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FRAGMENTS
CHRISTINE
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THE GIFT OF
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FRAGMENTS
OF
CHRISTIAN HISTORY
TO THE FOUNDATION OF THE HOLY
ROMAN EMPIRE
BY
JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN
Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University
(Author of " Hebrew Men and Times," &c.)
Cujus omnis religio est sine scelere ac maculâ vivere.
LACTANTIUS.
BOSTON
ROBERTS BROTHERS
1880
BR
162
• A41
藏​待
​Copyright, 1880,
BY JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN.
UNIVERSITY PRESS:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, Cambridge,
PREFACE.
OST of these “Fragments" have appeared, from
MOST
time to time, in various journals, and I have
been repeatedly asked to bring them together in a
more convenient form. It certainly is not altogether
such a form as I could wish, or as I might possibly
attempt with a longer prospect of working time. The
book is but a slender gleaning in a wide field, which
has been well reaped by stronger hands.
Still, it exhibits, as fairly as I can give, a view of
the subject which I have never seen properly worked
out. In whatever way we regard the origin and early
growth of Christianity, whether as special revelation
or as historic evolution, it appears to me that the key
to it is to be found, not in its speculative dogma,
not in its ecclesiastical organization, not even in what
strictly constitutes its religious life, but in its funda-
mentally ethical character. In either way of under-
standing it, it is first of all a gospel for the salvation
of human life. And to this primary notion of it
177090
iv
PREFACE.
as to
everything else has been subordinated to a degree that
astonishes me more and more as I look into its
original documents. A motive so intense and so
profound however crude and misinformed
dominate the reason and imagination for more than
a thousand years, and to create a civilization which
had (we may say) every great quality except that
of a voice for its own interpretation, which stifled
thought in the interest of morality, which reduced art
after its rich classic development to a bald symbolism,
and made a free science or literature impossible,-
whatever else we may think of it, is certainly an
amazing and unique phenomenon in human history.
From Constantine to Dante that is, substantially, the
fact we have to study. The Fragments that follow
are designed as a contribution to the right under-
standing of it.
This volume is very far from claiming to be a
history. Yet just as little is it a compilation. The
judgments it expresses are such as have been ripening
during thirty years of reasonable familiarity with most
of the phases of the subject I have attempted to pre-
sent; and they rest, in all cases, upon the acquaint-
ance I have been able to make with the original sources
of the history. I was so fortunate as to begin these
studies within reach of the Congressional Library at
Washington, which is (or was) exceptionally rich in
the earlier authorities; and to continue them as part
PREFACE.
V
of my stated labors here, with the far ampler treasures
of the University Library at command. Of course
I have availed myself, where I could, of modern
expositors and standard historians, of which due.
acknowledgment is made in the notes. My constant
authorities, however, have been the volumes of the
Fathers, of the early historians, and especially of
Migne's Patrologia, both Greek and Latin. I have
endeavored to keep true to the maxim which ought
to govern such an exposition: that it should include
the secular as well as the religious side of events;
that it should deal primarily with moral forces rather
than speculative opinions or institutional forms;
and that it should rest at all points directly on
original authorities, wherever these are accessible.
A brief Chronological Outline has been added, not
as sufficient for the uses of the student, but in order
to make the bearing of allusions and events more
distinct to those who are not otherwise familiar with
the ground. To the student the standard historians,
especially Gieseler and Neander, to the general reader
Milman's histories and Greenwood's Cathedra Petri,
to those who seek sufficient information in the brief-
est space the excellent text-book of Philip Smith,
may be recommended to fill in the sketch which
is here attempted. Better still, perhaps, would be
Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography, just/com-
pleted, and covering almost the precise period in-
¿
vi
PREFACE.
cluded here. But it cannot be too strongly urged
that some acquaintance with Catholic authorities—
as Rohrbacher, Ozanam, Montalembert - is indispen-
sable, if not to a knowledge of the facts, at least to an
apprehension of the spirit and motive, of this early
time. I may add, that this volume is, in a sense, a
continuation of "Hebrew Men and Times," in which
some of the earlier topics will be found presented in
more detail than the present plan admits; and that I
hope to follow it by a similar review of the Mediæval
and of the Modern period.
I should not do justice to my own feeling, without
adding here the acknowledgment of my constant
obligation to Professor F. H. Hedge, D. D., my prede-
cessor in this lectureship, whose learning and elo-
quence are known to many; whom fewer, perhaps,
have known so well as one of the wisest of teachers,
one of the kindest and most generous of friends.
HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL,
September, 1880.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION: STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY
ix
I. THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST
•
II. SAINT PAUL
I
21
III. CHRISTIAN THOUght of the SECOND CENTURY
47
IV. THE MIND OF PAGANISM
71
V. THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY
. 100
VI. SAINT AUGUSTINE
122
VII. LEO THE GREAT
•
146
VIII. MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE
165
IX. CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST .
X. CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
XI. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
185
204
227
XII. THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS
•
• 249
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE
INDEX
275
•
279
INTRODUCTION.
ON THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
A
MONG those who accept Christianity as a revela-
tion, in the most definite sense they are able to
give that word, there are two contrary ways of regard-
îng it. One considers it as an interpolation in human
things, a "scheme of salvation" introduced at a defi-
nite time, completely apart from anything that went be-
fore, except as the way may have been prepared for it by
a series of special providences. The other considers it as
a manifestation of the Divine life common to humanity,
coming in the fulness of time, and as much prepared
for by all that went before as a crop of fruit is ripened
by the sunshine and showers of the whole season. One
sees it as a communication from without; the other,
as a development from within. In the illustrations I
shall attempt to give of it, I shall frankly take the lat-
ter view.
As soon, however, as we begin to follow up this view,
we find ourselves quite outside the limits of “ecclesias-
tical history" as usually defined. Our field is, in fact,
as broad as civilization itself: only that we deal not
so much with its external forms, its institutions and
events, but with its governing and directing forces in the
X
INTRODUCTION.
thought, heart, and conscience of its representative
men. What we call the history of dogma is really a
very curious and instructive chapter in the development
of speculative thought, that record of intellectual effort
and error, opening out from Thales all the way down to
Hegel or Comte. What we call ecclesiastical polity is
really one of the most interesting chapters in the devel-
opment of social or political institutions,
those way-
marks, guides, and buttresses of the structure of civili-
zation itself. What we call church ceremonial is really
the most skilful, the most subtile, the most effective ap-
peal to human imagination, as one of the chief governing
principles of conduct, — reaching all the way from sim-
ple decoration of altar or vestment to the splendors
of form, color, and vocal or instrumental harmony in
a great cathedral, or the tender impressiveness of a
Catholic procession. What we call hierarchical domi-
nation resting on the terrors of eternity, and ever at
war with the powers of the world is really the form
authority came to take in the struggle, by which the
expanding life of humanity has been lifted so many
degrees above the savage or the brute. What we call
canon law is really the summing up of several centu-
ries' effort, by rule and precedent, to construct a code
of morality, and with it to create a new social system,
amidst the wreck of ancient society, or in presence of the
brutal disorders of barbarian invasion. We allow for
the error, the false ambition, the priestly cunning, the
ecclesiastical tyranny, just as we allow for the violences,
the vices, and the shames that run through all the
record of human affairs. They are incidents in that
wider, that universal struggle for existence," which
is the appointed means whereby Divine Providence at-
tains its ends.
"
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
xi
Now, history shows us many well-defined and easily
distinguishable types of civilization, -Egyptian, Classic
Pagan, Mahometan, Indian; and among these types the
Christian civilization is to be reckoned, as we hold,
the highest and most developed hitherto. Our present
business is to see, as clearly as we can, just what this is
in itself. In the study of comparative religions, which
is one of the boasts of our day, we should at least make
sure of one of the things to be compared. And this
will be best done, as it is done in natural history, by
patient, detailed, accurate study of its facts and fea-
tures. These, it is true, are found in what is some-
what intangible, in the thoughts and lives of a great
many men, scattered along through a great period of
time. But, if we will think of it, the scientific method
of study that is, of comparison and judgment, as
opposed to the method of heaping up mere multiplicity
of facts is the true one, as Saint Paul himself sug-
gests, when he speaks of his new converts as olive-shoots,
grafted upon a hardy stock. It is no disparagement to
pine, beech, or maple, to claim that the olive has a
natural history of its own.
Again, as already hinted, this history is to be studied,
in the main, on its ethical or ideal side, and not merely
in the record of its facts and dates. Christianity has
been not merely a type, shaping men's lives uncon-
sciously, like the type, or law of growth, of any organic
product. This it has been also, in the highest, the di-
vine, which is also the purely scientific sense. But not
only this. It has been vividly conceived in the thought
of its believers as the true and only solution to the great
mystery of the universe. It has been adoringly received
in faith, as the symbol of the holiest the heart can love
or worship. It has been earnestly, humbly, obediently
xii
INTRODUCTION.
accepted by the conscience, as the sovereign law of life.
In each one of these three ways it has been held with
fanaticism and intolerance. But in each of these three
ways, also, it has been held humbly, reverently, piously,
valiantly, and has thus been a great power to move the
world. The right place to study it is not in its errors,
ignorances, bigotries, and crimes. It must be studied
in its great and brave sincerities, as witnessed by its
glorious martyr-roll, blood-stained, fire-scorched; by its
record of heroic names, from those who bore the faith like
a flag before the despotisms of Rome or the barbarisms
of Germany and Scandinavia, down to the last mission-
ary who died for it in field or hospital; in the lives of
its great patient thinkers, the prayers of its saints, the
glad, tender, or triumphant strains of its choruses and
hymns, the fidelity of many generations of humble,
trustful, victorious lives. These are what it is the his-
torian's chief business to set forth. These are what we
mean when we say it should be studied first of all on its
ideal side, and not in that which is false, cruel, turbu-
lent, and base.
Again, when we speak of a type of civilization, or a
type of mental life, we mean not something that is fixed
and still, as a crystallographer or a dogmatist might
understand it. The life we speak of pours in a gener-
ous flood from its unknown source to its unknown future.
Scientific criticism in these days does not spare anything
from its rigid search. Of course it rationalizes upon
the origins of Christianity, as it does upon everything
else. But, for our present purpose, we have nothing to
do with any of its speculations. Our business is with
the stream itself. Theology assumes for its postulate,
that the origin of all life is in God, that is, in a source
that is everywhere present and always giving forth, in-
A C
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
xili
exhaustible, infinite, essentially one with perfect wis-
dom, justice, and love.
Just how these attributes of the Infinite Life were
embodied for their earthly manifestation in the person
of the Founder of Christianity, has been the most fruit-
ful ground of speculation and controversy. But, ante-
rior to all these speculations, it is well for us to have as
distinct a conception as we can of that large historic
life which we denominate Christian. And this, not by
theoretical distinctions or abstract definitions, but by
seeing it "manifest in the flesh": that is, not merely
in the "one greater Man" (as Milton calls him), of
whom that phrase was first used, but (as Leo the Great
interprets) in all of the innumerable company who have
received and have worthily shared that life.
Accordingly, the right study of Christian history con-
sists mainly in the study of MORAL FORCES: that is,
forces which bear on men on the side of character and
conduct. Of itself, state it as simply as we will, this
means a great deal. Conduct, says Matthew Arnold,
is at least three quarters of human life; and when to
this we add character which it springs from, and aspi-
ration which makes its ideal, and the education of con-
science which gives its law, we have pretty nearly
mapped out the whole field of practical religion as
opposed to the purely theoretic.
Now we want a phrase which denotes sharply that
characteristic of religion most important to consider as
affecting human life. Such a phrase, for example, is
"enthusiasm of humanity," which we find in Ecce Homo,
as best describing the religion of Jesus and his disci-
ples. But it seems to me that the higher and broader
phrase ETHICAL PASSION denotes better the quality I
Whatever else religion may include, at any
mean.
xiv
INTRODUCTION.
rate it means this. A strong and victorious religious
movement takes place, when the ethical passion I speak
of is blended with the mode of thinking dominant at a
given time. Indeed, a better definition could hardly be
given of an historical religion than the coincidence of
these two, originating with some crisis in human af-
fairs. The passion itself is the essential motive force:
its association with one or another form of dogma seems
almost pure accident.
I do not, of course, claim that this noblest of the
passions is peculiar to Christianity among the religions
of the world. In its elements, it certainly is not. In de-
gree, at least, I think it is, certainly in that line by
which, through Puritanism up to primitive Christian-
ity, we trace our own spiritual descent. As to this,
however, we need assume nothing at all. Christianity
at all events has shown itself in the world primarily as
a moral force. It is this quality in it that we have first
of all to keep in view in the different phases of it we
shall meet. Its creed, its symbols, its institutions, are
what they are in the history of mankind because they
are expressions of that force. They are superficial;
the ethical passion they embody is fundamental.
It shows itself in many ways: with Paul, in earnest
contrition and conviction of sin; with Howard, in the
deep sense of evil and suffering among men; with Savo-
narola, in flaming wrath against hypocrisy and injustice;
with mystic and monastic, in rude austerities or ecstatic
fervors. It appears in the patient pondering of moral
problems, with the Schoolmen; in willing and brave
self-sacrifice, with the Pilgrims; in endurance of perse-
cution, with the Martyrs; in heroism of battle, with the
Covenanters; in recoil from a corrupt society, with the
Anchorites; in rapturous visions of a reign of holiness,
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
XV
with the Saints. In all these shapes that intenser form
of moral emotion,which we rightly name the ethical
passion may appear: its characteristic being, not
merely that conscience, as against pleasure or gain, is
taken for the law of life which it has in common with
the Stoics; but that conscience, so obeyed, becomes a
source of enthusiasm, a ground of faith and hope, an in-
spiration of the will. As what Mr. Arnold calls "the
lyrical cry" is not only a mark of genuine poetry,
but makes the tone of true devotion, and so is the voice
of religion in the way of emotional fervor, appealing to
the Infinite; so the ethical passion I have named is the
very heart of true religion on its manward side, and is
the characteristic we have chiefly to seek and verify in
the study of its history.
This suggests, again, the direction our study should
take: namely, that its field chiefly lies in the lives and
thought of individual men. A great deal has been
said of the philosophy of history, and of the study of
history as a science. But, in much of this discussion,
what is after all the chief glory, interest, and value of
historical study is apt to be overlooked. History studied
as science tends to degenerate at once to anthropology;
studied as history, its great value will be found in its
appeal to imagination, its widening of the sympathy, and
its education of the moral sense. Of course, we want
to know all that can be given in the wide view and mice
distinctions of philosophy, in the accurate terms and
orderly arrangement of science. And we need not dis-
pute whether either of them is or is not a more valuable
study than history proper in itself. But, in respect of
our immediate purpose, they only serve as a framework
for the picture; they merely outline the conditions under
which the study of history is to be had.
xvi
INTRODUCTION.
This is the study of human life itself, — its action and
its passion; of life on its personal, suffering, dramatic,
rejoicing, heroic side; of its sin and holiness, its error
and its strength, its struggle and its grief. Nothing,
in fact, is more dramatic than the life shown us in the
field we enter, as soon as we pierce beyond the veil that
distance of time or strangeness of dialect has thrown
about it. The true way to know the men whose lives
are the history we would learn, is to come as close to
them as the barriers of time, distance, and language will
allow; to seek always the original sources first, at least
under the briefest guidance and exposition; never to
satisfy ourselves with dissertations, abridgments, com-
pends, or “standard historians"; to listen to each man's
words, so far as we have ability or opportunity, in the
tongue he learned from his mother, and talked with his
own kinsfolk, and wrote with his own pen. A single
page, read in that way, brings us nearer to the man, gives
us better (so to speak) the feel of his pulse, the light of
his eye, and the complexion of his face, than whole
chapters of commentary and paraphrase.
We have all learned, long ago, that faith is a very
different thing from opinion. Yet we do not always
reflect how wrongly men's historical judgments are
colored by their opinions, or how shallow and poor those
judgments often are, from the mere lack of power to
comprehend we might even say pardon any very
strong and sincere conviction at all. Thus of Gibbon
so masterly in grasp, so unwearied in research, so sub-
tile in suggestion, our indispensable daily companion
and guide in a large part of the field we have to investi-
gate - the instances are rare in which he has not done
wrong to the topic or the character he was treating, and
let down the moral tone of a great man or a great event,
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
xvii
such as the record fairly gives, by his strange incapacity
of historic sympathy. So that, in a very large part of
it, not only in his famous chapters on early Chris-
tianity but in his treatment of each critical epoch or
heroic life, his work, indispensable for its outlines and
its facts, is a masterly and very perfect model of what
our study of the history ought not to be.
Again, we must be clear of that besetting sin of theo-
logians, a controversial motive. We are not pledged,
in any sense, to uphold one set of opinions, or disparage
others. Our true business is to understand, if we can,
the men who held them, and why they held them. The
world of thought and belief has so shifted in all its
bearings, that we can never be quite sure we have the
mind of the early age; while the world of passion and
motive remains fundamentally the same. Very good
men have held in honesty of heart opinions wholly false
and shocking to us. Their thin ghosts do not flit before
our bar for judgment. Nay, when those men lived, they
were drawn by the tragic and terrible logic of their
opinions to acts in our view inconceivably hateful. In
all history there is perhaps nothing quite so awful as the
religious wars, the infernal tortures of Inquisition and
dragonnade, the frightful persecutions of mere opinion,
deliberately inflicted, for centuries, in the name of faith;
so that the very phrase "act of faith," translated into
Spanish, is perhaps of all human phrases ghastliest in its
suggestion. I have no more the will than the power to
exclude these horrors from our field, for the sake of a
serener view. Humanity does well to hate the name
and curse the memory of them. But our task, even for
these, is to see them in their causes; to trace how they
were linked in fatally with the train of opinions and
events; to see how bad men could have found means to
xviii
INTRODUCTION.
bring them to pass, and how good men could possibly
have been led to consent to them as a pardonable alter-
native from something worse.
A very large part of our history is the record of con-
troversies, in which we have no occasion whatever to
take sides as partisans. Our business is rather to see,
if we can, how each side was an element in the necessary
evolution; and how a gain in mind, morals, or society
is brought about, not by sudden victories of the truer
opinion, but by the very obstinate conflict itself, in which
each party fights toughly, whether for the gold or the
silver side of the shield of truth. We have our own
battles to fight; and we cannot afford to revive the
passions of those ancient ones.
A word of the periods into which the history naturally
falls. The main points of departure the nodal points,
so to speak, marking most visibly the coincidence of the
spiritual and secular evolutionare most conveniently
taken at the end of the eighth century, and at the end
of the fifteenth. The three periods so given, consid-
ered in reference to the type of Christian civilization
before spoken of, may be called the period of its struggle
for existence, of its dominance in a definite historic form,
and of its differentiation or expansion. The first ex-
tends from the origin of Christianity, through the time.
of its conflict with Classic paganism on one hand, and
Barbaric paganism on the other, down to the founding
of the Christian empire of Charlemagne. The second
extends through what is called the Middle Age of Euro-
pean history, the period of feudal society, of the cru-
sades, of the Holy Apostolic Church dominant under the
great popes and the Holy Roman Empire dominant under
the great imperial houses, down to and including the
revival of art and learning, and the period of the great
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
xix
discoveries which initiated the broader life of the mod-
ern world. The third begins with the controversies of
the Protestant Reformation, and follows its results in the
liberalizing of thought, the development of speculative
philosophy and scientific criticism, the vast growth of
natural science (far more important to us in its effect
on men's habit of thought than in its wealth of fact or
its practical skill), the great movements of modern so-
ciety and politics of the revolutionary period, in which
we are living now.
Naturally and rightly, these last are of vastly greater
consequence to us than anything in the past. More-
over, they are precisely the issues to which the great
evolution of religious life in the past has conducted
us.
But no stage of it need be followed in the spirit
of dogmatists, pedants, or archæologists. The life-
stream whose course we are endeavoring to trace
flows through channels, takes on forms and qualities,
that enter deeply into the spirit of our own life. Not
only, then, the echoes of the past are to be heard, but
its footsteps traced, and its spirit felt, and its lessons
heeded, on the spot where we stand, and in the moment
of time when we breathe. For us, its carliest tradition
is still alive. The record contained in so many ponder-
ous volumes is not an antiquarian curiosity, like those
title-deeds lately turned up in bricks and tiles of Neb-
uchadnezzar's time; but is like a merchant's ledger,
which lies always open to record the transactions of
to-day.
66
The antiquarian may learn facts and dates; but facts
and dates are not history. They are at best the
raw materials," which must be "cooked
(as our
friend in the story-book sagely says) before they are
fit food for the human mind. It is the very business
XX
INTRODUCTION.
of history to turn dead facts into live truths; to assort,
co-ordinate, arrange them, find out their bearing on
one another, and their relation to the life they cover,
often, it is true, as tombstones cover the forms once
warm with eager life. It is not that we disparage facts.
On the contrary, the mind in search of truth hungers
and thirsts for them. But one must not be mistaken
for the other. A hundred thousand facts will very
likely go to the making of a single truth.
And for method, the simplest is the best: that is,
to fix a few marked lives and dates, "as nail's in a sure
place." A very few, well fixed, will give us the lati-
tude and longitude of our facts, and save them from
being mislaid or lost. I once watched an artist be-
ginning to draw a portrait. He measured with a straight
stick one or two dimensions, marked them on his panel,
took rapidly the bearings with his eye, made a few swift
strokes; and, almost in less time than it takes to tell, my
mother's face, dim and faint, began to be shadowed out
under his trained hand, which hours and days of patient
skill would be needed to complete, but with features and
expression already there. In some such way, if not with
an artist's skill, yet with his patient accuracy, we may
so outline this vast and magnificent field of our inquiry
as never to lose from memory the features and expres-
sion of that life which we accept as a continual and yet
unfinished revelation in the flesh of the Universal Life.
FRAGMENTS OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY.
Ο
I.
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
UR first task, in approaching the study of Chris-
tianity as an event and a vital force in history,
is to see it on the side of Judaism, out of whose soil
it sprang; and to trace
at present in its purely
historical or human aspect-the connection between
the old religious order and the new. This is best
seen in the transition, in religious history, from the
name Messiah, with all that it denotes as the cul-
minating of the old dispensation, to the name Christ,
with all that it denotes as the inspiration of the
new.
No revolution that we know in the affairs of man-
kind, especially in its spiritual history, has been so
significant as that suggested in the connotation of
these two titles, of which each is a literal translation.
of the other. One brings before us the passionate,
ever-baffled, and finally most disastrous hope of a
perishing people, the narrow, intense, fierce patriot-
ism, that had its boundaries sharply defined in the little
state of Palestine; the other, a world-wide spiritual
2
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
empire, seated on the deepest foundations of faith and
reverence, and showing the ideal side of a manifold,
rich, powerful, and proud civilization, which has as
yet no ascertainable limit of duration.
While the name Messiah is at best the title of a
hoped-for prince who might do for Jerusalem what the
empire of the Cæsars did for Rome, that is, estab-
lish it as the seat of enduring dominion founded on
" righteousness" in the Jewish sense of that word, as
the other was built upon the Roman Law,
-the name
Christ has come, by successive changes and enlarge-
ments of its meaning, to be the title of the spiritual
or ideal leader of humanity. Nay, so instant and so
marked was this transition, as soon as the name had
passed from the local dialect into that Greek which
was the tongue of all known thought and culture, that
Paul (who did more than all other men to bring it
about) already uses that name to mean, not simply the
Person, however exalted and revered, but a Force
purely spiritual and ideal,-" Christ the power of
God and the wisdom of God."
It belongs more properly to an appreciation .of the
life and work of Paul to consider this transition as it
looks to the future, and opens the way to the new,
large development of a religion of Humanity. It is
our immediate task to consider it as it looks to the
past, and connects itself with the history of a pecu-
liar people.
That wonderful Messianic hope, which in the ways
of history was the indispensable preparation for the
advent of a gospel preached to every creature, emer-
ges amidst the desperate struggle of a little colony
THE CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLOOK.
3
in Judæa to defend its altar and temple from the
stranger, and saves that struggle from despair. We
need not go over here the story of that time which we
call the Maccabæan period. It is, or should be, toler-
ably familiar. We can at best attempt to make rea-
sonably clear one or two points of view, which may
help us understand its bearing on the impending
revolution.
Standing at the date of the gospel history, we seem
to have fairly firm ground on an island in the great
ocean of the past, or at least to be swinging at a toler-
ably sure anchorage among its restless waves. The
prophecy of Malachi, with its abrupt menace of "the
great and dreadful day of the Lord," the last head-
land laid down on the chart that most of us have
sailed by, is four hundred years away: about as far
as from us the conquest of the Eastern Empire by the
Turks, the Wars of the Roses, the break-up of feudal-
ism in France under Louis XI., the revival of letters
and arts in Italy, a few years before the discovery of
America by Columbus. A few dates like these may
serve to help our sluggish imagination, and show
what we mean by historical perspective. Near mid-
way, again, to where we are standing, is the glorious
revolt of the Maccabees, another point in the per-
spective to be fixed as firmly as we may not quite.
as far away as the Commonwealth in England, and
the Thirty Years' War in Germany. In other words,
to the contemporaries of Jesus the hero of the strug-
gle was somewhat nearer than Oliver Cromwell is to
us, and the visions of Daniel were about as near as
Paradise Lost.
4
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
.
I am probably not mistaken in thinking that this
comparison of dates startles us a little by bringing
the events so close. But, in fact, they are much
closer than that. If our daily walk took us past
Whitehall, or a stroll into the next village to the
hillside where Hampden fell, the events of that time.
would come incomparably nearer to our imagination.
How was it, then, with the Jews of Palestine in the
time of Jesus, who had no other memories, who
knew no other landmarks, whose only science and
only dream lay within the strict limits of the inter-
pretation of the Scripture that embodied, confirmed,
and illustrated their one only hope? Herod's wife
was great-grandchild of the hero's nephew; and
Herod's handiwork was there, unfinished, before their
eyes. The aged Simeon might as a child (to take the
average of several learned guesses) have known the
writer of Enoch, and he the writer of the visions of
Daniel. Three generations might thus touch hands.
across the whole space that separates the Old and the
New.* The chasin is apt to look abrupt and impass-
able, like the gorge at Niagara; still, it is not so
very wide but that we may fly a cord across, and that
shall carry a strand, and that a cable, and the gulf
is bridged.
Looking now a little more carefully at the point of
time which we have succeeded in bringing so near,
we see that the stream of national, or rather race
* Thus I recollect as a child going to see an old man who had
been an officer in the "French and Indian War" (1756-1763); and
he, by fair possibility, might have known some one who had seen
the execution of Charles I.
THREE STREAMS OF JEWISH LIFE.
LO
5
life, flows in three pretty well defined channels, — in
fact, ever since the time of the earlier dispersion and
the return of the pilgrim colony to Jerusalem, almost
six hundred years ago. In Egypt that stream is
widening out towards the placid lake of speculative
philosophy, which we call the new platonism of Philo,
-a great reservoir, which was pumped abundantly
long afterwards into the sluiceways of Christian the-
ology, to spread and dilute the river of the water of life
till it could float the heavy-laden bark of St. Peter.
Eastward in Babylon the stream loses itself, as it were,
in wide marshes, where it breeds in course of time.
that monstrous growth of water-weed and tangle, with
flowers interspersed of rare and curious perfume,
which we call the Babylonish legend, or the later
Talmud.
With either of these our subject has very little to
do. The learning which interprets the schools of
Jewish thought in Alexandria has been thoroughly
worked up, so as to be easily accessible and (I was
going to say) cheap; though it can never lose a certain
charm of its own in the blandly-flowing discourse of
Philo, or a very real interest to one who cares to trace
the sources of Christian theology.* The more remote
and intricate study of the Eastern branch has still less
present concern for us: it belongs really to the
strange and curious history of modern Judaism,
a
* Though Philo is called a Jew, and uses the Jewish scriptures
as the text of all his fluent expositions, his cast of thought is so
entirely Platonic or Grecian, that Ewald (in a conversation I had
with him some years ago) insisted that he was to be counted as
no Jew at all, but a Greek, quite outside the line of Hebrew
development.
}
6
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
side-shoot, which has grown, independent of the main
trunk, into a vigorous, persistent, fantastic life of its
own.
So our subject narrows down to the course of the
central stream, what we may call the Palestinian
life of the Jewish people. This is, from the outset
down, intensely national, patriotic, local, yet none
the less intensely confident in itself, disdainful of all
life or thought outside, and buoyed through great tides.
of disaster by an immeasurable hope. Indeed, that
great miracle of patriotic valor, the achieving of a
real though brief independence by the Maccabees in
the face of the splendid monarchy of Syria, might
almost justify any extravagance of hope.
We call that hope Messianic. In a certain vague
large way it dates back to the elder prophets of Judah,
Isaiah and Micah, who give not only hints, but splen-
did pictures and symbols, of the Lord's reign in right-
eousness and peace. When the flood of conquest had
flowed over the state of Judah, in the long Captivity
of Babylon those superb strains of prophecy had been
composed,* whose only fit interpretation yet is in the
gorgeous and tender harmonies of Handel's Messiah.
But now the prophecy becomes distinct, vivid, per-
sonal. Intelligent criticism is well agreed in setting
the visions of Daniel at the precise period of time
we are dealing with: in fact, it narrows the date of
their composition within some ten years, from 168 to
•
* Isaiah xl.-lxvi., the "Great Unknown" of the Captivity
(Ewald), sometimes spoken of as the younger Isaiah. The title
"Messiah" is here first given to Cyrus, as deliverer of the Jews
from Babylon (xlv. 1).
SOURCE OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE.
7
178 before the Christian era. These visions, doubtless,
it is easiest for us to bring before our minds as songs
of patriotic hope and cheer, in the strain and stress
of a conflict all but desperate, rather than expound
them painfully in their detail, as they apply to the
nearer past and the immediate present.
What we have definitely to do with them, for the
purpose now in hand, is to see how they fixed-crys-
tallized, as it were that patriotic hope about the
person of a Deliverer, who again was (like the "man
of sorrows" of the Prophet of the Captivity) hardly
to be distinguished in our criticism from Israel him-
self in his great agony. "I saw in the night visions,
and, behold, one like a son of man came in the clouds
of heaven, . . . and there was given him dominion,
and glory, and a kingdom: ... his dominion is an
everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and
his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed."
And again, "The kingdom and dominion . . . shall be
given to the people of the saints of the Most High,
whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all
dominions shall serve and obey Him." *
Now this promise comes close upon a description
which, by the universal understanding of interpreters,
points to the condition of the East among the suc-
cessors of Alexander,- that is, the immediate oppres-
sors of the Jews. There is no reason to doubt that
the coming of this "Son of Man in the clouds of
heaven" was passionately waited for, expected, longed
for, to appear from day to day, any more than that
* Daniel vii. 13, 14, 27. Compare Stanley (“Jewish Church,”
Vol. III. p. 385 of Am. ed.), whose rendering is here followed.
8
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
Christ's second advent was daily expected in the
Apostles' day, or has been and still is in ours. Most
likely some passing triumph of Judas, or Jonathan,
or Simon, the heroic brothers, brought from time to
time that fervent confidence and hope to rest on them.
And again, the hope deferred lay always ready to be
evoked anew, and applied to whatever champion
seemed at the moment likely to accomplish the un-
reasoning but fervid expectation. Thus, after a cen-
tury and a half of disappointment, it was just as
ready to centre upon Herod the Great, whom Antony
and Augustus had set in secure dominion, — a painful
travesty, indeed, of the great Hope, when we think
who and what Herod was, a son of Edom and a ty-
rant; but how genuine, we see in the Herodian party
in the Gospels, and in a sober argument by Epipha-
nius, three centuries later, in its disproof.
In point of fact, we are apt to think too much of
the Messianic hope in a formal, dogmatic way, or in
the way, perhaps, of learned exposition. We asso-
ciate it too exclusively with the august strains of
prophecy on one side, and the yet more august series.
of events that flowed from it on the other. We do
not always stop to think how simple, how natural, how
human it was, after all. In one sense it is a miracle
in history, a phenomenon without any exact parallel,—
the brooding tenacity, the passionate resolve, the re-
vival from defeat, the endurance through centuries of
humiliation, that characterize the Jews' faith in their
coming Deliverer. And so, again, it is a thing that is
and must remain without example, that a national
hope has been transfigured in the person of One who,
FERVOR OF THE NATIONAL PASSION.
9
after near nineteen centuries, is still looked up to as
the spiritual Chief of humanity, and whose name has
been received as the symbol of what is Infinite and
Divine, nay, as a name of the Infinite himself.
But look at it, again, on its nearer side, and it is
not so hard to see not only that it was altogether
human in its passion and limitation, not only that in
its wild frenzy it led straight to a tragedy of unex-
ampled horror; but that in its elements it belonged
quite naturally to such a time and people. In its ve-
hement persistency, in its passionate devoutness, it is
fairly matched by the four centuries' struggle in which
the fighting tribe of Montenegro, under their bishop-
prince, have consecrated themselves to the crusade
against the Turk, a struggle whose issues it is not
long since we were watching in the telegraphic bul-
letins of the day. In its temper of stern patriotism
sombre, tender, unyielding, pathetically hopeless
it is like that other amazing phenomenon of our time,
the life that smoulders in the ashes of thrice-desolated
Poland.
We do not always think how close these great his-
toric passions may come to our own life. There was
lately living quietly among us a princess of the blood
of old Lithuanian heroes - Antonia Jagiello—who,
with more than the heroism of a Deborah or a Judith,
led the forlorn hope at the head of her regiment on
the battle-fields of Hungary. Let me copy here a
picture which I find in a powerful French romance:
it is of the hapless insurrection of 1863, and it is a
young Pole that speaks, who visits his mother in
Paris, feeling himself dead to honor ever since he
1*
10
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
signed in prison a pledge not to persist in war against
the oppressor:
"Before me was a figure in alabaster representing a
woman crouched and in chains, with the inscription,
Polonia exspectans et sperans, Poland waits and hopes.'
Above hung an ivory crucifix; between the crucifix and
the crouching figure my portrait in medallion. Here
my mother had gathered all her love, — her God, her
country, and her child. How strange the position of
that portrait seemed! What had that woman in chains,
that crucified God, to say to him? What had he to an-
swer them? But no, I said, this portrait is not I. It
is that other, he who had a faith, and is dead. And I
thought of these things with unfathomable pity, that
hidden manna, that bread of life, held in a mother's
heart."
This is all over again the picture of that passion
which we have seen in the figure Judæa Capta seated
beneath a palm; which the women of Judah had in
their hearts when they wore the turreted ornament
on their head, "the golden city," as a witness that
they should never forget the fallen and loved Jerusa-
lem. The Polish lady learns her son's forfeited honor,
disowns him, and dies. It is exactly the old Hebrew
phrase, "cut off from his people." The terrible story
of Josephus tells of a temper as stern and high,
among the women of Judah who fell in their country's
fall. And a passion as deep, though not vindictive
and fierce like that, lay doubtless in the heart of Jesus,
when he said, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! that killest
the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto
thee, how often would I have gathered thy children
CHARACTER OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE.
11
together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left
unto you desolate." And again, "Daughters of Jerusa-
lem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and
for your children."
Intense, narrow, patriotic, human as it was, the
Messianic hope was very little ideal, had very little
of what we should call religious. So far as it looked
at all beyond the fact of triumph and independence,
it seems to have been entirely secular, even sordidly
practical. It meant meat and drink, olives, corn, and
vineyards, sheep, cows, and oxen, and a vigorous lord-
ing it over other people. Wherever the Jewish im-
agination trusts itself in images of the future, it takes
very strongly to such realities as these. So much, at
least, we can get from a glimpse or two at that master-
piece of fancy running riot, the Babylonish Talmud,
with its monstrous banquets of behemoth and levia-
than, and its vast clusters of grapes, each clamorous
to be gathered before its fellow. The Messianic
kingdom was to be established in "righteousness," it
is true; but, so far as consciously developed, a right-
eousness like that of the Scribes and Pharisees,
quite sincere in its way, but wonderfully dry and
thin, resembling what we think of under that name
very much as lichen resembles flowers and grain.
But we need not dwell on this side of it: first,
because it is sufficiently apparent in the censures of
Jesus himself; and secondly, because the Jewish peo-
ple never since the Captivity fairly exhibited their
qualities in an independent national life. Forced in
upon itself by oppression or else antagonism on every
12
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
side, the petty monarchy enjoyed at best such inde-
pendence as it could win from the mutual jealousies
of Syria and Rome. The real history of the Messi-
anic period is a history of almost constant struggle,
often heroic, and at critical periods in the highest de-
gree tragical.
That period, properly defined, includes about three
centuries. It begins with the revolt of the Macca-
bees and the visions of Daniel; it ends with the
brief messianic reign of Bar-kochab (or Barcochbas),*
who perished in the final conquest of Jerusalem by
Hadrian, and the martyrdom of Rabbi Akibah just a
hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus. With-
in this period-nay, in that brief space of restless
spiritual agitation between the death of Herod and
the fall of Jerusalem in A. D. 70—I have seen it stated
that no less than fifty adventurers were more or less
widely recognized as Messiahs, and were known under
that claim to history. Lawless and turbulent insur-
gents, most of them, against Roman rule, or else the
fiercest and most stubborn of military leaders when
the storm of conquest and destruction fell.
hard matter-of-fact rendering given in such events as
these, of a hope so fervid and ideal at the start, a
rendering of it at once sordid and fierce,- it seems
necessary to bring into strong relief, if we would see
it as a natural thing in human annals, and at the same
time know the real background of that purely ethical
and spiritual interpretation, which at length displaced
it, and transfigured the Messiah to the Christ
The
*This title signifies "Son of the Star," in allusion to Balaam's
prophecy (Numbers xxiv. 17).
MESSIANIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS.
13
It does not belong properly to our task to attempt
a solution of that central problem of history, the ori-
gin of Christianity. Science is not content until it
has traced one by one the links of sequence that guide
from antecedent to result, and is sure that there is no
missing link. But science does not define or assign
the Cause, which it must always assume, or else
ignore, historical science as much as any. This par-
ticular antecedent of Christianity, which we find in
the Messianic hope of the Jews, it is well for us to
see as distinctly as we can, - how it was, in the way
of historical perspective; what it was, in the way of
historical imagination. When we would apply it to
explain anything in the rise of Christianity, we find
it, so to speak, not at the heart, but rather at the two
edges of the phenomenon we are seeking to explain.
We find it at every step in the gospel narrative, where
it makes an element in the mental atmosphere, with-
out which the course of that narrative would be man-
ifestly inconsequent and incredible; and, when the
scene shifts to apostolic times, we find it just fading
away in all its grosser features, while it is getting
transfigured into a sacred memory and an ideal
truth.
The first thing we have to do, then, is to take the
record of the facts, if we can, absolutely without the
warp of any preconceived opinion, or any theological
dogmatism. Looking at them so, it appears plain that
what we may call the messianic consciousness of Jesus,
which is so intense and even predominant towards the
close of his ministry, was a comparatively late devel-
opment in him. To put it in theological phrase, his
14
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
generation as Son of God was anterior to his appoint-
ment as Messiah of the Jews. In the language we
usually apply to human experience, his vocation as a
moral and spiritual teacher was recognized first; and
only as an after result came his strong conviction that
he was the chosen Deliverer of his people, though by
a way they could not understand or follow.
At first they knew him only as a village enthusiast,
a Galilæan teacher, at best a Rabbi, like other inter-
preters of the Law, one of the school perhaps of Rabbi
Hillel or Rabbi Simeon, like them setting the weight-
ier matters of justice and mercy above the mint, anise,
and cumin of current exposition. For a background
to the understanding of his discourses, one should
know something of the wonderful well-meaning ped-
antry of the rabbinical interpreters, and something
too of the genuine and wholesome ethics which the
better sort, Hillel at their head, had tried to engraft
upon it.
But here was a new and astonishing phenomenon.
Their placid moralism, their commonplaces of natural
ethics, suddenly blazed out in a passionate and even
haughty conviction, - flooded too with a glow of
fervent trust, a wealth of human tenderness, a strain
of poetic beauty, which made it all, as it were, a new
revelation to his hearers, and "he taught them as
one having authority." All this is indicated, plainly
enough, in the austere morality, the sharp transitions,
the strange and winning sweetness, the tender and
bright imagery, the perfect expression of religious
trust, that make the Sermon on the Mount different
in kind from all other existing words, — from the calm
SYMPATHY WITH THE POPULAR FEELING. 15
beatitudes of its opening to the stern and menacing
parable at its close. This we must take as the type of
the teaching of Jesus in its earlier stage, apart from
all critical questions that touch its literary form or the
sources of its doctrine. The swift flow and the vivid
personality we find in it are the very stamp, the very
person, so to speak, of the young prophet of Galilee.
But this is not the person of the Jewish Messiah,
even by the highest Christian interpretation we can
give that title. The consciousness of this special
mission was developed in the mind of Jesus later than
this, and gradually. If it had crossed his thought be-
fore, the scene of the Temptation seems to show that it
had been definitely put aside. But it lay, so to speak,
very near, and offered itself once and again. With-
out any doubt he had been nurtured in that fervent
patriotic hope whose peculiar home was Galilee, and
felt it as strongly as any of his countrymen. And,
again, the words of John the Baptist had greatly
quickened that restless and eager expectation in the
general mind, which began already passionately to
demand the coming of a Deliverer. Remember, too,
how near, in the mental perspective, was that day of
sudden glory which had redeemed a martyr people
from a yoke more cruel and seemingly as strong as
that of Rome; and how the name of Elias the fore-
runner, mysteriously hinted by Malachi, and repeated
in more vehement strain in the prophecy of Enoch,
was already current in men's mouths.
Now it was not the words of purely religious teach-
ing in the discourse of Jesus, it was not the moral
loftiness, or the strong appeal to conscience, that
16
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
made the people's heart acknowledge its King in him,
and so (as it were) flashed back the conviction upon
his own.
It was rather those other signs of personal
power that went with his word. It was that his
presence, by some unexplained force, could stir great
multitudes, as the waves of the sea are moved by the
wind or lifted by the moon; that his voice could
soothe brooding insanity, and control the wild de-
moniac, and charm away the passion of despair or
grief; that healing went from his touch, and sick
men in his sight became conscious of new health and
strength, it was these things that so wrought on
them that they "were ready to take him by force
and make him a king."
Now when a man becomes aware in himself of
some rare, perhaps unparalleled, personal power, —
power, too, of a sort that distinctly imposes on him a
special mission to his fellow-men, a task to fulfil
altogether his own, and a destiny apart from theirs,
this conviction is apt to come upon him with awe
and sadness and a certain terror. "Ah, Lord God!"
said Jeremiah, "behold, I cannot speak, for I am a
child." But the Lord said, "Say not, I am a child;
for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and
whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak."
This spiritual crisis, we may conceive, came to
Jesus not before but during his public ministry. It
is indicated by his shrinking from the observation
and contact of men; by his spending whole nights
apart in prayer; by the Transfiguration, in which he
is forewarned of "the decease which he must accom-
plish at Jerusalem." Before it, his words are such as
THE ENTRANCE INTO JERUSALEM.
17
I have spoken of, the deep conviction of moral
truth, the pure poetry of the religious life. After
it, we have his vehement appeals to the Jewish peo-
ple, his passionate denunciations of their timeserving
and false leaders, his brooding tenderness over the
near fate of Jerusalem, his whip of small cords for
the traders of the temple, his apocalyptic visions
of the coming terror, his vague but awful hints con-
veyed in parables of the Virgins and of the impend-
ing Judgment.
These all belong to what we may call the later or
Messianic period of his ministry. I do not mean
that in its essential spiritual elements, in its assertion
of righteousness and mercy, not partiality and wrath,
as the heart of the Law, this second period was at all
altered from the spirit of the first; but only that its
force was narrowed more and more in a single chan-
nel, towards a special end. How distinctly he may
have thought of a national rescue and triumph like
that of Judas the Maccabee as a possible thing, be-
fore the great shadow fell upon him in the Garden of
Gethsemane, we are not, perhaps, entitled to judge.
If he did think of it as possible, we may be sure it
was by way of divine miracle, not of human valor.
There was one hour when it would almost seem as if
he accepted this conception of the Messiah's work,
- when he rode into Jerusalem over palm-leaves and
garments strewn in the way. There was one moment
when a word from him might have raised a storm of
popular passion, and possibly have secured a few days
of bloody triumph, like that which, forty years after-
wards, went before the final tragedy, when the
B
18
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
recognized Messianic war-cry, "Son of David, to the
rescue!" broke out in the crowd, and "all the city
was shaken, as by an earthquake," as he entered it.*
But this most powerful appeal to the frenzy of the
hour passed by him, like the rest. And it takes noth-
ing from the serene altitude of his spirit in the hour
of martyrdom, if we assume that it was won at last in
answer to his passionate prayer in the agony of bloody
sweat; and that the cup which he prayed might pass
from him held in it the disenchantment of a glorious,
unselfish, patriotic dream.
That dream-the dream of present deliverance
from the alien yoke was shared by those who had
caught imperfectly his spirit, and who, with mistaken
thought but loyal heart, continued to believe in him.
The belief in him had grown upon them till it had
altogether possessed their souls; and life itself was not
longer possible to them without it. His spiritual
and ethical interpretation of the great Hope had defi-
nitely resulted for us, and for them as fast as they
were able to receive it so―in emancipating it from all
boundaries of race or time, and making it signify the
deliverance of the soul of man from everything that is
evil, and a world-wide reign of righteousness. But
we know how long they clung to those narrow ren-
derings; how persistently they looked for his visible.
coming in the clouds; what plain words of promise
they believed had been audibly spoken to them by
angels out of the sky; how passionately a remnant,
*So we may understand the expression éσeíσon (Matt. xxi. 10).
The force of the cry Hosanna! ("Save now!") was suggested to
me in a conversation with Rabbi Gottheil.
THE SECOND ADVENT.
19
under the disdainful title of Ebionite or Nazarene, or
hiding, perhaps, in the disguise of the holy order
of the Essenes, clung to the very soil of Palestine
where had walked those blessed feet which they had
seen "nailed for our advantage on the bitter cross,'
and looked patiently for that vision of the Son of
Man, even from the blasted hill-sides of Judæa and
the ruined walls of Jerusalem.
""
But those blasted hill-sides and those ruined walls
had at length, to the great body of disciples, broken
the spell, weakened by years yet not wholly lost, by
which their eyes were holden so that they should not
know their Master. At first they had pieced out (as
it were) the outline of a life that in its earthly ap-
pearing was defeated and broken, by visions borrowed
from old seers and their interpreters. They had ad-
journed to a second advent* that perfect fulfilment
of his work which was wanting in the first. They
even clung to a doubtful prophecy that it was fore-
ordained there should be two Messiahs: the son of
Joseph must first come, to suffer defeat and death;
and then the son of David should come to victory
and endless reign.† And upon those of their coun-
trymen who had been won to share their faith there
came a passion of remorse at his rejection, which was
only pacified, at length, by the assurance that his
death was the one appointed Sacrifice, which at once
completed and dissolved the system of ritual expiation
that had made the corner-stone of Hebrew polity. +
*Taрovola. See especially First Thessalonians.
† Compare "Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 405–409.
As shown in the argument of the "Epistle to the Hebrews."
20
THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST.
But in the lapse of years, in the growth of other
sympathies and duties, and the keen interests of daily
life, all that was special and local in the Messianic
hope must inevitably thin out and disappear. How
it became transfigured in the minds of those who had
not known Jesus after the flesh, till for the Messiah
we have at length the Christ in history, belongs
rather to a study of the life and work of the Apos-
tle Paul, who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews; who
"for the hope of Israel" was bound in chains; but
who was also the great free-thinker of the Apostolic
era, and has been the real interpreter, some would
say even the founder, of Christianity for the modern
world.
1
II.
SAINT PAUL.
HERE is nowhere a finer challenge to the histori-
T cal imagination
cal imagination- that is, to our power of seeing
things in a former time just as they really were-
than that offered by the very beginnings of Christian-
ity as an organized power, as a social force. Let us try
to take up that challenge as if the facts were all new
to us, and we had to study them for the first time.
First of all, what was the source of the indomitable
faith, the victorious moral force, which made that
little company of disciples the corner-stone of a new
order of civilization? How was it that the incon-
spicuous gathering of about a hundred and twenty in
the upper chamber at Jerusalem had in it the seed of
a great growth, which spread its roots amidst the de-
cay of the old order of things, and flourished most.
abundantly when all that splendid structure of art
and empire was a mass of mouldering ruin?
A full answer to this question would cover the
whole ground of the early Christian history. With-
out attempting so much as that, it is enough to say
that every great political or social revolution will
have its type in the life, the character, the work, of
some one man; and that the great moral and spiritual
force we are considering is typified, more than any-
22
SAINT PAUL.
where else, in the vehement conviction, the ardent
temper, the impassioned eloquence, the organizing
skill, the personal experience, and the vivid religious
imagination of the Apostle Paul.
But in
besides
He is the man of genius and the man of power of
the first Christian age. Comte calls him, frankly, the
real founder of Christianity, holding the legend of
Jesus to be a pale and ineffectual myth.
Jesus himself, as already seen, there were
the indefinable something which resides in person-
ality at least two elements, one of vast personal
force, and the other of great historical significance: his
intense conception of purely moral truth and of re-
ligion as a life, and his equally intense conviction of
his calling as Messiah of the Jews. These were the
necessary antecedents of the revolution, looked at
from its purely human side. But, as soon as the
movement widens out beyond the narrow range of a
merely personal and local influence, then the life and
work of Paul come to be just as essential to any real
understanding of it. To show how that indispensable
service was enlisted, and how the new movement was
inspired and guided by it, is what we mean by an
intelligent study of his life.
The martyrdom of Stephen and the journey to Da-
mascus mark the critical moment of Paul's conver-
sion. The Council at Jerusalem, which is put some
fifteen years later, marks the critical moment when
Christianity burst the bounds of Judaism, and stood
before the world as an independent faith, in short,
when the mind and influence of Paul had become
predominant.
THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY.
23
But for each of these moments there is a previous
question, before it becomes intelligible for the first,
What was the bond of union among the first disci-
ples, that held them together so tenaciously and so
long? and for the second, What was the attraction in
them that drew the gentiles that way, so that it was
a privilege to join their body, and there was a de-
mand for the grave concessions (as they regarded
them) which they felt bound to make?
It is easy to answer both these questions by saying
that it was all a miracle, and then to take the only
record we have as simply a statement of the fact.
For my part, I do not see any reason to doubt that
the early Church had extraordinary powers-such as
gifts of healing, insight, and fervent speech - which
they would necessarily think miraculous. "Every
good gift," says James, "comes from the Father of
lights." Similar gifts have been asserted, with sin-
cerity and often no doubt with truth, by various
bodies of religionists in every age.
But take the account as literally as we will, that is
only to cut the knot which we are trying to untie:
the facts; so seen, are ascertained, not understood. We
want, if we can, to see them just as they lay in the
minds of the witnesses, and as we should see them if
we could cross-question those witnesses.
This we
cannot do. We can only look at the thing in a broad
way. We hold the facts, as it were, in solution in our
mind, and wait for them to crystallize in such shape.
as shall most naturally represent them to our mind.
We listen, then, to the reports that spread abroad
that the crucified Jesus had actually reappeared in
24
SAINT PAUL.
the flesh; we see the eager readiness with which those
reports were received and cherished; and then the
lingering expectation that he might resume his public
career and assert a triumphant messiahship appears
to give way, almost insensibly, to a belief among his
followers that he had been taken up visibly into the
clouds, and would presently reappear, just as visibly,
to establish his victorious reign.
I take it for granted that this belief of theirs was
very precise and simple, and that there was nothing
in their habit of mind which made it at all difficult
for them to receive it so. As to the narratives of the
Resurrection and Ascension, I do not undertake to ex-
plain them all away, or in fact to explain them at all.
From the arguments of the early apologists, it is clear
that they were received as precise and literal fact by
the general body of believers. But no amount of tes-
timony would be enough, to the mind of the present
day, to convince men as a new fact that a body once
really dead had been restored to life; still less, that it
had been actually seen to pass into the sky "with
flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the per-
fection of man's nature," as the later creed declares.
Such, at least, was not the view of Paul; who, in-
deed, asserts very earnestly the reality of the resur-
rection and the glorified life of Jesus in the eternal
state, but with equal explicitness declares that not
flesh and blood, but a "spiritual body," is that which
can really inherit the kingdom of heaven.
The first element of power in the early Church
was, then, a distinct and literal belief of certain facts,
coupled with a very positive and confident assurance
GROWTH OF THE COMMUNITY.
25
that a definite prophecy was going to be fulfilled.
That such an assurance is a real power and a bond of
union, however shadowy its ground may appear to us,
we see in those sects of Adventists who have appeared
at intervals ever since, and who, after eighteen cen-
turies of disappointment, are probably as numerous in
our day as ever. But we must conceive, if we can,
how intense and vivid, beyond all modern comparison,
this expectation of Christ's second coming must have
been in that age, and so assume it here as the first
unquestionable and all-powerful bond of union; re-
membering, too, that at this point we are dealing only
with Jews, at the very heart of the long period of
intense and heated expectation which we have called
the Messianic Era.
But this is only one point. Why was it that a little
inner circle of Jews, whose leaders were "unlearned
and ignorant men," more intensely Jewish, and (so to
speak) more bigoted and narrow than the average of
their countrymen,*- why was it that they could exert
such an immense power of attraction and persuasion
that in one day three thousand were added to their
number, and in a few months they reckoned a com-
munity of five thousand souls, and in a few years
multitudes were knocking hard for admission at their
doors, and in a few generations the whole Roman
empire was at their feet? Never in all history has
there been the parallel case of a growth so genuine,
so vast, or so powerful, out of what was at the start
a purely moral movement, or a purely religious im-
pulse.
*See Acts ii. 46, iv. 13.
2
26
SAINT PAUL.
A full answer to the question includes a great va-
riety of things: earnest faith, strong mutual attach-
ment, a common loyalty, skilful organization, good
lives, gifts of healing and the like (which they called
"powers," and which we call "miracles"), the con-
tagious enthusiasm that often comes from isolation
and from martyrdom. But the power of the organ-
ized movement at the start seems best explained by
what we are told of the socialistic sentiment and
theory of the early Church.
believed that aught which he possessed was his own,
but they had all things common." That is, they did
really try to put in practice, in the most literal way,
those precepts of boundless and uncalculating gen-
erosity which are contained in the Sermon on the
Mount.
"No man among them
And this, if we will look at it, was of itself a
prodigious force. Its power is commonly seen not in
the well educated or in the well-to-do, who in general
know nothing of the socialistic sentiment and rather
hold it in contempt. But look at the prodigious
fanaticism it evoked in the first French Revolution;
look at its terrific and obstinate strength in the Paris
Commune of 1871; look at the martyrdoms willingly
undergone for it in Russia at this day, where it has
been enthusiastically embraced by high-born men and
ladies delicately bred, who submit to persecution, con-
fiscation, exile more bitter than death; * look at the
* "Students leave the lecture-rooms to mix with the peasants;
princes leave their palaces to seek work in the factories; noble
girls flee from their families to go into service as cooks and seam-
stresses; and, if they are disturbed in the midst of their propa-
ganda by the police, they wander with unbroken courage to
THE MARTYRDOM OF STEPHEN.
27
grand, almost sublime, even if mistaken munificence
with which the workingmen of England and America.
in these last years have borne one another's burdens,
so as to win some far-off victory in the battle of capi-
tal and labor; and then you see that the socialistic
sentiment is one of the great moral forces to move
human society to its foundations. Not sordid interest,
but uncalculating sentiment, is what carries the day
in the great crises of humanity.
The early disciples were hard-working, plain-speak-
ing people; "not many great, not many rich, not
many mighty, not many noble were called." A part
of their working faith was a most generous, a most
unsparing doctrine of the sharing of goods and bur-
dens. Read the story of Ananias and Sapphira.
Read what Paul says of missionary and charitable
gifts. Read the Epistle of James, which in its de-
nouncing of the vanity, wealth, and fashion that began
to creep in, speaks the very heart of the first church
at Jerusalem, as it echoes the very thought of those
who assail most formidably a proud, rich, and dom-
inant ecclesiasticism at this day.
A crisis came to the affairs of the church at Jerusa-
lem, after six or eight years of unmolested growth, with
the death of Stephen. He was a sort of half-Greek,
a man of greater vigor, boldness, and mental breadth
than the rest, and is held to have been, in a sense, the
forerunner of Paul. His martyrdom shows the first
sharp collision caused by the Greek or foreign element
Siberia, march defiantly to the gallows, always setting the dan-
gerous, contagious example of triumphant martyrdom. Of what
use, then, are blows, chains, the scaffold?"
28
SAINT PAUL,
<<
asserting itself in the Church. Now Paul-at this
time known by the Jewish name of Saul was
consenting to his death." He was a man of thirty, in
the hot glow of a first conviction, trained austerely
as a Jew of the straitest sort, and doubtless thought
he ought to do something by way of testimony
against these disturbers of the comfortable religious
peace.
-
But his heart was very much larger than his creed.
How much he had been impressed in a quieter way
before, by the spectacle of that close-clinging and de-
voted life of the Christian community, nothing is
told. But the shock of that first martyrdom - the
noble head of Stephen, with a face "as it had been.
an angel's," battered out of human likeness by jagged
stones flung from fierce and cruel hands of a mob of
bigots right there on the pavement before his eyes -
struck him like a blow. That was putting the whole
thing in quite another shape. Out of sheer wilful
consistency, as we may imagine, he proceeded to carry
out his commission, "breathing out threatening and
slaughter," and to put it in execution as far as Da-
mascus, some hundred and fifty miles away. And
then we know the story: the blinding flash from
the sky; the voice as of the very Crucified One in
his heart, in sorrow, rebuke, appeal; the three days'
groping in darkness; and then the sudden, eager,
glad embracing of a new life.
It is quite beside my purpose to give even a brief
sketch of Paul's life, or anything like an analysis of
his system of belief. A single glance we may be per-
mitted at his person, as described by the earliest wit-
HIS PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS..
29
nesses: a man's physical frame and countenance are
often the best type of the personal force he carries.
Paul, then, according to the legends, was a man lit-
tle of stature under five feet high they say, high-
shouldered, beetle-browed, stooping, with head bent
forward, his beard and hair at middle life of an iron-
gray; his brow wide, his face thin, his eye deep and
somewhat sad; the dark eye, the marked features,
we may imagine of the strong Jewish type. His
bodily presence was weak and his speech contempti-
ble, so his enemies said. That his speech was hesi-
tating and slow, when not roused, we may believe
easily enough: it was so with Demosthenes; it was
so with Mahomet, who, next to Paul, has shown the
most burning and effective eloquence of the Semitic
race, and in whom, like Paul, that barrier of hesitating
and imperfect utterance gave way on occasion to a
hot flood of passionate and eager words, that stirred
great tides of popular conviction. How vivid and
dramatic that eloquence of Paul's could be, we see in
the noble speech before Festus; how dignified, seri-
ous, and apt, in the address on Mars' Hill. But these
were flashes of power, with misgivings and rebuffs
between. "I was with you," he says, " in weakness,
and fear, and much trembling." "Lest I should be
exalted above measure, there was given me a thorn in
the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me." This
thorn may have been (as Dr. Brown of Edinburgh
thinks) a dimness of sight - probably with much
pain ever after the shock that blinded him on the
road to Damascus; but perhaps we shall understand
it better if we connect it with that moral conflict of
30
SAINT PAUL.
flesh and spirit, which I shall speak of later, as more
than all else the source of Paul's peculiar power.
We get a much more vivid notion of his interior
person (so to speak) from Paul's own words, than we
do of his bodily presence through doubtful tradition.
I will recall a few phrases which reflect the native
pride, the utter lack of vanity, the sensitiveness to
affront, the eager craving for sympathy, that go along
with such a temperament:-" It is a very small thing
that I should be judged of you, or any man's judg-
ment; he that judgeth me is the Lord." "We have
labored night and day that we might not be charge-
able to any of you while we preached; as you know,
these hands have provided for my necessities." "We
both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buf-
feted, and have no certain dwelling-place; we work
with our own hands; we are made as the filth of
the earth, the offscouring of all things." And again :
"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed;
perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, yet not
forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; servants
of God in much endurance, in afflictions, in necessi-
ties, in distresses, in stripes, imprisonments, tumults,
labors, watchings, fastings, in honor and dishonor,
in good report and evil report; deceivers, and yet
true; unknown, and yet well known; dying, and be-
hold we live; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor,
yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet pos-
sessing all things." The vehemence and the love of
paradox, which run so well with many veins of reli-
gious experience, show strongly here.
And again, of the way of life: that had fightings
HARDSHIPS OF HIS LIFE.
31
without, and fears within. "Of the Jews," he says,
"five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice
I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Thrice
I suffered shipwreck: a night and a day I have been in
the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters,
in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen,
in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in
perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils
among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness,
in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings
often, in cold and nakedness; and, besides all these
things, which are without, what comes upon me daily,
anxiety about all the churches." This, it will be re-
membered, is no idle complaint or appeal to pity, but
an indignant retort to those enemies of his at Corinth
who appear to have called him weak, irritable, and
(( a fool."
"What do you mean, to weep and break
my heart?" he says at Caesarea; "I am ready, not
only to be bound, but to die at Jerusalem." "It is
for the hope of Israel," he says at Rome, "that I am
bound with this chain." And to the Roman gov-
ernor, "Would God that not only thou, but all that
hear me to-day, were both almost and altogether such
as I am, except these bonds."
In such words as these we already find hints of the
jealousies and disputes which followed him five and
twenty years, all the way from conversion to martyr-
dom. It was with much natural misgiving that the
disciples admitted him of their company at all and
very reluctantly that they let him speak frankly to
the Gentiles in their name. Even then (as we have
seen) taunting opponents would sneer at his stature,
32
SAINT PAUL.
or gait, or the imperfections of his speech. Men of
narrower culture and less ardent temper would set
themselves against his innovations, and he must
withstand them to the face," as he did Peter and
James at Antioch; failing so of his own fond dream
of a communion in which diversities of gifts should
be reconciled in the bond of peace, and sharing, in-
stead, the numberless frets and irritations that beset
a divided party, outwardly bound together, inwardly
sundered and harassed.
The work he has painfully done at Corinth is half
undone by jealous brethren, who throw out slurs
against his authority or his soundness in the faith.
Some officious intruder has "bewitched his foolish
Galatians" with scruples he thought silenced long
ago, and put him to the double task of defending his
own character, and arguing all over again the first
principles of his gospel. And it is a symptom at
once painful and strange of those early controversies,
that more than a generation after his death his
memory was attacked, under a false name, by the
partisans of Peter; and phrases of his writings are
travestied in Antinomian discourses ascribed to the
arch-heretic Simon Magus.
Doubtless there would be something to say on the
other side, if we had the words of any who were near
enough to say it. We too, if we were near enough,
should most likely have found faults in what we
dimly see now as excellences; should have shared
the jealous alarm of the earlier disciples at his daring
innovations on their faith; should have resented his
off-hand claim of official equality and mental supe-
HIS LAST JOURNEY.
33
riority; should have joined the rest in calling him
testy, irascible, and overbearing. But these small
personal traits fade in the perspective of time; and
we remember only the strong, brave, ardent, tender-
hearted man, whose very faults of temperament were
a sort of goad in the work he had to do. We remem-
ber only that that eager and many-sided mind has
done for us the necessary task of transforming the
Galilæan idyll, the tragedy at Jerusalem, the narrow
Messianic hope, from a local tradition to an imperish-
able possession of mankind.
This is the verdict of history upon him, and it is
just. But it is also made easier to us by the fact that
it is through his own words we know him best. The
most transparent of men unconsciously idealizes his
thought and aim. In the very effort to interpret
himself to others, not only what is most real, but
what is best in him, comes clearest into view. So
that it is to Paul's advantage, as well as ours, that he
is his own interpreter.
A few words may tell us the noble and fit close of
the story. Some Jewish fanatics had conspired, and
sworn his death. Forty of them vowed that "they
would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul."
Rescued by the captain of the guard, he appealed to
Rome. Naturally, he "had a great desire these many
years" to visit the Eternal City, then the sovereign
centre of mind as well as empire. A stormy passage,
broken by shipwreck on the coast of Malta, brought
him among a few friends there whom he had once
met at Corinth: here was the little nucleus of the
Roman Church. After two years there, busy and
2*
C
34
SAINT PAUL.
unmolested, -a prisoner, as it were, on parole, — he
travelled, as the traditions say, westward into Spain,
and even to the "farthest isle," by which some under-
stand England, or even Ireland. When, some time
later, Nero (as the people charged) set fire to Rome
in his brutal and insolent caprice, he turned the
charge upon the Christians, says Tacitus; threw them
to wild beasts in the arena, or wrapped them in tarred
cloth and set them afire at night to light the imperial
gardens. Paul was brought more than once before
the judgment. "At my first answer," he said, “no
man stood with me, but all deserted me; but the
Lord stood by me and strengthened me, and I was de-
livered from the lion's mouth." As a Roman citizen
he might not be cast to the beasts, or die a slave's
death on the cross, but was beheaded with the sword.
"I have fought a good fight," he said, while waiting
his doom. "I have finished my course, I have kept
the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a
crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous
judge, shall give me at that day."
"*
Recognizing that the forces which guide human
events are essentially moral forces, and have their
source in men's conviction, passion, and will, and
that events themselves are (in a sense) but the reflex,
at least the outgrowth, of personal character, I have
gathered thus a few scattered phrases in which Paul
lets in light on his temper, motive, and acts. Per-
* 2 Tim. iv. 7, 8, 16, 18. I say nothing about the genuineness
of the epistle, which is well known to be doubtful. But it is cer-
tainly easier to concede it to be Paul's, than to imagine it written
by anybody else.
HIS OPINIONS AND WRITINGS.
35
haps, with all these, we should not appreciate the
strong hold he had on his friends by way of sympa-
thy, but for those touching words in the parting at
Miletus: "And when he had thus spoken, he knelt
down and prayed with them all; and they all wept
sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, sorrow-
ing most of all for the words he spoke, that they
should see his face no more.” *
We see, then, that the immense influence which
went forth from Paul's life perhaps the most re-
markable, considered in all its effects, that ever flowed
from the action of a single mind had its main
source in the character of the man. His opinions
are of secondary consequence; in fact, they belong
as much to the time as to him, so far as they are
merely speculative. But, so far as they grow out of
his character, and express, not simply belief, but pas-
sionate conviction in him, they become most impor-
tant elements of power. They are the very avenues
and conductors by which, as from an electric pile,
that vivid force made itself effectually felt.
A word, first, of the documents in which these
opinions are found. It will be convenient to divide
Paul's epistles, roughly, into three groups; assuming
the Thessalonians (I. and II.) as the earliest; then the
four great epistles, Romans, Corinthians (I., II.), and
Galatians; lastly, the Ephesians, Philippians, and Co-
lossians. That to the Hebrews is almost certainly
not his; and the three short "pastoral" letters to
Timothy and Titus are of doubtful genuineness, and
of less doctrinal account.
•
*Acts xx. 36-38.
36
SAINT PAUL.
Strictly speaking, only the main central group is
quite undisputed; but the first nine mentioned have
a close connection and a like interest. They mark
three stages of a well-defined system of thought,
which we know best by the name of Paul. This sys-
tem turns upon two points or pivots, one of chief
importance in the history of speculative doctrine, the
other in the view of Christianity as a moral power
in the world. I shall attempt here only a brief and
imperfect exhibition of each.
I. Paul's doctrine of Christ is not only very marked
and striking in itself, but it shows exactly the transi-
tion from the Messiah-doctrine of the Jews to that
order of speculation which has been dominant in the
Church ever since.
as a man
In trying to understand this phase of opinion, we
must bear in mind that Paul had never known Jesus
"after the flesh," as he phrases it. If
he had, we should probably have never known any-
thing of his Christology. He claimed to have re-
ceived knowledge of his Lord direct, by revelation.
Such knowledge must have been strongly colored by
sentiment and imagination, especially in such a mind
as Paul's, impressed as he always was by the power-
ful and haunting remembrance of the vision near
Damascus. Whatever else we may think of Paul's
opinion on this matter, we must attempt, at any rate,
to conceive it as psychologically true.
We must remember, too, that he was first of all
and intensely a Jew, in belief, in habit, and in edu-
cation. His starting-place was not the simple and
unwarped desire of speculative truth, which we might
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PAUL
37
look for in a thorough-bred Greek philosopher, but an
eager attachment to and apprehension of a particular
order of truth, developed in Hebrew schools, assum-
ing a distinct historic background, and a definite
grasp upon the future. The widening out and ideal-
izing of his earlier messianic creed we may conceive
as the work and the growth of those secluded years
in Tarsus, after his conversion, before Barnabas sum-
moned him to the front at Antioch.*
†
1. First of all, accordingly, we have the fervent ex-
pression, in “Thessalonians," of faith in the risen and
glorified Messiah, and the vivid assurance, which, if
not Paul himself, at any rate his hearers must have
taken as fact, to be literally and presently brought to
pass: "The Lord himself shall descend from heaven
with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and
with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall
rise first; then we that are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet
the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the
Lord." +
This second coming of Christ has about it still the
vindictive temper, and the promise of a sweet revenge,
so characteristic of the elder creed: "It is a righteous.
thing with God to recompense tribulation to them
that trouble you"; and Jesus will be "revealed from
heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking
vengeance on them that know not God, . . . . who shall
*About A. D. 40–50.
† All the allusions to Christ in the first epistle, and most of
those in the second, are qualified by the expression “waiting,”
"hope," "coming" (rapovσía), or the like.
1 Thess. iv. 16, 17.
38
SAINT PAUL.
1
""*
be punished with everlasting destruction from the pres-
ence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.'
This is the first stage of Paul's thought: it is simply
a vivid and expanded copy of that vision of Daniel,
repeated as a promise and a solace to a longing, wait-
ing, suffering church.
2. But this first close and impatient expectation
must pass away. Incessant cares, varieties of peril,
daily duties, the need of controversy, instruction, and
advice, all served to put off, thin out, refine this grosser
vision, and irradiate it with a purer, inner light.
"(
In the "Corinthians" Christ is first of all a spiritual
lord and chief, "head of every man," soul of a body
having many members, the mystic "rock" of the old
covenant, the source of doctrine and authority, in
whose name believers are washed, sanctified, justi-.
fied," "by whom are all things, and we by him."
Paul knows him now in person:
"Have I not seen
Jesus Christ our Lord?" He speaks of " visions and
revelations of the Lord," which he distinguishes from
anything that can be had by sight of the eye or
knowledge after the flesh.
To the Galatians, again, he speaks of Christ as the
Deliverer who has "redeemed us from the curse of
the law" and has lifted off yokes and burdens: the
disciple is "no more a servant, but a son; and, if a
son, then an heir of God through Christ."
But perhaps it is in the epistle to the Romans that,
after toiling through much knotty and tangled argu-
ment about the law of sin and the soul struggling in
bonds of flesh, he bursts (in the magnificent eighth
* 2 Thess. i. 6-9; compare 1 Thess. ii. 14-16.
EPISTLES OF CAPTIVITY.
39
chapter) into the very noblest expression of grateful
joy in Christ as a pure spiritual presence, felt in the
soul, to reconcile, comfort, and uplift. It is still the
risen Christ in heaven, "at the right hand of God,” as
in the old prophetic vision; but it is now of a purely
gracious celestial force he speaks, manifesting itself
in the soul's own comfort, joy, victory, strength, and
peace. "I am persuaded that neither death nor life,
nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things
present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor
any other created thing,* shall be able to separate us
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord."
3. The later letters have been called "epistles of
captivity." Paul writes as a "prisoner of the Lord"
from Rome, in declining strength, debarred from his
eager activities, very likely in clear anticipation of
the inevitable end. His thought of Christ is now
wholly reverent, vague, idealizing. He has given full
play to the imagination, fed both by the familiar
teaching of Jewish schools and by the forms of specu-
lative philosophy that had taken so strong hold on
the Jewish mind in Alexandria and elsewhere, which
had come to him, doubtless, in the way of his learned
education. Now, the Christ of his revering fancy
retains no more the sharp outline of the messianic
hope, retains but the faintest trace of human person-
ality; he becomes a type of that Divine Energy which
it was the chief study of religious speculation then to
personify in some form less vague than the Infinite,
less precise than a Person or a Will.
* More strictly, "any different order of creation."
40
SAINT PAUL.
•
Paul does not use the phraseology about the Divine
Word which presently became so familiar in Christian
philosophy; but the Christ of the "Philippians" and
"Colossians" is a bright and vivid reflex of those
emanations of half-oriental imagination: "the bright-
ness of the Father's glory and express image of his
person"; "in the form of God, though not claiming
equality with God"; a pre-existent being, who "takes
upon him the form of a servant"; "image of the in-
visible, first-born of the whole creation"; "through
whom all things were créated, in heaven or earth."
This eager, fervent, passionate expression of reverence
and homage, cleaving still to the image of a suffer-
ing and glorified Saviour, to one who, "though he was
rich, yet for our sakes became poor," and "took on
him the condition of a slave," to die a slave's death
on the cross,* retaining as it does the phrases that
had been the familiar utterance of Jewish hope, is
the final exaltation and idealizing of that hope. It
was the one thing which- by a splendid quickening
vision, by a great surge, as it were, of religious en-
thusiasm, and warm, passionate emotion-floated the
yet crude and hesitating thought of the Christian
body beyond the boundaries that held it, and made
possible the conquests of an aggressive faith.
II. The other point, still more important in con-
sidering Christianity as a moral power in the world,
is Paul's doctrine of Sin and Justification. I should
like, if I could, to get rid of all theological preposses-
* This is the image which more than any other impressed the
imagination of the early Church, and is most dwelt on in appeals
as to the character of Christ's sacrifice.
THE GENTILE WORLD.
41
sion in regard to the meaning of those terms. Paul
was, first of all, a Jew, "a Hebrew of the Hebrews."
Now, whatever else the Hebrew tradition taught, it
certainly did teach the worship of "a Power, not
ourselves, that makes for righteousness." It certainly
did teach, along with much that was narrow, perverse,
grotesque, a very close and anxious obedience to a
"law of righteousness." By a thousand petty symbols
of ritual purification it enforced the notion of an ideal
purity as an attribute of God, and as the aim of man's
better life. And over against all this, conceived as it
was with the impassioned vividness characteristic of
the man, Paul saw what?
I will not speak in general terms of " a world lying in
wickedness," the familiar exaggeration of the apolo-
gists, one side all black, the other all bright. It was
no such thing. The life of Agricola or Germanicus,
as afterwards of Trajan, shows that manhood and
public virtue were not extinct in Rome. The stories
of Eponina, of Arria, of the elder Agrippina, show
that womanly honor and domestic love still remained.
The correspondence of Pliny, and the later possibili-
ties of the Antonines and of Epictetus, show that
many of the graces of life, and some of its noblest
virtues, survived among those who either had heard
nothing of the new faith, or else deliberately preferred
the old. But I will say, for specific charges, read the
first chapter of "Romans"; and, for comment, read
Tacitus, read Juvenal, read Seneca, read if you will
Petronius, written at the very time Paul lived "in bis
own hired house" at Rome.
Against that insolent riot of indulgence his ethics,
42
SAINT PAUL.
at once austere and humane, stands out in superb
relief. What he calls Sin had a very real and intense
signification to his mind; it forced a heavy burden
and challenge upon his conscience.* In what he says
of the Divine judgment of sin he does not once appeal,
except by vague allusion, to the terrors of a future
world, so strongly pronounced in the Jewish popular
imagination, and reflected so powerfully in the Apoca-
lypse and the parables of Jesus. He speaks of the
evil thing itself: the source of it, in human passion
and infirmity; the law of it, that it makes man its
slave; the result of it, in wretchedness, despair, and
death.
Paul's theory of moral evil is mixed up with some
traditional belief of inheritance from Adam; with
some technical philosophy of a threefold nature,
body, soul, and spirit; with some shadowy view of a
spiritual body" in the resurrection, to be free from
the corruption of grosser flesh. But, apart from all
matters of mere opinion, I do not know where we
could go for an equally keen and profound sense of
moral evil in itself. And, go where we will, I do not
think we can find anywhere so noble, so delicate, so
elevated, so austerely sweet, a code of ethics as we
find scattered through the writings of Paul. The
defects lie on the side of social questions as they
come to us among our political liberties in a more
complex civilization; the errors are almost all from
a certain ascetic vein (not very dangerous to us), or
Sin (åµapría) is conceived by Paul, in strict accord with the
realistic philosophy of the time, as an objective reality, and not
merely a phase of moral experience. See Romans vii. 17.
THE ETHICS OF PAUL.
43
else from sundry odd prejudices and grossnesses of
the Jewish schools.
The Pauline ethics differs from that of the Gospel
in being not purely ideal or sentimental, but practi-
cal and definite. For it is to be noticed that the
Christian scriptures contain, not one type of ethics,
but two one purely individual, ideal, spiritual, found
in the Gospels; the other social and organic, assum-
ing the mixed duties and relations of a somewhat
complex society, found in the Epistles.* The back-
ground of the first is the simplicity of village life, or
else the austere purity of Hebrew worship; the other
is incessantly conscious of sharp contrasts in human
condition, and of the corruption and cruelty of that
profligate age. And, in Paul's exposition of it, it is
matched, intentionally and intensely, point for point,
against the degrading doctrine and practice of the
gentile world. I am sorry that I cannot take time
to illustrate this; but there is less need, since nine
tenths of the best Christian teaching on the subject
(it is hardly too much to say) is made up of illustra-
tion and explanation of the texts of Paul.
But, if this were all, it would not constitute, prop-
erly speaking, a moral force, any more than that
average tone of exposition just spoken of. It might
amount to no more than the eloquent declamation
of Stoics like Seneca, weak-kneed when the special
*It is worth while to notice here that the exaggeration of the
former type led to the various forms of Christian asceticism and
solitary life, while the other made the base of ecclesiastical organ-
ization; and that they will be found represented respectively in
the distinction, so sharply drawn in later years, between the regu-
lar (or monastic) and the secular clergy.
44
SAINT PAUL.
temptation came: indeed, it is believed by many,
with some show of likelihood, that Seneca was a seri-
ous student and correspondent of Paul; or it might
amount to no more than the gloomy and sceptic sat-
ire of Tacitus or Juvenal. What made Paul's doc-
trine of sin a moral power among men was his own
conviction of sin. Here, again, I have to use a theo-
logical phrase, reluctantly, because there is no other.
But the fact itself is easy to see in a study of the
man. A certain nervous and morbid temperament,
native in him, was prone to exaggerate whatever
touched personal feeling; his strict training in the
Law made him intensely conscious of whatever bore
on personal conduct; a certain eagerness to assume
responsibility, to make any given task his own, is
seen in his hasty undertaking of the charge to crush
the Galilæan heresy at a blow. But here was the one
horrible thing which he could never hide or disguise:
that battered head, that crushed and bleeding form of
the martyr Stephen, and he standing by, eagerly "con-
senting to his death." That one thing, in his eyes,
made him — no, showed him "the chief of sin-
ners"; and it is as if we saw him with his head
bowed and his face hidden, when he says, "I am
meanest of the apostles, and not worthy to be called
an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God."
The germ of his moral power lay in this, then, that
he frankly rated himself-not simply by self-con-
demnation and regret, but by passionate and deep
contrition among the very ones who most needed
the deliverance he announced. To exhibit this point.
fully it would be necessary to show those symptoms
HIS RELIGIOUS CONVICTION.
45
of a strange and eager craving for expiation by any
sort of religious rite, common alike in the Jewish
and Pagan world.* The real expiation, the only ex-
piation possible, Paul taught,—and he taught it with
conviction and with power because he knew it, must
be found in a crisis of religious experience, and come.
from an act of faith. All this is wrapped about in
"Galatians" with strange subtilties of argument that
mean nothing to us. It is joined in "Corinthians"
with technical points of anthropology, and curious
glimpses of personal experience. It is wrought up
in "Romans" into the most intense and passionate
expression of the burden and the terror of a soul
confronted with the awful law of holiness: “O,
wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from
the body of this death?" And then the peace, sudden
and sweet as a child's sleep after an agony of fright,
when once the reconciling moment has come:
(C The
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we
are the children of God; and if children, then heirs, -
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ!- that if we
suffer with him we may be also glorified together."
So, with all the wickedness and the bondage that
confronted him in the spectacle of the world as it
was, the gods all dying or dead, old pagan faiths
fast fading out, political freedom perished, a frenzy
of vice and a gloom of superstition invading all the
sanctuaries of human life, Paul was able to appeal
in the tone of absolute conviction, courage and hope.
Whatever was bitter and intolerable in the evil of
the world, he had shared it too. Whatever of good-
* See below, pp. 98, 99.
46
SAINT PAUL.
ness men despaired of, he not only believed in, but
knew as a fact in his own life: it had broken upon
him as a great light out of a black cloud; and so he
could change their sullen despondency into an im-
measurable and glorious hope.
For the present these are the elements of power
which we have to recognize in the life of Paul. I do
not add to them that activity in the building up of
churches, and their regulation, in which so much of
his work consisted: first, because, when the convic-
tion and the brotherhood are strong enough, they will
make their own organized forms at any rate; and
secondly, because that model organization of the
church at Rome, which was presently to embody all
of Christianity that men knew or cared about, in-
cluded so many other elements of power that we
hardly think of it as an apostolic work at all. To
discuss the forms and the beliefs of the little religious
communities which were all Paul knew, would be
mere antiquarianism. It is in no antiquarian tem-
per, but as students of those great permanent forces
which did once and can again move the world, and
create new systems and societies on the ruins of the
old, that we should try to understand the genius, the
life, and the work of the Apostle Paul.
•
III.
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND
W
CENTURY.
HEN we shift our view to the second Christian
century, the first thing that arrests us is the
wide gulf that parts us from the comparatively clear
ground of the apostolic period. The interval between
the last of Paul's undisputed epistles and the first of
the extant apologists is something more than eighty
years. It is hardly too much to say that that whole
space is covered with a heavy mist, out of which, at
its close, a few well-defined figures are seen emerging.
Any bridge across it must be built, so to speak, "in
the air." We can erect our two towers, but the cables
will not meet.
Now this period of eighty years is precisely that
covered by unsettled controversies respecting the au-
thenticity, date, and authorship of the later New Tes-
tament writings, including all the Four Gospels; or
illustrated by historical glimpses so dim and few that
a chance notice of Tacitus and an official letter of
Pliny become our most instructive documents. The
gulf hides, so to speak; the very secret of Christianity
itself; for, as we shall see further on, what we find in
germ only in the apostolic period — in particular, the
identification of the Logos with the person of Jesus-
48 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
then took root and substance and form. This subter-
ranean life of the first Christian age has its most
touching symbol in the name which belongs to just
that period, when those germs were brooding there,
"the Church of the Catacombs." Of course we do
not forget the beauty and interest of the few half-
legendary accounts we have of this period, or the
purely religious value of some of the writings of the
so-called Apostolic Fathers. But, for purposes of
strict consecutive history, it is not too much to say
that we have to jump a gulf of more than eighty
years.
This statement should not be taken for more than
it distinctly asserts. Its limitation is in the phrase
"strict consecutive history." The period spoken of
has even a rich literature of its own, including all the
Gospels (probably), as well as several of the later
Epistles, the Apocalypse, and the Apostolic Fathers.
But the authorship or date of few if any of these is
quite undisputed; while the events of the period are
almost all in good part legendary or apocryphal. The
existence of the gulf is recognized by all historians;
but its importance in the history of doctrinal develop-
ment is not always sufficiently considered.
Now the existence of this gulf is not a thing to be
particularly wondered at. A véry nearly parallel
case occurs close by in the strange intellectual slum-
ber which fell upon the Roman mind after the storms
of the Republic had subsided to a sullen peace, and
which lasted for near a century. Virgil and Horace
had both found shelter from those storms in the
patronage of Augustus; Ovid was born the year
A PERIOD OF SILENCE.
49
that Cicero died. After these court poets passed
away, only here and there a satire, or a moral essay,
or a discourse of rhetoric, breaks the long silence, till
comparative liberty and security brought with it the
great writers of the silver age. Anecdote and legend,
often apocryphal and obscure, are what make most of
such history as we have of the earlier Cæsars and
their age. So that the forty years during which Pal-
estine comes into strong relief- counting from
Matthew to Josephus make a sort of oasis in a
century extraordinarily barren of events or men,
though in the full glare of all the imperial splendor
and all the ostentatious luxury of the Rome of the
Cæsars.
I do not propose to go into any of the literary con-
troversies, or any of the curious antiquarian research,
that belong to this obscure period. My business is
simply with what we find in the condition of Chris-
tian thought at the end of it. For we must not, at all
events, suppose that thought was idle during all those
years. On the contrary, there must have been a
mental movement going on, whose activity and inten-
sity are but feebly reflected to us, partly in a few
stray expressions gathered from epistle or anecdote,
but more distinctly (as hinted before) in the figures
seen emerging from the mist that overhangs the
gulf.
In fact, the period may be best described as one of
an intense, warm, brooding life. It was a period of
incubation, during which were evolved in dim embryo
the types that shaped the theological conflicts of many
an after age. Landed well on this side of it, we find
D
3
50 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
shaped, indeed,
the Logos doctrine fully developed,
into a pretty well defined trinity in Justin and
Athenagoras, who appeal to intelligent pagans (like
Aurelius) to recognize it as a theism at least as good
as the Greek pantheon.* It is not of the slightest con-
sequence whether we date this Logos doctrine from
Philo, before the gospel times,† or from John, towards
the end of the first century, or from Christian specu-
lative schools, early in the second. What we have to
observe is, that it has already reached a degree of
maturity to which later controversies or councils can
only add a few finishing touches by way of exacter
definition; and that the mission of Jesus, on its divine
or providential side, has already become thoroughly
identified, in a certain personal, exclusive, and dog-
matic sense, with the advent of that Logos which,
existing with God from the beginning, and in its own
nature divine, “was made flesh" in him. The source
of this conviction is not at present under discussion;
*This is not the same as the developed trinity of the later
creeds: in particular, the distinction between the Logos and the Holy
Spirit is quite undefined. The words of Justin are "Both Him
[God] and the Son who came forth from him and taught us these
things, and the host of the other good angels, who follow and are
made like to him, and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore.”
Athenagoras says (Chap. 10), "Who would not be astonished, to
hear men called atheists, who speak of the Father God and of the
Son God and of the Holy Spirit, and who declare both their power in
union and their distinction in order? . . . The Son [is] in the Father,
and the Father in the Son, by unity and power of Spirit. Mind
and Reason of the Father [is] the Son of God." This last expres-
sion should be particularly noted, as very characteristic of the
thought of the age.
† See the illustrations in "Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 374,
375.
THE DOCTRINE OF REDEMPTION.
51
but its existence at this time, with whatever empha-
sis or whatever fulness my words have already im-
plied, is the fact to be distinctly seen. The time I
refer to is from about A. D. 150, the date of Justin's
first Apology, to that of Athenagoras, about 175.
One other thing before we come to the sharper
characteristics of Christian thought at this time. The
descent of the Logos, in the person of Jesus, was for a
special work of REDEMPTION, or emancipation from the
dominion of Evil. This is, of course, a simple com-
monplace of Christian theology. But look at it a
moment, attentively, and it seems to connect itself by
natural evolution with two things: first, the Jewish
expectation of a national deliverance, of which enough
has been said before; and, second, the drift of Greek
speculation, more particularly during the three hun-
dred years previous. That vein of scepticism as to
ultimate truth, which crops out in Euripides and in
Socrates, took a new turn after the great speculative
period of Plato and his school: it turned men's minds
to moral problems, and the search for the "chief end
of man," or the highest good. Naturally, this made
them keenly conscious of existing evil; and the prob-
lem of philosophy more and more was the problem of
escape from it, the Epicureans by way of acquies-
cence, and the Stoics by way of defiance. The Epi-
cureans preached contentment and placidity of soul.
The Stoics kept asserting that evil is only in the
seeming, as if they hoped by incessant repetition to
convince themselves that it is so: in some of Cicero's
dialogues, for instance (as the Fifth Tusculan), it is
almost startling to find a rehearsal, as it were, of the
52 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
early Christian creed of emancipation of the soul by
martyrdom for the truth.
"The whole creation," says Paul, "groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now, waiting to be
delivered." So that the interest with which the claims
of Christianity were listened to from the first was
something more than a speculative interest in some
new theory as to the Divine nature and the law of
life. So far as the gospel was true at all, it was true
as a gospel of Salvation, that is, of actual rescue
from an actual calamity. That calamity was felt to
be in the very conditions of life upon this earth, as
men have received them. That rescue receded more
and more, in men's thought, from the notion of any
special deliverance, such (for example) as the Jews
hoped, which did needful service as scaffolding for a
time.
The thought of it became inevitably, more and
more, an intense craving and yearning: as they be-
held, on one side, the political bondage, the insecurity
and terror, the frequent crises of great suffering, the
moral corruption of society, the doom of death that
overhung the world like a pall; or dreamed, on the
other hand, of a possible realm of liberty and bliss.
The very despair that fell on their souls, when the
golden age that Virgil looked for under Augustus, or
that Galilæan zealots promised in a revolt from Rome,
was set against the terrible reality men saw. Their
very despair made them long and ask more passion-
ately for whatever hope might be given them in the
faith which now claimed to be the one and final
refuge.
TWO MODES OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT.
53
We have, I say, to conceive of this, or something
like it, as the process going on, during those long years
of silence, in the class of minds most apt to entertain
such thoughts. The bland moralisms of Seneca, the
scornful satire of Juvenal, the caustic portraiture of
Tacitus, the frank urbanity of Pliny, the light mockery
of Lucian, need not deceive us as to what was really
brooding in the mind of the age. An anecdote of
Josephus, a hint in Plutarch's Morals, a reminiscence
of Justin, is far more likely to reflect the mood of
mind sure to show itself in the next great evolution
of human thought, than the phrases of those haughty
and cultured men. What comes into literature is not
merely, and not even so much, the emotion or opinion
of the hour; but, rather, what has been brooded on in
silence for one generation, before it comes into speech
in the next, and then goes into the common inherit-
ance of mankind.
That this is the right view to take of the long
interval before spoken of is shown, at any rate, by
the very remarkable twofold nature of the phenome-
non before us, as soon as the mist is lifted, and we find
ourselves in daylight again, amongst articulating men.
The phenomenon, I repeat, is not single, but twofold.
It is signified to us in the names of the two groups
that stand most distinctly before us at the middle of
the second century: one, a school already fading or
becoming extinct, and known to us only through the
attacks or confutations of its opponents; the other, a
company of men who speak to us very earnestly the
mind of the early Church, and have traced in clear
outline the speculative or moral doctrine to be filled
54 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
in by later times. I mean the Gnostics and the
Apologists.
I shall not attempt to add another to the many ex-
positions of the tedious and fantastic schemes known
as Gnosticism. For myself, not only I can get into
my mind no intelligible meaning from those "endless.
genealogies," as Irenæus states them, but I cannot
easily imagine that any sane mind should hold them
as sober matter of opinion, much less take them as the
real expression of objective truth. The form these
speculations took seems to me perfectly worthless as
serving to interpret to our mind what the cast of
opinion really was, except as an eccentric style of
mere symbolism, or mere analysis. I will say a word
of this presently. But, in the mean time, there are
two points which it seems to me no more than fair to
keep in view, if we would do justice to the men who
held to the Gnostic sects; that is, if we would not
think of them as mere men of straw, lay figures,
decked with impossible habiliments, which we have
no occasion to think of as serving any of the uses of
human life.
The first point is, that Gnosticism is a genuine and
legitimate outgrowth of the same general movement
of thought which shaped the Christian dogma. Quite
evidently, it regarded itself as the true interpretation
of the Gospel, and for a generation or more disputed
its title to be that interpretation on even terms with
the more orthodox view. Why it eventually failed,
even dishonorably failed, I shall consider presently.
Perhaps the first thing that we find hard to recon-
cile to our mind is the extremely early date at which it
WHAT WAS GNOSTICISM?
55
appears. The Epistles of the Testament contain many
unmistakable hints and traces of it.* Within fifty
years after some of those epistles were written it was
already on the wane, and in thirty years more it was
dead. Yet in the interval it had been a full-fledged
philosophy, pretentious and superb as the New Pla-
tonism which it helped serve to introduce, and seems
to caricature. Not a vestige of it remains, except in
fragments and echoes in the writings of its assailants.
But, if we think of it, the very fact that its germs
already existed in the apostolic time is what helps
explain it. It was, in a sense, the double or anti-
type of Christianity, -a reflex in men's speculative
thought of the same Life which the Church embodied
in another way.
In the second place, it was unquestionably sincere,
-not a profane mockery and travesty of the truth.
It had not, apparently, the highest order of sincerity:
it does not appear that any of the Gnostics held any
truth so sacred that they were ready to die for it.
But that lay in their conception of truth itself. Men
do not die for an opinion: they die for a faith. Gnosis,
after all, was “opinion," not "knowledge,” much less
faith. Still, it was an opinion bravely and loyally
held, in spite of odium and hostility; and it persist-
ently called itself "Christian," at a time when the
Christian name was apt to invite official suspicion or
popular rage. Moreover at least in its riper forms.
-it had two marked features of a high order of sin-
cerity, even if not the highest. It had a discipline of
* See, for example, Colossians i. 15, et seq., especially the ex-
pressions πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα (i. 19), and θησαυρὸς τῆς γνώσεως (ii. 3).
56 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
its own, often scrupulously ascetic and severe; and it
cultivated the religious sentiment, in harmony doubt-
less with its own style of thought, with abundant
seeming fervor. It had hymns of its own, whole vol-
umes of them, while orthodox Christians still con-
tented themselves with Jewish Psalms. Thus in all
outward seeming — except its incoherent variety of
sects it might well appear not only Christian, which
in vehement profession (at least) it was, but a full-
grown, highly developed form of religion, amply en-
titled to hold its own with its antagonist. Nay, its
very variety of sects is something more than mere
license of speculation, or an untimely birth of “free
religion." It is a testimony to something ingenuous
and spontaneous in its acceptance of the Christian
It is at least as good an evidence of genuine-
ness and sincerity as that unity of creed, enforced by
ecclesiastical authority or social penalties, by which
the Church has always vindicated its claim of truth.*
name.
So much it seemed necessary to say, for historical
justice' sake, of those outlying groups of independent
thinkers, who make the strangest problem of early
Christianity. But it is also necessary to go one step
further, to say not only why Gnosticism failed as
an interpreter of the new religious life, but why it has
justly been under the ban of more serious believers.
And this is not because of the scandals and immoral-
ities charged against it. Odium at least as bad lay
just as heavily against the Christian body at large;
* As an instructive commentary on the supposed unity and
harmony of the first Christian age, Epiphanius gives us a list of
forty-three distinct "heresies" (including the Gnostic), belonging
to the period under review.
THE SPECULATIVE GNOSIS.
57
and, if that had gone down in the great persecution,
it would have gone down with a black stigma on its
name, which could never have been washed off.
What Irenæus said, at a distance and long after, in
theologic hate, may go for what it is worth. The
fatal thing in Gnosticism was that it made of reli-
gion a theory for the understanding, and not a life to
the soul. Its creed, or "gnosis," consisted in specula-
tions about the origin of existence, the origin of evil,
and the method of salvation, by turns ascetic and
antinomian, like all mere speculative creeds. Con-
sidered in themselves, these speculations may have
been as good as men could invent then, or now
either, for that matter, vain and fantastic as they
appear to us. They were, in the main, a perfectly
legitimate following out of a mode of thinking, which
not only has the sanction of great names like Plato,
but is at bottom the same from which the Logos-doc-
trine itself was evolved. From the brightest ortho-
doxy to the blackest heresy is but a step.
((
In a matter vague and abstract like this, it is
always best to see how the same problem shows itself
to a modern mind. Read, then, that chapter in
Ways of the Spirit," where an analysis is given of
the methods by which men have attempted to find
out God, in other words, to trace the passage from
Absolute Being to the manifold forms of actual Exist-
ence; and notice how helpless the mind is at every
step, till it seems at length easiest to say, that there
is no real existence at all except pure Intellect, of
which matter or sensation is but a mood of experi-
ence. Now, imagine a busy and speculative mind,
3*
58 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
utterly void of the certitudes of science, to busy it-
self with that problem. I shall have to return to this
point again, when we come to the realist and nomi-
nalist discussions of the Schoolmen. So now I will
say only this. That great impassable gulf from
Infinite to Finite, which Plato made the sphere of
divine Intelligence, in which lived those eternal Ideas
that were the patterns of all material things, the
Gnostics attempted to bridge by way of symbol and
analysis, and to fill up with Eons, or "eternals,"
having such names as Thought, Man, Soul, Wisdom,
and so on, giving these bleak conceptions a certain
fantastic life, and sequence by way of emanation or
evolution.*
These phantom-existences, set by Valentinus in
pairs, male and female, thirty in all, and made to
succeed one another by some spectral process of gen-
eration, are said to be derived from the Jewish
Cabbala. Their names are the carrying out of a
notion we find in Plato's Parmenides, that everything
which exists in the realm of life, or fact, has its coun-
terpart or prototype in the region of Ideas,which
are made to have, as it were, a shadowy life of their
own. Thus, in the scheme of Valentinus:
DEPTH (Father of All) and SILENCE (or Thought) begat
MIND (unconscious Intelligence ?) and TRUTH ; which begat
REASON (Logos, conscious Intelligence) and LIFE; which begat
MAN and ECCLESIA (or Church): i. e. the Ideal Society.†
* Words of like but inverse meaning, as if each were the other's
reflection in a mirror. Emanation begins with the highest form
of being and works downward; Evolution with the lowest, and
works upward.
†These eight Æons make the Valentinian Ogdoud.
A PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION.
59
In these it will be noticed that the former of each
pair is a masculine name, and the latter a feminine;
so that it was impossible to speak of them except as
"he" or
"she." To us they are only names, like
the categories of modern metaphysics; but to the
Greek mind their very grammatical gender suggested
veritable forms of life, and logical analysis itself be-
came a sort of transcendental theogony.
We may put the problem of Gnosticism from
another point of view, something as follows. The age
of the world being generally assumed to be between
five and six thousand years (more precisely, 5200),
the question naturally occurs, What was there, then,
before that time (or, as they would put it, before Time
was)? To this the only answer can be, The Infinite.
But, again, is this an infinite Void (the Unknowable),
or an infinite Fulness? Infinite Fulness (Tλnpwµa),
replied the Gnostics; and, to fill out the conception
of it, devised their wild genealogies and cosmogonies.
How, through the Eons LOGOS and CHRIST, these
were connected with the Christian scheme, and how,
through the Inferior Wisdom (Sophia Achamoth) with
the realm of Matter and of Evil, it belongs to a more
detailed exposition to set forth.
In short, Gnosticism is a philosophy of evolution,
-vague, premature, with no substance of verifiable
fact or scientific method, and carried over from the
realm of things to that of abstractions or mere visions.
and phantasms of things. Its favorite term "genesis
-or Birth by natural process as opposed to intelli-
gent Creationis attacked by the Apologists, ex-
actly as its counterpart "evolution" is attacked to-day,
""
60 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
on the ground of incompatibility with moral freedom.
To illustrate this phase of it, I translate here a Gnos-
tic hymn of Valentinus, given by Hippolytus, which
one might fancy taken straight from Shelley's Prome-
theus or Goethe's Faust: *
"All things on Spirit borne I see!
Flesh from Soul depending,
nor worse
Soul from the Air forth-going,
From Æther Air descending,
Fruits from the Depth o'erflowing :
So from the Womb springs Infancy."
All these speculations seem to me neither better
though a good deal more poetic than
the efforts to solve the problem of existence which
we find in more modern times. The fatal thing
about them is that they were made the substance or
the substitute of Religion. In calling them a phi-
losophy of Evolution, we have said in advance how
and where they failed. Schemes of evolution, taken
by themselves, do not give us the specific fact of SIN.
If not avowedly, at any rate by tendency and by im-
plication, they deny the fact of moral freedom. In
trying to account for Evil, they annihilate its nature
as the conscience apprehends it,--the wilful viola-
tion of divine law.
Here was the incurable weakness of Gnosticism,
its fatal flaw. What evil it recognized was in the na-
ture of things, in Matter as opposed to Mind. That
is, it was natural as opposed to moral evil; to be
known by Thought, not by Conscience. Of this we
*The rhythmic form of the Greek may be found in Bunsen's
Christianity and Mankind," Vol. V. p. 96.
THE GNOSTICS AND THE APOLOGISTS.
61
–
shall see more when we come to Augustine's con-
flict with that final form of Gnosticism known as
Manichæan. At present, we have to do only with
the single point of its moral impotence. Gnosticism
was in its nature absolutely nay, ridiculously –
incapable of what I have before called "ethical pas-
sion." To save society in those days, to re-create the
world, to inaugurate a new era of humanity the
task which Christianity did in fact achieve-was
not a speculative, it was a moral problem.* It de-
manded courage, faith, self-sacrifice; a willingness to
go to the rack, the stake, the lions, rather than say a
false word, or do an act capable of a disloyal inter-
pretation. Such tests do not come to us in these
days, and we are apt to forget that they were needed
When Basilides said it was permitted to throw
incense on a pagan chafing-dish, or mutter a prayer
to Cæsar with a mental reservation, the doom of
Gnosticism was sealed.
Now, side by side with the Gnostics in the field
was another class of men and women whom we call
Confessors, and their spokesmen we call Apologists.
Those of them who died on the field are glorified in
the church record as saints and martyrs. Their tragic
and pathetic story is well told by Milman, and I shall
not abridge it here. Such names as Ignatius and
Polycarp, as Blandina and Perpetua, ought to be
sufficiently familiar. But it is very interesting to
notice the style of thought that runs through the
* It appears to me that in his very interesting exposition
Maurice misses this point, which is more distinctly seen by
Mansel. Maurice is a good deal of a gnostic himself, in the fervor
of his speculative faith.
62 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
Christian writings of the latter half of the century.
We trace in them two things: a strong ethical reac-
tion against the speculative tendency just spoken of;
and what Mr. Maurice* has well indicated as a dis-
tinct effort to construct a religious system, able to
hold its own before the powers of the world, - dis-
tinct, that is, from the simple motive of seeking faith
and salvation in the religion itself. The moral reac-
tion it is fair enough to call the antithesis of Gnos-
ticism, and the constructive tendency its counterpart.
The most obvious symptom of the first is, of course,
the defence of the Christian society on moral grounds:†
the claim of purer lives, and the contrast with pagan
vices; the vehement denial of unclean and criminal
acts charged against Christian assemblies; the inces-
sant denunciations of paganism on the ground of its
corrupt mythology.
Each head of the defence emphasizes some point
of appeal to conscience, to the natural sense of right
and wrong. The weak side of the old society — its
easy indulgence to the flesh is pitilessly exposed;
and a certain austere sanctity of domestic morals, a
purity in the relation of man and wife, a tenderness
in the relation of parent and child, quite alien from
heathen custom, is especially dwelt on. The com-
mon virtues of life, as we should reckon them in any
orderly and decent condition of things, are pressed
in a way that shows what bitter calumnies were in
Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second Centuries."
† 1t is worth noting, that none of the writers of this period (I
think) except Irenæus claim miraculous powers for the Church,
though some assert that demons were busy on behalf of the pa-
gans. This does not, however, exclude wonders in some of the
martyrologies.
ITS EXCEEDING GRAVITY OF TEMPER.
63
vogue, and with what serious pains the foundations
were getting laid for those grave moralities which
have been the real heart of Christian civilization
since. It would be tedious to go into illustration
of this; but I think no one can read the Apology of
Justin, the Apostolic Constitutions, the grave homi-
lies of Clement, or even the loud tirades of Tertullian,
without feeling that a new life was growing up, or-
ganized, serious, strong, and wholesome; a life which
flowed broadly below political changes on one side,
and theological controversies on the other; a life
which was getting knit and braced, by vigilant dis-
cipline, against the time when it must abide the storm
of imperial persecution, or undertake the enormous
task of meeting the wild and brutal forces of the bar-
barian world. Either crisis would have been fatal,
unless there had been, at bottom, an absolute loyalty,
most assiduously cherished, in the great war of Good
and Evil. However imperfect its interpretation, or
its theory, yet the life of the Christian society was
staked on its unhesitating faith in a Power that makes
for righteousness.*
* It is hard to overstate the extreme seriousness, what some
would call puritanism, of the writings referred to. A brief chap-
ter on Smiling, by Clement of Alexandria (who allows it in mod-
eration), is, I think, the only relief to the rigor of the attitude in
which the Christians found themselves, in the battle of good and
evil which was upon them. The same severe temper is shown in
the bitter hostility of Tertullian (when a Montanist) against the
novel doctrine of Hermas, of a possible repentance and pardon
after baptism. (See Mossman's "Early Church," pp. 315–320.)
The most serious controversy of the Church, early in the third
century, was that sustained by Cyprian against the puritan ex-
clusiveness of the Novatians.
64 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
It is important to recognize this feature first of all,
because it is disguised in part by the crudeness of
idea and the very simplicity of good faith with which
these defences are put forth. It is hard, for instance,
to conceive how Justin could have mistaken a large
part of what he says for argument; or how Marcus
Aurelius could have kept the philosophic patience he
was so famous for, through Justin's long, irrelevant
harangue (as it must certainly have seemed to him)
about the Hebrew prophecies.
Again, in the face of the calm rationalism that for
centuries had screened or allegorized the old Greek
fables for all thinking men, the Apologists must needs,
in weary iteration, one after the other, repeat the dull
recital of the scandals of Olympus,-possibly, to some
good popular effect, without hinting at anything
less offensive than the baldest literal understanding
of them, exactly as some modern free-thinkers have
treated the Old Testament.
The frankness and vigor, too, with which the no-
blest doctrines of natural theology are discarded,
such as the immortality of the soul, which is thrust
aside to make way for the dogma of a miraculous re-
vival of the corpse, argued out in the oddest detail,
and (naturally) with the grossest ignorance of the
facts adduced in illustration, serve to prejudice a
modern mind unfairly against the main argument
itself. I need hardly add the vituperative calumnies.
of such writers as Tatian, in his clamor against Greek
philosophy, or the rhetoric of Tertullian, deepening
to vindictive exultation, which is, after all, mere
rhetoric, — as he contemplates the pits of eternal
RELATIONS WITH THE EMPIRE.
65
flame, into which the enemies of the Church shall
be cast. These things have left a stain upon the
memory of that age, quite plain enough in the view
of the average historian; and therefore it is right
that they should be mentioned here, only to put in
clearer relief the testimony to the real power and
sincerity of the moral life they disfigure.
*
The relations of the Christian community to the
Roman world at this period offer a very wide topic,
of which I can touch only a single point or two. It
is a familiar question, Why did the Roman empire.
deal so much more harshly with the Christian re-
ligion than with other local faiths, which it received
on easy terms into its wide pantheon? And it is a
familiar answer, Because the Christian religion wast
in its nature uncompromising, and at bottom carried
with it the destruction of Paganism itself, with the
imperial system closely bound up with it. This an-
swer, too, is illustrated by the refusal of the Chris-
tians to pay the customary official homage to Cæsar,
which they held blasphemy, - refusal that in them
was held constructive treason; and, still further, by
the fact that the Church was from the first a form
of polity as well as a system of belief, and held the
germ of a new organization of society (ToλTeia),
which was felt to be gradually crowding out the old.
All this, it is said, must have been clear to the mind
of a thoughtful pagan, like Aurelius; and sufficiently
accounts for the fact that he, the most scrupulously
just of all the emperors of this period save one, and
most gravely resolved to heal the evils of the state,
was also sternest of all to put in force the laws against
the Christians.
E
66 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
To this statement, however, two things should be
added that the earlier persecutions seem all-as we
see in the case of Polycarp-to have been a conces-
sion to popular clamor and the temper of the mob;
and that this popular hate runs a great way back, long
before the least public danger could have been thought
of, from an obscure and petty sect. Thus in Paul's
church at Rome were some of Nero's household; Com-
modus was capriciously indulgent to the Christians;
the language of Trajan and Hadrian is at worst that
of impatient contempt.* I have spoken elsewhere of
the persecution under Nero, a mere cowardly turn-
ing of the popular rage against a class that lay too
easily open to suspicion. Why was that? and why
were the mob so ready always with the most abom-
inable charges against the Christians," Edipodean
marriages and Thyestean feasts," as Athenagoras re-
ports?
It is, of course, impossible to go behind the reports
to investigate the charges. There have been students.
of these things, who have believed that the worst of
them were true, that the sacred "mysteries" did
include the tasting of blood and sensual excess.†
Possibly, in instances. Cases of horror, frightful or
disgusting, have not been unknown in religious orgies
in modern times; ‡ and Christians even then were
*The term Trajan addresses to Ignatius is кakódαμov, which
Mr. Maurice translates "
poor devil."
The specific forms of these calumnies may be found in Ter-
tullian's Ad Nationes and Apologeticus. For illustration of the style
of criticism referred to, see the very curious volume of Daumer.
Take that of the Convulsionnaires, for example, a century and
a half ago, which sprang from a sect with such grave antecedents
as the Jansenists.
CALUMNIES AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS.
67
not slow to throw off the charge upon heretical assem-
blies. Think of the raw material that entered into
their composition,-in Syria and North Africa, for
example; and that they called, avowedly, "not right-
eous, but sinners, to repentance.'
دو
But consider, too, how likely the religious language
of Christians was to invite, or at least give color to,
those charges. If the Apocalypse, for example, or
any of its imagery, was composed and current in the
time of Nero, what more likely than that its vague
threats of a sea of fire to engulf the guilty kingdoms
of the earth should have been caught up and used to
accuse the Christians of that vast conflagration in
which half Rome perished? What more likely - at
a time when the most innocent word easily took a
lewd signification *-than that the Christian language
about a God of love, and of greetings with a holy kiss,
should have been grossly but honestly misunderstood?
What more likely than that the frank symbolism,
favorite and familiar to Christian lips,-"Except ye
eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood,
ye have no life in you," - should have been quoted
to justify the most horrid accusation of cannibal ban-
quets at the table and the cup of sacrifice? We know
how easily such stories spread, and what frenzy of
hate they will engender.
It is likely, too, as implied in a hint of Suetonius,
-nay, from what happened in the ferocious revolt
under Hadrian it is certain, that the popular mind
made no distinction between Christian and Jew. It
was not so much, says Tacitus, the charge of the burn-
*Thus, in his own time, Erasmus says, it was not reckoned
comely to use the verb amo.
68 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
ing, as of hatred against all mankind,* that embittered
the persecution under Nero. And the fresh memory
of the horrors in Cyprus and Palestine, more than fifty
years later, which Justin alludes to as the background
of his dialogue with the Jew Trypho, had its share in
keeping up the frenzy of popular hate and fear which,
more than any imperial policy, was the real ground of
the terror that always menaced the Christian body:
just as we may imagine the horrors of the Paris Com-
mune, in 1871, not only to sharpen the vigilance of
the German police against socialistic conspiracy now,
but to goad the enemies of socialism with the haunt-
ing, unforgiving hate that is born of fear.
""
There is one other illustration of the Christian life
of this period, of which a word must be said in con- ·
clusion. I have spoken of the temper that runs
through most of the "Apologists," as a moral reac-
tion against the purely speculative views of Gnos-
ticism. Of course, that reaction ran out into crudi-
ties and excess. The hostility of Marcion against the
Old Testament; the sect of " Alogi," or " Wordless
Christians, who would hear nothing of any Logos at
all; the harsh asceticism of the "Encratites or
"wrestlers" against Satan,-are to be reckoned as
so many "heresies," more or less allied with Gnos-
ticism, yet of rather an ethical than speculative cast.
The exaggerated, untempered, and eccentric moral
phases exhibited by Tertullian, Neander explains by
calling him an “anti-gnostic,” making this the ex-
treme form the reaction took, and so accounting for
what most offends in him.
* Merivale's interpretation of odio humani generis.
>>
MONTANISM.
69
As part of the same phenomenon, too, we must
reckon the blazing out of the spiritualistic fervor of
Montanism in the East,* which cut adrift, like Qua-
kerism or Methodism, from the formalities and the
sober traditions of the Christian body, and claimed
to be a new dispensation, under the immediate guid-
ance of the Holy Ghost, as promised in the last dis-
course of Jesus, a sort of Gnosticism reversed (as
Baur explains it), finding in its dogma an account,
not of the beginning, but the end of all things.
That peculiar fanaticism has reappeared, in many
forms, from age to age, always, it is probable, as a
protest against some exaggeration of formality and tra-
dition; and the heat of it has always been absorbed,
to thaw out some gathering stiffness, or to warm some
pale intellectuality. The extravagant pretensions of
Montanism did no particular harm. But they occa-
sioned some scandal, and even alarm, at a time when
the Church was not used to dealing with such dis-
ordered symptoms. Its language was blasphemous,
perhaps, to the sober ear. It made more apparent
the value and the need of the restraints it despised;
and so had its share, doubtless, in strengthening the
hands of authority, to the confirming of creed and
ritual.
This, then, is the condition to which we are brought
at the end of the second Christian century. One
great phase of purely speculative development has
been left behind. The growing life of Christendom
has been asserted, again and again, to have its roots
* Of which Mossman's "Early Christianity" gives a very ap-
preciative account.
70 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
in morality, and for its law the law of personal holi-
ness, however technically, ascetically, or imperfectly
understood. There is already a lengthening calendar
of saints, martyrs, and heroes, making a sacred and
powerful bond of union. There is a fast-growing
consciousness that Christianity is to be shaped and
developed into a community, understanding itself,
organic, with its own authoritative belief and law.
The pressure of imperial power and of popular sus-
picion still holds it in check from spreading too
vaguely, and melting away in fatal forms of com-
promise. And, for the expression of that life, we
have already the group of writers and teachers I
have named, whose lives are closing with the cen-
tury, Irenæus, Clement, and Tertullian, to be im-
mediately followed by the equal or greater names of
Cyprian and of Origen.
IV.
IN
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
our study of early Christianity, it is easiest and
most common to think of Paganism simply as
its antagonist, or opposite; and to regard the process
going on as one purely of conquest or conversion.
It is so in the main. There was a new spirit at war
with the old institutions and beliefs. The eye catches
first and most readily the dramatic contrast, watches
with keenest interest the fortunes of the battle.
radical difference is what we have seen something of
already, in the Christian thought of the second cen-
tury, and shall see more of in the sharper collisions
yet to come.
The
It is not even,
Leaven works in
But this is not the only view.
strictly speaking, the truest view.
the lump, not by destruction, but by co-operation.
Christianity was at work "like leaven," like a new
element of great power suddenly set free, not to the
extinction or exclusion of those that were there be-
fore, but to the making of new compounds, in which
all their former potency abides under other names.
Nitrogen and hydrogen are not nearly so unlike in
their own apparent properties, as in the combinations
they make with the oxygen that attacks them both.
To understand the Christian movement justly, how-
72
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
ever imperfectly, we must know something of the
material it wrought upon. And of this, not merely
its falsehood, unbelief, or moral decay; but the posi-
tive side as well, — the serious thought, the vigorous
life, the genuine piety, that still had their place in
the mind of Paganism.
For it is to be seen, not only that the old Pagan
faiths had not died out at the coming of Christianity,
as we are apt to think; but that what was best and
truest in them had taken a new start, as it were, and
a genuine pagan revival was to some extent keeping
pace with the stronger religious growth that at length
absorbed, or else suppressed it. For a time, however,
not only the two movements are not antagonistic to
each other; they are, in a sense, independent efforts
after a similar ideal. The rapid and powerful process
of organization in Christianity itself would not have
been possible, unless a part of its work had been al-
ready done by its antagonist. The Providence itself
that wrought in it would not have been so clear,
without that spiritual and moral preparation which
was going on in the pagan world.
It has been common enough to recognize two forms
of this preparation. One is in the way of religious
craving after some good yet unattained. "We know,"
says Paul, "that the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now, waiting to be
delivered." Of this I shall say a word presently.
The other is in the way of philosophic speculation,
which failed to interpret these longings for a higher
life, but did much to shape the mould in which the
victorious dogma was long after cast. Besides these
CICERO.
73
is a third phase, which makes the object of our study
now.
-
Attention has been called* to the great contrast in
temper and spirit between the time of the fall of the
Roman Republic and that of the culmination of the
Empire two centuries later, between the time of Cicero
and that of Marcus Aurelius. In the earlier time we
have complete scepticism and negation. The foun-
tain of old belief seems to have quite run dry. As
to the forms of pagan ritual, once so venerable, Cicero
does not see how its diviners can look one another
soberly in the face. In his writings — by far the
broadest and completest reflection we have of the
mind of any ancient period- we find three phases,
or moods, so utterly distinct as to seem out of keep-
ing with any one era, not to say any one honest
mind. In his Speeches, he is the eloquent conserva-
tive, appealing profusely for popular effect to the im-
mortal gods, whose providence is too plain for cavil in
any crisis of the state, whose judgments are sure and
terrible to all who defy their law. In his Dialogues,
the very existence of these gods is an open question,
calmly debated in friendly philosophical discourse;
while the ideal life of pious contemplation, the confi-
dent hope of immortal peace and communion of con-
scious spirits beyond the grave, appear to make the
sure foundation and deep background of his thought.
In his Letters, both these phases disappear: the
friendly courtesy, the party passion, the personal mor-
tification or resentment, love or hate, are purely on a
* Boissier, La Religion Romaine, from which several of the fol-
lowing illustrations are taken.
4
74
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
secular level; even the confidences of intimate friend-
ship, or the sharpest sorrows of private life, give no
one hint of anything so distant and unreal as a reli-
gious interpretation to its riddle, or a ray of that com-
fort of which he is so eloquent when he robes himself
as a philosopher. For any personal conviction, any
guidance of conduct, any stay of character, religion
-if it means anything more than Roman justice or
Roman pride-is an absolute blank. And, beside
the best of his contemporaries, Cicero is a man of even
exemplary piety.
Now immediately after the age of Cicero, in the
first years of the new Empire, there are symptoms of
a profound change. Not only the head of the state
professes himself the patron of piety and morals, and
chooses a religious title, "Augustus," by which he is
to be most familiarly known to the minds of men:
speaking the most serious thought of his time, Virgil
dwells on the golden age which a divine providence
is just opening to mankind, in images and phrases
which many have thought borrowed directly from He-
brew prophets; so that his name and verse became
the charm that won for the mind of Paganism a place
in the widening domain of Christian culture. And as
the Empire, in spite of calamity and crime, grew more
broad, magnificent, and strong, the same feeling deep-
ened into a religion of the Empire, all the more formi-
dable to the Christian faith because it was genuine
and sincere; not merely, as we are too apt to think,
because it was cruel, degenerate, and corrupt.
This New Paganism, as we may call it, went along
with an increasing moral earnestness and religious
THE STOICS.
75
fervor. The moral feeling might be capricious, blind,
and intolerant; the religious fervor might run into
the wildest superstition. There was never a faith
yet that was not disgraced by its most zealous ad-
herents. But the contrast is hardly greater between
the implacable passions of the civil war and Virgil's
pious hopes of peace, than that between the blank
incredulity of Julius Cæsar and his age and the se-
rene kindliness of Antoninus Pius, or the religious
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the noblest of
Stoics on the most august of thrones.
The Stoic doctrine was the intellectual interpreta-
tion of the new pagan faith. In its speculations on
the origin of things, still more in its ethical ideal, it
is curiously near to some of the noblest phases of
Christian theology and morals. It is not likely,
though many argue still, that Seneca learned that
doctrine from the Apostle Paul; but no one can
read the writings of both without feeling how much
is of a common spirit, if not from a common source.
And what in Seneca is mere ethical glow has within
a century become, in Antoninus and Aurelius, the
fervor of a genuine religious life. The "reign of
the Stoics," represented by such names as these, does
infinitely more honor to the faith that inspired it
than anything we find in the first half-century, at
least, of the Christian Emperors. We may even have
to come down as far as St. Louis of France to find
their parallel.
How far, on the other hand, may the Christian
theology and morals have been indebted to the doc-
trine of the Stoics? A few words will serve to show
76
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
their points of likeness, and their fundamental dif-
ference.*
The Stoic cosmogony shows itself as a compromise
between the conception of a pre-existent personal Cre-
ator, outside the universe which he brings into being,
the idea of earlier philosophers and of the world
at large, and the notion of Matter blindly guided by
Force, the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus. To
the Stoic the universe was not made by God; it was
God, and endowed with all the attributes necessary
to his conception of a Divinity, including power, in-
telligence, wisdom, and justice. This Divinity had
from eternity a fixed and unchanging purpose, which
was the Pronoia, or Providentia, - the everlasting
Reason appearing in the succession of events. Such
a Divinity differs from the Christian ideal chiefly
in the absence of personal love and care for his off-
spring; and even as to this, the Pronoia is almost an
affectionate interest in Man, not men. The fact
that this Being is identified with the universe is of
no account. It would be more true to say, that the
universe is identified with the Divinity. The world
is seen as the successive emanations and withdrawals
of the Divine Reason, the eternal Logos. It is the
systole and diastole of the Divine nature, alternately
developing, through the series of the four elements,
from fire conceived as the primitive and natural
form of intelligent matter into the other three, in
the order of their density, and back again to the form
of fire. Thus the fundamental conception is not cre-
ation, but evolution or emanation.
* Compare "Hebrew Men and Times,” pp. 352–357. For some of
the following illustrations I am indebted to Prof. J. B. Greenough.
THE STOIC ETHICS.
77
Of this animate universe, with its periodicity of
creation (if we may call it so) and extinction, every-
thing, even the soul of the Stoic sage, forms a part.
Virtue is the perfect adjustment of all the desires
and acts of the soul-in Christian phraseology, the
submission of the will-to the universal and per-
sistent Logos, the divine reason and providence. Vir-
tue is thus, necessarily, one and indivisible. This
ethical view is essentially the same with that of the
more rigid Christian sects. Whosoever shall offend
in one point, he is guilty of all." All wrong-doing
and all right-doing must be alike in value. On this
side the razor's edge, it is all good; on that side, all
evil. Growth in goodness, properly speaking, there
can be none.
All the Stoic paradoxes are the logical following
out of this view. A man either is, or he is not, in
harmony with the divine order of the universe. If
he is, he is "the wise man" (sapiens); if not, he is
"the fool" (stultus). These two are all. A man can-
not be approaching wisdom. He is no nearer to it
with a thousand excellences (virtutes) than with one,
-like the string of a piano, which makes a discord
till it is perfectly in tune. The "wise man" is the
perfect human being; that is, perfectly adjusted to
the rest of the universe of which he forms a part.
The one problem of life is to make the Divine Reason
paramount and supreme in the sphere of one's own
conduct. "He has a truly great mind," say the
Stoics, "who surrenders himself wholly to God." His
*
* "Operis sic optimus omnis est opifex, solus sic rex, solus
formosus."
78
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
assurance of the right is his only and sufficient re-
ward. To him can be no evil, and no pain: all is
reconciled in the universal Order. He alone is free,
or rich, or of a sound mind; he, in truth, is the only
sovereign.
Of this serious and enlightened pagan gospel a sin-
gle point may be remarked. To say nothing of the
wealth of doctrine gathered about the Messianic idea
and the person of Jesus, Stoicism lacked the one thing
which made the Christian gospel a power in the
religious life of mankind. This was what we may
call Paul's method of salvation, of which the cardinal
points are conviction of sin and salvation by faith.
This method is as true, psychologically, as it was then
and is now essential to any genuine vigor of religious
life in the soul. If we allow ourselves to think of
Christianity as the development of a system of doc-
trine, we shall exactly miss its secret, the one thing
that makes its triumph intelligible or its history
worth our study. Christianity as a scheme of doc-
trine may be doubtfully balanced against one or two
pagan schemes, Stoic or Neo-Platonic, from both of
which it borrowed very largely. But, as a method of
the divine life, it had a power from another source, for
lack of which Stoicism miserably failed.
We have before us, then, two features of the later
Paganism, which we may call the religion of the peo-
ple and the religion of the philosophers. To these we
may add a third influence, working powerfully in the
same general direction, and shown in the reform of
the Roman Law. The period we are considering is
called by Gibbon "the learned and splendid era of
TESTIMONY OF TERTULLIAN.
79
jurisprudence." It culminated, a little later, in the
great jurists of the third century; but the expanding,
softening, humanizing process, carried out in the suc-
cessive Christian codes, was distinctly the fruit of
the early imperial age. The crude, stiff formalism of
the older code,* with its effete system of domestic
tyranny,† was shaped and tempered by larger max-
ims of equity, and by the humaner spirit that grew
up as national boundaries melted into the large sys-
tem of the Roman world.
These three-piety among the people, Stoicism
with the philosophers, law reform among the jurists-
we must set over against the decay of faith, the moral
corruption, and the political languor which are the
symptoms most commonly taken note of in the pagan
empire. They are not the whole of the picture. They
are not, by any means, its more salient points. But,
hidden as they often are in the background, they serve
not only for relief to darker impressions; they are
quite necessary to be taken into account, to explain
the remarkable phenomenon of the extension of Chris-
tianity at the end of the second century.
"We are a
people of yesterday," says Tertullian, in his tempest-
uous challenge to the pagan world; "yet we have
filled every place among you, — cities, islands, forts,
towns, assemblies; your very camps, your tribes, com-
panies, palace, senate, forum. We leave you nothing
but your temples."
These words, we must remember, were written hot
* See illustrations in Gibbon, and in Maine's "Ancient Law."
† The patria potestas. See Troplong, De l'Influence du Chris-
tianisme sur le Droit Civile des Romains, p. 62.
80
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
from witnessing the martyrdoms of Carthage, not long
before the persecutions of Decius, which made the
signal of a war of extermination against the Christian
Church. To a cooler eye, that war must have seemed
likely to succeed. The persecution of Christianity by
the Roman emperors, it is true, was capricious and
occasional; and it occurred at long enough intervals
averaging some twenty years to allow amply for
the peaceable spread of the new religion. Christianity
not as a moral force, or even as a system of dogma,
but only as a quasi-political structure dangerous to
the state, was the thing attacked. Moreover — to
judge from the edicts of Diocletian-quiet suppres-
sion was the thing aimed at: the atrocious cruelties
recorded by Eusebius were wilful acts of local gover-
nors, and the very execution of the edicts might be
systematically evaded (as by Constantius Chlorus)
without any rebuke from the central power. We
find nothing in these centuries to compare with the
virulence and ferocity with which the Reformers in
France and the Netherlands were hunted down; still
less, to compare with the diabolical craft and efficiency
of the Spanish Inquisition. Pagan Rome showed
never such wary and patient cruelty as Papal Rome.
There was, however, one moment when its whole.
weight bore on the rising faith to crush it. If Chris-
tianity triumphed in the end, it was by virtue of a
very wide sympathy and a very extensive preparation
in the mind of Paganism. And the moral ground
on which this rested was the same that had already
put forth that independent growth of conscience and
piety, just spoken of as the latest and best fruit of
the ancient creed.
THE OLD ITALIAN WORSHIP.
81
If we look more carefully at the case before us, we
see that this later Paganism, the popular religion of
the Empire, grew up along with the great political
change which suddenly turned a grinding municipal
tyranny into a broad imperial system embracing
many states. Christian writers have always pointed
to that system as the manifest opening of the way by
Divine Providence to the march of the true religion.
We shall see, for example, how distinctly this thought
lies in the appeals to faith of Leo the Great.
It is just as true of the religious and moral con-
ditions as it is of the political conditions. The old
nature worship, formulated in the popular Italian
creed, and embodied in the state religion of republican
Rome, was as formal and rigid as the aristocratic code
of the old law; inconceivably precise, minute, timid,
and often cruel. Ovid* relates the curious myth-
a grotesque parallel to the intended sacrifice of Isaac
and the substitution of a ram—in which the good
Numa palters with his deity, and evades the shocking
demand of human sacrifice, outwitting the divinity
in a play of words. "I demand," says Jupiter, "the
head"-"of a leek," says the pious king; "of a
live"-"fish," interposes Numa; "man," insists the
god; "one hair I give you." Jupiter laughs, and
Numa's point is gained.
Livy has many a story of the same grim half-
humorous formalism. Thus, to foil a prophecy that
the Gauls should occupy the soil of Rome, two cap-
tive Gauls, a man and a woman, are buried alive
within the city limits. Some soldiers in revolt think
*Fasti, iii. 339–344.
4*
F
82
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
to free their conscience from their military oath
by killing the consuls, to whom they have sworn
it. Papirius, on the eve of battle, is deceived by a
false official report of a favorable omen: the sacred
chickens have eaten heartily. Being told, later, that
the report was false, "The peril," said he, "is with
the officer who sent it; him the gods will doubtless
punish justly; as for myself, I am bound by the re-
port sent me in due form." Accordingly, he is victo-
rious in the battle, while the lying officer is killed.
Political sagacity or military sense, again, kept the
old formalism in check, so that it was rarely suffered
to stand in the way of policy. Its verbal juggles were
oftener used to patch up some atrocious state-craft or
treachery, like that by which the Roman armies.
escaped from the Caudine Forks, where the general
held as hostage, assuming to be a Samnite citizen,
insults the Roman envoy, and so brings on a new
cause of war; or else gave way to a rude rationalism,
as when a commander of the fleet orders the sacred
chickens that will not eat to be pitched overboard,
where at any rate they must drink. But the senti-
ment of it lay very deep in the popular heart. It is
a remarkable illustration of Roman feeling that, on
the day of his triumph, Julius Cæsar, the Epicurean
rationalist and the merciless destroyer, mounted on
his knees the long flight of stairs that led up to the
Capitol, that by this act of ostentatious humility he
might avert those divine judgments supposed to be
provoked by inordinate felicity.
It is not easy to see just how the Italians regarded
their popular divinities. Their worship (if we may
GODS OF THE NURSERY.
83
call it so) seems often frank fetichism of the rudest
sort. Their very names, as Augustine recounts them,*
seem as consciously make-believe as those in a fairy
story. Thus, as we should say, the babe is brought
to birth by the good fairy Light (Lucina); a second
(Levana) receives it in her arms; ministering sprites
(Cuba, Rumina, Cunina) take charge of the offices of
sleeping, nursing, and laying the infant in the cradle;
in due course he is given in charge of the attendant
fairies Walky, Talky, Eaty, Drinky, Outgo, Home-
come, and so on to others, whose names are about
equally ingenious and recondite, down to the sad
genius Waily (Nænia), lamenting at the burial.†
In all this, which the excellent Christian saint
stigmatizes as idolatry and superstition, to say
nothing of deities that to him are simply unclean
devils, we should probably see nothing more than
the same childish, half-reverent fancy, which crowds
the infant lore of our day with similar innocent im-
personations. Human life is beset, and the natural
world is crowded, with very real powers, utterly
mysterious to us; and what we call the old nature-
religions include, along with many a dismal super-
stition, some tender, trustful, grateful recognition of
a living Force, to which mere natural science is apt
to blind us. What made these simple fancies hateful
and abhorrent to the Christian mind was that they
were part of the habit and the system wrought up
*De Civitate Dei, vi.. 9.
† Among these names are Educa, Potina, Cuba, Abeona, Adeona,
Iterduca, Domiduca, and many others, for which see Keller, x. 3
(Dietz's Paris ed.).
84
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
into the tremendous despotism of Rome. The pagan-
ism which included them had also its horrible and
revolting side, full of violence, cruelty, and corrup-
tion; and so they had to take their flight, along with
the nymphs of mountain, wood, and wave, before the
wrath and hate of an austerer faith.
The great gods of Italian worship were no doubt
simply the powers of nature personified. Saturn is
the seed-time, Jupiter the sky, Juno the air, Janus
(Dianus) the sun-god, with his feminine partner Di-
ana, the moon; Mars is the mighty, Venus is spring-
tide (later, beauty or love), and so on. Our asso-
ciations with these names come mostly from the
Greek fables, which Latin poets and mythologists
imported ready made. To the popular mind, most
likely, they were abstractions nearly as vague and
dim as our Electricity, Gravitation, and the like,-
except that they were objects of more real awe, and
were regarded with the same curious formalism we
have noted before. As has been said, they were di-
vine Functions (numina), rather than divine Persons.
As soon as the functions are dimly seen, or absorbed
by a growing positivism, the divinity becomes a scare-
crow or laughing-stock: thus we see how Plautus
makes fun of the mythological sanctities.
This list is filled out with names that to us are ab-
solutely no more than abstract qualities, Honor,
Manhood, Terror, Fortune, Public Safety, which
seem quite as real as the rest. But the deity, the
function, or the quality, is strictly localized. Each
town has its own divinity, potent there, void and im-
potent elsewhere. For instance, a vow having been
ROMAN FORMALISM.
85
made to "Knights' Fortune," it must be paid in
another city, because no such divinity is known in
Rome. If a town is to be attacked, its gods are en-
treated, with a profusion of compliment and promise,
to forsake that place and take their abode in Rome:
a long formula is preserved,* which contains the right
phrases and etiquette of this "evocation." This com-
pliment performed, the Roman conscience is free; the
holy places are "made profane"; the attack, which
would have been sacrilege before, becomes a pious
act; if the deity refuses, the peril is his own.† Thus
Juno is solemnly evoked from Veii, and for the first
time becomes a great goddess of the Romans. And
from its first tutelar divinity, Mars, the victorious
state incorporates in its worship, one by one, the
deities of all conquered towns and nations, till its
pantheon includes all the gods and all the worships
of the pagan world.
Such a mythology as this is far enough from the
vivid and riotous fancy of the Greek. It is, in es-
sence, bald, hard, bleak, domineering. It lay in the
region of ritual and form. Its rites must be per-
formed strictly in accordance with rule and tradi-
tion; and the way of performing them duly was the
secret tradition of a sacred order. Originally, the
father of the family was priest as well as autocrat in
* In Macrobius, Saturn., iii. 9.
† Hence the importance of using the exact title which a divinity
will acknowledge. There is a charm in "Open Sesame" in the
tale which cannot be shared by any other grain. The true name
of Rome, and that of its tutelar divinity, are said to have been
kept as a mystery, lest they should become known to an enemy,
who might thus disarm the city of its defence.
86
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
his own household, and the ritual was closely bound
up with family dignities and aristocratic tradition.
Such formal devotion has little in it of what we
call religion: nothing of pious contemplation, little
if any fervor of devout emotion. Indeed, warmth of
religious sentiment, the emotional side of piety, it
distinctly repudiates and dreads; as we may imagine
a stiff ritualist of the last century to abhor the early
fervors of Methodism. Such passions only interfere
with its fixed and rigid temper. They are merely
a detestable, most likely an outlandish superstition,
alien and hateful to the mind of a true-born Roman.
And, again, it became the centre of a very wide and
powerful organization of religious motives, and ideas.
Rome won to itself, in ages of conquest, a monopoly
of religions, as well as a monopoly of political powers
and rights. The central, the real object of Roman
worship we may hold to have been Rome herself, -
as England was said to be the only religion of Lord
Palmerston. We may well believe it. The ancient
city was closely identified with the altar, the hearth-
fire, the sacred Name, which marked its peculiar wor-
ship.* Nothing less than that vast impersonal but
very real abstraction, the City itself, could be the
object of that vivid, intense, self-devoted, and narrow
loyalty which goes by the name of patriotism, and
made the civic virtue of the ancient State. Rome
was the object of a passionate devotion, a grateful
piety, a religious pride and veneration, which made
the most powerful and perhaps the holiest emotion a
Roman could know.
* See Coulanges, La Cité Antique.
ROMAN TYRANNY.
87
But Rome the "mother of his soul," the great
loved, revered, awful State, that put her sword in
his hand to strike, and set up her eagle as a symbol
for his military adoration and faith, and covered him
with her shield though he were the humblest citizen
in the remotest corner of the earth; Rome, at whose
name the magistrate at Philippi trembles when Paul
appeals to her protection was a haughty, tyrannical,
unjust sovereign to those stifled nationalities that
made up her imperial domain. Nothing in all the
history of despotism is more hateful than the dealings
of Rome with her conquered provinces; no aristocracy
was ever more insolent, domineering, and profligate,
than the oligarchy of officials and ex-officials that
made the Roman Senate in the latter days of the
Republic.* To believe Cicero's eloquent and gener-
ous harangues, himself proud of his place in that
famous oligarchy, the feelings of the provincials
towards Rome could hardly have been anything but
a helpless despair and hate. That divinity, to which
so many millions of human victims had been sacri-
ficed, could hardly have been, in their eyes, anything
else than an omnipotent, omnipresent, and inexorable
Demon. Ireland in her bloody memories of Crom-
well, Poland in her struggles following the Partition,
Greece under the brute despotism of Turkey, may
help us understand the condition of Syria, Macedonia,
Sicily, Gaul, or Spain, as provinces of the imperial
Republic. The word empire (imperium) in that day
meant simply military rule. By political tradition,
these provinces were held by the law of conquest.
* See Froude's "Julius Cæsar."
88
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
The municipal law that for centuries had grown up
as a system for a single city made the one type and
rule for a government as wide, almost, as the civilized
world. It was administered purely in the interest
and in the name of that one city; and its executive
officers (pro-consul, pro-prætor) were simply her mili-
tary commanders or civil magistrates, who had served
their term at home.
-
The evil and iniquity of this system had been seen
a hundred years before the Empire had been estab-
lished in its place, if by no others, by the great
tribunes Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, who both died
victims of the Roman aristocracy. A hundred years
of civil war had exterminated the old parties of the
Republic. The genius of Julius Cæsar and the cau-
tious policy of Augustus had created a new system, in
which all rulers, magistrates, and commanders were
made subject to the one Chief of the Roman world.
It is not necessary to speak of the new evils which
now came in place of the old evils. In one word,
political freedom was extinct. But that freedom was
the very thing men hated and feared.
For many
•
generations that freedom had meant violence at
home, and flagrant oppression in the provinces.
Whatever else the revolution in the state accom-
plished, it at least set the subject states free from the
irresponsible class despotism they had been suffering
under so long. It was a revolution that brought them
comparative prosperity and repose.
The phrase "peace of the Empire"* is the name
of what they felt to be an unspeakable relief and gain.
* The pax Romana.
THE EMPEROR A GOD.
89
Their sovereign was no longer the hard, cruel, grasp-
ing, abstract impersonation of the City, with her far-
reaching hundred hands, like those of a Hindoo idol.
It was at least a Man, who could make his will
prevail over the petty persecution of innumerable
despots. As Paul appealed from Festus, so men
throughout the Empire could appeal from their local
tyrants, to Cæsar. Whatever his personal vices or
crimes, at least he represented the unity of a sover-
eign state. To him all subjects, all states, were equal.
It was no great flight of imagination to make him in
men's eyes the type of a universal, impartial Provi-
dence,"image of all," say the Christian Clementines.
In men's eyes he was more: he was, very literally
and simply, a god in human form. As a god, Virgil
says, sacrifice shall be offered monthly on his altar.
And Velleius Paterculus, who went with Tiberius
into Germany, tells in vivacious narrative how a bar-
barian drove his canoe across the stream, pressed
through the crowds that surrounded the imperial
command, gazed long and earnestly at him, and went
away saying, “To-day I have seen the gods."
"'*
We do not enter readily into the state of mind
that made it easy and natural in that day to look on
a man as a real divinity; that literally deified him
*So when Pope Alexander III., in flight from Barbarossa,
landed at Montpellier, a Saracen in the crowd pressed close to his
stirrup, so as to have a fair view of the Christians' god. The feel-
ing of the barbarian in Velleius is exactly reflected in that of the
Southern negroes during the civil war. "What you know 'bout
Massa Linkum ?" said one of them to an army officer, who was
criticising some act of the government. "Him like de Lord; him
eberywhar."
90
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
because he was, as we should say, the incarnation of
an idea. Though to us, too, the worship of Paul as
Mercury, and of Barnabas as Jupiter, at Lystra, ought
to make it, if not clear, at least credible. To us it is
a very crude mythology; yet it certainly was one of
the forces that made it possible to reconcile men's
minds to a creed whose corner-stone was the Incarna-
tion of a Deity. The notion of a "man-god"— that
is, of a Divine Person in human form was already
familiar to the pagan mind. The Emperor was
spoken of in language that reflects, or prefigures, with
strict exactness, that applied in the later creeds to
the human life of Christ. This belief in the visible
presence of divinity upon earth springs no doubt from
sources very different in the Christian and in the
Pagan mind; but they ran closely parallel, and merged
in the faith that included both. The philosophical
elements that entered into the faith belong to the his-
tory of religious speculation, and we shall have more
to say of them further on. Just now it is enough to
say, that—however crude or impossible it may look
to us
there never was a faith in a deity actually
walking the earth and conversant among men more
positively, sincerely, or in its way devoutly held, than
this deification of the Roman Emperor among the peo-
ple of the provinces.*
*The worship of the Emperor was forbidden in Rome, toler-
ated in Italy, universal in the provinces. Sixty districts or towns of
Gaul, each with its separate shrine, joined in a common ritual in
his service at a metropolitan temple close to the wall of Lyons
(see below). The assemblies here made a sort of provincial par-
liament, and sent regular reports to Rome; having, however, no
power of independent legislation
WORSHIP OF THE EMPEROR.
91
the impious adula-
For it was not court flattery,
tion which craves "the thrift that follows fawning."
It was the expression of gratitude for a blessing too
great to have come from a merely human source, for de-
liverance from evils too great to be stayed by a human
hand. The wreck of old political institutions had
destroyed or set afloat those old local faiths that be-
longed to them; and this rude but vigorous growth of
a popular religion had come to take their place, and
throve on their decay.
Very significantly, too, there is scarce a hint of it in
the more familiar literary sources of our history. Its
record is in scattered monuments and inscriptions,
only brought to light and deciphered within the last
few years; just as our earliest contemporary records of
the popular Christian faith are in the monuments and
inscriptions of the Catacombs. From such sources we
learn that there was not only the vague popular ado-
ration, such as Tacitus speaks of when he ascribes
the working of miracles to the Emperor Vespasian.
There was also an organized worship of the Emperor,
with temple and ritual, and a consecrated order of
priests. Every year embassies went up from the
provinces to Rome to carry him their thanksgivings or
vows or expressions of religious homage. To be a
member of that priesthood, or head of such an em-
bassy, was a dignity held in reserve for men who had
discharged the highest official trusts in their native
district, a dignity to be recorded in inscriptions on
their funeral monuments.
*The official title of this priesthood was Flamen Romæ Divorum
et Augusti.
92
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
The religious vows were not merely the formal or
official language of diplomatic speech; but plain men,
of humble life, of no official station or ambition, re-
corded their private reverence and homage, or that of
their households, — just as a pious Catholic might re-
cord his self-consecration to a patron saint, in words
of pious gratitude for the blessings devoutly ascribed
to Cæsar as author and giver of daily benefits.* While
each nation had its especial deity, he only, men said,
was one god over all the earth.
To us, who know that succession of Cæsars main-
ly from the court scandal of Suetonius or the lurid
tragedy of the Annals of Tacitus, there is something
strange, and even pathetic, in this ascription of divine
honors to such names as Tiberius, Nero, or Domitian.
The habits of old faith, the terrible memories of con-
quest, the immense relief of comparative equity, secu-
rity, and quiet, are all necessary to be kept in mind,
to make it credible.†
In one way this imperial creed brought the Pagan
mind into most sharp and direct collision with the
Christian faith. The religion of the State became
more and more identified with the worship paid per-
sonally to the Emperor; and any symbolic act of that
* See examples of these inscriptions in Coulanges, Institutions
Politiques de l'ancienne France.
†That the Roman State still a Republic in name should
have endured for fourteen years what it is charity to call the insane
freaks and caprices of one sickly and weak-minded 'youth, Nero,
is partly explained by the remorseless cruelty of the Roman temper
and manners, but chiefly by the name of Cæsar, which he inher-
ited, and by the deep horror left on men's minds from the century
of the Civil War.
MARCUS AURELIUS.
93
worship swearing to the name of Cæsar, or casting
incense in the formal ritual- became in a special
way the test of political loyalty. To refuse it, under
whatever pretext, was constructive treason.
It was
this, and not any hatred of the Christian system, or
inclination to persecute it as such, that so often put
the Christians under the ban of the State. Most of
the Emperors, it is quite clear, would have been glad
to evade any such attack on a class of safe, obedient,
trusty subjects, which the Christians generally were;
so the early persecutions were spasmodic, of short
duration, and far apart. Even Trajan, who will not
have the Christians hunted out or betrayed by in-
formers, must submit them to the test of "worship-
ping my divinity."* In short, the more sincere and
the more fully developed this new state religion, the
more inexorably it must needs deal with any rival
creed.
It is to be noticed, also, that the antagonism spoken
of comes to a head about the middle of the second
century; and that from that time forth it is open war,
with little truce, until the stronger faith prevails. At
first sight it is strange that this war should have been
declared by the wisest and most scrupulously just of
all the Emperors, - by Marcus Aurelius, who is ad-
dressed by Justin as if he was almost persuaded to be
a Christian, and whose ethics are as clear and austere
as those of Paul. But it was because Aurelius had
* So I understand the phrase supplicando diis nostris, comparing
it with imagini tuæ supplicarent in the letter of Pliny. The spe-
cific act of sacrifice is the one thing demanded in the edicts of
Diocletian.
94
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
religiously consecrated himself to the service of the
State, because he scrupulously endeavored to make
himself worthy of the worship which the state religion
enjoined, that he saw the more clearly how inevitable
and uncompromising the conflict had come to be.
It was in his time that the worship of the Emperor
came to its highest reach of sincerity and fervor.
The personal virtues of the "five good Emperors," of
whom he was the last, contrasted with the vices of
most that went before, had carried the grateful hom-
age rendered to Cæsar to a certain loyal and devout
enthusiasm. As a picture of Napoleon might be found
sixty years ago in every French peasant's cottage, as an
image of the Virgin adorns the home of every hum-
blest Catholic devotee, so the figure or bust of the
good Emperor was to be found at the family altar of
every pious Roman subject; and the inscriptions of
veneration and homage become more fervent now.
than ever.* The popular religion of the Empire had
now reached its completest development. And, if
there had been an abiding principle of life in it,
Christianity might have found a worthier rival, and a
more doubtful encounter.
But we have not far to look for the causes of its
rapid fall from this culminating point. We need not
suppose any wordy hollowness in the profession of
"his
*"At this day"—that is, in the time of Constantine
statues stand in many houses among the household gods; he is
even now regarded as a divinity; priests, fellows, and chaplains
(flamines) are assigned him, and whatever antiquity has prescribed
of religious offices." Julius Capitolinus, Ch. 18 (in Coulanges).
The Christian Emperors, down to Gratian, were regularly deified
after their death, and had their due place in the Pagan pantheon.
RELIGION OF THE HUMBLER CLASSES.
95
strained, when
creed, like that
At any rate, it
faith made by the imperial Stoic. But his ideal of
character seems exaggerated and
divorced from a positive religious
which made the strength of Paul.
left exposed some weak spots. It is significant, that
the "decline and fall of the Roman Empire" begins.
with the reign of his successor. Aurelius himself
invites criticism by his indulgent fondness for Faus-
tina; it was even a crime against the State to leave
that in the brutal hands of Commodus.
That crowned gladiator must rudely shock the
pious faith that rested on his father's calm humani-
ties. And Commodus was the pioneer in a century
mostly filled with the names of military adventurers
twenty-five in all before we come to that of Dio-
cletian (the first who was worshipped as a god in
his own person) — on whose character and fortunes
that faith was completely wrecked. Whatever was
genuine in it was more and more rapidly absorbed in
the widening conquests of Christianity, whose type
of incarnation was by so many degrees more pure
and august. And the final battle of the creeds, at
the end of the third century, may be said to have
blotted out almost the very memory that the Pagan
Empire had ever so much as pretended to embody
any conception of justice, mercy, or religious truth.
There is another phase of the popular religion,
illustrated chiefly by funeral monuments and inscrip-
tions, showing more of the life of the humbler classes,
including slaves, respecting which a brief hint must
here suffice. The cruel lot of these poor creatures
was lightened by charitable societies and burial
96
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
societies among themselves. The inscriptions express
sometimes a pious and humble trust in terms curi-
ously like those of the Christian monuments; some-
times the despairing or mocking temper we might
more naturally expect. The glimpse they give of
family affection and kindly feeling is often very
touching; and helps us, better than almost any other
thing, to understand the "good ground" in the pop-
ular heart, where the new seed had its strongest
growth.
It has been necessary to speak of the long attempt
to create a religion among the ruins of the old Pagan
world chiefly on its formal side, that which is
shown in its modes of worship and its professions of
belief. There is another side, which shows more of
what we may call the heart of Paganism; and of this
a word remains to be said.
It is no lesson of antiquarian curiosity, but of the
latest experience, that religious passion is quite as
much to be dreaded as any other form of human
passion. Perhaps, indeed, no other passion has gen-
erated so much of frenzy, cruelty, and hate. The
ancient Romans did well, from their point of view,
to look with dread and dislike on all excesses of
religious emotion, particularly that which invaded
from the East, always the hot-bed and nursery of
fanaticism. When the delirious rites of Bacchus
were first known in Rome, and especially their effect
on female worshippers, it was with a panic of genu-
ine terror that the Senate undertook to keep it at
bay, at the cost of tortures and bloody executions.*
* Liv. xxxix. 8–18 (B. c. 185).
1
MAGIC AND HUMAN SACRIFICE.
97
This was about the time of the first contact of
Rome with the East. Two centuries later, under
Augustus and Tiberius, many an Oriental superstition
was well naturalized in Rome. Isis and Serapis
were fashionable divinities. Magic, sorcery, and all
manner of religious frenzy, were chronic symptoms
of the popular mind. Virgil's Pharmaceutria and
Horace's Canidia are the familiar types of these
wild superstitions. Their home was in the East.
· And with them came to Rome the crueller rites, the
self-mutilations and the bloody sacrifices, that belong
to the worship of Cybele, Dionysus, and the rest.
Now sacrifice in the earlier time, among the Greeks
and Romans, had little if any of the expiatory char-
acter afterwards given to it. There was not much, in
those days, of the feeling of remorse; crime itself
was rather fatality than guilt; the Furies that pur-
sued Orestes were charmed away by no slaughter of
an innocent victim, but by a grave decision of the
real nature of his deed. There was sacrifice of human
victims by Druids in the woods of Gaul; by bar-
barians on savage coasts; by Greeks or Romans in
moments of extreme terror; by the Carthaginians, a
Tyrian colony, who thought to avert the ruin of their
city by slaying two hundred of their noblest children
before their Canaanitish gods.
But the ordinary act of sacrifice was simply an act
of thanksgiving, or an offering to avert some natural
calamity, not an atonement for the sin of the soul.
The father of the household, in killing the creature
destined for the daily meal, was priest as well as
provider, and set apart the due portion to the house-
5
G
98
THE MIND OF PAGANISM.
hold divinity. This was simply a deliberate but
rather awkward "grace before meat." "A tender
lamb from the fold shall often stain the altar" which
Tityrus has built to the divine benefactor (who "will
always be a god" to him) that has restored his farm.
This, as far as we see, was the old Greek or Roman
notion. The more solemn public acts of sacrifice.
were acts of divination, not the atonement of national
guilt of which there might seem great need.
The meagre simplicity of ancient rites, as well as
the timid scruple in their performance, and perhaps
a quickened intensity of moral feeling, had something
to do with the eager and passionate reception of for-
eign custom. The Eastern temper in such things was
fervid, passionate, often delirious, sometimes brutal.
How it allied itself with practice of magic, evoking of
spirits, and what we should call animal magnetism—
curiously like the practice of spiritists in our own
day- belongs more to the latest phase of Paganism,
and the extravagances of the Neo-Platonists. But the
bloody sacrificial rites of the East were quite in keep-
ing with the peculiar brutality of public temper which
we find in the earlier Empire.
These rites went all the way from personal mutila-
tions, more or less severe, to the ghastly performance
of the taurobolium, in which the worshipper stood in a
pit below a perforated platform, and was drenched
from head to foot in the shower-bath of blood that
gushed from the slaughtered bull above.* This hor-
rible ritual was held to be a ransom from all guilt,
and a pledge of blessedness in this life and the next.†
*The criobolium was the similar sacrifice of a ram.
↑ In ceternum renatus. (See Prudentius, Perist., x. 1011.)
INCARNATION AND SACRIFICE.
99
As the worshipper, reeking and dripping with the
sanguine torrent, passed out through the crowd, others
pressed about him, to win some share, by a touch or
stain, in the magic efficacy of that atoning rite. It is
this strange custom of later Paganism, quite as much
as the Levitical tradition of the Old Testament, that
gives emphasis to the words written to the Hebrews:
"If the blood of bulls and goats sanctifieth, how much
more the blood of Christ!" and again, "It is not pos-
sible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take
away sin."
We have, then, in the mind of Paganism at this
epoch, the two characteristic religious ideas of the age
-Incarnation and expiatory Sacrifice distinctly
conceived and plainly developed, though in forms
that make them more a travesty than a counterpart
of the same ideas in the Christian creed. The impor-
tant thing to notice in them is, that they are the ideas
of that age. They are not peculiar to Christianity: it
would be truer to say that in origin and essence they
are rather Pagan than Christian. That they had a
powerful effect in shaping the Christian belief, there
can be no doubt. At least, they predisposed the mind
of the Roman world to accept that belief so broadly
and so easily as it did. The rapid decline of Paganism
in the third century, and the sudden change that
shows the whole Empire Christian at the end of it,
are facts to be accounted for on the common ground
of history so far as may be. The triumph of the latter
cannot be understood, as a human event, without an
understanding of those causes, working from within,
which predisposed mankind to receive it.
Uor M
THE
V.
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
HE one period of Christian history which most
fascinates the imagination at first sight, is that
when the new faith came to the throne of empire in
the person of Constantine the Great.
And this first attraction is fully borne out by the
real interest of the characters and events though
not in the way we might have thought at first. To
the Christians, suddenly released from a great stress
and dread of persecution, it would seem, no doubt, the
coming of a perfect day, and the establishing of the
kingdom they had prayed for, once for all. But then
came the inevitable recoil and disappointment. Con-
stantine was no saint, at best, and a very doubtful
Christian; but a victorious general, a suspicious and
wary politician; a man of some very great and noble
qualities, indeed, but stained by one or two dark
crimes. The religion he protected was no sooner in a
place of security and power than smothered jealousies.
burst out, and religious feuds began, and the Empire
rang with the noise of a controversy often unintel-
ligible as it was disgraceful-whose fame is hardly
diminished to this day.
The Arian Controversy has these two points of
interest for us. It is in itself one of the most dra-
DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE WORD.
101
matic and eventful chapters in the whole history of
human opinion, turning on the adventures, character,
and animosities of three or four leading actors, to-
gether with the lively passions of great multitudes
of partisans; and, secondly, it fixed for a great many
generations the type of the dominant belief, giving an
answer to the question, What sort of a system, intel-
lectual or religious, should come to take the place of
the dying Paganism? These two make, so to speak,
the pivots which sustain our interest and steady our
understanding of it.
It is not hard to trace in outline the development
of speculative opinion which prepared the way for
this extraordinary outburst of religious rage. This,
however, belongs to the history of doctrine, and need
not be dwelt on here. That the opinion became a
passion, and the motive of deadly controversy lasting
through centuries, turned on circumstances in the
history, and on principles of human conduct, not
so directly obvious. First, however, a few words are
needed as to the nature of the controversy itself.
The doctrine of the Divine Word (LOGOs) as mani-
fest in the human life of Jesus had for some two
centuries been the accepted key to the interpretation
of the Christian Gospel. More or less vaguely, the
Word was held to take the place of the human soul
in him, or to be intimately united with it, so that, in
virtue of it, and the Divine nature which it implied,
he became the Christ.
But the term Logos itself has a double meaning.
On one hand, it is identical with the Divine Wisdom,
-which is, in fact, constantly used as its equivalent,
102
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
both by the Greek and Latin writers; and in this
sense it is simply the name of an Attribute of the
Creator. On the other hand (by the habit of mind
already spoken of in considering the Gnostic genealo-
gies) it is easily, unconsciously, continually hyposta-
tized,—that is, regarded as an independent Substance,
or quasi-Personality; and in this sense, as a pre-
existent Divine Person, is especially identified with
the Christ.
It is clear that we may make either of these con-
ceptions prominent, so as to overshadow or dwarf the
other; and we shall do this according as the habit of
our mind is mystical on one side, or rationalizing on
the other. The mystic, reverential, imaginative mood
dwells upon the Attribute, which it tends more and
more to merge in absolute Divinity, in the direction
of a religious Pantheism. The rational, analytic, crit-
icising mood dwells upon the Substance, or Person
(hypostasis),* which it tends more and more to make
distinct and separate, and therefore a logically de-
pendent and inferior being. To the first, the Logos
as Divine Wisdom is necessarily coeternal with God
himself, as light with the source of light. To the
second, the Logos as a Divine Person is necessarily
inferior to and (so to speak) younger than the Infinite,
just as a son is younger than his father. To the first,
Christ is the Son of God figuratively, by eternal gen-
eration; to the second, he is the Son of God literally,
as the "first-born of the creation."
This radical difference of mental constitution and
* Explained by Gregory of Nyssa as bearing the same relation
to the individual as Substance (ovoía) to the class.
THEOLOGICAL PASSION.
103
habit repeats itself in all the phases of the contro-
versy that followed. The mystic tendency* appears
as an exaggerated orthodoxy, later known by the
names Monophysite and Monothelete, till it runs out
into the peculiar fanaticism of certain Oriental sects,
to whom Christ is the sole and essential Deity. The
rationalistic tendency † shows itself as a harassing
and incessant criticism, quite as intolerant as its
adversary, not repudiating but putting its own inter-
pretation on the accepted creed, exiled at length as
Nestorianism, under which name it subsists in the
East to this day. The narrow line of the church
faith, between these contrary drifts of opinion, has
its landmarks fixed in the decisions of the first four
General (or Ecumenical) Councils. ‡
+
This central line of doctrine, it is almost needless
to say, runs a good deal nearer to the mystic than to
the rationalizing opinion. In religious controversy,
it is not half so important that men should under-
stand their creed, as it is that they should hold it in
some well-defined symbol appealing strongly to the
imagination. And we misunderstand both the age
of Martyrdom, and the age of Controversy that im-
mediately followed, unless we see how the fervor,
nay, often the frenzy, of a passionate conviction-so
nurtured by the incessant discipline of the Church
when belief in it was a matter of life and death
will cling to what from outside seems a mere passion-
* Represented by the names of Sabellius, Apollinaris, and
Eutyches.
† Represented by Arius, Eunomius, and Nestorius.
‡ Viz. that of Nicæa (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431),
and Chalcedon (451).
104
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
less abstraction. The Dutch Republic, once free from
terror of the Spaniard, went straight into disputes
about predestination that risked its hard-bought liber-
ties, and cost the noble Barneveldt his head. What
can be more a mere abstraction, a mere identical
equation in logic, than There is no God but God?
Yet the phrase in which it rings on the battle-field
to-day hurls masses of Moslem fanatics against Rus-
sian intrenchments, and piles them dead or dying in
the ditch, just as, seven hundred years ago, it hurled
myriads of Saracens against the steel-clad ranks of
the Crusaders. It is the symbol, not the thing, for
which men oftenest stake their lives. In deliberate
sober thought we choose the policy we think most.
wise and safe, the theory of State-rights or the
theory of the Republic one and indivisible; but in
the fury of battle men think less of that than of the
visible sign of it, the Stars and Stripes against the
Stars and Bars!
Now it happened once in Alexandria, not far from
the time we are approaching, that a certain Bishop
Alexander was zealously expounding to his audience.
this cardinal point of Christian faith. They were
lately at rest from a time of persecution, ready and
hot for controversy. It was probably the exposition
of the religious symbol in some such cheap religious
rhetoric as most of us have heard as that the glori-
ous Sun in heaven represents the Father; his Light,
the eternal Word; his Heat, the life-giving Spirit;
and so on.
But the smooth discourse was cut short
by the cry of heresy. "That is the false doctrine of
Sabellius!" said a voice in the crowd. Now Sabel-
SABELLIUS AND ARIUS.
105
lius, most pious and unsuspecting of heretics, had
preached, a few years before, a sort of "modal trin-
ity," very much to the same effect. The voice was
the voice of Arius, a presbyter, no friend of the bishop,
of temper restless and litigious, an uncomfortable an-
tagonist in a war of words. In person slender and
tall, of features fine-cut and rather sharp; in manner
courteous; careful and somewhat elegant in dress;
ready of speech, and gifted with a certain keenness.
to fasten on the weak point of his adversary's state-
ment, and follow it out in a teasing, exasperating way
to some point of real or seeming contradiction; and,
withal, a man who would not be silenced or put
.down.
It is not likely that either opponent could state his
point so as to be very clear to us, or, at any rate, so
as to seem at all solvable by the human mind. After
many centuries, and whole libraries of dispute, it is,
we may say, as far from being solved as ever. If
Christ is the Son, said Arius, he must be younger
than the Father, if only by a single moment out of all
eternity, and so dependent on him; or, in the test-
phrase of Arianism, "there was when the Son did not
yet exist." Nay, was the reply, he is the eternal Son
of the eternal Father: to deny his equal eternity is to
say that the Sun in heaven can exist without giving
light and heat.
And so the dispute went on.
It turned on a very
fine point,—one, we might say, invisible to the naked
eye; and there was nothing for it but the incessant
* Not, "there was a time when": the Logos was non-existent
only in eternity, before time was.
5*
106
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
repetition and reiteration of the same words. The
discussion is very weary to follow, and it seems to
lead us nowhere. If we take the term Logos (which
is masculine in Greek) to signify merely an Attribute,
-conscious intelligence of the Eternal, it is a sim-
ple and intelligible symbol to speak of it as the Son
by eternal generation. If we take it to mean a Per-
son, it seems impossible not to distinguish it, by some
grade of dignity or precedence, from the Eternal One.
The arguments of Arius seem the incessant sharp
rattling of a logic-mill, like those windy disputes of
Sophists in Plato: those of his opponents -
we may
look through many a hundred of the pages that record
them, without finding one that any man now would
care to repeat or answer.
If we would understand the importance of the
Arian controversy, then, we must find it not in what
is wilful, personal, dramatic in the story,-least of
all in the speculative opinion on either side, what
seems so absolutely apart from anything that we un-
derstand or care about to-day; but in what lies behind
it and around it. It is really the great feature, the
one visible feature, of the intellectual history of a
time critical as any in the religious and social desti-
nies of mankind.
Let us transport ourselves now to the time when
this controversy came to a head in the Council at
Nicea (325). If we look back fifty years, we see the
vast intellectual and political system of Paganism-
to all outward appearance as vast and formidable as
ever-just preparing to put forth all its forces in a
final effort to suppress that threatening, unceasing, in-
A COMPARISON OF CREEDS.
107
sidious growth of the Christian system, and on the
edge of its last, most obstinate, and most cruel perse-
cution. If we look forward fifty years, we find the
same Paganism idealized in a new and arrogant sys-
tem of philosophy, contending for intellectual and
political revival with a speculative zeal and moral
pretensions fully equal to the Christianity of the day,
a sort of eclectic or transcendental free religion, as
brilliantly described in Kingsley's "Hypatia."
How was it, then, that in the middle of this cen-
tury of revolution, enveloped right and left by the
political forces, the philosophical systems, and the
menacing fanaticisms of the older civilization, Chris-
tians had time or heart to rage so furiously together?
And how was it that, in spite of a conflict which
seemed to consume all its strength, Christianity came
out of it in a hundred years stronger than ever, the
only live organized power to stay the tides of barbar-
ism; at the end of five hundred years, the base and
the ideal of a new Christian Empire, already rivalling
the power and dignity of the old; at the end of a
thousand years, in possession of a dominion which
seemed to Dante then as secure as the circles of his
Hell, or the portals of his Paradise?
There are two answers to this question, one con-
sisting in the nature of the thing itself which was at
issue between Paganisin and Christianity; the other
in a comparison of the two rival Christian creeds,
Arian and Athanasian.
First, it is not very hard to trace the genealogy of
opinion. The laws of thought are uniform, and intel-
lectual systems unfold naturally and easily by a
108
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
method of their own. So far as mere opinion goes, I
do not see in the least why Paganism did not furnish
materials of a system quite as likely to satisfy a
thoughtful man of that day, as the Christianity of the
first three centuries. In fact, we see that it did so
satisfy many of the very best and wisest men of the.
time: Tacitus, the stern historian; his friend Pliny,
the courteous and accomplished Roman gentleman;
Plutarch, the biographer of pagan heroes and critic of
pagan morals; both the Antonines, wisest and best of
statesmen; Galen, the pious and enlightened physiolo-
gist; Epictetus, most patient, shrewd, and austere of
moralists.
Why should such men burden themselves with
Jewish or Galilæan legends that to them must seem
foolish and incredible? Did not the caustic wisdom of
Socrates, the high philosophy of Plato, the scientific
breadth of Aristotle, the elevated and pure theism of
Cicero, above all, the large life, the political experi-
ence, and the manifold culture of pagan antiquity,-
did not these furnish materials for a religious system.
incomparably more broad, rich, and true than the nar-
row creed of Palestine ?
And then, too, could not a wise eclecticism adopt
and engraft upon it whatever seemed really worth
retaining of the fervid religious life, the "enthusiasm.
of humanity," the methods of mutual help, in the
Christian body? So it seems, at least, to many en-
lightened and cultivated people of our own day; and
so the thought must have crossed the mind of Paul,
himself an enlightened and cultivated man, when he
saw with a sort of amazement how God had chosen
THE METHOD OF FAITH.
109
the foolish things of the world to confound the
wise, and weak things to confound the mighty, and
base things to bring to naught the haughty and
strong.
But no. The history of opinion is one thing; the
history of faith is another thing. Faith belongs to
emotion, character, and will. It is capable of passion,
of enthusiasm, of obstinate courage. It can disdain
reason, and trample argument under foot. It cares
for reason or argument only as a weapon of attack:
its only weapon of defence is confidence in itself. It
has its own laws of growth, which resemble more the
spreading of flame than the skilful joining of archi-
tecture. It has its own methods of conquest, of which
the chief is to kindle and sedulously to nurture an
unreasoning devotion.
So it has been with all the great victorious faiths of
history, from Elijah to Mahomet, from Paul to Gar-
rison. What such men call reasoning is only the
expression of a passionate conviction; the method of
instruction such men employ is the contagion of their
own ardent thought. In the great struggle against
Paganism, the inheriting of that power, the secret of
that method, was with the Christians, and not with
their opponents. What cool and unprejudiced reason
might have chosen or might have done is not to the
point. I have often asked myself, in the controversies
of our own day, whether reason might not have
brought better and safer results than fanaticism; and
the only answer I could find was, that what we call
fanaticism is one of the great forces that impel man-
kind, while reason is not. Reason at best may serve,
110
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
in some small degree, as pilot or brakeman, the flame
and vapor are from quite another source.
In the second place, it is part of the method of
faith, that it scorns anything that looks like compro-
mise with its opponents. Compromise may be had
after the victory is gained, but not while the fight is
going on. Now Arianism was, in fact, as a system,
very high-toned, nay almost extravagant, in its Chris-
tian profession. In asserting for Christ a super-
angelic pre-existence all but absolute and eternal, it
claimed for him as much as could be forced from the
very highest expressions of reverence in the Alex-
andrine phraseology of Paul or John; infinitely more
than could be found in the earlier and more authentic
gospel. But observe. In that phrase all but, there
lurked a flaw of heresy, of weakness, of compromise
with the common enemy. Surely, in the light of
simple reason, it were better to accept frankly the
simple humanity of Jesus, to treat the nativity as a
myth, the miracles as legends, and the resurrection ast
a glorious illusion; or else to say, just as frankly, that
Jesus was God in the flesh, his temptations, his suf-
ferings, his prayers, a mere dramatic exhibition, or a
mysterious by-play of his divine and human nature.
At least, the first is intelligible reason, and the last
is sublime faith in a glorified humanity. Either is
better than that nondescript illogical compromise
which is known as Arianism.
-
And again, it was something worse than a logical
flaw. Did it not make Christ the "Son of God,"
after all, very much in the same way that Jupiter
was the son of Saturn, and Mars of Jupiter? Did
THE DRIFT OF ARIANISM.
111
it not open the way for all the shocking possibilities,
for all the blasphemous compromises, of a mongrel
paganism, nay, to all the horrible vices and cor-
ruptions that had grown out of the old worships of
paganism? If Christians too are to worship a Divin-
ity who is after all not the Supreme God, what are
they better than their enemies? Did they, too, not
worship sons of God, Apollo, Hercules, Bacchus,
and the rest?
brutal Commodus as well as the good Severus
sented in advance to such a compromise, and even
admitted Jesus of Nazareth to the generous Roman
pantheon? Had not the best of all the emperors,
Trajan and Aurelius, proved the impossibility of that
compromise by persecuting the Christian faith?
Had not some pagan emperors
the
con-
We need not suppose that all these thoughts came
in at once, to make the feud so bitter as it proved to
be. But they all lay behind, more or less conscious-
ly, to make the controversy obstinate and bitter under
the successors of Constantine in a later age. For
then Arianism had come to be a court party. Its
perilous drift towards compromise was seen then,
plainly, on the side of politics, where it seemed
somehow to flatter the self-love and fondness for
power of a despotic house; as it was seen, too, in
the fact which broadly marks its destiny in history,
that it kept strong hold of the speculative and sub-
tile Greek mind, and remained an apple of discord in
the East, taking many shapes and hues, one creed
having (we are told) no less than twenty-seven
anathemas appended to cover so many shadings of
dissent; while the central, catholic, domineering,
112
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
uncompromising faith held almost undisputed ground
in the West, where it became the basis of the most
vast and imposing spiritual dominion ever known.
The Nicene Creed, so called, is still the authentic
expression of that faith, as read in the liturgies of
to-day.
It is true that the Nicene Creed was itself a
sort of compromise, prepared at the summons of Con-
stantine, whose motive was more than half political;
and signed, with whatever demur, (it is stated, rather
doubtfully,) by Arius himself, who presently found
himself high in favor with the imperial court. But
its historical importance is very great; and, as the
central act of a most extraordinary drama, it demands
a few words of mention.
We cannot do justice to the very perplexing char-
acter of Constantine, unless we think of him, with all
his faults, as a man of strong, generous impulses, very
much dominated at times by a vivid imagination. It
was something more than policy, it was a natural
effect of the impressive, nay, appalling situation in
which he found himself, at the head of a force
largely Christian marching against the rude and fierce
Maxentius, who had mustered whatever there was in
Rome of fanatic attachment to the old religion or
fanatic hatred of the new, that he saw, or seemed
to see, a flaming cross in the sky at noon, and set that
sign above the crimson banner, the Labarum, under
which his army went, cheerful and strong, to certain
victory. A triumph in open battle against the old gods
of Rome in person! What an appeal to excited imagi-
nation on one side, to despairing frenzy on the other!
And again, when he traced the outline of his new
CONSTANTINE.
113
capital, the most felicitous choice ever made for the
seat of a great Empire, he asserted, and probably be-
lieved, that he was acting by Divine guidance. “I
must keep on," said he to his officers, amazed at the
wide plan he traced, "till the God who goes before
me stops." A man of strong imagination, lifted sud-
denly into a great success, comes (as Napoleon did) to
look on his own acts and destiny with a certain awe :
he easily thinks himself a man of destiny. Sylla be-
lieved in his star, and Cæsar in his descent from
gods; and it was a like feeling, half reverent, half
superstitious, that impelled Constantine, under cir-
cumstances far more impressive and strange, to set
up in his new City that extraordinary symbol of
empire, the statue of Apollo, or the Sun-god, with
a head made in his own likeness, surrounded by
gilded rays, which, said popular belief, were nails of
the true cross, miraculously discovered to the em-
peror's mother.
It is interesting, too, and very touching, amid so
much that is pitiless and stern, to see how the con-
queror really wished to be the father of his people.
Deserted children, who before had been sold as slaves,
were adopted as the emperor's own.* It was a
shameful thing, he said, that any of his people should
perish of hunger, or be forced to crime by stress of
actual want. It was cruel that mothers and children,
brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, should be
torn apart in the slave-market: let that be forbidden
at any public sale.
*The first orphan asylum had been founded by Trajan, two
hundred years before.
H
114
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
This sentiment of justice, or humanity, could not
ripen into a firm policy then. At more than fifteen cen-
turies' distance we are only groping about the problem
now. It resulted in little else than making Constanti-
nople a privileged city, which in that day meant a city
of paupers and courtiers. The dry-rot of the Empire
was hardly checked. The heart of society was perish-
ing by slow decay. The old Roman valor was well-
nigh extinct. The Roman state had to defend itself
by legions of Goths, whom it hired, cheated of their pay,
enslaved their children, and drove into a frenzy of
hate, till within fifty years from the building of the
splendid capital the emperor (Valens) was burned alive
in the hut to which he fled from the great disaster of
Adrianople (369), and the spell was forever broken
by which the name of Rome had charmed and awed
the barbarian world.
*
These calamities could not be foreseen or averted
by Constantine. Yet he must have felt the slippery
peril of his elevation. Some forty years before, Dio-
cletian — whose name is linked by a cruel destiny
with the persecution of Galerius, which he would have
been only too glad to stay - had tried to check the
break-up of that great military empire by dividing it
among four closely allied sovereigns. A tempest of
disorder, following his abdication, had compelled Con-
stantine to reduce it again under a single head. The
old gods of Rome had been, so to speak, literally met
and defeated in open battle under the standard of the
Cross. None of the ancient sanctities adhered to the
new dominion. Whatever Constantine's sincerity in
*See Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum, ch. xi.
COUNCIL OF NICÆA.
115
accepting the faith under whose symbol he had con-
quered, at least the formula of that faith must not be
left to angry and endless disputes among the professors
of it; and so he called together that most famous of
all Church Councils which met at Nicæa to settle
once for all the authentic creed (325).
Here, again, it is easiest to look upon the scene as
it appeared to the imagination and human feeling of
Constantine himself. When he advanced, tall and
stately, in imperial robes and attended by the impe-
rial guards, to preside in the sacred assembly, — he,
the champion of the Cross, the deliverer from per-
secution, the restorer of peace to a stormy world, —
there was no bound to the genuine homage of the
throng that saluted him, as if he had been a god in
human shape, or at least an angel, and "equal to an
apostle." And he on his part saw them there, scarred
veterans (as it were) of a long and terrible campaign,
living witnesses of a martyrdom in which many
of them had shared the torment, though not the
palm. So bruised and mutilated, this man wanting
an eye, and that an arm or leg, they seemed war-
worn soldiers, who, having served out their term,
were summoned once more to do battle for the faith.
To one old man, whose eye had been plucked out and
scarred by a firebrand, the emperor went up tenderly,
and kissed with his own lips the scorched and empty
socket, as if some healing virtue were in the scar; or
rather, with a deep touch of human feeling, to say by
that symbol how near those horrors lay to his own
compassionate heart. It was wise and generous, too,
as well as politic, when he took all their memorials of
116
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
their eyes.
personal grievances and burned them unread before
"Let the God of all things judge," said
"Respect yourselves and respect your office, ast
I myself would cover up any fault of yours with my
official robe."
he.
The discussion so auspiciously begun had the usual
fortunes of theological debate, "like a battle by
night," says one of the old historians; so little could
either party know the ground it stood on. It lasted
two months. It produced, by judicious compromise
and careful definition, what is known as the "Nicene
Creed," a document of some twenty lines, which was
signed by the delegates, three hundred and eighteen
in all. Some signed it under protest, or filed ex-
ceptions to particular phrases; but to Constantine it
was a state paper of first-rate importance, not a mat-
ter of speculative nicety, and he firmly insisted that
all should sign. The test-word in it was the Greek
word rendered con-substantial;* and this has been
the badge of orthodoxy ever since.
But the history of the Arian controversy was not
ended at Nicæa, only just begun. It lasted with great
violence some forty years, incessantly disturbing the
peace of the state. The terms of truce were not (so
to speak) officially defined before the Council of Chal-
cedon (451); the animosities of debate have not ab-
solutely disappeared at this day. For forty years,
however, it was an event in history, turning mostly
on the personal fortunes, efforts, and adventures of
"
* In Greek, duoovσios (homoousian), i. e. of the same essence."
The Greek word iπóσraσis (hypostasis), corresponding etymologi-
cally to "substance," was rendered in the Latin creed persona.
ATHANASIUS.
117
Athanasius, who from this time forth becomes the
champion and representative of the dominant faith.
He had been Alexander's delegate in the Council, —
a young man then under thirty, of keen intellect,
indomitable temper, and a vehement partisan, “tur-
bulent, fiery, and imperious," his enemies said, "arro-
gant, revengeful, and uncapable of being quiet." His
attacks on his opponents are more like shrieks than
argument. "O modern Jews and disciples of Caia-
phas!" he hails them. "Arians! nay, hollow Ario-
maniacs, madmen! They rob God of his wisdom
and his Word. They shed their cunning heresy as
the cuttle-fish sheds his blackness, to benighten the
ignorant and make their falsehood safe." "A heretic
is a wicked thing: his heart is depraved and impious
at every point."
Such are some of the amenities of this prince of
controversialists. They express, it must be owned, a
good deal more the heat than they do the light of
his opinions. They tell how he felt, much better
than what he thought. But it is these qualities,
more than largeness and breadth, that give men a
great place in the history of controversy. He is the
one man about whom are gathered the passions of
the struggle. Hostility, attack, the jealousy of ri-
vals, or government prosecution, he met with the
same defiance.
His life shows full of daring, of ready wit, of dra-
matic incident. As Bishop of Alexandria (where in
his childhood he had played boy-bishop, as Cyrus
played boy-king), he was charged with monstrous
crimes, — peculation and fraud, sacrilege and murder,
118
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
the murder of one Arsenius, whom his accusers (he
says) kept hid two years to give color to their charge.
One piece of evidence was the dead man's hand, used
by him, they said, in magic rites. Disdaining direct
reply, he led forth a man muffled in a cloak, and
asked, "Does any one here know Arsenius?" He
was known to many. He uncovered the man's face:
it was Arsenius himself. Lifting the cloak on either
side, he showed first the right hand, then the left.
"Show me where the third was cut off," said he,
coolly. This was his whole defence.
Again, pushing up the Nile once in his little boat,
in flight from Julian, he was nearly overtaken by
armed men in pursuit. Heading boldly down stream,
he soon reached them, when they hailed him: "Is
Athanasius near?" "Close by," said he; and so
passed on unmolested, and lay safe hid in Alexan-
dria, while they toiled vainly towards the desert.
Five times an exile, twice in Gaul or Rome, once
in the deserts of Upper Egypt, once for four months
hiding in his father's tomb, he was at length allowed
to live eleven years in peace, till his death at the age
of seventy-six (373).
One
But it is far from my intention to give a biography
of Athanasius, or to tell the story of the time.
is pretty safe to find in Gibbon a sufficiently accurate
travesty of the event: its real history is in thick vol-
umes of narrative and controversy of the old Greek
Fathers. There are only two points which I wish to
present in closing.
First, in the final defeat of the Arian party, Chris-
tianity was saved from being a political or speculative
RESULTS OF THE CONTROVERSY.
119
sect, and saved to be a great social and reconstructive
force. It is, perhaps, the misfortune of Arianism, that
judgment must go against it by default. We know
it mostly by report of its adversaries. But that judg-
ment is, that it began with disputatious quibbling
about words; that it did not enlist the better reli-
gious feeling; and that its strength, when it had any,
lay in the alliance of the Court.
The "Catholic faith," so called, on the other hand,
was very positive and explicit; unintelligible, no
doubt, but dogmatic and imperative, demanding and
receiving a loyalty that did not stay to reason. Christ
is very God of very God was the challenge thrown
down to all heresy and unbelief: a phrase that might
not satisfy the enlightened reason, but attracted the
fervent, passionate, exultant acceptance of whole pop-
ulations. Its root and strength were in that unrea-
soning- if you will, fanatic-loyalty. Its defence,
for forty years, lay in the intrepidity of a single man,
— ardent, whole-souled, uncompromising, the one
man then living who dared openly to defy an em-
peror's will.
Athanasius was not a great man; perhaps he was
not a just man; but he was, in his way, a very strong
man. He knew well how to appeal to men's im-
agination, sympathy, reverence. And the stamp he
gave to the creed of his day was just what was
wanted to keep the faith hot and intense, as a work-
ing force.
Again, there is a broader way in which this con-
troversy has told on Christian history. As against
his antagonists, the triumph of Athanasius was the
120
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY.
triumph of Europe and of Rome. Rome was then
the one metropolitan church of the world unrent by
theological feuds, first and last a stanch defender of
the faith and of its exiled champion. The dividing
line between Eastern and Western Church, so sharply
drawn that at this very day the Pope prefers that the
infidel Turk should triumph rather than the Orthodox
Russian, begins to appear in history about this time.
The symbol of this division is a phrase (filioque)
which the Roman Church long after appended to the
Catholic creed, claiming that the Son is one with the
Father as the source of spiritual grace.
Now the quarrel is none of ours; we are quite
neutral in the theological debate between "orthodox"
and "catholic." But it is a very great matter for us
for better or worse, and (we may fairly claim) much
for the better that our civilization, on its political,
religious, and social side, is the inheritance of the
West, and not the East. The overwhelming defeat
of the imperial army by the Goths, five years after
Athanasius's death, was the signal of the fall of that
avalanche of barbarian invasion which presently over-
whelmed the Roman world. Under the terror of that
disaster, the Empire took refuge with a chief of ortho-
dox piety, Theodosius the Great, part of whose work
was to give imperial prestige to the ecclesiastical
power—in the person of the great Ambrose which
was presently going to be the salvation of the West.
More than anything else, it was just then impor-
tant that the power to organize society and create the
institutions of the future should be a moral power.
And that was the same as saying that it should rest
THE REAL ALTERNATIVE.
121
A
on a religious conviction held with unreasoning fervor,
defined in a symbol positive enough to enlist like a
flag the passionate loyalty of multitudes of men.
decaying civilization, a perishing social fabric, a polit-
ical framework battered and just yielding before a
frightful tempest of invasion, a decrepit Paganism,
guilty of vices that might not be named and cruelties
not to be recalled without horror, these were on
one side; and on the other, the sublime faith, held
with whatever of unreason, turbulence, or feud, that
Almighty God had once lived bodily among men,
and that He did really in person lead them now in
the fight against His enemies.
6
A
VI.
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
UGUSTINE, called "greatest of the Fathers,"
was born in North Africa in 354; was Bishop
of Hippo (now Bona) from the year 395; and died
during the siege of this important city by the Vandals,
in 430. His fame is very great in the history of
religious opinion. It rests mainly on his doctrine of
Predestination, and his theory of inborn Evil to be
overcome only by the sovereign grace of God. But
his influence belongs far more to his warm, devout,
and impassioned temperament, to his eager, incessant
activity in the offices of the Church, and to the
transparent exhibition which he has made of himself
in his Confessions, a long and detailed account of
his religious life, made throughout in the form of an
act of devotion, or direct address to the Deity.
It is not easy for a modern mind to think of
Augustine as so great a man, intellectually, as he is
generally claimed to be, or as perhaps he really was.
In particular, he seems to want the power, which a
really great mind has, of making a clear, coherent
statement of opinion, especially of opinion which
he has outgrown and is controverting. It would, for
example, be worth a good deal to us if he had left us
an intelligible account of the Manichæan heresy,
HIS OPINIONS AND CHARACTER.
123
from the point of view of a believer, or even of a past
believer in it. As to this, we are obliged to consider
it more in the view suggested from its enormous,
seemingly disproportionate consequence in the his-
tory of opinion as an object of hate and terror
from its origin, about a hundred years before, down
even to the destruction of the Templars about nine
hundred years after the time of Augustine than in
the violently refracted light thrown on it in his own
writings.
And again, his cardinal doctrine of Predestination
is a purely technical and unscientific account of the
origin of good and evil. With all his passion for
abstract discussion, it has no more real basis in the
science of thought than it has in the science of things.
And it must definitely pass away in the form Au-
gustine gave to it, and which was all he cared for in
it- under the different habits of thought that come
from a different mode of investigation. In fact, he
had a very sincere, what we should call a holy horror
of science, in the only form of it known in his day.
Mathematicians and astronomers, he thought, were
prying impiously into the secrets of the Most High ;
and his repugnance to their line of study was only
less vehement than his repugnance to sin itself.
Still further, as Mr. Lecky shows, the influence of
Augustine in the development of character, in the
direction of moral goodness, itself requires to be
challenged, or at least to be taken with large abate-
ment. In the direction of personal piety it needs no
such abatement. Perhaps no other writings than his,
except the Hebrew Psalms, have done quite so much,
124
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
directly or indirectly, to lift men's minds into the
temper of penitence, humility, and adoration. But
piety is not all; it is not even the chief thing to be
considered. Paul puts charity before it. Now charity
that human love which has no soil of human pas-
sion - is of two sorts, and works in two directions.
As growing out of tenderness and sympathy, and lead-
ing to acts of mercy, Augustine was a noble example
of it. To personal opponents he was generous; in
the treatment of heresy he was magnanimous; in a
time of great calamity he was foremost to set the ex-
ample of self-sacrifice and devoted service in behalf of
the suffering and needy.
But there is another working-out of charity, which
consists in expanding men's notion of what goodness
is, and must go along with intellectual breadth as
well as pious fervor. It is not to condemn Augustine
personally, to say that the very glow of his religious
conviction, narrowed as it were to a focus upon a sin-
gle point of faith, made the effect of it perilous, in
some ways very mischievous, when the heat of it
caught a mind of baser temper and less generous zeal.
Hatred of sin in himself made him very tender of
sinners, in whose evil he saw the reflex of his own;
but it could easily turn, in other men, into a fanatic
hatred of those whom their narrow judgment con-
demned of sin. Awe at the Divine sentence passed
on human guilt, in which he figured nothing less ter-
rible than flames of everlasting anguish, might easily
come in them to justify any violence of threat and
torture by which they could lessen the chances of
that appalling doom. And so that one enormous, un-
HIS PLACE IN HISTORY.
125
speakable horror, which shadows as if with a bloody
pall the history of Christendom for thirteen hundred
years, tortures of flame, rack, dungeon, haunting
suspicion, infamous betrayal for opinion's sake, — all
could find a sort of pretext, and in one sense had a
source, in the vehement, undiscriminating, unsparing
temper of Augustine's war on the heretic Pelagians
and the schismatic Donatists.
It is necessary to make these large qualifications at
the start, because really it is hard to speak of Augus-
tine's name and influence so as to avoid mere blank
laudation.* He was a very strongly marked man, in
his way a great man. He is generally called the
greatest of the Fathers; that is, of the Christian
writers of the first six or eight centuries. Compari-
sons are difficult in such a case: there is no scale by
which souls can be accurately weighed; though this
might be allowed without ranking him very high
among the great minds of the world. But he was,
unquestionably, what may be called one of the great
characters of history; one of the very greatest moral
forces in the region both of character and of events.
that grow from character.
Now, when we think of a man's place in history,
we are very apt to think of it as of the place of a
brick in a wall, or of a statue in a niche,
as if it
might be taken away with no other special loss; as
if some other might have occupied it without much
* As a curious testimony to this eminence, it is said that at this
day the Moors near Bona (the modern Hippo) call him, in honor,
"the great Roman," and in pious memory of him visit every Fri-
day the ruins of the church where he was bishop. - Ozanam, Civi-
lisation au cinquième Siècle, Vol. II. p. 2.
126
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
change in the surroundings. But, in truth, a man
fills his place among human events very much as the
roots of a tree fill the interstices of the soil: they
either burrow a way by their own vital force, or a
way is made for them, inconceivably intricate, by the
seemingly chance adjustment of stones and mould.
More accurately still, he fills his place like a vital
organ in the body, itself a part of that living network
of tissues whose fibres and cells must be reckoned by
many millions, which it has helped and helps to
create. So that, when we are speaking of a very great
personal force, such as that of Augustine, it is not as
if it were something transferable, which might have
appeared, perhaps, in another century; but something
that grew out of and acted back on the innumerable
and intricately mingled circumstances of the time.
What, then, were those circumstances? I must
sketch them very broadly: we are already entering
the twilight of the Dark Ages; and any slightest
glimpse we have of them shows that we are standing
at the boundary-line of two historic periods. The
life we are considering spans that line at midway, and
serves as our easiest transition from one period to
the other.
The year 395 was one of those inexplicable times.
of panic, when prophecies fly about in the air, and a
superstitious fear exaggerates the real terror of coming
events. It was just three hundred and sixty-five
years, as men reckoned, since the crucifixion of Christ.
Thus the religion had endured for one prophetic cycle.
A crisis had come in its destinies. Some great change
was impending: its enemies said, to bring it to a
A YEAR OF TERROR.
127
sudden end, and restore the old system of things; its
friends said, to open before it a new era of strength,
perhaps to bring visibly the triumphant coming of
the Messiah, and his victorious reign.*
Various things happened just then, as always hap-
pen at such a time, to deepen the terror, to confirm
the hushed and eager expectation. That year the
great Theodosius died; and with him, says Gibbon,
died the genius of ancient Rome. Now first the per-
manent line of separation was drawn between the
Eastern and Western Empire, parted between his two
incapable sons. Within a month after his death, in
the dead of winter, vast hordes of barbarians, no
longer held back by the dread of his name, poured
across the frozen Danube to threaten Italy and G´ece:
poured like a tide-wave, driven on by a great storm
of wilder invasion behind, in front the Goths, after
them the terrible and hardly human Huns.
As that low thunder began to be heard along the
North, the spell of an unearthly horror seemed to
seize on men's minds, Pagan and Christian alike. Six
years before, the emperor had decreed by edict the
overthrow of Paganism; and at a blow, or rather by
a hundred blows wildly struck at once throughout the
empire, temple and altar and consecrated image and
secret shrine went down. The work was done by
swarms of monks, who issued from the monasteries
of East and West, with eager, triumphant, iconoclastic
zeal. To quote the words of Gibbon, "In almost every
province of the Roman world an army of fanatics,
without authority and without discipline, invaded the
* See De Civitate Dei, xviii. 54.
128
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest
structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of
those barbarians, who alone had time and inclination
to execute such laborious destruction."
Now it was not, to either party in this wild cru-
sade, the mere destruction of temple, grove, altar, or
sacred image. Still less was it to them what it is to
us, the mere destruction of Greek and Roman art.
To the Pagan mind the old gods were tutelar divini-
ties of land and city: their downfall left their walls
naked to the invader. To the Christian mind these
gods were Demons of awful and as yet unknown
power. They had been worsted, so far, in the life-
and-death struggle with a still mightier power, fer-
vently believed to be the very presence of Almighty
God himself. But suppose one shade of doubt as to
this; or suppose that in his dark decree God chose
to leave his people for a season naked to their ene-
mies! Who could tell what vengeance, what terror,
the "demons" they had fought against might yet have
it in their power to inflict?
*
Besides, had not they, too, been brought up to re-
vere before all earthly things the majesty of Rome?
Was not that very imperial majesty itself sundered
before their eyes? Were not rumors of peril such as
had not been dreamed of for near eight centuries, so
invincible had seemed the Eternal City, even now
echoing in their ears? They could not look forward,
as we from a long, safe distance can look back, to see
how the storm should sweep over and water the earth,
making it bring forth a more generous growth; and
*See De Civitate Dei, xx. 13 (compare ii. 10, x. 21).
HIS CONVERSION.
129
how its lightnings should strike down or scorch away,
first of all, noxious things, that while they stayed made
any better world impossible. They were in the gloom
of its blackness, and the mutterings of its thunder
were close upon them. In a few years more, Rome
was taken and sacked by Alaric (410). The spell of
her great name was broken. Her desolation, to use
the language of the time, was as the desolation of
Babylon the great, and of Nineveh, which Jehovah
had cursed of old. In men's imagination, the fall of
Rome seemed almost the very dissolution of the globe.
History can only give us the incidents of the scene,
not the passion and the terror that belong to it.* The
record of a time is truly read in the minds of those
living at the time: not in the events, which must be
gathered and put together afterwards; but in the atmos-
phere, which can alone make the picture of them real.
This atmosphere we find, more than anywhere else,
in the writings of Augustine; and it is to him we
must turn, in brief, to get such interpretation as we
may of the thought of the time. That thought we shall
find, for our present uses, in the three aspects under
which his writings have now to be considered.
I. His public life, as Bishop of Hippo in Africa,
began in that year of panic and dread, 395, and lasted
thirty-five years, till his death in 430. Ten years
before, at the age of thirty-one, was his conversion,-
an event of such note that it is commemorated in the
Roman calendar to this day. It may be worth while
* All that can be gleaned from the meagre annals of the time
will be found in Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders" (Oxford,
(6
1880).
6*
I
130
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
here to give his own tender and dramatic account of
it. He had listened to the preaching of Ambrose,
and had been pondering with a friend the writings of
Paul in much agitation of mind; and was strolling in
the garden, when he heard a voice saying, Tolle, lege;
tolle, lege: "Take, read; take, read." At first he
thought it was spoken in some children's game; but
suddenly it struck him that the voice must be an
angel's. "So, checking my tears, I rose, judging it to
be nothing else but a command to read the first words
of the book I should find on opening. For I had
heard of thy servant Antony, that coming in while
the gospel was read he took it as a warning to him-
self, Go sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and
come follow me; and by that word was at once turned
to thee. Eagerly then I returned to where my friend
sat, where I had left the volume when I came away.
I took it, opened it, and read silently the words my
eye first rested on: Let us walk honestly, as in the day;
not in rioting and drunkenness, not in lewdness and
debauchery, not in strife and jealousy; but put on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh
to satisfy its lusts. I read no more, and had no need
of more; for instantly, at the end of this sentence, a
calm light, as it were, entered my heart, and all the
darkness of doubt passed away."
Nothing is said here of any change of opinion, or
of the solution of any intellectual doubt that may
ever have troubled him. As far as such a thing
could be, it was a purely moral conversion, a change
of sentiment, emotion, and will. Remorse for boy-
ish faults, such as stealing a neighbor's pears, or for
MANICH ÆISM.
131
loose living in his youth, made only a part of it, —
most likely, only a small part of it. It was rather
a recoil against the whole theory of life by which he
had been living hitherto. Especially, it was closely
connected, in his own mind, with that marked in-
tellectual change which consisted in renouncing the
Manichæan philosophy, and accepting with great in-
tensity of conviction Paul's own doctrine of good
and evil.*
Just what this Manichæan opinion was, what was
its strange fascination to the most cultivated thought
of that time, and what made it the great bugbear of
true believers for a thousand years together, it is not
easy to state to a modern mind. Augustine's own
statement of it, as I have said before, is turbid, con-
fused, and unintelligible. But it must have some
meaning to us, if we could only get at it, seeing that
it makes so large and imposing a figure in the history
of opinion.
Its essential principle is commonly explained as
simple Dualism, in some such way as this. The
Universe consists of two vast realms infinities, we
might call them which are polar opposites: Light
and Darkness. Where they come in contact, there is
interminable strife. The darkness aspires to the light,
hungers for it, engulfs, or (it is Augustine's word) de-
vours a portion of it; and from their contact is pro-
duced the visible world, including the nature of man.
* "In turmoil of mind (æstuans) I asked, Whence is Evil? What
were the agonies of my laboring heart! what groans, O my God!
And there were thine ears, when I knew it not. And when in si-
lence I made bold to ask, loud was the cry appealing to thy mercy,
dumb the anguish of my soul."— Conf., viî. 7.
132
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
In him, again, the soul represents (or is born of) light,
and the body darkness. So man is the subject of a
divided empire; and the conflict, for all we see, must
be eternal.
*
Now this may pass very well for a sort of poetry,
telling in symbols the story of that strife which we
see going on in the world about us, and are conscious
of, more or less, within us. But it is not easy to see
why Augustine should have hated it so, when once
he had left it behind; why the Church should have
feared it so, that the first blood shed for heresy, and
the most ferocious of Crusades,† should have been on
the charge of this deadly misbelief. At first sight it
does not seem so very different from Paul's own doc-
trine of the war of flesh and spirit; it looks like
quite the same thing, in other terminology, with the
Church doctrine of Satan as the adversary of God,
which was, in fact, derived from the same Oriental
source. For the Persian Mani who had been
seized and flayed alive (according to the common
story) a hundred years before by the king of Persia
- had only set in more exaggerated and poetic strain
the old Zoroastrian scheme of Good and Evil, en-
grafting on it some wild mythology of creation, and a
scheme of redemption, which is only a strange phan-
tasmagory, coupled with some Gnostic tradition of a
Christ. I do not know how, seen merely from the
outside, we could easily tell the difference between
+
*Of the Priscillianists in Spain, A. D. 385.
†That against the Albigenses, 1208-1229.
>>
The completest statement of the Manichæan doctrine that I
have seen 18 in Mosheim's "Commentaries on the First Three
Centuries.
EVIL PHYSICAL OR MORAL.
133
Augustine's earlier and later theoretic view, as touch-
ing the conflict of good and evil in human nature.
We must look at it, therefore, in another way, from
the point of view of religious experience. According
to the Manichæan view, the source of Evil is physi-
cal; it exists in the nature of things. Man is subject
to it because he is part of the system of things. The
conflict is fought out, as it were, by vast impersonal
forces, which he can have no hand in guiding. And
so the system becomes one of Fatalism, fatalism of
that most hopeless and unrelenting sort which makes
a man's soul (as it were) a mere shifting focus, where
the rays of light and darkness meet, and his destiny
is the plaything of their caprice. In other words,
its view is speculative and physical, not ethical. It
is of the conflict of Light and Darkness simply, not
of Right and Wrong. "I had rather," says Augustine,
of his own Manichæan days, "that thine unchanging
Substance erred of necessity, than my own inconstant
nature by will; and that Sin befell by immutable
law from heaven, that so man should be free of its
guilt, while in proud corruption of flesh and blood."
And thus the modern counterpart of Manichæism
if we would understand it from the corresponding
thing in our own experience is to be found in that
scientific fatalism which is one of the threatening
forms of modern thought, which we are well used to
in the speculations of certain pessimists and evolu-
tionists. I am anxious not to add to the rancor of
any prejudice that may happen to exist. Evolution
is the accepted dominant philosophy of the day. I
accept it too, so far as I am entitled to exercise
134
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
private judgment on so large a matter; desiring in
all humility to know whatever there is true in it,
and seeming to find in it the explanation of more
dark facts in life than is found in any other system.
But the instant it takes the form of fatalism as to
the good or ill in human character, of helpless scep-
ticism as to the course of human destiny, or despair
of social progress, I surmise that there is something
wrong, and that man's mind is capable of something
better.
The insidious temptation to that way of thinking
we ought to be aware of in ourselves, if we would
judge the thought of Augustine and his contempora-
ries. We should see it not historically alone, as it
touched them, but in thoughts, images, and influ-
ences that reach us too. The gloomy imagination
of Shelley was strangely impressed by watching an
Alpine glacier that seemed "crawling" from its bleak
lair to swallow, like some monstrous dragon, the fer-
tile valley and the smiling life below; and he thought
of it as a symbol of the Fate which irresistibly over-
rides and crushes human hope.
Astronomers tell us the day is coming when all
this globe will be blasted, empty, frozen, incapable
of life; and to some this suggests a certain chilling
despair as to the value and end of human effort. To
others again it seems, after all these ages of costly
and toilsome progress, as if civilization itself were
going to be the prey of those appalling wars that
have followed one another like thunder-shocks in
these last five and twenty years, and still threaten;
or of the vices and miseries that like a cancer eat
NATURE OF THE CONFLICT.
135
at its very heart. And, if a serious and devout
thinker, like Carlyle or Ruskin, can be tempted
now to this intellectual despair, how was it in that
day, when the one only fabric of society, polity, and
art men knew seemed crumbling on one hand from
interior decay, and threatened on the other by the
irresistible avalanche of savage hordes? The wild
strange heresy of the Manichees was as it were the
echo in their soul of that knell of doom which seemed
clanging from all things around, in the downfall of a
perishing world.
Now it is not the warped judgment of a church-
man; it is the judgment of Comte in his masterly
outline of medieval history, it is the judgment of that
cool positivist, John Morley, in his apologetic essay
on Voltaire, that civilization was narrowly saved, at
this crisis of its fate, by the organized, valiant, ag-
gressive faith of Christendom. How its conflict was
carried on, and how its victory was gained, belongs to
the study of the next four centuries, ending with the
Christian Empire of Charlemagne. Just now, we are
standing at the moment of time which determined
what the nature of that struggle should be. And this
decision was precisely contained in the nature of that
change which passed upon the mind of Augustine in
the hour of his conversion.
It is hardly too much to say that that revolt of
his moral nature against the doctrine of the Mani-
chees had in it the germ and the key of that great
spiritual evolution. For the very point of it was that
it shifted the ground of conflict. The source of Evil,
it showed him, is not in the physical world; it is in
136
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
1
the moral world. The battle-ground is not the nature
of things; it is the nature of man. The conflict of
good and evil is to be fought out in the soul. It is
not as if man's salvation were staked on some great
game played by invisible combatants in the wide field
of the universe, a game in which he has no hand
and cannot see the moves. It is narrowed down to
the field of his own mind; and, whatever outside
forces are engaged in it, they are first of all, so to
speak, personified in his own reason, conscience, pas-
sion, and will. Just where and just because he is
most intensely conscious of his own personality, there
and therefore comes the great alternative of right or
wrong, of life or death.
We
Now it is in the very conviction of sin itself that
one first has the true idea of good; just as it is when
we would do good (as Paul says) that evil is present
too. For the two are counterparts; so that not only
we cannot know one without the other, but we cannot
know either of them in any other way than through
that struggle against the other. Nay, more.
cannot really know anything about God, of any con-
sequence for us to know, except as the power within
us "that makes for righteousness." in the struggle;
that "works in us both to will and to do." The phys-
ical nature and conditions (so to speak) of Infinite
Good what we call the Divine Attributes are as
impossible for us to define as those of Infinite Evil.
And so in the very struggle itself we have an assur-
ance, the only assurance we can have, that the great
spiritual forces of the Universe itself are on our
side; in short, that our salvation (which means our
(c
THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY.
137
safety" in it) is the direct gift of Almighty God
himself.
This we may take to be the real sense of the
Pauline or Augustinian doctrine of justification by
faith, as seen in the light of personal experience, and
especially as against the Manichæan heresy. Au-
gustine stakes his position in that controversy on the
point of moral freedom. To him it is a shocking
thing to say that anything is originally and essentially
evil.* Evil is a corruption of some native good; a
ruin, a fall, not a destiny from the beginning. To
attain the higher life is not a conquest of something
alien; it is winning back our birthright. This con-
viction lay at the heart of Augustine's creed. To con-
ceive it, further, as a force in history, we must think
of it not as a mere form of philosophic speculation
with him, but as a vivid, intense, fiery conviction,
such as he conceived it in the moment of conversion,
and such as, in the heated warfare of opinion, he has
stamped the impression of it on the Christian mind.
II. I have dwelt thus out of seeming proportion
on Augustine's relation to the Manichæan controversy,
both because it is the most obscure in itself, and be-
cause it gives the exact point of view from which to
consider the two other chief intellectual tasks of his
life. Of these the first was his controversy with Pe-
lagius, the great unending debate of Destiny and
Moral Freedom.
In one sense this controversy is impotent and futile,
turning on a question that necessarily remains un-
solved and unsolvable, the shuttlecock of metaphysics
* See the "Dialogue with Faustus."
138
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
since thought began. At whatever point we start,—
divine foreknowledge, destiny, natural law, evolution,
-strict logic brings us straight to one or another
form of necessity. Regarded scientifically, moral lib-
erty is not even thinkable. On the other hand, no
sooner do we come to the facts of life, — action, con-
duct, the judgment of motives, responsibility for re-
sults, personal appeal,- than we take for granted at
every step that moral freedom which our theory de-
nies. Accept whatever theory you will of antecedent
and result, with its logical consequences, and you
are a fatalist at once, helpless sport of destiny. Try
to state to yourself any theory you will of human
action, and apply it to men's character and conduct,
the instant you say I will or I ought, you have come
upon other ground. You have admitted in terms that
fact of human life which is all your opponent really
contends for, however irreconcilable to your own his
way of stating it. Life incessantly re-creates the faith
which science as incessantly denies.
All this is very simple and elementary business.
Leaving now the platitudes of metaphysics, let us at-
tempt to see the great debate as it enters here upon
the field of history. It is very interesting to watch
the combatants: Augustine, with the hot blood of his
native Barbary coast, a small, thin man, nervous,
fiery, intense, goaded by memories of his own sins of
the blood, haunted by the thought of a Hand that had
been held out to snatch him from destruction, humbly
sensitive of his own helplessness in that crisis, and
clinging like Paul to the thought of a Divine Power
he must always lean on for strength, himself only the
AUGUSTINE AND PELAGIUS.
139
meanest instrument of an Almighty Will; Pelagius,
with the clear, cool head of his native Britain, large of
frame, slow of speech, grave, honest, weighty, his self-
mastery trained by strife of wind and ocean-wave, of
firm, resolute will, clear conscience, cheerful courage,
and masculine understanding." * The two had kind
thoughts and respect for one another, for they had
met in personal debate; † but the controversy their
names represent lay as much in their radical differ-
ence of temperament as in the difference of theory
they started with.
As
It is of no use now to take up their arguments.
it must always be in the field of action, vehement
conviction had the better of sober common-sense, and
Pelagius went back to the calmer life of his native
North. Was that a thing to regret? At least it was
inevitable. The men who make the deepest mark on
history are the men who feel with a deep and intense
conviction that they are instruments of a higher
Power, their own will governed by a vast Force
behind them, impersonal and uncontrollable. This
seems to be the case even in direct ratio to their
weight of personality and vehemence of resolution:
with Paul, Augustine, Luther; with William of
Orange, Cromwell, Napoleon, -the men of God, or
else the men of Destiny. SEN
And perhaps it was better so. Here I will quote
the historian Michelet. "To reduce Christianity," he
says, “to a mere philosophy, were to strike it with
*To complete the parallel, later belief added that the two great
antagonists were born in the same year.
† See Augustine's letter to Pelagius (Ep. 146).
140
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
death, and to rob it of the future. What would the
dry rationalism of the Pelagians have availed when
the German invasion came? Not that proud theory
of liberty needed then to be preached to the conquer-
ors of the Empire, but the dependence of man, the
almightiness of God. To temper that fierce bar-
barism, all the religious and poetic fervor of Chris-
tianity was none too intense. The Roman world felt
by instinct that it must seek its own refuge in the
ample bosom of Religion. That was its hope, its
only asylum, when the Empire that had called itself
eternal was passing away in its turn, with the nations
it had subdued. . . . The mystic doctrine triumphed.
As the barbarians came, the controversy ceased; the
schools were closed and still. It was faith, simplicity,
patience, the world needed then."
The partisan applause of Augustine because his
doctrine triumphed, and the theological odium into
which his opponent fell, are both alike discreditable
to the occasion and the man. But as afterwards
in the sharp warfare in which the Protestant Refor-
mation was plunged - it was a time of crisis and
peril. At such a time men must look well to the
keenness of their weapons, and not spare blows in
the thick of the fight. It was well that that doctrine
triumphed which was likeliest to enlist men's pas-
sions on the side of religion and virtue. But Augus-
tine, any more than Calvin, cannot claim our full
verdict for all his acts. Of the two the first had
far the more generous, the tenderer, the broader
nature; and of the two his theological scheme
more thoroughly and deeply made part of his own
THE CITY OF GOD.
141
religious experience. He felt that, in a sense, every-
thing was at stake in the debate; and this is his
claim for pardon, that his vehemence in controversy
stirred up hate against his opponents, and they even
charged him with using the arm of the law against
them, and exciting the persecution under which they
suffered. At least, the moderate and gentle temper
he began with gave way, and his name is unhappily
used to justify the vindictive, unreasoning malice that
has spurred on the hunting of heresy to this day.
III. Of the very great bulk of Augustine's writings
the largest part consists of exhortations, discussions,
expositions, that filled up the spaces of his routine
work during his five and thirty years of office. One
famous treatise stands out in strong relief from the
mass; and for breadth of mind, largeness of view,
orderliness of argument, or mastery of style, his fame
rests chiefly on this, "The City of God."
The book abounds in arguments that would seem
childish now. Its notion of sacred history is formal,
uncritical, and dogmatic. Its sketch of early events.
is at once tediously minute and curiously incomplete.
Its reasoning on natural things shows all the igno-
rance and incompetency of an unscientific age. Its
expositions of Scripture are impossible to accept, its
personal testimonies of miracles and wonders impos-
sible to believe.* In other words, it has just the
intellectual defects, the bigotries, ignorances, and
superstitions, of the human mind at that day.
But it is not necessary to dwell on these. They
* See in particular the very curious and detailed account of
these miracles in Book xxii., chap. 8.
142
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
are faults on the surface, sometimes running down
into the substance, of a great and noble work, — the
one really great work that the human mind produced,
we may say, for four or five centuries, at least within
the limits of the Western Empire. Its substance I
cannot dwell on; of its temper and occasion a few
words remain now to be said.
The title of the book shows the splendid concep-
tion that lay in the mind of Augustine, a concep-
tion which we may call the final culminating and
idealizing of the old Messianic hope. It set up, as it
were, a magnificent standard of faith, right on the
spot and at the time that must see the great battle
of Christ and Antichrist fought out.
The time of its composition was between the
fall of Rome under Alaric the Goth and the more
furious invasion of the Vandal Genseric. At that
moment of chief horror and despair, when the brav-
est were appalled at a disaster that so appealed to
men's imagination, when even believers began to ask
whether Christianity had not proved impotent to the
task of holding the defences Paganism had main-
tained so long,* Augustine threw down this sublime
challenge to their faith.
His tone is proud, confident, uncompromising,
triumphant in advance. It is attack, and not de-
fence. He puts point-blank the contrast of the "Two
Cities" as he calls them: the City of this World, the
abode of superstition, cruelty, violence, conquest, lust,
greediness, hate, all illustrated in the record of
pagan Rome; the City of God, with its marvellous
* See the Introduction, and compare Book xx., chap. 13.
THE IDEAL STATE.
143
chronicle of prophecy and miracle, the saints and
heroes of its glorious calendar, its constant assurance
and proof of superhuman aid, its magnificent promise
of future ages that shall be its own, illustrated from
the sacred records of Hebrew faith. The two are
elaborately contrasted in their origin, their progress,
and their end, in the second and larger division of the
work; the former part having already shown, in even
superfluous detail, how helpless Paganism had been
to secure blessing and safety to its adherents in this
world, and how empty was its promise for the world
to come.
The phrase itself City of God carries a suggestion
of the compact, highly organized municipalities of
Italy or Greece, and their capacity to call out and
sustain the most strenuous and devoted patriotism.
The ancient City stood for natural justice, armed and
codified, for a common welfare, and for protection
against assault. Its justice, perhaps, was class-priv-
ilege. For liberty it had only "liberties." But it
was at once the highest political conception men knew
then, the most sacred and revered type of authority
they could comprehend. And, in making it the key
to his argument, Augustine has given, as it were,
the Roman counterpart of that "Kingdom of Heaven"
which the Jews looked for in their Messiah's reign. .
He offers, however, no such promise of a kingdom
upon earth. This "kingdom of heaven is within."
The "City" is purely ideal, spiritual, heavenly. The
miseries of the good and bad, so far as human eye can
see, will continue alike and equal through the pres-
ent life to the end of time; the visible separation
144
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
will be hereafter. The blessedness of the righteous
on earth is peace; the wretchedness of hell itself is
interior conflict, even if there were no everlasting
flame.*
In this fundamental thought of the "City
of God" we have, again, the complement of that
thought illustrated in Augustine's reaction against
Manichæism, which shifts the conflict of good and
evil to the world within, and stakes all in life that
is worth living for on the soul itself. This point of
contrast with Manichæism is urged in several places
in the "City of God." The blessing promised to good
men is not that they escape the anguish or the terror,
but that they are victorious over it.
If we can look back now a few years, to the time
of our own great national struggle, to those seasons
of disaster and defeat when to large numbers, brave
and fearful alike, the struggle itself seemed bootless
and hopeless; and if we can remember the enormous
advantage then of our faith in an ideal Republic,
one and indissoluble, that sublime ideal of political
justice and popular right which made the nation's
victory and strength; then, I think, we may conceive
something of what it was, as the world plunged into
those long dark ages of barbarism and strife, to have
that one flag kept proudly flying above that one im-
pregnable fortress of the City of God!
The ages that followed, when the Church was at
length victorious in its new empire, do not fulfil the
promise of that grand dream, any more than our new
* See the exquisite chapters, Book xix., ch. 13, 14; also the
brief but profound one, xix. 28; together with the noble and
sweet cadence with which the work concludes.
THE CITY OF GOD.
145
Republic fulfils the hope of those who fought to save
it, and gave their lives freely in that hope. But we
can see at least that one great danger is past. We
know now better than we knew then the evil and
fatal nature of that which threatened the national
life. So it was when men could look back after-
wards, and see the strong lines in which Augustine
had traced the contrast between two orders of society.
And, in the appalling miseries and divisions that tor-
mented the world for several centuries, it is not likely
that one brave man, or one frightened woman, ever
once looked back regretfully for the protection that
could have been given by an Empire which had so
proved itself abominable and accursed.
7
J
બ
T
VII.
LEO THE GREAT.
10 deal intelligently with an epoch like that of
Leo the Great (440–461), it is especially necessary
to bear in mind the aggressive, militant, antagonistic
position of the Church in human history. Our the-
ory of Christianity may be a theory of development;
but the facts we have to deal with are the incidents
of a long, obstinate, often deadly struggle. That
struggle takes mainly three directions, — against Pa-
ganism, against Barbarism, and against corruptions
engendered in the Church itself. At present, we are
concerned only with the first.
Now, to make any conflict effective, the first con-
dition of all is that the force shall be a disciplined.
force, and shall act with absolute singleness of pur-
pose, in absolute obedience to a single will. The
smooth theories of a time of peace will not suit a
period of war. Christianity as "free religion" would
have perished in a single generation. If we consent
to see that it was in any sense at that time a saving
power in the world; if it was, in fact, the genius and
spirit that carried society without wreck through
many generations of confusion and disaster, we
shall be content to see the conditions on which that
THE PAGAN REACTION.
147
work could be done then. And of these the first of
all was that the Christian Church should be united,
organized, loyal, absolutely confident of itself, and
thoroughly understanding the work it had to do.
Now, if we only remember that the last great bat-
tle fought by Rome - that in which, with Goths for
allies, she succeeded in crippling the army of the
Huns, in a fight that cost, it is said, three hundred
thousand lives was in the year 451; that the next
year the hordes of Attila, with recovered strength,
hovered like a flight of vultures above the plains of
Italy; that three years later Genseric with his Van-
dals swept Rome almost clean of its vast treasures of
gold, silver, and bronze, and precious works of art;
that these things happened in the very middle of
Leo's rule, while, within twenty-five years after his
death, the spectral sovereignty of Rome itself came
to an end, and the barbarian was lord of the Western
Empire, we shall see distinctly that we have come
to the death-agony of the ancient State. And, as this
great agony was coming on, the East was racked and
vexed by the bitterest of theological debates, only sus-
pended at Chalcedon in 451; while in the West, and
at Alexandria, the intellectual centre of the empire,
there was a revival of classic Paganism which threat-
ened the very life of Christianity itself.
I cannot speak at length of the causes, only men-
tion some of the symptoms, of the extraordinary pagan
revival which followed for a generation or two the
edict of Theodosius closing the temples, and forbid-
ding the public worship of the gods. The last pagan
writer of vigorous Latin prose, Ammianus, ends his
148
LEO THE GREAT.
story with a vivid account of the desperate battle
about Adrianople (378), in which the Goths broke
once and for all the spell of the Roman name. Three
years later, Paganism was nominally abolished by im-
perial edict. But five and twenty years after that,
while Alaric was training his Goths in Italy, Clau-
dian could celebrate alike, with easy courtliness, in
purely pagan fashion, the exploits of the brave Stili-
cho, and the holidays of Honorius who murdered him,
or recite in smooth epigram the miracles and mys-
teries of the Christian record; while at Alexandria
Hypatia lent the charm of her beauty and eloquence
to the new Platonism that glorified the old gods of
Greece with transcendental finery, till she was torn
to pieces by a mob of monks (415).
The pagan games, with circumstances of barbarity
and horror of which I shall have more to say at an-
other time, were still celebrated in circus and amphi-
theatre. A certain insolent fashion of ignoring the
new creed, with the growing power built upon it, had
taken hold of the popular mind, and was still domi-
nant in literature and art. And, for the last strange
proof how vital and tough were the roots of old su-
perstition, when Alaric appeared before the gates of
Rome, Etruscan soothsayers were sent for, to see if by
their incantations they could yet save the city; and
promised that they would do it, (we are told,) but at
the cost of human sacrifice, and of rites so horrid that
the people refused them at the hour of their greatest
terror. Even Pope Innocent the First, then in Rome,
had consented, it is said, that this last appeal to the
pagan magic should be made.
SURVIVAL OF THE PAGAN SPIRIT.
149
Now, at the time of this siege, the Empire had been
nominally Christian for about a hundred years. How
long the spirit and belief of Paganism remained after
this, it is of course impossible to say. The last great
work of Augustine's life was to argue in his "City of
God" against this very reaction, when it seemed as
if the new religion had failed to hold the ground con-
quered under the ancient gods of Rome. What he so
argued against was but a helpless and despairing cry.
The old wreck, swarming as it was with many evil
forms of life, was soon swept disastrously away. As a
clear-eyed man like Leo could see, even then, there
was only one power that could take its place.
To the common eye the struggle might look doubt-
ful, even yet. Paganism had lost its hold on men's
reason. On their conscience it never had any very
firm hold at all. But it held strong grasp on two
great springs of human action, their imagination and
their fear. We have just seen to what acts the terror
of the siege had nearly led. And, for the imagina-
tion, it had taken full possession of the forms of liter-
ature and art. Except for a few rude hymns feeling
their way to the common heart in a simple popular
rhythm, except for a few rude shapes and symbols
of Christian imagery, there was nothing to fill the
great void left by the perishing of ancient art. For
centuries yet, Christian poets clung helplessly, as
it were, to
"The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths."
150
LEO THE GREAT.
After seven centuries of implacable monastic rule,
Dante has still a half-belief in Charon and Pluto;
and when the revival of letters came, a little later,
the old deities sprang, as it were, from the soil of the
new culture, and flourished in a sort of pallid life
down almost to our day. But that life had run in
all the veins of the ancient world, where each state
had its own divinity, and every formal act was a re-
ligious symbol; where the head of the State was a
god visible in the flesh, and the very places of public
amusement were temples of Mars and Venus, the
divinities of violence and lust. So that it was still,
in the middle of the fifth century, a hand-to-hand
struggle in which the Church was engaged, if not
with Paganism itself, in its cruel older forms, at
least with those compromises of its spirit found
under the names of Priscillianist and Manichæan,
against which Leo waged an unsleeping and un-
tiring war.
Again, we must look from his point of view, not
ours, at the controversies that divided and disgraced
the Christians of the East. It was not controversy
between the friends and opponents of the orthodox
belief. Each party eagerly and honestly claimed his
own to be the true exposition of the Nicene faith.
Thus Apollinaris, fervently maintaining the doctrine
of his friend Athanasius, who had sojourned with him
in some of his travels, fell into the heresy that Christ's
body was of heavenly, and not of human substance.
Macedonius, taking the creed too literally in its lim-
itation as well as its assertion, was charged with sub-
ordinating the Spirit to the Father and the Son; to
NESTORIUS AND EUTYCHES.
151
meet which the Council at Constantinople expanded
that clause a little (in 381). Nestorius, holding
strongly to Christ's human nature, saw blasphemy in
the phrase "Mother of God" applied to Mary; saying
that Jesus was divine not intrinsically, but was made
so by the indwelling Deity.* And in the storm of
controversy that burst out on this, hardly stayed by
the decree at Ephesus (431), Eutyches, an Alexan-
drian monk of seventy, went so far, in his hot ortho-
doxy, as to say that the divine nature in him quite
absorbed the human.
To us these disputes are battles in the thinnest of
air; but then they were matters very literally of life
and death. Nestorius, who had himself been a hard,
high-handed ecclesiastic, was banished to the confines
of Persia, where living a long life of exile he left a
sect that bears his name down to our day. The party
of Eutyches took violent possession of the synod at
Ephesus (449), the "robber-synod," where they car-
ried their point not by acclamation only, but by blows;
so that their chief opponent was literally beaten and
trampled to death, and the Roman delegates sent by
Leo to maintain the primacy of Rome barely fled with
their lives.
Such was the state of things, so far as touched his
own immediate work, with which Leo had to deal.
It presents two sides of a conflict which we find in-
cessantly present in his writings. Now Leo was not,
"
or
*The terms by which he signified the operation of the Divine
nature in him were "indwelling" (volкnois), “assumption
adoption " (àváλŋyıs), “inworking" (èvépyeta), " inhumanizing"
(évavoρúπnσis), i. e. abiding in humanity.
152
LEO THE GREAT.
in any sort, a pietist, a sentimentalist, a recluse. He
was first of all a Roman statesman, with the clear
sagacity, the resolute will, the firm and inexorable.
temper when a point must be carried, the wary vigi-
lance, the unswerving persistency, that had made the
Romans masters of the world. He had this advan-
tage over them, besides, that his policy dealt with con-
victions, not with armies and state powers, so that
his clear intelligence had free range to act, moving
in the intangible region of ideas, where no friction
is ;
while he was in full command of the intellectual
sympathies and the moral conviction which are al-
ways the deepest moving forces of the time. One
does not read a page of his writings without seeing
how complete his convictions is, and how perfect his
command of those springs of power.
not sim-
Then he was a man of absolute courage,
ply that easy "courage of his convictions" which
enables or compels one who has any strong convic-
tion at all to give it expression somehow without dis-
guise, but that personal physical courage as well, which
with a man dealing in theories and policies is much
more rare. This absolute courage it was which made
him meet without blenching, squarely as an equal,
the terrible Attila, when sent to intercede with him
for the trembling inhabitants of Rome, and, by what
seemed then a miracle, but was indeed only the mir-
acle of mind over brute force, won from him the
terms by which he left Italy unharmed; then, two
years later, gained from the relentless Genseric such
conditions as still left security of life, when the city
for the second time was at the mercy of the barba-
THE DELIVERER OF ROME.
153
rian. Perfect courage joined with dignity of office
never, perhaps, won a nobler victory. I copy here the
words of no eulogist, but of a clear and somewhat
severe critic of the growth of papal power.
"The emperor, the court, the wealthy, and the noble
had fled at the approach of danger; the intrepid Bishop,
strong in faith and hope and love, alone remained at the
post of honor and of peril; and, when the satiated foe
had retired and left the city emptied of all its wealth
and substance, and almost reduced to a wilderness of
deserted habitations, there remained none to advise or
to cheer the famishing remnant but the undaunted
Bishop and his gallant clergy. These had never quitted
their posts; these had faced the foe, and averted the
extremity of ruin; and their example alone kept alive
the spark of life among the despairing multitude that
still clung to their desolate homes. It is in this spon-
taneous chieftainship that we recognize one of the most
effective elements of the subsequent political greatness
of the Roman bishops. The decaying mass of civil in-
stitutions became as manure at the root of the papacy.
Papal Rome drew nourishment from dissolution, courage
from despair. In desperate emergencies like that we
have just adverted to, no one will look into or scrutinize
too closely the claims and titles of the deliverer; in
such times the duties of civil and spiritual government
are thrust into the hands best able to execute them;
both duties are impelled into the same channel, and
flow on naturally and amicably together. To Leo it was
due that Rome was not converted into a heap of smoul-
dering ashes; and, if natural justice were to decide the
question between the Church and the State, without
doubt the Pope was the rightful governor of Rome,
7*
154
LEO THE GREAT.
for without him there would have been no Rome to
govern.”
It is a mark of the real greatness of Leo, that these
striking and dramatic events do not appear to have
even ruffled the surface of his mind. They are mere
incidents in the discharge of his duty, perhaps dis-
tractions from what he felt to be his true work. It is
a mark of his wisdom, too. In his judgment of the
relative importance of things, he was wiser in his own
day than we should probably be in our judgment
now. It was of more moment to the world, just as it
was of more account to him, that the invisible foun-
dation should be made sure, than that this or that
should be the working-out of any political event.
The work to be done was to build up a new Rome
on the ruins of the old. And, for this new structure,
his one task was to care for the foundations. These
were laid in men's loyalty and belief and hope, and
must be constructed patiently alike in the storm or
calm of outward events. You look through his en-
tire correspondence, page by page; and you find not
an allusion to events that even at this distance shed
such a powerful and lurid glare on the history of the
time. On the other hand, his letters † are full of the
official detail of his work as spiritual Head of the
Christian world, which he fully believed himself to
be. On this one point there is never a word of con-
cession, never an instant of hesitation. We have no
business, just now, with his arguments, only with his
convictions. Whether Peter was chief of the apostles
* Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, Vol. I. pp. 426, 467.
† Of which about one hundred and eighty are preserved.
in
HIS ECCLESIASTICAL THEORY.
155
any official sense; whether he ever came to Rome
and lived as bishop of the church there; whether his
primacy, if he had it, descended to his successors,
all these questions, of fruitful controversy once, are
nothing to the point. What we see is, that the
Church at Rome-partly by its metropolitan rank,
partly by the transfer of the court to Constantinople,
partly by the distractions of Italy, partly by the
steadily aggressive policy of its abler heads — had
come to have a dignity and authority that gradually
supplanted those of every other; and that, in the
great ruin that had overtaken the Roman state, men
came to lean more on its visible and compacted
strength. We also see, or seem to see, that this
power, so disciplined and firm, was the one thing
capable of saving to the world its old treasures of
thought and its traditions of social order. What is
now our best judgment of the time was then its in-
spiration and its faith, and gave it courage to abide
the bursting of the storm that was close upon it.
The strong heart of Leo held absolutely to that
conviction, whether as statesman or as Christian
believer is of little concern to us. In his singleness
of purpose, he probably could not have drawn any
nice line between his policy and his creed. His argu-
ments will not count for much with us. It is hardly
too much to say that he does not stoop to argument.
His tone is of assertion, instruction, authority, com-
mand. Several of his letters are treatises of some
length on disputed points: the famous one to Fla-
vian, which guided the decisions of the Council at
Chalcedon (451), would make a pamphlet of about
156
LEO THE GREAT.
twenty pages. Nowhere in any of them does he hint
that an opponent is to be met as an equal, on the fair
level of debate. The assumed grounds of his opinion
he is willing to explain; but the opinion itself you
must take, whether you accept the argument or not.
In that particular debate, Eutyches had appealed
to Leo, and had gained at first his cordial support.
But when the, point came to be better known, above
all, when the robber-synod at Ephesus showed in
what a temper it was held, then Leo was perfectly
uncompromising and distinct. He demanded at first
that the Council should be held in Italy; and, when
that could not be had, wrote his letter of instructions,
taking at once the tone not of debater but of judge.
His dictum has been the test phrase of orthodoxy
ever since that both natures, divine and human,
were blended, in their completeness, in the one Per-
son who was thus perfect God and perfect man;
and his little treatise, in this letter, is to this day as
authentic and clear a statement as has been made, or
perhaps can be made, of what, by the very terms of
it, is absolute and unintelligible mystery.* We may
think as we will of the proposition. We may find in
it, if we will, an important metaphysical truth, where
we fail to see a dogmatic one.
But at least we may
recognize its value as a symbol, or watchword, in the
crisis that was fast coming on. It is interesting to
remember that the decision at Chalcedon was in the
*Its terms are, Salvå igitur proprietate utriusque naturæ [et sub-
stantia], et in unam coëunte personam (in the Greek, eis èv πроσшπоν
συνιούσης). Leo I., Ep. xxviii. This is (I think) the first use
of the term póσwπоν, corresponding to the Latin persona, and is
apparently a concession to Leo's influence and authority.
THE DESTINY OF ROME.
157
very year of the great battle of Châlons,* which
broke the power of the Huns, and saved Europe from
the fate of Asia; and that, of these two events, Leo,
the greatest man of the time, seems utterly and
calmly careless of the one, while his whole heart is
full, and all his passion roused, by the subtile point
of transcendental theology determined in the other.
The permanent and real work of Leo's life was to
found a new Rome on the ruins of the old. At this
distance of time, it is easy for us to see how far
greater was the splendor, and vaster the sway, of the
spiritual empire that followed him, than of the politi-
cal dominion that went before. But, in that age of
ruin, it is very striking to see how distinctly it was
already prefigured to his mind. We must assume
that he, as a native Roman, had in his heart all the
proud and passionate loyalty which for so many ages
had made Rome's unbroken faith in her imperial
destiny. And perhaps it was in part the obstinate
resolve that that faith should not be defeated, which
made him so clear-eyed as to the coming glories of
the Eternal City. It is best to hear his expression of
it in his own words, which I copy from a sermon
delivered on the memorial day of St. Peter and St.
Paul.
"These are the men, O Rome, through whom the.
gospel of Christ hath shone upon thee. These are thy
holy fathers and thy true shepherds, who have set thee
in heavenly kingdoms far more gloriously than those
who laid the first foundations of thy walls. These are
* Or rather, of Troyes, some fifty miles farther south. See
Hodgkin's "Italy and her Invaders," Vol. II. p. 138.
158
LEO THE GREAT.
they who have advanced thee to such glory that, as a
holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state,
thou shouldst hold a broader sway in faith of God than
in dominion of the earth. Whatever the victories that
have borne forward thy right of empire by land and sea,
yet less the toil of war has yielded thee than the peace
of Christ. For the good, just, and almighty God, who
never denied his mercy to human kind, and always, by
his abundant benefits, has instructed all men in the
knowledge of himself, by a more secret counsel and a
deeper love took pity on the willing blindness of wan-
derers and their proneness to evil, by sending his Word,
equal and co-eternal with himself. And, that the fruit
of this unspeakable grace might be shed through all the
earth, he with divine foresight prepared the Roman
realm, whose growth was carried to limits that bor-
dered upon the universe of all nations on every side.
But this city, knowing not the Author of her greatness,
while queen of almost every nation, was slave to the
errors of every people, and seemed to herself to have
attained great faith, because she had spurned no false-
hood. And so, the more strictly she was held in bonds
by Satan, so much the more marvellously she is set free
by Christ."
These words we read, not as the complacent homily
by which it is so easy to glorify a victory already
won, but as the strong faith that is itself the pledge
of victory in advance. It was in part an educated
belief with Leo, and in part the clear pointing of the
time. No blame to him, if it was also in part his
secular and patriotic creed. To a Roman it was the
right thing that Rome should be sovereign of the
earth. To a pious and strong-hearted Roman of that
HIS POLICY.
159
age, the one thing needful at once and possible was,
that in her continued empire Rome should be a spirit-
ual sovereign, and not a temporal one. Rome, said
Jornandes, no longer held the world by arms, but by
men's imaginations.
This faith, this resolute purpose of Leo, it cannot
be denied that he carried into effect by diplomacy
and state-craft, as well as preached it for a religious
creed. In judging this, again, it is best to see the
situation as it really was. Leo was shrewd, wary,
persistent, determined, watchful of opportunity, after
the manner of statesmen. A large part of his policy
must be judged by the ethics of statesmanship, rather
than by the humbler private moralities. In this,
however, two things may be claimed for him that
the motive of his game was nobler, and the stake he
played for higher, than that of the mere statesman;
and that, while his policy was often stern and over-
bearing, it was never treacherous or cruel. As for
personal ambition, or selfish designs, as that phrase is
commonly understood, it does not appear that a
shadow of such a motive passed upon his mind, or a
shadow of such a suspicion ever rested upon his name.
Assuming the one end and aim of his policy which
he kept in view, all the acts of it were the natural,
straightforward, resolute carrying out of it. That he
meant to assert the spiritual sovereignty of Rome, and
the official supremacy of the post he held, explains
itself. That, with his high temper, he would have
yielded to it in another man's hands the simple
homage he claimed for it in his own, one may possi-
bly doubt. But, standing where he did, and seeing
160
LEO THE GREAT.
what he did, he believed in it with all his heart; and
it was well for the world that he did so believe in it.
Thus he was on the watch from the first for an
occasion to put his theory into force. The occasion
was quickly found: a strong man, in fact, never has
to wait long for it. Two hundred years before, under
Tertullian and Cyprian, the churches in Africa had
been, in strength and eloquence, the worthy pioneers
of Latin Christianity. Later still, under Augustine,
their fame had far surpassed that of Rome, in every-
thing except the accident of their provincial situation.
But they had been torn and rent by the schism of the
Donatists. Augustine himself had spent a great part
of his strength in incessant controversy; and he was
now fifteen years dead, and Vandal buccaneers lording
it over the whole Barbary coast. The church at Rome,
and Leo, its vigorous head, made the natural court of
appeal for the afflicted province; and so the first stone
was laid of that strong confederation which afterwards
grew to be the Catholic Empire of the West.
Again, the opportunity came, half by accident, that
led to official correspondence with the eastern coasts
of the Adriatic, an opportunity which Leo was not
slow to improve. He always assumes his authority,
never defends it; advises, urges, instructs, and in fact
exercises on the soil of Greece the jurisdiction which
the feebler Patriarch of Constantinople, leaning on
court influence, and jealous of a claim he had no
strength to enforce, found daily slipping from his
hand. This advantage Leo pushed, as we have seen,
to the extent of directing, almost (it would seem) of
dictating, the counsels at Chalcedon. He failed, how-
HILARY OF ARLES.
161
ever, in the one point of securing the formal admis-
sion by the East of the claims of Rome. The Council
was careful to declare in its celebrated twenty-
eighth canon, which he was equally careful to disown
-that Constantinople, the metropolis and official
capital of Christendom, held equal rank. And to that
declaration the East still adheres to-day.
The critical test, however, of Leo's theory was in
Gaul. That firmly allied with Rome, the West at
least was secure. Now the churches of Southern
Gaul were about as old as that of Rome; claimed, in-
deed, to have been founded by Paul himself.* They
had been famous and strong from the very earliest
time. Their martyr record was of the noblest; their
Irenæus, in the second century, of far more weight
than any Roman name; their St. Martin, in the fourth,
the purest and bravest of all who had carried the
faith into the barbarous West. Besides, that country
was earliest of all, under the old Roman dominion,
to feel conscious of the germs of a new nationality.
"Eldest daughter of Rome" the flatteries of Catholic
pontiffs have delighted in calling her; but a daughter
that long and often has contested vigorously the
mother's will.
Hilary of Arles, for some ecclesiastical offence,
had displaced one of his bishops, Celidonius, who
promptly appealed to Rome. Leo, as promptly, with-
out waiting to inquire, but eager to assert his juris-
diction, restored Celidonius to his place. Hilary, of
* One of the principal ones, at Trèves, by the widow's son of
Nain, who had been miraculously raised, a second time, by the
laying on of Peter's staff.
K
162
LEO THE GREAT.
ruder temper than Leo and at least as resolute, gray-
haired but vigorous, at once took his staff, and went
upon foot, in midwinter,* all the way to Rome. He
was sure that Leo did not understand the merits of
the case. He would not be put off, he said, with the
smooth compliments that greeted him, and pushed
his plea so hotly that Leo arrested him for contempt,
and put him under guard. He broke bounds, how-
ever, and went back the way he came, noway ready
to submit, deprived, meanwhile, of a large part of
the region he presided in. Still Leo's victory might
have hung doubtful, but that he prudently obtained
a decree from the worthless Valentinian III. (445),
who ruled in a sort of phantom sovereignty at Ra-
venna, declaring not only the subjection of Gaul and
of every other province to the Pope at Rome, but that
"to all men, whatever the authority of the Apostolic
See has ordained, or does, or shall ordain, shall be as
law." †
Those which I have recited were the most notable
occasions on which Leo asserted and maintained the
spiritual authority of Rome. They were the critical
acts of his sovereignty; and they have sketched, in
vigorous outline, the pretensions of the Pontificate,
which have been continually reasserted, in precisely
the same direction and general terms, down to our
day. Nothing on earth has been so consistent or per-
sistent as this ecclesiastical policy of Rome. What-
* On this journey we may assume that he departed from his
usual winter custom of going barefoot.
† See the terms of the Decree in Greenwood's Cathedra Petri,
Vol. I. pp. 353, 354.
GROWTH OF THE PAPACY.
163
ever we may think about it now, it had its uses and
necessities once; and we shall see them the more
plainly as we get deeper into the shadow of barbarian
times, and then into the twilight of Feudalism. Just
now, it is our business to see only how they lay in
the mind and shaped the policy of one strong, reso-
lute, and sagacious man.
Even that, however, dealing as it did with great
things, would not have been what it was in the his-
tory of human events, except for the incessant, un-
tiring vigilance in little things. How little these
were, yet how important in his eyes, the ordering
of a festival, the discipline of a churchman, the ex-
plaining of a phrase, the reiteration of a counsel or a
command, one can see only in the details of his
homilies and his correspondence. In these, we watch
as it were the process by which that enormous fabric
of ecclesiastical power was woven, thread by thread,
till it seemed to wrap inseparably, like the membrane
of a living body, every limb and interior organ of the
great structure of medieval civilization.
We see the process; but we see it only in one cor-
ner of its working, and for one moment of time. The
same thing was going on incessantly, untiringly, over
many a thousand miles, for many a hundred years,
still following the form and pattern that had been
traced by that strong hand, still appealing to and
guided by the very maxims and phrases that we have
heard from that resolute voice. The unity of counsel
in multiplicity of operations, which we call Catholi-
cism, apparently as strong to-day, in its own sphere,
as a thousand years ago, and as able to send its ser-
164
LEO THE GREAT.
vants to their post in hamlet or forest as then, as little
afraid as then of sword or fire or torture or starva-
tion, that great wonder of human history, the disci-
pline of a vast population, like an army loyal to one
flag and obedient to one word of command, — has
been the task of many ages and many men. In the
fifteen centuries of its existence it has produced enor-
mous good and enormous evil. But it is justice to
the name of Leo to say that the ideal good, without
the inseparable evil, was what lay in his heart and
made his strength; and to recognize him as the one
man, in that day of terror and despair, who was wise
enough and strong enough to do its necessary task.
VIII.
IT
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
T is hard for us to estimate fairly the value of a
thing so utterly alien from the modern mind as
the monastic spirit, with the ascetic practices and the
religious forms that grew out of it. To judge it out
of hand is easy enough from the modern point of
view, which puts in relief its corruptions and absurd-
ities, and contrasts it with what we know as the help-
ful and saving forces of society now.
It is also easy
to recount the services of the monastic orders, for
several centuries, in the shelter of the weak, the
preservation of letters, the building up of intelligent
and free industry. What is not so easy is to appre-
ciate the strength and fervor of the monastic passion
itself, as a moral force, and its value as a factor in
history.
A series of careful studies, or else of brilliant and
impressive pictures, by such writers as Guizot, Monta-
lembert, and Charles Kingsley, aids very much to
bring this matter within the range of our modern
sympathy and understanding. For my present pur-
pose, however, I must avoid all these attractive
fields of illustration. I must also avoid for the
most part that great, strange field of Eastern ascet-
icism, with the exhibition it offers, sometimes tender
166
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
and pathetic, often wild and repulsive, of cenobitic and
eremitic life in the region that gave it birth. My
object is simply to see how it entered as an element
into the larger life that was unfolding towards the
West.
As early as the time of Athanasius and Augus-
tine, monasticism had already powerfully affected the
imagination of Western Europe, and led the way to
some emulation of its fantastic austerities there."
* It
was not, however, till early in the sixth century that
it was definitely embodied and organized as a social
force by St. Benedict, whose death, in 543, left his
monastery of Monte Casino the acknowledged type
and head of the Western monastic life. At this date,
then, it is to be recognized as a distinct and powerful
element in the new civilization.
A
My view of the subject, accordingly, will be by
way of retrospect, and very simple. I wish to speak
of Monasticisin purely as a moral force, the motive.
it sprang from, and the way in which it acted on
men, mainly through their imagination and moral
sympathy.
First of all, we must go back a little, and remember
that Christianity very early showed itself as a hostile
and aggressive force, in sharp antagonism to the
beliefs and customs prevailing in the world. This
antagonistic attitude implies several things: deep
conviction both of personal guilt and of existing evil,
as in Paul; a motive widely apart from philosophic
*The monastery of St. Honoratus, founded about 400, in the
island of Lerins (or St. Honoré), off the southern coast of France,
was the chief head-quarters of early Western monasticism.
THE FORLORN HOPE.
167
speculation, as shown in the controversy against the
Gnostics; a symbol of faith accepted with absolute
loyalty, to fight under as a banner, as with the creed
of Athanasius; a definite appointing of the field of
conflict in the individual conscience or conviction,
as with Augustine; a powerful visible organization,
acting as one, like an army, under its official head,
which post of authority had been claimed and main-
tained by Leo. Each of these has already been sepa-
rately considered.
But, for its greatest efficiency, a fighting force needs
one other thing. It needs its outposts, its skirmish-
ers, its corps of desperate fighters; men absolutely
reckless of all fears, and bound by no interests or
hopes except such as identify them with the strength
and life of the army itself; volunteers, who make its
advance guard in battle and its forlorn hope at a
crisis; a body of reserve, to whom life itself is a thing
utterly indifferent in comparison with the honor of
the service, and all other affection thin and cold
except that which makes it their one pride to fight
under the flag, and their joy to die for it. From
Marathon down to Plevna, it is safe to say that no
army has been great, and no military dominion
strong, that could not count on the absolute devotion
of such a reserve force, a body to which danger
itself has an irresistible fascination, whose one mas-
ter-passion is warrior zeal, whose hot desire is for the
fiery delight of combat.
To say, then, that the Church was victorious in the
war it undertook, is to say that it had at its command
such a body of enthusiasts, a body of absolute loyalty
168
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
and fanatic zeal; whose zeal, indeed, might outrun
prudence and turn to frenzy, yet for that very reason.
could be counted on when the battle would be hope-
less without just that aid, the sharp edge of attack,
the obstinate heroism of defence. In fact, the Church
had two such bodies of reserve: one for the time of
persecution in the conflict against Paganism, the
Martyrs; one for the time of organized conquest
that followed, in the conflict against Barbarism,-
the Monastics. It is necessary to say a word on the
motive common to them both.
We must not forget — at the earlier stage, espe-
cially, of the conflict we are considering that Chris-
tianity presents itself to us in the form of a moral
reaction, or protest, against the gross inhumanities
and corruptions of Pagan society. This reaction would
be mild with some natures, violent with others. So
much we may easily understand. But what it was,
precisely, that it reacted against, requires some knowl-
edge of obscure authorities and some hardihood of
speech to show. We cannot always, it may be, trust
the eager invective of Christian apologists like Tertul-
lian; though where he refers to plain and well-known
fact, we have no right to deny his witness. But we
have a right to judge the Pagan world out of its own
mouth; and then there are testimonies written be-
tween the lines of classic authors such testimonies,
for instance, as the frescos at Pompeii- which help
us to an understanding of the darker facts. In Hor-
ace we have, mainly, an easy epicureanism, smooth
and fair, and only beginning to be withered at the
core; in Juvenal, a stoicism no longer humane, but
THE ROMAN SPECTACLES.
169
bitter and austere; in Petronius, who was Nero's
friend, a cynicism nakedly revolting.
These, however, are only hints of Roman manners,
and perhaps may be overcharged: it would be easy to
make a picture just as black of a Christian capital
to-day. But there are two points of public morality
at that period, which we can quite understand, and
which to the most placid temper now are full of hor-
ror: its brutal cruelty, and its beastly shamelessness.
Unless we do know these, we cannot understand the
violence, even fury, of the recoil against them. We
look at the statue of the dying gladiator, " butchered
to make a Roman holiday," and we cannot well avoid
a thrill of human pity. What have we to say, then,
that the wise and merciful Trajan, for whose salvation
Gregory prayed, remembering his patient kindness to
a widow suppliant, made the amphitheatre reek with
the blood of ten thousand such, to grace one holiday?
Wild beasts, we are told, were often lacking in the
vast numbers needed to glut the Roman thirst for
blood; but human victims, captives of war, were never
wanting.
This is but an item of the charge. It is hard for
us to understand or forgive the brutality of a Spanish
bull-fight, where dainty ladies applaud, or give the
signal for the blow. The Roman mob
men and
women, noble and base-looked on with the same
eager lust of blood, when the wild bull gored or the
famished tiger tore the delicate side of some modest
trembling Christian girl, set naked in the pit before
that gazing multitude, or else tangled in transparent
nets. Three times Blandina was thus exposed at
8
170
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
Vienna, in Gaul, till a barbarian in mercy pierced her
breast with a sword. Perpetua and Felicitas, in
Carthage, were allowed out of pure horror to wrap
themselves in mantles, before the gladiator finally
despatched them with his "stroke of grace." These
were mere girls, maidens or young wives, on the
edge of womanhood, innocent, beautiful.
To
Religious frenzy, perhaps, made these horrors possi-
ble. But the blood-spoilt crowd of the amphitheatre
needed no such motive of a heated fanaticism.
satisfy the lust of the eye, a drama representing the
death of Hercules on Mount Eta was not complete.
without a robust captive bound and burned on the
funeral pile, whose yells and writhings might coun-
terfeit those death-agonies. "We have seen it,” says
Tertullian. And, with still beastlier ferocity, in the
masks and mummeries of the Roman stage, the muti-
lations, rapes, and debaucheries, that stain the corrupt
mythology of Greece, were with a horrible realism
presented nakedly before the public eye.*
These hints will probably be enough to show what,
in some of its more shocking forms, it was that the
martyr church had to protest against. Nothing, it is
plain, except the martyr spirit, in its most vehement
and (if you will) fanatic form would have borne the
battle or gained the victory. I say nothing and I
know nothing about the frequency of these spectacles.
It is enough to know that they were possible, and that
*The better known authorities for these statements are Sue-
tonius, Martial, and Tertullian. Other authorities and details will
be found in Ozanam's Civilisation au Quatrième Siècle. See also
Renan's recent "English Conferences."
THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS.
171
they are what the world was forever delivered from
in the triumph of Christianity.* Along with the
vivid picture given of these horrors in his "Anti-
christ," Renan tells us of the contagion of the martyr
spirit, how eagerly not only hardy fanatics, but
modest matron and maiden, pressed toward the con-
summation of that awful sacrifice, just as volunteers
press to the most hazardous post in battle or siege;
and how the flame of that great passion burned away
all lesser thoughts of affection, duty, and shame.
Or take the following, from one of the earlier mar-
tyrologies. "My father," says Perpétua, "came from
the city, wasted with anxiety, to prevent me; and he
said, 'Have pity, my daughter, on my gray hairs;
have pity on thy father, if he is worthy the name of
father.' And so saying, he kissed my hands in his
fondness, and threw himself at my feet, calling me
in his tears no longer daughter, but lady. And I was
grieved for the gray hairs of my father, because he
only, of all our family, did not rejoice in my martyr-
dom. It is difficult for us to take in the hardness of
this young mother, at once to her father and her babe.
It is more shocking still to think that to them the
fiery or bloody death was an escape from ignominy
which to them was far more dreadful. Eusebius tells
of a mother who esteemed it a happy chance to drown
herself with her three daughters, rather than trust the
mercy of their jailer; and there is hardly a plea on
* Doubtless the Spanish bull-fights are almost as brutal, and
the autos da fé of the Inquisition were, as a form of human sacri-
fice, still more cruel. Still, these last appealed only to the pity
and terror of beholders, not to their beastlier passions.
172
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
record more piteous in its suggestion, than where
Augustine argues that, by brutal treatment in their
prison, Christian maidens had not lost their honor in
the sight of God.
The extraordinary romance of St. Thekla, which we
may count as the earliest Christian novel, is quite pos-
sibly founded upon fact. She is a young lady of high
birth, who innocently and unconsciously—perhaps
without the writer's consciousness either falls (as
we should say) in love with the Apostle Paul. Cast
off by her mother because she will not accept the hus-
band provided for her, she travels from place to place
as a Christian missionary, is exposed in the theatre to
lions, who fight with each other instead, till both are
killed; the people then take sudden pity on her; and
thus, miraculously saved, she finds refuge in a her-
mitage, where she lives a long life of pious solitude.
Thus a single life serves as link between the martyr
age and the age of monastic asceticism; and the same
spirit is the inspiration of both.
In their most strongly marked features, however, it
must be said that they belong to two different periods.
The martyr age expired when Christianity came to
the throne with Constantine; asceticism was most
fervent, and its haunts most crowded, in the time im-
mediately following. One, in fact, blends insensibly
into the other. The eager, perhaps frantic temper,
trained through whole generations up to the heat of
martyr zeal, was not content to repose in the tame
quiet of a religious peace. The solitude, the austerity,
the self-inflicted torment, the denial of human kind-
ness, which might have been a refuge or a compromise
THE ASCETIC MOTIVE.
173
at a time of real danger, became the accepted way of
working to that exalted temper.
What had been the passionate phase of a reaction
against pagan brutality, was now an intolerant and
hot protest against the love of ease and the lingering
sensuality that Paganism left behind. This intol-
erant protest had flashed out once or twice before, in
the hot anger and contempt felt towards those who
had "lapsed" under the storm of persecution, whom
it was held infamous, with whatever penance, to take
back to the bosom of the faithful; and so had arisen
the Novatian schism and the schism of the Donatists,*
and the fury of the Circumcellions, who rushed in a
mad way upon their death, courting martyrdom,—
disorders whose tradition vexed the Church for more
than three centuries. The same temper, now that
Christianity was in the ascendant, showed itself in
the many forms of ascetic and monastic life.
It is not necessary to dwell here on the tempting
features of anecdote and adventure which illustrate
that way of life. Two points only we have to consider:
its power as a motive in the mind of the ascetics
themselves; and its power as a moral force among
men, through imagination, sympathy, or emulation.
As to the former, I do not think we are content with
any theory of motives to account for asceticism, out-
side the moral quality of asceticism itself, and its
strange fascination to an order of feeling always pow-.
erful in human nature. It is easy, but it is delusive,
to say that men deliberately set themselves by aus-
terities and penance to win for themselves peculiar
* Well called by Mr. Hodgkin "the Cameronians of Africa.”
174
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
glories or joys in paradise. Possibly they may give
that for their own account of it, so deceiving them-
selves. But no profit-and-loss calculation like that
ever inspired that passion, of whose insanest extreme
we have so wonderful a picture in Tennyson's "St.
Simeon Stylites":
"Bethink thee, Lord! while thou and all the saints
Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth
House in the shade of comfortable roofs,
Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food,
And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls,
I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints;
Or in the night, after a little sleep,
I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet
With drenching dews, or stiff in the crackling frost;
I wear an undressed goat-skin on my back;
A grazing iron collar grinds my neck;
And in my weak lean arms I lift the cross,
And strive and wrestle with thee till I die.
O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin!"
In these strange outbursts, which echo the very
passion and fervor of ascetic life, we find something
far deeper than the balanced reckoning of chances be-
tween paradise and hell. We find, in the first place,
a conviction of moral unworthiness morbidly intense;
and in the next place, the flame of a peculiar passion,
that feeds on everything as fuel that it can lay hold
upon.
Of the first, the intense conviction of sin, it may
perhaps be said to be, in one or another form, the
source of all the moral power existing and operative
among men. It is not worth while to analyze it here,
SINFULNESS OF THE FLESH.
175
where it simply takes on an extravagant, fantastic,
unfamiliar form. It becomes to us simply a morbid
phenomenon, one manifestation of a force known to
us in many other calmer and (it may be) more in-
structive ways.
Only, a word should be said of the root from which
it grew, in a notion of the essential iniquity of all
pleasures of sense, an intense recoil from the ex-
treme sensualism of ancient life.
"In me," says
"*
Paul, "that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.
The ascetic life, says Sozomen, is "no compromise
between virtue and vice." This opinion of the radi-
cally evil nature of matter, and in especial the matter
of which our bodies are composed, must be presumed
in all our knowledge of the subject.
By a certain morbid logic, too, sensations repulsive
to the sense were thought a fit penance, and directly
pleasing to God. Thus, to take a few instances,
chiefly from the admiring Greek historians: St.
Anthony would scarce suffer clean water to touch his
feet or hands. St. Arsenius would change the water he
used in weaving rushes but once a year. St. Hilarion
built himself a hut too small to let him stand upright or
lie at length. St. Hallas touched no bread for seventy
years, contenting himself with roots and herbs. St.
*This is oddly illustrated in the following formula of confes-
sion: "I confess all the sins of my body, of my skin, of my flesh,
of my bones and sinews, of my veins and cartilages, of my tongue
and lips, of my jaws, teeth, and hair, of my marrow, and any other
part whatsoever, whether it be soft or hard, wet or dry." No peti-
tion is more frequent, in some of the older rituals, than that God
would be pleased to accept our leanness and mortification of the
flesh.
176
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
Senoch walled himself to the neck in a narrow cir-
cuit, too small to let him move or sit, and lived there
for years. St. Wulfilaich was hardly persuaded to
quit the pillar elevation in the north of Gaul, where
he stood barefoot, summer and winter, till his nails
dropped off with the bitter cold.* Some wore heavy
crosses, chains, or iron bands; some had no covering
but their long, unwashed, and shaggy hair, living in
dens the life of beasts. The brawny St. Moses, to tire
down his sinful muscular strength, stood praying every
night for six years, without sleep. St. Stephen kept.
on weaving baskets, while the surgeons were ampu-
tating a limb. These idle heroisms are the voice of
the ascetic conscience, morbidly acute; but they are
also, like the training of our athletes, a test of what
may be done in battle or endured in the siege.
Of what may be called the ascetic passion, however,
something remains to be added. It is a very shallow
theory of life, to say that the main motive, with most
men, is the pursuit of happiness, at least in any
sense in which happiness can be defined to the under-
standing, or chosen by the judgment. It is hardly an
exaggeration, on the other hand, to say that many
persons set their hearts on misery, and pursue it with
an obstinacy that we might call insane. I do not
think, for example, that the ascetic passion of a her-
mit or a monk is different at bottom or harder to un-
derstand except for such moral quality as may be
in it than the pining, wretched, eager self-denial of
*These practices, said his unflattering adviser, may be fit for
the great saints and holy men of the East; but a poor ignorant
barbarian like you should not aspire to such high things.
(C
THE HABIT OF SACRIFICE.
177
a rich miser, the very type that takes its name from
misery." And those argue weakly with human
nature as it is, who appeal first to men's desire of com-
fort and selfish ease. Hardihood and adventure, the
joy of conflict, defiance of danger, generous self-aban-
donment, are each and all more powerful motives in
real life, — not perhaps for weak characters, but at any
rate for strong ones. The six hundred who rode “into
the jaws of death," facing loaded cannon, do not show
it any more plainly than those other hundreds who
went the other day to risk their lives in pestilential
cities at the South; not more plainly than the father
or mother, of average conscience and self-denial, who
submits with never a thought to the innumerable priva-
tions which define the commonest conditions of duty
or (it may be) of indulgence to the child.
And so the habit of self-denial grows, till one may
come to feel who has not known such ? — as if the
very sensation of pleasure itself were a sin. Occa-
sionally we know of lives that are literally made a
sacrifice, not so much to a mere notion of duty, how-
ever morbidly scrupulous, as to a mood of mind in
which austerity itself, and self-torment, have come to
take the place of duty: not that they are chosen freely
as being right, but have grown into a moral necessity,
and so make the men their slaves.
Look at the heart of any such man, and you find
that the sacrifice, far from being a price weighed out
and duly paid, has come, by the mere cultivation of a
sense of duty, to be a delight in itself, as truly as the
enthusiasm of adventure or the contempt of danger.
It is, indeed, the very business of religious discipline
8*
L
178
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
to guide and train what may so come to be a mighty
master passion. And we should not fail, through any
shallow theory of pleasure, to see how prodigious a
force the Church enlisted, when it gave to what we.
have called the ascetic passion recognition and a
sphere. The time would soon come when that great
force would be needed, no longer for defence or idle
contemplation, but for active service.
That time came, indeed, in a very dramatic way.
In the flush of his temporary triumph over Alaric,
Honorius had renewed at Rome, in 404, the old
splendor of the public games; and, Christian as he
was, and against the warm protest of men's better
feeling, brought his show to a climax by a combat
of gladiators, a spectacle forbidden long before by
Christian law. When the sport was at its height,
the monk Telemachus, who had come (it is said) all
the way from Egypt to do it, threw himself into the
arena, between the swords of the combatants, and
was crushed under a shower of stones from the angry
mob,-"the only monk," says Gibbon, "who died a
martyr in the cause of humanity." This brave act
put a final stop to the brutal sport.
But Gibbon's comment is not true. Whole genera-
tions of Christian monks lived, and a great many of
them died, in cruel martyrdom, in working out that
long task by which the barbarian world
less cor-
rupt, no doubt, than the old Pagan society, but almost
inconceivable in its ferocity was brought into the
pale of Christian civilization. Some features and con-
ditions of that task we shall have to consider at an-
other time. At present we have to do only with the
THE MONK AS MISSIONARY.
179
way in which this great moral power was trained and
equipped to undertake it.
One feature of it, however, I must mention here.
It is the spectacle that offers itself to our imagina-
tion, as the face of the world slowly changes, from its
comparatively orderly and familiar look in the classic
age, to what it had become when the barbarian hordes
gave it the wild and strange complexion it wore so
long. We see the process at a great distance; and,
so seen, the features of one age melt insensibly into
those of another, so that it is no hard thing to us to
call the change an unmixed good. But in the time
of it, as we must not forget, there were infinite details
of literally unspeakable horror, details which you
find hints of in Gibbon's foot-notes, or can read at
more length in the half-barbaric authorities he cites,
Jornandes, Liutprand, Paulus Diaconus, and Gregory
of Tours. Now, when that three centuries' storm
settled down upon the Western world, innumerable
outposts were already held by religious zealots, whom
an ascetic fervor had scattered through Italy and Gaul,
and along the confines of Germany, some in solitary
hermitages, some in bands and brotherhoods, many.
with a faith burning in them, and a yearning for the
souls of those wild barbarians, in whom they saw
-as Salvian did more hopeful subjects of Christ
than in the corrupt and degenerate population they
had turned their backs upon.
Some of their religious retreats were the refuge of
cowards, so it was charged; of men who had cast
off all love of their country, who had lost the sense
of honor and public duty, who dared not look the
180
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
times in the face.* Most likely. Among those who
simply sought religious solitude or religious fellow-
ship in those retreats, it would be hard to draw the
line between pure cowardice and genuine despair of
the perishing world they forsook,-despair that would
settle upon many a mind, doubtless, as if the end of
all things were really at hand, and the only remain-
ing duty were to make one's peace with God, as on a
death-bed.
But not so with those who undertook such tasks as
the time made possible. Many, probably most of
those who are worthily recorded as the saints that
is, the moral heroes of that evil time, were men
trained in monastic discipline, hardened to service
by the interior conflicts which that discipline im-
plied.
+
And we have not to forget, either, the immense
effect of these austerities, of the strange humanity
and tenderness often joined with them, of the strange
vision and the new ideal of sanctity, offered before
the eyes and powerfully affecting the imagination of
the rude, cruel, unsophisticated invaders. The more
familiar accounts of St. Martin in France and St.
Severinus in South Germany illustrate vividly this
moral reaction.
In general, Catholic writers do completer justice.
than we do to this unfamiliar but most noble phase
of religious heroism. It is hard for a Protestant to
forget the strong repugnance which monastic life
called out in the time of its degeneracy. But we
*The ground taken by Valens (about 375), in his conscription
of monks for civil or military duty.
SAINT BENEDICT.
181
are not concerned here with those later scandals and
controversies. We have only to see and understand
a very genuine exhibition of moral power among men
to whom that way was the best they knew, and at a
time when no better service could possibly be given
to the world. Some of these lives commend them-
selves easily to our judgment: as of Cassiodorus, the
minister and secretary of Theodoric; and of Fortu-
natus, a genuine man of letters, whose verses, in-
scribed to that gentle recluse queen Radegonda, or to
his friend Gregory of Tours, make the closing pages
in the great body of classic Latin poetry.* But hun-
dreds and thousands of them passed away unknown,
and only added each its drop or its rill to the vast
stream which was widening into the new civilization.
Of others, again, it must be said that their asceticism
was sheer idle pretence, and slid into intoxication and
madness. The perils of that way of life became quite
plain, even at this time; and they needed a discipline
very sharp and severe to keep them in some sort of
check. The discipline which prevailed in Europe for
many generations, vigorous and wholesome, was that
of St. Benedict, established during the prosperous rule
of the Goth Theodoric. The anecdotes of his life we
need not dwell on how as a child of twelve, with
the connivance of his maid, he ran away and hid in a
cave from his vicious schoolfellows, till he was given
up for dead; how, to deliver himself once for all from
"the demon of the flesh," he stripped and rolled
among thorns till his skin was lacerated from head
to foot; how, as head of his monastery, he ruled his
* See below, "The Christian Schools."
182
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
monks so sharply that they turned against him and
tried to poison him in a bowl of wine; how his fame
for sanctity grew, till he was obliged to flee again to
the rocky retreat of Monte Casino, where his most
famous of monastic houses continues an object of pil-
grimage to this day.*
Here he established his firm code of discipline on
the three-fold vow, not to be taken till after due pro-
bation and the severest tests of resolution, of Poverty,
Chastity, and Obedience. The first meant simple and
absolute community of goods: the religious house
might and afterwards did revel in enormous wealth;
but the individual monk owned nothing. We shall
compare this presently with the later Mendicant
Orders, so that here we have only to notice the
pledge it gave of absolute devotion to the common
interest, and the enormous associated strength of the
brotherhood. The vow of Chastity at once forbade
all family ties, and put upon the conscience the task
through life of keeping up the ascetic discipline
>>
* There is an odd story of the occasion of this retreat. A bevý
of gay girls from Rome whom no doubt the grim ascetics took
to be emissaries of the Devil - went out "for a lark one day to
visit and perhaps cheer their dull abode; and tried, with all co-
quetries and blandishments, to coax them back to the city, and to
carnal ways. In horror at what might possibly come of it, Bene-
dict made all haste to the rudest spot he could find among the
rugged spurs of the hills.
It was on a like occasion that an aged monk was observed to
look very earnestly at the sauciest and most fascinating of the
group; and when his companions asked him why, replied, "Be-
cause it is revealed to me that she shall judge us all." Within a
short time, in fact, she became a penitent, and passed her life in the
austerest sanctity. For Benedict's miracles, see Migne's Patrologia,
cxlix. 965.
THE VOW OF OBEDIENCE.
183
which had originated that mode of life. We shall
see its immense consequences hereafter, when under
Hildebrand the monastic spirit gained complete rule
in the Church, and engaged in its sharpest-fought
battle against human nature.
For the present, then, I have but a word to say of
the vow of Obedience. It was in this that the West-
ern or Benedictine discipline differed most widely
from the ascetic life of the East, which (in its degen-
eracy at least) aimed only at piety and maceration ;
and it was in this that it rendered its essential ser-
vice to the modern world. For obedience, in the
rigidly practical rule of Benedict, meant steady, gen-
uine, useful work. “Laborare est orare" became the
monkish chime. Seven hours of manual labor were
required daily, besides study in the afternoon. The
old and feeble, who could do nothing else, were set to
copy manuscripts; and so saved to the world not
only a host of religious works, but whole libraries of
ancient classics. The toil of the Benedictines has
become a proverb of literary industry. They had
abundant leisure for it. One monk is said to have
spent a lifetime illuminating a single letter. Im-
mense results came of this organized industry. It
rescued labor itself from the degradation of its old
servile memories, made it intelligent, skilful, and free,
as well as a religious duty. There were no such
estates in Europe, nowhere so thrifty farming or so
tasteful gardening, as the monasteries had to show.
It was the monks who were clearers of the forest,
drainers of the marsh, frontiersmen, pioneers of civil-
ization, founders of more than half the towns of
184
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE.
France. They steadily recruited, through times of in-
conceivable peril, those armies of missionary-martyrs,
by which the barbarian world was tamed and trained
to a rude civilization.
The evils of monastic life are plain to see its
enormous seeming waste of moral force, shed like
showers on the bare sand of the desert; the wild and
ignorant fanaticism or religious madness it often ran
into; its hardening of the heart in the selfish seek-
ing for salvation, so that the natural affections and
humanities were crushed, and the monks became in
due time the fit and merciless agents of the Inqui-
sition; the temptation to indulge indolence, hypoc-
risy, and spiritual pride, with secret and abominable
vices demanding periodical reform. The memory of
such things makes us content that we shall never
know it any more. Still, it would not have had its
opportunity of evil, but for the immense service it
rendered at a critical period, when old things were
passing away, and new foundations must be laid in
the absolute courage, the denial of self-interest, the
strenuous virtue, the loyal obedience, which make the
ideal of that way of life; when not science, strength,
and skill, but poverty, hardship, and self-denial were
the power that overcame the world.
IX.
THE
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
HE main stream of Christian civilization, as it
affects the great events of history and as it in-
terests us in particular, follows a westward course,
and is bounded for a thousand years within the
limits that contain the Catholic Empire of the Mid-
dle Age. The separation of East and West was
slowly coming about for at least three centuries,
before it became definite and final in the controver-
sies of the ninth century; and the parting of the
Christian world into two jealous and hostile frag-
ments (879) lasted through many a peril that assailed
them both alike, till one was swallowed up in the
conquests of the Turk, and the other rent by the great
Protestant schism, with its innumerable sects.
There is something of pathos in calling to mind
that the most obstinate motive of a separation involv-
ing such tremendous historical consequences was the
persistence of the West in holding that the Holy
Ghost proceeds not from the Father only, but also from
the Son, to us a pure piece of unintelligible meta-
physics, or else the statement of a very simple moral
fact; and that, on the very eve of the ferocious assault
in which Constantinople fell, when terms of union
had been with difficulty negotiated at Florence to
186
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
secure a Christian league against the infidel (1438),
these terms were repudiated by the fanatic sectaries
of the East, who chose the risk of Ottoman slavery
rather than accept the hated symbol of Western
heresy.
But we have to deal at present not with these criti-
cal events of history so much as with certain charaċ-
teristics that mark the contrast of the two; and with
one or two phases of the Oriental Church that show
the position it holds in Christian history.
The contrast I speak of is exactly indicated, first,
by the division-line between the two languages, Greek
and Latin, in which the symbols of faith were re-
spectively set forth. Greek lends itself easily to
metaphysical discussions and nice logical distinctions,
which Latin could but imperfectly follow, at least till
it was tortured to metaphysical uses by the School-
The Greeks complained that the language of
their formulæ could not be adequately rendered in
another tongue.* It is clear that, if the meaning of
the Christian symbol, much more the salvation that
comes of actual belief, turns on the hair-breadth dis-
men.
* Thus the word hypostasis (to take a very familiar case), which
is used to express the distinctions in the Trinity, corresponds ety-
mologically to the Latin substantia, "substance"; but this word
means exactly what the theologians did not wish to say, and so
they chose the word persona instead (literally mask), which we
very inadequately render "person," really meaning the part, or
character, acted in a play, as in our phrase dramatis personce. Thus
the metaphysical terms ovoía (essentia), vñóoraois (substantia), and
πрóσшπоν (persona) are more or less interchangeable, and give rise
to endless discussion. According to Gregory of Nyssa, what ovola
is to the class, that iróσraσis is to the individual. We find this
discussion going on, brisk as ever, in Peter Lombard (about 1170).
CONTRASTS OF EAST AND WEST.
187
tinctions which can hardly be stated in words, and
are untranslatable at best, there is absolutely no end
of controversy. Leo the Great did wisely to cut the
knot by laying down his own hard-and-fast definition,
which contented the West then, and does so to this
day; while the East wrecked itself helplessly on the
successive sharp points that turned up in the crooked
channel of dispute, till it seemed to drift helplessly
on a sea of metaphysics.
Again, the West had a vigorous independent life
of its own, political, municipal, ecclesiastical, of
which Leo had the genius to seize the full advantage;
while church life in the East was absolutely over-
shadowed by the imperial despotism, under which, as
in the shelter of a great forest, it throve with a cer-
tain pining, sickly, and distorted life of its own. Not
that passion was wanting to it, or a certain fanatic,
even ferocious courage: the religious riots of Constan-
tinople, Antioch, and Alexandria were bloody and
fierce as the old struggles of the Roman forum. But
they were the disorderly, irresponsible action of a
mob, that might be crushed at any moment, and
periodically was, by the imperial military police, and
could never develop any disciplined courage of its own.
Indeed, how continually pressing, how closely haunt-
ing, the imperial despotism was, it is hard for us to
conceive, unless we remember that it inherited the
cruel and despotic traditions of a Caesar or a Diocle-
tian; and that it left its methods of merciless exac-
tion to be adopted and followed up in the unspeakable
inflictions of Oriental tyranny to-day. Ecclesiastical
rule was as minute, as tyrannous, as irritating here, as
188
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
ever it was in the West; but, awed by the nearness
of the Court, and dazzled by the paraphernalia of
Empire, it never had the free hand, even if it had the
wise and willing heart, to effect any one of the great
tasks of civilization.
What it could do, however, it did. The courage
and the devotedness of purpose were never wanting.
Long lines of saints show that the ecclesiastic spirit,
with its merits and its faults, was quite as fervent as
in the West. It had, in fact, a quality of its own,
which commands a genuine admiration. Looking at
its better side, we seem to see in it a sweetness of
piety, a gentleness of temper, a single-hearted moral
fervor, a purely religious courage, a capacity of warm
and long-abiding friendship, an absence of personal
ambition, which are not to be sure wanting, but are
less prominent traits, in the restless and energetic
Latin Church.*
These qualities answer well to the more dependent
position just spoken of; and may be held, justly, to
have characterized the churches of Syria, Greece, and
Egypt to this day, where they subsist, insulated,
helpless, non-resistant, disarmed, under the scornful
tolerance of the Mussulman. To these we may add a
certain simplicity of living often running into ascetic
poverty, a clinging family life, a quickness of social
sympathy, which seem to be their inheritance from an
earlier phase of Christian life than was transmitted
to the West, and which correspond with the primi-
tive and easy ecclesiastical code that permits, even
* In fact, we are hardly conscious of them there, until we come
to the later and greater period of the Religious Orders.
PERIODS OF INTEREST.
189
if it does not require, the marriage of the humbler
clergy.
These general traits it is well to bear in mind, in
studying the somewhat depressed and monotonous
life of Eastern Christendom. While they show its
good side, they help to remind us, also, of the feeble
executive force it has always shown, the often hu-
miliating attitude in the presence of authority, and
the ignorant, gross, imbecile condition in which we
find its lower clergy at this day in Russia, as well as
in Greece or Turkey. The political condition of the
East, too, from the first Gothic invasion down, has
shown little else than a succession of despotisms, and
violent conquests, and wide-spread miseries, never
once relieved by a show of genuine popular courage,
or a vigorous national life. The Byzantine Empire,
down to its fall in 1453, has always been a synonyme
for indolent luxury, gaudy but meretricious splendor,
pampered despotism, political degeneracy, and moral
decay. Only a few broad features require our con-
sideration now.
As belonging to our present purpose, there are
three phases of this languid history, which may de-
tain our eye. These are, the period immediately fol-
lowing the first Arian controversy; the reign of
Justinian; and the Image-Controversy, with the at-
tending circumstances that confirmed the separation
of East and West, this last preceded and followed
by the vast catastrophe of the Mahometan invasion.
I. The fervor, the sweetness, and the purely re-
ligious intrepidity which I have spoken of as char-
acterizing the Eastern Church, are seen nowhere to
190
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
so great advantage as in the group of eminent and
saintly men who adorn its calendar towards the end
of the fourth century. There are many other names
hardly less worthy; but, for purposes of illustration,
it is enough to mention four, who make a group
together.
*
Basil the Great, of Cæsarea (329-379), eminently
deserves to lead the list. High-minded, cultivated,
self-denying, charitable, austere, bold before the face.
of power, writer of the sweetest homilies on Crea-
tion, Paradise, and the discipline of Providence, he is
the great organizer of eastern monastic life.† Next is
his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (330-391), the elo-
quent ascetic, the personal antagonist of Julian, the
vigorous champion of orthodoxy at the capital (where
he raised it from a despised sect to a great popular
enthusiasm), the contented exile when court intrigues
drove him from the city to the harder penance of writ-
ing odes and hymns. Third is Gregory of Nyssa
(331–395), younger brother of Basil, a theologian and
commentator, a hard, clear, and serious thinker, a stu-
dent of Greek philosophy, whose treasures he would
gather for Christian uses, called "father of fathers" by
an admiring council, the reconciler of divided churches,
the thoughtful, gentle-minded Platonist, liberal and
serene among sharp party conflicts. Last and most
eminent of all is the bright name of John Chrysostom
+
+
* Witness, especially, his intrepid correspondence with his old
schoolfellow, the Emperor Julian.
† Whose rules he lays down in replies to 313 Queries.
Luke's genealogy, for instance, in hexameters, and Matthew's
in iambics; besides the appalling chapters of Chronicles and Num-
bers, and a drama on the death of Christ.
FOUR GREEK DIVINES.
191
(347-407), preacher of the "golden lips," held by
many to be the greatest of all religious orators of any
age, who would have been made Bishop of Antioch at
twenty-three but for his generous support of Basil;
who as Patriarch of Constantinople joined absolute
simplicity and charity of living with steady defiance
of court power and an electric eloquence that rings in
his pages vivid and alive to-day; who in perfect
serenity and sweetness of soul blessed God for his
rod of chastisement, while he lay dying on the road
under the barbarous cruelty that dragged him in age
and infirmities into banishment.
In this group of brilliant and saintly names we
notice, first, that they are all near friends, and two
of them brothers; and next, their short career, the
oldest living only to sixty-three, while the one who
passed into history as "great" died at fifty. They all
represent the very best of those qualities which seem
the family traits, so to speak, of Eastern Christianity.
It would be hard to find, in the writings of either of
them, a trace of sectarian rancor, or personal vindic-
tiveness, or spiritual pride, or dogmatic bigotry, or self-
ish ambition, or vanity of letters. All were humble-
minded and devout, ascetic in their training, austere
judges of themselves, utterly submissive to the Di-
vine will they worshipped. The strongest impression
one gets from their writings is their absolute lack of
self-reference or self-assertion, and the entire good.
faith with which they not only assume that the
ascetic life is the true moral ideal, but make its rule.
the law of conscience for themselves the rule of
personal purity and rigid self-denial.
192
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
But for a certain simplicity of courage, and a child-
like fearlessness, we might possibly miss in them the
more masculine virtues we look for in the religious
character. When Basil was threatened with confis-
cation, imprisonment, and death, his reply was, “Not
one of these things touches me. He who has no
goods cannot suffer any loss. He who is God's guest
cannot be an exile anywhere. For martyrdom I am
unworthy; but death is only a friend to me, to bring
me sooner to God."
All were lovers of nature, and lovers of what was
beautiful in Greek art and letters. Their writings
have all become Christian classics, and have had
their share in preserving the marvellous vitality of
the Greek tongue: a vitality so great, that it has not
only been kept alive in the debased Romaic; but in
our own day Schliemann, as he tells us, has moved a
village audience in Ithaca to tears by reciting out of
Homer the meeting of Ulysses and Penelope, while
Xenophon and Demosthenes are used as reading
books in Athenian public schools to-day. That the
classic Greek is still so nearly the language of the
people as to be almost intelligible, easily mastered
by a few weeks' study, and rather gaining upon the
modern in current employ, is greatly due to its uses
as a sacred tongue, and to those writers whose ora-
tions and commentaries have further consecrated it
to that use.
We notice, too, that this era of oratorical splendor
and religious fame immediately follows the great con-
troversy, and that it belongs wholly to the defenders
of what was then called Orthodoxy. This fact has a
JUSTINIAN.
193
certain value in the history of polemics as a phase of
human thought. It shows, not that their speculation
was more true, or their reasoning more honest, but
that they chose the side which best expressed the
warmth of devoted, unreasoning, and loyal faith.
II. The nearly forty years' reign of Justinian (527–
565) is very famous in history for two things;
victory over the Vandals by Belisarius and over the
Goths by Narses, which seemed likely to make the
Empire whole again by reconquest of the West; and
the codifying of Roman Law, which became a most
important element in the later civilization. Besides
these were certain marked merits of administration.
Justinian, says Sismondi, first made economy a sci-
ence, and systematically encouraged industry. The
silk-worm was brought by travelling monks from
India; trade was carried as far as China. The mag-
nificent dome of Santa Sophia testifies to this day
how the piety and splendor of the capital were cared
for in the imperial policy.
Justinian himself has only the accidental glory of
these achievements. His greatest general died under
his unjust and cruel jealousy; and his chief merit
is perhaps the steady and generous support he gave to
the great jurists who labored on the Code. He was
himself an ascetic, a scholastic, and a pedant, "neither
beloved in his life," says Gibbon, "nor regretted at
his death"; busying himself with theological disputes,
in which he showed neither a schoolman's subtilty
nor a statesman's skill; ruled by the strange, fascinat-
ing adventuress Theodora, whose name is shaded with
the blackest ignominy or else the blackest calumny,
9
M
194
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
who upheld her half-way heresy in the face of his
ostentatious orthodoxy, and left her memory to the
mercy of bigots who never pardon or forget.
The brief revival which this reign offers of impe-
rial magnificence is darkened by its almost unpar-
alleled calamities. War against the barbarian means
extermination, or, at its mildest, devastation. The
Vandal Gelimer surrendered, when he saw a morsel
of half-burnt dough snatched from between his neph-
ew's. very teeth by a Moorish boy, a type of the
ruin that spread through Italy and Africa. A glar-
ing comet amid these disasters seemed the scourge
of God hung visibly in the sky. An earthquake de-
stroyed, it is said, two hundred thousand lives in a
single city. A dreadful pestilence (bred, say the an-
nalists, from the bodies of reptiles left by a great
inundation of the Tiber) raged more than fifty years,
leaving hardly a spot or man untouched. At Justin-
ian's death, it has been reckoned, the population of the
Empire had been diminished (since Augustus, proba-
bly) by a hundred million lives.
The decision at Chalcedon (451) had settled the
standard of orthodoxy for the West, but had only
heated the jealousies between Antioch and Alexan-
dria. The partisans of a single nature in Christ never
failed to make points, or split them, that would make
against the accepted creed; and numberless shades of
the "Monophysite heresy " prevailed, till these flick-
ering contests paled in the glare of Saracen invasion.
A compromise the famous Henoticon - carefully
framed (482) to exclude the sharper lines of division,
had not long satisfied either party, since each had to
-
MONOPHYSITE AND MONOTHELETE.
195
sacrifice the prominence of its favorite dogma.
Justinian, in his desire to propitiate the more hereti-
cal sect, published a "confession," which went as far
as this: "Whosoever does not confess that our Lord
Jesus Christ, crucified in the flesh, is true God and
Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity, let such a
one be anathema"; and declared the body of Christ
incorruptible. They, on their part, admitted that,
while there is in Christ but one nature, yet that
nature is twofold: their test phrase was, that “God
was crucified."
These, with some obscure matters charged as heresy
against the Origenists, were the delicate differences
to be arranged at another Council in Constantinople
(553), which willingly enough accepted the very
words of the Emperor's confession. But after his
death dissensions went on widening, with admixture
of strange travesties here and there, that seemed to
make a fourth divinity of Mary "Mother of God,” till
all were swept away in a common ruin by the impla-
cable storm of Islamism. The last attempt to recon-
cile them was in the compromise (suggested 633) that,
though there were two natures in Christ, yet there
was only a single will. This seemed to satisfy for a
time, but was brought to an end by the sixth great
Council (680), which established as orthodox the doc-
trine of two wills. The Monotheletes, including the
Emperor himself, who had proposed the compromise,
were now denounced, and "peace," says Gieseler, drily,
was thus restored to the Church.”
((
This pitiful story seems fairly enough the logical
outcome of the attempt to stake man's faith on accu-
196
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
racy of belief. Assuming that it is to be so, the nat-
ural inference surely is, that no degree of accuracy can
be excessive, and no difference of belief too small to
justify intolerant debate. To absolute sceptical in-
difference, the distinction of two natures and two
wills is not more insignificant than the act of casting
incense on a pagan chafing-dish, the test which had
determined many an heroic martyr-death. One, how-
ever, is a point of speculative opinion; the other, how-
ever slight, an act of free choice. One deals with logic
merely; the other with the conscience, where the
foundation of moral life is. One is dogmatic ortho-
doxy, the other is spiritual integrity. The orthodox
postulate, that rightness of belief is essential to sal-
vation, could not have been more perfectly carried
out to its logical absurdity, than in these incessant,
unintelligible, disastrous controversies, that cost the
Eastern Church its last chance of vigorous life.
III. The third phase of Eastern Christianity to be
recalled here is the extraordinary outburst of fanati-
cism called the Image Controversy, lasting more than
a hundred years, and shaking the Empire to its cen-
tre. This need not detain us long. It broke out
something more than a hundred years after the furi-
ous assault on Arabian tribal idolatry led by Mahomet.
The attack on Christian images began, in fact, with
the intolerant Mussulman fanaticism itself, which ex-
pelled all "idols" from the churches where it had
power through its rapid conquests in the East, es-
pecially in Syria, to the despair of Christian and the
vindictive delight of Jew.
The Emperor Leo III. (the Isaurian) was the first
IMAGE CONTROVERSY.
197
"Iconoclast" of the Empire (718-741). He was a
man of military vigor, political good sense, and reso-
lute courage, one of the ablest and best of Byzantine
emperors. Image-worship had run to a violent su-
perstition, which worshipped statues of saints and mi-
raculous pictures, such as that of the Virgin Mary
at Sozopolis, whose hand flowed with balsam, as well
as the visible symbol of the Cross, at which no one
scrupled. Images were taken from the churches by
command of Leo, and a council called by his successor
(754) echoed in its Acts the imperial will, holding it
especially profane that she who was "literally and
truly Mother of God, higher than the whole creation,
visible or invisible," should be represented by "a
figure out of any sort of wood, or colors laid on by a
workman's hand."
It is unnecessary to tell the furious resistance to
such decrees, amounting to rebellion and civil war;
or how the fanaticism was fed by companies of monks,
and traded on by interested churchmen. By an odd
and childlike superstition, not only prayers were said
and offerings made to painted images, and lighted
candles set before them; but the sacred bread, "the
body of the Lord," was put in their hands, as children
feed their dolls, and the color scraped from them was
mixed in the cup of communion. Some councils or
synods were found to sanction the custom of image-
worship. Imperial edicts against it were passed in
vain. Silent toleration and persecuting rigor were
tried in turn; till, under a second Theodora (842), full
sanction of Church and State was given to the custom,
and a yearly festival was established to celebrate its
198
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
final triumph. What quaint, abject, homely forms
the superstition took, is told us by all visitors to.
Oriental churches at the present day. The dispute.
was finally settled by the curious compromise which
permitted pictures (or colored medallions), but not
images, while the Latin Church admits them both,
another rift of the breach between East and West
that went on widening hopelessly. Since this sepa-
ration,* the Eastern Church drifts out of the main
channels of history, and floats, in a certain idle and
sheltered way, in such shallows and coves as the
floods of fanaticism or conquest may have spared. Its
history will not detain us any longer.
To us the strange thing, the real tragedy in all
these disorders, so puerile and futile the cause of
them appears to us, is that they were the serious
and real interests of Eastern Christians, while the
storm was gathering in the South that soon swept
them to horrible destruction. We cannot watch with
their eyes the advancing tempest, or know how it
looked to them, because their eyes were holden, not
to see things as they were. An infatuation of secu-
rity possessed them, I suppose, in the august name
and traditions of the Empire, till the sweep of Ma-
hometan fanaticism had grown irresistible. For, in
the year 609, the Arab camel-driver Mahomet, in a
brooding, fitful way that we might take for mania,
had begun to talk of himself as a prophet of the One
* This was made final in 879, at a council in Constantinople,
which rejected, 1. The Roman assertion of supremacy; 2. The
claim that Bulgaria lay within the see of Rome; 3. The addition
of the phrase filioque to the Western creed.
MAHOMET.
199
God. In 622 he fled for his life from Mecca, and
began to gather a force personally devoted to him.
In ten years more he died, just on the edge of an
enterprise that blazed out suddenly, like a conflagra-
tion. Syria, Egypt, Persia, were by 650 held by the
Moslem sword, and along the confines of the Empire
the Crescent bore hard against the Cross.
I am not to repeat, in ever so rapid outline, the
story of those conquests, or discuss again the charac-
ter and career of the Arabian prophet. We have only
to look, very briefly, at the moral-causes at work in
the sudden catastrophe. By common opinion, Ma-
homet is regarded now as more reformer than im-
postor, as a fanatic if ever there was one, partially
(perhaps) insane. At least the frenzy that we call
madness is often the most effective appeal to Oriental
races, and it was strong in him at times. Still, it
was not only vehement passion, often on the edge of
insanity. However distorted, it never quite lost the
glow of religious feeling and moral passion it started
with. He is said to have picked up very early in
life some crude notion of Christian doctrine from cer-
tain Ebionitish sects, heretical and zealously mono-
theist; while his most indignant scorn was called
out by some monkish travesties of the trinity, already
alluded to. His career began with a furious attack
on the idols of the Arab Kaabah, and this iconoclastic
zeal he never abandoned. Indeed, among his followers
it is as hot and intolerant to-day as it was in the first
onslaught inspired by his voice.
A word of the field where this new fanaticism took
root, and the material on which it fed. To the most
200
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
religious races on earth Arabia itself is a holy land.
There is Mount Sinai, its rugged summit scorched by
the visible presence of Jehovah; the rock, where at
the stroke of Moses water gushed out for his fainting
people; the well Zemzem, which the angel showed to
Hagar when Ishmael, father of the desert tribes, was
dying of thirst; the black stone of Mecca, chief visi-
ble object of adoration to the faithful, which they say
fell from heaven. The Arab, we are told, claims a
license to plunder all other tribes of men, in retalia-
tion for Abraham's casting off of Ishmael. Whatever
the ground of it, the license is one, all travellers feel
to-day.
On them, again, God has bestowed four peculiar
gifts turbans for diadems, tents for walls and houses,
swords for intrenchments, and poems for laws. In
their worship they allow no images or pictures :
"Thank God," say they, "we have originals." The
same enormous conceit glorifies their Sacred Book.
No mortal man, they think, unless inspired, could
wield the vast fabric of their language, swollen with
unnumbered synonymes, having eighty names for
honey, two hundred for a serpent, a thousand for a
sword. Mahomet had never learned to read or write ;
yet the revelations he gave out from time to time are
held unrivalled by all poets or orators of that tongue :
"the greatest of miracles, equally stupendous with
the act of raising the dead, alone enough to convince
the world of its divine original."
No other creed has so worked up into a fanatic
passion the obscure feeling which lies at the heart
of most men, that their lives are ordered by a Destiny
C
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF ISLAM.
201
wholly out of their control. The Moslem faith teaches.
that the day and hour of each man's death is written
down in the book of fate. No power can avert or
alter that. His freedom is only to choose the
worthiest way to die. Those who fall in battle would
have perished all the same, about their business or in
bed at home; but basely so, most gloriously now.
It is their great privilege to have fallen so; already
they are in the joys of paradise. Thus fatalism is not
the helpless spell upon the will it might be in a fee-
bler race, but a passion of absolute daring. "Islam,"
Submission; "Kismet," It is so decreed, are the
watchwords both of that fierce courage in battle and
that helpless stupor in defeat or misery, alike charac-
teristic of the Moslem temper.
Both the strength and the impotence of Islamism
consist in its having drawn off all the moral forces of
the nature into that one channel, of a blind religious
frenzy; in its absolute scorn of all civilized arts, its
absolute surrender to the sensual delights of civilized
luxury. The conqueror Omar (637) lay on the stone
steps where beggars slept; the staff he leaned on was
his bow; all his equipage, as he rode his one camel to
the shrine at Jerusalem was a sack of wheat, a basket
of dates, a wooden platter, and a water-skin. When
Mustapha, ten and a half centuries later (1683), lay
in his camp before Vienna, it was with pavilions of
green silk and all the luxuries that could be gathered
by an enormous army train, till this insolent array
was swept back by the splendid chivalry of Sobieski,
and Europe was saved. From that hour the formi-
dable wave of Mahometan conquest has ebbed, stead-
9*
202
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST.
ily or fitfully, till the power which Luther thought
likely to bring the reign of Antichrist is hardly
propped from falling by Christian alliances. England
and Russia, not Arabia or Turkey, control the desti-
nies of the East.
But, in its first fury, it had nearly extinguished
the degenerate Christian Empire. Twice Constanti-
nople was beset by an Arab fleet, in 668 and 716;
and twice it was saved by the timely and terrible
defence of the unquenchable Greek fire, floods of
blazing petroleùm mixed with sulphur poured over
the surface of the waves. Meanwhile the invasion
spread westward, through Egypt; through the dis-
tracted states of North Africa, where it crushed at
once Greek and Vandal, and both the rival parties in
the Church; into the Gothic kingdom of Spain, where
it won almost the whole Peninsula, but was pushed
back by a religious passion equal to its own, and
driven out at length by Ferdinand and Isabella; across
the Pyrenees into France, where at Tours, in 732, the
light horse of Abdelrahman broke all day long against
the steel-clad line of Charles Martel, like surf against
a belt of ice. The Arab host, when night fell, "folded
their tents and silently stole away."
This set the western limit of Saracen invasion.
"For," says the chronicler, "as the hammer breaks
and bruises iron and steel and all other metals, so did
Charles bruise and break in battle all these foes and
strange nations." The Arabs, as ever submissive to
their destiny, call that fatal field "the martyrs' pave-
ment”; and to this day, say they, the sound is heard
which the angels of heaven make in so holy a place,
to call the faithful unto prayer.
THE FAILURE OF ISLAM.
203
And thus the flood, which at one time looked irre-
sistible, was beaten back, both in East and West.
The great Saracen Empire, which once threatened to
envelop the whole of Christendom, still touches it at
both ends of its broken crescent, reaching nearly half
way round the Mediterranean. As far as the strength
of merely religious passion goes, that power was well
matched against its antagonist, and was perhaps even
its superior. But the bleak monotheism of Islam, its
sombre fatalism, its fanatical pride, its ferocious cru-
elty, its gorgeous and fitful luxury, never were allied
-except for one brief holiday of splendor at Cor-
dova — with the great intellectual forces, never with
the sober and resolute temper and the moral will,
which make religion deep and real, and are alone
competent to the world's best work.
Mahometanism broods upon its departed glories.
It keeps alive, as its one root of strength, its blind aud
intolerant fanaticism. It is the creed of perhaps the
most recklessly daring fighters in the world. In
winning the inferior races, and training them to a
fervent worship of its own and a certain low level of
culture, it has shown an aptness, skill, and zeal quite
in advance of any Christian missions. But science
it treats with ignorant scorn. The arts of modern
life it takes at second hand, choosing always those of
mere luxury or else mere destruction. And so it has
no hold upon the future, only the memory of a bloody
and stormy past.
X.
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
NE of the most familiar of religious images is
ONE
that which figures the Christian movement as
a Warfare. The body of believers is likened to an
Army in the temper of its service, the aim of its
movement, the symbol of its loyalty, in its discipline,
drill, and organization. A favorite Christian phrase
has always been "the Church militant"; and many
illustrations have already shown what meaning, and
how much, lies in that phrase: that it means, not
simply that the religious life is a warfare to us indi-
vidually, which in one view it always is; but that, in
its largest sense, it is a movement of conflict and an-
tagonism, against very definite foes, and to certain
definite ends. This image we must still keep in view
a little longer.
How in its nobler sense that warfare was carried on
for some centuries, and by what sort of men, we have
seen already. We have now to consider it, in its
largest sense hitherto, as an invasion and a conquest.
We are to think of it as a Campaign, intricate in its
plan, wide in its field of operations, long in the carry-
ing out, conducted by wary and skilful strategy, and
brought to its close with a diplomacy equally adroit
and able. No other terms than these will fitly express
A THREE CENTURIES' CAMPAIGN.
205
the intricate character, the mingled motives, the variety
of agents, the acts sometimes heroic and then again
quite questionable, by which that campaign was car-
ried through.
Indeed, these only express it feebly. For the field
includes all Western Europe, - that is, the entire front
of the advancing civilization. The time it covers is
three centuries. Its strategy is the steady policy of
the Church of Rome, administered by a long succession
of able and zealous pontiffs. Its agents are not only
that great host of devoted servants, numbering many
thousands, of whose discipline and zeal we have seen
something already in the monastic orders; they in-
clude also barbarian chiefs and petty sovereigns, whose
policies, feuds, and even crimes are, with the heat
of fresh conversion, put at the service of the Church.
It is of this vast campaign that I am to attempt, not a
history, or outline, or even sketch, but only to hint
the nature of the forces that guided, impelled, and
fought it.
The three centuries just spoken of may be most
conveniently regarded as extending from the time of
Leo the Great, about 450, to the death of St. Boni-
face, Apostle of the Germans, in 755. Just midway
stands the remarkable and imposing figure of Gregory
the Great, sometimes called the last of the Fathers,
and the real dividing-mark between the ancient and
middle age,
who died in 604. He may be held to
have first distinctly conceived this great work from
the point of view just indicated, and, more than any
other man, to have given it the impulse and the
stamp of his powerful moral nature. At his noble
206
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
personal character we may glance briefly by and by.
At present, we have simply to fix this period of time
as a whole as definitely as may be, its beginning,
middle, and end. Its beginning corresponds nearly
with the fall of the Western Empire; its end is a lit-
tle before the refounding of that Empire in the person
of Charlemagne.
Recall now those words of Leo, in which he recites.
the glory God had bestowed on Rome in making it
the seat of military empire, as a preparation for the
greater glory that would belong to it as head of a
spiritual dominion broad as the earth itself. Those
words may serve as a key to the movement we are
about to consider, the Christian conquest of the bar-
barian nations.
But it may be worth while to reflect a moment on
the amazing realization of them which we have before
our eyes at the end of more than fourteen centuries.
Imperial Rome never had at its command so vast a
number of subjects, nor such absolute devotion, nor such
diplomatic skill, nor such willing obedience, nor such
wealth of voluntary gifts, nor such hold on the imagi-
nation and reverence of men, as Papal Rome, stripped
of the last vestige of temporal power, has to-day.
What no mere secular government can do, it can
command men to be martyrs. Its word is a spell of
authority as much in the heart of Africa or on the
Pacific coast as in the chambers of the Vatican.
can by a whisper raise or quell a religious frenzy in
Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, or Quebec. It can
block the wheels of the strongest military power that
ever existed on earth, and does it to-day. It claims.
It
2)
MILITARY EMPIRE OF ROME.
207
to hold, alone, the key to the great social problem, the
despair of moralists and statesmen, and with it to con-
trol the next great step of human evolution.
We may deny that claim; we may hate, dread, or
defy the authority which still asserts itself in so many
ways. The one thing we cannot do is to despise it.
And among all matters of historical inquiry the one
that seems best worth our understanding, if we can, is
the course of events that laid the foundations of that
power so deep and strong. Some of the conditions of
its exercise we shall have to consider when we come
to speak of the medieval Empire-Church. Just now
we deal only with the period of its foundation.
-
The military empire of Rome was about five hun-
dred years* in coming to its greatest breadth and
height. This was a process of conquest carried out
by the patriotic valor of the Roman armies, and
guided by the vigorous policy-often kept in check
by the jealous dread of the Roman Senate. Again
and again conquests were undertaken reluctantly, and
carried out in self-defence, exactly as they are by
England in Asia and Africa to-day. In particular,
Rome was obliged to resist steadily, for two or three
centuries, the steady advance of barbarian tribes, in
that movement which threatened to cover as with a
flood the whole field of ancient civilization. She was
obliged to conquer, exterminate, enslave them; to
draft them in her armies; to keep them in check by
military colonies; to adopt them in her political sys-
tem; to humor and tolerate their religions; to give
* Counting from the invasion of the Gauls (B. c. 390) to the
time of Trajan.
208
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
them whatever share and stake was possible in the
wealth, art, skill, at her command. All her treasures
of military skill, of population, of state-craft, had been
spent in that struggle with diminishing strength at
last, and vanishing hope; and now the end had plainly
come. The Barbarian was master of the civilized
world, and all its treasures were at his feet.
We need not go at any length into the vast tragedy
of the Fall of Rome. It is with a single point only
of its historical significance that we have to do. Just
at this moment of time-the final collapse of the
ancient system-the vast conception came, like a
flash of genius as it were, upon such minds as Leo's,
to win back all that was lost, and more, but in another
way. Pagan Rome had attempted the conquest of
the barbarian world, and had failed. Christian Rome
should undertake to conquer the soul of Barbarism itself,
and in God's name would do it. Such was the mag-
nificent conception of Leo, of Gregory, of the English
Winfried surnamed Boniface. Not only the thought
itself was more amazing and grand than had ever
dawned on the mind of general or statesman. The
means by which it was carried out show a larger
political grasp, a more consummate generalship, a
steadier courage, a reach and subtilty of resource, a
firmness of policy, to which the perishing Empire had
shown no parallel.
The weapons of this warfare, too, were as original
as its conception was great and new. They were, in
the most literal, even tender and pathetic sense, the
weapons of Christian love. The barbarian world must
be won, if at all, by way of sympathy. It must be
OUTSIDE VIEW OF THE BARBARIAN.
209
conquered through its imagination, conscience, and
religious awe. The men who went out to that con-
quest must go animated and haunted with a great
yearning for saving souls. The power with which
they were clothed was the power of poverty, austerity,
obedience, and self-denial.
I do not use these words at random. Volumes of
the correspondence of these men have come down to
us, and they show the qualities I have named on
every page. They show, too, an incredible patience
of detail; such as we might vaguely imagine to be
needful if we try to shape out in our minds the con-
ditions of the task; but such as we could not defi-
nitely conceive without those innumerable strange,
quaint, touching illustrations. I may attempt pres-
ently to restore a line or two of these faded memo-
ries; but first we should try to see a little more
distinctly the outside aspect of the case.
There is a brief bright picture in one of Chryso-
stom's homilies, of the barbarian as he appeared in the
market-place of Constantinople, restless, turbulent,
curious, bearded, thrusting at passers-by with the
stick he carries, tossing back his shock of hair "more
like a lion than a man." This is just before the great
real terror of the Gothic name. St. Jerome reflects,
from his convent in Bethlehem, the far-off vision of
the agony at the sack of Rome by Alaric, and the
haggard spectacle of vagrant, hungry, despairing troops
of men and women, high-born, delicately bred, used
to luxury, stripped of everything in that great deso-
lation. "I cannot see it without tears," he says;
"that power of old, and wealth unknown, have come
N
210
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
to such need as to lack roof, food, and clothing; and
still the hard and cruel heart of some men is not
softened nay, they rip up their wretched rags and
wallets, to find gold among these poor captives." *
The monk Salvian, a few years later, had watched
in Gaul or Spain the Gothic and Vandal tide, wave
upon wave, and set himself to a serious study of bar-
barian frankness, simplicity, courage, ferocity, or craft,
compared with the various forms of civilized vice
generated in the corruption of Pagan society; and finds
the new rude population at least as hopeful subjects
for conversion as the old, which it justly displaced.
St. Augustine about the same time recites, in phrase
that I have before cited, the judgment of God in the
overthrow of that evil world. The dainty Sidonius
Apollinaris, writing from Toulouse (about 455), tells
jestingly of his seven-foot Gothic hosts (too big for
his hexameters), greased with rancid butter, reeking
of onion and garlic, and clad in shabby kilt and tar-
tan. A little later, Jornandes gives, with the vivid-
ness of an eye-witness who had felt its terror, the
sketch which all historians since have copied, of the
hardly human Huns more brutes than men, cling-
ing like cats to the backs of the horses they scarce
ever left, with strange flat-nosed Mongol visages and
beaded gimlet-holes (as it were) in place of eyes-
who poured on like the flood and were swept back like
the ebb, but threatened at one time to put all Eu-
rope under the yoke of Asia.
Introduction to the Commentary on Ezekiel.
† So St. Sturmi, exploring the wilderness for Boniface, smells
the evil odor of the barbarians afar off.
GREGORY OF TOURS.
211
These are hints of the preliminary studies, sketches
of the field of operations, before the serious campaign
began. Of the century of wreck and waste that fol-
lowed, in the wake of Lombard and Frank invasion,
we have a full-length picture, grotesque in the sim-
plicity with which its horrors are drawn out, in the
pages of the excellent and pious Gregory, Bishop of
Tours, who bravely and patiently held his post in the
midst of them.* A single family group, taken from
his sketches and told in meagre outline, will help
us more, perhaps, than any generalization of them.
Clovis, king of the Franks, had been converted
by his Burgundian bride Clotilda, and baptized by
St. Remigius, who spoke to him the brave words,
"Meekly bow thy neck, Sicambrian ; adore what thou
hast burned, burn what thou hast adored.". He was
of the true faith, and impartially destroyed both
Pagan Alleman and Arian Burgundian or Goth. +
"God overthrew his enemies daily under his hand,"
says Gregory, "because he walked with an upright
heart before him, and did that which was pleasing in
*These have been condensed by Augustin Thierry in his six
brief and curious "Tales of the Merovingian Times."
† Barbaric, Chlodovig; softened in lapse of time to Louis.
The destruction of the premature but brilliant Arian civiliza-
tion of the Goths and Burgundians assailed by the conquests of
Belisarius on one side, and crushed by the brutality of the Franks
on the other is one of the obscurer tragedies of this evil time.
Some features of this civilization will be found hinted at below,
under the title "The Christian Schools." It is pathetic to read the
warning given (in the correspondence of Cassiodorus) by the great
Ostrogothic King Theodoric to the young Alaric of Toulouse, the
Visigoth, to beware of the quarrel with the Franks, in which, a
few years later, his kingdom perished.
212
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
6
his eyes."
And he adds, a little further on, that,
"having slain many other princes, yea, his own nearest
kindred, of whom he had jealousy lest they should
take the kingdom from him, he extended his power
through all Gaul. And once having called together
his people, he is said to have spoken thus concerning
the kinsmen whom he had slain: Woe is me, who
remain as a pilgrim among strangers, and have no
kindred, who if adversity should come might give me
help.' This he said," adds Gregory, quaintly, "not
grieving at their death, but by craft, if perchance he
might find any still remaining whom he might put
to death."
His son Clotaire was of the same barbarian temper,
his many murders and many wives alike the scandal
of his Christian profession. One of his queens,
Radegonda, whose father and brother he had killed
in war, escaped with some hazard and became a con-
secrated nun, founding with her dower a convent of
some celebrity, where with her friend, the poet Fortu-
natus, she found repose, a little island of peace
amidst the tumultuous inundation. The last act of
Clotaire's brutality was to fasten in a hut and burn
alive on some suspicion his son Chramnes, with all
his family; after which, at the tomb of St. Martin,
he confessed "all the acts which perchance he had
done amiss, imploring with deep groans that the
blessed saint would beseech the Lord's mercy for his
sins, and wash out by his intercession whatever he
had unreasonably done." "What a heavenly Lord is
this," he said when dying with fever, "who so destroys
mighty kings!"
THE BARBARIAN FRANKS.
213
Of the sons of Clotaire, Gontran "the good" was
held (says Sismondi) "to be a man of humane tem-
per; for, excepting his wife's physician, whom he cut
in pieces for failing to cure her, two of his brothers-
in-law whom he assassinated, and another whom he
treacherously slew, there is hardly any cruel act
recorded of him, except it be his destroying the city
of Cominges, and slaughtering all the inhabitants,
men, women, and children." He was, moreover, a
strong friend of the monks and clergy, founded sev-
eral monasteries, and paid liberally for the expiatory
rites that would give his soul repose.
-
A great part of the tale is taken up with the jeal-
ousies, treacheries, and ambitions of the two barbarian
queens, Fredegond and Brunehild, more famous far
than the two brothers whose wives they were, with
the intrigues and murders that grew out of them.
But both were zealous champions of orthodoxy.
Fredegond spared no cost to purchase ransom for the
souls of her hired assassins, if they should fall; and
Brunehild who was tied to a wild horse in her old
age, and so torn to pieces was a correspondent and
friend of Gregory the Great, and a stanch supporter
of his scheme for the conversion of the Saxons.
Such allies as these, for better or worse, the Church
had found in its campaign against barbarian pagan-
ism and Arian heresy; just as half-pagan Frankish
chiefs like Charles Martel sought the alliance of
churchmen like Boniface against the wilder floods
that still beat upon their frontier. The service was
mutual, and each party was largely independent of
the other. Often, indeed, the Church could only give
214
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
a Christian name, without changing the thing. Thus
Gregory the Great thinks it necessary to spare them
the old pagan temples, only sprinkling them with
holy water, and putting saints' relics in place of idols ;
and to adopt their old festivals, as Yule and Easter,
under new associations.
Many and strange were the scandals that came of
these conversions. "Here I have been baptized more
than twenty times," said an old man one day, when
the crowd was larger than usual, and the baptismal
robes gave out," and every time they have given me
most beautiful clothes. These old rags to-day are
hardly fit for a ploughboy, not to say a warrior like
me." One new convert takes the opportunity to
pick the priest's pocket while the water is preparing
for his baptism. One proposes that a point of her-
esy shall be settled, not by "these long talks," but
promptly, by the ordeal of boiling water.
"Is it
true," asks a barbarian chief, his foot already in the
sacred font, "that my ancestors the noble Frisians
are in hell?” Doubtless," replies the priest; "they
died without the only saving faith." "Then "-draw-
ing back his foot "I will not quit those brave men
to join the cowards of your paradise. We will follow
the ways of our fathers." And so, in comforting
vision, the priest soon after beheld the defiant chief
among his ancestors in the fiery pit.
It is a fair question to ask what such conversions
were really worth. To this the answer is, that the
first point was to bring those fierce tribes, in name at
least, within the Christian pale, and to substitute the
Christian for the pagan ideal. Everything was staked
SAINT COLUMBAN.
215
on the success with which this preliminary work was
done. The hope of the world lay in those rude men;
and their instructors felt it in a way which they pos-
sibly could not have explained to us so well as we
can understand it for them. Take the breadth of
modern thought and life, science, enterprise, art,
wealth, power, and set it against anything that
could possibly have grown from the degenerate Greek
or Roman stock; and you measure in part the service
that was done, when that rude vigor was grafted with
the shoot of a finer life, which would in time yield
such infinitely richer fruit.
Or, again, look away from the vague idealities
which are apt to fill the field of history to what the
Christian monks, scattered by tens of thousands all
through the great wilderness of barbarism, were ac-
tually doing there: the infinite serious patience with
which they went about their task; the austerities of
the self-denial that trained them for it, and kept its
ideal from fading in them; the hints of beastly and
violent ways which they attempted to keep in check;
the strange power of fascination which these very
austerities exercised, to attract men to them. St. Co-
lumban establishes his post alone in the hill-country
near the Rhine, because the rule of Benedict is not
sufficiently austere; and the more rigid the lines he
draws, the more men press to enter them.* This
* A brother who does not say Amen after grace must be pun-
ished with six stripes; who neglects to cross himself after bless-
ing, twelve stripes; who does not check a cough in reciting the
Psalm, or dents the sacramental cup with his teeth, six stripes;
who appeals from judgment to his superior, forty days' penance on
bread and water. A lay brother who gets drunk, or is sick from
216
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
earth, says Columnban, is non vita sed via, "not a life,
but a way," and to transgressors he made it very
hard.
((
I have said before that some of those men were mar-
tyrs for humanity. St. Pretextatus, who had bravely
sheltered his godson Merovig, is assassinated in his
own church by Fredegond's order. St. Wandregisil
keeps an angry mob at bay with pious words, and
will not appeal to any arm of flesh. St. Bavon hum-
bles himself in remorse before a slave he has once
owned, and for penance compels him to shave his
head, beat him with rods, and shut him up in prison.
St. Germanus strips himself to the shirt to clothe a
shivering beggar, and beggars himself to ransom cap-
tives. St. Sequanus goes out to live in a savage.
wood inhabited by more savage men.
No sooner
did they see him, than from wolves they became
lambs; from such as but now were a source of ter-
ror, they were thenceforth ministers of help; and
what had been a resort of cruel demons and robbers
became the abode of innocence and virtue." Such
tales as these, with many a miracle and wonder in-
terspersed, and enforced by many a Christian homily,
and seasoned by many a subtile theological debate,
came (says Guizot) to be the mental diversion and
the moral instruction of whole populations, their
Arabian Nights, their popular novel, their sermon
and essay, their daily newspaper.
Yes, the hope of the world lay in those rude men.
The future of humanity was staked upon such tasks
greediness, seven days' bread and water; who eats or drinks in
honor of pagan idols, three years of such penance.
GREGORY THE GREAT.
217
as those which attempted their conversion. When
Gregory the Great was yet a simple monk,- so each
of his biographers delights to repeat the tale, — he
saw in the market-place at Rome some captive Anglo-
Saxon boys, ruddy-faced, golden-haired, such as we
often see in the streets, and as the Italian painters
(Goethe says) take for their type of cherubs. Learn-
ing who they were, Non Angli sed angeli was his
famous reply, "Not Angles but angels"; and from
that hour he set his heart on their conversion. Now
the Saxons were rudest and fiercest of all the bar-
barous tribes; and since their conquest of England,
near a century and a half before, when they over-
threw the legendary realm of King Arthur, and drove
back the Christian Britons to the mountains of Wales
and the Western Isles, had remained obstinately
Pagan. All English histories tell the story of Au-
gustine of Canterbury and his forty monks, sent by
Gregory (597), and their conversion of the Saxon;
and in Gregory's letters you may read how persist-
ently and hopefully he followed them up, when they
shrank from the terror of the unknown journey.*
This was amid the very ferocity of the "Merovingian
times" before described. Their protector on the way
. was the truculent Brunehild; and the act was one
which, more than any other, marks Gregory as the
head and chief in this long unbloody crusade.
Gregory is one of those men who are heroic from
the steady courage and persistency of will with which
* What is so well told in so accessible a book as Green's "His-
tory of the English People," it does not seem worth while to repeat
by way of narrative.
10
218
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
they face great disasters, and carry a great burden of
duty through a hard and dangerous way. In reading
his correspondence, we feel painfully that we have
come upon a far lower intellectual level than we had
in Leo, a hundred and fifty years before. He dwells
rather pitifully on the marvels and terrors of saints'
bones, and makes much of the filings of St. Paul's or St.
Peter's chains, which he has enclosed in gold keys and
sends as gifts of magic efficacy to barbarian lord or
lady. But this childish way of thought is joined to
a very manful courage and sincerity in dealing with
the duties of his office. From that office he shrank
back at first, as well he might; fled from the city;
and yielded only when his retreat was betrayed by a
miraculous light, and a white dove led the way to
his pursuers. Of high rank and luxurious tastes, he
cast those things absolutely away, starving himself to
permanent ill health by his austerities, and enforcing
such rigid monastic discipline in his own household
that, when he learned once that a brother had kept
(for keepsake, perhaps) three pieces of gold, he would
pardon him not even on his death-bed, but cast his
body with the coins upon a dunghill, saying, as Peter
to Simon Magus, "Thy money perish with thee!"
These bitter rigors and self-denials were the answer
made, by a conscience highly strung, to the appeal of
the miseries that surrounded him in the city, thrice
desolated, by violence, flood, and pestilence. But it
is not the story of his fourteen years' rule (590-604),
rigid, charitable, energetic, and wise, that we have to
look at now; only the astonishing industry and moral
energy of the man. His correspondence is immense.
SAINT BONIFACE.
219
His homilies, commentaries, and moral treatises, in
many volumes, have earned him the title of "last of
the Fathers." This great amount of work he did with
a definite practical aim, with genuine humility, among
the distractions of office; surrounded by what looked
to him a mere chaos of wild waves, amidst which the
ship he was pilot of was tossing helplessly; suffering
too with illness and torments of "gout" (inflamma-
tory rheumatism, probably), and for years able only to
drag himself from bed for three hours in the day, to
attend the ceremonies of his priesthood. As he grew
old, he felt these pains and cares more heavily,—
poisoned, perhaps, with the malaria that already began
to infect the neighborhood of Rome. "Oppressed with
its burden," said he, "my soul sweats blood." Yet
he, more than any other one man, was the chief of
that great crusade, which he directed from his sick
bed; a campaign, says Ozanam, fought out by "in-
valids and women and slaves."
The next very eminent leader in this campaign
at the end of another century and a half-is the
English Winfried, otherwise St. Boniface of Germany,
who was martyred in 755. His work was a direct
though distant result of Gregory's great enterprise in
Saxon England. For the Saxons were at this time.
chief and most formidable of all the barbarous nations;
and, though Christian in England, still hung like a
heavy cloud all along the northeastern portion of
half-civilized France, fanatic in their old paganism,
till subdued by Charlemagne, with other outlying
tribes, many years later, in thirty-three bloody cam-
paigns.
220
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
I do not know where we have a higher example of
blended sweetness and courage, with a native frank-
ness and nobleness of temper, than in the life of Boni-
face. It has been asked whether his courage was not
rather of a feminine sort, considering, perhaps, the
passive serenity of his death. But, from the time
when the first great passion seized him, at the age of
twenty-three, of giving himself to this service, till his
death at seventy-two, his life was spent by choice in
the rudest and most hazardous exposures. While
passively obedient to meekness in his devotion to the
authority of Rome, he is plain to bluntness in rebuk-
ing to the Pope himself the disorders he found in the
Christian capital: "These carnal men, these simple.
Allemans, Boians, and Franks, if they hear of such
things at Rome as we forbid, will think them lawful,
and be offended. They hear of pagan dances, shouts,
and songs close by the church, at new-year, day or
night; and that one will not lend his neighbor tool
or fire; and that women wear amulets, garters, and
bracelets, in pagan fashion, and sell the same. With
these carnal and ignorant people, such things are a
great hindrance to our doctrine. If you prohibit them
at Rome, it will be a great gain to you and to us.”
And he warns the Pope of grosser scandals reported
within the church. "The pagan rites," answers Zach-
ary, we judge detestable and pernicious"; and he
says they must be put down. The worse offences he
entreats Boniface "noway to believe." This frankness
of correspondence is an honor alike to both.
(C
It was the yearning of kindred, no less than pure
missionary zeal, that drew the Saxon Winfried from
BONIFACE AND CHARLES MARTEL.
221
the pleasant South of England, towards those un-
tamed Saxons of the Continent, whom he could ad-
dress in his and their mother tongue.*
Now if we remember the place which this same
Saxon race has filled in history, how it was the
steady support of the Lutheran Reform on one side and
of English Puritanism on the other; how it makes
the mass and strength of the two great empires of
Britain and Germany to-day, and of the American Re-
public; how its blood and its language have spread,
through its great genius for colonization, till they are
dominant over nearly a third of the earth's surface
and population, we shall better appreciate the great-
ness of the work that was set on foot when Boniface
penetrated the wilds beyond the Rhine, to preach in
his native English there.
This work was distinctly understood to be the task
of civilization, and the saving of what men had then
best worth saving. We can still read the awkward
Latin of the safe-conduct given by Charles Martel to
this missionary monk, and signed with his hand and
seal. This is in 724, in the midst of the gathering
and disciplining of that confederation, with which
* The speech in which he addressed them is almost intelligible
to our English ears to-day, as preserved in this fragment of his
baptismal vows: "Forsachis tu diobolæ ? - Ec forsacho diobolæ. –
End allum diobol-gelde (fellowship)? — Ec forsacho allum diobol-
gelde. End allum dioboles werkum ?-End ec forsacho allum
dioboles werkum end wordum: Thunaer, ende Woden, ende Sax-
note, ende allem them unholdum the hira genotas sint (unholy
that are akin to them). — Gelobis tu in Got almehtigan fadaer?
Ec gelobo in Got almehtigan fadaer. - Gelobis tu in Crist, Godes
suno? — Ec gelobo in Crist, Godes suno. - Gelobis du in Halogan
Gast? Ec gelobo in Halogan Gast." [This is a little mangled in
Migne, but restored by Ozanam.]
222
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
eight years later he met Abdelrahman on the plain of
Tours, and dammed back the flood of Saracen con-
quest. The penniless unarmed monk and the power-
ful military chief respected one another as allies in
the defence of Christendom, neither more indispen-
sable than the other. As a token of the same alli-
ance, nearly thirty years later, Boniface anointed
with his own hand Charles's son Pepin as king of
the Franks (752), in place of the degenerate and
worthless house of Clovis, so sealing the compact of
the Monarchy and Church, and completing the first
act in the founding of the Christian Empire, which
we shall see presently as one of the essential steps of
civilization.
The service of those near thirty years was crowned
by the founding of the monastic school at Fulda, one
of the chief fountains of German culture.* In his
ecclesiastical residence at Mentz, on the Rhine, he
might have found rest in his old age, and his life's
work well done. But the same great yearning drew
him towards those Low Countries where the cloud of
Paganism still hung heaviest. "Know, my son," said
he to his successor, "that the time of my death draws
near. Go on with the work I have begun; finish the
church at Fulda, and, when my time is come, bury me
there; prepare what is needful for my journey, and do
not forget, with my books, to send a winding-sheet."
And with these words he left him weeping.
And so he went to the rude Low Country toward
* See the curious account (copied in Kingsley's "Roman and
Teuton "), in Eigil's Life of Sturmi, of the discovery and selection
of this spot. — Migne, Patrologia, cv. 530.
MARTYRDOM OF BONIFACE.
223
the North, where he lived by the river-side, and bap-
tized the converts who came to him as to John by
Jordan. But one day there came, instead of the band
of disciples he was looking for, a wild crew of Pagans,
who "with great din and horrid array of arms burst
upon the encampment of the saints." At first, his
young men would resist by force. "But the holy Bon-
iface, hearing the onset of the tumultuous crowd, fled
to the refuge of spiritual defence, taking (that is) the
relics of saints which he always had with him. So he
checked the young men, saying, 'Do not fight, my
children; do not bear arms against our adversaries,
which Holy Scripture forbids. We are taught to re-
turn not evil for evil, but even good for evil. The day
long desired is come, when we are bidden from the
toil and sorrow of this world to the joys of eternal
blessedness. Strengthen yourselves rather in the Lord,
and accept gratefully his offered mercy.' But, behold!
before his words were ended, the furious troop rushed
upon them, and slew them in the blood of a happy
martyrdom."
The letter of the story we may often have to ques-
tion. But, without any doubt, it tells us the temper
of that long campaign, in which the victory was
gained, once for all, for civilization and intelligence.
The barbarian world, once nominally won to the
Church, would become the field of what we are to
know hereafter as medieval and modern Christianity.
But here, to make the sketch complete, we must
anticipate a little the course of time. Along with
the conquests of Charlemagne, those pitiless con-
quests, in which (it was said) all were cut off who
224
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
were "taller than the Emperor's sword," a sort of
nominal Christianity had been carried deep into the
Saxon forests, and a mongrel faith had driven back
the worship of Odin and Thor. Such as it was, how-
ever, and spite of many a formidable recoil of the old
superstition, it seems to have pledged those regions to
alliance with the Christian monarchy of the West.
Loyalty to their creed was like loyalty to their flag.
With whatever misgiving and reluctance, the rude
Saxon, having once enlisted on the other side, stood
stanchly by the mightier Power that had foiled his
fathers' gods. The chief peril to those wavering con-
quests of the Church militant lay in the barbarous
realm beyond. The breach might be quickly healed
where it had been quickly broken; and a Scandina-
vian or Slavonic horde might find itself in alliance
with all the passionate terrors of a lingering Paganism.
Early in the ninth century, Paschasius Radbert
(whom we shall hear of again, more than once) was
head of a celebrated school at Corbey. His favorite
pupil was a young man, Anschar, a warm disciple of
his brooding and mystical theology. In the fervid
visions of his youth, Anschar had beheld the visible
glory of the Lord, and had heard himself summoned
by celestial voices to spend his life for the conversion
of the heathen, and so to win the blessed crown of
martyrdom. His heart was brave, and his will firm;
but his piety often took a sombre and penitential cast,
leading him to solitude and austerities, out of the
line of active duty. Conceiving himself to be fore-
appointed to some great enterprise, he waited for some
clear call to his real work,
ANSCHAR, APOSTLE OF THE NORTH.
225
At twenty-four he found himself already engaged
in it. From the monastic school at New Corbey on
the Elbe, the Christian conquests begun by Boniface
were pushed by Anschar into the remoter north. At
Hamburg, where a fortress had been built among the
dense forests that made the pagan frontier, and after-
wards at Bremen, he had his bishopric. And here he
found native helpers. Harold Hlak, an exiled Dane,
had found refuge with the Emperor Louis, son of
Charlemagne, adopting the Christian faith, and his
return opened the way for a mission among his peo-
ple. Roving Scandinavian traders, or freebooters,
had been as far as Micklagard, the "great city" of the
East; and there, or along the Levant, or on the British
coast, or at the Frankish court, they had found the
worship of the "white Christ," whose invisible might
had broken the Saxon strength, and forced their old
religion to hide itself among wilder mountains, in
ruder forests.* The secret charm of a more powerful
faith; the Roman ritual, which seemed to them the
invocation of a new order of spirits; intercourse with
their own Christian captives, and the sense that they
were dealing with a more skilled and educated race,
- all prepared them to welcome the new religion. At
their request, and under convoy of a trading fleet,
Anschar pursued his mission to the North.
Of the result we know not much more than that
he was favored by a strong party among the Swedes;
that he was partly foiled by an attack of pirates, who
seized most of the royal gifts and holy vessels on the
* All this is told in a charming tale, "Anschar, the Apostle of
the North," by Richard John King (London).
10*
226
CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS.
way; that he met the fierce hostility of the old Pa-
ganism, which stood savagely at bay in this its last
fortress; that his church and bishopric at Hamburg
were laid waste with fire; and that, after long wan-
dering and peril, he died at sixty-four, grieving that
his Lord had not thought him worthy of the martyr's
crown.
These three, Gregory, Boniface, and Anschar, are
conspicuously the heroes of that long crusade, whose
glory belongs to many generations and many thou-
sands of faithful men. Their completed work is seen
in the great fact, made clear before the end of this
period, that all Western Europe, from Sicily on the
south to Norway or even Iceland on the north, is
allied in one spiritual empire, and embarked on the
career of a common civilization.
XI.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
E have seen in Christianity, from the begin-
ning, something more than a system of doc-
trine, more than a movement of religious or reforming
zeal. Its first announcement was that "the kingdom
of heaven is at hand." These words were taken very
literally to mean the regeneration of society, and the
founding of a Divine Order on earth. Its scheme wast
social, and even political, quite as much as it was re-
ligious. The Church was organized for discipline and
authority, quite as much as it was for piety, charity,
or emotional appeal. Its success meant revolution in
the state, quite as much as conversion of the soul.
The Messianic hope of the reign of the chosen people
passed directly over to it as a heritage, and as an ele-
ment of power; and was adopted in the sense that all
institutions and all authority among men are right-
fully subject to the law of Christ as interpreted by
the ministers of Christ.
The reign of Constantine had been in part a fulfil-
ment of that scheme. It was the task of a Christian
Emperor to make over the institutions of the Empire
after the Christian model; at the very least, to make
himself the official defender of the faith. We have
seen how this view became idealized in Augustine's
→
228
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
"City of God"; and how it was expanded into the
conception of a spiritual Empire, co-ordinate with the
military dominion of Rome, we have heard from the
lips of Leo. We have followed, for the space of more
than three centuries, the conquests of that idea. We
have now to see the form it takes, as the period of
conquest is passed; as the task of Christianity comes
to be the shaping out of a political constitution, and
the administration of secular power.
Our immediate object of study, then, is the Empire
which came into being at the end of the eighth cen-
tury. It is, in a very accurate sense, the goal towards
which organized Christianity has been tending for
about five hundred years. The great historic figures
of Constantine and Charlemagne stand-as in the
stately porch of St. Peter's at the two extremities
of the course.
As to the series of events that fill the
long interval, the task of the historian, from our point
of view, is to set forth as well as he can the motive
and spirit of the great Christian leaders. This is per-
haps not very difficult. We see pretty clearly what
was the ideal of society and life as they conceived it;
and, on the whole, we may fairly say that they kept
that ideal pretty steadily in view, as the real aim of
their policy and conduct.
We are not quite so clear in our view of the great
social revolution now to be described. The circum-
stances are more perplexed. The motives are more
mixed. The responsibility of power compels a new
standard of judgment. Great events (such as the
conflicts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries)
resulting from that revolution throw back their
IMPERIAL ROME.
229
own light, sometimes very painfully, on the actors
in it.
Still, in the main, we must follow the same rule,
to put ourselves in their place as well as we can. We
must not judge that new Christian alliance of Church
and Empire by the shape it actually took at any given
time; still less by the horrible abuses, the travesties,
the corruptions, that came about long generations
after, which are too often the only material offered
for our judgment.
Nor, on the other hand, should we be misled by the
purely ideal and abstract way of regarding it which
we find in Dante, and in the great speculative church-
men who were his teachers. All that will come be-
fore our notice in due time. But, just now, we must
do it the justice of seeing it from the point of view of
the men who were the living actors in it. We must
take into our regard their ideal, as well as their very
coarse and hard surroundings, and the equally coarse
and hard temper bred by the passions of the struggle.
We must see, if we can, what they thought ought to
be done, what they thought could be done, and what
they really tried to do.
Now we must bear in mind — besides the ideal of
human society itself, which they held then, or which
we hold now that there was before their eyes a
form of government actual, irresistible, invincible,
and by its innumerable agents present everywhere.
This was the government of Imperial Rome. We
must not underrate the importance of that fact, es-
pecially the powerful charm it always held upon
their imagination. "The peace of the Empire" was
230
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
to them more than a phrase. For about two centu-
ries, from Augustus to Commodus, it had been the
symbol of a certain authority of law, a security of life,
a frequency and easiness of intercourse, a central,
controlling, and on the whole beneficent majesty, —
strongly relieved against old memories of conflict
everywhere, against the more dismal horror of the
century's civil war in Rome, the desolation, violence,
and fear men associated with outlying barbarism.*
The dominion of Rome, haughty and superb, included
all they knew of culture, art, splendor, civil order;
all they thought of as lawful authority and power.
All the sanctities which ancient life had known, such
as they were, had come to be embodied in that awful
and supreme dominion.
Rome had been prefigured, too, in prophecy, as last
of the four great kingdoms of the earth; and so its
name had to the Christian as well as the Pagan mind
something of a superhuman spell. It might perse-
cute and afflict the subjects of the Church, as under
the best of emperors, Trajan and Aurelius. It might
attempt to extirpate them as enemies and traitors, as
under the worst of tyrants, Nero and Galerius. It
might stand to them as the visible type of Antichrist,
a kingdom of Satan, to be presently overthrown, as in
the imagination of St. Augustine. But even then
there was something about it of sanctity and awe.
Martyrs of the faith testified on one side to its cor-
ruption and iniquity; but at the same moment legions
* See the very touching illustrations of this feeling given in
Hodgkin's "Italy and her Invaders," Vol. II. pp. 505-508. Com-
pare Claudian, In Rufinum, ii. 86–100.
ROME AND THE BARBARIAN.
231
of Christian soldiers as the "thundering legion" of
Aurelius—were fighting in its defence. Their abso-
lute loyalty to it in idea and in theory is as strongly
marked as their absolute courage in defying its power
and enduring its torture. We must bear in mind,
then, that the Empire of Rome stood to them, as it
was exhibited by Leo the Great and as it stands to
the Catholic mind to-day, the type of sovereignty, —
irresistible, august, divine.
Again, we must think of this wide and powerful
dominion as it commanded the homage and vague
awe of barbarous tribes, who knew it only at a dis-
tance. They were not wanting in intelligence, any
more than in courage. Their imagination was all the
more apt to be overawed, since nothing could offer
itself for comparison with that mysterious source of
power whose effects they felt. The weakness of bar-
barism before it was not lack of bravery, or lack of
men, or even lack of discipline. It was lack of organ-
ization on a large scale. Wherever the barbarian
came in contact with it, or heard of it by remotest
rumor, in African waste, or Parthian wild, or Ger-
man wood, it was always and everywhere the same
Roman eagle he met, the same compact force of
small,* tough, swarthy, nervous, disciplined, indom-
itable men, all trained alike to obey and to die for
that distant, dim abstraction, the Eternal City. He
met the same type of commander, - patient, resolute,
hardy like Cæsar, snatching a shield from a common
*"Men of such petty size (tantulæ staturæ): for our littleness is
mostly held in contempt among the Gauls, in comparison with
their own bigness."— Cæsar, B. G., ii. 30.
232
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
soldier, to fight without helm or breastplate in the
van; like Hadrian, bare-headed and on foot in the hot
dust of Egypt or the forests of Gaul, and always
obedient to the spell of that invincible Name.
This, I say, must have been the effect on men's
imagination of those five hundred years of conquest;
of those eight centuries during which no armed enemy
had entered the Roman gate; of that genius for organ-
ization which created the same type of rule, obeyed
the same symbol of authority, established the same
code of law, wherever a Roman force got footing on
the soil. The spell was all the stronger, because the
source of that authority was something mysterious,
vague, unseen. Or, if a barbarian embassy or captive
chief came to visit the Imperial City, the great circuit
of the walls and their invincible strength, the splen-
dor, wealth, and luxury, the strange spectacle of civil
order among a vast city population, could only, by
report of them, deepen and confirm the spell. Thus
for three centuries, while Gaul and Goth made the
chief strength of Roman armies, no Gaul or Goth
conceived a thought of disloyalty to the Roman name,
or of substituting his own authority for that he served
under. So Alaric was haunted by a voice, he said,
that gave him no quiet day or night, commanding him
to assault and capture Rome; * but first he led his
soldiers six years up and down in Italy, as if held off
by the potent charm, and when at last he had taken
* "Non somnia nobis,
Nec volucres, sed clara palam vox edita luco est:
Rumpe omnes, Alarice moras! hoc impiger anno,
Alpibus Italiæ ruptis, penetrabis ad Urbem.”
Claudian, De Bello Getico, 546, 547.
THE EMPIRE, SYMBOL OF SOVEREIGNTY.
233
the city and plundered it, within a year he was dead,
and his force dispersed. So Radagaisus, with his vast
host, had perished, lingering about Florence on his
way to the assault of Rome. So Attila, the "scourge
of God," had been deterred by the peaceable embassy
of Leo, who warned him of the sudden fate of all who
had offered violence to the holy city; and the bar-
barian had yielded, saying that he saw behind the
venerable priest the apparition of an old man with a
terrible countenance and threatening gesture, which
men thought was the Apostle Peter, but which we
may think was the spectre of the majesty of Rome;
and, a few months later, he too died, choked by his
own blood. So Odoacer the Herulian giant, real
sovereign of Italy, to whom St. Severinus had foretold
dominion when he stooped to enter the hermit's hut,
held that dominion first as the loyal officer of the last
boy-tenant of the Roman throne, and then as "Patri-
cian" by appointment of the Eastern Emperor. So
Theodoric the Ostrogoth reigned thirty-three years
in Italy as representing the best training that the
Empire could give, and as guardian of the art and
culture that the Empire had been able to hand down.
The vague awe of Rome, as something mysterious,
far-off, and invincible, had thus stamped itself deep
on the barbarian mind. The Empire became the
symbol of superhuman, absolute, universal sovereignty,
so far as that mind could conceive such a thought;
for which, indeed, no other symbol could possibly
occur. -
Accordingly and it is one of the most curi-
ous traits of the barbarian mind-any badge of
authority, any military title, the official robe or coro-
234
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
net bestowed by the Roman Emperor long after the
Empire itself had been humiliated by disasters, dis-
sensions, and defeats, was prized by a Gothic or Frank-
ish chief as a dignity that no barbarian rank or mere
success of arms could possibly give. To go no further
back, the truculent Clovis, who did not scruple to
cleave the skull of foe or kindred with his own battle-
axe, took a serious and solemn delight in the title
Patrician sent him by the Emperor of the East; he
clothed himself with the purple robe, paraded on
horseback with ring and coronet, and scattered with
his own hand among the crowd gold and silver coins
which he had caused to be struck, with the Emperor's
image on one side, and his own name as Consul and
Augustus on the other. Not that it added anything
to his power. As chief of the Frank confederacy he
was no doubt stronger, at any rate felt himself to be,
than Anastasius on his distant throne. But the patri-
cian rank and name gave him something that barbar-
ism could not give, the prestige and sanction of an
authority linked with the memories and upheld by
the sanctities of a thousand years.
This reverence for Roman prestige and authority
became a tradition with the Frankish house, along
with their fierce zeal for the orthodox faith. And it
is curious to see, a few generations later, how the rude
affectation of Roman dignity by the long-haired Mero-
vingian kings, who clad themselves in royal robes and
rode in state carriages drawn by oxen, ruined them
with their turbulent subjects; who speedily adopted
for their kings such real chiefs as Charles Martel and
his shrewd, strong-handed son Pepin. So the long-
DONATION OF PEPIN.
235
haired race of "do-nothing" sovereigns passed away,
and Pepin was crowned king by the hand of Boniface,
with the blessing of the Pope. Meanwhile the Em-
peror at Constantinople had since the fall of the
Western Empire held out the shadowy sceptre of
authority over Italy and the West, claiming the Pope
as subject. But Ravenna, his Italian capital, had
been swept up in the Lombard kingdom; and Pepin,
who as the Pope's ally had beaten back the Lombards,
made over to the Pope the temporal rule of the terri-
tory about Rome. So the Head of the Church became
an Italian prince. The celebrated "Donation" of Pe-
pin thus founded the temporal sovereignty of the Pope
(756), which lasted eleven hundred years, till it was
absorbed, in 1870, into the new Kingdom of Italy.
This rapid recital is not meant for history, but to
give the point of view and the point of time we have
reached, at the moment of founding the Christian
Empire of the West. Our business is not with the
historical incidents, but with the policy, the aim, the
ideal, that lay in the mind of the actors; that gave
direction to one of the most momentous revolutions
and shape to one of the greatest political constructions
that have been brought about in human affairs.
It is one of the happiest accidents of history that
associates the imposing personality of Charlemagne *
with this transition, and has made the title "great"
* It has come to be the fashion among historians to speak of
him simply by his personal name, Charles or Karl. But, as Head
of the revived Empire of the West, implying not only an actual
but a typical or ideal sovereignty, it seems best to retain that by
which he is most easily distinguished, which Mr. Freeman would
restrict to the Charlemagne of legend and romance.
236
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
a part of the very name by which he is known. The
immediate circumstances that brought him to the
spot where his colossal figure stands like a monument
at the boundary of two ages were tragic, even some-
what pitiful, as most things look when seen too
nearly. The revolution did not take place without
violence and parties in the Church. Leo III. had
been attacked in some street procession, dragged from
his horse, thrown into prison, and nearly killed by the
cruel hands that clumsily tried to blind him and cut
out his tongue, and so disqualify him by personal mu-
tilation from holding the priestly office. He had taken
refuge with Charles in France; and the strong hand
of Charles had set him back securely in his place.
The next year it was Christmas, of the year 800
-Charles visited him in Rome; and, as he knelt at
the high altar of St. Peter's in the vesper service, Leo
put on his head the imperial crown, and the people
joined in the salutation: To Charles crowned of God
Augustus, great and peace-giving Emperor of the Ro-
mans, life and victory! This was the first act of con-
secration of the "Holy Roman Empire," whose course,
parallel with that of the Church, fills the central space
of medieval history, and whose stately name, veiling
a thin phantom of its authority, was not abolished
till after more than a thousand years, when Napoleon
compelled Francis of Austria to abdicate the title,
holding himself, by force of his own arm, to be the
true and legitimate successor of Charlemagne.
At heart, Charles was no Roman patrician, but a
German chief. He delighted in border forays and
He gathered with a careful fondness
border tales.
CHARLEMAGNE.
237
the native German ballads. He lived the free life of
a huntsman in the woods, when not in the stir of
camp or court. He ranged incessantly from place to
place in his wide ill-defined dominion, choosing for
his capital not the royal town of Paris, much less
Rome, but Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), near his most
turbulent frontier, where he died, and where his sep-
ulchre remains until this day. He bore with an ill
grace the theatrical pomps and splendors of his office,
-unless it might be to rival in public ceremonial
the state of some distant sovereign whose embassy
was waiting on him. Only twice in his life he put
on the cumbrous robes of Roman majesty, preferring
the Gallic trousers and the loose sheep-skin jacket of
his easy-going home-life.
He chafed, too, under the rigid rules of church-dis-
cipline, that is, if he submitted to it at all. His
household was no model of manners or morals; he
was at best an easy, fond, indulgent father, with a
heart more large than wise; and he never quite gave
up the quasi-polygamy which had made the old
scandal of Frankish chiefs. His broad, bluff, generous
humor, too, no doubt scandalized and perplexed his
spiritual instructors; though there was nothing that
kept him nearer the heart of his own people, or that
we find it easier to pardon: no precisian or martinet,
but a large-souled and whole-souled man.
To these traits we should add the immense exter-
nal activity of his long reign:* relief of Rome from
Lombard pressure, till that kingdom was extinguished
in 774; war against the Saracens in Spain, where the
* Of forty-six years, extending in all from 768 to 814.
238
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
hero Roland, favorite of romance, fell in the retreat
at Roncesvalles; thirty-three campaigns across the
Rhine, mainly against the pagan Saxons, who were
not reduced till after forty-five hundred prisoners
had been slaughtered in one bloody act of reprisal,
and ten thousand families, a third of the population,
dispersed in colonies in the heart of France. So the
conqueror finished what the monk began.
The toils of war are even outdone by the restless
industry of his administration. This shows the
minute organizing of a civilized state, just emerging
from rude disorder. He orders tithes to be given to
the churches; standard weights and measures to be
kept; vines to be especially attended to; shelter for
cattle, sheep, swine, and goats to be prepared in every
village. He gives special directions for the care of
stables, the curing of provisions, and the furnishing
of houses, not neglecting the condition of stock and
crops, or the price of eggs and poultry. He attends
to the keeping and training of hawks and hounds;
directs the great wolf-hunts, when and how they shall
be carried on, the skins to be exhibited to him; and
the housekeepers on his estates must understand
making cider, beer, and perry. I have counted a list
of more than a hundred herbs and fruit-trees which he
desires always to have kept in the imperial gardens.*
Some of the largest stones used in building his own
cathedral at Aachen, it is said, he bent his sturdy
frame to bear. Messengers in his name must visit
every district four times a year, to correct or at least
report all irregularity. Every estate of a given size
* See the Capitulary De Villis Imperialibus, A. D. 812, § 70.
PERSONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE EMPEROR. 239
must send one man to serve in the public defence.
Rules equally vigilant and precise lay down the duty
of the local clergy, or order periodical visits of the
bishop. He is as prompt to supersede a churchman
as an army officer, when found guilty of gross neglect.*
It is necessary to speak of these personal cares of
office, because the government had to be personal in
the strictest sense. Most likely, there was no other
mind clear enough to see the need, or conscience to
feel the burden, any more than there was another
hand strong enough to do the task. The weight of
that great personality is felt all the more, that his
empire fell to pieces so soon after his death. In one
sense it was premature, an experiment that had to
fail. The mere fact that he carried all that weight
would help to keep any other from growing up fit to
bear it after him. The real organization of European
society, which he attempted so heroically, had to
come about at a later age. The unwieldy empire
had to be broken up in fragments, so that a new
*Thus in the first of his Capitularies, §§ 6, 7: "We ordain that,
according to the canons, every bishop shall give heed within his
own charge, that the people of God do no pagan rites; but that
they reject and put away all defilement of the gentiles, - profane
sacrifices for the dead, or fortune-tellers or diviners, or amulets
and charms, or incantations, or immolating of victims, which fool-
ish people do near churches with pagan rite in the name of holy
martyrs or confessors of the Lord; who invite their saints rather
to wrath than- mercy. We advise that each year every bishop
shall carefully visit his charge in circuit, and endeavor to confirm,
instruct, and watch the people, and forbid pagan rites, diviners,
fortune-tellers, auguries, amulets, incantations, and all defilements
of the gentiles." Churchmen are forbidden (Capit. Ann. 781) to
keep hawks or hounds, the latter, lest those who appeal for char-
ity should be "torn by the bite of dogs."
240
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
structure might strike innumerable roots into the
soil, and grow up in innumerable independent shoots.
The great need then was that the ideal of an orderly
and Christian State should be conceived in one pow-
erful mind, and its foundations should be laid by one
strong hand. The events of Charles's reign, and its
inordinate activities, are the mere incidents and sur-
roundings of the great work he really did, in creating
such an ideal of Christian sovereignty.
That this ideal lay very close to his heart, and was
always present to his thought, whatever the defects
of its carrying-out, - appears in one very interesting
trait recorded by Eginhard. "He took delight," he
says, “in the books of St. Augustine, and especially in`
those which are entitled Of the City of God," which
were read to him at meal-time. Those books, it is
true, do not give any plan or pattern of a Christian
State to be realized on earth, such as we might pos-
sibly expect. But they set forth with great em-
phasis the contrast of right and wrong, of the state
sacred and profane. They put in strong light the
corruption and violence that had destroyed the Pagan
Empire; they bring into equal relief the virtues of
the Divine Kingdom, and the peace that grows out
of them. They set forth vividly the warning given in
the fall of Rome, crushed under its own vices and
feuds long before the assault of barbarian arms.
And, from the hint just given, as well as from the
incessant coupling of religious things with secular in
his laws, it is likely that these lessons and these
warnings had been taken very much to heart by
Charles, in his reflections on the duties of empire.
THE IMPERIAL IDEA.
241
We may see the same thing, perhaps, in his shrink-
ing from those duties and from the name of Emperor.
His coronation took him by surprise. He protested,
says his biographer, that he would not have gone to
the church that day, if he had known what Leo had
in store for him. Possibly his sagacity foresaw the
use that would be made of that act by Leo's succes-
sors, to bolster up their enormous claim that the
Empire itself was in their gift, to bestow or revoke as
their policy might demand. It has been noticed that
an interval of more than a year passed, before he
claimed allegiance as Emperor; and then he stays to
explain how many and how great things are com-
prehended in that vow: not merely, as many even
now suppose, to the lord Emperor in his own lifetime,
and not to bring any enemy for hostility within his
realm, and not take part in or conceal any one's infi-
delity towards him; but that every man may know
that this vow has bearing direct upon himself"; and
so he goes on, in forty chapters, to recite a whole
code of civil and religious duty.*
That rude time could not show any very flattering
fulfilment of such an ideal. But there is no question
that the reign of Charlemagne did very much to
stamp that conception on the general mind; to make
it part of the notion of what a state should be, as well
as to enshrine him in memory as a sort of model sov-
ereign. There have been many emperors and kings
who have come nearer the commonly received pat-
tern of Christian living; but not one so dignified or
idealized in the imagination of the world. The Church
* See the 24 Sections of the Capitulary dated at Aachen, 802.
11
P
242
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
puts him in the next rank to saintship, and in some
countries he has been frankly reverenced as a saint.
Miracles are recorded to have been wrought at his
tomb. Within a century of his death he is made the
hero of legend and marvel, and volumes of popular
romance already gather about his name. His mili-
tary adventures are transfigured to make him the
ideal Champion of Christendom, carrying his con-
quests as far as Jerusalem, as the great typical Cru-
sader. And he is so appealed to in the oration by
which Urban II. stirred the multitude at Clermont to
the first Crusade (1094).
The real man, in his hearty humor, his rude sports,
his cordial loves and enmities, and his serious wish.
to do his work, is a much more interesting person
than this fabulous ideal. His traits are known to us,
as few men's are of a former age, by personal descrip-
tion and admiring anecdote. I copy here a few
sentences from his friend, favorite secretary, and
biographer, Eginhard, the hero of the romantic tale
which tells how he won the love of his sovereign's
stalwart daughter, and how she once carried him on
her shoulder from a stolen visit, lest his footsteps
should betray him in the new-fallen snow:
"In eloquence he was copious and ample, well able
to express plainly whatever he would. Not content
with his native speech, he bestowed pains in learning
foreign tongues. Latin he could speak as well as his
mother tongue; Greek he could understand better than
pronounce. He was so ready of speech that one might
think him a schoolmaster. He studiously cherished
liberal arts, and bestowed the highest honors on the
CARE OF EDUCATION AND CULTURE.
243
teachers of them. A great deal of time and labor he
spent in learning rhetoric and logic, and particularly
astronomy. He learned the art of reckoning, and with
eager curiosity would trace the path of the stars. He
made attempts to write, and used to carry tablets or
bits of bark, or keep them under his pillow, that he
might practise his hand at odd times in shaping out the
letters; but this late and unseasonable effort had poor
success. As long as health permitted, he promptly
attended church, morning and evening, even in the
night at time of service, and took great care that all
should be done decently and in order; and with great
diligence he improved the style of reading and chant-
ing. He was well skilled in both; though he never
read in public himself, and only sang softly, and in con-
cert with others."
Some copies add that he furnished eight hundred
and eighty-six churches at his own expense, and
restored in all three thousand seven hundred. He
gathered about him learned men and artists, tiring
them out with his incessant activity (says Guizot),
and through them giving strong impulse to every form
of culture. His imperial title challenged the regard
of other powers. Irene, reigning Empress of Con-
stantinople, proposed to unite East and West by mar-
riage, having already been the death of her husband
and son; an alliance which Charles discreetly but
firmly declined. From Haroun-al-Raschid, Caliph of
Bagdad, he received an embassy, bringing, along with
command of the Holy Places, rich Oriental gifts,
the first elephant ever seen in Françe,* with a Moorish
lion, a Numidian bear, eastern spiceries and drugs,
<< SO
* It arrived at Aachen, July 16, 812.
244
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRR.
*
that the East might be thought to be stripped to fur-
nish out the West"; a set of chessinen, said to be still
preserved, and a clock of curious skill. These em-
bassies marked a period of almost universal peace.
Free passage for western pilgrims was given to the
Holy Land. A fair was held yearly at Jerusalem for
a fortnight, and arts of peace flourished from India to
the farthest West.
From the Ebro to the Danube, the limits of
Charles's empire, the local names, it is said, inces-
santly recall his memory; while to write his history
one should know at once the mountain-passes of
Spain and the Alps, the Lombard towns, the old
monuments of France, and the legends of the Rhine.
His traditional beard and sceptre are travestied in
the popular figure of the King at cards. † Or, to see
the same figure on a larger canvas, barbarian tribes
(it is said) in their rude traditions keep the memory
of three great conquerors-Timour the Tartar, Alex-
ander, and Charlemagne.
But the interesting and instructive thing to us is
to see how far we have got in the development of the
Christian idea. And we find that we have got so far
as this. Organized Christianity has completed its
period of struggle and conquest. It has definitely
* At the twelve figures were twelve little doors, which opened
successively, letting drop so many balls to strike the hour; and
when the circle was finished, a row of little knights in ivory
passed round and closed them all. The last two are not included
in the documents of the Monumenta Carolina.
†The game was invented to cheer the moody insanity of
Charles VI. of France; and this unhappy prince, it is said, always
crossed himself when he touched the picture of the emperor-saint.
LATER FORTUNES OF THE EMPIRE.
245
superseded those old forms of Pagan society which
had tried so hard to destroy it. What was worth
saving in those old forins it has adopted into itself:
something of the old art and culture, all the old ex-
ecutive and organizing skill. It has persevered, with
incredible energy and patience, till the intelligence
and heart of pagan barbarism have been brought dis-
tinctly to accept the Christian ideal and the Christian
law. That law and that ideal it has now succeeded
in implanting in the thought and embodying in the
institutions of an Empire which distinctly adopts
them as its own. This one moment has been achieved
of absolute coincidence and harmony between the two
great powers, spiritual and temporal, that together
rule the world. It is but for a moment; but it marks
the passage to the next great era, when the task is
no longer conquest, but administration; when it is
not an army or a campaign we have to do with, but
a government and a constitution.
A word remains to be said of the fortunes of the
Christian Empire founded by Charlemagne. That
perfect harmony of interest and motive between
Church and State which made its ideal* could be at
best but for a moment of unstable equilibrium. On
one side violences and passions thinly covered, on the
other natural jealousies and honest fears, were enough
to dissolve an alliance which was the harder to keep
the closer it had been knit. These are fatal dissolv-
ing forces in all human things. But, besides these, a
*This ideal theory of sovereignty makes the argument of Dante's
De Monarchiâ. It is amply stated and illustrated in Bryce's "Holy
Roman Empire," pp. 102-108 (7th ed.).
246
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
great political revolution was impending, which the
Church must have seen with terror; which it met, at
any rate, with masterly determination and craft. The
constitution that made its political scheme through
seven centuries was founded on forged decretal and
canon law. Its theory was Sacerdotalism, the abso-
lute sanctity, immunity, and authority of the priestly
Order. True to that theory, it would have overridden
and absorbed all other power whatsoever. It would
have established a universal Empire, supreme to
men's thought in heaven, earth, and hell, and so
laid mankind helpless at the feet of ecclesiastical
absolutism.
When the political fabric that Charles had pain-
fully built together was broken up, in the great
change we call the rise of Feudalism, the Church held
to its theory; and, after an age of incredible corrup-
tion and disorder, declared open war upon the State.
The Empire, which was in theory one, holy, and indis-
soluble, ally and partner with the Church in the great
work of civilization, was matched against it in an ob-
stinate and bitter struggle of near two hundred years.
Its title of "Holy Roman Empire," and its claim to
dominion over Italy, were maintained by a long line
of German kings. The proudest-tempered of them
all, Henry IV., wore himself out to beggary and death
(1073-1106) in a struggle with Hildebrand and the
successors trained in the school of Hildebrand. The
greatest of them all, Frederick Barbarossa, bent hist
stubborn will to beg peace of Alexander III., and
his terrible Italian campaigns closed in the dra-
matic scene of his humiliation before the Pope at
SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL SOVEREIGNTY.
247
Venice (1177). The most brilliant and accomplished
of them all, Frederick II., found himself thwarted
and foiled at every hand by that stern old man, of
nearly ninety, who ruled as Gregory IX. (1227–1241),
and held him under the invisible spell of excommuni-
cation.
That close alliance of Church and Empire was a
dream, out of which both awoke, to find themselves.
deadly enemies. It need not have been so, perhaps,
if the boundaries of secular and spiritual power had
been more clearly drawn and honestly kept. Un-
questionably, the Empire observed those bounds bet-
ter than its ghostly rival. There was a political order,
a secular justice, a national independence, which in
good faith it made many efforts to establish. Tempo-
ral sovereignty, dealing with secular conditions only,
may be fairly just; spiritual sovereignty, in human
hands, is necessarily tyrannical. A theory of suprem-
acy was growing up within the Church, assiduously
developed, incessantly urged and pressed, resting on
the deep foundations of imagination and religious
fear, which held that all human government existed
only by its sufferance; which would have made any
independence in the State, nay, any decent secular
government at all, impossible.
Such as it was, however, after the fall of the great
imperial houses, the Holy Roman Empire retained
almost to our own day something of its sanctity and
prestige. A few great names- the names of Rodolph
and Sigismund, of Maximilian and Charles the Fifth
illustrate its later fortunes. But in the great
dynastic wars and political revolutions its splendor
248
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
steadily faded out. Other forces held the field. Dig-
nity was left it when its strength decayed. A phan-
tom of authority long survived the substance of power.
And no shock was felt in the political system when
Napoleon, who had seized the imperial name as the
symbol of his conquests, compelled the last heir of
Augustus, of Constantine, of Charlemagne, to abdi-
cate the title in 1806, and the Holy Roman Empire
was no more.
XII.
IN
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
¨N a poetical "Lament" on the division of the Em-
pire after the death of Louis the Pious, the
writer speaks of the good time past, when "a noble
realm wore its bright diadem as a wreath; when there
was one Prince, and one subject people; when all cities
flourished under one law and judgment; citizens were
bound in peace, the enemy repelled by their valor";
when "the cherishing care of the priesthood was emu-
lous in its task; in frequent councils insuring right-
eous laws to the people; and the word of salvation
sounded from far to a holy clergy, to noble prin-
ces, and to common men"; when "everywhere young
men learned the book of God, and children's hearts
drank in the art of letters."*
* Florus Diaconus, Querela de Divisione Imperii post mortem Ludo-
vici Pii:
Floruit egregio claro diademate regnum;
Princeps unus erat, populus quoque subditus unus.
Lex simul et judex totas ornaverat urbes ;
Pax cives tenuit, virtus exterruit hostes.
Alma sacerdotum certatim cura vigebat,
Conciliis crebris, populis pia jura ministrans.
Hinc sacris cleris, hinc plebibus eximiisque
Principibus late resonabat sermo salutis.
Discebant juvenes divina volumina passim ;
Littereas artes puerorum corda bibebant.
11*
250
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
Nothing so softens our notion of that rude time as
to be reminded in this way that there were tender
thoughts and vigilant care, then as now, concerning
the education of the young. The time which this
Christian poet looks back on regretfully was when
the schools flourished under the vigorous impulse of
Charlemagne himself, or were continued by his son;
when they made, in one sense, the crowning work of
that Christian Empire which stood in men's minds as
the ideal of sovereignty.
The great Emperor had, in fact, not only made his
court the head-quarters of learning at that day, sparing
no cost to bring together eminent scholars like Alcuin
and Eginhard; but he took delight in directing him-
self the instruction of children, examined their classes,
heard their essays, promised rewards to the diligent,
or menaced the idle with the loss of all his favor; and
even undertook the task of superintending or (it is
said) practising with his own hand the copying and
elaborate ornamentation of manuscripts. Under the
same powerful impulse, a great work of editing went
on; and famous writings were cleared of the blots
and blunders that had grown upon them in the ruder
times that went before. So that we have to look upon
this period as an early revival of letters. It gathered
up on one hand whatever could be gathered from the
past; and, on the other, it planted the seeds of a
new, vigorous, and remarkable growth of independent
thought.
These two views, then, remain to be taken of the
Christian Schools of the ninth century: first, looking
to the past, as they represented the learning and cul-
THE CLASSIC TRADITION.
251
ture of the barbaric age; next, looking to the future,
as they opened the way to a new development of
thought. The first must be treated very briefly; the
second, in a little more detail.
The first thing we have to conceive, then, as dis-
tinctly as we can, is the course of that unbroken
stream of tradition, which had floated down the germs
of ancient culture through what we call the Dark
Ages. So far as this term is a fit one to use at all, it
belongs to the period from the latter part of the fifth
century to near the end of the eighth; that is, from
the time of Leo the Great to that of Charlemagne.*
In Leo's time, we saw the great vigor of the pagan
reaction in art and letters; and we know the obsti-
nacy of the pagan tradition in the world of imagina-
tion and poetry, down to a very late day. In fact,
what we call the classical school, as distinct from the
romantic, holds avowedly to that tradition, even now.
The reasons of this immense vitality of the pagan
classic thought lie deeper than we are apt to think.
It may perhaps be more accurate to say that they are
strown thicker upon the surface, and are more care-
fully worked into the soil, than we are apt to think.
If we subtract from the school system of the present
day what belongs properly to our own time, -as
modern history, science, and literature, we still see
how great a space is left, in what most strongly affects
the habit of mind, to the purely traditional culture of
*The tenth century, it is true, is in a sort of eclipse, deeper
perhaps than the darkness of either of the preceding; but this
appears to be from moral or social causes rather than intellectual.
What we may call the Catholic philosophy had, at all events, been
well established in the ninth.
252
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
ancient languages and formal grammar. We may
even doubt whether the most powerful educational
influences, even now, do not run in the old channel,
in our own best schools and colleges. Every educa-
tional reformer has been astonished, if not staggered,
at the dead-weight of resistance he has encountered
from classic prejudice.
It is, really, the momentum of more than two thou-
sand years' unbroken tradition that we are dealing
with. The methods we use to-day, if not the same
with, were at least developed step by step from, the
methods of children's schools in Athens and in Rome.
Our best instruction in morals is exactly what we find
in Plato's Lysis; the forms of words, the logic of
structure, that we teach now, are the same that chil-
dren were drilled in, conscientiously, in the Roman
imperial schools. The same rules and forms were
carefully instilled as school-rudiments, the same lit-
erary tradition was sacredly held fast, in all the ages
that followed. They were retained with a clinging
and (as it were) desperate tenacity through the bar-
barian times, as if there were some peculiar sanctity
in this one living link of connection with the ancient
splendor. When Rome was almost famished, beg-
gared, and depopulated, there was still heart left to
celebrate a literary holiday. On one occasion a new
poema versifying of the Book of Acts-had to be
recited in public seven times over, occupying many
days in all, to satisfy crowds that could not all hear at
once, and that insisted on the repeating of favorite
passages. And, as Rome impressed the barbarian
imaginatiou in other ways, so it imposed respect for
CASSIODORUS.
253
ancient letters, mixed possibly with a little awe.
When the Goths were masters of Italy, it was pub-
licly ordered (about 530) that the revenues of the
public schools should be untouched. All else was
fair plunder in the rage of conquest; but the generous
barbarian would not take away what was to feed the
life of coming generations.*
It would not be hard, though it might be pedantic,
to trace the series of names that make an unbroken
chain through the centuries of barbarism. I shall
mention only two or three.
Cassiodorus, who lived, according to some accounts,
to the great age of a hundred (463-563),† has been
called the chief instructor of the barbarian world. He
more than any other is the visible link between the
old world of culture and the new. Till the age of
seventy he was the confidential minister of Theodoric
and his successor, Gothic kings of Italy; and his cor-
respondence, under their names, is the best picture
we have of that period of change. In particular, there
are two letters addressed to Boëthius, the honored
counsellor and afterwards the victim of Theodoric,
which give a lively notion of the skill and intelli-
gence of the age. One is in praise of music; one
commissions him to send gifts to a Burgundian prince,
a sun-dial and a water-clock; and he takes occasion.
to enlarge on these marvels of science, as we might on
the electric light or the telephone. Evidently the
argument is addressed not to Boëthius, the most cul-
+
* Cassiodorus, Epist., ix. 21. Compare Ozanam, Civilisation des
Francs.
Lib. i. 45; ii. 40.
† More probably 468-563.
254
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
tivated man of his age, but to the imagination of rude,
eager, curious men, such as made up these nations of
invaders. In the tumult and ruin of the time, it is
pathetic to see this eager clinging to the wealth of in-
telligence and art that seemed drifting to hopeless
wreck. It was carrying on the same task in another
way, when in his old age Cassiodorus withdrew to a
monastery of Southern Italy, and spent his thirty re-
maining years in arranging, copying, correcting, restor-
ing the treasures of classic learning, and in preparing
the manuals of instruction that were of chief authority
in the schools for the next few centuries.
I have already spoken of the Christian poets of this
dark period such as Prudentius, Sidonius, and For-
tunatus; and of the pains they took to copy the form
and preserve the diction of the Roman writers.
We
are apt, perhaps, to think of the Latin hymns, from
Ambrose down, in very simple measures, accented and
sometimes rhymed, as if they were the only poetry of
the time; as if the classical model had quite perished.
Nothing, on the contrary, strikes us oftener or sooner
in looking through the body of the Christian litera-
ture, than the fond, abundant, often skilful handling
of the metres of Virgil and Horace: in simple hymns,
in narrative, in elegy, in familiar playful or occasional
address, sometimes a little awkward in phrase, with
false quantities now and then that rasp the ear; but
with serious painstaking that the literary art should
not be lost. These poetic essays belong to every cen-
tury, coming below the time and including the name
of Charlemagne himself, who was a diligent learner
in all arts of refinement, and whose epitaph on his
CICERO AND VIRGIL.
255
personal and dear friend, Pope Adrian I. (to whom he
had renewed and extended his father's grant in 774),
is but a specimen of his very creditable skill.*
Doubtless, the value of this large body of Christian
verse is not chiefly what it is in itself as poetry. It
is rather a testimony to the faithful, patient, skilful
school-instruction that went on from age to age.
There was no contempt of pagan letters. The grave
tone of Cicero's moral dialogues, and especially the
prophetic strain of Virgil's fourth eclogue, in which
he predicts a golden age of righteousness and peace,
wholly won the Christian heart. Virgil's, it was said,
was the golden key that opened to all classic antiquity
the door of the Medieval Church.†
Another thing is very noticeable in the large body
of early Christian literature, that is, from the fifth
century to the ninth. It is the vast amount of com-
* If we were to set any date for the dying out of the classic
literary tradition, it would be that assigned in the "Lament” al-
ready quoted. It is not until now that letters are quite overlaid
by theology; it is not till about five centuries later that that heavy
atmosphere has rolled quite away.
†This fondness for the name and memory of Virgil is illustrated
in a legend which tells how St. Paul, on landing at Puteoli, went
to pay his homage at the poet's tomb. The following verses are
said at one time to have been chanted in the cathedral of
Mantua :-
Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum
Piæ rorem lacrimæ :
Quem te" inquit "reddidissem,
Si te vivum invenissem,
Poëtarum maxime!"
And the chapel above the tomb used to be pointed out as the spot
where Virgil went to hear mass.
256
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
*
ment and homily on the books of Scripture, the only
recognized authority in religion, history, or morals;
and especially dwelling on the historical record of
Scripture, all the way down from the Creation. In
itself this is not surprising in an age ignorant of
almost everything else. Still, one is led to think
there was a motive in thus incessantly directing the
mind of barbarian converts to the detail of Hebrew
annals, often far from edifying." This motive we
shall find, if we reflect that those barbarians were
men, so to speak, without a past, except it might
be a very near and bloody one. To the barbarian mind
the past closes up behind, like a bank of mist, hiding
all but a few distorted and exaggerated forms. Thus
-to take historic examples the same Theodoric
whom Cassiodorus served, and the Brunehild who
figures in the recital of Gregory of Tours, became
mythologic hero and heroine in the Nibelungen; or, to
go farther back, the same Odin who ranks chief among
the immortals in Scandinavian fable is held by some
writers to have been the purely human leader of a
migration out of Asia not many generations before.
This great void in the barbaric mind must be filled,
or this wild phantasmagory displaced, by the Chris-
tian tradition. The rude tribe-life must be bound by
religious association to the remotest past that could.
be conceived then, and widened to the broadest fel-
lowship that might be consecrated by a common.
origin. Such crude ethnology as their teachers could
* Ulfilas, in translating the Bible for his Gothic converts, omit-
ted "Samuel" and "Kings," since the barbarian passion for fight-
ing had no need of such stimulus or sanction.
MILDNESS OF THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGY.
257
explain thus entered as an element in that long task
of education.
This is as convenient a place as any to state an
impression which flatly contradicts the notion some
of us have got from other sources, as to the spirit of
religious teaching in this period. The many volumes
some scores of thousands of pages
of early
Catholic theology leave upon my mind a strong feel-
ing of surprise at finding so little appeal to the vulgar
terrors of the future world. I do not mean by this.
that the doctrine implied all along was not as grim
and terrible as it has ever been. It is assumed, we
may say, as a matter of course, that there is no salva-
tion out of the true Church. It is taken for granted
that the penalty of sin or unbelief is everlasting
death, or, a good deal worse, everlasting torment.
But this lurid background is a background merely. It
is not forced, as we might expect, upon the imagination
of the believer. Rather, it is made simply an appeal
to his conscience, and is, on the whole, greatly ob-
scured by the emphasis laid on other things. No
Νο
doubt cases might be quoted to qualify this state-
ment. A few are readily recalled: a rhetorical flour-
ish of Tertullian; an appeal or two of the somewhat
harsh and gloomy Ambrose; a chapter in Augustine's
City of God"; and a paragraph of some twenty lines
from a homily of Boniface to the barbarians, - hardly
a faint echo, all told, of the terrors of the Apocalypse.
But I should say (not as a fact, but as an impression)
that there is more "blood-theology" and "hell-fire”
that is, the vivid setting forth of everlasting tor-
ment to terrify the soul-in one sermon of Jona-
258
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
than Edwards, or one harangue at a modern "re-
vival," than can be found in the whole body of
homilies and epistles through all the Dark Ages put
together. Purely speculative doctrine, such as the
Trinity or the Sacrament, is abundantly urged. No
emphasis can be strong enough to state the need of
strict accuracy of one's belief as to the most abstract,
mystic, unprovable, unintelligible points of faith,
with an implied menace of dreadful consequences to
the lack of faith. And the moral doctrine taught we
may often censure as overstrained and unwholesome,
or else coarse and low. But, set beside more modern
dispensations, the Catholic exposition of this period
is surprisingly merciful and mild. The Church had
other and better business in hand, than to add the
terrors of eternity to those of time, which were black
enough already.
The sacred task of education, with its strong im-
pelling motive, is brought even more vividly before
us in the next name on the list, that of "the Vener-
able Bede" (673-735). I wish there were time to go
a little into the detail of the sweet and patient labor
of his life, or at least to repeat the gentle and pathetic
story of his death.* Bede, or Baeda, with whom the
title "venerable" has grown to be almost part of his
name, is best known to us as the historian of the
Saxon Church, from Augustine of Canterbury to
within three years of his own death. That, however,
is only a chapter of his very voluminous works.
These include extended homilies and comments on
* It is well told in Green's "History of the English People”
with some slight affectations of speech, as Mr. Green's manner is.
BEDE.
ALCUIN.
259
almost all the Bible, and
more to our point — a
considerable treatise on the learning of the day. It
begins with an essay on Orthography, the essential
basis of true learning then, when trained proof-readers
there were none, and all accuracy of speech was in
danger of being lost by unskilful copyists. Then come
the rules of Metre; and then a series of treatises on
the Reckoning of Time, a very perplexed thing
when there was no true astronomy, and when so
many festivals turned on arbitrary reckoning. Thus
the topic includes the whole science of arithmetic as
then known, and such knowledge of the sun and
moon as could be given, and the cause of eclipses,
and expositions of the calendar; and these lead,
again, to some simple lore of meteorology, and the
cause of thunder, and how tides are affected by the
moon. Certainly we have not much to learn of nat-
ural science from these crude essays of near twelve
centuries ago. But we see, at least, that there were
leisure and intelligence to observe such things; and
again we honor the high aim and motive of these
pious teachers.
The next name brings us down to the time we
have been looking back from. Alcuin, most famous
of all these teachers and men of learning, was born.
in the year of Bede's death, and died ten years before
his friend and pupil Charlemagne (735-804). He
also was an Englishman, caught on his return from
Italy by the all-embracing Empire, and detained for
his life-work at Charles's court, or at his monastery-
school in Tours. He is the author of a great many
of the pious and occasional verses I have mentioned;
260
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
((
and it is a little odd to hear him address the king as
my David," speak of himself as "Flaccus," and call
his other friends by such names as Homer" and the
rest. Some of his letters and one or two dialogues
turn on "enigmas," or plays upon words, riddles, and
quaint forms of speech. These sportive efforts do not
much disturb his gravity: the wit we may call pon-
derous and slow, the gravity genuine and sincere.
His correspondence is a very long one, and includes
some of our most curious pictures of the time. But
you are more struck with the great share it gives to
serious counsel: at least a third are letters of advice;
at least half, if we include all the appeals to religious
and moral motive. Cheerful in the main, and always
showing how close to his heart is the thought of
friendship, he never forgets, or lets you forget, that
he is first of all a teacher. His longest dialogue, and
most vivacious,* is a compend of Latin grammar.
The above names do not give us the history, but
they will serve to illustrate the course, of the Chris-
tian Schools down to the time of Charlemagne. One
thing in particular should be noticed in regard to
them. They are strictly schools of instruction, not
of investigation or of philosophic thought. Their
foundation is wholly on precedent, or else on dogma.
Their task is simply to co-operate with the Church in
its great work of civilization. Their instructions they
take unquestioning from the Church, when not given
outright in the literary tradition. A little they may
* Except an entertaining chapter of quirks and repartees in a
conversation between Alcuin and the boy Pepin, son of Charle-
magne.
MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT UNDER THE EMPIRE. 261
have done in the development of doctrine: as when
Bede comments on the texts of Paul, or Alcuin dis-
cusses the Adoptian heresy.* Aside from such in-
stances as these, we do not find a ray of original
thought or independent speculation in what has
proceeded from any of these schools. Their great
teachers were content to be learners.† Their work was
to instruct the childhood of a powerful race, and thus
prepare the way for what it should do in its maturity.
This task of preparation may be said to have come
to a natural term with the formation of the Christian
Empire. That event marks, in a sense, the political
manhood of the race; and, in a sense still more qual-
ified, its mental emancipation. It will be found, in
the history of literature, that the chief productive
periods of the human mind have generally come a
little after some great political event, or series of
events, that powerfully appealed to men's imagina-
tion; that shifted their mental bearings, so to speak,
and compelled them to see all things in a new light.
So it was with the age of Pericles, in the generation.
next after the great Persian war. So it was with
the Augustan age, following the collapse of parties in
Rome. So it was with the Elizabethan age, following
the violent shocks of the Reformation. The ninth
century was no such brilliant period of literature and
* See below, page 262.
†Their modest course of preparatory instruction was the
Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic; their narrow circle of
the sciences was the Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Astron-
omy and Music; as in the memorial verses : —
Gram. loquitur; Dia. vera docet; Rhet. verba colorat ;
Mus. canit; Ar. numerat; G. ponderat; As. colit astra.
262
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
art as those; yet its great fertility and comparative
independence of intellect are naturally and justly to
be associated with the momentous revolution in the
State before described.
An occasion as well as a cause, however, is to be
sought for any marked phase of mental activity; and
the nature of the occasion will determine the charac-
ter of the phase. In this case, what we notice is a
remarkable and sudden development of speculative
philosophy, running in the old channels of theology,
but widely overflowing its banks, and forming the
head-water of streams that continued a great way
farther down.
And for this we find not one occasion only, but
two. The controversy with the Adoptionists, which
was carried on at Frankfort in 794, and determined
five years later at Aachen, had served to launch the
Western mind upon the shoreless sea of transcenden-
tal metaphysics. . In itself, the Adoptian heresy * was
a form of Nestorianism which need not detain us
here. It was developed in Spain by contact with the
rigid and unimaginative monotheism of the Arabs,
intolerant of mystic speculation;† and had been car-
* Making Christ son of God by adoption.
† Another view, given by Peyrat (Les Réformaleurs au 12me Siècle),
is, that the view of Christ called "Adoptian"— and, in general,
the "Arianism" of the German tribes was derived from no Ori-
ental source, but was native to the Gothic races which now occu-
pied the country near the Pyrenees. It was a view which might
naturally take the place of their belief in Balder, son of Odin, who
had suffered death from the machinations of the Adversary, but
was to return as Prince of a coming reign of peace. In this view,
Christ was not made out of nothing (as held by Arius), but was Son
of God, so to speak, in the ordinary sense.
DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE.
263
ried over into France, to the perplexity of the priest-
hood and the confusion of unsophisticated faith. It
was easily vanquished in the church councils of that
pious time; but left a mental unrest that would be
sure to show itself in some other way.
That other way was soon found. In the course of
the Greek metaphysical discussions of the Trinity,
some three or four hundred years before, certain writ-
ings had turned up, said to be by Dionysius the Are-
opagite, the one educated man at Athens that had been
converted by Paul's address on Mars' Hill. Copies
of them had found their way into France, where, tra-
dition would have it, the same Dionysius had been
one of the first teachers of Christianity, and was, in
fact, the St. Denys whose name has rung since on so
many a French battle-field. Very little was known
of the contents, for these were in Greek; and this, es-
pecially metaphysical Greek, few scholars of that day
were competent to understand.
Among the rest, a copy beautifully written and
adorned had been sent as a complimentary gift from
the Eastern Emperor Michael to Louis, son of Charle-
magne. It lay a good while in the imperial library,
unread, as presentation copies sometimes will; and
was overlooked in the disorders of Louis's unhappy
reign. But his son Charles, who goes in history by
the name of Bald, had inherited some of his mother's*
brilliant gifts and his grandfather's love of letters; and
his court was the home of the most famous scholar of
his age, John the Scot, known in the history of phi-
* The Empress Judith. His medallion shows something too of
her beauty.
264
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
losophy as Scotus Erigena, that is, Irish-born.* For
the British schools of learning, and especially the Irish
schools, had been out of the reach of storms that blew
upon the Continent; and we have already seen how
the English Bede, Wilfried, and Alcuin had had a large
share in keeping up the tradition of letters in Europe.
Of all the Christian Latin writers, Scotus Erigena
was perhaps ablest up to this time, at any rate since
Augustine, and certainly the most independent in his
speculative temper. The poet, whose Lament I began
by quoting, calls him "a man vain of speech, and gar-
rulous, who has dared, forsooth, to define presumptu-
ously of the Divine foreknowledge and decree; dis-
puting by arguments of philosophy, without reason
rendered, or alleging any authority of the Scriptures
or holy Fathers; held in admiration, I hear, as a
scholar and man of learning; who possesses all his
hearers and admirers with his empty wordiness and
windy talk, so that they no longer obey the authority
of holy Scripture or the Fathers, but follow rather his
fantastic babblings." This language sounds quite
familiar the bigotry of ignorance, or theologic terror
of free thought, could not be more neatly expressed.
This famous scholar was set by Charles the Bald
(about 850) to interpret the obscure writings of the
m
*His was the famous repartee which illustrates the court man-
ners of those days. As he sat opposite Charles at dinner, he
offended the nicer code of French manners, - possibly, passing
his cup once too often, which led the king to say, "What is the
difference between a Scot and a Sot? Just a board's width,"
he instantly replied. [Quid distat inter Scotum et Sottum? - Tabula
tuntum]. At which the good-natured monarch laughed with the
rest.
THE DIONYSIAN WRITINGS.
265
Alexandrian mystic who passed under the name of
Dionysius the Areopagite; and it is not, perhaps,
unfair to ascribe the extraordinary freedom of his
own speculations to the intoxication of that contact.
>>
Of the false Dionysius little need be said. He rep-
resents a line of independent tradition, that had come
down, parallel with the orthodox dogma, from the
early time of Gnosticism. It cropped out in many an
Eastern heresy. It had blended more or less in the
theology of many who did not forfeit their place of
honor in the Church. Origen was not held free from
the taint of it. Synesius, the famous "squire-bishop
of Ptolemais, held his Platonism as dear as his ortho-
doxy, and in his letters to Hypatia he addresses her
as his teacher, his sister, his mother in philosophy.
Particularly it throve in those schools of New-Plato-
nists who tried to build up a spiritualized and diluted
Paganism. Their hazy speculations, their incessant
allegorizing, liken them to the Swedenborgians; their
ecstasies and trances, giving them direct visions of
divine things, their animal magnetism and natural
magic, are the express counterpart of modern Spir-
itism. These acts, or nervous states, they had cul-
tivated as part of their philosophic piety; and they
make a curious double, reflex, or travesty of those high
forms of Christian mysticism that have appeared from
age to age.
In form, the Dionysian writings are fervently, we
might say emulously, Christian. Jesus is " a most
divine and super-essential soul"; the theosophic sys-
tem they teach is the revelation of the Eternal Word.
As we might anticipate, the Latin language reels and
12
266
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
staggers in its effort to carry the weight of transcen-
dental speculation, to find its way in the mazes of in-
cessant allegory.*
Of the four Books, the first is on the "Celestial
Hierarchy," one vast field of allegorizing on the
scripture symbols of angels and archangels, cherubim,
seraphim, thrones, powers, and dominions, that answer
to the Gnostic genealogies. The second gives the
"Ecclesiastical Hierarchy": that is, not of ranks and
orders in the Church, but (as I understand it) the re-
flex or parallel, as it were, of the celestial order in
variously gifted souls. The third, "on Divine Names,"
deals with such topics as being, life, likeness, unlike-
ness, motion, rest, and similar abstractions, setting
forth, in particular, that Evil is nothing in itself, nor
produced from anything that is, but is pure negation,
1
a doctrine which seems to have had a profounder
effect than any other on the views of the translator.
A very brief book follows "On Mystical Theology,"
closing with an astonishing period, in which all im-
aginable attributes are denied of the Universal Being,
which is above all possible conceptions of human
thought, as it is itself the crown of all things.†
* For example: "Ut ascendamus in deiformosissimam eorum
simplicitatem per mysticas reformationes, et simul omnis ierarchi-
cæ scientiæ principium laudabimus in divinitus præfatâ religi-
ositate et teletarchicis gratiarum actionibus. . . . . Omnia igitur,
quæ sunt, participant providentiam, ex superessentiali et causa-
lissimâ divinitate manantem." - Lib. i. cap. 4.
"Neque anima est, neque intellectus, neque phantasiam aut
opinionem aut verbum aut intelligentiam habet. quoniam
•
•
et super omnem positionem est perfecta et singularis omnium
causa, super omnem ablationem excellentia omnium simpliciter
perfectione, et summitas omnium."- Lib. iv. cap. 5.
SCOTUS ERIGENA.
267
I do not give this as a summary of that famous
scheme of transcendental theology; only to hint what
ranges of speculation were thrown open by it. The
writings of the false Dionysius have been held to be
the real fountain-head of the vast flood of Scholastic
theology; and Scotus Erigena has been called first
and greatest of the Schoolmen. I have not, however,
to deal here with this line of speculation as a system
of opinion. Of that we shall have more to say, when
we come to the great age of Scholasticism.
All we
have to do now is to see its effect on the mind of the
time we are dealing with, the reality of its influ-
ence, and the nature of it.*
That influence is seen not so much in the questions
that come up for discussion as in the treatment of
those questions, and the nature of the arguments
employed. As a system of doctrine, Scotus set his
opinions forth in his most labored work, a long philo-
sophic dialogue "On the Division of Things,"
treatise of mixed logic and metaphysics. The exposi-
tion of this belongs to a history of philosophy. In
a
* An interesting example of the speculative temper of the day
is found in the correspondence of Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Fulda,
who writes to Gottschalk of the beatific vision, doubting whether
we can see the Divine glory in the resurrection with our fleshly
eyes. "In this vision will consist at once our secure blessedness
and our blessed security; and for beholding it, the Truth admon-
ishes that the eyes not of the body but of heart and mind be made
clear." These words are the very echo of the Dionysian writings,
or of St. Augustine. A little before, he has been discussing the
quantity of Latin syllables; a little after, he sets pitifully forth to
Hincmar the desolate condition of his estate. "We have," he
says, to wear patched and worn-out clothes, and stay our hunger
almost always with garden-stuff and market vegetables." See
also his urgent letters on the same subject to Charles the Bald.
268
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
the history of theology his place is known as the
antagonist of Gottschalk in the famous controversy
on Predestination; and a few words on this become
necessary, as part of the general history of the time.
Gottschalk was a Saxon monk, who had long
brooded in his solitude over the works of Augustine,
then of unquestioned authority; until he startled the
theological mind of the day by the fervor, almost the
fanaticism, of his assertion of a "double predestina-
tion," of the elect to life eternal, of the reprobate to
everlasting death. This doctrine is, in moral tone,
like that form of Calvinism which we should call
Hopkinsian, — a doctrine of unspeakable horror to
those who do not hold it, but of fervid and obstinate
conviction to those who do; a doctrine which is the
necessary logical result to all who hold consistently
the view at once of absolute Divine foreknowledge
and of an endless hell.
Of Gottschalk himself hardly anything remains
except his two Confessions, which consist of little else
than a very positive statement of that one thing. He
is spoken of in a letter from Hincmar to Pope Nicho-
las, as "a man of high-strung temper (animo elatus),
impatient of repose, fond of new phrases, burning with
quenchless thirst of reputation, vehement and frac-
tious." We should have called him rather moody,
gloomy, and intractable. "He was condemned in a
council at Mentz," Hincmar goes on to say, and "by
their order severely beaten with rods." To that rude
and secular clergy this was easier than a contest of
logic. They would rather fight in battle (and very
likely did), or hunt with hawks and hounds.
GOTTSCHALK.
269
Gottschalk, in fact, was far too confident of his
opinion to trust it to the mercy of any logic. The
judgment of God, to the mind of that age, was best to
be known by ordeal. "Set me here," said he, "four
vessels in a row; fill one with boiling water, one with
heated oil, one with hot pitch, and one with blazing
fire; and let me, to prove this faith of mine, which
indeed is the Catholic faith, go into and pass through
each one of them." This grim fatalism had its natu-
ral effect, in wild despair with some, in reckless anti-
nomianism with others.
Hincmar himself, the great domineering prelate,
tried his hand at the sad, impracticable dogmatist, and
thought to bring him over by a compromise which
taught God's foreknowledge and predestination of the
good, his foreknowledge and permission only of the
evil. But such weakness was not for Gottschalk, who
chose rather to be shut up. in prison, and in fact
ended his days there, deluded by visions, his morbid
temper made really insane, but sturdily holding his
rigid creed. As with Calvin, he saw nothing in all
the world, evil or good, salvation or damnation, that
was not the express act of God.
So, as the ablest philosopher of the day, Scotus
Erigena was drawn into the debate. But, in oppos-
ing Gottschalk's doctrine of arbitrary destiny, he
opposed just as much the church doctrine of creation
and the fall, of sin and judgment. His language was
as devout, and his claim of authority as sincere; but
the whole dogmatic scheme melted away in the mist
of his abstractions. True philosophy, said he, is true
religion; true religion is true philosophy. To him,
270
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
"
there is nothing arbitrary anywhere; no room seems
left for what we should call freedom, human or divine,
only one broad "Stream of Tendency." Harmony
with that is apparently the real freedom he asserts.
That universal life, that flood of eternal light, pours
with absolute impartiality upon all; it falls on men,
according to their nature, whether for blessing or
curse. As a blind eye cannot see the light, as an
inflamed eye is only pained by the light which yet is
meant for blessing to all, so with the ignorant or sin-
ful soul. "There is no misery," he said, "except
eternal death; eternal death is ignorance of the truth,
and there is no misery but ignorance of the truth;
and where the truth is unknown there is no life."
:
There is, again, no beginning of creation with God,
and no end of things except that all shall be received
back into the one source of life. In his own essence
God cannot be known his personality is simply "an
act of man's imagination"; the revelation of Scrip-
ture is only figurative and symbolic. Existence itself
is more and more abstract as it becomes more real;
in its highest form it cannot even be conceived. The
divine trinity is Being, Wisdom, Life; and to this
answers the trinity in man's nature, to be, to know,
to will. The "division of nature is fourfold:—
1. That which creates and is uncreated, the First
Cause; 2. That which is created and creates, sec-
ond causes; 3. That which is created and does not
create, things as known in time and space; 4. That
which neither creates nor is created, under which
head will come the world of Evil. This logical for-
mality is the groundwork of an immense amount of
""
DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST.
271
allegorical interpretation; it is also the formal pat-
tern, or type, of the ponderous discussions known as
the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Age.
Much of the language I have quoted is familiar
to us now; but it was strange and alarming then,
particularly in the inference which Scotus seems to
draw. His theory denies the possibility of Evil,
which to the common mind is the most real of exist-
ences. His logic leads us straight to a pantheistic.
Fatalism, as that he opposed declares an arbitrary
Destiny. Everything is swallowed up in the vague
impersonality of Pantheism. All life is one. Human
freedom is lost in the Divine necessity. Guilt itself
is the only penalty of guilt. Nay, evil itself, of any
sort, is only the negation of good: it is nothing of
itself; and, being nothing, of course it could neither
be predestined nor foreknown. To which we may
add, that it could not be committed, either.
But our business is not with his philosophical sys-
tem, or with the events of his life, which are very
obscure; only with his place in history. It is proba-
ble that he took part in the discussion raised by
Radbert's doctrine, that the bread and wine of the
Eucharist are literally the body and blood of Christ;
*
*This discussion (of which an eminently satisfactory account
is given by Neander) opens in the period we have been reviewing,
and embraces several names hardly less eminent than those
already cited, particularly the great encyclopedist of the age,
Rabanus Maurus, and the keen theologian Ratramnus (or Ber-
tram). The doctrine, however, belongs strictly to the mediæval
system of thought, and will be more appropriately considered else-
where. The same may be said of the discussion respecting the
Forged Decretals, associated with the names of Radbert and
Hincmar, which first appeared during this century (about 850).
272
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.
and one may imagine the cheerfulness with which
he would bring allegory to bear on that great mys-
tery. To him, the Real Presence is not in the bread
and wine only, but in all things. The striking thing
to notice is the positive and (as it were) unconscious
tone in which he sets aside all authority except that
of reason. "Authority," he says, "proceeds from right
reason; reason by no means from authority. All
authority not approved by right reason is invalid.
Right reason needs to be strengthened by no agree-
ment with authority."
These are brave nineteenth-century words. It is
likely that their reach and force were not felt then,
whatever uneasy jealousy they may have stirred. It
does not appear that Scotus lost favor in court or
school; or that the death he was said to have suf-
fered stabbed with styles (pricked to death, as we
should say, with steel pens) by a mob of students
had any other motive than the sharpness of his dis-
cipline. Some have called him "a saintly man
through and through"; others have carped at his
fame, as "a liar, a fool, a madman, and a heretic." A
glance through his writings shows a wide contrast
between his purely intellectual method-whether
we call it religious mysticism or speculative pan-
theism and all the church theologians from Augus-
tine down. So that to us the interest in him is not
merely as a scholar or a philosopher, the father of
mediæval speculation, but, still more, as the fore-
runner, by nearly a thousand years, of the newest
forms of transcendental free thought.
I have spoken of the time of Charlemagne and his
THE INVASION OF FEUDALISM.
273
successors of the next half-century as an age of early
revival; and have indicated some of the causes and *
results that seem to justify this view. In one sense,
the revival was not only early, but premature, and it
faded quickly. Hardly anything seems left, a cen-
tury later, of what had such vigor and promise. As
when wheat is sown in autumn, the fields were green
a little while, and then buried under a sudden change
of season. The real growth, and the real harvest,
came after the winter that followed. The change
that passed over the face of society with the breaking-
up of the short-lived Empire, and that seemed to
undo the whole fabric so painfully built together,
nay, to overwhelm learning, religion, and morality in
a common wreck, we call by the general name of
Feudalism, whose relations with the Church make
the plot of the vast drama which we know as the
history of the Middle Age.
12*
R
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.
[Many of the earlier dates are uncertain. The mark † denotes the year
of death;
indicates the name of a Pope.]
B. C. 30.
A. D. 14.
EMPERORS.
AUGUSTUS.
TIBERIUS.
37. CALIGULA.
41. CLAUDIUS.
54. NERO.
25. Pilate in Judæa.
30. THE CRUCIFIXION.
Conversion of Paul.
50. Council at Jerusalem.
Simon Magus.
64. Conflagration of Rome. First Persecution.
Death of Paul.
69.
VESPASIAN.
79. TITUS.
81.
DOMITIAN.
70. Destruction of Jerusalem.
Cerinthus.
96. NERVA.
95. Persecution; death of Clement.
98. TRAJAN. Edict against Secret Societies.
100.
Pliny in Bithynia: Correspondence with Trajan.
Apostolic Fathers: Ignatius †115.
Polycarp † 165.
117. HADrian.
Gnostics: Basilides (c. 130).
Valentinus (c. 150).
138. ANTONINUS PIUS.
Marcion (c. 150).
Apologists: Justin † 168.
Athenagoras † 180.
161. MARCUS AURELIUS.
Montanism (chiefly in Asia Minor).
177. Martyrs of Lyons (Pothinus, Blandina).
Alexandrian School: Pantænus † 202.
Clement † 220.
Western Church: Irenæus (Gaul) † 202.
180. COMMODUS,
193. SEPTIMIUS SEVERus.
Tertullian (Africa) †220.
276
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.
200.
211.
218.
222.
202. Martyrs of Carthage (Perpetua, Felicitas.)
CARACALLA.
ELAGABALUS.
ALEXANDER SEVErus.
Christian Writers.
Hippolytus †236.
238. Invasion of Franks.
Origen † 254.
241.
of Burgundians.
Cyprian †258.
249-251. DECIUS. Persecution.
NOVATIAN SCHISM.
PAUL the Hermit †351.
260. GALLIENUS. Edict of Toleration.
270. AURELIAN. Captivity of Zenobia.
Sabellius 260.
Paul of Samosata †275.
272. Goths settled in Dacia.
284. DIOCLETIAN (to 305): two Augusti and two Cæsars.
GENERAL PERSECUTION.
300.
306. CONSTANTINE. 312. Defeats Maxentius.
Lactantius † 330.
313. Edict of Milan. DONATIST SCHISM.
314-336. SYLVESTER I.
ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 325. Council of Nicca.
Eusebius † 340.
337. CONSTANTIUS. Eastern Monasticism.
St. Anthony (251-356).
361. JULIAN (the Apostate).
364. VALENTINIAN, VALENS.
375. Goths in Mœsia.
378. Battle of Adrianople.
Athanasius † 373.
Basil, 329-379.
Gregory Naz., 330-391.
Gregory Nyss., 331-395.
Chrysostom, 347–407.
379. THEODOSIUS. 381. Council of Constantinople.
Suppression of Pagan Worship. St. Martin in Gaul.
Ambrose, 340-397.
395. ARCADIUS (East) and HONORIUS (West).
Jerome, 340-420.
400. 410. Sack of Rome by Alaric. Augustine, 354-430.
PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY.
408-450. THEODOSIUS II. 423-455. VALENTINIAN III.
429. Vandals in Africa. 431. Council of Ephesus.
440-461. LEO I. (the Great). 445. Edict of Valentinian.
451. Huns: Defeat of Attila. Council of Chalcedon.
MONOPHYSITE CONTROVERSY.
St. Severinus in Germany.
476. Odoacer. Fall of Western Empire.
482. Henoticon of Zeno. 484. Schism of East and West.
493-526. Theodoric: Gothic Kingdom of Italy (to 554).
496. Conversion of Clovis.
Merovingian Kingdom in France.
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.
500. 493. Gothic Kingdom of Italy.
Cassiodorus, 468-563.
518-527. JUSTIN, Emperor of the East.
519. Reconciliation of East and West.
Benedict at Monte Casino, 529–543.
527-565. JUSTINIAN. Reform of Roman Law.
533-548. Conquests of Belisarius.
554. Gothic kingdom destroyed by Narses.
568. Lombard Kingdom in Italy.
277
St. Columba at Iona † 600.
Gregory of Tours, 540-595.
590-604. GREGORY I. (the Great); Augustine in England, 597.
600.
622. Mahomet (Hegira).
700.
St. Columban in Gaul † 615.
St. Gall in Switzerland † 627.
Isidore of Seville † 630.
632-732. Conquests of Mahometanism.
MONOTHELETE CONTROVERSY.
668, 716. Constantinople besieged by Arabs.
687. Pepin (d'Heristal) founds the Carolingian House.
Bede (the Venerable), 672-735.
711. Saracen Conquest of Spain.
718-741. LEO III. (Isauricus), Emperor.
IMAGE CONTROVERSY.
732. Battle of Tours: Saracens defeated by Charles Martel.
St. Boniface in Germany †755.
741-752. ZACHARY. 752. Coronation of Pepin.
755. Donation of Pepin (extended, 774).
771. Charles (Charlemagne), king of Franks.
772-795.
ADRIAN I.
774. Conquest of Lombards.
ADOPTIAN CONTROVERSY.
787. 2d Council of Nicæa.
794. Council of Frankfort.
795-816.
LEO III.
Alcuin, 735-804.
800. CHARLEMAGNE, Emperor of the West.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
814. Louis I. (the Pious). Anschar, Apostle of the North, † 865.
843. Partition of the Empire. FEUDALISM.
843-877. CHARLES II. (the Bald).
858-867.
NICHOLAS I.
Scotus Erigena †877.
Forged Decretals.
INDEX.
I. THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST, 1-20.- The Messianic hope, 2.
Chronological outlook, 3. Sources of the Messianic hope, 6; its charac-
ter, 8. A national passion (parallels), 9. The Messianic period, 12.
Sermon on the Mount, 14. Messianic consciousness of Jesus, 16. The
entrance into Jerusalem, 17. The hope transfigured by his death, 19.
II. SAINT PAUL, 21-46. The primitive Church, 23; power of the
communistic sentiment, 25. Conversion of Paul, 28. His personal char-
acteristics, 29; his trials and contentions, 30; jealousies towards him,
32; his death, 34. Writings of Paul, 35; his Christology, 36; his doc-
trine of sin and justification, 40; his conviction of sin and assurance of
salvation, 44.
III. CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY, 47–70. — A
gulf of eighty years, 48; development of doctrine during this period: the
LOGOS, 50. A longing for Redemption, 51; how conceived, 52. The
Gnostics, 54; the problem of Gnosticism, 57; scheme of Valentinus, 58;
failure of Gnosticism, and why, 60. The Apologists, 61; character of
their Defence, 62; seriousness of the Christian mind at this period, 63.
Relations to the Roman world, 65; calumnies against the Christians, 66;
Montanism; results of this period, 69.
IV. THE MIND OF PAGANISM, 71–99. — A Pagan Revival, 72; Cicero,
73; a religion of the Empire, 74. Doctrine of the Stoics, 75; cosmogony,
75; ethics, 76. Law Reform, 78. Persecution of Christianity, 80. The
old Italian religion, 81; gods of the Nursery, 83; the great gods, 84; Rome
as an object of worship, 86; her tyranny, 87. Peace of the Empire, 88;
the Emperor deified, 89; formal worship of the Emperor, 91; collision
with Christianity, 92; Marcus Aurelius, 93; degradation and decline of
this worship, 95. Oriental superstitions, 96; sacrifices, 97; the taurobo-
lium, 98. Ideas of Incarnation and Sacrifice, 99.
V. THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY, 100-121.- Accession of Constantine,
100. Doctrinal development meanwhile, 101; analysis of the Logos-idea,
102. Sabellius and Arius, 105. Christianity and Paganism, 107. The
280
INDEX.
method of Faith, 109. Character of Arianism, 110. Constantine, his
character and circumstances, 112; at the Council of Nicæa, 115; the Ni-
cene Creed, 116. Athanasius, his adventures and character, 117. Re-
sults of the Controversy, 119; the triumph of Orthodoxy, 120.
VI. SAINT AUGUSTINE, 122-145. His doctrine and character, 122;
his place in history, 125. Circumstances of his life, 126; terror of the time,
127. His Conversion, 129; a reaction against Manichæism, 130; the
Manichæan dualism, 131; a system of fatalism, 133; nature of the crisis,
135; source of Evil, 136. The Pelagian Controversy; destiny and moral
freedom, 137; Augustine and Pelagius, 138; issue of the controvers y,
139. The City of God, 141; time of its completion, 142; the ancient city,
143; moral effect of the work, 144.
Character of the period; a Pagan
VII. LEO THE GREAT, 146-164.
reaction, 147. Controversies of the Fifth Century, 150; Nestorius and
Eutyches; the "robber-synod,” 151. Character of Leo, 152; the saviour
of Rome. 153; conception of his work, 154; the Council of Chalcedon, 156;
faith in the destinies of Rome, 157; his ecclesiastical policy, 159; Hilary
of Arles, 161. Creation of the Papal Power, 163.
VIII. MONASTICIsm as a Moral Force, 165–184. — Christianity as
a conflict, 165; need of a reserve force, 166; enormous evils of Pagan so-
ciety, 168; horrors of the Roman spectacles, 169. The martyr-spirit:
Perpetua, 171. The ascetic motive, 173; Simeon Stylites, 174; the moral
craving and habit of sacrifice; examples of Eastern asceticism, 175. The
monk Telemachus, 178. The monk and the barbarian, 180; Benedict (of
Nursia) at Monte Casino, 181; the monastic vow, 183.
IX. CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST, 185–203. — Contrast of East and West,
185; in language, 186; in political life, 187. Qualities of Eastern reli-
gious life, 188; illustrated by four great divines, 190; effect on the vitality
of the Greek language, 192. Reign of Justinian, 193; his conquests and
public works, 194; Monophysite and Monothelete controversies, 195.
Image-Controversy, 196; forms of image-worship, 197. Mahomet, 198;
spread and conquests of Islamism, 199; its strength and weakness, 201.
X. CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS, 204-226.-A larger concep-
tion of the Christian work, 205; a three centuries' campaign, 206; com-
parison of Imperial and Papal Rome, 207; spirit of the enterprise, 208.
The Barbarian as he appeared: testimonies, 209. Clovis and his House,
211; the "Merovingian times," 212. The Conversions: examples; what
were they worth? 214. Gregory the Great, 217; conversion of the
Saxons, 218. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, 219. Anschar, the
Apostle of the North, 224.
XI. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, 227–248. — The imperial idea, 228;
Rome as it impressed the barbarian mind, 231; the barbarian conquerors,
233; Clovis as Patrician, 234. Donation of Pepin, 235. Coronation of
Charlemagne, 236; his conquests and administration: details, 237; his
INDEX.
281
ideal of sovereignty, 240; reverence for his memory, 244. The period of
organization, 244; ultimate divorce and rivalry of Church and Empire,
245; the medieval conflict, 246; later fortunes of the Empire, 247.
XII. THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS, 249–273. - Partition of the Em-
pire, the loss to civilization, 249; its care for learning, 250; the classic
tradition, 251; the imperial Schools, 252. Cassiodorus as minister of
Theodoric, 253; as a monastic recluse, 254. The barbarian mind; how
instructed, 256; mild doctrine of the Church, 257. The Venerable Bede,
258. Alcuin his writings, 260; the Adoptian controversy, 262. Writ-
ings of Dionysius (the Areopagite), 263; Scotus Erigena, 264. Gott-
schalk: controversy on Predestination, 268; doctrine of the non-existence
of Evil, 271. The intellectual development is checked by the invasion
of Feudalism, 273.
Adoptian Controversy, 262.
Adrianople, battle of, 114, 120,
148.
Æons of the Gnostics, 58, 59.
Alaric, 129, 148, 232.
Alcuin, 260.
Barbarians, their aspect, 209; the
barbarian mind, 256.
Bar-cochab, 12.
Basil (the Great), 190.
Basilides (the Gnostic), 61.
Bede (the Venerable), 258.
Alexandrian Jews, 5; theology, 50. Belisarius, his conquests, 193.
Ambrose, 120.
Anschar, Apostle of the North, 224.
Apollinaris, 150.
Apologists, character of their de-
fence, 62, 68.
Apostolic Fathers, 48.
Arabia, 200.
ARIAN CONTROVERSY, 100-121; civ-
ilization of Goths and Burgundi-
ans, 211, n.
Arianism, 110; its drift, 111.
Arius, 105.
Asceticism, its motive, 175.
Athanasius, 117; his adventures
and character, 118.
AUGUSTINE, 122-145; his character,
123, 125; circumstances of his
time, 126; his conversion, 130;
controversy with Manichæism,
132; with Pelagius, 137; the City
of God, 141.
Attila and Leo, 152, 233.
Babylon, Jews in, 5.
Benedict, St., founder of monastic
rule, 181.
Boniface, Apostle of the Germans,
219; his catechism, 221; his death,
223.
Byzantine Empire, 189.
Cæsar, 82, 88.
Calvin and Augustine, 140.
Cassiodorus, 181, 253.
Chalcedon, Council of, 147, 194.
Charges against Christians, 66, 67.
Charity, what it means, 124.
Charles Martel, 202, 234; relations
with Boniface, 223.
Charles (Charlemagne), 235; his
coronation, 236; conquests and
administration, 237; effects of his
reign, 240; character and mem-
ory, 244.
Charles the Bald, 263.
Church, causes of its early growth,
25; its relations to the Roman
world, 65, 92.
282
INDEX.
Cicero, as representing Pagan Evil, Pauline doctrine of, 42;
thought, 73.
Circumcellions, 173.
Gnostic doctrine, 66; Manichæan,
133.
City of God, 141; the ancient city, Faith, the method of, 109.
143.
Classic tradition, 251.
Clement of Alexandria, 63.
Clovis, his conversion, 211; his de-
scendants, 212; as Patrician, 234.
Columban, his monastic rule, 215.
Commodus, 95.
Filioque, 120, 186.
Formalism of Roman religion, 81.
Fulda, foundation of, 222.
Gnosticism, its early appearance,
54; its character, 55; its problem,
57; its doctrine, 59; its failure
(cause of), 60.
Communistic spirit of early Church, Goths, their victory over Valens,
26.
Confessors, 61.
Constantine, 100, 227; his charac-
ter, 112; legislation, 113; at the
Council of Nicæa, 115.
Council of Nicæa, 106, 115; of
Ephesus, 151; of Chalcedon, 116,
156; later councils, 195, 196.
Creed, Nicene, 116.
Daniel, 4; date, 6; predictions, 7.
Destiny and moral freedom, 139;
Mahometan doctrine of, 201.
Diocletian, 80, 114.
114, 120; their Arian civiliza-
tion, 211, n.
Gottschalk, 268.
Gracchi, the, 88.
Greek language, its subtilty, 186;
its vitality, 192.
Gregory of Nazianzus, 190; of
Nyssa, id; of Tours, 211; the
Great, 205, 217.
Henoticon of Zeno, 194.
Herod, 4.
Hilary of Arles, 161.
Hinemar, 268.
Dionysius the Areopagite, 263, 265. Huns, as described by Jornandes,
Divinities of Rome, 84.
Donatist Schism, 125, 173.
Dualism (Manichæan), 131.
EAST (Christianity in), 185-203;
separation from the West, 186.
Education a care of the State, 250
Eginhard (Einhard), biographer of
Charlemagne, 240, 242.
Emanation or Evolution, 58.
Emperor (Roman), as a Divinity, 89.
Empire, Peace of the, 88; ideal of,
227; restored under Charlemagne,
236; mediæval, 247.
EMPIRE (Holy Roman), 227-248.
Ephesus, Council of, 151; robber-
synod, 156.
Ethics of New Testament, 43.
Eutyches, 151, 156.
210; their defeat at Troyes, 157.
Hypatia, 148.
Hypostasis, 102, 116.
Image-worship, 197; controversy,
196-198.
Interval after the Pauline period,
its importance in history, 47.
Islamism, 201.
[84.
Italian worship, 81; the great gods,
Jerome, 209.
Jesus of Nazareth, his messianic
consciousness, 13, 16; his moral
teaching, 14; the entrance into
Jerusalem, 17.
Justification by faith, 45, 137.
Justin Martyr, 63, 64, 68.
Justinian, reign of, 193, 194.
Law, Roman, reform of, 78.
INDEX.
LEO THE GREAT, 146-164; his char-
acter, 152; deliverance of Rome,
153; faith in the destiny of Rome,
157, 206; assertion of papal
claims, 160.
Leo, the Isaurian, 197.
Logos, doctrine of, 40, 51, 76, 101;
how interpreted, 106.
Maccabæan period, 3.
Mahomet, 196.
Malachi, 3.
283
doctrine of Christ, 36; of sin and
justification, 40.
Pagan virtues, 41; worship, destruc-
tion of, 127.
PAGANISM, MIND OF, 71-99; revi-
val of, 74; its weakness, compared
with Christianity, 107; suppressed
by Theodosius, 127; reaction, 147;
its hold on the imagination, 149.
Papal power, its growth, 163; its
extent, 206.
Mani (or Manes), founder of Man- Paschasius Radbert, 224, 271.
ichæism, 132.
Pelagius, 137.
Manichæism, 131; a system of fatal- Persecution of Christianity, 66, 80.
ism, 133.
Marcion, 68.
Mariolatry, 151, 195.
Martyrs, 171.
MESSIAH AND CHRIST, 1-20.
Messianic predictions, 6; hope, its
character, 8, 11; period, 12; how
transformed, 19, 37, 142.
Miracles in the early Church, 23.
MONASTICISM, 165-184; in the
West, 166; its root in the moral
nature, 175; monastic vows, 182.
Monks as missionaries, 180.
Monophysite (single-nature), and
Monothelete (single-will), 195.
Montanism, 69.
Philo, 5, 50.
Radegonda, 212.
Redemption, the gospel of, 51.
Religion of Rome, 86; it discour-
ages emotion, 96; of the humbler
classes, 95.
Resurrection, 24; doctrine of, 64.
Rome as a divinity, 87; taken by
Alaric, 129; its spiritual and
military empire, 206; how viewed
by the barbarians, 231.
Sabellius, 105.
Sacrifice of Christ, 19; in Antiquity,
81, 97, 99.
Saints of the ascetic period, 175;
of the missionary period, 216.
Mythology: Roman compared with Salvation, how taught by Paul, 45;
Greck, 85.
Nestorius, 151.
New Paganisin, 74.
New Platonism, 148, 265.
Nica, Council of, 106, 115.
Nicene Creed, 112, 116.
the aim of the gospel, 52.
Saracen conquests, 202.
Scandinavia, how converted, 225.
Schools, imperial, 252; of the ninth
century, 261.
Scotus Erigena, 264, 267–271.
Numina (functions of divinity), 84. SECOND CENTURY, Christian
Nursery-gods of Rome, 83.
Odoacer (or Odovaker), 233.
Ovid, myth of Numa, 81.
PAUL (the Apostle), 21-46; his
character, 22, 30; person, 29;
trials, 32; death, 34; writings, 35;
Thought of, 47–70.
Second coming of Christ, 19, 25, 37.
Simeon Stylites, 174.
Simon Magus, 32.
Son of God, interpretation of the
phrase, 102.
284
INDEX.
Spectacles at Rome, 148, 169.
Stephen, martyrdom of, 28, 44.
Stoic doctrines, 75; cosmogony, 76;
morals, 77; failure of, 78.
Symbol, value of, 104.
Tatian, 64.
Taurobolium, 98.
Telemachus, the monk, 178.
Tertullian, 60, 68; his testimony,
79, 168.
Thekla, St. 172.
Theodosius, 120, 127.
Tours, battle of, 202.
Trajan, 66, 93, 128.
Valentinus, the Gnostic, 55, 60.
Vandals, 160, 194.
Virgil, his anticipation of a golden
age, 74; regard of him in Chris-
tian tradition, 255.
THE END.
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destiny." Christian Standard.
"They tell what we would all gladly believe, if we cannot prove
it to be true. And they will save those who read them with
sympathy from that pride of half-knowledge, which makes the
present seeming a barrier to all future revelation."- Christian
Register.
Sold everywhere. Mailed postpaid by the Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
Boston.
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL.
A MANUAL.
Translated from the Dutch of J. Knappert, Pastor of Leiden.
By RICHARD Armstrong, B. A.
16mo. Price $1.00.
From the Boston Daily Advertiser.
Its purpose is to give a faithful and accurate account of the results of moderL
research into the early development of the Israelitish religion. Without attempt-
ing to set forth the facts and considerations by which the most thorough and ac
complished scholars have reached their conclusions respecting the origin and date
of the several books of the Old Testament, those conclusions are briefly stated,
and the gradual development of the Jewish form of religion traced down to the
Christian era...
The translator says that there may be those who will be painfully startled by
some of the statements which are made in the work. In his view, however, it is
far better that the young especially should learn from those who are friendly to
religion what is now known of the actual origin of the Scriptures, rather than to
be left in ignorance till they are rudely awakened by the enemies of Christianity
from a blind and unreasoning faith in the supernatural inspiration of the Scriptures.
From the Providence Journal.
If this Manual were not an exponent of Dutch theologians in high repute
among their own countrymen, and if it were not an expression of the honest con-
viction of Rev. J. Knappert, the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church at Leiden,
we should feel inclined to pass it by, for it is not pleasant to have doctrines and
facts rudely questioned that have been firmly held as sacred truths for a lifetime.
And yet one cannot read "The Religion of Israel" without feeling that the writer
is an earnest seeker after the truth, and has carefully weighed and diligently exam-
ined the premises on which his arguments are based, and the conclusions which he
presents as the result of his researches.
The book is one of singular and stirring interest: it speaks with an air of au-
thority that will command attention; and, though it ruthlessly transforms time-
honored beliefs into myths and poetic allegories, it makes its bold attacks with a
reverent hand, and an evident desire to present the truth and nothing but the
truth.
From the Boston Christian Register.
Here we have, for a dollar, just what many liberal Sunday schools are praying
for, a book which gives in a compact form the conclusions of the "advanced
scholarship" concerning the Old Testament record. Taking Kuenen's great
"History of Israel" for a guide, Dr. Knappert has outlined what may be called
the reverently rational view of that religious literature and development which led
up to "the fulness of times," or the beginning of Christianity.
Sold everywhere by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by
the Publishers,
Boston.
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS.
THE RISING FAITH. By Rev. C. A. BARTOL,
D.D. One volume, 16mo. Cloth. Price $2.00.
From the Boston Advertiser.
The book in its drift is a sequel to the "Radical Problems" published last
year; though it deals less with the mysteries of faith and opinion about which
thinkers and teachers, earnest and thoughtful like himself, differ widely. . . . With
a dash of his pen he strikes at forms of belief and worship which to him are nothing,
or worse than nothing, but to many millions of the human race have been a savor
of life unto life, and have opened the way of spiritual illumination, the reality of
which no man living has the right to question. But after all, the reader, whatever
his religious experience may have been, if he reads to the end, will find the reli-
gious philosophy of Dr. Bartol resting on the deep and unchangeable foundations
of faith in God, the foundation on which all creeds and all systems must be
built to be eternal.
From the Liberal Christian.
His book may not define the creed of the future, but it does better. It inspires
us with "the rising faith." What a glorious faith it is! Faith in God, in man,
in immortality. Faith in reason, in spirit, in character. Faith in the past, in
the present, in the future. Faith in law, in order, in beneficence. Faith in hu-
man nature, not as a finality, but as a becoming." Faith in man's environment
as admirably adapted to develop him into "the stature of a man which is that of
the angel." Faith in liberty, but not in license. Faith in the pure marriage of
coequal hearts and minds. Faith in forbearance and self-sacrifice as better than
divorce-made-easy to solve the social riddle of the time. Faith in educated labor
as the best solution of the problem of labor. These are a few of the "notes" of
"The Rising Faith" which Dr. Bartol blends in his wonderful Fantasia.
From the Christian Leader.
It is the faith that Mr. Bartol has attained to as the result of his studies,
observations, reflections for more than sixty years, following the apostolic direc-
tion to try all things and hold fast that which is good. And certainly a great part
of what he with his constant trying has held fast to will be called good by the
large majority of those who are esteemed right-minded and sound-thinking men.
But above all things, the writer is true to his own convictions. These he states
positively, clearly, unhesitatingly, but with all gentleness.
He is certainly a Liberal Thinker, but in sweetness, candor, fair-mindedness,
love of his fellow-men, patience with their errors and infirmities, shrewd observa-
tion of their weaknesses, purity and spirituality, he should be taken as an example
by all the Liberal Thinkers of our day. The book has a long life before it, if for
nothing else but its literary excellencies. . . . It will be cordially welcomed by all
the best intellects of our day as a valuable contribution to human thought, and be
the text of many an essay for a long time to come.
Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of the price, by the
Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
PHILOCHRISTUS:
MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF THE LORD.
Second and Cheaper Edition. Price $1.50.
From Harper's Magazine.
•
•
"Philochristus" is a very unique book, both in its literary and its theological
aspects. It purports to be the memoirs of a disciple of Jesus Christ, written
ten years after the destruction of Jerusalem. . . . Artistically, the book is nearly
faultless. In form a romance, it has not the faults which have rendered the Gos-
pel romances such wretched works of art. It is characterized by simplicity in
expression and by an air of historic genuineness. . Theologically, it is char-
acteristic of the era. It belongs to no recognized school of theology. The
critics do not know what to make of it. In this respect, it reminds one of "Ecce
Homo." It is not Orthodox, yet he throughout recognizes Christ as in
a true sense the manifestation of God in the flesh. . . . Those who are inclined
to dread any presentation of the life and character of Christ which does not
openly and clearly recognize the old philosophy respecting him will look on
this book with suspicion, if not with aversion. Those who are ready to welcome
fresh studies into this character will find a peculiar charm in this singular volume.
• • •
From the Contemporary Review.
The winning beauty of this book, and the fascinating power with which the
subject of it appears to all English minds, will secure for it many readers. It is a
work which ranks rather with "Ecce Homo" than with Canon Farrar's "Life
of Christ." It is associated, indeed, with the former book by the dedication :
"To the author of 'Ecce Homo,' not more in admiration of his writings than in
gratitude for the suggestive influence of a long and intimate friendship."
From the Christian Register.
Since "Ecce Homo," no religious book has appeared which can be compared
with "Philochristus" for its power to nourish and deepen the interest felt by
multitudes in the life and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.
Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by the Pub
lishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
Aspirations of the World.
A CHAIN OF OPALS.
COLLECTED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY L. MARIA CHILD.
Price $1.25.
From Mrs. Child's Introduction.
As men become more familiar with each other by means of travel, emigration,
free institutions, general diffusion of literature, and mutual translation of each
other's languages, the more they will become convinced that all men are brethren;
that God is the Father of them all, and that he has not neglected any of his
children. The fire which sends steam-chariots whirling through the world is a
mighty agent to melt away the barriers of race and creed.
From Dr. H. I. Bowditch.
•
• •
of the nations in religion, has
It is written in a most winning
that religion is natural to man,
The work, as a résumé of the past progress
been deeply interesting and instructive to me.
spirit. The quotations are most convincing,
and to be developed as other traits are, either well or ill, according to circum-
stances, more or less under human control, and never to be eradicated from
humanity... I know of no more beautiful subject to interest any human being
in declining years than this.
From the Chicago Tribune.
• • •
The esteemed and venerable author of this volume has made a serious study of
the different religions of mankind, and over twenty years ago published some of its
fruits in a work on the "Progress of Religious Ideas," that has been commended
for its research, and liberal, philosophical thought. The highest advantage
to be derived from this devout anthology, to which all the world's Bibles have
contributed, is the lesson it teaches in Christian charity. It shakes the founda-
tions of history by showing that no religion contains the whole code of wisdom.
and truth, to the exclusion of the rest. In an introduction of considerable length,
the author reviews some of the distinctive doctrines of the great religions of the
worid, calling particular notice to their many points of likeness.
Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by the Pub-
lishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
THE BIBLE FOR LEARNERS.
By Dr. H. OORT, of Leyden, and Dr. I. HOOYKAAS,
Pastor at Rotterdam.
Translated from the Dutch by Rev. P. H. Wicksteed, of London.
THE OLD TESTAMENT. 2 vols. 12mo.
THE NEW TESTAMENT. I vol. 12mo.
Price $4.00.
Price $2.00.
"This work emanates from the Dutch school of theologians.
Nowhere in Europe," said the lamented J. J. Tayler, "has theo-
logical science assumed a bolder or more decisive tone [than in
Holland]; though always within the limits of profound reverence,
and an unenfeebled attachment to the divine essence of the gos-
pel. We know of no work done here which gives such evi-
dence of solid scholarship joined to a deep and strong religious
spirit. The 'Bible for Young People' should be the means to
very many, both old and young, of a more satisfying idea of what
Israel really was and did among the nations."
Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by the Pub
lishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON.
UNIV. OF MICH.
APR 27 1908

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