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3

The Church's Task under
the Roman Empire
FOUR LECTURES
WITH PREFACE, NOTES, AND AN EXCURSUS
BY
CHARLES BIGG, D.D.
CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH AND REGIUS PROFESSOR OP ECCLESIASTICAL
HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1905

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PVBUSHER TO THB UNIVBRSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO

Hec2.G SOSb

PREFACE
These four Lectures, delivered in the Oxford
Schools in the Michaelmas Term of 1904, are an
attempt to sketch in broad outlines the nature of the
task which lay before the Church when she set out
in obedience to the divine call to evangelize the
Graeco-Roman world, and the degree in which she
was enabled to fulfil that task within the compass of
the first five centuries.
It is far too large a subject for so small a volume.
Ori very many points I have only been able to in
dicate the quarters where information is to be found,
and the problems that court further investigation.
When I have ventured to give my own opinion it
has been done, not without consideration, but briefly
and rather too much ex cathedra. The reader must
allow for all this. I shall be quite content if the
Lectures are found to promote in any degree what
js in fact their main object.
What is that object ? It is to direct attention to
the extreme importance of studying the relation
between the Empire and the Church even in those
days which preceded the recognition of Christianity by
Constantine, and, further, of ascertaining as clearly as

iv PREFACE
possible the condition, intellectual, moral, and material,
of the people who filled the ranks of the Church,
These are in the main two aspects of the same
question. If we knew exactly what the Empire was,
and what it made of its subjects, we should know
also what each individual Christian was, down to the
moment of his conversion, and it would then be much
easier to discern what change came over the man
after his conversion.
For the first branch of this investigation there has
been made, in recent times, an immense accumulation
of material. The great march of public events re
mains still very much as it appears in the pages of
Gibbon. But our knowledge of the causes of the
events, which lie deep in the general condition of
the people, has been enormously increased by epi
graphy, archaeology, and palaeography. On the
subject of education, clubs, the imperial finance, the
imperial administration, town-government, changes in
the army, the gradual intrusion of barbarians into
the Empire, the rise and spread of villainage, we
know far more than Gibbon, and every one of these
is a cause with far-reaching results. Our notions of
heathen religion, again, have been largely modified
by the labours of M, Cumont and others, by the
Egyptologists, and by the inscriptions. All this mass
of new information is waiting to be drawn to a focus
and appraised by the historian of the Church. Hitherto

PREFACE V
we have seen the ancient world only as it was
described for us by the great or by the hangers-on of
the great. Now we can hear the voice of the common
people. It is still not so full or articulate as we could
wish, but it suffices to put the whole story in a new and
more instructive light. Read, for instance, the panegyrics
of Gibbon and Renan upon the philosophic Marcus
Aurelius, and then turn to Schiller's account of the in^
capacity of the Emperor and the disasters of his reign.
Church history also has been mainly the history
of the great, though their greatness was of a far nobler
kind than that of Caesars or proconsuls. It has con
sisted mainly of the lives and actions of a handful
of eminent clergymen. To a great extent this is
unavoidable. The great bishops were the men who
moulded the institutions, formulated the definitions,
and exemplified the life of the Church. Yet it would
be a great gain if by any means we could improve
our acquaintance with the ordinary priest, or, still
more, with the ordinary layman. For there can be
little doubt that the most significant changes in history
were not imposed upon the Church by the bishops
from above, but forced upon the bishops by the
pressure of popular opinion from below.
Now can we by any road find a way down to this
underground still in which the Church of the New
Testament was gradually transformed into the Church
of the Middle Ages ? To some extent we can. The

VI

PREFACE

Canons will help us, and in this department we have
received valuable assistance from the translation of
the Didascalia, from the deciphering of the Verona
Fragments of the Didascalia, and from the recon
struction of the Canons of Hippolytus. The principal
writers do not as a rule give material assistance, but
Tertullian supplies much useful information, while
Clement and Origen would be of extraordinary service,
if we only knew exactly whom they meant by the
' orthodoxasts ' and the ' simpler brethren.' The Life
of Gregory Thaumaturgus, by Gregory of Nyssa, is
instructive. For the fourth and fifth centuries we
have considerable information in the Pilgrimage of
Silvia, if this is its right designation, in the Lausiac
History, in Prudentius, the Life of St. Martin of
Tours, the newly recovered treatises of Priscillian,
the epistles and poems of Paulinus of Nola, and of
Sidonius ApoUinaris, the Life of Jerome, the works of
Salvian. Again, there are the Apocrypha, the Sibylline
Oracles, the Apocryphal Acts and Gospels. On the
latter much study has recently been bestowed. We
do not yet know accurately in what proportion they
are Gnostic and in what proportion they are vulgar
Christian. But they had considerable influence, and
they throw much light upon ideas that were not
unfamiliar in the lower strata of the Early Church,
and were destined as time went on to take their place
among recognized beliefs.

PREFACE

VU

It would not be right to discourage the study of
the great divines. Eminent personages are as im
portant in ecclesiastical as in secular history, nay^
they are even more important. But institutions grow
like plants, not from the blossom, but from the roots.
If we want to understand the making of the mediaeval
Church we must go into the by-ways, we must listen
not to the masters of theology, but to the Campanian
farmer complaining to St. Felix of the theft of his
oxen, and menacing the saint, if he does not make
good the loss caused by his neglect.
These considerations suggest the natural reflection
that there ought to be many more workers in the
field of ecclesiastical history, and much more com
munity of purpose between those who are engaged
upon the work.
It is easy to see why it is not so. At present we
are like the Crusaders attacking Saladin. We all fear
the infidel, but we fear one another hardly less.
' King Richard,' says Geoffrey de Vinsauf, ' captured
Messina by one assault in less time than a priest
could chant the matin service. . . , And, lo, after
this action had been performed, the French suddenly
beheld the ensigns and standards of King Richard
floating above the walls of the city; at which the
King of France was so mortified, that he conceived
that hatred against King Richard which lasted during
his life, and afterwards led him to the unjust invasion

vni

PREFACE

of Normandy.' Nor was this deep mutual distrust
ill-grounded. Each of the rival kings was in truth
playing his own game, and intended to make the
Holy City, not the common property of all Christian
people, but a French or an English Jerusalem.
Geoffrey might almost seem to be describing in
an allegory the mutual relation of theological students
in England of the present day. Every community
likes to have its scholars, and treats them with great
respect, but always on the tacit understanding that
they score for their side and advertise the principles
of their backers. They may be allowed to enter into
some temporary coalition with their rivals, but in that
case they must take great care who gets credit for
planting the flag upon the walls of Messina,
It need hardly be pointed out what damage is done
by this commercial or political temper to the interests
of learning and even of truth. But surely there is
no cure for the mischief at all equal to the scholarly
study of history. It has been called, by a master
of the craft, the great cordial, but it is also the great
peacemaker. No one can travel down the long river
of time with a scholar's eye, a scholar's reverence
for fact, and a scholar's trained discernment, without
coming to feel how trivial are the little inferences that
part him from his fellow believers, in comparison with
the great axioms in which all are agreed.
It has been maintained, even in recent times and

PREFACE

IX

by men of inteUigence, that impartiality in a Church
historian is neither possible, desirable, nor lawful.
No doubt all men do bring to their studies certain
prepossessions; and it may be allowed that in the
field of religion these prepossessions are more numerous
and powerful than elsewhere. We all have our per
sonal equations. But it does not follow that we ought
to be steeped to the lips in prejudice. We do not
think that a secular historian cannot love his own
country if he is critical, or if he does not undervalue
the laws and the exploits of other peoples. Why
then should we think that the ecclesiastical historian
cannot love his own Church if he too admits that
institutions were made for men, and not men for
institutions ?
The critical temper is not the same as the con
troversial. But neither is criticism the same thing
as indifferentism. It is probable that the most thorough
and scientific study of the origines of the church would
not greatly affect existing divisions of opinion ; at
any rate it would not obliterate the main Hnes of
cleavage. But it would materiaUy change our attitude
towards these divisions by enlarging charity. It would
deepen the spiritual life, for there is nothing more
injurious to the soul than the habit of sectarian
animosity. Finally, it would greatly promote the
increase of knowledge if there were more workers
in the field of ecclesiastical history, and if all were

X PREFACE
drawn together in the bond of a common love of
truth. It was hoped last spring that some movement in
this direction might have been facilitated by the
proposal to abolish the existing restrictions upon the
selection of Examiners in the Honour School of
Theology. The teaching body of Oxford sanctioned
the proposal, but Convocation rejected it after a scene
which will not readily be forgotten by those who had
the misfortune to witness it. But the library is secure
from these noisy invasions ; and much might be done
in that peaceful atmosphere.
There is room for workers of every shade of
opinion, provided only that they are competent and
that they are unselfish. As has already been said,
there is little fear that their labours would end in
bringing us all to a dead level of uniformity, or in
clothing all minds in grey. But they might take the
sting out of our differences of opinion. They might
show us that intolerance is not the necessary ally of
conviction, and teach us the lesson which Constantine
the Great vainly endeavoured to impress upon the
old Novatian, when he said to him in his pleasant
ironical way, ' Take a ladder, Acesius, and climb to
heaven by yourself.'
There are a few words more that may here be
added. The study of the great Greek and Roman
moralists of the Empire leaves upon my own mind

PREFACE

XI

a strong conviction that the fundamental difference
between heathenism of all shades and Christianity
is to be discovered in the doctrine of Vicarious
Sacrifice, that is to say, in the Passion of our Lord.
The thought was in my mind all the time that I was
composing these lectures, but it does not appear
clearly, if at all, in the text.
If we ask what is das Wesen des Christenthunts,
this is surely the same thing as asking what is the
specific difference between Christianity and any other
religion. The old logicians used to say that every
thing should be defined per genus et differentiam.
Christianity is a religion ; this is its genus, this it has
in common with all other religions. It is the religion
of Vicarious Sacrifice, or of the Cross, this is its
differentia ; in this addition lies the peculiar nature
which makes it what it is, and distinguishes it from
every other member of the same class.
Now the Fatherhood of God, the immortality of
the soul, revelation, are beliefs common to many
religions. So again are sacrifice, prophecy, law. The
belief that by virtue men become like God, children
of God, and attain to communion with their divine
Father is a commonplace of Greek idealism, and is
found in many of the better pagan cults. The idea
of a Messiah, again, is common to Judaism and Chris
tianity, and something not wholly unlike it meets us in
the ' inspired men ' of Platonism, or the ' heroes ' of

xii PREFACE
Hellenism. But the Cross is the peculiar property
of the Gospel. What the first Christians adopted as
their emblem was not the portrait of Jesus, but simply
the Cross, without any portrait at all.
It may be said that this peculiar feature of the
Christian faith throws back light upon, and gives new
meaning and new shape to all the other articles of
our religion. From this source flow all the distinctive
beliefs and practices of the Church, which, though all, or
almost all, common in some degree to other religions,
have received a specially Christian form and develop
ment from this central doctrine. It has affected, for in
stance, very deeply indeed even the conception of God.
If we look at the great Stoic doctors we shall find
in them an admirable account of duty, so admirable
indeed that it was largely adopted by Christian
teachers. The Stoic set a very high value upon the
individual soul, its wisdom, its purity, its freedom.
He preached even self-denial, in the sense of self-
limitation, or renunciation of all that turns a man
away from the pursuit of a high ideal. He taught
courage also and the endurance of suffering, so long
as it did not appear to the man himself to be irre
mediable or excessive ; otherwise he held that suicide
was right But attention has been directed in one
of the following lectures to the harsh contempt with
which Epictetus speaks of women and children. It
would hardly have been fair to do so if this scorn had

PREFACE

XIU

been a personal trait belonging to Epictetus himself.
But it is not so; it flows quite naturally from his
system. Epictetus did not Uke women and children,
because they bored him, and he did not see why he
should be bored. These weaker vessels take from
the wise man, and give nothing in return. They are
a clog upon one who pursues inner perfection and
tranquillity. It never for a moment occurred to
Epictetus that man becomes better not by self-cultiva- ^
tion, but by making others better, or, in other words,
that the voluntary suffering of the good lifts up the
bad and makes the good better than he was.
The Platonists were much more humane, and
allowed much more scope for the natural affections,
which always entail more or less of self-sacrifice.
They did not regard the world as an enemy to be
kept at bay ; it was in their opinion a divinely-
appointed place of discipline, and for this reason they
shrank from suicide. They offered to mankind all that
Idealism has to teach. Even Hegel adds nothing
substantial to Plotinus, and their system of doctrine
was so like that of the Church that it has been
doubted, not without reason, whether Dionysius the
Areopagite and Synesius of Cyrene were at bottom
anything more than Neoplatonists. Nevertheless,
they also were brought up by precisely the same
fence as the Stoics. They held that self-cultivation
and the divine blessing are the two things necessary.

xiv PREFACE
They came nearer to the fence than the Stoics, and
admitted that one man must show the way to another,
not so much by words as by personal influence.
Divine philosophy is ' like a light kindled in the soul
by a darting fire,' by much conversation about the
thing itself and by living with the wise (Plato, Ep. vii,
p. 341 c, d: this was a very famous and influential
text). But, when once kindled, the light must • feed
itself.' They would not admit that the undeserved
voluntary suffering of one could make another better.
Plotinus expressly rejects the idea as immoral, though
he must have had a mother. It seemed to him
inconceivable that it should be the duty of a good
man to give up any portion of his spiritual wealth
for the relief of the poor, to make himself worse in
order that others might be better. In fact, with him,
as with the Stoic, the ultimate formula is ' my soul
and God.' Whereas with the Christian it is ' my soul,
my brother's soul, and God.'
The same thing is true of the pagan religion.
Some exception must be made in favour of the new
Oriental cults. The worshippers of I sis and of Mithra
used the term ' brethren,' a fact of great significance,
and were in consequence missionaries. The imperial
world was groping its way towards this great idea.
Still, it may be said with confidence that the contents,
the power, the sanction of this idea were the property
of the Church alone, which taught that no man could

PREFACE

XV

be Christ's disciple without bearing the Cross of Christ,
that every man must do for his brethren what Christ
did for all, ' empty himself,' become poor and a slave,
make himself what a heathen philosopher or a heathen
pro-consul would have thought a very inferior creature.
The speculative consequences of this faith in the
Cross need not here be explained ; they were naturally
very great. But the moral consequences also are
enormous. It shifts the centre of gravity, and alters
everything from top to bottom. It is of course an
enthusiasm, and therefore liable to great extravagances
and mistakes. Further, being the highest of all moral
laws, it is naturally also the most difficult to assimilate,
especially for ignorant and undisciplined people, such
as were probably the great mass of the converts to
Christianity. There are many traces of these short
comings in the early history of the Church, which
ought not to be blinked. They are no reproach to
our fathers, but they are a warning to ourselves.
The old Gnostics called the Cross ' Horos,' the
Boundary or Dividing Line. The Gnostics were
a curious people, but they were right here. On this
side of the Cross all history is, or ought to be, a
different thing to what it is on the other, and every
one who carries the Cross, in so far as he carries it,
is a better citizen, a better philosopher, and a better
man than he would have been otherwise.
C. BIGG.

CONTENTS PAGE
I. Education under the Empire ... i
II. Religion under the Empire ... 3a
III, Religion under the Empire {continued) . 60
IV. Moral and Social Condition of the
Empire  90
Excursus on Lecture IV . . . .128

EDUCATION UNDER THE EMPIRE
It is impossible to form a just estimate of ecclesi
astical history without a clear conception of the Roman
Empire within whose shelter the Church was born
and grew to maturity. When the Western Empire
fell before the arms of the barbarian invaders the
Church had assumed in all essential respects the shape
which she retained down to the time of the Reforma
tion. We can hardly doubt that this shape was given
to her with a view to that society which it was her
divine mission to transform.
Let me endeavour then in these four Lectures to
sketch the inner life of the Empire under the three
great heads of Education, Religion, and Morality.
One great difficulty, which cannot be wholly over
come, meets us at the outset. We are apt to speak of
heathenism in the abstract in antithesis to the Gospel.
But the sharp antagonisms of language do not exist
in nature. There were innumerable gradations of
heathenism ranging from the lowest to all but the
highest phase of the religious life, from Druidism
and Moloch worship, and from even lower depths, up
to the enlightened theism of Epictetus or Plotinus.

2 THE CHURCH'S TASK
Historians, again, speak of Greco-Roman culture as
if there was one definite thing answering to the name.
But what we actually find is the most amazing dis
parity. Between the highest and the lowest of the
subjects of Caesar there was no less difference than
there is to-day between an Englishman and a Kaffir.
Yet further, men of every race,' every colour, every
degree of civilization, dwelt not only within the same
Empire, but within the same walls. Barbarian, Scythian,
bond and free, jostled one another in the streets of
Rome. Great nobles, learned scholars, experienced
men of affairs, admirable artists, skilful artisans, lived
in the same city, under the same roof, with fierce and
ignorant savages from the mountains of Morocco or
the wilds of Britain. Year by year, so long as the
Empire endured, the tide of barbarian immigrants
increased till at last in the West it completely sub
merged the older population. This gradual deteriora
tion of the mass of its inhabitants is the significant
feature of the later history of Rome. It set the
Empire its task, and fixed the limits of its success.
When such hosts of rude pupils were swarming up
from below, the great schoolmistress could do no more
than impart the first lessons of humanity. Thus, while
the area of civilization increased, its depth diminished.
But, infinitely various as were the pupils, the system
of education was one and the same. It will not be
possible for me, nor indeed is it necessary for my

EDUCATION 3
purpose, to speak of special professional training, of
the higher mathematics, or philosophy, or medicine,
or jurisprudence. There were places where instruction
of this kind could be procured by those who desired it
— Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Berytus, Constantinople ^
But we may leave them out of the account. Educa
tion, as the word was understood by the vast majority
of the ancients, means the discipline of the grammar

' The University towns of the Empire were Athens, Alexandria,
Rome, and Constantinople. Here everything might be studied.
Our information about Athens is pretty copious ; see Lucian,
Nigrinus and Eunuchus ; Aulus Gellius ; Philostratus ; Eunapius ;
Gregory Nazianzen ; Marinus, Life of Proclus; Synesius, Ep. 136.
It has been put together with great skill by Mr. Capes in his
University Life in Ancient Athens. Alexandria was predominantly
scientific and medical. The student may read G. Parthey, Das
Alexandrinische Museum. Mommsen, Die Provinzen, has something
on the subject. For Rome, see Cod. Theod. xiv. 9. i with Godefroi's
notes ; for Constantinople, Cod. Theod. xiv. 9. 2, 3. Berytus was
specially a law school. Gregory Thaumaturgus was on his way
thither when he was captured by Origen. Mr. Glover, Life and
Letters in the Fourth Century, would add Bordeaux and Carthage to
the list of Universities. The professors celebrated by Ausonius
were all rhetoricians or grammarians, but he ends by saying that he
may have omitted some whom ' medicae vel artis dogma, vel Platoni-
cum, Dedit perenni gloriae.' St. Augustine learned no philosophy
at Carthage except what he picked up by himself, but it would
appear from Conf. iv. 16 that there were lectures on the Categories
of Aristotle. Generally speaking, philosophy appears to have been
reserved for what we may call post-graduate study, which was carried
on between the ages of twenty and thirty. Hence very few can
have had more than a very superficial acquaintance with the subject.
Even at Rome and Athens rhetoric was the main preoccupation.
B 2

4 THE CHURCH'S TASK
and the rhetoric schools. Let us fix our eyes then
upon these institutions, and see what they professed
and what they accomplished. In the time of Horace,
and throughout the first century, they were what we
should call private schools. From the second century
onwards they assume a public character ; and teachers
were appointed and paid by the state or the munici
pality. Grammar schools^ were to be found every
where, and every township of any Importance possessed
also teachers of rhetoric.
In the Grammar School the ages of the pupils
ranged from about seven to about fourteen. The
course of instruction began with reading, writing, and
ciphering, and in poor out-of-the-way places probably
did not go much beyond these elementary accomplish
ments. But in the better class of school these
rudiments, of course, were merely the foundation for
lessons of a more advanced kind. These included
music, mathematics (arithmetic and geometry), and
' For the Schools our principal sources of information are
Quintilian, Horace, Petronius, Juvenal, Suetonius, Aulus Gellius,
Fronto, Macrobius, Ausonius, St. Augustine's Confessions, Eumenius.
Of modern books the following may be mentioned — Friedlander,
Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms, Leipzig, 1881 (there
is a later edition of this work, published in 1901, but it supplies no
references) ; Boissier, Fin du Paganisme ; Dill, Roman Society in the
Last Century of the Western Empire ; Glover, Life and Letters in
the Fourth Century. Of the Grammar School proper in the eastern
parts of the Empire there appears to be little or no direct informa
tion. In the following paragraphs Quintilian has been very closely
followed.

EDUCATION 5
as much science and philosophy as was necessary for
the proper understanding of the classic authors. But
the main subject, which gave its name to both school
master and school, was Grammar,
Grammar included not merely syntax and accidence^
but the history and morphology of language, as far as
these subjects were at the time understood. Indeed,
its scope was much broader than anything that we
understand by the term. In the mind of Quintilian,
or of any other ancient professor. Grammar means
nothing less than literaryj;riticism, as that phrase was
employed by Mark Pattison or Matthew Arnold, It
aimed at forming judgement and taste, and strove
to equip the opening intelligence of the pupil with all
knowledge that would enable him to appraise the
absolute or the comparative merits of the books read
in class. For this purpose he was led on through
a carefully selected list of authors, poets, orators, and
historians, beginning with Aesop's Fables and ending
in Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Demosthenes, and Homer,
Every author was carefully explained by the master.
The pupils were required to read aloud clearly,
correctly, and with proper dramatic expression, to scan
the verses, to learn by heart and repeat from memory,
to paraphrase selected passages in their own words,
to amplify and elaborate traits which seemed capable
of expansion.
It was an admirable system, probably much better

6 THE CHURCH'S TASK
than any to be found in our own schools down to
the time of Dr. Arnold. But there are two criticisms
that suggest themselves.
The first is this. In all Western schools Greek
was taught as well as Latin. But apparently Latin
was not taught in Eastern schools ^ Even in the
West boys rebelled against the foreign language, just
as English boys rebel against French or German.
St. Augustine and the poet Ausonius both make the
same confession, that they had acquired a very limited
acquaintance with the language of Homer ^, and we
may judge from this how little progress was made
by lads of less intelligence. The consequence was
I that the two halves of the old world never thoroughly
understood one another, and in this fact we may
j discover a leading cause of the disruption of the
I Empire and of the disruption of the Church, A most
interesting and instructive lecture might be written
on the confusion, the misunderstandings, the quarrels
that arose between theologians from this little simple
reason, that the Easterns could not speak Latinyand
the Westerns could not speak Greek,
The second is this. The Grammar School was
dominated by the school of Rhetoric. From the very
first, Quintilian tells us, the Grammarian must keep
^ See Glover, pp. 33, 50.
^ For Ausonius, see the sapphics addressed to the Greek Gram
marians at Bordeaux. For St. Augustine, Conf. i. 14.

EDUCATION 7
steadily before his eyes the object for which he exists
— that of turning out orators. It is from this point of
view alone that he regards Music as valuable. It
teaches the management and production of the voice,
the emotional value of the various notes or keys, and
grace of gesture. Mathematics are judged by the
same rule. Barristers must be proficient at figures
because they will have to deal with sums of money,
and for a further reason which strikes us moderns as
peculiar. Figures were expressed not only by word
of mouth, but by accompanying movements of the
fingers, and it was therefore highly desirable that the
pleader should have been trained to make these signs
correctly and gracefully. History, again, was hardly
taught except in its literary aspect, as helping in the
formation of a good narrative style. The master,
says Quintilian, should not trouble himself with pedantic
accuracy in matters of fact. One of the virtues of
a grammarian is aliqua nescire. But we shall have
to recur to this point later on. Let us only notice
here, that the system of the schools did not aim at
scientific results of any kind. The judgement which
it endeavoured to form was entirely aesthetic.
The Grammar School was a powerful agent in the
diffusion of Roman culture; and under the Empire
the system was extended with great rapidity into the
most distant parts of the provinces. In Southern
Gaul both grammar and rhetoric were taught from

8 THE CHURCH'S TASK
a very early date at Marseilles, Autun, Lyons, and
Bordeaux. Later on we read of flourishing schools
at Toulouse, Narbonne, Treves, and in all the chief
cities of the Gallic provinces. The famous Agricola,
who had received his own education at Marseilles,
established Roman schools for the sons of the native
chieftains in newly conquered Britain ^ and Juvenal
tells us in his hyperbolical way that even Thule, the
unknown North, is beginning to talk of hiring a
professor of rhetoric 2. Spain also was covered with
schools. Even little mining villages in the south of
Portugal were not left unprovided ^ and Augustine
shows us that in Africa the same state of things
existed. .Ever3rwhere the schoolmaster followed the
standard, and the subdued barbarian was carefully
drilled in the arts of peace.
The proficiency attained would naturally vary very
greatly according to local circumstances. In a little
Italian town probably nearly everybody could read
and write, and knew a little poetry. We have proof
^ Tac. Agricola, 21. Cp. Martial, xi. 3. 5 'Dicitur et nostros
cantare Britannia versus.'
^ Sat. XV. 112.
' In 1876 there was discovered near the little town of Aljustrel in
Portugal, in a mountainous region, a tablet of bronze covered with
a long Latin inscription. It contains an ordinance for the regulation
of the mining industry in the district, and speaks of schoolmasters,
to whom certain immunities are granted. See Boissier, Fin du
Paganisme, vol. i. p. 152; Hiibner et Mommsen, 'Lex metalli
Vipascensis,' Eph. epigr. iii. 165-189.

EDUCATION 9
of this in the graffiti scrawled on the walls of Pompeii,
which were clearly addressed to the vulgarest of the
people, and often contain verses of the classic poets.
The epitaphs, again, tell the same tale. Many of them
are adorned with scraps of Virgil or Propertius, often
sadly mangled by ignorant admirers. In Egypt the
papyri discover to us a condition of general education
which is certainly not worse than that of our own
countrymen in the eighteenth century. The admirably
edited Oxyrhynchus Papyri, for which we owe our
warmest thanks to Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt, contain
a letter from a little boy to his father which is quite as
good as anything that an English child could write.
Many of the documents are ill-spelt and ungrammatical,
and we find frequent notice of people who could only
make their marks \ But the proportion of illiterates
does not seem to be larger than could be found in the
marriage registers of an English country parish a
hundred years ago, and it must be remembered that
in Egypt Greek was a foreign language. Among the
clergy of the Church the standard of education was not
* In the first volume of the Oxy. Pap. the following instances of
illiteracy occur in documents of the first four centuries — no. 43,
a petty town official; no. 53, a carpenter; nos. 67, 69, two small
farmers; no. 72, a small owner of property; nos. 76, 77, two women
of property; no. 83, an egg seller; no. 85, two workmen out of
several; no. 86, the wife of the pilot of a boat; no. 91, a woman
who had put her child out to nurse, and the owner of the slave who
acted as wet-nurse ; no. loi, a person who farmed thirty-eight arouras
of land; no. 106, a lady who made a will.

ID THE CHURCH'S TASK
high. St. Cyprian ordained as Lector a confessor
who could not write, but apparently could read ^, and
about the same time (in the middle of the third century)
the Didascalia informs us that even bishops were
often unlearned men^ Some of the Fathers of the
Desert knew no Greek, and some could not write * ;
and no doubt in all the outlying provinces there were
numbers of people who could speak nothing but their
native tongue. But, wherever Latin and Greek were
understood, the influence of the Grammar School was
deep and permanent. The Fathers of the Western
Church, generally speaking, knew Virgil by heart, and
in the East, Homer was equally familiar.
From the Grammar School the more capable and
aspiring or wealthier students passed on to the School
of Rhetoric. Here they remained till about the age
of twenty, and here the process of education in the
vast majority of cases reached its end. Here, then,
we shall see most clearly the intention of the whole
system. It was to produce not students, nor men of
any special technical aptitude, but the accomplished
gentleman, who is adorned with that fine flower of
' Cyp. Epp. xxvii, xxxviii (ed. Hartel).
^ Achelis and Flemming, Die syrische Didaskalia, p. 13 ; Mrs.
Gibson, The Didascalia Apostolorum, p. 23.
' Apollonius could not write. Hist. Laus., ed. Butler, xiii. John
pf Lycopolis conversed with Evagrius by means of an interpreter,
ibid. xxxv. Antony also could not speak Greek, and used an inter
preter, ibid, xxi, ad fin.

EDUCATION II
cultivation which the Romans called * Url^nity ^,' and
in all social relations knows how to say the right
thing in the right way. For such a purpose the main
requisites are self-possession, and the command of
speech, and these the rhetorician undertook to supply.
In the senate, at the bar, at the banquet-table, on the
tribunal, at any festival, in any assembly of the people,
or on any of those deputations which the provincials
were perpetually sending up to Rome, a man of any
consideration was called upon to talk, and to talk well,
about every subject under the sun. The business of
the rhetorician was to show him how the thing was
done. When a boy entered the School of Rhetoric, though
he continued to read much the same authors, he
began to study them from a new point of view, not
that of matter or style, but that of oratorical effective-
' Urbanitas is defined by Quintilian (vi. 3 ad in.) as 'a certain
peculiar flavour of the City, an implication of culture {tacita eruditio)
derived from conversation with men of letters.' It involved nicety
of expression, judgement, taste, pleasantness — ^what the Greek meant
by Atticism. The French esprit has much the same signification,
but in the eyes of a Roman the proper field of display was, not the
drawing-room, but the senate or the bar. How delicate was the sense
of propriety of speech appears from the fact that Livy was blamed
for Patavinitas. The meaning of this criticism may perhaps be
found in the fact that fashion was turning towards the archaic Latin
of the Repubhc. Fronto (iv. 3) blames even Cicero, Quintilian's
idol, because he does not use 'insperata atque inopinata verba.'
The great classics were not exquisite and affected enough for the
taste of the second century.

12 THE CHURCH'S TASK
ness. Henceforth he was to consider not what a
writer says, but by what means he produces, or why
he fails to produce, the desired effect on the mind of
the reader. For the more advanced students theory
went hand in hand with practice ; one or more of the
many excellent Manuals of Rhetoric, or Artes as they
were called, was minutely studied, and afforded a
scientific basis for the new curriculum. But the
characteristic feature of the high school was the Theme
or Declamation, original production written or spoken,
written always with a view to being spoken.
The subjects were carefully graduated according to
the age and progress of the pupil. He began with
simple essays in narrative and proceeded at the next
stage to discuss the probability of historical statements
— whether it is really credible that Romulus and
Remus were suckled by a she-wolf, or that Messalla
Corvinus was enabled to defeat the gigantic Gaul by
the friendly aid of a crow. From this he advanced
to comparison, and was made to ask himself, for
instance, whether Livy's account of Hannibal's passage
of the Alps is to be preferred to that of other his
torians or not. The next step brought him to the
discussion of moral questions, in which the same order
was observed. First come the facts. These were
given in the highly important Common Places.
The Common Places, which lie at the root of
ancient rhetoric, included in the first place abstract

EDUCATION 13
sketches of character, such as those drawn by Aristotle
or Theophrastus, or indeed in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries by Bishop Earle and William
Law. These characters, often acute and amusing, but
always abstract and conventional, were learned by
heart, and formed the stock in trade of the ancient
orator or dramatist. From them come the well-known
figures of the ancient stage, the severe or lenient
father, the miser, the young rake, the cunning slave,
and all the rest of that amusing company. Some of
them are pleasant, others are extremely unpleasant.
It is noticeable that those selected by the moral
Quintilian, as calling for especial study, are all un
pleasant. They are those of the adulterer, the dicer,
and the rake. He tells his pupils that they must be
ready to speak not only against such people, but on
their behalf. No doubt he is thinking mainly of the
barrister, who will have to defend as well as to
prosecute, but we may find here a striking proof of
the way in which the Rhetoric School uniformly sub
ordinated morality to effect.
The next step led on to ethical comparisons —
whether town or country life is the happier, whether
sword or gown is the more glorious, and so forth ; the
next to deliberation — ought a man to marry, ought he
to seek magistracies ; this last is a theme that equipped
the budding orator for invectives against the Church,
for it was a common complaint against Christians that

14 THE CHURCH'S TASK
they declined to take office under the pagan state ; the
next again to what are called conjectural cases, such
as the question why Cupid is depicted as a boy armed
with torch and arrows, on which free scope is given
for the exercise of fancy or imagination. Finally, the
learner was carried on to problems of standing interest
for the Law Court or the Senate — when are witnesses
credible ? what is the value of circumstantial proof ?
what is the diff"erence between good laws and bad .¦*
All these were Common Places reduced to formulae,
illustrated by apt quotations and then learned by
llgart, needing nothing but a few names and details
to fit them on to any case that might arise. There
was no need for any one to think about them ; there
they were stereotyped and ready for use. On each
of these topics the pupils wrote and declaimed without
cessation. Every care was taken to cure stage-fright
and ensure an effective delivery. Not a point was
left unregulated ; there were minute rules as to the
use of the pocket-handkerchief, and professors were
divided on the question how far the hair might be
tumbled when the orator was simulating passion.
Once a week there was a speech-day ^, when parents
and friends came in numbers to see for themselves
' Juv. vii. 1 60 ' Cuius mihi sexta Quaque die miserum dirus caput
Hannibal implet ' ; Quint, ii. 7 ' Ne omnia, quae scripserint, ediscant,
et certa, ut moris est, die dicant; quod quidem maxime patres
exigunt'; Suet. Tib. 32 'Diogenes grammaticus, disputare sabbatis
Rhodi solitus ' ; Persius, iii. 44.

EDUCATION 15
how their boys were getting on. Thus emulation and
ambition were excited to what St. Augustine thought
a very mischievous extent \ Many epitaphs on young
children show us what pride and delight Roman
fathers and mothers drew from the progress of their
sons and daughters in the exercises of the school ^.
Many of the themes have a certain historical
interest, like the examples given in the old Eton
Latin Grammar ^ Two subjects, often declaimed
upon in the early days of the Empire, were the
abdication of Sulla and the lawfulness of tyrannicide.
We see here how, in a time when there were no
radical journals, the Stoic malcontents contrived to
utilize the schools in their hopeless crusade against
Caesarism. Later on the themes become exclusively
moral. Many of them would furnish excellent argu
ments for a melodrama or a problem novel. Let
us take this one. A young man captured by a pirate
is set free by the pirate's lovely daughter, like Lord
Bateman in the ballad. He promises her marriage,
' Conf. i. 17.
* CIL. vi. 3. 20133 'puero studiosissimo ' ; viii. i. 724, on a lad of
seventeen, ' qui dixi, scribsi, pincsi bene,' he knew Greek also ; on
a girl of eight, ' Quodsi longa tuae mansissent tempora vitae Doctior
in terris nulla puella foret' (I omitted to take down the number of
this). ' 'Expedit reipublicae animadverti in malos' referred to the
execution of Empson and Dudley by Henry VIII ; ' Audito regem
Doroberniam proficisci ' to the meeting of the King and the Emperor
at Dover.

i6 THE CHURCH'S TASK
goes home, and there discovers that his stern parent
has arranged that he shall give his hand to a wealthy
widow. Ought he to keep his word or not ^ ? Or
again : a band of students go down to Ostia for a
holiday. Some fishermen are putting off in their
boats ; the students agree to give them a guinea for
their catch. The fishermen let down their net, and
bring up a basket full of gold coins. Is this ' a catch,'
or not ? Several of these rhetorical themes were
actually worked up into romances, and, as the Gesta
Romanorum, formed the favourite reading of light-
hearted people in the Middle Ages^ They were
gushing, sentimental and risky, but things generally
come right in the end. They were more like
Richardson than the modern French novel.
Time forbids me to dwell at any length upon the
products of the system — the professional rhetorician,
who was prepared to speak at any moment, or any
length, upon any subject that his auditors liked to
suggest ; the swarm of minor poets who scribbled
verses even in the hunting-field, and compared one
another to Catullus or even Virgil ; the barristers, of
whom the good ones, like Pliny, were much more
anxious about the turn of their sentences than about
the justice of their cause, while the bad ones, like
* Seneca, Controv. i. 6. But see Friedlander, who gives a full
and interesting collection of themes.
2 Friedlander, iii. p. 248 (ed. 1881).

EDUCATION 17
Regulus, were not satisfied with hunting down the
victims of the Emperor's displeasure, but used every
art to draw the friends, relatives, advocates of the
accused into the net of destruction. All this you may
read in Pliny's Letters, or in Mr. Capes' excellent
little book on University Life in Ancient Athens.
What strikes us as remarkable is that these finicking
and often very vicious dilettanti were the governors
and administrators of the whole civilized world.
Under the early Empire the enervating eff^ect of the
school training was to a considerable extent obviated
by later practical discipline. The cursus honorum,
or system of promotion^, required that the young
aspirant, upon leaving the rhetorical school, should
first of all apply for one of the inferior judicial or
administrative offices. Then he underwent a period
of military service, then he was raised to the higher
magistracies, involving important civil functions and
the command of legions or armies, until at last, as
praetor or consul, he became governor of a province.
But gradually the civil and military careers were
entirely dissociated, and from this time onwards the
really important officials had no training at all except
that of the bureau. The same division of function
prevails in modern nations. But the result of the
separation must be greatly to increase the influence
^ See on this subject Pelham, Outlines of Roman History, vi. i ;
Friedlander ; Seeck, Untergang der antiken Welt.

i8 THE CHURCH'S TASK
of the school, and we may say that the Roman
school was much fitter to produce amateur_actors
than efficient servants of the State,
Such was the ideal of Education ; rather stagey, we
may think, and thin, wanting in solidity, and concerned
far more with words than with things, but admirably
calculated to spread a rapid varnish of refinement
over the coarsest natural grain. Let us now look at
the persons by whom the system was administered.
First in order comes the Nurse ^, who seems to
have had exclusive charge of the little children. She
was a slave, as devoted as an Indian ayah, but ex
tremely unfit for the moral direction of infant minds.
Lying was the taint of her class, and she was steeped
as a matter of course in the grossest and most horrible
superstition. Next comes the Pedagogue, another slave. He
was half valet, half tutor; his duties were to act as
body-servant, to convey his young master to and
from school, and to see that the tasks were properly
prepared. During lesson-time he sat at the back of
' Quintilian thought it desirable that the nurse should be able to
speak correctly, but makes no other stipulation, i. 20. Many of the
epitaphs are inscribed by the nurse to the child, or by the child to
the nurse. Clement of Alexandria quotes a Greek couplet, t6 Opeyl/m
8' iv ^poTola-i TToXXaxis TrXet'to iropi^ei (piKrpa rov (pilaai rcxoa, Paed. i. 6. 49.
CIL. vi. 4. 3442, we have a pathetic epitaph on a little girl. Besides
the parents are named five persons 'qui eam nutrierunt in diem
mortis eius.* For nursery superstitions see Persius, ii. 31 sqq. ; Aug.
Conf. i. 7.

EDUCATION 19
the class-room. In this way he sometimes managed
to pick up an education for himself. Then, when
he had received the cap of liberty, he would not
uncommonly set up school on his own account.
We must remember, of course, that the Roman
slave was sometimes equal in birth and race, and
often far superior in intelligence and accomplishments
to his master. Some of these pedagogues were
excellent men, for instance, Mardonius the Scythian,
for whom Julian the Apostate always cherished a
grateful affection. But, even when they were decent
people, they were compelled to pander to the vices
of their owners. There is an instructive scene in one
of the comedies of Plautus, where a pedagogue Lydus
ventures to give his master a little moral advice.
The young rake cuts him short with the fierce ques
tion, ' Am I your slave or are you mine ? ' and poor
Lydus has no choice but to hold his tongue, and do
what he is bid ^. In modern times we regard self-
control as one of the chief fruits of education,
Seneca assures us that at Rome it was quite other
wise ; the rich and refined were the most passionate.
The reason he gives is that they had been brought up
by slave-nurses and pedagogues who lived in constant
dread of the scourge, and found their interest in
ministering to the depravity of their young charges *-
The character and status of the Doctor improved
> Bacch. i. 2, " De Ira, ii. 21.
C 2

20 THE CHURCH'S TASK
greatly as education became more of a public concern.
The Orbilius of Horace was an old soldier, and many
other schoolmasters at that time were men who had
failed in other vocations. The best teachers of the
first century were almost invariably freedmen, and
generally Greeks ; though there were exceptions, for-
instance the elder Statius, a Roman of good standing
and high character, who kept a flourishing boarding-
school at Capua. From the second century the
private school tends to disappear, and the masters
are selected and paid by the town council, in some
cases by the Emperor himself. There was thus a
great change for the better in the conditions of the
profession. The teachers in the high school of
Bordeaux in the time of Ausonius held a good social
position, married rich wives, and were often promoted
to high rank in the civil service. Yet about the same
y time Augustine, who was at first a private teacher,
complains that his pupils cheated him out of his
fees ; and Libanius of Antioch, who was paid, or ought
to have been paid, by the town council, tells us that,
when he sees the baker go past his lodging, he wants
to run after the man, because he is starving, but dare
not, because he owes him money. Town councillors
were often irregular paymasters, for the best of
reasons, because they were ruined themselves.
There were, no doubt, grammarians and rhetoricians
who took a low view of their duties, but this was not

EDUCATION 21
generally the case, Quintilian was an excellent man.
He adopts as his own the definition of old Cato, that
the orator is vir bonus dicendi peritus, ' a good man
who knows how to speak ' ; and goes on to insist that
he ought to be not only virtuous but religious. He
was deeply interested in the morals of the young
people committed to his charge, and doubtless there
were many like him. As a rule, we may think, the
teacher did his best to shape the character of his
pupils. Something he could accomplish no doubt,
but he must have found it hard to counteract the
influence of the nurse, the pedagogue, and the parents.
The last, Quintilian tells us, was often the worst of
the three. He paints the evil example often set to
the children at home in very dark colours, though
he is no satirist^. We may remember that he lived
in the first century, which was an exceptional time,
and that he is speaking of the Roman nobility.
When we come to think over the history of the
ancient schools, we begin to perceive that they suc
ceeded admirably in one great object, and failed
lamentably in two others. They drew together in
most powerful bands the heterogeneous elements of
which the Empire was composed. Even in this
' 'Verba, ne Alexandrinis quidem permittenda deliciis, risu et
osculo excipimus : nee mirum : nos docuimus, ex nobis audierunt.
Nostras arnicas, nostros concubinos vident : omne convivium obscenis
canticis strepit : pudenda dictu spectantur,' i. 2.

22 THE CHURCH'S TASK
respect their work was not quite accompHshed ; East
and West never became really one. But in the West
the schools created and established that sentiment
which later writers call Romania'^, a proud and
elevated patriotism, uniting Briton, Gaul, Spaniard,
and African by a tie as strong as that of blood,
and teaching them to look upon the Eternal City
no longer as their tyrant but as the great mother,
whose glories were their own. But they aimed at
producing good officials ; and the officials whom they
sent forth in crowds from their class-rooms were
corrupt, insolent, servile, and incapable. They aimed
also at producing poets, historians, orators, and men
of letters. Yet the more they perfected their system,
the more did art and learning decline. Seeck ^ finds
a reason for this rapid decay of intelligence in what
he calls 'the Extermination of the Best,' and con
sequent survival of the unfittest. There is something
in this explanation. Proscriptions, wars, conspiracies,
plagues, natural and political catastrophes swept away
great numbers of brave and capable men. But there
were more serious causes at work. The ideas that
governed the schools were really extinct ; their political
no less than their religious creed was a thing of the
^ The sentiment is finely expressed by the pagan Claudian, de cons.
Stil. iii. 150-159; and by the Christian Orosius, Hist. v. 2. The
word Romania appears for the first time in Orosius, iii. 20 and vii.
43 ; in the latter passage he says that it is a vulgar phrase.
^ Untergang der antiken Welt.

EDUCATION 23
past; Camillus and Cincinnatus were not examples
from whom the youth of Lyons or Thagaste could
drink inspiration, and the gods of the Capitol were
not their gods. And there were no new ideas to
take the place of the old. Science made no progress,
and literature and art had been brought to a pitch
of perfection which could not be surpassed without
striking out an entirely new line. It is clear enough
to us, as we look back, where the land of promise lay.
The classic writers addressed themselves to their
noble patrons, who knew nature only as they saw it
from the windows of a palace, in carefully trimmed
parks and pleasaunces, and looked down with infinite
scorn upon the simple ways of obscure men and
women. What was wanted was a literature of the
people. There were plenty of men who might have
written it ; but they were condemned to silence, partly
by the tyranny of this windy vapouring rhetoric,
partly by the grinding oppression of the bureaucratic
government. The first ray of hope is to be found
in the Christian Church, which thought more of
nature than of convention, more of the little than
of the great, which in art substituted the beauty of
colour for the beauty of line and form^, in prose
' The reader should consult Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle
Ages, Eng. trans., vol. i. p. 82 sqq. Gregorovius calls mosaic
'essentially the art of decadence — the gilt flower of barbarism.'
I would not venture to express an opinion on a disputed point of

24 THE CHURCH'S TASK
the simple pathos of the martyrology for the tinsel
pomp of the panegyric, and in poetry the hymn for
the ode. There was plenty of ability, if it could have
been guided in the right direction and provided with
a career. The Hymn of the Soul in the apocryphal
Acts of Thomas, written by some nameless Syrian
Gnostic, is marked by an imaginative power and
freshness which we should seek in vain in any classical
piece of the second or third centuries.
But for the ecclesiastical historian the most in
teresting matter is the relation of the schools to the
Church. It will have been seen that rhetoric was not a good
training for political wisdom, for practical capacity,
or for moral seriousness and insight; and further,
that it was deeply attached to that glorious past,
which formed the whetstone for its voluble tongue.
We shall not therefore be surprised to find rhetors,
aesthetics. But it may be said with confidence that colour is more
democratic than sculpture ; it appeals more to the emotions and less
to the intelligence. Further Gregorovius makes the important
remark that while the inside of the Constantinian churches was richly
adorned, the outside was left bald and unattractive. Decoration
superseded architecture. Whereas with the heathen temple the case
was just the reverse. These changes are highly significant. The
church was not a public monument, but a shelter for devout spirits ;
you must enter into the shrine to see its beauty, and the life therein
fostered is that of contemplation and adoration, not that of civic
ambition. The art was doubtless inferior, because it was nascent.
But it was inspired by a new motive. Romanticism, and this
eventually gav^ birth to new forms of beauty in every department.

EDUCATION 25
men like Fronto, Aristides, Hierocles, among the
bitterest enemies of the new faith, which, as we may
see from Clement of Alexandria, heartily reciprocated
their dislike.
This, however, is a small point. Far more important
is the effect of rhetorical training upon the Church
from within. Let us remember that every Christian
child, who received any education at all, passed
through these schools ^ that the system was purely
secular, and down to the fall of the Empire, long
after the accession of Constantine, was administered
by teachers who were very commonly pagan, and
^ TertuUian, de Idol, x, strenuously insisted that no Christian
could be a schoolmaster ; but even he did not go so far as to main
tain that Christian children ought not to attend school. The Canons
of Hippolytus, which probably belong to the same age as Tertullian,
allow a converted grammarian to exercise his function on condition
that, before lessons begin, he shall say aloud 'Non est deus nisi
pater et filius et spiritus sanctus.' He is recommended also to use
his influence as teacher for religious purposes ; it is a merit if he can
draw his pupils over to the true faith (ed. Achelis, p. 81). Julian's
edict excluding Christians from the right to teach was resented
naturally as a gross injustice, but its main effect was to deprive
a number of good men of the means of getting a livelihood.
St. Augustine in his Confessions criticizes the methods of the schools
with severity, but does not attempt to show how they might be re
modelled. Boissier attributes to Cassiodorus a desire to effect this
change, but Cassiodorus (in the de inst. div. litt!) was thinking not
of schoolboys but of monks, and what he desired to create was a
theological college, like those of Alexandria and Nisibis. The
Church appears to have been content that grammar and rhetoric
schools should be entirely secular down to the fall of the Empire.

26 THE CHURCH'S TASK
that many of the most eminent Christian writers —
Cyprian, Basil, Augustine^ are instances — began life
as teachers of rhetoric. It would be amazing if their
style were not deeply coloured by reminiscences of
the school.
But style is merely the form of the thought. Did
the rhetorical influence pierce any deeper, and affect
the substance also? I am afraid it must be_ allowed
that it did. One very striking feature in Origen is
his dread of the homeliness of Scripture. He tried
hard to shake off the faults of the school, but still
could never master the feeling that it was unworthy
of a sacred book to speak of cakes of bread, or wells
of water, or to tell such a story as that of Ruth^.
^ Tertullian also, a most influential writer, who reflected and
strengthened, and to some extent created, the peculiar spirit of Latin
theology, was steeped in rhetoric, though we do not know that he
ever gave lessons in the art.
"^ Origen, de Princ. iv; Aug. Conf. iii.. 5, v. 14, vi. 4sq. The
allegorism of Origen is a complicated subject, which should be
treated with great tenderness and discrimination, (i) It applied to
Scripture the golden rule that ' the letter killeth but the spirit giveth
life,' and in this respect was highly admirable. (2) Its other cardinal
axiom was that Scripture can contain nothing unworthy of God.
Among things unworthy Origen reckoned (a) triviality ; {b) scientific
error ; (f) immorality. As to (a) he was undoubtedly misled by the
vicious rhetorical taste of his age. The other two points were
strongly pressed by Gnostics and by the philosophers, and Origen
was far too candid and courageous to shirk them. He did not deny
that there were statements in the Old Testament which no educated
man could accept, but, having no sense of historical development,
he was driven to maintain that, though false in the letter, they were

EDUCATION 27
Vitiated taste was the root from which sprang the
flower of allegorism. Another result of rhetoric is
to be found in the neglect of History. The Roman
professor could not read Livy without seeing that
there had been changes ; but he never rose to the
conception of orderly development, of a causal link
between past and present. Change was merely a
shifting to and fro, and the order of the past might
at any time recur, when fortune's wheel had completed
its revolution. It was this defect which rendered
the Church unable to find an effectual answer to the
Gnostic and pagan attack upon the morality of the
Old Testament ; and this weakness was another cause
of allegorism. But further, it was this same inability
to grasp the idea of progress which led to the whole
sale importation of ideas and practices from the Old
Testament into the Christian Churchy And may
true as conveying ' mysteries,' that is to say, in general, as wrapping
up Christian dogmas. It is precisely here that he has not been
treated with the tenderness that he deserves. The later Church
dropped almost entirely his two great canons, and was too un
educated to feel his intellectual difficulties, but caught eagerly at the
erroneous method by which he extracted Christian teaching from the
least significant phrases of the Hebrew Scriptures.
* At two points in particular this contamination occurred, (i) In
regard to the hierarchy. Even at the end of the first century the
Christian presbyter is compared by Clement of Rome to the Jewish
iepeCs. The idea struck deep root in the course of the third century.
(2) In the adoption of the belief that certain sins were mortal.
Hence arose Montanism, Novatianism, and Donatianism. The best
teachers always insisted that no transgression was beyond the reach

28 THE CHURCH'S TASK
it not be added that a sound historical training would
have helped to stem the extraordinary tide of credulity
and superstition which marks the fourth century ?
Consider again that, the Bible not being taught in
the ancient schools, the mass of the laity knew no
more of Scripture than what they gathered from the
lessons, the sermon, and the catechising. Probably
even the ordinary priest was not much better in
structed. Hence the authority of the clergy must
have been greatly increased, while at the same time
they were less fitted to wield it.
Lastly we may observe that the schools imparted
nothing but the merest smattering of philosophy, and
the results of this superficial veneer are clearly to be
discerned in the age of the Four Great Councils.
What the fathers then defined was undoubtedly the
faith of the Church, The thing was the Christian
belief, but the voice was that of the schools. Men
found themselves driven to use words borrowed from
Plato and the Stoics, Essence, Hypostasis, Substance
and others, which they themselves did not thoroughly
understand; and hence arose naturally the most
disastrous strife and confusion. The Greek Church,
which was the better educated, was amply justified
in its dislike of all philosophic terms ^
of God's mercy, or outside of the Church's commission to forgive.
But the behef in death-sins was the cause of persecution, which
began at once with the ascendancy of the Church.
' ' The fact is that the Christian conception of religion was radically

EDUCATION 29
But, upon the whole, what we ought to notice is
the energy of the Church's reaction against rhetoric
and the rhetorical frame of mind, against garrulous
sciolism, decadent taste, grandiosity, lax sentimen
talism, and all the moral evils which attend these
vices of the school. I have noticed briefly how the
humility and simplicity of Christianity led eventually
to the formation of new canons of taste, and prepared
the way for the great popular literatures of modern
times. Much more might be said upon this point, if time
allowed. Let me offier just a few remarks which may
be found suggestive.
different from that out of which the philosophical notion of oicria
emerged ; and when this came into contact with Christianity a con
siderable disturbance was likely' (article by the Dean of Christ
Church in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. iii. p. 30). The
meaning of the word Essence, again, differed in every school,
and, according to most Platonists, God had no Essence, because
He is above it. Again, the Latins avoided the word Essence and
used in its place Hypostasis (or its Latin equivalent Substantia),
but Hypostasis was the word selected by the Greeks to denote
the Persons. Hence, while one-half of the Empire spoke of Three
Hypostases, the other half spoke of One only. The words were
in fact little more than counters, used to express whatever ideas
theologians stamped upon them ; the ideas were Christian, the words
were heathen. Yet it should be observed that the Latin usage was
in a sense scriptural. Tertullian took the word Persona from his
old Latin Bible, from Prov. viii. 30 ' cottidie oblectabar in persona
ipsius,' and Lam. iv. 20 'spiritus personae eius Christus dominus'
(see adv. Prax. 6, 14; Harnack, Dogmeng. ii. 288, ed. 1887).
Substantia he probably found in Heb. i. 3, but the author of this
Epistle was not without a tincture of philosophy.

30 THE CHURCH'S TASK
Quintilian ascribes to rhetoric three main functions,
which he calls the Laudatory, the Deliberative, and
the Judicial. To the Laudatory belong those fulsome
panegyrics of which we have so many examples.
They were highly paid ; the ablest men spent their
best efforts on their elaboration ; and they are
monuments of depraved taste and inveracity. The
Deliberative taught men to speak in the Senate or
the Consistory; the Judicial shaped the pleadings
of the barrister in courts of justice.
Now for the Christian the Laudatory found its
proper field in worship. Some Christians wrote
panegyrics under the Christian Emperors, and their
effusions are quite as deplorable as those of the pagan
orators. But every member of the Church was taught
that glory, honour, and adoration belong of right to
Almighty God, and the lesson was most powerfully
driven home by the stately liturgies and the impres
sive ritual which enhanced their effect. If the worship
of the Constantinian Church was too magnificent, as
Jerome thought ^, at any rate the pomp and splendour
had a worthy motive ; what men were called upon to
adore was a grandeur not of earth but of heaven.
Deliberative eloquence found its nearest counterpart
in the sermon or homily. The name implies a con
versational style, and the earliest sermons, as we know
from the so-called Second Clement and Origen, were
' Epp. 52. 130.

EDUCATION 31
grave, didactic, and quiet. It was looked upon as
a high misdemeanour in Paul of Samosata that he
practised the tricks of the rhetorician in the pulpit,
and not before the fourth century do we find preachers
who deliberately aimed at oratorical effect.
For the Judicial style we must go to the Church
court, as it is described in the Didascalia ^ There,
every Monday, the bishop sat to hear and decide all
disputes and recriminations amongst the brethren.
Speech, in such a gathering would be brief, unadorned
and to the point, and its object would be not victory
but justice.
The mind dwells with pleasure on this contrast
between the false eloquence and the true. But after
all it must be confessed that the old heathen taint
was never thoroughly purged, till the deluge of the
Barbarian invasion washed away all but the bare
foundations of Roman art. Some of the results even
survived the waters of that cataclysm.
* In chap. xi. See Mrs. Gibson's English translation, pp. 59 sqq. ;
or the German translation of Achelis and Flemming, pp. 59 sqq.

II
RELIGION UNDER THE EMPIRE
Under the Empire Education, we may say, is the
One, Religion is the Many. In the first we find
a uniform system, which extends unchanged from
farthest East to farthest West. In the second we
find a sea of confusion. There are gods of Rome,
of Greece, of Syria, of Persia, of Egypt, of the
Carthaginians and Africans, of Celts, of Teutons, and
many other barbarous races; and all these various
deities cross and intermingle. Further, we have the
religion of the philosopher, and the religion of plain
men and women. The very idea of religion differs
from our own. Generally speaking these heathen
cults had no Bible, no prayer-book, except a few
special prayers and hymns, no creed, no catechism,
no church-going, no sermon, no discipline. Even the
priest in our sense of the word hardly existed. If we
except the Druids in the West, the servants of Isis
and Cybele in the East, the priest was merely one
who offered the prescribed sacrifices, and presided at
certain festivals. He was not pastor, or instructor,
or example. It was not at all necessary that he
should be a religious man or take his functions at

RELIGION 33
all seriously. The same man became a priest, just
as he became a police-magistrate, as a natural step
in his official promotion. One of the rocks on which
Julian the Apostate went to wreck was that he tried
to turn the heathen priest into the likeness of a
Christian clergyman, and make him, among other new
duties, train the temple choir ^ The priests greatly
resented this interference with their liberties.
The divinities of old Greece were divided into two
classes, the Olympian and the Chthonian, the heavenly
and the earthly, the gods and the demons, the good
gods and the hard. They represent possibly the two
governing ideas of nature worship, nature in her
good humour and nature in her wrath, summer and
winter, sunshine and storm, health and disease, calm
and earthquake. There has been much speculation
as to the origin of the religious idea, but this dualism
is what we actually find in historical Greece ^- From
' Ep. 56.
* No one theory will account for the extraordinary variety of beliefs
and practices which are found in the old heathen cults. Those who
are old enough to remember the beginnings of comparative philo
logy in England will remember also how fascinating was the solar
myth as set forth by Professor Max Miiller. Since that time
anthropology, folklore, and the study of the monuments, especially
those of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria, have familiarized us with
a number of other hypotheses. It seems clear that the notions of
God, of immortality, of duty had many sources or were strengthened
by influences from many different quarters. The great question is
whether these influences can be arranged in chronological and causal
BIGG D

34 THE CHURCH'S TASK
the Olympian deities comes all that is good — wisdom,
happiness, prosperity, unity, beauty, song. From the
hard gods all that is evil — sickness of body and mind,
crime, remorse, punishment, lamentation, mourning,
and woe. One of the chief of the religious emotions,
it will be observed, repentance, belonged exclusively
to the sphere of the demons. Zeus and Apollo knew
nothing about the broken and contrite heart. Zeus
was honoured when all went well; but in times of
trouble or disaster the Greek turned not to the god,
but to the devil.
Greek nature worship lent itself easily to art and
philosophy; it is intellectual but only feebly moral.
Latin theology, though it must have sprung from
the same roots in the forgotten past, is, as we know
it, entirely different both in character and in tendency.
The gods represent not the forces of nature, but the
order, or whether from the very first what we should call higher
beliefs coexisted with those which we should call lower. In the
latter case religious development must appear as a process not so
much of growth as of purification. For instance, M. Fustel de
Coulanges, in La Citi antique, connects Vesta, the Manes, and the
Lares with ancestor worship, and traces this back to ages preceding
the division between Greeks and Romans. But the names of
Jupiter and Zeus go back equally far into prehistoric antiquity.
They are connected with the word 'day'; both involve the idea
that heaven is God or a symbol of God, while Jupiter adds further
the belief that God is Father. Max Miiller is still regarded as right
upon this point. Fustel de Coulanges makes too much of ancestor
worship, and there is much doubt as to what ancestor worship really
meant. See note 2 on p. 99, below.

RELIGION 35
laws and institutions of social life. The family in
heaven was a counterpart of the family on earth, as
it might be seen in the palace of any of the Roman
nobility. Jupiter and Juno were the lord and lady;
and beneath them was an army of officers, attendants,
ministers of every rank and degree. Some managed
the service of the house; Vesta kept the hearth,
the Penates watched over the store-closet, Janus
guarded the door, under him again were three deputy
porters, of whom Cardua attended to the hinges,
Forculus to the leaves, Limentinus to the threshold.
Others worked the farm. Saturn governed the
sowing, Pales the cattle, Stercutius the foldyard,
Epona the stable. Every place, every thing, had
some one to look after it ; and, as in a large household
there are all kinds of characters, so some of the
heavenly ministers were tricksy, or spiteful, or malig
nant. There were gods of fever and of mephitis, and
there were plenty of wicked runaway slaves, vampires
and hobgoblins.
The old Roman faith was remarkably simple. There
was hardly any mythology, and for a long time the
gods had no statues. It was also strongly moral.
The gods gave every man his duty, and expected him
to perform it. Filial obedience, chastity, respect for
women, decency and gravity, good faith in public
and in private, respect for law, sobriety, diligence,
patriotism, all these were good old Roman virtues,
D 2

36 THE CHURCH'S TASK
commanded by the gods and enforced by the Censors,
Among the ancient Gentile cults there is none so
respectable, and none so prosaic, as the Roman, It
is the religion of men who are too busy to have any
time for sentiment.
When Rome became the mistress of the world there
was no doubt a change. The gods of Greece found
their way into the city along with Greek culture and
Greek vices. But the mythology never made itself
at home in the West. To a certain extent Latin
poets drew material for their verses from these vile
legends, and any one who chose to corrupt himself
with them could do so. But Virgil and Horace used
them with great reserve, educated men never treated
them seriously, soldiers looked for victory to the gods
of the standards \ and rustics still committed the fruit
of their labours to Pales and the homely deities of the
fields. Most people seem hardly to have looked
beyond the household fetishes, the little Lares and
Penates. The old Roman religion still lived on and
' The pet deities of the Roman soldier appear to have been
generally of a harmless beneficent type, the natural protectors of
peasants who, though inured to camps, have not forgotten the fields
^here they were bred. In the West the legionaries were much
attached to the Matres, or Suleviae, who are represented on the
monuments as three seated female figures, and were apparently
regarded as givers of the harvest. They were cottage divinities,
quite unknown to the upper classes, perhaps Celtic. See the article
by Mr. F. Haverfield in Archaeologia Aeliana, vol. xv, new series,
p. 324-

RELIGION zj
found its natural consummation in Caesar worship^.
The Emperor while he lived had been the ruler and
saviour of the world ; what more natural than that he
should continue after death to watch over the destinies
of his people ?
But the consolidation of the Empire had deeper
consequences than this. Great political revolutions
always strike deep, and this was the greatest that ever
happened. The whole world woke up to find itself
one family. The ruler was a despot, it is true ; still,
he was only one despot instead of many, and hence
forth the meanest subject of the Empire might, and
often did, climb through the school, the army, the bar,
the senate, to high position in the state, even to the
throne itself New hopes dawned for the provincial,
" The ancient state in Greece and Rome, as truly as in Palestine,
was theocratic; the oldest institutions and laws flowed not from
reason or expedience, to which indeed they were often strongly
opposed, but from the religious behef (Fustel de Coulanges, La Citi
antique). Caesar worship was an attempt to perpetuate the theocracy,
under the changed conditions of society. ' Praesens divus habebitur
Augustus,' says Horace, Carm. iii. 5. 2. The idea was heathen
because Caesar was regarded as an object of worship, at any rate
after his death. The Christian Emperors made a very similar claim,
though this specially heathen feature was dropped. See the military
oath in Vegetius, ii. 5 : The soldier swore ' per Deum et Christum et
Sanctum Spiritum et per maiestatem imperatoris ' ; because he owed
obedience to Augustus ' tamquam praesenti et corporali deo.' Con
stantine and his successors claimed to be the vicegerents of God, in
the same sense as King David or King Solomon. In the Eastern
Church the claim is still recognized (see the note at the end of the
last Lecture).

38 THE CHURCH'S TASK
and even for the slave. The full significance of the
change began to reveal itself distinctly with the acces
sion of Vespasian, who owed his elevation to the
provinces, and to the eastern provinces.
All over the Empire expectation was aroused, and
views were broadened. There was a new sense of
human dignity, a higher estimation, we may say, of the
human soul, with which, according to the profound
observation of Pascal, is always united a keener sense
of its misery. It is in this way that we must account
for that quickening of the religious instinct which
begins in the first century, and becomes very manifest
in the second. We can discern it in many quarters,
in the marriage legislation of Augustus, in the Carmen
Seculare of Horace, in Virgil's lines on the battle of
Actium, in the epitaphs, in those clubs or guilds
which flourished in great numbers and all had a
religious character, in the vogue of the Stoic philo
sophy, in attempts to ameliorate the condition of the
slave, in the foundation of orphanages ^ A new idea
of sanctity emerges in Apollonius of Tyana, the
Pythagorean ascetic and worker of miracles ; in the
Boeotian shepherd, Agathion, who spent his life in
destroying wild beasts and would touch no food that
had been prepared by a woman ; in the old Greek
priestess described by Dion Chrysostom. The majesty
^ Orphanages in a loose sense; they are generally called the
' alimentary institutions,' See Lecture IV.

RELIGION 39
of Purity has revealed itself in that lawless heathen
world, like Milton's lady amid the rout of Comus.
Behind her comes Repentance, and a strange new
craving for atonement and expiation. We have seen
what was made of these emotions by the old religions.
The Greek attributed them to the Demons, the Latin
ignored them altogether. The new men required
a new God who could explain them and guide them to
some profitable end, a God of the conscience, bene
ficent at once and dreadful. Hence the popularity
of the Oriental mysteries, of the Egyptian Isis and of
the Persian Mithra \
Isis worship had gained a footing in Rome in the
days of Sulla, but for a long time it was regarded with
great disfavour. It sprang out of that Egyptian beast
worship which seemed so hateful to Virgil, and, like
many other forms of emotional religion, it lent itself
very easily to moral depravity. On one occasion the
Emperor Tiberius, provoked by a vile intrigue which
had been planned and perpetrated in the very shrine,
pulled down the temple of Isis, crucified her priests,
and threw her statue into the Tiber. But the Flavians,
* Fustel de Coulanges, La Citi antique, p. 328, 'Les cultes
orientaux, qui, k partir du sixifeme sifecle, envahirent la Grfece et
ritalie, furent accueillis avec empressement par la plfebe; c'^taient
des cultes qui, comme le bouddhisme, ne faisaient acception ni de
castes ni de peuples. . . . Ce furent Ik les dieux de la democratie.'
The remark is just and instructive, but it was the Empire that made
these Oriental ideas powerfully operative.

40 THE CHURCH'S TASK
whose cause had been greatly helped by her devotees,
treated her with especial favour. Juvenal testifies to
her fascination for the ladies of Rome, and, by the
end of the second century, Isis had found a home in
every part of the Empire. Even in Britain, from the
Roman Wall to the Land's End, her name was
adored ; a ring bearing the figure of her companion,
the dog-headed Anubis, has been found in a grave in .
the Isle of Man. Like wildfire, far more rapidly than
Christianity, this ambiguous cult overran the world.
We shall see the reason, if we consider the best-known
instance of conversion, that of Apuleius, towards the
end of the second century.
Apuleius^ describes for us, first of all, the mode
in which the goddess appealed to the people. On
stated days there was a great procession through the
streets of the town. The column was headed by
a band of dancing masqueraders, like the old rout of
the Lord of Misrule, or such as you might see at
a modern carnival. Then came the catechumens, the
new recruits of the Sospitatrix Dea, dressed in their
best and crowned with flowers. Then came a company
^ See for Isis worship Apuleius, Metam. xi ; Plutarch, De Lside et
Osiride ; an elaborate article on the goddess will be found in Roscher.
I have not yet seen the new translation of the Book of the Dead ;
there is a review of it by Mr. G. St. Clair in the Journal of Theo
logical Studies for Oct., 1904. The Hibbert Lectures for 1879, on
The Origin and Growth of Religion as LUustrated by the Religion of
Ancient Egypt, by P. le Page Renouf, will be found very useful.

RELIGION 41
of men and women bearing flaring torches of wax;
then the choir, singing hymns to the sound of the
flute ; then the initiated, or, as Apuleius calls them,
' the religious,' tonsured men and veiled women, of
all ranks and ages, clothed in pure white linen, and
bearing in their hands the mystic sistrum, a kind
of rattle fashioned in silver or gold. Finally the rear
was closed by the clergy, also draped in white linen,
carrying the sacred emblems. It is such a picture
as Lord Leighton delighted to portray. The pomp
swept into the temple, where the grammateus, chief of
the pastophori or priests, the Isiac bishop, mounted
the pulpit, and recited from a book a long bidding
prayer in Greek, which was the sacred language of
Isis worship as it was for two centuries that of the
Church of Rome, for the Emperor, the senate, the
knights, the people of Rome, for all travellers by land
or by sea, and for all the provinces. When he finished
the congregation responded with a loud cry, a sort
of Amen, knelt down one by one to kiss the feet of
the goddess, and so dispersed.
Here we discern an organized body of worshippers,
an organized body of clergy, a prayer-book, a liturgy,
a tonsure, a surplice, the use of a sacred language, an
elaborate and impressive ceremonial in many respects
very similar to that of the mediaeval church. Even
the phraseology exhibits curious analogies. Apuleius
speaks of 'the religious,' the worshippers of Isis are

42 THE CHURCH'S TASK
her ' soldiers ^' her service is a militia, the outside
world will be that of the ' civilians ' or pagani ; again,
there is a sacramentum ^, and the initiated are said
to be ' regenerate.' There are other singular facts,
Isis is figured as a woman bearing the divine child
Horus upon her knees, and claims the titles of Queen
of Heaven, Queen of the Sea, Did Isis borrow from
the Church or the Church from Isis ? Or are some
at least of these resemblances accidental ? The same
question will recur when we come to examine the
worship of Mithra, For the present we may put it

' The term ' brethren ' was also used ; see Deissmann, Bibel-
studien, pp. 82, 209.
" Sacramentum means especially, ' the soldier's oath of allegiance,'
and its use in Latin theology as in Isis worship follows immediately
from the conception of the believer as a soldier (see Cumont, i.
318). Paganus means 'a civilian,' as opposed to 'a soldier ' (Phny,
Epp. X. 18 ' et milites et pagani ' : cp. Juv. xvi. 33 ; Tac. Hist. i. 53 ;
iii. 24, 43, 77 ; Tert. de Cor. 11), and is used in a general sense like
our 'layman' (Pliny, Epp. vii. 25 'Sunt enim, ut in castris, sic etiam
in literis nostris, plures cultu pagano'). In this sense the word is
found, perhaps for the first time, in Persius, prol. 6 'ipse semipaganus
ad sacra vatum carmen affero nostrum.' The first instance of the
use of ' pagan,' as opposed to ' Christian,' is to be found possibly in
an inscription of the second century given by Lanciani, Pagan and
Christian Rome, p. 15 'quod inter fedeles fidelis fuit, inter alienos
pagana fuit,' which, from the use of the word _fidelis, is most probably
Christian, not Isiac or Mithraic. For the old explanation (which is
still widely held) that ' pagan ' means ' villager,' see Godefroi's note
in Cod. Theod. vol. vi. pp. 274 sqq. ; it is rejected by Harnack, Die
Mission, pp. 297 sqq., and by Zahn, Neue kirch. Zeitschrift, 1899,
pp. 28 sqq.

RELIGION 43
upon one side, only observing that Apuleius was
writing somewhat late in the second century.
The chief moment in the worship of Isis was the
rite of initiation, which Apuleius describes in language
of guarded obscurity. There was a baptism, a ten
days' fast, and a course of instruction given by a priest.
There were persons who acted as godfathers to the
neophyte. Finally, there was a service of reception
at the temple in the evening. Crowds assembled to
welcome the new brother ; every one brought him
a gift. Then, clad in a coarse linen garment, and
attended only by his sponsors, he was led by the
priest into the dark penetralia of the shrine, ' What
I saw there,' says Apuleius, ' I would tell if it were
lawful. ... I trode the confines of death, and the
threshold of Proserpine ; I was swept round all
the elements, and returned ; I beheld the sun at
midnight shining with purest radiance. Gods of heaven
and gods of hell I saw face to face and adored in
presence,' In that dark cell, illuminated by flashlights
and filled with surging stupefying vapours, dizzy as
he was with protracted fasting, and excited by wild
anticipations, he saw Osiris ruling among the dead,
and heard the magic formula by which the awful judge
is appeased. The ancients were past masters in the
scenic art, and could have taught our modern thauma-
turgists a good deal that has happily been forgotten.
Now what did it all mean ? What was the secret,

44 THE CHURCH'S TASK
the inner significance, of this new and popular devotion?
We can answer this question with tolerable clearness
and certainty. Isis adapted herself to every degree
of intelligence. Most of her devotees would know
little beyond the wild legend, which told how the god
Osiris was cruelly slain by his wicked brother Typhon ;
how Isis, his faithful wife, wandered over the marshes
of the Delta in her papyrus boat, gathering up the
fragments of his corpse ; how Horus would have
avenged his father Osiris and slain his murderer,
but that Isis intervened, cut Typhon's bonds and let
him go free ; how Osiris became lord of the world
beyond the grave, and is strong to deliver the souls
of them that believe from the evil spirits that lie in
wait to devour them \ It is a legend, and it is wild ;
^ ' The deceased passes through the chine of Apepi the Serpent,
at the risk of being devoured ; he meets with crocodiles, and through
them, strangely, may be robbed of his Words of Power. There are
Merta goddesses, and the Apshait, and the Eater of the Ass, all
requiring to be kept back. At a place called Sutenhenen a great
slaughter is perpetrated, and at another place there is a divine block
of execution. The unwary soul may be imprisoned, or be taken in
the net of the catchers of fish ' (Mr. St. Clair in /. T. S. for Oct.
1904, p. 57). The Ass, I suppose, is that upon which Typhon fled
(see Plutarch, de Ls. et Os. 31). Apuleius tells us that initiation was
very costly, but it may well have been thought worth the money.
In an inscription, CLL. vi. 3. 20616, we read, 'May Osiris give thee
the cold water.' For the explanation of this prayer see Le Page
Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, p. 141. 'The most usual representation
of this is the picture in which the goddess Nut pours out the water
of hfe to the deceased from the interior of a sycamore tree. In

RELIGION 45
yet what elements of beauty does it enclose ! Here
we have a divine humanity, a God who suffers a cruel
death out of love for man, and a divinely human wife
and mother, Isis the compassionate and merciful, who
loves her husband with a love that is stronger than
death, yet sets his murderer free, bidding him go and
sin no more. Many a stricken spirit found comfort
in the adoration of Isis. ' She does not forget,' says
Plutarch, ' the sorrows which she endured, nor her
painful wanderings, but ordains most holy rites in
remembrance of her sufferings, for instruction in piety,
and for the comfort of men and women oppressed by
similar misfortunes \' Such were the lessons incul
cated by her priests, and enforced by washings, fastings,
penances, pilgrimages. May we not say that Isis
worship was a sort of savage counterpart of Christi
anity, deeply tainted, alas, by magic, better able to
rouse the feelings than to chasten them, yet, in its
wild Egyptian way, a gospel of suffering, a shadow
of better things to come ?
For the educated there was an inner doctrine.
Above the bestial gods of the Nile the hierophants
had constructed a system of Pantheism, just as the
a picture, published by M. Chabas, the deceased kneels before
Osiris, and receives from him the water of life from a vessel under
which is written anch ba, " that the soul may live." The picture is
taken from the mummy of a priest who lived twelve hundred years
before Christ.'
' Plutarch, de Ls. et Os. 27.

46 THE CHURCH'S TASK
Brahmins have evolved the Vedinta out of the repul
sive pantheon of Hinduism. The dog, the hawk, the
bull, the crocodile, are but symbols of that great
world-spirit from which all living things emerge, and
into which they sink, like waves rising and falling
on the ocean of eternity. On the statue of Isis at
Sais is said to have been an inscription running thus,
' I am all that is, or has been, or shall be, and no
mortal hath ever lifted my veiP.' This is not mono
theism — there was no monotheism in the Roman
world — ^it is Pantheism, Thus the two extremes of
religious belief, the personal and the impersonal con
ception of God, joined hands amicably before the
shrine of Isis.
She was too good-natured, this kindly goddess,
and dispensed her favours too liberally. Apuleius
was a disreputable creature before his initiation, and
quite as disreputable afterwards. The worship of
Mithra ^ was a far more serious thing. From monu
ments and inscriptions, which are extremely plentiful,
we know enough to be certain on this point. But,
though we possess its temples, its altars, its altar-
pictures, though we have considerable and minute
information as to its rites and organization, even
* Plutarch, de Is. et Os. 9.
* See Cumont, Textes et monuments figuris relatifs aux mysteres
de Mithra, Bruxelles, 1 896. It is needless to give any other reference.
Everything that is at present known will be found amassed, digested,
and ready for use in these two magnificent volumes.

RELIGION 47
M. Cumont cannot tell us exactly what it taught.
It came into the West a little later than Isis worship,
struck root towards the end of the Flavian period,
and by the middle of the third century had attained
such dimensions that it seemed not unlikely to become
the religion of the whole world. Fortunately it was
otherwise ordered. But to this strange Persian religion
we owe the name of Sunday and of the other days
of the week, and probably the date of Christmas
Day\ Mithra was a Persian deity, but in the original
scheme of Mazdeism he plays only a subordinate part.
* 'Sunday' is used by Justin, Apol. i. 67, but 'Saturday ' is found
in TibuUus, i. 3. 18 'Saturni aut sacram me tenuisse diem.' CIL. vi.
I. 13602 'dies lunae, Saturni ' ; 13782 'dies Mercurii'; vi. 4. 30112
' in die Saturno.' It was a very common practice to cast the horoscope
of a new-born child, and the planetary day-names were probably
brought into vogue in Rome by the Chaldaean astrologers, who were
in close alliance with Mithraism (see Cumont, i. 299). Mithiaism
was very strong among the legions on the German frontier and in
Britain, and it was probably by this road that the day-names found
entrance among the Teutons and Celts (see also the article on
Week in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities). December 25 was
the Natalis Invicti, and, when Christmas was instituted in the fourth
century and in the West, it has been thought that this day was
selected as that of the Nativity in order to drive out Mithra from one
of his strongholds (see Cumont, i. 342). Duchesne {Origines du
culte chritien, ed. 2, p. 250) thinks that, March 25 having been
adopted as the date of the Conception, the Birth was placed by
natural inference on December 25. But he does not absolutely reject
the view of M. Cumont. Indeed no affirmation is possible, as there is
nothing but hypothesis to build upon.

48 THE CHURCH'S TASK
From Iran he had travelled to Babylon, thence north
wards to the eastern borders of Asia Minor, where
he came into touch with Greek ideas. The well-known
figures of the god are partly Greek and partly Oriental.
Mithra is always represented as a young man, wearing
what was supposed to be the dress of a Persian ; and
the sculptured slabs, which formed what we may call
the reredos in all his temples, are thought to have
been copied about two centuries before Christ from
a group much in fashion with Hellenic statuaries;
representing Victory slaying a Bull. Thus Persia,
Chaldaea, Greece — the three nations whose hand is
to be traced in the post-exilic literature of Israel — all
helped to shape Mithraism. It is a much nobler
pedigree than that of Isis.
One highly remarkable feature in this new cult
is that its missionaries appear to have been mainly
soldiers. Men of war are always strongly susceptible
to religious influence ; and the standing army of Rome
was no exception to the rule. Auxiliary cohorts from
Commagene and Cappadocia, who had been nurtured
in the faith of Mithra, legionaries who had served
a term of years in the East and then returned to their
quarters on the Rhine or the Danube carrying the
new god with them, were the chief agents of the
propaganda. By this means Mithraism was dissemi
nated with surprising rapidity all along the northern
frontier of the Empire as far as the Roman Wall in

RELIGION 49
Britain, and all along the southern frontier on the borders
of the African desert, Syrian merchants also, who
carried on a considerable trade in Italy and Southern
Gaul, played a large part, and slaves who were
kidnapped or captured in large numbers in the East,
and then sold all over the West, a still larger.
M. Cumont in his elaborate volumes gives an instruc
tive map, showing the geographical distribution of
Mithraism. Wherever the legions were quartered or
trade was active, there the temples of the Persian
deity occur in great numbers. But it is noticeable
that in the East this Eastern god found little favour.
In Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the caves of
Mithra, though not unknown, are rare. These countries
had mysteries of their own, better suited to the national
temperament. In primitive times Mithra appears to have been
worshipped in natural grottoes among the rocks, and,
wherever his religion spread, this ancient usage was
kept in mind by the peculiar construction of his
temples, which were subterranean, and were always
called ' caves.' Above ground there would be a hall,
serving as vestibule or ante-chapel ; from this a flight
of steps led down to the dark sanctuary below. The
best instance of these ' caves ' is that which lies under
the church, or rather the two churches, of St, Clement
in Rome, It is a rectangular vault about thirty feet
long and nineteen feet wide. Along each of the side

50 THE CHURCH'S TASK
walls runs a sloping bench of stone, on which the
worshippers knelt, or rather crouched. In the shorter
wall at the further end is a little apse, once filled in
by a large bas-relief, which may have been made to
revolve on a pivot in the semicircular recess, so as to
exhibit first one of its faces and then the other. In
front of this stood three altars, and on the sides of the
chamber, above the benches, appear to have been
other sculptures. The place is very small, and cannot
have accommodated more than forty or fifty worship
pers at a time. It is now full of water from the
overflow of some underground spring. Running water
was necessary for the ritual, and in or near every cave
there was a fountain.
The original ornaments of the cave beneath St.
Clement's have almost wholly disappeared, but we
know pretty well what they must have been, an
immense number of Mithraic monuments having been
discovered elsewhere. Unfortunately it is not easy
to interpret them as clearly as we could wish. The
legend illustrated by these grotesque symbols is much
older than the Zend Avesta, in which Mazdeism
appears in the more modern shape imprinted upon
it by the Zoroastrian reformation. But, with the
help of M, Cumont and other scholars, we can form
a tolerable idea of the Mithra Saga as it was taught
in the Roman Empire.
In the old Iranian theology Mithra was by no

RELIGION 51
means the sovereign figure. The highest place be
longs to Zervan or Eternity, beneath whom stand
Ormuzd, the great Father of all that exists, and his
opposite Ahriman, the spirit of evil. Between these
two there is incessant war. Beneath these great
beings, again, appear the four divine elements, earth,
air, fire, and water, which no good Persian may pollute,
and a host of minor deities, good and bad, allies of
Ormuzd or of Ahriman in their eternal strife. Here
we meet, again, the same ideas as in the Isis legend —
the metaphysical, pantheistic thought of Eternity, the
hostility between the champions of good and evil,
legible traces of a primaeval nature worship. Some
food is provided for every rank of intelligence, from
the philosopher to the slave. Again, like Isis worship,
and unlike Christianity, Mithraism is not an exclusive
religion. Somewhere or another within this host of
deities ample room can be found for all the gods
of all the nations. Both Isis and Mithra added
something to the indigenous cults but abolished
nothing. Mithra was originally but one among the lower gods
of Persia; but his figure is of such force and vitality,
and has been animated by such profoundly religious
conceptions, that he pushes all the others into the
background, and remains the one sufficient object
of adoration. He is the mediator between god and
man, creator, regenerator, the giver of all light, the
E 2

52 THE CHURCH'S TASK
champion of justice, truth, and holiness, the comforter
of man in all trouble, and his strong helper against the
evil Ahriman, who by his grace can always be over
come. The title most commonly given to him is
Invictus, ' the unconquerable.'
A favourite theme for the sculptor is his nativity.
He is depicted as a child, wearing a Phrygian cap
and rising out of a rock ; in his right hand is a knife,
in his left a torch. Shepherds peep forth from a
hiding-place to see the wonder, or offer to the new
born god the first-fruits of their flocks.
A series of tableaux depicts his labours on behalf
of man. The subject of the great altar-piece is always
the slaying of the Bull, Mithra has cast the beast
upon its knees and strides upon its back, dragging its
head upwards with his left hand, while with the right
he plunges his knife into its right shoulder. Generally,
but not always, his face is turned away from the
wound which he inflicts. On either side stand his
two inseparable attendants, Cautes and Cautopates,
each holding a torch ; the one torch is erect, the other
reversed; they are the symbols of life and death.
The end of the bull's tail is formed by three ears of
wheat, the dog is lapping up the blood, and noxious
creatures, the snake and the scorpion, are endeavour
ing to suck the vital juices of the dying beast. The
averted face has been thought to signify the horror
and reluctance with which Mithra performs the

RELIGION 53
dreadful task imposed upon him from above, but the
attitude is not universal, and the interpretation may
be fanciful. The slaying of the Bull is emblematic
of the profound idea of life through death. The Bull
is the power of evil, which is twice slain, once at
creation, when its blood gives birth to all animal and
vegetable existence, once again at the end of the
world, when from the same blood flows new life for
the soul and for the body of man.
Other pictures show us Mithra feasting with the
Sun, his comrade and ally, after the accomplishment
of his labours on behalf of man. The two gods
recline upon a couch; before them is a three-legged
table, on which are four small round loaves marked
with a cross.
In all these sculptures Mithra is represented as
a beautiful youth clad in Persian attire. In none of
his effigies is there anything monstrous or super
natural. Great importance must have been attached
to this point ; the object was no doubt to inculcate
his perfect sympathy with the human race.
All this is very remarkable. In these strange
monuments we can discern, though dimly, the existence
of a lofty system of religious speculation, and of a not
inconsiderable acquaintance with the spiritual needs
of humanity. But, besides these reliefs, we possess
also a large number of brief inscriptions which, taken
in combination with such scanty notices as can be

54 THE CHURCH'S TASK
gleaned from ancient writers, set before us a detailed
picture of a highly organized Mithraic Church. We
read of seven grades of initiation ; the three lowest
did not admit to the mysteries, and correspond
roughly to the catechumenate ; the four highest are
those of the communicants. The highest class of all
was that of the Fathers, one of whom acted as
president of each of the inferior divisions. There
was a body of priests headed by a chief-priest, and
there were companies of ascetics and of virgins.
There was an authoritative moral teaching, which
is spoken of as ' the commandments.' Among the
rites of initiation was a baptism in water, a brand \
the use of honey and of anointing; and there was
a sort of Agape in commemoration of the banquet
of Mithra and the Sun, in which the worshippers
partook of bread, water, and wine. The resurrection
of the body was taught, and the faithful were not
cremated but interred.
The churches were small, but linked together in
federation by some recognized bond of union. They
consisted at first almost entirely of the poor, but
within the body the most perfect equality reigned;
the members are known as the Brethren, and we
meet with a slave who yet was a Father. The
' Some of the Carpocratian Gnostics marked themselves with
a brand upon the back of the right ear {Iren. i. 25. 6) ; they may
have borrowed this usage from Mithraism.

RELIGION 55
expenses of worship must have been considerable,
but they were provided by poor men with lavish
generosity ; for one Mithra temple at Rome, a free
man and a libertine join resources to provide an altar
of marble, and in the list of donations appears the
contribution of a slave. It is impossible in part of
a single lecture to give more than an outline of this
remarkable sect, but a rich profusion of details and
illustrations will be found in the stately quartos of
M. Cumont,
Some portion of what I have said about Isis wor
ship will be true also of Mithraism, The scenes
enacted in these gloomy caverns were probably not
unlike those witnessed by Apuleius in the inner shrine
of the Egyptian goddess. In both cases alike the
thaumaturgic art was no doubt freely employed to
quicken the dull susceptibility of the devotee. Not
one of the pagan mysteries was uncontaminated by
magic, and Maximus, who initiated Julian into the
rites of Mithra, was a charlatan of the most ac
complished kind. But Mithra appears to have given,
what Isis did not even attempt, a severe and regular
moral discipline. Further, this discipline was to issue
not in mere asceticism, though it inculcated abstinence
and purity, but in an active warfare, under the banner
of Mithra, against all the evil wrought by Ahriman
in this world. This is a trait that deserves our
warmest admiration.

56 THE CHURCH'S TASK
We noticed in the case of Isis worship certain
resemblances to Christianity, chiefly of a verbal kind.
In Mithraism they are more numerous, and are more
than verbal. We find a Feast of the Nativity, a
Sunday, an Adoration of Shepherds, a Baptism,
a Last Supper, an Ascension, an organization in many
remarkable points strangely parallel to that of the
Church. It is true that when we pick them out and
isolate them, as in a brief account we are compelled
to do, they appear more salient, more significant, than
they really are. It is true also that some of them
cannot be precisely dated. Cumont thinks that there
was a growing tendency to assimilate Mithra to
Jesus. Very probably he is right ; for there can be
little doubt that the later heathenism freely appro
priated the ideas, the practices, the language of the
Christian Church. Something is due to community
of origin ; the week of seven days named after the
planets comes from Chaldaea, and lustral washings
were common in the East. Good organization springs
out of good common sense, and will always follow the
same main lines. But here, again, we cannot withhold
our praise from the Mithraists. They have not only
the name of brotherhood, but the thing and the spirit.
What Seneca prated about and Epictetus preached,
they made a living reality.
We can see many good reasons for the great
popularity of Mithraism. It was brotherly and it was

RELIGION 57
pure ; it caused no scandals, hatched no conspiracies,
and interfered with nobody. It provided the slave
with a good lord in whose sight are neither bond nor
free, the soldier with a good captain, the Invictus
Comes. Philosophers saw in Mithra the ally of the
Sun, which to the Platonist was the symbol of the
sovereign idea of Good. There was an atone
ment for the sinner, spiritual comfort and temporal
help for the afflicted, a virtuous and strenuous ex
ample for the lovers of righteousness. But all this
was for men only. Women were shut out from
the cave of Mithra, but a shelter was provided for
them in the allied temples of the Great Mother,
Cybele, The effects of Mithraism were very great. It
paved the way for Gnosticism, and it fostered, and
partly blended with, the worship of the Sun, which
from the time of Alexander Severus becomes, we may
say, the official religion of the Empire ^ The figure
of the Sun-god is found on the earlier coins of Con
stantine, and what Julian the Apostate endeavoured
to restore was the worship, not of the Capitoline Jove,
but of the Sun. So greatly had heathenism changed
since the days of Augustus,
St. Augustine once met a Mithraic priest who said
to him Et ipse Pileatus Christianus est, ' The man
' Cumont, i. 287 sqq. See also L^on Homo, Essai sur le rlgne
de lEmpereur Aurilien, pp. 190 sqq.

58 THE CHURCH'S TASK
with the Phrygian cap is also a Christian ^.' Like
other Fathers St. Augustine looked upon Mithraism
as a base imitation of the Gospel, invented by the
devil for the purpose of deluding the unwary. It
was not an unnatural view for a Christian teacher in
those days. But time has vanquished the Uncon
quered Comrade, and we, to whom his caves, his
sacraments, his monuments are merely objects of
antiquarian curiosity, can afford to take a more liberal
view. The priest was partly right and partly wrong.
Mithraism was so like Christianity that it no doubt
helped to open the door for its advent ; at the same
time it was so unlike that there could be no peace
between the two. It rested upon a fable. There
never was a Mithra, and he never slew the Bull.
Some of the Mithraic prayers were probably not
unlike the bidding prayer of Isis ; but in the darkened
shrines of both divinities, when the god was implored
to come near and show himself, a very different kind
of petition was employed. We have what is thought
to be a Mithra liturgy ^. It is a mere vulgar incanta
tion; strings of divine titles are freely punctuated
with screams, inarticulate noises, and barbaric unmean-
^ In loh. evang. tract. 7, p. 1140, Migne.
"^ Eine Mithrasliturgie, Dieterich, Leipzig, 1903. M. Cumont
regards this curious document as magical rather than Mithraic, but
the two epithets are by no means mutually exclusive. The prayers
are of just the same character 4s the Gnostic prayer given in the next
Lecture.

RELIGION 59
ing words, and the object is clearly to work up the
mind of the devotee into a state of unreasoning
frenzy, like that of the priests of Baal on Mount
Carmel. Mithraism had no doubt its dark side, though it
was probably not so dark as it appeared to the early
Christians, who accused the god of demanding human
sacrifices ^. But it had also a bright side, which marks
it as the best and most elevating of all the forms of
heathenism known to have existed in the Empire.
^ Socrates, iii. 2. There was some ground for the suspicion.
In the Vita Commodi, 9, we read, ' Sacra Mithriaca homicidio vero
polluit, cum illic aliquid ad speciem timoris vel dici vel fingi soleat.'
Among the rites of initiation there would appear to have been some
jugghng with a sword and a bowl of blood, ' un meurtre simul^,'
says Cumont, i. 322, ' qui k I'origine avait sans doute €t€ reel.'
Human sacrifice may have endured in the more barbarous districts
of Asia Minor, but in the West it was suppressed by law (ibid. p. 69).
For this reason Moloch-worship was forbidden by Tiberius in Africa,
and Druidism by Claudius in Gaul. Human bones have been
found in the caves of Mithra, but this fact is not incapable of an
innocent explanation.

Ill
RELIGION UNDER THE EMPIRE
Isis worship and Mithraism prepared the way for
Gnosticism, which may, upon the whole, be regarded
as a phase of heathenism.
Gnosticism is a term rather loosely employed to
denote not a particular definite sect, but rather a type
or genus, which embraces a bewildering variety of
systems, some wholly pagan, some more or less
Christian. It is impossible to describe them except
in general terms. They all taught the existence of
an evil Creator of the world, side by side with,
#
or not far below, the good Creator of spirit and
intelligence ; and they all, except perhaps the Mar-
cionites, dealt in occultism. Occultism was the
knowledge, or Gnosis, from which they derived their
title. They sprang up we do not exactly know when,
but there are allusions to some kind of Gnosticism
in the Epistle to the Colossians and in the Pastoral
Epistles. They flourished from the second century
onwards, gradually changing their old name for
that of Manicheeism. They maintained their exis
tence down to the time of the Albigensian War and
St. Thomas Aquinas. During all these centuries

RELIGION 6i
they never produced a great man, or won a place in
the kingdom of letters. The reason must surely have
been that they addressed themselves to the congenital
infirmities of the human mind, but could not satisfy
its higher powers.
Gnosticism is commonly said to be a form of
Syncretism. This is a word of such importance for
the history of religion under the Empire that we
ought not to leave it unexplained. Syncretism means
'mixture,' and, in special, the mixture of two things
that will not blend, as for instance of oil and water.
Let us take an example. Among the many illus
trations in M. Cumont's elaborate volumes on Mithra
is one representing a ring^. It is a flat hoop of
gold, on which are engraved the names of Zeus and
Mithra, a snake, a number of mystical signs, and
the monogram of Christ. The wearer of this amulet
worshipped the ancient Graeco-Roman gods, the new
Persian god, the old serpent, with we know not what
other fetishes, and in some sense the Lord Jesus.
He pooled all religions, we may say, on the idea that,
as the unknown god may always have power to
hinder or to help, it is better to leave no one out
of the list. In the same way, Redwald, King of
East Anglia, set up an altar to Christ in the temple
of Woden and Thor**. So, again, in the time of
' ii. 452 sq.
' Bede, ii. 15 ; see Mr. Plummer's note for other similar instances;

62 THE CHURCH'S TASK
St. Boniface, Thuringians, who called themselves
Christians, ate the stork and the wild horse ^. Even
in modern Hayti it is said that many of the negroes
combine Roman Catholicism with Voodoo, practising
in secret serpent worship, poisoning, magic, and human
sacrifice. All this is Syncretism. It is extremely common
under the Empire, In the Book of Acts we read of
an altar at Athens dedicated 'to an Unknown God,'
and inscriptions of the same kind are to be found
in the Corpus^. We have seen how the old Roman
faith was mixed with the Greek, how Isis worship,
which in the eyes of Virgil was an abomination, was
yet finally taken up with great fervour, Judaism also
exercised considerable influence. Fuscus Aristius, the
friend of Horace, professes to observe the Sabbath
and respect the prejudices of the circumcised, Pytha-
goreanism again had a popular representative in
Apollonius of Tyana, who combined Greek idealism
with Buddhist asceticism and magic, A Httle later
Plutarch adopts from Plato, from Egypt, and from
Persia the doctrine of an Evil Soul in nature. At
the same time there was a growing interest in
Christianity, The church doors stood open, and
* Boniface, Epp. 87 (in Epistolae Merowingtci et Karolini aevi,
Berlin, 1892).
' CIL. vi. 4. 30694, 'Sei deo sei deivae saer. C. Sextus C. F.
Calvinus pr. de Senati sententia restituit.'

RELIGION 63
numbers of people attended at certain portions of
the worship without any definite purpose of becoming
communicants. They would learn about as much of
the Gospel as Fuscus Aristius knew of Judaism. In
this state of things we find the adequate explanation
of Gnostic Syncretism.
It will not be possible to give you a detailed
account of these curious sects, but I may venture
to sketch a few of their leading and authentic
traits. Many of the Gnostics accepted the whole of the
Christian creed, and were diligent students ofthe New
Testament. But the simple doctrine of the Church
was quite inadequate to feed their insatiable curiosity
about the unseen world. The Gnostic dwelt habitually
in a realm of angels and demons, and the most
powerful of the evil spirits were the gods of Greece,
w^o rule this lower earth. Thus in the Valentinian
book called the Pistis Sophia ^ we read, ' God bound
eighteen hundred rulers in every aeon (there were
twelve aeons), and set three hundred and sixty over
them, and further set five other great rulers to rule
over the three hundred and sixty and all the other
rulers that are bound. The five they call in the
world of human kind by these names : the first is
^ P. 361 of Mead's English translation. One of these demons
rejoices in what is perhaps the longest name in existence, Ipsanta-
chounchainchoucheoch.

64 THE CHURCH'S TASK
called Kronos ; the second Ares ; the third Hermes ;
the fourth Aphrodite; the fifth Zeus.'
They were 'bound' by divine decrees allotting to
each his province, but this binding did not deprive
them of power. On the contrary, it is said of them
that 'they steer the world and the aeons of the
sphere.' Let me give you from the same book a passage
describing the Valentinian Eucharist \ ' And Jesus
said, Bring me some fire and vine-branches. They
brought them unto him. He set out the offering,
placing two vessels of wine, the one on the right,
the other on the left thereof. The offering was set
in front of the vessels. He placed a cup of water
in front of the vessel of wine on the right, and a cup
of water in front of the vessel of wine on the left.
Between the cups he set pieces of bread, according to
the number of the disciples. The cups were behind
the bread, Jesus stood before the offering, and
grouped his disciples behind him, all clad in linen gar
ments, holding in their hands the number of the names
of the father of the treasure of light. He cried aloud,
saying, Hear rae, O Father, Father of all Fatherhood,
Boundless Light, fao, louo, lao, Aoi, Oia, Psinother,
Theropsin, Opsitherl and so on through a string of
forty-five similar ejaculations. It will be observed
that some of them are shrieking utterances of the
' Ibid. p. 377-

RELIGION 65
vocalic sounds, others are permutations of the same
combination of syllables, others again may be forgotten
names or titles of Oriental deities, punctuated by
repetitions of the word Amen, We find exactly the
same thing in that supposed Mithra Liturgy to which
I made allusion in the preceding Lecture, and in
magical documents, for instance in the Ephesian
Letters, These unmeaning and reiterated yells were
intended, no doubt, to work up the devotee into a state
of frenzy, but they were also supposed to form a sacred
language, understood of God though not of man, and
powerful to call down divinfe help which might other
wise be refused. We find them in the old Baal
worship, and in some of the Gnostic Acts, and they
probably formed a leading feature in all the newer
types of paganism.
Another striking feature of the Gnostic sects is the
great influence which they allowed to women. Many
of their leaders had an Egeria, and some were
attended by troops of ecstatic female devotees. They
attributed exaggerated honour to the Virgin Mary;
'the pleroma of all pleromas' she is called in the
Pistis Sophia^. In this direction there is only too
^ P. 28 (Mead's transl.) ; cp. also pp. 115 sqq. Mary and Martha,
the sisters of Lazarus, also act as interpreters of deep mysteries,
pp. 52 sqq. Peter complains, p. 57, ' Master, we cannot endure this
woman thus to take our place from us, and not suffer us to speak,
but she speaks many times.' Jesus soothes the angry apostle, but
still encouraiges and praises the woman.

66 THE CHURCH'S TASK
much reason for suspecting that the Gnostics were
largely instrumental in corrupting the doctrine of the
Church. The same emotional temperament led them
often into grave moral disorders.
It must not be supposed that there was nothing
more serious than this in Gnosticism. Beneath their
monstrous systems lay a solid logical basis, and there
are documents, such as the Letter of Ptolemy to Flora,
the Fragments of Basilides and Valentinus, and the
Confessions of St. Augustine, which show us what it
was. The Gnostic was beset by just those difficulties
which beset ourselves, and which we are accustomed
to regard as our own peculiar burden, the waste,
confusion, and apparent cruelty of nature, the great
inequality in the intellectual and physical endowments
of mankind, the problem of the will, the theory of
punishment and of the divine justice, and the rudi
mentary morality of the Hebrew Scriptures. All
these are serious problems, which are as oppressive
now as they were in the second century. The mistake
of the Gnostic was twofold. They are scientific
problems, and he approached them, not in the spirit
of Greek science, but in groundless confidence upon
the inner light. Again, what the Christian called
a doubt the Gnostic took for a certainty, and thus
what the Christian regarded as a certainty became
to the Gnostic necessarily a most formidable doubt.
He maintained that the world was the work of an

RELIGION 67
evil creator, and all things beautiful and good rose
up instantly in protest. This is the inevitable lot of
all systems of pessimism, agnosticism, or atheism.
Yet we must not pass final judgement upon the
Gnostic without taking into account that striking
Hymn of the Soul in the Acts of Thomas, to which
I have already referred. It is too long to reproduce ;
you may easily read it in Mr. Burkitt's excellent
Lectures upon Early Eastern Christianity. There
was true religious feeling in the gifted man by whom
this remarkable piece was composed.
It is sometimes thought that there was much re
ligious infidelity under the Empire, but this is hardly
true, except perhaps in the first century, which was
in many respects a peculiar age. Juvenal complains
that even children had ceased to believe in a future
life, but the statements of the satirist must always
be taken with a grain of salt. Let us listen rather
to the Campanian farmer in Petronius \ He is grum
bling about a prolonged drought ; the colony, he says,
is growing downwards like a cow's tail, and he cannot
think what will happen, if neither gods nor men have
pity on the township. ' For my part,' he goes on,
' I think everything comes from the gods, but nowadays
people don't believe that heaven is heaven. Nobody
keeps a fast, nobody cares a straw for Jupiter; they
' Cena, 44. Friedlander's edition of this book is full of valuable
information.
F 2

68 THE CHURCH'S TASK
all shut their eyes and count their money. In the
old times the matrons would have gone up the hill
in their best gowns, with bare feet and hair hanging
down, and prayed to Jupiter for rain. And rain it
did, in bucketfuls. It was then or never ; and every
body laughed, like drowned rats. That is why the
gods have the gout nowadays, because we are not
religious,' The passage seems to tell both ways.
There was indifference in the days of Nero, but there
was also a good deal of rough old-fashioned piety.
In fact the honest vulgarians who sat at Trimalchio's
table believed not too little, but too much. Let us
turn from these middle-class folk, and see how it was
among the educated classes.
In the last days of the Republic we find Lucretius,
one of the few poets of atheism. He tells in his
stately hexameters the story of Iphigenia at Aulis,
and bids us observe how belief in the gods led a father
to steep his hands in the blood of his own daughter,
' Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum \' Human
life begins in the throes of birth, and ends in the
* It is to be observed that Lucretius is roused to this fierce protest
by the fables of the Greek mythology. Nobody felt bound to believe
or to defend these stories. Educated people either rejected or
allegorized them. In the East, wherever people could not speak
Greek, they were unknown (see the Clementine Homilies, iv. 19).
Where the grammar school exerted its influence they would be
familiar, so far as they are contained in the recognized classic authors,
and their power for moral corruption must have been considerable
(see on this point, Aug. Conf. i. 16).

RELIGION 69
agony of death, and these ugly dreams of a future
existence do but increase the misery and the sin,
Lucretius finds the one hope of salvation in materialistic
science, which he hails with rapture as the new and
final revelation. ' Nothing is greater, more holy,
more wonderful, or dearer' than Empedocles and the
Atomists. In the Augustan age Virgil moderates these
transports. ' Happy the man,' he says, ' who has
penetrated the causes of things, and has set his foot
on all fears and inexorable fate^.' Virgil was a re
ligious man who believed in a future life, and knew
that there are other fears, and worse fears, than those
of earthquakes or eclipses. But the atheism of the
old republican reappears, almost for the last time,
in Pliny the elder, a man of immense learning and
infinite credulity. But it reappears with a difference ;
all the rapture has gone, ' The one thing which is
certain,' he writes, 'is that there is no certainty, and
that there is nothing more wretched and more arrogant
than man.' Some touch of the same melancholy
strain is to be found in the historian Tacitus ^,
Before the death of Pliny the great line of the
' Georg. ii. 490.
^ Hist. i. 3 'non esse curae deis securitatem nostram, esse ultionem.'
He hoped that those Stoic teachers, who admitted the possibility of
a future life for certain elect souls, might be right. Agric. 46 'Si
quis piorum Manibus locus, si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum
corpore extinguuntur magnae animae, placide quiescas.'

70 THE CHURCH'S TASK
Roman Stoics had begun in Seneca and Musonius
Rufus ; the other most famous names are those of
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The writings of the
two last are so well known that I must not dwell
upon them at length, but something should be said.
We may think that Epictetus is the greatest of them
all. Stoicism was the natural creed of the poor, the
afflicted, and the rebel, and it does not agree well
either with the ill-earned magnificence of the unfor
tunate Seneca or with the imperial purple of Marcus.
A Stoic millionaire or a Stoic Caesar is in a false
position. We are tempted to regard Seneca as a
hypocrite, and Marcus, partly because he was a good
Stoic, was a very bad emperor. But Epictetus was
a lame slave and a sturdy republican, and the harsh
doctrines of the porch fit him like his own cloak.
The morality of Stoicism was high and pure, but
as stern as Calvinism, which in many features it
strongly resembled. It had no milk for babes :
Epictetus has great sympathy with the slave, but
of women he speaks with the most acrid contempt^
and children he dismisses as ' snivelling brats ^,'
Stoicism flourished mainly in the first century and
among the discontented Roman grandees. The causes
^ iii. 22. 77 Svo 5 Tpla KOKoppvyxa Traibia. ii. 4. 8 Tt ovv; ovK elcrXv ai
yvvaiKes Koivai (piirei; Kayi> Xeyoi. 'Your slave is your brother, descended
from the same father Zeus,' i. 13, but women, children, and Caesar are
outside the pale of this typical Stoic's charity.

RELIGION 71
of its decline were partly political ; it was natural that
the provinces, which looked to Caesar as their pro
tector, and had good reason for rejoicing in the change
of government, should take a view of the world in
general very different from that of their old oppressors;
but they were mainly religious^ Stoicism was rigidly
and puritanically ethical ; this was its great merit ;
but it was strongly individualistic, it allowed no value
to beauty or the emotions, and it had no clear belief
in the immortality of the soul, or even in the existence
of God ^ These defects unfitted it for playing a part
in the new world, and accordingly we find that, from
the beginning of the second century, the great religious
writers are almost exclusively Platonist ".
Of these, again, it is not possible for me to speak
in detail. One interesting figure is that of Dion
* Justin Martyr attached himself, when first he began to study
philosophy, to a Stoic professor; ' but,' says he, 'when I could learn
nothing from him about God, for he knew nothing himself and
insisted that it was not a necessary branch of doctrine, I left him
and went to a Peripatetic' The Peripatetic suggested a fee, but this
Justin thought unphilosophic. The Pythagorean to whom he next
applied would not speak of religion till Justin could show that he
understood music, astronomy, and geometry. Finally he turned to
the Platonists, and from them made his way into the Church
{Trypho, 2).
' I may perhaps venture to refer the reader to my little volume on
Neoplatonism (S. P. C. K.). Constant Martha — Les Moralistes sous
PEmpire Romain — gives an interesting and instructive account of
the Stoics, Dion Chrysostom, and Lucian, but does not deal with the
later Platonists. Zeiler is still indispensable.

72 THE CHURCH'S TASK
Chrysostom, the cheery optimistic sage, who, when
driven out of Rome by Domitian, wandered through
the world on foot with nothing in his pocket but the
Phaedo of Plato and an oration of Demosthenes,
living amongst the poor, and noting with a kindly eye
their simple pious ways. Another is that of Plutarch
whose histories were read by Shakespeare, and whose
wise sayings are so constantly in the mouth of Jeremy
Taylor. As Dion is the only classical author who
speaks with understanding sympathy of the labouring
poor, so Plutarch is the only one who treats women
and the married life in worthy fashion. Benign good
sense and a tone of what we may call chivalry mark
this Boeotian squire, who was also a philosopher and
a priest. The line of Platonism runs on through Maximus
Tyrius and the Neoplatonists. Some of these latter
were little better than spiritualistic mediums ; some of
them we might call charlatans ; but others were men
of high intellectual and religious quality. Chief among
them were Plotinus, in whose books Augustine found
the whole Gospel of St. John except the Incarnation; we
may call him also the father of modern metaphysics ;
and Proclus, whose philosophy with slight modification
was adopted bodily by Dionysius the Areopagite, and
in this new garb is quoted repeatedly with the highest
respect by St. Thomas Aquinas. Let me give you
by way of illustration a few sentences from Maximus

RELIGION 73
Tyrius, one of the less known of this brilliant succession
of writers.
First of pleasure. The Platonist would not allow
that pleasure was an end to be pursued. Like beauty,
it is a charm on the face of goodness. Seize goodness,
and you will gain happiness as well ; make pleasure
your aim, and you will find that you have grasped at
the shadow and missed the reality. Sensual pleasure
the philosopher rated very low. ' For there is nothing
that can be so easily satisfied as the needs of the
body. Art thou thirsty ? there are fountains every
where. Art thou hungry ? there are beech-trees
everywhere. Yon sun is warmer than any cloak ;
these meadows are the most artistic of shows, these
flowers are nature's spicery. Let thy necessity bound
thy desires. If thou goest beyond, thou givest the
open field to pleasure, and shuttest up virtue within
castle walls ^'
Perhaps Maximus is giving the reins to his rhetoric
when he talks of satisfying his hunger upon beech
nuts. But these Platonists were extremely abstemious,
though they never paraded their self-denial. We
* iv. 3. Maximus is not so much a philosopher as a philosophic
preacher, the most graceful of his class. No one conveys so favour
able and attractive a conception of Platonism on its moral and
religious side. No one shows us more clearly why Stoicism declined,
or why Plato made so many Christians. He addresses himself not
to students, but to people of ordinary education who want to live
reasonable and virtuous lives.

74 THE CHURCH'S TASK
ought to notice also the love of this philosopher for
wild flowers. He gives expression to this feeling
elsewhere, and justifies it. The senses sit on guard
in the antechamber of the soul, and send in their
message, as it were a sealed letter, to the prince, who
opens, reads, and understands. Thus the beauty of
the flower awakens in the intelligence the thought
of God \
Of prayer he says that it should not be a petition,
because all is ordered by the divine wisdom and
goodness. ' I think it ought to be a talking to
GodV He defends idolatry *, The statue cannot really
express the glory of God, who is ' father and creator
of all things, older than the sun, older than heaven>
stronger than time or eternity,' but it quickens our
dull susceptibility, as the portrait of our beloved ones,
or the lute on which they used to play, or the chair in
which they used to sit recalls to our minds their bodily
presence and character.
Attendant upon the Father of All is a host of
divine but subordinate beings, the demons. ' Their
nature is immortal in the second degree, and they are
called secondary gods.' They are posted between
earth and heaven, execute the decrees of providence,
and form a chain of connexion between God and man.
' See the fine passages xvii. lo, ii ; xvi. 8.
' xi. 8. ' viii.

RELIGION 75
' Innumerable is the swarm of demons,
For thrice ten thousand are there on the breast of mother
earth ;
And every one immortal and a pursuivant of Zeus.
Some are healers of disease, some advise in difficulties,
some are revealers of secrets, some are fellow-workers
in the arts, some are companions in travel. Some are
of the city, some of the fields, some of the sea, some
of the dry land \' Some, again, are guardian angels,
and give to each man his character.
Here we have the most notable doctrine of Neo-
paganism, that of the demons. It is often said that
the course of religious thought under the Empire was
marked by a strong inclination in the direction of
monotheism ; and this is true, but not the whole truth.
Philosophic thinkers, of whom there were few, recog
nized the necessity of bringing the celestial hierarchy
into unity under one supreme head, and turned all
the other deities into his officers. Celsus very aptly
compared them to the proconsuls of Caesar. But we
may find a better parallel in the constitution of the
modern German Empire. All the gods of all the
mythologies were ' mediatized ' like the Kings of
Bavaria and Saxony, But they were carefully kept
alive, and received sovereign honours.
Again, there was great divergence in the conception
' xiv. 8.

76 THE CHURCH'S TASK
of the demons, Maximus regards them as all good ;
they are ' angels and ministers of grace ' ; indeed he
uses the word ' angel,' as did many others. But
commonly it is allowed that many of the demons are
evil, who can and will do man great harm, unless they
are propitiated by magic formulae and by sacrifice.
Let us see how this worked out, I have said that
Plutarch was an excellent man ; but this is what he
tells us about the demons, ' Black and ill-omened
days on which men devour raw flesh, obscene cries
at sacred altars, fasts and beatings of the breast do
not belong to any god, but are propitiatory rites
to keep off" evil demons^.' The same explanation is
given of human sacrifices, which were not unknown,
and of tales of barbarous lust, and painful expiations
like that of Orestes after he had slain his mother.
All these things belonged to the 'hard gods,' the
Alastors. You will observe that Plutarch ascribes
to the demons not only magic but all manifestations
of repentance and remorse. What are we to expect
of the vulgar, when a philosopher can speak like this ?
We have plenty of information on this point.
At the supper of Trimalchio the guests tell blood
curdling stories of werewolves and vampires, ' We
wonder,' says the narrator, ' and believe, and, kissing
the table, beseech the nighthags to keep in their
own place while we return home *.' Even a highly
' De Defectu Oraculorum, xiv. * Cena, 6i sqq.

RELIGION 77
accomplished and most vicious man, like Petronius,
was afraid to go out in the dark. When Germanicus,
the darling of the people, was carried off by an
untimely death, men dragged the little images of
the Penates out of their houses and flung them into
the gutter. It was suspected that Germanicus had
been murdered by Piso, and it is not improbable,
Tacitus tells us that 'there were found stuffed into
the walls of his palace, and into holes in the floor,
leaden tablets inscribed with his name, bits of human
bones with fragments of charred flesh, and other
magical gear, by which it is believed that souls are
devoted to the infernal gods ^.' We have plenty of
these leaden tablets. One, found in a hot spring at
Arctium ^, bears this inscription : ' Quintus Letinius
Lupus, who is also called Caucadio, son of Sallustia
Veneria or Veneriosa, him I arraign, devote, sacrifice
to your deity, that ye, O boiling waters, ye Nymphs,
or whatever else ye please to be called, may kill him
within this year,' Notice what pains the rogue takes
not to shoot the wrong man, giving the alias as well
as the name of his victim and his victim's mother, and
begging the deities not to be angry, if he is not quite
' Ann. ii. 69.
' Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 231,
is the source from which this instance is borrowed. Bishop Words
worth refers to Hermes, iv, pp, 282 sqq., ed. Mommsen. For similar
tablets see CLL. vi. i. 140, 141. A very curious love-charm will be
found in Deissmann, Bibelstudien, p. 28.

78 THE CHURCH'S TASK
sure of their proper style and title. Magic papyri
exist in great numbers. The formulae were used
mostly perhaps as philtres or for the recovery of lost
property, but it is evident that they were often turned
to much darker purposes. Even love-potions were
bad enough and led to horrid deeds. Faustina, the
wife of Marcus Aurelius, was supposed to have been
bewitched by a gladiator. On the advice of his
Chaldaean wizards the Emperor put the man to
death, and made Faustina bathe herself in his blood ^.
Such is the story that was told ; people thought it not
incredible ^. We have epitaphs on the graves of
children who were supposed to have been killed by
witchcraft through the agency of the Nymphs '. We
^ Vita Marci, 19.
^ Some of the stories of witchcraft we might be tempted to regard
as purely fanciful, for instance, Horace's Canidia, Epod. v, or Lucan's
Erichtho, Phars. vi. 507, or again the extravagant romance of
Apuleius. But there can be no doubt that they were believed by
the great mass of the people, and even by educated men ; see the
Philopseudes of Lucian. Even Marcus Aurelius, Stoic and sceptical
as he was, showed himself as superstitious as anybody in the stress
of the Marcomannian war, when he surrounded himself with
Egyptian and Chaldaean magicians, and 'celebrated foreign rites,'
Vita, 13. In particular he threw two lions and a quantity of spices
into the Danube (Lucian, Alex. 48), on the advice of Alexander of
Abonoteichos. Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that St. Athanasius
was regarded as a powerful magician (xv. 7). Even by Christians the
saint was so regarded; and this fact helps us to understand the
otherwise almost incredible story of the Synod of Tyre.
' CIL. vi. 4. 29195 on a child of eight who was 'raptus a
Nymphis.' The father's name was Ulpius Nymphicus, and we may

RELIGION 79
look upon these airy delicate spirits of the fountain
as the most charming creations of ancient fancy, but
they were regarded by the people who worshipped
them as most horrible and malignant beings.
I must not attempt to speak in detail of dreams
and omens, or the way in which almost everybody,
high or low, was ridden by these miserable obsessions.
Those who wish to know the extent of the evil may
read the book of Artemidorus ^ It is written in
excellent Greek — he was an educated and, in a very
perverted sense, an intelligent man — and the text has
come down to us in an excellent state of preservation.
wonder whether the nymphs were in this case a sort of family
banshee. ^ An Italian version of Artemidorus, published in 1548 and
reissued in 1558, was eagerly bought because just at that time
lotteries were instituted at Venice, and people hoped that the old
pagan would teach them how to dream the winning numbers. Un
fortunately, lotteries not having been known in his days, he could
give them no help, and his popularity immediately vanished. See
the preface to Herscher's edition. It is to the credit of Artemidorus
(and he needs all the credit that can be found for him) that his
friends, though they often dreamed about horses, never appear to
have dreamed about betting. His book is valuable to the modern
student chiefly for the curious bits of information scattered up and
down its pages. Does any other ancient writer tell us that it was
customary for a condemned man to carry his own cross ? Artemi
dorus assures us that this was a common dream (ii. 56), and we
may judge from the fact how many must have been in dread of
crucifixion, and how common the spectacle was. He also tells us
that there was no better omen than to dream of an amarantine
crown (i. 77). Cp. i Pet. v. 4.

8o THE CHURCH'S TASK
It is to be feared that the reason of this is that a long
series of Christian transcribers thought his abject
nonsense very interesting and very valuable.
Among the better educated classes this superstition
appears later on as spiritualism. Towards the end
of the second century we meet with the first famous
medium in Alexander of Abonoteichos. Whatever
the modern adept can do his ancient counterpart
could do much better — telepathy, floating in the air,
table-rapping, writing on locked slates, clairvoyance.
Maximus, the perverter of Julian the Apostate, could
make a marble statue smile. At first we find a sort
of Society of Psychical Research ; Lucian and his
friend Celsus investigate the phenomena, and arrive
at the conclusion that they are produced by imposition.
But neither ridicule nor exposure could kill the super
stition. Alexander was worshipped as a god after his
death. Spiritualism was patronized and fostered by
the rising school of Neoplatonism, a school which
numbered among its adherents many acute thinkers
and many accomplished men of science. It seduced
Julian from Christianity, and maintained itself for
nearly two centuries after his death. Indeed, the
belief in magic and witchcraft passed over into the
Church, and caused many more judicial murders in
the Middle Ages, and down to quite recent times,
than under the Empire \
* The old Roman law against witchcraft was very severe. The

RELIGION 8i
It is probably not too hard a thing to say that
demon worship was the really operative religion of
the vast mass of the population of the Empire. Gods
who like to do harm are always much nearer to the
ordinary man than gods who promise only spiritual
blessings in return for the distasteful virtues of self-
control and moral purity. The philosophers were
quite awake to the danger of superstition, though
they did very little indeed to cure it, and have left
us many definitions of this vice. Theophrastus,
Varro, and Plutarch call it the servile fear of God,
dread, that is to say, of the divine power without the
complementary belief in the divine wisdom and love ;
and this is a just observation. Maximus Tyrius says
that the pious man is the friend of God, while the
superstitious man is the flatterer of God ; a flatterer
administration of a philtre was punishable by labour in the mines
or exile. Those who celebrated nocturnal rites for the purpose of
putting a spell upon anybody were crucified or thrown to the beasts.
Human sacrifice was forbidden on pain of death. Magicians were
to be burnt ahve. Even the possessor of magical books was liable
to death or deportation ; see Paullus, Sent, xxiii. 14 sqq. But Horace,
though he says that Canidia will be stoned by the neighbours, does
not speak of any legal prosecution or penalty, nor, so far as I re
member, does any other of those writers who have been mentioned
in the note on p. 78. There was a sanguinary raid upon magicians
under Valentinian and Valens (Amm. Marcell. xxix. i); it was at
this time that John Chrysostom came into imminent peril through
fishing a magical book out of the river Orontes ; but this raid was
caused by the not altogether groundless suspicion of Valens that his
own life had been menaced.

82 THE CHURCH'S TASK
like a cunning slave who tries to coax and wheedle
his master into doing what he wants. This, again, is
true, though it gives a different aspect of the same
disease. The Christian Platonists, Clement and
Origen of Alexandria, would say that superstition
is the thinking unworthy thoughts of God, and in this
we may find the root of the evil, whatever practical
form it may assume. It springs from the ' lie in the
soul,' from an imperfect and unworthy conception of
the divine nature, of that perfect unity of power,
wisdom, and goodness to which we give the name
of God.
Plutarch again tells us that there are two extremes,
atheism and superstition, and that superstition is the
less evil of the two, and we may think that upon the
whole he is right. It is true that the Roman atheists,
Lucretius and Pliny the Elder, were better men than
Apuleius, who acted upon the belief that, if he shaved
«^his head and put on the linen robe, Isis would suffer
him to amuse himself as he pleased ; but they were
probably not so good as Aristides the Rhetor, or
Porphyry, or Proclus, who were full of superstition,
which, though vain and intellectually degrading, was
yet not noxious, and left room for virtues of a very
attractive kind. There are superstitions and super
stitions. All are foolish, but not all are base ; some
are defects only by comparison with heights of wisdom
and goodness which few can discern and still fewer
can attain.

RELIGION 83
Many writers, including the late Lord Acton, have
spoken in language of the strongest reprehension of
the superstition of the early Church. It begins about
the middle of the third century ; we see it first
distinctly in Cyprian, Novatian, and Gregory Thauma
turgus ^ ; and in the fourth century it is very strongly
marked. It showed itself partly in asceticism, partly
in credulity, partly in persecution. Asceticism we shall
understand better when we have passed in review
the moral condition of the old heathen society, for
you cannot fairly judge the men who fled from the
world until you have seen the world from which they
fled. The credulity no one can doubt who reads the
Lausiac History, or Prudentius, or Paulinus of Nola,
or Sulpicius Severus, or indeed almost any of the
Fathers. It is a grave intellectual blot ; it was worse
perhaps in the West than in the East ; it clouded the
^ See the stories told by Cyprian in the de lapsis, 25 sq., in which
magical powers are attributed to the consecrated elements. Novatian,
quite in pagan or mediaeval fashion, made his disciples swear upon
the Eucharist that they would not forsake him and go back to
Cornelius; Eus. H. E. vi. 43. 18. Dionysius of Alexandria tells of
a repentant apostate, Sarapion, who could not die until he had
received the sacrament ; as the priest was unable to go in person the
sacred bread was sent by the hands of a boy ; Eus. H E. vi. 44.
Gregory Thaumaturgus once passed the night in a heathen temple.
Next day the priest, finding that his gods had fled, pursued Gregory
with menaces and execrations. The saint gave him a piece of
parchment on which he had written 'Gregory to Satan. Enter.'
The priest laid this upon the altar, and immediately the demons
retumed to their abode. See the Life by Gregory Nyssen.
G 2

84 THE CHURCH'S TASK
judgement and affected the doctrine of the Church,
though not in the essential points. It added much
that was needless and in a degree harmful, but it
did not seriously vitiate the Christian ideal. We may
notice that it was largely fostered by the desire to
quicken the evangelization of the world. Good and
intelligent men, like Gregory Thaumaturgus, the
pupil of Origen, sanctioned practices of which they
did not approve, in order to make it easier for the
heathen to come over ^, and the ignorant, undisciplined
converts thus acquired sensibly lowered the tone of
the whole community. The Fathers would have
defended themselves by the argument that a super
stitious Christian is better than a superstitious heathen,
and something may be allowed for this plea. But the
leaven affiects the whole of the bread ; and it is as
true of the Church, as it is of Roman education, that
in proportion as its area broadened its depth fell off",
^ ' For, having observed that the childish and uneducated mass
were held fast to idolatry by bodily delights, in order that the main
principle, the habit of looking to God rather than to their vain objects
of worship, might be established in them, he suffered them to delight
themselves in the memorials of the holy martyrs and to make merry
and exult, thinking that their life would gradually be changed into
a more virtuous and scrupulous pattern.' See his Life in the works
of Gregory of Nyssa, vol. iii, p. 574, ed. Morel, 1638. The object,
adds the Nyssen, has already been attained. The best commentary
is supplied by Paulinus of Nola, who followed the same policy in
the fourth century in Campania. The object was to some extent
attained ; but the church-ale was so like the old heathen festival that
it was really the same thing, though a little better at every point.

RELIGION 85
As for persecution, of which Lord Acton speaks in
such scathing words, we must not attempt to justify
or to extenuate it. It began at once in Constantine's
treatment of the Donatists, and culminated in the
terrible laws of Theodosius, of which the best that we
can say is that they do not appear to have been very
often applied to their full extent. It is a mistake to
suppose that the Church learned cruelty from the
heathen, who indeed were very spasmodic and ineffi
cient persecutors. The old persecutions were neither
very numerous nor very fatal, and, so far as they did
not originate in the fury of the vulgar mob, were
almost entirely political, like that of Queen Elizabeth,
not inquisitorial, like that of Queen Mary, But the
Christian emperors and bishops were guided not by
the example of their old enemies, but by that same
mistaken reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures which
caused so much injury in other directions. Because
the Jew had been commanded to put the blasphemer
to death, it appeared to be the sacred duty of the
Christian also not to suffer the heretic to live. Here
we see most distinctly the evil results of that playing
with history which was inculcated in the Roman
schools. I said a moment ago that paganism to some extent
infected the Church. Let us notice in conclusion how
the Church reacted upon paganism. Many illustrations
might be given ; some from very early times. They

86 THE CHURCH'S TASK
may be found in the worship of Mithra, in the biography
of Apollonius, in Maximus Tyrius, in the historian
Ammianus Marcellinus, in the life of Proclus, the
Neoplatonist, who was a thorough-paced ecclesiastic,
and in many other places. Especially in the great
Roman pagans of the fourth century, of whom the
chief was Symmachus, the friend of popes and bishops.
He was a strong pagan, and wanted to bury a fallen
vestal virgin alive, just to keep up the good old rule ^
yet as against Christianity he went no further than
to maintain that ' there are more roads to the great
secret than one ^.' But the fine flower of dying
heathenism Is to be found in the epitaph Inscribed
by Paulina on the tomb of her distinguished husband,
Agorius Praetextatus ^. Let me try to translate It
for you.
The glory of my proud ancestral line
Was that it made me worthy to be thine.
For all my hght thou art and all my fame,
Agorius, noblest of the Roman name,
Light of the senate, and thy fatherland.
Not of me only, but of all who scanned
Thy genius, worth and learning, which combined
The crown of virtue round thy brow entwined.
For all that Latin sage or Greek has taught,
And all that heaven to earth has nearer brought,
^ Symmachus, Epp. ix. 147, 148, ed. Seeck.
" ' Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum ' ;
Rei. iii, ed. Seeck, p. 282.
' CIL. vi. I. 1779.

RELIGION 87
In dulcet verse or rugged prose expressed,
Flowed from thy lips, which bettered still the best.
But these are trifles. In thy pious mind
The secrets of all mysteries lay enshrined.
Thou knewest well what worship should be given
To each of all the many gods of heaven ;
And madest me partner of thy faith to be,
Sister of gods and men, and true to thee.
Why should I count thy titles, passing toys
Which men heaped on thee? These were not thy joys.
These were but fleeting gauds of earth ; to fame
The priestly fillet was thy highest claim.
O husband, teacher, thou whose loving care
Discipled me in virtue, saved from the snare
Of death, and led within the temple gate.
The handmaid of the gods to consecrate,
Thou wast my sponsor in the mysteries,
Thou Cybele and Attis didst appease
For me with blood of bulls; thou didst teach me
The triple secret of dark Hecate,
And make me meet to worship at the shrine
Of Eleusinian Ceres. It is thine.
Thy gift alone, that all men call me blest.
Thou madest me paragon from East to West,
Unknown of all yet known of all, for why
Should men not praise me, when thy wife was I ?
Lo ! Roman matrons shape their lives by me.
And think their children beauteous, if like thee.
Great men, good women own thy master hand.
And propagate thy virtues through the land.
Now comfortless, thy widow not thy wife,
I mourn. O, if the gods had spared thy life
And let me die ! — yet bliss it is to me
That thine I was, and thine again shall be.
If I have not spoiled these lines in the translation,
you will think them, though not poetry of the highest

88 THE CHURCH'S TASK
kind, yet tender, graceful, and deeply religious. They
give us an admirable picture of paganism in Its best
days, Praetextatus was a very great personage indeed,
a man of the bluest blood, dignified with every honour
that the Emperor could bestow, and enormously
wealthy^. He was a convinced pagan, and there can
be no doubt that he was as polythelstlcal as a man
can be. But the Important thing to notice is that he
was a priest, and a priest of a new kind. He took his
priesthood quite seriously, regarding it as his highest
title to consideration, adorning it with a vast range of
theological learning, and taking Infinite pains with the
religious education of his noble and devoted wife.
And Paulina must have been worthy of his care.
Proud she was, no doubt, for she too came of a race
of princes, but with a pride sweetened and chastened
by that strange creed which, we are tempted to think,
could only make men worse.
Praetextatus and Paulina belong to the age of
Julian the Apostate, who endeavoured to destroy the
Church with weapons borrowed from the Church's
armoury. They could hardly have been such as we
see them, unless Christianity had taught them what
priests and temples ought to be.
If we compare them with their contemporaries and
' Praetextatus is the leading personage in the Saturnalia of
Macrobius. See Dill, Roman Society in the last century of the
Roman Empire ; Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century.

RELIGION 89
equals in rank who were friends and disciples of
St. Jerome — and we have ample means for making
the comparison — we shall find that these high pagans
were superior In intellectual culture. In their sense of
duty to the state, and even in their view of the possi
bilities of the married life. It Is only the last point
that need surprise us. The task of the Church was
not to improve, but to remake the foundations of
education, politics, and morality. It was a gigantic
task, not yet completed after nearly two thousand
years of effort. We must not be surprised to find
that In that short chapter, which comprises the history
of the old Roman Empire, the outward proofs of the
great transformation are Imperfect and unequal.

IV
MORAL AND SOCIAL CONDITION
OF THE EMPIRE
It Is never easy and rarely safe to make broad
assertions about the morality of a whole people. It is
perilous to generalize even about our own people in
our own time. We are swimming In the stream, as
it were, and cannot lift our heads high enough to see
exactly in what direction we are being carried. When
we attempt to criticize a foreign contemporaneous
nation, the difficulty Is, as we are well aware, greatly
enhanced. There Is a lack of sympathy, which pre
vents us from really understanding what we see.
Now the Roman Empire is divided from us by a vast
stretch of time ; and It was not a nation but a world,
immensely diverse and unequal in itself, and unlike
our own world at every point. What is true of the
patrician is not true of the slave ; what is true of
the Greek or Italian is not true of the African or
Briton. It is an extraordinary scene that we are
looking upon. The nearest analogy that we can find
Is the state of things existing in India, since the
conquests of Clive and Warren Hastings.

MORALITY 91
Another difficulty arises from the nature of our
sources of information.
The great writers, from whom our ideas used to be
mainly derived, belong almost entirely to the first
century, or to the early years of the second. They
are, with few exceptions, men of pure and amiable
character. You might pick holes In Horace, charming
as he is, but Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Persius are all
admirable. Round these great luminaries circled a
host of minor stars — poetasters without end — who
filled up every day of the Roman season, and even the
month of August, with their recitations, absurd figures
no doubt, the product of an absurd school, but not
often immoral. In prose we have Seneca and Epictetus,
the two Plinies, Quintilian, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion
Chrysostom, Plutarch, Juvenal again was a good
man, though he wrote chiefly about bad ones. These
were the popular authors, Ovid, Petronius, Martial,
are deeply corrupted by the vices of their time ; but
their own people knew this quite as well as we do.
The great pagans were as great in their own days
as they are in modern times, and their writings have
come down to us because they appealed to the con
science and intelligence of their countrymen. Virgil
in particular was almost adored, and he ranks among
the great ones of all the ages. No man so clearly
shows that even In evil times the way to abiding fame
in the kingdom of letters Is to lift up the reader to

92 THE CHURCH'S TASK
dignified and beautiful conceptions of life and duty.
He did not speak merely to the aristocracy. His
verses were sung at middle-class dinner parties,
scribbled on the walls of Pompeian houses, recited
by children in third-rate schools. We may see the
very faces and figures of the people who made his
fame In the broken frieze of the Ara Pacis, which
has been most skilfully reconstructed by Dr. Petersen,
It represents a religious procession, men, women, and
children gathered together to thank the gods for the
Augustan Peace, stately men, sweet women, innocent-
looking children, the children who sang the Carmen
Saccular e of Horace. They are the people who rose
up when Virgil entered the theatre, and acclaimed him
with marks of distinction reserved by custom for
members of the imperial house. They look fit to be
the masters of the world.
Still in some respects the age of the Julian and
Claudian Caesars Is a time apart. Towards the end
of the Republic enormous sums of money were brought
into Rome by victorious generals. At the same time
the old frugal habits of the farmer state were broken
down by the licence of warfare and plunder, by
familiarity with the softer and more luxurious habits
of the East, and by the sight of indulgences as yet
undreamed of, but now easily within reach. The great
Romans found themselves in the position of the
English nobles of the Restoration, or of the nabobs of

MORALITY 93
the eighteenth century, and plunged headlong into the
newly found delights. The city was remodelled on
a scale of great magnificence ; enormous palaces, filled
with armies of slaves and furniture of the costliest
description, replaced the modest dwellings of the old
patricians. Personal Indulgence of every kind became
a study, and In the times of Claudius and Nero
extravagance rose Into a great flare-up. In which many
threw aside all self-restraint. At the same time the
demand for articles of luxury greatly enriched the
mercantile class, and many of these, like Trimalchio,
aped the manners of their betters, and flung away
money with both hands. This is the time described
by the satirists. There is much truth in their dia
tribes, but there is also a narrow spirit of conservatism,
to which every departure from the good old days of
Cincinnatus seemed a proof of the depravity of man
kind. That marble should be brought from Africa,
or oysters from Britain, or that men should sit upon
feather cushions, or drink from silver or glass, seemed
to be all of one piece with the enormities of Messalina,
We must discount their invectives. At most they
strike only a limited class, whose heads were turned
by the revolution of the world. With the accession
of the Flavians a new order begins. The old patriciate
was in great measure exterminated or ruined. Men
from the Italian country towns, or even from the
provinces, made their way Into the senate in increasing

94 THE CHURCH'S TASK
numbers, bringing with them, says Tacitus, ' their
domestic thrift,' and Vespasian himself belonged to
the same class. We may say that the Empire begins
at this date. After this time we find an universal
system of state education ; the new religions come
into play ; the senate becomes a chamber of peers
representing the whole Empire ; the civil service is
organized ; great jurists sit upon the Imperial council ;
the slave Is taken to some extent under the protection
of the law ^ ; suicide is no longer the fashion ^, and the
shameless profligacy and brutality of the old nobility
disappear. Another difficulty in our way arises from the
seclusion of the ancient home life, and the consequent
^ 'Servos a dominis occidi vetuit, eosque iussit damnari per indices,
si digni essent ; lenoni et lanistae servum vel ancillam vendi vetuit
causa non praestita ... si dominus in domo interemptus esset, non
de omnibus servis quaestionem haberi sed de is qui per vicinitatem,
poterant sentire praecepit' ( Vita Hadriani, i8). In the same passage
we read that Hadrian abolished the ergastula, but, if the statement
is correct, the prohibition produced no effect.
^ Hadrian wished to commit suicide when the physicians gave
him no hope of recovery, but Antoninus Pius would not permit him
to carry out his resolution ( Vita Ant. Pii, 2). Artemidorus assures
us that suicide was regarded as an infamy and as a sin. 'Avaprriaas
iavTOP eTc\fVTr)(Te tov /3ioi/, i>i pt)8e dirodavav e;(6U' Svopa. Tovtovs yap
povovs iv veKp&v deiirvois ou KoKovaiv oi irpofTrjKoims (i. 4). But Pliny
approves of suicide, provided only that it was committed with due
deliberation {Epp. i. 22), and there are many tales of Stoics who.
made their own exit from the stage in very theatrical fashion.
Perhaps the most characteristic is that of the worthy old savage
Corellius Rufus {Epp. i. 12).

MORALITY 95
rarity of glimpses into the family circle, especially
of the middle and lower classes.
We know the ancient town from its ruins, many
of which — Pompeii in Italy, TImgad and Lambaesis
in Africa, Silchester and Uriconium In our own
country — have been exhaustively rummaged and
elaborately described. We know also very fully the
life of the streets and public places, but we very
seldom find ourselves behind the door of the house.
The great writers of antiquity wrote for grandees
and for men, and knew and cared very little about
the ways of small people or of women. They never
really studied what we call ' the human document.'
They always generalize, and what they describe
Is not a character but a type, as I have already
remarked when speaking of the rhetorical common
places. Such sketches are often extremely clever
and amusing, but they do not give us living people.
The only writer of the Imperial times who really
drew from life was Petronius ; we might call him the
Roman Zola. He shows us real men and women,
rich vulgar tradespeople, talking In dialect and be
having just as such folks would do. But It is not
a sympathetic picture. Petronius was a great noble,
exquisitely corrupt, and looking down on the citizens
with Ineffable scorn because they aped his vices, like
some of the dramatists of our own Restoration.
Dion Chrysostom, a delightful man, who had wan-

96 THE CHURCH'S TASK
dered about the world as an exile, and knew poor
people and their ways, has told us of some Greek
peasants, by whom he was sheltered for a time, when
he had been shipwrecked on the rocks of Euboea,
He dwells with evident pleasure on their simple, pious,
kindly ways. Such passages are unfortunately very
rare In the classic authors. But of late years we have
been able in increasing measure to supplement our
scanty literary sources by other Information which,
though not quite of the kind we desire. Is yet very
considerable, and has the great merit of being con
temporaneous and accurate. Much valuable know
ledge may be gleaned from the law-books, much more
from the enormous collections of Inscriptions, much
more, again, though chiefly as regards Egypt, from
the papyri. If all this chaotic mass of facts had been
Indexed, annotated, and explained with the industry
and intelligence lavished by Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt
upon their admirable volumes, the task of the student
would have been Immensely facilitated. Even as It Is
the church historian, though he has to wade through
masses of stuff" which for his special purpose are
irrelevant, cannot be too grateful for the light thrown
upon his subject by the jurist, the economist, and
above all the archaeologist.
The papyri In particular are full of interest. Here
you find, though often sadly mutilated, the every
day documents of an orderly and respectable people.

MORALITY 97
their wills, marriage contracts, and business accounts,
their dealings with the police and courts of law, their
dinner Invitations and cook's bills, their letters of
condolence, their gossip, and little, intimate, con
fidential notes. The general Impression which we
gather agrees, not with the worst, but with the best
of our other witnesses. What we find In Egypt is
the same kind of society on a lower plane that Is
described by Pliny the younger or by Plutarch.
The epitaphs, again, tell much the same tale. Some
are sceptical and resemble in tone the pathetic lines
of the dying Hadrian ^ : —
Little soul, so restless, so pretty,
Guest and comrade of the body,
Whither now art thou minded to fly.
Pale, cold, and naked.
Never to jest any more?
Some are frankly negative and epicurean. ' I was
nothing, I am nothing; thou who livest eat, drink,
amuse thyself, come,' are the words inscribed by a
Spanish father on the tomb of his eight-year-old
son 2, and there are others of the same type. Some,
again, but very few, are frankly licentious.
Balnea, vina, Venus, corrumpunt corpora nostra;
Sed vitam faciunt,
' ' Animula vagula, blandula' : in the Vita Hadriani, 25.
» CIL. ii. 1434.
BIGG H

98 THE CHURCH'S TASK
is a specimen ^, engraved upon the tomb of a man
who cannot have been a very reputable person. More
are marked by bitter complaint against the cruelty
of the gods, or a hopeless pessimism.
O miseros homines, vivunt qui vivere nolunt,
Vivere qui debent fato moriuntur acerbo,
are the words In which a pagan priest sums up his
philosophy of life \ 'I, Procope, lift up my hands
against the gods, who cut short my Innocent life,'
is the protest of a young girl. So Julian the Apostate,
when he was struck down by the fatal lance, splashed
his blood up towards the sun, saying, ' Drink thy fill.'
But many epitaphs are of very diff'erent character,
' This is the place of rest of VIncentius. Many have
gone before me ; I wait for all. Eat, drink, be merry,
come to me. While thou livest do well; this thou
wilt carry with thee.' On the same stone is a picture
of Vibia, the wife of VIncentius. She is being led
* CIL. vi. 3. 15258. Still more coarsely outspoken is vi. 3.
17985- * CLL. V. 2. 7917. Similar complaints are not uncommon in the
Roman inscriptions: see vi. 2. 6319, 10969, 15038, 15077; vi. 3.
15454, 15546. Perhaps the most tragic is vi. 4. 27227 'Ego sum
quae in Carinis peperi. O di superi et inferi. O misera mater.'
So vi. 2. 5534 ' Causa latet fati ; partum tamen esse loquuntur. Sed,
quaecumque fuit, tam cito non merui.' A remarkable phrase occurs
in vi. 3. 15160 'Filiis suis infehcissimis, qui aetate sua non sunt
fruniti, fecit mater scelerata'; cp. 3. 21899; 4- 35 769. Here the
premature death of the child is regarded as the consequence of the
parents' sins.

MORALITY 99
through an archway by a draped figure, beneath which
are the words Bonus Angelus, 'the Good AngeP,'
VIncentius was a worshipper of Mithra. You will
see that, though he repeats the heathenish phrase of
the Spanish father, he has a clear belief in a future
life, in which he will be reunited to his Vibia, and
be rewarded for his good deeds. The 'good angel'
is probably borrowed from Christianity. There Is,
as I have already pointed out, some reason for
thinking that Mithraism was not untouched by the
Gospel. But there are many purely pagan epitaphs
which express a belief in the immortality of the soul *.
' CLL. vi. X. 142. There are other inscriptions which have a
Christian ring but are probably not Christian — vi. 2. 7578, on a child
who died 120 a.d.; the epitaph ends with the words 'Tu reddas,
Aeteme, piis solacia semper, Et vitam serves cunctis generisque
(?generique) piorum' (this may be Mithraic); vi. 4. 29642 'Dulcis
apud Manes Zoe benedicta moraris, Tu secura iaces nobis reliquisti
querelas. Praecesti hospitium dulce parare tuis'; vi. 4. 29265, on
a wife, ' quam ne lacrimere precor et potius benedicas manibus eius.'
On the other hand there are epitaphs in which Christianity appears
to be contaminated by heathenism. Thus in the African inscriptions,
CLL. viii. I. 450 is one on Astius Vindicianus, who was 'vir
clarissimus et flamen perpetuus.' The stone bears the Christian
monogram. That Christians were sometimes yfa»?/««j we learn from
the canons of the synod of Elvira, 4 and 55 (see Hefele). There
are several instances of ' D. M. S.' combined with 'in pace.'
"^ Perhaps the best instance is vi. 4. 34635 ' Fossor, vide ne fodias,
Deus magnum oculum habet'; though it is only indirect. But
there are many in every volume ; see iii. 406, 686, 1759, 1992, 3397,
6414, 7407, 7584. In vi. I. 12072 a husband begs his dead wife to
pray to the gods for him. Vision in dreams was regarded as a proof
H 2

TOO THE CHURCH'S TASK
Let us come closer to our subject by passing in
review the great domestic relations, and first that of
wife and husband. We have seen what a great
Roman matron of the fourth century might be; let
us now take one of the Augustan age, Turia, the
wife of Q, Lucretius Vespillo ^. She Is described for
us In a long epitaph, or rather funeral oration, written
by her husband. The language Is steeped In strong
emotion, and bears the clearest marks of sincerity,
Turia's parents had been murdered in the evil times
of the proscriptions, and the first act of this girl —
she must have been quite a girl at the time — was
to get justice done upon the assassins. Her husband,
Vespillo, was sent Into exile by the all-powerful
triumvirs, and a plot was laid to strip him of his
property. She managed to baffle the plot, and even
of continued existence; see CLL. vi. i. 18817 ' Ita peto vos, manes
sanctissimae, commendatum habeatis meum earum, et vellitis huic
indulgentissimi esse horis nocturnis ut eum videam, et etiam me fato
suadere vellit, ut ego possim dulcius et celerius aput eum pervenire.'
Perhaps M. Fustel de Coulanges is wrong in identifying the Di Manes
with the spirit of the dead. The monuments use phrases in which
this identification seems to be made, but they use others in which
the Manes appear rather as guardian angels. The two conceptions
meet in that of the Genius, or Ka, the heavenly twin or double, who
is at one and the same time the self and the god of the individual
man. This curious confused belief is of immemorial antiquity. See
le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, p. 147 ; Burkitt, Early Eastern
Christianity, p. 215 ; Moulton, ' It is His Angel,' in/. T. S., vol. iii,
p, 514; Frazer, Golden Bough, iii. 351 sqq.
• CIL. vi. I. 1527.

MORALITY IOI
obtained her husband's pardon from Octavianus, For
forty-one years she lived in unbroken harmony with
Vespillo, who tells of her chastity, her courtesy, her
diligence in spinning, her 'religion without super
stition,' her moderation In dress, her unvarying good
ness to her own relations and to his. Only once
was there any serious disagreement between the two.
All their children died young, and Turia begged
Vespillo to divorce her and re-marry, lest the stock
should come to an end. He vowed that nothing but
death should part them, and after her death adopted
a daughter whom she had selected for him, ' May
thy manes,' he says in conclusion, ' leave thee In peace,
and keep thee so.' May we not say that this fine
pair were not far from the Kingdom of God ?
You will notice that Vespillo regards divorce with
horror. Marriage is to him a sacred and lifelong
bond, which nothing can cancel as long as love
remains. You will notice also that he has a strong
desire for sons and daughters to perpetuate the name
of the famous Lucretlan house. The same things
are true also of Pliny and of Pliny's friends. We
should remember this when we read of that child
lessness which was the curse of smart society in
Rome, What is true of many is not true of all ^
» On the monuments we find many parents boasting of the
number of their children. See CIL. vi. 2. 12845 ' Nam patri similes
uno de coniuge nati Tres sunt florentes iuvenili robore vitae Et
virgo tenera gestans aetate iuventam.'

lot THE CHURCH'S TASK
Shortly after the time of Vespillo an alteration in
the ceremonial of marriage abolished what was called
the manus, or power, of the husband. It was designed
to secure the property of married women, but it made
divorce much easier and more common \ Seneca,
a professed woman-hater, tells us that many fashion
able ladles dated the year not by the consuls, but
by their husbands^. But In the epitaphs two not
uncommon words are virginius and Virginia ', They
^ The old religious marriage by Confarreatio, under which divorce
was almost impossible, was all but obsolete in the time of Tiberius,
see Tac. Ann. iv. i6. By the middle of the second century the
conventio in manum was no longer in use; see Gains, Instit. i. no,
III' Ohm itaque tribus modis in manum conveniebant, usu, farreo,
coemptione . . . sed hoc totum ius partim legibus sublatum est,
partim ipsa desuetudine obliteratum est.' When the manus was
avoided the wife remained in the power of her father, and could
appeal to him against her husband. Apparently under the new rule
the wife could divorce the husband, even when he was not a consent
ing party. No trial was needed, and hardly any form. Under the
old law it seems doubtful whether the wife could in any circumstances
divorce her husband.
'^ de Ben. iii. i6. 2. It may be noticed that Seneca's coarse
diatribe de matrimonio would have perished altogether, if it had not
been for St. Jerome, who quoted from it largely and with approval
in his treatise against Jovinian.
' CIL. vi. 2. 1 1 731 'quorum corpora Virginia hie condita sunt
ad bene quiescendum.' So also vii. 4. 34035, 34728. In vi. 4.
31711 we have ' univira ' ; in vi. 3. 22657, on a wife who died aged
sixty-six, 'quae vixit cum eo a virginitate sine ulla macula aim.
xxxiv'; vi. 2. 14404 'In cineres versa es tumuloque inclusa;
cicadae Diceris coniux una fuisse viri ' — the cricket chirping on her
tomb will proclaim that she was never divorced. Constantly we find

MORALITY 103
denote a husband who never had but the one wife,
a wife who never had but the one husband. Many
people must have regarded an unbroken marriage as
a great blessing and a strong claim to sympathy.
You may notice again that the chief virtue ascribed
by Vespillo to Turia Is courage. She championed
her husband's cause with dauntless Intrepidity, at
a time when she could not speak a word In his behalf
without endangering her own life. These great Roman
dames were not wanting in masculine virtues, and
their training was such as to darken the harsher
shade in their disposition. They were well educated
by private tutors, who were often Greek slaves of
corrupt morals. As girls they lived In great seclusion.
Their marriage, which took place at a very early age
(fourteen or fifteen ^), was arranged for them, and there
was no love romance. But the moment these chil
dren became matrons they found themselves absolute
queens of an immense establishment, numbering from
400 to 1,000 people, able to gratify every whim,
able to make fortunes and to mar them, able even,
down to the time of Hadrian at least, to crucify
a tirewoman who let the mirror drop. There was
no check at all upon them except the will of the
' quacum,' or ' quocum, vixit annis — sine querela,' or ' sine offensa,'
pr ' sine stomacho,' or ' sine verbo scabro.'
* Or younger. CLL. vi. 2. 14930 on a wife married at thirteen ;
vi. 3. 15488 'cum quem (qua) vixi ab infantia'; 184 12, wife
married at eleven.

I04 THE CHURCH'S TASK
husband, and perhaps some wholesome dread of the
Matrons' Parliament — the matronarum conventus —
a curious institution, a sort of legalized Almack's, to
which every lady of a certain position was admitted
upon marriage^. The matrons regulated etiquette
and possibly interfered in cases of scandal, at any
rate they talked very freely about them.
It is no wonder that many of these child-wives did
very monstrous things. On the other hand there
were many admirable wives. But Roman tales of
feminine devotion are often very fierce, like that of
Arria^, who, when her husband was condemned to
die, first struck the dagger into her own bosom and
then handed It to him, saying, ' Paetus, It does not
hurt.' An inscription, carved on a rock at Cagllari,
tells us how Cassius PhiUppus was banished to Sar
dinia, how his wife Atilla Pomptilla went with him and
shared his prison. In that pestilential climate he fell

' On the Matronarum Conventus see Friedlander.
^ For Arria the elder, wife of Caecina Paetus, see Phny, Epp. iii.
16. In the palmy days of Stoicism there were many of these heroic
dames — Annia PoUitta, wife of Rubelhus Plautus, Tac. Ann. xvi. 10;
Pauhna, wife of Seneca, Tac. Ann. xv. 64 ; Arria the younger, wife
of Thrasea, Tac, Ann. xvi. 34 ; Fannia, widow of Helvidius, Phny,
Epp. vii. 19. Phny tells us also of a wife of lower degree, who,
finding that her husband was afflicted with an incurable disease,
clasped him in her arms and sprang with him out of a window into
the lake of Como. ' Quod factum,' he continues, ' ne mihi quidem
qui municeps, nisi proxime, auditum est; non quia minus illo
clarissimo Arriae facto, sed quia minor ' ; Epp. vi. 24.

MORALITY 105
deadly sick ; the wife killed herself as an offering in
his stead to the infernal gods. Her sacrifice was
accepted, and the man recovered \ Another Alcestis
was a Greek matron named Callicratea, She too
gave herself to death 'for her excellent husband
Zeno, the only husband whom she had clasped to her
bosom, whom her heart prized above the light of the
sun or her dear children *,' We cannot doubt the
love or the unselfishness of such wives, nor can we
doubt that they would be pure and faithful mates.
But there is something of the tigress in them.
In Greece the moral tone was as a rule serener and
more humane. There the tone of thought ran rather
towards Atticism and Platonism than towards Stoicism ;
and Platonism honoured women, not for the harsh
virtues of the Amazon, but for the graces which made
them charming companions, for the delicate intuitions
which often pierce more profoundly into truth than
the stiff, sharp instruments of masculine logic. The
great women of Roman literature are all of the virago
type ; they did not blench at the sight of blood, and
they would turn down their thumbs In the amphi
theatre when a gladiator fell. When good they were
like Arria, when bad like Messalina; always proud,
fearless, and masculine. The Greek heroines are of
gentler mould, like Penelope, or Andromache, or
' CIG. 5757; Friedlander, Sittengeschichte, i. 461.
2 Anthol. Graeca, vii. 691 ; Friedlander, ibid.

io6 THE CHURCH'S TASK
Antigone. Plutarch speaks of women and of the
married life in very much the tone of a refined and
kindly English gentleman.
The Roman noble was a fitting mate for his
haughty spouse ; and his position was, to our modern
notions, even more extraordinary. Every Roman
family was an empire within the empire, and the
paterfamilias was ruler, judge, and, when he thought
proper, executioner of his wife, children, and slaves.
A remarkable case In point is that of Pomponia
Graeclna, who. In the year 57, was accused of attach
ment to 'a foreign superstition \' Nero, following
the usual practice, remitted the matter to her husband,
A. Plautlus, the conqueror of southern Britain ; he In
due form called together his kinsmen, heard the
evidence and acquitted her. He might have put her
to death, but this great noble and stout soldier was
probably very fond of his wife, and seems to have
been minded that his Pomponia should believe what
she pleased and not be troubled by a crew of vile
informers. She was very possibly a Christian; but,
whether she was so or not, the facts show how easily
Christianity might find shelter within the walls of the
Roman palaces. It is probable that Pomponia was
' In the hand ' of her husband, and had been married
under the old rules, but the new form of marriage also
was capable of being worked to the advantage of
^ Tac. Ann. xiii. 32.

MORALITY 107
the Church. Justin Martyr ^ tells us of a woman who
was afflicted with a profligate wretch of a husband.
She divorced him, and thereupon he accused her to
the prefect of the city, as a Christian, which Indeed
she was. She appealed to the Emperor, who gave
her leave to ' settle her affairs ' before making her
answer on the capital charge. In order to settle her
affairs, she had to recover her dowry from her husband,
and, as he could not pay, the charge fell to the ground.
No doubt this was what the Emperor intended. Thus
the dowry sheltered the wife, even when the husband
was a worthless man who hated her. In both these
cases, and in others that are known to us, Caesar
appears to have been quite willing to protect women
of position from religious persecution, and very few
ladies suffered for the faith. They were shielded by
the house-father even when he was a pagan, Lanciani
gives us an inscription of the second century written
on the tomb of a daughter, of whom the father says
that 'she was a pagan among pagans, a believer
among believers ^.' Probably she was the child of
a mixed marriage who had done her best, in sweet
girlish ways, to keep the peace between a pagan
father and a Christian mother.
But the patria potestas had another side. It was
the unquestioned right of the father to decide which
of his children should be permitted to live, and he
' Apol. ii. 2. ' Pagan and Christian Rome, p. 15.

io8 THE CHURCH'S TASK
exercised this right very freely. Infanticide was
extremely common, especially in families of limited
means. Superfluous children were just cast into the
street, as soon as they were born. In the Oxyrhynchus
Papyri we have a pleasant chatty note from a husband
In Alexandria to his wife and sisters at home. Among
other things he speaks of an expected Infant ; ' If it Is
a boy,' he says, ' let it be ; If It is a girl, throw it out *.'
The poor little creatures did not Invariably perish, for
there were people who made a trade of collecting
foundlings and rearing them as slaves. There were
baby-farms to which they could be sent for this
purpose. In the same papyri we find an account
of a law-suit arising out of this practice *. One Syrus
picked up a baby ' In the gutter,' and put him out
to nurse with a woman named Saraeus who had a
little child of her own. The foundling died, and
thereupon Syrus swore before the magistrate that the
dead child was the woman's and the living was his.
The destiny of these waifs, especially If they were
girls, may readily be imagined ; yet sometimes they
managed to make for themselves a place in the world.
Out of twenty eminent grammarians, or, as we should
say, professors or masters of the great public schools,
enumerated by Suetonius, two had been exposed by
their parents. Ten per cent, of the Roman Keates
and Arnolds had risen from this beginning. Consider
* Ooiyr. Pap. iv, no. 744. '^ Oxyr. Pap. i, no. 38.

MORALITY 109
again the moral complications which might easily
arise from this state of things.
Yet, notwithstanding the prevalence of this abomin
able custom, we find in the monuments abundant
evidence of parental affection. We have an inscription
on the grave of one Marcellinus who committed suicide
on the death of his little son ^, z.ndparentes infelicissimi
is a most common phrase upon the tombs of children.
Let me give you three Instances out of a great many.
One occurs in the epitaph of a little boy. ' The joker
of his grandmother, because he used to call her his
nurse, the staff" of her great age ; the joker of his
uncle, because he was so sweet to him ; and he used
to delight his grandfather with his little voice, so that
all the neighbours would say O sweet Titus ''.' On
a girl of fifteen ; ' My little life, thou hast forsaken
thy unhappy mamma *.' On a little girl who did not
live to complete her second year ; ' I gave my mother
and father grief, before I threw my arms round them,
before I could please my mother and father *.' These
1 CIL. iii. 6082. " CLL. vi. 3. 18086.
' CIL. vi. 4. 25808 'Destituisti vitilla mea miseram mammam
tuam.' * CIL. vi. 4. 26544. See also vi. 3. 22251, on Marsidia Agathe-
meris, an old lady of seventy, wrapped up in her twin daughters and
her grandson. Her only trouble was that one of her daughters had
died before her. This was always regarded as a great grief. Con
stantly we find the phrase ' I have done for my child what my child
ought to have done for me.' It may be noticed here that life seems
to have been very short in Rome. I have taken the average of

IIO THE CHURCH'S TASK
words are not conventional; they are cries from the
heart which all parents will recognize.
The practice of infanticide, ruinous as it was to the
Empire, was so deeply rooted in the ancient law of
the home that even Constantine did not venture
to prohibit it. In 374 Valentinian made it penal,
bringing it under the general law of murder. But
earlier emperors, alarmed by the growing tendency
of the population to decline, had attempted to stem
the evil by the establishment of what are known as
the 'alimentary institutions \' This form of charity
began with Nerva, and continued to be much In
fashion till the time of Alexander Severus. The
example of the Emperor was readily followed by
private donors, and In every large town there were
landed estates, from the rents of which a monthly
allowance, equivalent to the price of four or five
bushels of wheat, was made to poor boys or girls
under the age of sixteen. The object was, of course>
to render infanticide unnecessary, but little good seems
500 Uves recorded consecutively (vi. 3. 17571-19143). Of these
181 died under ten, and 113 between ten and twenty. Two lived
to be over seventy; eleven over eighty; three over ninety. In
Africa {CIL. viii. i) instances of longevity are much more common.
Between nos. 342 and 439 occur three centenarians, five non
agenarians, and ten octogenarians. As to other provinces I have
kept no count.
* See Friedlander ; Seeck ; Schiller, Kaisergeschichte ; Hatch,
Bampton Lectures, ed. 1882, p. 34. Full references will be found in
these authorities.

MORALITY III
to have been accomplished. The relief was Inade
quate ; and, amid the growing disasters of the time,
the rents were often misappropriated, or confiscated,
or destroyed. Constantine undertook to maintain
necessitous children at the expense of the fiscus, but
still the law of Valentinian was needed, and even this
was probably not strictly enforced. The evil endured
till the destruction of the Western Empire by the
Germans, who had always regarded child-murder with
natural abhorrence. The Church, it need hardly be
said, had condemned it from the very first in the
strongest possible terms.
Another great domestic relation Is that of master
and slave. On this subject there is little that is new
to be said, but the Institution of slavery had such deep
and wide-reaching moral effects that it cannot be
passed over without some notice.
The first thing that strikes us is the enormous
number of the slaves. The richest men would possess
as many as twenty thousand, of whom from four or
five hundred to a thousand would be attached to their
palaces in Rome, while the remainder were agricultural
labourers scattered about upon their vast estates, I do
not know that there are any trustworthy statistics
as to the relation of the two classes, but It is probable
that the number of slaves and freedmen greatly
exceeded that of the freeborn. And the evil went on
increasing. From the second century onwards we

112 THE CHURCH'S TASK
begin to hear of a class of serfs or villains, who were
adscripti glebae, and slaves In all but name. Gradually
the bulk of the rustic population appear to have sunk
Into this miserable condition \
In the Roman Empire the slave was for the most
part of the same colour, and practically of the same
race, as his master. No attempt was ever made to
prevent his education ; on the contrary, skill In a
handicraft, in the management of business, in art,
even In erudition and Intellectual accomplishments
generally, was held greatly to increase his market
value. The natural consequence was that, being
helped by the favour, the confidence, the capital of his
master, the slave or freedman flooded every kind of
employment. There was no dignity, not even the
throne Itself — for the Emperor Pertinax was of servile
descent — to which the son or grandson of a slave
might not attain ; and the arts and crafts, the trades
and professions were full of them. So great were the
advantages enjoyed by the slave that freeborn pro
vincials not uncommonly made themselves slaves to
some great Roman, in order to be emancipated by
him, and thus secure the franchise and his patronage ^.
All this is In a sense greatly to the credit of Roman
* For the Coloni, Inquilini, Laeti, see Seeck and Schiller.
' Petronius, Cena, 57 'ipse me dedi in servitutem et malui civis
Romanus esse quam tributarius.' See Friedlander's note on the
passage.

MORALITY 113
liberality. No effort was made to keep the slave
down, and those of the better class obtained their
freedom easily and in great numbers. Yet the slave
or freedman was always regarded with contempt, and
not without reason ^ There was no doubt a vast
difference between the trained and capable man who
had written Caesar's despatches or managed the great
estates of a senator, and the stupid Dacian who tended
the lord's cattle in the mountains, shackled by day
and locked up in the ergastulum by night, lest he
should run away or murder the overseer. But In all
cases the yoke was degrading, and left its mark upon
the neck. For years there had been nothing between
the slave and the scourge but the good humour of his
' Even St. Basil writes rather hardly of the vices of slaves, Epp.
115. But take this epitaph, engraved by one freedman on the tomb
of another, CLL. vi. 3. 22355, ' Between thee and me, my most holy
fellow freedman, I am not conscious that there was ever any division.
I call gods above and gods below to witness that I met thee first in
the auction room, that we were emancipated by the same master ;
and nothing would ever have parted us but this thy fatal day..' The
great bulk of those inscriptions which give frank expression to natural
affection or religious behefs appear, if we may judge by the names,
to emanate from the servile or the enfranchised class. Many dis
tinguished Bishops, Clement, Pius, Callistus of Rome, probably also
Ignatius and Polycarp — not to go beyond the second century — had
the same origin. What is said in the text must not be harshly inter
preted. Cringing, domineering, and credulity are marks of the yoke,
and these were probably all but universal. Lying, drunkenness,
impurity, and dishonesty are also marks, worse, but not so uni
versal.

JI4 THE CHURCH'S TASK
owner, and the master's order had been his one
standard of right and wrong.
The Roman slave down to the time of Hadrian
was absolutely at the mercy of his master, and even
after that date had no more civil rights than the
American negro before the Civil War, In other
respects he was far better off. But the same circum
stances which gave him a career, his white skin and
his education, made slavery, as an institution, Infinitely
more demoralizing. To this cause we may trace the
cringing servility which began with the first institution
of Caesarism, assumed the basest Oriental shape under
Aurellan, Diocletian, and the Christian Emperors, and
corrupted political life from top to bottom. Every
authority, of Caesar, or governor, or magistrate, or
tax-gatherer — I am afraid we must even say of bishop
— was moulded upon the same bad analogy. Some
scholars are inclined to think that the rapid decline of
literature and art is in part due to the fact that so
many of their professors came from the servile class.
The dignity of work was lost, because paid labour was
thought unworthy of any freeborn man. And as for
sexual morality, what can it have been when the mass
of the people were slaves, when slaves were Incapable
of marriage and the number of men greatly pre
ponderated over that of women, when women and
boys had no protection at all against their masters ^,
* ' Nee turpe est quod dominus iubet ' had been Trimalchio's rule

MORALITY 115
when impurity was not denounced by philosophy, and
was encouraged by some of the many forms of
religion? Certainly we cannot be surprised when
we are told that throughout Imperial times the old
population was steadily dying out. Salvian regards
unchastity as one of the main causes of the ruin of the
Empire. Let us pass here to another important topic — that
of amusements.
Duelling, if we call that an amusement, did not
exist among the ancients. Drunkenness and gluttony
were probably not so mischievous in the old world as
in modern England. Nor was gambling. We read
little about betting except In connexion with the
circus, which did not exist outside of the capital.
Games of chance were very popular, and among an
excitable people would lead no doubt to a good deal
of quarrelling, but we very seldom read of men ruining
themselves over the dice-box, A Christian treatise
of uncertain date, known as the de Aleatoribus, de-
{Cena, 75). Friedlander quotes Haterius in Seneca, Controv. iv. pr.
P- 378) 9 Burs. ' impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas,
in liberto officium.' But Haterius was expressing the wholesome old
Roman sentiment when he said that unchastity was crimen in ingenuo.
Epictetus {Enchir. xxxiii. 8) says ¦ntpi ai^poiiaia tis Sivapiv jrpo ydpov
KaSapt-UTtov' AiTTopiva ii hv vopipov peToKifirriov. Mij fiivrot iiraxSris yivov
TOK -f^apiivois, pirjdi i\eyKTiK6s' pi&f iroXKaxov ro on airos ov XPV Trapdtptpt,
The Stoic maxim was qui vitia odit homines odit (Pliny, Epp. viii.
22), and this rule of tolerance was applied to the most abominable
vices. I 2

ii6 THE CHURCH'S TASK
nounces the vice with great vehemence, but the author
would have found much more to say if he had lived
in the eighteenth century, or indeed in our own time.
Gambling was condemned under the Empire both by
law and by public opinion ; and gambling debts were
never regarded as debts of honour ^, There were no
Monte Carlos and no lotteries. Even commercial
speculation, 'rings,' 'corners,' and all other devices
for enhancing prices, especially of food, were regarded
with a very severe eye by the Roman jurists. But
though this Is trlie, the amusements of the ancient
world form one of the darkest blots upon Its moral
character. As to their quality we may say that the
* The Roman law on the subject of gambling will be found in.
the Digest, xi. 5. Juvenal, i. 88 sqq., speaks of losing 100,000
sesterces (about ;^i,ooo) at a sitting as something quite outrageous,
and he is speaking of a time when all the vices were at their worst.
In the fourth century Ammianus Marcellinus, xxviii. 4. 21, says that
there was much dice-playing among the Roman nobility, that those
who indulged in the pastime called themselves tesserarii, not aleatores,
'though there is no more difference between the two words than
there is between thief and robber,' and that a good player was much
in request at social gatherings and was affronted if a proconsul
received more attention than himself. In the fifth century the
friends of Sidonius ApoUinaris constantly played at dice when it
was too hot to play at ball, or when they were too old for violent
exercise. They amused themselves in this way between two services
in church ; Epp. v. 5. But Sidonius never speaks of any stakes ;
his dice-playing was as harmless as backgammon or dominoes.
Even Ammianus, though he looks upon play as an unworthy
occupation for a man of rank, does not complain of its ruinous
consequences.

MORALITY 117
circus was bad, the theatre was worse, and the arena
was altogether detestable \ Their cost was gigantic,
and formed a terrible burden on the coffers of the
state and of individuals. It has been computed that
more than a million a year of our money was spent
upon gladiators alone, without taking Rome itself into
' For details as to the Schauspiele it is sufficient here to refer to
Friedlander. There are but three passages in which heathen writers
express anything like an adequate condemnation of the vile
gladiatorial shows. Seneca, Epp. i. 7, speaks with great disgust
of the exhibition of meridiani; this was a mere butchery. Pliny,
Epp. iv. 22, tells us that the gymnicus agon at Vienna in Gaul was
abolished by Trebonius Rufus. As money had been bequeathed
for the purpose, there was an appeal to Trajan, the good emperor,
who celebrated his Dacian triumph by sending 10,000 prisoners of
war into the arena (Dio Cassius, Ixviii. 15). Mauricus, when called
upon for his opinion, said ' I wish such shows could be abolished at
Rome also.' The Council upheld the action of Trebonius. In
Lucian, Demonax, 57, we read how Demonax advised the Athenians
to pull down the altar of Pity before they gave a gladiatorial show in
their town. But the excellent Symmachus, Epp. ii. 46, ed. Seeck,
was reduced to the verge of despair by the outrageous conduct of
thirty-nine Saxon captives, who strangled one another in their prison
rather than go into the arena, and thus spoiled the magnificent
show which he was giving in honour of his son's praetorship. He
speaks almost with tears of the ' impious hands ' of those wretches
who were * worse than Spartacus.' Augustine, Conf. ix. 8, describes
the horrid intoxication which came over Alypius when first he saw
blood flow in the amphitheatre. Constantine forbade gladiatorial
shows, but his edict remained a dead letter. Early in the fifth
century the Christian poet addressed to Honorius the fine line
' Nullus in urbe cadat cuius sit poena voluptas' {contra Symm. 1125).
Shortly afterwards Telemachus, an Eastern monk, lost his life in
trying to part the swordsmen, and these wicked displays were then
finally abolished.

ii8 THE CHURCH'S TASK
the account, and In the capital, at one time, shows
of one kind or another were given on more than half
the days in the year. The spectators assembled
before dawn and sat in their places till the fall of
night. Such a state of things is unparalleled in the
history of the world, and the evil consequences of
every kind must have been Immense. Nor can we
say In excuse that there was no other kind of amuse
ment. On the contrary, life must have been much
more agreeable in the ancient town, with Its baths,
fountains, basilicas, parks, libraries, its profusion of
works of art, its guild meetings, processions, feasts,
athletic sports, musical and rhetorical competitions,
above all its climate — for the greater part of the
Empire lay in the lands of the sun — than It has ever
been since. These colossal and hideous shows of the
amphitheatre were provided gratis in addition to an
extraordinarily large measure of other and more
innocent enjoyments.
This huge expenditure on amusements and the
consequent and equally huge expenditure on food,
clothing, and doles of money for the vast multitude
of the unemployed, this socialism run mad, as we may
call it, working in the same direction with a system
of education which stifled all zeal for improvement,
and a despotic govemment which treated even desire
for Improvement as a crime, combined to produce
that amazing fiscal mismanagement which displays

SOCIAL CONDITION 119
its evil fruits as early as the reign of Trajan. It
grew worse and worse till the very end. We may
trace Its results very clearly in the gradual ruin of the
curiales or town councillors \ that is to say of the
respectable middle class, all over the Empire, and in
the gradual formation of an Iron system of castes.
As to the latter, it may be observed that the notion
of hereditary obligation was applied with most rigour
to just those occupations which were necessary for
the maintenance of the shows and the doles, to the
curiales who were responsible for the taxes, to the
* For the downfall of the curiales the reader should consult Dill
or Seeck ; it forms the most instructive and melancholy chapter in
the history of imperial Rome. Even in the time of Pliny we hear
of men who were compelled to serve as decurions, and by the end
of the second century the office seems to have been regarded as
nearly synonymous with ruin {Digest, 50. 2, 4, 5). These officials
had to discharge mainly at their own expense a long list of munera,
including all, and much more than all, that in modern England is
provided out of the rates (see the list of munera in Digest, 50. 4).
In the time of Diocletian the curiales were further obliged to make
good the deficits in the imperial budget, which were always large
(Seeck ii. 190). Under the Christian emperors matters grew worse
and worse {Cod. Theod. xii. i). Men caught at every means of
escape from the intolerable burden, sometimes endeavouring to rise
above it, by purchasing a title or dignity that would exempt, some
times flying abroad into the country of the barbarians, or making
themselves serfs to some powerful noble. Many ran away to the
monasteries in the desert ; this was forbidden by a law of Valens in
373 {Cod. Theod. xii. i. 63; the date is not certain). Others en
deavoured to get themselves ordained. The relation of the curia
to the Church is so interesting that I have ventured to make it the
subject of an excursus, which follows this lecture.

I20 THE CHURCH'S TASK
cultivators of the soil who grew the wheat, to the
shipmasters who carried it to Rome or Constantinople,
to the bakers who made the bread, and to all sorts of
theatrical people. Thus every career was blocked
except the bar, the civil service, and the army, and
of these the bar was largely occupied In the conduct
of oppressive suits against defaulters to the treasury,
and the civil service was screwing taxes out of people
who could not pay, while the chief places in the army
fell more and more to German or Scythian barbarians.
The state of things in the Empire, especially in
Christian times, was worse than that in France just
before the Revolution. The senators were enormously
wealthy, and stood practically above the reach of the
law ; the people were exceedingly poor. The rich
shoved off" their burdens on to the shoulders of the
poor ; the poor were ground down by heavy and ill-
adjusted taxation, and by still heavier corvdes, and
were harried to desperation by a host of greedy and
corrupt officials. Salvian tells us that the advent of
the barbarian conquerors was in many places hailed
with joy, and this Is probably true ^. Indeed we may
think that, if It had not been for that great revolution,
the Empire would have sunk into a condition not
unlike that of China. The literati and officials of
' Salvian may be called the ancestor of our Christian Socialists.
A good account of him will be found in Mr. Dill's book, but he well
deserves to be read in the original.

SOCIAL CONDITION 121
the time of Sidonius ApoUinaris are, in many curious
points, very similar to mandarins^.
It should be added finally, that as the number of
barbarians in the Empire Increased — from the time
of Marcus Aurelius onwards — the old Roman virtues
disappear. I must not dwell upon the point, though
it is one of great Interest ; let It suffice just to notice
two facts — the growing barbarity of punishment in
flicted by law and sanctioned by popular opinion, and
the prevalence of treason, not merely in the shape of
conspiracies against the Emperor, but as a legitimate
weapon against an enemy In open war. The dis
graceful treachery of Count Boniface, who called the
Vandals into Africa to gratify his spite against the
Empress Placldia, is characteristic of his age and
would have been impossible in the old heathen
times. All this will help to make clear to us the nature
and the magnitude of the task which lay before the
Church, and to enable us to judge with equity the
degree of her success.
It was in the field of private morality that she
accomplished most. She regarded It rightly as her
first and principal duty to purify the soul of the
^ This remark will justify itself to any one who, after reading the
Epistles of Sidonius, will turn to that most amusing and instruc
tive Chinese novel, Les deux Cousines, translated and judiciously
abbreviated by M. Remusat.

122 THE CHURCH'S TASK
individual, and draw him into brotherly communion
with his fellow believers. By what means she effected
this aim may be read best perhaps in the Didascalia,
to which reference has already been made, and in
Dr. Harnack's instructive volume die Mission und
Ausbreitung des Christentums. Later on, the great
ascetic movement of the fourth century was a
strenuous effort in the same direction. That move
ment was no doubt open to criticism ; and it has been
.much debated whether the Church did not hasten the
( downfall of the Empire by calling soldiers away from
' the standard, officials from the administration of the
state, and large numbers of excellent men and women
: from their social duties into what may seem the
sterility of the cloistered life. I think we may say
three things; first, that we must not condemn flight
\ from the world without fully knowing what that world
i was from which the ascetic fled ; second, that a monk
\ like St. Martin of Tours, in the circumstances of the
'; time, probably rendered far greater services to his
generation than he could have done in any other
capacity; third, that what is true is that the Church
did not prevent, nor even retard, the downfall of the
Empire. That Christianity in itself did not sap the
forces of the state is evident from the fact that
the victorious Germanic invaders were, for the most
part, Christians themselves.
But, If we turn our eyes to the field of public virtue,

SOCIAL CONDITION 123
then it must be acknowledged that the Church pro
duced very little result indeed. The evils which were
destroying the body politic went on unchecked, and
the process of deterioration was more rapid than ever
nnder the Christian emperors.
It would be unjust to hold the Church accountable
for this decline. The real root of the mischief was
the entire absence of any form of popular representa
tion in the government, and the sufficient causes of
this radical defect are to be found in the heterogeneous
character of the Empire, and In its gradual degrada*
tion of tissue, as the barbarian element In the
population Increased. It is important to notice that
the Church was never, in any real sense of the word,
established. Certain judicial powers were given to
the bishop, but the great ecclesiastics were never
formally admitted to the councils of the Empire,
They were shut out from all Imperial responsibility,
and from all chance of gathering political wisdom.
They were relegated, not entirely against their own
will, to the domains of theology and ethics, and this
sharp division between the secular and the spiritual
produced very unfortunate results both In State and
Church. A great bishop, such as St, Basil or St.
Ambrose, would resist the Emperor with dauntless
courage in a matter of orthodoxy or of clerical privi
lege ; an exceptionally great bishop would even
rebuke an emperor for his personal misdeeds, thus

124 THE CHURCH'S TASK
St. Ambrose excommunicated Theodosius for the
massacre of Thessalonica, and vehemently protested
against the judicial murder of Priscillian by Maximus.
Every good bishop regarded himself as a sort of
unofficial defensor plebis ^. The writings of Basil and
Synesius in the East, and of Sidonius ApoUinaris in
' Not quite unofficial. A law of Honorius and Theodosius
enacted in 409 {Cod. Theod. ix. 3. 7) directs that a judge shall visit
the town jail every Sunday, listen to the prisoners' complaints, see
that they are properly fed and washed (they are to be taken to the
public bath under charge of the jailer), and generally treated with
humanity. The Bishop is to take care that the visiting justice does
his duty. ' Nee deerit antistitum christianae religionis cura laudabihs,
quae ad observationem constituti iudicis hanc ingerat monitionem.'
See Godefroi's note upon this law; Seeck, ii. 175, 529. But the
power of the Bishop was very limited. He could not directly
inhibit the action of a magistrate, as we learn from the story of
Synesius and Andronicus. In the case of a very glaring injustice he
might excommunicate, but this was a perilous and almost unheard-
of course. Constantine granted the Bishop an extensive and rather
indefinite jurisdiction, but it certainly did not include actions in
which the rights of the crown were involved. It was exercised by
St. Basil; but it was a consensual jurisdiction, and was always
difficult to assert against the claims of the imperial judges. See the
Epistles, 225, 237, 270, 286, 289. Cases of abduction, slander, and
theft or misappropriation of church property are here in question.
In Ep. 289 (a slander case) Basil tells us that his rule is not to hand
over offenders to the secular court, but not to claim them if they
have been indicted before a secular court. In the West, a little
later, St. Ambrose maintains the exemption of clerics from secular
jurisdiction, but he is speaking only of cases involving the faith, or
ecclesiastical property {Ep. 21). See the Appendix to the Codex
Theod. in Godefroi and Sirmondi; Eus. V. C. iv. 27; Seeck, i. 63,
473 and ii. 180.

SOCIAL CONDITION 125
the West, show us how manfully they would strive
for redress In Individual cases of oppression by bad
governors. Many of the Gallic bishops, at the time
of the invasion, fed large masses of destitute people ;
some even led, or encouraged, armed resistance to the
barbarians. In that catastrophe the bishops showed
themselves better men and better citizens than any
other class. But, so far as I know, no one ever
ventured to criticize the system through which all
these evils had come to pass, except Salvian, a priest
of South Gaul, and he was wise after the event, and
could safely defy an emperor who was no longer his
sovereign. The Church, which lived among the poor, knew far
better than any one else the moral and social evils
that afflicted the state, and the fiscal and other In
justices by which they were caused or intensified.
But she was not allowed to utilize her experience.
It is probable also that she did not really grasp the
meaning of her experience, partly from defective
education, partly because she was compelled to rely
too exclusively on the clergy, partly also because
asceticism, which regarded the service of the world
as the service of the devil ^ warped her view, and
^ Paulinus of Nola expresses this sentiment very strongly ; Ep. viii
' Quanta etenim coelo et terris distantia, tanta est Caesaris et Christi
rebus et imperils ' ; Ep. xxv ' Quodsi magis dilexerimus hoc saeculum
et maluerimus Caesari mihtare quam Christo, postea non ad Christum

126 THE CHURCH'S TASK
prevented her from even conceiving the idea of a
Christian statesman.
Two reflections appear to be forced upon us. One
is that orthodoxy, and even private virtue, will not
save a state that Is rotten at the core. The other
is that under the rule of the Christian emperors the
Church still continued to do exactly what she had
done in the days of Decius and Diocletian, palliating
by charity the evils inflicted by Injustice, like the
Good Samaritan, or like an ambulance In the train
of an army. It was a noble office, and It was nobly
fulfilled. Only in quite modern times have we beg^n
to understand that there is a still higher conception of
Christian duty, that the private virtues cannot flourish
sed ad gehennam transferemur, ubi principum huius mundi uertitur
causa.' On the other hand, when the wretched Boniface told
Augustine and Alypius that he wanted to be a monk, they replied
that he would render greater service to the Church of Christ if he
would repel the barbarians for the sake of her peace (Aug. Epp.
220). Gregory Nazianzen {Or. xix. 10) simply exhorts soldiers to
follow the precepts of John the Baptist. Basil maintained a friendly
correspondence with several officers in the army {Epp. 116, 117,
152, 153), begs a friend to accept the ofifice of tajvaiTap {Ep. 299),
and reminds another that in the Eucharistic office the Church prays
Insip rav iv reus aTpareiais i^€Ta(opfvav {Ep. 155). Many Christians
appear to have held that when a man had discharged all his civic
duties and reached the age of natural and legal exemption he ought
then to ' quit the world.' St. Martin of Tours probably served the
whole of his time in the army before he became a monk. But the
opinion expressed by Paulinus was very widely held and very
strenuously preached.

SOCIAL CONDITION 127
without the public, that religion and policy ought to
go hand in hand, and that for the old ideal of Church
and State we ought to substitute that new ideal of the
Church-State, which hovered before the minds of
Piers Plowman and of John Wycllf ', but has not yet
been realized.
* WycHf revived in the West the old theocratic belief, which in
the East has never disappeared, that the Sovereign is God's deputy,
whose sacred office it is to see that all men, clergy, and laity do their
appointed duty. In the West it had been broken down by a variety
of causes, among which asceticism and the barbarism of the new
Teutonic kings were the chief. Papal domination was not so much
a cause as another result of these causes. Wychf s doctrine, which
well deserves study, may be found in the prefaces to Mr. Poole's
editions of the de dominio divino and de dominio civili, in the Select
English Works edited by Arnold, or in Shirley's edition of the
Fasciculi Zizaniorum.

EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV
The relation of the Curia to the Church Is so
important, and has attracted so Httle attention, that
it may be worth while to collect passages bearing
upon the point.
In the second century Aristides {Or. xlvi) complains
that Christians will not sit upon the town councils.
Celsus makes the same charge (Origen, Cont, Cels.
viii, 68).
The stricter party in the Church appear to have
refused to serve (Tatian, Or. xi Soio/jiavias dirrjXXay/iai.
Speratus, one of the Scillltan martyrs, says, ' Ego
imperium huius saeculi non cognosco.' Min, Felix,
viii 'honores et purpuras desplciunt.* Tert, Apol.
xxxviii ' nee ulla magis aliena res est quam publica ' ;
xlvi ' christianus nee aedilltatem adfectat '), But
Tertullian, de idol, xvii, lets us see also that there
were many who did not agree with him, who were
willing to perform their municipal duty, and defended
themselves by the example of Joseph and of Daniel.
The Canons of Hippolytus, about the same date,
decidedly supports this more liberal view, and only
stipulates that a Christian who takes office shall

EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV 129
discharge his functions conscientiously (ed, Achelis,
p. 82),
At first, while a seat upon the town council and
a place among the town magistrates was regarded
as a high distinction, evasion may have been easy
enough, though it would be greatly resented by the
burgesses, who depended on the liberality of their
magistrates for much of the comfort and nearly all
the amusement of civic life. But, towards the end
of the second century, service began to be felt as an
oppressive burden, and severe laws made It extremely
difficult to escape (see Ulpian, in Digest, 50). At the
outbreak of the Decian persecution there were many
Christian decurions In Alexandria (Eus. H. E. vi. 41.
11), and no doubt elsewhere, and in the time of Diocle
tian there were still more (Eus. H. E. viii. i). The
Council of Illlberis does not forbid Christians to serve,
though it directs that a duumvir shall be excluded
from church during his year of office (can. 56). The
Council of Aries (can. 7) allows a Christian to hold
civil office, but admonishes the bishop to watch over
him, and 'if he acts against discipline' to excom
municate him.
In the time of Diocletian the town council had
sunk so low that enrolment in the Curia had become
a favourite method of punishment or annoyance. See
the law In MIgne's Constantine, 259. Later on we
find complaint that Donatists and Arians managed
BIGG K

I30 EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV
to get Catholics punished in this way; it is perhaps
an accident that we do not hear of similar complaints
on the other side.
In the very beginning of his reign Constantine
exempted the Catholic clergy from all munera, In
cluding the dreaded and hated curial obligation (see
Cod. Theod. xvi. 2, i, 2, with Godefroi's Notes), but
this concession was seriously modified, indeed prac
tically annulled, by later enactments ; thus in 320
a law, repeating an older law which has disappeared,
directs that no decurlon or person liable to the
decurlonate shall be ordained, and that, if ordained,
he shall be deposed and sent back to the Curia
{Cod. Theod. xvi. 2. 3) ; and in 326 another law enacts
that there shall be no ordinations except to fill death
vacancies, that no one shall be ordained who by reason
of birth or property Is bound to curial service, and
that the Curia shall have power to lodge a protest
against the ordination of any such person {Cod. Theod.
xvi. 2, 6). To the last law a reason is appended —
'opulentos enim saeculi subire necessitates oportet,
pauperes ecclesiarum divitlis sustentarl ' — but the real
reason was, as we see from the law of 320, that
numbers of people sought for ordination in order to
get rid of the curial obligation.
These laws of Constantine, if strictly enforced,
would have made ordination Impossible except for
the senators who were above the curial burden, for
the poor who were beneath it, and for the aged who

EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV 131
had discharged their duty and so become exempt.
They are quite sufficient to account for the ignorance
which Is charged against the Eastern bishops by
Philostorglus and by Gregory Nazianzen.
The only legal course for a well-to-do plebeian
who desired ordination was to make over his property
to the Curiales, and in this way indemnify them for
the loss of his services. But this was naturally felt
to be a great hardship, and methods of evasion were
attempted ; men appear to have made away with their
property by some sort of fictitious transfer (' allenatis
facultatlbus aut In aliorum iura ante transcrlbtis ' are
the words of the Codex). The Emperor thought it
politic to make a compromise, and by a law of
Constantlus in 361 {Cod. Theod. xii. i. 49) bishops
were no longer required to divest themselves of their
property. Nor were the Inferior clergy, if It appeared
on examination before a judge, in presence of the
Curia, that their purpose to serve God was sincere,
and If the whole laity desired their ordination.
Otherwise they were obliged to cede two-thirds of
their property to some relative who would discharge
their curial obligations In their stead, or, In default
of such relatives, to the Curia. (For a parallel law
of the same date see Cod. Theod. viii, 4. 7.) Thus
the Curia retained the right of a negative voice in
all ordinations except those of bishops.
Julian the Apostate deprived the clergy of all
immunities. After his death Valentinian In 364 re-

132 EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV
verted to the arrangement which had existed before
361 ; all clergymen were obliged to surrender the
whole of their property, only they were allowed to
make it over, not to the Curia, but to a relation.
By a later law of the same reign {Cod. Theod.
xvi. 2. 19) this was re-enacted, but a proviso was
added that no one should be molested who had been
in orders for ten years. It is clear from this that
there had again been evasions. Even Theodosius
the Great repeats the same severe rule {Cod. Theod.
xii. I. 104 — 'quippe animos divina observatlone de-
vinctos non decet patrlmonlorum deslderiis occupari ' ;
cp. same title, 115). But again there were evasions,
and again the law was repeated with the addition of
a time of grace {Cod. Theod. -sin. i. 121, 123).
It is not Improbable that these difficulties had
been felt in the time of Cyprian, who was a wealthy
plebeian, and before his consecration gave away the
whole of his property {Vita, 15). Certainly at that
date the obligation to serve on the town council could
not have been avoided In any other way. His
house and garden were bought by the brethren and
given back to him, but we may suppose that the
value of this property did not amount to the curial
census, which was generally about .;^iooo. But the
most Interesting commentary upon the working of the
law is supplied by the correspondence of St. Basil.
Basil was ordained priest in the reign of Julian,
when all clerical immunities had been abolished. It

EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV 133
is sometimes said that he divested himself of all his
property, but what Is meant apparently is that from
the moment of his conversion he regarded it no longer
as his own. We may suppose that he retained legal
possession of his estate, but lived an austere life and
gave away large sums (see Gregory Nyssen's Oration
on Basil, pp. 488, 491, ed. Morel, 1638) Thus under
Valens he would be liable to be called back to the
Curia ; and this is probably the reason why we find
him writing {Ep. 190) about 'a dignity' which he is
anxious to obtain, even If he has to pay a price for it.
The dignity was probably one of those sinecure offices
which exempted from service (see Seeck, ii. p. 315).
From Ep. 192 it would appear that he had obtained
what he wanted through the good offices of Sophronius.
In Ep. 230 (the date is 375 ; see Loofs, Eustathius
von Sebaste, p. 53) Basil writes to the Curia of
Nicopolls, telling them that the bishops have elected
a bishop for their city, and that It Is now their business
to confirm him. This, as will have been seen. Is in
strict accordance with the law. Basil does not here
speak of any formal recognition of the bishop-elect
by the general body of the laity, but in the West
certainly three parties were concerned, as we see
from Ep. 7 of Pope Celestine ; ' Nullus invitis detur
Episcopus, Clerl, plebis et ordinis consensus et desi-
derium requiratur.' Indeed in the West the Influence
of the laity was often predominant in the fourth and
fifth centuries, as In the cases of Ambrose, Augustine,

134 EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV
Pinianus — especially in Gaul and Spain, as In the cases
of St. Martin, Paulinus of Nola, Sidonius ApoUinaris,
Simplicius of Bourges, and probably in those of Patiens
of Lyons, Volusianus of Tours, Venerandus of Cler
mont, and Remigius. In the East It has been held
that the right of the general laity was taken away
by the Council of Nicaea (can. 4), and though this
Is not strictly correct, yet the vote of the Orcb or
Curia seems to have outweighed and finally, In the
time of Justinian, to have superseded it.
But from the present point of view the most
remarkable of all Basil's Letters Is Ep. 104. It was
written In 372 to no less a personage than Modestus,
the praetorian prefect. In It Basil complains that,
whereas the old law (that of 361) granted Immunity
to all clerics, the new officials have withdrawn the
privilege from all who were not over the age of
exemption. This act would be In accordance with
the law of 364, If the clerics in question had not made
due surrender of their estates. He goes on to beg
Modestus to grant exemption, not to the persons
actually affected, 'for in that case the benefit would
pass to their successors, who may not in all cases be
worthy of the priesthood.' Godefroi understands
' successors ' to mean ' successors In office,' but the
meaning appears rather to be 'their sons.' If a
clergyman were exempted the privilege would be
inherited by his children, who would no longer be
' sanguine curiall districti.' This, Basil argues, would

EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV 135
not be to the advantage of the exchequer, because,
as many sons of clergymen would not be ordained,
the number of privileged persons would tend to
Increase. Hence he suggests that the bishop should
have power to grant exemption to such persons as in
his judgement deserved the relief We have already,
he adds, a somewhat similar power in the case of the
eXevOepa airoypa^ij, alluding, I suppose, to the right
of bishops to manumit their own slaves without any
witnesses or forms {Cod. Theod. iv. 7. i), and the slaves
of other people by merely signing a certificate. If
Modestus had adopted this suggestion, Basil would
have been able (i) to screen offenders against the
law; (2) to ordain as many curiales as he liked; (3)
to secure a better class of candidates for ordination,
and (4) greatly to Increase the power of the bishop.
But it Is obvious that Modestus was not likely to
entertain the suggestion.
Basil himself was more of a statesman than perhaps
any other ancient bishop, and always showed himself
honourably punctilious In the observance of his political
relations. A good Instance of this trait is to be found
in Epp. 53, 54. Some of his chor episcopi had been
ordaining men who wanted merely to escape military
service (this phrase includes not merely enlistment
in the army but service in the civil bureaus), and had
accepted money for this infraction of the law. Basil
deals with the charge promptly and severely, and de
clares that he will degrade those who so offend again.

136 EXCURSUS ON LECTURE IV
These severe laws in restraint of ordination were
promulgated, as the reader will have observed, not
merely by Constantlus and Valens, two emperors
of dubious orthodoxy, whom the high-church party
regarded as persecutors, but by the great Constantine
and the great Theodosius. Under these popular
rulers the Church silently accepted measures which,
however disagreeable, could yet be justified as neces
sary to the state.
Here, again, we find an Illustration of the miserable
condition to which the curiales were reduced. Ordina
tion was one of the loopholes through which they
sought to escape their burden. It was probably the
most tempting and the easiest of all. But, again,
the bishops must have been compelled generally to
recruit their staffs from those who were beneath the
curial degree, that is to say, from the poorest and
most ignorant class. Thus the law tended directly
to foster worldliness and incapacity among the clergy.
Finally we must notice the strong and oppressive grip
which the State maintained upon the Church in the
palmy days of the Four Great Councils. At no other
time have the clergy been reduced to such an Erastian
servitude, and this fact helps to explain many painful
features of that period.

Oxford : Printed at the Clarendon Press, by Horace Hart, M.A.

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