Kitobni o'qish: «The Formation of Christendom, Volume II»

Preface

In the six chapters forming the first volume of this work I was engaged in describing the operation of Christianity, as it took the individual human soul for its unit, purified it, and wrought in it a supernatural life. I began with the consummation of the old world in its state of the highest civilisation united with the utmost moral degeneracy; I proceeded thence to the new creation of individual man; compared heathen with Christian man in the persons of Cicero and St. Augustine; drew out certain effects upon the world around of Christian life, as seen in those professing it, and viewed Christian marriage as restoring the primary relation between man and woman, and thus remaking the basis of human society, while the Virginal Life exhibited the crown and efflorescence of the most distinctive Christian grace in the soul.

I had thus, beginning with the stones of which the building is formed, reached the building itself; and the next thing was to consider the Christian Church in its historical development as the Kingdom of Truth and Grace: for while the soul of man is the unit with which it works, the word “Christendom” betokens a society founded in Christ, made by Christ, stamped with the image of Christ. It is the first great epoch of such a Kingdom of Truth and Grace, proceeding from the Person of its Founder, which I here attempt to delineate.

But not merely is the volume which I now publish a part only of a projected design; even as a part it is incomplete. It was my wish to finish this portion of my subject in one volume, which should reach to the great Nicene Council. But the treatment of the Greek Philosophy was too large for my limits, and so the last two chapters serve but as an introduction to the actual contact of that Philosophy with the Christian Church, which remains to be considered before I can complete my view of the Formation of Christendom in the ante-Nicene period.

Chapter VII. The Gods Of The Nations When Christ Appeared

“Emmanuel, Rex et Legifer noster, Expectatio gentium, et Salvator earum, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster.”

Under the sceptre of the imperial unity were brought together a hundred different lands occupied by as many different races. That rule of Rome which had grown for many centuries with out, as it seemed, any presiding thought, by the casual accretions of conquest, may be said to assume under the hands of Augustus, about the year of Rome 750, certain definite and deliberately chosen limits, and to be governed by a fixed Idea, more and more developed in the imperial policy. The limits which the most fortunate of Roman emperors, nay the creator of the empire itself, put to it, were the Rhine and Danube, with the Euxine Sea, on the north; the deserts of Africa on the south; the Euphrates on the east; the ocean on the west. The Idea, which may indeed have been conceived by Julius, but was certainly first embodied by Augustus, was to change the constitution of a conquering city, ruled by an aristocratic senate, into a commonwealth governed by one man, the representative of the whole people; and the effect of this change, an effect no doubt unforeseen, at least in its extent, by its framer, was gradually to absorb the manifold races inhabiting these vast regions into the majesty of the Roman law, order, and citizenship. The three centuries which follow Augustus are occupied in working out the drama of this unity. During this time the provinces appear to come out more and more as parts of one whole. Some which at its commencement had only just entered the circle of Roman power and thought, as Gaul, become entirely interpenetrated with the law, language, customs, and civilisation of the sovereign city. Spain was nearly as much, and northern Africa perhaps even more Latinised: in all, local inequalities, and the dissimilarity arising from conflicting races, customs, and languages, are more and more softened down, though never entirely removed; and while throughout this period the great city continues the head, yet the body assumes an ever-increasing importance, until at length its members engage the equal solicitude of that central potentate to whom all equally belong. In the times of so-called Roman liberty, the plunder of lands which received pro-consuls for their annual rulers, served to replenish the fortunes of nobles exhausted by the corruption requisite to gain high office; but if the dominion of one at Rome seemed an evil exchange to a nobility which deemed itself born to enjoy a conquered world, at least it served as a protection to those many millions for whom the equality of law and order, the fair administration of justice, and the undisturbed possession of property, constituted the chief goods of life. Cicero and his peers might grieve over the extinction of what they termed liberty, but Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia exulted in deliverance from the oppression of a Verres, a Fonteius, a Gabinius, a Piso, or a Clodius, in the communication of citizenship, and in the peace of a common civilisation.

I. With a passing glance at the progress of this unity, which, great and magnificent as it is, is yet external, let us turn to an object filling the whole of this vast empire with its varied manifestations: for this object leads us to the consideration of another unity, wholly internal, without which that of government, law, and order must be apparent rather than real, or at best, however seemingly imposing, be deprived of the greater part of its efficacy.

1. It has been said that the empire contained in it many lands and many races, but these likewise worshipped their own distinct gods, which were acknowledged and sanctioned as national divinities for the several countries wherein they were locally established. Had Augustus ordered an enrolment not only of the numbers, the landed property, and the wealth of his subjects, but of their gods, his public register, or Breviarium, would have included at least ten distinct systems of idolatrous worship. First of all, there would be the proper gods of Rome, then those of the Hellenic race; and these, though the most similar to each other, yet refused a complete amalgamation. But besides these there were on the west the Etrurian, the Iberian, the Gallic, and the Germanic gods; on the east, the Carian and Phrygian, the Syrian, the Assyrian, the Arabian; on the south, the Phœnician, Libyan, and Egyptian. All these different races, inasmuch as they were subjects of the empire, enjoyed undisturbed the right of worshipping their ancestral gods,¹ who, so long as they did not overstep their local boundaries, were recognised; they possessed priests, rites, temples, estates, and self-government; they held the soil, and their worship was legal. It was a matter of Roman policy not to interfere with them. Nay, their several worshippers could carry their rites along with them in their various sojourns and settlements, and even in Rome build altars, and adore Egyptian, Asiatic, African, or Gallic gods. These various systems agreed all in one point, that they were systems of polytheistic idolatry: they all divided the attributes of the godhead, assigning them to more or fewer objects, and worshipping all these by visible symbols which the power worshipped was deemed to inhabit:² but they did not make the same division with a mere difference of name; on the contrary, they ran into and across each other with the most bewildering multiplicity, variation, and contradiction. Even in the same system, if we may give this name to any of the various mythologies, the several divinities were perpetually interfering with each other's province. When the Roman made vows for the removal of his ailments, in his uncertainty to which god the ailment belonged, or who was most proper to remove it, he addressed his vow to several together; or in public supplications, being often uncertain to whom exactly the prayer or offering should be made, he cautiously expressed himself, “whether it be a god or a goddess.” And the various Hellenic, Asiatic, or Egyptian cities often possessed local gods, whose worship was supreme there, while they exercised far less influence, or were even scarcely known elsewhere.³

Now merely as a specimen of what this worship was all over the Roman empire, let us take the brilliant Athens, Greece's eye, the world's university. First of all ruled in her the worship of Pallas-Athené: she was the lady of the land, who had won it for her own after a hard contest with Poseidon. Her chief sanctuaries were the temple of Athené, guardian of the city, with its old statue fallen down from heaven on the Acropolis. On the Acropolis likewise the Parthenon, built expressly for the gorgeous Panathenaic festival; and in the lower city the Palladium with the statue of the goddess supposed to have been brought from Troy. Yet the worship of the “high goddesses,” Demeter and Persephoné, was also richly endowed with shrines and festivals, and affected scarcely less the feelings of the Athenians. Then Jupiter, as “supreme,” was honoured with unbloody offering before the Erechtheium, dedicated to Athené: whilst as “Olympian” he had the colossal temple begun by Peisistratus and finished after many hundred years by Hadrian, and as “guardian of the city” distinct festivals. Yet more manifold was the invocation of Apollo, as the Pythian, the Delphic, the Lycian, as the ancestral god of the Ionians. The multiform Artemis had her temples and worshippers as the Tauric, by the name Brauronia; as the port-goddess, by the name Munychia; as the goddess of the hunt, by the name Agrotera, who had the credit of the victory won at Marathon; as presiding over birth, she was called Chitone, while Themistocles had built a temple to her as the Counsellor. Heré had only a doorless and roofless temple on the road to Phalerum; but the god of fire was worshipped in Athens abundantly. Hermes had his peculiar statues in every street, irreverence to which might be fatal even to an Alcibiades, the city's darling; while Aphrodité had a crowd of temples and shrines whose unchaste worship found but too many frequenters. Poseidon had to content himself with a single altar in his rival's city, and with games in its harbour; but Dionysos had three temples, with brilliant festivals; Mars was not without one; Hestia was throned in the Prytaneum; the Earth, Kronos, and Rhea had their temples and festivals, as also the Erinnyes, who were worshipped only in two other places in Greece. Here alone in Greece was a sanctuary and a rite to Prometheus; while the Asiatic mother of the gods had a splendid temple where the archives of the state were kept. Besides, there was the worship of the Hours and the Graces, of Eileithyia, goddess of victory and of birth, of Æsculapius and Themis, of the Kabirian Anakes, the Arcadian Pan, the Thracian Cotytto and Bendis, the Egyptian Serapis. Mercy and Shame, Fame and Endeavour had their altars; and the hero-worship numbered Theseus, Codrus, Academus, Solon, the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton; and Hercules, originally a hero, but here and elsewhere widely honoured as a god.⁴

Athens, if the most superstitious as well as the most intellectual of cities, may be taken as the type of a thousand others of Hellenic race scattered over the Roman empire from Marseilles to Antioch. Say that she had twice as many deities and festivals as her sister cities, enough will remain for them wherewith to occupy the soil with their temples and to fill the year's cycle with their rites.

The lively Grecian imagination impregnated not with stern notions of duty, nor with reverential devotion to those whom it worshipped, but regarding them as objects of æsthetical satisfaction,⁵ and yearning for a serene and confidential exchange of relations with them, had in process of time spun out a complete web of idolatrous worship which encompassed heaven and earth, the whole domain of nature, every state and act of human life. Rain and sunshine and the weather stood under the ordering of Zeus; the fruitfulness of the soil was Demeter's care; countless nymphs of field, of fountain, and of river, offered to men their gifts; the vine and its juice was under the protection of Dionysos, and Poseidon was lord of the sea. The flocks had their defenders in Hermes and Pan; the Fates ruled the lot of men. Kings and magistrates had in Zeus their prototype and guardian. Athené held her shield over cities; the hearth of each private home and the public hearth of the city were in Hestia's charge. Marriage was secure under Heré's care. Demeter was entrusted with legislation; the pains of childbirth were recommended to Eileithyia, or Artemis. Music, archery, divination, were Apollo's attributes; the art of healing claimed him and his son Æsculapius as patrons. Athené and Ares swayed the issue of war; the chase was the domain of Artemis; smiths and all workers in fire saw in Hephæstus their patron; whilst Athené the Worker protected the gentler trades, and Hecate watched over the roads.⁶

Yet Rome itself, whose own Capitoline Jupiter claimed a certain superiority over all these gods, would scarcely have yielded to any Grecian city, even were it Athens, in the number or variety of her deities, the frequency and solemnity of her festivals; while in the costliness of victims offered to her gods, and in the strictness of her ceremonies, she probably far surpassed that and all other cities. Her sterner worship of originally shapeless gods, presiding over the labours of a simple agricultural life, had long yielded to the seductions of her dangerous Grecian captive. The rude block Terminus, and Jupiter the Stone, ceased to satisfy those who had beheld the majesty of the father of gods and men embodied by the genius of a Phidias; and she had ended by going farther in breaking up the conception of one god, and in the personification of particular powers, operations, physical functions, and qualities, than any nation of antiquity.⁷ But though the beautiful forms of the Hellenic gods, as expressed by the skill of unrivalled sculptors, had carried her away, yet the nature of her worship was in strong contrast with that of Greece. Her religion had rested originally on two ideas, the might of the gods friendly to Rome, and the force of ceremonial over these gods;⁸ and still when she accepted the gods of conquered nations for her own, it was to secure the possession of their might, and to have them for friends instead of foes; while her own worship was a matter of routine and habit jealously guarded by unchanging ceremonies, and prosecuted not out of affection, but for the material security of daily life, which, according to the deeply-rooted feeling of the people, could not go on without it.

The individualised and humanised Latin and Hellenic gods, if they had much in common, still could not be thoroughly amalgamated; but Rome, as the mistress of Western Asia and Egypt, came upon Oriental religions of a very different stamp. Instead of this wide Pantheon of gods, each of whom had his occupation, these Asiatics generally regarded the deity in a sexual relationship, as one male and one female god, representing the active and passive forms of nature,⁹ and worshipped with a mixture of fear and voluptuousness. Such were Bel and Mylitta, Moloch and Astarte, and by whatever different names the same idea was presented. The worship of the great mother Cybele, so widely spread through Asia Minor, approached in many respects in character to that of this female goddess. But it is needless to go farther into the specific differences of these various idolatries; only bear in mind that they in their several countries occupied the domain of public and private life, as the worship of which I have given the details did at Athens. So it was before the influence of external conquerors reached them. After this a certain change ensues. The Roman empire was accomplishing in the west as well as in the east what the progress of Grecian rule and thought had commenced three hundred years before¹⁰ under Alexander and his successors, the bringing together and in some sort fusing the multiform and often contradictory worship of the nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Not merely in Rome, but in all the chief cities of the Empire, the Asiatic, the Egyptian, the Libyan deities, and many others of subject nations under the Roman sway, were worshipped side by side. Accordingly, in the time of Augustus, and at the year of Rome 750, where we are taking our stand, there prevailed all over the hundred millions of men ruled by him a polytheistic idolatry bewildering by its multiplicity, internal contradictions, fluctuations, and mixtures, yet imposing by its universal extent and prevalence. The only exception seems to have been the Jewish worship of one God, whether in its chief seat, the small province of Judæa, or as it was seen in the lives of Jewish settlers scattered throughout the empire. It must be remarked that this Jewish worship of the true God was sanctioned as that of a national god belonging to the Jews, and sacrifice was perpetually offered for Augustus in the Temple at Jerusalem. But the Jews did not, as a rule, make efforts to convert the Gentiles to their religion, nor seek to exhibit it as antagonistic to the prevailing idolatry, and as claiming to subdue and cast it out. They were content to keep their own worship to themselves, and with the toleration which the Roman law thus allowed them. Yet even so in every place where they dwelt in any numbers some of the better heathens were found to be attracted to their worship by the intrinsic beauty of their belief in one God.

2. But such an exception as this hardly made a perceptible break in that continuous mass of evil and falsehood which then surrounded young and old, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, in its grasp. The sea stands in Holy Writ as the well-known image of the world's disobedience to the divine promptings, of its impetuosity and lawlessness. What image is there in nature so striking and awful as the long waves of the Atlantic bearing down in storm upon a helpless ship, and sweeping it upon an iron-bound coast! So broke that wild sea of human error over the individual mind of man. The observer looked round upon all the nations, and it was everywhere the same – a multiplicity of gods filling up the whole circle of human life, many-named, many-natured, but all without truth, purity, and justice; full of violent and sensual deeds, and still viler imaginations. What stay was there for the spirit of man against that universal flood? Its vastness was everywhere. Who was strong enough, who wise enough, to resist what all his fellows accepted? And the struggle of a single soul against it might seem like that of “some strong swimmer in his agony” alone at night amid the waste of waters.

3. For this polytheism was no dormant, otiose power withdrawn into the background and crouching apart from the actions and feelings of daily life. Its presence was indicated in every home by the little images of the Lares; homage was done to it at every table by libations; every house had its consecrated emblems; every street its statues of Hermes and serpents; in the forum there were feasts in honour of the gods; the shops, taverns, and manufactories had little altars on which wine and incense were offered to them; there were idolatrous emblems on the foreheads of the dead, on their funeral pyre, on their tombs. The places of amusement were specially dedicated to the gods; the theatres had representations in honour of them; the circus had their images, chairs, carriages, robes borne in procession; the amphitheatre was consecrated to them, and as being so Tertullian called it “the temple of all demons.” So much for private and social life. But not only so. All political acts were bound up with a crowd of religious formalities, and outward signs of divine concurrence; and were carried on with a ceremonial, every part of which was prescribed as having an exact inward meaning. Then there were continually recurring vows to the gods made for the great, made for private individuals, made for the emperor and his family. Three special ceremonies were used to obtain favours from them or to deprecate calamities, feasts, the solemnly bearing their images on cushions, processions with naked feet.¹¹ To this we must add the priestly colleges, pontifices, flamines, augurs, and magistrates, whether distinct or co-ordinated. Then, besides, consider the magical character of the prayers, and the strict use of formularies without mistake, omission, or addition, which were supposed to insure success apart from the intention of those offering them. Thus the whole life of the Romans was filled with invocations, propitiations, purifications, and even in any small matter a whole string of gods had prayer and service offered to them, and no one of their names might be omitted. Consider again the great frequency of the offerings, whether propitiative or consultatory; and, further, how particular beasts belonged to particular gods. The mere expense of victims was felt as a great burden. It was reckoned that on the accession of Caligula 160,000 animals, chiefly oxen and calves, were sacrificed in the Roman Empire in token of the general joy; and Augustus and Marcus Aurelius devoted such a multitude of beasts to their sacrifices that what had been said of the former was repeated as to the latter, how the white oxen had written to him, saying, “If you conquer, we are lost.” Indications of the will of the gods were to be taken on all occasions; nothing was to be done in public or private without consulting the auspices. Then there was the institution of the Haruspices, in its two branches of examining the entrails of the victims, and divining the meaning of all prodigies. One is still amazed at the ever-untiring solicitude which the senate showed to have all these things carefully watched – eclipses, rainbows of unusual colours, shooting stars, misbirths human or bestial; showers of earth, stones, chalk, or ashes; mice gnawing the golden vessels of a temple, bees swarming on a public place, but especially a shrine touched by lightning. Such things struck senate and people with consternation; special supplications were ordered to appease the causers of them.¹²

These are the external manifestations of polytheism which struck every eye, and affected the mind by their constant recurrence. But if we go beneath the surface and examine the root, we shall find an universal sense in the minds of all men in that day of unseen power over and above the material operations of nature. It was too strong as well as too general and invariable to be called an opinion, and it so acted on the nerves and feelings of men that I term it not so much a logical conviction as a sense of the close contact between man and nature, or rather an unseen power behind the veil of nature and working through it. Various as the forms of idolatry were – Egyptian, Asiatic, Libyan, Greek, or Roman; or, again, Iberian, Gallic, German, – all teemed with this sense. To the adherents of these religions, one and all, the world was very far from being a mere system of nature governed by general laws;¹³ it may rather be said that this was precisely what it was not. They looked upon nature in all its forms as an expression of the divine will, and therefore the unusual productions of nature became to them intimations respecting that will. And having lost the guidance of a fixed moral and religious teaching, they were ruled by an ever-watchful anxiety to gain acquaintance with that will. On this sense rested the universal belief that it was in man's power to hold intercourse by means of charms, spells, adjurations, with spirits of greater might and knowledge than his own – that is, magic or witchcraft. Hence the evocation of the spirits of the dead to reveal secrets of their prison-house, or necromancy. Hence the recurrence to oracles, running through all pagan history, of which there were many scattered through the Roman world, and which, after a temporary discredit, rose again into name in the time of Hadrian. Not less general was the belief that men and women might be possessed by spirits who ruled their words and actions according to an overmastering will. Then divination existed in endlessly various forms; and of its force we can gather a notion by Cicero's remark that it lay like an oppressive burden on the minds of men, so that even sleep, which should be the refuge from anxieties, became through the meaning attached to dreams the cause of a multitude of cares.¹⁴ To this must be added the use of sortileges, amulets, and talismans, in countless number and variety; and the belief that the actions and fortune of men were swayed by the course of the stars – that is, astrology. It was not the vulgar and ignorant merely whose minds were filled with these things. Scarcely a philosopher, scarcely a statesman, scarcely a ruler can be found whose mind, even if proof against a genuine devotion to a divine providence, was not open to one or more manifestations of the dark mysterious power pressing upon the confines of human life, and every now and then breaking through the veil of visible things with evidences of malignant might. A more determined and unscrupulous conqueror than Sylla, a more genuine philosopher than Marcus Aurelius, a more sagacious user of religion than Augustus, we shall not easily find; yet each of these, like their ordinary countrymen, had this sense of the supernatural and intangible above, beneath, and around them. Sylla, on the eve of any battle, would, in the sight of his soldiers, embrace a small statue of Apollo, which he had taken from Delphi, and entreat it to give an early fulfilment of its promises.¹⁵ Marcus Aurelius, in his war with the Marcomanni, collected priests from all quarters to Rome, and was so long occupied in offering rites to their various foreign gods that he kept his army waiting for him. And Augustus watched carefully the most trivial signs, and was distressed if in the morning his left shoe was given to him for his right. Even that Julius before whose genius all men quailed, and whose disbelief of a future state stands recorded at a notable point of Roman history, never mounted a chariot without uttering certain words for good luck and preservation against calamity.¹⁶ We shall therefore judge most inadequately of the force which the innumerable rites, temples, festivals, pomps, ceremonies, prayers, invocations, priesthoods, sodalities, initiations, and mysteries of polytheism exercised upon the minds of men, unless we take into full account that remarkable sense of contact and sympathy between the external world and man – of invisible power betraying itself through palpable agents, whether in reasoning or unreasoning productions, whether in the animal or vegetable world – which served as its basis. The line between religion and superstition in paganism no eye can trace; but at least the foundation of true worship plunged deep out of sight into the secret recesses of abject fear.

4. But what was the moral influence of this multiform, universal, all-embracing, and all-penetrating worship?

Varro, whom Cicero calls the most acute and learned of writers, and whose great work in forty-one books he praises as containing the names, classes, offices, and causes of all divine and human things, divided theology into the fabulous, the natural, and the civil. In the first, he said, are many fictions unworthy of the nature and dignity of immortal beings: such as that one god sprang from the head, another from the thigh, another from drops of blood; such, again, as that gods were thieves or adulterers, or became slaves to men. In fact, this fabulous theology attributed everything to them which might happen not merely to a man, but to the most contemptible of men.¹⁷ Let us leave what he calls natural theology, which is the discussion of philosophers concerning the physical nature of the gods, and proceed to the third, which he calls civil, and which is that which the citizens, and especially the priests of human communities, are bound to know and administer. This treats of what gods are to be worshipped, and with what rites and sacrifices. The first theology, he says, belongs to the theatre, the second to the universe, the third to the city. S. Augustine, commenting at length upon his division, proves that the first and the third, the fabulous and the civil, are, in fact, identical, since the universe is a divine work, but the theatre and the city works of men. The theatre is indeed made for the city, and the very same gods are ridiculed on the stage who are adored in the temple; the same have games exhibited in their honour and victims sacrificed to them. The images, features, ages, sexes, bearing of the gods in the one and in the other are the same. Thus this fabulous, theatrical, and scenic theology, full of everything vile and criminal, is actually a part of the civil, cohering with it as limb with limb in the same body.¹⁸

Conceive, then, every revolting detail of adultery, prostitution, incest, or of dishonesty, or of violence, which the perverted invention of modern writers has ever dressed up for the theatres of great cities in this and other countries. They will perhaps yield in turpitude to that which the theatres of the Roman empire exhibited. But what these theatres represented in mimic action was the exact image, as reflected in a mirror, of what was transacted at the solemn service of the gods in unnumbered temples.¹⁹ The exact image so far as it went, yet stopping short in some respects, for our eye-witness above cited declares that gratitude was due to the actors, inasmuch as they spared the eyes of men, and did not lay bare upon the theatre all that was hidden within the walls of temples. It was not enough, then, that all the many games and spectacles in which such things were represented were dedicated to the gods, acted under their especial sanction, even enjoined by them as means of gaining their favour or averting their wrath, which alone would have made them answerable for the immorality so portrayed; not enough, even, that actions of this quality were in the theatres ascribed to the gods who presided over them; but these acts of immorality were not the fictions of poets or the acting of players, but the very substance of the theology itself in which the worship of all these nations was embodied. Priapus appeared to make a laugh on the stage exactly in the costume in which he was worshipped in the temples, or in which he entered into the rites of marriage; a costume of indescribable turpitude, the shame of our human nature. The players on the stage and the statues in the temples equally exhibited Jove bearded and Mercury beardless, Saturn in decrepitude and Apollo in youthful beauty. In the rites of Juno, of Ceres, of Venus, of the mother of the gods, words were uttered and scenes acted such as no decent person would suffer to be spoken or acted before his own mother; or rather they contained, as a portion of themselves, the worst crimes which the theatres represented; nay, crimes which they stopped short of acting, and persons so infamous that they were not tolerated even on the stage, where yet to take part was a civil dishonour. What, then, was the nature of those rites wherein those were chosen to take part whom the utmost license of the stage banished from its boards?²⁰ Let us conceive – if such a conception can be adequately represented to the mind – that the vilest drama ever acted upon a modern theatre was being daily carried on in all the churches of Christendom by troops of priests and priestesses, with all the paraphernalia of costliest worship, with prayers, invocation, and sacrifices, as a service acceptable to the Ruler of man's lot, and as an account of what that ruler had Himself done, and of what He loved to be imitated by others. That would be a picture of heathen worship in the time of Augustus; that would be the moral food on which was nurtured that crowd of nations which acknowledged Cæsar's sway; that the conception of divine things wrought into the minds of the hundred millions of men who formed the Roman empire.

We can now take a prospect of human society in reference to the polytheism of the empire from the standing-point of Augustus in the last twenty years of his reign. The worship of her gods was so intertwined with the political constitution of Rome from her birth through seven centuries and a half, that it might be said to be one thing with it. Almost as close was the identification of the several religious systems of the East with the enjoyments of civilised life which they prized so highly, and which the empire of Rome secured to them. Further in the background the national gods of the many races included in the empire were the last inheritance of their former independent life. Again, not only was the emperor as Pontifex Maximus the official head of this polytheism, but as representing the whole power of the state, he was its guardian, and whatever assailed it was an insult to the majesty which he embodied; while the slavery in which the masses were lying seemed to represent in human society the chances of war which had all ended in the dominion of Rome and the subjection of the whole pantheon of incongruous gods to the sovereignty of the Capitoline Jupiter. These were general conditions to that multifarious whole of nations and races. Then if Augustus sought to examine more narrowly the society of Roman citizens spread through his empire, he would find it divided very unequally as to numbers into two classes. The vast majority were those who take things as they find them, and who belonged with more or less fidelity and heartiness to the idolatrous polytheism. The worship which came to them as part and parcel of the empire, of civilised and of national life, they accepted without thought. To all these an indefinite number of immoral gods was throned in possession of Olympus; to all these the result of such worship was, as we have seen described by S. Augustine, the utter perversion of morality, the consecration of fables equalling in turpitude the utmost license of the theatres. But everywhere among the educated classes were to be found a small number of sceptical minds: philosophers they termed themselves: it was fashionable to follow some philosophic system or sect, and these fell mainly into two. Now the Epicureans and the Stoics, while they left the existing polytheism in practical possession, as a matter of custom and state religion, and so delivered themselves from any unpleasant consequences of denying the prevailing worship, concurred entirely in this, that the one by the way of atheism, the other by that of pantheism, destroyed all religion of the heart and inner conduct; because they equally removed the notion of a personal God, and its corresponding notion of a personal being in man outliving the body and the world of sense, and meeting with a personal retribution. Whether the power they acknowledge be nature, as in Lucretius, or a hidden physical force running through all nature, which might be called Jupiter, Juno, Hercules, or the name of any other god, as in Marcus Aurelius, the notion of a personal Creator, provident and rewarding, was equally destroyed. Nor before the preaching of the Gospel does there appear a single individual who drew out of the existing polytheism such a conclusion. On the contrary, in Augustus and his successors the imperial idea of unity in religion was to make out that all these systems of polytheism, running into and athwart each other, came practically to the same thing, differing in name only. Their obedience to Jupiter of the Capitol was the only bond of unity, and pledge of the empire's duration, conceived by the Roman rulers.

II. Thus in the time of Augustus no human eye, whether we look at the mass of mankind or the thinking few, could see any sign either that the dominant polytheism was about to fall, or that the lost doctrine of the divine Unity and Personality could be extricated from the bewildering mass of error and superstition which had grown over, disguised, and distorted it. Darker still, if possible, became the prospect under his successor, Tiberius, whose reign had reached the climax of moral debasement, when Sejanus was all-powerful at Rome. Hope for the human race there appeared none, when such an emperor devolved his omnipotence on such a prime minister. Then in the judgment-hall of a procurator in a small and distant eastern province, there passed the following dialogue between an accused criminal and his judge: – “Pilate went into the prætorium again, and called Jesus, and said to him, ‘Art thou the king of the Jews?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or have others told it thee of me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee up to me: what hast thou done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now my kingdom is not from hence.’ Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Art thou a king, then?’ Jesus answered, ‘Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.’ Pilate saith to him, ‘What is truth?’ ” He who thus declared himself to be a king, the cause of whose birth and advent into the world, the function of whose royalty, was to bear witness to the truth, received from the power which then ruled the world the punishment allotted to the slave who was worthy of death. For many ages a false worship had overshadowed the earth, hiding the true God from men, and setting up instead a multitude of demons for gods. And during this time the thinkers of Greek and Roman society had been asking, What is truth? And now the officer who asked that question of the Truth Himself, replied to it by crucifying Him. And when the body of that Crucified One was the same day taken down from the cross and laid in its sepulchre, the power which reigned in polytheism and spoke by the mouth of the judge, seemed to have given the final answer of triumphant force to its question, What is truth? and falsehood might be thought to reign supreme and victorious in the world.

It was with the resurrection of that Body, in which Truth was enshrined, that the resurrection of truth among men began. He had said to His disciples a few hours before, not “I show the truth,” but “I am the Truth.” His birth and His advent took place that His witness might be given to it, the witness to it being that very birth and advent, His appearance among men, and the reception He would meet with. The crucifixion itself – the reply of triumphant force to its own unanswered question – was the witness which, first in Him, and then in His followers, should make itself heard over the earth, now held in captivity by falsehood. And since Truth is His proper Name and His personal Being from eternity, and by being the Truth He who spoke is the second Person in the Godhead, the perfect Image of all Truth, let us consider the import of His Name as the summing-up of the great antagonism which He then planted on the earth.

For He named Himself the Truth because He is the Son and the Word of the Father. “Thus the Father, as it were uttering Himself, begot His Word, equal to Himself in all things. For He would not fully and perfectly have uttered Himself, if there were anything less or anything more in His Word than in Himself… And therefore this Word is truly the Truth; inasmuch as whatever is in that knowledge of which He is begotten, is also in Himself; and whatsoever is not in it, is not in Himself… The Father and the Son know each other, the one by generating, the other by being generated.”⁴⁴ Thus it is that He is the perfect Word, the absolute Image of God; and being the Image of God He created man in the beginning a copy of that Image, and according to its resemblance, in that He created him in the indivisible unity of a soul intelligent and willing – a created copy of the Trinity in Unity. But though by the original constitution of the soul this copy could not be destroyed, being the very essence of the soul, yet the resemblance might be marred, and the harmony which reigned in the original man between the soul, its intellect, and will, through the indwelling of God's Spirit, was broken by the act of sin; whereupon that Spirit withdrew from him, and left the copy of the divine Image defaced and disordered. All the heathenism we have been considering is the sequence of that disorder, part of which is the grievous obscuration of truth, that is, of the whole relation between God and man, of which idolatrous polytheism is the perversion. It was the exact representation of the soul's own disorder, being the distortion but not the extinction of worship; the fear of many demons, instead of the fear of one God; slavish instead of filial fear.

But as the Truth of the Father is beheld and expressed in generating His Son, His Word, His perfect Image, so truth to man is the resemblance of created things to the archetypal idea of them in God; the resemblance of the works of the divine art to the Artificer's intention. In this long act of heathenism we see the work of the divine Artificer marred and obscured, and the marring and obscuration seem to have gone as far as was possible without touching the essence of the soul. Who, then, should restore, but He who had first created? Who should give back to the copy the lost harmony, and reimprint the defaced resemblance, save the perfect Image of God? Thus, when the corruption had run its course, and the original disobedience had reproduced itself all over the earth in a harvest of evil and disorder, the time for the work of reparation was come, and the Divine Word, the Image of the Father, took flesh.

Magnificent as had been the dower of the First Man, and wonderful the grace which held his soul in harmony with itself, and his bodily affections in obedience to his soul, incomparably more magnificent was the dower of human nature in its reparation, inconceivably grander the grace which ruled the Soul and Body of the Restorer. For whereas the First Man's person had been simply human, the Person of the Second Man was the Divine Word Himself, the perfect Image of the Father; and whereas the grace of the First Man was such that he was able not to sin, the grace which had assumed the nature of the Second Man was a Person who could not sin, the fountain of grace itself, measureless, absolute, and personal. The Image of God Himself came to restore the copy of that Image in Man; his appearance as man among men was the reconveying of the Truth to them, because He was the Truth Himself. The Truth in all its extent; the Truth in the whole moral order and every relation which belongs to it; the Truth by which all the rational creation of God corresponds to the Idea of its Creator, was the gift which He brought to man in His Incarnation.

But this truth is not merely external to man. In order to be received and appropriated by him, he must become capable of it. The Restorer works his restoration by an inward act upon the soul, its intellect and will. The Image of God sets up His seat within His work, the copy. Man is sealed by the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father's Face, the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after God.⁴⁵ The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth.

And this restoration is itself the witness to the Truth of which He spoke before Pilate as the object of His birth and advent. But to make the witness operative and fruitful, the greatest wonder in this list of wonders is required, the suffering of the Truth Himself. He said of the corn of wheat, which was to bear fruit in unnumbered hearts, that it would remain alone unless it fell into the ground and died. And so His crucifixion in the nature which He had assumed was the act from which the renewal of truth went forth; and not only in His Person, but likewise in His chosen witnesses this special mode of vivifying the truth, and making it fruitful, should be repeated. Not only must the absolute Truth of God appear in our nature itself in order to be accepted, but the nature in which it appeared should offer the sacrifice of itself; and this particular mode of propagating the truth should be observed in that chosen band whom He termed specially His witnesses. Their witness should be their suffering; in them too the Truth should be crucified, and so become fruitful.

And as man in his original creation had been a copy, however faint, of the eternal relations of the Godhead in itself, so his restoration springs from those same eternal relations. In it the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are seen working.⁴⁶ It springs from the Father, in that He is the Father of the only-begotten Son, the Original of the Image, and so the Father of all those who are the copies of that Image. It springs from the Son, in that He is the perfect Image of the Father, and by dwelling in a created nature has raised it to the dignity of His Person, from which the grace of Sonship comes. It springs from the Holy Spirit, whose work as the Spirit of the Father and the Son is to imprint the copy of the Son on man. He performs in every one of the redeemed by communicating to them a participation of the divine nature, by dwelling in them, by contact and coherence with them, a work infinitely less in degree, but yet of the same order with that work of His whereby all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt by personal unity in our Lord's Manhood.⁴⁷

But we left our Lord before Pilate, bearing witness to the truth. It remains to see how that truth became impressed on the world.

Chapter VIII. The First And The Second Man

“Totus Christus caput et corpus est. Caput unigenitus Dei Filius, et corpus ejus Ecclesia, Sponsus et Sponsa, duo in carne una.” S. Aug. de Unitate Ecc. tom. ix. 341.

“Totus Christus, id est, caput et membra.” S. Thomas, Prolog. ad 1 Sentent. art. 4.

Let us look back on the space which we have traversed, and gather up in a few words the sight which it presents to us. We have man before us as far as history will carry us back, as far as reasoning, planting itself on the scanty traces of history, will penetrate into the cloudland of prehistoric times: and the result stands before us exhibited in the manifold records still remaining of the most renowned ancient civilisation. Here, then, we see nations whose genius, whether in history, poetry, and literature, or in works of art, or in civil government, we still admire, comprising men in many of whom the powers of reason reached their utmost limit; nations inhabiting the most varied climates and countries, and amongst them the fairest in the world, nations formed under the most different circumstances and pursuing the most distinct employments, some agricultural, some commercial, some inland, some nautical, but alike in this, that they were enthralled by systems of a false worship, of which it is hard to say whether it was the more revolting to the reason by its absurdity, or to the conscience of man by its foulness. And this false worship does not lie distinct and apart from the concerns of daily civil and domestic life, but is intertwined with all the public and private actions of men, forming their habits and ruling their affections. Moreover, the polytheistic idolatry described above as existing at the time of Augustus in every province of his empire except one, in almost⁴⁸ every country which touched upon it, or was known to it, is the result, the summing-up, the embodiment of man's whole history up to that time, so far as we know it: it is that into which this history had run out, its palpable, it almost seemed its irresistible, form. And it amounts to a complete corruption, first of the relation between man and his Creator, secondly of the relation between man and his fellow, thirdly of the relations of man in civil government, that is, of states and political communities, to each other.

Now, looking at this polytheistic idolatry simply as a fact, without for the moment any attempt to give a solution of it from authority, looking at it just as modern science would regard the facts of geology or astronomy, there is one thing, we may suppose, which it proves with a superabundance of evidence not found to belong to any other fact of history; and that is, the intrinsic corruption of man as a moral being. That which in theological language is called the Fall of man is, apart from all revealed doctrine on the subject, brought in upon the mind with irresistible force by the mere enumeration of the gods which heathendom worshipped, and of the worship paid by it to them; a force which is indefinitely increased by every inquiry into the moral and religious state of man as he lived under this worship.

Now, then, let us consider what solution the Christian faith does give of this fact, which exists, be it remembered, independently of this solution, and would exist with all its force undiminished, if this were rejected.

I. The Christian faith, as a solution of this wonderful maze of polytheistic idolatry, with all its accompaniments and consequences, carries us back to the first father of the race, whose development we have been following in it. This, it says, is nothing else⁴⁹ but the body of Adam carried out through thousands of years, the body of Adam fallen under a terrible captivity. Not only does the Christian faith set before us man as one race descended from one, but because he is this one race, descended from one, it represents him as having come into such a state. To understand this we must contemplate the original creation, the fall of man, and its consequences, in their several bearings on each other, which will then lead us on to the nature and mode of the restoration.

In speaking of the creation of man we may first consider the union of the soul and body simply by themselves; that is, in order to obtain a clear view of our subject, we may form to ourselves a purely ideal state of simple nature. Such a state would include two things; one positive, the other negative.⁵⁰ Positively, human nature in this condition would have all natural faculties in their essential perfection, and the assistance and providence of God naturally due to it: negatively, it would have nothing superadded to nature, nothing not due to it, whether evil or good, that is, neither sin on the one hand, and what follows sin, the guilt which entails punishment, nor on the other hand any gifts of grace, or perfections not due to nature.

Human nature, if created in such a state, would have no supernatural end; its end would be to love God with a natural love, as the Author and Ruler of the world.

Of such a state it is requisite for our present purpose to say only two things further. The first, that it is not contrary to any attribute of God to have created human nature in such a state. The gift of eternal beatitude, arising from the vision of God, which such a creature would not have had for its end, is simply and absolutely a gratuitous gift of the divine bounty, which God is not bound to bestow on any creature as such. Secondly, God did not in fact so create man.

Going on from this state of simple nature, we may consider another state in man, in which, beyond all his natural faculties,⁵¹ he would have a certain special perfection, consisting in the absence of immoderate concupiscence, or in the perfect subjection of the sensitive to the rational appetite, so that the inferior appetite should not be allowed to set itself in motion against the superior, or to anticipate reason. For human nature, regarded in itself as the union of a spirit and a body, is as it were divided in its natural affections, which tend in diverse directions, and thus totters, so to say, in its gait; when, therefore, it receives an inward peace in its own proper faculties, it is said to be supplemented, or to receive its integrity.

Now it is much to be noted that this special gift of integrity would not be connatural to man, that is, not given to him by force of his nature itself. It is true indeed that as such a gift perfects nature in regard to all natural acts, and supplies a sort of natural deficiency arising out of the combination of a spiritual with a material substance, wherein a conflict is engendered, in such a sense it may be called natural: but strictly speaking it is a gift superadded to nature.

It must further be noted that this state of nature in its integrity, however high and beautiful, is not only entirely distinct from but of an inferior order to the state of human nature raised to the gift of Divine Sonship. Between human nature in this condition and human nature raised to the gift of sonship, there would be more than the difference⁵² that with us exists between the kindly-treated servant and the adopted son: for human nature in this integrity would still not by virtue of it possess sanctifying grace, or, in consequence, have God and His vision for its supernatural end.

But, thirdly, it was not merely in this state that God created man, but in a state which not only included this, but had grace for its basis,⁵³ that is to say, every perfection which it had sprang out of this, that it was united to God by grace. This is a state of far superior order, absolutely gratuitous, and beyond anything which is due to nature. The first man, Adam, then, was not only a union of soul and body, not only did he possess this nature in its integrity, but he was created in grace, so that there was a union of the Holy Spirit with him, whereby he was exalted to the condition of a supernatural end and adopted Sonship, and in this union was rooted the integrity of his nature, and the supernatural power of so ruling all the lower faculties of his soul that the higher could mount undisturbedly to God: and certain other gifts over and above, such as immunity from error or deception, so long as he did not sin, immunity from even venial fault, immunity from death, and from all pain or sorrow. Such was the original condition which grace bestowed on human nature, wherein man had not only a supernatural end, but the power to attain it easily.⁵⁴

Now it is evident that man, by being created in grace, was raised to an astonishing height of dignity, to which not only his nature, but any created nature whatsoever had no claim. All that the justice and goodness of God required him to do in creating such a being as man of two substances, soul and body, was to bestow on the compound being so united such perfections as made the several substances complete in their own order. Such would be the ideal state of simple nature as delineated above. It was a gift beyond nature, such as nature in its first beginning could not claim, to bestow on it the integrity which in the second place we considered. But how far beyond this, passing it by an unmeasured chasm, was that dower of sonship rooted in sanctifying grace which God actually bestowed on His favoured child? It is obvious at first sight that the divine gift here intended, being in Adam's actual creation the root of all which was over and above the natural faculties of body and soul in their union, was bestowed absolutely by the pure goodness of God, and therefore could be bestowed with such conditions attached to it as pleased the Giver. In all that is beyond the mere faculties and needs of nature – in forming which God's own being is a sort of rule to Him – He is absolutely free to give as pleases Himself, to what degree He pleases, on what terms He pleases. What, then, were the conditions on which He invested Adam with the gift of Sonship, and created Him in grace as its foundation? He created him, not only as the individual Adam, but as the Head of his race, so that his race was summed up in him, and a unity was founded in him attaching his whole race as members to his body, in such manner that the supernatural gift of sonship bestowed on him was to descend from him by virtue of natural propagation to every member of that body, which thus became a supernatural race from a supernatural father. So absolute was this unity that the order maintained in the case of every other creature put under the dominion of the man so formed was not followed in his case. For whereas they were created with the difference of sex, each a male and a female, he was created alone, as the Head, and then she, by whose coöperation the race was to be continued, was formed out of him. It was not a second man who was so formed from the first, but one made with reference to him, in dependence on him, to be a help meet for him, not for herself, with an independent being, but for him. This formation of Eve from Adam, which has a meaning of unfathomable depth in the development of the race, is an essential part of the original design. “Therefore,” says Adam, speaking in an ecstasy sent upon him by God, the words of God, “this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” First, the Eve so formed from him is one flesh with him; secondly, the race springing from both is one flesh likewise with him. The consequence intended by that one flesh was the transmission of that magnificent inheritance in which Adam was standing when he so spoke. In this he was Father and Head, for this created alone, then Eve built up from him, from whom afterwards was to issue their joint race. On the further condition of his personal obedience to God and fidelity to his grace, he held the whole supernatural gift of grace conferring sonship, both for himself and for his race: on these terms it was bestowed by the charter of God, the original Giver. Thus, the greatness of his Headship was visible in two things, the power of transmitting his quality of divine sonship to his race by propagation, and the dependence of that quality, in them as well as in himself, on his personal fidelity to God.

But the First Man, the Father and Head of the race, did not stand in his inheritance. He broke the divine command, and lost the gift of sonship, and with it all the prerogatives attendant on that gift, which were above nature and rooted in grace, and which the eminent goodness of God had bestowed upon him: and by the terms of the original charter lost the gift, not only for himself, but for his race. But he did not, therefore, destroy that relation between the Head and the Race, which was part of the original foundation of God. This continued; but whereas it had been intended to communicate the blessing of adoption, it now served to communicate the demerit of adoption lost, the guilt, and with it the punishment incurred by that loss. This is the original sin, the sin of the nature, not of the person, inherited by the members of Adam's body; and as there can be no sin without free-will, the sin of the whole nature included in Adam as its Root and Head, which sinned by Adam's abuse of his free-will.

Let us try to determine as accurately as we can the position into which Adam and his race fell.

Did, then, Adam simply lose with the forfeiture of sanctifying grace the gift of sonship, the supernatural inheritance, all which God had bestowed on him beyond that ideal state of pure nature which we described in the first instance? God, we said, might have created man originally in this condition, and man so created, that is, in virtue of this creation, would not have been under any sin, nor exposed to the anger of God. Did man, by Adam's sin, fall back into it? Not so. His state after his fall differed from such a state of pure nature in that he had upon him the guilt of lost adoption, of adoption lost by the first Adam's fault, and in proportion to the greatness of the loss, and the gratuitousness of the gift originally bestowed, was the anger with which, on the donor's part, the loss was regarded. How would a king, a man like ourselves, regard one whom he had raised out of the dust to be his adopted child, and who had been unfaithful to the parent who had so chosen him with more than natural affection? Such an anger we can indeed understand when felt against the person sinning; but we fail to enter into it as resting on the race, because the secret tie which binds the head and the race into one is not discerned by us; because too the greatness of the divine majesty, the awfulness of His sovereignty, and the wrath of that majesty slighted, are feebly appreciated by us. But this image may at least give us some notion of the nature of that divine anger which pressed upon Adam and his race after the fall. Not only, therefore, was the gift of sonship and the prerogatives attending it withdrawn, but this withdrawal was a punishment, which their absence in the presumed case of an original state of simple nature would not have been. Thus death was a punishment to Adam and his race; the body's weakness and disease, the soul's sorrows and pains, the disobedience of the inferior appetites to the reason, the resistance of the reason to the law of God, were all punishments, and a remarkable point of the punishment is to be seen in this. Adam, as the head of his race, was in virtue of natural propagation to have bestowed on the children of his flesh, the members of his body, his own supernatural inheritance. Thus a singular honour was conferred on the fathership of Adam. But now when, in virtue of this natural propagation, he, continuing to be the head of his race, transmitted to it the guilt of adoption lost instead of the blessing of adoption conferred, a peculiar shame was set by God upon this fathership of Adam, and upon all the circumstances attending it: so that henceforth in the disinherited race the bride veiled her head, and the act of being a father became an act of shame.

Chapter IX. The Second Man Verified In History

“Magnum principium, et regni ejus non erit finis. Deus fortis, dominator, princeps pacis.”

In order to complete the view taken in the preceding chapter of the work of Christ as the second Adam over against the work of the first Adam, it is necessary to dwell at greater length upon a point of which only cursory mention was made therein. It was our object there to bring out the relation of Christ to the Church, but this cannot be done without fully exhibiting the relation to the same Church of the Holy Spirit. To the Incarnation the Fathers in general give the title of the Dispensation of the Son, and as the equivalent, the result, the complement and crown of this Dispensation, they put the Giving of the Spirit.⁹¹ This Giving of the Spirit occupies the whole region of grace, and is coextensive with the whole action of the Incarnate God upon men whom He has taken to be His brethren. The Holy Spirit in this Giving is He who represents the Redeemer, and executes His will, not as an instrument, not as one subordinate, but as the very mind of Christ between whom and Christ there can far less enter any notion of division or separation than between a man and his own spirit. He is that other Paraclete, abiding for ever, who replaces to the disciples the visible absence of the first Paraclete, the Redeemer Himself: He is the Power constituting the Kingdom of Christ; the Godhead inhabiting His Temple; the Soul animating His mystical Body; the Charity, kindling into a living flame the heart of His Bride; the Creator and Father of His Race.

This connection between the Dispensation of the Son and the Giving of the Spirit was delineated by our Lord himself when He first appeared to His assembled disciples after His resurrection. As they were gazing in wonder and trembling joy on that Body which had undergone His awful passion, as He showed them the wounds in His hands and His feet, He told them how His sufferings were the fulfilment of all that in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms had been written concerning Him. And thereupon it is said, He opened their mind to the understanding of these Scriptures. It was thus that the Christ was to suffer, it was thus that He was to rise again on the third day. Hitherto He has dwelt upon His own dispensation, as the fulfilment of all prophecy, now He proceeds to its fruit: that in the name of this Christ repentance and remission of sins should be proclaimed to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you,” He says, “are the witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but stay you in the city of Jerusalem until you be endued with power from on high.” Again, at another occasion of equal solemnity, when He was with His assembled disciples in visible form for the last time, at the moment preceding His ascension, He uses the same emphatic words, charging them not to depart from the city, but to await there that promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Ghost, which they were to receive in common together, which was to be the power in virtue of which they should be His witnesses for all time unto the ends of the earth: the power which instead of restoring a local kingdom to Israel, as was in their thoughts when they questioned Him, was to create an universal kingdom to Him in the hearts of men. It is then as the result of His passion, and the token of His resurrection, that the Son sends down upon His disciples the promise of the Father, that is, the perpetual presence of the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit of Truth and Grace, that permanent and immanent power from on high, who, dwelling for ever in the disciples, makes the Church.

But these words, so singular and so forcible, which He uses on these two occasions, at His resurrection and His ascension, are themselves a reference to the long discourse which He had held with His apostles on the night of His passion. It is in this discourse, from the moment that Judas left them to the conclusion of the divine prayer – and if we can make any distinction in His words, surely these are the most solemn which were ever put together in human language, since they are the prayer not of a creature to the Creator, but the prayer of One divine Person to Another – it is in this discourse that He describes the power from on high with which, as the promise of the Father, He, the Son, would invest His disciples. It is here He says that He would ask the Father, who should give them another Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, to abide with them for ever: whom the world would not receive, nor see, nor know, but whom they should know, because He should abide with them and be in them. This other Paraclete, coequal therefore with Himself, whom the Father should send in His name, and whom He should send from the Father, the Spirit of holiness as well as the Spirit of truth, should teach them all things and remind them of all His teaching. And His coming, though invisible, should profit them more than His own visible presence. For while He declared Himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life,⁹² He revealed to them here that it was by that very way that the Spirit of truth should lead them by the hand into all truth. It was in this Truth, that is, in Himself, that they should be sanctified, and that they should be one, the glory of the Incarnation, which had been given to Him, passing on to them as the members of His Body, by the joint possession of the spirit of truth and holiness, whose presence was the gage that the Father loved them, as He loved Christ, the Body being identified with the Head. In all this He was describing to them the work of that other Paraclete, His own Spirit, “who was to sanctify what He had redeemed, and to guard and maintain possession of what He had acquired.”⁹³ This is but a small portion of that abundant revelation, which our Lord then communicated to His apostles, concerning the Power from on high with which they were to be invested.

The words of our Lord to His apostles at the three great points of His passion, His resurrection, and His ascension, stand out beyond the rest in their appeal to our affections. The last words of a friend are the dearest, and these are the last words of the Bridegroom, and they are concerning His Bride. When He was Himself quitting His disciples He dwells upon the Power which was to create and maintain His Church, upon the gift of His Spirit, His other self, in which gift lay the formation of His kingdom. It is thus He expresses to us the point with which we started, that the Giving of His Spirit is the fulfilment of all that Dispensation wherein the eternal Word took human flesh.

It is not only then the unanimous voice of the Fathers which sets the Giving of the Spirit over against the Incarnation of the Son. They are but carrying on that which our Lord so markedly taught; their tradition was but the echo of His voice, as their life was the fulfilment of it.

But it was a double malady in man which God the Word became man to cure. It was the whole nature which was affected with a taint, and the soul through the whole race touched in both its powers of the intellect⁹⁴ and the will. That false worship which we have seen spreading through the earth, and that deep corruption of manners which was interlaced with it, were the symptoms of this malady. The perversion of the truth concerning the being of God, and all the duties of man which grow out of this being, was inextricably blended with the disregard of these duties in the actual conduct of man. It was in vain to set the truth before man's intellect without a corresponding power to act upon his will. Therefore the apostle described the glory of the only-begotten Son, when He dwelt as man among us, by the double expression that He was “full of grace and truth.” Viewed as the Head of human nature, its Father and new beginning, He is the perpetual fountain to it of these two, which no law, not even one divinely given, could bestow. For the law could make nothing perfect, because it could not touch the will; and the law gave the shadow, but not the very truth of things. But when that unspeakable union of the divine nature with the human had taken effect in the unity of one Person, Truth and Grace had an everlasting human fountain in the created nature of the Incarnate Word. Now was the fountain to pour forth a perpetual stream upon the race assumed. And this it does by the descent of the Spirit. In this descent upon the assembled Church the Grace and Truth of the divine Head, with which His Flesh, carried by the Godhead, overstreams, find themselves a human dwelling in the race. Such an operation belongs only to the Divine Spirit, for God alone can so act upon the intellect and will of creatures as to penetrate them with His gifts of Truth and Grace, while He leaves them their free will, their full individuality, as creatures. This, then, was the range of that power with which our Lord foretold to His apostles that they should be invested, and for which He bade them wait. The whole field of truth as it respects the relation of God to His creatures as moral beings, and the whole extent of grace, as it touches the human will, for the performance of every act which a reasonable creature can execute, made up the extent of that divine indwelling in men which the Spirit of Christ assumed upon the day of Pentecost. This was the power of the Holy Ghost which then came down upon men. Through the whole divine discourse which preceded His passion, our Lord dwells upon this double power, referring to Himself as the Truth, to His Spirit as the Spirit of the Truth, to Himself as the Vine, and so that root of grace which should communicate its sap to the branches, and to His Spirit, who should take of His and give it to them; uniting both ideas of Truth and Grace in that one word, “Sanctify them in thy Truth,” that is by incorporation with me, who am the Truth, in my Spirit, who is the Truth. And so the eternal Word, having assumed a human Body, when He withdraws His corporal presence, proceeds to form that other human Body, the dwelling-place of His Spirit, in which His Truth and Grace are to become visible.

Thus the transfusion of Truth and Grace from the Incarnate Word to His mystical Body is the generic character of the Giving of the Spirit.

Two differential marks distinguish this giving from any which preceded the coming of our Lord.

First, the Spirit should come upon them, but should never depart from them. “He shall give you another Comforter, to abide with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth.” This giving was not an intermittent operation, whether extraordinary, such as had shown itself in Moses and the Prophets, for their inspiration in writing, or their guidance in particular trials, nor that ordinary one whereby from the beginning He had enabled all the good and just to lead a life acceptable to Him. It was a far higher gift,⁹⁵ wherein, as S. Augustine says, by the very presence of His majesty no longer the mere odour of the balsam, but the substance itself of the sacred unguent was poured into those vessels, making them His temple, and conveying that adoption in virtue of which they should not be left orphans, but have their Father invisibly with them for ever. No intermittent operation, and no presence less than that of His substance, would reach the force of the words used by our Lord, “I will ask the Father, and He shall send you another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, to abide with you for ever;” for that word “other” conveys a comparison with Himself, from whom they had never been separated since He had called them, in whose continuance with them alone was their strength, their unity, their joint existence and mission, without whom they could do nothing. All this to them that “other” Paraclete was to be, in order that the departure of the Former Paraclete should be expedient for them. For in this continuity of His presence was involved the further gift that the Paraclete was to come to them as a Body, and because of this manner of coming He replaced the Former. Had He come to them only as individuals, they would have suffered a grievous loss, the loss of the Head who made them one. But He came to them as the Body of Christ, and by coming made them that Body, being the Spirit of the Head. That rushing mighty wind filled the whole house in which they were sitting, and they all were filled together with the presence; and as a sign that the old confusion and separation of mankind were in them to be done away, speaking in one tongue the one truth which was evermore to dwell with them, they were heard in all the various languages of the nations present at the feast. “The society by which men are made the one Body of the only Son of God belongs to the Spirit,”⁹⁶ and He came upon all together in one House to indicate, as He made, that one Body. “The mode of giving,” says S. Augustine, “was such as never before appeared. Nowhere do we read before that men congregated together had by receiving the Holy Ghost spoken with the tongues of all nations.”⁹⁷ “Therefore He came upon Pentecost as upon His birthday.”⁹⁸

It is His presence alone which confers four gifts upon the body which He vivifies.

It was the will, says S. Augustine,⁹⁹ of the Father and the Son that we should have communion with each other and with Them by means of that which is common to Them, and by that gift to collect us into one, which, being one, They both have; that is to say, by the Holy Ghost, who is God, and the gift of God. For, says S. Thomas,¹⁰⁰ the unity of the Holy Spirit makes unity in the Church. It is not by similarity, or by juxtaposition, or by agreement, how much less by concessions and compromises, that unity exists in the body of Christ, but because the Spirit is one, because all gifts, however various, all functions, however distinct, are distributed by this One.

For the same reason truth dwells in this Body, because He is the Spirit of Truth. Our Lord Himself has defined His great function in this particular, to lead His disciples by the hand¹⁰¹ into all truth, to teach all things, and remind of all things which made up His own teaching. This function began on the day of Pentecost, and lasts to the day of judgment, and belongs to the Body of Christ, and to it alone, and belongs to it because it is animated by the Spirit of Truth. And this animation is like the Head, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is not of any past time more or less than of the present or the future. It is the illumination which belongs to that whole last day, through which the Body of Christ grows, teaches, labours, and suffers, until the mortal day break into the light of eternity.

His third gift to the Body is that of charity, and for the same reason, because He is this Himself. He who is not only the Unity of the Father and the Son, but their mutual Love, coming as the gift of that Divine love which redeemed the world by the sacrifice of its Maker, and as the Spirit of that Love, who invested Himself with human flesh, creates in this human dwelling-place that one charity which bears His name, and is of His nature, and which in that one body joins the wills of men together as His Truth joins their intellects. If the Body of Christ has one prevailing charity, which reaches to all its members, and encompasses the least as well as the greatest, it is because the heart is divine.

The fourth gift which He bestows upon the Body is sanctification, and it may be said to be the result of the other three. This, again, is His own name and nature, and many have thought and said, His personal attribute, to make holy; and that, as Fathership indicates the First Person, and Sonship the Second, so the making holy names the Third, the bond of the most blessed Trinity. But this, at least, may be said to be the final cause of the body which He animates, the imparting of holiness. In virtue of this gift, all the means and aids and rules of holiness are stored up in the Body. And this does not mean that there is not a continual falling away from the rule and practice of holiness in particular members, but it means that while these, in spite of the Body's nurture and solicitude, fall away from it and perish, the Body lasts for ever, the rules and aids and means of holiness lasting for ever within it, because it is the Body of the Spirit of holiness.

Now these four gifts, Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, can none of them exist in the Body without the other, and all of them exist together there, because they have one divine root, that indwelling of the Holy Spirit which is the fruit of the Incarnation, and whereby the mystical Body of Christ corresponds to His natural Body. Of this Body the beginning is Unity, the substance Truth, the bond Charity, the end Sanctity. Countless heresies and schisms have sought to break up the coinherence of these gifts, but in vain. The only success which the indwelling Spirit allows them is to detach from the Body those who are unworthy to remain in it, and to prolong for a time their maimed existence by some portion of some of His gifts. Truth, for instance, has such a vitality that many a heresy will live for ages on that fragment which it has detached from the mass; unity and charity have such force that even their shadow, that is, the joint possession of a fragmentary truth, and the good-will thence proceeding, will prolong for a time a sort of corporate existence. Holiness has so attractive a power, that zeal and self-denial, which present the seeming of it, will make the fortune of a sect for a time. But in the union and the completeness of these four gifts, the great Body of Christ stands out through all the ages inimitable and unapproachable. Alone it dares to claim them thus united and complete, for alone it can present their realisation.

These four gifts, then, dwell in the Body in a higher degree than that in which they adorn the members of the Body, as in it, by force of the Spirit's indwelling, they ever exist together. Let us now see the qualities which the Spirit imparts to the members of the Body, by virtue of their incorporation into it.

First of all is the forgiveness of sins. The Spirit takes them out of that state of alienation in which they are born, and unites them to His Body; and in so doing He effaces both the birth-sin and every actual sin which they may have committed. This is that plenary forgiveness of sins, the pure gift of God unpreceded by any merit on man's part, which greets the new-comer out of Adam's body of sin into the Body of Christ. It is imparted by and from the Body, and to its members alone.

The second quality is that illumination of the mind, irradiated by the truth, the whole compass of which exists in the Body. This illumination is the root of the virtue of faith, by means of which the individual mind appropriates the divine truth presented to it. The force of the virtue differs in the individual as the keenness of sight in the natural man, but the visual power is the same in quality in all. By it the mind of the believer lays hold in ever varying degree, one more and one less, of that great harmony of truth which is held in its completeness, its manifold applications, and all but infinite relations, only by the Body. For the truth with which we deal is not unlocalised and scattered, the prey, as it were, of the individual mind, which can hunt it down and take it as a spoil, but it is a divine gift, orbed in the sphere which was created for it, the Body of that Word who is the Truth. Hence the first question to the applicant for baptism: What askest thou of the Church of God? and the answer is, Faith.

The third quality is the adoption of Sonship, which flows directly from incorporation into the Body of Christ, and to which man has no sort of title in himself or from his own nature, but which comes to him only by kindred with Him who, on the morning of His resurrection, greeted that great penitent who bore the figure of the Church with that paschal salutation of the Second Adam, “Go to my brethren, and say, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.” And the divine virtue of hope well corresponds to this quality, the effects of which in a state of trial and conflict are to so great a degree future and unseen. It seems, moreover, to be as a special link and tie between the virtue which purifies the intellect, and that which corrects the will and makes it obedient. Thus through it we pass on to the fourth quality of Sanctification, which is the completion of the other three and their end, the harmony of each individual will with the divine will, the work of charity. That divine virtue is the special fruit of the passion of Christ, which was to gather up into one what sin had disunited and torn away, first from its Author, and then from the order by Him created, which was to heal the animosities thus introduced, and to change the world from a conflict wherein each sought to better himself at the expense of his neighbour, into a community cemented together with mutual affection. It was with reason, therefore, that S. Augustine would not allow the possession of charity, save in the unity of that one Body which Christ had created,¹⁰² and without charity there is no sanctification.

The four qualities thus slightly sketched, forgiveness of sins, illumination of faith, adoption to sonship, and sanctification by charity, which come to the individual by and with incorporation into the Body, are not given to him irrevocably, but are conditional upon his perseverance. They are portions and derivations of that vast treasure of Truth and Grace which the Body holds in their entireness and for ever, because of the perpetual indwelling of the Spirit who makes its life, but which He dispenses as it pleases Him to the members, and which He may withdraw from them in default of their coöperation. Vast are the losses thereby incurred, not to the treasure-house which remains inexhaustible, but to those who fall out of it back into the world, or rather that body of Adam from which they were taken. But these losses touch not the beauty and the glory of that Body of Christ, which goes on through the ages, and takes up its own, fulfils its appointed work, and reaches its intended end.

Thus on the day of Pentecost a new Power, the Spirit of the Incarnate God, descended not upon single men, but upon an assembly of men, binding it in a unity, conveying to it a truth, kindling in it a charity, and working through these a sanctification never before known; which Power, thenceforth dwelling in that Body, was to collect and draw into itself out of all nations and ranks of men those who should form the Church, that is, the Kingdom and Temple, and House, and Body, and Family of Christ. In it was to work and from it to go forth henceforward to all time the virtue of Him who had assumed our flesh, not transiently, but for ever; in the Head and the Body, through the life of His Spirit, Christ should teach and bear for ever that witness to the truth of which He spoke in the hall of Pilate, and concerning which He said that “this gospel of the kingdom should be proclaimed through the whole world, for a witness to all nations, and then that the end should come.”¹⁰³ To the continuance, the indissolubility, the purity of this power He has pledged His word in such a way that they who deny it must in doing so deny Him. He has even made the unity of this Body the special mark to men of the truth of His mission, beseeching His Father in that last prayer, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for those also who through their word shall believe in Me, that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.”

There are three analogies¹⁰⁴ which illustrate this creation of our Lord – a creation in itself as singular as His assumption of man's nature.

First, that of the relation between the soul and body. The soul is the life of the body; the body, as it were, the mansion and home of the soul, its bearer. Through the body the qualities of the soul become visible and known; its powers exercise themselves, and personal unity so binds the two together that we love or hate, admire or despise, the one for the sake of the other; the grief of the soul acts upon the body, the sickness of the body depresses the soul. Through the acts of the body we learn the very existence of the soul, and in these acts it portrays itself. Human nature has been so made by its Creator that the qualities of soul and body, of spirit and matter, are imputed in the individual man to each other. Now to the Body we have been considering the Spirit of Christ is, as it were, the soul. It is nothing strange, then, if it was His will to create such a Body, if it be the result of His Incarnation, that the like effects which exist in the case of every human soul and body should take place here. To this Body also the power and virtue of its soul are communicated; and, since Christ by His Spirit animates it, in honouring it He is honoured; in despising it, He is despised. There is an imparting to it of the qualities which He has; and thus it is that unity and sanctity, truth and charity dwell in it as the operation of His mind. Thus every man contains in himself, in the union of soul and body, an image of that tie by which Christ and His Church are one.

Secondly, because God has created man for society, He has implanted in him an irrepressible instinct of communion with his brother men. This instinct it is which, under circumstances of every possible variety, results in one end, the State. The human commonwealth, whatever external shape it wear, whatever division of its powers it make, springs from this. In virtue of this original formation of man, that he is made to live together, and gregariously, not separately, the supreme power of government, the power of life and death, dwells in the community, and obedience to it has a divine sanction. Thus, the commonwealth has a variety of powers which the individual has not, and not only so, but it also has powers which do not arise from the mere aggregation of individuals, rather which belong to it as a community, as a whole, for instance, sovereignty in all the details of its exercise. But now the very object for which Christ became Incarnate was to constitute a divine commonwealth. He is the King: it is the tenderness of a God Incarnate that He calls and makes His Kingdom His Body. The powers, then, which belong to the earthly commonwealth belong, with the changes which the change of subject carries, to the Divine. They who have so great a reverence for human government, who respect in the nation an ultimate irresponsible power, ought, if they were consistent, when they acknowledge Christ as having come in the flesh, to acknowledge His government in the kingdom which He has set up. All that his country is to the patriot, the Church is to the Christian, but in so much higher a degree, as the object for which Christ came is above the needs and cares of this present life. Has the City of God, then, less claim upon Christians than the City of Romulus had upon Romans? Thus, in the natural duty of the citizen, as well as in the compound nature of man, is contained a reminder of the Christian's relation to the Church, and a picture and ensample of the Church's authority.

Thirdly, there is the analogy presented by the transmission of natural life¹⁰⁵ through the one flesh of Adam to all his race. As the breath of natural life, once given to Adam, is continued on to all those sprung from his body, the power of the Creator never starting anew, but working in and through the trunk of human nature; so the supernatural life springing from our Lord, as the gift of His Incarnation, is breathed on the day of Pentecost into the whole Body of the Church to be communicated from that Body for ever. Christ is to the one exactly what Adam is to the other. As the Word of God, creating, joined to the inheritance of the flesh of Adam from generation to generation the communication of a spirit such as Adam's, by which double action we have the unity of race, so the Word of God, redeeming, when He had taken our flesh as the first-fruits of human nature, breathed forth from that flesh the communication of His Spirit to the Body of the Church, by which we belong to the race of the Incarnate God, and are become His family, and make His house. Thus that which the body of Adam is naturally, the Body of Christ is spiritually, and the descent of human nature in its unity a picture of the Holy Spirit's unity working through the Body which He has chosen. And this analogy is made the more striking by the statement so often repeated in the Greek Fathers, that with the natural life, as first given to Adam, was conjoined the gift of the Holy Ghost, forfeited afterwards by his sin, and withdrawn from him and his race, and now restored as the special gift of the Incarnate God.¹⁰⁶ Thus the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is a true and real counterpart of the creation of man in Eden; but they who share it are become kindred of God through His flesh, and by so sharing it together, they form that society which failed through Adam's sin. In the first creation, the Omnipotent Creator, in His bounty towards His favourite child, as foreseeing the assumption of that nature by Himself, attached to the gift of natural life the Spirit of sanctification; in the second, having assumed that nature, He gave through His own Body, first taken out of us, then crucified, now risen and exalted, the gift of the Spirit, Who, with all the endowments springing from Him, as the Inspirer of truth and charity, of unity and holiness, dwells in that Body for ever.

Thus in the union of the soul and body, in the constitution and authority of the human commonwealth, and in the race's natural unity, God holds before us three analogies, which each in some respect, and altogether very largely, illustrate His finished work, to which all natural productions of His providence are subordinate, His work of predilection, His work of unbounded love and sovereign magnificence, the creation of that which is at once the Body, the Kingdom, and the Family of the Incarnate Word.

Thus the three successions, of men, of doctrines, and of institutions, are woven by the Holy Spirit together as three strands of a rope which cannot be broken: in the union of these three His perpetual presence dwells; and this is the spinal cord whereby He joins the Body with the Head.

Let us take instances wherein the force of this union is seen.

The first gift He bestowed upon men when the gospel of the kingdom approached them was the forgiveness of sins. This is a power belonging to God alone, as sin is an offence against His majesty. The conferring of this power upon the Apostles by our Lord Himself is explicitly recorded. But then two sacraments exhibit the application of this power, first that of baptism, where it is given plenarily; secondly that of penance, where it is given under restriction. And further, an order of men is instituted for this perpetual application. Here, then, we see the force of the triple cord carrying on through all ages this great truth of the forgiveness of sins in and by the Church of God. The very definite mention of the grant of this power in the written tradition is not left exposed by itself to the action of unbelieving reason. It has a double bulwark in the two institutions which assert its perpetual exercise as a matter of history, and in the order of men established to carry it out.

Take again the doctrine of the Real Presence, upon which infidelity falls as being a proof charge of human credulity,¹³⁰ on which faith and love rest as the sovereign gift of God. The recorded words of our Lord Himself express it distinctly and emphatically; further words of His in the sixth chapter of S. John allude to it with equal force, and S. Paul repeatedly refers to it. But this is not enough for the solicitude with which the Holy Spirit has guarded it against all attack. As the great central rite of Christian worship it is presented day after day, in myriads of churches, from age to age, to the eyes and hearts of men. The act in which Christians assemble, in which they offer up at once their repentance and their requests, their thanksgivings and their praises, to Him who has formed them into one Body, lives upon this truth. And further, the order of men which is the backbone of the Church, the great Christian priesthood, made by our Lord in instituting the rite and conferring the gift, exists for its continuance. Against such a truth, defended with such bulwarks, both infidelity and heresy dash themselves with impotent rage in vain.

Thirdly, we have in the epistles of S. Paul a mention of the bishop's office and the duties belonging to it. The mention is incidental, and the words not so determinate as in the former instances given. Those who are outside the Body, in their attack upon the necessity of episcopacy, thought that they could cut through these words so as to make it doubtful whether the office of bishop, as distinguished from that of priest, was of original institution. But then history disclosed the fact that when the last apostle was taken from the earth not a church existed which was not under episcopal jurisdiction, and through the whole world, by the institution of bishops, was fulfilled the prediction, – Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children, whom thou mayest make princes in all lands. Thus, while the written record was interpreted, the unwritten teaching of the Church found a plain and unanswerable proof in her invariable practice. All through her long history she is seen to be governed by bishops; and the words of S. Paul, flanked by the institution and the practice, are more than sufficient to maintain the truth.

Once more let us take the primacy of S. Peter's see in the Church. This, as is well known, rests in the written word mainly on three great passages of S. Matthew, S. Luke, and S. John. These, indeed, are so specific and definite that they convey the dignity intended as clearly as the passages above referred to convey the forgiveness of sins or the Real Presence. But over and above these, what an overwhelming proof in the unbroken succession of those who exercised the primacy from the beginning, and are referred to from age to age by the doctors, fathers, and historians of the Church. Beside the charter of institution stands the long record of the work wrought in virtue of it, the witness of the Church to it in councils, the obedience to it in fact. As the priesthood exists in attestation of the Real Presence, so the primacy stands beside our Lord's words, first promising and then conferring it, like the comment of eighteen hundred years, uniform and consistent.

What we have here applied in the case of the forgiveness of sins, the Real Presence, episcopacy, and the primacy of the Church, might be carried out in the case of many more doctrines forming a part of the great deposit. But it may be well to cite one instance of a truth not contained in the written word at all, which through the unwritten teaching of the Church has passed into universal practice. This is not the abolition only of the Jewish Sabbath, constituted as it was by the most express divine command, for to that abolition there is a passing reference in an epistle of S. Paul, but the further substitution of the day of the resurrection, the first day of the week for the seventh, with a modified observance. This rests solely upon the deposit of the Church's unwritten teaching, corroborated by universal practice from the apostolic times.

Viewing, then, the transmission of the Truth as a whole, and the creation of the mystical Body of Christ as its home, and the Holy Spirit as the perpetual Indweller who fills that treasure-house of Truth and Grace, we may consider its maintenance as secured by the triple succession or tradition of men, of doctrine, and of institutions which are inseparably joined together in that its home. But there are some words of our Lord so distinctly and translucently expressing all this statement respecting the mode in which His Truth was first and is ever to be transmitted, and the conditions to which His perpetual presence is attached, that we cannot forbear to adduce them.

His parting instructions to His Apostles on the Mountain of Galilee given by S. Matthew run thus: “Jesus approached them and said unto them, All power has been given unto Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore, and make disciples all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all days even to the end of the world.” We shall here note six things. First, there is the root and foundation of all mission, the power bestowed upon Christ as man, in virtue of the Incarnation: “all power has been given to Me in heaven and on earth;” secondly, there is the derivation of this power from Christ to His Apostles, in virtue of which sent by Him, as He by His Father, they were to go forth: “Go ye therefore;” thirdly, there is the creation of the perpetual teaching power, the authority by which truth was to be imparted: “make disciples all nations.” He placed it in them as in one Body, here fulfilling what S. Augustine afterwards expressed, that He “seated the doctrine of Verity in the Chair of Unity.” They, invested with one Spirit, His own Spirit of Truth, should go forth and make disciples all nations to one Body of Truth. It is the creation of a power new as the Incarnation, as it unique, because springing from it, founded and continued in it. He Himself is the one Teacher whose voice they express: He who came on earth for three and thirty years speaks for evermore in those whom He sends as one Body, which calls no man teacher, because it is the Body of Christ, the Teacher: so that this function of magisterial teaching is the great distinctive office of His Church, coming from above, and invested with the authority of the God-man, by which it draws to it disciples, whose consent is not the ground but the result of its authority. Fourthly, there is the creation of the sacraments, as containing the grace which is needed for the reception of this Truth, and they are summed up in the first, which is the beginning of the new life, illumination, and perfection, and which is given in the covenant name of God, as the Christian God, and is the mark of the triune Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, impressed on his own people of acquisition. Thus Grace is for ever associated with Truth as the means whereby alone on earth Truth shall prevail and be received, and that only as the teaching of that Body whose Head is full of Grace and Truth. Fifthly, there is marked the manner of the teaching, the nature of the magisterial office created as that of a living body of men: “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” The fund from which this teaching is drawn is that whole communication of truth from the Incarnate Word Himself, given to them by word of mouth, of which we have spoken above as the great Tradition or Delivery; and out of which a part is incorporated in the written word, while the whole dwells ever in the Body created to receive it, from which it is to be imparted by perpetual oral teaching. The teaching, therefore, rests upon the perpetual presence of the Body representing Christ, and as in the days of His flesh He teaches through it, and has fixed part of His tradition in it by writing, not to the exclusion of the rest, but as the charter of a sovereign, the title-deeds of an empire, to be perpetually applied, interpreted, and developed in that whole system of institutions, by that whole race of teachers, in the life of that one Body, which He was creating. And lastly, to this perpetual living line of teachers, to this perpetual living doctrine, to this perpetual living framework of grace, He has promised His own presence without fail to the end. In this triple succession He is seen, lives, and rules, and this is His Kingdom, His Temple, His Body, His Bride, His Family, to whom He says, Behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world.

From these words of our Lord, as from the whole previous argument, we gather that while the Truth which Christ imparted to His Apostles was one and complete, its development in its various relations was designedly left as the proper work of such a Body as He created. He Himself spoke as God in human flesh, uttering, that is, creative words, which gathered up in a sentence a germ of truth capable of a long series of applications, and requiring them in order to be understood. And the aptitude to make these applications, so that the truth proclaimed by Him and committed to His Apostles should penetrate through and leaven the whole human society, He gave to His mystical Body. Let us take an instance of this. The Pharisees approached Him one day to entangle Him by their words, and proposed to Him a dilemma from which they thought that He could not escape save by ruining His influence with one great party, or by encountering the danger of being charged with seditious teaching by another. They put to Him the question whether it was lawful to give tribute to Cæsar or not. Whereupon He asked them to show Him the tribute-money, and pointing to the image of the emperor upon it, uttered those famous words, “Render therefore to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's, and to God the things which are God's.” Now these words were laid up in the treasury of His Church, and by them she has had to determine the relation between the civil and the spiritual powers in the society created by Him who spake them. Here is a vast development from a small seed: but it is a seed cast by the world's Creator and the Body's Head. And His teaching is full of such seeds, as the history of His Church is one great process of developing and harmonising and conveying to man the truth thus cast into the fallows of her soil. It is not new truth, for He gave the germ, and no power in man could have developed it without the germ, any more than it could produce the oak without the acorn. It is the same truth, as He taught it, but with that process passed upon it which He intended when He gave it in such a form, and when He made a living Body, to be called by His name, to propagate His teaching, to collect His members into one, and to fill the earth with the knowledge which He brought.

Such a work, therefore, the root and authorisation of which we have been attempting to delineate in this chapter, stretches over the whole field which Truth and Grace occupy, and over all the relations of men which are summed up in what they are to believe and what they are to do. These ramifications are all but endless. But to all these extends that giving of the Holy Ghost in His fourfold character of the Spirit of Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, which is the result of the Incarnation, and which makes the Church. What we have said here has a special relation to Truth, and to Christian morals as resting upon Christian dogma. But it is impossible to separate Truth from Grace, in their actual operation as powers: faith and charity in the Christian are linked together, as the intellect and the will are one soul. What we have said is but an introduction to a sketch of the great evolution of dogmatic truth through eighteen centuries: but in recording its rise, the secret of its growth, and the source of its strength, it was impossible not to bring out the great fact that Christianity was nothing less than a divine life produced in the world over against the existing heathenism, and laying hold of the whole soul of man, in which, as we have just said, intellect and will are inseparable. It did not consist in anything which individuals believed, however true; but in a society of which Truth and Grace were the joint spring, and it was produced in the midst of a world which had to a great extent forfeited both Truth and Grace, while both returned to it as the gift of Christ assuming man's nature. This error and distraction of heathenism, and this great unity of Christian life grounded in faith and charity which rose up against it, were profoundly felt by all the Fathers, being eye-witnesses of the old world and the new. Their writings express it again and again, with the vividness which only eye-witnesses, who are likewise actors and sufferers, feel. In nothing, perhaps, do they so differ from modern writers as in the energy with which they appreciate the supernatural character of the Christian, and the wonderful being and endowment of that Christian Body which impressed this character on its members. One cause, we may suppose, of this was the sight of heathenism before them with all its impurities and its impotence to produce good. So they were not even tempted to that naturalism which is the besetting sin of our age and these countries. It would have seemed to them not only an ingratitude but an absurdity to refer to the inborn force of humanity a change equally of the intellect and of the will which they saw to belong only to the power of Christ revealed in His Church. We will cite one such passage as a conclusion to this discussion, and because it represents the whole train of thought which we have been drawing out.¹³¹

“Of this sacrament, this sacrifice, this priest, this God, before, having been made of a woman, He entered on His mission, all sacred and mystical, angelic and miraculous appearances to our fathers, as well as their own deeds, were resemblances, in order that every creature might in a manner by its acts speak of that One destined to come, in whom should be the salvation of all that were to be restored from death. For as we had started away from the one true supreme God by the injustice of impiety, and fallen out of harmony with Him, and become unstable as water, and wasted ourselves on a multitude of vanities, rent in pieces, and hanging in tatters to every piece, need was there that by the will and command of a compassionating God this multitude of objects itself should utter a cry in unison, calling for One to come; and that thus called upon this One should come, and that the multitude should attest together that the One had come: and so we, discharged from the burden of this multitude, should come to One; and dead in our soul by many sins, and from our sin doomed to death in the flesh, should love that One, who, being without sin, died for us in the flesh: and believing on Him when risen, and with Him rising again in the Spirit through faith, should be justified, being in the One Just made one: and should not despair of rising again in our very flesh, beholding our Head being One going before His many members; in whom now, cleansed by faith, and hereafter restored by vision, and reconciled by the Mediator to God, we might inhere in the One, enjoy the One, and continue One for ever.

“Thus the Son of God, Himself at once the Word of God and Son of man, Mediator of God and men, equal to the Father by the unity of the godhead, and partaker of us through the assumption of the manhood, interceding with the Father for us through that which was man, yet not concealing that as God He was One with the Father, thus speaks: ‘Neither pray I for these alone, but for those also who shall believe through their word on Me; that all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be One in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest Me, I have given them, that they may be One as we also are One.’ He said not, that I and they may be One thing, although in that He is the Head of the Church, and the Church His Body, He might say, I and they not One thing, but One person, because the Head and the Body is One Christ. But marking His Godhead as consubstantial with the Father (whence in another place He says, I and the Father are One thing), He wills that His own should be One thing in their own kind, that is, in the consubstantial parity of the same nature, but in Him, because in themselves they could not, as severed from each other by diversity of pleasures, desires, and impurities of sin. From these they are cleansed through the Mediator, so as to be One Thing in Him, not merely by the same nature in which all from mortal men become equal to the angels, but likewise by the same will breathing in perfect harmony together into the same beatitude, welded, as it were, by the fire of charity into One Spirit. For this is the force of His words, That they may be One, as We also are One: that as the Father and the Son are One not only in equality of substance, but also in will, so these also between whom and God the Son is Mediator, may be One Thing not merely by being of the same nature, but also by the same society of affection. And the very point that He is Mediator, by whom we are reconciled to God, He indicates in the words, ‘I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be consummated into One.’ Thus as through the mediator of death we had receded from our Creator, stained and alienated, so through the Mediator of life we might be purified and reconciled, wherein consist our true peace and stable union with Him.”

Chapter X. The First Age Of The Martyr Church

“Magnum hæreditatis mysterium! Templum Dei factus est uterus nescientis virum. Non est pollutus ex ea carnem assumens. Omnes gentes venient dicentes, Gloria tibi, Domine.”

Antiphon on Vespers of Circumcision.

The world which Augustus and Tiberius ruled was not conscious of the fact that there was an order of truth, and of morality based upon that truth, the maintenance of which was to be purchased, and cheaply purchased, with the loss of life, or of all that made life valuable. This world was indeed familiar with the thought and with the practice of sacrificing life for one object – an object which collected all the natural affections and interests of a man together, and presented them to him in the most attractive form, his country. Greek and Roman history, and indeed the history of all nations up to that time, had been full of instances in which privations and sufferings were endured, and, if necessary, life itself given up for wife and children, for the dear affections of house and home, for friends, for freedom, for fatherland. Man, civilised and uncivilised, was alike capable of this, and capable of it in profusion. Rome had many a Regulus and Sparta many a Leonidas in the humblest ranks of their citizens: Gaul had thousands as noble as Vercingetorex, and Spain not one but many Numantias. Human nature had never been wanting in the courage to die for the visible goods of human life. But to labour, to combat, to endure pain, sorrow, privations, to suffer in every form for the invisible goods of a future life, to recognise, that is, an inviolable order of religion and morality, so far superior to all that a man can grasp and hold in his possession, to wife, children, goods, friends, freedom, and fatherland, and to life adorned and crowned with these, that any or all of these, and life itself, are to be sacrificed for its preservation; this may be said to be a thought of which the whole heathen world ruled by Augustus and Tiberius was unconscious.¹³² For other reasons also it was familiar enough with the sacrifice of life, since the continual practice of war and the permanent institution of slavery had made human life the cheapest of all things in its eyes. And further, to die rather than to live dishonoured was still the rule of the nobler among the millions who yielded to the sway of Augustus. But to die for the maintenance of moral truth, that is, for faith, – this was known indeed to the Jews, who had already their “cloud of witnesses” to it; but it was unknown to heathendom, which has in all its ranks and times but one man¹³³ to offer whose death approaches to such a sacrifice, and therefore shines with incomparable lustre among all deeds of purely human heroism. But the death of Socrates found in this no imitators, he created here no line of followers; and he stands alone in this greatness, an exception to an otherwise invariable rule.

However, in our two preceding chapters we have been describing something much more than the exhibition of this order of truth; that is, we have set forth the union of it with a Person, who both exhibits it in Himself, and is the source of it to others. And the difference between these two things is very great. Many at different times have said, “I teach the truth.” One only has said, “I am the Truth:” and to say it is the most emphatic indirect assumption of Godhead which can be conceived. And with it that One also joined a similar expression, containing the same assumption of Godhead, and which equally was never approached by any other teacher, “I am the Life.” The union of the Truth at once and of the Life with His Person, which is thus become the root of both to human nature, was the subject of the last two chapters. Now, as we have said, that there was an order of truth sacred and inviolable above all things, was borne witness to by the Hebrew martyrs, and therefore was not new to the chosen race of Israel, though it was new to heathendom, at the time at which our Lord appeared. But the union of the Truth and of the Life with the Person of One appearing visibly in the world as man, was as new to the Hebrews as to the heathen, was an absolute novelty to human nature. And so the Christian Faith also, as a system of belief and action, that is, as embracing the mind and the will of man, as giving both Truth and Life, is entirely new in this respect; that in this double action it is in its origin and in its whole course and maintenance bound up with a Person. Thus all which it teaches is not naked truth, unlocalised as it were, and impersonal, but is the development of relations in which the disciples of Christ stand to Him; for instance, as King, as God, as Head, as Bridegroom, as Father. As these, He is at once The Truth and the Life. Thus it is that the Christian Faith flows out of the Person of Christ the God-man; and, as its Truth is centered in that Person, so also its continuous Life depends on Him.

And further, as the connection of doctrine, or truth, and of life, that is, action, with a Person is the point from which all this movement springs, in which respect we have said it was absolutely new, so the term to which it reaches is the creation of something in both these things correlative to that Person, the creation of a Kingdom, a Temple, a Body, a Mother, a Race, in which respect also the term is as new as that from which it springs. That He is the Truth and the Life is shown in this creation, which has a distinctive character, as He has, an unique existence, and an organic unity with Him.

The subject on which we are now employed is to describe as an historic fact how the duty of maintaining, propagating, and dying for the truth and conduct thus identified with the Person of Christ, was carried out through many generations and under difficulties which seemed to preclude the possibility of its success; and to show the means by which this great creation, starting from the day of Pentecost, made a home and established itself in the Roman empire, by which, after a conflict of nearly three hundred years, it was finally recognised.

The worship of the one true God had been fixed in the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the faith which made them a nation, that is, as the dogma on which their national existence was so based, that through maintaining it they were to continue a people. The Jewish polity lived in and by this belief, and, as a nation, was its prophet. Certainly, this was the noblest form which nationalism has ever assumed. Yet it was nationalism still; and the proselyte who would enter into the full worship of the God of Abraham and all its privileges had to become a Jew. But now, instead of this bond another was substituted, signifying that the King of the Jews who had appeared was come as the saviour of man, not of this or of that nation. The bond is therefore placed at the point which constituted the salvation of the whole race, that is in the Person of the God-man, and by this the corporation was put beyond the bounds of a nationality, and made coextensive with the world. The Christian creed was formed round the Person, the actions, and the sufferings of Christ. Now here, precisely in what constituted the character, the greatness, and the glory of the Christian faith, was seated the principle and the beginning of the persecution which it encountered from the Roman empire. In that empire every species of idolatry¹³⁴ had a right of homestead as the national or tribe religion of any one of its constituent parts; and the worship of even one God, exclusive as that Jewish worship was of the whole heathen pantheon, was allowed by the laws of Rome to the Jews, because he was considered their national god. But the Christians had no such justification in Roman eyes for their exclusive worship. They were not a nation nor a province of the empire; they had not, therefore, that title for their worship which constituted the charter of toleration to all besides, including the Jew, who worshipped the same God. For the Christians worshipped Him, not as their ancestral God, but as the Father of that Son who had taken human flesh, and become the Saviour of men. Their worship of the one true God was not only exclusive, but in and through the fact of the Incarnation claimed the homage of all men to it. It knew of no bond of brotherhood but in Him who had deigned to call men His brethren. Thus its special character and preëminent glory were the cause of its persecution, and from the moment that it came before the notice of the Roman governor not as a Jewish sect but as a distinct belief, it was considered as not a lawful religion. Thus too it was that the selfsame point which kindled Jewish hatred entailed Roman persecution. The Christian faith was a mortal offence to the Jew because it extended what had been his special privileges to all the Gentiles. He abhorred the substitution of the Person of the God-man for the race of Abraham after the flesh; as the Roman at once despised and hated a worship which not only adhered to one God, but dethroned from his political supremacy the capitoline Jupiter, and whose title rested not on tradition and national inheritance, but on a fact touching the whole race of man, and therefore claiming the allegiance of the whole race – the assumption of human nature by a divine Person. Thus the doctrine in which lay the whole creative force, the truth and the life of Christianity, was that which from the first caused the dislike of the Jew and the persecution of the Gentile – the kingship of Christ, involving the headship of a universal religion, and a power which was not that of Cæsar.

We have, then, now to treat of a period of 280 years, homogeneous in its character from the beginning to the end, which is, that it is the carrying out by a people ever increasing in number and strength of that good confession made before Pontius Pilate – that witness at its proper time of which S. Paul¹³⁵ in its first stage said that he was the herald and apostle. The course and life of Christians during these ten generations is to be the prolongation of this testimony, the embodiment of this confession. It is as soldiers, imitators, followers of one Chief, that all appear on the scene in their respective order.¹³⁶ It is by a direct virtue drawn from the cross of that Chief that they move onward to their own passion. They endure and they conquer simply as under His command, and because He endured and conquered before them. Their oath of military fidelity is the bond of their discipline; they prevail because they are His, and because they are one in Him:

 
“And they stand in glittering ring
Round their warrior God and King —
Who before and for them bled —
With their robes of ruby red,
And their swords of cherub flame.”
 

The whole process and cause of Christians during this long period, the ground of their accusation, the conduct and principles of the judges, and their judgment, are summed up as in a parable in that scene which passed before Pilate, while the subsequent day of Pentecost is in the same manner an image of the final result won in these three hundred years. For as the crucifixion of the Truth in the Person of Christ is followed by the descent of the Holy Ghost forming the Church, so the persecution and crucifixion of the truth in ten generations of His people is followed by the empire's public recognition of His eternal kingdom – of that Body of Christ seen visibly in a council of its prelates assembling freely from all lands.

Here we reach the highest point of toleration which Christians received in the first 130 years. Instead of Trajan's somewhat reluctant order to punish Christians as Christians, when once convicted, instead of Hadrian's decision that something contrary to Roman law must be proved against them, Antoninus, while quoting the latter, goes far beyond it, and lays down that as Christians they were blameless, and were only to be punished in case some hostility to the Roman empire could be proved in their conduct. Moreover, their accuser was to be punished. And this rescript being repeated to several places, amounted to an assurance that Christians should be left in tranquillity during the principate of Pius.

Putting ourselves into the position of a Roman emperor at this middle of the second century, let us endeavour to form a notion of what Christianity would appear to him. In the first place, he who had all the threads of Roman organisation gathered in his hand, would certainly recognise it as a sect spread throughout the empire, the Jewish origin of which was known to him, and the author as one crucified by order of a Roman governor under Tiberius.¹⁸⁹ Yet he would hardly distinguish accurately the Church from the different heresies which everywhere sprang up around it, holding more or less of its doctrines and mixing them up with corruptions and abuses.¹⁹⁰ And it would scarcely appear to him as a power in the State, either from its numbers or the influence of the people belonging to it; yet on the other hand it would appear as something not inconsiderable in either of these respects. Moreover, we may suppose it would come before him as a belief, and not as an institution. It had as yet no public churches.¹⁹¹ A heathen would say of Christians at this time that they had no temples, altars, or statues;¹⁹² no ceremonial worship, for he could not, as a heathen, get admittance to Christian rites, which moreover were carried on in private houses, and carefully concealed. The emperor would be well aware that Christians had rulers of their own;¹⁹³ it was as such that Trajan had fixed upon the bishop third in rank among Christian communities for punishment the most severe and degrading, to be thrown as food for wild beasts, for the pleasure of the people. But nevertheless, the internal constitution of the Church would lie hidden from him: the link which bound together the bishops of the various local communities, and so formed the Catholicism of the Church, would be quite invisible to all outside. Jealous as Trajan was of secret societies, so that he could hardly tolerate a guild of firemen in a provincial town, he had no suspicion of a society which had become even in his time conterminous with his empire, and was bound together not only by the profession of one faith, but by the living links of one government. Nor, fifty years later, could Antoninus have had any such knowledge. The persecution which we have seen arose from simpler causes; the faith of Christians in one God who had made heaven and earth, and in one Son of God who had become Man and redeemed them, and with this, and indeed as part of this, their summary rejection, their utter intolerance of all the heathen gods; this it was that had drawn down the Roman sword upon them in answer to the popular cry,¹⁹⁴ Away with the godless! And again, their standing aloof from heathen life, their refusal to take part in heathen festivals, their withdrawal as far as possible from all public concerns: this was part of the hatred of the human race imputed to them, which made them objects of suspicion first, and then, when any special excitement arose, of persecution. These peculiarities also, and the secrecy with which their worship was necessarily conducted because it was not allowed, had led to calumnies concerning them, imputing the grossest immorality as well as cruelty.

The apologies of Quadratus, Aristides, and Justin, were probably the first connected revelation of the Christian doctrines which the emperor could have; but these would be very far from conveying to him the character of the Church as an institution. They were intended to obviate the persecutions arising from the causes above described, to show the purity of Christian morality, the reasonableness of Christian belief, the fidelity of Christian sentiment to the imperial rule as established by a divine providence. They were not in the least intended to lay before him the Christian Church as a whole. Thus Justin, replying to the accusation that they were expecting a kingdom, says, “You rashly conceive that we mean a human one, whereas we speak of that with God.” We may then, it seems, conclude with certainty that Antoninus was only partially aware of what Christianity was. That discipline of the secret, which was itself the result of persecution – of the Christian Faith having to make itself a place in a world utterly opposed to it, – became at once its protection, and the cause of further persecution; of persecution, in so far as it put Christians under general suspicion, but of protection, inasmuch as it covered with a veil that complete moral revolution to which the Christian Faith was tending from the first, and towards which it was continually advancing. Could Trajan have foreseen what was apparent under Constantine, his treatment of Christians would have had no forbearance or hesitation in it, his blows no intermission or doubtfulness. As it is, up to the time we are now considering, there are no traces of a general persecution against the Christian name organised by the emperor as head of the State. There are numberless local and individual persecutions starting up in this city and in that, and arising from the fundamental contrariety of Christian belief to the existing heathen worship and the ordinary heathen life. Such we have and no more. And so a great host of martyrs in single combat won their crown. But the emperor did not set himself to destroy a unity which he did not see.

Now as to the character in Christians which their condition in these hundred and thirty years tended to produce, we can form a clear conclusion. Of the relative proportion of actual martyrs to the whole mass of believers, we can indeed have no accurate notion; but it is plain that all were liable to suffering as Christians in every various degree up to that ultimate point of witnessing by death. Thus the acceptance of the Christian Faith itself involved at least the spirit of confession, if not that of martyrdom. A man lived for years, perhaps a whole generation, with the prospect of suffering, which it may be never came, or came as the crown of a long period in which heroic virtues had been called forth. Thus S. Ignatius had been more than forty years bishop of Antioch, and had carried his church hardly through the bad times of Domitian, when he gained at last what he deemed perfect union with his Lord, by being ground under the teeth of lions, as “the pure bread of God.” What is here expressed with so sublime a confidence by one actual martyr, must have made the tissue of Christian life in general. Those early disciples of the cross put in the cross their victory. The habitual danger which hung about their life must have scared away the timid, the insincere, the half-hearted. Yet alternations of peace rapidly succeeded times of suffering. Throughout these hundred and thirty years there is no long-continued even local persecution. Breathing-times of comparative tranquillity come, wherein Christians can grow, propagate, and mature for the conflict which may at any time arise. Thus while the opposition made to the infant faith is quite sufficient to have destroyed an untrue religion, born of earth or human device, to have scattered and eradicated its professors, it was precisely what would favour the real advance of a faith rooted upon a suffering God, and in which suffering with Him was made the means of union with Him.

And here we halt at the accession of Marcus Aurelius, as a middle point between the day of Pentecost and the time of Constantine.

Chapter XI. The Second Age Of The Martyr Church

 
“Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.
Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.
Ingredere, O magnos, aderit jam tempus, honores,
Cara Dei soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum.”
 

There is a moment in the history of the Roman empire when it comes before us with the most imposing grandeur. The imperial rule has been definitively accepted by that proud old aristocracy under which the city of the seven hills was built up from a robber fortress to be the centre of a world-wide confederation; while on their side the nations all round the Mediterranean bow with an almost voluntary homage before the sceptre of their queen. If the north be still untameable, it has learnt to dread the talons of the Roman eagle, and cowers murmuring in its forests and morasses; if the Parthian still shoot as he flies from the western Cæsar's hosts, he has at least expiated in the ruin of Ctesiphon the capture of Crassus and the dishonour of Mark Antony. But far more than this. On the Cæsar in his undisputed greatness has dawned the real sublimity of the task which Providence had assigned to him; to mould, that is, under one rule of equal beneficence the many tongues and many nations which a course of conquest often the most unjust had brought to own his sway. And this point of time is when after the great warrior Trajan comes Hadrian the man of culture; in whom seems implanted the most restless curiosity, carrying him with the speed of a soldier and the power of a prince over every climate from Carlisle to Alexandria, from Morocco to Armenia, in order that he may see in each the good of which so many varying races of men are capable, and use them all for his grand design. To him Rome is still the head; but he has learnt to esteem at their due value the members of her great body. The first fifteen years of his reign are almost entirely spent away from Rome, in those truly imperial progresses wherein the master of this mighty realm, when he would relieve himself of his helmet, walks like the simple legionary,¹⁹⁵ bareheaded in front of his soldiers, under the suns of the south, examining, wherever he comes, the whole civil and military organisation, promoting the capable and censuring the unworthy, scattering benefits with unsparing hand. York has known him as a protecting genius; Athens blends his name with that of her own Theseus as a second founder; wayward Alexandria exalts him, at least for the time, as a granter of privileges; the extreme north and utmost south acknowledge alike the unsparing zeal and majestic presence of their ruler. At that moment Rome is still Roman. While the Augustan discipline still animates her legions, the sense of the subordination of the military power to the civil spirit of a free state is not wholly lost; her proconsuls and præfects have passed out of those plundering magnates, who replenished in the tyranny of a year or two from a drained province the treasures they had squandered in a life of corruption at Rome, into the orderly and yet dignified magistrates accountable to the Republic's life-president¹⁹⁶ for their high delegated power. Perhaps the world had never yet seen anything at once so great and so beneficent as the government of Hadrian. But one thing was wanting to the many-tongued and many-tempered peoples ruled by him, that they should of their own will accept the worship of one God, and so the matchless empire receive the only true principle of coherence and permanence in the common possession of one religion. And the thoughtful student of history can hardly restrain himself from indulging his fancy as to what might then have been the result, and into how great a structure provinces worthy of being kingdoms might then have grown by the process of an unbroken civilisation instinct with the principles of the pure Christian Faith. Then the northern flood of barbarism and the eastern tempest of a false religion, which together were to break up the fabric of a thousand years, might have been beaten back from its boundaries, and from them the messengers of light have so penetrated the world in all directions that the advance of the truth should not have been impeded by any great civil destruction, but the nations of Europe have developed themselves from their Roman cradle by a continuous growth, in which there had been no ages of conquest, violence, and confusion, no relapse into chaos, no struggle back into an intricate and yet imperfect order, but the serene advance from dawn to day.

So, however, it was not to be. The time of probation in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, wherein a sort of toleration had seemed to be allowed to Christians, passed away, and the beginning of a far different destiny broke upon the empire. With the accession of Marcus Aurelius the great old enemies, the North and the East, awoke from their trance in fresh vigour. A Parthian war of four years, a German war of twelve, with pestilence, earthquakes, and famines through a large part of the empire, try to the utmost the vigour and temper of one of the most upright sovereigns known to heathenism. Marcus Aurelius meets both enemies with equal courage and ability, but he dies prematurely, and leaves the rule carried so temperately by four great sovereigns successively adopted to empire at mature age, in the untried hands of the heir of his blood, a youth of nineteen, born in the purple. In this at least the great Roman was wanting both to Stoic greatness and to Roman duty. And it was a fatal error. During thirteen years this son of the most virtuous heathen shows himself the most vicious of tyrants. At a single bound Rome passes from a ruler more just than Trajan to a ruler more abandoned than Nero; and in the palace of Marcus Aurelius endures an emperor who has a double harem of three hundred victims;¹⁹⁷ who spares the blood of no senator, and respects the worth of no officer.

When a revolution, similar to that which swept away Domitian, has removed Commodus, the Roman world is not so fortunate as to find a second Trajan to take his place. Three great officers who command in Syria, Illyricum, and Britain, contend for the prize, and when victory has determined in favour of Septimius Severus, he rules for eighteen years with a force and capacity which may indeed be compared with Trajan's, but with a deceit and remorseless severity all his own. At one time forty senators are slaughtered for the crime of having looked with favour upon that pretender to the empire who did not succeed. Nor is this a passing cruelty, but the fixed spirit of his reign. The sway of the sword is openly proclaimed. That the army is everything is not only acted on, but laid down as a guiding principle of state to his children. The unbroken discipline of her legionaries had hitherto indeed proved the salvation of the state; but this Septimius fatally tampers with, and in so doing sows the seeds of future anarchy and dissolution.

His death in 211 places the empire in the hands of a youth of twenty-three, all but born in the purple, like Commodus, and his rival in tyranny and dissoluteness of every kind. Caracalla is endured for six years, and being killed by a plot in the camp, is succeeded by his murderer Macrinus. He again, after a year, gives place to a Syrian boy of fourteen, who took at his accession the honoured name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, but is known to posterity as Heliogabalus. Once more during a space of four years the crimes of Commodus and Caracalla are repeated, or even exceeded. Indeed in these years from 218 to 222 the story of shame and degradation reaches its lowest point. But the soldiers of the prætorian camp themselves rise against Heliogabalus, massacre him with his mother, and place on the throne his cousin Alexander Severus, at the age of fourteen. Now Alexander has for his mother Mammæa, if not a Christian, at least a hearer of Origen, who gives her son from his earliest youth a virtuous education, who surrounds him on the perilous height of the Roman throne with the arms of her affection and her practical wisdom. Alexander rules for thirteen years, a period equal to that of Commodus, and little less than that of Nero. Younger than both at his accession and his death, his reign offers the most striking contrast to theirs. Of all heathen rulers he stands forth as the most blameless. It is a reign which, after the obscene domination of Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, with the savagery between them of Septimius Severus immediately preceding it, seems like a romance of goodness. Simple and admirable in his private life, he rivals Marcus Aurelius in his zeal for the administration of justice, for the choice of good governors, for devotion to the public service; and, happier than Marcus Aurelius, on his name rests no stain of persecution. “He suffered the Christians to be,”¹⁹⁸ are the emphatic words of his biographer; concerning which it has been well remarked that little as this seems to say, it had been said of no one of his predecessors, though several had not persecuted the Church.¹⁹⁹ And therefore this expression must mean that he left them in an entire liberty as to religion. It is indeed the exact contradiction of what, thirty years before, Tertullian had stated respecting the law in the time of Septimius Severus; for one of his complaints in pleading for Christians was, “your harsh sentence ‘that we are not allowed to exist,’ is an open appeal to brute force.”²⁰⁰

Alexander Severus, the darling of his people, perished by the hands of some treacherous soldiers suborned by his successor Maximin; and with him ends this period of seventy-four years, which we will consider together, in order to estimate the progress of the Christian Faith. A time of more remarkable contrasts in rulers cannot be found. It begins with Marcus Aurelius, and it ends with Alexander Severus, the two most virtuous of heathen princes; between them it contains Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, the three generally reputed the most vicious; while the definitive course which the history of the empire took is given to it by another, Septimius Severus, of great abilities and mixed character, who gained the empire as a successful soldier, and was true to his origin in that he established the ultimate victory of pure force over every restriction of a civil constitution: an African unsparing of blood, who sat on the throne of Augustus, and worked out the problem of government which the founder of the empire had started by preparing the result of Diocletian.

The rule of Commodus and his successors fully revealed the fatal truth, that the five princes who from the accession of Nerva had governed as if they were really responsible to the senate, had only been a fortunate chance; that this time of prosperity rested upon no legal limitation of rights between those things wont to exist only in severance,²⁰¹ the sovereign's power and the subject's freedom; that it was no result of a constitution which had grown up under a mutual sense of benefit arising from authority exercised conscientiously, and obedience cordially rendered. The age which Tacitus²⁰² at its commencement had called “most blessed” was indeed over, and as soon as the second Antonine left the scene, a state of things ensued in which tyranny and cruelty were as unchecked as under Nero or Domitian at their worst. It became evident that all had depended on the sovereign's personal character. From Marcus to Commodus the leap was instantaneous; and so, again, afterwards the short-lived serenity and order of Alexander's rule passed at his death into a confusion lasting for more than forty years, which threatened to break up the very existence of the empire.

But in Rome from the accession of Commodus in 180 to the death of Heliogabalus in 222 we find a profound corruption of morals, an excess of cruelty, and a disregard of civil rights, which could scarcely be exceeded. Tacitus, at the beginning of Trajan's reign, burst forth into indignation at the thought that it had cost Rusticus and Senecio their lives, in Domitian's time, to have praised Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus, and that their very writings had been publicly burned, as if that fire could extinguish the voice of the Roman people, the liberty of the senate, and the conscience of mankind. “Truly great,” he cried, “was the specimen of patient endurance which we exhibited.”²⁰³ What words, then, would he have found to express the degradation of servile spirit in that selfsame city a hundred years later, when Plautianus, the favourite minister of Septimius Severus, at the marriage of his daughter with Caracalla, caused a hundred persons of good family, some of them already fathers, secretly to be made eunuchs, in order that they might serve as chamberlains to the imperial bride.²⁰⁴ Or to take another example; as Quintillus, one of the chiefs of the senate, both by birth and by the employments which he had held, a man of advanced years and living retired in the country, was seized in order to be put to death, he declared that his only surprise was that he had been suffered to live so long, and that he had made every preparation for his burial. A third incident will show both the sort of crimes for which men were punished, the protection given by the law to the individual, and the spirit and temper of the senate. It had condemned Apronianus, proconsul of Asia, without giving him a hearing, because his nurse had dreamt that he was one day to reign, concerning which he was reported to have consulted a magician. Now, in reading the informations laid against him, it was found that a witness deposed that during the consultation some senator who was bald had stretched out his head to listen. Upon this all the bald senators, even those who had never gone to the house of Apronianus, began to tremble, while the rest put their hands to their heads to make sure that they had still their hair. However, a certain Marcellinus fell under special suspicion, whereupon he demanded that the witness should be brought in, who could not fail to recognise him if guilty. The witness looked round upon them all for a long time without saying a word, until upon a sign that a certain senator made him, he declared it was Marcellinus, who forthwith was hurried out of the senate to be beheaded, before Severus was even informed of it. As he went to execution he met four of his children, to whom he said that his greatest grief was to leave them living after him in so miserable a time.²⁰⁵ It was not without reason that Tertullian at this very moment encouraged the martyrs to be constant, with the reflection that there was no one who might not, for the cause of man, be made to suffer whatever nature would most shrink from suffering in the cause of God. “The times we live in are proofs,” he cried, “of this. How many and how great are the instances we have seen, in which no height of birth, no degree of rank, no personal dignity, no time of life, have saved men from coming to the most unexpected end, for some man's cause, either at his own hands, if they stood against him, or if for him, by the hands of his adversaries.”²⁰⁶

It was a time at which the extremes of reckless cruelty, of profuse luxury, of shameless dissoluteness, met together; in which women were forbidden by an express law to expose themselves on the arena as gladiators; in which, when the emperor Severus would legislate against adultery, a memorial was handed to him with the names of three thousand persons whom his law would touch.²⁰⁷ Such was the character of the time which followed at once on the empire's golden age; the time in which the Church of God was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes, and building up her divine polity amid the worthlessness of the world's greatest empire, and the instability of all earthly things.

II. In the last review which we took of her material progress we said that to the eye of Pius Antoninus she would not yet appear from her multitude as a power in the state. But before the end of the seventy-four years which we are here considering as one period, it was otherwise. Already in the reign of Commodus, Eusebius states that the word of salvation was bringing to the worship of the one God men out of every race, so that in Rome itself many distinguished for wealth and rank embraced it with their whole families.²⁰⁸ A few years later, when Tertullian writes his apology, he makes the heathen complain “that the state is overrun with us, that Christians are found in the country, in forts, in islands; that every sex and age and condition and rank come over to them.”²⁰⁹ And again; “we are of yesterday, and have already filled every place you have, your cities, islands, forts, boroughs, councils, your very camps, tribes, corporations, the palace, senate, and forum. Your temples only we leave you. For what war should we not be equal, we who are so ready to be slaughtered, if our religion did not command us rather to suffer death than to inflict it.” Elsewhere he speaks of Christians as “so great a multitude of men as to be almost the majority in every city.” Now make whatsoever allowance we will for Tertullian's vehemence, such statements, laid before adversaries, if they had not a great amount of truth in them, would bring ridicule on his cause rather than strengthen it. Tertullian besides wrote at the time of the general persecution set on foot by Septimius Severus against the Christian Faith, which itself was a proof of what importance it had assumed. We may perhaps put the first twenty years of the third century as the point at which, having passed through the period when it was embraced by individuals with a several choice, it was become the faith of families, and one step only remained, that it should become the faith of nations.²¹⁰

Let us consider a moment the mode of its increase. It was twofold. The plant of which a root was fixed by the Apostles and their successors in each of the cities of the empire grew, gathering to itself in every place the better minds of heathenism, and exercising from the beginning a marked attraction upon the more religious sex and upon the most down-trodden portion of society; women were ever won to it by the purity which its doctrines inculcated, slaves by its tender charity: it gave a moral emancipation to both. If we possessed a continuous and detailed history of the Christian Faith in any one city, say Rome, or Alexandria, or Antioch, or Ephesus, or Carthage, or Corinth, for the first three centuries, what a wonderful exhibition of spiritual power and material weakness it would offer. By fixing the mind on Christianity as merely one object, as an abstraction, we lose in large part the sense of the moral force to which its propagation bears witness. It was in each city a community,²¹¹ which had its centre and representative in its Bishop, which had its worship, discipline, and rule of life presided over by him; its presbytery, diaconate, and deaconesses; its sisterhoods and works of charity, spiritual and temporal: a complete government and a complete society held together by purely spiritual bonds, which the state sometimes ignored, not unfrequently persecuted, but never favoured. Such was the grain of mustard-seed, from north to south, from east to west, in presence of the political Roman, the sensitive and lettered Greek, the sensuous African, the volatile and disputatious Alexandrian, the corrupt Antiochene. It had one sort of population to deal with at Rome, quite another in the capital of Egypt, a third at Ephesus, which belonged to the great goddess Diana, and the statue which had fallen down from heaven, a fourth at Carthage, where the hot Numidian blood came in contact with the civilisation of Rome, a fifth at Corinth, the mistress of all art and luxury. And so on. Now in each and all of these cities and a hundred others the divine plant met with various soils and temperatures; but in them all it grew. It had its distinct experiences, encountering many a withering heat and many a stormy blast, and watered full oft with blood, but in them all the seed, dropped so imperceptibly that the mightiest and most jealous of empires was unconscious of what was cast into its bosom, became a tree. It was an organic growth of vital power. Christianity, during the ten ages of persecution, is the upspringing of several hundred such communities, distinct as we see here, and as described above by S. Ignatius, but at the same time coinherent, as we saw in the beginning, and as we shall find presently. As, then, all the cities of the Roman empire had a secular political and social life, and a municipal government of their own, so had the Christian Faith in each of them a corresponding life of spiritual government and inward thought; and if we had the materials to construct the history of this Faith in any one, it would give us a wonderful insight into the course of that prodigious victory over the world which the whole result presents. We cannot do so. The data for it do not exist, and because they do not, we allude here to this first mode of growth made by the Christian Faith.

Its second mode was thus. The Apostolical Churches, as they severally grew, scattered from their bosoms a seed as prolific as their own. They sent out those who founded communities such as their own. Thus the Christian plant was communicated from Rome to all the west. With every decade of years it crept silently over the vast regions of Gaul and Spain, advancing further west and north. This extension was not a chance springing up of Christians in different localities. It always took place by the founding²¹² of sees, with the apostolic authority, after the apostolic model. If the Roman colonia had its rites of inauguration, and was a transcript of the great city, its senate and its forum, so much more the Christian city had its prototype and derived its authority from the great citadel of the Faith, wherein Peter's prerogative was stored up,²¹³ and whence it had a derivation wider in extent and more ample in character than that of Rome the natural city. But we will take from another quarter what is as perfect a specimen of this extension as any that can be found. In the great city of Alexandria, the centre of intellectual and commercial life to all the East and the whole Greek name, S. Peter set up the chair of his disciple Mark. There the evangelist taught and there in due time suffered. Dragged by an infuriated populace through the streets he thus gave up his soul. But the plant which he so watered with his blood was of extraordinary vigour. It not only grew amid the intensest intellectual rivalry of Greek and Jew in the capital, but likewise in course of time occupied the whole civil government which obeyed the præfect of Egypt. From Alexandria, Egypt and the Pentapolis of Cyrene derived their Christian faith and government; and so powerful was this bond that the bishop of the capital exercised control over all the bishops of the civil diocese, as it was then termed. He was in power a patriarch long before he had that name, or even the name of archbishop. How great and strict this rule was we may judge from an incident preserved by Photius,²¹⁴ which occurred in the very last year of the period we are considering, in 235. Heraclas, bishop of Alexandria, a former pupil of Origen, had inflicted upon that great writer a second expulsion from the Church for his erroneous teaching. Origen on his way to Syria came to the city of Thmuis, where bishop Ammonius allowed him, in spite of the above-mentioned censure of Heraclas, to preach. When Heraclas heard this, he came to Thmuis and deposed Ammonius, and appointed in his stead Philippus as bishop. Afterwards, on the earnest request of the people of the city, he restored Ammonius to the office of bishop, and ordained that he and Philippus should be bishops together. The latter, however, voluntarily gave way to Ammonius, and succeeded him at his death. Such, ninety years before the Nicene Council, which recognised and approved these powers of the bishop of Alexandria, as being after the model of those exercised by the bishop of Rome,²¹⁵ was his authority by the natural force of the hierarchic principle which built up the Church. And so little were these Christian communities, which we have seen so complete in their own organic growth, independent of the bond which held the whole Church together, and of which the authority of the Egyptian primate was itself a derivation.

These three scenes of martyrdom at Rome, at Smyrna, and at Lyons, will give a notion of the grounds upon which Eusebius asserts that in the reign of Marcus Aurelius innumerable martyrs suffered²⁶² throughout the world through popular persecutions. Respecting the following reign of Commodus he says, on the contrary, that the Church enjoyed peace, for while the law which considered Christianity an illicit religion had not been revoked, it was made capital to inform against any one as Christian; and yet if the information took place, and the crime was proved, the punishment of death ensued, as in the case of the senator Apollonius recorded by him.²⁶³ This state of things would seem to have lasted about seventeen years, until the year 197, when Severus, some time after his accession, became unfavourable to Christians. And it brings us to Tertullian, whose writings are full of testimonies to the sufferings endured by Christians for their Faith. For some time these sufferings would seem to fall under the same sort of intermittent popular persecution, which we have seen prevailing in the time of Marcus: but in the year 202 Severus published an edict forbidding any to become Jews or Christians. And forthwith a persecution broke out so severe and terrible, that many thought the time of Antichrist was come. It was no longer the mere action of an original law against all unauthorised religions, but an assault led on by the emperor himself, who turned directly the imperial power against Christianity as a whole. It raged especially at Alexandria, where the master of the catechetical school writes: “we have before our eyes every day abundant instances of martyrs, tortured by fire, impaled, beheaded: they are superior to pleasure; they conquer suffering; they overcome the world.”²⁶⁴ Then it was that Origen, a youth of seventeen, desired to share the martyrdom of his father Leonides, and that seven whom he had himself instructed, gained this crown. Then it was that the slave Potamiæna, in the bloom of youth and beauty, not only rejected every blandishment of corruption, but suffered the extremest torture of fire to preserve her innocence and faith, and gained at Alexandria such a name as St. Lawrence afterwards gained at Rome. So at Carthage Perpetua and Felicitas, young mothers, with their companions repeated the example of those whom we have seen suffering at Lyons; in which city a second persecution as vehement as the first breaking out numbered Irenæus with his predecessor Pothinus, his people in this case as in the other accompanying the pastor's sacrifice with their own.

This state of suffering continued during the life of Severus for nine years: and splendid examples of Christian championship were shown in all the churches.²⁶⁵ It is only with the accession of Caracalla that peace is restored, and then ensues a period of comparative repose: that is, while the ordinary law against the Christian Faith as an illicit religion still continues, it is understood that the emperor does not wish it to be put in action. In such intervals that Faith, strengthened by the conflicts it had undergone, and admired by those before whose eyes it had enabled its adherents to brave and endure every sort of suffering, sprung up and shot out with redoubled vigour, and the seed which the blood of the martyrs had shed abroad found time to grow.

The summary of the seventy-four years is this. From 161 to 180 there are nineteen years of irregular but severe persecution, followed by seventeen, from 180 to 197, wherein the denouncing of Christians is forbidden, though if brought to trial, they are punishable with death. Five years succeed, from 197 to 202, in which the favour of Severus seems lost, and the state of intermittent persecution takes effect. Then breaks out a general persecution, set on foot by the emperor himself, and we may judge if he who slaughtered his senate spared Christians. This lasts for nine years until his death in 211, whereon a time of peace returns, which is most complete during the reign of Alexander, but continues more or less from 211 to the end of his reign in 235.

On a review of the whole period it is evident that the Church has passed from its state of concealment into almost full light. The fiery trial which it met at the beginning of the third century from the hand of Severus is the best proof that can be given how greatly it had increased, how it could no longer be ignored or despised; how its organisation which was hidden from Trajan was at least partially revealed to Severus, and how he saw and attempted to meet the danger which the earlier emperor would have tried to stamp out, had he divined it. But it is evident also that in proportion as the Christian Faith had grown, the heathen empire had been shaken in its foundations. Its period of just government was over; its imperial power was to fall henceforth into the hands of adventurers, with whom it would be more and more the symbol of force alone, and not of law: henceforth they would seldom even in blood be Roman, and more seldom still in principles. Marcus was well nigh the last zealot for the Jupiter of the Capitol: within a generation after him Heliogabalus will think of a fusion of all religions in his god the sun, and Alexander Severus of a religious syncretism wherein Orpheus, Abraham, and Christ testify together to the divine unity.²⁶⁶ Nor is this a fancy of the prince alone. All the thinking minds of his time have become ashamed of Olympus and its gods. The cross has wounded them to death. A new philosophy – the last fortress into which retreating heathenism throws itself – while it breaks up Roman life, prepares the way for the Christian Faith which it strenuously combats. The Emperor Severus, fixing the eye of a statesman and a soldier on that Faith, contemplates its grasp upon society, and decrees from the height of the throne a general assault upon it; while his wife encourages a writer²⁶⁷ to draw an ideal heathen portrait as a counterpart to the character of Christ, tacitly subtracting from the gospels an imitation which is to supply the place of the reality. The time was not far distant when Origen would already discern and prophesy the complete triumph of the religion thus assailed; and if Celsus had objected, that were all to do as Christians did, the emperor would be deserted, and his power fall into the hands of the most savage and lawless barbarians, would reply: “If all did as I do, men would honour the emperor as a divine command, and the barbarians drawing nigh to the word of God would become most law-loving and most civilised; their worship would be dissolved, and that of the Christians alone prevail, as one day it will alone prevail, by means of that Word gathering to itself more and more souls.”²⁶⁸

But before such a goal be reached, many a martyr's crown has yet to be won, and more than barbarian lawlessness and cruelty have to be overcome.

Chapter XII. The Third Age Of The Martyr Church

“Rex pacificus magnificatus est, cujus vultum desiderat universa terra.”

The third century is that during which the Christian Church was making its way into every relation of life, and taking possession of human society. During this period it advances into full light, and becomes a manifest power. In the second century Celsus had attacked it as disclosed only to the yearning hearts of slaves, and fostered by the devotion of the weaker sex. At the distance of three generations Origen answered him, but the religion which he defended already stood avowed alike before the inquiring gaze of philosophers, the corrupt crowds of cities, and the jealous fear of rulers. Even in Rome, the sceptered head of idolatry, whose nobles the great political traditions of their city, and whose populace their sensual life, having its root in a false worship, made the most difficult to convert, the hated faith is known to have had public churches by the time of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after its first rise.²⁶⁹ And much more everywhere else it had planted its foot openly on the soil of the empire. It is time, then, to view the Church as an institution offering the strongest contrast to the empire itself, to the barbarism which surrounded the empire, and to the sectarianism which was everywhere aspiring to counter-work and supplant that entire body of truth on some portion of which nevertheless it was all the time feeding.

1. And first the empire during this century presents itself to us in a most unwonted aspect.

Septimius Severus having destroyed the rivals who competed with him for what was now become the great object of a successful general's ambition, based his power avowedly on the sword. The secret of empire which he transmitted to his children was to foster and indulge the army, and to disregard all else. The senate, the representative of legal power, he despised and decimated. He died in 211, not before his eldest son had already lifted his hand against him, and the four princes of his house all perished by the sword, one by the hand of a brother, the other three by revolted soldiers. In the seventy-three years which elapse from his death to the accession of Diocletian twenty-five emperors are acknowledged at Rome, of whom twenty-three come to an end by violent deaths, almost always by insurrections of soldiers, under instigation of ambitious officers. Besides these, eight associates of the empire, and nineteen generals who during the reign of Gallienus assume the purple in various provinces, are all slain. During eighty-two years Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus, all at a mature time of life, adopted by the actual ruler to succeed, had governed a stable empire: but now it passes within a shorter period of time, the term of a single human life, nay a term in one case embraced by a single reign,²⁷⁰ into twenty-five different hands. And indeed it seemed after the capture of the Emperor Valerian by the Persians, as if that great confederacy, which had just celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the imperial city's foundation, was about to break up and be resolved into its component parts. At one moment two great princesses, Victoria and Zenobia, worthy even by the avowal of Romans to wear the Roman diadem, were on the point of establishing the one an empire of the Gauls in the West, the other an empire of the East embracing just those countries which Antony had ruled with Cleopatra at his side. A succession of great generals, all from the province of Illyricum, at last saves the empire and reasserts its unity. But the forty-nine years following the murder of Alexander Severus are filled by the struggles of twenty sovereigns and nineteen pretenders to sovereignty, scarcely any of whom reign so much as five years. Many of them are rulers of great ability and remarkable energy. Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, and Carus, and perhaps Decius, required but happier circumstances to be emperors whose fame would have matched that of Trajan or Hadrian: but their short tenure of power, occupied with the vast effort to restore unity and beat back the barbarian, prevented their doing more than preserve the imperial power and the empire itself. This whole time, then, in civil society was one of fluctuation, anxiety, disaster, alarms from beyond the frontiers and anarchy within them. The Roman peace seemed departing, and the majesty of the empire irreparably violated. Men could not tell what the morrow would bring forth. The fairest cities of the Roman world, Alexandria and Antioch, narrowly escaped perishing through internal discord or hostile surprise. Greece and Asia Minor, after reposing for centuries under the safeguard of the Roman name, found themselves swept through and desolated by barbarian hordes. Italy itself was in imminent danger of the same lot. Towards the end of this period the senate by the election of Tacitus seems to make what may be termed its final effort to assert itself as the depository of legitimate power, the representative of civil society: and this time of confusion issues in a rejection of any such claim, and the establishment of unlimited despotism in the empire as reconstituted by Diocletian. To these straits, then, the first great and haughty enemy of the Christian Church was reduced, so that the power which a century before could look down with proud indifference on the sufferings of Christians now seemed to tremble for its own existence. And in such a condition of human society the great advance of the Church was carried on.

2. But beyond the empire to the north, advancing upon it like the multitudinous waves of the ocean on an exposed coast, lay the ever-battling legions of the northern tribes in their three great divisions of the Teutonic, Slavic, and Finnish races. If Roman society suffered throes of distress, its condition was peace compared with the instability which may be said to have been the very life of these tribes. Once at least in every century they gather themselves up for a concentrated effort against the empire whose rich civilisation lies stretched out before them as a continual prey. After the failure of Arminius to construct a German kingdom, and of Marobod to construct a Suevian, in the time of Augustus, Decebalus, in the time of Trajan, makes another effort in behalf of his Dacians. But here the great Roman general forces barbarism to retreat, and plants a fresh citadel in its very stronghold by establishing a province north of the Danube. Then there is comparative tranquillity for sixty years. It seems as if these two generations were offered by divine Providence to the empire yet in its unbroken strength as a time for its pacific conversion, which if it had accepted, the eruption of the northern nations might for ever have been kept back by the unity which religious conviction would have bestowed on civilisation, and the fresh and living force which it would have imparted to society not yet exhausted by despotic power. But with Marcus Aurelius the empire turns definitively away. A new religious revolution under Odin in Scandinavia had wakened up with redoubled force the destroying energy of barbarism. The Goths had migrated from Sweden to the Black Sea; all the tribes in the interval had been displaced and dashed upon each other by this removal. The war of the Marcomans occupied during eighteen years, from 162 to 180, the whole forces of the empire; Rome was obliged even to arm its slaves, and Italy feared an invasion more terrible than that of the Cimbri, which it cost Marcus Aurelius his life to avert.

Again, during the captivity of Valerian, another grand assault of the northern tribes takes place. The Franks attack western, the Alamans eastern Gaul; they pass the Alps and advance to Ravenna, while Alamans and Sarmatians throw themselves upon Pannonia, and the Goths seize upon Thrace and Greece. The emperors Claudius, Aurelian, and Probus are the saviours of Rome from this new flood. Of the last of these it is recorded that he dealt successively with Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Vandals, the Bastarnæ, and the whole barbarian brood: and seventy cities raised from their ruins, and fortifications repaired upon a line of fifteen hundred miles, were the fruits of his victories.²⁷¹

So much for the north: while on the east the Persian empire, hereditary foe of the Roman name, had found a new and more vigorous master in the race of the Sassanidæ, who took the religion of Zoroaster to reanimate the national spirit. Ardeschir claimed once more the whole realm which Cyrus and Darius had ruled. Henceforth the Romans had a neighbour more than ever threatening their eastern frontier, and never to be wholly subdued, until the empire of Mohammed arose to detach a great part of their dominion, and to move with redoubled force upon what remained.

To the south of the Roman provinces in Africa were tribes at least as savage as those of the north. Thus the whole empire was enringed with enemies: on the east an opposing civilisation and religion; on the north and south barbarian tribes in perpetual confusion and conflict with each other. Such was the great realm of disorder which surged and heaved to the north and south of the empire; and such the second great enemy which in future times was to occupy the Christian Church, and at present offered the strongest contrast to that moral polity of peace and goodwill, of loyal submission, patient endurance, and heroic fortitude, which was spreading daily in the empire.

3. But there was yet another enemy within the empire itself, which from the beginning tracked the footsteps of the Church, grew with its increase, and everywhere attempted to dissolve its organisation and weaken its influence. The whole second century is occupied with the rise and tangled growth of the Gnostic sects. But these were not alone. From the very time of the Apostles we find the evidence of a number of sects, rising and falling, preying on and devouring each other, none without some portion of Christian truth, on which it feeds, blended with Jewish, Greek, Oriental, Egyptian, Libyan notions, prejudices, and errors; domiciled in various parts of the empire in accordance with the national or local character which they represent. They reproduce with a Christian colour the sects and the sect-life of the Greek schools of philosophy. As the wheat has its proper weed, which springs up in the midst of it and counterfeits it, so error, everywhere gathering round some portion of truth, forms itself into an antagonistic life. The force and truth of the Christian Church were shown not in the absence of these rivals, but in its triumph over their variety, in its remaining one whilst they diverged endlessly from that unchanging original type, in its continuous and uniform growth whilst they rose and fell, domineered in certain times and places, and then disappeared. In this its course the Church had to master very great difficulties, which were inherent in the manner of its rise. It had to remain one society in spite of the isolation and self-government of its local portions. It possessed in each place but a feeble minority of members compared with the mass of unbelievers. Against its assimilating power was ranged the force of national feelings which underlay the Roman authority throughout the whole empire. It had to deal entirely by moral means with the full liberty of error to which its adherents were exposed. Lastly, it had to do all this amid the continual strain of threatened or actual persecution, a state which at its best was one of insecurity, and which any local trouble, the ill-will of a mob, the greed or ambition or fear of provincial rulers, not to speak of the imperial state-policy, might turn into the pressure of severe suffering.

In the face of such difficulties, if the Christian Church continued one in its doctrine, organisation, and manner of life, such unity was assuredly the proof of a divine power residing it.

I shall now proceed to show by the testimony of eye-witnesses that such unity was its distinguishing characteristic.

Now there was not a race or a religion in all this Roman empire, endless as the races and religions comprehended in it were, out of which individuals were not drawn into the bosom of the one great Christian society; and yet within this there was a perfect union of all hearts and minds in the conviction that the multitude so collected was one people apart from all other peoples. And this conviction is itself the great marvel. How was it wrought? For it was an utterly new thing upon the earth. The union of race, language, and locality, with which sameness of religion was usually interwoven, had been hitherto the bond of such nations as had as yet existed. The great city itself had sprung up and flourished by the strict union of these four things. After its career of foreign conquest had substituted for the government of a city the great Roman confederation, it had indeed, like the preceding world-empires, in fact disregarded all these, being supported by a force independent of them all. But that force was material power. The great statue was of iron. It was a novelty unheard of as yet among the gentiles and unimagined by poet or philosopher, to create a polity which, disregarding sameness of race, of language, and of locality, should exist and maintain itself throughout the whole earth solely by the force of faith and charity.

Such was the idea of Christians about themselves from the beginning. The idea preceded the fact. The prophets foretold it; the Apostles proclaimed it:²⁷² let us observe the fulfilment of the prophecy and the proclamation. We will take our stand in the middle of the third century, when seven full generations have passed since the day of Pentecost. In this time a people has been formed. Already a hundred and fifty years before an eyewitness among themselves had observed the nature of this people. “Christians are not distinguished from other men either by country, or by language, or by customs: for they have no cities peculiar to themselves, nor any language different from others, nor singularity in their mode of life… But they dwell both in Greek and in barbarous cities, as the lot of each may be, following local customs as to raiment and food, and the rest of their life, but exhibiting withal a polity of their own, marvellous and truly incredible. They dwell in their own country, but it is as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens, yet suffer everything as strangers. Every foreign land is to them a country, and every country a foreign land… In a word, what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul is diffused through all the limbs of the body, and Christians through all the cities of the world… The soul is shut within the body, of which it is the bond, and Christians are like a garrison in the world, which they hold together.”²⁷³

Here a writer, calling himself a disciple of Apostles, describes to us, at the beginning of the second century, what the apostolic age of seventy years had wrought. He puts his finger just upon the marvel which we are contemplating. Fifty years later, at the moment the empire was culminating under the serene rule of Antoninus, a convert from heathenism, a philosopher who had spent his life in examining all the sects and races of the empire, and who afterwards became a martyr, said of Christians that being “quarried out of the side of Christ, they were the true Israelitic race,” “altogether being called the body, for both people and church, being many in number, are called by one name as one thing;” they are in fact “as one man before the Maker of all things, through the name of His first-born Son,” the High-priest gathering up first in the prophetical vision and then in the real fact “the true high-priestly race”²⁷⁴ in His own Person. Thus Justin pointed out this conception of the Christian people to the Jew of his time as both foretold in prophecy and exhibited in fact. The longer that such a people as this endured, the greater would be the marvel.

A hundred years after this, Origen uses the same language and points to the same marvel. He had in the year 249, at the entreaty of a friend and pupil, set himself in the maturity of life, and of a renown which filled the Church as no man's before had filled it, to answer the attack of a heathen philosopher, Celsus, upon Christianity. He was writing just at the end of the longest period of peace which is found during those three centuries. From the death of the Emperor Septimius Severus in 211 to that of the Emperor Philip in this year 249, there had been, with the exception of a short attack from Maximin, to which his death put a stop, no general persecution of Christians. Thus thirty-eight years had passed of such tranquillity as it was ever in those times the lot of Christians to obtain. The mother of one emperor had been Origen's disciple, and the emperor actually reigning was a Christian, however unworthy of such a profession. Now in this work Origen speaks of the superiority of the Christian churches in each several place, as, for instance, at Athens, Corinth, Alexandria, to the heathen assemblies, and of the Christian rulers to the heathen. He puts it as a mark of divine power that God sending His Son, “a God come in human soul and body,”²⁷⁵ should have established everywhere churches offering the contrast of their polity to the assemblies of the superstitious, the impure, and the unjust. He considers that Christians do a greater benefit to their country than all other men by teaching them piety to the one God, and “gathering up into a certain divine and heavenly city those who have lived well in the smallest cities.”²⁷⁶ “We,” he says, “knowing that there is in each city another fabric of a country, founded by the word of God, call those who are powerful in word and of a virtuous life to the government of churches: we do not accept the covetous to such a place, but force it against their will upon those who in their moderation would decline taking on them this general care of the Church of God.”²⁷⁷ And the compulsion thus exercised is that “of the great King, whom we are persuaded to be the Son of God, God the Word.” But this other form of country which he saw in each city is “the whole Church of God, which the divine scriptures assert to be the Body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body are particular believers; for as the soul quickens and moves the body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so the Word moving to what is fitting, and energising in the whole Body, the Church, moves likewise each member of it, who does nothing without the Word.”²⁷⁸ And he completes this view in another beautiful passage wherein he describes Christ as the high-priest Aaron, who has received upon his single body the whole chrism, from whom it flows down upon his beard, the symbol of the complete man, and on to the utmost skirt of his raiment. Every one who partakes of Him, partakes likewise of his chrism, because Christ is the head of the Church, and the Church and Christ one Body.²⁷⁹ We have here in Origen's thought one and the same divine power, proceeding forth from the Incarnation, which forms first the Body of the Lord, and then gathers into this Body every individual as a copy of the Christ. The heathen scoffer had objected: why send forth one spirit into one corner of the earth? It was needed to breathe that spirit into many bodies, and to send them forth into all the world. Nay, replied Origen, “the whole Church of God – animated by the Son of God as the soul quickens and moves the body – was enough. It needed not that there should be many bodies and many souls, like that of Jesus, in the way you suppose, for the one Word as the sun of righteousness rising from Judea was sufficient to send forth rays that should reach every soul that would receive him.” He has done far more than you suggest: every member of that one Body has received according to his measure a due portion of anointment: after the model of the Christ, they too are Christs; “so that beginning in the body He should dawn in power and in spirit upon the universe of souls which would no longer be destitute of God.”

In Origen's mind, then, the greatness of the King lies specifically in this, that out of confusion He draws unity, out of those who were no people He forms a people, out of nations and tribes at enmity He moulds an indivisible kingdom, and from His own Body a Body which shall embrace a universe of souls, instinct with one life, and that His own. This was Origen's view of the work and triumph of Christ, as he saw it before him, at the eve of the great Decian persecution in 249.

Origen was writing this at a moment of great interest. It was the last year which preceded those two generations, in the course of which five great persecutions should be directed by the emperors against the Church. He was then a man of sixty-four. The son of a martyr, he had when a youth of eighteen beheld his father imprisoned for the faith, and had encouraged him to suffer the loss of all his goods, and death itself, without regarding that large family which must be left in penury, of whom Origen was the eldest. He was burning himself to share his father's sufferings. In the persecution of which this was the opening Eusebius tells us that seven of his disciples were martyrs: and, lastly, he was to undergo such cruelties himself in the persecution of Decius, then on the eve of breaking out, that he is believed to have died of their results. Now it is in this work that he speaks of the remarkable providence of God in preserving Christians, who by their religion were bound not to defend themselves, against the attacks of their enemies, for God, he says, had fought for them, and from time to time had stopped those who had risen up with the purpose of destroying them. Few and easily numbered were those who hitherto had suffered death for the Christian Faith, samples chosen by God as champions to encourage the rest, while He prevented their whole nation from being rooted out: for it was His purpose that this nation should be firmly rooted and consolidated, and the whole world be filled with its saving doctrine and discipline.²⁸⁰ Thus it was by His will alone that He scattered every plot directed against them, so that neither emperors, nor local governors, nor the people should be able to indulge their wrath beyond a certain point. Origen, when he thus wrote, could look back on a period of thirty-eight years, during which, with the exception of the severe but passing storm raised by the Emperor Maximin, peace had reigned: years which he had himself employed in unwearied labours of teaching, writing, and converting; in which he had directed and advised an emperor's mother, and seen a Christian emperor; in which he had witnessed a wonderful increase of the Christian people, and indeed of this increase his words above cited convey a faithful picture. He knew not the fearful trials which were to be encountered before that triumph of the truth which he already anticipated should be attained: or that God was about to accept from the grayhaired man the sacrifice which the impetuous youth had affronted without success. For scarcely has he written this book when he has to fly for his life before the edict of Decius, who will attempt to destroy the Christian religion, and to whose anger Pope S. Fabian falls a victim. Amid great peril after long delay the next Pope Cornelius is chosen. And now for the first time a new danger from within assaults the Church. Novatian, a Roman presbyter of great repute, attempts after the due election and consecration of Cornelius to usurp his place, and to divide the one flock of Christ. Under circumstances so wholly altered from those in which Origen above was writing, we come to our next witness, the man in all the Western Church the most renowned, as Origen was in the Eastern.

At the end of this time the conflict was terminated by the Emperor Galerius, the chief mover of the whole persecution, being struck by a mortal disease, in which reduced to impotence by his sufferings he withdrew his edicts against the Christian Faith. One after another the persecuting emperors are taken away by death. Constantine inheriting his father's justice towards Christians, and preserving them in his own territory from these outrages, gradually appears as their champion. It is when advancing to Rome against Maxentius that he sees in the Cross the token of victory over all enemies: enrolling it on his banner he rules with Licinius the Roman world, and by a decree issued at Milan in 313 assures to all Christians the free exercise of their religion.

In the year 64 Nero had declared by initiating a persecution against Christians that their religion was illicit, and fell under the ban of the old Roman laws which forbade the exercise of any worship not approved by the senate. From that time down to the edict of Constantine no Christian could stand before a Roman tribunal plainly avowing his faith in one God and one Christ without incurring the liability of capital punishment. In this period of two hundred and forty-eight years it is true that there were intervals of comparative peace when the emperors did not themselves call into action the laws against Christians. During the whole second century there would seem to be no emperor who set himself to destroy the Christian name and people as a whole. In the time of Commodus it was even forbidden to accuse a Christian of his religion; yet even then, if the accusation was made and proved, it was a capital offence, followed, and that too in the case of a senator after defence before the senate, by the infliction of the penalty. Alexander Severus is the first of whom it is said that “he suffered the Christians to be;” Philip also favoured them; so again Valerian at first; Gallienus gave back their churches; Diocletian trusted them and filled his palace with them: but no one of these emperors ventured to declare the Christian religion to be according to the laws of Rome a “licit” religion, and no one therefore enabled Christians to avow it without danger of suffering. The most favourable suspended the action of the laws either by positive edict, or by letting it be understood that they did not wish Christians to be disturbed. A change either of the ruler, or of the ruler's inclination, as was seen in the cases of Valerian, Aurelian, and Diocletian, induced at once that full state of penality under which Christianity was as much forbidden as homicide or treason, and in virtue of which Roman magistrates could as little refuse to judge the crime of being a Christian as those other crimes. Thus it is that we find martyrdoms assigned to times at which there is not known to have been any general persecution: and in unnumbered cases Christians won their crown through private enmity or local tumults, when any one of the thousand motives which awaken ill-will was sufficient to cause an appeal to that great and unchanged enemy, the Law of Rome, which proscribed them. To Constantine belongs the glory of having removed this enemy. He made the profession of Christianity no longer a crime. He accomplished that which Justin and Tertullian and every Christian apologist had asked for in vain, that every Christian in the Roman empire might profess and practise the Christian Faith without suffering punishment for it.

Chapter XIII. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part I

Socrates. It is, then, necessary to wait until we learn how we ought to be disposed towards gods and men.

Alcibiades. But when, Socrates, will that time arrive? and who shall teach us it? For it seems to me that I should with the greatest pleasure see that man.

Socrates. It is he who cares for thee.³²⁰

Second Alcib. § 22.

In the three preceding chapters we have witnessed a great spectacle, a spectacle in all history unique and without a rival, the encounter, that is, with the forces of the great world-empire of a voluntary society which bears in its bosom and propagates a body of truth, and this encounter carried on without respite during ten generations of men. The elements of this conflict are, on the one side, power, throned in civilisation, and defended by that sword before which nothing hitherto had stood; on the other, a belief testified by suffering and patience, but which moreover appears only as the possession of a society which is itself dropped as a seed into the earth's bosom and silently fills its expanse. Attention must now be called to another aspect of the same encounter. Rome, as we have said, preëminently wielded power; not the power of her legions only, immense as that was, but the power of her laws, and the power of that many-sided and as it seemed triumphant all-embracing civilisation, of which she was the golden head. The mind however, the thought of the world which she ruled, belonged to the great Hellenic race: and it remains to consider what contest this mind waged with the truth which the Christian Church sustained and suffered for. The sword hews away limbs; the fire destroys bodies; and the martyrs offered freely their limbs and their bodies to sword and flame. But the martyrs were inspired with a mind; they carried Christ in them; and a mind too was opposed to theirs; the mind which animated that ancient civilisation; the mind which had erected such shrines as Diana of Ephesus and the Parthenon at Athens; the mind which dictated the laws of Solon and Lycurgus; the mind which taught in the Academus, the Lyceum, the Portico, and the Garden; the mind which built Alexandria for the world's emporium and university, and raised Antioch to be the gorgeous throne of eastern magnificence. We have to consider how this heathen mind encountered the Christian; in short, how, “after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased Him through the folly of Christian preaching to save those that believed.”³²¹ Let us trace the encounter of heathen wisdom – that is, Philosophy – with Christian wisdom, that is, the truth of a God incarnate and crucified, with all its consequences, as upborne by the Christian Church and planted among men.

Now the system of polytheistic worship which was then in possession of the Græco-Roman world had been subjected for many ages to all the analytic power of human reason as exercised by the most gifted of races which have hitherto embodied their genius in a corresponding civilisation. The philosophy of Greece is in fact such an analysis, and the rise of this philosophy is carried back by the ablest inquirers to the time of Thales and Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ, In the beautiful climate of Ionia and Southern Italy there arose at this time men who attempted by the efforts of their own reason to form a physical and a moral theory of the world which surrounded them. Philosophy is not merely thought, but methodical thinking, thinking consciously directed upon the knowledge of things in their connection with each other. Nor is it content merely with the collecting of observations and the knowledge so derived, but proceeds to gather the individual instances into a whole, to draw to a centre what was scattered, and to form a view of the world resting upon clear conceptions and at unity with itself.³²² This was the nature of that work which Thales and Pythagoras commenced. Let us give a glance at the race which bore them, and of which they were representative men.

This race had dwelt for some ages in Greece, and from thence occupied by emigration the shores of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Southern Italy, with a part of Africa. Pythagoras, the father of Italian philosophy, had migrated from Samos to Crotona, having visited Egypt, examined and gathered from all the stores of its knowledge. A century later Herodotus, the father of Greek history, migrated likewise from his country Halicarnassus, and after spending many years in extensive travels through Egypt and Western Asia settled at Thurii. In the succeeding century Plato travelled in like manner with similar purposes. He was familiar with Sicily as with his own Attica, not to speak of Egypt or Phœnicia. These three great men, Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato, are specimens herein of the cultured Greek, the gentleman, as we should call him. Thus though Greece proper was a very small country, the whole region from middle Italy, including Sicily, and the rich coast-land of Northern Africa from Carthage to Egypt, with again Phœnicia and Syria, and the continent to the depth of perhaps a hundred miles round the three sides of Asia Minor watered by the sea, were in a larger sense the Greek's country, a field of Grecian thought, and enterprise, and observation, a sphere in which his mind was enlarged, and his judgment of men and things matured.³²³ Generally speaking these regions were singularly favoured as to richness of soil and convenience of situation. Herodotus himself has marked the climate of Ionia as the most beautiful and best-tempered of the earth; and with a far wider knowledge of its regions we should not venture to dispute the justness of his remark. Some modern writers are wont to dwell on the effect which climate exercises upon man's mind. However this may be, it is certain that the race whose energies were diffused over this region was most highly gifted with natural endowments. When out of the world which Christianity has mainly formed, and from the bosom of nations which have grown through the struggle of a thousand years, and with perpetual competition among each other, into a rich civilisation, we look back on that ancient and simpler world, we find in Hellenism the most perfect expression of the natural man, as a plastic, artistic, poetical, philosophical, and generally intellectual race, wherein matter was most completely permeated by mind. The language which they used even yet presents a very perfect image of such a race, as not being formed from the corruption of other idioms, but a mother tongue, the most brilliant of the Aryan sisters. In its union of strength with beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense, in its power to convey the most subtle distinctions of philosophic thought, or the most radiant images of sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations of law, or the tenderest dreams of romance, it was well calculated to be the organ of a people wherein bodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated. The language which we use ourselves is full of nerve and vigor, with a certain northern force and a habit of appropriating the material stores of other languages by incorporating their words, which suits well the descendants of sea-kings, who have provinces all over the world; but it is without inflexions, deprived of cases and genders, defective in marking time, whereas the Greek in all these is most rich and flexible: the one resembles the torso of a Hercules without its limbs, the other an Apollo as he touches the earth in his perfect symmetry. Then compare its sound with that of the old Hellenic tongue, and we seem to hear the poet's “stridor ferri tractæque catenæ,” beside the voice of a lute; while as to texture, it is like the train of a railway matched with the golden network, fine as the spider's web, indissoluble as adamant, which the poet feigns to have been wrought by Vulcan: the English imprisons thought in a rude and cumbrous iron, while the Greek exhibits it in a rich and ductile gold. As was the language, so was the people. Fond of society and intercourse, skilful, crafty, commercial, enterprising, with a most human and genial intellect, with a keen and critical judgment, and a vivid imagination. When such a race turned itself to a scientific consideration of the world, it might well produce what we are now to pass in review, the Greek philosophy.

And here it is well to lay down first the standing-point of the Greek mind. The Hellenic religion was a natural religion, inasmuch as according to it man had no need to raise himself above the surrounding world and his own nature in order to connect himself with the Deity. As he was originally constituted, he felt himself related to it: no inward change in his mode of thought, no struggle with his natural impulses and inclinations, was required of him for this purpose. All that to him was humanly natural seemed to him to have its justification in regard to the Deity likewise; and so the most godlike man was he who worked out most completely his powers as man, and the essence of religious duty consisted in that man should do for the honour of the Deity what is in accordance with his own nature.³²⁴

But this natural religion of the Greeks differed from that of others in that neither outward nature as such, nor the sensuous being of man as such, but human nature in its beauty, as illumined by mind, is its point of excellence. The Greek did not, like the Eastern, lose his independence before the powers of nature, nor revel like the northern savage in boundless liberty, but in the full consciousness of his freedom saw its highest fulfilment in obedience to the general order as the law of his own nature. And as the purely Grecian deities are the ideals of human activity, he thus stands to them in a calm and free relation, such as no other nation of antiquity felt, because they are the mirror of his own being, but his being exalted, so that he is drawn to them without purchasing this at the cost of the pain and toil of an inward struggle.³²⁵

How the features of his own land served to image out to his fancy the Greek's religious attitude a poet has told us in exquisite verses, worthy of the beauty which they describe; the apotheosis of nature.

 
“Where are the Islands of the Blest?
They stud the Ægean sea;
And where the deep Elysian rest?
It haunts the vale where Peneus strong
Pours his incessant stream along,
While craggy ridge and mountain bare
Cut keenly through the liquid air,
And in their own pure tints arrayed,
Scorn earth's green robes which change and fade,
And stand in beauty undecayed,
Guards of the bold and free.”³²⁶
 

It seems to me essential to bear in mind throughout our whole inquiry this standing-point of the Greek mind, because through all the succession of schools and the fluctuation of doctrines, it remains, so to say, the ground-work on which they are embroidered. It is the very texture of Hellenic thought upon which first Pythagoras, then Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Panætius, and even Plotinus and Porphyrius spin their web. They vary the decoration, but the substance remains unaltered. This standing-point rules the conception of virtue, and therefore of the whole moral world. It reaches also to the final end of man, and determines it.

Moreover as the intellectual power of man seems to have culminated in the Hellenic race, so it would seem that a state of things existed among that people which left the human reason practically more to its own unaided resources than we find to have been the case elsewhere. No doubt the Greek mind had lived and brooded for ages upon the remains of original revelation, nor can any learning now completely unravel the interwoven threads of tradition and reason so as to distinguish their separate work. However, it is certain that in the sixth century before Christ the Greeks were without a hierarchy, and without a definite theology: not indeed without individual priesthoods, traditionary rites, and an existing worship, as well as certain mysteries which professed to communicate a higher and more recondite doctrine than that exposed to the vulgar gaze. But in the absence of any hierarchy holding this priesthood together, and teaching anything like a specific doctrine about divine and human things, a very large range indeed was given to the mind, acting upon this shadowy religious belief, and reacted upon by it, to form their philosophy. The Greeks did not, any more than antiquity in general, use the acts of religious service for instruction by religious discourse.³²⁷ In other words, there was no such thing as preaching among them. A domain therefore was open to the philosopher on which he might stand without directly impeaching the ancestral worship, while he examined its grounds, and perhaps sapped its foundations. He was therein taking up a position which their priests, the civil functionaries of religious rites scarcely any longer retaining a spiritual meaning or a moral cogency, had not occupied.

Thus it was that in the midst of a people who worshipped traditionally a multitude of gods and goddesses, such as we have them exhibited in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, the chief, perhaps the only, and the yet unwritten literature of that day, beings with a personal character and will, who were supposed to divide the government of the world between them, with a more or less recognised sovereignty of one chief, arose men who set themselves by the light of reason to think steadily and continuously how that world in which they were living had become what it was. Such a movement of mind indicated in itself dissatisfaction with the existing religion, wherein the gods were considered the causes of things, and their wills the rulers of them, though in the background even here loomed the idea of fate, the representative, as it were, of brute matter, from which the Greek mind could never disengage itself. Yet we do not find that these philosophers set themselves openly to attack the existing religion; rather leaving it in possession, and themselves usually complying with its forms, they pursued their own train of thought, as it were by its side, not choosing to look whither it would lead them.

Such very much appears the position of inquirers in the first period of Greek philosophy, which is generally made to extend from its rise under Thales to the time of the Sophists and Socrates. Their thoughts were mainly occupied with the appearances of the physical world: they speculated how it could have arisen. Thus Thales, we are told, imagined its first principle to be water; Anaximander, boundless matter; Anaximenes, air; the Pythagoreans said, all is number; the Eleatic school, all is the one unchangeable being.³²⁸ On the contrary Heracleitus conceived the one Being as ever in motion, involved in perpetual change: in accordance with which he nowhere finds true knowledge, and thinks the mass of men have no understanding for eternal truth.³²⁹ Empedocles of Agrigentum sets forth the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, as the material principles or roots of things, attaching to these two ideal principles as moving forces, Love as the unitive, and Hatred as the severing.³³⁰ Anaxagoras, over and above mechanical causes, to which he limited himself in the explanation of everything in particular, recognises a divine spirit, which as the finest of all things is simple, unmixed, passionless reason, which came upon chaos, forming and ordering the world out of it.³³¹ Democritus of Abdera takes for his principles the Full and the Empty, identifying these with Being and Non-being, or Something and Nothing. His Full consists of indivisible atoms.³³²

The remarkable thing about all these systems, if we may so call them, is, that while the existing popular religion teemed over, so to say, with the idea of a number of personal agents directing human things, these philosophers nearly all concurred in the attempt to find some one agent, and that material, from which all should spring. As yet even the radical distinction of matter and spirit was not clear to their minds:³³³ the soul of the individual man was to them merely a particle of the vital power which disclosed itself through the universe, the purest portion, but a portion still, of primal matter. In their conception of the constituent cause while they advanced towards unity they receded from personality. Even the world-forming Intelligence of Anaxagoras, who first distinctly declares that spirit is not mixed with matter, works only as a power of nature, and is portrayed to us in a semi-sensuous form, as a finer matter.³³⁴

After Greek philosophy had run out during about a hundred and fifty years in this sort of vague and imaginative speculation upon the physical world, it underwent a great change, which marks the transition to its second period. These successive opinions of philosophers led a class of men who arose at Athens about the middle age of Socrates to the conclusion, that it would be more profitable to turn the course of human thought from such cosmological reveries to the question of the perception itself of truth by man. He who accomplished this was Socrates, who turned his reflexion by preference upon man himself as the subject who thinks and wills.³³⁵ And herein his character had an influence over Greek philosophy which is strikingly marked through the whole of its second period. This period embraces the Sophists, Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle, and the Stoics and Epicureans; finally those Sceptic and Eclectic schools which rose naturally from the criticism detecting what is untenable in preceding systems. During the six hundred years which elapse from the teaching career of Socrates to the death of Marcus Antoninus we may say that one great line of inquiry occupied among philosophers the human mind; it was man himself, as the subject of logical thought and moral will.³³⁶ The chief endeavour was to form a science of ethics, and a science of reasoning, to which physical and mathematical studies, though at times warmly pursued and never wholly neglected, were yet subordinate.³³⁷

Who is this man of singular ugliness, with a face like a Silenus, with a body enduring hunger and impervious to heat and cold, who for thirty years frequents from morning to night the agora, the streets, the porticoes of Athens; who can drain the wine-cup through the night, and with reason unimpaired discuss philosophy through the following day; never alone, ready to converse with all in whom he discerned the germ of inquiry; who neither courts the high nor despises the low, but beside whom may be found the reckless beauty of Alcibiades and the staid gravity of Nicias, the admiring gaze of Plato even in youth majestic, and the sober homage of plainer Xenophon? Who is this, the man most social of men where the whole population is a club, the club of Athenian citizenship; whose tongue arrests the most volatile and inconstant of peoples; whose reason attracts and by turns draws out or silences the most opposite of characters; whose whole life is publicity; of spirit at once homely and subtle, simple and critical, parent both of philosophic certitude and philosophic scepticism? This is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, to whom Greek philosophy will look back as on one that had given its bent and directed its course during a thousand years, until the last of its defenders³³⁸ will fight a hopeless battle with triumphant Christianity, as the gods of Greece vanish, never more to return, and the lurid star of a false prophet teaching a false monotheism appears above the horizon, and takes the place, which they have left vacant, to be chief foe of the Christian name.

The special principle of Socrates is thus described to us by an historian of Greek philosophy.³³⁹ “It is not merely an already existing mode of thought which was further developed by Socrates, but an essentially new principle and proceeding which were introduced into philosophy. Whilst all preceding philosophy had been directed immediately on the object, so that the question of the essence and grounds of natural appearances is in it the radical question, on which all others depend, Socrates was the first to give utterance to the conviction that nothing can be known respecting anything which meets our thought, before its general essence, its conception, be determined: that accordingly the trial of our own representations by the standard of the conception is philosophical self-cognition, the beginning and the condition of all true knowing: whilst those who preceded him had arrived through the consideration of things only to distinguishing between the representation of things and the knowing of them, he, reversing this, makes all cognition of things dependent on the right view of the nature of knowledge.”

Another³⁴⁰ says: “It is stated in Aristotle's Metaphysics³⁴¹ that Socrates introduced the method of Induction and Definition, which proceeds from the individual to the determination of the conception. Aristotle marks³⁴² the domain of ethics as that on which Socrates applied this method. According to him the fundamental view of Socrates was the indivisible unity of theoretical prudence and practical ability on ethical ground. Socrates conceived all the virtues to be prudences, inasmuch as they are sciences.³⁴³ These statements are fully borne out by the portraits of Xenophon and Plato: Aristotle has only given point to their expression. Thus Xenophon says,³⁴⁴ ‘he was ever conversing about human things, inquiring what was piety and what impiety; what honour and what turpitude; what just and what unjust; what sobermindedness and what madness; what courage and what cowardice; what policy and what politician; what the government of men and who capable of it; and suchlike things; and those who knew these he esteemed men of honour and goodness, those who knew them not to be justly called of servile mind.’ ‘Never did he cease inquiring with those who frequented him about what everything was.’³⁴⁵ ‘And he did not distinguish between wisdom and temperance, but he asserted that justice and every other virtue was wisdom.’³⁴⁶ With this view hang together the convictions that virtue can be taught, that all virtue in truth is only one, and that no one is willingly wicked, but only through ignorance.³⁴⁷ The good is identical with the beautiful and the expedient. Right dealing, grounded upon prudence and practice, is better than good fortune. Self-knowledge, the fulfilment of the Delphic Apollo's injunction, ‘Know thyself,’ is the condition of practical ability. External goods do not advance. To need nothing is godlike; to need the least possible comes nearest to the divine perfection.³⁴⁸ Cicero's well-known expression is substantially correct,³⁴⁹ that Socrates called down philosophy from heaven to earth, introduced it into cities and houses, and required it to study life, morals, goods and evils, which constituted a progress from the natural philosophy pursued by his predecessors to ethics whose province is man. But Socrates possessed no complete system of ethical doctrines, but only the mainspring of inquiry; and so it was natural that he could only reach definite ethical statements in conversation with others. Thus his art was Mental Midwifery,³⁵⁰ as Plato designates it. His confessed non-knowledge, resting on the firm consciousness of the essence of true knowledge, stood higher than the imagined knowledge of those who conversed with him; and to it was attached the Socratic Irony; that apparent recognition which is paid to the superior wisdom and prudence of another until this is dissolved into its nothingness by the dialectic examination which measures what is maintained as a generalisation by the fixed point of the particular case. Thus it was that Socrates exercised the charge of examining men,³⁵¹ which he was convinced had been imposed upon him by the Delphic god in the oracle elicited by Chærepho, that he was the wisest of men.”

The opinion, practice, and teaching of Socrates concerning the gods and the godhead are set forth most graphically by his disciple Xenophon in two chapters of his Memorabilia. Scarcely could a Christian moralist exhibit more lucidly the argument from design in proof of a divine Providence which has formed and which rules the world; more than this, which has produced the seasons of the year, the plants, the animals, for the good of man. In the eyes of Socrates the human body itself is a never-failing proof of the divine love of man. He details the wisdom with which it is put together, and forces the opponent, who is introduced as not sacrificing, nor praying to the gods, nor believing in divination, to confess: “When I consider this, assuredly these things seem the device of some wise world-maker, the lover of living things.”³⁵² Another he compels by a long enumeration of divine benefits to man to come to a similar conclusion.³⁵³ “Certainly, Socrates, the gods seem to have a great care for men. Besides, he replies, when we cannot foresee in the future what is good for us, they help us by revealing through divination what is to come, and instructing us as to the best course. Nay, Socrates, rejoins the other, they seem to treat you even more kindly than other men; for without being asked by you they signify before to you what you should do and what leave undone. That I say true, answers Socrates, even you, O Euthydemus, will acknowledge, if you do not wait until you see the forms of the gods, but are contented, when you behold their works, to worship and honour them. And consider that the gods themselves point this out to you: for not only do the rest of them, when they give us good things, not exhibit themselves to our senses in so doing, but he³⁵⁴ who coördinates and holds together the whole universe, in whom are all beautiful and good things, and who provides them for the perpetual use of men free from waste, disease, and old age, so that they help us unfailingly, quicker than thought, is discerned in the greatness of his operations, but while he administers these to us, is himself invisible. And take thought that the sun, who seems to be manifest to all, allows not men to examine him closely, but should anyone attempt to look at him shamelessly, takes away his sight. And the ministers of the gods too you will find evading our senses; the lightning shoots from on high, and is master wherever it alights, but is seen neither in its approach, nor in its stroke, nor in its departure. The winds themselves are invisible, but their works are manifest, and we feel them as they come. Nay and man's soul too, or if there be anything else in man participating the divine, manifestly rules in us as a king, but is not seen. Bearing in thought these things we must not despise the invisible, but learning their power by their results, honour that which is divine.³⁵⁵ Indeed, Socrates, says Euthydemus, for my part I am quite resolved not the least to neglect what is divine; but my trouble is, that it seems to me that no single man can ever be duly thankful for the kindnesses of the gods. Do not let this trouble you, Euthydemus, for you see the god at Delphi, when anyone asks him how to be grateful to the gods, answers, By your country's law. Now it is surely law everywhere to please the gods by sacrifices, as best you can. How then can anyone honour the gods better or more piously than by doing what themselves bid? Only we must not be behind our power: for anyone who is so behind surely is manifest therein as not honouring the gods. Our duty is to honour them to the utmost of our power, and then to take heart and hope from them, the greatest goods: for a man cannot show a sound mind in hoping from others greater goods than from those who have the power to give the greatest aid; nor from those in any other way than by pleasing them. And how can one better please them than by the most unfailing obedience to them? Now by saying such things, and himself doing them, he was ever bringing those who were in intercourse with him to piety and a sound mind.”

This, then, was the relation existing in the mind of the prince of Greek philosophers between the written and the spoken word as instruments in imparting true knowledge, or science. The written word he regarded as subsidiary, as presupposing instruction by question and answer, and still more the moral discipline of a life earnestly given up to the study of the subjects in question. Without this a writing by itself was like a figure in a picture, which makes an impression on the beholder, but when asked if it is the true impression keeps, as he says, a solemn face, and makes no reply; which is the same to all, the earnest and the indifferent, and cannot treat them according to their merits. He laughs at the notion of such a writing being by itself any more than sport. And let us remember that he who said this has enshrined his own philosophy in the most finished specimens of dramatic dialogues which the Greek mind produced. These are the statements of the man who wrote Greek in his countrymen's opinion as Jupiter would have spoken it. There are, then, in Plato's mind three constituents of teaching: first, the choice of fitting subjects for it, and what is therein implied, the imposition of a moral discipline upon them regulating their life to the end in view; secondly, the master's oral instruction conveying gradually and with authority to minds so prepared the doctrine to be received; and thirdly, the committing such doctrine to writing, which shall serve to remind the disciple of what he has been taught. And this was what he carried into effect.³⁹³ He fixed himself at the Academia, over which he presided for forty years: he was succeeded therein by his nephew Speusippus, who held his chair for eight years; Xenocrates followed in the same post during twenty-five years; and the line was continued afterwards by Polemon, Crantor, Crates, Arcesilaus, and others in uninterrupted series. Plato thus established the method of Greek philosophy, and his example herein was followed by Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus.

His great disciple Aristotle came to him at the age of seventeen, and studied under him during twenty years. At a later age, when, after completing the education of Alexander, he fixed himself in middle life at Athens, he set up there a second philosophical school at the Lyceum on its eastern side, and on the model of that of Plato. Attached to this museum were a portico, a hall with seats, one seat especially for the lecturing professor, a garden, and a walk, together with a residence, all permanently appropriated to the teacher and the process of instruction.³⁹⁴ When Aristotle died in the year 322 b. c., his friend Theophrastus presided over his school during five and thirty years, and the line continued on. We learn that there were periodical meetings, convivial and conversational, among the members both of the Academic and Peripatetic schools, and laws for their regulation established by Xenocrates and Aristotle. It was in the shady walks of his garden that this great philosopher taught by word of mouth the choicer circle of his disciples: for the more general hearers he gave lectures sitting.³⁹⁵ His instructions were divided into two classes, those which he gave on rhetoric, the art of discussion, knowledge of civil matters, and suchlike, which were exoteric, and those which touched the finer and more subtle points of philosophy, which were termed acroatic, as addressed to the ears.³⁹⁶ Again, his dialogues he called “public” or “issued” discourses, things made over to the general public, in distinction from what was not so disclosed, but reserved for the philosopher's own meditation, to be subsequently communicated either by oral lecture or by writing to the private circle of scholars who gave themselves up entirely to his philosophy. These Aristotle called “philosophical” or “teaching” discourses, proceeding, that is, from the principles proper to each branch of learning, and not from the opinions of the lecturer. These latter were termed “tentative,” as belonging to the exoteric. Simplicius, one of the latest writers on Greek philosophy, defines exoteric as “the common, and what concludes by arguments which are matter of opinion;” and Philoponus, as discourses “not of strict proof, and not directed to lawfully-begotten hearers,” that is, trained and prepared, “but to the public, and springing from probabilities.”³⁹⁷ Thus in Aristotle, the largest in grasp of mind, the most observant of facts, the most accurate in definition among Greek writers, the philosopher in fact and “master of those who know,”³⁹⁸ for all future ages, we find the same three constituents of teaching as in Plato, and in the same order of importance: first, hearers selected for their natural aptitude, and then submitted to a moral discipline and a common life; secondly, the instruction of such hearers by word of mouth, question and answer, discussion and cross-examination; and lastly, the committing of doctrines to writing. With him too his written philosophical discourses were reminders of his oral teaching, which they presupposed and required as a key to their full meaning, and especially for the comprehension of their harmony as a system.

The order of teaching which I have thus sketched as being followed in practice by the two most eminent Greek philosophers belonged to them all. They had no other conception respecting the method of communicating a doctrine efficiently to men. None of them considered philosophy merely or chiefly as a literature: none of them attributed to a book the power of teaching it. Their conception was, a master and his scholars, and the living together, the moral subordination and discipline which this involved. This school of education or training in knowledge³⁹⁹ was their primary thought: the committing of their doctrine to writing was both subsequent and secondary. Their writings were intended, as Plato says, to be recollections⁴⁰⁰ of their teaching, and failed to convey the real knowledge to those who had not the stamp of this teaching impressed on their minds.

As Plato made a local habitation for himself and his doctrine in the Academia, and Aristotle in the Lyceum, so Zeno, the founder of the third great philosophic school, took up his abode in the Portico at Athens, a court surrounded with pillars, and adorned with the paintings of Polygnotus. Here he began to teach about 308 b. c., and here he continued teaching as some say for fifty-eight years. It is said that the character of Socrates, as drawn by Xenophon and by Plato in his Apology, filled him with astonishment and admiration:⁴⁰¹ and the Stoics afterwards drew their doctrine of the wise man, which they endeavoured to image out and realise, from that living example of it,⁴⁰² an instance of the connection of doctrine with person which is full of interest and suggestion. Zeno was succeeded in his office of teaching by Cleanthes, and Cleanthes by Chrysippus and a long line of teachers, who for several hundred years continued, with variations, the same general doctrine of ethics.

Just in the same way and at the same time Zeno's great rival Epicurus fixed the seat of his school in the Garden at Athens, which thenceforth became for thirty-six years the central point of the teacher's activity. About him gathered a circle of friends whom similarity of principles and the enjoyment of cultivated intercourse bound together with unusual intimacy. It speaks for the special character of his philosophy that from the beginning women and even hetæræ formed a part of this society. But he succeeded during this long period of teaching in impressing upon his school so strong a character that it is recognised without essential change during hundreds of years.⁴⁰³

We should do injustice to the character and the work of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, the founders of the four great schools of Greek philosophy, if we did not take into account what was in their day no doubt of greater influence than their writings, that is, their function as teachers, their oral teaching itself, and those fundamental principles of philosophic education which lay at the bottom of it. Plato has left us very little of doctrine put out in his own name. He is not a speaker in his dialogues. He puts what he would say in the mouth of others, especially of Socrates. He tells us that he has purposely done this in order that men might not say, here is Plato's philosophy:⁴⁰⁴ and the reason of this was that he utterly distrusted his own or any man's power to disclose to others such a system in a set form of words. It is, then, the more remarkable that he has said in his own person what were his most settled convictions as to intercourse by word of mouth, and continuous written discourse, viewed as instruments for attaining and communicating truth. He expresses his absolute disbelief that men can reach true conceptions by their being set forth in the immutable form of writing. It is a far other and more difficult work which has to be accomplished. In a word, not even aptness for learning and memory will give the power to see the truth as to virtue and vice to one who is not kin to the subject; nor, again, this kinship without such aptitude and memory: but when both are joined, then out of living together, after much time,⁴⁰⁵ by the continual friction of name, definition, acts of sight and perception, by thought and meditation, the hearing and answering the objections of others, the process of mutual cross-examination discharged without envy or jealousy, and with sincere love of the truth, a sudden flash of fire kindles in the mind, and nourishes itself, disclosing the knowledge required. Thus it is that prudence and intelligence on each subject, shining out in this beam of light, go forward as far as man may reach. The view here propounded, if reflected upon, will convey to us what the living work first of Pythagoras, and then of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and their successors, was. Both the conception indeed and the realisation seem to have been most complete in Pythagoras. The philosophic living together was its basis. Instruction was oral. Learning was effected by the collision of mind with mind, by objection and answer. It was the Socratic principle inherited from these schools that nothing passed muster for knowledge which did not stand the test of cross-examination:⁴⁰⁶ but an unchangeable text was utterly unsuited, according to Plato, to debate the question under treatment in such fashion, while on the other hand the mind of the reader was passive in receiving the impression which it conveyed. On neither side therefore did the conditions of knowledge exist, but this was reached under the circumstances of personal intercourse above mentioned, and might be recalled in the written form to the minds of those who had thus first attained it.

Down to the end of Greek philosophy the same conception as to the method of teaching prevailed. Ammonius Sakkas, the founder of Neoplatonism, delivered his doctrine only by word of mouth, which his chief disciples, Erennius, Origines, and Plotinus, engaged not to make public.⁴⁰⁷ It was when one of them, Erennius, had broken this promise, that another, Plotinus, after delivering lectures at Rome, wrote down his philosophy; but his scheme was to carry it out by collecting his disciples together in one city, and thus realising Plato's republic.

Chapter XIV. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part II

The mind of the next great teacher who arose in Greece after Plato presented an almost complete contrast to that of the master under whom he had so long studied. Aristotle's power consisted in a parallel development of two forces which do not often coexist.⁴⁰⁸ He joined together a rare degree of consistent philosophic thinking with an equally rare degree of accurate observation. This double faculty is shown in what he effected. He made the sciences of logic, ethics, and psychology: he built up those of natural history and politics with the wealth of knowledge which his experience had accumulated.⁴⁰⁹ Thus his analytic and synthetic genius embraced the whole range of human knowledge then existing. As Plato threw his vivid fancy and imagination and his religious temper into everything which concerned the human spirit, so Aristotle fixed his gaze upon nature, which with him in all its manifestations was the ultimate fact. As Plato rose from the single being to his conception of the true, the good, the beautiful, of which the Idea to him was everything, so Aristotle, steadfastly discarding his master's doctrine of Ideas, took his stand on the single being, examining it with the closest observation and the subtlest thought, and the knowledge thus conveyed to him is everything. Plato's conception of God is that of the great world-former, orderer, and ruler: Aristotle's conception of God is that of a pure intelligence, without power, an eternal, ever-active, endless, incorporeal substance, who never steps out of that everlasting rest into action: who is the world's first cause, but is unconscious of it, his action upon the world being likened to the influence of the beloved object upon the lover. Plato's dualism is summed up in the expression, God and Matter; Aristotle's dualism, in God and the World. Plato represents the action of the Deity as the working-up of the original matter into the millions of forms which the world exhibits: but these millions of forms are taken by Aristotle as if they had existed for ever; the World, as it is, and the Deity, are coeternal.

Aristotle's doctrine of the human soul is that it exists only as that which animates the body, without which its being cannot be known.⁴¹⁰ It is the principle which forms, moves, and developes the body; the substance which only appears in the body formed and penetrated by it, and which works continuously in it, as the life which determines and prevails over its matter. Thus the body is of itself nothing; what it is, it is only through the soul, whose being and nature it expresses, to which it is related as the medium in which the purpose, which is the soul, realises itself. Thus the soul cannot be thought of without the body, nor the body without the soul: both come into their actual state together. In the soul Aristotle distinguishes three parts, the vegetative, the sensitive, and the thinking. This last, the peculiar property of man, is further divisible into the passive and the active, of which the former is linked to the soul as the soul is to the body, as form is to matter, multiplies itself with individuals, and is extinguished with them. But the reason, or pure intelligence, has nothing in common with matter, comes from without into man, and exists in him as a self-consisting indestructible being, without multiplying or dividing itself. Accordingly this intellect or reason suffers the soul to sink back with the body into the nothing from which both have been together produced. It alone continues to subsist as what is ever the same and unchangeable, since it is nothing but the divine intelligence in an individual existence, enlightening the darkness of the human subject in the passive part of the understanding, and so must be considered as the first mover in man of his discursive thinking and knowing, as well as of his willing.⁴¹¹ As that which is properly human in the soul, that which has had a beginning, must also pass away, even the understanding, and only the divine reason is immortal, and as memory belongs to the sensitive soul, and individual thinking only takes place by means of the passive intellect, all consciousness must cease with death. And again, clearly as Aristotle maintains that man is the mover and master of his own actions, and has it in his power to be good or evil, and thence repudiates the assumption of Socrates and Plato that no one is willingly evil, yet he cannot find a place for real freedom of the will between the motion which arises from sensitive desire, and that which proceeds from the divine intelligence dwelling in the soul. Necessity arises on both sides, from the things which determine the passive understanding, and from the divine intelligence.⁴¹² Thus his physical theory, as in the case of Plato noted above,⁴¹³ prevents a clear conception of the human personality. His notion of man in this point corresponds to his notion of God: he does not concern himself with questions respecting the goodness, justice, and freedom of God, inasmuch as his God is not really personal:⁴¹⁴ so with regard to man we find in him no elucidation as to the question of moral freedom, nor of the origin and nature of wickedness in man. Wickedness is with Aristotle the impotence to hold the mean between too much and too little: it presents itself therefore only in this world of contingency and change, and has no relation to God, since the first or absolute good has nothing opposed to it. He has not the sense of moral perversion with regard to evil. In accordance with which the end of all moral activity with him is happiness, which consists in the well-being arising from an energy according to nature; as virtue is the observing a proper mean between two extremes. And the highest happiness is contemplative thought, the function of the divine in man, the turning away from everything external to the inner world of the conceptions.

The religious character, which belongs conspicuously to Plato's philosophy, fails, it will be seen, in that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato strove to purify the popular belief, and urged as the highest point of virtue to become like to God by the conjunction of justice and sanctity with prudence,⁴¹⁵ Aristotle divides morality from religion as his God is separated off from the world.⁴¹⁶ His scientific inquiries have not that immediate relation to the personal life and the destiny of man in which the religiousness of Platonism most consists. His whole view of the world goes to explain things as far as possible from their natural causes.⁴¹⁷ Thus he admits in the whole direction of the world the ruling of a divine power, of a reason which reaches its purpose; he believes in particular that the gods care for men, take an interest in him who lives in accordance with reason; that happiness is their gift; he contradicts the notion that the godhead is envious, and so could withhold from man knowledge, the best of its gifts; but this divine providence coincides for him entirely with the working of natural causes. In his view the godhead stands in solitary self-contemplation outside the world, the object of admiration and reverence to man. The knowledge of it is the highest task for his intellect. It is the good to which in common with everything that is finite he is struggling; whose perfection calls forth his love: but little as he can expect a return of love from it, so little does he find in it any coöperation distinct from the natural connection of things, and his reason is the only point of immediate contact with it.

Religion⁴¹⁸ itself Aristotle treats as an unconditional moral necessity. The man who doubts whether the gods should be honoured is a subject fit not for instruction but for punishment, just as the man who asks whether he should love his parents. As the natural system of the world cannot be imagined without God, so neither can man in it be imagined without religion. But he can give us no other ground save political expediency for resting religion upon fables so apparent as the stories of the popular belief. He sometimes himself uses these fables, like other popular opinions, to illustrate some general proposition, as, for instance, Homer's verses on the golden chain show the immobility of the first mover: just as in other cases he likes to pursue his scientific assumptions to their least apparent beginnings, and to take account of sayings and proverbs. But if we except the few general principles of religious belief, he ascribes to these fables no deeper meaning, and as little does he seem to care about purifying their character. For his state he presupposes the existing religion, as in his personal conduct he did not withdraw from its usages, and expressed his attachment to friends and relations in the forms consecrated by it. But no trace is found in him of Plato's desire to reform religion by means of philosophy: and in his politics he allows in the existing worship even what in itself he disapproves, as the case of unseemly words, inscriptions, and statues. Thus the relation of the Aristotelic philosophy to the actual religion is generally a very loose one. It does not disdain indeed to use the points of connection which the other presents, but has no need of it whatever for itself: nor does it seek on its own side to purify and transform religion, the imperfection of which it rather seems to take as something unavoidable. The two are indifferent to each other; philosophy pursues its way without troubling itself about religion, without fearing any interruption from it.

In the seventy-seven years which elapsed from the death of Socrates, b. c. 399, to that of Aristotle, b. c. 322, Greek life had suffered a great change. That dear-loved independence which every state had cultivated, and which concentrated every energy of the mind in civil life, had vanished. During the forty years of Plato's work as a teacher it was becoming less and less: Chæronea gave it the death-blow; while Aristotle is the son of a time at which scientific study had already begun to take the place of active political life.⁴¹⁹ But the conquest effected by his great pupil Alexander completed this change. He opened the East to the Greek mind, bringing it into close contact with Asiatic thought, beliefs, and customs. Under his successors Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia, Tarsus, Pergamus, and Rhodes became great centres of Greek culture: but Greek self-government was gone. Athens with the rest of the Greek cities had lost its political independence, but it remained the metropolis of Greek philosophy. From the last decade of the fourth century before Christ four great schools, the Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean, all seated here, as embodied in the dwelling-place and oral teaching of their masters, stand over against each other. The point most interesting to our present subject is this, that all these schools take up a common ground, one which we consider to belong properly to religion, that is, the question wherein the happiness of man consists, and how to attain it.⁴²⁰ Thus the political circumstances of the land gave the tone to its philosophy. What the time required was something which would compensate men for the lost position of a free citizen and a self-governed fatherland. The cultivated classes looked to philosophy for consolation and support. The answers to this question which the various systems gave were very different from each other, but an answer they all attempted. What they have in common is, the drawing-back of man upon himself, his inner mind, his consciousness, as a being who thinks and wills:⁴²¹ while on the other hand the mental view was widened from the boundaries of a narrow state to that which touches man in general. The field of morality opened out beyond the range of this or that city, territory, or monarchy. Thus two hundred full years were occupied with the struggles of the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and the sceptical opposition to them of the middle and later Academy. At the very beginning of this time the man who sat first in Aristotle's chair after him, and therefore the head of the most speculative school, Theophrastus, had shocked the students of philosophy by declaring that fortune, not wisdom, was the ruler of the world. But it was precisely against the despondence which such a conviction would work in the mind that the Stoics struggled with their doctrine of apathy, Epicurus with his self-contentment, the Sceptics with their tranquillity of indifference.⁴²² These all sought to cure those whom the fables of the popular religion were insufficient to satisfy, those who felt the evils and trials of life and knew not whither to turn in their need. But the Stoic and the Epicurean cures stood in the strongest contrast to each other.

Zeno⁴²³ of Cittium in Cyprus, after listening for twenty years to the teaching of various Socratic masters in Athens, founded a school himself, and wished it to be a school of virtuous men rather than of speculative philosophers. It was a system of complete materialism rigorously carried out. He admitted only corporeal causes, and two principles, matter, and a force eternally indwelling in it and shaping it. These two principles, matter and force, were in fact to the stoic mind only one eternal being viewed in a twofold aspect. Matter for its subsistence needs a principle of unity to form and hold it together: and this, the active element, is inconceivable without matter as the subject in which it dwells, works, and moves. Thus the positive element is matter viewed as being as yet without qualities, while the active element which runs through and quickens everything is God in matter. In real truth God and matter are one thing, or, in other words, the stoic doctrine is a pantheism which views matter as instinct with life.⁴²⁴ God is the unity of that force which embraces and interpenetrates the universe, assuming all forms, and as such is a subtle fluid, fire, ether, or breath, in which are contained all forms of existence belonging to the world-body which it animates, and from which they develop themselves in order: it lives and moves in all, and is the common source of all effect and all desire. God, then, is the world-soul, and the world itself no aggregate of independent elements, but a being, organised, living, filled and animated by a single soul, that is to say, by one original fire manifesting itself in various degrees of tension and heat. If in Aristotle's theory the world is a total of single beings, which are only bound together unto a higher aim by a community of effort, in the stoic system on the contrary these beings all viewed together are members of a surpassingly perfect organisation, and as such, so bound in one, that nothing can happen to the individual being, which does not by sympathy extend its operation to all others. Thus on his physical side, God is the world-fire, the vital all-interpenetrating heat, the sole cause of all life and motion, and the necessity which rules the world: while on his moral side, inasmuch as the first general cause can only be a soul full of reason and wisdom, he is the world-reason, a blessed being, the originator of the moral law, ever occupied with the government of the world, being in fact himself the world. Thus everything is subject to the law of absolute necessity; everything eternally determined through an endless series of preceding causes, since nothing happens without a cause, and that again is the working of a cause before it. What, then, is called, or seems to be, chance, is merely the working of a cause unknown to us. The will of man is accordingly mere spontaneity. He wills, but what he wills is inevitable: he determines himself, but always in consequence of preceding causes. And since here every cause is something subject to the conditions of matter, something purely inside the world, it becomes unalterable destiny. But inasmuch as the series of causes leads back to the first, and this first cause has not only a physical side, but includes intelligence with it, and so everything in it is foreseen and predetermined, therefore that which considered under the aspect of inevitable necessity is called fate or destiny, viewed as thought may be termed Providence, a divine arrangement.

With such a doctrine it is evident that all morality was reduced to a matter of physics: and yet no sect of Greek philosophers struggled so hard to solve the great problem of moral freedom as the Stoics.⁴²⁵ But the iron grasp of their leading tenet was ever too much for them. Man's soul is of the same substance as the world-soul, that is, breath or fire, of which it is a portion: in man it manifests itself as the force from which knowledge and action proceed, as at once intelligence, will, and consciousness. It is, then, closely allied with the Divine Being, but at the same time corporeal, a being which stands in perpetual action and reaction with the human body. It is that heat-matter bound to the blood, which communicates life and motion: it is perishable, though it lasts beyond the body, perhaps to the general conflagration. It has therefore, in the most favourable view, the duration of a world-period, with the outrun of which it must return to the universal ether or godhead: its individual existence and consciousness end.

As to the popular religion,⁴²⁶ the Stoics admitted that it was filled with pretended deities, false doctrines, and rank superstition; that its wilderness of fables about the gods was simply contemptible: but that it was well to retain the names of gods consecrated in public opinion, who were merely descriptions of particular incorporations of the one world-god.

The Stoics did not represent the component elements of human nature as struggling with each other, like Plato.⁴²⁷ With them nature and reason is one thing. Their virtue,⁴²⁸ or highest good, is life in accordance with nature, that is, the concurrence of human conduct with the all-ruling law of nature, or of man's will with God's will. Thus it was that the Stoic sought to reach his doctrine of philosophical impassibility: and to this system the majority of earnest and thinking minds in the two centuries before Christ inclined.⁴²⁹

At the very same time as Zeno, Epicurus set up at Athens a school destined through all its existence to wage a battle with stoicism, yet aiming by different means at the same end, the freedom of the individual man from anxiety and disturbance.⁴³⁰ If Zeno's world was an intelligent animal, that of Epicurus was a machine formed and kept in action by chance. He assumed the atomic theory of Democritus, that all bodies – and there are nothing else but corporeal things – have arisen originally from atoms moving themselves in empty space. They are eternal and indestructible, without quality, but not without quantity, and endlessly various in figure. As these from mere weight and impulse would fall like an everlasting rain in empty space without meeting each other, Epicurus devised a third motion, a slight declension from the perpendicular, in virtue of which their agglomeration is produced: and thus it is a work of pure chance that out of these, the countless worlds which frame the universe began to be. Any order or higher guidance of the universe, as directed to a purpose, is not to be thought of, any more than necessary laws, according to which the appearances of nature reproduce themselves. For a law would ultimately lead to a lawgiver, and this might reawaken fear, and disturb the wise man's repose. He utterly denied the intervention either of one god or of many gods in the forming or the maintenance of the world: the main purpose indeed of his philosophy was to overthrow that religious view which saw in the argument from design a sure proof of a divine Providence.⁴³¹ Nothing, he thought, was more perverted than that the opinion that nature was directed for the good of man, or generally for any object at all; that we have tongues in order to speak, or ears in order to hear, for in fact just the reverse is true. We speak because we have tongues, and hear because we have ears. The powers of nature have worked purely under the law of necessity. Among their manifold productions some were necessarily composed in accordance with an end: hence resulted for man in particular many means and powers; but such result must not be viewed as intentional, rather as a purely casual consequence of naturally necessary operations. Gods, such as the people believed, he utterly repudiated. Not he who denied such gods, but he who assumed their existence, was godless. He allowed, indeed, that there existed an immense multitude of gods, beings of human form, but endued with subtle, ethereal, transparent, indestructible bodies, who occupied the intermundial spaces, free from care, regardless of human things, enjoying their own blissful repose.⁴³² His gods are in fact a company of Epicurean philosophers, possessing everything which they can desire, eternal life, no care, and perpetual opportunity of agreeable entertainment.