The Formation of Christendom

                                Volume II

                                    By

                          Thomas William Allies

                                 London:

                    Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.

                                   1869





CONTENTS


Preface.
Chapter VII. The Gods Of The Nations When Christ Appeared.
Chapter VIII. The First And The Second Man.
Chapter IX. The Second Man Verified In History.
Chapter X. The First Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XI. The Second Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XII. The Third Age Of The Martyr Church.
Chapter XIII. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part I.
Chapter XIV. The Christian Church And The Greek Philosophy. Part II.
Index.
Footnotes






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
before(10) 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.

Was it surprising that all worshippers of the gods should look for their
example rather in Jupiter’s actions than in Plato’s teaching or the moral
judgments of Cato?(21) A nature subject in itself to the sway of passion
was stimulated by an authority supposed to be divine to the commission of
every criminal excess; and herein lay a strong proof of the malignant and
impure character of these gods.

On the other hand, the same eye-witness challenges the defenders of the
pagan gods to produce a single instance wherein moral precepts of living
were delivered to their worshippers upon divine authority. True, indeed,
there were here and there whispers of secret rites in which a pure and
chaste life was recommended, but where were the buildings dedicated to the
public preaching of such truths? Places there were in abundance
consecrated to the celebration of infamous games, rightly termed
“Fugalia,” since they put modesty and decency to flight, but none where
the people might listen to divine commands repressing avarice, ambition,
or unchaste desire. Thus with the positive inculcation of all evil, under
cover of their own example, was united the negative absence of all moral
teaching.(22)

For even the prayers which accompanied these sacrifices and this
ceremonial, and this lavish exhibition of every human wickedness under
divine names, were not addressed for moral goods, but for wealth, bodily
strength, temporal prosperity. Horace but expresses the general mind when
he says:


    “Sed satis est orare Jovem quæ donat et anfert;
    Det vitam, det opes, æquum mi animum ipse parabo.”

    (_Epist._ i. 18, 111.)


They were moreover viewed as carrying with them a sort of physical force,
not as prevailing through purity of intention in those who offered them.
In fact, the gods to whom they were addressed were powers of nature, or
malignant and impure powers, but in neither case beings who looked for a
moral service from rational creatures.

One other turpitude the Asiatic idolatry added to the Greek and Roman
forms. By consecrating the sexual relations themselves in one male and one
female god, they effected this crowning connection of idolatry with
immorality that unchaste acts became themselves acts of sacrifice, and so
of worship.(23) This is the strange perversion borne witness to by
Herodotus, and corroborated by the prophet Jeremiah. A great seat of this
worship was the city of Hierapolis, in Syria, where was one of the most
magnificent temples of the ancient world, dedicated to Derketo, and rich
with the offerings of Arabians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians,
Cilicians, Cappadocians, and all nations of the Semitic tongue. Nor was
this worship confined to the East, for hence, as from a centre, the
adherents of the Syrian goddess spread themselves in begging troops over
the provinces of the empire. And the worship of Venus at Eryx, and other
places in the West, with the thousands of female priestesses dedicated to
it, reproduced the same abomination.

As the great result of all that we have said, we find the notion of
sanctifying the human will absent from the religious rites of the
polytheistic idolatry in all its forms. To this corresponded the absence
of the notion of holiness in the gods. And this leads us finally to the
remarkable character which defines it as a whole. This worship was
throughout a corruption,(24) the spoiling, that is, of something good; a
turning away from the better to the worse. The worship itself had been
originally good. The corruption lay in the alteration of the quality and
the object of the worship. Worship had been implanted in man, and
prescribed to him. It was at once the need of his nature and the command
of Him who gave that nature. It had for it, first, positive institution,
and then tradition and custom, and throughout, the conscience, the reason,
and the heart of man. The reason of man ever bore powerful witness to the
unity of the Godhead; the breaking up of that unity, as exhibited by this
idolatrous polytheism, in contradiction to the original prompting and
continued witness of the reason, is a very strong proof of that moral
corruption in the will which first generated it, which continued its
existence, and which, while multiplying, degraded its forms from age to
age. But man was free to decline from the good in which he had been
placed. The corruption which was left in his power he exerted; he changed
the quality of the service, and the person served. The productive cause of
idolatry on the part of man was the soul of man turning away from the
notion of a good and holy Creator, the contemplation of whom was its
present support and future reward, to visible things. Of these things the
chief were bodily pleasures. Thus this corruption of the soul, in process
of time, and continually becoming worse, produced this whole pantheon of
gods, originally the creation of its own lusts, and subsisting as a
perpetual food and support of those lusts. For this cause it had broken up
the one perfect idea of God the Creator and Ruler of all persons and
things into a multitude of gods, whose functions became more and more
divided, until the ether, the air, the earth, and the water swarmed with
these supposed beings, which took possession even of wood and stone,
dwelling in the statues erected to them; and every desire which the soul
in its corruption could entertain had its corresponding patron, helper,
and exemplar. In this descending course cause and effect were perpetually
reacting on each other, and as the corruption of the human soul had
generated these gods, so their multiplication and degradation intensified
its corruption from age to age.(25)

5. But this was not all. If corrupt affection in man himself, if the charm
of representing the unseen objects of worship in visible characters of
wood or stone, if, finally, the ignorance of the true God, together with
the beauty of the creature substituted for Him,(26) were the disposing
causes within man to idolatry, there was a cause outside of him which must
not be forgotten. When we look upon this idolatry, occupying not one
country or race, but all; not merely bewildering savage or uncivilised
man, but throned in the chief seats of the world’s choicest civilisation;
when we look upon its endlessly divergent forms, its palpable
contradictions, its cherished or commanded immoralities, its crowd of
debasing, irrational, heterogeneous superstitions, its cruelty,
sensuality, and fearfulness, all these being no less an insult to man’s
reason than a derogation from God’s majesty, who is there that does not
feel this to be the strangest and most astonishing sight which history
presents to man? And yet there is a unity which runs through it all, and
stamps it with a double mark. Not only is it a service due from man to
God, which is paid by him to the creature rather than to the Creator,(27)
but more especially it is that service paid by man to God’s enemies, the
fallen angels. These it is who have assumed the mask of dead men; these it
is who within the sculptured forms of Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Venus, of
Baal and Derketo and Mylitta, of Anubis and Serapis, of Thor and Woden,
and so many more, receive man’s adoration, and rejoice above all things in
possessing his heart. These it is who have seduced him by exhibitions of
visible beauty, have lain in wait for him by fountain, forest, and field,
and filled the groves and high places with the charms which best pleased
him under the name of worship; or have promised to disclose future things
to him; or, again, have harrowed his soul with phantasms and terrors of
the unseen world. These incoherent systems; these deities, whose functions
ran into and athwart each other; these investing of human passions, and
even unnatural and monstrous vices, with immortality and terrible power;
these rivals ever quarrelling with each other, and jealous for the
possession of man’s homage, all serve the purpose of those behind the
scenes, are puppets under their command, and have a common end and result
in the captivity of their victim. More even than this; while they seem
disunited and contradictory, they are really one, marshalled by the power,
directed by the mind, held in the hand of him who is called “the ruler of
this world,” “the power of darkness,” “the might of the enemy,” who “holds
the power of death,” “the ancient serpent, who leads into error the whole
world,” “that malignant one in whom the whole world is lying,” “the prince
of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the children of
disobedience,” who musters “the principalities, the powers, the
world-rulers of this life’s darkness, the spirits of wickedness in
ethereal places,” to serve him in his conflict with man’s flesh and blood;
in fine, for S. Paul’s language goes one point even beyond that of his
Master, and terms him not merely the ruler, but “the God of this
world;”(28) that is to say, this manifold idolatry is the establishment of
his kingdom, the enthronement of his godhead over men, the mark of their
captivity and prostration before him.

The statements of our Lord and his apostles being so express and definite
as to the existence of this diabolic kingdom, and as to the personal sway
of a sovereign over it, let us look once more at this idolatry itself by
the light thus shed upon it.

And first, whether we regard men as made to be members of a well-ordered
society, enjoying temporal prosperity in this life, or as further intended
for happiness in a future life, resulting from their present actions,(29)
the condition in which the heathen nations are actually found at our
Lord’s coming is quite unintelligible unless we suppose the reality of a
diabolic power exercised upon them. The polytheism which we have witnessed
holding all human life in its grasp, while it did not teach and uphold the
great laws of morality, did, on the other hand, actively inculcate the
violation of those laws by continually representing to the minds and eyes
of men such a violation in the acts of the deities worshipped. It was a
perpetual incitement of men to crimes, as well against social order as
against all the sanctities of private life; it fostered the savageness of
slavery, and the utmost cruelty in carrying on war, because its deities,
being diverse for every nation, and belonging exclusively to the nation,
had obliterated the idea that all men were of one blood, and thus
delivered over the captive and the slave to the pitiless hatred or equally
pitiless luxury of their fellow-men. So much for its action on human
society as terminating with this life, while for a life to come it had no
doctrine and made no preparation, but had suffered the earlier teaching of
a future retribution to be considered as a fable fit for children and old
women. Looking at such a condition of human society from the moral point
of view, we may conclude with certainty that man would never, if left to
himself, have devised it.

Secondly, regarding this polytheism as an object presented to the human
intellect, nothing more unreasonable and monstrous than this crowd of
deities can even be conceived. The human reason demands imperatively the
unity of the godhead, since infinite power at least enters into the
conception of the godhead, and to divide or limit infinity is an unreason.
All the great works and order of the world bore witness likewise to this
unity of the godhead, and were sufficient to prove it;(30) and even in the
worst times of paganism we find this proof exhibited with a force and
lucidity to which even now little can be added. And in the worst times,
again, we find the natural witness of the human soul breaking out in
moments of sudden trial or great anguish, and calling upon the one God for
help.(31) Yet in spite of this we see whole nations renowned for their
intellectual productions, and men among them in whom the force of reason
has rarely or never been surpassed, bowing their necks to this yoke of
polytheism, and accepting this tissue of monstrous error, paying homage to
it in their life, and dying with it on their lips; as Socrates offering
the cock to Æsculapius, and Seneca the libation to Jove the liberator. We
know not how to account for this, were man’s reason left alone. We can see
an adequate ground for it only in “men having been made unreasonable, and
in the demoniacal error overshadowing the earth, and concealing the
knowledge of the true God.”(32)

Let us take a third view of it, neither the moral nor the logical, but the
view of it as an existing fact, as something which for many hundred years
occupied the earth, ruled nations, moulded the institutions and characters
of men. Here we do not speak merely of the multitude of temples, of
priests or priestesses serving in them, of sacrifices offered by these, of
prayers, vows, festivals in honour of the gods—because all these enter
into the notion of a service rendered by man to the power superior to him,
and in their utmost perversion there is nothing which may not be accounted
for by a simply human corruption stealing into and spoiling an originally
good institution; but all these in the actual condition of paganism were
mixed up with and penetrated by other elements, and accompanied by effects
not to be so accounted for. Let us take the universal persuasion that the
statues of the gods were inhabited by the deities which they represented,
as bodies by souls.(33) Here was the notion of a spiritual power taking
possession of material forms. But how was this notion introduced,
propagated, and maintained in men’s minds? By certain visible and palpable
effects,(34) of which those who were eye-witnesses give us many details.
Take again the oracles which existed throughout the heathen world, and, as
dealing with the same subject-matter, divination in all its forms. However
much of deceit there might be here, was there not also, in many instances,
an exhibition of power and knowledge beyond that of man, which no mere
deceit could produce? Take again magic, the invocation, adjuration, and
compacting with spirits, which ran through heathen society in numberless
shapes; and take lastly the fact of spirits seizing upon and possessing
the bodies of men, speaking by their voice, and controlling their minds.
The four classes which we have just given comprehend in themselves an
innumerable multitude of facts which are apparent in pagan history, in all
which the corruption of the human soul is an agent or patient, but for
which that corruption by itself supplies no adequate cause. A spiritual
power is behind, laying hold of and acting upon this corruption, and by
fault of the human will making an inroad into the visible world, and
partially mastering it, bending it to an evil purpose, and making it serve
as an agent to man’s captivity. Let us briefly cite as to the reality of
this spiritual power the witness of its victims and the witness of its
opponents.

First, as to its victims. Scarcely a writer, whether poet, historian,
philosopher, or biographer, can be found among the heathens of Greece and
Rome who does not attest facts belonging to one or more of these four
classes which surpass human power, and suggest an invisible spiritual
agency. The poet who writes expressly to deny such an agency speaks of the
whole world as bowed beneath the fear of it; another poet,(35) referring
tacitly to this very passage, felicitates the man not who has a pure
conscience, but who through knowledge of natural things has trampled these
fears under his feet. Nor is such a belief confined to the vulgar; but
scarcely a man of eminence, a soldier, or a statesman can be cited who
does not in his life and actions acknowledge it, shrink from it, or cower
beneath it. It is too powerful for Alexander or even Julius to escape; and
the philosophers who affect to deny it in their systems exhibit it in
their conduct. They have all the conviction of an evil power beyond and
above nature, but taking hold of natural forms, and ever lying in wait to
burst forth from them upon human life. The Greek name for superstition is
fear of the demons; and what S. Paul said of the Athenians, that he found
them in all things too fearful of the demons, might be applied to the
whole circle of nations surrounding the midland sea.

Secondly, as to the opponents of this power. Now they offer a triple
witness to its existence. The first of these is in the facts mentioned in
the New Testament. The strongest, most terrible, and most inexplicable
instance of this power lies in those diabolical possessions with which so
many of our Lord’s miracles are concerned. Again, as to the reality of
divining powers arising from the presence of a demon in a human form, we
have the evil spirit in the girl at Philippi acknowledging in S. Paul a
servant of the most high God, and, when cast out by the Apostle in the
name of Christ, leaving his victim destitute of those powers which had
brought gain to her masters, who forthwith try to avenge themselves for
their loss by exciting a persecution against the Apostle.(36)

A second witness is found in the rites and offices of the very power set
up to dethrone and abolish this other power. The Church called upon every
one who was received into her bosom to begin by renouncing the usurpation
of this great enemy, which was thus declared to be universal. She provided
forms for exorcising him. One of her Apostles warned those to whom he
wrote that men could not partake at once of the Christian sacrifice and
the heathen; for as truly as one was the chalice of the Lord, the other
was the chalice of devils; as one was the table of the Lord, the other was
the table of devils.(37)

A third witness is found in the unanimous testimony of all Christian
writers as to the reality of the demoniacal powers with which they were
waging war; as to their perpetual interference with human life; as to the
open and palpable effects which they produced; as to their unwilling
retirement in the face of that Stronger One who was come upon them. It was
not merely the fervid Tertullian who offered to rest the truth of
Christianity and the life of any ordinary Christian upon his power
publicly to expel a demon. Athanasius, who weighs every word he utters,
says also, “Let him who will, try the truth of what we have said, and in
the very presence of the spectral illusion of the demons, of the deceit of
oracles and the wonders of magic, let him use the sign of the cross
derided by them, only naming the name of Christ, and he shall see how by
him the demons fly, the oracles cease, and every sort of magic and
witchcraft is annulled.” No less express is S. Augustine in acknowledging
the reality of these dark powers, and the wonders worked by them.(38)

Resuming then for a moment our view of heathenism as a whole, with regard
to the exhibition of diabolic power in it, let us bear in mind, joined to
the absence of moral teaching, its flagrantly immoral disposition;
secondly, its illogical character, by which it is an insult to human
reason while yet accepted by the human will; and thirdly, the superhuman
effects noted in it and attached to its rites, ceremonies, and practices,
attested by many generations alike of its victims as of its opponents.
These proofs have each their own separate force, but they have likewise as
to our conclusion a cumulative force; and its result is, that the
existence of a diabolic kingdom and sovereign throned in heathenism,
pervading its rites and directing its operations, which is so expressly
declared in Holy Writ, is no less strongly proved by the facts of history.

6. Now, having sketched in four main points the substance of this
polytheism, its multiplicity, its universality, its hold upon daily life,
and its moral corruption, to all which a consummating force is added by
the indwelling of diabolic power, it remains to give a glance at certain
conditions and circumstances under which it was acting on the minds of
men. We have here taken it and examined it by itself, abstracting it from
those circumstances, but it never so appeared to those who lived under it.
The wonderful error which so enfolded these widespread nations never
exhibited itself to them bare and naked. On the contrary, it came to them
interwoven with the dearest claims of the family, the city, the country,
with the force of habit and tradition, with the dread of change, with the
past history and future hopes of their fatherland, coloured moreover with
the radiant dress of a rich and ever-advancing civilisation.

To judge of its power, vitality, and chance of permanence, we must look at
it under these conditions. And if, when we regard this idolatrous
polytheism in itself, one is lost in wonder at its ever having arisen, at
its existence, at its continuance, so, when one regards it as throned in
the customs, feelings, convictions, and interests of society, one wonders
how any moral force could ever overthrow it. At the present time not only
are there religions outside of Christianity, but there are also sects
within it, so irrational, so devoid of the witness given by internal truth
and harmony, so unable to render any account of themselves and their
claims which will satisfy a mind looking for consistency, that, regarding
them merely as facts, one cannot account for them, yet notwithstanding
they may have existed for several hundred years, and had a large share in
forming national habits of thought, or even national character; nay,
perhaps their secret strength lies in some fold of this character itself.
And because they are never seen by themselves, their intrinsic absurdity
does not come before their adherents, and the last thing which these think
of examining is the foundation of their sect, inasmuch as in fact it has
never approached them otherwise than as a condition of their daily life.
So we shall understand paganism better by considering it as interwoven
with civilisation, polity, and national feelings. We will treat of it
briefly under these three heads.

1. First, the whole eastern part of the Roman empire was made up of many
various nations having a long and sometimes renowned history, kingdoms,
and politics much anterior to Rome herself, of which the Romans had taken
violent possession, but wherein remained still the fruits of a rich and
undisturbed civilisation. And this word comprehends all the natural life
of man, all the discoveries gained by his invention or experience, and
accumulated by wealth descending from age to age, all the manifold ties of
social intercourse, all the pleasures of the intellect, united, moreover,
in their case with an art even now unrivalled in portraying the beauty of
the human figure, and in the elegance with which it adapted material forms
to the conveniences of life. So rich and varied an inheritance unfolded
itself in a thousand Hellenic cities studding the shores of the
Mediterranean. The culture itself since the time of Alexander might be
termed Hellenic, but it embraced Egypt, and Syria, and all Western Asia.
And so completely was idolatrous polytheism interwoven with culture, so
inextricably was it blended with the bulk, so gradually had it grown with
the growth, and wound its fibres about the tree and the branches, that the
worship might be absolutely identified with the civilisation. The gods of
Greece were the heads of the most illustrious Grecian families; their
hero-worship consecrated every city, every grove, every field. The gods of
Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every
Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the
gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These
deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the
sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. They had
their mementos in every street of busy traffic; they watched over the
Acropolis; not a fountain but laid claim to their patronage, nor a field
which was fruitful but by their supposed influence. These countries had
lost their political independence, but the material ease of life under the
majesty of the Roman name they retained. There was a passionate love for
this world’s goods, comforts, and enjoyments in the Greek, Syrian,
Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan races, all of them more or less worn, and
effete, and deeply sensualised; but their glory was this great Hellenic
civilisation, with which polytheism might be termed one and the same
thing.

2. When we turn to the West, the seat of the sovereign city and of the
empire itself, we find that from the very beginning and through many
centuries the political constitution of the city had been indissolubly
blended with the worship of the Roman gods. The religion of Rome was much
more than national; her polity seemed only another name for her worship.
Her temples were as much a part of her political life as her forum. So far
at least she had embodied in her whole structure the legend of her
Etruscan teacher, wherein the dwarf Tages sprung from the soil to
communicate the worship claimed by the gods.(39) Her soil and her worship
were indivisible. And even after seven centuries, when the city was
embracing the world in its arms, this union practically existed. Rome
indeed admitted, as we have said, the gods of the conquered nations into
her pantheon, but it was on the same tenure as the nations themselves
shared her civic rights. Jupiter Capitolinus was a sort of suzerain not
only to the gods of the Grecian Olympus, but to the dark forms of the Nile
deities, to the Syrian, the Libyan, the Gallic, the Germanic, the
Sarmatian Valhalla. When the greatest of her poets would express unending
duration, he joins together the race of Æneas enthroned on the Capitol
with the god who dwelt there:


    “Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo,
    Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum
    Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.”


The Roman father is the Capitoline Jupiter. I am not a king; the only king
of the Romans is Jupiter, said the most royal of the race, and the founder
of her empire, when, seeing all prostrate at his feet, he put away
reluctantly the diadem offered by his creature. Thus even he who had
seized the reality of power, who would have omens when he pleased, and
whose will was his law, left the crown on the head of Jupiter. In Rome,
all through her history “piety and patriotism were the same feeling.”(40)
When her empire became world-wide, this sort of devotion did not cease.
Rome had long been deified; and the double import of her name(41)
expressed strength against the foe without, and nourishment to the child
within. She was at once a warrior-goddess clothed in mail to meet the
enemy, and a mother offering her bosom to her citizens clustered around
her. And so in her new constitution, adapted for the world, her emperor
too was deified, as the first of her children, her living representative,
the embodiment of her force and love, the visible wielder of her unseen
power. All that is sacred in home and country to us the Roman signified
when he swore by the genius of the emperor. Nothing could be more tolerant
than this polytheism, if the innovation extended only to the borrowing or
creating a new divinity, to reforming a rite or a ceremony,(42) or to
suchlike modifications of worship which admitted that on which it rested;
but nothing more intolerant than the same polytheism when the worship
itself was attacked. A movement against the Capitoline Jupiter would be
not only sacrilege but high treason, and the refusal to call to witness
the emperor’s genius was in fact to deny his imperial authority. The
worship of the gods was as much identified with the empire of Rome in the
West as with the civilisation of Greece throughout the East.

3. But as if these two powers were not ties sufficiently strong to hold
polytheism together, there was another feeling distinct from both, which
formed its last bulwark. The iron hand which held in its grasp these vast
countries, many of them so large that by themselves they might have been
empires, was strong enough to prevent or crush insurrection, but provided
only the majesty of the Roman peace was accepted, did not seek to disturb
a large remnant of local feeling and interest still representing the
former life and polity of the several provinces. Now whatever of national,
tribe, or race feeling existed, was grouped everywhere about the worship
of the native gods.(43) The Nile-land had ceased to be a royal seat, and
was governed by a simple Roman knight as prefect of the emperor; but not
for this had the Nile gods abdicated their dark sway over their votaries.
In them the Egyptians still felt that they had something which was their
own. Thus, whatever force of patriotism still lurked in the several parts
of the empire was nurtured by its own form of polytheism, which it in turn
invested with the memories dearest and most ineradicable in man, of past
independence or renown. Not only the Egyptians, but the various Asiatic
and Libyan races, the Gauls and Germans under Roman sway, were thus
attached to their native gods with a feeling no doubt akin to that of the
English towards “Old England,” or the Russians towards “Holy Russia.”

4. Two more conditions of society throughout the whole empire we have yet
to consider in their bearing on the maintenance of polytheism: first, the
concentration of the vast power of the state—in itself an acknowledged
omnipotence, without the restriction or reservation of individual
rights—in one hand, the hand of the emperor, the sole representative of
the people. By this it would seem that all the upper classes of society,
the classes at ease as to their maintenance, the classes who have leisure
to think and will to act in political matters, were deprived of so much of
their freedom, and such deprivation would tend to support an existing
institution. Secondly, the despotism above was met by a corresponding
despotism below. The rights of the slaveholder over the human labourer
left as little margin of freedom to daily toil as the right of the
imperial autocrat to the freedom of conscience in the rich. The servants
throughout the world of Rome being slaves, were as much in the hand of
their masters as those masters were in the hand of the prince.

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 almost(48)
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 else(49) 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 difference(52) 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.

The condition, therefore, of Adam and his posterity after his fall
differed from the condition which would have been that of simple nature by
the whole extent of the guilt incurred by the nature in its fall from
sonship.

And herein lies one peculiarity, and one strangely distressing condition
of his state, in that while he lost by the fall the grace in which, as an
indwelling gift, his whole supernatural state had been rooted, he yet did
not lose that condition of being formed and intended for a supernatural
end which grace alone could enable him to attain. For the supernatural
vision and love of God he had been created, and in his fall he did not
sink to be merely a natural man; but his original end was still held out
before him as that which he might reach supported by that grace the aids
of which were in a different measure promised to him in order to lead a
life of penance, and as the earnest of a future restoration.

This, however, is far from being a complete statement of his case, and we
must go back to the circumstances of his fall in order to add that further
still more peculiar and remarkable condition which, added to the one just
described, made up the whole of his fall.

Adam had not disobeyed the divine command, and so broken the covenant of
his sonship, by the simple promptings of his own will. Another had
intervened; had suggested to the woman doubts against her Maker and
Father. She had yielded to these doubts, and disobeyed; and then Adam had
suffered himself to be drawn with her in her disobedience. Who was this
other? He was the prince and leader of spirits created good, but fallen
into enmity with God. Thus, the favourite son of God had listened to the
persuasion of God’s chief enemy, and his fall from sonship had been, by
the judgment of the offended Parent, not a simple fall from his
supernatural estate, but a fall likewise into servitude to that enemy.
This servitude also, with the guilt of the nature in which he had sinned,
Adam transmitted to the members of his body in and by their nature. Adam
with his race was the captive taken in war by the enemy of God, and the
life which he was allowed to live had the condition of this servitude
impressed on it, with this alleviation only, that the assistance of the
divine grace offered to him by the mercy of God in his state of penance
could protect those who accepted it from the effects of this servitude,
and ultimately deliver them.

Here, then, is the condition of Adam’s posterity in consequence of his
fall; members of a Head who had broken his allegiance to his Creator and
Father, and so inheriting with their nature the disinherited state into
which he had cast himself; captives, moreover, of that powerful spirit,
God’s antagonist, who had tempted Adam, seduced him, and led him to his
fall.

Now the heathenism which we have been contemplating is the carrying out in
time and space of this body of Adam in those who, by their personal fault,
fell away from the aids of grace which were accorded to man after his
fall—aids given first to Adam for the whole race, and then renewed to Noah
for the whole race; and the false worship, so blent and mingled with
heathenism, which seemed as if it were the soul of its body, is the sign
and stamp of that captivity to the evil spirit which the first man’s sin
inaugurated.

How powerful was the bond between Adam and his race, how great and
influential the headship which the Divine choice had vested in him, we see
in that mysterious transmission of guilt which passed from him to his
children. And it must be expressly noted that it was not a transmission of
punishment alone. Rather, the divine justice cannot punish where there is
no guilt; and as in this case Adam’s fall, and that of his posterity with
him, was not merely a loss but a punishment, so it had the special nature
of guilt, not only in him but in his posterity, and was a sin both of the
person and of the nature in him, of the nature only in them. We see the
force and range of the divine endowment of Adam here, though it be in the
tenacity of the calamity which ensued to his race; but it must be
remembered that such in this respect as the punishment was, the blessing
would have been. Adam was created both an individual and a race. In him
were two things—the single man and the head; but of these two things the
headship was peculiar to himself, while such as the individual Adam was,
his race was to be. He had it in his power to break the covenant of his
sonship with God, but not the tie between himself and his race.

And this sheds a light upon the darkest part of that terrible picture
which collected heathenism presents to us. Man, as a social animal, is
incessant in his action on his fellow-man; the parent and the family form
the child; the companion and the neighbourhood lead forth the child into
manhood. This work is perpetually going on in all its parts, and society
is the joint result. When, therefore, we see this society once fallen into
the possession of a false worship, which perverts the very foundations of
morality, and instils deadly error into the child with the mother’s milk,
no thoughtful mind can gaze without horror upon beings involved in such a
maze,(55) yet intended for an eternal duration. Man’s nature, as a race,
seems turned against him; and in addition to the guilt under which each
individual of the race is born, and the nature which each inherits,
wherein the internal harmony of peace is broken, and neither the appetites
obey the reason nor the reason is obedient to God, comes the force of
habit, of education, of culture, of companionship, of man’s business and
leisure, his play and his earnest, the force of his language, the
expression of his thoughts upon himself and others, the whole force, in
fact, of man’s social being when it is put under possession of an evil
power, man’s adversary. But this social nature was to have been to him the
means of the greatest good. As by his natural descent from Adam unfallen
would have come the grace of sonship, so the whole brotherhood of those
who shared that gift would have helped and supported each in the
maintenance of it. The human family would have had a beauty and a unity of
its own as such; an order and a lustre would have rested on the whole
body, confirming each member in the possession of his own particular gift.
The concatenation of evil in the corrupt society is the most striking
contrast to the fellowship of good in the upright; and while it is
distinct from that guilt which descends to man as the sin of his nature,
yet springs like it from the original constitution of that nature as a
race. It is the invasion of evil upon good carried to its utmost point,
wherein we discern most plainly “the prince of this world” wielding that
“power of darkness” by which the Apostle described the whole state of the
world, out of which these nations, which made the empire of Augustus, were
a part.

We have thus contemplated four distinct pictures. The first of these was
human nature bare and naked by itself, a merely ideal view of man, as a
being compounded of soul and body, each possessing only the faculties
which belong to them as spiritual and corporeal natures, the result of
which is a substantial union, because the spiritual substance becomes the
form of the corporeal, not by making the body, when already animated by
another principle, to participate of spiritual life, but by becoming
itself the principle first animating it. And we set forth this condition
of human nature in order to throw light upon our second picture—the first
man as he was actually created, possessing, as a gift superadded by the
purest divine bounty to this his natural constitution, a divine sonship
founded in grace; which transcendant union of the Holy Spirit with his
soul kept the soul with all its faculties in a loving obedience to God,
and the body in obedience to the soul; and added even to this state the
further gratuitous prerogatives of immunity from error, fault, pain,
distress, and death. Our third picture was man in this same state, but
constituted besides by the divine will, whose good pleasure was the sole
source of all this state of sonship, to be father of a race like to
himself, receiving from him, with its natural generation, the transmitted
gift of sonship; that is, from our view of him as an individual person we
went on to consider him as the head of a body—the root of a tree.
Fourthly, we have looked on the same man stripped by a fault, personal to
himself but natural to his race, of this divine sonship—reduced to a state
like that which the first would have been, but altered from it by two
grave conditions, one of guilt lying on himself and his race on account of
this gratuitous gift of sonship lost, another of captivity to that enemy
of his Creator and Father who had seduced him to fall. And this picture
included in it the double effect of guilt transmitted through a whole race
from its head and father, and of the personal sins of each individual of
the race: which, moreover, had a tendency to be perpetually heightened by
the social nature of man—that part of his original condition which, as it
would have supported his highest good in the state of innocence, so came
to make his corruption intense and more complicated in the state of fall.
It has not been our purpose in this sketch to dwell upon those who, like
Adam himself after his fall, accepted the divine assistance offered to
them, and the promise of a future Restorer, and who, living a life of
penance, kept their faith in God. Such an assistance was offered not only
to Adam but to his whole race, and such a line of men there always was; of
whom Abel was the type in the world before the flood; Noah after the
flood, as the second father of the whole race; Abraham, the friend of God
and father of the faithful, in whose son Isaac a people was to be formed,
which, as the nations in their apostasy fell more and more away from the
faith and knowledge of the true God, should maintain still the seed of
promise out of which the Restorer should spring. But before that Restorer
came, the heathenism—of which we have been speaking in the former chapter,
and of which we have been giving the solution above—was in possession of
all but the whole earth, and the captivity of man to his spiritual foe, on
account of which that foe is called “the Ruler” and “the God” “of this
world,” which is said “to lie in the malignant one,”(56) was all but
universal. This universality denoted that the fulness of the time(57)
marked out in the providence of God was come.

For Adam, in his first creation, and in the splendour of that robe of
sonship(58) in which he was invested, had been the figure of One to come:
his figure as an individual person, his figure as father and head of a
race; his figure likewise, when the race itself is viewed as summed up in
one, as one body. Let us take each of these in their order.

What was the counterpart of Adam, as an individual person, in the new
creation? It was the Eternal Son Himself assuming a human soul and body,
and bearing our nature in His divine personality. Over against the
creature invested with sonship stood the uncreated Son, invested with a
created nature. For the grace of the Holy Spirit given by measure, and
depending for its continuance on the obedience of the creature, was the
Fountain of Grace Himself ruling the creature by a union indefeasible and
eternal; for grace communicated grace immanent in its source. For the son
gratuitously adopted was the Son by nature, making, by an inconceivable
grace, the created nature assumed to be that not of the adopted but of the
natural Son. In a word, the figure was man united to God; the counterpart,
the God-man.

What, again, is Adam’s counterpart as Father and Head of his race? It was
human nature itself, which the Word of God espoused in the bridal chamber
of the Virginal Womb, and so is become the Second Adam, the Father of a
new race, the Head of a mystical Body, which corresponds to Adam’s
original Headship, but as far transcends it as the grace of the Incarnate
Word transcends the grace bestowed on the first man. As Adam, had he stood
in his original state of son, would have transmitted the gift of a like
sonship to his whole race—as, falling, he did actually transmit to that
race the guilt of adoption lost, so the Second Adam, out of His own
uncreated Sonship, but through the nature which He had assumed, bestowed
the dower of adopted sons and the gift of justice on his race. From the
one there was punishment generating through the flesh;(59) from the other,
grace regenerating through the Spirit. From the one, nature stripped and
wounded, yet still bound to its head by an indissoluble tie; by the other,
the Spirit of the Head, the Spirit of Truth, Charity, Unity, and Sanctity,
ruling his Body and animating it, as the natural soul animates the natural
body. Precisely where the mystery was darkest and the misery greatest, the
divine grace is most conspicuous, and the divine power most triumphant.
The very point which brings out Adam’s connection with his race has an
exact counterpart in Christ’s Headship of His people, and an inscrutable
judgment serves to illustrate an unspeakable gift. In exact accordance
with the doctrine that the sin of Adam is man’s sin, and the guilt of Adam
man’s guilt, is that boundless and unimaginable grace that the Incarnate
Word did not merely assume an individual human nature, but espoused in
that assumption the whole nature; that on the cross He paid the debt of
the whole nature, whether for original or actual sin; that His
resurrection is our collective justification; that the gift of sonship is
bestowed on men not as individual persons, but as members of His Body,
before they have personally merited anything, just as the guilt came on
them, as members of Adam, before they demerited anything personally.
Exactly where the obscurity of the fall was the deepest, the light of the
restoration is brightest; and where the sentence was most severe, the
grace most wonderful. But to deny the first Adam would entail the loss of
the Second; and he who declines the inheritance of the father stripped and
wounded cannot enter into the Body of the Word made flesh.

But thirdly, as in that terrible corruption of heathenism, wherein
immorality was based on false worship, we saw the body of Adam run out
through time and space into the most afflicting form which evil can assume
in the individual and social life of man, so in that Body which is ruled
by the Divine Headship we see the counterpart, the triumph of grace,
individual man taken out of that state of fallen nature, and invested with
a membership answering to the dignity of the Head. The one great Christian
people, the Kingdom of Christ, stands over against that kingdom of
violence, disorder, impurity, and false worship. As there is a unity of
the fallen Adam, a force of evil which impact only gives, so much more is
there a unity of the Second Adam, which is not a collection of
individuals, but a Body with its Head. The first unity consists in the
reasonable soul, informing the flesh which was moulded once for all from
the clay and descended to the whole race; and the race so descending was
polluted by a common guilt, on which, as an ever-fertile root, grew the
whole trunk of man’s personal sins, of falsehood, enmity, corruption of
morals, division, having the common quality of egotism. The second unity
consists in the Holy Spirit of the Head communicated to the soul and body
of the faithful people, both being restored by that grace of which truth
and charity, unity and sanctity, are the tokens, the full virtue being
planted in the cross of the Head, and from the cross diffusing itself to
His Body.

II. And so we are brought again to Him who stood before Pilate to make the
good confession, and who declared that the cause of His coming into the
world was to bear witness to the truth. In what form was that witness to
be made, and how was it to be efficacious? This is that point which we
have now to illustrate. Adam’s disobedience was a single act, the power of
which, springing out of his headship, extended through the whole line of
his race; through the consequences of this act the truth was obscured to
them, and human life involved in manifold error. What was that action on
the part of Christ, the purpose, as He declares, of His Incarnation, which
had an equally enduring effect? If the guilt communicated was not
transitory, then should the corresponding grace be perpetual. And how was
it so? The Son of God, as the Head of His race, does not stand at
disadvantage with Adam, but rather, we are told His grace is superabundant
in its results over the other’s sin: and He Himself declared that He had
completely finished the work given Him to do.(60) But here He describes
this work to be the bearing witness to the truth. For, indeed, it was
worthy of the eternal wisdom to clothe Himself in flesh(61) in order that
truth, the good of the intellect, and the end of the whole universe, might
stand forth revealed to His rational creatures: and He who made all things
in truth would Himself restore truth, when it had been obscured by the
traducer.

1. Let us take the character which He acknowledged and claimed before
Pilate: His character of King, and the kingdom in which it is exercised.

The Person of Christ, as that of the eternal Word, is the Truth itself.
But He has assumed a body, and in that body He declares that He is a king,
and that the exercise of His royalty is the bearing witness to the
truth.(62) His words therefore indicate no less than the creation of a
kingdom to which the truth should be the principle of subsistence. But
what in the material or temporal kingdom is that by force of which it
subsists? Plainly power. A kingdom may be larger or smaller in population,
wealth, extent, stronger or weaker in the quality of its people; but as
long as it retains in itself that in which power culminates, sovereignty,
it will be a kingdom. If this power departs from it, if it falls into
subjection to a foreign authority, or if its own subjects successfully
rebel against its power, it ceases to be. In the kingdom, therefore, of
which Christ speaks, the maintenance of truth corresponds to what the
maintenance of power is in a material kingdom.

But power in the material kingdom moves men to the natural end of society;
it preserves order, administers justice, allows and assists all natural
forces to develop themselves, and it must be in its supreme exercise one
and indisputable: that is, it culminates in sovereignty. So in the
spiritual kingdom truth, the corresponding power, moves men to the
supernatural end, and truth culminates in infallibility. But where is this
power seated, and how does the King wield it?

The same who here calls Himself King and declares it to be the function of
His royalty to bear witness to the truth, in describing elsewhere the very
creation of His kingdom says to His apostles, “You shall receive power by
the Holy Ghost coming upon you,” bidding them also to remain in Jerusalem
“until they were endued with power from on high.”(63) But a few hours
before that scene in the hall of Pilate He had told them also that He
would send them the Spirit of Truth, who should abide with them for ever,
and should lead them into all truth. He creates therefore the kingdom of
the truth by sending down the Spirit of the Truth to dwell for ever with
those to whom He is sent; and this Spirit of the Truth is His own Spirit,
whom He Himself will send as the token of His ascension and session; the
Spirit who dwelt in the Body which He had assumed, and in which He spoke
before Pilate, should be sent by Him when that Body had taken its place at
the right hand of God, should invest with His own power those to whom He
was sent, and should never cease to be with them in His character of the
Spirit of Truth. Here, then, is that power in the kingdom of the Truth
which enables it to bear a true and a perpetual witness. It is the power
of the King, for it is His Spirit: it is the power of the kingdom, for it
remains in it, is throned in it, and makes it to be what it is.

But to create a kingdom of the truth, and to bear perpetual witness in
that kingdom to the truth, is not only to state what is true. These
expressions mark out an organisation in and by means of which truth is
perpetuated. And further, the spirit in man is both reason and will; and
that man may act, the intellect which has truth for its object must work
on the will which has good for its object. And so the witness which our
Lord speaks of is that action of the truth upon the will which produces a
life in accordance with it: it is truth not left to itself, but supported
by grace. This power of the Spirit of Truth is therefore double, as
intended to work on the two powers of the soul, the reason and the will:
it is the double gift of Truth and Grace; as He is the Spirit of Grace no
less than the Spirit of Truth, and all grace is His immediate gift.

Thus the Word made flesh being full of Truth and Grace from His own Person
communicated that Truth and Grace as the power which should form His
kingdom for ever, abide in it, and constitute its being a kingdom; the
gift of truth and grace being the very presence of His own Spirit, who
took possession of His kingdom on the day of Pentecost and holds it for
ever.

This whole possession of Truth and Grace dwelling in a visible body is the
work of the eternal Word, who assumed a body for that purpose. It is the
counter-creation to the kingdom of falsehood which commenced with the sin
of the first man believing a falsehood against his Maker, and which spread
itself with his lineage into all lands.(64) And as in the natural creation
He not only created but maintained—for He did not make His creatures and
then depart from them, but from that time they exist in Him—so in the
supernatural the act of maintaining is equivalent to the act of creating,
it is a continued creation. As the guilt had a force which was fruitful,
which continued and propagated itself, and produced a widespread reign of
falsehood, how much more should that mighty and astonishing grace of a
Divine Person assuming a created nature be fruitful, continue, and
propagate itself in the maintenance of a visible kingdom, whose
distinctive character and its very life should be the possession and
communication of the truth. Should the Creator of man in His greatest work
be less powerful than His seduced creature in his fall? and if the fall,
pregnant with falsehood, bore fruit through ages in a whole race, should
not the recovery likewise have its visible dominion, and stand over
against the ruin as the kingdom of truth?

It is as King ruling in the kingdom of truth that the Divine Word
incarnate redeems man from captivity, which began in a revolt from the
truth, and in becoming subject to falsehood. All who are outside His
kingdom lie in this captivity;(65) the life which He gave voluntarily is
the price paid for their liberation; and as age after age, so long as the
natural body of Adam lasts, the captivity endures, so age after age the
liberation takes effect by entering into His kingdom. And this is the most
general name, the name of predilection, which both in prophecy marked the
time of Messiah the King, and was announced by His precursor, and taken by
our Lord to indicate His having come. The eternal duration of this kingdom
may be said to be the substance of all prophecy, and it was precisely in
the interpretation of a vision describing under the image of a great
statue the four world-kingdoms, that is, the whole structure, course, and
issue of the heathenism which we have been contemplating, that Daniel
contrasts these kingdoms with another. “In the days of these kings shall
the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the
kingdom shall not be delivered to another people, but it shall break in
pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and shall stand itself for ever.”
As King in this kingdom through all the generations of men from the moment
that He stood in Pilate’s hall until He comes to judge the world, our Lord
bears witness to the truth, His witness and His royalty being
contemporaneous and conterminous to each other.

2. This perpetual possession and announcement of the truth is indicated by
another image which is of constant recurrence,(66) wherein Christ is the
Inhabitant, His people the Inhabited, while both are the House or Temple,
for that in which God dwells is at once His House and Temple. Thus Moses
is said to have been “faithful in all his house as a servant, but Christ
as a Son over His own house, whose house are we.” Here the King who bears
witness to the truth is the God who sanctifies the faithful people by
dwelling in them and building them in the truth. It is not merely the
individual believer, but the whole mass of the faithful which grows up to
be a holy temple; and the ever-abiding Spirit of truth, whose presence is
the guarantee of truth, is the equally abiding Spirit of sanctity, whose
presence imparts holiness. The Son dwells in His own house by His Spirit
for ever: as He ceases not to be incarnate, He ceases not to dwell in His
house, and could falsehood be worshipped in His temple, it would cease to
be His. That was the work of heathenism, when a false spirit had caused
error to be worshipped for truth; the specific victory of the Word
incarnate was to set up a temple in which the truth should be worshipped
for ever, “the inhabitation of God in the Spirit.” But living stones make
up this temple, that is, individual spirits, endued with their own reason
and will, yet no less fitted in and cemented together by His grace, and so
forming a structure which has an organic unity of its own, being the House
and Temple of One. It is in virtue of this inhabitation that the Church is
termed the House of God, the pillar and ground of the truth, inasmuch as
it contains, as between walls,(67) the faith and its announcement and
proclamation, that is, the law of the King of Truth declared by His
heralds. “We speculate,” says S. Augustine, “that we may attain to vision;
yet even the most studious speculation would fall into error unless the
Lord inhabited the Church herself that now is.”(68) And again: “In earthly
possessions a benefit is given to the proprietor when he is given
possession; not so is the possession which is the Church. The benefit here
lies in being possessed by such a one.”—“Christ’s Body is both Temple and
House and City, and He who is Head of the Body is Inhabiter of the House,
and Sanctifier of the Temple, and King of the City.—What can we say more
acceptable to Him than this, Possess us?”(69)

3. Again, to take another image, which is the greatest of realities. What
a wonderful production of divine skill is the structure of the human body!
Even its outward beauty is such as to sway our feelings with a force which
reason has at times a hard combat to overcome, so keen is the delight
which it conveys. But the inward distribution of its parts is so
marvellous that those who have spent their lives in the study of its
anatomy can find in a single member, for instance, in the hand, enough out
of which to fill a volume with the wise adaptation of means to ends which
it reveals. There are parts of it the structure of which is so minute and
subtle that the most persevering science has not yet attained fully to
unravel their use. In all this arrangement of nerves and muscles, machines
of every sort, meeting all manner of difficulties, and supplying all kinds
of uses, what an endless storehouse of wisdom and forethought! And all
these are permeated by a common life, which binds every part, whatever its
several importance, into one whole, and all these, in the state of health,
work together with so perfect an ease that the living actor, the bearer of
so marvellous a structure, is unconscious of an effort, and exults in the
life so simple and yet so manifold poured out on such a multitude of
members, a life so tender that the smallest prick is felt over the whole
body, and yet so strong that a wound may transfix the whole structure
leaving the life untouched. And, in addition to this physical marvel, the
incorporeal mind, which has its seat in this material structure, and whose
presence is itself its life, rules like an absolute monarch with
undisputed sway over his whole dominion, so that the least movement of
volition carries with it a willing obedience in the whole frame, and for
it instantaneously the eye gazes, the ear listens, the tongue speaks, the
feet walk, the hands work, and the brain feels with an incomparable unity.
The marvel of the body is that things so many and various by the rule of
the artificer impressed upon them are yet one, concur to one end, and
produce one whole, from which no part can be taken, and to which none can
be added without injury, the least and the greatest replete with one life,
which so entirely belongs to the whole body that what is severed from the
body at once dies. “Now as the body is one, and has many members, but all
the members of this one body, being many, are one body, so also,” says S.
Paul, “is Christ,” giving the name of the Head to the whole Body. What the
human head is to its own body, that our Lord is to His Church. Perhaps no
other image in the whole realm of nature would convey with such force the
three relations(70) which constitute spiritual headship, an inseparable
union, by which the head and the body form one whole, an unceasing
government, including every sort of provision and care, and a perpetual
influx of grace. This is on the part of the head, while as to the body
perhaps no other image but this could equally convey the conjunction of
many different members with various functions, whose union makes the
structure, and whose unity is something entirely distinct from that which
all the parts in their several state, or even in their collocation and
arrangement, make up, for it is the life which makes them one. Thus it is
an unfathomed depth of doctrine, which is conveyed in the words, “God gave
Him to be Head over all things to the Church, who is His Body, the fulness
of Him who fills all things in all.” For though no language could exhaust
or duly exhibit the meaning of the kingdom or the temple in which the
abiding work of our Lord is indicated, we have in this title yet more
strikingly portrayed the intimate union and common life of His people with
Christ, and His tender affection for them, since the King of Truth who
redeems and the God of Truth who sanctifies is at the same time the Head
who by His own Spirit of the truth rules and vivifies His own Body. If it
be possible to dissociate the idea of the King from his kingdom, or that
of God from the temple of living souls in whom He is worshipped, and whose
worship of Him makes them one, yet in the human frame to dissever the head
from the body is to destroy the propriety of both terms, and it is as a
whole human body that the apostle represents Christ and His people to us.

4. Yet, as if this was not enough, S. Paul goes on to delineate Him as the
Bridegroom, whose love after redeeming sanctifies one who shall be His
bride for ever, one who obeys Him with the fidelity of conjugal love, one
whose preservation of His faith unstained is not the dry fulfilment of a
command, but the prompting of wedded affection. The image seems chosen to
convey intensity of love, first on the part of the Bridegroom as
originating it, and then on the part of the Bride as responding to it. But
no less does the unity of person in the Bride, given by S. John as well as
by S. Paul, indicate in the Church something quite distinct from the
individuals who compose her. For she is the pattern of the faithful wife
in that she is subject to Christ; and in these words a fact is stated,(71)
a fact without limit of place or time, which therefore marks that she who
is so described can never at any time be separated from the fidelity and
love due from her to her Head and Husband. And this is not true of the
individual souls belonging to her, for they, having been once faithful
members of the body, may fall away and be finally lost. The Bride alone is
subject to Christ with a never-failing subjection. And He on His part
loves her as His own flesh, a union of the two loves of the Head for the
Body, and of the Bridegroom for the Bride, which is true with regard to
Him of the Church alone, since individuals within her He may cast off, but
her alone He cherishes and fosters for ever. It is indefectible union and
unbroken charity with Him which her quality of Bride conveys.

5. And out of this wedded union by that great sacrament concerning Christ
and the Church, of which in the same passage S. Paul speaks, that they two
shall be one flesh, springs the whole race, in the generation of whom is
most completely verified his title of the Second Adam. From the womb of
the Church, become from a Bride the Mother of all living, the Father of
the age to come bears that chosen race, and royal priesthood, and holy
nation, and purchased people. And here we see expressed with great force
the truth that all who belong to the Father’s supernatural race must come
by the Mother. Her office of parent is here set forth; as her fidelity and
intense affection shine in the title of the Bride, as her union,
submission, and unfailing reception of life in her title of Body, so in
the title of Mother all the saved are borne to Christ by her, as S.
Cyprian(72) drew the conclusion, “he cannot have God for his father who
has not the Church for his mother.”

In all this we see the five(73) great loves first shown by God to man,
then returned by man to God; the love of the Saviour, redeeming captives,
and out of these forming His kingdom; the love of the friend, who is God,
sanctifying those whom He redeems into one temple; the love which He has
implanted in man for self-preservation, since that which He so redeems and
sanctifies He has made His own body; the love which He has given to the
bridegroom for the bride, since it is the Bride of the Lamb who is so
adorned; and the love of the Father for his race, since it is his wife who
bears every child to him. Why is the whole force of human language
exhausted, and the whole strength of the several human affections
accumulated, in this manner? It is to express the super-eminent work of
God made flesh, who, when He took a human body, created in correspondence
to it that among men and out of men in which the virtue of His Incarnation
is stored up, the mystical Kingdom, Temple, Body, Bride, and Mother. No
one of these titles could convey the full riches of His work, or the
variously wrought splendour of His wisdom, which the angels desire to look
into; therefore He searched through human nature and society in all its
depth and height for images whose union might express a work so unexampled
and unique. Rather, it is truer to say that these natural affections
themselves, the gift of that most bountiful giver, were created by Him
originally to be types, foreshadowings, and partial copies of that more
excellent supernatural love which He had decreed to show to man, since
first of all things in the order of the divine design must the Incarnation
have been. The whole structure of the family, and the affections which it
contains, must spring out of this root, for nature was anticipated by
grace in man’s creation, and must ever have been subordinate to it. And
now, when the full time of grace is come, these titles of things which by
His mercy have lasted through the fall, serve to illustrate the greatness
of the restoration. For this, which has many names, all precious and dear,
is but one creation, having the manifold qualities of redemption and
sanctification, of organic unity in one body, wherein many members
conspire to a corporate life, which life itself is charity, and in which
is the production of the holy race. As we gaze on the Kingdom, Temple,
Body, Spouse, and Family, one seems to melt and change into the other. The
Kingdom is deepened and enlarged by the thought that the King is the
eternal Truth who is worshipped therein; and the worship passes on into
the love of the Incarnate God for the members of His own Body, whom He
first saves, then fosters and cherishes as His own flesh: and here again
is blended that tenderest love of the Bridegroom for the bride, which
further issues into the crowning love of the Father for His race. The mode
of the salvation seems to spring from the nature of God Himself, since all
paternity in heaven and earth springs from that whereby He is Father of
the only-begotten Son, who, descending from heaven with the love of the
Bridegroom for the bride, binds together in sonship derived from his own
the members of His body, the bride of His heart, the subjects of His
kingdom, who are built up as living stones into that unimaginable temple
raised in the unity of worshipping hearts to the ever-blessed Trinity. To
this grows out, as the fulness of Him who fills all in all, that body of
the Second Adam, of which in the body of the first Adam He had Himself
deposited the germ.

When the angel described to the Blessed Virgin herself that miracle of
miracles which was to take place in her, the assumption of human flesh by
the Son of God, he used these terms: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee,
and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” When the Son of
God, at the moment of His Ascension, declared to His Apostles the creation
of His mystical body, by using similar words He referred them back to His
own conception: “You shall receive power, the Holy Ghost coming upon you:”
having already on the day of His Resurrection told them, “I send the
promise of my Father upon you; but wait you in the city until you be
indued with power from on high.”(74) Our Lord Himself thus suggests to us
the remarkable parallel between the formation of His natural and His
mystical body. He who framed the one and the other is the same, the Holy
Ghost: the Head precedes, the Body follows; because of the first descent,
that Holy Thing which was to be born should be called the Son of God;
because of the second, “you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all
Judea, and Samaria, and to the farthest part of the earth;” and this is
said in answer to their question whether He would then restore the kingdom
to Israel: that is, the second descent of the Holy Ghost forms the kingdom
whose witness to Christ is perpetual; forms the body with which and in
which He will be for ever by this power of His Spirit dwelling in it to
the end of the world. We have therefore here all the various functions and
qualities which, under the five great titles of Kingdom, Temple, Body,
Spouse, and Mother, delineate His Church, gathered up into that unity
which comprehends them all, and from which, as a source, they all flow,
“The Power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men.”(75) This creation is as
absolutely His, and His alone, as the forming of our Lord’s own Body in
the Virginal Womb; it is the sequel of it; the fulfilment among men of
those divine purposes for which God became Incarnate; in one word, the
Body of the Head perpetually quickened by His Spirit. And here we may
remark those striking resemblances between the natural and mystical Body
which this “power of the Holy Ghost,” the former of them both, indicates.
For in the first the manhood(76) cannot be severed from the Person of the
Word, nor in the second can the body of the Church be severed from Christ
the Head and His Spirit. Secondly, in the first the Person of the Word and
His manhood make one Christ, and in the second Christ the Head and the
Church the Body make one complete Body. Thirdly, in the first the manhood
has its own will, but through union with the Godhead is impeccable and
indefeasible; and in the second the Body of the Church, though possessing
its own liberty, is so ruled by Christ and guided by His Spirit, that it
cannot fail in truth or in charity. Fourthly, in the first there is an
influx of celestial gifts from the Person of the Word into the manhood,
and in the second there is a like influx from Christ the Head into His
Body the Church, so that he who hears the Church hears Christ, and he who
persecutes the Church, as Saul before the gate of Damascus, persecutes
Christ. Fifthly, in the first the Head, through the manhood as His
instrument, fulfilled all the economy of redemption, dwelt among men,
taught them, redeemed them, bestowed on them the gifts of holiness and the
friendship of God; and in the second, what He began in His manhood He
continues through the Church as His own Body,(77) and bestows on men what
He merited in His flesh, showing in and by the Church His presence among
men, teaching them holiness, preserving them from error, and leading them
to the eternal inheritance.

It is also by this one “power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men” that we
learn how the Head and the Body make one Christ. As in the human frame the
presence of the soul gives it life and unity, binding together every
member by that secret indivisible force, from the least to the greatest,
from the heart and brain to the minutest portion of the outward skin, so
in this divine Body, which makes the whole Christ, it is the presence of
the Holy Ghost, as of the soul, which gives it unity and life. The
conclusion was drawn by a great Saint, and no less great a genius,
fourteen hundred years ago, and I prefer S. Augustine’s words to any which
I can use myself: “Our spirit by which the whole race of man lives is
called the soul; our spirit, too, by which each man in particular lives is
called the soul; and you see what the soul does in the body. It quickens
all the limbs: through the eyes it sees, through the ears it hears,
through the nostrils smells, through the tongue speaks, through the hands
works, through the feet walks; it is present at once in all the limbs that
they may live; life it gives to all, their functions to each. The eye does
not hear, nor the ear nor the tongue see, nor the ear nor the eye speak,
but both live; the functions are diverse, the life common. So is the
Church of God. In some saints it works miracles; in others gives voice to
the truth; in others, again, maintains the virginal life; in others keeps
conjugal fidelity; in these one thing, in those another; each have their
proper work, but all alike live. Now, what the soul is to the human body,
that is the Holy Spirit to the body of Christ, which is the Church: what
the soul does in all the limbs of an individual body, that does the Holy
Spirit in the whole Church. But see what you have to avoid, what to
observe, and what to fear. It happens that, in the human body, or in any
other body, some member may be cut off, hand, finger, or foot. Does the
soul follow it when cut off? As long as it was in the body it lived: when
cut off, it loses life. So too the Christian man is a Catholic while he
lives in the body; when cut off, he becomes a heretic; the Spirit does not
follow the amputated limb.”(78)

But what is this “power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men”? It is the
whole treasure of truth and grace, which dwelt first in the natural body
of Christ, which He came to bestow on men, which He withdrew not when He
ascended, but of which He promised the continuance in the Person of the
Holy Ghost, and fulfils by that Person indwelling in the Church. It was
the imparting the whole treasure of truth and grace by such an indwelling
which made it expedient for Him to go, which made His bodily departure not
a loss, but a gain, which was “the promise” of which He spoke on that last
night, and which was expressly declared to be a perpetual presence,
leading, as it were, by the hand(79) into all truth—an all-powerful,
all-completing, all-compensating presence, such as that alone is or can be
which maintains the intellect of man in truth, because it maintains his
will in grace: and, instead of the two wild horses of which the great
heathen(80) spoke, guides the soul in her course as borne aloft on those
twin divine yoke-fellows,(81) faith and charity.

Correlative, therefore, to the Person of Him who is at once King, and God,
and Head, and Bridegroom, and Father, is that singular creation of His
Spirit, by which, in the Kingdom, Temple, Body, Spouse, and Mother, He
deposited the treasure of the truth and grace which He became man to
communicate. It was not as individual men, living a life apart, but as
common children of one race, joint members of one body, that the guilt of
the first father fell upon them; it is only on them as children of a
higher race and members of a far greater body, that the grace of the
Deliverer is bestowed. The distinctions of race and the divisions of
condition drop away as they are baptised into one body, and made to drink
of one spirit. The new and supernatural life cannot be communicated save
by this act of engrafting into a new body. As Eve from the side of Adam
sleeping, so the Church from the side of Christ suffering; as Eve bears
still to Adam the children of men, so the Church to Christ the children of
Christ. These are not two mysteries, but one, unfathomable in both its
parts, of justice and of mercy; but the whole history of the human race
bears witness to the first, and the whole history of the Christian people
to the second. It would be amply sufficient to prove what we have been
saying, that the first communication of the supernatural life is conferred
by being baptised into one body and made to drink into one spirit. But
this is not all. There is a yet dearer and more precious gift, which
maintains and increases the life so given. Our Lord stands in the midst of
His Church visibly forming from day to day and from age to age that Body
of His which reaches through the ages; He takes from Himself and gives to
us. He incorporates Himself in His children. He grows up in us, and by
visible streams from His heart maintains the life first given. Here, above
all, is the one Christ, the Head and the Body. This is but an elemental
truth of Christian faith, though it is the highest joy of the Christian
heart. It was in an instruction to catechumens that S. Augustine said,
“Would you understand the Body of Christ? Hear the Apostle saying to the
faithful, ‘But you are the Body and the members of Christ.’ If, then, you
are Christ’s Body and His members, it is your own mystery which is placed
on the Lord’s table; it is your own mystery which you receive. It is to
what you are that you reply amen, and by replying subscribe. For you are
told, ‘the Body of Christ,’ and you reply, amen. Be a member of the Body
of Christ, and let your amen be true. Why, then, in bread? Let us bring
here nothing of our own, but listen to the Apostle himself again and
again, for in speaking of that sacrament he says, ‘We that are many are
one bread, one body.’ Understand and rejoice. Here is unity, verity,
piety, charity. One bread. Who is that one bread? We being many are one
bread. Remember that the bread is not made of one, but of many grains.
When you were exorcised, it was as if you were ground; when baptised, as
if you were kneaded together with water; when you received the fire of the
Holy Ghost, it was your baking. Be what you see, and receive what you are.
This the Apostle said of the bread. Of the chalice what we should
understand is clear enough even unsaid. For as to make the visible species
of bread many grains are kneaded with water into one, as if that were
taking place which Holy Scripture records of the faithful, ‘they had one
mind and one heart in God,’ so also in the case of the wine. Many grapes
hang on the bunch, but their juice is poured together into one. So too
Christ the Lord signified us; willed us to belong to Himself; consecrated
on His own table the mystery of our peace and unity. He who receives the
mystery of unity and holds not the bond of peace receives not a mystery
for himself, but a witness against himself.”(82)

Thus the coherence of the natural and mystical Body of Christ was at once
exhibited and effected in the great central act of Christian worship, and
the whole fruit of the Incarnation was seen springing from the Person of
Christ, and bestowed on men as His members in the unity of one Body. Thus
were they taken out of the isolation, distraction, and enmity—that state
of mutual strife and disorder which heathendom expresses—and made into the
one divine commonwealth; and thus the Body of Christ grows to its full
stature and perfect form through all the ages of Christendom.

And if there be one conviction which, together with the belief in the
Incarnation itself of the Word, is common to all the Fathers, Doctors,
Saints, and Martyrs of the Church—which together with that belief and as
part of it is the ground of their confidence in trouble, of their
perseverance in enduring, of their undoubting faith in times of
persecution, of their assurance of final victory, it is the sense which
encompassed their whole life, that they were members of one Body, which,
in virtue of an organic unity in itself and with its Head, was to last for
ever. The notion that this Body, as such, could fail, that it could cease
to be the treasure-house of the divine truth and grace, would have struck
them with as much horror as the notion that Christ had not become
incarnate, and was not their Redeemer. The Body which the Holy Ghost
animated on the day of Pentecost never ceased to be conscious of its
existence—conscious that the power of its Head, the Eternal Truth, was in
it, and would be in it for ever. Confidence in himself as an individual
member of the Body, the Christian had not, for he knew that through his
personal sinfulness grace might be withdrawn from him, and that he might
fall away; confidence he did not place either in his own learning,
knowledge, and sanctity, or in these gifts as belonging to any individual
Christian; his confidence lay in the King who reigned in an everlasting
Kingdom, in the Head who animated an incorruptible Body. To sever these
two would have been to decapitate Christ.(83) The thought that the Bride
of Christ could herself become an adulteress, and teach her children the
very falsehoods of that idol-worship which she was created to overthrow,
would have appeared to him the denial of all Christian belief. And such a
denial indeed it is to any mind which, receiving the Christian truth as a
divine gift, looks for it also to have a logical cohesion with itself, to
be consistent and complete, to be a body of truth, not a bundle of
opinions. Let us take once more S. Augustine as expressing, not a private
feeling, but the universal Christian sense, when he thus reprehended the
Donatist pretension, that truth had deserted the Body of the Church to
dwell in the province of Africa. “But, they say, that Church which was the
Church of all nations exists no longer. She has perished. This they say
who are not in her. O shameless word! The Church is not because thou art
not in her. See, lest therefore thou be not, for though thou be not, she
will be. This word, abominable, detestable, full of presumption and
falsehood, supported by no truth, illuminated by no wisdom, seasoned with
no sense, vain, rash, precipitate, and pernicious—this it was which the
Spirit of God foresaw, and as against these very men, when He foretold
unity in that saying, ‘To announce the name of the Lord in Zion, and his
worship in Jerusalem, when the peoples and kingdoms join together in one
that they may serve the Lord.’ ”(84)

Now, to suppose that anything which is false has been, or is, or can be
taught by the Church of God, is to overthrow the one idea which runs
through the titles of the Kingdom, Temple, Body, and Spouse of Christ, it
is to make the Mother of His children an adulteress, to deny that power of
the Holy Ghost coming down on the day of Pentecost, and abiding for ever,
with His special function of leading into all truth, that presence of the
Comforter in virtue of which the Apostles said for themselves and for the
Church through all time, “It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.”
With all men who reason, such a supposition is equivalent to the statement
that Christ has failed in what He came on earth to do, for “the Word was
made flesh that He might become the Head of the Church.”(85) Next,
therefore, in atrocity to that blasphemy which assaults the blessed
Trinity in Unity upon His throne is the miserable and heartless blasphemy
which, by imputing corruption of the truth to the very Kingdom and Temple,
the very Body and Spouse of the Truth Himself, the Incarnate God, would
declare the frustration of that purpose which He became man to execute,
the falsifying of that witness of which He spoke in the hall of Pilate,
and would so annihilate that glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace to men of good-will, which was the angelic song on the morning of
His birth, and is daily(86) in the mouth of His Bride. The truth can as
little cease out of the House and Temple of God as the Father and Son can
cease sending the Spirit to dwell in it: the truth can as little cease to
be proclaimed and taught in its own kingdom as the King can cease to reign
in it. The conjugal faith of the Bride of Christ cannot fail, because He
remains her Bridegroom. The power of the Head, the double power of truth
and grace, cannot cease to rule and vivify His Body, because He is its
Head for ever. The Mother cannot deceive her children, because she is of
one flesh with the Son of Man, in the union of an unbroken wedlock.

It has been said above that the power of that bond which from the origin
of man united the race to its head was shown not only in the guilt which
the act of that head was able to inflict on the body, not only in the
exact transmission of the same nature, thus stained, from age to age, but
likewise in that social character of the race in virtue of which such a
thing as a man entirely independent of his fellow men, neither acting upon
them, nor acted upon by them, never has existed nor can exist. It was in
that connected mass which this social nature creates, that corporate unity
of human society, that heathenism appeared most terrible, because
corruption seemed to propagate itself, and evil by this force of cohesion
to become almost impregnable. But it was especially in creating a
corporate unity which should show the force of our social nature for good,
as the corruption had shown it for evil, that the power of the Restorer
shines forth. The true Head of our race came to redeem and sanctify not so
many individuals but His Body. Surely there is no distinction more
important to bear in mind.(87) “No single member by itself can make a
body; each of them fails in this; coöperation is required, for when many
become one, there is one body. The being or not being a body depends on
being united or not united into one.” And, again, beautiful as the
individual member, the hand or the eye, may be in itself, far higher is
the beauty which belongs to the body as the whole in which these members
coalesce and are one. Each member too has a double energy, its own proper
work, and that which it contributes to the body’s unity, for this is a
higher work which the coöperation of all produces; each a double beauty,
its beauty as a part, and that which it adds to the whole: and these two,
which seem to be separate, have the closest connection, for a maimed limb
impairs the whole body’s force, and as to its beauty, as it is
incomparably finer than the beauty of any part, so is it marred by a
slight defect in one part, as the fairest face would be spoilt by the
absence of eyebrows, the fairest eyes lose their lustre, and the
countenance its light, by the want of eyelashes. It is, then, in the
beauty of the Body of Christ that the Christian mind would exult, not
merely in the several graces of those who are its members, but in that
corporate unity which they present. We see in the course of the world that
great image of the prophet, lofty in stature and terrible to behold, whose
head is of gold, whose breast and arms of silver, the thighs of brass, the
legs of iron, the toes mixed of iron and clay. This is the form of the
first Adam, seen in his race; and over against it likewise is the one man
Christ, forming through the ages, gathering His members in a mightier
unity. This is the Word made flesh, the Second Adam, “so that the whole
human race is, as it were, two men, the First and the Second.”(88)

So much, then, is the creation of the Church superior to the creation of a
single Christian as the creation of a body is superior to that of a single
bone or muscle. This superiority belongs to the nature of a body as such.
It is another thought, which we only suggest here, _whose_ body it is. And
here it appears in two very different conditions, the one as it is seen by
us now, the other as it will be seen hereafter. There is, I conceive, no
subject in all human history comparable in interest to that which the
divine commonwealth as such, when traced through the eighteen centuries
which it has hitherto run, presents. What nation can be compared to this
nation? what people to this people? what labours to its labours? what
sufferings to its sufferings? what conflicts to those which it has
endured? what triumphs to those which it has gained? what duration to that
portion only of its years which is as yet run out? what promise to its
future? what performance to its past? What is the courage and self-denial,
what is the patience and generosity, what the genius, the learning, the
sustained devotion to any work, shown by any human race, compared to those
which are to be found in this race of the Divine Mother? How do those who
are enamoured of nationalities fail to see the glories of this nation,
before which all others pale their ineffectual fires? How do those with
whom industry is a chief virtue, and stubborn perseverance the crowning
praise, not acknowledge her whose work is undying and whose endurance
never fails? These men admire greatness and worship success. Let them look
back fourteen hundred years, when that great world-statue seemed to be
breaking up into the iron and clay which ran through its feet. Then this
kingdom was already great and glorious, and crowned with victory, and
filled the earth. The toes of that statue have meanwhile run out into ten
kingdoms, and the islands which were forest and swamp when this kingdom
commenced have become the head of a dominion which can be mentioned beside
that of old Rome; but still in undiminished grandeur the great divine
republic stands over against all these kingdoms, penetrates through them,
stretches beyond them, and while they grow, mature, and decay, and power
passes from one to the other, her power ceases not, declines not, changes
not, but shows the beauty of youth upon the brow of age, and amid the
confusion of Babel her pentecostal unity. If success be worshipful,
worship it here; if power be venerable, bow before its holiest shrine.

But if this be the Body of Christ here in its state of humiliation, during
which it repeats the passion of its Head, if these be the grains of wheat
now scattered among the chaff,(89) what is that one mass to be which these
shall make when the threshing-floor is winnowed out? We see the Body in
its preliminary state of suffering, where it has a grandeur, a duration,
and a beauty like nothing else on earth. What it shall be in its future
state S. John saw when he called it the great City invested with the glory
of God, the Bride adorned for her husband; and S. Paul hints, when he
speaks of the perfect man compacted and fitly framed together by what
every joint supplies, and grown up to full stature in the Head. There is
in the redeemed, not only the exceeding greatness of the quality of their
salvation, that is, the gift of divine sonship; nor, again, that this gift
is heightened by its being the purchase of the Son of God, so that He is
not ashamed to call those brethren whom He has first washed in His own
blood: but over and above all this, one thing more, that the whole mass of
the redeemed and adopted are not so many souls, but the Body of Christ.
Faint shadows, indeed, to our earthly senses are House and Temple, Kingdom
and City paved with precious stones of that mighty unity of all rational
natures, powers, and virtues, each with the perfection of his individual
being, each with the superadded lustre of membership in a marvellous
whole, under the Headship of Christ. The exceeding glory of this creation,
which will be the wonder of all creation through eternity, is that God the
Word made flesh, the Head and His Body, make one thing, not an inorganic,
but an organised unity, the glorified Body of a glorified Head.

Once more let us note the consistency and unbroken evolution of the divine
plan.

In the first creation of the human race the Body of Christ is not only
foretold but prefigured, not only prefigured but expressed in the very
words uttered by Adam in his ecstasy, the words of God delineating that
act of God, the greatest of all His acts of power, wisdom, and goodness,
whereby becoming man, and leaving His Father and His Mother,(90) He would
cleave to the wife He so took, the human nature which in redeeming He
espoused. This, and no other, was the reason why Eve was formed out of
Adam. It is the beginning of the divine plan, which is coherent
throughout, which was designed in the state of innocency, which remains
intended through the state of guilt, which is unfolded in the state of
grace, which is completed in the state of glory, when what that forming of
Eve from the side of Adam, and of the Church from the side of her Lord,
what that growth through thousands of years, through multitudinous
conflicts, through unspeakable sorrows, through immeasurable triumphs,
shall finally issue in, shall be seen by those whom the Second Adam has
made worthy of that vision, and by whom it is seen enjoyed.





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 intellect(94) 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 hand(101) 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 analogies(104) 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
life(105) 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.

From all that has gone before we gather this conclusion, that to become a
Christian was to enter into a spiritual and physical(107) unity with
Christ by incorporation into that Body which He had created as the result
of His becoming man. This it was for the individual to become a Christian.
But Christianity itself was neither a mere system of belief, nor an
outward order representing that belief; but “the great and glorious Body
of Christ,”(108) possessing and exhibiting the whole truth of doctrine,
possessing and distributing all the means of grace, and presenting
together to God those whom it had reconciled with Him, and made one, as
the members of the Son by the indwelling of the Spirit.

Let us now trace the exact correspondence of the historical fact with the
dogmatic statement just given.

The Acts of the Apostles exhibit to us the creation of the divine society
by the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost. When they were
all together, the sound as of a rushing mighty wind was heard, which
filled the whole house wherein they were sitting, and tongues as of fire
were seen, the tongues apportioned severally, but the fire one,(109) which
rested upon each, to kindle in all that eternal flame of charity which was
to draw into one the hearts of men, the fire of which our Lord had spoken
as being that which He was come to light upon the earth. Fire, whose
inward nature it is at once to illuminate and warm, to purify and unite,
was thus appropriately selected as the outward sign, both expressing and
conveying the fourfold office of the Comforter, who came to be “no longer
an occasional visitant, but a perpetual Consoler and eternal
Inhabitant”(110) of this His chosen home. As each in that assembly spoke
in the one tongue of the country, he was heard by those present in the
several tongues of all the nations of the earth represented at that great
feast by the Jews who dwelt in them. And this was the mark, says S.
Augustine,(111) of the Church which was to be through all nations, and
that no one should receive the Holy Spirit, save he who should be jointed
into the framework of its unity; the mark which signified that the
confusion of Babel, dividing the race into nationalities jealous of each
other and perpetual enemies, was to be reversed and overcome by the one
Power whose force to unite should be greater than the force of sin to
sever; who should gather out of all nations the City of God, fed by the
exulting and abounding river of His Spirit, the fountain proper and
peculiar to the Church of Christ: the mark of that one truth,(112) which
conveys and harmonises and works out into all its details the whole
revelation of God, and so is the utterance of one voice, the voice of
Christ; speaking to all nations, not in the broken languages of their
division, but in the Unity of His Person, carried by His Body. We have
then in the one Fire the one inward power; in the one language its outward
expression, in the assembly its receptacle, the House of God. This Body
appears at once as formed and complete. In it sits and prays in her silent
tenderness and unapproachable grandeur, as the Mother of the risen Lord
and Head, and the Mother too of His race, the most beloved, the most
lovable, and the most loving of creatures,(113) whose great function in
the Church for ever is to pray for the members of her Son, and to solicit
the graces of His Spirit, which as the Mother of the sacred race she gains
and distributes to all and each that belong to it, a Second Eve who
corresponds to the Second Adam, as the First Eve in the divine plan
corresponded to the First Adam. In it the Apostles, so long before chosen
and designated by their Lord, and having already received from Him
portions of their supernatural power on the day of His resurrection and
during the forty days of His secret instruction, teach and govern; in it
Peter at their head exercises that primacy, which, imaged out by a new
name imposed at his first calling, promised at his great confession, and
confirmed and conveyed on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee, is
exhibited with such grandeur, as he stood with the eleven and lifted up
his voice, to describe to the men of Judea and the inhabitants of
Jerusalem the nature of the event which they were witnessing, and the
fulfilment of all the promises made through their prophets concerning that
presence of God in the pouring out of His Spirit among men in the last
days. That first discourse of his at the head of his brethren is the
summary as it were of his perpetual office of teaching and promulgating
the dispensation of the Christ in the midst of the Church. Its immediate
effect was the aggregation of three thousand persons to the Body, who were
told that this was the way in which they should receive remission of sins
and the gift of the Holy Ghost.(114) The subsequent teaching of Peter and
the Apostles, accompanied with miraculous cures, produced further
aggregations among all ranks of the people. And the mode of salvation for
all time is pointedly marked out by the words, “the Lord was adding to the
Church day by day such as should be saved.”

We have only to repeat the process which is thus described as having taken
place at Jerusalem in the first months after the day of Pentecost, by
carrying it through the various cities of the Roman empire, Damascus,
Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and between these all round the shores of the
Mediterranean, to have a just picture of the mode in which the Divine
Society grew and gathered into itself more and more of those who listened
to the truth which it announced. What is important to dwell upon is that
men uniformly became Christians in one way, by being received into the
Divine Body, through which reception forgiveness of sins and the gift of
the Holy Ghost were conveyed to them. From the whole account contained in
the sacred Scriptures, and from all that remains to us of history, the
great fact is established for us that Christianity came into the world at
its first beginning a society created by the Holy Ghost, and held together
and informed by Him as its soul, who is sent down upon it as the Promise
of the Father from the Incarnate Son.

Further, it was in and by their reception into this society that men
received all the fruits of the Incarnation; it was in it that all the
gifts of the Holy Ghost dwelt, and through it that they were dispensed. By
hearing the truth announced by its ministry penitence was engendered in
the listeners, itself a preventing grace of the Holy Ghost, which gave
inward effect to the outward word. As a working of this penitence they
came, according to the instruction of the teachers, to be baptised. By and
in the act of baptism they were received into the divine society, and made
partakers of the full operation of the Spirit who dwelt in it. They had
the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity infused into them,
each according to the measure of the grace accorded to him, and to help
the exercise of these virtues, that they might be borne as it were with
the wings of a Spirit, the seven-fold gifts of wisdom, understanding,
counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear, were added to the soul.
None of these virtues and gifts were possessed by believers as
individuals; all of them came to men as members of her who was dowered
with the blood of Christ,(115) and whose bridal quality imparted to her
children all which that blood had purchased. In her was stored up that
great, inexhaustible source of abiding life, the Body and Blood of her
Lord and Husband: in her the redeeming Word gave direct from His heart the
vivifying stream. In her was the gift of teaching which illumined the
understanding, and not only drew from without, as we have seen, those who
should be saved from the ignorance of the pagan or the carnalism of the
Jew, but which erected in the world the Chair of Truth,(116) that is, the
rule and standard of right belief, which was the continuance of the
pentecostal gift, the illuminating and kindling fire, and the speaking
tongue of unity, which the Body of Christ possesses for ever. It was by
enjoying these endowments together in her bosom, by the actions of a life
pervaded with these principles, by the joint possession and exercise of
these supernatural powers which at once opened to the intellect a new
field of knowledge and strengthened the will to acts above its inborn
force, that men were Christians. And those who remembered what they had
been as Jews, and what they had been as heathens, had no difficulty in
recognising such a life as the effect of a divine grace, and no temptation
to refer it to anything which belonged to them as individuals, since its
commencement coincided with their entrance into a divine society, its
growth depended on their membership in that Body. Their union with Christ
in this Body was something direct and palpable; to them the several
degrees of that one ministry constituted by Christ were the joints and
articulations of the structure; the teaching thence proceeding as it were
the current of life; by their being parts of the structure they were saved
from the confusion of errors which swept freely round them without,
through the craft of men and the seduction of deceit.(117) “Possessing the
truth in charity,” or “sanctified in the truth,” was the expression of
that divine life in common whereby they were to grow up into one, and be
called by the name of their Lord,(118) because inseparably united to Him
by the nerves and ligaments of one Body.

And this makes manifest to us how Christians, while scattered through
every city of the great Roman empire, formed one Body. It was by virtue of
the unity of spiritual jurisdiction which directed the whole ministry of
that Body. The command of our Lord was, “Go, and make disciples all
nations,” “proclaim the gospel to every creature;” the Body assembled and
empowered at Pentecost was to carry out this command. How did it do so?
The teaching and ruling power was distributed through a ministry wherein
those of a particular order were equal as holding that order: bishops as
bishops were equal, priests as priests. But not the less by the
distribution of the places where the ministry was to be fulfilled,
subordination was maintained through the whole Body. Had it been
otherwise, as each Bishop had the completeness of the priesthood in
himself, his sphere of action, that is, his diocese, would have
constituted a distinct body. But no such thing was ever imagined in the
Church of those first centuries. The Bishops were, on the contrary, joint
possessors of one power, only to be exercised in unity.(119) The unity was
provided for in the Apostolic body by the creation of the Primacy, without
which the Body never acted, the Primate being designated before the Body
was made; the Primate invested with his functions on the sea-shore of the
lake of Galilee before the Ascension, the Body on which he was to exercise
them animated on the day of Pentecost. Spiritual jurisdiction being
nothing else but the grant to exercise all spiritual powers, two
jurisdictions would make two bodies; a thousand would make a thousand; so
that the more the Church grew, the more it would be divided, were it not
that the root of all its powers in their exercise is one. A spiritual
kingdom is absolutely impossible without this unity of jurisdiction; and
in virtue of it the whole Church, from north to south and from east to
west, was and is one Body in its teaching and its rule; that is, in the
administration of all those gifts which were bestowed at the day of
Pentecost, and which have never ceased to be exercised from that day to
this, and which shall never cease to the end of the world. Thus as it is
through the Body that men are made and kept Christians, so the Primacy is
that principle of cohesion and subordination without which the Body cannot
exist.

Let us carry on the history of the divine Body to another point. How was
the Truth transmitted in it?

Peter and his brethren having received through the great forty days from
our Lord the complement of His teaching concerning His kingdom, were
empowered by the descent of the Holy Ghost to commence its propagation.
And for this work they use the same instrument which their Lord had
used—the living spoken word. They labour together for some time; after
several years they divide the world between them; but in both these
periods they found communities and supply them with everything needful for
complete organisation and future increase and progress by their spoken
teaching, which therefore contained the whole deposit of the truth. The
gospel of which S. Paul so repeatedly speaks was that which he
communicated by word of mouth, and S. Peter and all the rest did the same.
Communities were planted by Apostolic zeal over a great part of the Roman
empire before as yet anything was written by their founders. The whole
administration of the sacraments, and the order and matter of the divine
service, were arranged by this personal teaching of the living word. All
that concerned the Person of our Lord, all that He had taught, done, and
suffered, was so communicated. One reason of this is plain. It was not the
bare gospel, but the “gospel of the kingdom,”(120) which was to be
proclaimed to all nations. It was not a naked intellectual truth of which
they were the bearers, but a kingdom which they were to build. They were
not disseminating a sect of philosophy, but founding an empire. They were
a King’s heralds, and every king has a realm. Thus the Kingdom of the Word
was proclaimed by the word spoken through many voices, but as the
outpouring of one Spirit given on the day of Pentecost. This whole body of
their teaching, therefore, was one Tradition; that is, a delivery over of
the truth to them by inspiration of the Spirit, as the Truth who had
become incarnate taught it, and a delivery of this truth from them to the
communities which they set up. The first communication of the Christian
faith to the individual was never made by writing. How, said the Apostle,
should they invoke one whom they did not believe, but how believe in one
of whom they had not heard, and how hear without a preacher, and how
preach except they were sent?(121) It did not occur to him to ask how
should they believe in one of whom they had not read. On the contrary, he
gives in these few words the whole order of the truth’s transmission. He
conceived not heralds without a commission, any more than faith without
trust in the word of the heralds. But here is the great sending, at and
from the day of Pentecost, the root of perpetual mission from which the
heralds derive their commission; they are sent, they proclaim, they are
heard, they are believed, and this faith opens the door for the admission
of subjects into the kingdom, according to the law which they proclaim.
Thus are described to us at some length the acts of that wise
master-builder whose words we have just cited; but though he laboured more
abundantly than all, all acted after the same manner. The Church was
founded by personal teaching, of which the living word was the instrument,
and the whole truth which was thus communicated was termed the
Tradition(122) or Delivery.

We now come to the second step. Before the Apostles were taken to their
reward, the same Spirit, who had instructed them that they were to found
the spiritual kingdom by means of the living word, inspired them to commit
to writing a portion of that great tradition which they had already taught
by mouth.(123) But they never delivered these writings to men not already
Christians. One evangelist expressly says that he drew up a narrative in
order that his disciple might know the certainty of what he had already
been instructed in catechetically, that is, that by that great system of
oral teaching by question and answer, that grounding of the truth in the
memory, intellect, and will, which Christianity had inaugurated, and that
he wrote after the pattern of those who had delivered over the word to us,
having been its original eyewitnesses and servants.(124) A second
evangelist declares that what he was putting into writing was a very small
portion indeed of what his Lord had done.(125) Another very remarkable
thing is that the Apostles are not recorded to have put together what they
had written themselves, or others by their direction, so as to make it one
whole; far less that they ever declared what was so written to contain the
complete tradition of what they had received. But what they did was to
leave these writings in the hands of particular churches, having in every
case addressed them to those who were already instructed as Christians,
and not having left among them any document whatever intended to impart
the Christian faith to those who were ignorant of it. These writings were
in the strictest sense Scriptures of the Church, which sometimes stated,
and always in their form and construction showed that they were adapted to
those who had been taught the Christian faith by word of mouth. Moreover,
it was left to the Church to gather them together, and make them into one
book, which thenceforward should be _the Book_; it was left to the Church
to determine which were to be received as inspired writings, and in
accordance with the teaching already diffused in her, and which were not.
And this collection of the several writings from the particular Churches
to which they were addressed into one mass would seem not to have taken
place until at least three or four generations after the whole order and
institutions of the Church had been established by oral teaching, which
filled as with a flood the whole Christian people. Then, finally, the
authority of the Church alone established the canon of Scripture, and
separated it off from all other writings.

Now as the planting of the Church by oral teaching was a direction of the
Holy Spirit, from whom the whole work of mission proceeded, so all these
particulars concerning the degree in which writing was to be employed, and
the manner in which that writing was to be attested, and the persons to
whom it was to be addressed, were a direction of the same Spirit. That a
spiritual kingdom could not have been established save by oral teaching
Christians may infer with certainty, because, in fact, that method was
pursued. That a portion of the great Tradition should be committed to
writing they may for the same reason infer to have been necessary for the
maintenance of the truth, because it was so done. That these writings were
the property of the Church—her Scriptures—may be inferred with no less
truth, because they were addressed only to her children, and presupposed a
system of instruction already received by those who were to read them.
And, finally, that they were to be understood in their right sense only by
the aid of the Spirit who dictated them, is, their being given in this
manner once admitted, an inference of just reasoning. It is plain, when
once these things are stated, that these writings were not intended to
stand alone, as ordinary books, and to be understood by themselves. Not
only were they part of a great body of teaching, but a portion of a great
institution, to which they incessantly alluded and bore witness. They
would speak very differently to those without and to those within the
kingdom of which they were documents. They would remind the instructed at
every turn of doctrines which they had been taught, corroborating these
and themselves explained by them. Some of them indeed were letters, and we
all know how different is the meaning of letters to those who know the
writer and his allusions, and to those who do not. A word of reference in
these documents to a great practice of Christian life would kindle into a
flame the affection of those who possessed that practice, while it would
pass as a dead letter to those who had it not.(126) Such word, therefore,
would be absolute proof of the practice to the former, while it would seem
vague and indeterminate and no proof at all to the latter.

From what has been said we may determine the relation of the Church to the
Scriptures. She having been planted everywhere by the personal oral
teaching of the apostles and their disciples, being in full possession of
her worship and her sacraments, filled by that word which they had spoken
to her, and ruled by that Spirit in whom they had spoken, accepted these
writings which they left as conformable to that teaching which they had
delivered by word of mouth, esteemed them, moreover, as sacred, because
proceeding from the dictation of the one Spirit, and finally put them
together and severed them off from all other books, as forming, in
conjunction with that unwritten word in possession of which she passed
this judgment upon them, her own canon or rule of faith. Thenceforth they
were to be for all ages a necessary portion of the divine Tradition which
was her inheritance from the Incarnate Word, distributed by His Spirit.
They were to be in her and of her. To her belonged, first, the
understanding of them; secondly, the interpreting them to her children,
out of the fund of that whole Tradition lodged in her, and by virtue of
that indwelling Spirit, who, as He had created, maintained her; as part
and parcel, moreover, of that whole kingdom, of that body of worship and
sacraments, which she is.

And this brings us to a further point of the utmost importance. For the
Truth, which is the subject matter of all this divine Tradition or
Delivery from the Incarnate Word, in order to be efficacious and
permanent, approached men in the shape of a society invested with
grace.(127) It was not proposed as a theory which is presented simply to
the reason, and accepted or rejected by it. True, it was addressed to the
reason, but only when illuminated by faith could the reason accept it.
Here, again, it showed itself manifestly as “the gospel _of the kingdom_.”
It was the good tidings proclaimed, not simply and nakedly to man’s
intellect, but as the gift and at the same time the law of that kingdom
which accompanied its publication by the bestowal of power to accept it,
and to make it the rule of conduct. There were many whom the word, though
proclaimed to them as to others, did not help, because it was not mixed
with faith in those who heard it. S. Paul preached to many when the heart
of one Lydia was opened to receive what he announced.(128) Thus with the
first hearing of the message coincided the beginning of grace to accept
it. But so likewise the Church supplied a storehouse of grace for the
continuance of the truth in those who had once received it. Truth and
grace, as they come together in her, so they remain together inseparable.
Wisdom, understanding, counsel, and knowledge, which perfect the
intellect, are linked in her with fortitude, piety, and fear, which
perfect the will. And this which is true of the individual is true of the
mass. In the Body, as well as in each single member of it, and the more
because the Body is an incomparably grander creation, it is the sanctified
intellect which must receive, harmonise, and develope the truth. If the
sevenfold fountain of the Spirit’s gifts is one in the individual, much
more is it one in that Body out of whose plenitude the individual
receives. Thus wherever the Apostles preached the word, if faith made it
fruitful, they bestowed the sacraments.

We shall see, if we observe it closely, that it is a triple cord through
which the Holy Spirit conveys His life perpetually to the Body; and in His
life is the Truth.

First, there is the succession of men. As the Word Incarnate taught, so
men bear on His teaching. Personal labours, intercourse from mouth to
mouth, the action of men on men, the suffering of men for men, this was
from the beginning, this is to be for ever, the mode of spreading His
kingdom. It is not a paper kingdom, it cannot be printed off and
disseminated by the post. But from His own Person it passed to Peter and
the Apostles, and from them to a perpetual succession of men, whose
special work it is to continue on this line by a chain never to be broken.
These are the messengers, or heralds, or stewards, or ministers, or
teachers, or shepherds. They are all and each of these according to the
manifoldness of the gift which they carry. Through the unbrokenness of
this line the continuity of the gift is secured. Through it the Redeemer,
King, and Head touches, as it were, each point of time and space, and with
a personal ministry lays hold of each individual through the vast extent
of His kingdom in time and space. And the gift is as living and as near to
Him now as it was when S. Paul spoke of it as communicated by the
imposition of his hands to his disciple; nay, as it was when He himself
breathed on His Apostles together assembled, and said, “Receive the Holy
Ghost;” and will be equally living and direct from Him to the last who
shall receive it to the end of time. And all this because these men who
are taken up into this succession are the nerves of His mystical Body,
through which runs the supply to all the members. This is the
indestructible framework which He has wrought for carrying on to men His
own teaching, until the whole mass grow up to that fulness of the perfect
stature which He has foreseen and determined.

The second succession is that of the Truth itself committed to these men.
For that plenitude of teaching which the Apostles delivered orally to the
Church has never ceased to rest in her, and out of it she dispenses to all
the ages her divine message. But part of this teaching by the further
ordering of the Spirit of Truth has been incorporated in writing. And no
one can doubt that this incorporation has given a firmness and stability
to the teaching which we do not see how it could otherwise have possessed.
Thus the great Tradition of the Truth poured out upon the Church has been
partly written and partly unwritten; not as if there were two teachings
separable from each other, but one and the same which runs in a perpetual
blending. Through the written teaching we receive the very words
consecrated by our Lord’s use: we have the priceless privilege of knowing
how he spoke; of catching the accents of His voice, and the look of His
eyes, and the gestures of His body, portrayed in that narrative. The words
of Him who spake as never man spake live and sound for ever in our ears;
and we recognise in the structure of His sentences, which convey in a
clause principles of endless application, forces on which a universe can
be built, the Father’s Word, and the world’s Creator, and the Church’s
Head. Parable and apophthegm and answer, metaphor and plain speech, when
used by Him, are all impregnated with this power. And now that we possess
this peculiar language of the Word Incarnate, embodied and fixed for ever
to our senses as well as our affections, it seems as if we could not have
done without it. Then the mode in which His own Apostles apply and
illustrate His doctrines, and exhibit to us the formation of the society
which He came to institute, possesses a value only subordinate to His own
words. The written word, it has been said,(129) gives to the whole Church
through all times a sense of the truth and consistency of her teaching
like that which the sense of personal identity gives to the individual
respecting his own being. And again, what memory is to the single man,
such is the whole tradition of the Truth in the bosom of the Church. But
it is through the unwritten teaching deposited in her by the Apostles that
she possesses the key to the true understanding of that which is written.
The one in her practice has never been severed from the other. So dear has
the written word been to her that almost the blackest epithet in language,
“traitor,” is derived from the name which she gave to those who, under
fear of persecution, surrendered to the heathen her sacred books. With
these in her hand, or rather in her heart, she has directed and carried
out that great system of instruction which the Apostles laid down and
established by their acts. For to her what they did was as sacred as what
they said, or what they wrote; and numberless acts of theirs constituted
her teaching originally, and have prolonged and continued it on since.

For, besides the succession of men and the succession of doctrine, there
is in her likewise the succession of institutions. As chief of these, but
involving a number of subordinate rites, the Apostles with their first
oral teaching delivered likewise to the Church sacraments, instituted, not
by them, but by their Lord Himself, which at once embodied the truth
taught by them, and conveyed the grace by which that truth was to find a
home in men’s heart and mind. No sooner was the first teaching of Peter at
the head of the Apostles uttered, and the gift of forgiveness of sins and
of adoption disclosed, than three thousand persons received the double
gift by the baptism which followed. Thus they established in the Church
seven great rites, encompassing the whole of human life. The regenerating
power which was the beginning of the whole change that they sought to work
in man was stored up in one; the confirming and developing it in a second;
the feeding and increasing it in a third; the removal of obstacles to it
in a fourth; the supporting and restoring the human nature so elevated,
when under pressure of sickness and in fear of death, in a fifth; the
blessing and consecrating the union of the species in a sixth; and,
finally, the conferring that distinctive power which transmitted through
all ages her Lord’s gift to the Church in a seventh. This is that great
and marvellous sacramental system by which the Church, dowered, as we have
said, in her quality of Bride with her Lord’s blood, applies that blood to
His members, according to their needs. This is the perpetual consecration
of matter to a supernatural end, of which the highest example is found in
the Body of the Head Himself, and so it is an enfolding of human nature
with the Incarnation, and a transforming it into the image of its Head.
But such, likewise, is the summary of the whole written and unwritten
teaching of the Church; such also, in few and brief words, the perpetual
work of the succession of men whom we have described.

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
man(133) 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 idolatry(134) 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. Paul(135) 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.

Take first the seventy years which form the Apostolic age. What do we find
as the result when S. John, the last apostle, is taken away? In a large
number of cities throughout the Roman empire a community has been planted
after the pattern of that which we have described as arising at Jerusalem,
and by the same means, the power of oral teaching. Every such community
has at its head its bishop, or angel, who sums up and represents in his
own person the people over which he presides. This is exactly the picture
presented to us at the close of this period by S. John in the Apocalypse,
when he is directed by our Lord personally appearing to him to write seven
letters to as many bishops of cities on the seaboard of the province of
Asia. Each, with his people, is addressed as a unit. One, “I know thy
works, and thy labour, and thy endurance, and how thou canst not bear
those which are evil;” a second, “Fear not what thou art about to suffer;
behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison;” a third, “I have
against thee some few things, that thou hast there some who hold the
doctrine of Balaam.”(137) Each has around him his council of priests, his
ministering deacons, his faithful people. The last apostle is still
living; but in all these communities many exist, both of teachers and
taught, who have learned Christian doctrine, either from the mouth of an
apostle or the comrade of an apostle—a Mark, a Luke, a Silvanus, a
Clemens. Thus they live mainly upon oral teaching: the voice which went
forth from the day of Pentecost is sounding freshly in their ears.
Doctrine is in the stage of simple tradition and authority. The writings
of the New Testament are completed, but being addressed to various parts
of the Church, are best known to those for whom they were written. They
are not yet collected and made the common patrimony of the whole Church.
S. John leaves the earth without performing any such function; without
setting the seal of his apostolical authority upon the New Testament as a
whole; nay, the authorship of some of his own writings, as we now receive
them, will be partially contested after his death before their final
reception. Of the absolute number of these Christian communities, and of
the multitude they severally embrace, we have no account; we can form no
estimate, save to infer that the whole number of the faithful, at the end
of this period, was very small in comparison with the mass out of which
they had been drawn. Still it was a germ with a living force of expansion,
planted in every considerable spot of the empire; and wherever it was
planted, a Christian people, in the full sense of the word, existed,
having a complete spiritual life of its own, possessing the sacraments
which insured the beginning and the continuance of that life, an order of
worship based on the great central fact which made them a people, and a
ministry charged with the power to teach and to convey on to their
successors the doctrines delivered to them.

But in the mean time how had the empire treated it? In these seventy years
it has traversed the seven last years of the Emperor Tiberius, and the
whole principates of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; the revolutionary
crisis in which Galba, Otho, and Vitellius reigned for an instant, and
then the settled time of Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, and Nerva. Now,
during this period its treatment by the empire has been a singular
reproduction of what passed in the hall of Pilate. For the Jewish religion
was one allowed by Roman law. The profession of it entailed no penalty.
Now the first heralds of the Gospel, as Jews, preached their message
boldly and publicly, and in doing so it does not seem that Roman law would
have interfered with them.(138) At this stage it looked upon Christians as
a sect of Jews. As no authority of the empire had interfered with the
public ministry of our Lord, so it would seem to have left the ministry of
His disciples in the first instance free. It is from another quarter that
opposition arises. The Jew in his jealous anger at the promulgation of a
Messiah and a spiritual kingdom which is not after Jewish taste, both
because it is a kingdom not of this world, and because it raises the
Gentile to coinheritance with the race of Abraham, drags the Christian
missionary before the tribunal of the Roman magistrate and imputes to him
“sedition.” Then many a Gallio, many a Felix, many a Festus have as it
were unwillingly to enter into and decide these questions of the Jewish
law. It would seem that converts to the Christian faith in these its
earliest days might long have escaped the notice of the magistrate, as
belonging to a Jewish sect, but for this enmity of the Jews themselves.
But as the teachers of the new faith everywhere addressed themselves first
to their countrymen, so everywhere they found these countrymen alive to
their progress and bitterly set against it.(139) This state of things is
pretty well expressed by that answer of the Roman Jews to S. Paul when he
excuses himself before them for having been compelled to appeal to the
Emperor Nero: “as concerning this sect, we know that it is spoken against
everywhere.”(140) This, however, was Jewish, not Roman, contradiction. So
far as everywhere Jewish hatred and jealousy could malign and counterwork
the progress of the Christian Faith, and bring suffering on its teachers,
it had been done. But nevertheless with this exception it would seem that
for thirty-five years after the day of Pentecost that Faith had been
freely and publicly taught throughout the empire. It was through the
malignity of his own countrymen, stirring up a dangerous conspiracy
against him, that S. Paul felt himself compelled to appeal to the emperor,
and the result of his appeal was that he was set free. But in the year 64
another state of things had arisen. The ruin of a large part of Rome by
fire had brought a great odium upon Nero. Now his wife Poppæa is said to
have been a Jewish proselyte, he himself to have been surrounded by Jewish
influences, and nothing is more probable than that Jewish hatred, which
had tracked the Christians everywhere, pursued them especially here, and
suggested them to him both as authors of the conflagration, and as
convenient scapegoats whereon to divert the odium against himself which
had arisen from it. Thus he took the opportunity of exposing to shame and
torment, as victims of the popular dislike, and in popular opinion guilty
of “hatred of the human race,” or of being hated by them, “a vast
multitude”(141) of Christians, who, says the heathen historian, were put
to the most exquisite suffering, being wrapt in the skins of wild beasts,
and torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or clothed in garments of pitch
and set on fire to illuminate the night. Thus it is, as decorations of
Nero’s games, in his gardens of the Vatican, where the obelisk from
Heliopolis, once the ornament of his circus, now bears witness to the
victory of Christ, that Christians first come before us in the pages of
Roman historians, just at the middle of the period we are now describing,
thirty-five years after the Ascension.

It may be considered part of this first persecution that the two great
Apostles—Peter, who had founded the Roman Church, and Paul, who after its
first foundation had helped to build it up—were condemned in the last year
of Nero, and by his deputies(142) during his absence, to suffer as
Christians, the one the death of a Roman citizen by the sword, and the
other that of a slave by crucifixion. Thus the two great brethren by
enduring together the martyr’s death, the highest mark of Christian
charity, sealed their joint foundation of Christian Rome, that like as the
Rome which had gained the conquest of the world by the strong hand of
violence, had been planted in the blood of one brother shed by another, so
the Rome which was to be the centre of Christ’s kingdom, and in the words
of S. Ignatius “preside over charity,” should have for her founders
brethren in supernatural love, pouring forth their blood together for the
seat of that Christian unity which binds the earth in one.

But this persecution by Nero is not transitory in its consequences. The
emperor had judged that Christians as such professed a religion not
allowed by the Roman laws, and were guilty therein of a capital crime.
This crime, if technically expressed, would amount to sacrilege and
treason;(143) for they could not acknowledge the Roman gods as gods, nor
the emperor as Pontifex Maximus; nor could they swear by his genius, which
was the oath expressing fidelity to the Roman constitution in its civil
and religious aspect. This was that “hatred of the human race,” that is,
in other words, of the Roman empire, of which in the eyes of Tacitus and
Pliny, of Nero now and of Trajan afterwards, they were guilty as
Christians. But the singular thing is this, that the Jew, who was the
first to drag them before the Roman tribunal, who was their omnipresent,
ever-ready antagonist and traducer, though he worshipped one only God,
though he abhorred the whole Roman polytheism, though he swore not by the
genius of the emperor, was exempt from punishment: his religion was
recognised by Roman law and the senate its interpreter, because it was the
national and time-honoured religion of a constituent part of the empire.
On the same ground the vilest Egyptian, Asiatic, African idol was allowed
the worship of those who claimed it as their ancestral god. The Christian
Faith was the sole exception to this universal tolerance, because it was
not the religion of a subject nation, because it was new, because, in
fine, it rested on principles which, if carried out, would sweep away the
whole fabric of polytheism on which the Roman State rested. And the act of
Nero had its great importance in that it formally distinguished the
Christian from the Jewish religion, and took away from it by a legal
decision of the State’s highest authority the claim to be considered
“licit.”

Nero then bestows the crown of martyrdom on S. Peter and S. Paul, and on
what Tacitus calls, even within Rome alone, a vast multitude. But he does
more than this. On the first appearance of Christians before the supreme
authority he so applies an existing law to their case as to establish
their liability under it to capital punishment, and this liability rests
upon them henceforth down to the time of Constantine. It is by no means
always carried out; it is often suspended, sometimes for many years
together, according to the character of the ruling prince, or the maxims
of his government, or the state itself of the empire. But it is henceforth
the legal position of Christians. It is a danger which besets their
condition, and may be called into action at any moment, in any city of the
empire, from any motive of private enmity, cupidity, or passion. It is the
legal Roman equivalent and interpretation of their Master’s words, “You
shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake.”(144)

How often, and in how many instances, it was carried out in this period of
seventy years we have no means of telling; but another emperor is named as
a persecutor. Domitian not only put to death as Christian his cousin, the
Consul Flavius Clemens, but, as it would seem, a great many others at
Rome, in the latter years of his principate.(145) Domitian and Nero are
mentioned as persecutors by Melito when addressing Marcus Aurelius, and by
Tertullian,(146) in the time of Severus, though it was the object of both
to make the emperors appear to have been not unfavourable to Christians.
But, independent of any general act which would constitute an emperor a
persecutor,(147) this liability to punishment,(148) in virtue of which the
confessor or martyr was brought before the local magistrates, was that
under which individual Christians, in most peaceful times, and in the
reign of emperors generally just and moderate, endured their sufferings.
The Emperor Tiberius is said by Tertullian to have brought before the
senate a proposition to allow the Christian Faith as a lawful religion.
Had this been done, the whole course of Christian history in these three
centuries would have been changed. As it was, every one, in becoming a
Christian, accepted the chance that he might thereby be called upon to
forfeit the possession of wife, children, goods, every civil right, and
life itself.

The end of the reign of the first Antonine, in the year 161, furnishes us
with a second fitting epoch at which we may estimate the growth and
position in the empire of the Christian Faith.

During the sixty years which elapse from the death of S. John to the
accession of Marcus, the Roman empire is ruled by three sovereigns, who
have each left a fair name and a considerable renown behind them, and who,
compared with most of those who preceded or who followed them, may almost
be termed great. Trajan by his military successes raised to the highest
point the credit of the Roman arms, by his moderation in civil government
effaced the remembrance of Domitian’s cruelties, and gave the Romans
perhaps as much liberty as they could bear. His successor Hadrian, joining
great energy, administrative ability, and moderation of his own to the
fear and respect for the Roman name, which the powerful arm of Trajan had
spread around, was able at once to exercise his army with unwearied
discipline, and to maintain the empire at its full tide of power in
honourable peace, while Antoninus crowned the forty years of equable and
generally just government—bestowed on the Roman world by Trajan and
Hadrian—with a further happy period of more than half that length, wherein
the glory of the empire may be said to have culminated. Imperial Rome
never saw again such a day of power, or such a prospect of security, as
when Antoninus celebrated the secular games at the completion of nine
hundred years; and for ages afterwards his name carried respect, and men
looked back on his reign as on an ideal period of happiness for those whom
he ruled.

One of the most competent observers of our time has marked the last ten
years of the reign of Pius as the period at which the independent
development of Græco-Roman heathenism terminated, when it had exhausted
all the forms of its own inward life, since the Neoplatonic philosophy
which is the only striking product of intelligence that arises afterwards,
is manifestly due to the antagonism with Christianity, and is no pure
offspring of the heathen spirit.(149) From this time forth Christian
influences become unmistakable in their action upon heathen thought and
society. This, then, affords another reason why we should endeavour to
trace the progress and extension which the Church had reached at this
point.

Now a contemporary of Antoninus declares that in his time, that is, about
the year 150, there was no race of men, either barbarians or Greeks, none
even of Scythian nomads roaming in waggons, or of pastoral tribes dwelling
in tents, among whom prayers and thanksgivings were not offered to the
Father and Creator of the universe in the name of the crucified
Jesus.(150) Thus, in a hundred and twenty years the Church had outstripped
the limits of the empire. The germ which in the time of S. John was rooted
in the chief cities, had spread out thence and increased, taking more and
more possession of the soil in all directions. Still we must consider the
Christian Church in each place of its occupation as a small minority of
the people: nor is there any reason to doubt the statement made by Celsus,
that at the period when he wrote, the middle of the second century, the
Christian Faith counted few of the educated, distinguished, and rich among
its adherents;(151) for Origen, in replying to him, alleges no specific
example to the contrary. Yet, here too we must consider the justice of
Origen’s remark,(152) that these classes are everywhere few in proportion
to the poor and ignorant, and that Christianity being the day-star arising
on every soul took of all classes alike. So much, then, as to the Church’s
material extension: now as to its internal growth.

As this period opens, comrades of the Apostles still abound in the
churches. We know of several instances wherein such persons hold eminent
rank. At Rome, S. Clement is the third successor of S. Peter; and S.
Irenæus,(153) recording him as such eighty years afterwards, specially
notes that he had seen and lived with Apostles, and had their preaching
still sounding in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes; at
Antioch, S. Ignatius, second after the same S. Peter; in the See of
Jerusalem, S. Simeon, the brother of James, still survives; at Smyrna, S.
John’s disciple Polykarp is bishop. Many more such S. Irenæus declares
that there were. This would prepare us for the strength with which the
principle of authority and tradition was held, and show how completely the
sense of a spiritual government, of cohesion, and continuity of moral
life, and of a common doctrine and teaching, the foundation of these,
prevailed. But we are not left to inferences, we have the clearest
statements on this point about fifteen years after S. John’s death. It has
been remarked above how in the Apocalypse our Lord himself, addressing the
seven churches, gathers them up in their bishops, and speaks of them each
collectively as of one person. In the year 116, as is supposed, Ignatius
still after forty-eight years bishop of one of the three great mother
churches, all of them Sees of Peter, and types and models of church
government, whence missions went forth, and the layers of apostolic
teaching were propagated, in his seven extant epistles conveys the same
idea as that presented by those divine words which S. John had heard in
vision, and was commanded to record, but with much greater detail. As he
is being led to martyrdom, in the long transit between Antioch and Rome,
he pours forth the earnestness of one under sentence of death, glowing at
the prospect of shedding his blood for Christ, and being for ever united
with Him. These letters remain as a sample of numberless conversations
held with the deputations which came to meet him on his way, mingling
their tears at his approaching passion with their exultation in his
triumph. They are of one tissue throughout. Ignatius dwells with incessant
repetition upon union with God and with Christ through obedience to the
hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, by maintenance of one faith,
in one body of the Church, which is wherever Christ is.(154) Let us take
one instance from his letter to the Ephesians. After saying that he had
“received their whole multitude in the person of Onesimus, their bishop,”
he continues: “It is, then, fitting that you should by all means glorify
Jesus Christ who has glorified you; that by a uniform obedience you may be
perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment, and
may all speak alike concerning everything, and that being subject to the
bishop and the presbytery, you may be altogether sanctified. I am not
giving you commands, as if I were any one; for, though I am in bonds for
His name, I am not yet perfected in Jesus Christ. For now I begin to
learn, and I speak to you as my fellow-disciples, for I had need to be
encouraged by you in faith, exhortation, endurance, long-suffering. But
since charity suffers me not to be silent to you, I have taken on me to
exhort you to run together all with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ,
your inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, as also the bishops,
placed in their several limits, are the mind of Jesus Christ. Therefore
you should run together with the bishop’s mind, as indeed you do. So then
in your concord and harmonious charity Jesus Christ is sung. And each
several one of you makes up the chorus; so that all being harmonious in
concord, you take up the melody in unity, and sing with one voice through
Jesus Christ to the Father, that He may hear you, and perceive by your
good works that you are members of His Son. It is good for you then to be
in blameless unity, that you may always have fellowship with God.” And
then he adds: “For if I in a short time have had such familiarity with
your bishop, and that not human, but spiritual, how much more should I
think you happy, who are so fused with him as the Church with Jesus
Christ, and as Jesus Christ with the Father, that all things may be
accordant in unity.”(155)

This is an incidental passage out of a very short letter, in which the
speaker is addressing practical exhortations to the people of a great
church, founded by S. Paul about sixty years before, dwelt in by S. John
up to about fifteen years of the time at which he was speaking. We should
not in such a writing expect S. Ignatius to speak with the scientific
correctness of a theologian, nor is he completely exhibiting his subject
in a treatise; yet here, as it were at the first moment after the Apostles
have left the earth, we have a picture of the Church as a world-wide
institution, held together by a divine unity, which has its seat in the
Person of Christ as the mind of the Father. It is a composite unity which
is contemplated in the image of a harp with its strings pouring forth one
song—the song of Christ—to the Father. It is a unity wide as the earth;
for the bishops, placed in their several limits, constitute the mind of
Christ, who is Himself the Father’s mind. It is the unity of the diocese,
for it is summed up in the bishop: but it is the unity likewise of the
whole Church, for the bishops are linked together in One whose mind they
collectively represent, and that One is He from whose Person their
authority radiates; in whom, as he says in this same letter, “the old
kingdom was being destroyed, God appearing in the form of a man, unto the
newness of eternal life.”(156) Again, it is not merely an outward unity of
government, but an inward unity of the truth held in common, and also held
as given by authority: not truth, as a result of the curiosity of the
human intellect, rather truth, as a participation in the mind of Christ.
Thus the Catholic unity of government is at the same time a unity of
belief, which two unities are not, in fact, separable, for their principle
is one in the Person of Christ, in respect of whom submission to the Ruler
is one and the same thing with belief in the truth revealed by Him, who is
King no less than Word, Word no less than King.

We have, then, here the principle of authority and tradition as seated in
the hierarchy, and at the same time the whole order and unity of the
Church as girdling the world by its chain of the Episcopate, and as
possessing the truth and exhibiting it in its quality of an institution.
It is before us and at work in its succession of men, in its sacraments
which they administer,(157) in its truth which is imparted by the one and
delivered by the other. It is no vague congeries of opinions held by
individuals with the diversity of individuals, but a body strongly
organised, and possessing an imperishable life, the life of its Author.
And we have all this mentioned as fulfilled at the distance of one life
from our Lord’s ascension, while indeed his kinsman and elder in age, S.
Simeon, is still bishop of Jerusalem, and mentioned by one of whom a
beautiful though insufficiently grounded legend says that he was that
child whom our Lord had called and placed before His disciples as the
model of those who should enter into His kingdom. He was at least so near
in time to Christ that this could be said of him. He is the bishop of
Antioch; he is on his way to be thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum at
Rome;(158) he is welcomed on his way by church after church, and he sees
and describes the bishops, in their several boundaries through the earth,
as each maintaining the mind of Christ in the unity of his Body.

Such is the Church merely stated as a fact towards the beginning of the
second century.

And the trial which in these sixty years the Church was going through was
well calculated to test her constitution. It is against the spread of
false doctrine that S. Ignatius in these epistles so constantly appeals,
to the unity of the faithful among each other.(159) He warns them to use
only Christian nourishment, and to abstain from strange food, which is
heresy.(160) The Church was then continually receiving into her bosom
converts at all ages of life, some from the Jews, many more from the
Gentiles; among these, therefore, minds brought up in Jewish prejudices,
and others which had run havoc in eastern superstitions and systems of
philosophy. In the course of these sixty years she probably multiplied
many times over in number; and the multiplication was rather by the
accession of adults than by the education of children born of Christian
parents. The Church was composed of a small minority of the general
population scattered at wide intervals over an immense empire; and, so far
from being assisted by the civil power, was under constant persecution
from it. Whatever force her spiritual government possessed could be
exercised only by the voluntary submission of her members. Let us weigh
the fact that, under these circumstances, a number of heresies arose. Some
were of Jewish, some of Gentile parentage. But we are not here concerned
either with their cause or with their matter: we dwell at present only on
the fact of their existence. In number they were many; in character most
diverse; they arose and flourished in different places. Hardly anywhere
was the Church free from them. Let us ask only one question here: by what
power were they resisted? The human mind had then the fullest liberty of
action in Christians. It was by a free choice—a choice accompanied with
danger, and persisted in through suffering—that men became Christians. The
liberty which men exercised in becoming Christians they could use further
against Christian doctrine, by innovating; by mixing it up with other
doctrines, with which, perhaps, their minds had been familiar before their
conversion; by developing it after their own fashion. The desire of fame,
the self-will of genius, the mere luxury of thought, would offer a
continual temptation to such a course. Many, from one motive or another,
fell into it. The question which we repeat is, what power prevented the
one Church from breaking up under this process of free thought into
fragments? These heresies began even while the Apostles were teaching. S.
Peter, S. Paul, and S. John speak strongly against them. They swarm in the
two generations succeeding the death of S. John. How is it that, at the
accession of Marcus Aurelius, Christians having passed the limits of the
empire, and being found so far as the wandering tribes of the north, there
is still one Church, surrounded, indeed, by a multitude of sects,
differing from her and from each other, but herself distinguished and
unmistakable among them all? We think the epistles of S. Ignatius furnish
us with a reply to this question. As we have seen above, he views the
Church in each place as a community closely bound together under a
spiritual government which is summed up in the bishop, while the bishops
in their several dioceses are as closely linked to each other, and all
form one society, wherein is Jesus Christ. And these two truths are not
separated from each other, but the unity of the part is deduced from the
unity of the whole, and is subordinate to it. See, first, with what force
he states the unity of the diocese.(161) “Avoid divisions, as the
beginning of evils. Follow all of you the bishop as Jesus Christ the
Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles, and reverence the deacons as
God’s command. Let no one without the bishop do aught of what appertains
to the Church. Let that be deemed a sure Eucharist which is under the
bishop, or under him who has the bishop’s authority for it. Wherever the
bishop appears, there let the multitude (of the faithful) be.” But this
strict unity of the diocese is derived from that of the whole Church; for
he adds as the reason of the foregoing, “just as wherever Jesus Christ is,
there is the Catholic Church.”(162) This is the first time when the word
“catholic” is known to be used, and it is applied to the Church as its
distinctive character, to convey the two attributes of unity and
universality, in connection with the Person of Christ, exactly as it has
been used, an unique term for an unique object, from that day to this. S.
Ignatius further views the Church in each place as having one faith; and
not only so, but the same faith in every place; one faith at Antioch, one
at Rome, one at every city between them, beyond them, around them. Here,
then, is a double unity, inward and outward. As the double unity of body
and spirit makes the man, so the double unity of government and of faith
makes the Church. As neither mind nor body alone make the man, so neither
faith nor government alone make the Church, but the coherence of both. The
Incarnation is the joining a human soul and body with the Person of the
Divine Word; after which pattern the Church, which is His special
creation, is the joining of one faith and one government in a moral unity.
It is by this force, by the same hierarchy everywhere guarding the same
faith, by the principle of authority and tradition planted in this one
living organisation throughout the earth, that the attacks of heresy are
everywhere resisted. What S. Paul(163) lays down in dogma, history
exhibits in fact. A hundred years after his words are written, the Church
has stretched her limits beyond the empire, has multiplied incessantly,
has been attacked by a crowd of heresies striving to adulterate her
doctrine, and has cast them out of her by this double unity of her faith
and her government, and so is one Body and one Spirit. Her victory lies
not in being without heresies, but in standing among them as a contrast
and a condemnation.

The solidity of internal organisation, and the definiteness of the One
Faith which animated it, kept pace with the material increase of numbers.
At the expiration of this period it is probable that among all the
contemporaries and immediate disciples of the Apostles one only of high
rank remained, that Polykarp, joint-hearer with Ignatius of S. John, and
to whom in his passage the martyr addressed a letter as well as to his
Church; whose own letter written at the time of the martyr’s combat, and
commemorating the wonderful patience therein shown forth, is yet extant.
But in the mean time in every Church the transmission of authoritative
teaching passed to those who had grown up themselves in the bishop’s
council—his presbytery, which Ignatius loved to represent as being to each
bishop what the Council of Apostles was to their Lord. And as the death of
Apostles themselves had caused no break in this living chain, so the
gradual departure of their immediate disciples was made up by the careful
handing-on of the same deposit, lodged securely in its receptacle, the
succession of men, which carried on the teaching office of the
Church.(164)

In the mean time, what was the attitude of the empire to the Christian
Faith under Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius? Domitian’s reign had
ended in active persecution, to which Nerva had put a stop on his
accession.(165) But though Domitian’s edicts had been reversed, like those
of Nero, one of the most ancient laws of the Roman empire forbad the
worship of any god not approved by the Senate.(166) This, as we have said
above, was the sword perpetually suspended over the heads of Christians,
without any fresh action on the part of the emperors. By virtue of this,
even when it was forbidden to accuse them, yet if they were brought before
justice it was forbidden to absolve them.(167) And even senators,(168) if
accused, were not exempt from this severity. We find Trajan acting upon
this law in the year 111, when Pliny, being governor of Bithynia, brings
expressly the case of the Christians before him. And the terms in which he
does this show at once the temper of the Roman magistrate in such cases
and the state of the law.

“I have never been present,” he says, “at the trials of Christians, and
therefore do not know either the nature of their crime, or the degree of
the punishment, or how far examination should go. And I have been in great
hesitation whether age made any difference, or the tender should not be
distinguished from the strong; whether they should be pardoned upon
repentance, or, when once a man had been a Christian, ceasing to be so
should not profit him; or whether the mere profession without any crime,
or whether the crimes involved in the profession should be punished. In
the mean time, with regard to those brought before me as Christians, my
practice has been this: I asked them if they were Christians. If they
admitted it, I put the question a second and a third time, threatening
them with death. If they persevered, I ordered them to be led away to
execution.(169) For whatever it was which they were confessing, I had no
doubt that stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment.
There were others of a like infatuation, but as being Roman citizens I
directed them to be sent to the city. Presently the crime spreading, from
being under prosecution, as is usual, several incidents happened. An
anonymous delation was sent in to me, containing the names of many who say
that they are not Christians, nor ever were. As at my instance they
invoked the gods, and made supplication with frankincense and wine to your
image, which I had ordered for that purpose to be brought, together with
the statues of the gods, and as moreover they reviled Christ, none of
which things, it is said, real Christians can be induced to do, I thought
they might be let go. Others, being accused by a witness, admitted that
they were Christians, and presently said that they had been, some three
years before, some many years, and some even twenty, but were no longer.
All venerated your image and the statues of the gods, and reviled Christ.
But they alleged that the utmost of their fault or error was this: They
were accustomed to meet before dawn on a stated day, and addressed
themselves in a certain form to Christ as to a god, binding themselves by
oath not to any crime, but not to commit theft, robbery, adultery, the
breaking of their word, or the refusal to restore a deposit. After this
they were wont to separate, and then reassemble to take a common and
harmless meal. This, however, they had ceased to do from the publication
of my edict forbidding, according to your command, private assemblies. I
therefore thought it the more necessary to examine into the truth by
putting to the torture two female slaves, who were said to be deaconesses
among them. I found, however, nothing but a perverse and immoderate
superstition, and so, adjourning the inquiry, I took refuge in consulting
you. For the matter seemed to me worthy of consultation, specially on
account of the number of those involved in danger. For many of every age,
every rank, both sexes, have been already, and will be endangered, since
the contagion of this superstition has spread not only through cities but
through villages and country. And it seems capable of being arrested and
corrected. At all events there is proof that the almost deserted temples
have begun to be frequented, and the long intermitted rites renewed, and
victims for sacrifice are found ready, whereof hitherto there were very
few purchasers. Hence it is easy to form an opinion what a number of
persons may be reclaimed if pardon be allowed.”(170)

To which the emperor replies: “You have pursued the right course, my dear
Secundus, in examining the causes of those delated to you as Christians.
For no universal rule can be laid down in a certain formula. They are not
to be searched after; but if brought before you and convicted, they must
be punished. Yet with this condition, that whoever denies himself to be a
Christian, and makes it plain in fact, that is, by supplicating our gods,
though he has been in past time suspected, shall obtain pardon for his
repentance. But anonymous delations must not be admitted for any
accusation. This is at once the very worst precedent, and unworthy of our
time.”

A great difficulty in tracing the progress of the Christian Faith in these
three centuries is that we possess nothing like a consecutive secular or
religious history of them. We only catch glimpses of what passes at
intervals. Incidents are recorded which, like a flash of lightning,
suddenly reveal the landscape and the actors. Such an incident is this
letter of Pliny to Trajan, and his reply. We have here the governor of a
province before whom Christians are brought as criminals. We find that if
they acknowledge their faith and persist in professing it, he sentences
them to death. But embarrassed by their numbers, and perplexed also by the
fact, that, save the profession of their faith, there appeared nothing
criminal in their conduct, he refers the matter to the emperor. The
emperor, no Nero or Domitian, but one renowned for his justice and
moderation, praises what the governor has done; pronounces that Christians
as such are guilty of a capital crime, and that Pliny was right in so
interpreting the existing law; that, however, it is not desirable to seek
them out; that even when brought before justice they are to be released if
they deny their faith, but that if they persist in it, they are to be
punished with death.

Here, then, is the law—an original law of Rome before the Christian Faith
began—under which the martyrs suffered at different times, throughout
every province and city, without anything which could be called a general
persecution on the part of the emperor directed to the destruction of the
whole religion. This perpetual liability to punishment might be called
into action anywhere in the empire for various causes. The first in time,
and one of the most constant, was the enmity of the Jews; then the dislike
of the heathens to Christians and their ways, which was further sharpened
by local calamities or distress irritating the mind of the population, or
by the jealousy of the heathen priests and worshippers at the desertion of
their temples. Then, again, there was the ascription to Christian
godlessness, as it was called, that is their refusal to acknowledge the
Roman gods, of famines, pestilences, and whatever troubled the popular
mind. To these we must add a copious harvest of private grudges, and a
host of calumnies, which seem now almost grotesque, but then found wide
belief. But it was the existence of such a law as this, acted on by Pliny
before he referred to the emperor, and confirmed by Trajan, that gave
force and effect to all these causes of persecution. And it would appear
that when Christians were brought before the magistrates, as guilty of the
Christian Faith, it was not in the magistrates’ power to decline hearing
the case, any more than any other accusation of sacrilege or treason, for
it had been determined that Christians were not a mere Jewish sect, and
therefore could not in security worship one God, as the Jews did. It was a
ruled point that their worship was unauthorised.

The practice of Trajan himself was in accordance with his answer to Pliny.

The very ancient and genuine acts of the martyrdom of S. Ignatius state
that having struggled with difficulty through the persecution of Domitian,
he had carefully governed his church of Antioch, grieving only that he had
not yet reached the rank of a perfect disciple by the sacrifice of his
life, for he considered that the confession which is made by martyrdom
brings into closer union with the Lord. Trajan then having come to the
East, full of exultation at the victories which he had gained, and
considering that the subjugation of the Christians was all that was
wanting to the perfect obedience of his empire, began to threaten them
with the alternative of sacrifice or death. Then Ignatius fearing for his
church caused himself to be brought before the emperor, and being in the
presence was thus addressed by him. “Who are you, evil spirit, who are
zealous to transgress our commands, besides persuading others to come to
an evil end?” Ignatius replied, “No one calls the bearer of God an evil
spirit, for the demons fly away from the servants of God. But if you mean
that I am a trouble to these, and so call me evil to them, I admit it, for
having Christ my Heavenly King, I continually dissolve their plots.”
Trajan said, “Who is a bearer of God?” Ignatius replied, “He who has
Christ in his breast.” Trajan said, “We then appear to you not to have
gods in our minds, whom we use to help us against our enemies.” Ignatius
answered, “You in your error call gods the demons of the nations, for
there is one God who made the heaven, the earth, and the sea, and all that
is in them; and one Christ Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, of whose
friendship may I partake.” Trajan said, “You mean him who was crucified
under Pontius Pilate?” Ignatius answered, “Him who crucifies my sin, with
its inventor, and condemns all the error and the malice of the demons
under the feet of those who carry him in their heart.” Trajan said, “You
then carry the Crucified in your heart?” Ignatius replied, “Yes; for it is
written, I will dwell in them, and walk in them.” Trajan gave sentence:
“It is our command that Ignatius, who says that he carries the crucified
one about in him, be taken in chains by soldiers to the great Rome to
become the food of wild beasts, for the pleasure of the people.” The holy
martyr, when he heard this sentence, cried out with joy, “I thank Thee, O
Lord, who hast thought me worthy to be honoured with perfect charity
towards Thee, and to be bound in iron chains together with Thy Apostle
Paul.”(171)

So, with great eagerness and joy, through desire of his passion, having
commended his church to God, he set out on that long journey, “fighting,
as he says, with wild beasts all the way from Syria to Rome, over land and
sea, by day and by night,” a captive under sentence of death, in the hands
of soldiers, but receiving at each city a deputation from the bishop and
people, who came forth to honour him as their champion. And he has but one
anxiety, expressed again and again in that fervent letter to the Roman
Christians, that they should not by their prayers intercept his martyrdom.
“I entreat you not to be untimely kind to me. Suffer me to be the food of
the beasts, since by them I may enjoy God. I am God’s grain: let me be
ground by their teeth, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ:”(172)
and then, presently, “I do not command you, as Peter and Paul;” thus
giving an incidental but most powerful witness of the special relation
which those Apostles bore to the Roman Church.

And it may be remarked that while he has words of honour, praise, and
affection for the other five churches which he addresses, yet in speaking
of Rome his heart overflows with emotion. Upon this church he pours out
epithet upon epithet, as “the beloved and enlightened in the will of Him
who has willed all things which are according to the charity of Jesus
Christ our God,” whose people are “united to every command of His in flesh
and spirit, filled undividedly with the grace of God, and thoroughly
cleansed from every spot of foreign doctrine.” She is not only the Church
“which presides in the fortress of Roman power,” but likewise, “worthy of
God, and of all honour and blessing and praise, worthy to receive that
which she wishes, chaste, bearing the name of Christ and the name of the
Father, and presiding over charity.” What is the meaning of this last
phrase? As she presides in the fortress of Roman power, so she presides
over charity. May we thus interpret the mind of the martyr? God in His
Triune Being is Charity; the Holy Spirit, the ineffable embrace of the
Father and His Image, their Love, or Delight, or Joy, or Blessedness, or
whatever human name we may dare to give to what is most divine, is
charity: by charity God became man; charity is the individual Christian’s
state; charity makes men one in the Body of the God-man; charity is the
condition of angels and men in the great kingdom to come, the God-formed
kingdom. Thus charity is the distinctive mark of the Christian religion,
that from which it springs, that which it is, that which it points to, and
in which it will be consummated. When, then, S. Ignatius said of the Roman
Church, using the same word in one sentence,(173) that as she presided
over the country of the Romans, so she presided over charity, does he not
with equal delicacy and emphasis indicate her primacy? she presides over
that in which the Unity of the Church consists, in which its truth, its
grace, and its holiness coinhere.

The desire of the martyr was accomplished: he reached Rome on the last day
of the great games, and was thrown in the Colosseum before the beasts,
which, according to his repeated prayers, so entirely devoured him that
only the greater bones remained. These, says the contemporary account, “a
priceless treasure,” were carried back to Antioch. Somewhat less than
three hundred years afterwards S. Chrysostom, preaching on his day in his
city, thus speaks of him: “It was a divine benefaction to bring him back
again to us, and to distribute the martyr to the cities:—Rome received his
dripping blood, but you are honoured with his relics.—From that time he
enriches your city, and like a perpetual treasure, drawn upon every day
and never failing, gives his bounty to all. So this happy Ignatius,
blessing all that come to him, sends them home full of confidence, bold
resolution, and fortitude. Not, then, to-day only but every day go to him,
reaping spiritual fruits from him. For, indeed, he who comes hither with
faith may reap great goods. Not the bodies only, but the very coffins of
the saints are full of spiritual grace. For if in the case of Eliseus this
happened, and the dead man who touched his bier broke through the bonds of
death, how much more now, when grace is more abundant, and the energy of
the Spirit fuller?—So, I beseech you, if any one be in despondency, in
sickness, in the depth of sin, in any circumstance of life, to come here
with faith, and he will put off all these.”(174)

Before S. Ignatius reached that completion of his faith to which he
aspired, he was cheered with the account that his sacrifice had produced
its effect, and peace had been restored to his church, with the
completeness of its body.(175)

Now in all this—in Pliny’s conduct as governor, in his reference to
Trajan, in the emperor’s reply, in his treatment of S. Ignatius, and in
the restoration of peace afterwards—there is, we conceive, a very exact
sample of what the position of Christians was in Trajan’s time. His answer
ruled the question of Roman law for the following two hundred years. It
declared the profession of Christianity to be illicit and a capital
offence; but to call this law into action, or to leave it suspended as a
threat over the heads of Christians, was a matter of expedience. When the
latter took place, the churches were said to be at peace; when the former,
a persecution was said to rage; but at any time and place an individual
might suffer; while on the other hand a persecution directed to root out
the whole Christian name was not yet thought of.

And this state of things seems to continue through Hadrian’s principate.
In his first year, Alexander, fifth successor of S. Peter at Rome, having
been imprisoned under Trajan, suffers martyrdom; It would seem as if the
same hand had struck down about the same time the heads of the two great
churches of Rome and Antioch, the first and the third in rank, and perhaps
ordered the execution of the bishop of Antioch at Rome, with that of the
Roman bishop, in order to give greater force to the example.(176) Many
other martyrs at Rome and in the north of Italy are found at this time. It
is not at all necessary to suppose the personal action of Hadrian in
these.

After this he was engaged during fifteen years in those splendid
progresses, in which he examined personally every part of his vast empire,
from its northern frontier between Carlisle and Newcastle to the
Euphrates. While he was so engaged, the governors of the various provinces
would apply the existing law in the cases brought before them. He would
have had to interfere, and that with the whole weight of the imperial arm,
if he wished to check the course of the law. We have, however, recorded
the most interesting fact that when he was at Athens in the year 126,
Christians for the first time approached a Roman emperor with a public
defence of their doctrines, and a persecution is said to have been stopped
by the apologies which Quadratus and Aristides presented to him. Perhaps
the rescript to Minucius Fundanus, proconsul of the province of Asia,
which Justin has preserved, was a result of this. It runs thus: “I have
received the letter written to me by your predecessor, the noble Serenius
Granianus. And indeed it seems to me that that affair should not be passed
by without a diligent examination, in order that Christians may not be
disturbed, nor an occasion of false accusation be opened to informers. If,
then, the provincials can present themselves openly with their petitions
against Christians, so as to answer before the tribunal, let them do that,
and not betake themselves to mere requests and outcries. It would be much
more just that you should take cognisance of the matter, if any one be
willing to accuse. If, then, any one denounce them, and prove that they
are doing anything illegal, sentence them according to the gravity of the
crime. But, by Hercules, if it be a mere false accusation, punish the
informer according to its importance.”

Here would seem to be a considerable modification of Trajan’s rescript.
The profession of Christianity is not taken by itself as a capital
offence. Proof must be given that something illegal has been committed. So
far it approaches to an act of toleration. It plainly discourages
anonymous and malicious attacks. But on the other hand it was not
difficult to show that Christians did commit something illegal. Any real
accuser bringing them before the tribunal could prove by their own
testimony that they declared the gods worshipped by the Romans to be
demons, while they refused to swear by the emperor’s genius. Thus,
favourable as this decree was to them, it fell far short of declaring
their religion to be allowable.

And the same emperor who could thus write, whose curiosity made him
acquainted with all the religious sects of his empire, whose temper, as an
exceedingly accomplished man, having the widest experience of men and
things, and ruling an empire of the most diverse races with the most
various religions, led him to an eclectic indifference, and so far
toleration of all, yet showed by his personal conduct at a later period of
his life how he would treat the profession of the Christian Faith if it
thwarted a ruling desire. When, after fifteen years of incessant travel,
study, and observation, he returned to Rome, and had enclosed at Tivoli a
space of eight miles in circumference, adorned with copies of the most
beautiful temples in his wide dominion, he offered sacrifices and
consulted the gods as to the duration of his work; but he received for
answer that the gods who inhabited their images were tormented by the
prayers which the widow Symphorosa and her seven sons offered daily to
their God.(177) If she and her children would sacrifice, they promised to
grant all his demands. Upon this Hadrian ordered Symphorosa and her seven
sons to be brought before him, and endeavoured by kind words to bring them
to sacrifice. She replied, “It was for not consenting to what you ask that
my husband Gætulius and his brother Amantius, both tribunes in your army,
suffered various tortures, and, like generous champions, overcame your
demons by a glorious death. If their death was shameful before men, it was
honourable in the sight of the angels, and now they are crowned with
immortal light. They live in heaven, and follow everywhere the King who
reigns there, covered with glory by the trophies they have gained in dying
for Him.” Hadrian, stung by this reply, could not contain himself, but
said: “Either sacrifice this instant to the immortal gods, or I will
myself sacrifice you with your children to these gods whom you despise.”
“And how should I be so happy,” said Symphorosa, “as to be worthy with my
children to be sacrificed to my God?” “I tell you,” said Hadrian, “I will
have you sacrificed to my gods.” “Your gods,” replied she, “cannot receive
me in sacrifice. I am not a victim for them; but if you order me to be
burnt for the name of Christ my God, know that the fire which consumes me
will only increase their punishment.” “Choose, I tell you,” said the
emperor; “sacrifice or die.” “You think, doubtless, to frighten me,”
rejoined Symphorosa; “but I desire to be at rest with my husband, whom you
put to death for the name of Christ.” Then the emperor ordered her to be
taken before the temple of Hercules, to be struck in the face, and hung up
by her hair. But finding that these torments only served to strengthen her
in the faith, he had her thrown into the Anio. Her brother Eugenius, being
one of the chief men at Tibur, drew her body from the water, and buried
her in the suburbs of the town.

The next day Hadrian ordered the seven sons of Symphorosa to be brought
before him. And, seeing that neither his threats nor his promises, nor the
exhibition of the most fearful punishments, could shake their constancy,
nor induce them to sacrifice to idols, he caused seven poles to be planted
round the temple of Hercules, on which they were raised by pulleys. Then
Crescentius, the eldest, had his throat cut; Julian, the second, was run
through the breast; Nemesius was struck in the heart; Primitivus in the
stomach; Justin in the back; Stactæus in the side; while the youngest,
Eugenius, was cleft to the middle.

The day following the death of these brethren Hadrian came to the temple
and ordered their bodies to be removed, and to be cast into a deep hole.
The priests and sacrificers of the temple called this spot the place of
the Seven Executed. Their blood stopped the persecution, which was only
rekindled eighteen months afterwards.(178)

As the rescript to Minucius Fundanus did not prevent the emperor from thus
acting, neither was it an obstacle to such an incident as this occurring
in any part of the empire.

That it was so likewise in the principate of his successor, of all down to
this period the most tranquil and the least persecuting, we have strong
and clear evidence in the earliest of the extant apologies, that of Justin
Martyr, presented to the emperor Antoninus Pius about the year 150. He who
would breathe the atmosphere in which the early Christians lived will find
it in this work of a distinguished convert from heathen philosophy, which
is the more interesting as being composed at a moment when the empire
seems to have reached its highest point, and the ruler of it was its most
moderate spirit. We may cite a few passages bearing on the condition of
Christians.

“To the Emperor Titus Ælius Adrianus Antoninus Pius Augustus Cæsar, and to
his son Verissimus the Philosopher, and to Lucius the Philosopher, son of
Cæsar by birth, and of Pius by adoption, the lover of learning, and to the
sacred Senate, and to all the Roman people, in behalf of those out of
every race of men who are unjustly hated and persecuted, I, that am one of
such myself, Justin, son of Priscus, and grandson of Baccheius, natives of
Flavia Neapolis, of Palestine, in Syria, offer this address and
supplication.

“Reason dictates that those who are really pious and philosophers should
love and honour truth alone, declining to follow the opinions of the
ancients if they be corrupt. For right reason not only forbids us to
assent to those who are unjust either in practice or in principle, but
commands the lover of truth to choose that which is just in word and deed
in every way, even before his own life, and with death threatening him.
Now you hear yourselves called on all sides Pious, Philosophers, Guardians
of Justice, and Lovers of Learning; but, whether you be such in truth, the
event will show. For we have come before you, not to flatter you in this
address, nor to gain your favour, but to demand of you to pass judgment
according to strict and well-weighed reason, not influenced by prejudice,
nor by the desire of pleasing superstitious men, nor by inconsiderate
passion, nor by the long prevalence of an evil report, in giving a
sentence which would turn against yourselves. For, as to us, we are fully
persuaded that we can suffer no injury from anyone, unless we be found
guilty of some wickedness, or proved to be bad men; and, as to you, kill
us you may, but hurt us you cannot.(179)

“We ask, then, that the actions of those who are accused before you may be
examined, that he who is convicted may be punished as an evildoer, but not
as a Christian. And, if anyone appears to be innocent, that he may be
dismissed as a Christian who has done no evil. For we do not require you
to punish our accusers: they are sufficiently recompensed by their own
malice, and their ignorance of what is good. Moreover, bear in mind that
it is for your sakes that we thus speak, since it is in our power to deny
when we are questioned. But we choose not to live by falsehood.(180)

“And you, when you hear that we are expecting a kingdom, rashly conceive
that we mean a human one, whereas we speak of that with God, as is evident
even from those who are under examination by you confessing that they are
Christians, whilst they know that death is the penalty of the confession.
For if we expected a human kingdom, we should deny in order to obtain our
expectations; but, since our hopes are not of the present, we do not
regard those who kill us, knowing that death is an inevitable debt to
all.(181)

“We adore God only, but in all other matters joyfully serve you,
confessing that you are kings and rulers, and praying that you may be
found to possess, together with your royal power, a sound and discerning
mind. If, however, notwithstanding that we thus pray and openly lay
everything before you, you treat us with contempt, we shall receive no
injury; believing, or rather, being convinced, that every one, if his
deeds shall so deserve, shall receive the punishment of eternal fire, and
that an account will be required of him in proportion to the powers which
he has received from God, as Christ has declared in those words, ‘To
whomsoever God has given much, of him shall be much required.’(182)

“Though death be the penalty to those who teach or even who confess the
name of Christ, we everywhere accept it, and teach it. And if you as
enemies meet these words, you can do no more, as we have already said,
than kill us, which brings no hurt to us, but to you, and to all who hate
unjustly, and do not repent, the chastisement of eternal fire.”(183)

And his concluding words are: “If now what we have said appears to be
reasonable and true, honour it accordingly; but if folly, despise it as
foolish; yet pass not sentence of death against those as enemies, who have
done no evil. For we tell you beforehand that you will not escape the
future judgment of God, if you continue in injustice, and we shall cry,
Let the will of God be done.”(184)

Such then is the testimony of a Christian as to the way in which the
confessors of his religion were treated; and it is corroborated by that of
the heathen philosopher Celsus, who writes his books against Christianity
about this time, and imputes the secrecy practised by Christians in their
teaching and their actions to their attempts to escape the punishment of
death hanging over their heads.(185) And again having put into the mouth
of Christians the remark, that if they blaspheme or strike a statue of
Jupiter or Apollo, these gods cannot defend themselves, he subjoins: “Do
you not, then, see that your own demon is not merely blasphemed but
expelled from every land and sea, while you, his consecrated image,(186)
are chained, and led away to prison, and crucified; and the demon, or as
you call him, the Son of God, gives you no protection.” And in another
place, comparing Christians with Jews, to whom God had made so many
promises: “See,” he says, “what good has He done to them and to you? To
them, instead of being lords of all the earth, not a clod of soil or a
hearth remains;(187) while of you, if any one still wanders about in
hiding, yet justice pursues him with the doom of death.”

However, we know that at this time at least the bold words of Justin drew
down no punishment from Antoninus, and a rescript of this emperor, dated
about two years after the presentation of this first apology, has been
preserved, which is more favourable to Christians than that of Hadrian. It
is addressed to that province of Asia which contained so many flourishing
Christian churches, and which accordingly was so bitter against them. They
had written to complain of the Christians, and to accuse them as the cause
of the earthquakes which had happened. The emperor replies: “It was my
belief that the gods would take care that such men as you describe should
not escape. For much rather would they, if they could, punish such as will
not worship them. Now these men you are annoying, and accusing their
opinion as atheistical, and charging them with sundry other things which
we cannot prove. Yet it would be serviceable to them to seem to meet their
death for such an accusation; and they surpass you in giving up their
lives rather than comply with what you call upon them to do. But as to the
earthquakes which have happened or are happening now, it is not reasonable
that you should mention them, you who lose heart when they take place,
comparing your conduct with theirs, who have more confidence than you
towards God. And you indeed in such a time seem to have no knowledge of
the gods, and neglect the temples, and know nothing of worshipping God;
whence it is that you are jealous of those who do worship him, and that
you persecute them to death. Respecting such men various other rulers of
provinces wrote to my divine father, and his reply was, not to trouble
such men, except they appear to be contriving something against the Roman
empire. Many too have referred to me about such, and my reply was in
agreement to my father’s decision. Now if anyone has an accusation to
bring against such a one as such, let the accused be released from the
charge, even though he appear to be such, and let the accuser be
punished.”(188)

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-president(196)
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 Tacitus(202) 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 founding(212) 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, then, were the two modes in which the Christian Faith pursued and
attained its orderly increase; as a seed it grew to a plant in each city,
and as a plant it ramified, or as Tertullian says, carried “the vine-layer
of the faith”(216) from city to city, from province to province. In the
meantime the last disciples of the Apostles, those who from the especial
veneration with which they were regarded as teachers of the Faith and
“second links in the chain of tradition,” were termed Presbyters,(217) had
died out. S. Polycarp, at the time of his martyrdom in 167, was probably
the sole remaining one, though his pupil S. Irenæus had known others. When
the latter, upon the martyrdom of S. Pothinus in 177, is raised to the
government of the See of Lyons, we may consider that no one survived in
possession of that great personal authority which belonged to those who
had themselves been taught by Apostles; and so at the third generation
from the last of these the Church throughout the world stood without any
such support, simply upon that basis of the tradition and teaching of the
truth, and of the succession of rulers, on which the Apostles had placed
it, to last for ever. Now in this position it had already, throughout the
whole course of the second century, been violently assaulted by a family
of heresies, which growing upon one root—a natural philosophy confusing
the being of God with the world—burst forth into an astonishing variety of
outward forms. Gnosticism completely altered and defaced Christian
doctrine under each of the four great heads, the Being of God, the Person
of Christ, the nature of man, the office and function of the Church. Into
the Godhead it introduced a dualism, recognising with the absolute good an
absolute evil represented by matter: it denied the reality of the
Incarnation; it made the body a principle of evil in man’s nature: but we
will here limit ourselves to the characteristic and formal principle of
the system from which it derived its name, to Gnosis as the means of
acquiring divine truth. Now the Christian religion taught that revealed
truth was to be attained by the individual through receiving, upon the
ground of the divine veracity, those mysterious doctrines superior but not
contrary to reason which it unfolded; and that the communication of such
doctrines might continue unimpaired and unchanging, it taught that our
Lord had established a never-failing authority charged with the execution
of this office, and assisted by the perpetual presence of His Spirit with
it to the end. But the Gnostics admitted only in the case of the imperfect
or natural man that faith was the means for acquiring religious truth; to
the spiritual, the proper gnostic, gnosis should take the place of faith:
for to many a heathen, accustomed to unlimited philosophical speculation,
the absolute subjection of the intellect to divine authority, required by
the principle of faith, was repugnant. Now this Gnosis was in their mind
not knowledge grounded upon faith, but either philosophic science, or a
supposed intuition of truth, which was not only to replace faith, but the
whole moral life, inasmuch as the completion and sanctification of man
were to be wrought by it. And thus instead of an external authority the
individual reason was set up as the highest standard of religious truth,
the issue of which could only be rationalism in belief and sectarianism in
practice.

This formal principle of Gnosticism when duly carried out would deny the
idea of the Church, its divine institution, its properties and
prerogatives. For the gnostic mode of attaining divine truth, as above
stated, contains in it such a denial. Besides this, the gnostic doctrine
that matter was the seat of evil, destroyed the belief that Christ had
assumed a body: the gnostic doctrine that the supreme God could enter into
no communion with man made their Æon Christ no member of human society,
but a phantom which had enlightened the man Jesus, and then returned back
to the “Light-realm.” Not being really the Son of God, he could have no
Church which was his body: not really redeeming, for sin to the gnostic
had only a physical, not a moral cause, he was but a teacher, and
therefore had created no institution to convey grace; which, moreover, was
superfluous, for whatever elements of good human nature had were derived
from creation and not from redemption. Nor was such an universal
institution wanted, since not all men but only the spiritual were capable
of being drawn up to the Light-realm. The Gnostic therefore required
neither hierarchy nor priesthood, since the soul of this system was the
gnosis of the individual. For this a body enjoying infallibility through
the assistance of the Holy Ghost was not needed. It was enough for
enthusiasts and dreamers to pursue their speculations without any limit to
free inquiry, save what themselves chose to impose as the interpretation
of such scriptures as they acknowledged, or as the exhibition of a private
tradition with which they held themselves to be favoured.

Lastly, the idea of Sacraments, as conveying grace under a covering of
sense, would be superfluous to the gnostic, inasmuch as the spiritual
elements in man belong to him by nature, and are not communicated by a
Redeemer, and would be repulsive to him because matter is a product of the
evil principle, and cannot be the channel of grace from out the
Light-realm.(218)

My purpose here has only been to say just so much of Gnosticism as may
show how the whole Christian truth was attacked by it, and especially the
existence and functions of the Church.

And this may indeed be termed the first heresy in that it struck its roots
right up into Apostolic times. Irenæus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius account
Simon Magus to be its father, and the father of all heresy. As such it is
not without significance that he encountered the first of the Apostles in
Samaria, endeavouring to purchase from him the gifts of grace and
miraculous power, and that he likewise afterwards encountered him at Rome.
To this the first manifestation of Gnosticism succeed heretical doctrines
concerning the Person of our Lord, which sprung out of Judaism; but no
sooner are these overcome than Gnosticism in its later forms spreads from
Syria and Alexandria over the whole empire, everywhere confronting the
Church, seducing her members, and tempting especially speculative minds
within her. A mixture itself of Platonic, Philonic, Pythagorean, and
Parsic philosophy, affecting to gather the best out of all philosophies
and religions, in which it exactly represented the eclectic spirit of its
age, arraying itself in the most fantastic garb of imagination, but at the
bottom no dubious product of the old heathen pantheism, it set itself to
the work, while it assumed Christian names, of confusing and distracting
Christian truth. From the beginning of the second century it was the great
enemy which beset the Church. It may, then, well represent to us the
principle of heresy itself, and as such let us consider on what principles
it was met by the Church’s teachers.

Now to form a correct notion of the danger to which the Christian people
at this time was exposed, we must have before us that it was contained in
several hundred communities, each of them forming a complete spiritual
society and government. These had arisen under the pressure of such
hostility on the part of the empire that it is only in the time of the
last emperor during this period, Alexander Severus, that churches are
known to have publicly existed at Rome.(219) For a very long time all
meetings of Christians and all celebration of their worship was secret. It
is obvious what an absolute freedom of choice on the part of all those who
became Christians this fact involved. Nor did that freedom cease when they
had been initiated into the new religion. Their fidelity to the Christian
faith was all through their subsequent life solicited by the danger in
which as Christians they stood. Only a continuous freedom of choice on
their part could maintain it. And not only did every temporal interest
turn against it, but in the case at least of the more intellectual
converts the activity of thought implied in their voluntary acceptance of
a new belief served as a material on which the seductions of false
teachers might afterwards act, unless it was controlled by an everliving
faith, and penetrated by an active charity. The more these Christian
communities multiplied, the more it was to be expected that some of them
would yield to the assaults of false teachers. It is in just such a state
of things that a great dogmatic treatise was written against Gnosticism by
one who stood at only a single remove from the Apostle John, being the
disciple of his disciple Polycarp. Irenæus, by birth a native of lesser
Asia, enjoyed when young the instructions and intimate friendship of the
bishop of Smyrna. In his old age he delighted to remember how Polycarp had
described his intercourse with John, and with those who had seen the Lord:
how he repeated their discourse, and what he had heard from them
respecting the teaching and the miracles of that Word of life whom they
had seen with their own eyes. “These things,” says Irenæus, “through the
mercy of God I then diligently listened to, writing them down not on
paper, but on my heart, and by His grace I ruminate upon them
perpetually.”(220) Later in life he left Smyrna, and settled in Lyons, of
which Church he was a presbyter when the terrible persecution of 177 broke
out there. Elected thereupon to succeed a martyr as bishop, he crowned an
episcopate of twenty-five years with a similar martyrdom. He wrote, as he
says, during the episcopate of Eleutherius, who was the twelfth bishop of
Rome from Peter, and sat from 177 to 192. After describing at length the
Gnostic errors concerning the divine nature, he sets forth in contrast the
unity of the truth as declared by the Church in the following words:

“The Church, though she be spread abroad through the whole world unto the
ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and their disciples
faith in one God;” and he proceeds to recite her creed, in substance the
same as that now held: then he adds, dwelling with emphasis on the very
point which I have been noting, the sprinkling about, that is, of distinct
communities so widely dispersed, which yet are one in their belief.

“This proclamation and this faith the Church having received, though she
be disseminated through the whole world, carefully guards, as the
inhabitant of one house, and equally believes these things as having one
soul and the same heart, and in exact agreement these things she proclaims
and teaches and hands down, as having one mouth. For, though the languages
through the world be dissimilar, the power of the tradition is one and the
same. Nor have the churches founded in Germany otherwise believed or
otherwise handed down, nor those in Spain, nor in Gaul, nor in the East,
nor in Egypt, nor those in the middle of the world. But as the sun, God’s
creature, in all the world is one and the same, so too the proclamation of
the truth shines everywhere, and lights all men that are willing to come
to the knowledge of the truth. Nor will he among the Church’s rulers who
is most powerful in word say other than this, for no one is above his
teacher;(221) nor will he that is weak in word diminish the tradition, for
the Faith being one and the same, neither he that can say much on it has
gathered too much, nor he that can say little is deficient.”

Against the gnostic claim to possess a private tradition, in virtue of
which each of them “depraving the rule of the truth was not ashamed to
preach himself,” he sets forth the one original tradition which the
Apostles,(222) only “when they had first been invested with the power of
the Holy Ghost coming down on them, and endued with perfect knowledge,”
delivered to the churches founded by them. “And this tradition of the
Apostles, manifested in the whole world, may be seen in every church by
all who have the will to see what is true, and we can give the chain of
those who by the Apostles were appointed bishops in the churches, and
their successors down to our time, who have neither taught nor known any
such delirious dream as these imagine. For, had the Apostles known any
reserved mysteries, which they taught to the perfect separately and
secretly from the rest, assuredly they would have delivered them to those
especially to whom they intrusted the churches themselves. For very
perfect and irreprehensible in all respects did they wish those to be whom
they left for their own successors,(223) delivering over to them their own
office of teaching, by correct conduct on whose part great advantage would
accrue, as from their fall the utmost calamity. But since it were very
long, in a volume like this, to enumerate the succession of all the
churches, we take the church the greatest, the most ancient, and known to
all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles
Peter and Paul, and pointing out the tradition which it has received from
the Apostles, and the faith which it has announced to men, reaching down
to us by the succession of its bishops, we confound all those who form
societies other than they ought, in any way, whether for the sake of
self-fancied doctrines, or through blindness and an evil mind. For, with
this church, on account of its superior principate, it is necessary that
every church agree, that is, the faithful everywhere (every church) in
which by the (faithful) everywhere, the apostolic tradition is preserved.

“The blessed Apostles, then, having founded and built up the church,
committed to Linus the administration of its episcopate.... Anencletus
succeeds him, from whom in the third place from the Apostles Clemens
inherits the episcopate.... He is succeeded by Evaristus; Evaristus by
Alexander, who is followed by Xystus sixth from the Apostles. Then
Telesphorus, who was gloriously martyred; next Hyginus; then Pius; after
whom Anicetus. Soter followed Anicetus; and now in the twelfth degree from
the Apostles Eleutherius holds the place of bishop. By this order and
succession the tradition from the Apostles in the Church and the teaching
of the truth have come down to us. And this proof is most complete that it
is one and the same life-giving Faith which has been preserved in the
Church from the Apostles up to this time, and handed down in truth....
With such proofs, then, before us, we ought not still to search among
others for the truth, which it is easy to take from the Church, since the
Apostles most fully committed unto this, as unto a rich storehouse, all
which is of the truth, so that everyone, whoever will, may draw from it
the draught of life. For this is the gate of life: all the rest are
thieves and robbers. They must therefore be avoided; but whatever is of
the Church we must love with the utmost diligence, and lay hold of the
tradition of the truth. For how? if on any small matter question arose,
ought we not to recur to the most ancient churches in which the Apostles
lived, and take from them on the matter in hand what is certain and plain.
And suppose the Apostles had not even left us writings, ought we not to
follow that order of tradition which they delivered to those to whom they
intrusted the churches? To this order many barbarous nations of believers
in Christ assent, having salvation written upon their hearts by the Holy
Spirit without paper and ink, and diligently guarding the old
tradition.”(224)

This capital point of the ever-living teaching office he further dwells
on:

“The Faith received in the Church we guard in it, which being always from
the Spirit of God, like an admirable deposit in a good vessel, is young
itself, and makes young the vessel in which it is. For this office on the
part of God(225) is intrusted to the Church, as the breath of life was
given to the body, in order that all the members receiving may be
quickened, and in this is placed the communication of Christ, that is, the
Holy Spirit, the earnest of incorruption, the confirmation of our faith,
and the ladder by which we ascend to God. For, says he, in the Church God
has placed Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, and all the remaining operation
of the Spirit; of whom all those are not partakers who do not run to the
Church, but deprive themselves of life by an evil opinion and a still
worse conduct. For where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God:
and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the
Spirit is Truth. Wherefore they who are not partakers of Him are neither
nourished unto life from the breasts of the mother, nor receive that most
pure fountain which proceeds from the Body of Christ, but dig out for
themselves broken cisterns from earthly ditches, and from the filth drink
foul water, avoiding the Faith of the Church lest they be brought back,
and rejecting the Spirit that they may not be taught. So estranged from
the truth they deservedly wallow in every error, tossed about by it,
having different opinions on the same subjects at different times, and
never holding one firm mind, choosing rather to be sophists of words than
disciples of the truth; for they are not founded upon the one rock, but on
the sand, which has in it a multitude of pebbles.”(226)

And he elsewhere contrasts the certainty within, and the uncertainty
without, this teaching power:

“The said heretics, then, being blind to the truth, cannot help walking
out of the track into one path after another, and hence it is that the
vestiges of their doctrine are scattered about without any rule or
sequence. Whereas the road of those who are of the Church goes round the
whole world, because it possesses a firm tradition from the Apostles, and
gives us to see that all have one and the same faith, where all enjoin one
and the same God the Father, believe one disposition of the Son of God’s
incarnation, know the same gift of the Spirit, meditate on the same
precepts, guard the same regimen of ecclesiastical rule, await the same
advent of the Lord, and support the same salvation of the whole man, body
and soul alike. Now the Church’s preaching is true and firm, in whom one
and the same way of salvation is shown through the whole world. For to her
is intrusted the light of God; and hence the wisdom of God, by which He
saves all men, ‘is sung at her entrance, acts with confidence in her
streets, is proclaimed on her walls, and speaks ever in the gates of the
city.’ For everywhere the Church proclaims the truth: she is the
seven-branched candlestick bearing Christ’s light.”(227)

It has been necessary to give at considerable length the very words of S.
Irenæus, because they are stronger and more perspicuous than any summary
of them can be, and because they exhibit a complete answer not to this
particular heresy only, but to all heresy for ever. Such an answer, coming
from one who stood at the second generation from S. John, is of the
highest value. Thus he meets the gnostic principle that divine truth is
acquired by the individual through some process of his own mind, which in
this particular case is termed gnosis, but which may bear many other
names, by appealing to an external standard, the Rule of Faith in the
Church from the beginning, which by its unity points to its origin and
lineage from the apostles and Christ. And this serves to bring out the
central idea which rules his whole mind, that “where the Church is, there
also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the
Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth.” The deposit of which he
spoke is not a dead mass, or lump of ore, requiring only safe custody, but
a living Spirit dwelling in the Church, the source within her of unity,
truth, and grace, using her teaching office, which is set up in her
episcopate, for the drawing out and propagation of the deposit from the
double fountain of Tradition and Scripture, for these her teachers as such
have a divine gift of truth.(228) It is thus that he expands without
altering the doctrine of his teacher Polycarp’s fellow-disciple, “Where
Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”(229) And from it he
proceeds to what follows necessarily on such a conception, that this
Church must have a visible point of unity. As then he appeals to the
churches founded by Apostles as the principal centres of living tradition,
so before yet one of these churches had fallen into possession of
heretics,(230) before yet there was any disagreement between them, he
singles out one for its superior principate, on account of which it was
necessary for every church to agree with it, which he grounds on its
descent from S. Peter and S. Paul, giving every link in the chain of
succession during the hundred and ten years which had elapsed between
their martyrdom and his own episcopate. He sees an especial prerogative
lodged in that church as the means of securing the whole Church’s organic
unity; and this prerogative is, that it is among churches what S. Peter
and S. Paul were among Apostles;(231) as the first general western council
expressed it, “in it the Apostles sit daily, and their blood without
intermission bears witness to the glory of God.”(232)

Thus the conception expressed by Irenæus, with the greatest emphasis and
continual repetition, in order to refute heresy, is that all truth and
grace are stored up in the one body of the Church; to which his doctrine
of the Roman Primacy is as the keystone to the arch. For everything in his
view depends on the unity, the intrinsic harmony, of the truth which he is
describing as lodged in the episcopate: the means therefore of securing
that unity are part of its conception. Accordingly, to see in its due
force his statement that every church must agree with the Roman Church, it
must not be severed from the context and taken by itself, but viewed in
connexion with the argument as part of which it stands. If the Church is
to speak one truth with one mouth, which is his main idea, she must have
an organic provision for such a result, which he places in the necessary
agreement of all churches with one: and this is his second idea,
subsidiary to the first, and completing it.

Irenæus by birth and education represents in all this the witness of the
Asiatic churches; as bishop of Lyons, the churches of Gaul.

A few years after Irenæus, Tertullian in a professed treatise against
heresy lays down exactly the same principles. With him, too, the main idea
is the possession of all truth and grace by the one Body which Christ
formed and the Apostles established. This he thus exhibits:

“We must not appeal to the Scriptures, nor try the issue on points on
which the victory is either none, or doubtful, or too little doubtful. For
though the debate on the Scriptures should not so turn out as to place
each party on an equal footing, the order of things requires that that
question should be first proposed which is the only one now to be
discussed, To whom does the Faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures?
From whom and through whom, when and to whom, was that discipline by which
men become Christians delivered? For wherever the truth of that which is
the Christian discipline at once and faith be shown to be, there will be
the truth of the Scriptures, of their exposition, and of all Christian
traditions. Our Lord Jesus Christ (may He suffer me so to speak for the
present), whoever He is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance
God and Man, of whatever reward the promiser, Himself declared so long as
He was on earth, whether to the people openly, or to the disciples apart,
what He was, what He had been, what will of the Father He administered,
what duty of man He laid down. Of whom He had attached to his own side
twelve in chief, the destined teachers of the nations. One of these having
fallen off from Him, He bade the other eleven, on his departure to the
Father after the resurrection, go and teach the nations, who were to be
baptised into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. The
Apostles then forthwith, the meaning of their title being the Sent,
assuming by lot Matthias as a twelfth into the place of Judas, by the
authority of the prophecy in the psalm of David, when they had obtained
the promised power of the Holy Ghost for miracles and utterance, first
through Judea bore witness to the Faith in Christ Jesus, and established
churches, thence proceeding into the world promulgated the same doctrine
of the same Faith to the nations, and thereupon founded churches in every
city, from which the other churches thenceforth borrowed the vine-layer of
the Faith and the seeds of the doctrine, and are daily borrowing them that
they may become churches. And for this cause they are themselves also
counted apostolical, as being the offspring of apostolical churches. The
whole kind must be classed under its original. And thus these churches so
many and so great are that one first from the Apostles, whence they all
spring. Thus all are the first, and all apostolical, while all being the
one prove unity: whilst there is between them communication of peace, and
the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality.(233) And no other
principle rules these rights than the one tradition of the same
sacrament.”(234)

Here is the summing up of what Irenæus had said with the force, brevity,
and incisiveness which characterise Tertullian. Further on he rejects any
appeal on the part of heretics to scripture:

“If the truth be in our possession, as many as walk by the rule which the
Church has handed down from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and
Christ from God, the reasonableness of our proposition is manifest, which
lays down that heretics are not to be allowed to enter an appeal to
scriptures, since without scriptures we prove them to have no concern with
scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, inasmuch
as they do not hold from Christ what they follow by their own choice, and
in consequence admit the name of heretics.(235) Therefore not being
Christians, they have no right to Christian writings. To whom we may well
say, Who are you? when did you come? and whence? What are you, who are not
mine, doing in my property? By what right dost thou, Marcion, cut down my
wood? By what license dost thou, Valentinus, turn the course of my waters?
By what power remove my landmarks? This is my possession: how are you
sowing it and feeding on it at your pleasure? It is mine, I repeat: I had
it of old; I had it first: I have the unquestioned title-deeds from the
first proprietors. I am the heir of the Apostles. According to their will,
according to their trust, according to the oath I took from them, I hold
it. You, assuredly, they have ever disinherited and renounced, as aliens,
as enemies. But why are heretics aliens and enemies to Apostles, save from
difference of doctrine, which each at his own pleasure has either brought
forward or received against Apostles?”(236)

Thus Tertullian adds the witness of the African church to that of the
Asiatic and Gallic churches in Irenæus.

We have noted the great church of Alexandria as a most complete instance
of the growth whereby from the mother see the hierarchy took possession of
a land. But the principle of such growth was the ecclesiastical rule, and
its strength the energy with which that rule was preserved. This rule was
twofold: the rule of discipline, or outward regimen, what we now call a
constitution; and the rule of Faith. What the church of Alexandria was in
discipline has been seen above: and now just at this time we have in the
first great teacher of this church, who has come down to us, the most
decisive exhibition of this rule as a defence against this same gnostic
heresy. “As,” says Clement, “a man like those under the enchantment of
Circe should become a beast, so whoever has kicked against the tradition
of the Church, and started aside into the opinions of human heresies, has
ceased to be a man of God, and faithful to the Lord.” ... “There are three
states of the soul, ignorance, opinion, knowledge. Those who are in
ignorance, are the Gentiles; those in knowledge, the true Church; those in
opinion, the adherents of heresies.” ... “We have learnt that bodily
pleasure is one thing, which we give to the Gentiles; strife a second,
which we adjudge to heresies; joy a third, which is the property of the
Church.” Again, he speaks of those who “not using the divine words well,
but perversely, neither enter themselves into the kingdom of heaven, nor
suffer those whom they have deceived to attain the truth. They have not
indeed the key to the entrance, but rather a false key, whereby they do
not enter as we do through the Lord’s tradition, drawing back the veil,
but cutting out a side way, and secretly digging through the Church’s
wall, they transgress the truth, and initiate into rites of error the soul
of the irreligious. For that they have made their human associations later
than the Catholic Church, it needs not many words to show.” Then, after
referring to the origin and propagation “of the Lord’s teaching,”(237)
exactly after the mode of Irenæus and Tertullian, he concludes, “So it is
clear from the most ancient and true Church, that these heresies coming in
subsequently to it, and others still later, are innovations from it, as
coins of adulterate stamp. From what has been said, then, I consider it
manifest that the true Church, the really ancient Church, is one, in which
are enrolled all who are just according to (God’s) purpose. For inasmuch
as there is one God and one Lord, therefore that which is most highly
precious is praised for being alone, since it is an imitation of the one
Principle. The one Church, then, which they try by force to cut up into
many heresies, falls under the same category as the nature of the One. So
then we assert that the ancient and Catholic Church is one alone in its
foundation, in its idea, in its origin, and in its excellence, collecting
by the will of the one God, through the one Lord, into the unity of one
Faith, according to the peculiar covenants, or rather to the one covenant
at different times, the preordained whom God predestined, having known
before the foundation of the world that they would be just. But the
excellence of the Church, as the principle of the whole construction, is
in unity, surpassing all other things, and having nothing similar or equal
to itself.”(238)

One other writer remains, the larger part of whose life falls within this
period, greater in renown than either of the foregoing; and into whatever
particular errors Origen may have fallen, he did not swerve from their
doctrine as to the mode of meeting error itself. “Since,” says he, “there
are many who think that they hold the tenets of Christ, while some of them
hold different tenets from those who went before them, let the
ecclesiastical preaching as handed down by the order of succession from
the Apostles, and maintained even to the present time in the churches, be
preserved: that alone is to be believed as truth which in nothing is
discordant from the ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition.”(239) And
the ground for such a principle he has given elsewhere:

“The divine words assert that the whole Church of God is the Body of
Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body as a
whole are particular believers: since 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 working in, the whole body, the
Church, moves likewise each member of the Church, who does nothing without
the Word.”(240)

The four great writers, then, of this period, Irenæus, Tertullian,
Clement, and Origen, none of them indeed from Rome, but representing the
churches of Asia, Gaul, Africa, and Egypt, exactly concur in the principle
by which they refuted heresy, the propagation, that is, of the rule of
Faith in its purity and integrity, by those who possessed the succession
of the Apostles and their office of teaching, in which lay a divine gift
of the truth.

But to those who proceeded from this basis it was a further labour to set
forth the true knowledge against the false. And we may trace the following
results of heresy, quite unintended by itself, in its operation on the
Church.

1. In the first place, S. Augustine continually remarks that the more
accurate enucleation of true doctrine usually proceeded from the attacks
of heresy; and this happened so continually that it seems to him a special
instance of that law of divine Providence which educes good from evil. “If
the truth,” says he, “had not lying adversaries, it would be examined with
less carefulness,” and so “a question started by an opponent becomes to
the disciple an occasion of learning.”(241) And he observes that “we have
found by experience that every heresy has brought into the Church its own
questions, against which the divine Scripture was defended with greater
care than if no such necessity had existed.”(242) Thus the doctrine of the
Trinity owed its perfect treatment to the Arian assault on it; the
doctrine of penance to that of Novatian; the doctrine of baptism to those
who wished to introduce the practice of rebaptising; even the unity of
Christ was brought out with greater clearness by the attempt to rend it,
and the doctrine of one Catholic Church diffused through the whole world
cleared from its objectors by showing that the mixture of evil men in it
does not prejudice the good.(243) And he illustrates his meaning by a very
picturesque image: “When heretics calumniate, the young of the flock are
disturbed; in their disturbance they inquire; so the young lamb butts its
mother’s udder till it gets sufficient nutriment for its thirst.”(244) For
the doctors of the Church being called upon for an answer supply the truth
which before was latent. And there is no more signal instance of the great
writer’s remark than himself; for the attacks of the most various heresies
led him during forty years of unwearied mental activity into almost every
question of theology.

The gnostic heresy, then, presents us with the first instance of a law
which will run all through the Church’s history. Peter, the first Apostle,
meets and refutes Simon Magus, the first propagator of falsehood, who
receives divine sacraments and then claims against the giver to be “the
great power of God.” This fact is likewise the symbol of a long line of
action, wherein it is part of the divine plan to make the perpetual
restlessness of error subserve the complete exhibition of truth. The
Gnostics denied the divine monarchy; at once mutilated and misinterpreted
Scripture; claimed to themselves a secret tradition of truth. We owe to
them in consequence the treatises of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement, and
a written exhibition of the Church’s divine order, succession, and unity,
as well as a specific mention of the tie which held that unity together;
and the mention of this tie at so early a period might otherwise have been
wanting to us. But these three writers do but represent to us partially an
universal result. The danger which from gnostic influence beset all the
chief centres of ecclesiastical teaching marks the transition from the
first state of simple faith to that of human learning, inquiry, and
thought, turned upon the objects of Christian belief. The Gnostics had a
merit which they little imagined for themselves. They formed the first
doctors of post-apostolic times. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement are a
great advance upon the more simple and external exhibition of Christianity
which we find in the apologists. In them the Church is preparing to
encounter the deepest questions moved against her by Greek philosophy.
They are her first champions in that contest with Hellenic culture which
was a real combat of mind, not a mere massacre of unresisting victims, and
which lasted for five hundred years.

2. Secondly, when the gnostic attack began, the canon of the New Testament
was still unfixed. Nothing can be more certain than that the Apostles did
not set forth any official collection of their writings, and that no such
collection existed shortly after their death. This fact most plainly shows
that the Christian religion at their departure did not rest for its
maintenance upon writings. Not only had our Lord written no word Himself,
but He left no command to His Apostles to write. His command was to
propagate His Gospel and to found His kingdom by oral teaching; and His
promise was that the Holy Ghost should accompany, follow upon, and
continue with, this their action. What we find is, that they did this, and
that the writings which besides they left, being from the first kept and
venerated by the several churches to which they were addressed, gradually
became known through the whole body of the Church. With the lapse of time
they would become more and more valuable. Moreover, when the Gnostics set
themselves to interpolate and corrupt them, and to fabricate false
writings, the need of a genuine collection became more and more urgent. It
is from the three writers above mentioned, towards the end of the second
century, that we learn that such a collection existed, in forming which
these principles were followed: only to admit writings which tradition
attested to spring from an Apostle or a witness of our Lord’s life,(245)
among whom Paul was specially counted: secondly, only such writings as
were attested by some church of apostolical foundation: and thirdly, only
such writings the doctrine contained in which did not differ from the rule
of faith orally handed down in the churches of apostolic origin, or in the
one Catholic Church, excluding all such as were at variance with the
doctrine hitherto received. Thus in the settlement of the Canon authority
as well as tradition intervened; an authority which felt itself in secure
possession of the same Holy Spirit who had inspired the Apostles, and of
the same doctrine which they had taught.(246)

With the reception of a book into the Canon of Scripture was joined a
belief in its inspiration, which rested on what was a part of oral
tradition, that is, that the Apostles as well in their oral as in their
written teaching had enjoyed the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It is evident that such a tradition reposes, in the last instance, upon
the authority of the Church.(247)

If by means of the gnostic attacks the Canon of the New Testament, as we
now possess it, was not absolutely completed, it had at least advanced a
very great way towards that completion, which we have finally attested as
of long standing in a Council held at Carthage in 397.(248)

3. Another result of the gnostic attack was the setting forth the
tradition of the Faith, seated and maintained in the apostolic churches,
as the rule for interpreting Scripture. The Gnostics in two ways impeached
this rule, by claiming a private tradition of their own, and by
interpreting such scripture as they chose to acknowledge after their own
pleasure. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement found an adequate answer to
both errors by showing that the Faith which the Apostles had set forth in
their writings could not contradict the Faith which they had established
in the Church. These were two sources of the same doctrine; but it is by
the permanent connection and interpenetration of the two that the truth is
maintained; and that which holds both together, that which utters and
propagates the truth which they jointly contain, is the Teaching office,
the mouth of the Church. Hence the force of the appeal in Irenæus to the
succession of the episcopate, and to the divine gift of truth which the
Apostles had handed down therein with their teaching office. Hence
Tertullian’s exclusion of heretics from the right to possess scriptures
which belong only to the Church. Hence Clement’s description of the only
true Gnostic, as “one who has grown old in the study of the Scriptures,
while he preserves the apostolic and ecclesiastical standard of
doctrine.”(249) For neither in founding churches, nor in teaching orally,
nor in writing, did the Apostles exhaust or resign the authority committed
to them.(250) The authority itself, which was the source of all this their
action, after all that they had founded, taught, or written, continued
complete and entire in them, and was transmitted on to their successors,
for the maintenance of the work assigned to it. It is this perpetual
living power which Irenæus so strongly testifies,(251) to which he
attaches the gift of the Spirit, not scripture, nor tradition, but that
which carries both scripture and tradition through the ages, which is “as
the breath of life to the body, which is always from the Spirit of God,
wherein is placed the communication of Christ, which is always young, and
makes young the vessel in which it is.”(252) The writings which the Holy
Ghost has inspired, and the tradition of the Faith which He has
established, would be subject, the one to misinterpretation, the other to
alteration and corruption, without that particular presence of His, in
which consists the divine gift of truth, the teaching office, “the making
disciples all nations.”

4. And the action of heresy, which was so effective in bringing out the
function of the teaching church, was not without force in extending and
corroborating the function of the ruling church. The first synods of which
we have mention are those assembled in Asia Minor towards the end of the
second century against the diffusion of Montanism.(253) But what through
the loss of records has been mentioned only in this one case must have
taken place generally, since it is obvious that as soon as erroneous
doctrines spread from one diocese to another, they would call forth joint
action against them. Since then heresies have been the frequent, almost
the exclusive, cause of councils. The parallel is fruitful in thought,
which is suggested between the action of error in eliciting the more
precise expression of the truth which it abhors, and its action in
strengthening the governing power of the body which it assaults. In the
one case and in the other the result is that which it least desires and
intends; heresy, disbelieving and disobeying, is made to perfect the faith
and build up the hierarchy.

Now to sum up our sketch of the internal history of the Christian Faith in
the seventy-four years which elapse from the accession of Marcus Aurelius
to the death of Alexander Severus. At the first-named date we find that it
had spread beyond the confines of the Roman empire, and taken incipient
possession of all the great centres of human intercourse by founding its
hierarchy in them. At the second date it has subdued the powerful and
widespread family of heresies which threatened to distort and corrupt its
doctrines, and has done this by the vigour of its teaching office, which
combined in one expression the yet fresh apostolic tradition stored up in
its churches, and the doctrine of its sacred scriptures; while it has
well-nigh determined the number and genuineness of these, severing them
off from all other writings. The episcopate in which its teaching office
resides appears not as a number of bishops, each independent and severed,
and merely governing his diocese upon a similar rule, but with a bond
recognised among them, the superior principate of the Roman See. That is,
as the teaching office itself is in them all the voice of living teachers,
so its highest expression is the voice of the living Peter in his see. And
this bond as discerned and recognised by the Asiatic disciple of S.
Polycarp, the bishop of the chief city of Gaul, is so strong that he uses
for it rather the term denoting physical necessity than moral
fitness:(254) as if he would say: As Christ has made the Church, it must
agree from one end to the other in doctrine and communion with the
doctrine and communion of the Church in which Peter, to whom He has
committed His sheep, speaks and rules. And so powerful is the derivation
of this authority that he who sits in the place of Mark, whom Peter sent,
punishes by degradation a bishop who disregards his sentence in the case
of a great writer, the brightest genius of the Church in that day. And
when we look at the spiritual state of the world at the commencement of
the third century, we find that Christianity, having formed and made its
place in human society, is penetrating through it more and more in every
direction. It is then that we discern the first beginnings of that great
spiritual creation, in which Reason has been applied to Faith under the
guidance of Authority, which the Christian Church, alone being in
possession of these three constituents, could alone produce, and has
carried on from that day to this. Alexandria was at this time the seat of
a Jewish religious philosophy; it had just become the seat likewise of a
heathen religious philosophy; there was within its church a great
catechetical school, in which the Faith as taught by the apostolical and
ecclesiastical tradition according to the scriptures was communicated. It
was to be expected that its teachers, such men as Pantænus, Clement, and
Origen, would be led on from the more elementary work of imparting the
rudiments of the Faith to the scientific consideration of its deeper
mysteries; and even the sight of what was going on around them among Jews
and Greeks would invite them to attempt the construction of a Christian
religious philosophy.

Moreover Gnosticism, of which Alexandria was the chief focus, had raised
the question of the unity and nature of the Godhead, and professed a false
gnosis as the perfection of religion. By this also thoughtful minds were
led to consider the true relation of knowledge to faith, and hence to
attempt the first rudiments of a Theology, the Science of Faith.

To refute heathenism both as a Philosophy and as a Religion, and to set
forth Christianity as the absolute truth, was the very function of such
men as Clement and Origen; and the former in his work entitled _The
Pedagogue_ exhibits the conduct of life according to the principles and
doctrines of Christianity; while his Stromata, or Tapestries, exhibit the
building up of science on the foundation of faith.(255) We can hardly
realise now the difficulties which beset his great pupil Origen, when,
carrying on the master’s thought, he endeavoured to found a theology. The
fact that he was among the first to venture on such a deep, is the best
excuse that can be made for those speculative errors into which he fell.

III. And now we turn to the conduct of the empire towards this religion
which has grown up in its bosom.

At once with the accession of Marcus Aurelius a temper of greater severity
to Christians is shown. The sort of toleration expressed in the rescript
of Pius to the province of Asia is withdrawn. No new law about them is
enacted, for none is needed, but the old law is let loose. The almost
sublime clemency of Marcus towards his revolted general Cassius, his reign
of nineteen years unstained with senatorial blood, and the campaigns
prolonged from year to year of one who loved his philosophic studies above
all things, and yet at the call of imperial duty gave up night and day to
the rudest toils of a weary conflict with barbarous tribes on the
frontier, have won for him immortal honour: his regard for his subjects in
general has sometimes given him in Christian estimation the place of
predilection among all princes ancient and modern.(256) It is well, then,
to consider his bearing towards Christians. Now among his teachers was
that Junius Rusticus, grandson of the man who perished for the sake of
liberty in Domitian’s time, and in his day no doubt a perfect specimen of
the Roman gentleman and noble, a blending of all that was best in Cicero,
Lælius, and Cato, whom Marcus made Prefect of Rome, and to whom when
bearing that office he addressed a rescript containing the words, “to
Junius Rusticus, Prefect of the city, our friend.” And what this friend of
Marcus thought on the most important subjects we may judge from the
sentiments of another friend and fellow-teacher of the emperor, Maximus of
Tyre, who has left written, “how God rules a mighty and stable kingdom
having for its limits not river or lake or shore or ocean, but the heaven
above and the earth beneath, in which He, impassive as law, bestows on
those who obey him the security of which He is the fountain: and the gods
his children need not images any more than good men statues. But just as
our vocal speech requires not in itself any particular characters, yet
human weakness has invented the alphabetical signs whereby to give
expression to its remembrance, so the nature of the gods needs not images,
but man, removed from them as far as heaven from earth, has devised these
signs, by which to give them names. There may be those strong enough to do
without these helps, but they are rare, and as schoolmasters guide their
scholars to write by first pencilling letters for them, so legislators
have invented these images as signs of the divine honour, and helps to
human memory. But God is the father and framer of all things, older than
heaven, superior to time and all fleeting nature, legislator ineffable,
unexpressed by voice, unseen by eye; and we who cannot grasp his essence
rest upon words and names, and forms of gold, ivory, and silver, in our
longing to conceive Him, giving to His nature what is fair among
ourselves. But fix Him only in the mind; I care not whether the Greek is
kindled into remembrance of Him by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptian by
the worship of animals, that fire is his symbol to these, and water to
those; only let them understand, let them love, let them remember Him
alone.”(257)

I doubt not that Junius Rusticus was familiar with such thoughts as these,
and as a matter of philosophic reflection assented to them. And now let us
study the scene which was enacted in his presence and by his command.(258)

“At a time when the defenders of idolatry had proposed edicts in every
city and region to compel Christians to sacrifice, Justin and his
companions were seized and brought before the Prefect of Rome, Rusticus.
When they stood before his tribunal, the Prefect Rusticus said: Well, be
obedient to the gods and the emperor’s edicts. Justin answered: No man can
ever be blamed or condemned who obeys the precepts of our Saviour Jesus
Christ. Then the Prefect Rusticus asked: In what sect’s learning or
discipline are you versed? Justin replied: I endeavoured to learn every
sort of sect, and tried every kind of instruction; but at last I adhered
to the Christian discipline, though that is not acceptable to those who
are led by the error of a false opinion. Rusticus said: Wretch, is that
the sect in which you take delight? Assuredly, said Justin; since together
with a right belief I follow the example of Christians. What belief is
that, I pray? said the Prefect. Justin replied: The right belief which we
as Christians join with piety is this, to hold that there is one God, the
Maker and Creator of all things which are seen and which are not seen by
the body’s eyes, and to confess one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God,
foretold of old by the prophets, who will also come to judge the human
race, and who is the herald of salvation and the teacher of those who
learn of Him well. I indeed as a man am feeble, and far too little to say
anything great of His infinite Godhead: this I confess to be the office of
prophets, who many ages ago by inspiration foretold the advent upon earth
of the same whom I have called the Son of God.

“The Prefect inquired where the Christians met. Justin answered: Each
where he will and can. Do you suppose that we are accustomed all to meet
in the same place? By no means, since the God of the Christians is not
circumscribed by place, but being invisible fills heaven and earth, and is
everywhere adored, and His glory praised by the faithful. The Prefect
said: Come, tell me where you meet and assemble your disciples. Justin
answered: For myself I have hitherto lodged near the house of a certain
Martin, by the Timiotine bath. It is the second time I have come to Rome,
and I know no other place than the one mentioned. And if anyone chose to
come to me, I communicated to him the doctrine of truth. You are, then, a
Christian, said Rusticus. Assuredly, said Justin, I am.

“Then the Prefect asked Charito: Are you too a Christian? Charito replied:
By God’s help I am a Christian. The Prefect asked the woman Charitana
whether she too followed the Faith of Christ. She replied: I also by the
gift of God am a Christian. Then Rusticus said to Evelpistus: And who are
you? He replied: I am Cæsar’s slave, but a Christian to whom Christ has
given liberty, and by His favour and grace made partaker of the same hope
with those whom you see. The Prefect then asked Hierax whether he too was
a Christian; and he replied: Certainly I am a Christian, since I worship
and adore the same God. The Prefect inquired: Was it Justin who made you
Christians? I, said Hierax, both was and will be a Christian. Pæon
likewise stood before him and said: I too am a Christian. Who taught you?
said the Prefect. He replied: I received this good confession from my
parents. Then Evelpistus said: I also was accustomed to hear with great
delight Justin’s discourses, but it was from my parents that I learnt to
be a Christian. Then the Prefect: And where are your parents? In
Cappadocia, said Evelpistus. The Prefect likewise asked Hierax where his
parents were, and Hierax replied: Our true Father is Christ, and our
mother the Faith, by which we believe on Him. But my earthly parents are
dead. It was, however, from Iconium in Phrygia that I was brought hither.
The Prefect asked Liberianus whether he too was a Christian and without
piety towards the gods. He said: I also am a Christian, for I worship and
adore the only true God.

“Then the Prefect turned to Justin and said: You fellow, who are said to
be eloquent, and think you hold the true discipline. If you are beaten
from head to foot, is it your persuasion that you will go up to heaven?
Justin answered: I hope if I suffer what you say, that I shall have what
those have who have kept the commands of Christ. For I know that to all
who live thus the divine grace is preserved until the whole world have its
consummation. The Prefect Rusticus replied: It is, then, your opinion that
you will go up to heaven to receive some reward? I do not opine, said
Justin, but I know, and am so certain of this that I am incapable of
doubt. Rusticus said: Let us come at length to what is before us and
urgent. Agree together and with one mind sacrifice to the gods. Justin
replied: No one of right mind deserts piety to fall into error and
impiety. The Prefect Rusticus said: Unless you be willing to obey our
commands, you will suffer torments without mercy. Justin answered: What we
most desire is to suffer torments for our Lord Jesus Christ and to be
saved: for this will procure for us salvation and confidence before that
terrible tribunal of the same our Lord and Saviour, at which by divine
command the whole world shall attend. The same likewise said all the other
martyrs, adding: What thou wilt do, do quickly; for we are Christians and
sacrifice not to idols.

“The Prefect hearing this pronounced the following sentence: Let those who
have refused to sacrifice to the gods, and to obey the emperor’s edict, be
beaten with rods, and led away to capital punishment, as the laws enjoin.
And so the holy martyrs praising God were led to the accustomed place, and
after being beaten were struck with the axe, and consummated their
martyrdom in the confession of the Saviour. After which certain of the
faithful took away their bodies, and laid them in a suitable place, by the
help of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and
ever.”

As the pillars of Trajan and Antonine faithfully record the deeds of those
whose names they bear, and stand before posterity as a visible history,
so, I conceive, the judgment of Ignatius by Trajan, and that of Justin by
Rusticus, under the eye as it were of Marcus Aurelius and in his name,
embody to us perfectly the mind and conduct of those great emperors
towards Christians. The marble of Phidias could present no more perfect
sculpture, the pencil of Apelles no more breathing picture, than the
simple transcription of the judicial record given above. In the mind of
Marcus the jealousy of the old Roman for his country’s worship joined with
the philosopher’s dislike of Christian principles to move him from that
more equable temper which dictated the later moderation of his immediate
predecessor. It scarcely needed the spirit which ruled at Rome to kindle
passionate outbreaks against Christians in the various cities of the
empire. We have just seen the impassive majesty of Roman law declaring at
the chief seat of power that to be a Christian is a capital crime. If we
go at the same time to Smyrna, there the voices of a furious populace are
demanding that an aged man venerable through the whole region for his
innocent life and his virtues, be cast to the lions, because he is “the
teacher of impiety, the father of the Christians, the destroyer of our
gods, who has instructed many not to sacrifice to them or adore them.” No
grander scene among all the deeds of men is preserved to us, as described
by his own church at the time, than the martyrdom of Polycarp, as after
eighty-six years of Christian service he stood bound at the stake before
the raging multitude in the theatre, and uttered his last prayer: “I thank
thee, O God of angels and powers, and all the generation of the just who
live before thee, that thou hast thought me worthy of this day and hour to
receive a portion in the number of thy martyrs, in the chalice of thy
Christ.” Ten years later, in the great city of Lyons a similar spectacle
was offered on a far larger scale. The Bishop Pothinus, more than ninety
years old, is carried before the tribunal, “the magistrates of the city
following him, and all the multitude pursuing him with cries as if he were
Christ.” But the triumph of the bishop is accompanied by that of many
among his flock, of whom while all were admirable, yet the slave Blandina,
poor and contemptible in appearance, surpassed the rest. “She was exposed
to the beasts raised as it were upon a cross, and so praying most
contentedly to God, she inspired the utmost ardour in her fellow
combatants, who with the eyes of the body saw in this their sister’s
person Him who had been crucified for them in order to persuade those who
should believe in Him that whoever suffers for the glory of Christ shall
obtain companionship with the living God.”(259) Since the wild beasts
refused to touch her, Blandina and the survivors among her
fellow-sufferers were remanded to prison, in order that the pleasure of
the emperor might be taken, one of them being a Roman citizen. For this
persecution had arisen without any command of his, and the punishments
were inflicted in virtue of the ordinary law. After an interval, as it
would seem, of two months, a rescript was received from Marcus Aurelius
which ordered that those who confessed should be punished ignominiously,
those who denied, be dismissed. “And so at the time of our great fair,
when a vast multitude from the various provinces flock thither, the
governor ordered the most blessed martyrs to be brought before his
tribunal, exhibiting them to the people as in theatric pomp; and after a
last interrogation those who were Roman citizens were beheaded, and the
rest given to the wild beasts.”(260) But Blandina, after being every day
brought to behold the sufferings of her companions, “the last of all, like
a noble mother who had kindled her children to the combat, and sent them
forward as conquerors to the king,—was eager to follow them, rejoicing and
exulting over her departure, as if invited to a nuptial banquet, not cast
before wild beasts. At length, after scourging and tearing and burning,
she was put in a net and exposed to the bull. Tossed again and again by
him, yet feeling now nothing which was done to her, both from the
intensity of hope with which she grasped the rewards of faith, and from
her intimate intercourse in prayer with Christ, in the end she had her
throat cut, as a victim, while the heathen themselves confessed that never
had they seen a woman who had borne so much and so long.”(261)

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 suffered(262) 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 writer(267) 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.

For it was on occasion of the first antipope, an effort, that is, within
the See of Peter itself to arm the episcopal power at its very source
against itself, to set an altar up against the legitimate altar, and to
divide the sacraments of the Church from the Bride whose dowry they are,
that S. Cyprian wrote his treatise on the Unity of the Church. “It was for
the purpose of reminding his brethren that unity is the first element of
the Christian state, and that those who break off from the principle of
unity, which is lodged in the episcopate, even though they be confessors
and martyrs, have no portion in the hopes of the gospel.”(281) This
definite purpose, so unlike that state of leisure and tranquillity in
which Origen answered by thought and learning a speculative attack, will
account for the very remarkable precision and force of S. Cyprian’s
language.

“The enemy,” he says, “detected and down-fallen by the advent of Christ,
now that light is come to the nations—seeing his idols left—has made
heresies and schisms, wherewith to subvert faith, to corrupt truth, and to
rend unity.” But this will all be in vain if men will look to the Head,
and keep to the doctrine of the Master. For the truth may be quickly
stated.(282) “The Lord saith unto Peter: I say unto thee that thou art
Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the
kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound
also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed
in heaven. To him again, after His resurrection, He says: Feed my sheep.
Upon him, being one, He builds His Church; and though He gives to all the
Apostles an equal power, and says: As my Father sent Me, even so send I
you; receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they shall be
remitted to him, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they shall be
retained;—yet in order to manifest unity, He has by His own authority so
placed the source of the same unity as to begin from one. Certainly the
other Apostles also were what Peter was, endued with an equal fellowship
both of honour and power; but a commencement is made from unity, that the
Church may be set before us as one: which one Church in the Canticle of
Canticles doth the Holy Spirit design and name in the Person of our Lord:
My dove, my spotless one is but one; she is the only one of her mother,
elect of her that bare her.

“He who holds not this unity of the Church, does he think that he holds
the faith? He who strives against and resists the Church, is he assured
that he is in the Church? For the blessed Apostle Paul teaches this same
thing, and manifests the sacrament of unity thus speaking: There is one
Body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one Hope of your calling;
one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God. This unity firmly should we
hold and maintain, especially we bishops, presiding in the Church, in
order that we may approve the Episcopate itself to be one and undivided.
Let no one deceive the brotherhood by falsehood; no one corrupt the truth
of our faith by a faithless treachery. The Episcopate is one, of which a
part is held by each without division of the whole. The Church is likewise
one, though she be spread abroad, and multiplies with the increase of her
progeny: even as the sun has rays many, yet one light, and the tree boughs
many, yet its strength is one, seated in the deep-lodged root; and as,
when many streams flow down from one source, though a multiplicity of
waters seems to be diffused from the bountifulness of the overflowing
abundance, unity is preserved in the source itself. Part a ray of the sun
from its orb, and its unity forbids this division of light; break a branch
from the tree, once broken it can bud no more; cut the stream from its
fountain, the remnant will be dried up. Thus the Church, flooded with the
light of the Lord, puts forth her rays through the whole world, with yet
one light, which is spread upon all places, while its unity of body is not
infringed. She stretches forth her branches over the universal earth, in
the riches of plenty, and pours abroad her bountiful and onward streams;
yet is there one head, one source, one mother, abundant in the results of
her fruitfulness.

“It is of her womb that we are born; our nourishing is from her milk, our
quickening from her breath. The Spouse of Christ cannot become adulterate;
she is undefiled and chaste; owning but one home, and guarding with
virtuous modesty the sanctity of one chamber. She it is who keeps us for
God, and appoints unto the kingdom the sons she has borne. Whosoever parts
company with the Church and joins himself to an adulteress, is estranged
from the promises of the Church. He who leaves the Church of Christ,
attains not to Christ’s rewards. He is an alien, an outcast, an enemy. He
can no longer have God for a Father who has not the Church for a mother.
If any man was able to escape who remained without the ark of Noah, then
will that man escape who is out of doors beyond the Church. The Lord warns
us and says: He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who gathereth not
with Me, scattereth. He who breaks the peace and concord of Christ, sets
himself against Christ. He who gathers elsewhere but in the Church,
scatters the Church of Christ. The Lord says: I and the Father are one;
and again of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost it is written: And
these three are one. And does anyone think that oneness, thus proceeding
from the divine immutability, and cohering in heavenly sacraments, admits
of being sundered in the Church, and split by the divorce of antagonist
wills? He who holds not this unity holds not the law of God, holds not the
faith of Father and Son, holds not the truth unto salvation.

“This sacrament of unity, this bond of concord inseparably cohering, is
signified in the place in the Gospel where the coat of our Lord Jesus
Christ is in nowise parted or cut, but is received a whole garment, by
them who cast lots who should rather wear it, and is possessed as an
inviolate and individual robe. The divine scripture thus speaks: But for
the coat, because it was not sewed, but woven from the top throughout,
they said one to another, Let us not rend it, but cast lots whose it shall
be. It has with it a unity descending from above, as coming, that is, from
heaven and from the Father; which it was not for the receiver and owner in
anywise to sunder, but which he received once for all and indivisibly as
one unbroken whole. He cannot own Christ’s garment who splits and divides
Christ’s Church. On the other hand, when on Solomon’s death his kingdom
and people were split in parts, Ahijah the prophet, meeting King Jeroboam
in the field, rent his garment into twelve pieces, saying: Take thee ten
pieces; for thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of
the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee; and two tribes
shall be to him for my servant David’s sake, and for Jerusalem, the city
which I have chosen, to place my name there. When the twelve tribes of
Israel were torn asunder, the prophet Ahijah rent his garment. But because
Christ’s people cannot be rent, His coat, woven and conjoined throughout,
was not divided by those to whom it fell. Individual, conjoined,
coentwined, it shows the coherent concord of our people who put on Christ.
In the sacrament and sign of His garment, He has declared the unity of His
Church.

“Who, then, is the criminal and traitor, who so inflamed by the madness of
discord, as to think aught can rend, or to venture on rending God’s unity,
the Lord’s garment, Christ’s Church? He Himself warns us in His Gospel and
teaches, saying: And there shall be one Fold and one Shepherd.... Think
you that any can stand and live who withdraws from the Church, and forms
for himself new homes and different domiciles?... Believers have no house
but the Church only. This house, this hostelry of unanimity, the Holy
Spirit designs and betokens in the Psalms, thus speaking: God who makes
men to dwell with one mind in a house. In the house of God, in the Church
of Christ, men dwell with one mind, and persevere in concord and
simplicity.” To this he adds: “There is one God, and one Christ, and His
Church one, and the Faith one, and one the people joined into the solid
unity of a body by the cement of concord. Unity cannot be sundered, nor
can one body be divided by a dissolution of its structure, nor be severed
into pieces with torn and lacerated vitals. Parted from the womb nothing
can live and breathe in its separated state: it loses its principle of
health;” for “charity will ever exist in the kingdom; she will abide
evermore in the unity of a brotherhood which entwines itself around her.”

And he is more specific still; for this “one Church is founded by the Lord
Christ upon Peter, having its source and its principle in unity,” “on
whose person He built the Church, and in whom He began and exhibited the
source of unity.”(283)

Certainly if any idea has ever been put forth clearly and definitely, it
would seem to be the idea of organic unity here delineated by Cyprian, as
necessary not merely to the well-being but to the essence of the Church.
Nor does one see what words he could have found more expressly to reject
the notion that the individual bishop in his diocese was the unit on the
aggregation of which the Church was built, and to assert in contradiction
that the Church was built on the Primacy of Peter as its generative,
formative, controlling, and unifying power. According to him the whole
order and government of the Church are bound up in the Lord’s words to
Peter: while as to the Church herself three ideas are in his mind so
compacted together, so running into and pervading each other, that they
cannot be severed; and these ideas are Unity, Grace, and Truth. The
symbols of the Sun, the Tree, and the Fountain, the Lord’s Coat, the one
Flock tethered in one Fold under one Shepherd, the one House as opposed to
sundry self-chosen domiciles, the Mother embracing her whole progeny in
her womb, illustrate and enforce each other, and all contain the three
ideas, of which Grace and Truth are as the warp and woof in which the
substance of the one web consists. For Unity, Truth, and Grace, viewed as
attributes of the Church, are blended together in the light and warmth of
the sun, in the sap which vivifies every branch of the tree, and gives it
fruitfulness from the root, in the fountain of water, under which image
our Lord has so often summed up His whole gift to man, in the flock which
the Shepherd has chosen, and for which He cares, in the house where the
master dwells and collects his family, in the one robe which encompassed
and contained the virtue of the Wearer, in the prolific womb which gives
birth to the whole sacred race. The force of all these images lies in
their unicity: plurality would not modify, but destroy them. Yet even
these symbols are surpassed by that argument from the divine Unity which
he sets forth as the type and cause of the Church’s unity. From created
likenesses—the fairest and choicest which the world presents—he passes to
the uncreated nature, and from the divine immutability, wherewith these
three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the divine Exemplar of
Unity, Truth, and Grace, are one, deduces the Unity of the Church their
dwelling-place.

Cyprian, then, cannot sever the Church of his heart, the Church for which
he lived and died, from Unity, or from Truth, or from Grace: and this
Church is to him founded on the Primacy of Peter, and developed from his
person. The one Episcopate, whose golden chain he looks upon as
surrounding the earth in its embrace, “of which a part is held by each
without division of the whole,” wherein therefore joint possession is
dependent on unity, would have no existence without the bond of the
Primacy, from which it was developed and which keeps it one. Take away
this, and the office of each bishop is crystallised into a separate mass,
having no coherence or impact with its like: bishops so conceived would
hold indeed a similar office, but being detached from each other would not
hold joint possession of one Episcopate. Separate crystals do not make one
body; nor a heap of pebbles a rock. But it was a Rock on which Christ
built and builds His Church, that Rock being His own Person, from which He
communicated this virtue, wherein the cohesion and impact of the whole
Episcopate lies, to the See of him whom He constituted His Vicar. Finally,
Cyprian contrasts pointedly the people of Christ _which cannot be rent_
with the twelve tribes of Israel, which were torn asunder: as if he would
beforehand repudiate that parallel between the Synagogue and the Church,
in the question of unity, which has before now been resorted to as a
refuge by minds in distress, who failed to see the tokens of the Bride of
Christ in the community to which they belonged.

In Origen and in Cyprian we put ourselves back into the middle of the
third century. In the words of the latter we see portrayed to the life
that idea which had filled the hearts of Christians through seven
generations of labours and sorrows from the day of Pentecost down to his
time. But whence arose this perfect union of all hearts and minds in the
early Christians, who were penetrated with the conviction that the Church
was the home of truth and grace? We may answer this question thus: No
catechumen was received into the fold without a clear and distinct belief
in that article of the earliest creed, and part of the baptismal
profession, “the Holy Catholic Church.” A new word was made to express a
new idea, the glorious and unique work of that ever-blessed Trinity whom
the creed recited: the Home and House in which the Triune God, whom the
Christian glorified, by indwelling made the fountain of that grace and
that truth which God had become Man in order to communicate. The
catechumen’s baptism into the one Body was the foundation of all the hope
in which his life consisted;(284) the integrity, duration, sanctity of
that Body being component parts of the hope. And with regard at least to
all gentile converts this precise and definite catechetical instruction
was reinforced by the new sense which at their conversion was impressed on
them of the heathenism out of which they were then taken. In how many of
them was the remembrance of their past life connected with the guilt of
deeds and habits which their new Christian conscience taught them to
regard as fearful sins. Nay, the notion of sin itself—as a transgression
of the eternal law and an offence against the personal Majesty of God—was
a Christian acquisition to the corrupted heathen. Thus the passage into
the one Body and the divine Kingdom was contemporaneous in their case with
a total change of the moral life. It is Cyprian, again, who has given us a
vivid account of this change, which took place at a time of mature manhood
in his own life, and which will serve as a graphic sketch of what had
happened to the great mass of adult converts besides himself.

Let us suppose a man forty-five years of age speaking: “For me, while I
yet lay in darkness and bewildering night, and was tossed to and fro on
the billows of this troublesome world, ignorant of my true life, an
outcast from light and truth, I used to think that second birth, which
divine mercy promised for my salvation, a hard saying according to the
life I then led: as if a man could be so quickened to a new life in the
laver of healing water as to put off his natural self, and keep his former
tabernacle, yet be changed in heart and soul. How is it possible, said I,
for so great a conversion to be accomplished, so that both the obstinate
defilement of our natural substance, and old and ingrained habits, should
suddenly and rapidly be put off; evils whose roots are deeply seated
within? When does he learn frugality, to whom fine feasts and rich
banquets have become a habit? Or he who in gay sumptuous robes glisters
with gold and purple, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple
raiment? Another whose bent is to public distinctions and honours cannot
bear to become a private and unnoticed man; while one who is thronged by a
phalanx of dependents, and retinued by the overflowing attendance of an
obsequious host, thinks it punishment to be alone. The temptation still
unrelaxed, need is it that, as before, wine should entice, pride inflate,
anger inflame, covetousness disquiet, cruelty stimulate, ambition delight,
and lust lead headlong.

“Such were my frequent musings; for whereas I was encumbered with the many
sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so I had
used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of
better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house
and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water succoured me,
washing away the stain of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and
hallowed breast the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in
the heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth,
then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to me, what was
hidden was revealed, what was dark began to shine, what was difficult now
had a way and means, what had seemed impossible now could be achieved,
what was in me of the guilty flesh now confessed that it was earthy, what
was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost now had a growth according to God.
Thou knowest well, thou canst recollect as well as I, what was then taken
from me, and what was given by that death of sin, that quickening power of
holiness. Thou knowest, I name it not; over my own praises it were
unwelcome to boast, though that is ground never for boasting but for
gratitude, which is not ascribed to man’s virtue but is confessed to be
God’s bounty; so that to sin no more has come of faith, as heretofore to
sin had come of human error. From God, I say, from God is all we can be;
from Him we live, from Him we grow, and by that strength which is from Him
accepted and ingathered we learn beforehand, even in this present state,
the foretokens of what is yet to be. Let only fear be a guard upon
innocency, that that Lord who by the influence of His heavenly mercy has
graciously shone into our hearts, may be detained by righteous obedience
in the hostelry of a mind that pleases Him; that the security imparted to
us may not beget slothfulness, nor the former enemy steal upon us
anew.”(285)

Add to this that Christians were marked out as one Body by the Jewish and
heathen persecution which tracked them everywhere. But the sects were not
persecuted. The various schools of the Gnostics all agreed in this, that
it was not necessary or desirable to suffer martyrdom for the faith. Their
view was, that they could believe with their minds whatever they pleased,
though an enemy might force them by threats of suffering to utter with the
mouth what they abhorred; and with this convenient distinction they
escaped imprisonment, poverty, bereavement, and death. But the Christian
was bound—when the fitting circumstances came—to repeat the confession of
his Lord before Pilate. Joined therefore to his baptismal belief, and to
the utter change of life involved in his conversion, was the bond of
common suffering which held together Christians as one Body throughout the
world: whence an old martyr bishop said: “The Church, for that love which
she bears to God, in every place and at every time sends forward a
multitude of martyrs to the Father, whereas all the rest not only have no
such thing among themselves to show, but deem not even such a witness
necessary.”(286)

Moreover, as a fourth cause, the historic origin of their name and belief
led them up to that day of Pentecost when the descent of the Spirit of God
constituted the formation of that body in belonging to which was all their
hope and trust; with the existence of which their faith was identified; in
the communion of which their charity was engendered. As the birth and the
life and the passion of Christ were that subject-matter on which their
whole faith grew, so the creation of their existence as a people was a
definite act in which the Redeemer showed Himself the Father of His Race,
creating them as His children and generating them by His Spirit. The
loving thought of Christians in every age ran along this line to its
source. Nature herself presents us with an image of what this idea of the
Church was to them. As the great river whose water is the symbol of
blessing and the bearer of fertility leaps down a giant birth from its
parent lake, ever blazing under the splendour of a tropical sun, yet ever
fed by sources springing from snow-crowned mountains, and changes in its
course the desert into earth’s fruitfulest region, so the river of God,
welling forth on the day of Pentecost from the central abyss of the divine
love, bore down to all the nations the one water of salvation, and
wheresoever it spread, the desert retreated, and the earth brought forth
corn and wine in abundance. And the idea of this divine stream was from
the beginning as deep as it was clear in every Christian heart. It is one
of a very few doctrines, such as the unity of the Godhead, whereof indeed
it is the image and the result, of which there is not only an implicit
belief but a definite consciousness from the first. For the thought of the
kingdom is inseparable from that of the king: and he could be no divine
Sovereign whose realm was not one and indivisible: and that this realm
should break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms,(287) but itself
stand for ever, was the trust on which the whole Christian life of
endurance and hope was built.

The Christian society through its whole structure was marked with the seal
of that great act on which it grew, the assumption of human nature by a
divine Person. Its whole government, its whole worship, and the whole
moral and spiritual being of its people radiate from that Person as King,
as Priest, and as Prophet. Take first the character of the individual
Christian. It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the
same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and
suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the
one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the
divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is
traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue
is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole
life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. Thus He
is the Prophet not only declaring the whole divine will to men, but
leading them in it by His own example. The divine Painter is but
representing in every one of His children a copy in some sort of that
life, which He set forth in full in the thirty-three years: a thought
which we have seen Origen expressing in the chrism which descended from
the head of Aaron to the utmost skirt of his raiment.

But likewise in His Priesthood a parallel derivation ensues. First He
multiplies Himself in His Apostles: they again in the Bishops whom they
create; while each of these communicates himself in his priests. A triple
transfusion suffices to form the whole hierarchical order. Nothing can be
conceived more simple, yet nothing more efficient supposing that He is
what He proclaimed Himself to be. The victim which He appoints to be
offered by this priesthood is Himself, and His Body so offered is the
food, the life, and the bond of the whole spiritual Body thus created.
That Person with which He took the manhood is the centre of all this
worship, of which the manhood so taken is the instrument. Thus it is that
His second office of Priest, bound up so entirely with Himself, is yet
communicated through His divine manhood to the whole Body which He forms.
And this order remains through all ages, as intimately connected with his
Person now, as eighteen centuries ago, and as it will be when all the
centuries to come are evolved.

One office remains; His office of King. And here, again, the jurisdiction
which He created for His kingdom springs from His Person, and that not
only in its origin but in its perpetual derivation. He was Himself(288)
the Apostle: as such He first multiplied Himself in the Twelve, whom from
Himself He named Apostles. His public life on earth is an image of the
whole mission or government which He would set up after His ascension. He
lives with the Twelve: He teaches them: He is their Instructor, Father,
and Friend. When His Apostles afterwards created Bishops, this form of our
Lord’s life on earth was exactly reproduced in the earliest dioceses. Thus
S. Mark went forth from the side of Peter, and the mode of his living, and
the family which he drew around him at Alexandria was after this pattern.
He, the Bishop, is the image of Christ, and his twelve presbyters of the
Apostles. This model is continually set forth by S. Ignatius as a divine
command and institution, he being himself the occupant of the great Mother
See of the East, the third See of Peter, and that wherein he first
sat.(289) Thus the canonical life was formed by the exactest imitation of
our Lord’s public life, and its reproduction throughout the various
dioceses formed the Church. Such was the life which S. Augustine
afterwards practised and reduced to rule; and those who planted the
Christian Faith throughout the north, Apostles to new and barbarous races,
had this model before them. The diocese was first a family, in which the
Bishop as a father presided over his priests, and sent them forth to their
work. The Eucharist which he consecrated was from the beginning dispensed
from his church to all his flock. The diocese, then, in its earliest form
was an image of our Lord’s intercourse with the Twelve, wherein the Bishop
represents Him, and the priesthood His Apostles.

But the whole Church in its episcopate or mass of dioceses no less
represented that His public life. For as He was the Head, the Living
Teacher and Guide of His Apostles, and as He came to establish one
Kingdom, and one only,(290) wherein the Twelve represented the whole
Episcopate, and contained in themselves its powers, so the Primacy which
He visibly exercised among them, He delegated, when He left them, to one
of their number. Peter, when he received that commission to feed His
sheep, took the place on earth of the great Shepherd, and in him the flock
remains one.

Thus the double power which expresses the divinely-established government
of the Church, the Primacy and the Episcopate, is as close a transcript of
the Lord’s life on earth with His Apostles as the diocese taken by itself.
In His intercourse with His Apostles He is the germ of the Bishop with his
priests; in His Vicariate bestowed upon Peter He repeats or rather
continues His visible Headship on earth.

But spiritual jurisdiction is the expression of Christ’s sovereignty on
earth, and in the order just described it is linked with His Person as
strictly as the worship exercised by means of His Priesthood, and the
spiritual character which every one of His children bears. Surely no
kingdom has ever been so contained in its king, no family in its father,
no worship in its object, as the Christian kingdom, family, and worship,
which together is the Church. Is it, then, any wonder that all Christian
hearts from the first were filled with the blessing of belonging to such a
creation as this, in which to them their Redeemer lived and reigned,
penetrated them with His own life, and gathered them in His kingdom? Are
not the words of S. Cyprian just what we should expect those to utter who
overflowed with this conviction? At the same time that Cyprian was so
writing, Dionysius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, addressed Novatian the
antipope in these words: “It was better to suffer any extremity in order
not to divide the Church of God. And martyrdom endured to prevent schism
were not less glorious than that endured to refuse idolatry, but in my
opinion more so. For in the one case a man suffers martyrdom for his own
single soul, but in the other for the whole Church.”(291)

But let us trace the chronological sequence in history of that great
institution, the real as well as logical coherence of which has just been
set forth. The Church was a fact long before its theory became the subject
of reflection. It came forth from the mind of the divine Architect and
established itself among men through His power; and it is only when this
was done that the creative thought according to which it grew could be
delineated.

The fact, then, exactly agrees with the theory, and history here
interprets dogma.

It is during the great forty days that our Lord founded the Primacy, when
He made S. John and the rest of the Apostles sheep of Peter’s fold. The
period of thirty-eight years which follows is the carrying into effect His
design in the first stage. The Church grows around Peter. First in
Jerusalem he forms a mass of disciples; then for a certain number of years
at Antioch. In the second year of Claudius, the thirteenth after the
Ascension, he lays the foundations of the Roman Church. In the sixtieth
year of our era he sends forth S. Mark to found the Christian society in
Alexandria. Thus he takes possession of the three great cities of the
empire, of east, west, and south. In the mean time the labours of S. Paul
and the other Apostles, in conjunction with those of Peter and in
subordination to them, plant the Christian root in a great number of
cities. As S. Paul toils all round the northern circuit of the empire,
through Asia Minor, Macedonia, Illyricum, to Spain, his work has a
manifest reference to the work of Peter in the metropolis of the east, of
the south, and of the west. In the latter he joins his elder brother, and
the two Princes of the Apostles offer up their lives together on the same
day in that city which was to be the perpetual citadel of the Christian
Faith, the immovable Rock of a divine Capitol. Thus was it Peter, “from
whom the very Episcopate, and all the authority of this title
sprung,”(292) and what Pope Boniface wrote in 422 is a simple fact of
history: that “the formation of the universal Church at its birth took its
beginning from the honour of blessed Peter, in whose person its regimen
and sum consists. For from his fountain the stream of ecclesiastical
discipline flowed forth into all churches, as the culture of religion
progressively advanced.”(293) Thus the whole initial movement was from
above downwards, and S. Cyprian was not only enunciating dogma but
speaking history when he wrote that the Lord built the Church upon Peter.
In one generation the structure rose above the ground, and during all that
time S. Peter’s hand directed the work.

Just at the end of this time, on the point of being thrown into prison,
whence he only emerged to martyrdom, Paul was at Rome with Peter, and he
describes in imperishable words the work which had been already
accomplished. Again it is not only dogma but history, not only that which
was always to be but that which already was, which he set forth as it were
with his dying voice: the one Body, and the one Spirit, the one Lord, one
Faith, and one Baptism, as there is one God. That Body in which Apostles,
Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers were fixed, that the visible
structure might grow up to its final stature, in whose accordant unity was
the perpetual safeguard against error. When Paul so wrote,(294) the Body
was formed, and its headship was incontestably with Peter. He had no need
to remind them of the man with whom he was labouring, of whose work the
whole Church from Rome to Antioch and Alexandria was the fruit. But he
places the maintenance of truth, and the perpetual fountain of grace, in
the unity of the Church, which was before those to whom he wrote an
accomplished fact.

Two generations pass and the aged S. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom,
attests the same fact. “Where is Jesus Christ,” he says, “there is the
Catholic Church.” The King is in His Kingdom; the Master in His House; the
Lord in His Temple. The bishops throughout the world inseparably linked
together are His mind: and the presidency of charity, which is the inner
life of all this spiritual empire, is at Rome. S. Ignatius and the author
of the letter to Diognetus write just after the expiration of the
apostolic period; and they both regard Christians as one mass throughout
the world, living under a divine form of spiritual government. No one who
studies their words can doubt that the one Body and the one Spirit were as
visible to their eyes and as dear to their heart as to S. Paul.

We pass two generations further and S. Irenæus repeats the same testimony.
The interval has been filled by incessant attacks of heresies, and the
Bishop of Lyons dwells upon the fact that the Church speaks with one voice
through all the regions of the earth as being one House of God, and that
the seat of this its unity is in the great See founded by the Princes of
the Apostles at Rome. He reproduces at great length the statements of S.
Paul that the safeguard of truth lies in the one apostolic ministry, for
which he runs up to the fountain-head in Rome. It is in the living voice
and the teaching office of the Church that he sees a perpetual
preservative against whatever error may arise. Thus it has been up to his
time, and thus it will ever be.

Another period of seventy years runs on, and we come to the just-cited
testimony of Cyprian, who therefore said nothing new, nor anything
exaggerated; but when the truth was assailed in its very citadel, he spoke
out and described wherein its strength lay. He gathers up and gives
expression to the two hundred and twenty years between the day of
Pentecost and his own time. Here are the creative words of our Apostle and
High-priest explained and attested and exhibited as having passed into
fact by four witnesses, first S. Paul, then S. Ignatius, thirdly S.
Irenæus, fourthly S. Cyprian. Between all the five there is no shadow of
divergence, between the Master who designed the building and the servants
who described its erection; between the Prophet who foretold and the
historians who recorded. The one said, Upon this rock I will build my
Church; the others pointed out that the work was accomplished.

The original and fundamental conception of all this work is expressed by
S. Matthew and S. Mark when they speak of our Lord at His first going
forth as “proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.” His three years’
ministry is the germ and type of the perpetual mission which He founded.
It was to be from first to last a work of personal ministry, beginning
from above, not spreading from below; its power and virtue descending from
Him through those whom He chose, the people being the work of the Prince,
their government a delegation from Him, as their moral condition lay in
following Him, and their life and support in feeding on Him. And He
declared that the original conception should be carried out to the end,
and that “the gospel of the kingdom” should be proclaimed through the
whole world as a witness to all nations, until the consummation should
come.(295)

The chief events of the third century brought out more and more the unity
of the Church and the Primacy of S. Peter’s See as the power within the
Church by which that unity is produced and maintained.

With this century the great persecutions begin. That of Septimius Severus
arose in the year 202. Now a persecution which assaulted the mass of
Christians was the occasion of fall and apostasy to some, of martyrdom to
others. Hence the question became urgent how those should be treated by
the Christian society who through fear of suffering had failed to maintain
the confession of their faith. It was necessary to lay down more
distinctly rules as to what crimes should be admitted to penance, and what
that penance should be. The practice here involved doctrine; it raised
immediately the question of the power which the society itself had to
grant pardon, and to receive the guilty back into its bosom. And here the
authority of the chief Bishop was at once called out. We find as a matter
of fact Pope Zephyrinus in the first years of this century determining the
rules of penance, and a small party of rigid disciplinarians, among whom
Tertullian was conspicuous, who considered his rules as too indulgent. It
is in the vehement pamphlet with which Tertullian assails the Pope that we
have one of the earliest expressions of the great authority claimed by
him. “I hear,” he exclaims, “that an edict has been set forth, and a
peremptory one. The Pontifex Maximus, in sooth, that is, the Bishop of
Bishops, issues his edict: I pardon to those who have discharged their
penance the sins both of adultery and of fornication.”(296) Twenty years
later Pope Callistus carried the indulgence yet further, receiving to
penance those who had committed murder or idolatry.(297) Once more, after
a period of thirty years, the breaking out of the Decian persecution
raised afresh the question of admitting great sinners to penance, and the
actual discipline of the Roman Church, as established under Zephyrinus and
Callistus, is set forth in a letter to Cyprian by Novatian, then one of
the most esteemed presbyters of that church. By the discipline which these
facts attest it is determined that the Church has lodged in her the power
of pardoning any sin whatsoever according to the rules of the penance
which she imposes. And it is the Roman Church which herein takes the
guidance. She maintained the ancient faith, severity, and discipline, yet
tempered with that consideration which the full possession of the truth
alone bestows.(298) Thus she received back without hesitation those who
returned from heresy or schism, as well as those who had fallen in the
conflict with persecution.

For another question of great importance which her guidance determined was
that concerning the rebaptisation of heretics; and in this she went
against the judgment of Cyprian with his council, of Firmilian, and of
other bishops. It had been the custom that those who had received baptism
among heretics, provided it was with the proper rite, should, when they
sought admission into the Church, be received only by an imposition of
hands, not by the iteration of baptism. And though Cyprian and a great
majority of African bishops, through their horror of schism and heresy,
wished to modify this rule, and to insist that baptism given outside the
Church was invalid, Pope Stephen resisted, and maintained the ancient
rule, with the decision that nothing save what had been handed down should
be done.

It is evident that the question of penance and that of rebaptisation
touched the whole Christian society, and here accordingly we find the
superior Principate of the Roman Church exert itself. In fact, the right
decision as to both these questions involved the right conception of the
Church herself, her constitution, power, and prerogatives. The
rigorism(299) with which some had endeavoured to exclude certain sinners
from the faculty of receiving penance, and the view which led them to
confine the validity itself of baptism to its reception within the one
Church, led when fully developed in the following century to the obstinate
schism and heresy of the Donatists. These dangerous tendencies were
resisted, when they first appeared, by the Roman See, and we owe to such
resistance the application by Tertullian to the Pope of the title of
“Pontifex Maximus” and “Bishop of Bishops,” about the year 202, as the
expression of the power which he then claimed and exercised.

Another question likewise touching the whole Christian society, which the
Roman Pontiff had already decided against the practice of the influential
and ancient churches of Asia Minor, was the time of holding Easter. Pope
Victor insisted that the practice of the Roman Church must be followed,
which kept the day of the Crucifixion invariably on the Friday, and that
of the Resurrection on the Sunday, and not the Jewish practice of the
Asiatics, which took the 14th and the 16th days of the month Nisan, on
whatever days of the week they might fall, for that purpose. And here in
the peremptory tone of Pope Victor, and in the threat of excommunication
which he issued, the consciousness was shown that the right to determine
lay with him, while subsequent times justified his judgment and followed
it. Nor was it of little importance that the greatest festival of the
Church should be celebrated by all her children both on the same day and
in the same spirit.

We have then now traced up to the end of the third century the inner
growth and constituent principles of that great institution, which out of
every language, tribe, and religion in the empire or beyond it had formed
and welded together one people, the bearer of that Truth and that Grace
which the Son of God in assuming manhood had conveyed to the world. It
remains rapidly to review the relations of the empire with this people
during seventy-eight years, from the death of Alexander Severus in 235 to
the edict of toleration in 313.

II. The seizure of the empire by Maximin was accompanied by a violent
attack upon Christians, whom Alexander was held to have favoured. It is on
this occasion that we learn from Origen(300) that churches were burnt, and
thus their existence as public buildings is attested. The clergy were
especially threatened, and amongst them Ambrosius, the friend of Origen,
and Origen himself. But Maximin after reigning three years with
extraordinary cruelty was slain by his own soldiers. And then during
eleven years a period of comparative tranquillity for Christians ensued.

It is with the accession of Decius that the severest trials of the Church
commence. In the sixty-four years which elapse from this to the edict of
toleration, the force of the empire is five times directed by its rulers
against the Christian name. The cause of this is disclosed to us by S.
Cyprian mentioning incidentally the very words of that emperor whose name
is associated with the bitterest hatred to Christians. He praises Pope
Cornelius,(301) who when Pope “Fabian’s place, that is,” he says, “the
place of Peter and the rank of the sacerdotal chair was vacant,” “sat
fearless in that chair at Rome at the moment when the tyrant who hated
God’s priests uttered every horrible threat, and with much more patience
and endurance heard the rise of a rival prince than the appointment of
God’s priest at Rome.” But why should Decius regard with such dislike the
nomination of a Roman Bishop? Why, but that the emperors had now come
clearly to discern the organisation of the Church as a visible kingdom of
Christ, at the head of which the Roman Bishop stood. That kingdom, the
whole moral and religious doctrine of which, together with the life
founded upon it, they felt to be in contradiction with the heathen life
and the maxims of polity on which from time immemorial the empire had been
based, that kingdom Decius saw to be summed up and represented in him who
held, to use the words of Cyprian, “Peter’s place.” With that religious
association which Decius saw extending round him on every side, and
gradually drawing into its bosom the best of the two sexes, there was no
way of dealing but either to yield to those new maxims which it set forth,
or to destroy it. In proportion as the emperors were zealous for the
worship of the Roman gods, and instinct with the old discipline of the
state, they inclined to the latter alternative, and none more decisively
than Decius, who prided himself on following the spirit of Trajan. The
persecution which he set on foot reached and slew Pope Fabian, and caused
the election of a successor to be deferred for sixteen months. When at the
end of that time Cornelius was chosen, Cyprian praises him “as to be
reckoned among the glorious confessors and martyrs, who sat so long
awaiting his butchers, ready either to slay him with the sword, or crucify
him, or burn him, or tear open and maim his body with any unheard-of kind
of punishment.”(302) Decius indeed was slain by the Goths in battle after
less than two years’ reign, but the persecution was renewed by Gallus, and
again by Valerian, so that in ten years no less than five Pontiffs,
holding that place of Peter, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephen, and
Sistus, offered up their lives for the faith. Then it was that the ten
years’ noble episcopate of S. Cyprian after many minor sufferings ended in
martyrdom: and then too the deacon Laurence wore out in the agony of fire
all the malignity of the enemy, and gained his almost matchless
crown.(303)

The state of things which immediately preceded this grand attack of the
empire on the Church is thus described by Cyprian in the interval which
followed the persecution of Decius and preceded that of Gallus; and the
words of one who not only taught but died for his teaching carry with them
no common force. “As long repose had corrupted the discipline which had
come down to us from God, the divine judgment awakened our faith from a
declining, and if I may so speak an almost slumbering state; and whereas
we deserved yet more for our sins, the most merciful Lord has so moderated
all, that what has passed has seemed rather a trial of what we were than
an actual infliction. Everyone was applying himself to the increase of
wealth, and forgetting both what was the conduct of believers under the
Apostles, and what ought to be their conduct in every age, they with
insatiable eagerness for gain devoted themselves to the multiplying of
possessions. The priests were wanting in religious devotedness; the
ministers in entireness of faith; there was no mercy in works, no
discipline in manners. Men wore their beards disfigured, and women stained
their complexion with a dye. The eyes were changed from what God made
them, and a lying colour was passed upon the hair. The hearts of the
simple were misled by treacherous artifices, and brethren became entangled
in seductive snares; ties of marriage were formed with unbelievers;
members of Christ abandoned to the heathen. Not only rash swearing was
heard, but even false; persons in high place were swollen with
contemptuousness; poisoned reproaches fell from their mouths; and men were
sundered by unabating quarrels. Numerous bishops, who ought to be an
encouragement and example to others, despising their sacred calling,
engaged themselves in secular vocations, relinquished their chair,
deserted their people, strayed among foreign provinces, hunted the markets
for mercantile profits, tried to amass large sums of money, while they had
brethren starving within the Church, took possession of estates by
fraudulent proceedings, and multiplied their gains by accumulated
usuries.”(304)

Such was the end of the long peace which succeeded the persecution of
Septimius Severus, and yet it was followed at once by that ten years’
conflict which if stained with apostasies at first, soon became rife in
martyrdoms. And as the former relaxation seems to prove that the third
century among Christians was no ideal time in which moral corruptions and
abuses did not largely exist, so the improvement which trial and suffering
at once produced, calling forth some of the greatest triumphs which the
Faith has ever known, seems to indicate that the divine power of the
Church lies not in forming a community free from imperfections, or even
secured from scandals, but in building up a portion of her children to
sanctity. At all times the wheat and the chaff lie together on her
threshing-floor, and the flail of suffering winnows them. But those who
seek for a time when all professing believers were saints, will find it
neither when the Apostles taught nor afterwards.

The Emperor Valerian, after being during four years more kindly disposed
to Christians than any preceding emperor, and after filling his palace
with them, was instigated by an Egyptian magician into becoming a most
bitter persecutor.(305) This was ended in less than three years through
his capture by the Persian monarch, when his son Gallienus restored the
sacred places to the Christians, and ordered the bishops not to be
disturbed.(306) The empire during the following eight years seemed through
the supineness of Gallienus to be on the point of dissolution; it is the
time when nineteen commanders in various provinces assume the purple, and
successively perish. At last Gallienus is put out of the way by a council
of officers, and the empire is restored by Claudius and by Aurelian. The
latter, after being for some years fair to Christians, ends by persecuting
them. But he too is speedily removed by death. It is remarkable that all
these persecutions, by Maximin, by Decius, by Gallus, by Valerian, and by
Aurelian, are of short duration: none of them continue more than three
years. After Aurelian’s death in 275 a whole generation ensues in which
Christians by the ordinary operation of the empire’s laws, according to
which their religion was illicit, were liable to suffer much in individual
cases. Thus it is in a time not reckoned persecuting, shortly after
Maximianus had been made his colleague in the empire by Diocletian, that
one of the most merciless acts of tyrannical cruelty took place, which
gave an occasion for several thousand men at once to offer up their lives.
Unresisting victims, yet brave soldiers with arms in their hands, they
endured two decimations, and when remonstrance had proved in vain, piled
their arms, and let themselves be massacred to the last man rather than
violate their conscience. The place where they suffered took the name of
their heroic captain, Maurice; the churches of that Alpine valley to this
day bear witness by his figure over their altars to that most illustrious
act of Christian sacrifice: and beside the place of their repose rises
still a monastery which for thirteen hundred and fifty years has guarded
the sepulture of a legion of martyrs, and is become one of the most
ancient Christian houses of prayer.

It cannot be doubted that in the last twenty-five years of the third
century the number of Christians was being largely increased, and moreover
they were daily gaining the higher ranks of society. Diocletian had
reigned for eighteen years, and seemed effectually to have stopped that
incessant succession of soldiers gaining the throne by assassination and
yielding it in turn to their assassins, which for fifty years threatened
to destroy the state. At such a moment it was that Diocletian, belying all
the past conduct of his life, let loose against the Christian Church the
last, the fiercest, and the longest of the heathen persecutions.

It was in truth scarcely less than the rending in pieces the whole social
framework when a proclamation of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, in
the year 303, declared that the Christian Faith should cease to exist. How
entirely that faith had now penetrated all ranks was shown in Diocletian’s
own household, wherein his most trusted(307) chamberlains, beloved as his
children, were cruelly tortured because they refused to worship the
heathen gods, while his wife Prisca and his daughter Valeria purchased
immunity for the present by compliance. We have the emperor described by
an eye-witness of those times as himself sitting in judgment,(308) and
putting men to the torture of fire. The same power was delegated to the
governors throughout the provinces. “It was,” says Eusebius, “the
nineteenth year of Diocletian’s reign, in the month of March, when the
festival of the Lord’s Passion was drawing near, that imperial edicts were
everywhere published, ordering the churches to be levelled, the scriptures
to be burnt, those of rank to be deprived of it, the common people, if
they remained faithful, to be reduced to slavery. This was the first edict
against us; another soon came enjoining that all those who ruled the
churches should first be imprisoned, and then by every means compelled to
sacrifice.”(309) Lactantius adds that every action at law was to proceed
against Christians, while they should not be allowed to claim the law for
any wrong inflicted, or spoliation suffered, or dishonour done to their
wives.(310) Many in consequence of these edicts suffered willingly
terrible torments: many others at first gave way. What these torments were
Eusebius describes: some were beaten; some torn with hooks.(311) “It is
impossible to say how many and how great martyrs of Christ might be seen
in every city and country.” A man of the highest rank in Nicomedia from an
impulse of zeal when the edict first appeared tore it down: he was seized,
and not merely tortured but slowly roasted alive,(312) which he bore with
unflinching patience, preserving joyousness and tranquillity to his last
breath. The emperors polluted the provinces subject to them, by the
slaughter of men and women who worshipped God, as if it had been in a
civil war, with the exception of Constantius,(313) who ruled the Gauls and
Britain, and preserved his soul pure from this stain. But it was so much
worse than a war in which the conquered have only to suffer servitude or
at most death, whereas in this case what was committed against those who
refused to do wrong passes all description. They used against them every
imaginable torture, and thought it little to slay those whom they hated,
unless by cruelty having first exposed their bodies to mockery. If they
could persuade, by terror, any to violate the faith to which they were
bound, and to agree to the fatal sacrifice, these they praised and with
their honours destroyed, but on the others they exhausted the whole
ingenuity of their butchery, calling them desperate as disregarding their
own body.(314) For two years the whole Roman world ruled by Diocletian,
Maximian, and Galerius was exposed to this misery: when on the retirement
of Diocletian and Maximian in 305 Galerius became the chief emperor, the
persecution continued in all its intensity, save in the territory subject
to Constantius. “It is impossible to describe the individual scenes which
took place throughout the world. The several governors having received
their commission carried it out according to their own ferocity. Some
through excess of fear did more than their orders; some were inspired by
personal enmity; some by natural cruelty; some sought to advance
themselves; some were precipitate in the work of destruction, as one in
Phrygia,”(315) where, says Eusebius, the soldiers surrounded a Christian
town and burnt it with all its inhabitants, “men, women, and children
calling upon the name of Christ, the God of all.”(316) “And in devising
various kinds of tortures they aim at gaining a victory. They are well
aware that it is a struggle between champions. I myself saw in Bithynia a
governor beside himself in joy, as if he had subdued some barbarous
nation, because one who for two years had with great virtue resisted was
seen to fail. They inflict therefore exquisite pains, only avoiding to put
the tortured to death, as if it were only death that made them blessed,
and not likewise those torments which in proportion to their severity
produce a greater glory by the virtue which they exhibit.”(317)

Eusebius declares that such cruelties were perpetrated not for a short
time, but during several years; that ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, and as
many as a hundred men, women, and children would be slain in a day by
various tortures. “When I was in Egypt myself I saw a crowd in one day,
some beheaded, some burnt; with my own eyes I beheld the marvellous
ardour, the truly divine virtue and alacrity of those who believed in
Christ. Scarcely was sentence passed against the first, when a fresh
number hastened before the tribunal, professing themselves Christians:
with joy, gaiety, and smiles they received the award of death, singing
hymns, and returning thanks to their last breath.”(318)

Among those distinguished for their learning in all Grecian studies, and
for the universal honour in which they had been held, Eusebius mentions
especially a bishop of Thmuis named Phileas. While he lay in prison under
sentence of death, which was afterwards executed by beheading, he wrote a
letter to his people, detailing the scenes in which he bore a part. This
letter the historian has happily preserved for us. “Inasmuch,” he says,
“as the holy scriptures presented us with so many fair ensamples and
lessons, the blessed martyrs who are with me felt no hesitation. They
fixed their mind’s eye steadily upon the God of all, formed the conception
of death suffered for piety’s sake, and clung firmly to that to which they
were called. For they knew that our Lord Jesus Christ had become man for
our sakes in order to cut up all sin by the root, and to supply us with
food on that journey by which we enter into eternal life. For He thought
it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied Himself by taking the
form of a slave, and being found in fashion as a man humbled Himself to
death, and that death the cross. Hence it was that the martyrs, bearing
Christ within them, in their zeal for the greater gifts endured every
suffering and all the various inventions of torture not once, but some of
them a second time, and all the threats of their guards, which did not
stop with words in their zeal to overcome them, without their resolution
being broken, because perfect charity casts out fear. What words can I
find to enumerate their virtue and their endurance in each particular
trial? Since they were left exposed to anyone’s outrage, some being struck
with clubs, others with rods, others with scourges, some with lashes, some
with ropes. The sight of the tortures presented every variety, but great
suffering throughout. These with hands bound behind them were distended on
the wood, and had every limb stretched by machinery; and thus their
tormentors by command attacked the whole body, tearing them not on the
sides alone as murderers are treated, but on the stomach, the knees, and
the cheeks. Others were hung by one hand from the portico, and this
tension of the sinews and limbs caused a more terrible pain than any.
Others were bound to pillars face to face, the feet not reaching the
ground, but the weight of the body tightening the bonds, and this they
suffered not during the time of examination only, or while the governor
was engaged with them, but almost the whole day. For when he went to
others, he left his officers watching over these, to see if the extremity
of torture should cause any to give way: and he charged them to be bound
without mercy, but when at their last gasp to be let down and dragged
along the ground. For he said that no account at all was to be taken of
us, but we were to be both reputed and treated as non-existent. This last
was a second torture which they superadded to their blows. There were
those also who after their tortures were put in the stocks with their feet
distended to the fourth hole, where they must needs lie down, not being
able to hold themselves up through their wounds gaping over the whole
body. Others flung on the pavement lay there through the repeated violence
of their racking, the many signs of suffering over their body presenting a
more fearful spectacle to those who looked on than the racking itself.
Thus treated, some died under the torture, putting their adversary to
shame by their endurance; some shut up in prison half-dead, after a few
days expired through the extremity of their pains; the rest having
treatment applied became still more resolute through the time spent in
prison. And so when the choice was presented to them either to touch the
abominable sacrifice, and depart unmolested, gaining by this course an
execrable deliverance, or, not sacrificing, to receive sentence of death,
without any doubt they joyfully went to death. For they knew what the
sacred writings enjoin: ‘he that sacrifices to other gods shall be rooted
out,’ and ‘thou shalt have no other gods but me.’ ”(319)

This may suffice as a specimen of what was done during a course of years
throughout the dominion of Galerius, Maximin, and Maxentius. It is in this
persecution especially that the virgin martyrs suffered the extremity of
the heathen malignity in the threatened loss of that purity which they
valued more than life. And here a fellow-Christian at Alexandria
disguising himself as a soldier was to S. Theodora the guardian which her
angel himself became to S. Agnes at Rome. In this persecution also S.
Vincent repeats in Spain the trial and the triumph of S. Laurence at Rome.
The authentic account of his martyrdom shows the utmost point to which the
most ingenious and the most ferocious cruelty could reach on the one side,
and the most enduring patience on the other. But the numberless details
concerning the sufferings of this time preserved to us show that it was
indeed a conflict prolonged during eight years, in which the Roman state
put forth the utmost strength which unlimited power guided by unhesitating
cruelty could exert to destroy the Christian Church and name.

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 defenders(338) 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.”

Another(340) says: “It is stated in Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_(341) that
Socrates introduced the method of Induction and Definition, which proceeds
from the individual to the determination of the conception. Aristotle
marks(342) 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 he(354) 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.”

The last words of this man to his judges were: “And now it is time that we
depart, I to death, and you to life; but which of us are going unto the
better thing is not clear to anyone save to God.”(356) And when the
hemlock was reaching his heart,(357) he uncovered his head, and said with
his last utterance, “O Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius: pay it, and do
not neglect it.”

I have cited at length these passages because I think that they exhibit
clearly the opinions and convictions of Socrates on the most important of
all subjects. We behold here a man of a very religious mind, holding with
the utmost tenacity the idea of a Providence, the Benefactor of men and
their Judge, since it discriminates between them by reward and punishment:
nor is it an impersonal Providence, an abstract Reason, but “a wise
world-maker,” who loves man and does him good, and whose operations in
this very purpose of doing him good indicate unity of design and
perfection of execution: and yet in his conception of the godhead itself
he halts between unity and plurality, and beside a statement such as we
might read in a Pauline epistle of the one God who orders in harmony the
universe and holds it together, we find him passing to the recognition and
worship of many gods: beside words to his judges most sublime and most
pathetic, concerning the issue of life and of death, we find him with his
last breath directing his friend to discharge the sacrifice of a cock
which he had promised to Æsculapius. He does not attempt to solve either
the rational or the moral antagonism between many gods and one; but
practically he throws himself into the worship of his country, referring
to the law of each place as that which should determine for ever man the
question how the gods are to be honoured. And in this I believe that he is
typical of the whole race of philosophers at whose head he stands. Like
him they spoke of one God, and they offered the cock to Æsculapius. If we
seek the highest expressions concerning the divine unity, wisdom, and
power which are to be found in their writings, they approach S. Paul: if
we consider other expressions, and above all, their practice, it is in the
main that other word of Socrates, Worship according to the law of your
country. In the doctrine attributed to him both by Xenophon and Aristotle,
that he identified virtue and prudence, and believed that no man is
willingly wicked, but only out of ignorance, we have a proof which can
scarcely be exceeded in force how entirely the standing-point of Socrates
was that above attributed to the Greek mind in general, that of a religion
according to nature. It ignores in the most emphatic because in the most
unconscious way the inclination to evil in man. The relation between God
and man is simply that of greater and less. There is a physical affinity
and a numerical proportion between that mighty nature which is ruled
through all its length and breadth by a pervading reason, and the portion
of it contained in man’s body and soul.(358)

It is curious to imagine what would have been the effect of the life and
the death of Socrates had he lived and died just as he did with one sole
exception, that Plato and Xenophon had not been his disciples. Socrates
wrote nothing: oral discourse was his sole instrument of teaching. When
its last memories had faded away, we might have known as little of him as
we really know of Pythagoras. He would still indeed have been the greatest
of heathen names because he died for his moral convictions. This might
have been all, and it would have been very much. This, however, was not to
be. In Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_ we have an accurate life-portrait of the
man, while in the great genius of Plato we have the application of what
may be termed Socratic principles to the formation of an ethical, logical,
and physical system. The Megaric(359) school of Euclides, and Phædo’s
school of Elis, took indeed one side of his doctrine, the dialectic, for
their special subject of inquiry; the Cynic school of Antisthenes and the
Cyrenian school of Aristippus another side, the ethical: but it was Plato
who embraced in one comprehensive scheme the whole grasp of his master’s
thought, as well as the collective approved elements of former systems.

The principle of Socrates concerning the union of knowledge and virtue
invited his followers to work out a system of dialectics and ethics.(360)
And further the dialectic process of induction and definition, which
Aristotle tells us that Socrates introduced, was made by Plato the
foundation of his philosophy.(361) Its central point is the doctrine of
Ideas. Now the Platonic Idea is the object of the conception. As a single
object becomes known by its representation, so the Idea becomes known by
its conception. It is not the essence as such which dwells in many similar
individual objects, but that essence as represented perfectly in its kind,
unalterably, in unity, independence, and self-existence. The Idea points
to the general, but is represented by Plato as an original image of the
individual projected as it were outside of time and space. Conceive
individuals which have a similar being, or belong to the same class,
delivered from the limits of time and space, of materiality and individual
imperfections, and so reduced to that unity which is the groundwork of
their existence, and such unity is the Platonic Idea. The highest Idea is
the Idea of the good,(362) which is as it were the sun in the realm of
Ideas, viewed as the first cause of being and of knowledge. Plato seems to
identify it with the highest godhead. Thus the method to attain the
knowledge of Ideas is dialectics, which comprehend the double path of
rising to the general and returning from the general to the particular.

As to the generation(363) of the doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle states it as
the common product of the doctrine of Heracleitus that everything which
meets the senses is subject to change and flux, and of the Socratic view
of the conception. From Socrates Plato learnt that when once this is
rightly formed, it can be held fast unchangeably: he would not then apply
it to anything which meets the senses, but inferred that there must be
other beings which are the objects of the knowledge acquired by the
conception, and these objects he named Ideas. The filiation,(364) then,
between Socrates and Plato is this: Socrates was the first to require that
all knowledge and all moral dealing should proceed from the knowing of the
conception, and endeavoured to execute this by his inductive process,
while with Plato the same conviction formed the starting-point of a
philosophical system: so that what with Socrates was simply a rule of
scientific procedure was carried out by Plato to an objective intuition,
and when Socrates said, Only the knowing of the conception is true
knowledge, Plato added, Only the being of the conception is true being.

Thus in Plato we have a man of great original mind attempting with this
instrument of induction and definition to form a scheme of the universe,
which divides under his hand into a triple aspect of ethics, physics, and
dialectics.(365) No doubt his main intention was to offer to the cultured
and reflective few,—that inner circle to which his teaching and his
writings were directed,—a philosophy which should serve them as a
religion,(366) which should fill up the gaps and remove the anomalies of
the existing worship, purifying and restoring it, while it preserved amity
with it notwithstanding. Such being his intention, the manner in which he
treats the doctrine of the Divine Being is the more remarkable. Instead of
basing his philosophy upon it, and showing its relation as a part of his
system of physics, ethics, and dialectics, he speaks of it frequently
indeed, but always incidentally.(367) It is not so with other doctrines
which he has at heart. Three of his finest dialogues are dedicated to
setting forth as many aspects of his doctrine as to the soul’s
immortality; the Phædrus treats of its preëxistence; the Banquet of the
influence of immortality on the relations of the present life; the Phædo
of death as the means of a happy futurity.(368) But no one collects
together and lucidly exhibits his view of the divine nature. This has to
be picked out of his writings, a bit here, and another there, and put
together by the student. No doubt he felt, as he has said,(369) “with
regard to the Maker and the Father of this universe it is hard to find him
out, and when you have found him impossible to describe him to all men.”
He was intimately convinced that the great mass of mankind was quite
unsuited to receive the conception of the Divine Being which he had
formed. But I believe there to have been another reason of greater force
with him for his not having presented as a whole his conclusions on this
central doctrine of all. It was not merely that the fate of his master
Socrates was ever before him,(370) but the singular position which he held
with regard to the established worship. He wished to correct, not to
destroy it; he wished to reduce it to monotheism, and yet to preserve
polytheism. The two are bound together in his mind. If then his writings
be carefully analysed, and every reference to the Supreme Being put
together into a sort of mosaic,(371) we should find the following picture.
The everlasting essence of things, with which Philosophy deals, is the
highest object. Ideas are those everlasting gods after the pattern of
which the world and all things which are in it are formed, and the
Godhead, taken absolutely, is not distinct from the highest Idea. Plato
sets forth the causality of Ideas and the sway of reason in the world
together with the impossibility to explain what is generated save by an
Ingenerate, motion save by a soul, and the ordered disposition of the
world, working out a purpose, save by reason; and in all which he declares
respecting the Godhead, the Idea of Good, of the highest metaphysical and
ethical perfection, is his guiding-point. As this highest Idea stands at
the head of all Ideas as the cause of all being and knowledge, so the one
everlasting invisible God, the Former and Father of all things, stands at
the head of all the gods, alike difficult to find and to describe. Just as
the above Idea is distinguished by the conception of the Good, so Plato
selects goodness as God’s most essential attribute. It is on this ground
that he maintains the Godhead to be absolutely good and upright, and its
operation to be merely good and upright; against the old notion which
imputed envy to it, and derived evil from it. Again, in opposition to the
fabulous appearances of the gods, it is from the goodness of the Godhead
that he deduces its unchangeableness, inasmuch as what is perfect can
neither be changed by anything else, nor change itself, and so become
worse. He adds, the Godhead will never show itself to men other than it
is, since all falsehood is foreign to it; inasmuch as to falsehood in the
properest sense, that is, ignorance and self-deception, it is not exposed,
and has no need to deceive others. He extols the divine perfection, to
which no beauty and no excellence is wanting; the divine power, which
embraces everything and can do everything which is possible, that is,
which does not involve a moral or a metaphysical contradiction: for
instance, it is impossible for God to wish to change Himself, for evil to
cease, and from the doctrine respecting the forming of the world and
matter it is clear that the divine activity in producing is limited by the
nature of the finite.(372) He extols the divine wisdom which disposes all
things to its purpose; its omniscience, which nothing escapes; its
justice, which leaves no transgression unpunished and no virtue
unrewarded; its goodness, which makes the best provision for all. He
rejects, as notions taken from man, not merely the Godhead’s having a
body, but likewise all those tales which impute passions, quarrels, crimes
of every kind to the gods. He declares them to be exalted above pleasure
and displeasure, to be untouched by any evil; and is full of moral
indignation at the thought that they allow themselves to be won over, or
rather corrupted, by prayers and offerings. Moreover he shows that
everything is ordered and ruled by Divine Providence, which extends over
the least as well as the greatest, and as regards men is especially
convinced that they are a carefully-tended possession of the Godhead, and
that all things must issue in good to those who through virtue gain its
goodwill. If the unequal and unjust distribution of men’s lot is objected,
his reply is, that virtue carries its reward and wickedness its punishment
immediately in itself; further, that both are sure of a complete
retribution in the after-world, while already in this life as a rule in
the end the upright goes not without recognition and thanks, nor the
transgressor without universal hate and detestation. As to the general
fact that there is evil in the world, it seemed to him so inevitable that
it was not requisite expressly to defend the Godhead on that score. All
these statements carry us back at last to one and the same point. It is
the Idea of the Good by applying which Plato produces so exalted a
doctrine of God. In the like spirit he will consider only the moral
intention in acts of worship. He alone can please the Godhead who is like
it, and he alone is like it who is pious, wise, and just. The gods cannot
receive the gifts of the wicked; the virtuous alone have a right to invoke
them. God is goodness; and he who bears not the image of that goodness in
himself stands in no communion with him.

The doctrine here set forth is the highest ever reached by purely heathen
Greek speculation; but we must remember that it is not thus collected into
a head by Plato himself, still less is it put into such a relation to his
physical, his logical, and his moral system as such a doctrine ought to
bear. A man who had reached so lofty a conviction of the divine unity and
moral perfection as this must, if he would make it effectual, give to it
in his system the place which it really holds in the world. If there be
indeed a Maker and Father of the universe by whom all things consist, all
that Plato taught should have been subordinated to this its first
principle, and the sum of his teaching to men should have been to set him
forth. So far is this from the position which Plato really took, that in
his ideal Republic no other religion but the traditional Greek religion
was to subsist; he changes nothing in the very forms of the polytheistic
worship; he refers the decision on many points to the Delphic Apollo.(373)
And when in his last book on the Laws(374) he sets forth the notion of a
second best state, one which can be realised under actual circumstances,
wherein he gives a mass of practical directions for the needs of the lower
classes, religion in its purely polytheistic dress is the soul of his
teaching, the groundwork of his structure. Men are to worship first of all
the Olympian gods, and the gods who are the patrons of the city; then the
gods of the earth; then demons and heroes; and all these in the
traditional way by offerings, prayers, and vows. All good in public life
is their gift; everything is to be consecrated to them; to violate their
shrines is the greatest of crimes. In fact, after all, but few of mankind
are capable of understanding or receiving the philosophic God. However
imperfect(375) the popular belief in the gods may be, and however
unsatisfactory to him the allegorical interpretations of it then so much
in vogue, yet is it in Plato’s conviction indispensable to all those who
have not had a scientific education. Men must first be taught with lies,
and then with the truth: the popular fables and the worship grounded on
them is therefore for all the _first_, and for most the _only_ form of
religion.(376) The philosopher, it is true, sees deeper and despises them
in his heart. Thus the monotheist in speculation is a polytheist in
practice: as Socrates, the model and exemplar of Greek philosophy, with
his dying breath, so Plato, its most inspired teacher with all the voice
of his authority, sacrificed the cock to Æsculapius.

But moreover, this supreme God, who has to be disinterred from the
recesses of the Platonic teaching, and conciliated with the worship
practically paid to a host of subordinate gods, is in Plato’s conception
neither absolutely personal nor free, and he is not the Creator but only
the Former of the world. In Plato’s theory there is coeternal with him a
first matter, without form or quality, which exists independently of him;
which moreover is inhabited and swayed to and fro in disorderly heavings
by a sort of soul, the token of that dark Necessity(377) which rises
behind the figures of gods and men in Greek poetry. It is indeed the work
of the divine reason to come down upon this shapeless mass and its inborn
mover, and out of them to construct the world-soul, with which and with
his own reason he forms and maintains and vivifies the ordered universe.
As he is by this operation the Father of the universe, so this First
Matter is “the Mother of all generation,” the condition of the existence
of corporeal things. But in this original matter lies the origin of evil,
which, perpetuated in the corporeal structure of man, can indeed be tamed
and schooled, and in a certain degree subdued, but never can be
exterminated by the divine reason. The power, the wisdom, and the
providence of Plato’s God are encountered by this check, which stands
eternally over against the Demiurgos in his world-forming activity, which
limits his freedom, and impairs his personality, while it excludes the
whole idea of creation. Students of this philosophy(378) attempt to
associate together his highest Idea, that of the Good, with the supreme
God, of whom he speaks with personal attributes, as the just, the wise,
the true, the good, but admit that Plato has not attempted to solve the
problem how the Idea, which by his hypothesis as it is the highest is also
the most general, is at the same time the most individual, the one
personal God. In fact, it is admitted that he fails—together with all the
ancient Greek writers—in the strict conception of personality.(379) As
according to him individual beings are what they are only by participation
of something higher, it is no wonder that in describing that one Reason,
the Idea of the Good, the highest and most general of all, which forms and
governs the world, his language oscillates between the personal and the
impersonal. But if his philosophical reasons tend one way, it must be
allowed that the heart and affections of the man, and the whole moral
sense of the teacher, decide another.

The ethical system of Plato appears to be a strict deduction from his
physical. As man in his view is a compound of matter, vivified by a
portion of the world-soul, which the divine reason takes and unites with a
portion of itself, so his virtues correspond to this threefold
composition.(380) For man has an immortal portion in his soul, the reason,
the godlike, in him, but the divine reason, in joining a portion of the
world-soul with matter, invests it with two mortal parts, one the
courageous, or manly, the other, sensuous desire, or the female element,
having their seat in the body’s activity. To these answer respectively the
virtues of prudence, of courage, and of temperance, while justice comes in
afterwards as a right ordering of the three, or as prudence applied to
practice. The seat of all irregular desires, of all evil, in fact, is to
Plato in this union of the soul with matter. As this matter is primordial,
evil in its origin does not indeed spring from God, but it is beyond his
power: it springs from that state of things which existed before the
action of God on chaos:(381) it must stand over against the good: and of
necessity encompasses this mortal nature and the place of its habitation:
and to man it lies not in the perverted use of free-will, but in his
original composition, wherein his body is its seat. But in this triple
composition of man Plato does not seem to have clearly apprehended a human
personality at all: he has not even attempted to explain(382) in what the
unity of the soul consists besides these its three portions, two of which,
being tied to the body, drop off at death.

It is in the practice of Plato as a teacher that we can most fitly
consider the conception which the Greek philosophers in general had
concerning the method of studying and imparting philosophy altogether. It
was about the fortieth year of his life, and twelve years after the death
of his master Socrates, that Plato, having already travelled widely,
settled at Athens.(383) Here he purchased a fixed residence at the
Academia, which became from that time a philosophical school for study,
conversation, oral lectures, and friendly meetings. Here he drew around
him an inner circle of scholars to whom he addressed his unwritten
doctrines,(384) especially his doctrine of Ideas, the key to his whole
system, according as they were able, after preparation, to receive them:
and here besides he gave lectures which might be attended not only by that
inner circle of choice disciples but by studious persons in general. This
residence of Plato served for three hundred years, from 387 before Christ
until the siege of Athens by Sylla in 87, as the centre of Plato’s
philosophy viewed as a teaching power. Now in this Plato had before him
the great example of Pythagoras, in the first age of Greek philosophy.
Concerning the doctrines of that philosopher we know little with
certainty,(385) but all are agreed as to his manner of teaching them. His
attempt was to establish a community which should carry in its bosom,
propagate, and perpetuate a doctrine in morals, politics, religion, and
philosophy. His whole procedure was by oral teaching, for he left not a
word written. It was in fact a religious order of life which he first
practised in his own person, and then endeavoured to communicate to
others. Into this order trial for everyone preceded reception.(386) His
scholars were for a long period required to practise silent obedience and
unconditional submission to the authority of the doctrine delivered to
them. Severe daily examination was imposed upon all. The publishing of his
doctrine, especially his speculation as to the nature of God, was strictly
forbidden. The upright life, the learning which then could only be
attained by personal inquiry, the persuasiveness of Pythagoras, were
together so effective that he succeeded in establishing such a community
both in Crotona and in other cities of Southern Italy. It was persecuted
and suffered continual disasters, but still this Pythagorean community,
bearing on its founder’s doctrines and manner of life, existed for several
generations after his death, during which many of the most distinguished
Greeks belonged to it. Such was the poet Æschylus, whose mind was formed
on Pythagorean principles. In Plato’s time the Pythagorean Archytas was at
the head of the state of Tarentum: and Plato himself was largely imbued
with Pythagorean tenets.(387)

Now Plato, it is true, did not imitate the political part of the
Pythagorean scheme. It was only upon paper that he set forth his ideal
republic. But the same conception as to the manner of communicating a
doctrine lay in his mind as in that of Pythagoras. He did not look to
writing as a primary instrument of communicating thought. He places it
himself in a relation of dependence upon oral dialectic instruction. It is
only to serve as a reminder of what had been otherwise taught: and,
moreover, it is quite subordinate to his first postulate, the earnestness
of a life devoted to inquiry and education.(388) These principles are set
forth with great lucidity in his dialogue Phædrus, where he introduces by
the mouth of Socrates the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, drafts and dice, and also of letters. With these
inventions in his hand the god approached the then king of Egypt Thamous,
recommending him to make them known to his subjects. But Thamous was by no
means inclined to receive these inventions unconditionally: he praises or
blames them, as he judges of them, and at last he comes to the
letters.(389) “This discovery,” says Thoth, “O king, will make the
Egyptians wiser, and improve their memory. It is of sovereign effect in
both things.” “Most ingenious Thoth,” replies the king, “one man is made
to give birth to art, and another to judge what good or what harm it will
do to those who use it. And now you, being the father of letters, out of
natural affection assert of them that which is just the contrary to their
real office. For they will breed forgetfulness in the minds of those who
learn them, who will slight the faculty of memory, inasmuch as relying on
what is written externally in the types of others they do not exercise
remembrance by an inward act of their own. The spell you have found is
good not for fixing in the mind, but for reminding. And as to wisdom, you
offer to those who learn them not its reality but its appearance. For they
will indeed hear much, but as this will be without teaching, they will
seem to have many minds but generally no judgment, and be hard to
comprehend, having become wiseacres instead of wise men. O Socrates, says
Phædrus, you are one who can easily tell stories from Egypt or any other
country. My dear Phædrus, it was in the temple of Dodonean Jupiter that
they made the first oracular words to proceed from an oak. The men of that
day, not being wise as you young men, were satisfied in their simplicity
to listen to an oak or a rock, if they only spoke the truth. Perhaps it
makes a difference to you who the speaker is, and from what country; for
you do not look merely whether it is true or not. Your rebuke, says
Phædrus, is just, and what the Theban says about letters seems to me to be
right. Well then, says Socrates, the man who thinks to leave an art in
writing, and he also who receives it as being, when written, something
clear and certain, must be very simple, and be really ignorant of Ammon’s
oracle, when he thinks that written words are something more than a
reminder to one who knows the subject of the matters about which they are
written. Exactly so, Socrates. For surely, Phædrus, writing shares this
troublesome characteristic with painting. The productions of painting
stand there as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question,
preserve a solemn silence. Just so it is with writing. You may think that
they speak with some meaning, but if you ask what that meaning is, there
they stand with just the same word in their mouth. When once a thing is
written, it is tossed over and over by all who take it in, whether it
concerns them or not, and is unable to speak, or to be silent with the
proper persons. And if it is maltreated or slandered, it wants its father
always to help it, for it can neither defend nor help itself. What you say
now is also very true indeed. But, says Socrates, can we not find another
word, this one’s lawful brother, and see the process by which it arises,
and how much better and abler than the former it is? What word is this,
and how does it arise? The word which is written on the disciple’s soul
together with true knowledge, which is able to defend itself, and knows
how to speak and to be silent with the proper persons. You mean the living
and animated word of one who has knowledge, whereof the written word may
justly be called the shadow.(390) I mean that indeed. Tell me now; an
intelligent gardener, who had seeds that he cared for, and wished to bear
fruit, would he hurry with them in summer to the gardens of Adonis, plant
them, and rejoice to see them springing up with a fair show in a week? or
would he do this for amusement, and in festival-time, if he did it at all,
but when he took pains would use his gardener’s art, sow them at the
fitting time, and be too glad if, seven months afterwards, he saw them
coming to perfection? Certainly, Socrates, that would be the difference
between his sport and his earnest. Shall we, then, say that he who
possesses the science of justice, honour, and goodness, has less
intelligence than the gardener for his own seeds? Surely not. He will not,
then, hurry to write them with a pen in ink with words, which cannot on
the one hand help themselves with speech, and on the other hand are
incapable to teach the truth sufficiently. I should think he would not. He
will not; but as for these written flower-borders, he will sow and write
them, when he does write them, for amusement, storing up reminders for
himself, should he come to a forgetful old age, and for every one who
pursues the same footsteps, and he will take pleasure in seeing them
springing up tenderly: so when other men fall to other amusements,
lubricating themselves at the banquet, or other such things, he will take
his amusement here. In this, Socrates, you would substitute a very seemly
amusement for a bad one, when the man who can play with words sports upon
the subject of justice and suchlike. So it is, my dear Phædrus, but it is,
I take it, earnest in a far higher sense, when one, using the art of
dialectics, takes hold of a fitting soul, and plants and sows with true
knowledge words able to help both themselves and their planter, not
fruitless, but having seed, whence growing up in a succession of minds
they will from age to age produce an immortal line,(391) and will make
their possessor happy as far as man can be.”

In these words, put in his master’s mouth, Plato, if I mistake not, has
given us the whole purpose of his life, and the manner in which he hoped
to accomplish it. It was in the Academia that he sought to establish that
immortal line of living words, who should speak as the possessors of real
knowledge upon justice, truth, and goodness. He is describing a living
culture by living teachers, of whom he aspired to be himself the first;
and the written dialogues which he has left are in his intention, and so
far as they enter at all upon the higher points of his doctrine,(392)
reminders of that which he had set forth to chosen auditors by word of
mouth, the word which was able, as he says, to explain and defend itself,
and to answer a question put to it.

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 knowledge(399) 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 recollections(400) 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.

Religion(418) 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.

Zeno(423) 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.

The soul of man is a body made out of the finest round and fiery atoms; a
body which, like heated air, most rapidly penetrates the whole material
frame. The finest portion of the soul, the feeling and thinking spirit,
which as a fourth element is added to the fiery, aerial, and vaporous
portions, dwells in the breast. In these elements all the soul’s passions
and impulses are rooted. When death destroys the body, the sheltering and
protecting home of the soul’s atoms, these evaporate at once. It was clear
that in such a system the soul could not outlive the body, but Epicurus
laid a special stress on this, since thereby only could men be delivered
from the greatest impediment to repose and undisturbed enjoyment of life,
the torturing fear of the world below, and of punishments after death. It
was the crown of his system, to which ethics, physics, and such logic as
he admitted were entirely subordinate, to emancipate men from four fears,
the fear of death, the fear of natural things, the fear of the gods, the
fear of a divine Providence, which was the same thing as fate.(433)
Nevertheless, the followers of Epicurus had no scruple, after the manner
of their master, who had spoken of the worship of the gods like a priest,
to visit temples and take part in religious ceremonies. These, it is true,
were useless, since they had nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the
gods, but it was an act of reason, and could do no harm, to honour beings
naturally so high and excellent.(434)

Of this school we learn that it gradually became the most numerous of all.
Its social force really lay in setting forth as a model the undisturbed
security of individual life. It agreed at the bottom with stoicism that
man’s wisdom and highest end was to live in accordance with nature. Zeno,
it is true, called this living in accordance with nature, virtue, man’s
highest and only good; Epicurus called it pleasure; but Zeno’s virtue
consisted essentially in the absence of passions, the pleasure of Epicurus
in the mind’s undisturbedness.(435) The Epicureans were more attached to
their master’s memory than any other school. They were renowned for their
friendship with each other. Epicurus’s Garden at Athens meant the highest
refinement of Athenian life, the enjoyment of everything that was pleasant
in the society of likeminded men.(436) It was this side of his philosophy
which made it popular.

While the schools of Zeno and Epicurus seated at Athens were powerfully
influencing Grecian thought, the former especially drawing to it the
stronger and more thinking minds, resistance arose to them both in the
chair of Plato. First Arcesilaus and then Carneades, who had succeeded to
this office, set up in the middle Academy the school of Scepticism. While
Stoics and Epicureans alike sought peace of mind through knowledge of the
world and its laws, they on the contrary maintained that this same peace
of mind could only be attained by renouncing all such knowledge.(437) They
held that no truth and no certainty were given to man by the
representations of his senses, by his feelings, and by his consciousness
of these, which do not enable him to know the real being of anything.(438)
Those who held this view would not say downright that what they
contradicted was untrue: they were of opinion that it might be true, only
there was no certitude of this, and therefore it must be left
undetermined. The uncertainty was as great on the one side as on the
other. Sextus Empiricus defined the state of skepsis to be “skilfulness in
so setting forth appearances and reflections against each other, as to be
brought through the equilibrium of opposing facts and grounds in their
favour first to a suspension of judgment, and then to imperturbable
tranquillity.”

Carneades, whose life occupied the greater part of the second century
before Christ, and who is extolled by Cicero as the keenest and most
copious of disputants, was the man in whom this school of thought reached
its highest point. He had appeared at Rome among a deputation of
philosophers in the year 155, when his eloquence and earnestness made a
great impression on his Roman hearers. This scepticism of the younger
Academy however ran in accordance with the direction which the collective
philosophy of the Greeks naturally took, and was carried out with an
acuteness and a scientific ability which makes us recognise in it an
important member of philosophical development.(439) Carneades subjected
the stoic doctrine as to God in particular to a criticism the range of
which went far beyond the dogmas of this school, and in fact tended to
represent every conviction as to the existence of the godhead, and every
religious belief, as something impossible and untenable.(440) This,
however, as Cicero repeatedly assures us, was not done for the purpose of
destroying belief in the gods, but only to point out the weakness and
groundlessness of stoic doctrines. It is chiefly in his assaults on the
assertions and assumptions of his adversaries that Carneades is
victorious: when he attempts anything positive on his own side, it amounts
to this, that a rational man will take probability for his guide, when he
cannot be assured of truth: and his chief merit appears to have been in
more accurately determining the degrees of probability.(441)

The contests of these schools bring us down to the middle of the second
century before Christ, when Greece fell under the dominion of Rome. From
this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live
themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of
intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly
completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and
other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the
empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon
the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his
side obtained a sort of victory. As a rule he was anything but an original
thinker. He was an essentially practical man: he had a steady instinct
which led him to distrust first causes and general principles. The Greek
schools were to him of value only as they might fit into his daily life,
not as coherent systems of thought. The spirit therefore in which he
regarded their differences was to select from them what best suited his
tastes and feelings. If he had no power to originate, he could choose. But
such likewise had been the result among the Greeks themselves of two
centuries of conflict, in which the rival systems of Stoicism,
Epicureanism, and Scepticism had stood over against each other. They
sprung from the same soil; they might even be termed three branches of one
stem,(442) inasmuch as their common root was the desire to find for the
individual man something which would give him tranquillity of mind,
happiness in fact, independent of his civil circumstances. In this they
all took up a practical rather than a theoretical ground, the ground
indeed which is now assigned to religion. Utterly opposed, then, as they
were in their means, they sought the same end, and it was not in nature
that the collision of their various arguments should not at length kindle
the spirit of eclecticism. Thus the temper of the Roman statesman and
noble, and the course of Greek philosophy itself, combined to produce this
spirit, which from the beginning of the first century before Christ
pervaded the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world.(443) But eclecticism
betokens a weakening of the philosophic mind, that weariness which is
unable to take a firm grasp of truth, an absence of the keen aim and high
desire which such a grasp betokens. It is a confession that no one system
possesses the truth: in which state of things nothing remains for the
individual but to choose for himself out of different systems those
morsels of truth which approve themselves most to his taste or tact, or,
as he would term it, his truth-seeking sincerity.

But it is not too much to say that the whole spirit of later antiquity, so
far as it interested itself in the discovery of truth, from the time that
Greek philosophy was diffused over the Roman world, leant more or less to
eclecticism. Its most able, most distinguished, and most interesting
representative is Cicero.(444) He lived at a time when rival criticism had
searched out and exposed every weak point in the different systems of
thought. To found new systems there was no further creative force; his
eclectic position was the necessary result. His genius supplied him with
no means to overcome it. His philosophical writings are scarcely more than
transcripts from various Grecian sources, wherein he uses his skill as a
rhetorician and his unfailing wealth of words to set forth with lawyerlike
balancing the arguments of different schools. We can yet detect the
originals, from which in the short intervals of enforced absence from
political life before and after the death of Cæsar he transfused with such
rapidity into a Latin shape the products of Greek discussion.(445) Thus
his treatise on the Republic and on Laws are in form imitations of Plato’s
writings with the same title, while for their contents Cicero applies
Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines to his own political
experiences, making also much use of Polybius. His _Paradoxa_ explain
Stoic propositions. The groundwork of his _Consolatio_ is Crantor’s
writing upon Grief. The _Lost Hortensius_ is drawn from an exhortation of
Aristotle to Themison, a prince of a city of Cyprus, or from a similar
work of the academician Philo of Larissa; his books _De Finibus_ from
works of Phædrus, Chrysippus, Carneades, Antiochus, as well as the studies
which Cicero himself in his youth made while attending lectures; his
_Academica_ from the writings and partly also from the lectures of the
best-known Academicians: his _Tusculan Disputations_ from Plato and
Crantor, from Stoics and Peripatetics. The first book on the _Nature of
the Gods_ from the writing of an Epicurean, which has been discovered in
the rolls of Herculaneum, and was first supposed to be a treatise of
Phædrus, but is now known to be a work of Philodemus: his critique on the
Epicurean standing-point is drawn from the stoic Posidonius; the second
book from Cleanthes and Chrysippus; the third from Carneades and
Clitomachus. Of his books on _Divination_, the first is taken from
Chrysippus, Posidonius, Diogenes, and Antipater; the second from
Carneades, and the stoic Panætius. His treatise on _Fate_ from the
writings of Chrysippus, Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Carneades: his _Elder
Cato_ from Plato, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristo of Chius: his _Lælius_
mainly from a writing of Theophrastus on Friendship. His main authority
for the first two books on _Offices_ is Panætius; and for the third
Posidonius; while besides Plato and Aristotle he has made use of Diogenes
of Babylon, Antipater of Tyre, and Hecato.

Now in this selection from rival and antagonistic schools—this oscillation
between the positive and sceptical tone of thought, this sitting as a
judge rather than obeying as a disciple—Cicero very exactly represented
the tone and attitude of the cultivated classes in his own time and in the
century following his death. Originality of mind in philosophic studies
was gone; nor was any system as a whole believed in. The sceptic and
eclectic turn of mind are but the reverse sides of the same mental
coinage: he who selects from all is convinced by none. Neither his doubts
nor his choices satisfied Cicero, or any one of those who followed him in
that most important century, the eighth of the Roman city, fifty years of
which preceded and fifty followed the coming of Christ. In its
philosophical productions no preceding century had been so poor as this.
It had only to show the school of the Sextii, which arose at Rome about
the beginning of our era, and took a sort of middle standing between
Pythagorean, Cynic, and Stoic principles.(446) This school was of small
importance, and soon became extinct. With this exception from Cicero to
Seneca no names of distinction appear. There is a gap in philosophical
thought. A period so influential on the destinies of man in its events, so
celebrated for its polite literature, on which the world has since been
feeding, is barren in the highest realm of inquiry. For this reason there
is a particular justice in taking Cicero as an exponent of heathen thought
and spirit, the living specimen of the kind, inasmuch as he is the last
philosophic writer before Christian thought appears in the world, and
chose for himself the function of summing up what he thought of value in
the ages before him.

We omit therefore nothing in our review if we place ourselves at the end
of this century, in the reign of Claudius, and cast a glance backward over
that prodigious labour of human reason through which we have hastily
travelled, and which had then lasted six hundred years. The problem was,
given the universe, what will man’s reason in the most gifted, cultivated,
inquiring, dialectic race of the ancient world do with it? And more
particularly, to what results will reason come as to the power which has
formed, or which rules it: as to its chief inhabitant, his nature, and the
purpose for which he exists, and the end to which he is ever advancing: as
to the duties by which he is bound to this creating, or at least
maintaining and ruling power: as to those offices which he owes to his
fellow, the individual to the individual, the civil community to the
community. It was to these points especially that the greatest character
in the whole movement—the single heathen who knew how to die for his
convictions—turned the thoughts of those who followed him. Again, at the
very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct,
gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in
a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the
mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to
have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have
been the original and even the only form of teaching which they
recognised. What was the result in this respect also? In the four hundred
and forty years following the death of Socrates had reason produced a
consistent doctrine, and a society of which that doctrine should be the
law and bond, a fitting body for its soul to tenant, the immortal race of
that living word which Plato contemplated? Time there had been enough, and
even a superfluity of genius: but there were also two great outward events
which might be expected to favour and advance such a result.

The first of these was the subjection of the whole East to the influence
of the Greek mind by the conquest of Alexander, the effect of which
continued in the kingdoms carried on by his successors. Originally the
civil position of the Greek, as the free citizen of a free state, had been
all in all to him. His country was his single measure. But during the
lifetime of Plato and Aristotle this position had been more and more
altering. The philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus was set up by men who had
lost it altogether, who were thrown back on themselves, on the intrinsic
nature of man, for support. Their inmost thought was how to produce
tranquillity of mind, and so far as might be, happiness, for man, in
something independent of his civil position. The loss of self-government
had opened to them perforce a field far wider than the narrow confines of
a provincial citizenship. Henceforth the schools of Plato, Aristotle,
Zeno, and Epicurus issued their mental legislation not for the inhabitant
of Attica, but for all that fusion of races which occupied the eastern
coasts of the Mediterranean, was ruled by Greek potentates, and spoke the
Hellenic tongue. Thus the ground taken up by philosophy was at once
religious and cosmopolitan; the former because it attempted to deal with
the nature of man as man, and to give him inward contentment, the latter
because the mind, which used as its organ the Greek language, swayed large
and independent empires, embracing various races of men. Then, if ever, it
might have been expected that heathenism would make a great spring,(447)
would cast aside what was local and accidental in the various customs,
races, and beliefs brought under the fusing influence of one spirit, and
idealise out of them a religion bearing the stamp and showing the force of
that human reason of which Greece was the great representative. But the
three centuries which witnessed the birth, the vigorous growth, and the
incessant contests of the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, together with the
scepticism which from Plato’s chair passed judgment on them both, produced
no such result, but rather terminated in that balancing of opposite
systems, and the selection of fragments from each, which we have seen in
Cicero.

The second great event which we have to note is that when the Greek mind
had thus been for three hundred years in possession of society throughout
the East, the Roman empire came to bind in unity of government not only
all those races which the successors of Alexander had ruled, but the wide
regions of the West as well, and their yet uncivilised inhabitants. Here,
again, the Greek mind was not dethroned, but married, as it were, to Roman
power. Philosophy made a sort of triumphal entry into Rome in spite of
Cato and all the conservative force of the old Roman spirit. And if fusion
had been the thought, the desire, and the attempt of the Ptolemies and the
Seleucidæ, even more certainly was it the only spirit by which Augustus
and Tiberius could hope to rule in peace the world made subject to them.
And not less than the extinction of Greek autonomy did the loss of
self-government accompanying the institution of the empire force the Roman
also back upon himself. When Cicero could no longer sway the senate, he
studied philosophic systems at Tusculum: and certainly his book of Offices
has been more valued by all posterity than his speeches against Catiline
or his defence of Milo. A long train of writers from the Fathers downwards
have seen in the civil unity of the Roman empire a providential
preparation for a great religion. But the field on which that empire arose
had already, so far as concerns the thinking classes, long been occupied
by the Greek philosophy. The two forces come into operation now together:
and seventy years after the battle of Actium, when Augustus and Tiberius
had completely established one ruling authority, and when this second
outward revolution had had full time to give its impulse to thought, and
had set before the eyes of men for two whole generations the vision of an
empire which seemed conterminous with civilisation itself, we may fairly
ask what philosophy had done towards producing a corresponding unity of
doctrine, and a society sustaining and propagating it.

If, then, we take our stand at the moment when Claudius began to reign,
and count a century backwards, it is impossible to mention a time when
philosophy was more impotent for good, and when the higher classes of the
Roman empire were more thoroughly irreligious and unbelieving. To
understand the reason of this we must take into account first the negative
and then the positive action of philosophy up to that time. As to the
former, there can be no doubt that the effect of philosophy in all its
schools and through all its shades of thought had been hostile to a simple
belief in polytheism and its mythology. Human reason had been turned with
pitiless severity on its mass of fables, its discreditable stories, its
manifold contradictions. As early as the sixth century before Christ it
had used the key of allegory in order to infuse into these some better
meaning, and this was carried out into full detail by Metrodorus, a
follower of Anaxagoras. Thus if Homer, the mirror in which the Greek saw
his religion reflected, described Jupiter as suspending Juno between
heaven and earth, Heracleitus was indignant with the atheists who did not
see that it meant how the world and the elements were formed.(448) By this
process indecent personal agencies melted away into physical effects, or
were even sublimated into moral lessons. Men were told that only soft
Phæacians could see in the loves of Mars and Venus a consecration of
adultery: to the man of sense it meant that valour and beauty were worthy
of each other. Through all the following centuries this tone of mind
continued. As to the stoical philosophers in particular, this physical
allegorising was the perpetual instrument by which they reconciled their
stern system of material Pantheism with all the stage scenery of the
poet’s Olympus. Epicurus, on the contrary, recognised the existence of
gods in countless numbers, but they were beings who lived in the enjoyment
of his philosophy, far removed from the cares of providence and the
thought of human things. On the other hand, Plato’s attempt to purify,
while he recognised, polytheism, and to sweep away all its fables as
purveyors of evil thoughts and desires, found little success, though his
conception of the godhead as the Idea of goodness, remained the highest
ever reached in that long process of thought; and through all this period
the best and purest minds found in him a support against that bewilderment
of the reason which the vulgar religion inflicted on them. But few and far
between were those who followed Plato in this his highest conception,
while the literature of that last century, in the midst of which Christ
appeared, remains an abiding proof that the critical, scoffing, negative
spirit of philosophy had spread itself over all the cultured classes. We
seek in vain in Julius Cæsar and Cicero, in Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil,
Manilius, Horace, Ovid, in Polybius, Dionysius, Diodorus, or Strabo, for
any real belief in the immortal gods whose names appear in their writings.
The poets use them for stage-effect, the statesmen as part of the
machinery of government, the historians as names interwoven with the
events which they recount: yet the life of all these men was filled with
the frequentation of rites and ceremonies, as a matter of law and custom,
having reference to a multitude of gods, concerning whom they had a
contemptuous disbelief, though none of them were without many a dark
superstition.

Such was the negative influence of philosophy; but what inward support had
it given to minds whose ancestral belief, still entertained by the mass of
men all around, was thus eaten out? What substitute had it provided for
this discredited polytheism with its ridiculed mythology?

1. First, did the Greek philosophy teach the unity of the Godhead? If by
this question be meant, did philosophy ever go forth into the midst of the
temples and smoking sacrifices with which every city teemed, and proclaim,
These gods which you worship are no gods: there is one Maker and Ruler of
the universe, and the homage due to him alone is usurped by a multitude of
pretended deities;—then there is no doubt about the answer, that this is
what neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno, nor any other
philosopher thought of doing. The philosophic god was never set in the
forefront of the battle after this fashion. He dwelt in the most secret
shrine of Plato’s mind, hard to be discovered, and to be confessed, if at
all, in secret. If with Aristotle he was a pure spirit, yet he abode apart
from the world, working on it indeed, as the magnet on the iron, but
unconscious of it, not ruling it with free will.(449) And, save so far as
this is an exception, the Greek mind from beginning to end never succeeded
in absolutely separating God from matter. And as time went on, this
original defect showed itself more and more, until in the stoic system,
which, as to the conception of the power ruling the world, prevailed over
all the rest, that which was called God was simply a force pervading all
matter.(450) The Stoics could, indeed, as in the hymn of Cleanthes, invest
this god of theirs with many beautiful, grand, and attractive attributes.
His was almighty power;(451) he was the author of nature; he ruled all
things with law; and the world willingly obeyed his will. And this common
law passed through all things, so that evil mixed with good resulted in a
general order. Thus they could address him as Father and as King, guiding
all things with justice; and this being they termed Jupiter. But this is
only a poetic(452) exhibition of their genuine thought and meaning, which
was, that “all which was real was corporeal; matter and force are the two
chief principles; matter in itself is motionless and formless, but capable
of assuming every motion and every form. Force is the active, moving, and
forming principle; it is indivisibly joined with matter: the operating
force in the whole of the world is the Godhead.”(453) “By the names
World-soul, World-reason, Nature, Universal Law, Providence, Fate, the
same thing is indicated, the one Primal Force determining everything with
absolute regularity, interpenetrating the whole world.” And even the
opposition between the material and the spiritual description of the
Godhead disappears upon closer examination, for on Stoic principles the
Godhead can only then be considered as real when considered as body.(454)
It was to such a unity that Greek philosophy advanced, receding more and
more from that imperfect conception of personality with which it had
started. Further, the idea of creation is wanting to Greek philosophy from
its beginning to its end. The power which it contemplates is evermore
confronted with matter, which it can permeate, fashion, move through a
natural alchemy of endless changes, but in face of which it is not free to
create or not to create, not even free to prevent the evil which lies
therein as a sort of blind necessity. As there was always Force, so was
there always Matter. To the conception of a free Creator of spirit and of
matter the Greek mind never rose: nor accordingly to that of a free Ruler
of the universe: and this is only to say in other words, that the
conception of personality—that is, of self-consciousness and moral
freedom, as applied to a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness—was
imperfect and confused. Plato in his highest flight had seemed to
recognise one God, whom to enjoy is the happiness of man; but Plato and
all who followed him had endured, had countenanced, had taken part in the
polytheistic worship. And again, neither he, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno
showed any inclination to suffer for their doctrines. This philosophic
god, gradually evolved by the reasoning mind, produced the very smallest
effect upon the unphilosophic world. The stoic argument from final causes,
which Cicero has preserved for us, and the force of which he has
acknowledged in very remarkable words,(455) generated no martyrs. Was it
merely from want of earnestness that the philosophers tolerated and
practised the polytheism which surrounded them, and avoided all suffering
for their opinions by compliance with a worship which they disbelieved? or
was it that their standing-ground, in all more or less pantheistic, was
identical with that which they impugned?(456) that the gods of Olympus
were powers of nature personified, while their god was simply one power
inhabiting nature? that they never reached the one personal creating God,
and were consequently unable to maintain his absolute distinction from the
world together with his relation to it as Creator and Ruler? That which
they cherished as a private philosophical good, which they cared so little
to exhibit to the world, was in fact incapable of conquering the world,
for the human heart cannot live upon an impersonal god, and will not
suffer for a conception of the reason. But it was in this conception that
philosophic thought had terminated. And here we find the chief cause of
its powerlessness to improve and purify the mythology which it attacked,
and much more to affect the lives and conduct of those who professed its
tenets. For the old mythology had at least a strong consciousness of
personality in its gods. In Homer himself the original tradition, of which
his religion was a corruption, still spoke of the father of gods and men
as the ruler and judge of the world. In the heathen mind generally such a
conception still existed; nor is it too much to say that the common people
among the Greeks and Romans were nearer to the truth of one personal God
than the philosopher; and the philosopher himself when he listened at any
moment of danger and anxiety to the promptings “of the soul naturally
Christian” within him, than when he indulged in his esoteric problems.

2. But the conception of personality in God rules the conception of
personality in man. As throughout the Greek philosophy the former was weak
and imperfect, until in the Stoic system it vanished, so the latter. The
physical theory of the Greek overmastered and excluded the conception of
freewill in his mind, first as to God and then as to man. As evil existed
throughout the world, for which he had no better solution than to place
its seat in that matter which was coexistent with the divine reason, and
which that reason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in the smaller world
of man. In him a portion of the divine reason was united with matter. If
Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differently the mode of
this composition, yet to all of them alike from the one side and the other
the notion of physical necessity came in. The material constituent tended
to evil, the reasoning constituent to good: in the man who was made up of
the two there was a perpetual jar. There was no room left in their theory
for the conception of the soul as a self-originating cause of action. No
sect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintain a doctrine of
freewill as the Stoic: but it went down before that central tenet of their
system, physical necessity, the inexorable sequence of cause and effect,
which made up their “common law,” by which the world was ruled. The
conception of an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful personal Creator, in
whose nature the eternal law is based, not being clear to their minds, so
neither was the conception of sin, as the infringement of that law. The
law of physical necessity took the place of the eternal moral law: that
which man did he did by virtue of the physical constituents out of which
he was composed. The evil which he did was physical rather than moral: and
he was not responsible for what he could not prevent. The questions of
freewill, of evil viewed as sin, and of responsibility, are inextricably
bound up with the doctrine of the human personality; and on all these the
philosophic mind was dark and confused.

But if the Greek’s physical theory stood in the way of his conceiving
clearly the human personality in this life, much more did it impede his
conception of that personality as continuing after death. For as the union
of a portion of the divine reason with matter constituted man, and as
death put an end to that union, the compound being ceased to exist, the
portion of the divine reason reverted to its source, but the sensitive
soul, as well as the body, was dissolved and came to nothing. There was in
his mind no “individual substance of a rational nature” to form the basis
of identity, and maintain the conception of personality. In the absence of
this, he who had felt, thought, and acted, was no more. He could not
therefore receive retribution for his deeds, since there was no personal
agent on whom the retribution was to fall.

3. A god who was not personal and did not make man,—man in whom freewill,
the mark of personality, was not recognised, so long as he lived, and in
whom after death no personal agent continued to exist,—these correspond to
each other, and these were the last result of Græco-Roman philosophic
thought up to the time of Claudius. But what sort of duty did man, being
such, owe to such a god? Cicero’s book on Offices had been written upwards
of eighty years, but nothing that followed it during that time equalled it
in reputation or ability. It was the best product that his Roman thought
could draw from all the preceding Grecian schools: and it was accepted for
centuries as the standard of heathen morality. Let us, then, first note
that in this book(457) there is nothing like a recognition of God as the
Creator and Common Father; no call upon the human soul to love him as
such, and for his own perfections; no thought that the duty of man
consists in becoming like to him, nor his reward in attaining that
likeness. The absence of such a thought gives its character to the whole
book, and measures its level. The second point to be noted is, that the
happiness of man consists not in being like God, and consequently, in
union with him, but in virtue, which is living according to nature. In his
reasonable nature everyone possesses a sufficient standard of moral action
under every circumstance which may arise. Thirdly, throughout the whole of
his treatise Cicero makes no use of the doctrine of man’s immortality. His
happiness, then, is left to consist in virtue—life according to reason,
which again is life according to nature—without respect to any future
state of existence. Now, if Cicero stood alone in these three points, his
book would only represent his own authority, but he is in fact the
mouthpiece herein of that whole preceding heathen philosophy which he
criticised, and from which he selected. Even Plato himself, by far the
highest and best of Greek philosophers in this respect, though he had in
single expressions indicated that the happiness of man was to be made like
to God, constructed no system of ethics in dependence on that conception,
which, if it be true, is of all-constraining influence, and is to the
whole moral system what the law of gravity is to the material universe.
Plato’s ethical system was a strict deduction from his physical theory of
the three parts in man, to each of which he assigned its virtue. Far less
did Aristotle connect morality with God. The Stoics, indeed, who occupy by
far the largest space in Greek philosophy, seem to be an exception. It is
said that “their whole view of the world springs from the thought of the
Divine Being who generates all finite beings from himself, and includes
them all in himself, who penetrates them with his power, rules them with
his unchangeable law, and thus merely manifests himself in them all;” so
that their system “is fundamentally religious, and scarcely an important
statement in it which is not in connection with their doctrine of God;”
and so with them “all moral duties rest on a religious ground, all
virtuous actions are a fulfilment of the divine will and law;”(458) but
then this God is but a name for the sternest and most absolute system of
material necessity: a God without a moral nature; without freedom; without
personality; under that name, in fact, force and matter making up one
thing are substituted for a living God, who, in virtue of the laws of
nature, is swept out of his own universe. So, again, Cicero’s statement
that man’s happiness consists in virtue, which virtue is life according to
nature, is the general doctrine of philosophy, which the Stoics in
particular had elaborated. If there be any one expression which would
sum-up in a point the whole heathen conception of what man should do, it
would be “Life according to nature.” So, again, the exclusion of any
thought of immortality, and a consequent retribution, in its bearing on
morality, was common to all the schools of Grecian thought, if we except
the faltering accents and yearning heart of Plato, and most of all was
truly stoic. The imperfection and unclearness of their view as to the
divine personality, and as to the human, in the reasonable being, the
image and reflection of the divine, accords but too truly, while it
accounts for, this detachment of man from God in the field of moral duty.

4. What, then, remained to man after such deductions? There remained the
earthly city, the human commonwealth. And when, passing beyond the bounds
of any particular nation, and man’s civil position therein, philosophy
grasped the moral life as the relation between man as man,(459) and
conceived human society itself as one universal kingdom of gods and men,
it made a real progress and reached its highest point. But this was the
proper merit of the Stoics.(460) Plutarch attributes to Zeno, their
founder, this precise idea, that we ought not to live in cities and towns,
each divided by peculiar notions of justice, but esteem all men as
tribesmen and citizens, who should make up one flock feeding in a common
pasture under a common law. The grandest passages of Cicero are those in
which he clothes in his Roman diction this stoic idea, as for
instance:(461) “They judge the world to be ruled by the power and will of
the gods, and to be a sort of city and polity common to gods and men, and
that everyone of us is part of this world.” The bond of this community is
the common possession of reason,(462) “in which consists the primal
society of man with God. But they who have reason in common, have also
right reason in common. And as this is law, we are as men to be considered
as associated with the gods by law also. Now they who have community of
law, have likewise community of rights. This latter makes them also to
belong to the same polity. But if such pay obedience to the same commands
and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal
allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal
world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the
supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to
be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I
derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of
this subject-matter.” Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing
philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of
universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the
result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the
similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for
restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves
more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they
have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all
equally partake of reason. All are members of one body, since the same
nature has formed them out of one stuff, for the same destination.(463)

Greek philosophy has undoubtedly the merit of bringing out into clear
conception this purely human and natural society. It thus expressed in
language the work of Alexander, and still more the work of the Roman
empire, as it was to be; and more than this, it herein supplied a point of
future contact with Christian morality. The advance from the narrowness of
the Greek mind in its proud rejection of all non-hellenic nations, and no
less from the revolting selfishness of Roman conquest, is remarkable. And
it is an advance of philosophic thought. As the older thinkers considered
the political life of the city to be an immediate demand of human nature,
so the Stoics considered the unitedness of man as a whole together, the
dilatation of the particular political community to the whole race, in the
same light. Its ground was the common possession of reason. The common law
which ruled this human commonwealth was to live according to the dictation
of reason, that is, according to nature, in which therefore virtue
consists,(464) being one and the same in God and in man, and in them
alone.(465) Such virtue branches into four parts, the prudence which
discerns and practises the truth; the justice which assigns his own to
each; the courage which prevails over all difficulties; the self-restraint
and order which preserves temperance in all things. These being bound up
together cover the whole moral domain, and embrace all those relations
within which human society moves, and, as having their root in the moral
nature of man, are a duty to everyone.

This human commonwealth enfolds in idea the whole earth. It is the society
of man with man. But it closes with this life. It has no respect to
anything beyond. It was the Stoics who most completely worked out this
system of moral philosophy; who urged the duty of man’s obedience to
nature, of his voluntary subjection to that one universal law and power
which held all things from the highest to the lowest in its grasp; and who
likewise most absolutely cut him off from any personal existence in a
future state. The virtue in which they placed his happiness was to be
complete in itself; it was the work of man without any assistance on the
part of God.(466) It made man equal to God. It found its reward in itself.
If it was objected that the highest virtue in this life sometimes met with
the greatest disasters, sorrows, pains, and bereavements, the system had
no reply to this mystery. It did not attempt to assert a recompense beyond
the grave.

As little did it attempt to account for or to correct the conflict between
man’s reason and his animal nature. That perpetual approval of the better
and choice of the worse part stood before the Stoic as before us all. He
admitted that the vast majority of men were bad, and his wise man was an
ideal never reached. But he had no answer whatever to the question, why,
if vice is so evil in the eye of our reason, it so clings to our nature;
why, if so contrary to the good of the mass, it dwells within every
individual.(467)

The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral
philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the
image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had
constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the
whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the
whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of
the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if
vicious, he must follow it against his will. There was no real freedom for
the individual in the system as philosophy. What was disguised under the
name of law, reason, and God, was a relentless necessity before which
everyone was to bow. But transfer this philosophy to any political
community, and consider in what position it placed the individual with
regard to the civil government. Human society is considered as supreme:
but his own state represents to him that society, and as all things end
with this life, no part of man remains withdrawn from that despotism which
requires the sacrifice of the part for the good of the whole. Man’s
conscience had no refuge in the thought of a future life; no reserve which
the abuse of human power could not touch. And so we find that in matter of
fact there was no issue out of such a difficulty but in the doctrine of
self-destruction. They termed it in truth _The Issue_,(468) when disease,
or disaster, or pain, or the abuse of human power, rendered it impossible
any longer to lead a life in accordance with nature. In this case all the
Stoic authorities justified it, praised it, and termed it the Door which
divine Providence had benignantly left ever open.

While therefore it must be acknowledged that the stoical conception of the
whole earth as one city(469) was a true result of Greek thought, and at
the same time the highest point it reached, and a positive result of great
value, yet it must also be said that it was one rather big with rich
promises for the future than of any great present advantage: for it
required to be impregnated and filled with another conception of which its
framers had lost their hold, the doctrine, that is, of a future
retribution, redressing the inequality, the injustice, the undeserved
suffering so often falling upon virtue in the present life. When that
conception came to complete and exalt the Stoic idea, the need of
self-destruction as an issue of the wise man, as soon as he could not live
according to nature, ceased, for man himself ceased to be a part of a
physical whole governed by necessity. The human city relaxed its right
over the individual in presence of a divine city, which embraced indeed
man in his present life, but taught him to look for its complete
realisation in another.

The human commonwealth, however, extended in idea to the race itself, as
possessing reason in common, and individual man therein, as well as the
whole aggregate, viewed as being ruled by the cardinal virtues of
prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, but both the commonwealth
and the individual terminating with this life, was the last word of
heathen philosophy up to the time of Claudius.

We have seen that from the time the Greek race was absorbed in the Roman
empire the systems of philosophy were broken up by the eclectic spirit,
which, engendered within already by the ferment of opinions, was
strengthened and developed by the accession of the practical Roman mind.
Variety of belief is indeed marked as “the essential feature of Greek
philosophy” from its outset, and “the antagonist force of suspensive
scepticism” as including some of its most powerful intellects from
Xenophanes five hundred years before to Sextus Empiricus two hundred years
after the Christian era. One of its historians stamps it as “a collection
of dissenters, small sects each with its own following, each springing
from a special individual as authority, each knowing itself to be only one
among many.”(470) It is therefore no wonder that if Plato’s grand
conception of an immortal line of the living word thus came to nought,
philosophy proved itself much more incapable of founding a society
impregnated with its principles than it had even been of constructing a
coherent doctrine which should obtain general reception. And to judge of
the actual impotence of philosophy in the century ending with the
principate of Claudius, we must rest a moment on this second fact.
Philosophers calling themselves Platonic, Peripatetic, Sceptic, Stoic,
Epicurean, or these in various mixtures, were to be found at the various
seats of learning, Athens, Rhodes, Alexandria, for instance, or at Rome as
the seat of empire, or travelling like wandering stars over her vast
territory, but these scattered, nebular, and disjointed luminaries shone
with a varying as well as a feeble light, which rather confused than
satisfied human reason. They were utterly powerless to transfer their
doctrine into any number of human hearts living in accordance therein. The
only exception to this statement seems to prove its real truth. By far the
most united of the sects was that of the Epicureans, who held with great
tenacity to their founder’s views and mode of life, which may be summed up
in denial of God and Providence, and enjoyment to the utmost of this
world’s goods; the fair side of it being a general benevolence, courtesy,
friendship, in short, a genial appreciation of what we understand by the
word civilisation. These antagonists of Stoic principles and of the
highest morality which heathen thought had constructed were the most
numerous of existing sects, and we are told that hundreds of years after
their founder’s death they presented the appearance of a well-ordered
republic, ruled without uproar or dissension by one spirit, in which they
formed a favourable contrast to the Stoics. With the exception of a single
fugitive, Metrodorus, never had an Epicurean detached himself from his
school.(471) We must give philosophy the credit of this single instance of
a capacity to create a social life in accordance with its tenets in a sect
whose doctrines were a reproach among the heathens themselves. The failure
of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno, was the success of
Epicurus, and at the same time the announcement that the age of Augustus
and Tiberius was ready to expire in sensuality and unbelief, and even in
exhaustion of the philosophic mind, for no period is so barren of
scientific names, which carry any weight, as the fifty years preceding
Claudius.(472) We have seen above that all these philosophers aimed at
forming a society which should carry out their principles; that this was
their original and their only idea of teaching; that with a view to make
it permanent they created a chair of teaching, a living authority who was
to continue on their doctrine. But the chair of Plato alone presented(473)
five Academies with dissentient doctrines; and a Platonic or Stoic city no
one had seen. Thus viewing their united action upon the polytheistic
idolatry we may say that while they could discredit its fables in
reflecting minds, while they could even raise an altar in their thoughts
“to the unknown God,” they left society in possession of the temples and
observant of a worship which they pronounced to be immoral, monstrous, and
ridiculous. They had destroyed in many the ancestral belief; they had
awakened perhaps in some a sense of one great Power ruling the universe;
but having taken up the religious ground and professed to satisfy man’s
desire for happiness, they had been utterly powerless to construct a
religion. They failed entirely in the union of three things,(474) a dogma
and a morality founded on that dogma, both of which should be exhibited,
brought before the eyes and worked into the hearts of men by a
corresponding worship. To unite these three things was needed an authority
of which above all they were destitute. Their dogma was without the
principle of faith; their morality without binding power; but the worship
which should blend the two they had not at all. And so they presented no
semblance of the society which should carry these three things in its
bosom, and they could not in the least satisfy the doubts or the yearnings
which they had raised.

But the period beginning with the rise of Greek philosophy and ending with
the principate of Claudius will ever remain of the highest interest and
importance as showing what human reason, putting forth its highest powers
in the race in which it culminated, but at the same time more thoroughly
separated from belief, tradition, and authority than anywhere else, did
actually achieve. It is in this respect that the heathen philosophers,
together with the poets and historians who precede the publication of the
Christian religion in the Roman world, possess a value far beyond any
intrinsic merit of their own. It is a study of pathology the results of
which are far as yet from being gathered in. It is only by carefully
examining what the philosophers taught in theology and morals—for they
aspired to be and were both the theologians and the moralists of those
ages—that we can at all form an adequate judgment of the real work which
the Christian Church has wrought in the world. It is only by using the
historians and poets as a mirror of that general society to whose cultured
classes the philosophers spoke, that we can estimate what the great mass
of mankind then was, and what effect the philosophers produced on them.
The difference between their world and their society and ours is the
measure of Christian work. The hundred years preceding Claudius, which
include in them almost all the greatest names of Roman literature, are the
most important of all in this point of view, both as containing the result
of scientific thought in the five preceding centuries, and as giving the
depth of the moral and intellectual descent. We learn from this whole long
period the fulness of the truth conveyed in those words of the angelic
doctor at the commencement of his great work: “Even for those things which
can be investigated concerning God by the force of human reason, it was
necessary for man to be instructed by a divine revelation, because few
only, and they after long inquiries, and with the admixture of many
errors, would convey to man the truth concerning God as searched out by
reason.”(475)

What the philosophers from the time of Thales had taken as their special
work was to measure and estimate the visible world. And for the last four
centuries of this period especially they made the nature and the needs,
the supreme good and the happiness of man their chief concern, in
subordination to which they continued their physical inquiries. And surely
the judgment which an inspired writer formed of their travail must recur
to the mind with great force at the end of the preceding review: “If they
knew so much as to be able to estimate the visible world, why did they not
more easily discover its Lord?”(476) Why from the goods which they beheld
had they not power to know the sole possessor of being, nor when they gave
attention to his works, recognised their artificer? Why did they esteem
fire or breath, rapid air or circling stars, or the force of water, or the
lights of heaven rulers of the universe? For if the visible beauty of
these delighted them so that they conceived them to be gods, how did they
not draw the conclusion that the Lord of these was so much better than
they? for it was the Author of beauty who created them. If they were
struck dumb with the sense of their power and operation, why did they not
conceive how much more powerful He who made them was? For from the
greatness and the beauty of creatures the parent of them is by the force
of reason discerned.(477)

From their capital error in this—which the same writer declares to be
inexcusable(478)—proceeded their other errors concerning man, his nature,
his supreme good, and his final end. It is here sufficient to note that
down to the age of Claudius there is no appearance that either of these
great errors would be corrected: and still less any appearance of the rise
of a great religion which would cause the multitudinous altars of
heathenism to disappear before the altar of the unknown God, and would
construct a City of God in the midst of that population in the thinking
minds of which divergent systems of philosophy had eaten out belief in the
babel of false gods without implanting belief in a personal Creator, the
author and the end of man.





INDEX.


_Academies_, the five, of Plato’s school, 480.

_Adam_, his headship, 60, 62, 65;
  its result seen in his fall, 67.

_Alexander_ the Great, effects of his conquests on Greek life, 436, 455.

_Alexander Severus_, his treatment of Christians, 244.

_Antoninus Pius_, extension of the Church in his reign, 197;
  treatment of it under him, 227-233;
  what aspect the Church bore to him, 233-7.

_Apollonius_, a senator, martyred under Commodus, 302, 209, note 37.

_Apostolic age_, result of, 186-7.

_Aristotle_, his character as a philosopher, 429;
  his view of the soul, 430;
  relation of his philosophy to religion, 433;
  conception of the method of teaching, 420;
  what he says of Socrates, 390;
  his account of the generation of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, 400.

_Athanasius, S._, 26, 32, 34, 37, 98.

_Athenagoras_, 182.

_Athens_, worship at, 5.

_Augustine, S._, his contrast of Heathenism with Christianity, 172-5;
  on the moral influence of Polytheism, 21-4, 27, 30, 33;
  how the Second Divine Person is the Truth, 51;
  Adam and Christ, 76, 77, 84, 110;
  the Church Christ’s Body, 99;
  and at once his Temple, House, and City, 88;
  also the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men, 97;
  dowered with Christ’s Blood, 144;
  Christ and the Church one Man, 57, 144;
  believing Christ, without believing the Church, is decapitating Christ,
              105;
  crime of denying that the Catholic Church will for ever continue in its
              unity, 106;
  the Word made flesh that He might become the Head of the Church, 107;
  the Holy Spirit Vicarius Redemptoris, 115, 119, 124, 125, 139;
  asserts the perpetual Principatus of the Roman See from the beginning,
              290;
  describes the uses of heresy, 281-2;
  admits of no charity but in the unity of the Body, 130, 139;
  coherence of the natural and mystical Body of Christ in the Eucharist,
              103;
  what the Church will be hereafter, 112.

_Augustus_, his idea of the Roman empire, 2;
  prospects of Polytheism at the end of his reign, 46.

_Aulus Gellius_, 421.

_Beugnot_, Destruction du Paganisme, 43, 44.

_Captivity_ of man to the devil, 27-30, 33-8, 69;
  its full reversal as seen in the Body of Christ, 112.

_Carneades_, 447.

_Catholic_, term used of the Church by S. Ignatius about A.D. 115, and by
            the Church of Polycarp fifty years later, 206.

_Celsus_, 179, 197, 230, 231, 234.

_Champagny_, 16, 182, 241, 243, 305, 475, 480.

_Christ_, declares Himself to be a king, 49;
  His kingdom that of Truth, 50-4;
  the counterpart of Adam as an individual, 76;
  as Head of a race, 77;
  as making one Body with His people, 79;
  parallel in His natural and mystical Body, 96;
  analogies between them, 97;
  coherence of both in the Eucharist, 103;
  His action permanent in His kingdom, 81;
  in His House, 86;
  in His Body, 88;
  in His Bride, 91;
  in the Mother of His race, 92;
  His five distinct loves, 93;
  His Body imperishable, 104;
  crime of imputing falsehood to it, 105;
  force of its corporate unity, 110;
  gifts which He bestows on it, 125;
  connection of Truth with His Person the principle of persecution, 182;
  His Passion repeated in His people, 185;
  His work summed up by S. Augustine, 172-5.

_Chrysostom, S._, 87, 101, 109, 220, 224.

_Church_, the, the Kingdom of Truth, 81;
  the House of Christ, 86;
  the Body of Christ, 88;
  the Bride of Christ, 91;
  the Mother of His race, 92;
  the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men, 97;
  as such, the treasure-house of Truth and Grace, 100, 120-2;
  conveys the fruits of the Incarnation, 101, 143;
  is imperishable and incorruptible, 105;
  possesses Unity, Truth, Charity, and Sanctity as coinherent gifts of the
              Spirit, 125-8;
  bestows forgiveness of sins, faith, adoption, and sanctification on the
              individual, 128-31;
  unity of its jurisdiction, 146;
  analogy between it and the relation of soul and body, 133;
  between it and the human commonwealth, 134;
  between it and the natural unity of man’s race, 135;
  transmission of truth in it, 148, 166;
  by a triple succession, 156-161;
  development of the Truth its proper work, 168;
  its divine life as opposed to heathenism, 171;
  its witness of Christ’s confession in the first ten generations, 184;
  its first persecution by Nero, 191;
  growth in the time of Antoninus Pius, 195;
  picture of it by S. Ignatius, 199;
  its treatment of heresies, 204, 206, 258, 265, 274, 276;
  bearing of Trajan to it, 209, 215;
  of Hadrian, 221;
  of Antoninus Pius, 226;
  of Marcus Aurelius, 292;
  of Commodus, 302;
  of Septimius Severus, 302;
  its position in the third century, 308;
  its organic unity as set forth by S. Cyprian, 325-334;
  power of its idea on Christians, 340;
  expresses Christ in its moral character, its worship, and its
              government, 341-5;
  persecuted by Decius, 356;
  by Valerian and Aurelian, 361;
  by Diocletian, 362;
  obtains freedom from Constantine, 371;
  how affected by Roman law between A.D. 64 and 313, 371-3.

_Church_, a mother or cathedral church only so called, 253.

_Churches_, public, when first known to exist at Rome, 308.

_Cicero_, states the work of Socrates, 391;
  representative of Eclecticism, 450;
  sources of his philosophical works, 451;
  what he says of the atomic theory, 464;
  his book _de Officiis_ the standard of heathen morality for centuries
              after him, 468;
  his statement of the Stoic idea of the world as one republic of gods and
              men, 471;
  his conception of virtue in general, 471, 473;
  his partition of the cardinal virtues, 473;
  virtue not a gift of God, but the work of man, 474.

_Cleanthes_, his hymn quoted, 461.

_Clement_, Pope S., 191, 194.

_Clement_, of Alexandria, 278, 287, 303.

_Commodus_, 243, 302.

_Cyprian, S._, his statement of the Church’s organic unity founded on the
            Primacy given to Peter, 326-331;
  puts the force of the Episcopate in its unity, 147, 332-4;
  repudiates a parallel between the twelve tribes of Israel and the
              Church, on the question of unity, 334;
  agreement of his witness with that of S. Paul, S. Ignatius, and S.
              Irenæus, 349;
  his conversion, described by himself, a type of heathen conversion in
              general, 336-8;
  describes the relaxation produced by the long peace of the Church before
              the Decian persecution, 350-2;
  his martyrdom, 358;
  says the Emperor Decius would much rather endure the appointment of a
              rival emperor than of a Bishop of Rome, 356.

_Cyril, S._, of Alexandria, 54, 55;
  on the Fall and the Restoration, 136;
  to become a Christian is to enter into unity with Christ both physical
              and spiritual, 137.

_Dante_, 422.

_Decius_, 356.

_De Rossi_, 252.

_Diocletian_, 362.

_Diognetus_, author of letter to, marks the Christians as one body and
            people, but diffused everywhere, circ. A.D. 100, 318.

_Dionysius, S._, archbishop of Alexandria, prizes martyrdom for the unity
            of the Church more highly than for resistance to idolatry,
            345.

_Döllinger_, Heidenthum und Judenthum, quoted or referred to, 5-13, 25,
            196, 386, 401, 402, 407, 409, 410, 429-31, 438, 441, 442,
            445-47, 456, 458, 461, 479, 480;
  Hippolytus und Kallistus, 248, 256, 257.

_Domitian_, his persecution, 94.

_Eclecticism_, how it arose in Greek Philosophy, 448;
  becomes universal, 450.

_Epicurus_, his conception of the method of teaching, 424;
  his doctrine, 442.

_Episcopate_, the, triply defended by scripture, by institutions, and by
            continuous personal descent, 163;
  one and undivided, 327;
  like the unity of the Godhead, 333;
  which is effected by the Primacy, 334.

_Eucharist_, coherence of natural and mystical Body of Christ in, 102-3;
  called by S. Ignatius that flesh of our Saviour Christ which suffered
              for our sins, 202, note.

_Eusebius_, 150, 209, 251, 253, 302, 304, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367, 369.

_Forgiveness of sins_, doctrine of, guarded by triple succession of
            teaching, of men, and of sacraments, 162.

_Freewill_, no room for it in the physical theory of Greek philosophy,
            _e.g._ in Plato, 410, 411;
  in Aristotle, 432;
  in Stoicism, 440-1;
  in all the schools, as to God, 461-5;
  as to man, 465-7;
  bearing of this on civil government, 475.

_Future life_ of man as a personal being, why not held by Greek
            philosophy, 467, 470;
  absence of it from Cicero’s _de Officiis_, 468.

_Grace_, Adam created in, 62, 64;
  loss of this gift in the Fall, 66;
  grace as restored in Christ, 136;
  grace in the God-man, 77;
  as in Adam and as in the God-man compared, 53;
  as bestowed through the headship of the God-man, 78;
  as seen in the Body of Christ, the counterpart of the body of Adam, 79;
  grace, with truth, makes “the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men,”
              97, 117;
  the human fountain of this double power in the created nature of Christ,
              121;
  whence it is transfused into the Church, His Body, 122, 123-6;
  grace, as given to the Church complete and indefeasible, 127;
  as given to the individual may be withdrawn, 131;
  actual bestowal of this grace on the Church, 138-142;
  grace necessary for the acceptance and maintenance of truth, 155-6, 167,
              170-2, 269;
  grace, truth, and unity, viewed by S. Cyprian as inseparable, 332-3.

_Greek mind_, its standing-point, 380;
  represents human reason more than any other ancient race, 382;
  aided by a matchless language, 379;
  ripens in the most beautiful of climates, 378;
  pervades the whole East from the time of Alexander, 455;
  is married to Roman power in the empire, 456;
  is the great intellectual opponent of the Christian mind and Church,
              375;
  criticises polytheism for six hundred years, 376;
  its outcome up to the time of S. Peter’s founding the Roman Church,
              475-484;
  why its philosophy disbelieved a future life, 467, 470.

_Grote_, Plato, 377, 402, 412, 413, 420, 421, 427, 478.

_Hadrian_, grandeur of Rome in his days, 240;
  treatment of the Church, 221-3;
  puts to death S. Symphorosa and her sons, 224-6.

_Hagemann_, die römische Kirche in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 209,
            257, 273, 289, 352, 354.

_Hasler_, Verhältniss der heidnischen und christlichen Ethik, 468.

_Heathenism_, what it is, 59, 70, 72;
  contrasted with Christianity, 79, 170-2;
  by S. Augustine, 172-5;
  its disregard of the value of moral truths, 177-9.

_Heresy_, subserves the enucleation of doctrine, 281;
  the determining the Canon of the New Testament, 284;
  brings out full statements of the principle of tradition, 286;
  promotes extension and corroboration of the hierarchy, 288;
  temper of, described by Irenæus, 270;
  by Tertullian, 276;
  by Clement of Alexandria, 278, 279;
  by S. Augustine, 282.

_Herodotus_, the travelled Greek gentleman, 377.

_Idolatry_, Asiatic, its turpitude, 25;
  division of gods, how far it could go, 27.

_Ignatius, S._, Bishop of Antioch, his picture of the Church in his day,
            199-203;
  his martyrdom, 215;
  his recognition of the Roman Primacy, 218;
  power of his intercession attested by S. Chrysostom, 219;
  the Eucharist, that flesh of our Saviour Christ which suffered for our
              sins, 202;
  “Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church”, 206;
  completeness of a diocesan church called τὸ ἴδιον σωματεῖον, of the
              whole church τὸ ἒν σῶμα τῆς ἐκκλησίας, 220.

_Innocent I._ Pope S., 255, 347.

_Irenæus, S._, 113, 264;
  guilt of those who divide the great and glorious Body of Christ, 138;
  on the Church’s unity of belief, 264-6;
  gives the descent of the Roman See to his time, 267;
  affirms its superior principality, 267;
  sets forth the Church as the treasure-house of truth and grace, 268-9;
  distinguishes the perpetual teaching office in her, 269, 287;
  contrasts her truth with the variation of heresies, 270;
  summary of his doctrine on the Church, heresy, the Primacy, tradition,
              271-4;
  one of a chain between S. Paul, S. Ignatius, and S. Cyprian, 349;
  speaks of the number of martyrs, 339;
  himself martyred with many of his people, 303;
  speaks of “the tradition of the Apostles” as the whole body of truth
              which they communicated, 198;
  speaks of the “founding and building” of Sees, 255.

_Junius Rusticus_, 293.

_Jurisdiction_, spiritual, its unity, 146;
  emanates from Christ’s Person, 342;
  is the expression of His sovereignty, 345.

_Justin, S._, his martyrdom, 294-8;
  his _Apologia_ quoted, 227-30;
  marks Christians as one people and body, 319;
  censures Jewish conduct in defaming Christians, 189;
  describes the extension of Christianity in his time, 197.

_Kellner_, Hellenismus und Christenthum, 182, 197, 306.

_Kleutgen_, die Theologie der Vorzeit, 62, 63, 287.

_Kuhn_, Einleitung in die katholische Dogmatik, 291.

_Lactantius_, 363, 364, 365, 366.

_Lasaulæ_, Fall des Hellenismus, 192.

_Laurence, S._, his martyrdom, compared with a contemporaneous incident,
            358.

_Liguori, S. Alphonso_, 141.

_Man_, various states of: state of pure nature, 60;
  state of integrity, 61;
  state of original justice, 62;
  state of, after the fall, 67;
  how summed up in Adam, 64, 71;
  effect of his being a race, 59;
  force of his social nature, when fallen, 72;
  when restored, 108-110;
  his corruption viewed as a fact of modern science, 58.

_Marcus Aurelius_, treatment of the Church, 292, 299-301.

_Martyrdom_, said by S. Irenæus to be frequent in the Church, but not
            deemed necessary by the sects, 339;
  losses to the Christian body by it contrasted with those of civil war,
              by Origen, 324;
  a continuation of Christ’s confession before Pilate, 184;
  its spirit the tissue of early Christian life, 238;
  identified with “perfect charity” by S. Ignatius, 217;
  termed “the chalice of Christ” by S. Polycarp, 300.

_Maximus of Tyre_, a teacher of Marcus Aurelius, his notions of God, 293.

_Merivale_, History of the Romans, 19, 203, 210.

_Möhler_, 59, 132, 135, 159.

_Nero_, importance of his act in raising the first persecution, 191.

_Newman, Dr._, the natural beauty of Greece, 381;
  the martyrs soldiers of Christ, 185.

_Oral teaching_, viewed as the only adequate instrument for conveying
            doctrine by Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and all subsequent
            Greek philosophers, 411-425;
  the means by which the Word of God declared that His kingdom should be
              propagated for ever, 166;
  which, as a fact, is fulfilled in the apostolic age, 148;
  and in all subsequent times, 157.

_Origen_, his heroic conduct in youth, 303;
  agrees with Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, in the
              principle of tradition, 280;
  states the unity of the Church, 286;
  treats the Church as a polity, and compares it with other polities, 320;
  the Christian people one people, formed on the imitation of Christ, 322;
  dies of ill-treatment under the Decian persecution, 323;
  how Christ leaves His Father and Mother to espouse the Church, 114, note
              43;
  anticipates the universal prevalence of Christianity, 306;
  on the number of martyrs, 324.

_Pantheism_, Stoic, and _Polytheism_, how they fitted into each other,
            Zeller, 464, note.

_Passaglia_, 92, 97.

_Patriarchal Sees_, the three original all Sees of Peter, 343.

_Penance_, doctrine and practice of, in first half of third century, 351.

_Personality_, defective conception of, by Plato, in God, 409;
  in man, 411;
  by Aristotle, in both, 432;
  by Stoicism, in both, 439, 440;
  by all the Greek schools as to God, 460-5;
  as to man, 465-7.

_Petavius_, 90, 56, 123.

_Peter, S._, his personal work in building the Church, 346.

_Peter and Paul, SS._, their martyrdom, 191.

_Phileas_, Bishop of Thmuis, his account of persecution in Egypt, 367-9.

_Philosophy_, what it is, 376, 377;
  the Presocratic, 384;
  its second period opened by Socrates, 386;
  its four great schools at Athens, 436;
  effect of the empire’s establishment on it, 457;
  its negative effect, 458;
  its positive effect, 460;
  as to the divine unity and personality, 461-5;
  as to man’s personality, 465-7;
  as to man’s duties to God, 467;
  as to the duties of man to man, 470;
  its conception of the human commonwealth, 472;
  its failure to construct a society ruled by its principles, 477.

_Philostratus_, 306.

_Plato_, applies Socratic principles to an ethical, logical, and physical
            system, 398;
  his doctrine of Ideas, 399;
  his filiation with Socrates, 400;
  his philosophy, and his idea of God, 401-6;
  with which, however, he retains the inculcation and practice of the
              popular religion, 406;
  his God not absolutely personal, nor free, nor a creator, 408;
  his ethical system, 410;
  his conception of the method of teaching, 411;
  his contrast between oral teaching and writing, as means of imparting
              doctrine, 414-18;
  his account in his own person of how real knowledge, ἐπιστήμη, is to be
              attained, 425;
  calls the art of Socrates mental midwifery, 392;
  the highest point of virtue to become like to God, 433.

_Pliny_, the younger, his report of Christians to Trajan, 210;
  compared in his conduct to them with Trajan and Junius Rusticus, 210,
              note 38.

_Plutarch_, his statement of Zeno’s Politeia, 471.

_Polytheism_, of the Græco-Roman world, its multiplicity, 4;
  universality, 12;
  grasp on daily life, 13;
  moral influence, 19;
  absence of moral teaching in it, 23;
  its internal cause in man, 26;
  its external cause, 27;
  its injuriousness to man, 30;
  illogical character, 31;
  superhuman power, 33;
  relation to civilisation, 38;
  to the empire’s constitution, 42;
  to national feelings, 44;
  to despotism and slavery, 45;
  its prospects about A.U.C. 750, 46;
  is the summing-up of human history before Christ, 58.

_Primacy_, S. Peter’s, defended by specific scriptural proof, unbroken
            succession, and perpetual recognition, 164;
  attested by S. Ignatius, 218;
  by S. Irenæus, 267;
  by Tertullian, 352;
  by S. Cyprian, 326-331;
  necessary to the Church’s unity, 146-8;
  is linked with jurisdiction, and is the expression of Christ’s
              sovereignty, 345;
  brought out by the questions of penance, rebaptising heretics, and
              keeping Easter, 351-5;
  in it lies the unity of the Episcopate, 334.

_Pythagoras_, 377;
  his attempt to construct a philosophic religious community, 412;
  his conception influences Plato, and all subsequent Greek philosophy,
              414.

_Real Presence_, defended by the succession of doctrine, of men, and of
            institutions, 162.

_Rebaptisation_ of heretics, 353.

_Ruinart_, Acta Sincera Martyrum, quoted, 184, 207, 217, 226, 294, 300,
            301.

_Sabbath_, the day changed, and the observance modified, by authority of
            the Church alone, 165.

_Schmidt_, Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit, 194.

_Schwane_, Dogmengeschichte der vornicänischen Zeit, 261, 285, 287, 288.

_Scripture_, not used as the means for the first foundation of
            Christianity, 148-50;
  introduced as subsidiary to oral teaching, 150-2;
  its great value in this light, 152-4;
  relation hence arising of Scripture to the Church, 154;
  instances of this relation, 161-5;
  this relation set forth by our Lord for perpetual guidance of His
              Church, 166-8;
  the same, urged by Tertullian, 274;
  by S. Irenæus, 268, 269;
  by Clement of Alexandria, 278.

_Sects_, their multitude in early times, 204, 261, 270, 315.

_Septimius Severus_, maxims of government, 243, 248-50;
  his persecution, 302.

_Socrates_, his person, 388;
  influence on Greek philosophy, 387;
  the Stoic type of the wise man, 424;
  Zeller’s account of his special principle, 389;
  that of Ueberweg, 390;
  his opinion on the gods and the Godhead, 392-5;
  his last words to his judges, 395;
  last words of his life, 396;
  halts between unity and plurality in the Godhead, 396, 397;
  absence from his mind of the sense of impurity, 397, note.
  Plato makes an ethical, logical, and physical system from his
              principles, 398;
  the filiation between them, 400;
  his art termed mental midwifery by Plato, 392;
  one of his statements compared with that of S. Paul, 393, note.

_Stoicism_, Epicureanism, Scepticism, three branches on one stem, 449.

_Suarez_, 60-2.

_Suicide_, termed the _Issue_ in Stoic philosophy, 476.

_Tacitus_, 190, 247, 248.

_Teaching office_, created by Christ, 166;
  witnessed by S. Ignatius, 202;
    by S. Irenæus, 266, 268, 269, 272;
    by Tertullian, 274, 276;
    by Clement of Alexandria, 278;
    by Origen, 280;
  alone carries both Tradition and Scripture as a living gift of the
              Spirit, 287.

_Tertullian_, 4, 32, 37, 188, 192, 194, 197, 209, 246, 250, 251, 274, 276,
            352.

_Thierry_, Amadée, 313, 481.

_Thomas Aquinas, S._, 28, 57, 81, 125, 483.

_Tillemont_, 209, 245, 249, 263.

_Tradition_, the whole body of Apostolic teaching so called, 149, 150;
  ἡ παράδοσις, by S. Irenæus, 198;
  Tertullian, 274-7;
  Clement of Alexandria, 278;
  Origen, 280.

_Trajan_, his treatment of Christians, 213;
  of S. Ignatius, 215;
  importance of his answer to Pliny, 221.

_Truth_, as meaning the whole body of the divine revelation, 140;
  committed for its propagation to a society, 155, 166;
  secured in it by a triple succession, 156-60;
  its root in the Person of Christ, 51, 121, 181;
  the gift of His Spirit, 121, 125, 127;
  development of, 168;
  in the hall of Pilate, 49;
  its first transmission by oral teaching only, 148.

_Ueberweg_, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie des Alterthums,
            quoted or referred to, 385, 387, 390, 398, 399, 400, 401, 412,
            413, 414, 421, 422, 424, 428, 442, 450, 451, 453, 462, 479,
            480.

_Varro_, divides theology into fabulous, natural, and civil, 19.

_Xenophon_, 390-5.

_Zeller_, Philosophie der Griechen, quoted or referred to, 377, 380, 381,
            383, 385, 386, 388, 389, 400, 401, 403-6; 407, 408, 409, 410,
            411, 412, 425, 429, 433, 434, 436, 437, 438, 443, 444, 445,
            446, 447, 448, 449, 462, 469, 471, 472, 476.

_Zeno_, the Stoic, his conception of the method of teaching, 424;
  his doctrine upon God and the soul, 438-442;
  his conception of men as one flock feeding in a common pasture under a
              common law, 471.

_Zukrigl_, 468.






FOOTNOTES


    1 Tertull. _Apolog._ xxiv, “Ideo et Ægyptiis permissa est tam vanæ
      superstitionis potestas, avibus et bestiis consecrandis, et capite
      damnandis qui aliquem hujusmodi Deum occiderint. Unicuique etiam
      provinciæ et civitati suus Deus est, ut Syriæ Astartes, ut Arabiæ
      Disares, ut Noricis Belenus, ut Africæ Cælestis, ut Mauritaniæ
      Reguli sui,” &c.; and Minucius Felix, Octavius vi., in like manner.

    2 See Aug. _de Civ. Dei_, l. viii. 24.

    3 Döllinger, _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, pp. 528, 529.

    4 From _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, pp. 101-2.

_    5 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 480.

_    6 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 107.

_    7 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 469.

    8 Ibid. pp. 468, 480.

_    9 Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 344.

   10 Ibid. p. 312.

   11 “Epulæ, lectisternia, nudipedalia.”

   12 These incidents are taken from various places in _Heidenthum und
      Judenthum_, pp. 531, 549, 550, &c.

   13 Champagny, _Les Antonins_, liv. v. c. 3.

_   14 De Divinat._ ii. 72.

   15 Valerius Max. i. c. 2, 3.

   16 Merivale’s _History of the Romans_, ii. 447.

   17 See Varro, quoted by S. Aug. _De Civ. Dei_, lib. vi. 5.

_   18 De Civ. Dei_, l. vi. 5, 6, 7.

   19 “Illam theatricam et fabulosam theologiam ab ista civili pendere
      noverunt, et ei de carminibus poetarum tanquam de speculo resultare:
      et ideo ista exposita, quam damnare non audent, illam ejus imaginem
      liberius arguunt.” _De Civ. Dei_, vi. 9; id. vi. 7.

   20 “Quæ sunt ergo illa sacra quibus agendis tales elegit sanctitas
      quales nec thymelica in se admittit obscœnitas.” _De Civ. Dei_, vi.
      7.

   21 “Omnes cultores talium deorum—magis intuentur quid Jupiter fecerit,
      quam quid docuerit Plato vel censuerit Cato.” _De Civ. Dei_, ii. 7.

_   22 De Civ. Dei_, ii. 6. “Demonstrentur vel commemorentur loca—ubi
      populi audirent quid dii præciperent de cohibenda avaritia,
      ambitione frangenda, luxuria refrænanda.” See also sec. 28.

   23 See _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 398. Herodotus, i. 199. Baruch,
      vi. 42-3.

   24 See S. Athan, _con. Gentes_, 5-9. In like manner S. Theophilus, lib.
      i. ad Autolyc. c. 2.

   25 In order to form a notion how far this division of gods could
      descend, and what an incredible depth of turpitude it reached, see
      _De Civ. Dei_, l. vi. c. 9, de officiis singulorum deorum. Its
      foulness prevents any adequate representation of it.

   26 See S. Thomas, _Summa_, 2, 2, q. 94, a. 4.

   27 Of this whole polytheism in the mass S. Paul pronounces the
      judgment: Οἵτινες μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει, καὶ
      ἐσεβάσθησαν καὶ ἐλάτρευσαν τῇ κτίσει παρὰ τὸν κτίσαντα. Rom. i. 25.
      And the Psalmist adds: Ὅτι πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια; ὁ δὲ
      Κύριος τοὺς οὐρανοὺς ἐποίησεν. Sept. xcv. 5. See also Ps. cv. 37.

   28 See John xii. 31; xiv. 30; xvi. 11; Luke xxii. 53; x. 19; Apoc. xii.
      9; Heb. ii. 14; 1 John v. 18; Ephes. vi. 12; ii. 2; 2 Cor. iv. 3.

   29 These two subjects occupy respectively the first five and the second
      five books of S. Augustine’s _City of God_, where the argument is
      carried out in great detail.

   30 Rom. i. 20. See the Stoical argument for the unity of the deity in
      Cic. _de Nat. Deor._ 2.

   31 Tertullian _de Testimonio Animæ_, 2.

   32 Οὔτω τοίνυν ἀλογωθέντων τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καὶ οὕτω τῆς δαιμονικῆς πλάνης
      ἐπισκιαζούσης τὰ πανταχοῦ, καὶ κρυπτούσης τὴν περὶ τοῦ ἀληθινοῦ Θεοῦ
      γνῶσιν. S. Athan. _de Incar._ 13.

   33 See S. August. _de Civ. Dei_, viii. 24. “Immundi spiritus, eisdem
      simulacris arte illa nefaria colligati, cultorum suorum animas in
      suam societatem redigendo miserabiliter captivaverant.”

   34 Called by S. Athan. ἡ τῶν δαιμόνων ἀπάτη—μανία—φαντασίαι. Thus _De
      Inc._ 47. πάλαι μὲν δαίμονες ἐφαντασιασκόπουν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους.
      προκαταλαμβάνοντες πηγὰς ἢ ποταμοὺς, ἢ ξύλα, ἢ λίθους, καὶ οὕτω ταῖς
      μαγγανείαις ἐξέπληττον τοὺς ἄφρονας. Νῦν δὲ τῆς θείας ἐπιφανείας τοῦ
      Λόγου γεγενημένης. πέπαυται τούτων ἡ φαντασία.

   35 “Humana ante oculos fœde quam vita jaceret
      In terris, oppressa gravi sub religione,” &c. Lucret. i. 63.

      “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
      Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
      Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.”

      Virg. _Geo._ ii. 491.

   36 Acts xvi. 16.

   37 1 Cor. x. 21.

   38 Tertullian, _Apologeticus_, 23; S. Athanas. _de Inc._ 48; S. Aug.
      _de Civ. Dei_, xxi. 6, who says, “Ut autem demones illiciantur ab
      hominibus, prius eos ipsi astutissima calliditate seducunt, vel
      inspirando eorum cordibus virus occultum, vel étiam fallacibus
      amicitiis apparendo, eorumque paucos discipulos suos faciunt,
      plurimorumque doctores. Neque enim potuit, nisi primum ipsis
      docentibus, disci quid quisque illorum appetat, quid exhorreat, quo
      invitetur nomine, quo cogatur, unde magicæ artes carumque artifices
      exstiterunt.”

   39 Merivale, iii. 496.

   40 Beugnot, _Destruction du Paganisme_, i. 8.

   41 ῥώμη, strength; _ruma_, a mother’s breast.

   42 Beugnot, i. 17.

   43 Οἱ ἐγχώριοι θεοί.

   44 S. Aug. _de Trin._ l. xv. c. 14, tom. viii. 984.

   45 S. Cyril. Alex. tom. v. 1, pp. 544, 557 a.

   46 S. Cyril. Alex. _in Joh._ x. p. 858 b.

   47 Petav. _de Trin._ lib. viii. c. 7.

   48 An exception must be made in favour of Persia, where the original
      monotheism was preserved with more or less corruption.

   49 “Das Heidenthum ist nichts anderes als der gefallene und nicht
      wiedergeborne Mensch im Grossen.” Möhler, _Kirchengeschichte_, i.
      169.

   50 Suarez, _de Gratia_, Proleg. 4, cap. i. sec. 3.

   51 Suarez, _de Gratia_, Proleg. cap. ii. sec. 3.

   52 Kleutgen, _die Theologie der Vorzeit_, ii. p. 559.

   53 Suarez, _de Grat._ Proleg. 4, cap. v. sec. 3.

   54 Kleutgen, _die Theologie der Vorzeit_, vol. ii. 650.

   55 This is called by S. Peter 1. i. 18 ἡ ματαία ἀναστροφὴ
      πατροπαράδοτος.

   56 The apostle speaks here not of “wickedness,” but of a personal
      agent, “the wicked or malignant one;” as the context shows. “He who
      is born of God keeps himself, and the malignant one touches him not.
      We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the
      malignant one.” 1 John v. 18, 19.

   57 Gal. iv. 4. τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου.

   58 τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος. Rom. v. 14. “Forma futuri e contrario Christus
      ostenditur.” S. Aug. tom. x. 1335.

   59 “Adam unus est, in quo omnes peccaverunt, quia non solum ejus
      imitatio peccatores facit, sed per carnem generans pœna: Christus
      unus est, in quo omnes justificentur, quia non solum ejus imitatio
      justos facit, sed per spiritum regenerans gratia.” S. Aug. tom. x.
      p. 12 c.

   60 John xvii. 4.

   61 S. Thomas, _Summa contra Gentiles_, l. i. c. 1.

   62 John xviii. 37. “Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I
      born, and for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness unto
      the truth.”

   63 Acts i. 8; Luke xxiv. 49.

   64 See S. Aug. tom. iv. 1039 e. “Ipse ergo Adam,” &c.

   65 Οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐσμὲν, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ
      κεῖται; οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἥκει, καὶ δέδωκεν ἡμῖν
      διάνοιαν ἵνα γινώσκωμεν τὸν ἀληθινόν; καὶ ἐσμὲν ἐν τῷ ἀληθινῷ, ἐν τῷ
      υἱῷ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. 1 Joh. v. 19. Two persons are here opposed
      to each other, ὁ πονηρός and ὁ ἀληθινός. Compare the Lord’s Prayer,
      ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ. Matt. vi. 13 and Joh. xvii. 14, 15. ἐγὼ
      δέδωκα αὐτοῖς τὸν λόγον σου, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ἐμίσησεν αὐτοὺς, ὅτι οὐκ
      εἰσὶν ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, καθὼς ἐγὼ οὐκ εἰμὶ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου. οὐκ ἐρωτῶ ἵνα
      ἀρῇς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα τηρησῇς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

   66 Heb. iii. 1-6; Ephes. ii. 19-22; 1 Cor. iii. 9, 10-15; 2 Cor. vi.
      16; 1 Peter ii. 4, 5.

   67 Τοῦτο γὰρ ἐστὶ τὸ συνέχον τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὸ κήρυγμα. S. Chrys. in
      loc. Compare S. Irenæus, lib. i. c. 10. Τοῦτο τὸ κήρυγμα
      παρειληφυῖα, καὶ ταύτην τὴν πίστιν, ὡς προέφαμεν, ἡ Ἐκκλησία, καίπερ
      ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ κόσμῳ διεσπαρμένη, ἐπιμελῶς φυλάσσει, ὡς ἕνα οἶκον
      οἰκοῦσα.

   68 S. Aug. in Ps. ix. tom. iv. 51.

   69 Ibid. in Ps. cxxxi. tom. iv. 1473.

   70 Petavius on the Headship of Christ.

   71 Passaglia _de Ecclesia_.

   72 S. Cyprian _de Unitate_, 5.

   73 All these five relations between Christ and the Church are mentioned
      in one passage of S. Paul, Ephes. v. 22-33.

   74 Luke i. 35. Πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπί σε, καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου
      ἐπισκιάσει σοι. Acts i. 8. λήψεσθε δύναμιν, ἐπελθόντος τοῦ ἁγίου
      Πνεύματος ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς. Luke xxiv. 49. ἕως οὗ ἐνδύσησθε δύναμιν ἐξ
      ὕψους.

   75 The Church is so called by S. Augustine.

   76 These five are taken from Passaglia _de Ecclesia_, lib. i. cap. 3,
      p. 34, 5.

   77 Compare S. Athanasius _cont. Arian. de Incarn._ p. 877 c.—καὶ ὅταν
      λέγῃ ὁ Πέτρος, ἀσφαλῶς οὖν γινωσκέτω πᾶς οἶκος Ἰσραὴλ ὅτι καὶ Κύριον
      καὶ Χριστὸν αὐτον ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τοῦτον τὸν Ἰησοῦν ὂν ὑμεῖς
      ἐσταυρώσατε, οὐ περὶ τῆς Θεότητος αὐτοῦ λέγει, ὅτι καὶ Κύριον αὐτὸν
      καὶ Χριστὸν ἐποίησεν, ἀλλὰ περὶ τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος αὐτοῦ, ἥτις ἐστι
      πᾶσα ἡ ἐκκλησία, ἡ ἐν αὐτῷ κυριεύουσα καὶ βασιλεύουσα, μετὰ τὸ αὐτὸν
      σταυρωθῆναι; καὶ χριομένη εἰς βασίλειαν οὐρανῶν, ἵνα συμβασιλεύσῃ
      αὐτῷ, τῷ δι᾽ αὐτὴν ἑαυτὸν κενώσαντι, καὶ ἀναλαβόντι αὐτὴν διὰ τῆς
      δουλικῆς μορφῆς.

   78 S. Aug. serm. 267, tom. v. p. 1090 e.

   79 Luke xxiv. 49 and John xvi. 13. ἐκεῖνος, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας,
      ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν; and 14, 15. ἐγὼ ἐρωτήσω τὸν
      Πατέρα, καὶ ἄλλον παράκλητον δώσει ὑμῖν, ἵνα μένῃ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸν
      αἰῶνα, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας.

   80 Plato.

   81 πανταχοῦ συνάπτει καὶ συγκολλᾷ τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὴν ἀγάπην, θαυμαστήν
      τινα ξυνωρίδα. S. Chrys. 3d Hom. on Ephes. tom. xi. p. 16.

   82 S. Aug. serm. 272, tom. v. p. 1104 c.

   83 “Quid tibi fecit Ecclesia, ut eam velis quodammodo decollare?
      Tollere vis Ecclesiæ caput et capiti credere, corpus relinquere,
      quasi exanime corpus. Sine caussa capiti quasi famulus devotus
      blandiris. Qui decollare vult, et caput et corpus conatur occidere.”
      S. Aug. tom. v. p. 636.

   84 S. Aug. in Ps. ci. tom. iv. p. 1105 d.

   85 S. Augustine, tom. iv. p. 1677. “Elegit hic sibi thalamum castum,
      ubi conjungeretur Sponsus Sponsæ. Verbum caro factum est, ut fieret
      caput Ecclesiæ.”

   86 By the “Gloria in excelsis,” &c. in the Mass.

   87 Οὐδὲν γὰρ αὐτῶν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ σῶμα δύναται ποιεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ ὁμοίως ἕκαστον
      λείπεται εἰς τὸ ποιεῖν σῶμα, καὶ δεῖ τῆς συνόδου; ὅταν γὰρ τὰ πολλὰ
      ἓν γίνηται, τότε ἐστὶν ἓν σῶμα.... τὸ γὰρ εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι σῶμα ἐκ
      τοῦ ἡνῶσθαι ἢ μὴ ἡνῶσθαι γίνεται.... τῶν γὰρ μελῶν ἡμῶν ἕκαστον καὶ
      ἴδιαν ἐνέργειαν ἔχει καὶ κοινήν; καὶ κάλλος ὁμοίως καὶ ἴδιον καὶ
      κοινόν ἐστιν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ δοκεῖ μὲν διηρῆσθαι ταῦτα, συμπέπλεκται δὲ
      ἀκιβῶς, καὶ θατέρου διαφθαρέντος καὶ τὸ ἕτερον συναπόλλυται. S.
      Chrys. on 1 Cor. xii. tom. x. pp. 269, 271, 273.

   88 S. Aug. _Op. imp. contr. Julian._ lib. ii. tom. x. p. 1018 d.

   89 “Grana illa quæ modo gemunt inter paleas, quæ massam unam factura
      sunt, quando area in fine fuerit ventilata.” S. Aug. in Ps. cxxvi.
      tom. iv. p. 1429.

   90 See Origen on Matt. xiv. 17. καὶ ὁ κτίσας γε ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς τὸν κατ᾽
      εἰκόνα ὃς ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων ἄῤῥεν αὐτὸν ἐποίησε, καὶ θῆλυ τὴν
      ἐκκλησίαν, ἓν τὸ κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ἀμφοτέροις χαρισάμενος; καὶ καταλέλοιπέ
      γε διὰ τὴν ἐκκλήσιαν κύριος ὁ ἀνὴρ πατέρα ὃν ἑώρα, ὅτε ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ
      ὑπῆρχε, καταλέλοιπε δὲ καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς ὢν τῆς ἂνω
      Ἱερουσαλὴμ, καὶ ἐκολλήθη τῇ ἐνταῦθα καταπεσούσῃ γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ, καὶ
      γεγόνασιν ἐνθάδε οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν. διὰ γὰρ αὐτὴν γέγονε καὶ
      αὐτὸς σὰρξ, ὅτε ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ
      οὐκέτι γέ εἰσι δύο, ἀλλὰ νῦν μία γέ ἐστι σὰρξ, ἔπει τῇ γυναικὶ
      λέγεται τὸ, ὑμεῖς δέ ἐστε σῶμα Χριστοῦ καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους, οὐ γάρ
      ἐστί τι ἰδιᾳ Χριστοῦ σῶμα ἕτερον παρὰ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν οὖσαν σῶμα
      αὐτοῦ, καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους. καὶ ὁ Θεός γε τούτους τοὺς μη δύο ἀλλὰ
      γεγομένους σάρκα μίαν συνέζευζεν, ἐντελλόμενος ἵνα ἄνθρωπος μὴ
      χωρίζη τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου.

   91 As S. Irenæus, v. 20. “Omnibus unum et eundem Deum Patrem
      præcipientibus, et eamdem dispositionem incarnationis Filii Dei
      credentibus, et eamdem donationem Spiritus scientibus;” and S. Aug.
      tom. v. app. p. 307 f. “Ecce iterum humanis divina miscentur, id
      est, Vicarius Redemtoris: ut beneficia quæ Salvator Dominus
      inchoavit peculiari Spiritus Sancti virtute consummet, et quod ille
      redemit, iste sanctificet, quod ille acquisivit, iste custodiat.”
      This striking sermon is quoted by Petavius as genuine, but placed by
      the Benedictines in the appendix.

   92 There is in the original words here something which is lost both in
      the Vulgate and in the English translation. First, c. xiv. 6. ἐγώ
      εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια, καὶ ἡ ζωή; then c. xvi. 13. ὅταν δὲ ἔλθη
      ἐκεῖνος τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ὁδηγίσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν
      ἀλήθειαν. As Christ is the ὁδὸς, so His Spirit is the ὁδηγῶν. “Ego
      sum via et veritas; ille vos docebit omnem veritatem,” does not
      render this: and as little, “I am _the way_, the truth, and the
      life; He shall _lead_ you into all truth.”

   93 S. Aug., quoted above in note.

   94 This word is used as the equivalent of λόγος, _ratio_, _Vernunft_,
      in man.

   95 See Petavius _de Trin._ vii. 7, where he states it to be the general
      belief of the ancient writers that a new and _substantial_ presence
      of the Holy Ghost began at the day of Pentecost.

   96 S. Aug. tom. v. 398 g.

   97 S. Aug. tom. iii. pp. 2, 527.

   98 Ib. tom. v. 47.

   99 Ib. tom. v. 392 e.

  100 S. Thomas in Joh. i. lec. 10: “Nam unitas Spiritus Sancti facit in
      Ecclesia unitatem.”

  101 ὁδηγεῖν.

  102 Epist. 185. tom. ii. p. 663. “Proinde Ecclesia Catholica sola corpus
      est Christi, cujus ille caput est, Salvator corporis sui. Extra hoc
      corpus neminem vivificat Spiritus Sanctus, quia sicut ipse dicit
      Apostolus; Caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum
      Sanctum, qui datus est nobis. Non est autem particeps divinæ
      caritatis, qui hostis est unitatis. Non habent itaque Spiritum
      Sanctum qui sunt extra Ecclesiam.”

  103 Matt. xxiv. 14.

  104 See Möhler, _Die Einheit in der Kirche_, p. 176. “Der Körper des
      Menschen ist eine Offenbarung des Geistes, der in ihm sein Dasein
      bekundet, und sich entwickelt. Der Staat ist eine nothwendige
      Erscheinung, eine Bildung und Gestaltung des von Gott gegebenen
      κοινωνικόν.”

  105 Möhler, _Einheit_, &c. p. 8. “Wie das Leben des sinnlichen Menschen
      nur einmal unmittelbar aus der Hand des Schöpfers kam, und wo nun
      sinnliches Leben werden soll, es durch die Mittheilung der
      Lebenskraft eines schon Lebenden bedingt ist, so sollte das neue
      göttliche Leben ein Auströmen aus den schon Belebten, die Erzeugung
      desselben sollte ein Ueberzeugung sein.”

  106 For instance, two passages on the Incarnation in S. Cyril of
      Alexandria, tom. iv. pp. 819-824 and 918-920, set forth the whole
      sequence of the Fall and the Restoration, and how wonderfully the
      gift of the Spirit replaces what was lost in Adam.

  107 See S. Cyril. Alex. _in Joan._ p. 997 e. ἐν δὲ τούτοις ἤδη πως καὶ
      φυσικὴν τὴν ἑνότητα δεικνῦναι σπουδάζομεν, καθ᾽ ἢν ἡμεῖς τε ἀλλήλοισ
      καὶ οἱ πάντες Θεῷ συνδούμεθα; κ.τ.λ.; and p. 998. τίς γὰρ ἂν καὶ
      διέλοι καὶ τῆς εἰς ἀλλήλους φυσικῆς ἑνώσεως ἐξοικέοι τοὺς δι᾽ ἑνὸς
      τοῦ ἁγίου σώματος πρὸς ἑνότητα τὴν εἰς Χριστὸν ἀναδεσμουμένουσ?

  108 S. Iren. iv. c. 33, 7. ἀνακρινεῖ τοὺς τὰ σχίσματα ἐργαζομένους,
      κένους ὄντας τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἀγάπης, καὶ τὸ ἴδιον λυσιτελὲς σκοποῦντας,
      ἀλλὰ μὴ τὴν ἕνωσιν τῆς ἐκκλησίας; καὶ διὰ μικρὰς καὶ τὰς ὑψούσας
      αἰτίας τὸ μέγα καὶ ἔνδοξον σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ τέμνοντας καὶ
      διαιροῦντας, καὶ ὅσον τὸ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἀναιροῦντας, τοὺς εἰρήνην
      λαλοῦντας καὶ πόλεμον ἐργαζομένους, ἀληθῶς διυλίζοντας τὸν κώνωπα,
      καὶ τὸν κάμηλον καταπίνοντας.

  109 Acts ii. 3. ὤφθησαν αὐτοῖς διαμεριζόμεναι γλῶσσαι ὡσεὶ πυρὸς,
      ἐκάθισέ τε ἐφ᾽ ἕνα ἕκαστον αὐτῶν, καὶ ἐπλήσθησαν ἅπαντες Πνεύματος
      ἁγίου.

  110 “Non jam visitator subitus, sed perpetuus consolator et habitator
      æternus.” S. Aug. tom. v. d. app. p. 307.

  111 Con. Crescou. lib. ii. c. 14, tom. ix. p. 418. “Hic Spiritus sanctus
      veniens in eos tale signum primitus dedit, ut qui eum acciperent
      linguis omnium gentium loquerentur, quia portendebat Ecclesiam per
      omnes gentes futuram, nec quemquam accepturum Spiritum sanctum nisi
      qui ejus unitati copularetur. Hujus fontis largo atque invisibili
      flumine lætificat Deus civitatem suam, quia Propheta dixit: Fluminis
      impetus lætificat civitatem Dei. Ad hunc enim fontem nullus
      extraneus, quia nullus nisi vita æterna dignus accedit. Hic est
      proprius Ecclesiæ Christi.”

  112 Ἡ ἀλήθεια: there seems to be no one word in the New Testament of
      more pregnant signification than this, which in a great number of
      instances bears the sense of _the whole body of the divine
      revelation_. The root of this meaning would seem to lie in Christ
      Himself, who as the Divine Word is the αὐτοαλήθεια, the εἰκὼν of the
      Father; on which title S. Athanasius and S. Cyril of Alexandria
      specially dwell, while S. Hilary expresses the Blessed Trinity by
      “Æternitas in Patre, Species in Imagine, Usus in Munere,” on which
      see S. Augustine’s magnificent comment, _de Trin._ l. vi. 10, p.
      850; and as our Lord is from eternity the Truth, so in and by His
      Incarnation He becomes in a special sense the Truth to man: ἐγώ εἰμι
      ἡ ὁδὸς, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια, καὶ ἡ ζωή: and so the Spirit who proceeds
      from the Father and the Son, “ille ineffabilis quidam complexus
      Patris et Imaginis” (S. Aug.), is τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, who
      ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν: and again, 1 John v. 6, τὸ
      Πνεῦμά ἐστι τὸ μαρτυροῦν, ὅτι τὸ Πνεῦμά ἐστιν ἡ ἀλήθεια. This is the
      first meaning. Secondly, as derived from it, the Truth is the whole
      body of the divine revelation. In this sense it is used in a great
      many places of S. John’s Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles, _e.g._
      John i. 14, 17; viii. 31; xvi. 13; xvii. 17; xviii. 37; 1 John ii.
      21; iii. 19; 2 John i. 1-3; 3 John 3, 4, 8, 12; 1 Tim. iii. 15,
      where, because this whole body of truth dwells in the Church of
      Christ and there alone, it is emphatically called the “House of God,
      which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the
      Truth;” 1 Tim. ii. 3; Rom. xv. 8; 2 Cor, iv. 2; xiii. 8; Gal. iii.
      1; v. 7; Ephes. i. 13; iv. 21-24 (in which passage the Apostle
      contrasts heathen man with Christian, the one, τὸν φθειρόμενον κατὰ
      τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τῆς ἁπάτης; the other, τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα ἐν
      δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ὁσιότητι τῆς ἀληθείας, and again, the mass of the
      Gentiles, as τὰ ἔθνη περιπατεῖ ἐν ματαιότητι τοῦ νοὸς αὐτῶν,
      ἐσκοτισμένοι τῇ διανοίᾳ, while Christians ἐν αὐτῷ ἐδιδάχθητε, καθώς
      ἐστιν ἀλήθεια ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ); 2 Thess. ii. 8-13; 1 Tim. iv. 3; vi. 5;
      2 Tim. ii. 15, 25; iii. 7, 8; iv. 4; Titus i. 1 and 14; Heb. x. 26;
      Jac. v. 19; 1 Pet. i. 22; 2 Pet. ii. 2. In this second sense, as
      signifying the whole body of the divine revelation, the expression
      has been searched for, but without success, in the Gospels of S.
      Matthew, S. Mark, and S. Luke, and in the Acts.

      Thirdly, as the effect of this revelation to man, the Truth
      signifies uprightness, as equivalent to justice or sanctity, in the
      individual.

      Fourthly, it means sincerity, absence of hypocrisy: and Fifthly,
      correspondence to fact.

      In the Apocalypse our Lord is designated “the holy, the true,” “the
      Amen, the Witness faithful and true,” the rider of the white horse,
      “called faithful and true,” “whose name is the Word of God.” iii. 7,
      14; xix. 11.

  113 “La creatura, la più amabile, la più amata, e la più amante di Dio.”
      S. Alfonso, _Gran Mezzo della Preghiera_, p. 280.

  114 Acts ii. 38.

  115 “Non te fefellit sponsus tuus: non te fefellit qui suo sanguine te
      dotavit.” S. Aug. tom. v. 1090 b.

  116 “Quod tunc faciebat unus homo accepto Spiritu sancto, ut unus homo
      linguis omnium loqueretur, hoc modo ipsa unitas facit, linguis
      omnibus loquitur. Et modo unus homo in omnibus gentibus linguis
      omnibus loquitur, unus homo, caput et corpus, unus homo, Christus et
      Ecclesia, vir perfectus, ille sponsus, illa sponsa. Sed erunt,
      inquit, duo in carne una; judicia Dei vera, justificata in idipsum:
      propter unitatem.” S. Aug. in Ps. xviii. 2, tom. iv. 85 f.

  117 Ephes. iv. 11-16. ἀληθεύοντες ἐν ἀγάπῃ. Joh. xvii. 19. ἡγιασμένοι ἐν
      ἀληθείᾳ.

  118 1 Cor. xii. 12. οὕτω καὶ ὁ Χριστός.

  119 So says the great maintainer of episcopal power, S. Cyprian, in his
      famous aphorism: “Episcopatus unus est, cujus a singulis in solidum
      pars tenetur.”

  120 Matt. xxiv. 14.

  121 Rom. x. 15.

  122 ἡ παράδοσις. It will be shown hereafter that the four great writers,
      Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, unanimously
      refer to Tradition in this sense.

  123 See S. Irenæus, ii. 1. expressly stating this of S. Mark’s and S.
      Luke’s Gospel, and of the Apostles generally: “quod (Evangelium)
      quidem tunc præconaverunt, postea vero per Dei voluntatem in
      Scripturis nobis tradiderunt;” which is repeated by Euseb. _Hist._
      ii. 15, who declares that the Roman Christians, not content τῇ
      ἀγράφῳ τοῦ θείου κηρύγματος διδασκαλία, besought Mark with many
      prayers ὡς ἂν καὶ διὰ γραφῆς ὑπόμνημα τῆς διὰ λόγου παραδοθείσης
      αὐτοῖς καταλείψοι διδασκαλίας, which S. Peter afterwards approved.

  124 Luke i. 2-4.

  125 John xx. 30.

  126 As one instance out of many take the words of S. Paul, 2 Cor. i. 22:
      “He that _confirms_ us with you is Christ, and that has _anointed_
      us is God; who has also _sealed_ us, and given the pledge of the
      Spirit in our hearts.” How differently would this passage appear to
      one who had received the confirming chrism, with the words conveying
      it, “_Signo_ te signo crucis, et _confirmo_ te _chrismate_ salutis;”
      and to one who had lost the possession of this Sacrament. Those who
      have deserted the ecclesiastical tradition and practice read the
      Scriptures with a negative mind, and so fail to draw out the truth
      which is in them.

  127 Eine Gnadenanstalt: our language does not supply the expression.

  128 Heb. iv. 2; Acts xvi. 14.

  129 By Möhler.

  130 See Macaulay’s Essays.

  131 S. Aug. _de Trin._ iv. 11, 12, tom. viii. 817.

  132 Tertullian, _Apol._ 50. “O gloriam licitam, quia humanam, cui nec
      præsumptio perdita nec persuasio desperata deputatur in contemptu
      mortis et atrocitatis omnimodæ, cui tantum pro patria, pro imperio,
      pro amicitia pati permissum est, quantum pro Deo non licet.” See
      again the instances he collects _ad Martyres_, 4; and Eusebius,
      _Hist. 5_, proœm., draws the same contrast.

  133 Celsus only alleges the suffering of Socrates as a parallel to that
      of the martyrs. Origen _c. Cels._ i. 3.

  134 With an appeal to this fact Athenagoras begins his apology to the
      Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, about A.D. 177. ἑνὶ λόγῳ κατὰ
      ἔθνη καὶ δήμους θυσίας κατάγουσιν ἂς ἂν ἐθέλωσιν ἄνθρωποι καὶ
      μυστήρια. οἱ δὲ Αἰγύπτιοι καὶ αἰλούρους καὶ κροκοδείλους καὶ ὄφεις
      καὶ ἀσπίδας καὶ κύνας θεούς νομίζουσι. καὶ τούτοις πᾶσιν ἐπετρέπετε
      καὶ ὑμεῖς καὶ οἱ νόμοι ... ἡμῖν δὲ (καὶ μὴ παρακρουσθῆτε, ὡς οἱ
      πολλοὶ, ἐξ ἀκοῆς) τῷ ὀνόματι ἀπεχθάνεσθε. Ch. i. See also Kellner’s
      _Hellenismus und Christenthum_, p. 79; and Champagny, _Les
      Antonins_, ii. 189.

  135 1 Tim. vi. 13; ii. 6.

  136 “Æmulos nos ergo Sibi esse voluit, ac primus virtute cœlesti
      injustorum justus obtemperavit arbitrio; dans scilicet secuturis
      viam, ut pius Dominus exemplum famulis Se præbendo, ne onerosus
      præceptor a quodam putaretur. Pertulit ante illa quæ aliis
      perferenda mandavit.” _Epist. Ecc. Smyr._ i. Ruinart, p. 31.

  137 Apoc. ii. 2, 10, 14.

  138 This is what Tertullian calls “sub umbraculo insignissimæ
      religionis, certe licitæ,” _Apolog._ 21; and _ad Nationes_, i. 11,
      “Nos quoque ut Judaicæ religionis propinquos.”

  139 See Justin Martyr, _Dial. c. Tryph._ 17, who speaks of the Jews as
      sending everywhere deputies in order to defame Christians.

  140 Acts xxviii. 22.

  141 Tacitus, _Ann._ xv. 44.

  142 Ὁ Παῦλος, μαρτυρήσας ἐπὶ τῶν ἡγουμένων, οὕτως ἀπηλλάγη τοῦ κόσμου.
      S. Clem. Rom. _ad Cor._ 5.

  143 Tertull. _Apol._ 10. “Sacrilegii et majestatis rei convenimur: summa
      hæc causa, immo tota est.” Lassaulx says, “die beiden Hauptanklagen,
      die Religion-verachtung, die Majestäts-beleidigung.” _Fall des
      Hellenismus_, p. 11.

  144 Matt. x. 22; xxiv. 9.

  145 S. Clemens Rom., writing just after Domitian’s time, associates as
      sufferers with S. Peter and S. Paul in his own time πολὺ πλῆθος
      ἐκλεκτῶν, οἵτινες πολλὰς αἰκίας καὶ βασάνους διὰ ζῆλον παθόντες
      ὑποδεῖγμα κάλλιστον ἐγένοντο ἐν ἡμῖν. _Ad Cor._ 6.

  146 Euseb. _Hist._ iv. 25; Tertull. _Apol._ 5.

  147 In Tertullian’s words, “debellator Christianorum,” _Apol._ 5.

  148 Thus a late Protestant writer, Schmidt (_Geschichte der Denk- und
      Glaubensfreiheit_, p. 165), remarks of the condition of Christians,
      “Vollkommen gewiss ist, dass unter Domitian eine neue Drangperiode
      für die Christen begann, die sich in Verfolgungen, in Hinrichtungen,
      und Verbannungen äusserte. (_Dio._ 67, 14, und die Ausleger.) Damals
      soll auch der Apostel Johannes nach Pathmos verwiesen worden sein.
      Erst Nerva lüftete wiederum diesen Druck, indem er den Verhafteten
      die Freiheit gab, und die Verbannten zurückberief. (_Dio._ 68, 1.)
      _Es war dies aber doch nur als eine Amnestie, als ein Gnadenact
      anzusehen, nicht als eine Anerkennung der Unsträflichkeit, wie das
      schwankende Verhalten des nicht minder hochherzigen und freisinnigen
      Trajan zur Genüge darthut._”

  149 Döllinger, _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, Vorwort, iv.

  150 Justin, _Dialog. with Tryphon_, 117. Tertullian, 50 years later,
      _adv. Judæos_, 7, goes beyond this.

  151 Kellner, _Hellenismus und Christenthum_, p. 85.

  152 Origen _cont. Cels._ i. 27.

  153 Lib. iii.3. Ἔτι ἔναυλον τὸ κήρυγμα τῶν ἀποστόλων καὶ τὴν παράδοσιν
      πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν ἔχων, οὐ μόνος, ἔτι γὰρ πολλοὶ ἐπελείποντο τότε ἀπὸ τῶν
      ἀποστόλων δεδιδαγμένοι: where τὸ κήρυγμα and ἡ παράδοσις τῶν
      ἀποστόλων indicate the whole body of truth which they communicated
      to the Church, whether written or unwritten.

  154 S. Ign. _ad Smyrn._ 1 and 8.

  155 S. Ignat. _ad Ephes._ i.-iv.

_  156 Ad Ephes._ xix.

  157 Another point on which S. Ignatius dwells repeatedly is the
      receiving the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist: thus he says of the
      heterodox, _ad Smyrn._ 6: “They abstain from the Eucharist and
      prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is that flesh
      of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, which in
      His goodness the Father raised.”

  158 He says, _ad Rom._ ii.: Ὅτι τὸν ἐπίσκοπον Συρίας ὁ Θεὸς κατηξίωσεν
      εὑρεθῆναι εἰς δύσιν ἀπὸ ἀνατολῆς μεταπεμψάμενος. Merivale, _Hist._
      c. lxv. p. 150, note 1, says, “We are at a loss to account for the
      bishop being sent to suffer martyrdom at Rome.” This passage in the
      epistle confirms the acts of martyrdom. It was the wish of Trajan to
      make a great example, and the Bishop of Rome, S. Alexander, was at
      this time in prison, and shortly afterwards martyred.

  159 See _Epist. ad Magnes._ 13.

_  160 Ad Trall._ 6.

_  161 Ad Smyrn._ viii.

  162 Compare with this expression of S. Ignatius that of the Church of
      Polycarp, fifty years later, describing how after his martyrdom, σὺν
      τοῖς Ἀποστόλοις καὶ πᾶσι δικαίοις ἀγαλλιώμενος, δοξάζει τὸν Θεὸν καὶ
      Πατέρα, καὶ εὐλογεῖ τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν καὶ κυβερνήτην τῶν [ψυχῶν τε
      καὶ] σωμάτων ἡμῶν, καὶ ποιμένα τῆς κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην καθολικῆς
      ἐκκλησίας. _Acta Polycarpi_, xix Ruinart, p. 45.

  163 Ephes. iv. 4-16.

  164 See Eusebius, _Hist._ iii. 37, who speaks exactly in this sense; and
      an important passage in Döllinger, _Kallistus und Hippolytus_,
      338-343, on the force of the word πρεσβύτερος, as Ecclesiæ Doctor,
      one particularly charged with the magisterium veritatis. See also
      Hagemann, _die Römische Kirche_, pp. 607-8.

  165 Tillemont, _Ecc. Hist._ ii. 132.

  166 Tertull. _Apol._ 5, and Euseb. _Hist._ v. 21, assert the existence
      of this law.

  167 Tillemont, _E. H._ ii. 182-3.

  168 See the singular instance given by Euseb. v. 21, in the reign of
      Commodus. An informer accuses Apollonius of being a Christian, at a
      time when the imperial laws made such an accusation a capital
      offence. The accuser is put to death; but Apollonius, who is
      supposed to have been a senator, having made a brilliant defence
      before the Senate, suffers martyrdom.

  169 Duci jussi (confer Acts xii. 19, ἐκέλευσεν ἀπαχθῆναι). The extreme
      brevity with which the most urbane, kind-hearted, and accomplished
      of Roman gentlemen, as Mr. Merivale conceives him, describes himself
      as having ordered a number of men and women to be put to death for
      the profession of Christianity, is remarkable and significant.
      Compare it with the bearing of his friend Trajan to S. Ignatius
      below. As soon as the saint’s confession of “bearing the Crucified
      in his heart” is specific, Trajan without a word of remark orders
      his execution. The “duci jussi” of Pliny and Trajan’s manner in
      sentencing perfectly correspond and bear witness to each other’s
      authenticity. So later the like tone used by Junius Rusticus,
      prefect of the city under Marcus Aurelius, to Justin Martyr, as will
      be seen further on.

  170 Pliny, _Ep._ x. 97, chiefly Melmoth’s translation.

_  171 Acts of S. Ignatius_, Ruinart, pp. 8, 9.

_  172 Ad Rom._ iv.

  173 Ἐκκλησίᾳ—ἥτις καὶ προκάθηται ἐν τότῳ χωρίου Ῥωμαίων—προκαθημένη τῆς
      ἀγάπης.

  174 S. Chrysostom, _Hom. on S. Ignatius_, tom. ii. 600.

  175 S. Ignatius in the 11th sec. of his epistle to the Smyrnæans
      requests them to send a messenger to congratulate the church of
      Antioch, ὅτι εἰρηνεύουσιν, καὶ ἀπέλαβον τὸ ἵδιον μέγαθος,
      ἀποκατεστάθη αὐτοῖς τὸ ἴδιον σωματεῖον. The word σωματεῖον, or
      corpusculum, indicates the completeness of a diocesan church with
      its bishop, the whole Church being σῶμα Χριστοῦ, as S. Ignatius had
      said in sec. I of the same epistle, ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι τῆς ἐκκλησίας
      αὐτοῦ.

  176 There is some doubt about the time of S. Ignatius’s martyrdom. We
      suppose it to be at the end of Trajan’s reign. S. Alexander I. is
      reckoned a martyr, and placed in the canon of the Mass next after S.
      Ignatius, which seems to indicate a connection between their deaths.

  177 So the persecution of Diocletian is said to have arisen from Apollo
      declaring that the just who were upon the earth prevented him from
      uttering true oracles; and a like answer was received by Julian the
      Apostate at Antioch, where the relics of S. Babylas had been
      translated by Gallus to Daphne, near a celebrated temple of Apollo.
      Here Julian, offering in vain a great number of sacrifices to the
      demon, was at length informed that the body of the saint condemned
      him to silence, and ordered the Christians to remove it. S. Chrys.
      tom. ii. 560.

  178 Acts of S. Symphorosa, from Dom Ruinart, pp. 23-4.

  179 Justin. 1 _Apol._ 1, 2.

  180 Sec. 7.

  181 Sec. 11.

  182 Sec. 17.

  183 Sec. 45.

  184 Sec. 68. Chevallier’s translation, sometimes altered.

  185 Origen _c. Cels._ i. 3. Περὶ τοῦ κρύφα Χριστιανοὺς τὰ ἀρέσκοντα
      αὐτοῖς ποιεῖν καὶ διδάσκειν εἰπὼν, καὶ ὅτι οὐ μάτην τοῦτο ποιοῦσιν,
      ἅτε διωθούμενοι τὴν ἐπηρτημένην αὐτοῖς δίκην τοῦ θανάτου.

  186 Σὲ τὸν καθωσιωμένον ὥσπερ ἄγαλμα αὐτῷ δήσας ἀπάγει καὶ
      ἀνασκολοπίζει. viii. 38, 39.

  187 viii. 69; by this we should judge that the work of Celsus appeared
      not long after the punishment of the Jews by Hadrian.

  188 Attached to Justin’s first Apology.

  189 See Trajan’s remark to S. Ignatius: “You mean him that was crucified
      under Pontius Pilate.”

  190 See the curious letter of Hadrian about the Alexandrians, in which
      the Christians spoken of are probably heretics.

  191 They are first mentioned at Rome in the reign of Alexander Severus.

  192 See Origen _c. Cels._ vii. 62.

  193 See Trajan’s question, “Who art thou who art zealous to transgress
      our commands, besides persuading others to come to an evil end?”

  194 Αἷρε τοὺς ἀθέους.

  195 The Roman legionary, if he wished to lay aside his helmet, was only
      allowed to go bareheaded.

  196 Champagny remarks, that the emperors were never in the mind of the
      Romans _sovereigns_ in the modern acceptation of the word, but
      _life-presidents_ with absolute power.

  197 Champagny, _Les Antonins_, iii. 311.

  198 “Christianos esse passus est.” Lampridius.

  199 Tillemont, _Hist. Ecc._ iii. 250.

_  200 Apolog._ iv. “Jampridem, cum dure definitis dicendo, non licet esse
      vos, et hoc sine ullo retractatu humaniore describitis, vim
      profitemini et iniquam ex arce dominationem, si ideo negatis licere
      quia vultis, non quia debuit non licere.”

  201 “Res olim dissociabiles, principatum et libertatem.” Tacit. _Agric._
      3.

  202 “Primo statim beatissimi sæculi ortu.” _Ibid._

_  203 Agricola_, 2.

  204 See Döllinger, _Hippolytus und Kattistus_, p. 187, who quotes from
      Dio Cassius, l. 75, p. 1267, Reimar. This was A.D. 203.

  205 Tillemont, _Life of Severus_, iii. 75, from Dio: A.D. 206.

  206 Tertullian, _ad Martyres_, 4: about A.D. 196.

  207 Dio, quoted by Döllinger, ut supra.

  208 Euseb. _Hist._ v. 21.

  209 Tertullian, _Apol._ i. 37; _ad Scap._ 2.

  210 De Rossi, _Archeol. Cristiana_, 1866, p. 33, makes this estimate.

  211 From a passage in the account of the Martyrs of Lyons, A.D. 177
      (Euseb. _Hist._ v. 1, p. 201, l. 3), it appears that the word
      “Church” was only given to a mother or cathedral church by writers
      of that time.

  212 Thus S. Irenæus (iii. 3. 3) speaks of S. Peter and S. Paul as
      θεμελιώσαντες καὶ οἰκοδομήσαντες the Church of Rome, and of the
      Church of Ephesus (ibid. iv.) as τεθεμελιωμένη ὑπὸ Παύλου.

  213 This S. Innocent states to S. Augustine and the African bishops in
      417 as a fact well known to them: “Scientes quid Apostolicæ Sedi,
      cum omnes hoc loco positi ipsum sequi desideremus Apostolum,
      debeatur, _a quo ipse episcopatus et tota auctoritas nominis hujus
      emersit_.” Coustant, _Epist. Rom. Pontif._ 888.

  214 Photius, συναγωγαὶ καὶ ἀποδείξεις, quoted by Döllinger, _Hippolytus
      und Kallistus_, p. 264, 5.

  215 Can. 6. Concil. Nic. τὰ ἀρχαῖα ἔθη κρατείτω, τὰ ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ καὶ Λιβύῃ
      καὶ Πενταπόλει, ὥστε τὸν Ἀλεξανδρείας ἐπίσκοπον πάντων τούτων ἔχειν
      τὴν ἐξουσίαν, ἐπειδὴ και τῷ εν Ῥωμῃ επισκοπῳ τοῦτο συνηθεσ εστιν.
      See Hagemann, _die Römische Kirche_, 596-8.

  216 “Traducem fidei et semina doctrinæ.” _De Præscrip._ 20.

  217 See Döllinger, _Hipp. u. Kall._ p. 338-343, for the meaning of this
      word in the time of S. Irenæus, as carrying with it a special
      magisterium fidei. “Presbyteros” was added as a title of honour to
      the name of Bishop. In S. Irenæus tho same persons have as Bishops
      the succession of the Apostles, as Presbyteri “the charisma of the
      truth.” Papias marks the Asiatic Presbyteri as those who had heard
      of S. John; and Clement of Alex. speaks of Presbyteri who, occupied
      with the office of teaching, and deeming it diverse from that of
      composition, did not write. _Eclogæ_ xxvii. p. 996.

  218 I am indebted for the above sketch of Gnosticism mainly to Schwane,
      _Dogmengeschichte der vornicänischen Zeit_, p. 648-51.

  219 Tillemont, _Hist. des Emp._ iii. 281, deduces it from a passage of
      Origen on S. Matt. tom. iii. p. 857 c.

_  220 Frag. Epist. ad Florin._ tom. i. p. 340.

  221 He seems to refer to Matt. x. 24: οὐκ ἔστι μαθητὴς ὑπὲρ τὸν
      διδάσκαλον.

  222 S. Irenæus, lib. iii. c. 2; lib. iii. c. 1.

  223 “Quos et successores relinquebant, suum ipsorum locum magisterii
      tradentes.”

  224 S. Irenæus, lib. iii. c. 3, 4.

  225 “Hoc enim Ecclesiæ creditum est Dei munus.”

  226 Lib. iii. c. 24.

  227 Lib. v. c. 20.

  228 “Qui cum episcopatus successione charisma veritatis certum secundum
      placitum Patris acceperunt.” iv. 26, 2; and 5, “ubi igitur
      charismata Domini posita sunt, ibi discere oportet veritatem, apud
      quos est ea quæ est ab apostolis ecclesiæ successio.”

  229 S. Ignatius, quoted above, p. 206.

  230 Schwane, p. 661.

  231 Hagemann, p. 622.

  232 Letter of the Synod of Arles to Pope Sylvester: “Quoniam recedere a
      partibus istis minime potuisti, in quibus et Apostoli quotidie
      sedent, et cruor ipsorum sine intermissione Dei gloriam testatur.”
      Mansi, _Concilia_, ii. 469.

  233 Tertull. _de Præsc._ 19, 20.

  234 The word here stands evidently for the whole body of Christian
      truth, rites, and discipline, the communication of which was a
      sacramentum.

  235 That is, he opposes the word _choosers_ to the word _Christians_;
      the one signifying those who believe what they _choose_, the other
      those who believe what Christ taught.

_  236 De Præscrip._ 37.

  237 ἡ τοῦ κυρίου κατὰ τὴν παρουσίαν διδασκαλία.

  238 Clem. Alex. _Strom._ vii. 16, p. 890-894; 17, p. 897-900. The
      sections 15-17, p. 886-900, treat of the spirit and conduct of
      heresy.

_  239 De Principiis_, pref. p. 47. See also on Matt. tom. iii. 864, a
      passage equally decisive.

_  240 Cont. Cels._ vi. 48, tom. i. 670.

_  241 De Civ. Dei_, xvi. 2.

_  242 De dono persev._ 53.

  243 Enarr. in Ps. 54, tom. iv. 513.

  244 Serm. 51, tom. v. 288.

  245 S. Mark’s Gospel would be referred to S. Peter, and S. Luke’s
      writings to S. Paul.

  246 See Schwane, p. 779-80.

  247 Schwane, p. 783-4.

  248 “Quia a patribus ista accepimus in ecclesia legenda.” n. 47.

  249 Stromata, vii. c. 16, p. 896.

  250 See Kleutgen, _Theologie der Vorzeit_, iii. 957; Schwane, vol. i. 3.

  251 L. iv. 26. 2, p. 262. “Quapropter _iis qui in Ecclesia sunt_
      presbyteris obaudire oportet,” &c.

  252 L. iii. 24, p. 223.

  253 Schwane, p. 683.

  254 Observed by Hagemann, p. 618, referring to the words of S. Irenæus,
      “ad hanc enim Ecclesiam propter potiorem prinicipalitatem _necesse
      est_ omnem convenire Ecclesiam,” &c. It must be remembered that the
      proper word for the power which held together the whole Roman empire
      was Principatus, the very word used by S. Augustine to express the
      _original_ authority of the Roman See: “Romanæ Ecclesiæ, in qua
      _semper_ apostolicæ cathedræ viguit _principatus_.” _Ep._ 43.

  255 See Kuhn, _Einleitung in die katholische Dogmatik_, i. 345-6.

  256 Guizot ranks Marcus Aurelius with S. Louis, as the only rulers who
      preferred conscience to gain in all their conduct.

  257 Maximus Tyrius, diss. 17, 12; Reiske, and diss, ii. 2. 10.

_  258 Acta Martyrum sincera_, Ruinart, p. 58-60.

  259 Ruinart, p. 67.

  260 Ruinart, p. 68.

  261 Ruinart, p. 69.

_  262 Hist._ v. i. μυριάδας μαρτύρων διαπρέψαι στοχασμῷ λαβεῖν ἔνεστιν.

  263 Ib, v. 21.

  264 Clem. Alex. _Strom._ ii. c. 20, p. 494.

  265 Euseb. _Hist._ vi. 1.

  266 Champagny, _les Antonins_, iii. 326, 338.

  267 Philostratus in his _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_, written at the
      request of the empress Julia Domna. See Kellner, _Hellenismus und
      Christenthum_, c. v. s. 4, 81-4.

  268 Orig. _c. Cels._ viii. 68, tom. i. p. 793.

  269 Churches in private houses, under cover of that great liberty which
      invested with a sort of sacred independence the Roman household, it
      had from the beginning: the church of S. Pudentiana in the house of
      the senator Pudens still guards the altar on which S. Peter offered.

  270 The reign of Louis XIV.

  271 Am. Thierry, _Tableau de l’Empire Romain_, p. 412.

  272 Zach. ii. 11, Is. ii. 2, Mich. iv. 1, compared with Titus ii. 14 and
      1 Pet. ii. 9.

_  273 Ep. ad Diognetum_, 5, 6.

  274 S. Justin Martyr, _Tryphon_, sec. 135, 42, 116; where he refers to
      and explains the vision of the high-priest Jesus in the prophet
      Zacharias iii. 1.

  275 ὡς υἱὸν Θεοῦ, Θεὸν ἐληλυθότα ἐν ἀνθρωπίνῃ ψυχῇ καὶ σώματι. _Cont.
      Cels._ iii. 29.

  276 Ibid. viii. 74.

_  277 Cont. Cels._ viii. 75.

  278 Ibid. vi. 48, p. 670.

_  279 Cont. Cels._ vi. 79, p. 692.

  280 Κωλύοντος τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸ πᾶν ἐκπολεμηθῆναι αὐτῶν ἔθνος; συστῆναι γὰρ
      αὐτὸ ἐβούλετο καὶ πληρωθῆναι πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν τῆς σωτηρίου ταύτης καὶ
      εὐσεβεστάτης διδασκαλίας. _Cont. Cels._ iii. 8. It must be
      remembered that Celsus in the passage to which this is an answer had
      asserted that the Christians had arisen out of the Jews through a
      sedition; which makes the train of thought pertinent. For Origen is
      contrasting the losses which occur through exterminating wars, such
      as a sedition, or civil war, excites, with the losses to the
      Christian body through martyrdom. The comparison therefore lies
      between the whole number of Christians viewed _en masse_ and the
      martyrs. Lasaulx remarks that this was written before the Decian
      persecution.

  281 Preface to the Oxford edition of S. Cyprian’s treatise on the Unity
      of the Church.

_  282 De Unitate_, iii. &c.

  283 Epist. 70 and 73.

  284 τῇ γὰρ ἐλπίδι ἐσώθημεν.

  285 Ep. 1, Oxford translation.

  286 S. Irenæus, lib. iv. 33 g.

  287 Dan. ii. 44. Compare Apoc. i. 9. ὁ ἀδελφὸς ὑμῶν καὶ συγκοινωνὸς ἐν
      τῇ θλίψει καὶ ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ καὶ ὑπομονῇ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

  288 Κατανοήσατε τὸν ἀπόστολον καὶ ἀρχιερέα τῆς ὁμολογίας ἡμῶν Χριστὸν
      Ἰησοῦν. Heb. iii. 1.

  289 Thus S. Gregory the Great wrote to Eulogius, Patriarch of
      Alexandria, that the three original patriarchal Sees were all Sees
      of Peter: “Cum multi sint Apostoli, pro ipso tamen principatu sola
      Apostolorum Principis Sedes in auctoritate convaluit, quæ in tribus
      locis unius est.” _Epist._ lib. vii. 40. The Patriarchal authority
      is a derivation from the Primacy, which is the well-head.

  290 Κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας. Matt. iv. 23.

  291 S. Dionys. Alex. Ep. 2. Gallandi, iii. 512.

  292 Answer of Pope Innocent I. to the Council of Carthage in 416, among
      the letters of S. Augustine.

  293 Constant. _Epist. Rom. Pontif._ p. 1037.

  294 Ephes. iv., written during S. Paul’s imprisonment at Rome.

  295 This text is continually used by S. Augustine against the Donatists,
      as containing an express divine prophecy that the one Catholic
      Church should continue to the end of the world. The Gospel _of_ the
      Kingdom, and the Gospel _without_ the Kingdom, are ideas far as the
      poles apart.

_  296 De Pudicitia_, § 1. See Hagemann, p. 54.

  297 He is so represented by Hippolytus, _Philosophumen_, lib. ix. p.
      209. See Hagemann, p. 59.

  298 “Nec hoc nobis nunc nuper consilium cogitatum est, nec hæc apud nos
      adversus improbos modo supervenerunt repentina subsidia: sed antiqua
      hæc apud nos severitas, antiqua fides, disciplina legitur antiqua;
      quoniam nec tantas de nobis laudes Apostolus protulisset dicendo:
      Quia fides vestra prædicatur in toto mundo, nisi jam exinde vigor
      iste radices fidei de temporibus illis mutuatus fuisset: quarum
      laudum et gloriæ degenerem fuisse maximum crimen est.” _Epist. Cleri
      Rom. ad Cyprian._ 31.

  299 Hagemann, p. 77.

  300 In Matt. tom. iii. 857 c.

  301 “Cum Fabiani locus, id est, cum locus Petri et gradus cathedræ
      sacerdotalis vacaret.” _Epist._ lii. p. 68. “Sedisse intrepidum Romæ
      in sacerdotali cathedra eo tempore cum tyrannus infestus
      sacerdotibus Dei fanda atque infanda comminaretur, cum multo
      patientius et tolerabilius audiret levari adversus se æmulum
      principem quam constitui Romæ Dei sacerdotem.” Ibid. p. 69.

_  302 Epist._ lii. p. 69.

  303 Compare with the savageness of the Prefect of Rome in torturing S.
      Laurence the following incident which occurred five years later.
      Valerian had been captured by the Persian monarch, and his son the
      Emperor Gallienus bore the reproach with great tranquillity. In the
      great festival which he held at Rome about 263, to commemorate the
      victory of Odenatus over Sapor, some revellers mixed themselves with
      the pretended Persian captives, and examined their faces closely.
      When asked what they meant, they replied, “We are looking for the
      emperor’s father.” The jest so stung Gallienus that he had them
      burnt alive. Weiss, _Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte_, ii. 224. It was
      for showing him the Church’s spiritual treasures, the poor, the
      helpless, and the suffering, instead of the coveted gold and silver,
      that the Prefect burnt S. Laurence alive.

_  304 De Lapsis_, iv. p. 182-3, Oxford translation.

  305 Euseb. _Hist._ l. vii. c. 10.

  306 Ib. l. vii. c. 13.

  307 See the martyrdom of the favourite chamberlain Peter, who, says
      Eusebius (_Hist._ viii. 6), was violently scourged, and then slowly
      roasted alive.

  308 “Diocletianus ... excarnificare omnes suos protenus cœpit. Sedebat
      ipse atque innocentes igne torrebat.... Omnis sexus et ætatis
      homines ad exustionem rapti; nec singuli, quoniam tanta erat
      multitudo, sed gregatim circumdato igni amburebantur,” &c. Lactant.
      14, 15.

  309 Eusebius, _Hist._ viii. 2.

  310 Lactantius, _de Morte Persecutorum_, 13.

  311 Euseb. viii. 4.

  312 “Statim productus non modo extortus sed etiam legitime coctus cum
      admirabili patientia, postremo exustus est.” Lact. _de Mort. Pers._
      13; Euseb. viii. 5.

  313 Euseb. _de Vita Constant_. 1. i. 13.

  314 Lactant. _Divin. Institut._ 1. v. 9. Gallandi, tom. iv. 313-4.

  315 Ib. 1. v. 11.

  316 Euseb. _Hist._ viii. 11.

  317 Lactantius, as above.

_  318 Hist._ viii. 9.

  319 Euseb. _Hist._ viii. 10.

  320 Σωκ. Ἀναγκαῖον οὖν ἐστὶ περιμένειν ἕως ἄν τις μάθῃ ὡς δεῖ πρὸς θεοὺς
      καὶ πρὸς ἀνθρώπους διακεῖσθαι.

      Αλκ. Πότε οὖν παρέσται ὁ χρόνος οὗτος, ὦ Σώκρατες? καὶ τίς ὁ
      παιδεύσων? ἥδιστα γὰρ ἄν μοι δοκῶ ἰδεῖν τοῦτον τὸν ἄνθρωπον τίς
      ἐστιν.

      Σωκ. Οὗτος ἐστιν ᾧ μέλει περὶ σοῦ.

  321 1 Cor. i. 21.

  322 Zeller, _die Philosophie der Griechen_, 2te Aufl. vol. i. pp. 6 and
      35. “Philosophy,” says Grote, _Plato_, vol. i. v. “is, or aims at
      becoming, reasoned truth: an aggregate of matters believed or
      disbelieved after conscious process of examination gone through by
      the mind and capable of being explained to others:” who quotes
      Cicero’s “Philosophia ex rationum collatione consistit.”

  323 Thus Herodotus says of Solon, τῆς θεωρίης ἐκδημήσας εἵνεκεν, i. 30;
      and presently, ξεῖνε Ἀθηναῖε, παρ᾽ ἡμέας γὰρ περὶ σέο λόγος ἀπῖκται
      πολλὸς, καὶ σοφίης εἵνεκεν τῆς σῆς καὶ πλάνης, ὡς φιλοσοφέων γῆν
      πολλὴν θεωρίης εἵνεκεν ἐπελήλυθας.

  324 Zeller, i. 39, quoted.

  325 Zeller, i. p. 38.

  326 Newman, _Verses on various occasions_; Heathen Greece, p. 158.

  327 Zeller, i. p. 43. “Aber es liegt überhaupt nicht in der Weise des
      Alterthums, die gottesdienstlichen Handlungen zur Belehrung durch
      Religionsvorträge zu benützen. Ein Julian mochte in Nachahmung
      christlicher Sitte dazu den Versuch machen, aus der klassischen Zeit
      selbst ist uns kein Beispiel hievon überliefert.”

  328 Zeller, i. p. 141.

  329 Ib. i. pp. 449-452.

  330 Ueberweg, _Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie_, drit. Aufl. i.
      p. 65.

  331 Ueberweg, i. 68.

  332 Ib. i. 72.

  333 Döllinger, _Heidenthum und Judenthum_, p. 272, and Zeller, i. p.
      139, who states this of the Eleatics, Heracleitus, Democritus, and
      even the Pythagoreans, who, though they put Number instead of
      Matter, yet conceived incorporeal principles as material, and so
      considered from the same point of view the soul and the body, the
      ethical and the physical, in man.

  334 Zeller, ibid.

  335 Ueberweg, i. 75. “Die Sophistik bildet den Uebergang von der
      kosmologischen zu der auf das denkende und wollende Subject
      gerichteten Philosophie.” p. 76. “Sokrates... theilt mit den
      Sophisten die allgemeine Tendenz der Reflexion auf das Subject,
      tritt aber zu ihnen dadurch in Gegensatz, das seine Reflexion sich
      nicht bloss auf die elementaren Functionen des Subjects, die
      Wahrnehmung und Meinung und das sinnliche und egoistische Begehren,
      sondern auch auf die höchsten gestigen, zur Objectivität in
      wesentlicher Beziehung stehenden Functionen, nämlich auf das Wissen
      und die Tugend richtet.”

  336 Ib. i. 76.

  337 Thus Zeller throughout his great work perpetually deplores that
      through this long period, and with increasing force after
      Aristotle’s time, pure science, _die reine Wissenschaft_, was not
      studied for its own sake, but was subordinate to a moral purpose,
      the question, that is, of man’s greatest good, and his happiness.

  338 Simplicius, in the sixth century.

  339 Zeller, i. p. 117.

  340 Ueberweg, i. p. 88.

  341 xiii. 4.

_  342 Metaph._ i. 6.

  343 Σωκράτης φρονήσεις ᾤετο εἶναι πάσας τὰς ἀρετάς ... λόγους τὰς ἀρετὰς
      ᾤετο εἶναι; ἐπιστήμας γὰρ εἶναι πάσας. _Ethic. Nic._ vi. 13.

  344 Xen. _Mem._ i. 1. 16.

  345 Xen. _Mem._ iv. 6. 1.

  346 Ibid. iii. 4. 9.

  347 Ibid. iii. 9, iv. 6; _Sympos._ ii. 12. Plat. _Apol._ 25 e; _Protag._
      p. 329 b.

_  348 Memor._ i. 6, 10.

_  349 Tusc._ v. 4.

  350 ἡ μαιευτική, Plat. _Theæt._ p. 149.

  351 ἐξέτασις, Plat. _Apol._ p. 20.

  352 Xen. _Mem._ i. 4. 7. σοφοῦ τινὸς δημιουργοῦ καὶ φιλοζώου.

  353 Ibid. iv. 3.

  354 ὁ τὸν ὅλον κόσμον συντάττων τὲ καὶ συνέχων, ἐν ᾣ πάντα τὰ καλὰ καὶ
      ἀγαθά ἐστι, καὶ ἀεὶ μὲν χρωμένοις ἀτριβῆ τε καὶ ὑγιᾶ καὶ ἀγήρατον
      παρέχων, θᾶττον δὲ νοήματος ἀναμαρτήτως ὑπηρετοῦντα, οὗτος τὰ
      μέγιστα μὲν πράττων ὁρᾶται, τάδε δὲ οἰκονομῶν ἀόρατος ἡμῖν ἐστι.
      Compare the famous passage of S. Paul, Rom. i. 19, 20. διότι τὸ
      γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ φάνερόν ἐστιν ἐν αὐτοῖς; ὁ γὰρ Θεὸς αὐτοῖς
      ἐφανέρωσε; τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασι
      νοούμενα καθορᾶται, ἥτε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης εἰς τὸ
      εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀναπολογήτους. Socrates draws precisely the conclusion
      which S. Paul asserts that the premises warrant.

  355 τὸ δαιμόνιον.

  356 Plato, _Apol._, at the end.

_  357 Phædo_, p. 118.

  358 The view here taken would be powerfully confirmed by citing at
      length the interview of Socrates with the hetæra Theodote, as given
      by Xen. _Mem._ iii. 11. The unconscious absence from the mind of
      Socrates of any notion of turpitude in the occupation of Theodote is
      very striking indeed. One is reminded that Socrates took lessons in
      rhetoric of that Aspasia, herself the hetæra of Pericles, who is
      recorded to have educated a school of Theodotes. Thus Plutarch,
      _Pericles_, 24, says of her, παιδίσκας ἑταιρούσας τρέφουσα. In the
      Meneximus, p. 235, Socrates claims her as being his διδάσκαλος οὖσα
      οὐ πάνυ φαύλη περὶ ῥητορικῆς, quoted by Wallon, _de l’Esclavage_,
      vol. i. p. 190.

  359 Ueberweg, i. 92, 93.

  360 Ueberweg, i. 91.

  361 Ibid. i. 117.

  362 Ibid. i. 118.

  363 Ueberweg, i. 120, from Aristotle, _Metaph._ i. 6 and 9, and xiii. 4.

  364 Zeller, i. 119.

  365 Ueberweg, i. 120, remarks: “Die Eintheilung der Philosophie in
      Ethik, Physik und Dialektik (die Cicero _Acad. pos._ i. 5, 19, Plato
      zugeschreibt), hat nach Sextus Empir (_adv. Math._ vii. 16) zuerst
      Plato’s Schüler Xenocrates förmlich aufgestellt: Plato aber sei,
      sagt Sextus mit Recht, δυνάμει ihr Urheber, ἀρχηγός.”

  366 See Zeller, vol. ii. part 2, p. 599. Döllinger, p. 299, sec. 122; p.
      279, sec. 87.

  367 Zeller, ii. part 1, p. 598. “Ueber diese beiden Gegenstände (die
      Religion und die Kunst) hat sich Plato ziemlich häufig, aber immer
      nur gelegenheitlich geäussert.”

  368 Döllinger, p. 290, sec. 110.

_  369 Timæus_, 28.

  370 Thus Grote, _Plato_, i. 230, speaks of “the early caution produced
      by the fate of Socrates,” and believes “such apprehension to have
      operated as one motive deterring him from publishing any
      philosophical exposition under his own name, any Πλάτωνος
      σύγγραμμα,” p. 231.

  371 This has been done by Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, pp. 599-602, from
      whom I take it. He supports his analysis with a great number of
      references to various works of Plato.

  372 Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, p. 487, remarks of Plato’s doctrine: “So
      far as things are the appearance and the image of the Idea, they
      must be determined by the Idea; so far as they have in themselves a
      proper principle in matter, they must be determined likewise by
      necessity: since, certain as it is that the world is the work of
      reason, it is as little to be left out of mind that in its formation
      beside reason another blindly working cause was in play, and that
      even the Godhead could make its work not absolutely perfect, but
      only so good as the nature of the finite permitted;” and he refers
      to many passages of the _Timæus_, of which one will suffice, wherein
      at the conclusion of a review of the physical causes of things Plato
      says: ταῦτα δὴ πάντα τότε ταύτῃ πεφυκότα ἐξ ἀνάγκης ὁ τοῦ καλλίστου
      τε καὶ ἀρίστου δημιουργὸς ἐν τοῖς γιγνομένοις παρελάμβανεν ἡνίκα τὸν
      αὐτάρκη τε καὶ τὸν τελεώτατον Θεὸν ἐγέννα, χρώμενος μὲν ταῖς περὶ
      ταῦτα αἰτίαις ὑπηρετούσαις, τὸ δὲ εὖ τεκταινόμενος ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς
      γιγνομένοις αὐτὸς; διὸ δὴ χρὴ δὔ αἰτίας εἴδη διορίζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν
      ἀναγκαῖον, τὸ δὲ θεῖον, καὶ τὸ μὲν θεῖον ἐν ἅπασι ζητεῖν κτήσεως
      ἕνεκα εὐδαίμονος βίου, καθ᾽ ὅσον ἡμῶν ἡ φύσις ἐνδέχεται, τὸ δὲ
      ἀναγκαῖον ἐκείνων χάριν, λογιζομένους ὡς ἄνευ τούτων οὐ δυνατὰ αὐτὰ
      ἐκεῖνα, ἐφ᾽ οἷς σπουδάζομεν, μόνα κατανοεῖν, οὐδ᾽ αὖ λαβεῖν, οὐδ᾽
      ἄλλως πως μετασχεῖν. p. 68. Compare p. 48. μεμιγμένη γὰρ οὖν ἡ τοῦδε
      τοῦ κόσμου γένεσις ἐξ ἀνάγκης τε καὶ νοῦ συστάσεως ἐγεννήθη; κ.τ.λ.

  373 Döllinger, p. 297, sec. 119, quoted.

  374 So likewise Zeller remarks, vol. ii. part 1, p. 604: “Die Gesetze,
      welchen die philosophischen Regenten fehlen, behandeln die
      Volks-religion durchweg als die sittliche Grundlage des
      Staatswesens.”

  375 Ibid. p. 605.

  376 Here Zeller remarks: “Diese Voraussetzung liegt der ganzen
      Behandlung dieser Gegenstände bei Plato zu Grunde.... Dass die
      philosophische Erkenntniss immer auf eine kleine Minderheit
      beschränkt sein müsse ist Plato’s entschiedene Ueberzeugung.”

  377 Döllinger, p. 293.

  378 See Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, pp. 448-457.

  379 “Wie es sich aber in dieser Beziehung mit der Persönlichkeit
      verhalte, dies ist eine Frage, welche sich Plato wohl schwerlich
      bestimmt vorgelegt hat, wie ja dem Alterthum überhaupt der schärfere
      Begriff der Persönlichkeit fehlt, und die Vernunft nicht selten als
      allgemeine Weltvernunft in einer zwischen Persönlichem und
      Unpersönlichem unsicher schwankenden Weise gedacht wird.” _Zeller_,
      p. 454.

  380 Döllinger, p. 286, sec. 103. Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, p. 538.

_  381 Theætetus_, p. 176. Σωκ. Ἀλλ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἀπόλεσθαι τὰ κυκὰ δυνατόν, ὦ
      Θεόδωρε; ὑπενάντιον γὰρ τι τῷ ἀγαθῷ ἀεὶ εἶναι ἀνάγκη; οὔτ᾽ ἐν θεοῖς
      αὐτὰ ἴδρυσθαι, τὴν δὲ θνητὴν φύσιν καὶ τόνδε τὸν τόπον περιπολεῖ ἐξ
      ἀνάγκης.

  382 See Zeller, vol. ii. part 1, pp. 541-4, who points out a string of
      difficulties on the subject of personality, free-will, as maintained
      by Plato, and his doctrine that no one is willingly wicked.

  383 See Grote’s _Plato_, i. pp. 133, 4.

  384 Ueberweg, i. p. 116.

  385 So Zeller sets forth at length, i. p. 206; and Ueberweg, i. p. 47.

  386 Ueberweg, i. p. 50. Plato calls it ὁδόν τινα βίου, for which
      Pythagoras αὐτός τε διαφερόντως ἠγαπήθη, καὶ οἱ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ νῦν
      Πυθαγόρειον τρόπον ἐπονομάζοντες τοῦ βίου διαφανεῖς πη δοκοῦσιν
      εἶναι. _Polit._ x. p. 600.

  387 Grote, _Plato_, i. p. 221.

  388 Ueberweg, i. 115.

_  389 Phæd._ sec. 135, p. 274.

  390 τὸν τοῦ εἰδότος λόγον λέγεις ζῶντα καὶ ἔμψυχον, οὗ ὁ γεγραμμένος
      εἴδωλον ἄν τι λέγοιτο δικαίως.

  391 ἔχοντες σπέρμα, ὅθεν ἄλλοι ἐν ἄλλοις ἤθεοι φυόμενοι τοῦτ᾽ ἀεὶ
      ἀθάνατον παρέχειν ἱκανοί.

  392 See his averseness to write on such doctrines at all set forth in
      his 7th epistle.

  393 Grote observes, _Plato_, i. 216: “Plato was not merely a composer of
      dialogues. He was lecturer and chief of a school besides. The
      presidency of that school, commencing about 386 B.C., and continued
      by him with great celebrity for the last half (nearly forty years)
      of his life, _was his most important function_. Among his
      contemporaries he must have exerted greater influence through his
      school than through his writings.”

  394 Grote, _Plato_, i. p. 138.

  395 Ueberweg, i. p. 140, from Diogenes.

  396 Aulus Gellius, _N. A._ xx. 5, quoted by Ueberweg.

  397 Ἐν κοινῷ γιγνόμενοι λόγοι ... ἐκδεδομένοι λόγοι; οἱ κατὰ φιλοσοφίαν
      λόγοι, or διδασκαλικοὶ λόγοι, οἱ ἐκ τῶν οἰκείων ἀρχῶν ἑκάστου
      μαθήματος καὶ οὐκ ἐκ τῶν τοῦ ἀποκρινομένου δοξῶν συλλογιζόμενοι,
      which last are λόγοι πειραστικοὶ. Simplicius calls τὰ ἐξωτερικὰ, τὰ
      κοινὰ καὶ δι᾽ ἐνδόξων περαινόμενα; Philoponus, λόγοι μὴ
      ἀποδεικτικοὶ, μηδὲ πρὸς τοὺς γνησίους τῶν ἀκροατῶν εἰρημένοι, ἀλλὰ
      πρὸς τοὺς πολλοὺς, ἐκ πιθανῶν ὡρμημένοι. Quoted by Ueberweg, i. p.
      146.

  398 Vidi il maestro di color che sanuo
      Seder tra filosofica famiglia.

      Dante, _Inf._ iv. 131.

  399 διδασκαλία.

  400 ὑπόμνησις.

  401 Ueberweg, i. p. 188, from Diogenes and Themistius.

  402 Ibid, from Noack, _Psyche_, v. i. sec. 13.

  403 Zeller, vol, iii. part 1, p. 343.

  404 Ep. vii. p. 341. οὔκουν ἐμόν γε περὶ αὐτῶν ἐστι σύγγραμμα, οὐδὲ μή
      ποτε γένηται; ῥητὸν γὰρ οὐδαμῶς ἐστὶν ὡς ἄλλα μαθήματα, ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ
      πολλῆς συνουσίας γιγνομένης περὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα αὐτὸ καὶ τοῦ συζῇν
      ἐξαίφνης, οἷον ἀπὸ πυρὸς πηδήσαντος ἐξαφθὲν φῶς, ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ
      γενόμενον αὐτὸ ἑαυτὸ ἤδη τρέφει and much more to the same effect;
      after which he says, ὧν ἕνεκα νοῦν ἔχων οὐδεὶς τολμήσει ποτὲ εἰς
      αὐτὸ τιθέναι τὰ νενοημένα, καὶ ταῦτα εἰς ἀμετακίνητον, ὃ δὴ πάσχει
      τὰ γεγραμμένα τύποις. So again in his second letter, p. 314.
      πολλάκις δὲ λεγόμενα καὶ ἀεὶ ἀκουόμενα καὶ πολλὰ ἔτη μόγις, ὥσπερ
      χρυσὸς, ἐκκαθαίρεται μετὰ πολλῆς πραγματείας.... μεγίστη δὲ φυλακὴ
      τὸ μὴ γράφειν ἀλλ᾽ ἐκμανθάνειν; οὐ γὰρ ἔστι τὰ γραφέντα μὴ οὐκ
      ἐκπεσεῖν. Grote seems to me fully justified in counting these
      epistles as genuine, against the attacks of some modern German
      sceptics.

  405 Μετὰ τριβῆς πάσης καὶ χρόνου πολλοῦ, ὅπερ ἐν ἀρχαῖς εἶπον; μόγις δὲ
      τριβόμενα πρὸς ἄλληλα αὐτῶν ἕκαστα, ὀνόματα καὶ λόγοι ὄψεις τε καὶ
      αἰσθήσεις, ἐν εὐμενέσιν ἐλέγχοις ἐλεγχόμενα καὶ ἄνευ φθόνων
      ἐρωτήσεσι καὶ ἀποκρίσεσι χρωμένων, ἐξέλαμψε φρόνησις περὶ ἕκαστον
      καὶ νοῦς, συντείνων ὅτι μάλιστ᾽ εἰς δύναμιν ἀνθρωπίνην. _Ep._ vii.
      p. 344.

  406 Grote, _Plato_, i. 229. “When we see by what Standard Plato tests
      the efficacy of any expository process, we shall see yet more
      clearly how he came to consider written exposition unavailing. The
      standard which he applies is, that the learner shall be rendered
      able both to apply to others and himself to endure a Socratic
      Elenchus or cross-examination as to the logical difficulties
      involved in all the steps and helps to learning.” Without this
      “Plato will not allow that he has attained true knowledge”
      (ἐπιστήμη). Compare the system pursued in the mediæval schools and
      universities.

  407 Ueberweg, i. pp. 242, 3.

  408 Zeller, vol. ii. part 2, p. 632.

  409 Döllinger, pp. 304, 305.

  410 Döllinger, pp. 309, 310, sec. 137, 138.

  411 Döllinger, p. 310, sec. 139.

  412 Ibid. p. 311, sec. 140.

  413 See p. 411, above.

  414 Döllinger, pp. 307 and 311.

  415 Διὸ καὶ πειρᾶσθαι χρὴ ἐνθένδε ἐκεῖσε φεύγειν ὅτι τάχιστα; φυγὴ δὲ
      ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν; ὁμοίωσις δὲ δίκαιον καὶ ὅσιον μετὰ
      φρονήσεως γενέσθαι. κ.τ.λ. _Theætet._ p. 176.

  416 Zeller, vol. ii. part 2, p. 623.

  417 Zeller, ii. 2, p. 625.

  418 Ibid. p. 629.

  419 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 7.

  420 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 14.

  421 Ibid. p. 18.

  422 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 12. Döllinger, p. 318.

  423 Döllinger, pp. 319-321.

  424 The doctrine of Hylozoismus.

  425 Döllinger, pp. 322-324.

  426 Ibid. p. 324.

  427 Döllinger, p. 326.

  428 ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν. Ueberweg, i. p. 198.

  429 Döllinger, p. 340.

  430 Ibid. p. 330.

  431 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 370.

  432 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 398.

  433 Döllinger, pp. 331-333. Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 392.

  434 Döllinger, p. 335.

  435 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 427. ἀπαθία and ἀταραξία.

  436 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, i. p. 107.

  437 Ibid. p. 435.

  438 Döllinger, p. 336, who quotes Sextus, _Hypot._ i. 8.

  439 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 477.

  440 Döllinger, p. 338.

  441 For a full account of the line of thought followed by Carneades, see
      Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, pp. 454-477.

  442 Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 436.

  443 Ibid. pp. 482, 492.

  444 Ueberweg, i. p. 218; and Zeller, iii. part 1, p. 593, calls him
      “neben seinem Lehrer Antiochus den eigentlichsten Vertreter des
      philosophischen Eklekticismus in dem letzen Jahrhundert vor dem
      Anfang unserer Zeitrechnung.”

  445 Ueberweg, i. pp. 221-2.

  446 Ueberweg, i. 219, 223.

  447 Döllinger, p. 313.

  448 Döllinger, p. 254.

  449 Döllinger, p. 307. “Er wirkt also zwar auf die Welt, aber ohne sie
      zu kennen, wie der Magnet auf das Eisen, und seine Action auf die
      Welt ist keine freiwollende.”

  450 Ibid. pp. 340, 572.

  451 Ζεῦ, φύσεως ἄρχηγε, νόμου μέτα πάντα κυβερνῶν;—
      Σοὶ δὴ πᾶς ὅδε κόσμος ἐλισσόμενος περὶ γαῖαν
      Πείθεται ᾗ μὲν ἄγης, καὶ ἑκὼν ὑπὸ σεῖο κρατεῖται—
      Ἀλλὰ σὺ καὶ τὰ περισσὰ, ἐπίστασαι ἄρτια θεῖναι,
      Καὶ κοσμεῖς τὰ ἄκοσμα, καὶ οὐ φίλα σοὶ φίλα ἐστίν.
      Ὧδε γὰρ εἰς ἓν ἅπαντα συνήρμοκας ἐσθλὰ κακοῖσιν,
      Ὥσθ᾽ ἕνα γίγνεσθαι πάντων λόγον ἀὲν ἔοντα.

  452 Cleanthes preferred expressly the poetic form; see the note in
      Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 289: for poetry and music are better
      suited to reach the truth of divine contemplation than the bare
      philosophical expression.

  453 Ueberweg, i. p. 195.

  454 Zeller, vol. iii. pp. 130, 131: see the many authorities he
      produces, pp. 126-131.

  455 He says of the opposite theory of Epicurus, the construction of the
      world from the chance falling-together of atoms: “Hoc qui existimat
      fieri potuisse, non intelligo, cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles
      unius et viginti formæ literarum, vel aureæ vel quales libet, aliquo
      conjiciantur, posse ex his in terram excussis annales Ennii, ut
      deinceps legi possint, effici: quod nescio an ne in uno quidem versu
      possit tantum valere fortuna.” _De Nat. Deor._ ii. 37.

  456 So Zeller remarks, iii. 1, p. 296: “A Pantheism, such as the stoic,
      could take up into itself the most boundless polytheism, a double
      liberty only being allowed, that of passing on to derived beings the
      name of deity, from the Being to whom alone originally and in the
      strict sense it belonged, and that of personifying as God the
      impersonal, which is an appearance of divine power.”

  457 See Hasler, _Verhältniss der heidnischen und christlichen Ethik_, p.
      28; and Zukrigl’s commentary on the same, _Tübingen theol.
      Quartalschrift_, 1867, pp. 475-482.

  458 Zeller, iii. 1, pp. 288-9.

  459 Zeller, iii. 1, 12.

  460 Καὶ μὴν ἡ πολὺ θαυμαζομένη πολιτεία τοῦ τὴν Στωϊκῶν αἵρεσιν
      καταβαλλομένου Ζήνωνος εἰς ἓν τοῦτο συντείνει κεφάλαιον, ἵνα μὴ κατὰ
      πόλεις μηδὲ κατὰ δήμους οἰκῶμεν, ἰδίοις ἕκαστοι διωρισμένοι
      δικαίοις, ἀλλὰ πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἡγώμεθα δημότας καὶ πολίτας, εἷς δὲ
      βίος ᾖ, καὶ κόσμος, ὥσπερ ἀγέλης συννόμου νόμῳ κοινῷ τρεφομένης.
      Plutarch, _Alex. M. Virt._ i. 6, p. 329, quoted by Zeller, iii. 1,
      p. 281.

_  461 De Finibus_, iii. sec. 19.

_  462 De Legibus_, i. 7, 6.

  463 Zeller, iii. 1, p. 278, from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, who here,
      however, only enlarge on Cicero’s idea, or rather Zeno’s.

  464 “Jam vero virtus eadem in homine ac Deo est, neque ullo alio ingenio
      præterea. Est autem virtus nihil aliud quam in se perfecta, et ad
      summum perducta natura.” _De Legibus_, i. 8.

_  465 De Officiis_, i. 5.

  466 Cic. _de Nat. Deor._ iii. 36. “Virtutem nemo unquam acceptam deo
      retulit. Nimirum recte. Propter virtutem enim jure laudamur, et in
      virtute recie gloriamur: quod non contingeret, si id donum a deo,
      non a nobis, haberemus.”

  467 Champagny, _les Césars_, iii. 333.

  468 “Ἐξαγωγὴ ist bei den Stoïkern der stehende Ausdruck für den
      Selbstmord.” Zeller, vol. iii. part 1, p. 284 n. 2, who quotes Diog.
      vii. 130. Ἐλλόγως τέ φασιν ἐξάξειν ἑαυτὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ βίου τὸν σοφὸν καὶ
      ὑπὲρ πατρίδος καὶ ὑπὲρ φίλων, κὰν ἐν σκληροτέρᾳ γένηται ἀλγηδόνι, ἢ
      πηρώσεσιν, ἢ νόσοις ἀνιάτοις.

  469 “Qui omnem orbem terrarum unam urbem esse ducunt.” Cicero,
      _Paradoxon_ 2.

  470 Grote, _Plato_, vol. i. p. 87.

  471 Döllinger, p. 315, from Numenius, quoted by Eusebius. Ueberweg, i.
      205, says of them, that up to the rise of Neoplatonism they were the
      most numerous of all.

  472 See Döllinger, pp. 341 and 572-584; so Champagny, _les Césars_, iii.
      294.

  473 Ueberweg gives them thus: to the first Academy belong Plato’s
      successor Speusippus, who taught 347-339 B.C.; Xenocrates, 339-314;
      Polemo, 314-270; Crates, a short time. The second Academy was
      founded by Arcesilaus, who lived 315-241, taking more and more a
      sceptical direction, which was carried out to the utmost by
      Carneades, 214-129, in the third: in the fourth, Philo of Larissa,
      about 80 B.C., returned to the dogmatic direction; and Antiochus of
      Ascalon, Cicero’s friend, founded the fifth, in which he fused
      Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines together. S. Augustine,
      _de Civ. Dei_, viii. 3, puts his finger on the variations of the
      Socratici.

  474 “Lier ensemble les dogmes, une morale, et un culte, c’est-à-dire
      donner à la société une foi, une règle, et des pratiques, c’était
      l’œuvre que le genre humain appelait de ses vœux, et sur laquelle
      pourtant tous les efforts humains semblaient échouer.” A. Thierry,
      _Tableau de l’Empire Romain_, p. 328.

  475 S. Thomas, _Summa_, p. 1. 9. 1. a. 1.

_  476 Sap._ xiii. 9.

  477 Reading with S. Chrys. and S. Gregory ἐκ μεγέθους καὶ καλλονῆς
      κτισμάτων ἀναλόγως, cognoscibiliter, _i.e._ by a conclusion of
      reason.

  478 Μάταιοι μὲν γὰρ πάντες ἄνθρωποι φύσει, οἷς παρῆν Θεοῦ ἀγνωσία ...
      πάλιν δὲ οὐδ᾽ αὐτοὶ συγγνωστοί. _Sap._ xiii. 1, 8.