles of St. Paul;

and the presumption derived from them has been strengthened by the facts

that the brother of Seneca was that Gallio who refused to hear the

disputes between St. Paul and the Jews, and that Burrhus, who was the

friend and colleague of Seneca, was the officer to whose custody St. Paul

had been entrusted at Rome. Into the minute verbal criticism to which this

question had given rise,(641) it is not necessary for me to enter. It has

been shown that much of what was deemed Christian phraseology grew out of

the pantheistic notion of one great body including, and one Divine mind

animating and guiding, all existing things; and many other of the

pretended coincidences are so slight as to be altogether worthless as an

argument. Still I think most persons who review what has been written on

the subject will conclude that it is probable some fragments at least of

Christian language had come to the ears of Seneca. But to suppose that his

system of morals is in any degree formed after the model or under the

influence of Christianity, is to be blind to the most obvious

characteristics of both Christianity and Stoicism; for no other moralist

could be so aptly selected as representing their extreme divergence.

Reverence and humility, a constant sense of the supreme majesty of God and

of the weakness and sinfulness of man, and a perpetual reference to

another world, were the essential characteristics of Christianity, the

source of all its power, the basis of its distinctive type. Of all these,

the teaching of Seneca is the direct antithesis. Careless of the future

world, and profoundly convinced of the supreme majesty of man, he laboured

to emancipate his disciples “from every fear of God and man;” and the

proud language in which he claimed for the sage an equality with the gods

represents, perhaps, the highest point to which philosophic arrogance has

been carried. The Jews, with whom the Christians were then universally

identified, he emphatically describes as “an accursed race.”(642) One man,

indeed, there was among the later Stoics who had almost realised the

Christian type, and in whose pure and gentle nature the arrogance of his

school can be scarcely traced; but Marcus Aurelius, who of all the Pagan

world, if we argued by internal evidence alone, would have been most

readily identified with Christianity, was a persecutor of the faith, and

he has left on record in his “Meditations” his contempt for the Christian

martyrs.(643)

The relation between the Pagan philosophers and the Christian religion was

a subject of much discussion and of profound difference of opinion in the

early Church.(644) While the writers of one school apologised for the

murder of Socrates, described the martyred Greek as the ’buffoon of

Athens,’(645) and attributed his inspiration to diabolical influence;(646)

while they designated the writings of the philosophers as “the schools of

heretics,” and collected with a malicious assiduity all the calumnies that

had been heaped upon their memory—there were others who made it a leading

object to establish a close affinity between Pagan philosophy and the

Christian revelation. Imbued in many instances, almost from childhood,

with the noble teaching of Plato, and keenly alive to the analogies

between his philosophy and their new faith, these writers found the

exhibition of this resemblance at once deeply grateful to themselves and

the most successful way of dispelling the prejudices of their Pagan

neighbours. The success that had attended the Christian prophecies

attributed to the Sibyls and the oracles, the passion for eclecticism,

which the social and commercial position of Alexandria had generated, and

also the example of the Jew Aristobulus, who had some time before

contended that the Jewish writings had been translated into Greek, and had

been the source of much of the Pagan wisdom, encouraged them in their

course. The most conciliatory, and at the same time the most philosophical

school, was the earliest in the Church. Justin Martyr—the first of the

Fathers whose writings possess any general philosophical

interest—cordially recognises the excellence of many parts of the Pagan

philosophy, and even attributes it to a Divine inspiration, to the action

of the generative or “seminal Logos,” which from the earliest times had

existed in the world, had inspired teachers like Socrates and Musonius,

who had been persecuted by the dæmons, and had received in Christianity

its final and perfect manifestation.(647) The same generous and expansive

appreciation may be traced in the writings of several later Fathers,

although the school was speedily disfigured by some grotesque

extravagances. Clement of Alexandria—a writer of wide sympathies,

considerable originality, very extensive learning, but of a feeble and

fantastic judgment—who immediately succeeded Justin Martyr, attributed all

the wisdom of antiquity to two sources. The first source was tradition;

for the angels, who had been fascinated by the antediluvian ladies, had

endeavoured to ingratiate themselves with their fair companions by giving

them an abstract of the metaphysical and other learning which was then

current in heaven, and the substance of these conversations, being

transmitted by tradition, supplied the Pagan philosophers with their

leading notions. The angels did not know everything, and therefore the

Greek philosophy was imperfect; but this event formed the first great

epoch in literary history. The second and most important source of Pagan

wisdom was the Old Testament,(648) the influence of which many of the

early Christians traced in every department of ancient wisdom. Plato had

borrowed from it all his philosophy, Homer the noblest conceptions of his

poetry, Demosthenes the finest touches of his eloquence. Even Miltiades

owed his military skill to an assiduous study of the Pentateuch, and the

ambuscade by which he won the battle of Marathon was imitated from the

strategy of Moses.(649) Pythagoras, moreover, had been himself a

circumcised Jew.(650) Plato had been instructed in Egypt by the prophet

Jeremiah. The god Serapis was no other than the patriarch Joseph, his

Egyptian name being manifestly derived from his great-grandmother

Sarah.(651)

Absurdities of this kind, of which I have given extreme but by no means

the only examples, were usually primarily intended to repel arguments

against Christianity, and they are illustrations of the tendency which has

always existed in an uncritical age to invent, without a shadow of

foundation, the most elaborate theories of explanation rather than

recognise the smallest force in an objection. Thus, when the Pagans

attempted to reduce Christianity to a normal product of the human mind, by

pointing to the very numerous Pagan legends which were precisely parallel

to the Jewish histories, it was answered that the dæmons were careful

students of prophecy, that they foresaw with terror the advent of their

Divine Conqueror, and that, in order to prevent men believing in him, they

had invented, by anticipation, a series of legends resembling the events

which were foretold.(652) More frequently, however, the early Christians

retorted the accusations of plagiarism, and by forged writings attributed

to Pagan authors, or, by pointing out alleged traces of Jewish influence

in genuine Pagan writings, they endeavoured to trace through the past the

footsteps of their faith. But this method of assimilation, which

culminated in the Gnostics, the Neoplatonists, and especially in Origen,

was directed not to the later Stoics of the Empire, but to the great

philosophers who had preceded Christianity. It was in the writings of

Plato, not in those of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, that the Fathers of

the first three centuries found the influence of the Jewish Scriptures,

and at the time when the passion for discovering these connections was

most extravagant, the notion of Seneca and his followers being inspired by

the Christians was unknown.

Dismissing then, as altogether groundless, the notion that Christianity

had obtained a complete or even a partial influence over the philosophic

classes during the period of Stoical ascendancy, we come to the opinion of

those who suppose that the Roman Empire was converted by a system of

evidences—by the miraculous proofs of the divinity of Christianity,

submitted to the adjudication of the people. To estimate this view aright,

we have to consider both the capacity of the men of that age for judging

miracles, and also—which is a different question—the extent to which such

evidence would weigh upon their minds. To treat this subject

satisfactorily, it may be advisable to enter at some little length into

the broad question of the evidence of the miraculous.

With the exception of a small minority of the priests of the Catholic

Church, a general incredulity on the subject of miracles now underlies the

opinions of almost all educated men. Nearly every one, however cordially

he may admit some one particular class of miracles, as a general rule

regards the accounts of such events, which are so frequent in all old

historians, as false and incredible, even when he fully believes the

natural events that are authenticated by the same testimony. The reason of

this incredulity is not altogether the impossibility or even extreme

natural improbability of miracles; for, whatever may be the case with

some, there is at least one class or conception of them which is perfectly

free from logical difficulty. There is no contradiction involved in the

belief that spiritual beings, of power and wisdom immeasurably

transcending our own, exist, or that, existing, they might, by the normal

exercise of their powers, perform feats as far surpassing the

understanding of the most gifted of mankind, as the electric telegraph and

the prediction of an eclipse surpass the faculties of a savage. Nor does

the incredulity arise, I think, as is commonly asserted, from the want of

that amount and kind of evidence which in other departments is deemed

sufficient. Very few of the minor facts of history are authenticated by as

much evidence as the Stigmata of St. Francis, or the miracle of the holy

thorn, or those which were said to have been wrought at the tomb of the

Abbé Paris. We believe, with tolerable assurance, a crowd of historical

events on the testimony of one or two Roman historians; but when Tacitus

and Suetonius describe how Vespasian restored a blind man to sight, and a

cripple to strength,(653) their deliberate assertions do not even beget in

our minds a suspicion that the narrative may possibly be true. We are

quite certain that miracles were not ordinary occurrences in classical or

mediæval times, but nearly all the contemporary writers from whom we

derive our knowledge of those periods were convinced that they were.

If, then, I have correctly interpreted the opinions of ordinary educated

people on this subject, it appears that the common attitude towards

miracles is not that of doubt, of hesitation, of discontent with the

existing evidence, but rather of absolute, derisive, and even unexamining

incredulity. Such a fact, when we consider that the antecedent possibility

of at least some miracles is usually admitted, and in the face of the vast

mass of tradition that may be adduced in their favour, appears at first

sight a striking anomaly, and the more so because it can be shown that the

belief in miracles had in most cases not been reasoned down, but had

simply faded away.

In order to ascertain the process by which this state of mind has been

attained, we may take an example in a sphere which is happily removed from

controversy. There are very few persons with whom the fictitious character

of fairy tales has not ceased to be a question, or who would hesitate to

disbelieve or even to ridicule any anecdote of this nature which was told

them, without the very smallest examination of its evidence. Yet, if we

ask in what respect the existence of fairies is naturally contradictory or

absurd, it would be difficult to answer the question. A fairy is simply a

being possessing a moderate share of human intelligence, with little or no

moral faculty, with a body pellucid, winged, and volatile, like that of an

insect, with a passion for dancing, and, perhaps, with an extraordinary

knowledge of the properties of different plants. That such beings should

exist, or that, existing, they should be able to do many things beyond

human power, are propositions which do not present the smallest

difficulty. For many centuries their existence was almost universally

believed. There is not a country, not a province, scarcely a parish, in

which traditions of their appearance were not long preserved. So great a

weight of tradition, so many independent trains of evidence attesting

statements perfectly free from intrinsic absurdity, or even improbability,

might appear sufficient, if not to establish conviction, at least to

supply a very strong _primâ facie_ case, and ensure a patient and

respectful investigation of the subject.

It has not done so, and the reason is sufficiently plain. The question of

the credibility of fairy tales has not been resolved by an examination of

evidence, but by an observation of the laws of historic development.

Wherever we find an ignorant and rustic population, the belief in fairies

is found to exist, and circumstantial accounts of their apparitions are

circulated. But invariably with increased education this belief passes

away. It is not that the fairy tales are refuted or explained away, or

even narrowly scrutinised. It is that the fairies cease to appear. From

the uniformity of this decline, we infer that fairy tales are the normal

product of a certain condition of the imagination; and this position is

raised to a moral certainty when we find that the decadence of fairy tales

is but one of a long series of similar transformations.

When the savage looks around upon the world and begins to form his

theories of existence, he falls at once into three great errors, which

become the first principles of his subsequent opinions. He believes that

this earth is the centre of the universe, and that all the bodies

encircling it are intended for its use; that the disturbances and

dislocations it presents, and especially the master curse of death, are

connected with some event in his history, and also that the numerous

phenomena and natural vicissitudes he sees around him are due to direct

and isolated volitions, either of spirits presiding over, or of

intelligences inherent in, matter. Around these leading conceptions a

crowd of particular legends speedily cluster. If a stone falls beside him,

he naturally infers that some one has thrown it. If it be an aërolite, it

is attributed to some celestial being. Believing that each comet, tempest,

or pestilence results from a direct and isolated act, he proceeds to make

theories regarding the motives that have induced his spiritual persecutors

to assail him, and the methods by which he may assuage their anger.

Finding numerous distinct trains or series of phenomena, he invents for

each appropriate presiding spirits. Miracles are to him neither strange

events nor violations of natural law, but simply the unveiling or

manifestation of the ordinary government of the world.

With these broad intellectual conceptions several minor influences concur.

A latent fetichism, which is betrayed in that love of direct

personification, or of applying epithets derived from sentient beings to

inanimate nature, which appears so largely in all poetry and eloquence,

and especially in those of an early period of society, is the root of a

great part of our opinions. If—to employ a very familiar illustration—the

most civilised and rational of mankind will observe his own emotions, when

by some accident he has struck his head violently against a door-post, he

will probably find that his first exclamation was not merely of pain but

of anger, and of anger directed against the wood. In a moment reason

checks the emotion; but if he observes carefully his own feelings, he may

easily convince himself of the unconscious fetichism which, is latent in

his mind, and which, in the case of a child or a savage, displays itself

without reserve. Man instinctively ascribes volition to whatever

powerfully affects him. The feebleness of his imagination conspires with

other causes to prevent an uncivilised man from rising above the

conception of an anthropomorphic Deity, and the capricious or isolated

acts of such a being form his exact notion of miracles. The same

feebleness of imagination makes him clothe all intellectual tendencies,

all conflicting emotions, all forces, passions, or fancies, in material

forms. His mind naturally translates the conflict between opposing

feelings into a history of the combat between rival spirits. A vast

accumulation of myths is spontaneously formed—each legend being merely the

material expression of a moral fact. The simple love of the wonderful, and

the complete absence of all critical spirit, aid the formation.

In this manner we find that in certain stages of society, and under the

action of the influences I have stated, an accretion of miraculous legends

is naturally formed around prominent personages or institutions. We look

for them as we look for showers in April, or for harvest in autumn. We can

very rarely show with any confidence the precise manner in which a

particular legend is created or the nucleus of truth it contains, but we

can analyse the general causes that have impelled men towards the

miraculous; we can show that these causes have never failed to produce the

effect, and we can trace the gradual alteration of mental conditions

invariably accompanying the decline of the belief. When men are destitute

of critical spirit, when the notion of uniform law is yet unborn, and when

their imaginations are still incapable of rising to abstract ideas,

histories of miracles are always formed and always believed, and they

continue to flourish and to multiply until these conditions have altered.

Miracles cease when men cease to believe and to expect them. In periods

that are equally credulous, they multiply or diminish in proportion to the

intensity with which the imagination is directed to theological topics. A

comparison of the histories of the most different nations shows the

mythical period to have been common to all; and we may trace in many

quarters substantially the same miracles, though varied by national

characteristics, and with a certain local cast and colouring. As among the

Alps the same shower falls as rain in the sunny valleys, and as snow among

the lofty peaks, so the same intellectual conceptions which in one moral

latitude take the form of nymphs, or fairies, or sportive legends, appear

in another as dæmons or appalling apparitions. Sometimes we can discover

the precise natural fact which the superstition had misread. Thus,

epilepsy, the phenomenon of nightmare, and that form of madness which

leads men to imagine themselves transformed into some animal, are,

doubtless, the explanation of many tales of demoniacal possession, of

incubi, and of lycanthropy. In other cases we may detect a single error,

such as the notion that the sky is close to the earth, or that the sun

revolves around the globe, which had suggested the legend. But more

frequently we can give only a general explanation, enabling us to assign

these legends to their place, as the normal expression of a certain stage

of knowledge or intellectual power; and this explanation is their

refutation. We do not say that they are impossible, or even that they are

not authenticated by as much evidence as many facts we believe. We only

say that, in certain conditions of society, illusions of the kind

inevitably appear. No one can prove that there are no such things as

ghosts; but if a man whose brain is reeling with fever declares that he

has seen one, we have no great difficulty in forming an opinion about his

assertion.

The gradual decadence of miraculous narratives which accompanies advancing

civilisation may be chiefly traced to three causes. The first is that

general accuracy of observation and of statement which all education tends

more or less to produce, which checks the amplifications of the

undisciplined imagination, and is speedily followed by a much stronger

moral feeling on the subject of truth than ever exists in a rude

civilisation. The second is an increased power of abstraction, which is

likewise a result of general education, and which, by correcting the early

habit of personifying all phenomena, destroys one of the most prolific

sources of legends, and closes the mythical period of history. The third

is the progress of physical science, which gradually dispels that

conception of a universe governed by perpetual and arbitrary interference,

from which, for the most part, these legends originally sprang. The whole

history of physical science is one continued revelation of the reign of

law. The same law that governs the motions of a grain of dust, or the

light of the glowworm’s lamp, is shown to preside over the march of the

most majestic planet or the fire of the most distant sun. Countless

phenomena, which were for centuries universally believed to be the results

of spiritual agency, portents of calamity, or acts of Divine vengeance,

have been one by one explained, have been shown to rise from blind

physical causes, to be capable of prediction, or amenable to human

remedies. Forms of madness which were for ages supposed to result from

possession, are treated successfully in our hospitals. The advent of the

comet is predicted. The wire invented by the sceptic Franklin defends the

crosses on our churches from the lightning stroke of heaven. Whether we

examine the course of the planets or the world of the animalculæ; to

whatever field of physical nature our research is turned, the uniform,

invariable result of scientific enquiry is to show that even the most

apparently irregular and surprising phenomena are governed by natural

antecedents, and are parts of one great connected system. From this vast

concurrence of evidence, from this uniformity of experience in so many

spheres, there arises in the minds of scientific men a conviction,

amounting to absolute moral certainty, that the whole course of physical

nature is governed by law, that the notion of the perpetual interference

of the Deity with some particular classes of its phenomena is false and

unscientific, and that the theological habit of interpreting the

catastrophes of nature as Divine warnings or punishments, or disciplines,

is a baseless and a pernicious superstition.

The effects of these discoveries upon miraculous legends are of various

kinds. In the first place, a vast number which have clustered around the

notion of the irregularity of some phenomenon which is proved to be

regular—such as the innumerable accounts collected by the ancients to

corroborate their opinion of the portentous nature of comets—are directly

overthrown. In the next place, the revelation of the interdependence of

phenomena greatly increases the improbability of some legends which it

does not actually disprove. Thus, when men believed the sun to be simply a

lamp revolving around and lighting our world, they had no great difficulty

in believing that it was one day literally arrested in its course, to

illuminate an army which was engaged in massacring its enemies; but the

case became different when it was perceived that the sun was the centre of

a vast system of worlds, which a suspension of the earth’s motion must

have reduced to chaos, without a miracle extending through it all. Thus,

again, the old belief that some animals became for the first time

carnivorous in consequence of the sin of Adam, appeared tolerably simple

so long as this revolution was supposed to be only a change of habits or

of tastes; but it became more difficult of belief when it was shown to

involve a change of teeth; and the difficulty was, I suppose, still

further aggravated when it was proved that, every animal having digestive

organs specially adapted to its food, these also must have been changed.

In the last place, physical science exercises a still wider influence by

destroying what I have called the centre ideas out of which countless

particular theories were evolved, of which they were the natural

expression, and upon which their permanence depends. Proving that our

world is not the centre of the universe, but is a simple planet, revolving

with many others around a common sun; proving that the disturbances and

sufferings of the world do not result from an event which occurred but

6,000 years ago; that long before that period the earth was dislocated by

the most fearful convulsions; that countless generations of sentient

animals, and also, as recent discoveries appear conclusively to show, of

men, not only lived but died; proving, by an immense accumulation of

evidence, that the notion of a universe governed by isolated acts of

special intervention is untrue—physical science had given new directions

to the currents of the imagination, supplied the judgment with new

measures of probability, and thus affected the whole circle of our

beliefs.

With most men, however, the transition is as yet but imperfectly

accomplished, and that part of physical nature which science has hitherto

failed to explain is regarded as a sphere of special interposition. Thus,

multitudes who recognise the fact that the celestial phenomena are subject

to inflexible law, imagine that the dispensation of rain is in some sense

the result of arbitrary interpositions, determined by the conduct of

mankind. Near the equator, it is true, it is tolerably constant and

capable of prediction; but in proportion as we recede from the equator,

the rainfall becomes more variable, and consequently, in the eyes of some,

supernatural, and although no scientific man has the faintest doubt that

it is governed by laws as inflexible as those which determine the motions

of the planets, yet because, owing to the great complexity of the

determining causes, we are unable fully to explain them, it is still

customary to speak of “plagues of rain and water” sent on account of our

sins, and of “scarcity and dearth, which we most justly suffer for our

iniquity.” Corresponding language is employed about the forms of disease

and death which science has but imperfectly explained. If men are employed

in some profession which compels them to inhale steel filings or noxious

vapours, or if they live in a pestilential marsh, the diseases that result

from these conditions are not regarded as a judgment or a discipline, for

the natural cause is obvious and decisive. But if the conditions that

produced the disease are very subtle and very complicated; if physicians

are incapable of tracing with certainty its nature or its effects; if,

above all, it assumes the character of an epidemic, it is continually

treated as a Divine judgment. The presumption against this view arises not

only from the fact that, in exact proportion as medical science advances,

diseases are proved to be the necessary consequence of physical

conditions, but also from many characteristics of unexplained disease

which unequivocally prove it to be natural. Thus, cholera, which is

frequently treated according to the theological method, varies with the

conditions of temperature, is engendered by particular forms of diet,

follows the course of rivers, yields in some measure to medical treatment,

can be aggravated or mitigated by courses of conduct that have no relation

to vice or virtue, takes its victims indiscriminately from all grades of

morals or opinion. Usually, when definite causes are assigned for a

supposed judgment, they lead to consequences of the most grotesque

absurdity. Thus, when a deadly and mysterious disease fell upon the cattle

of England, some divines, not content with treating it as a judgment,

proceeded to trace it to certain popular writings containing what were

deemed heterodox opinions about the Pentateuch, or about the eternity of

punishment. It may be true that the disease was imported from a country

where such speculations are unknown; that the authors objected to had no

cattle; that the farmers, who chiefly suffered by the disease, were for

the most part absolutely unconscious of the existence of these books, and

if they knew them would have indignantly repudiated them; that the town

populations, who chiefly read them, were only affected indirectly by a

rise in the price of food, which falls with perfect impartiality upon the

orthodox and upon the heterodox; that particular counties were peculiarly

sufferers, without being at all conspicuous for their scepticism; that

similar writings appeared in former periods, without cattle being in any

respect the worse; and that, at the very period at which the plague was

raging, other countries, in which far more audacious speculations were

rife, enjoyed an absolute immunity. In the face of all these consequences,

the theory has been confidently urged and warmly applauded.

It is not, I think, sufficiently observed how large a proportion of such

questions are capable of a strictly inductive method of discussion. If it

is said that plagues or pestilences are sent as a punishment of error or

of vice, the assertion must be tested by a comprehensive examination of

the history of plagues on the one hand, and of periods of great vice and

heterodoxy on the other. If it be said that an influence more powerful

than any military agency directs the course of battles, the action of this

force must be detected as we would detect electricity, or any other force,

by experiment. If the attribute of infallibility be ascribed to a

particular Church, an inductive reasoner will not be content with

enquiring how far an infallible Church would be a desirable thing, or how

far certain ancient words may be construed as a prediction of its

appearance; he will examine, by a wide and careful survey of

ecclesiastical history, whether this Church has actually been immutable

and consistent in its teaching; whether it has never been affected by the

ignorance or the passion of the age; whether its influence has uniformly

been exerted on the side which proved to be true; whether it has never

supported by its authority scientific views which were afterwards

demonstrated to be false, or countenanced and consolidated popular errors,

or thrown obstacles in the path of those who were afterwards recognised as

the enlighteners of mankind. If ecclesiastical deliberations are said to

be specially inspired or directed by an illuminating and supernatural

power, we should examine whether the councils and convocations of

clergymen exhibit a degree and harmony of wisdom that cannot reasonably be

accounted for by the play of our unassisted faculties. If institutions are

said to owe their growth to special supernatural agencies, distinct from

the ordinary system of natural laws, we must examine whether their courses

are so striking and so peculiar that natural laws fail to explain them.

Whenever, as in the case of a battle, very many influences concur to the

result, it will frequently happen that that result will baffle our

predictions. It will also happen that strange coincidences, such as the

frequent recurrence of the same number in a game of chance, will occur.

But there are limits to these variations from what we regard as probable.

If, in throwing the dice, we uniformly attained the same number, or if in

war the army which was most destitute of all military advantages was

uniformly victorious, we should readily infer that some special cause was

operating to produce the result. We must remember, too, that in every

great historical crisis the prevalence of either side will bring with it a

long train of consequences, and that we only see one side of the picture.

If Hannibal, after his victory at Cannæ, had captured and burnt Rome, the

vast series of results that have followed from the ascendancy of the Roman

Empire would never have taken place, but the supremacy of a maritime,

commercial, and comparatively pacific power would have produced an

entirely different series, which would have formed the basis and been the

essential condition of all the subsequent progress; a civilisation, the

type and character of which it is now impossible to conjecture, would have

arisen, and its theologians would probably have regarded the career of

Hannibal as one of the most manifest instances of special interposition on

record.

If we would form sound opinions on these matters, we must take a very wide

and impartial survey of the phenomena of history. We must examine whether

events have tended in a given direction with a uniformity or a persistence

that is not naturally explicable. We must examine not only the facts that

corroborate our theory, but also those which oppose it.

That such a method is not ordinarily adopted must be manifest to all. As

Bacon said, men “mark the hits, but not the misses;” they collect

industriously the examples in which many, and sometimes improbable,

circumstances have converged to a result which they consider good, and

they simply leave out of their consideration the circumstances that tend

in the opposite direction. They expatiate with triumph upon the careers of

emperors who have been the unconscious pioneers or agents in some great

movement of human progress, but they do not dwell upon those whose genius

was expended in a hopeless resistance, or upon those who, like Bajazet or

Tamerlane, having inflicted incalculable evils upon mankind, passed away,

leaving no enduring fruit behind them. A hundred missionaries start upon

an enterprise, the success of which appears exceedingly improbable.

Ninety-nine perish and are forgotten. One missionary succeeds, and his

success is attributed to supernatural interference, because the

probabilities were so greatly against him. It is observed that a long

train of political or military events ensured the triumph of Protestantism

in certain nations and periods. It is forgotten that another train of

events destroyed the same faith in other lands, and paralysed the efforts

of its noblest martyrs. We are told of showers of rain that followed

public prayer; but we are not told how often prayers for rain proved

abortive, or how much longer than usual the dry weather had already

continued when they were offered.(654) As the old philosopher observed,

the votive tablets of those who escaped are suspended in the temple, while

those who were shipwrecked are forgotten.

Unfortunately, these inconsistencies do not arise simply from intellectual

causes. A feeling which was intended to be religious, but which was in

truth deeply the reverse, once led men to shrink from examining the causes

of some of the more terrible of physical phenomena, because it was thought

that these should be deemed special instances of Divine interference, and

should, therefore, be regarded as too sacred for investigation.(655) In

the world of physical science this mode of thought has almost vanished,

but a corresponding sentiment may be often detected in the common

judgments of history. Very many well-meaning men—censuring the pursuit of

truth in the name of the God of Truth—while they regard it as commendable

and religious to collect facts illustrating or corroborating the

theological theory of life, consider it irreverent and wrong to apply to

those facts, and to that theory, the ordinary severity of inductive

reasoning.

What I have written is not in any degree inconsistent with the belief

that, by the dispensation of Providence, moral causes have a natural and

often overwhelming influence upon happiness and upon success, nor yet with

the belief that our moral nature enters into a very real, constant, and

immediate contact with a higher power. Nor does it at all disprove the

possibility of Divine interference with the order even of physical nature.

A world governed by special acts of intervention, such as that which

mediæval theologians imagined, is perfectly conceivable, though it is

probable that most impartial enquirers will convince themselves that this

is not the system of the planet we inhabit; and if any instance of such

interference be sufficiently attested, it should not be rejected as

intrinsically impossible. It is, however, the fundamental error of most

writers on miracles, that they confine their attention to two points—the

possibility of the fact, and the nature of the evidence. There is a third

element, which in these questions is of capital importance: the

predisposition of men in certain stages of society towards the miraculous,

which is so strong that miraculous stories are then invariably circulated

and credited, and which makes an amount of evidence that would be quite

sufficient to establish a natural fact, altogether inadequate to establish

a supernatural one. The positions for which I have been contending are

that a perpetual interference of the Deity with the natural course of

events is the earliest and simplest notion of miracles, and that this

notion, which is implied in so many systems of belief, arose in part from

an ignorance of the laws of nature, and in part also from an incapacity

for inductive reasoning, which led men merely to collect facts coinciding

with their preconceived opinions, without attending to those that were

inconsistent with them. By this method there is no superstition that could

not be defended. Volumes have been written giving perfectly authentic

histories of wars, famines, and pestilences that followed the appearance

of comets. There is not an omen, not a prognostic, however childish, that

has not, in the infinite variety of events, been occasionally verified,

and to minds that are under the influence of a superstitious imagination

these occasional verifications more than outweigh all the instances of

error. Simple knowledge is wholly insufficient to correct the disease. No

one is so firmly convinced of the reality of lucky and unlucky days, and

of supernatural portents, as the sailor, who has spent his life in

watching the deep, and has learnt to read with almost unerring skill the

promise of the clouds. No one is more persuaded of the superstitions about

fortune than the habitual gambler. Sooner than abandon his theory, there

is no extravagance of hypothesis to which the superstitious man will not

resort. The ancients were convinced that dreams were usually supernatural.

If the dream was verified, this was plainly a prophecy. If the event was

the exact opposite of what the dream foreshadowed, the latter was still

supernatural, for it was a recognised principle that dreams should

sometimes be interpreted by contraries. If the dream bore no relation to

subsequent events, unless it were transformed into a fantastic allegory,

it was still supernatural, for allegory was one of the most ordinary forms

of revelation. If no ingenuity of interpretation could find a prophetic

meaning in a dream, its supernatural character was even then not

necessarily destroyed; for Homer said there was a special portal through

which deceptive visions passed into the mind, and the Fathers declared

that it was one of the occupations of the dæmons to perplex and bewilder

us with unmeaning dreams.

To estimate aright the force of the predisposition to the miraculous

should be one of the first tasks of the enquirer into its reality; and no

one, I think, can examine the subject with impartiality without arriving

at the conclusion that in many periods of history it has been so strong as

to accumulate around pure delusions an amount of evidence far greater than

would be sufficient to establish even improbable natural facts. Through

the entire duration of Pagan Rome, it was regarded as an unquestionable

truth, established by the most ample experience, that prodigies of various

kinds announced every memorable event, and that sacrifices had the power

of mitigating or arresting calamity. In the Republic, the Senate itself

officially verified and explained the prodigies.(656) In the Empire there

is not an historian, from Tacitus down to the meanest writer in the

Augustan history, who was not convinced that numerous prodigies

foreshadowed the accession and death of every sovereign, and every great

catastrophe that fell upon the people. Cicero could say with truth that

there was not a single nation of antiquity, from the polished Greek to the

rudest savage, which did not admit the existence of a real art enabling

men to foretell the future, and that the splendid temples of the oracles,

which for so many centuries commanded the reverence of mankind,

sufficiently attested the intensity of the belief.(657) The reality of the

witch miracles was established by a critical tribunal, which, however

imperfect, was at least the most searching then existing in the world, by

the judicial decisions of the law courts of every European country,

supported by the unanimous voice of public opinion, and corroborated by

the investigation of some of the ablest men during several centuries. The

belief that the king’s touch can cure scrofula flourished in the most

brilliant periods of English history.(658) It was unshaken by the most

numerous and public experiments. It was asserted by the privy council, by

the bishops of two religions, by the general voice of the clergy in the

palmiest days of the English Church, by the University of Oxford, and by

the enthusiastic assent of the people. It survived the ages of the

Reformation, of Bacon, of Milton, and of Hobbes. It was by no means

extinct in the age of Locke, and would probably have lasted still longer,

had not the change of dynasty at the Revolution assisted the tardy

scepticism.(659) Yet there is now scarcely an educated man who will defend

these miracles. Considered abstractedly, indeed, it is perfectly

conceivable that Providence might have announced coming events by

prodigies, or imparted to some one a miraculous power, or permitted evil

spirits to exist among mankind and assist them in their enterprises. The

evidence establishing these miracles is cumulative, and it is immeasurably

greater than the evidence of many natural facts, such as the earthquakes

at Antioch, which no one would dream of questioning. We disbelieve the

miracles, because an overwhelming experience proves that in certain

intellectual conditions, and under the influence of certain errors which

we are enabled to trace, superstitions of this order invariably appear and

flourish, and that, when these intellectual conditions have passed, the

prodigies as invariably cease, and the whole fabric of superstition melts

silently away.

It is extremely difficult for an ordinary man, who is little conversant

with the writings of the past, and who unconsciously transfers to other

ages the critical spirit of his own, to realise the fact that histories of

the most grotesquely extravagant nature could, during the space of many

centuries, be continually propounded without either provoking the smallest

question or possessing the smallest truth. We may, however, understand

something of this credulity when we remember the diversion of the ancient

mind from physical science to speculative philosophy; the want of the many

checks upon error which printing affords; the complete absence of that

habit of cautious, experimental research which Bacon and his

contemporaries infused into modern philosophy; and, in Christian times,

the theological notion that the spirit of belief is a virtue, and the

spirit of scepticism a sin. We must remember, too, that before men had

found the key to the motions of the heavenly bodies—before the false

theory of the vortices and the true theory of gravitation—when the

multitude of apparently capricious phenomena was very great, the notion

that the world was governed by distinct and isolated influences was that

which appeared most probable even to the most rational intellect. In such

a condition of knowledge—which was that of the most enlightened days of

the Roman Empire—the hypothesis of universal law was justly regarded as a

rash and premature generalisation. Every enquirer was confronted with

innumerable phenomena that were deemed plainly miraculous. When Lucretius

sought to banish the supernatural from the universe, he was compelled to

employ much ingenuity in endeavouring to explain, by a natural law, why a

miraculous fountain near the temple of Jupiter Ammon was hot by night and

cold by day, and why the temperature of wells was higher in winter than in

summer.(660) Eclipses were supposed by the populace to foreshadow

calamity; but the Roman soldiers believed that by beating drums and

cymbals they could cause the moon’s disc to regain its brightness.(661) In

obedience to dreams, the great Emperor Augustus went begging money through

the streets of Rome,(662) and the historian who records the act himself

wrote to Pliny, entreating the postponement of a trial.(663) The stroke of

the lightning was an augury,(664) and its menace was directed especially

against the great, who cowered in abject terror during a thunder-storm.

Augustus used to guard himself against thunder by wearing the skin of a

sea-calf.(665) Tiberius, who professed to be a complete freethinker, had

greater faith in laurel leaves.(666) Caligula was accustomed during a

thunderstorm to creep beneath his bed.(667) During the games in honour of

Julius Cæsar, a comet appearing for seven days in the sky, the people

believed it to be the soul of the dead,(668) and a temple was erected in

its honour.(669) Sometimes we find this credulity broken by curious

inconsistencies of belief, or semi-rationalistic explanations. Livy, who

relates with perfect faith innumerable prodigies, has observed,

nevertheless, that the more prodigies are believed, the more they are

announced.(670) Those who admitted most fully the reality of the oracles

occasionally represented them as natural contending that a prophetic

faculty was innate in all men, though dormant in most; that it might be

quickened into action by sleep, by a pure and ascetic life, or in the

prostration that precedes death, or in the delirium produced by certain

vapours; and that the gradual enfeebling of the last was the cause of the

cessation of the oracles.(671) Earthquakes were believed to result from

supernatural interpositions, and to call for expiatory sacrifices, but at

the same time they had direct natural antecedents. The Greeks believed

that they were caused by subterranean waters, and they accordingly

sacrificed to Poseidon. The Romans were uncertain as to their physical

antecedents, and therefore inscribed no name on the altar of

expiation.(672) Pythagoras is said to have attributed them to the

strugglings of the dead.(673) Pliny, after a long discussion, decided that

they were produced by air forcing itself through fissures of the earth,

but he immediately proceeds to assert that they are invariably the

precursors of calamity.(674) The same writer, having recounted the triumph

of astronomers in predicting and explaining eclipses, bursts into an

eloquent apostrophe to those great men who had thus reclaimed man from the

dominion of superstition, and in high and enthusiastic terms urges them to

pursue still further their labour in breaking the thraldom of

ignorance.(675) A few chapters later he professes his unhesitating belief

in the ominous character of comets.(676) The notions, too, of magic and

astrology, were detached from all theological belief, and might be found

among many who were absolute atheists.(677)

These few examples will be sufficient to show how fully the Roman soil was

prepared for the reception of miraculous histories, even after the

writings of Cicero and Seneca, in the brilliant days of Augustus and the

Antonines. The feebleness of the uncultivated mind, which cannot rise

above material conceptions, had indeed passed away, the legends of the

popular theology had lost all power over the educated, but at the same

time an absolute ignorance of physical science and of inductive reasoning

remained. The facility of belief that was manifested by some of the most

eminent men, even on matters that were not deemed supernatural, can only

be realised by those who have an intimate acquaintance with their works.

Thus, to give but a few examples, that great naturalist whom I have so

often cited tells us with the utmost gravity how the fiercest lion

trembles at the crowing of a cock;(678) how elephants celebrate their

religious ceremonies;(679) how the stag draws serpents by its breath from

their holes, and then tramples them to death;(680) how the salamander is

so deadly that the food cooked in water, or the fruit grown on trees it

has touched, are fatal to man;(681) how, when a ship is flying before so

fierce a tempest that no anchors or chains can hold it, if only the remora

or echinus fastens on its keel, it is arrested in its course, and remains

motionless and rooted among the waves.(682) On matters that would appear

the most easily verified, he is equally confident. Thus, the human saliva,

he assures us, has many mysterious properties. If a man, especially when

fasting, spits into the throat of a serpent, it is said that the animal

speedily dies.(683) It is certain that to anoint the eyes with spittle is

a sovereign remedy against ophthalmia.(684) If a pugilist, having struck

his adversary, spits into his own hand, the pain he caused instantly

ceases. If he spits into his hand before striking, the blow is the more

severe.(685) Aristotle, the greatest naturalist of Greece, had observed

that it was a curious fact that on the sea-shore no animal ever dies

except during the ebbing of the tide. Several centuries later, Pliny, the

greatest naturalist of an empire that was washed by many tidal seas,

directed his attention to this statement. He declared that, after careful

observations which had been made in Gaul, it had been found to be

inaccurate, for what Aristotle stated of all animals was in fact only true

of man.(686) It was in 1727 and the two following years, that scientific

observations made at Rochefort and at Brest finally dissipated the

delusion.(687)

Volumes might be filled with illustrations of how readily, in the most

enlightened days of the Roman Empire, strange, and especially miraculous,

tales were believed, even under circumstances that would appear to give

every facility for the detection of the imposture. In the field of the

supernatural, however, it should be remembered that a movement, which I

have traced in the last chapter, had produced a very exceptional amount of

credulity during the century and a half that preceded the conversion of

Constantine. Neither the writings of Cicero and Seneca, nor even those of

Pliny and Plutarch, can be regarded as fair samples of the belief of the

educated. The Epicurean philosophy which rejected, the Academic philosophy

which doubted, and the Stoic philosophy which simplified and sublimated

superstition, had alike disappeared. The “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius

closed the period of Stoical influence, and the “Dialogues” of Lucian were

the last solitary protest of expiring scepticism.(688) The aim of the

philosophy of Cicero had been to ascertain truth by the free exercise of

the critical powers. The aim of the Pythagorean philosophy was to attain

the state of ecstasy, and to purify the mind by religious rites. Every

philosopher soon plunged into magical practices, and was encircled, in the

eyes of his disciples, with a halo of legend. Apollonius of Tyana, whom

the Pagans opposed to Christ, had raised the dead, healed the sick, cast

out devils, freed a young man from a lamia or vampire with whom he was

enamoured, prophesied, seen in one country events that were occurring in

another, and filled the world with the fame of his miracles and of his

sanctity.(689) A similar power, notwithstanding his own disclaimer, was

popularly attributed to the Platonist Apuleius.(690) Lucian has left us a

detailed account of the impostures by which the philosopher Alexander

endeavoured to acquire the fame of a miracle-worker.(691) When a magician

plotted against Plotinus, his spells recoiled miraculously against

himself; and when an Egyptian priest endeavoured by incantations to evoke

the guardian dæmon of the philosopher, instead of a dæmon the temple of

Isis was irradiated by the presence of a god.(692) Porphyry was said to

have expelled an evil dæmon from a bath.(693) It was reported among his

disciples that when Iamblichus prayed he was raised (like the saints of

another creed) ten cubits from the ground, and that his body and his dress

assumed a golden hue.(694) It was well known that he had at Gadara drawn

forth from the waters of two fountains their guardian spirits, and

exhibited them in bodily form to his disciples.(695) A woman named

Sospitra had been visited by two spirits under the form of aged Chaldeans,

and had been endowed with a transcendent beauty and with a superhuman

knowledge. Raised above all human frailties, save only love and death, she

was able to see at once the deeds which were done in every land, and the

people, dazzled by her beauty and her wisdom, ascribed to her a share of

the omnipresence of the Deity.(696)

Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the wave of credulity that

brought with it this long train of Oriental superstitions and legends. In

its moral aspect it was broadly distinguished from the systems around it,

but its miracles were accepted by both friend and foe as the ordinary

accompaniments of religious teaching. The Jews, in the eyes of the Pagans,

had long been proverbial for their credulity,(697) and the Christians

inherited a double measure of their reputation. Nor is it possible to deny

that in the matter of the miraculous the reputation was deserved. Among

the Pagans the theory of Euhemerus, who believed the gods to be but

deified men, had been the stronghold of the Sceptics, while the Platonic

notion of dæmons was adopted by the more believing philosophers. The

Christian teachers combined both theories, maintaining that deceased kings

had originally supplied the names of the deities, but that malevolent

dæmons had taken their places; and without a single exception the Fathers

maintained the reality of the Pagan miracles as fully as their own.(698)

The oracles, as we have seen, had been ridiculed and rejected by numbers

of the philosophers, but the Christians unanimously admitted their

reality. They appealed to a long series of oracles as predictions of their

faith; and there is, I believe, no example of the denial of their

supernatural character in the Christian Church till 1696, when a Dutch

Anabaptist minister named Van Dale, in a remarkable book,(699) which was

abridged and translated by Fontenelle, asserted, in opposition to the

unanimous voice of ecclesiastical authority, that they were simple

impostures—a theory which is now almost universally accepted. To suppose

that men who held these opinions were capable, in the second or third

centuries, of ascertaining with any degree of just confidence whether

miracles had taken place in Judæa in the first century, is grossly absurd;

nor would the conviction of their reality have made any great impression

on their minds at a time when miracles were supposed to be so abundantly

diffused.

In truth, the question of the reality of the Jewish miracles must be

carefully distinguished from that of the conversion of the Roman Empire.

With the light that is furnished to us by modern investigations and habits

of thought, we weigh the testimony of the Jewish writers; but most of the

more judicious of modern apologists, considering the extreme credulity of

the Jewish people, decline to make the question simply one of evidence,

and occupy themselves chiefly in endeavouring to show that miracles are

possible, that those recorded in the Biblical narratives are related in

such a manner, and are so interwoven with the texture of a simple and

artless narrative, as to carry with them an internal proof of their

reality; that they differ in kind from later miracles, and especially that

the character and destinies of Christianity are such as to render its

miraculous origin antecedently probable. But in the ages when the Roman

Empire was chiefly converted, all sound and discriminating historical

investigation of the evidence of the early miracles was impossible, nor

was any large use made of those miracles as proofs of the religion. The

rhetorician Arnobius is probably the only one of the early apologists who

gives, among the evidences of the faith, any prominent place to the

miracles of Christ.(700) When evidential reasoning was employed, it was

usually an appeal not to miracles, but to prophecy. But here again the

opinions of the patristic age must be pronounced absolutely worthless. To

prove that events had taken place in Judæa, accurately corresponding with

the prophecies, or that the prophecies were themselves genuine, were both

tasks far transcending the critical powers of the Roman converts. The wild

extravagance of fantastic allegory, commonly connected with Origen, but

which appears at a much earlier date in the writings of Justin Martyr and

Irenæus, had thrown the interpretation of prophecy into hopeless

confusion, while the deliberate and apparently perfectly unscrupulous

forgery of a whole literature, destined to further the propagation either

of Christianity as a whole, or of some particular class of tenets that had

arisen within its border,(701) made criticism at once pre-eminently

difficult and necessary. A long series of oracles were cited, predicting

in detail the sufferings of Christ. The prophecies forged by the

Christians, and attributed by them to the heathen Sibyls, were accepted as

genuine by the entire Church, and were continually appealed to as among

the most powerful evidences of the faith. Justin Martyr declared that it

was by the instigation of dæmons that it had been made a capital offence

to read them.(702) Clement of Alexandria preserved the tradition that St.

Paul had urged the brethren to study them.(703) Celsus designated the

Christians Sibyllists, on account of the pertinacity with which they

insisted upon them.(704) Constantine the Great adduced them in a solemn

speech before the Council of Nice.(705) St. Augustine notices that the

Greek word for a fish, which, containing the initial letters of the name

and titles of Christ, had been adopted by the Early Church as its sacred

symbol, contains also the initial letters of some prophetic lines ascribed

to the Sibyl of Erythra.(706) The Pagans, it is true, accused their

opponents of having forged or interpolated these prophecies;(707) but

there was not a single Christian writer of the patristic period who

disputed their authority, and there were very few even of the most

illustrious who did not appeal to them. Unanimously admitted by the Church

of the Fathers, they were unanimously admitted during the middle ages, and

an allusion to them passed into the most beautiful lyric of the Missal. It

was only at the period of the Reformation that the great but unhappy

Castellio pointed out many passages in them which could not possibly be

genuine. He was followed, in the first years of the seventeenth century,

by a Jesuit named Possevin, who observed that the Sibyls were known to

have lived at a later period than Moses, and that many passages in the

Sibylline books purported to have been written before Moses. Those

passages, therefore, he said, were interpolated; and he added, with a

characteristic sagacity, that they had doubtless been inserted by Satan,

for the purpose of throwing suspicion upon the books.(708) It was in 1649

that a French Protestant minister, named Blondel, ventured for the first

time in the Christian Church to denounce these writings as deliberate and

clumsy forgeries, and after much angry controversy his sentiment has

acquired an almost undisputed ascendancy in criticism.

But although the opinion of the Roman converts was extremely worthless,

when dealing with past history or with literary criticism, there was one

branch of miracles concerning which their position was somewhat different.

Contemporary miracles, often of the most extraordinary character, but

usually of the nature of visions, exorcisms, or healing the sick, were

from the time of Justin Martyr uniformly represented by the Fathers as

existing among them,(709) and they continue steadily along the path of

history, till in the pages of Evagrius and Theodoret, in the Lives of

Hilarion and Paul, by St. Jerome, of Antony, by St. Athanasius, and of

Gregory Thaumaturgus, by his namesake of Nyssa, and in the Dialogues of

St. Gregory the Great, they attain as grotesque an extravagance as the

wildest mediæval legends. Few things are more striking than the assertions

hazarded on this matter by some of the ablest of the Fathers. Thus, St.

Irenæus assures us that all Christians possessed the power of working

miracles; that they prophesied, cast out devils, healed the sick, and

sometimes even raised the dead; that some who had been thus resuscitated

lived for many years among them, and that it would be impossible to reckon

the wonderful acts that were daily performed.(710) St. Epiphanius tells us

that some rivers and fountains were annually transformed into wine, in

attestation of the miracle of Cana; and he adds that he had himself drunk

of one of these fountains, and his brethren of another.(711) St. Augustine

notices that miracles were less frequent and less widely known than

formerly, but that many still occurred, and some of them he had himself

witnessed. Whenever a miracle was reported, he ordered that a special

examination into its circumstances should be made, and that the

depositions of the witnesses should be read publicly to the people. He

tells us, besides many other miracles, that Gamaliel in a dream revealed

to a priest named Lucianus the place where the bones of St. Stephen were

buried; that those bones, being thus discovered, were brought to Hippo,

the diocese of which St. Augustine was bishop; that they raised five dead

persons to life; and that, although only a portion of the miraculous cures

they effected had been registered, the certificates drawn up in two years

in the diocese, and by the orders of the saint, were nearly seventy. In

the adjoining diocese of Calama they were incomparably more numerous.(712)

In the height of the great conflict between St. Ambrose and the Arian

Empress Justina, the saint declared that it had been revealed to him by an

irresistible presentiment—or, as St. Augustine, who was present on the

occasion, says, in a dream—that relics were buried in a spot which he

indicated. The earth being removed, a tomb was found filled with blood,

and containing two gigantic skeletons, with their heads severed from their

bodies, which were pronounced to be those of St. Gervasius and St.

Protasius, two martyrs of remarkable physical dimensions, who were said to

have suffered about 300 years before. To prove that they were genuine

relics, the bones were brought in contact with a blind man, who was

restored to sight, and with demoniacs, who were cured; the dæmons,

however, in the first place, acknowledging that the relics were genuine;

that St. Ambrose was the deadly enemy of the powers of hell; that the

Trinitarian doctrine was true; and that those who rejected it would

infallibly be damned. The next day St. Ambrose delivered an invective

against all who questioned the miracle. St. Augustine recorded it in his

works, and spread the worship of the saints through Africa. The transport

of enthusiasm with which the miracles were greeted at Milan enabled St.

Ambrose to overcome every obstacle; but the Arians treated them with a

derisive incredulity, and declared that the pretended demoniacs had been

bribed by the saint.(713)

Statements of this kind, which are selected from very many that are

equally positive, though not equally precise, suggest veins of thought of

obvious interest and importance. We are now, however, only concerned with

the fact, that, with the exception of one or two isolated miracles, such

as the last I have noticed, and of one class of miracles which I shall

proceed to describe, these prodigies, whether true or false, were wrought

for the exclusive edification of confirmed believers. The exceptional

miracles were those of exorcism, which occupied a very singular position

in the early Church. The belief that certain diseases were inflicted by

Divine agency was familiar to the ancients, but among the early Greeks the

notion of diabolical possession appears to have been unknown. A dæmon, in

the philosophy of Plato, though inferior to a deity, was not an evil

spirit, and it is extremely doubtful whether the existence of evil dæmons

was known either to the Greeks or Romans till about the time of the advent

of Christ.(714) The belief was introduced with the Oriental superstitions

which then poured into Rome, and it brought in its train the notions of

possession and exorcism. The Jews, who in their own country appear to have

regarded it as a most ordinary occurrence to meet men walking about

visibly possessed by devils, and who professed to have learnt from Solomon

the means of expelling them, soon became the principal exorcists,

accomplishing their feats partly by adjuration, and partly by means of a

certain miraculous root named Baaras. Josephus assures us that he had

himself, in the reign of Vespasian, seen a Jew named Eleazar drawing by

these means a dæmon through the nostrils of a possessed person, who fell

to the ground on the accomplishment of the miracle; while, upon the

command of the magician, the devil, to prove that it had really left his

victim, threw down a cup of water which had been placed at a

distance.(715) The growth of Neoplatonism and kindred philosophies greatly

strengthened the belief, and some of the later philosophers, as well as

many religious charlatans, practised exorcism. But, of all classes, the

Christians became in this respect the most famous. From the time of Justin

Martyr, for about two centuries, there is, I believe, not a single

Christian writer who does not solemnly and explicitly assert the reality

and frequent employment of this power;(716) and although, after the

Council of Laodicea, the instances became less numerous, they by no means

ceased. The Christians fully recognised the supernatural power possessed

by the Jewish and Gentile exorcists, but they claimed to be in many

respects their superiors. By the simple sign of the cross, or by repeating

the name of their Master, they professed to be able to cast out devils

which had resisted all the enchantments of Pagan exorcists, to silence the

oracles, to compel the dæmons to confess the truth of the Christian faith.

Sometimes their power extended still further. Dæmons, we are told, were

accustomed to enter into animals, and these also were expelled by the

Christian adjuration. St. Jerome, in his “Life of St. Hilarion,” has given

us a graphic account of the courage with which that saint confronted, and

the success with which he relieved, a possessed camel.(717) In the reign

of Julian, the very bones of the martyr Babylas were sufficient to silence

the oracle of Daphne; and when, amid the triumphant chants of the

Christians, the relics, by the command of Julian, were removed, the

lightning descended from heaven and consumed the temple.(718) St. Gregory

Thaumaturgus having expelled the dæmons from an idol temple, the priest,

finding his means of subsistence destroyed, came to the saint, imploring

him to permit the oracles to be renewed. St. Gregory, who was then on his

journey, wrote a note containing the words “Satan, return,” which was

immediately obeyed, and the priest, awe-struck by the miracle, was

converted to Christianity.(719) Tertullian, writing to the Pagans in a

time of persecution, in language of the most deliberate earnestness,

challenges his opponents to bring forth any person who is possessed by a

dæmon or any of those virgins or prophets who are supposed to be inspired

by a divinity. He asserts that, in reply to the interrogation of any

Christian, the dæmons will be compelled to confess their diabolical

character; he invites the Pagans, if it be otherwise, to put the Christian

immediately to death; and he proposes this as at once the simplest and

most decisive demonstration of the faith.(720) Justin Martyr,(721)

Origen,(722) Lactantius,(723) Athanasius,(724) and Minucius Felix,(725)

all in language equally solemn and explicit, call upon the Pagans to form

their opinions from the confessions wrung from their own gods. We hear

from them, that when a Christian began to pray, to make the sign of the

cross, or to utter the name of his Master in the presence of a possessed

or inspired person, the latter, by screams and frightful contortions,

exhibited the torture that was inflicted, and by this torture the evil

spirit was compelled to avow its nature. Several of the Christian writers

declare that this was generally known to the Pagans. In one respect, it

was observed, the miracle of exorcism was especially available for

evidential purposes; for, as dæmons would not expel dæmons, it was the

only miracle which was necessarily divine.

It would be curious to examine the manner in which the challenge was

received by the Pagan writers; but unhappily, the writings which were

directed against the faith having been destroyed by the Christian

emperors, our means of information on this point are very scanty. Some

information, however, we possess, and it would appear to show that, among

the educated classes at least, these phenomena did not extort any great

admiration. The eloquent silence about diabolical possession observed by

the early philosophers, when discussing such questions as the nature of

the soul and of the spiritual world, decisively show that in their time

possession had not assumed any great prominence or acquired any general

credence. Plutarch, who admitted the reality of evil dæmons, and who was

the most strenuous defender of the oracles, treats the whole class of

superstitions to which exorcism belongs with much contempt.(726) Marcus

Aurelius, in recounting the benefits he had received from different

persons with whom he had been connected, acknowledges his debt of

gratitude to the philosopher Diognetus for having taught him to give no

credence to magicians, jugglers, and expellers of dæmons.(727) Lucian

declares that every cunning juggler could make his fortune by going over

to the Christians and preying upon their simplicity.(728) Celsus described

the Christians as jugglers performing their tricks among the young and the

credulous.(729) The most decisive evidence, however, we possess, is a law

of Ulpian, directed, it is thought, against the Christians, which condemns

those “who use incantations or imprecations, or (to employ the common word

of impostors) exorcisms.”(730) Modern criticism has noted a few facts

which may throw some light upon this obscure subject. It has been observed

that the symptoms of possession were for the most part identical with

those of lunacy or epilepsy; that it is quite possible that the excitement

of an imposing religious ceremony might produce or suspend the disorder;

that leading questions might in these cases be followed by the desired

answers; and that some passages from the Fathers show that the exorcisms

were not always successful, or the cures always permanent. It has been

observed, too, that at first the power of exorcism was open to all

Christians without restraint; that this licence, in an age when religious

jugglers were very common, and in a Church whose members were very

credulous, gave great facilities to impostors; that when the Laodicean

Council, in the fourth century, forbade any one to exorcise, except those

who were duly authorised by the bishop, these miracles speedily declined;

and that, in the very beginning of the fifth century, a physician named

Posidonius denied the existence of possession.(731)

To sum up this whole subject, we may conclude that what is called the

evidential system had no prominent place in effecting the conversion of

the Roman Empire. Historical criticisms were far too imperfect to make

appeals to the miracles of former days of any value, and the notion of the

wide diffusion of miraculous or magical powers, as well as the generally

private character of the alleged miracles of the Patristic age, made

contemporary wonders very unimpressive. The prophecies attributed to the

Sibyls, and the practice of exorcism, had, however, a certain weight; for

the first were connected with a religious authority, long and deeply

revered at Rome, and the second had been forced by several circumstances

into great prominence. But the effect even of these may be safely regarded

as altogether subsidiary, and the main causes of the conversion must be

looked for in another and a wider sphere.

These causes were the general tendencies of the age. They are to be found

in that vast movement of mingled scepticism and credulity, in that

amalgamation or dissolution of many creeds, in that profound

transformation of habits, of feelings, and of ideals, which I have

attempted to paint in the last chapter. Under circumstances more

favourable to religious proselytism than the world had ever before known,

with the path cleared by a long course of destructive criticism, the

religions and philosophies of mankind were struggling for the mastery in

that great metropolis where all were amply represented, and in which alone

the destinies of the world could be decided. Among the educated a frigid

Stoicism, teaching a majestic but unattainable grandeur, and scorning the

support of the affections, the hope of another world, and the consolations

of worship, had for a time been in the ascendant, and it only terminated

its noble and most fruitful career when it had become manifestly

inadequate to the religious wants of the age. Among other classes,

religion after religion ran its conquering course. The Jews, although a

number of causes had made them the most hated of all the Roman subjects,

and although their religion, from its intensely national character, seemed

peculiarly unsuited for proselytism, had yet, by the force of their

monotheism, their charity, and their exorcisms, spread the creed of Moses

far and wide. The Empress Poppæa is said to have been a proselyte. The

passion of Roman women for Jewish rites was one of the complaints of

Juvenal. The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts became familiar facts in all the

great cities, and the antiquity of the Jewish law the subject of eager

discussion. Other Oriental religions were even more successful. The

worship of Mithra, and, above all, of the Egyptian divinities, attracted

their thousands, and during more than three centuries the Roman writings

are crowded with allusions to their progress. The mysteries of the Bona

Dea,(732) the solemn worship of Isis, the expiatory rites that cleansed

the guilty soul, excited a very delirium of enthusiasm. Juvenal describes

the Roman women, at the dawn of the winter day, breaking the ice of the

Tiber to plunge three times into its sacred stream, dragging themselves on

bleeding knees in penance around the field of Tarquin, offering to

undertake pilgrimages to Egypt to seek the holy water for the shrine of

Isis, fondly dreaming that they had heard the voice of the goddess.(733)

Apuleius has drawn a graphic picture of the solemn majesty of her

processions, and the spell they cast upon the most licentious and the most

sceptical.(734) Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus were passionately

devoted to them.(735) The temples of Isis and Serapis, and the statues of

Mithra, are among the last prominent works of Roman art. In all other

forms the same credulity was manifested. The oracles that had been silent

were heard again; the astrologers swarmed in every city; the philosophers

were surrounded with an atmosphere of legend; the Pythagorean school had

raised credulity into a system. On all sides, and to a degree unparalleled

in history, we find men who were no longer satisfied with their old local

religion, thirsting for belief, passionately and restlessly seeking for a

new faith.

In the midst of this movement, Christianity gained its ascendancy, and we

can be at no loss to discover the cause of its triumph. No other religion,

under such circumstances, had ever combined so many distinct elements of

power and attraction. Unlike the Jewish religion, it was bound by no local

ties, and was equally adapted for every nation and for every class. Unlike

Stoicism, it appealed in the strongest manner to the affections, and

offered all the charm of a sympathetic worship. Unlike the Egyptian

religions, it united with its distinctive teaching a pure and noble system

of ethics, and proved itself capable of realising it in action. It

proclaimed, amid a vast movement of social and national amalgamation, the

universal brotherhood of mankind. Amid the softening influence of

philosophy and civilisation, it taught the supreme sanctity of love. To

the slave, who had never before exercised so large an influence over Roman

religious life, it was the religion of the suffering and the oppressed. To

the philosopher it was at once the echo of the highest ethics of the later

Stoics, and the expansion of the best teaching of the school of Plato. To

a world thirsting for prodigy, it offered a history replete with wonders

more strange that those of Apollonius; while the Jew and the Chaldean

could scarcely rival its exorcists, and the legends of continual miracles

circulated among its followers. To a world deeply conscious of political

dissolution, and prying eagerly and anxiously into the future, it

proclaimed with a thrilling power the immediate destruction of the

globe—the glory of all its friends, and the damnation of all its foes. To

a world that had grown very weary gazing on the cold and passionless

grandeur which Cato realised, and which Lucan sung, it presented an ideal

of compassion and of love—a Teacher who could weep by the sepulchre of His

friend, who was touched with the feeling of our infirmities. To a world,

in fine, distracted by hostile creeds and colliding philosophies, it

taught its doctrines, not as a human speculation, but as a Divine

revelation, authenticated much less by reason than by faith. “With the

heart man believeth unto righteousness;” “He that doeth the will of my

Father will know the doctrine, whether it be of God;” “Unless you believe

you cannot understand;” “A heart naturally Christian;” “The heart makes

the theologian,” are the phrases which best express the first action of

Christianity upon the world. Like all great religions, it was more

concerned with modes of feeling than with modes of thought. The chief

cause of its success was the congruity of its teaching with the spiritual

nature of mankind. It was because it was true to the moral sentiments of

the age, because it represented faithfully the supreme type of excellence

to which men were then tending, because it corresponded with their

religious wants, aims, and emotions, because the whole spiritual being

could then expand and expatiate under its influence, that it planted its

roots so deeply in the hearts of men.

To all these elements of attraction, others of a different order must be

added. Christianity was not merely a moral influence, or a system of

opinions, or an historical record, or a collection of wonder-working men;

it was also an institution definitely, elaborately, and skilfully

organised, possessing a weight and a stability which isolated or

undisciplined teachers could never rival, and evoking, to a degree before

unexampled in the world, an enthusiastic devotion to its corporate

welfare, analogous to that of the patriot to his country. The many forms

of Pagan worship were pliant in their nature. Each offered certain

advantages or spiritual gratifications; but there was no reason why all

should not exist together, and participation in one by no means implied

disrespect to the others. But Christianity was emphatically exclusive; its

adherent was bound to detest and abjure the faiths around him as the

workmanship of dæmons, and to consider himself placed in the world to

destroy them. Hence there sprang a stern, aggressive, and at the same time

disciplined enthusiasm, wholly unlike any other that had been witnessed

upon earth. The duties of public worship; the sacraments, which were

represented as the oaths of the Christian warrior; the fasts and penances

and commemorative days, which strengthened the Church feeling; the

intervention of religion in the most solemn epochs of life, conspired to

sustain it. Above all, the doctrine of salvation by belief, which then for

the first time flashed upon the world; the persuasion, realised with all

the vividness of novelty, that Christianity opened out to its votaries

eternal happiness, while all beyond its pale were doomed to an eternity of

torture, supplied a motive of action as powerful as it is perhaps possible

to conceive. It struck alike the coarsest chords of hope and fear, and the

finest chords of compassion and love. The polytheist, admitting that

Christianity might possibly be true, was led by a mere calculation of

prudence to embrace it, and the fervent Christian would shrink from no

suffering to draw those whom he loved within its pale. Nor were other

inducements wanting. To the confessor was granted in the Church a great

and venerable authority, such as the bishop could scarcely claim.(736) To

the martyr, besides the fruition of heaven, belonged the highest glory on

earth. By winning that bloodstained crown, the meanest Christian slave

might gain a reputation as glorious as that of a Decius or a Regulus. His

body was laid to rest with a sumptuous splendour;(737) his relics,

embalmed or shrined, were venerated with an almost idolatrous homage. The

anniversary of his birth into another life was commemorated in the Church,

and before the great assembly of the saints his heroic sufferings were

recounted.(738) How, indeed, should he not be envied? He had passed away

into eternal bliss. He had left upon earth an abiding name. By the

“baptism of blood” the sins of a life had been in a moment effaced.

Those who are accustomed to recognise heroic enthusiasm as a normal

product of certain natural conditions, will have no difficulty in

understanding that, under such circumstances as I have described, a

transcendent courage should have been evoked. Men seemed indeed to be in

love with death. Believing, with St. Ignatius, that they were “the wheat

of God,” they panted for the day when they should be “ground by the teeth

of wild beasts into the pure bread of Christ!” Beneath this one burning

enthusiasm all the ties of earthly love were snapt in twain. Origen, when

a boy, being restrained by force from going forth to deliver himself up to

the persecutors, wrote to his imprisoned father, imploring him not to let

any thought of his family intervene to quench his resolution or to deter

him from sealing his faith with his blood. St. Perpetua, an only daughter,

a young mother of twenty-two, had embraced the Christian creed, confessed

it before her judges, and declared herself ready to endure for it the

martyr’s death. Again and again her father came to her in a paroxysm of

agony, entreating her not to deprive him of the joy and the consolation of

his closing years. He appealed to her by the memory of all the tenderness

he had lavished upon her—by her infant child—by his own gray hairs, that

were soon to be brought down in sorrow to the grave. Forgetting in his

deep anguish all the dignity of a parent, he fell upon his knees before

his child, covered her hands with kisses, and, with tears streaming from

his eyes, implored her to have mercy upon him. But she was unshaken though

not untouched; she saw her father, frenzied with grief, dragged from

before the tribunal; she saw him tearing his white beard, and lying

prostrate and broken-hearted on the prison floor; she went forth to die

for a faith she loved more dearly—for a faith that told her that her

father would be lost for ever.(739) The desire for martyrdom became at

times a form of absolute madness, a kind of epidemic of suicide, and the

leading minds of the Church found it necessary to exert all their

authority to prevent their followers from thrusting themselves into the

hands of the persecutors.(740) Tertullian mentions how, in a little

Asiatic town, the entire population once flocked to the proconsul,

declaring themselves to be Christians, and imploring him to execute the

decree of the emperor and grant them the privilege of martyrdom. The

bewildered functionary asked them whether, if they were so weary of life,

there were no precipices or ropes by which they could end their days; and

he put to death a small number of the suppliants, and dismissed the

others.(741) Two illustrious Pagan moralists and one profane Pagan

satirist have noticed this passion with a most unpleasing scorn. “There

are some,” said Epictetus, “whom madness, there are others, like the

Galilæans, whom custom, makes indifferent to death.”(742) “What mind,”

said Marcus Aurelius, “is prepared, if need be, to go forth from the body,

whether it be to be extinguished, or to be dispersed, or to

endure?—prepared by deliberate reflection, and not by pure obstinacy, as

is the custom of the Christians.”(743) “These wretches,” said Lucian,

speaking of the Christians, “persuade themselves that they are going to be

altogether immortal, and to live for ever; wherefore they despise death,

and many of their own accord give themselves up to be slain.”(744)

“I send against you men who are as greedy of death as you are of

pleasures,” were the words which, in after days, the Mohammedan chief

addressed to the degenerate Christians of Syria, and which were at once

the presage and the explanation of his triumph. Such words might with

equal propriety have been employed by the early Christian leaders to their

Pagan adversaries. The zeal of the Christians and of the Pagans differed

alike in degree and in kind. When Constantine made Christianity the

religion of the State, it is probable that its adherents were but a

minority in Rome. Even in the days of Theodosius the senate was still

wedded to Paganism;(745) yet the measures of Constantine were both natural

and necessary. The majority were without inflexible belief, without moral

enthusiasm, without definite organisation, without any of those principles

that inspire the heroism either of resistance or aggression. The minority

formed a serried phalanx, animated by every motive that could purify,

discipline, and sustain their zeal. When once the Christians had acquired

a considerable position, the question of their destiny was a simple one.

They must either be crushed or they must reign. The failure of the

persecution of Diocletian conducted them inevitably to the throne.

It may indeed be confidently asserted that the conversion of the Roman

Empire is so far from being of the nature of a miracle or suspension of

the ordinary principles of human nature, that there is scarcely any other

great movement on record in which the causes and effects so manifestly

correspond. The apparent anomalies of history are not inconsiderable, but

they must be sought for in other quarters. That within the narrow limits

and scanty population of the Greek States should have arisen men who, in

almost every conceivable form of genius, in philosophy, in epic, dramatic

and lyric poetry, in written and spoken eloquence, in statesmanship, in

sculpture, in painting, and probably also in music, should have attained

almost or altogether the highest limits of human perfection—that the creed

of Mohammed should have preserved its pure monotheism and its freedom from

all idolatrous tendencies, when adopted by vast populations in that

intellectual condition in which, under all other creeds, a gross and

material worship has proved inevitable, both these are facts which we can

only very imperfectly explain. Considerations of climate, and still more

of political, social, and intellectual customs and institutions, may

palliate the first difficulty, and the attitude Mohammed assumed to art

may supply us with a partial explanation of the second; but I suppose

that, after all has been said, most persons will feel that they are in

presence of phenomena very exceptional and astonishing. The first rise of

Christianity in Judæa is a subject wholly apart from this book. We are

examining only the subsequent movement in the Roman Empire. Of this

movement it may be boldly asserted that the assumption of a moral or

intellectual miracle is utterly gratuitous. Never before was a religious

transformation so manifestly inevitable. No other religion ever combined

so many forms of attraction as Christianity, both from its intrinsic

excellence, and from its manifest adaptation to the special wants of the

time. One great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic

actions and formed more upright men than any other creed; but that it

should do so was precisely what might have been expected.

To these reasonings, however, those who maintain that the triumph of

Christianity in Rome is naturally inexplicable, reply by pointing to the

persecutions which Christianity had to encounter. As this subject is one

on which many misconceptions exist, and as it is of extreme importance on

account of its connection with later persecutions, it will be necessary

briefly to discuss it.

It is manifest that the reasons that may induce a ruler to suppress by

force some forms of religious worship or opinion, are very various. He may

do so on moral grounds, because they directly or indirectly produce

immorality; or on religious grounds, because he believes them to be

offensive to the Deity; or on political grounds, because they are

injurious either to the State or to the Government; or on corrupt grounds,

because he desires to gratify some vindictive or avaricious passion. From

the simple fact, therefore, of a religious persecution we cannot at once

infer the principles of the persecutor, but must examine in detail by

which of the above motives, or by what combination of them, he has been

actuated.

Now, the persecution which has taken place at the instigation of the

Christian priests differs in some respects broadly from all others. It has

been far more sustained, systematic, and unflinching. It has been directed

not merely against acts of worship, but also against speculative opinions.

It has been supported not merely as a right, but also as a duty. It has

been advocated in a whole literature of theology, by the classes that are

especially devout, and by the most opposing sects, and it has invariably

declined in conjunction with a large portion of theological dogmas.

I have elsewhere examined in great detail the history of persecutions by

Christians, and have endeavoured to show that, while exceptional causes

have undoubtedly occasionally occurred, they were, in the overwhelming

majority of cases, simply the natural, legitimate, and inevitable

consequence of a certain portion of the received theology. That portion is

the doctrine that correct theological opinions are essential to salvation,

and that theological error necessarily involves guilt. To these two

opinions may be distinctly traced almost all the sufferings that Christian

persecutors have caused, almost all the obstructions they have thrown in

the path of human progress; and those sufferings have been so grievous

that it may be reasonably questioned whether superstition has not often

proved a greater curse than vice, and that obstruction was so

pertinacious, that the contraction of theological influence has been at

once the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual

advance. The notion that he might himself be possibly mistaken in his

opinions, which alone could cause a man who was thoroughly imbued with

these principles to shrink from persecuting, was excluded by the

theological virtue of faith, which, whatever else it might involve,

implied at least an absolute unbroken certainty, and led the devotee to

regard all doubt, and therefore all action based upon doubt, as sin.

To this general cause of Christian persecution I have shown that two

subsidiary influences may be joined. A large portion of theological ethics

was derived from writings in which religious massacres, on the whole the

most ruthless and sanguinary upon record, were said to have been directly

enjoined by the Deity, in which the duty of suppressing idolatry by force

was given a greater prominence than any article of the moral code, and in

which the spirit of intolerance has found its most eloquent and most

passionate expressions.(746) Besides this, the destiny theologians

represented as awaiting the misbeliever was so ghastly and so appalling as

to render it almost childish to lay any stress upon the earthly suffering

that might be inflicted in the extirpation of error.

That these are the true causes of the great bulk of Christian persecution,

I believe to be one of the most certain as well as one of the most

important facts in history. For the detailed proof I can only refer to

what I have elsewhere written; but I may here notice that that proof

combines every conceivable kind of evidence that in such a question can be

demanded. It can be shown that these principles would naturally lead men

to persecute. It can be shown that from the time of Constantine to the

time when the rationalistic spirit wrested the bloodstained sword from the

priestly hand, persecution was uniformly defended upon them—defended in

long, learned, and elaborate treatises, by the best and greatest men the

Church had produced, by sects that differed on almost all other points, by

multitudes who proved in every conceivable manner the purity of their

zeal. It can be shown, too, that toleration began with the distinction

between fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines, expanded in exact

proportion to the growing latitudinarianism, and triumphed only when

indifference to dogma had become a prevailing sentiment among legislators.

It was only when the battle had been won—when the anti-dogmatic party,

acting in opposition to the Church, had rendered persecution

impossible—that the great body of theologians revised their arguments, and

discovered that to punish men for their opinions was wholly at variance

with their faith. With the merits of this pleasing though somewhat tardy

conversion I am not now concerned; but few persons, I think, can follow

the history of Christian persecution without a feeling of extreme

astonishment that some modern writers, not content with maintaining that

the doctrine of exclusive salvation _ought_ not to have produced

persecution, have ventured, in defiance of the unanimous testimony of the

theologians of so many centuries, to dispute the plain historical fact

that it _did_ produce it. They argue that the Pagans, who did not believe

in exclusive salvation, persecuted, and that therefore that doctrine

cannot be the cause of persecution. The answer is that no sane man ever

maintained that all the persecutions on record were from the same source.

We can prove by the clearest evidence that Christian persecutions sprang

chiefly from the causes I have alleged. The causes of Pagan persecutions,

though different, are equally manifest, and I shall proceed shortly to

indicate them.

They were partly political and partly religious. The Governments in most

of the ancient States, in the earlier stages of their existence, undertook

the complete education of the people; professed to control and regulate

all the details of their social life, even to the dresses they wore, or

the dishes that were served upon their tables; and, in a word, to mould

their whole lives and characters into a uniform type. Hence, all

organisations and corporations not connected with the State, and

especially all that emanated from foreign countries, were looked upon with

distrust or antipathy. But this antipathy was greatly strengthened by a

religious consideration. No belief was more deeply rooted in the ancient

mind than that good or bad fortune sprang from the intervention of

spiritual beings, and that to neglect the sacred rites was to bring down

calamity upon the city. In the diminutive Greek States, where the function

of the Government was immensely enlarged, a strong intolerance existed,

which extended for some time not merely to practices, but to writings and

discourses. The well-known persecutions of Anaxagoras, Theodorus,

Diagoras, Stilpo, and Socrates; the laws of Plato, which were as opposed

to religious as to domestic freedom; and the existence in Athens of an

inquisitorial tribunal,(747) sufficiently attested it. But long before the

final ruin of Greece, speculative liberty had been fully attained. The

Epicurean and the Sceptical schools developed unmolested, and even in the

days of Socrates, Aristophanes was able to ridicule the gods upon the

stage.

In the earlier days of Rome religion was looked upon as a function of the

State; its chief object was to make the gods auspicious to the national

policy,(748) and its principal ceremonies were performed at the direct

command of the Senate. The national theory on religious matters was that

the best religion is always that of a man’s own country. At the same time,

the widest tolerance was granted to the religions of conquered nations.

The temples of every god were respected by the Roman army. Before

besieging a city, the Romans were accustomed to supplicate the presiding

deities of that city. With the single exception of the Druids, whose human

sacrifices it was thought a matter of humanity to suppress,(749) and whose

fierce rebellions it was thought necessary to crush, the teachers of all

national religions continued unmolested by the conqueror.

This policy, however, applied specially to religious rites practised in

the countries in which they were indigenous. The liberty to be granted to

the vast confluence of strangers attracted to Italy during the Empire was

another question. In the old Republican days, when the censors regulated

with the most despotic authority the minutest affairs of life, and when

the national religion was interwoven with every detail of political and

even domestic transactions, but little liberty could be expected. When

Carneades endeavoured to inculcate his universal scepticism upon the

Romans, by arguing alternately for and against the same proposition, Cato

immediately urged the Senate to expel him from the city, lest the people

should be corrupted by his teaching.(750) For a similar reason all

rhetoricians had been banished from the Republic.(751) The most

remarkable, however, and at the same time the extreme expression of Roman

intolerance that has descended to us, is the advice which Mæcenas is

represented as having given to Octavius Cæsar, before his accession to the

throne. “Always,” he said, “and everywhere, worship the gods according to

the rites of your country, and compel others to the same worship. Pursue

with your hatred and with punishments those who introduce foreign

religions, not only for the sake of the gods—the despisers of whom can

assuredly never do anything great—but also because they who introduce new

divinities entice many to use foreign laws. Hence arise conspiracies,

societies, and assemblies, things very unsuited to an homogeneous empire.

Tolerate no despiser of the gods, and no religious juggler. Divination is

necessary, and therefore let the aruspices and augurs by all means be

sustained, and let those who will, consult them; but the magicians must be

utterly prohibited, who, though they sometimes tell the truth, more

frequently, by false promises, urge men on to conspiracies.”(752)

This striking passage exhibits very clearly the extent to which in some

minds the intolerant spirit was carried in antiquity, and also the

blending motives that produced it. We should be, however, widely mistaken

if we regarded it as a picture of the actual religious policy of the

Empire. In order to realise this, it will be necessary to notice

separately liberty of speculation and liberty of worship.

When Asinius Pollio founded the first public library in Rome, he placed it

in the Temple of Liberty. The lesson which was thus taught to the literary

classes was never forgotten. It is probable that in no other period of the

history of the world was speculative freedom so perfect as in the Roman

Empire. The fearless scrutiny of all notions of popular belief, displayed

in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius, or Lucian, did not excite an

effort of repression. Philosophers were, indeed, persecuted by Domitian

and Vespasian for their ardent opposition to the despotism of the

throne,(753) but on their own subjects they were wholly untrammelled. The

Greek writers consoled themselves for the extinction of the independence

of their country by the reflection that in the sphere of intellect the

meddling policy of the Greek States was replaced by an absolute and a

majestic freedom.(754) The fierceness of the opposition of sects faded

beneath its influence. Of all the speculative conflicts of antiquity, that

which most nearly approached the virulence of later theological

controversies was probably that between the Stoics and the Epicureans; but

it is well worthy of notice that some of the most emphatic testimonies to

the moral goodness of Epicurus have come from the writings of his

opponents.

But the policy of the Roman rulers towards religious rites was very

different from, and would at first sight appear to be in direct opposition

to, their policy towards opinions. An old law, which Cicero mentions,

expressly forbade the introduction of new religions,(755) and in the

Republican days and the earliest days of the Empire there are many

instances of its being enforced. Thus, in A.U.C. 326, a severe drought

having led men to seek help from new gods, the Senate charged the ædiles

to allow none but Roman deities to be worshipped.(756) Lutatius, soon

after the first Punic war, was forbidden by the Senate to consult foreign

gods, “because,” said the historian, “it was deemed right the Republic

should be administered according to the national auspices, and not

according to those of other lands.”(757) During the second Punic war, a

severe edict of the Senate enjoined the suppression of certain recent

innovations.(758) About A.U.C. 615 the prætor Hispalus exiled those who

had introduced the worship of the Sabasian Jupiter.(759) The rites of

Bacchus, being accompanied by gross and scandalous obscenity, were

suppressed, the consul, in a remarkable speech, calling upon the people to

revive the religious policy of their ancestors.(760) The worship of Isis

and Serapis only gained its footing after a long struggle, and no small

amount of persecution. The gross immorality it sometimes favoured, its

wild and abject superstition, so thoroughly alien to the whole character

of Roman life and tradition, and also the organisation of its priesthood,

rendered it peculiarly obnoxious to the Government. When the first edict

of suppression was issued, the people hesitated to destroy a temple which

seemed so venerable in their eyes, and the consul Æmilius Paulus dispelled

their fears by seizing an axe and striking the first blow himself.(761)

During the latter days of the Republic, edicts had commanded the

destruction of the Egyptian temples. Octavius, however, in his younger

days, favoured the new worship, but, soon after, it was again

suppressed.(762) Under Tiberius it had once more crept in; but the priests

of Isis having enabled a patrician named Mundus to disguise himself as the

god Anubis, and win the favours of a devout worshipper, the temple, by

order of the emperor, was destroyed, the images were thrown into the

Tiber, the priests were crucified, and the seducer was banished.(763)

Under the same emperor four thousand persons were exiled to Sardinia, as

affected with Jewish and Egyptian superstitions. They were commissioned to

repress robbers; but it was at the same time added, with a characteristic

scorn, that if they died through the unhealthiness of the climate, it

would be but a “small loss.”(764)

These measures represent together a considerable amount of religious

repression, but they were produced exclusively by notions of policy or

discipline. They grew out of that intense national spirit which sacrificed

every other interest to the State, and resisted every form of innovation,

whether secular or religious, that could impair the unity of the national

type, and dissolve the discipline which the predominance of the military

spirit and the stern government of the Republic had formed. They were

also, in some cases, the result of moral scandals. When, however, it

became evident that the internal condition of the Republic was unsuited

for the Empire, the rulers frankly acquiesced in the change, and from the

time of Tiberius, with the single exception of the Christians, perfect

liberty of worship seems to have been granted to the professors of all

religions in Rome.(765) The old law upon the subject was not revoked, but

it was not generally enforced. Sometimes the new creeds were expressly

authorised. Sometimes they were tacitly permitted. With a single

exception, all the religions of the world raised their heads unmolested in

the “Holy City.”(766)

The liberty, however, of professing and practising a foreign worship did

not dispense the Roman from the obligation of performing also the

sacrifices or other religious rites of his own land. It was here that

whatever religious fanaticism mingled with Pagan persecutions was

displayed. Eusebius tells us that religion was divided by the Romans into

three parts—the mythology, or legends that had descended from the poets;

the interpretations or theories by which the philosophers endeavoured to

rationalise, filter, or explain away these legends; and the ritual or

official religious observances. In the first two spheres perfect liberty

was accorded, but the ritual was placed under the control of the

Government, and was made a matter of compulsion.(767) In order to realise

the strength of the feeling that supported it, we must remember that the

multitude firmly believed that the prosperity and adversity of the Empire

depended chiefly upon the zeal or indifference that was shown in

conciliating the national divinities, and also that the philosophers, as I

have noticed in the last chapter, for the most part not only practised,

but warmly defended, the official observances. The love of truth in many

forms was exhibited among the Pagan philosophers to a degree which has

never been surpassed; but there was one form in which it was absolutely

unknown. The belief that it is wrong for a man in religious matters to act

a lie, to sanction by his presence and by his example what he regards as

baseless superstitions, had no place in the ethics of antiquity. The

religious flexibility which polytheism had originally generated, the

strong political feeling that pervaded all classes, and also the manifest

impossibility of making philosophy the creed of the ignorant, had rendered

nearly universal among philosophers a state of feeling which is often

exhibited, but rarely openly professed, among ourselves.(768) The

religious opinions of men had but little influence on their religious

practices, and the sceptic considered it not merely lawful, but a duty, to

attend the observances of his country. No one did more to scatter the

ancient superstitions than Cicero, who was himself an augur, and who

strongly asserted the duty of complying with the national rites.(769)

Seneca, having recounted in the most derisive terms the absurdities of the

popular worship, concludes his enumeration by declaring that “the sage

will observe all these things, not as pleasing to the Divinities, but as

commanded by the law,” and that he should remember “that his worship is

due to custom, not to belief.”(770) Epictetus, whose austere creed rises

to the purest monotheism, teaches as a fundamental religious maxim that

every man in his devotions should “conform to the customs of his

country.”(771) The Jews and Christians, who alone refused to do so, were

the representatives of a moral principle that was unknown to the Pagan

world.

It should be remembered, too, that the Oriental custom of deifying

emperors having been introduced into Rome, to burn incense before their

statues had become a kind of test of loyalty. This adoration does not, it

is true, appear to have implied any particular article of belief, and it

was probably regarded by most men as we regard the application of the term

“Sacred Majesty” to a sovereign, and the custom of kneeling in his

presence; but it was esteemed inconsistent with Christianity, and the

conscientious refusal of the Christians to comply with it aroused a

feeling resembling that which was long produced in Christendom by the

refusal of Quakers to comply with the usages of courts.

The obligation to perform the sacred rites of an idolatrous worship, if

rigidly enforced, would have amounted, in the case of the Jews and the

Christians, to a complete proscription. It does not, however, appear that

the Jews were ever persecuted on this ground. They formed a large and

influential colony in Rome. They retained undiminished, in the midst of

the Pagan population, their exclusive habits, refusing not merely all

religious communion, but most social intercourse with the idolaters,

occupying a separate quarter of the city, and sedulously practising their

distinctive rites. Tiberius, as we have seen, appears to have involved

them in his proscription of Egyptian superstitions; but they were usually

perfectly unmolested, or were molested only when their riotous conduct had

attracted the attention of the rulers. The Government was so far from

compelling them to perform acts contrary to their religion, that Augustus

expressly changed the day of the distribution of corn, in order that they

might not be reduced to the alternative of forfeiting their share, or of

breaking the Sabbath.(772)

It appears, then, that the old Republican intolerance had in the Empire

been so modified as almost to have disappeared. The liberty of speculation

and discussion was entirely unchecked. The liberty of practising foreign

religious rites, though ostensibly limited by the law against unauthorised

religions, was after Tiberius equally secure. The liberty of abstaining

from the official national rites, though more precarious, was fully

conceded to the Jews, whose jealousy of idolatry was in no degree inferior

to that of the Christians. It remains, then, to examine what were the

causes of the very exceptional fanaticism and animosity that were directed

against the latter.

The first cause of the persecution of the Christians was the religious

notion to which I have already referred. The belief that our world is

governed by isolated acts of Divine intervention, and that, in

consequence, every great calamity, whether physical, or military, or

political, may be regarded as a punishment or a warning, was the basis of

the whole religious system of antiquity.(773) In the days of the Republic

every famine, pestilence, or drought was followed by a searching

investigation of the sacred rites, to ascertain what irregularity or

neglect had caused the Divine anger, and two instances are recorded in

which vestal virgins were put to death because their unchastity was

believed to have provoked a national calamity.(774) It might appear at

first sight that the fanaticism which this belief would naturally produce

would have been directed against the Jews as strongly as against the

Christians; but a moment’s reflection is sufficient to explain the

difference. The Jewish religion was essentially conservative and

unexpansive. Although, in the passion for Oriental religions, many of the

Romans had begun to practise its ceremonies, there was no spirit of

proselytism in the sect; and it is probable that almost all who followed

this religion, to the exclusion of others, were of Hebrew nationality. The

Christians, on the other hand, were ardent missionaries; they were, for

the most part, Romans who had thrown off the allegiance of their old gods,

and their activity was so great that from a very early period the temples

were in some districts almost deserted.(775) Besides this, the Jews simply

abstained from and despised the religions around them. The Christians

denounced them as the worship of dæmons, and lost no opportunity of

insulting them. It is not, therefore, surprising that the populace should

have been firmly convinced that every great catastrophe that occurred was

due to the presence of the enemies of the gods. “If the Tiber ascends to

the walls,” says Tertullian, “or if the Nile does not overflow the fields,

if the heaven refuses its rain, if the earth quakes, if famine and

pestilence desolate the land, immediately the cry is raised, ‘The

Christians to the lions!’ ”(776) “There is no rain—the Christians are the

cause,” had become a popular proverb in Rome.(777) Earthquakes, which, on

account of their peculiarly appalling, and, to ignorant men, mysterious

nature, have played a very large part in the history of superstition, were

frequent and terrible in the Asiatic provinces, and in three or four

instances the persecution of the Christians may be distinctly traced to

the fanaticism they produced.

There is no part of ecclesiastical history more curious than the effects

of this belief in alternately assisting or impeding the progress of

different Churches. In the first three centuries of Christian history, it

was the cause of fearful sufferings to the faith; but even then the

Christians usually accepted the theory of their adversaries, though they

differed concerning its application. Tertullian and Cyprian strongly

maintained, sometimes that the calamities were due to the anger of the

Almighty against idolatry, sometimes that they were intended to avenge the

persecution of the truth. A collection was early made of men who, having

been hostile to the Christian faith, had died by some horrible death, and

their deaths were pronounced to be Divine punishments.(778) The victory

which established the power of the first Christian emperor, and the sudden

death of Arius, were afterwards accepted as decisive proofs of the truth

of Christianity, and of the falsehood of Arianism.(779) But soon the

manifest signs of the dissolution of the Empire revived the zeal of the

Pagans, who began to reproach themselves for their ingratitude to their

old gods, and who recognised in the calamities of their country the

vengeance of an insulted Heaven. When the altar of Victory was removed

contemptuously from the Senate, when the sacred college of the vestals was

suppressed, when, above all, the armies of Alaric encircled the Imperial

city, angry murmurs arose which disturbed the Christians in their triumph.

The standing-point of the theologians was then somewhat altered. St.

Ambrose dissected with the most unsparing rationalism the theory that

ascribed the national decline to the suppression of the vestals, traced it

to all its consequences, and exposed all its absurdities. Orosius wrote

his history to prove that great misfortunes had befallen the Empire before

its conversion. Salvian wrote his treatise on Providence to prove that the

barbarian invasions were a Divine judgment on the immorality of the

Christians. St. Augustine concentrated all his genius on a great work,

written under the impression of the invasion of Alaric, and intended to

prove that “the city of God” was not on earth, and that the downfall of

the Empire need therefore cause no disquietude to the Christians. St.

Gregory the Great continually represented the calamities of Italy as

warnings foreboding the destruction of the world. When Rome sank finally

before the barbarian hosts, it would seem as though the doctrine that

temporal success was the proof of Divine favour must be finally abandoned.

But the Christian clergy disengaged their cause from that of the ruined

Empire, proclaimed its downfall to be a fulfilment of prophecy and a

Divine judgment, confronted the barbarian conquerors in all the majesty of

their sacred office, and overawed them in the very moment of their

victory. In the conversion of the uncivilised tribes, the doctrine of

special intervention occupied a commanding place. The Burgundians, when

defeated by the Huns, resolved, as a last resource, to place themselves

under the protection of the Roman God whom they vaguely believed to be the

most powerful, and the whole nation in consequence embraced

Christianity.(780) In a critical moment of a great battle, Clovis invoked

the assistance of the God of his wife. The battle was won, and he, with

many thousands of Franks, was converted to the faith.(781) In England, the

conversion of Northumbria was partly, and the conversion of Mercia was

mainly, due to the belief that the Divine interposition had secured the

victory of a Christian king.(782) A Bulgarian prince was driven into the

Church by the terror of a pestilence, and he speedily effected the

conversion of his subjects.(783) The destruction of so many shrines, and

the defeat of so many Christian armies, by the followers of Mohammed; the

disastrous and ignominious overthrow of the Crusaders, who went forth

protected by all the blessings of the Church, were unable to impair the

belief. All through the middle ages, and for some centuries after the

middle ages had passed, every startling catastrophe was regarded as a

punishment, or a warning, or a sign of the approaching termination of the

world. Churches and monasteries were built. Religious societies were

founded. Penances were performed. Jews were massacred, and a long

catalogue might be given of the theories by which men attempted to connect

every vicissitude of fortune, and every convulsion of nature, with the

wranglings of theologians. Thus, to give but a few examples: St. Ambrose

confidently asserted that the death of Maximus was a consequence of the

crime he had committed in compelling the Christians to rebuild a Jewish

synagogue they had destroyed.(784) One of the laws in the Justinian code,

directed against the Jews, Samaritans, and Pagans, expressly attributes to

them the sterility of the soil, which in an earlier age the Pagans had so

often attributed to the Christians.(785) A volcanic eruption that broke

out at the commencement of the iconoclastic persecution was adduced as a

clear proof that the Divine anger was aroused, according to one party, by

the hostility of the emperor to the sacred images; according to the other

party, by his sinful hesitation in extirpating idolatry.(786) Bodin, in a

later age, considered that the early death of the sovereign who commanded

the massacre of St. Bartholomew was due to what he deemed the master crime

of that sovereign’s reign. He had spared the life of a famous

sorcerer.(787) In the struggles that followed the Reformation, physical

calamities were continually ascribed in one age to the toleration, in

another to the endowment, of either heresy or Popery.(788) Sometimes,

however, they were traced to the theatre, and sometimes to the writings of

freethinkers. But gradually, and almost insensibly, these notions faded

away. The old language is often heard, but it is no longer realised and

operative, and the doctrine which played so large a part in the history of

the world has ceased to exercise any appreciable influence upon the

actions of mankind.

In addition to this religious motive, which acted chiefly upon the vulgar,

there was a political motive which rendered Christianity obnoxious to the

educated. The Church constituted a vast, highly organised, and in many

respects secret society, and as such was not only distinctly illegal, but

was also in the very highest degree calculated to excite the apprehensions

of the Government. There was no principle in the Imperial policy more

stubbornly upheld than the suppression of all corporations that might be

made the nuclei of revolt. The extent to which this policy was carried is

strikingly evinced by a letter from Trajan to Pliny, in which the emperor

forbade the formation even of a guild of firemen, on the ground that they

would constitute an association and hold meetings.(789) In such a state of

feeling, the existence of a vast association, governed by countless

functionaries, shrouding its meetings and some of its doctrines in

impenetrable obscurity, evoking a degree of attachment and devotion

greater than could be elicited by the State, ramifying through the whole

extent of the empire, and restlessly extending its influence, would

naturally arouse the strongest apprehension. That it did so is clearly

recognised by the Christian apologists, who, however, justly retorted upon

the objectors the impossibility of showing a single instance in which, in

an age of continual conspiracies, the numerous and persecuted Christians

had proved disloyal. Whatever we may think of their doctrine of passive

obedience, it is impossible not to admire the constancy with which they

clung to it, when all their interests were the other way. But yet the

Pagans were not altogether wrong in regarding the new association as fatal

to the greatness of the Empire. It consisted of men who regarded the Roman

Empire as a manifestation of Antichrist, and who looked forward with

passionate longing to its destruction. It substituted a new enthusiasm for

that patriotism which was the very life-blood of the national existence.

Many of the Christians deemed it wrong to fight for their country. All of

them aspired to a type of character, and were actuated by hopes and

motives, wholly inconsistent with that proud martial ardour by which the

triumphs of Rome had been won, and by which alone her impending ruin could

be averted.

The aims and principles of this association were very imperfectly

understood. The greatest and best of the Pagans spoke of it as a hateful

superstition, and the phrase they most frequently reiterated, when

speaking of its members, was “enemies” or “haters of the human race.” Such

a charge, directed persistently against men whose main principle was the

supreme excellence of love, and whose charity unquestionably rose far

above that of any other class, was probably due in the first place to the

unsocial habits of the converts, who deemed it necessary to abstain from

all the forms of public amusement, to refuse to illuminate their houses,

or hang garlands from their portals in honour of the national triumphs,

and who somewhat ostentatiously exhibited themselves as separate and alien

from their countrymen. It may also have arisen from a knowledge of the

popular Christian doctrine about the future destiny of Pagans. When the

Roman learnt what fate the Christian assigned to the heroes and sages of

his nation, and to the immense mass of his living fellow-countrymen, when

he was told that the destruction of the once glorious Empire to which he

belonged was one of the most fervent aspirations of the Church, his

feelings were very likely to clothe themselves in such language as I have

cited.

But, in addition to the general charges, specific accusations(790) of the

grossest kind were directed against Christian morals. At a time when the

moral standard was very low, they were charged with deeds so atrocious as

to scandalise the most corrupt. They were represented as habitually, in

their secret assemblies, celebrating the most licentious orgies, feeding

on human flesh, and then, the lights having been extinguished, indulging

in promiscuous, and especially in incestuous, intercourse. The persistence

with which these accusations were made is shown by the great prominence

they occupy, both in the writings of the apologists and in the narrations

of the persecutions. That these charges were absolutely false will now be

questioned by no one. The Fathers were long able to challenge their

adversaries to produce a single instance in which any other crime than his

faith was proved against a martyr, and they urged with a just and noble

pride that whatever doubt there might be of the truth of the Christian

doctrines, or of the Divine origin of the Christian miracles, there was at

least no doubt that Christianity had transformed the characters of

multitudes, vivified the cold heart by a new enthusiasm, redeemed,

regenerated, and emancipated the most depraved of mankind. Noble lives,

crowned by heroic deaths, were the best arguments of the infant

Church.(791) Their enemies themselves not unfrequently acknowledged it.

The love shown by the early Christians to their suffering brethren has

never been more emphatically attested than by Lucian,(792) or the

beautiful simplicity of their worship than by Pliny,(793) or their ardent

charity than by Julian.(794) There was, it is true, another side to the

picture; but even when the moral standard of Christians was greatly

lowered, it was lowered only to that of the community about them.

These calumnies were greatly encouraged by the ecclesiastical rule, which

withheld from the unbaptised all knowledge of some of the more mysterious

doctrines of the Church, and veiled, at least, one of its ceremonies in

great obscurity. Vague rumours about the nature of that sacramental feast,

to which none but the baptised Christian was suffered to penetrate, and

which no ecclesiastic was permitted to explain either to the catechumens

or to the world, were probably the origin of the charge of cannibalism;

while the Agapæ or love feasts, the ceremony of the kiss of love, and the

peculiar and, to the Pagans, perhaps unintelligible, language in which the

Christians proclaimed themselves one body and fellow-members in Christ,

may have suggested the other charges. The eager credulity with which

equally baseless accusations against the Jews were for centuries believed,

illustrates the readiness with which they were accepted, and the extremely

imperfect system of police which rendered the verification of secret

crimes very difficult, had no doubt greatly enlarged the sphere of

calumny. But, in addition to these considerations, the orthodox were in

some respects exceedingly unfortunate. In the eyes of the Pagans they were

regarded as a sect of Jews; and the Jews, on account of their continual

riots, their inextinguishable hatred of the Gentile world,(795) and the

atrocities that frequently accompanied their rebellions, had early excited

the anger and the contempt of the Pagans. On the other hand, the Jew, who

deemed the abandonment of the law the most heinous of crimes, and whose

patriotism only shone with a fiercer flame amid the calamities of his

nation, regarded the Christian with an implacable hostility. Scorned or

hated by those around him, his temple levelled with the dust, and the last

vestige of his independence destroyed, he clung with a desperate tenacity

to the hopes and privileges of his ancient creed. In his eyes the

Christians were at once apostates and traitors. He could not forget that

in the last dark hour of his country’s agony, when the armies of the

Gentile encompassed Jerusalem, and when the hosts of the faithful flocked

to its defence, the Christian Jews had abandoned the fortunes of their

race, and refused to bear any part in the heroism and the sufferings of

the closing scene. They had proclaimed that the promised Messiah, who was

to restore the faded glories of Israel, had already come; that the

privileges which were so long the monopoly of a single people had passed

to the Gentile world; that the race which was once supremely blest was for

all future time to be accursed among mankind. It is not, therefore,

surprising that there should have arisen between the two creeds an

animosity which Paganism could never rival. While the Christians viewed

with too much exultation the calamities that fell upon the prostrate

people,(796) whose cup of bitterness they were destined through long

centuries to fill to the brim, the Jews laboured with unwearied hatred to

foment by calumnies the passions of the Pagan multitude.(797) On the other

hand, the Catholic Christians showed themselves extremely willing to draw

down the sword of the persecutor upon the heretical sects. When the Pagans

accused the Christians of indulging in orgies of gross licentiousness, the

first apologist, while repudiating the charge, was careful to add, of the

heretics, “Whether or not these people commit those shameful and fabulous

acts, the putting out the lights, indulging in promiscuous intercourse,

and eating human flesh, I know not.”(798) In a few years the language of

doubt and insinuation was exchanged for that of direct assertion; and, if

we may believe St. Irenæus and St. Clement of Alexandria, the followers of

Carpocrates, the Marcionites, and some other Gnostic sects, habitually

indulged, in their secret meetings, in acts of impurity and licentiousness

as hideous and as monstrous as can be conceived, and their conduct was one

of the causes of the persecution of the orthodox.(799) Even the most

extravagant charges of the Pagan populace were reiterated by the Fathers

in their accusations of the Gnostics. St. Epiphanius, in the fourth

century, assures us that some of their sects were accustomed to kill, to

dress with spices, and to eat the children born of their promiscuous

intercourse.(800) The heretics, in their turn, gladly accused the

Catholics;(801) while the Roman judge, in whose eyes Judaism, orthodox

Christianity, and heresy were but slightly differing modifications of one

despicable superstition, doubtless found in this interchange of

accusations a corroboration of his prejudices.