INTRODUCTORY
The scene of the following sketches of the life of a Christian of the first days is, generally speaking, laid in Rome; but much of what belonged to the Christian of the Roman congregation was common to the believer who dwelt in other great cities of the Empire.
The sketches in question deal with the following subjects:
1. The numbers of believers in the first two centuries which followed the death of Peter and Paul.
2. The assemblies or meetings together of the Christian folk in those very early times are specially dwelt on. These assemblies were an extremely important and influential factor in the life of the believer. This was recognized in the New Testament writings and in the contemporary writings of the earliest teachers of the faith.
3. The various classes of the population of a great city which composed these early assemblies are enumerated.
4. What was taught and done at these early gatherings together of Christians is set forth with some detail.
5. Outside these gatherings, the life of a believer in the world is referred to with especial regard to the many difficulties which were constantly encountered by one who professed the religion of Jesus.
6. The methods by which these difficulties were to be grappled with are described. Two schools of teaching evidently existed here, generally characterized as the “Rigourist” and the “Gentle” schools. These are briefly dwelt upon.
7. In the concluding paragraphs of this sketch of the early Christian life, what Christianity offered in return for the hard and often painful life which its professors had to live, is sketched.
I
LIFE OF A CHRISTIAN IN THE EARLY DAYS
There is no shadow of doubt but that in a comparatively short space of time the religion of Jesus was accepted by great numbers of the dwellers in the various provinces of the Roman Empire. This fact is abundantly testified to by contemporary writers, Christian and pagan.
The only other widely professed religion with which we can compare it—Mahommedanism—owed its rapid progress and the extraordinary numbers of its proselytes mainly to the sword of the conquerors. Christianity, on the other hand, possessed no army to enforce its tenets. It was not even the heritage of a people or a nation. The Jews, to whom in the first days of its existence it might have belonged, were very soon to be reckoned among its deadliest foes.
One powerful factor which influenced the reception of the new religion has been rarely dwelt upon, but it deserves more than a merely passing notice.
The news of the religion of Jesus, as by many channels it reached the slave, often a highly educated slave, the freedman, the merchant, the small trader, the soldier of the legions, the lawyer, the Roman patrician, the women of the varied classes and orders in the great Empire,—the news came of something that had quite recently happened; and not only recently, but in a well-known city of the Empire. It was a wonderful story, firmly and strongly attested by many eye-witnesses, and it appealed at once to the hearts of all sorts and conditions of men.
It differed curiously from all other religions of which the pagans of the Empire had ever heard. These other religions were very ancient; their cradle, so to speak, belonged to far-back days—pre-historical days, as men would now call them. This new religion really belonged to their own time. Its founder had talked with men quite recently. He had lived in a city they knew a good deal about.
There was no dim mist about its origin; no old legends had gathered round it—legends which few, if any, believed.
The story of the religion of Jesus, told so simply, so convincingly, in the four Gospels, had a strange attraction; it went home to the hearts of a vast multitude; it rang true and real.
We know that very soon after the date of the events of the Gospel story the numbers of the men and women who accepted it were great. From the pagan Empire we have the testimony of Tacitus, the most eminent of Roman historians. Writing some fifty years after the first persecution under Nero, A.D. 64, he describes the Christians at the time of that first persecution as “a vast multitude” (ingens multitudo).[40]
Still more in detail the younger Pliny, the Governor of Bithynia, writing to the Emperor Trajan circa A.D. 112–13 for instructions how to deal with the Christians, relates that the new religion had spread so widely in his province, not merely in the cities but in the villages and country districts generally, that the temples were almost deserted.[41] It is, of course, possible that the new faith had found especial favour in Bithynia; but such a formal and detailed representation from an official of the highest rank and reputation to the Emperor of what was happening in his own province, is a sure indication of the enormous strides which Christianity had generally made in the Empire when the echoes of apostles and apostolic men were still ringing in the ears of their disciples. S. John’s death only preceded Pliny’s letter to Trajan[42] by at most twenty years.
Among contemporary Christian writers we find similar testimony to the vast numbers of Christians in very early times. To take a few conspicuous examples:
Clement, bishop of Rome circa A.D. 95, writing to the Church at Corinth, speaks of “the great multitude of Christians” who suffered in the persecution of Nero, A.D. 64.[43]
Hermas, in his book termed the Shepherd, shows us that in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, circa A.D. 130–40, there was resident a large number of Christians in the capital, many of them well-to-do and wealthy citizens.
Soter, bishop of Rome, writing to the Church of Corinth,[44] shortly after A.D. 165, refers to the Christians as superior in numbers to the Jews, no doubt especially alluding to the Roman congregation mentioned.
In the Acts of the Martyrdom of Justin, circa A.D. 165, an undoubtedly genuine piece, Rusticus the Roman prefect asks Justin where the Christians assembled. In reply, Justin said, “Where each one chooses and can; for do you imagine that we all meet in the very same place?”
Irenæus in a very striking passage,[45] written circa A.D. 180, alludes to the size and importance of the Roman congregation. His words are as follows:
“Since, however, it would be most tedious in such a volume as this to reckon up the (Episcopal) succession of all the Churches, we confound all those who assemble in unauthorized meetings by indicating the tradition handed down from the apostles of the most great, the very ancient, and universally known Church organized by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul.”
The statements of Tertullian circa A.D. 195–200 are well known and are often quoted; and though they are probably exaggerated, still such assertions, although they are rhetorical rather than simple statistics, would never have been advanced by such a learned and weighty writer if the numbers of the Christians of his time (the latter years of the second century) had not, in many cities and countries, been very great.
In the works of Tertullian we come across such statements as the following:
“The grievance (of the pagan government) is that the State is filled with Christians; that they are in the fields, in the citadels, in blocks of houses (which fill up the cities). It grieves (does the government), as over some calamity, that both sexes indifferently, all ages, every condition, even persons of high rank, are passing over to the Christian ranks.”[46]
And again: “We are not Indian Brahmins who dwell in forests and exile themselves from the common life of men.... We company with you in the world, forsaking neither the life of the Forum, nor the Bath, nor Workshop, nor Inn, nor Market-place, nor any Mart of commerce. We sail with you, fight with you, till the ground with you, even we share in the various arts.”[47]
About fifty years after Tertullian’s writing just quoted, Cornelius, bishop of Rome, A.D. 251, in an Epistle addressed to Fabius, bishop of Antioch,[48] gives some official statistics of the Roman Church in his days.[49] Cornelius particularizes the classes of the various officials, together with the numbers of persons in distress who were on the lists of the Church receiving charitable relief. Scholars and experts, basing their calculations upon these official statistics, variously estimate the numbers of Christians in the city of Rome at from 30,000 to 50,000, the latter calculation on the whole being probably nearest to the truth.
Lastly, in this little sketch of the vast numbers of disciples who at a very early date had joined the Christian community, the changeless testimony of the Roman catacombs must be cited. Much will be found written in this work regarding these enormous cemeteries of the Christian dead. It is absolutely certain that in the second half of the first century these catacombs were already begun.
The words of the eminent German scholar Harnack may well be quoted here: “The number, the size, and the extent of the Roman catacombs ... is so great that even from them we may infer the size of the Roman Church, its steady growth, its adherents from distinguished families, its spread all over Rome.”[50]
The foregoing contemporary witnesses, including the testimony of the Church to the size and numbers of the Christian congregation, speak of the Roman Christians with two notable exceptions—the pagan Pliny and the Christian Tertullian. The others, including Clement of Rome, Hermas, Justin Martyr, Soter, Irenæus, Cornelius, are specially writing of Rome and the Christian portion of its population.
But, as has been already remarked, what was written of Rome in a greater or less degree applies to other great centres of population in the Empire, notably to such centres as Antioch and Ephesus, Alexandria and Carthage.
II
THE ASSEMBLIES OF CHRISTIANS
The Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline and other New Testament Epistles, bear witness to the favourable reception of the preaching of the new faith. Paul’s success in Macedonia, Achaia, in the province of Asia, and in Galatia had been extraordinary. Peter in his First Epistle addresses the converts already scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. Paul again expressly mentions in a letter to the Roman Christians, that the faith of the Roman Church was spoken of throughout the whole world.
The story of the progress of Christianity was taken up by the pagan writers Tacitus and Pliny, and was dwelt upon by Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Hermas, Justin, Irenæus, and the other Christian writers of the first and second centuries already quoted.
Thus the great numbers of Christians in Rome and in other centres dating from primitive days, already dwelt upon with some detail, is a clear and indisputable fact.
Nothing did more for the progress and extension of the Christian religion than the constant meeting together, the assemblies of the various congregations of believers.
This was recognized from the earliest days. We read in the Epistle to the Hebrews (x. 25) a solemn injunction to Christians not “to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.”
Definite allusions to such “assemblies of believers” occur in the New Testament writings, in the Acts and in the Epistles, e.g. 1 Cor. xi. 20 and following verses, Jas. ii. 2–4.
The importance attached to these meetings of believers by the rulers and teachers of the Church of the first days, is manifest from the chain of reminders and injunctions to the faithful which exists in the contemporary writings we possess of leading Christians, dating from the latter years of the first and all through the second and third centuries.
The words they heard, and the matters decided upon at these gatherings, more or less coloured and guided the life and conduct of Christians in the world. From the first the Sunday meeting seems to have been obligatory; but these meetings of the brethren were by no means confined to the general assembly on Sunday. So we read in the Didaché (the Teaching of the Apostles), a writing probably dating from the latter years of the first century: “Thou shalt seek out every day the company of the Saints, to be refreshed by their words.”[51] “Let us,” writes Clement, bishop of Rome (circa A.D. 95), “ourselves then being gathered together in concord with intentness of heart, cry unto Him as from one mouth earnestly, that we may be made partakers of His great and glorious promise.”[52]
So S. Ignatius (circa A.D. 107–10) in his Epistle to the Ephesian Church[53] writes: “Do your diligence therefore to meet together more frequently for thanksgiving to God, and for His glory; for when ye meet together frequently the powers of Satan are cast down, and his mischief cometh to nought in the concord of your faith.”
In his letter to Polycarp he says: “Let meetings be held more frequently.”[54]
Barnabas (circa A.D. 120–30): “Keep not apart by yourselves, as if you were already justified; but meet together, and confer upon the common weal.”[55]
Justin Martyr—in his first Apology, written in the middle of the second century—describes these meetings of the brethren with some detail.[56]
A very striking passage occurs in a writing of Theophilus, the sixth bishop of Antioch, addressed to his friend Autolycus. Its date is between A.D. 168 and A.D. 181. The power which these meetings of the brethren exercised over the life of Christians is described as follows:
“As in the Sea there are Islands ... with havens and harbours in which the storm-tossed may find refuge, so God has given to the world, which is driven and tempest-tossed by sins, assemblies ... in which survive the doctrines of the truth, as in the island-harbours of good anchorage; and into these run those who desire to be saved ... and who wish to escape the wrath and judgment of God.”[57]
III
OF WHOM WERE THESE ASSEMBLIES OF BELIEVERS COMPOSED?
From the very first days, it is certain that the assemblies or congregations of the Christians were made up of all classes and orders of the people. The lower classes, including slaves, freedmen, artisans, small traders, no doubt were in the majority; but from the beginning, persons of position, culture, and even of rank were certainly reckoned among them.
In the days of the apostles we hear of many such. Among the earliest believers were reckoned a Nicodemus, a Joseph of Arimathea, a Barnabas, a Sergius Paulus. In Acts vi. 7 mention is made of a great company of the priests obedient to the faith. Chapter x. tells us of the centurion who sent for S. Peter. Paul himself and Stephen were men of high culture. Priscilla the wife of Aquila and the Phoebe of Rom. xvi. 1 were evidently persons of considerable means. Others might be named in these categories. S. James (ii. 14) in his picture of one of these meetings alludes to the presence of the rich among the worshippers. Tacitus speaks of a lady of distinguished birth (insignis femina) who evidently belonged to the Christian ranks; and very shortly after, some near connexions of the imperial house of Domitian were persecuted for their faith.
Pliny, when he wrote to Trajan, tells him how many of all ranks in the province of Bithynia had joined the Christian sect.
Ignatius in the early years of the second century, writing to the Roman Church, gives utterance to his fear lest influential members of the Church should intercede for him, and so hinder his being exposed to the beasts in the amphitheatre games.
Roman Christians of wealth and position are clearly alluded to by Hermas in the Shepherd (Comm. x. 1), and he assumes the presence of such in the Roman congregation (Simil. i. etc.)
In the famous dialogue of Minucius Felix, circa A.D. 160, the speakers belong to the higher ranks; these under thinly disguised names were probably actual personages well known in their day. The scene and story of the writing, the class of argument brought forward, all evidently issued from and were addressed to a highly cultured circle.
In the writings of Justin Martyr, dating from about the middle of the second century, are various references to the presence of wealthy and cultured persons in the Christian congregation of Rome.
Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, whose pictures of Christian life belong to the latter years of the second century, bear ample testimony to the same fact. Clement even wrote a special treatise entitled, What rich man can be saved? in which he refers not to pagans whose conversion to Christianity was to be aimed at, but to those who were Christians and at the same time wealthy.[58]
Tertullian again and again refers to the presence of the rich and the noble in the Christian Churches, in such passages where he speaks of thousands of every age and rank among the brethren—of officials of the Empire, of officers of the imperial household, of lawyers, and even of men of senatorial rank. In his passionate appeals, too, he singles out fashionable ladies, and dwells on their costly dress and jewels.
But the most striking proof of the presence of many high-born and wealthy members of the Christian Brotherhood in this congregation dating from primitive times, after all exists in that wonderful City of the Dead beneath the suburbs of Rome which is now being explored.
These Roman catacombs, as they are termed, in the large majority of cases in the first instance began in the villa gardens of the rich, and were, as time went on, enlarged by their owners in order to offer the hospitality of the tomb to their poorer brothers and sisters.
As we shall see in our chapter dealing with these all-important memories of early Roman Christianity, as cemetery after cemetery is examined we come upon more and more relics in marble and stone which tell of great and powerful Roman families who had thrown in their lot with the despised and persecuted people who had accepted the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and who, in common with the slave and petty tradesman, shared in the hard trials of the Christian life, and welcomed the joys and solace of the glorious Christian hope.
These striking memories of the Christian dead, who in life bore great names and possessed ample means, date from the first century onward. One of the more famous of these very early catacombs, the cemetery of Domitilla, was the work of the members of the imperial family—of near relatives of the Emperor Domitian.
Indeed the composition of the meetings of the Christian Brotherhood varied very little from the days of Peter and Paul to the era of the Emperor Constantine. The numbers of these assemblies, however, increased with strange rapidity. There were, of course, in primitive times but few of these assemblies. By the end of the third century there were in the city of Rome some forty basilicas, each with its separate staff of ministers and its individual congregation.[59]
IV
WHAT WAS SAID AND DONE IN THESE ASSEMBLIES AND MEETINGS OF THE BRETHREN
Justin Martyr in his first Apology, which was written, before A.D. 139, gives us a good picture of one of these primitive Christian assemblies in Rome. The early date of this writing enables us to form an accurate idea of the outward procedure of one of these most important factors in the Christian life in the first half of the second century.
Justin has been explaining the nature of the Eucharist; he then goes on to say: “We continually remind each other of these things. And the rich among us help the poor, and we always keep together; and for all things which are given us, we bless the Maker of all through His Son Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Ghost. And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the ‘Memoirs of the Apostles’ or the writings of the Prophets are read, as time allows; then when the reader has done, the president (of the assembly), in an address, instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of the good things (which had formed the subject of the address). Then we all rise and pray; and when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president offers prayers and thanksgivings according to his ability; and the people assent, saying, Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given; and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.
“And they who are well-to-do and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows, and those who through sickness or any other cause are in want, and those who are in bonds, and the stranger sojourning among us—in a word, takes care of all who are in need.
“Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly.”
Justin goes on to explain the reason of the choice of Sunday, dwelling especially on the fact of Jesus Christ having risen from the dead on that day.
Such is a sketch of the framework of one of these primitive meetings of the Christian Brotherhood, drawn by an eye-witness some time in the first half of the second century, at most thirty or forty years after S. John’s death.
It is a little picture of a gathering composed of all sorts and conditions of men and women, of slaves and freedmen, of artisans, tradesmen, and soldiers, with a certain admixture of cultured and wealthy persons, drawn together in the first instance by the pressure of the burden of the awful sadness of life, by a belief, hazy at first, but growing clearer and more definite every day, as the congregation listened to these teachers who dwelt on the words and acts of the Divine Redeemer who had visited this earth for their sakes.
For they came together to hear more of the Redeemer who had sojourned so lately among men. They listened while the Christian teacher who presided over the gathering explained the historic words, the commandments and promises of that pitiful, loving Master who had entered into their life; they would then partake of the mystic Eucharist feast together; and as they partook of the sacred bread and wine as He had bidden His followers to do in memory of Him and His death and suffering for their sakes, they would feel He was indeed in their midst, and that new life, new hope were theirs.
The dogmatic teaching in these early assemblies was very simple, but strangely sublime. It was given in a language every one could understand. It went home to the hearts of all—of the wise and unlearned alike. The story of the Gospels, the wonderful words of the Master—were at once the text and subject of every sermon and exposition.
We have among our precious reliquiæ of the earliest days enough to show us what was the groundwork of this primitive teaching.
An atonement had been made by the Divine One who had come among men; He had suffered for them, and by His suffering had redeemed them. In all the earliest Christian writings which we possess, this great truth is repeated again and again. With adoring gratitude the Christian Brotherhood loved and worshipped Him. Jesus Christ was the centre of all their hopes—the source of their strange, newly found happiness.[60]
Very briefly we will quote a very few of these important dogmatic sayings pressed home to the believers when they met together.
Clement of Rome—circa A.D. 95:
“Let us fix our eyes on the blood of Christ, and understand how precious it is unto His Father, because being shed for our salvation.”—Ep. i. 7.
“Let us fear the Lord Jesus whose blood was given for us.”—Ep. i. 11.
“Jesus Christ our Lord hath given His blood for us, by the will of God ... His life for our lives.”—Ep. i. 49.
Ignatius of Antioch—circa A.D. 107–10.
“It is evident to me that you are living not after men but after Jesus Christ who died for us, that believing on His death ye might escape death.”—Ep. ad Trall. 2.
“Him (Jesus Christ) I seek, who died on our behalf; Him I desire, who rose again (for our sake).”—Ep. ad Rom. 6.
After relating the passion of the Cross, Ignatius went on to say: “For He suffered these things for our sakes (that we might be saved).”—Ep. ad Smyrn. 1, 2.
“Even the heavenly beings, and the glory of the angels, and the rulers visible and invisible, if they believe not in the blood of Christ (who is God), judgment awaiteth them also.”—Ep. ad Smyrn. 6.
“Await Him ... the Eternal, the Invisible, who became visible for our sakes; the Impalpable, the Impassible, who suffered for our sake, who endured in all ways for our sake.”—Ep. ad Polycarp, 3.
Epistle to Diognetus,—early in second century,—an anonymous writing:
“He Himself took on Him the burden of our iniquities, He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the Holy One for transgressors, the blameless One for the wicked, the righteous One for the unrighteous, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for them that are mortal.”
“For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other One was it possible that we, the wicked and the ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God?”
“Oh sweet exchange! Oh unsearchable operation! Oh benefits surpassing expectation! that the wickedness of many shall be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!”
“Having therefore convinced us in the former time that our nature was unable to attain to life, and having now revealed the Saviour who is able to save even those things which it was (formerly) impossible to save, by both these facts He desired to lead us to trust in His kindness, to deem Him our Minister—Father—Teacher—Counsellor—Healer—our Wisdom, Light, Honour, Glory, Power and Life.”—Ep. ad Diog. ix.
Shepherd of Hermas—written circa A.D. 140.
“He Himself (the Son of God) then having purged away the sins of the people, showed them the paths of life, by giving them the law which He received from His Father.”
Epistle of Barnabas—written circa A.D. 120–50:
“For to this end the Lord endured to deliver up His flesh to corruption, that we might be sanctified through the remission of sins, which is effected by His blood of sprinkling.”—Ep. Barnabas, v.
“If, therefore, the Son of God, who is Lord (of all things), and who will judge the living and the dead, suffered, that His stroke might give us life, let us believe that the Son of God could not have suffered except for our sakes.”—Ep. Barnabas, vii.
“Thou shalt love Him that created thee, thou shalt glorify Him that redeemed thee from death.”—Ep. Barnabas, xix.
Justin Martyr—writing between circa A.D. 114 and A.D. 165:
“Isaiah,” wrote Justin, “did not send you to a laver, there to wash away murder and other sins; but those who repented were purified by faith through the blood of Christ, and through His death, who died for this very reason.”—Dial. with Trypho, xiii.
Writing of Jesus Christ, Justin comments thus on the words written by Moses as prophesied by the patriarch Jacob: “He shall wash his garments with wine, and his vesture with the blood of the grape.” This signified that “He (Jesus Christ) would wash those who believe in Him with His own blood.”—Dial. with Trypho, liv.
“If, then, the Father of all wished His Christ to take upon Him the curses of all, knowing that after He had been crucified and was dead, He would raise Him up”....
“For although His Father caused Him to suffer these things in behalf of the human family”....
“If His Father wished Him to suffer thus in order that by His stripes the human race might be healed.”—Dial. with Trypho, xcv.
“And as the blood of the Passover saved those who were in Egypt, so also the blood of Christ will deliver from death those who have believed.”—Dial. with Trypho, cxi.
In well-nigh all these reliquiæ of the earliest Christian teaching, copious use was made of that wonderful 53rd chapter of Isaiah, in which the Hebrew seer sketched with a startling accuracy of detail some of the leading features of the awful drama of the Divine Atonement for all sin.[61] The scene of this drama was the storied Holy City, and the One who made the great Atonement was He who on earth was known as Jesus Christ and in heaven as the Son of God.
The above “Catena Aurea” (golden chain) of passages is taken from the works we possess of the earliest teachers of Christianity who wrote in the fifty years immediately following the passing of S. John the beloved apostle, and they tell us exactly what was the doctrine pressed home to the Brotherhood in the early assemblies of Christians of which we are here speaking.
There were other dogmas, no doubt, included in the teaching of these early assemblies and meetings, such as the resurrection of the flesh; the great reckoning before the Judge, at which even the just would tremble were it not that the Judge was at the same time their Redeemer and loving Friend. The unspeakable joys of Paradise, the garden of their God and Saviour, were constantly dwelt upon, and the good glad tidings would fall like dew from heaven upon the world-weary, sad-eyed listeners.
But the great doctrine of the “Atonement,” at once simple and sublime, so repeatedly pressed home in the above-quoted words of the earliest teachers, was no doubt the strongest inducement which drew the Christian folk to meet often together—was the link which bound them into one brotherhood, and knit them at the same time to the loving Master.
It was a new preaching, this secret of the great love of God which passeth understanding, and one that excited wonderful and soul-stirring fears and hopes, and which filled the small dark corridors and low-browed chapels of the Roman catacombs which the faithful often used as meeting-homes for teaching and for prayer, with what seemed to the groups of worshippers verily a Divine light; and to these early Christian worshippers, the gloomy rough-hewn sleeping-places of the dead, through which the pilgrim traveller now wanders and wonders, seemed to them the very ante-chambers of heaven.
We have dwelt with some insistence upon the dogmatic teaching which without doubt formed a part, and that by no means an inconsiderable part, of the procedure of the primitive gatherings of Christians; for it is often urged that the great bond which united the brethren of the very early Church was only the beautiful mutual love and charity urged in these gatherings.
There is some truth in this assertion. It was a new life which was preached, and to a certain extent lived, by the Christian Brotherhood. It was a life quite different to anything which had existed before the Redeemer went in and out among men. We shall dwell on it presently; but it must never be forgotten that the mainspring of this new life was the doctrine of the Cross—of the Atonement made by that Divine One who had founded the new religion.
The belief in the supreme Divinity of Jesus, who had come from heaven to redeem men, was the foundation story of the wonderful love and boundless charity which lived in their midst,—a love which charmed the hearts of all sorts and conditions of men, and attracted more and ever more weary and heavy-laden men and women to join the company of Christians.
Almsgiving
The duty and delight of materially assisting the poor and sad-eyed brothers and sisters of the community became an absorbing passion in the lives of very many of the rich and well-to-do members of each congregation; and in populous centres the abundance of the alms publicly contributed or privately given is a sure indication that many well-to-do and even wealthy persons were at an early date numbered among the Christians.
The splendid charities of the Church of the first days no doubt did much to bring about the rapid progress of the religion of Jesus. There was an intense reality in the love of the Christians of the first days for one another. “See,” says Tertullian (Apol. xxxix.), quoting from the pagan estimate of the new society, “how they love one another.” So Cæcilius (in Minucius Felix, ix.) tells us “they love one another almost before they are acquainted.”
Justin Martyr, in his picture already quoted of a Christian assembly in the first half of the second century, speaks, as we have seen, in detail of the destination of the alms collected.[62]
Tertullian, writing in the last years of the same century on what took place at these meetings of the brethren, relates how “each of us puts in a small amount one day in the month, or whenever he pleases, but only if he pleases, and if he is able; for there is no compulsion in the matter, every one contributing of his own free will. The amounts so collected are expended on poor orphans, in support of old folk, ... on those who are in the mines, or exiled, or in prison, so long as their distress is for the sake of God’s fellowship.”
We notice how often it is repeated that all these offerings are purely voluntary—the idea of communism[63] was absolutely unknown in the Church of the first days. The fact that there were rich and poor is ever acknowledged. This is especially marked in the tombs of the catacombs, where the rich were laid to sleep in costly and even in splendidly adorned chambers, leading out of the corridors where the bodies of the poorer ones were tenderly and reverently buried, but in far humbler and unadorned resting-places.
In less that fifty years after Tertullian’s time, Cornelius, bishop of Rome, in a letter written circa A.D. 250 (quoted by Eusebius, H. E. vi. 43), gives us a fairly exhaustive catalogue of the officials and the persons in distress supported by the voluntary contributions of the Roman Brotherhood. He enumerates forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolytes, fifty-two exorcists, readers, and doorkeepers, together with fifteen hundred widows and persons in poverty maintained constantly by the alms of the faithful.
It is evident from the references in writings of the second century that almsgiving in the Church of the first days occupied in the hearts of believers a higher place, a far more important position, than it filled in the dogmatic teaching of mediæval and yet later times.
The immeasurable work effected by the blessed Redeemer is never minimized by the earliest and most weighty of the Christian teachers, as we have seen in our little chain of quoted passages; but it is indisputable that they considered that something might be done by men themselves. Alms, according to these early instructors, held a very high position in the new beautiful life they taught men who loved the Lord to strive after.
We will quote a few prominent examples of this very early teaching which, of course, was pressed home to the Brotherhood who gathered together in these primitive assemblies; and to a large extent we see that this somewhat peculiar dogmatic teaching concerning the value of almsgiving had a marked and striking effect upon the listeners.
For instance, in the Didaché (Teaching of the Apostles), written in the last years of the first century, we read:
“If thou possessest (anything) by thy hands, thou shalt give a ransom for thy sins.”—Didaché, iv.
This was no new idea in Hebrew theology; see Dan. iv. 27: “Break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by shoving mercy to the poor.” See Prov. xvi. 6, and also Tob. xii. 8, 9.
So in the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs, put out in the first quarter of the second century:
“For in proportion as a man is pitiful to the poor, will the Lord be pitiful towards him” (Zabulon 7).
“Almsgiving therefore is a good thing, even as repentance from sin. Fasting is better than prayer, but almsgiving than both; and ‘love covereth a multitude of sins,’[64] but prayer out of a good conscience delivereth from death. Blessed is every man that is found full of these. For almsgiving lifteth off the burden of sin.”—2nd Epistle of Clement (part of an ancient homily put out circa A.D. 130 to 150).[65]
S. Cyprian about the middle of the third century develops almsgiving into a formal means of grace, and indeed assigns a distinct propitiatory value to alms, representing them as a means of prolonging the effectiveness of baptism and abolishing subsequent frailties.[66]
Lactantius—Inst. vi. 12—circa end of fourth century:
“Mercy has a great reward (magna est misericordiæ merces), for God promises to it that He will remit all sins.”
S. Chrysostom speaks of this as “the medicine for our sins.”
In the Apostolical Constitutions, vii. 12 (probably put out in the form that we possess them circa the end of the fourth or early in the fifth century), we read:
“If thou hast (acquired anything by the work of thy hands) give, that thou mayest labour for the redemption of thy sins; for by alms and acts of faith sins are purged away.”
All this is somewhat an exaggerated development of a teaching which in the primitive Church undoubtedly elevated almsgiving to a chief place in Christian practice; but that charity and kindness to the poor and needy in primitive times often were regarded positively as a formal means of grace, is clear from the weighty early references just quoted, such honoured names as Cyprian and later even Chrysostom appearing among the supporters of this view. That it was an exaggerated estimate is, however, clear from the plain words of Paul in his exquisite Psalm of Love (1 Cor. xiii.), where under the general term of love or charity he expressly includes much besides mere almsgiving.
But, apart from this somewhat curious development and perhaps exaggerated view, there remains the undisputed fact that almsgiving was urged upon the primitive congregations of Christians with a force and insistency quite unknown in mediæval and modern times; and the splendid voluntary generosity to the poor and needy and forlorn on the part not only of the well-to-do, but of all who had anything to give, however little, was no doubt a most important element in the rapid extension of the Christian religion. It demonstrated, as nothing else could, the real and intense love of Christians one for the other. It was verily a brotherhood, and constantly, even in the most exalted quarters,[67] evoked the grudging admiration of the bitterest foes of the religion of Jesus.
So numerous, so touching, so insistent are the early references here, that it would be simply impossible to quote even a small part of them. But a very few examples from early writings will, however, show what was the nature of the exhortations and teaching here which we know were pressed home in every one of these early gatherings of the Christian Brotherhood.
The 1st Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (circa A.D. 90 or earlier) has been well described as matchless in early Christian literature as an elaborate and effective piece of writing, lit up with all the brotherly affection of the Church.
Such sentences as these occur in the Epistle: “Who did not proclaim your splendid hospitality (to strangers)—you did everything without respect of persons ... you are more ready to give than to take. Day and night you agonized for all the Brotherhood, that by means of comparison and care the number of God’s elect might be saved. You never rued an act of kindness, but were ready for every good work.”
In the Didaché (Teaching of the Apostles) we come across such directions as—
“To every one that asketh thee give, and ask not back; for to all the Father wishes to give of His own gracious gifts.”
“Blessed is he that giveth.... Let thine alms drop like sweat into thy hands, so long as thou knowest to whom thou givest.” This last injunction, from the way it is introduced, is probably a reference to some unwritten traditional saying spoken by our Lord Himself.—Didaché, i.
“Thou shalt not hesitate to give, nor in giving shalt thou murmur.”—Didaché, iv.
“Thou shalt not turn away from the needy, but thou shalt share all things with thy brother; and thou shalt not say that they are thine own: for if ye are fellow partakers in that which is immortal, how much more in things which are mortal.”—Didaché, iv.
Aristides—circa A.D. 130–40:
“They (the Christians) love one another, and from the widows they do not turn away their countenance, and they rescue the orphan ... and he who has, gives to him who has not without grudging ... and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs.... And if there is among them a man that is poor and needy, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days, that they may supply the needy with their necessary food.”[68]—Apol. xv.
Hermas—Shepherd—circa A.D. 135–40:
“You know that you, servants of God, dwell in a foreign land, for your city is far from this city. If, then, you know the city where you are to dwell, why provide yourselves here with fields and costly luxuries? He who makes such provision for this city has no mind to return to his own city.... Instead of fields, then, buy souls in trouble as each of you is able. Visit widows and orphans, and neglect them not; expend on such fields and houses, God has given you your wealth and all your gains. The Master endowed you with riches that you might perform such ministries for Him.
“Far better is it to buy fields, possessions, houses of this kind. Thou wilt find them in thine own city when thou dost visit it. Such expenditure is noble and joyous: it brings gladness, not fear and sorrow.”—Simil. i.
Harnack, Mission, etc., of Christianity (book ii. chap. i.), commenting on this passage of the Shepherd, has an interesting and suggestive Note, in which he says: “For all the vigour of his counsel, however, it never occurs to Hermas that the distinction between the rich and the poor should cease within the Church. This is plain from the next Similitude or Parable (ii.). The saying of Jesus, too, S. John xii. 8, ‘The poor ye have always with you,’ shows that the abolition of the distinction between rich and poor was never contemplated in the Church.”
Hermas—Shepherd.—“Not hesitating as to whom you are to give or not to give, for God wishes His gifts to be shared by all.”—Comm. 2.
“Rescuing the servants of God from necessities—being hospitable, for in hospitality good-doing finds a field.”—Comm. 8.
Polycarp—Epistle (written early in the second century):
“In love of the brotherhood, kindly affectioned one to another ... when ye are able to do good, defer it not, for pitifulness delivereth from death.”—Epistle, 10.
A short sketch of the practical side of the teaching current at these meetings of the brethren will complete our description of these primitive Christian gatherings. The teaching dwelt on duties for the most part absolutely novel to the Roman world of the first and second centuries of our era. The inescapable duties pressed home to the listeners were duties generally quite unknown to noble, artisan, or slave in Roman society of the first three centuries. If carried out they would essentially change the old view of life current in all grades of the Roman world.
As before, we draw our information exclusively from the remains of very early Christian letters (Epistles) and tractates of well-known and honoured teachers in the Brotherhood which have been preserved to us.
The practical side of the teaching current in the gatherings was very largely based on the strange, beautiful, but perfectly novel saying of the Founder of the religion. It was, in fact, a new language which was used:
“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” The instructions given in the early assemblies defined the term “neighbour,” and explained how the love enjoined was to be especially shown.
Now in all the early Christian writings the persons to be helped in the first place seem invariably to have been “the widows and orphans” of the new Society; for example, S. James, the Lord’s disciple, writes how “pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction,” etc. (i. 27).
Hermas—circa A.D. 135–40—in his list of good deeds which ought to be done, after faith and the fear of the Lord—love, concord, words of righteousness, truth, patience—places “the helping widows, looking after orphans.”—Shepherd, Comm. viii.
Aristides—circa A.D. 130–40—has been already quoted.
Clement of Rome—circa A.D. 90—gives as one of his quotations: “He—the Master of the Universe—saith, ... Give judgment for the orphan, and execute righteousness for the widows.”—1 Epistle, 8.
Lactantius—circa last years of fourth century—in his catalogue of the different kinds of benevolence and works of mercy which had especially been enjoined on Christians, twice dwells on this peculiar work, and then writes: “Nor is it less a great work of justice to protect and defend orphans and widows who are destitute and stand in need of assistance, and therefore that Divine Law prescribes this to all,” etc.... And again: “For God, to whom everlasting mercy belongs, commands that widows and orphans should be defended and cherished, that no one through regard and pity for his loved ones should be prevented from suffering death (i.e. martyrdom)” ... “but should meet it with promptitude and faith, since he knows that he leaves his beloved ones to the care of God, and that they will never want protection.” This last telling argument repeated by Lactantius had been, no doubt, frequently taught in the days of stress and trial.
These very early references might be multiplied; we find this injunction again and again repeated. It is no exaggeration to assert that among the poor and sad-eyed ones placed before the congregations of believers to help, the poor widow and the orphan occupy the first place.
The Sick.—The visiting the sick and distributing the alms of the brethren, public and private, were also urged as an inescapable duty. This stood in the forefront of all their exhortations, and the injunction was ever generously responded to. To quote references here, where they are so very numerous, would be superfluous. Lactantius’ words, in his summary above referred to, will suffice to show what was the mind of the Church, and how this wish of the Master’s had been constantly urged.
Justin Martyr has well summarized the loved duty—“To undertake the care and support of the sick, who need some one to assist them, is the part of the greatest kindness, and is of great beneficence; and he who shall do this, will both offer a living sacrifice to God, and that which he has given to another for a time he will himself receive from God for eternity.”—Justin, vi. 12.
So prominent a place did the giving of alms to the sick occupy among the exhortations addressed to the Christians of the first days, that the injunctions to succour the sick sufferers seem not infrequently to have been extended beyond the circle of the “Household of faith.” We find S. Cyprian, for instance, on the occasion of the great plague of Carthage, A.D. 252, telling, in one of his addresses, his audience that to cherish our own people was nothing wonderful, but surely he who would become perfect must do more; he must love even his enemies, as the Lord admonishes and expects.
“It is our duty not to fall short of our splendid ancestry.” In the saintly bishop’s own grand untranslatable words—“Respondere nos decet natalibus nostris.”[69] The Christians of Carthage, as their reply, at once raised amongst themselves an abundant fund, and forming a company for the succour of the sick, absolutely helped all without any inquiry as to whether the sick sufferers were pagan or Christian.—Pontius, Life of Cyprian.
Eusebius (H. E. ix. 8) gives a pathetic picture of the great pestilence which raged at the end of the third century, and notices the devoted behaviour of the Christians to all the sick and dying, without reference to the sufferer’s creed.
This splendid altruism of the “Godless Galilean” was markedly referred to by the Emperor Julian—“Not only their own poor, but ours do they care for,” wrote the great Emperor; “our poor lack our care,” was his bitter reproach to paganism.—Letter to Arsacius.
Hospitality was another urgent recommendation pressed home by the early Christian teachers to their flocks. Clement of Rome (quoted above) in the first century dwells on this special virtue in his Letter to the Corinthian Church.
The Didaché—circa end of first century—dwells on this. “If he who comes is a traveller, help him to the best of your ability” (chap. xii.).
Much is said in this very early treatise on the duty of caring for strangers, but care is specially enjoined to guard against any imposture here.
Hermas in the Shepherd writes: “In hospitality, good-doing finds a field” (Comm. viii.).
Aristides, quoted above, tells us how Christians “when they see the stranger, bring him to their dwellings, and rejoice over him as over a true brother.”
Justin Martyr (quoted above), in his picture of a Christian meeting on Sunday, especially directs that out of the alms contributed by the faithful, among those who were to be succoured were “the strangers sojourning amongst us.”—1 Apol. lxvii.
Melito of Sardis—so Eusebius, H. E. iv. 26, tells us—wrote a treatise “on hospitality.”
Cyprian expressly directs that the expenses of any stranger who may happen to be in want, be paid out of certain moneys he had left for that purpose.—Ep. vii.
Among other direct references to this duty may be quoted Tertullian, ad Uxor. ii. 4, and the Apost. Constit. iii. 3; the Emperor Julian in his Letter to Arsacius wishes the pagans would imitate these Christian practices.
This striking and unique custom, which no doubt very largely contributed to the feeling of Christian brotherhood, was, of course, based upon the directions so often repeated in the New Testament Epistles.
“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” Heb. xiii. 2. “Distributing to the necessity of saints, given to hospitality,” Rom. xii. 13. “Use hospitality one to another, without grudging,” 1 Pet. iv. 9. “Beloved, thou doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest to the brethren and to strangers,” 3 John 5, etc.
This urgent recommendation to practise hospitality in the New Testament Epistles of Peter and Paul, of John and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, repeated with insistence and earnestness by writers of the second and third centuries, was, as Justin Martyr tells us in his picture of the Sunday gathering of Christians, incorporated among the special exhortations to the brethren urging them to generous almsgiving.
The duty of “hospitality” thus pressed home at these gatherings as important enough to rank with the claims of the widow and the orphan and the sick poor, needs a few words of explanation.
In the early days of Christianity it must be borne in mind that the widely extended world of Rome was not as in mediæval and modern times, made up of different nations and peoples, but that the Roman world was all one, that men were fellow-subjects of one great Empire, and that the passing to and fro from land to land was far more common than in after times; and that Christians, whether belonging to Asia or to Greece, to Italy or to Gaul, made up one great Brotherhood.
For a Christian coming into a strange city to find there at once a home and a warm welcome, and if poor and needy, help and assistance, would constitute a very powerful inducement to very many to join the new Society in which lived such a spirit of loving brotherhood and kindness.
Special means of intercourse through letters and messages and other means were provided. Cæcilius in Minucius Felix (c. ix.), an early writing, as we have said, belonging to the middle of the second century or even earlier, especially tells us that “Christians recognize each other by means of secret marks and signs, and love one another almost before they are acquainted.”
It was to give effect to this far-reaching spirit of brotherhood that the apostles and their successors insisted so earnestly upon the new and beautiful duty of “hospitality.” It was a practical proof that all Christians were really brothers and sisters—“that goodness among the Christians was not an impotent claim or a pale ideal, but a power which was developed on all sides, and was actually exercised in common everyday life.”
We have dwelt at some length upon what were the principal objects to which the alms of the Brotherhood, asked so earnestly at the various weekly assemblies, were devoted; there were, however, other “causes” pleaded for besides these—no doubt principally in such great centres as Rome, where a proportion of rich and well-to-do persons formed part of the little gatherings; of these, relief and assistance to “prisoners of the faith” occupy a prominent place.
There were many Christians, especially in the more acute periods of persecution, who were arrested and imprisoned by the government, and not a few condemned to the harsh discipline of the mines. Justin Martyr especially names assistance to imprisoned Christians as one of the regular objects to which a portion of the collections at the “meetings” was devoted. It was ever a matter of love, if not of absolute duty, to help and succour these. “If,” wrote Aristides in his Apology quoted above, “the Christians learn that any one of their number is imprisoned or is in distress for the sake of the Name of Christ, they should all render aid to such a one in his necessity.”—Apol. xv.
See, too, among other references, Heb. x. 34; Tert. ad Mart. i., and Apol. xxxix.
Another and special object of almsgiving pressed upon the faithful was help to other and perhaps distant Churches who from one cause or other were in want. We find this urged upon Christian congregations even in apostolic days.
In S. Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians we find various appeals to the generosity of these early communities to assist the Church at Jerusalem. The deep poverty of this famous Church we have already suggested was probably owing to the attempt of the Jerusalem Christians literally to carry out the idea of community of goods.
In the Letter of Dionysius of Corinth to the Roman Church written circa A.D. 170, quoted by Eusebius, H. E. iv. 23, we find this generosity referred to as a well-known custom of the comparatively wealthy Roman congregation. “From the very first,” wrote Dionysius, “you have had this practice of aiding all the brethren in many ways, and of sending contributions to many Churches in every city ... by these gifts you keep up the hereditary custom of the Roman Christians, a practice which your bishop, Soter, has not only kept up, but even extended.” In the third century, Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, writing to Stephen, bishop of Rome, alludes to the generous help given to the poor Churches of Syria and Arabia. “To them,” he says, “you send help regularly.”—Euseb. H. E. viii. 5.
Ignatius, referring to this noble generosity of the Roman congregations as early as the first years of the second century, styles the Church of Rome as “the leader of love.”
Cyprian, in the middle of the third century, several times mentions how the Church at Carthage, evidently a wealthy community, was in the habit of sending help to other and needy communities.
But there was one department in the novel teaching pressed home by the early Christian teachers which seems at once to have riveted the attention of the listeners, and its universal acceptance at once won extraordinary, possibly an undreamed of popularity in the Christian ranks. It was an entirely new departure from any custom prevalent in the world of Rome—the injunction reverently to care for the bodies of the dead poor.
The Emperor Julian in his summary of what he considered the chief points in the hated Christian system which had won them so many hearts, especially calls attention to this. He wrote this remarkable comment here:
“This godlessness (i.e. Christianity) is mainly furthered by its charity towards strangers, and its careful attention to the bestowal of the dead.”—Letter to Arsacius, in Soz. v. 15.
Lactantius in his review of the Christian virtues urged by the great teachers of the new religion, and to a great extent practised in the early centuries, gives a prominent and detailed notice of this pious and loving custom, and strikingly writes as follows: “The last and greatest office of piety is the burying of strangers and the poor,” adding that the noblest pagan teachers of virtue and justice had never touched at all upon this inescapable duty. These had left this, he adds, quite out, because they were unable to see any advantage in it.
Some of these pagan teachers, he goes on to say, even esteemed burial as superfluous, adding that it was no evil to lie unburied and neglected.
The great fourth century writer proceeds at some length to give some of the reasons which had influenced Christians so tenderly to care for their brethren who had fallen asleep: “We will not suffer the image and workmanship of God to lie exposed as a prey to beasts and birds, but we will restore it to earth from which it was taken; and although it be in the case of an unknown person, we will supply the place of relatives, whose place, since they are wanting, let benevolence take.”—Lactantius, Inst. vi. 12.
Aristides—middle years of second century—thus dwells upon the tender solicitude of the Christian folk for their dead: “When one of their poor passes away from the world, one of them (the brethren) looks after him, and sees to his burial according to his means.”—Apol. xv.
Aristides is here referring to the private charity of individual members of the community, which was often very lavish in the early centuries. Tertullian, on the other hand, writing on the same duty of caring for the brethren, includes the cost of “burying the poor” as coming out of the common fund made up of the money contributed at the public meetings of the Brotherhood.—Apol. xxxix.
As the amount required for these burials and the subsequent care bestowed on the places of Christian sepulture was very considerable, the public collections made in the assemblies were necessarily often largely supplemented by private alms.
All this loving care for the remains of the deceased went home to numberless hearts among the survivors of the loved, and evidently ranked high among the reasons which attracted many into the ranks of the Christian Brotherhood.
In our little picture of very early Christian life, Rome and its powerful Church has been generally selected as the scene of the life in question. In this primitive custom of reverent care for the dead,—a care which embraced the very poor as well as the rich and well-to-do, we discern the reasons which led to the first beginnings of the vast city of the Christian dead,—the wonderful city known as the Roman catacombs. This will be carefully described at some length in this work: the building and excavating of the endless corridors, the private chambers, the chapels and meeting-rooms, began even before the close of the first century of the Christian era, and went on for some two centuries and a half—the long-drawn-out age of persecution.
They constitute a mighty and ever-present proof of the accuracy of much that has been advanced in the foregoing pages on the subject of the life led—of the hopes and ideals cherished among the disciples of Jesus in that first stage of anxious trial and sore danger.
The pictures painted below in the chapters treating of the catacombs of Rome are admirable contemporary illustrations of what the writings of Aristides, Tertullian, and Lactantius tell us of the solemn duty to the dead which was insisted upon with such touching eloquence to the primitive congregations of the faithful.
V
THE SLAVE IN EARLY CHRISTIAN LIFE
There was ever present in these early assemblies of Christians one class of persons who had no rank, no place in Roman society,—a class in which Cicero had declared that nothing great or noble could exist. Slavery has been well characterized as the “most frightful feature of the corruption of ancient Rome, and it extended through every class of the community.” Economically, “the poor citizen found almost all the spheres in which an honourable livelihood might be obtained, wholly or at least in a very great part preoccupied by slaves.” Morally, “the slave population was a hotbed of vice, and it contaminated all with which it came in contact.”[70]
Now what position did the slave occupy in early Christian society? It is quite clear that the primitive Christians had no idea of abolishing slavery. It was part of the ancient society, and they accepted it even amongst themselves—apparently made no effort to abolish it; but the view they took of it in reality dealt a death-blow to the unhappy and miserable institution. It is true that whilst Christianity gradually modified its most painful and objectionable features by example and by precept, it was only after long, long years that it succeeded by a bloodless revolution to wipe away the awful curse—“The mills of God grind slowly.”
But the New Testament simply directs slaves to be faithful and obedient. In the letter to Philemon, Paul never even hints at the release of the slave Onesimus, who was very dear to him.
In 1 Cor. vii. 20, Paul urges every man to abide in the calling (i.e. the state of life or condition) in which he was when he was called to God; and even advises the slave to be content to remain a slave even if the opportunity to become free presents itself; for this is the interpretation which a chain of the best commentators gives to the words “use it rather.” See, too, Eph. vi. 5–9; Tit. ii. 9; 1 Pet. ii. 18.[71]
The earliest Christian writings take the same view of the question of slavery as we find in the Epistles of Paul and Peter. So in the Didaché we read: “Thou shalt not give directions when thou art in anger to thy slave or thy handmaid, who trust in the same God, lest perchance they shall not fear the Lord who is over you both; for He cometh not to call men according to their outward position, but He cometh to those whom the Spirit hath made ready. And ye slaves, ye shall be subject to your masters as to God’s image, in modesty and fear” (chap. iv.).
Aristides writes as follows: “But as for their servants or handmaids, or their children if any of them have any, they (the Christians) persuade them to become Christians, for the love that they have towards them; and when they have become so, they call them without distinction Brethren.”—Apol., chap. xv.
But although slavery as an institution[72] was left for the time virtually untouched, Christianity in its own circles worked an immediate and vast change in the condition of the slave: “It supplied a new order of relations, in which the relations of classes were unknown, and it imparted a new dignity to the servile classes.”[73]
In the assemblies of the Christians of the first days on which we have been dwelling, the social difference between master and slave was quite unknown. They knelt side by side when they received the Holy Eucharist. They sat side by side as the instructions were given and the words of the Lord Jesus were expounded. Their prayers ascended together to the mercy-seat of the Eternal. While not unfrequently a slave was promoted to be the teacher; the highest offices in the congregation[74] were now and again filled by chosen members of the slave class. They suffered with their masters, and shared with them the glory of martyrdom.
The Acts of the Martyred Slaves were read to the congregations of the faithful, and the highest honour and veneration was paid to their memory. The slaves Blandina of Lyons, Felicitas of Carthage, Emerentiana of Rome the foster-sister of Agnes, the famous martyr—are names which deservedly rank high in the histories of the early heroines of the Church.
But although slavery was still recognized in the new Society which outwardly made no abrupt changes, which desired no sudden and violent uprooting in the old Society, a marvellous change passed over the ordinary conception of the slave.
An extract from a letter of Paulinus of Nola to Sulpicius Severus, the disciple and biographer of S. Martin of Tours (circa the last years of the fourth century), will give some idea of the regard so largely entertained by Christian thinkers for the slave members of the community. Thanking Sulpicius for a young slave he had sent him, Paulinus of Nola, recognizing in the slave an earnest and devout soul, writes to his friend as follows: “He has served me, and woe is me that I have allowed him to be my servant—that he who was no servant of sin, should yet be in the service of a sinner! Unworthy that I am, every day I suffered him to wash my feet; and there was no menial duty he would not have performed had I allowed him, so unsparing was he of his body—so watchful for his soul. Ah, it is Jesus Christ that I venerate in this young man; for surely every faithful soul proceeds from God, and every humble man of heart comes from the very heart of Christ.”[75]
There is little doubt but that this authoritative teaching of the Christian masters in the matter of the perfect equality of the slave in the eyes of God, and the consequent tender and often loving treatment meted out to the Christian members of the despised and downtrodden class, gravely misliked the more thoughtful among the pagan aristocracy of Rome, and that this teaching and practice of Christians in the case of the vast slave class in the pagan Empire ranked high among the dangers which they felt threatened the existence of the old state of things. Grave considerations of this kind must have strongly influenced the minds of men like Pius and Marcus and their entourage, before they determined to carry out their bitter policy of persecution.
The Romans of the old school could have well afforded to regard with comparative indifference the enfranchisement of any number of Christian slaves. Freedmen, especially in the imperial household, were very numerous in the days of the Antonines. But the teaching that these slaves—while still slaves—were their brethren, and ought to be treated with love and esteem, was a new and disturbing thought in the Empire of the great Antonines.
Lecky, in his History of European Morals (chap. iv.), has a fine passage in which he sums up the great features of the new movement of Christian charity, and its results on the world at large. It runs as follows:
“There is no fact of which an historian becomes more steadily or more painfully conscious than the great difference between the importance and the dramatic interest of the subjects he treats. Wars or massacres, the horrors of martyrdom or the splendour of individual prowess, are susceptible of such brilliant colouring that with but very little literary skill they can be so portrayed that their importance is adequately realized, and that they appeal powerfully to the emotions of the reader. But this vast and unostentatious movement of charity, operating in the village hamlets and in the lonely hospital, staunching the widow’s tears and following all the windings of the poor man’s griefs, presents few features the imagination can grasp, and leaves no deep impression upon the mind. The greatest things are those which are most imperfectly realized; and surely no achievements of the Christian Church are more truly great than those which it has effected in the sphere of charity. For the first time in the history of the world it has inspired many thousands of men and women, at the sacrifice of all worldly interests, and often under circumstances of extreme discomfort or danger, to devote their entire lives to the single object of assuaging the sufferings of humanity. It has covered the globe with countless institutions of mercy, absolutely unknown to the whole pagan world. It has indissolubly united in the minds of men the idea of supreme goodness with that of active and constant benevolence.”
The foundation stories of all this vast movement of charity and altruistic love were laid in the early years of Christianity.
The assemblies—the meetings together of the Christians of the first days—constructed and developed, as we have seen, the laws of charity; indicating the persons who were to be assisted, suggesting, too, the means and resources out of which the sufferers—the forlorn and needy—might be helped and comforted in life and in death.
All that happened subsequently—the mighty organizing work of great masters of charity, such as Basil of Cappadocian Cæsarea, and later of members of the monastic orders—was simply the development, the expansion, the application to individual needs of the primitive ordinances of the first days which we have been sketching out,—ordinances all founded upon the advice, the injunctions, the commands which we find in early Christian writings such as the Didaché, the 1st Epistle of Clement of Rome, the Apology of Aristides, the Shepherd of Hermas, the writings of Justin Martyr and Minucius Felix, and a very little later in the more elaborate works of Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, and repeated in the first half of the third century by eminent teachers such as Origen and Cyprian of Carthage; all primarily based more or less exactly upon the words of the Lord Jesus and of His own immediate disciples.
In the primitive assemblies of the Christian Brotherhood these things formed the groundwork of the instructions and exhortations of the teachers and preachers, and were united with the dogma of the Atonement, with the tidings of immortality, the promises of bliss and eternal peace in the life beyond the grave.
Entering into one of these early assemblies held in an upper chamber or courtyard of a wealthy Christian brother, or in one of those dark and gloomy chambers of the catacombs, “we step,” as it has been well said, “into a whole world of sympathy and of love.”
VI
DIFFICULTIES IN ORDINARY LIFE AMONG THE EARLY CHRISTIANS
But the rapt moments enjoyed by the men and women who met together in these primitive assemblies soon passed. The perfect realization of brotherhood, the sharing in the mystic Eucharist, the fervent prayers, the dwelling on the sunlit words of their Divine Master, the earnest and pressing injunctions to be generous in charity and almsgiving for the benefit of the forlorn and sick in their company, the feeling that the unseen presence of the Lord was all the while in their midst,—all these things contributed to the joy and gladness which permeated each little assembly; every one who assisted at one of these meetings could whisper in his or her heart the words of the “apostle” on the Mount of Transfiguration—“Lord, it is good for us to be here.”
But when the gathering dispersed, a reaction must have quickly set in. From that atmosphere of sympathy, of love and hope, they passed at once into the cold, hard, busy world—into family life—into the workshop, the study, the barrack, and the Forum—all coloured with—permeated by that system of gross and actual idolatry which entered into every home, every trade and profession of the Roman Empire. What was to be their conduct? how were Christians to behave in a world wholly given up to an idolatry they knew was false, and utterly hateful to the Lord whose presence they had just left?
The difficulties of a believer’s life in the early Christian centuries must have been terrible; and it must be borne in mind that these difficulties were not occasional, but of daily, almost of hourly occurrence. To enumerate a few:
1. In the family, in domestic life. Consider the position of a Christian slave—of a son or daughter—of a wife—in a pagan family. What scenes of strain and estrangement if one member was a Christian and the household generally clung to the old Roman religion! The son or daughter might wish to be Christ’s disciple, and yet shrink from “hating father and mother, brothers and sisters.” What constant contests would the Christian have to endure—what bitter reproaches—what perpetual danger of giving way and so endangering the immortal soul! What share could the Christian member of a pagan family take in the ordinary business and pleasures of the everyday existence, to say nothing of the extreme peril to which a member of the sect would be constantly subject of being denounced as a Christian to the authorities, who were often too ready to listen to the informer?
2. In Trade.—Many commercial occupations were more or less closely connected with idol-worship; to say nothing of the makers and decorators of idol-images, a trade that manifestly was impossible for a Christian to be occupied in, there were hosts of artisans employed in the great arenas where the public games were held; then, too, there were the actors—the gladiators—those engaged in the schools and training-homes of these. What were such persons to do?
3. In the ordinary pleasures of the people in which such multitudes took the keenest delight, was the Christian to stand aloof from all these? Was the Christian to attract a painful and dangerous notoriety by refusing to share in such dearly loved amusements, which with rare exceptions were positively hateful to every Christian’s conscience?
4. Was the civil servant or the lawyer to abandon his calling in which the worship of and reverence for the gods of Rome played so prominent a part? Was the soldier, or still more the officer of the Legions, to abandon his post and desert his colours, rather than acquiesce in the daily service and adoration of the gods of Rome. Was he to refuse to pay the customary homage to the awful Cæsar, when the slightest disrespect or failure in homage to this sovereign master, who claimed the rank of Deity, would be construed into treason and disloyalty?
5. Education.—Could a Christian still continue to be a teacher of the young, seeing that in all the manuals of education a knowledge of the old gods still worshipped in Rome—their myths, their prowess, their various attributes—was carefully taught? The very festivals and sacred days had to be carefully observed by them, since it was by means of these the teachers’ fees were reckoned.
All such and many other like questions had to be considered and weighed by the Christian converts living in the world of Rome. Very thorny and rough was the path which had to be travelled by every earnest Christian in his way through life.
A striking and eloquent apologia for or explanation of the reasons which guided many of the early Christian teachers to advocate a certain feeling of toleration in various circumstances of everyday life may be quoted here:
“The (Roman) Empire was originally developed quite apart from Christianity under the shadow of the worship of the old false gods. Everything in it bore the stamp of idolatry. Its laws and its customs, first framed by patricians who were at once priests and lawgivers, then consolidated by Emperors who ranked first and foremost as sovereign pontiffs of the idol-worship, everything was coloured with and permeated by polytheism. Art—Letters—private customs—all were pagan. There was no public monument but was placed under the guardianship of some heathen deity. No poem was composed without special reference to an idol god; no feast began without a libation to an idol; no household omitted the inescapable duty which directed that a sacred fire should burn before the household gods (Lares). Thus absolutely independent of Christianity, such a civilization must needs be intensely hostile to the new faith, and its hostility never faltered one instant. Differing here from the fixed rule of universal toleration, Roman society from the very first displayed towards Christianity the bitterest contempt—insulting treatment—persecution. The religion of Jesus grew up and spread under circumstances of general ignominy and hatred ... living in such a highly civilized community—mighty and indeed all-powerful—the Church of Christ destroyed nothing, adopted everything, quietly correcting, gently changing and reforming everything, graving the Cross of its Founder on all the institutions of pagan Rome; breathing its inspiration by degrees into all its laws and customs.”[76]
VII
THE ASCETIC AND THE MORE PRACTICAL SCHOOLS OF TEACHING
The members of the Christian Brotherhood were not left without guidance as to their behaviour in the world of Rome. There were two schools among the Christian teachers of authority in the primitive Church.
The one which we will term the school of “Rigourists” or “ascetics” found a brilliant and able exponent in the stern African Father, Tertullian, who taught and wrote in the latter years of the second and the earlier years of the third centuries. From the burning and impassioned words of this famous African teacher we can form a generally accurate idea of what was taught and pressed home in the school of “Rigourists.”
No compromise was ever suggested by these hard, stern teachers—no “via media” was even hinted at.
The artisan must forsake his calling if it even was connected in the most remote degree with idol-worship,[77] with the games loved of the people, with anything which appeared antagonistic to any of the Master’s commands. These words must be understood in their strict literal sense, and must be obeyed.
The soldier must abandon his colours, the civil servant his profession. The slave must at all risks refuse his obedience when that obedience involved acquiescence in any form of idolatry. The Christian wife, the son or daughter in a pagan family, must gently but firmly decline to share even in the formal ancestral worship, or to be present at the public games of the arena, or the performances in the theatre. In their dress and ornaments, in their very language, in their hours of play and work, they must hold themselves aloof. We may picture to ourselves how in many a pagan household, in the Forum, in the army and civil service, gentle, pitying men and women would be found who would shield and shelter these seemingly fanatical and earnest adherents of a despised religion; but in many cases there would be no loving, pitying ones who would strive to throw a kindly veil over what seemed to them such strange, such unpatriotic and even disloyal conduct. Then would assuredly follow arrest—imprisonment—exile—the deadly mines, where the condemned toiled in a hopeless, dreary captivity. Not unfrequently torture and death would be the guerdon of the devoted Christian under circumstances of awful pain and mortal agony.
It is out of this class that the martyrs mostly came. It was to embolden and encourage these that the little known “Schools of Martyrdom” were formed, where very earnest Christians were trained to endure all and suffer for the Name’s sake.[78]
The ascetics, however, were in the minority. There was another school in the primitive Church, strict certainly in its instructions, but more ready to make allowances; less uncompromising in its views of the everyday Christian life; less literal in its interpretation of the Divine Master’s words.
This gentler and more practical school is well represented in the works still preserved to us of several of the great teachers of early Christianity. A very conspicuous example of this school of teaching is the famous Dialogue put together by the North African Latin writer, Minucius Felix. The generally received date of the writing is circa A.D. 160, in the reign of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus. It is a work of peculiar charm. One scholar terms it “a golden Book”; another (Renan) styles it “the pearl of Apologetic literature.”
It is cast in the form of a dialogue held by three persons on the then beautiful seashore of Ostia. The speakers are real historic characters of some rank and position in the Roman world in the middle years of the second century. The arguments adduced by the pagan Cæcilius are supposed to be a reproduction of a lost work of Fronto, the tutor and friend of the Emperor Marcus. The refutation of Octavius the wealthy Christian merchant, which follows and which convinced Cæcilius of the truth of the new faith, is the principal piece in the work and the part to which reference is specially made here, and it admirably voices many of the views of the second and gentler school of early Christianity. The criticism of Renan on the view of Christianity taken by Octavius is striking, and fairly accurate. It is, he says, “the conception of the new religion of amiable advocates wishful to enrol in the Christian ranks, men of culture and position. Such men as the Octavius of the Dialogue would never have written the Gospels or the Apocalypse; but, on the other hand, without such liberal interpreters, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, and the Epistles of Paul would have never penetrated beyond the circle of a narrow sect, and in the long run the sect of Christians would have disappeared.” “Minucius Felix,” the great French writer, goes on to say, “represented in those early years the preacher of Nôtre Dâme (in Paris) in our own time, addressing men of the world.”[79]
Christianity, in the eloquent presentment of Octavius, by no means requires the believer to put aside the philosophers and pagan writers whose works he admired. In the argument of Octavius, Christian teaching lives in the pages of Aristotle and Plato. He points out with rare skill and ingenuity that the new religion makes no claim on men to give up their callings and professions; for instance, advocates like Minucius, the author of “the Dialogue,” never dream, save in times of vacation, of leaving the Forum the scene of their life-work. Christians, like other men, busy themselves with the same occupations; so society may surely accept them without any scruples. The cultivation of Art—the study of Letters—are by no means incompatible with the profession of Christianity. The religion of Jesus uses all these things, and using them sanctifies them.
Eminent teachers, such as Clement of Alexandria at the close of the second century in his Pædagogus, give directions to believers to enable them to live a Christian life in the world. Origen, in many respects a “Rigourist,” is far from emulating Tertullian in his stern denunciations and warnings; and even such men as the saintly Cyprian, who closed his beautiful life by a voluntary martyrdom, shows by his own example that there were even times and seasons when a Christian by flight might rightly avoid arrest and suffering for the Name’s sake.
In this gentler, more accommodating school it was clear that heathen art was not forbidden. The decoration of even the earlier sepulchral chambers in the Roman catacombs plainly indicates this freedom.
That this policy of the gentler school of early teaching, which countenanced, perhaps suggested, many allowances, especially in matters of purely ceremonial idolatry, was adopted by the majority of believers, is clear from the numbers of Christians who we know lived in the imperial court, served in the army, and occupied positions in the civil service.
For instance, in the imperial court, in the days of S. Paul, we meet with salutations from Christians in Cæsar’s household (Phil. iv. 22).
The well-known “graffito” on the Palatine, of the caricature of a crucifix, is an indication that there were Christians among the imperial pages in the reign of Marcus,[80] A.D. 161–80.
Irenæus (iv. 30) in the last quarter of the second century expressly writes as follows: “And what of those who in the royal palace are believers?”
Marcia, the favourite of Commodus, if not a Christian, was more than kind to the Christian sect; that many Christians were in her circle is certain. Even Tertullian testifies (Apol. xxxvi.) to the fact that there were Christians in the palace of the Emperor Septimius Severus, A.D. 193–212.
In the court of Alexander Severus (A.D. 222–35) were many Christians; and it has been supposed, not without some reason, that the Emperor himself was secretly a believer.
Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria (quoted in Euseb. H. E. vii. 10), writing of the favourable disposition of the Emperor Valerian towards Christians in the earlier part of his reign, A.D. 253, says: “All his house (court) was filled with pious persons; it was indeed a congregation of the Lord.”
In the first part of Diocletian’s reign, A.D. 284–96, the court of Nicomedia was in great measure composed of Christians; the wife and daughter of the Emperor were believers.
From this chain of references to the presence of Christians in the imperial court from the days of S. Paul to the latter years of the third century, we are compelled to conclude that large allowances on the part of the Emperor were not unfrequently made to the sect, and even that not a few concessions outwardly to take part in the ceremonies of official paganism must have been allowed to the Christian courtier all through the period when Christianity was an unlawful and forbidden religion.
In the army a similar spirit of mutual allowance and concession must have been often shown. It is clear that from the very first there were not a few Christian soldiers in the Legions. There must have been many cases in which the superior officers connived at the scruples of Christian soldiers; while, on the other hand, the Christian Legionary must have consented generally to share in the more public and official ceremonies in which the old worship of the gods was inextricably mixed up. Nowhere were the difficulties, however, for believers more acute than in the army, and the slightest ill-will or pagan bigotry on the part of the superior officer made the position of a Christian soldier absolutely untenable even when the soldier belonged to what we have termed the gentler and more accommodating school of Christian teaching. Martyrs in the army, it has been noticed, were relatively more numerous than in the civil callings.[81]
The civil service contained undoubtedly many Christians in the early centuries of the era; see Aristides (Apol. xv.), who, writing of Christians, says: “Where they are judges they judge righteously.” Tertullian refers to the presence of Christians in all ranks, and states how “they could be found in the palace, in the Senate, and in the Forum” (Ad. Nat. i. 1 and Apol. i.). Cyprian, Ep. lxxx. 1, and other early authorities could be quoted here. Eus. H. E. viii. 1, specially mentions how provinces were occasionally ruled by Christian governors, and calls attention to a Phrygian city whose whole population including officials were Christians. He was writing of the last years of the third century. Such Christian officials must have had great allowances made to them, and they must have often availed themselves of the licence permitted to believers on the occasion of purely State ceremonials, which were literally permeated with references to the old State religion.
Instances and examples from the Old Testament books were adduced by the teachers of the gentler school of Christian life in support of the allowances made to believers to retain their court appointments and civil service offices, and to carry on their professions in spite of the idolatrous associations connected with these offices and callings.
Great saints such as Daniel—revered patriarchs such as Joseph—had been ministers of mighty idol-worshipping sovereigns, and must have been present at and given a certain countenance to official pagan ceremonies. Naaman, the eminent servant of the King of Syria, after he had accepted the worship of the God of Israel, even asked the great prophet Elisha permission to accompany his royal master into the temple of the god Rimmon, and to pay obeisance to the Syrian idol on State occasions; and asked that he might be forgiven for this apparent act of idolatry. In reply, Elisha simply bade him “go in peace” (2 Kings v. 18–19).
But in spite of these kindly allowances, these gentler rules and directions, the condition of Christians, even for those, and they certainly were in the majority, who followed the teaching of the more kindly and lenient school, was very hard and difficult. In the family life—in public life, the searchings of heart of a true believer must have been often very acute and distressing, and their position most precarious; and in those times when a wave of pagan fanaticism swept over the imperial court, the province, or the city, no maxims of earthly prudence and caution, however carefully followed out, would have been able to save them from prosecution; and prosecution was invariably followed by the breaking up of their homes, by rigorous imprisonment, confiscation of their property, loss of rank and position, too often by torture and death.
To turn once more to the sterner and smaller school of “Rigourists,” for these, after all, were “les âmes d’élite” of the Christians in the first three centuries; in later times such men and women possibly were termed fanatics, they have been often branded as wild and unpractical persons; but it was to these heroic souls after all that in great measure Christianity owed its final victory.
The wonderful and rapid spread of Christianity noticeable after the Milan toleration Edict of Constantine, A.D. 313, has often been commented upon with surprise. From being a persecuted and despised cult, Christianity became, long before the fourth century had run its course, the religion of the Empire; it had previously gained evidently the hearts of the people in well-nigh all the provinces of the mighty Empire.
Now no imperial edicts—no mere favour and patronage of the Emperor and his court, could ever have won for Christianity that widespread and general acceptance among the people so noticeable within fifty years of the Milan proclamation of Constantine.[82] Something more was needed. For a little over two hundred years the Christians had been sowing the seeds of a new and nobler view of life—“it had gradually taught the supreme sanctity of love—it had presented an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest as well as all that was noblest on earth; and one great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed.... Noble lives crowned by heroic deaths were the best arguments of the infant Church.”[83]
There is no doubt but that a deep impression had been gradually made upon the masses (i.e. the people generally of the Empire) by the undaunted behaviour under suffering, of the confessors in the two centuries which followed the death of Peter and Paul; and this impression was deepened by the events connected with the last terrible persecution of Diocletian. The extent of this last onslaught, the awful severity of its edicts, the fearful thoroughness with which these edicts were carried out, the numbers, the constancy and brave patience of the confessors, went home to the hearts of the indifferent; it affected even the enemies of the Church, and brought about a complete revulsion of feeling towards the once hated and despised sect.
And it must be remembered that the examples of the marvellous endurance of suffering, the constancy, the brave patience, the heroic deaths, were drawn in a vast majority of conspicuous cases from the school of Rigourists, from that company of men and women of intense, perhaps of exaggerated earnestness, who listened to and obeyed the burning words of a Tertullian or an Hippolytus, rather than to the gentler counsels of a Minucius Felix and the teachers who pointed out to Christians a way of living in the world which only rarely required such tremendous sacrifices as home and family, career and profession, even life itself—things very dear to men.
Surely no just historian would dare to speak slightingly of these splendid lives of utter sacrifice of self, when he reflects on the power which such lives have exercised over their fellow-men. The debt which Christianity owes to this stern school of Rigourists is simply measureless.
In the last half of the third century there arose a Christian poet—the first great songman who had appeared since the famous singers of the Augustan age had passed away. The popularity of Prudentius has been enduring; for centuries in many lands his striking and original poems have been read and re-read. Among his poems the most eagerly sought after have been the hymns descriptive of and in praise of the martyrs for the “Name’s” sake. These loved poems are known as “Peri-Stephanôn”—the Book of the (Martyrs’) Crowns.
It is the halo of glory surrounding these martyrs or confessors that especially strikes the historian. We see in these popular poems what a profound, what a lasting impression the sufferings of the martyrs had made on the peoples of the Roman Empire. The saint-sufferers, men or women, became soon an object of something more than reverence.
The heroic personages of Prudentius belong to no one land, to no solitary nationality. Nowhere was the truth of the well-known saying that “the blood of the martyr was the seed of the Church” more conspicuously exemplified than in the songs of Prudentius. It has been remarked with great force and truth that in the burning lilts of this great Spanish poet of the later years of the fourth century, we must perforce recognize something more than the inspiration of a solitary individual. We seem to hear in his impassioned words the echoes of the voice of the people.[84]
VIII
WHAT THE RELIGION OF JESUS OFFERED IN RETURN FOR THE HARDSHIPS CHRISTIANS HAD TO ENDURE IN THE EARLY CENTURIES
Such was the life of a Christian for nearly two hundred and fifty years after the deaths of Peter and Paul at Rome.
For all, as we have urged, even for the majority who were disciples of the gentler, less exacting school of teaching, but who generally accepted the yoke and burden of Christ, the life must have been very hard and difficult, at times even full of danger; while for some, i.e., for the disciples of the school of “Rigourists,” so hard—so austere—so full of nameless perils, that men now can scarcely credit that any could really have lived so difficult, so painful a life—could have listened to and striven in real earnest to obey such rules as the great Rigourist master, Tertullian, laid down for the faithful; as, for instance:
“Fast—because rigid fasting is a preparation for martyrdom; tortures will have no material to work on; your dry skins will better resist the iron claws; your blood, already exhausted, will flow less freely.”[85]
“Women, shun the marriage bond. To what purpose will you bear children, seeing you are longing to be taken out of this sinful world, and you are desirous to send your children before you[86] (to glory).”
“Ye women (take heed how you adorn yourselves), for I know not how the wrist that is accustomed to the (gemmed) bracelet will endure the roughness of the chain. I know not how the leg that has rejoiced in the golden anklet will endure the harsh restraint of the iron fetters. I fear the neck hung round with a chain of pearls and emeralds will leave scanty room for the sword of the executioner.” “Dear sisters, let us meditate on hardships, then when they come to us we shall not feel them; let us give up luxuries and we shall not regret them; for Christians now, remember, pass their time not in gold, but in iron. At this moment are the angels weaving for you robes of martyrdom.”[87]
But in return for all this, Christianity offered much—in truth, a splendid guerdon for the life of sacrifice. In the first place, the Christian was delivered from the dread spectre which constantly haunted the life of the pagan—the fear of death. Throughout life, sleeping and waking, to the pagan of all ranks and orders, death was an enemy. What the men of the pagan Empire in the early Christian centuries felt in respect of the great universal foe—what they thought of it—is well shown in the epitaphs on the pagan tombs of the first, second, and third centuries.[88]
Complete freedom from this ever-present dread was the immediate reward received by the believer: so far was death from being an enemy, that to the Christian it appeared as the best and most longed for friend. Again and again the Church was compelled to restrain rather than to encourage candidates for martyrdom. From Paul, who wrote how “he desired to depart and be with Christ, which was far better” (Phil. i. 23); from Ignatius, whose passionate desire for a martyr’s death appears and reappears, in his Letter to the Romans, in such words as “it is good for me to die for Jesus Christ, rather than to reign over the farthest bounds of the earth”; “Suffer me to receive the pure light when I come thither, then I shall be a man indeed”; “Let me be an imitator of the passion of my God” (To the Romans, vi.); from the thousand epitaphs in the catacomb tombs, which we can still read, we gather this knowledge—the absolute freedom of the Christian from that fear of death which weighed so heavily upon all pagan society.
The very expressions used by the disciples of the first centuries when speaking of the dread enemy,[89] bear curious witness to the new relation of the believer to the ancient foe of man; they spoke of death as “a passage into life”—as “a sleep.” The spot where the dead were laid was now termed “a cemetery”—“a place of sleeping”; burial was called “depositio”—the body laid up as it were in trust.
Cyprian the saintly, the martyr Bishop of Carthage, well voices the feelings of Christians in the matter of death the friend:[90] “Let us think what we mean when we speak of the presence of Christ (after death), of the increasing hosts of our friends, the loved, the reverenced, the sainted who are there. Cyprian cannot even mourn the departed—he only misses them as friends gone on a long journey. He is unable to bear the putting on black garments of mourning, in memory of those who wear the fadeless white.” “Put the terror of death quite away—think only of the deathlessness beyond.” “Let us greet the day which gives to each of us his own country ... which restores us to paradise. Who that has lived in foreign lands would not hasten to go back to his own country?... We look on paradise as our country.”
The wondrous joy which came to the Christian in the assemblies we have been picturing—the fact of the new Brotherhood—the feeling of the presence of the Master in their midst, watching over them—has been already dwelt upon at some length.
The blessed consciousness of the forgiveness of all sin, the knowledge that in repentance and in prayer they could ever wash anew their scarred robes white in the blood of the Lamb, was a source of perpetual and ever-recurring joy to the earnest Christian. The doctrine of the atonement ever would give them constant comfort and confidence in all the difficulties and dangers of common everyday life—“Though their sins were as scarlet they would become white as snow,” was an ancient Hebrew saying of Isaiah. It was one of the precious treasures inherited by the Christian from the Jewish Church. And in the sorely harassed and tempted life of the world of Rome the words would be often repeated by the believers, with the new striking Christian addition—“when washed in the blood of the Lamb,” and the memory of the beautiful saying would ever supply fresh courage for the conflict.
Perhaps the most powerful and sustaining of all the Christian beliefs, the one that never for an instant was absent from their thoughts, was the hope—aye, more than hope, the certainty that bliss indescribable awaited the soul of the happy redeemed the moment it quitted the body—“To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise”—a wonderful promise, indeed, of the Redeemer, which must have brought ineffable sweetness and repose into thousands of storm-tossed hearts,—a promise which must have made up for many a hard and painful struggle. The life so hard and difficult—so full of dangers and perplexities—would soon come to an end, and then at once the beatific vision would be their guerdon, and rest and peace and joy would be the portion of the redeemed souls for ever.
Our picture of the inner life of the Christian in the early Christian centuries would be incomplete were we not to allude to the influence, perhaps scarcely recognised but ever at work, of portions of the “Revelation” of S. John. Holding, of course, in the teaching of the Christian masters a very different position to the Gospels, which, of course, formed the authoritative basis of all Christian instruction, the “Revelation” occupied a peculiar and singularly influential place in the thoughts of the early harassed believers.
Many of the more mystical and obscure sections of that wonderful composition which was very generally accepted as the work of the beloved apostle, we may assume were little dwelt upon either in public teaching or in private meditation; the mystic prophecies of the seer were, comparatively speaking, but little read, and received then as now different interpretations; but interspersed with these prophecies, and not necessarily connected with them, occur passages of surpassing beauty, in which pictures of the heaven-life are painted by no mortal hand. It was these which arrested the imagination, and found a home in many a Christian heart. The passages which contained these pictures were no doubt repeated again and again by lonely harassed men and women in the silent watches of the night, in the public worship, in the study chamber, especially in the hour of danger and trial.
The hope of a glorious eternity was vividly painted in several remarkable passages of S. John’s great Vision of Heaven and the future things. The disciples of the sterner school, who were trained so to speak for martyrdom, felt themselves specially addressed when the Seer told his vision of the thrones and of those who sat on them,—they would occupy the place of the souls of those who had been slain for the witness of Jesus (Rev. xx. 4); and again they would call to mind that when the Seer asked who were these arrayed in white robes, and whence came they? he was told that these were they which came out of great tribulation, and who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb; and that therefore were they before the throne of God, and that from their eyes God would wipe away all tears (Rev. vii. 13–17).
To the disciples of the gentler school, too, words of immortal hope were spoken often in the same Book which spoke as no writing of earth had ever spoken before of the heaven-life. The Seer heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and said how blessed they were which are called to the marriage-supper of the Lamb; and the same Seer heard how there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying; and again repeated the glorious promise that His servants (all His servants) should see His face, and that they should reign for ever and ever (Rev. xix. 6, 9, xxi. 4, xxii. 4, 5).
Moreover, they read and pondered over that most beautiful, most exhaustive promise made to all His faithful servants,—not only to the martyr band,—“Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city (of God).” (Rev. xxii. 14, REVISED VERSION).
These and many other like sunlit sayings of the Book of Life in the Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation of S. John were ever ringing in the ears of the Christians of the first days, and telling them of the immortal hope which was their blessed treasure,—words which sweetened their hard and too frequently painful lot, which made them feel that they had made a good exchange when they gave up the fleeting and often sinful pleasures of earth for the sure hope of the immortal joys of heaven. They felt how poor and tawdry after all were the things they had renounced in comparison with what awaited them when the short and weary period of human life came to an end.
In spite of what the believers renounced for the Name’s sake, notwithstanding the many daily trials and dangers to which they were ever exposed, they were strangely happy with a new happiness quite unknown in the old pagan world, with a joy no man could take from them. Pagan society, whenever it deigned to notice them, treated them with a contemptuous pity, which too often shaded into positive hatred. We see this in the “Acts” of the Martyrs from the questions put to them by the Roman officials when they were brought before the tribunals, simply because they were Christians. This was the estimate of the sect entertained by men like the great Antonine Emperors, Pius and Marcus. The summary of Fronto the famous rhetorician, Marcus’ tutor and friend, reproduced in the discourse of Cæcilius in the Dialogue of Minucius Felix, repeats too clearly the same disparaging view coloured with contempt and scarcely veiled hatred.
Nowhere is the pagan conception of the misery and wretchedness of the Christian life more clearly expressed than in the picturesque and graphic poem of Rutilius Namatianus,[91] a contemporary of Paulinus of Nola in the first years of the fifth century.
It is a comparatively late pagan criticism of Christianity, but it admirably expresses the common view of pagan society, and exactly coincides with the opinion of such eminent Romans as Marcus and his friend Fronto in the second century.
“Is there any sense,” writes Rutilius, “in living a wretched life for fear of becoming unhappy? these Christians love to torture themselves: they are more cruel even than the offended gods. I ask the question, has not the sect the secret of poisons more deadly than any possessed by Circe; for Circe only brought about a danger in the body, but these people change the very soul?”
The life of a Christian in the first two hundred and fifty years of the era was, however, as we have shown, emphatically no sad and mournful, no wretched existence. It was a life unspeakably bright and happy, undreamed of by any poet or philosopher in the many-sided story of paganism.
BOOK III
THE INNER LIFE OF THE CHURCH
PART I
FROM THE DATE OF THE GREAT FIRE OF ROME IN THE REIGN OF NERO TO THE DEATH OF MARCUS ANTONINUS
A.D. 64–A.D. 180
Introductory
There is really no doubt but that in the period of which we are writing in this Third Book, roughly stretching over some hundred and sixteen years, with very short intervals of comparative stillness, the Christian sect constantly lived under the veiled shadow of persecution; the penalties exacted for the confession of the Name were very severe—the confessors were ever exposed to confiscation of their goods, to harsh imprisonment, to torture, and to death.
This state of things, which existed in the Church in Rome and in all the communities of Christians, is disclosed to us not merely or even principally in the Acts of Martyrs, which for this very early period are comparatively few in number, and, with a few notable exceptions, of questionable authority, but largely from the fragments of contemporary Christian writings of undoubted authenticity which have come down to us.[92]
These fragments, for several of these writings are but fragments, represent a somewhat considerable literature, and they may be looked upon as descriptive of much of the life led by Christians during these hundred and sixteen years,[93] the period when the religion of Jesus was gradually but rapidly taking root in the world of Rome. With one notable exception the writings to which we refer issued from the heart of the New Sect.
We shall give a chain of some of the more striking passages from the fragments of the works in question, the passages which especially bear upon the ceaseless persecution which the Christians had to endure during that period we are dwelling upon in this section—which ended with the death of Marcus and the accession of his son Commodus in A.D. 180.
The quotations will be divided into two groups: the first from writings of apostles and apostolic men; that is, of men who had seen and conversed with the apostles themselves. The dates of this first group of witnesses range from the days of Nero to the days of Trajan, roughly from A.D. 64 to A.D. 107–10. The second group will include writings dating from the days of Trajan to the accession of Commodus, A.D. 180: the approximate dates of each writing and a very brief account of the several authors will be given.
It will be seen that the allusions to a state of persecution grow more numerous, more detailed and emphatic after A.D. 134–5, the date of the close of the last terrible Jewish war in the latter years of the Emperor Hadrian, when the line of separation between the Jew and the Christian became definitely marked, and the position and attitude of the Christians was no longer merely contemptuously viewed, but was misliked and even feared by the State authorities, who then (after A.D. 135) for the first time clearly saw what a great and powerful society had grown up in the heart of the Empire.
What a weighty group of words are those we are about to quote! They were written by men who lived in the heart of that little Society who with a love stronger than death loved Jesus of Nazareth as their friend and their God. They are words which are embedded in their letters—their devotional works—their histories—their pleading treatises and apologies for the faith, the faith which they esteemed of greater price than life.
Intensely real, they tell us of the life they and theirs were leading: reading them we seem to breathe the air they breathed; the simple unvarnished story tells us what daily, hourly perils were theirs,—what awful trials, what unspeakable dangers ever surrounded them; they show how hard it was to be a Christian in those early days in the first hundred years which followed the “passing” of S. John.
Nothing we can say now—write now—can give us a picture, a living picture, of the life of these first generations of believers in the Name, as do these words gathered from the fragments of contemporary writings which have come down to us across the long ages of storm and stress and change.
In the first group we will briefly examine the following:—The Epistle to the Hebrews, circa A.D. 65–6; the First Epistle of S. Peter, circa A.D. 65–7; the Apocalypse of S. John (the Revelation), circa A.D. 90; the 1st Epistle of S. Clement of Rome, circa A.D. 95. To this little selection we would add The Seven Epistles of S. Ignatius, A.D. 107–10, now generally received as undoubtedly genuine.
I
FIRST GROUP OF QUOTATIONS
Epistle to the Hebrews, CIRCA A.D. 65–6
The first three of the above-mentioned writings possess a peculiar authority; they have been from very early times recognized as forming part of the Canon of New Testament Scriptures: of these three the Epistle to the Hebrews is generally believed to have been composed about A.D. 65–6. The congregations addressed in it had evidently been exposed to grave afflictions, and are told that a more awful trial awaits them in no distant future. For this bitter persecution they must prepare themselves.
A number of examples of noble and heroic resistances to trial and temptation are cited (Heb. xi. 32–40, xii. 1–4); the writer of the Epistle evidently expected that similar experiences will be the lot of the congregation he was addressing.
First Epistle of S. Peter, CIRCA A.D. 65–7
The second writing, which will be examined at rather greater length, is of the utmost importance as a witness to the view of the perpetual persecution to which after A.D. 64 the sect was exposed. The First Epistle of S. Peter[94] was put out circa 65–7. It was written manifestly in a time of persecution; the keynote of the Epistle is consolation and encouragement for the distant congregations addressed. The persecution was evidently raging in Rome, whence the letter was written, but it was rapidly spreading also in the provinces of the Empire. The language used shows it was no isolated capricious onslaught, but a systematic and legalized attack on the religion of Jesus. To quote a few passages:
“Now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness by reason of manifold temptations: that the trial of your faith, being more precious than of gold which perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ” (i. 6, 7).
“If ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye; and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled.... It is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing” (iii. 14–17).
“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you” (iv. 12).
“If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you.... If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf” (iv. 14–16).
“Whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world” (v. 9).
Revelation of S. John, CIRCA A.D. 90
The Apocalypse of S. John is now generally dated circa A.D. 90; the keynote of this strange and in many parts beautiful writing—so unlike, save in certain sections, the other acknowledged books of the New Testament Canon—is the suffering of the Church: just a quarter of a century had elapsed since Nero and his advisers resolved upon the persecution of the congregations of the believers in Jesus.
No one can read this striking “Revelation” of S. John, with its wonderful visions, its exhortations, its words of warning, its messages of encouragement and comfort, without being keenly sensible that the Church therein portrayed had been exposed—was then exposed to a bitter, relentless persecution; that the sufferers were witnesses to the Name; and that their sufferings were not owing to any deeds of wrong or treason to the State, but purely because of the Name which they confessed. They had been condemned simply because they were Christians.
It is true that comparatively little is said directly about these persecutions. Other subjects clearly are far more important to the writer; but a number of incidental allusions to the sufferings endured in the course of persecution occur—allusions which cannot be mistaken.
We will quote a few of these. Many of them imply that the Church was exposed to a long continued harrying to the death:
“I saw under the altar the souls of those that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: and they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled” (vi. 9–11).
“These are they that came out of great tribulation ... therefore are they before the throne of God” (vii. 14–17).
“And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death” (xii. 11).
“They have shed the blood of saints and prophets” (xvi. 6).
“And I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God ... and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” (xx. 4).
The victims of these persecutions, we are markedly told, are witnesses to the “Name” or the “Faith”: so in the letter to the Church in Pergamos we read:
“Thou holdest fast My name, and hast not denied My Faith” (ii. 13).
“And I saw the woman[95] drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (xvii. 6).
The persecution had been of long standing:
“I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is: and thou holdest fast My name ... even in those days wherein Antipas was My faithful martyr, who was slain among you” (ii. 13).
And the persecution is to continue:
“Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer ... be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (ii. 10).
Specially interesting from an historical point of view in this connexion of the testimony of the “Apocalypse” of S. John with the sleepless persecution to which the sect was subjected, is Professor Ramsay’s exegesis of the words, “And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him (the beast) whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb” (xiii. 8), and “as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed” (xiii. 15).
“It is here implied that the persecutor is worshipped as a God by all people[96] except the Christians, and that the martyrs are slain because they do not worship ‘the beast’—i.e. the Roman Emperor. Hence their refusal to worship ‘the beast’ and their witness to their own God, are united in one act; and this implies that the worship of ‘the beast’ (the Emperor) formed a test, the refusal of which was equivalent to a confession and witness....
“The importance attached during this persecution to the worship of the Emperor, and the hatred of this special form of idolatry as the special enemy, have dictated the phrase addressed to the Church of Pergamos, ‘Thou dwellest where the throne of Satan, i.e. the temple of Rome and Augustus, is’” (ii. 13).
The peculiar partiality of the Emperor Domitian for this especial form of idolatry, in which he personally was adored as a god, has been already alluded to.
S. Clement of Rome, First Epistle, CIRCA A.D. 95–6
About the year of grace 95–6, Clement, bishop of Rome, wrote his letter to the Christian congregation of Corinth—generally known as his 1st Epistle. From the days of Irenæus downwards this letter has ever been considered a work of the highest importance, and its genuineness as a writing of Clement of Rome has never been disputed. Its importance consists in its record of the traditional interpretation of the apostolic teaching which was held in the great congregation of the metropolis from the first days. The immediate reasons of the Bishop of Rome writing to the Church of Corinth were the disastrous internal dissensions which were harassing the Corinthian congregation, disputes which not only marred its influence at home, but were productive of grave scandal abroad, and which, unless checked, would seriously affect the work of the Church in cities far distant from Corinth.
It was a gentle loving letter of remonstrance; but its value to the Church at large in all times consists in its being an authoritative declaration of the doctrine taught in the great Church in Rome in the closing years of the first century, somewhat more than a quarter of a century after the deaths of SS. Peter and Paul.
Clement in his Epistle to the Church of Corinth had no intention of writing a history of his Church. The object of his writing was a very different one. There are, however, a few notices scattered here and there in the course of his long letter, which bear upon the subject now under discussion, i.e., the continuous nature of the persecution under which the Christian folk lived from the year 64 onward.
Clement begins by explaining the reason of his delay in taking up the questions which vexed the Corinthian congregation. “By reason of the sudden and repeated calamities which are befalling us, we consider, brethren, we have been somewhat tardy in giving heed to the matters of dispute that have arisen among you, dearly beloved” (1 Ep. 1).
The next allusion is a very striking one. “But to pass from the examples of ancient days” (Clement had been quoting from the Old Testament), “let us come to those champions who lived very near to our time. Let us set before us the examples which belong to our generation ... the greatest and most righteous pillars of the Church were persecuted and contended even unto death. There was Peter who ... endured not one nor two but many labours, and then having borne his testimony went to his appointed place of glory.... Paul by his example pointed out the prize of patient endurance ... he departed from the world, and went unto the holy place.... Unto these men of holy lives was gathered a vast multitude, who through many indignities and tortures ... set a brave example among ourselves.
“These things, dearly beloved, we write not only as admonishing you, but also as putting ourselves in remembrance; for we are in the same lists, and the same contest awaiteth us” (1 Ep. 5–7).
Clement’s words here, which occur in the middle of his argument, indisputably imply that after the martyr-death of the two great Christian teachers Peter and Paul, a continuous persecution harried the congregation (he is speaking especially of Rome) all through his own generation. “A vast multitude of the elect,” he tells us, in their turn suffered martyrdom, and were joined to the eminent leaders who had gone before them. When Domitian perished we know there was a temporary lull in the storm of persecution. Dion relates how the Emperor Nerva dismissed those who were awaiting their trial on the charge of sacrilege. It was no doubt in this very brief period of comparative quiet that Clement had leisure to attend to the troubled affairs at the Church of Corinth, and to write the important letter just quoted from.
But the Roman bishop was aware that “the lull” was quite a temporary one, and was due only to the reaction which set in after the murder of Domitian during the short reign of the Emperor Nerva; for he goes on to speak (in chap. vi.) of his condition and of the condition of his co-religionists at Rome: “We are in the same lists (with those who have been slain), and the same contest awaits us.”
Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr, CIRCA A.D. 107–10
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, who suffered martyrdom in the days of Trajan, circa A.D. 107–10,—some twelve or fifteen years after Clement of Rome wrote his memorable letter to the Church of Corinth,—is the next witness we propose to call in support of the contention advanced in the preceding pages, namely, that the persecution began by Nero in the year 64 was never really allowed again to slumber, but that with more or less vehemence it continued to harass the Christian sect all through the reigns of the Emperors of the Flavian dynasty and onward.
The Letters of Ignatius were written, it is true, a few years after the extinction of the Flavian House. But the martyr-bishop of Antioch was born about the year of grace 40, and he therefore was about twenty-four years old when the persecution of Nero began; and all through the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian without doubt he occupied a high position, probably in the Christian congregation at Antioch; he therefore may well be cited as a responsible witness of the relations which existed between the Christians and the government of the Empire during the last thirty-five years of the first century.
In the course of his journey from Syria to Rome, where he was condemned to be exposed to the wild beasts in the magnificent Flavian amphitheatre (the Colosseum), Ignatius wrote seven letters which have been preserved to us; six of these were addressed to special Churches, and one to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna.
Round these letters a long controversial war has raged respecting their authenticity. In our own day and time, thanks to the almost lifelong labours of the eminent scholar-bishop of Durham (Dr. Lightfoot), the controversy has virtually been closed. Serious European scholars, with rare exceptions, now accept the seven Epistles (the middle recension,[97] as Lightfoot calls it) of the Ignatian correspondence, as absolutely genuine.
Ramsay well and briefly sums up the purport of the allusions to the conditions under which the Christian sect had been and still was living during the long period of Ignatius’ own personal experience, which included the whole duration of the sovereignty of the Flavian family, i.e. during the reign of the Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. These allusions all occur in the martyr’s four letters written in the course of his journey to Rome, during his halt at Smyrna, i.e. in the Epistles to the Churches of Ephesus, Tralles, Magnesia and Rome.
He says, “These abound in delicate phrases, the most explicit of which may be quoted—The life of a Christian is a life of suffering; the climax of his life, and the crowning honour of which he gradually hopes to make himself worthy, is martyrdom; but Ignatius is far from confident that he is worthy of it (Tralles, 4). Suffering and persecution are the education of the Christian, and through them he becomes a true disciple (Eph. iii. Magn. viii. 9). The teacher, then, is the person or Church which has gone through most suffering, and thus shown true discipleship, and Ignatius distinguished Ephesus and Rome as his teachers. Ignatius is still in danger, not having as yet completely proved his steadfastness, whereas Ephesus has been proved and is firmly fixed, the implication being that it has been specially distinguished by the number of its martyrs; and, moreover, Ephesus has been the highway of martyrs, the chief city of the province where many, even from other parts, appeared before the proconsul for trial, and was, at the same time, the port whence they were sent to Rome. We read in the Letter to Ephesus the somewhat curious expression, ‘Ye are a high road of them which are on their way to die unto God’ (Eph. xii.).”
“A detailed comparison is made in the Letter to the Magnesians, viii. 9, between the prophets and the Christians of the age. The prophets were persecuted, and the Christians endure persecution patiently in order to become true disciples.... Such is the principle of the Christian life; that suffering is the best training.... The impression which had been produced by persecution on the feelings of the Christians towards the Empire is very strongly marked in the Letters of Ignatius. Outside of the Apocalypse, the irreconcilable opposition between the State and Christianity is nowhere more strongly expressed than in them, and there runs throughout both groups of writings the same identification of the State with the world. The same magnificent audacity towards the State, the same refusal to accept what seemed to men to be the plain facts of the situation, the same perfect assurance of victory, characterize both.”[98]
With the exception, however, of passages in the Epistle to the Romans, Ignatius’ letters contain no direct reference to persecution; they are exclusively devoted to the affairs and prospects of the Churches to which he was writing, but the whole spirit of the little collection indicates that persecution and suffering were the common lot of the Christian sect in the days of the Flavian Emperors and their immediate successors.
The letter to the Roman Church is, however, quite different in its contents from the other six. It is entirely taken up with one single topic—the coming martyrdom of the writer. For the Christian, indeed, in earnest, “martyrdom is the new birth, the true life, the pure light, the complete discipleship; the martyr’s crown is better than all the kingdoms of the earth; only then, when the martyr sets to the world, will he rise to God. Crowned by martyrdom, his life becomes an utterance of God.”
This fervid, passionate—if somewhat exaggerated—picture of martyrdom would convey little meaning to the Roman congregations had not such scenes as that depicted by Ignatius been of common occurrence in Rome. Its reception, however, shows how well it was understood by those to whom the burning words of the martyr-bishop were addressed. His letters were most highly prized in very early days, but this special Epistle to the Roman Church from the beginning enjoyed a wider popularity than the others. Its details and teaching were absolutely unique. It appears to have been circulated apart from the other six, sometimes alone, sometimes attached to the story of the martyrdom for which Ignatius so longed.
Two or three references in this letter deserve to be noted as bearing especially on the question of the sleepless nature of the persecution endured by the sect.
Epistle to Romans, 3. Bishop Lightfoot well paraphrases this passage, thus:
“Do not,” writes Ignatius, urging the Roman Church not to take any step which might hinder his anticipated death in the arena, “depart from your true character; you have hitherto sped the martyrs forward to victory; do not now interpose and rob me of my crown.” Rome had hitherto been the chief arena of martyrdom; the Roman brethren had cheered on many a dying Christian hero in his glorious contest.
In the Epistle to Romans, 5, we come upon the following curious statement concerning the arena wild beasts to which he was condemned: “May I have joy of the beasts that have been prepared for me; and I pray that I may find them ready, nay, I will entice them that they may devour me quickly, not as they have done to some, refusing to touch them through fear; yea, though of themselves they should not be willing while I am ready, I myself will force them to it.”
This refusal of the wild beasts to touch their intended victims is by no means an uncommon incident in early martyrology. The capricious conduct of beasts suddenly released from confinement and darkness, and brought into the bright light of the amphitheatre, with the dense crowds of spectators all around shouting applause or execration, is quite natural. It is by no means necessary to impart the miraculous into all these stories, many of them absolutely authentic. Still that the Most High did at times close the mouths of the “wild” is quite credible. The strange, mysterious power often exercised by saintly men and women over furred and feathered untamed creatures is a well-known fact, and has been more than once the subject of discussion.[99] Such an allusion, however, to the occasional conduct of the wild creatures in the arena occurring in the midst of the writer’s arguments, plainly shows that the spectacle of terrible massacres of Christian folk in the arena, where they were exposed to wild beasts, was no uncommon feature in Roman life.
The grim catalogue of tortures which the heroic martyr enumerates in the same chapter of the Roman Epistle, completed the awful picture of the sufferings of brave Christian confessors, sufferings which the Roman citizens had no doubt for many past years often gazed at.
II
SECOND GROUP OF QUOTATIONS
Letter of Pliny to Trajan, CIRCA A.D. 112
In the second group of quotations from ancient authorities must be placed the very important notice of the persecution in the days of Trajan, contained in the well-known correspondence of Pliny and the Emperor. This has been already discussed at some length.
It will be sufficient[100] here briefly to refer to the treatment of Christians whom Pliny found in his province of Bithynia not only in the towns but in the country villages, and to the influence which these Christians evidently exercised on the life of the province.
These Christians, with the exception of those who claimed to be citizens of Rome—who were sent to the capital for trial—were after the third examination, if they still continued contumacious, condemned and put to death on the authority of the governor (“perseverantes duci (ad mortem) jussi”).
This is the only heathen authority[101] quoted here, but its extreme importance in this inquiry into the condition of Christians in the Roman Empire in the days of Trajan and earlier will justify its insertion.
Letter to Diognetus, CIRCA A.D. 117
The author of this very early Christian writing is unknown, and of the Diognetus to whom the letter is addressed we have no knowledge. But the short writing in question is interesting and even eloquent, and its date can be ascertained with fair certainty from expressions contained in the letter. Christianity, when the writing was put out, was a new thing in the world—this is several times noticed in the letter.[102]
The following notable references to persecution occur: “Christians love all men, and are persecuted by all; they are unknown and (yet) condemned; they are put to death ... they are in want of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour they are glorified; they are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled and bless; they are insulted and yet repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers; when punished they rejoice” (Letter to Diognetus, chap. v.).
“Do you not see them (the Christians) exposed to wild beasts, that they may be persuaded to deny the Lord, and yet not overcome? Do you not see that the more of them that are punished, the greater become the numbers of the rest” (Letter to Diognetus, chap. vii.).
“Then shalt thou both love and admire those that suffer punishment because they will not deny God.”
“Then shalt thou admire those who for righteousness’ sake endure the fire which is but for a moment, and shalt count them happy, when thou shalt know (the nature of) that fire” (Letter to Diognetus, chap. x.).
The Shepherd of Hermas, CIRCA A.D. 140
Hermas, the author or compiler of the once famous Shepherd (the Pastor) in a very ancient tradition was identified with the Hermas mentioned by S. Paul (Rom. xvi. 14). This identification was suggested by Origen in the middle of the third century. The Muratorian Canon gives as the approximate date of its composition circa A.D. 140, and suggests another author. Modern scholarship, however, considers that the work in question passed through several redactions, the first belonging to a yet earlier date. If this, as is probable, be the case, then certainly considerable portions of the little volume of the “Shepherd” belong to the reign of Trajan, and possibly to the period of the episcopate of Clement of Rome.[103]
But whether we adopt for the composition of the writing the year 140, or thereabouts, or with Duchesne and Harnack the earlier date of portions of the writing (the last years of the first century), there is no doubt whatever that the work containing the “Visions,” “Commandments,” and “Parables” of Hermas (generally known as the Shepherd) was accepted by the Christians of the second century as a treatise of very high authority. It was publicly read in the congregations along with the canonical (to use a later term) Scriptures, without, however, being put on a level with these sacred writings.
Gradually though we find its authority diminishing, sterner spirits, like Tertullian, misliking its gentle and compassionate directions in the case of the reconciliation of sinners, theologians too, who in the first years were less positive, less precise in their dogmatical definitions, soon began to see how speculative and even wild were some of the statements and definitions of the Persons in the Godhead. Thus the work became less and less an important piece in the arsenal of Christian theology. S. Jerome, for instance, openly flouts it when he writes of the Shepherd as “Liber ille apocryphus stultitiæ condemnandus.” Others, however, of the highest authority in the Church in the third and fourth centuries, such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius, seem to have ever held the Shepherd in great veneration.
The high place it held in the early Church is shown by its appearing in that most ancient MS. of the Holy Scriptures the Codex Sinaiticus, where it is honoured by being placed at the end of the canonical writings.
But it is as an historical piece of evidence respecting the continued persecutions which vexed the early Church, without any period of cessation, that the work is quoted here. The Shepherd is full of references to this state of things. Renan (L’Église Chrétienne) describes this book in his picturesque vivid imagery as “issuing from a bath of blood.” Lightfoot speaks of it as “haunted in large parts by this ghastly spectre of persecution.” The writer specially alludes to this harrying of the Christian sect in the past, and says that it was likely to continue in the future.
Hermas, in his unique and interesting work, says nothing about the Jewish foes of the Church, and his allusions to the pagans around him are very few. The work may be said to deal exclusively with the inner life of the Roman congregations. On the whole he pictures the life led by the followers of Jesus as fairly satisfactory and good, harassed though it was, but there were many things constantly appearing and reappearing in that life which needed amendment. He dwells with more or less detail on differences, quarrels, bitterness, which arose among themselves, and which too often disfigured and marred the beautiful Christian ideals.
But after all, in Hermas’ evidently faithful and accurate pictures of the Christian congregations in Rome, the point he dwells on with the greatest emphasis is their behaviour in those ever-recurring trials of their faith to which they were constantly exposed through the sleepless, restless ill-will of the Government. Whether the writing dates from circa 140, when Hadrian was reigning, or in part from the last years of the first century in the days of Trajan, it is evident that the position of the Christian community was ever most precarious.
The rescripts of Trajan and Hadrian somewhat softened the stern measures, but before and even after these humane and statesmanlike regulations the position of the Christian was indeed a trying and painful one. For even after the issuing of the rescripts in question the sword ever hung over their heads, and the slender thread upon which it hung was often snapped.
Perpetually were the Christians haled before the magistrate. They had stern searching questions to answer; easily was the capital crime of professing the unlawful cult daily brought home to them. They were asked: Were they willing to renounce it, and in place of it adore the gods of the pagans? Would they throw a few grains of incense, as a token of their recantation, on the altars of Rome and Augustus? If they would do this very little thing, as it seemed, at once they were released; but if they refused, then death, in some form or other, was their speedy and inevitable doom.
Hermas tells us a good deal of what was happening in the Roman congregations in the matter of persecution for the Name’s sake. The harrying of Christians, when the author of the Shepherd was writing, must have been continuous, for he sadly speaks of those who were frequently yielding to pressure. Apostasy in the Christian ranks was, alas! not an unknown scandal. Some, he tells us, simply renounced their faith; others, terrified, went further and publicly blasphemed the Name. Some were positively base enough to betray and denounce their brethren in the Faith.
But, on the other hand, Hermas tells us how the Church numbered many martyrs. All, he says, were not on a level even here, for some trembled at first and flinched, and only witnessed a good confession at the last, probably when about to cense the idol altar. There were some though, said our writer, whose heart never for an instant failed them.
Yet, on the whole, this stern though kindly censor of the Christian Church was not dissatisfied with the life generally led by the congregations of believers in Jesus; he seems to recognise to the full the sorely tempted lives—tempted not only by the imminent danger which the confession of the Name entailed—though he dwells mostly on this ever-present peril—but also by the smaller lures with which all human existence is inextricably bound up: business matters, society obligations, the old jealousy and envy which ever exist between the rich and the poor.
“Le livre d’Hermas,” observes Duchesne, “est un vaste examen de conscience de l’Église Romaine.” The writer spares none in his severe yet kindly criticism; the priests and deacons of the congregations are among the classes with whom he finds grave fault. In spite, however, of his earnest and touching remonstrances with those who, in hours of trial and persecution, in the many daily temptations of common life, had left their first love, Hermas acknowledges that in the Church of Rome the numbers of the just and upright are greater than the numbers of those who have fallen away. It is true that he sternly rebukes the unfaithful priests and deacons and other members of the hierarchy, but he recognizes here, too, men worthy of the highest commendation; he dwells on their love, their charity, their hospitality, and even assigns to these faithful ministers of religion a place among the glorious company of apostles.
The general impression which a careful study of Hermas’ portraiture of the Christian congregations in Rome leaves on the reader’s mind in those far-back days, roughly from the days of Nero to the times of Trajan and even Hadrian, is that that great and sorely tried Church was far from being composed entirely of saints, but that the righteous and God-fearing—the men and women who had washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, as true disciples of the Master, were after all decidedly in the majority.
Closely connected with his picture of the sins and errors of the Roman Christians—sins largely connected with the falling away of many in the dread hour of persecution—is his assurance that these sins are capable of pardon here, even if committed after baptism. No sin, no falling away, in Hermas’ teaching is inexpiable; no truly penitent one is ever to be excluded from pardon and reconciliation. It was this generous and broad view of the goodness and the divine pity of God that was so misliked by the stern and pitiless teachers of the powerful school to which men like Tertullian belonged, a school which soon arose in the Church. Of the genuine written remains of the earliest period we have nothing comparable to the Shepherd of Hermas, when we look for a picture of the inner life of the Church of Rome in that far-back time when the echoes of the voices of the disciples who had been with Jesus were still ringing in men’s ears.
As a dogmatic teacher the writer of the Shepherd is of little or no value; Hermas emphatically was no theologian, but he was a close and evidently an accurate observer of men and things. Earnest and devout, while sadly deploring the weakness in the hour of trial of some, the failure of others in the ordinary course of things to keep on the narrow way leading to life—he rejoices with an unfeigned joy over the many noble men and women who, in all their sore danger and temptation, kept the Faith untarnished and undimmed.
Hermas of the Shepherd is a witness, to whose voice none can refuse to listen, of the sore and sleepless persecution which, from the days of Nero, with rare and brief pauses ever harassed the Christian sect in Rome.[104]
Composed as this book evidently was directly under the veiled shadow of persecution—a state of things which colours well-nigh every page of the writing—it is difficult out of so many testimonies here to select any special passage telling of this perpetual harrying of the sect; a very few passages will be quoted where this restless state of persecution is painted with vivid colouring.
“Happy ye who endure the great tribulation that is coming on, and happy they who shall not deny their own life” (Hermas, Vision, ii. 2).
“The place to the right is for others who have pleased God, and have suffered for His Name’s sake” (Hermas, Vision, iii. 1).
“What have they borne? Listen: Scourges, prisons, great tribulations, crosses, wild beasts for God’s Name’s sake—to them is assigned the division of sanctification on the right hand—to every one who shall suffer for God’s Name” (Hermas, Vision, iii. 2).
“But who are the stones that were dragged from the depths and which were laid in the building, and fitted in with the rest of the stones before placed in the Tower? These are they who suffered for the Lord’s sake” (Hermas, Vision, iii. 5).
“They without hesitation repented, and practise all virtue and righteousness, and some of them even suffered, being willingly put to death,”—“Of all these, therefore, the dwelling shall be in the Tower.”
“All who were brought before the authorities and were examined, and did not deny, but suffered gladly, these are held in great honour with God” (Hermas, Parables, viii. 10).
“All who once suffered for the name of the Lord are honourable before God, and of all these the sins were remitted, because they suffer for the Name of the Son of God” (Hermas, Parables, viii. 20).
“And ye who suffer for His Name ought to glorify God, because He deemed you worthy to bear His Name, that all your sores might be healed” (Hermas, Parables, viii. 28).
Justin Martyr, CIRCA A.D. 140–A.D. 160
The above dates roughly embrace the period of Justin’s literary activity. He was, however, born not later than circa A.D. 114, probably several years before. We know little of his early history. He was a diligent student and a thinker, and his works are amongst the most important that have come down to us from the first sixty years of the second century. Three writings of his are extant of the genuineness of which there is no doubt. Two Apologies and The Dialogue with the Jew Trypho. The first Apology and the Dialogue are works of considerable size. There are besides other writings which bear his name, but the authenticity of these is doubtful.
Originally a pagan, it seems that he became a Christian owing to the strong impression made upon him by the fearlessness which the disciples of the New Sect showed in the presence of death. He was also deeply persuaded of the grandeur and truth of the old Testament Scriptures. In the end, while the Emperor Marcus Antoninus was reigning, he received the Martyr’s crown he had for so many years passionately admired and coveted. This was about the year 165.
His three authentic writings contain numberless references to the persecutions endured by the followers of the Name, and countless allusions to the state of perpetual risk and danger in which his co-religionists lived and worked.
We will cite a very few of these, in which unmistakable details are given.
“If any one acknowledges that he is a Christian, you punish him on account of this confession” (Justin, Apol. i. 4).
The condemnation to death for the mere name of Christian is often dwelt upon by our writer (see such passages as are contained in 1 Apol. xi.).
“We may not lie or deceive our (official) interrogators; we willingly die confessing Christ” (Justin, Apol. i. 39).
“Although death is decreed against those who teach, or even confess the name of Christ, everywhere we confess it and teach it” (Justin, Apol. i. 45).
“They that believe that there is nothing after death ... they become our benefactors when they free us from the sufferings and trials of this life; ... they kill us, however, not with the view of benefiting us, but that we may be deprived of life and joy” (Justin, Apol. i. 57).
“The Gentiles who know God—the Creator of all things through Jesus the Crucified ... patiently await every torture and vengeance—even death—rather than worship idols” (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, xxxv.).
“ ... Lest you be persecuted by the rulers who ... will not cease putting to death and persecuting those who confess the Name of Christ....” (Justin, Dial. xxxix.).
“ ... Because we refuse to sacrifice to those to whom in old times we used to sacrifice to, we suffer the severest penalties, and rejoice in death, believing that God will raise us up by His Christ, and will make us incorruptible—safe—immortal” (Justin, Dial. xlvi.).
“Now it is plain that no one is able to frighten us or subject us who have believed in Jesus, ... for it is manifest that though beheaded and crucified, and cast to wild beasts, and fire, and all other kinds of torture, we do not give up our confession; but the more such things happen, the more do others, and in ever-increasing numbers too, become believers and worshippers of God through the Name of Jesus” (Justin, Dial. cx.).
“And you yourselves ... must acknowledge that we who have been called by God through the contemned and shameful mystery of the Cross ... endure all torments rather than deny Christ even by word” (Justin, Dial. cxxxi.).
“For having put some to death on account of the false charges brought against us, they also dragged to the torture our servants—children—weak women—and by awful torments drove them to admit that they were guilty of those very actions which they (the persecutors) openly perpetrate,—about which, however, we are little concerned, because none of these actions are really ours. We have the ineffable God as witness both of our thoughts and deeds” (Justin, II. Apol. xii.).
The Octavius of Minucius Felix, CIRCA A.D. 160
Jerome tells us that Minucius Felix was, before his conversion to Christianity, an advocate at Rome. The dialogue, which forms the substance of the writing—a work of some considerable length, is a supposed argument between a cultured pagan Cæcilius and the Christian Octavius—the writer Minucius Felix acting as arbiter between the disputants. The scene of the dialogue was the seashore of Ostia, it closes with the conversion of the pagan Cæcilius, who is convinced by the arguments brought forward by the Christian Octavius.[105]
The resemblances between Minucius Felix and the famous Apology of Tertullian, which was written circa A.D. 200, are most striking—and the question which of the two was the plagiarist has long been before critics. Later scholars, among whom Ebert, Salmon, Bishop Lightfoot, Renan, and Keim are conspicuous, have conclusively established the priority of Minucius. The year of grace 160, before the death of Antoninus Pius, a date based upon the internal evidence of the writing, is suggested by Lightfoot as the most probable period of the composition.
Dean Milman’s estimate of the literary excellence of the piece is as follows: “Perhaps no late work, either pagan or Christian, reminds us of the golden days of Latin prose so much as the Octavius of Minucius Felix” (Hist. of Christianity, book iv. chap. iii.).
The following striking passages bearing on the subject of the ceaseless persecution to which the Christians were subjected in the middle years of the second century are taken from the thirty-seventh chapter of the Dialogue:
“How beautiful before God is the spectacle of a Christian entering into the lists with pain, when he is matched against threats and punishments and tortures; when, deriding the noise of death, he treads under foot the horror of the public executioner; when he raises up his liberty in opposition to kings and princes, and yields to God alone, whose he is; when, triumphant and a victor, he tramples upon the very man who has pronounced sentence against him! For he has conquered who has won that for which he fights.... But God’s soldier is neither forsaken in suffering, nor is he brought to an end by death. Thus the Christian may seem to be miserable, he cannot really be found to be so. You yourselves extol unfortunate men to the skies. Mucius Scævola, for instance, who, when he had failed in his attempts against the king, would have perished ... had he not sacrificed his right hand. And how many of our people have endured that not only their right hand but that their whole body should be burned—burned without a cry of pain—though they had it in their power to be freed!
... “Do I compare Christian men with Mucius or even with Regulus? Yet boys and young girls mock at crosses and tortures, wild beasts and all the terrors of punishment—with all the inspired patience of suffering” (Minucius Felix, cap. xxxvii.).
Melito, Bishop of the Church in Sardis, CIRCA A.D. 170
Very little is known of this Melito; he was evidently a somewhat voluminous writer, but only few fragments remain of the long list of his works which Eusebius has given (H.E. Book vi. 26). In one of these fragments of a discourse, addressed to the Emperor Marcus, the following passage occurs:
“What indeed never before happened, the race of the pious (the Christians) is now persecuted, driven about in Asia by new and strange decrees. For the shameless informers are those that covet the goods of others, and, making use of the edicts of the Emperors, openly commit robbery, night and day, plundering those (the Christians) who are guilty of no crime.... And if these things are carried out by your commands (i.e. of the Emperor Marcus), let them at least be done in a legal form.... We (Christians) indeed bear joyfully the guerdon of such a death—still, we only urge upon you this petition, that you yourself would first inquire into the persons of these plotters of mischief, and judge whether they themselves deserve death and punishment, or safety and immunity.... We entreat you not to forget us in the midst of this lawless plunder of the populace” (Melito of Sardis, Fragment quoted by Eusebius, H.E. iv. 26).
Athenagoras, CIRCA A.D. 177
It is singular how little information has come down to us concerning this Athenian philosopher who had become a Christian. It is believed he wrote much, but the very names of his works have perished. The only fragments of Athenagoras that remain are his Apology, or Embassy, as he styles it, addressed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus, and a treatise on The Resurrection.
Philip of Side[106] gives one interesting detail respecting this little known early writer. He tells us he was converted to Christianity by the Scriptures, which he was studying with the view of controverting them.
The following passage is from the Apology or Embassy of Athenagoras.
He is addressing the Emperors Marcus and Commodus, and then writes: “Why is the mere name (of Christian) hateful to you? Names (surely) are not deserving of hatred. It is the wrongful act that calls for penalty and punishment. But, for us who are called Christians you have had no care, though we commit no wrong.... You allow us to be harassed—plundered—persecuted—the people warring with us for our name alone.... We suffer unjustly contrary to the law.... We beseech you to have some care for us, that we may cease at length to be slaughtered at the instigation of false accusers.... When we have surrendered our goods, they still plot against our very bodies and souls—levelling against us many charges of crimes of which we are guiltless even in thought” (chap. i.).
“ ... If indeed any one can convict us of a crime either small or great, we do not plead to be let off punishment; we are then prepared to suffer the sharpest and most merciless chastisement, but if the accusation is merely concerned with our Name ... then, O illustrious sovereigns, it is your part to free us by law from their evil treatment.... What therefore is granted as the common right of all, we too claim for ourselves, that we shall not be hated and punished merely because we are called Christians” (Athenagoras, chap. ii.).
The above quotations from Athenagoras show very clearly on what apparently superficial grounds the Christians were bitterly persecuted and harassed in every conceivable fashion—solely because they were Christians. The nomen ipsum, the bare “name,” was a sufficient ground of condemnation in the reign of the great and good Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
Theophilus of Antioch, CIRCA A.D. 180
Theophilus, according to Eusebius, H.E. iv. 20–24, was sixth Bishop of the Syrian Antioch in succession (so Eusebius). He became bishop in the year 168, when Marcus was reigning. Nothing is known of his life save that he was born a pagan. He was the author of several works—including Commentaries on the Gospels and on the Book of Proverbs, and of a writing against Marcion, etc. But none of these have come down to us. All we possess are the three books containing “the Elements of the Faith,” addressed to his friend Autolycus. The quoted passage is from the third of these books. His arguments in many respects are similar to those advanced by Justin Martyr.
“They persecute, and do daily persecute, those who worship Him (the only God).... Of those (i.e. of the Christians) who are zealous in the pursuit of virtue, and practise a holy life, some they stone, some they put to death, and up to the present time they subject them to cruel torture.”
Tertullian, CIRCA A.D. 195–211
To complete the chain of testimony supplied by contemporary writers to the perpetual state of unrest, an unrest ever passing into active persecution, which was the lot of the Christian sect from A.D. 64, the date of the first formal harrying of Nero, to A.D. 180, the date of the death of the Emperor Marcus, the period here under consideration—the important witness of Tertullian is added. The years of his literary activity stretch roughly from A.D. 195–211. But although the dates of his works range from some fifteen to twenty years after the death of Marcus, it is certain that his general view of the condition of Christians would include at least the latter years of the period we are specially dwelling on.
His treatises, which especially relate to Christian and church life and to ecclesiastical discipline, are coloured with references to this condition of persecution under which the Christian sect evidently lived. The very numerous references in question are introduced casually as though the dangerous conditions were a matter of course, were inescapable, and entered into the ordinary life of the sect.
We cite a very few of these as specimen instances of Tertullian’s conception of the life so environed with deadly perils.
The whole of the short and interesting address to “Blessed Martyrs designate” in this connection should be read here.
“We are daily beset by foes, we are daily betrayed, we are oftentimes surprised in our meetings and congregations” (Tertullian, Apol. 7).
“Without ceasing for our Emperors we offer prayer ... we ask for whatever, as man or Cæsar, an Emperor could wish.... With our hands thus stretched out and up to God, rend us with your iron claws, hang us up on crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads from us with the sword, let loose the wild beasts on us; the very attitude of a Christian praying is one of preparation for its punishment. Let this, good rulers, be your work, wring from us the soul beseeching God on the Emperor’s behalf. Upon the truth of God, and devotion to His Name, put the brand of crime” (Tertullian, Apol. 30).
“Christians alone are forbidden to say anything in their defence to help the judge to a righteous decision; all that is cared about is getting what the public hatred demands—the confession of the Name” (Tertullian, Apol. 2).
Constantly Tertullian refers to the great offence in the Christians simply lying in “the Name.” “Your sentences, however, are only to this effect, viz.: that one has confessed himself to be a Christian,” occurs frequently (Tertullian, Ad Nationes, 8).
PART II
THE TRAINING FOR MARTYRDOM
Introductory
We read in the pathetic and interesting study De Laude Martyrii (On the Praise of Martyrdom) by an anonymous writer—a study which usually follows the works of S. Cyprian—how some Roman officials who were assisting in the torture of a dying Christian saint said one to another: “This is really marvellous, this power of disregarding pain and agony! Nothing seems to move him; he has a wife and little ones, but even the love of these touches him not. What is the secret of his strange power? It can surely be no imaginary faith which enables him thus to welcome such suffering—such a death!”
The moral effect of this endurance—of this serene acceptance of torture and death—both on persecutors and persecuted, was no doubt very great. It has probably been underrated. What we have just quoted from the treatise De Laude Martyrii, i.e. the testimony to what must have happened many thousand times—viz.: how it struck the officials who were carrying out the stern law of Rome—was repeated in our own day and time by one of our most serious historians; one not likely by any means to have been carried away by religious enthusiasm. Lecky, in his scrupulously fair but at the same time cold and passionless chapter on early Christian persecutions, closes his review of the period with the following remarkable words: “For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men, and even weak girls, endured these things (he has been detailing some of the well-known tortures and deaths of the early Christian believers) without flinching, when one word would have freed them from their sufferings. No opinion we may form of the proceedings of priests in a later age should impair the reverence with which we bend before the martyr’s tomb.”[107]
Now, the more thoughtful of the pagan rulers who dreaded with a nameless dread the overthrow of the idol-cult, the preservation of which they believed was indissolubly linked with the maintenance of the great Roman Empire they loved so well, saw in the constancy of the martyrs a great danger to which this idol-cult was exposed.
Rulers so different as Nero and Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Antoninus, Severus, Decius, and Diocletian, and their ministers, felt that the sternest measures of repression of the new Faith were absolutely necessary if they would stem the fast advancing and apparently resistless tide of Christianity in the Empire.
In view of the powerful impression which the constancy of the accused Christian when brought face to face with all the horrors of torture and of death made upon the pagan population who beheld it or heard of it, every effort was made by the more far-seeing of the Roman magistrates to induce the accused Christian to recant and to yield to the will and wishes of the imperial government.
In countless cases this yielding was made seemingly very easy—just a few grains of incense thrown upon an idol altar; just an acknowledgment of the divinity of the reigning Emperor, which could after all be explained away as a simple official expression of fervid loyalty.
In some cases a recognition of one supreme deity—Jupiter—who would represent the one Almighty God of the Christians—was suggested as a “modus vivendi” by the plausible rhetoric of a statesmanlike magistrate who cared for Rome, but to whom all religions were myths.
The Christian senator, who for the sake of Christ had given up a beautiful home and an exalted rank, would be reminded by his pagan colleagues on the judges seat of the inescapable duty which one in his great position owed to law and order—to his master the Emperor;—surely he, of all men, should set an example of loyalty and obedience; was he to degrade his proud order by worshipping an unknown Crucified offender in defiance of the wishes and commands of the Emperor and the imperial government?
A yet more moving appeal was very often made to the brave Christians of both sexes by an eloquent magistrate to show some pity for those they loved,—for their aged father and mother; for husband or wife or helpless children. Were they by their fatal obstinacy to bring bereavement and disgrace, shame and poverty, on these unoffending ones?
Then behind all these specious arguments the Roman judge would show the pale confessor standing before him the awful tortures—the cruel death which surely awaited the one who refused, with what seemed a sullen and inexplicable obstinacy, to obey the laws of an immemorial Empire, when after all obedience was so easy.
And many did yield—of this there is no doubt. The number of martyrs who resisted unto death no doubt is very great, much greater than the cold and passionless critic chooses to acknowledge, but the number of those who did yield was no doubt considerable.
It was indeed a title to honour for a magistrate of Rome publicly to win over one or more of these confessors of the New Religion, to succeed in persuading some well-known Christian to scatter on the altar of the deified Emperor, or of the popular image of Mars the Avenger, or of Diana, or of the yet greater Jupiter, a few grains of incense typifying his return to the ancient pagan cult—or better still, to extract a few reluctant words in which the adored Christ was renounced and abandoned.
Such a judicial victory was ever a signal triumph for the Roman pagan judge. It would speedily bear its fruits and rally to the drooping standard of paganism a number of men and women pondering, doubting, hesitating on the threshold of Christianity; a threshold with such an example of recantation before them, which they would surely never cross!
And these scenes during the long years of active persecution were acted again and again. The war between the religion of Christ and the old idol-cult so dear to Rome and her subject millions was indeed a protracted and deadly combat, and, as far as men could see, the issue for long years trembled in the balance.
And all this time much—more than men now think—hung on the grave and solemn question of martyrdom.
It was an outward and visible sign of that new wonderful revelation which was influencing so many different minds, which was working restlessly in such varied classes, in Rome, and in the many provinces of the world of Rome, which from the early days of its appearance in the great Empire, began at once to work a mighty change in all ranks in all society where it penetrated, and every year it penetrated deeper.
The New Revelation was taught by an ever-increasing band of teachers, fervid, impassioned, eloquent—some of them learned and cultivated. It possessed too a literature which gradually increased in volume and power—a literature which was founded upon “a Record” which these teachers affirmed issued from no workshops of this earth.
But all this literature, powerful, soul-stirring though it was, only touched, comparatively speaking, a very few of the men and women who made up the mighty world of Rome. The great mass of the peoples of the Empire neither read the books nor heard the words of the teachers of the New Religion.
Something more was needed to touch the masses of the people—something thousands might see and hear of; something they might see for themselves. That something was supplied by the noble army of martyrs.
From the first days of the appearance of the new teaching the imperial government of Rome was determined, if possible, to stamp it out of the society which Rome controlled.
While the disciples of Him who gave the doctrine and the solemn charge to His own to teach the strange wonderful story to all men, were still living and bravely carrying out the command of their Master, began the relentless persecution of those who received the New Revelation (men named them Christians after their Master Christ); a persecution which was now fitful and uncertain, now fierce and relentless in its action, now languid and halting, but which never slept. During the two centuries and a half, the period roughly from Nero to Constantine,—to be a Christian was simply unlawful, and exposed its votary to the direst penalties, which at times were rigorously exacted. The law of the State at times was suffered to remain in partial abeyance; but to use the great African teacher’s nervous words spoken to the Christian Brotherhood, during all these long years—“Non licet esse vos.”[108]
The more statesmanlike of the Roman rulers, recognising the influence exercised by the martyrs over the people, as we have remarked, by all the means in their power encouraged apostasy—because a public renunciation of the Faith deeply moved the people. Every public act of apostasy was a heavy blow to the Christian cause; while on the other hand, each example of splendid endurance of suffering and death was a wonderful encouragement to the vast crowd of outsiders who were hesitating on the borderland of Christianity. What must be, thought these, and they were a great multitude, the secret power of the new Faith which could nerve strong men, tender women—of all ages and of different ranks—to endure such awful sufferings, and at the end to meet death with a smile lighting up the wan pain-wrung faces.
I
The Story they told must be true, otherwise never would it possess such a mighty power.
Now, the leaders of the sect of the New Revelation were fully conscious of these two factors in the life of their day and time. Anything like apostasy or public renunciation of the religion of Christ once adopted was a calamity to be guarded against with the utmost vigilance. On the other hand, each example of public endurance to the end was an enormous aid to the work of propagating the Faith,—so from very early days a school—we can use no other fitting term—was established in the great Christian centres, of preparation for Martyrdom. This most interesting and far-reaching work in the very early Church—the Church of the Ages of Persecution—has hitherto generally escaped notice; only quite lately has it attracted some attention.[109]
It was no haphazard temporary piece of work, this “training for martyrdom,” but as we shall see a veritable “school,” a protracted education for an awful, for a not improbable contingency. At the end of the second and through the third century it was evidently a recognized and important Christian agency. When once we are aware of its existence we begin to find unmistakable proofs of it in the writings of important teachers like Tertullian and Cyprian.
In this once famous but now forgotten school of martyrdom the well-known simile of S. Paul was the basis of the theory which seems to have inspired the work—the simile which compared the Christian combatant in the world-arena to the athlete in the well-known and popular games of the amphitheatre. There the athlete, before entering the theatre of combat, was carefully educated to endure hardness: a long and careful training before such an one could hope to win the palm and the crown was absolutely necessary. He must go through many long, laborious, and painful exercises, abstinence, watchings, fastings, before his body was fit to endure the perils and sufferings of a trained combatant in the public arena.
In like manner must the Christian athlete who looked forward to a possible martyr’s trial train himself. S. Cyprian, in the middle of the third century, thus definitely writes of what clearly had been the practice of the Church: “Ad agonem sæcularem, exercentur homines et parantur.... Armari et præparari nos beatus Apostolus docet.”[110] (“For the combat with the world are men trained and prepared.... The blessed apostle teaches us to be all armed and ready.”)
The prize of martyrdom was very great. The visions and dreams of the blessed sufferers were constantly read aloud in the congregation.
At the moment after death angels would bear them into Paradise—the garden of God. They would be welcomed there with words of triumph and even admiration. The Master would Himself receive His redeemed servants who had fought the good fight and won. His kiss of welcome, the touch of His hand, would at once fill their souls with a joy indescribable. The “Vision of Perpetua,” circa A.D. 200, or a little earlier, one of the early Passions of Martyrs, the absolute authenticity of which is undisputed,—for it has never been added to or re-edited,—is a good example of the “Visions” seen by the martyrs before their supreme trial.
But far more than the public recital of these well-loved acts and passions was required for the training and preparation work, so a number of short treatises or tracts were specially composed and put out for the instruction of the earnest and devoted men and women as “Manuals,” so to speak, of preparation for the great trial. Most of these have disappeared; they were composed by fervid teachers for a special season, for the years when the Church was exposed to bitter trial; and when the trial time was over they were no longer required, and as a rule were not preserved. A very few remain to us, such as the “Exhortatio ad Martyrium” of Origen, such tractates of Tertullian as “ad Martyres” and the “Scorpiace”; the letter “Ad Thibaritanos” of S. Cyprian, and the anonymous work quoted at the beginning of this chapter, De Laude Martyrii. These are fair specimens of what was once a considerable literature. In very many of the “Passions of the Martyrs” which have been preserved we meet with an oft-repeated answer made by the Christian to the judge when asked about his rank in life, country, family, and the like. “I am a Christian” was the almost invariable answer to these questions; often nothing more. This seems to have been the “formula” taught in the schools of martyrdom,—very few traces, however, of this “formula” appear in the treatises which have come down to us; it must, however, have been constantly repeated in the “lost” treatises or tracts placed in the hands of those under training, lost treatises to which reference has been made. The Epistle of S. Ignatius to the Romans was no doubt used as one of these treatises or manuals.
The words too of a famous teacher like Cyprian, who himself in the end suffered martyrdom, were treasured up. Some of them are contained in the Vision of S. Flavian before he suffered: “I saw in a dream the martyr Bishop of Carthage, and I said to him: ‘Cyprian, is the death stroke very agonizing?’ He replied: ‘When the soul is in a state of heavenly rapture the suffering flesh is no longer ours; the body is quite insensible to pain when the spirit is with God.”
This conception of the insensibility to pain on the part of the martyr was a very general one. Tertullian repeats it almost in identical words. S. Felicitas, quoted in the Passion of S. Perpetua above referred to, said: “When I am in the amphitheatre the Lord will be there and will suffer for me.”
S. Perpetua in the same well-known “Passion,” after having been tossed and gored by a wild and maddened beast, woke up from the ecstacy into which she had been plunged and asked the official standing near her when she was to be exposed to the infuriated animal. S. Blandina in another cruel scene of martyrdom was equally insensible to pain—her soul was far away speaking with or praying to the Lord.
But of all the various “Manuals of Martyrdom” which were put into the hands of those who desired to receive a special training against the day of trial, none seemed to have been efficacious, easy of comprehension, persuasive—like the words of S. Matthew’s Gospel. These were evidently committed to memory and murmured again and again in the sore hour of trial.
Such sayings as these—they were the Lord’s own words, the sufferer knew: “Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “How[111] strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.” “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
“Whosoever, therefore, shall confess Me before men, him will I confess (acknowledge) before My Father which is in heaven.” “But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven.”
“He that loveth father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.” “And he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.”
“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.”
“And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children, or lands for My Name’s sake, shall receive an hundred fold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”
But the “training for martyrdom” to which a number of Christians in the first, second, and third centuries voluntarily gave themselves was by no means confined to the mastering of the contents of a small collection of carefully prepared treatises, or to the listening to eloquent and burning exhortations of devoted teachers, or even to the constant dwelling on the words of the Divine Master. This training included a prolonged and carefully balanced practice in austerities which would accustom the body to self-denial and to suffering, so that when the agony of the trial really began, the body, thoroughly enured to endurance, would be able to meet pain without flinching.
In this training for the mortal combat in which victory was so all-important to the cause, no efforts were spared—painful and laborious exercises, long fasting, watching and prayer, which would render the body insensible to fatigue, capable of bearing any suffering however poignant, were constantly practised. This training sometimes went on for a long while before a fitting opportunity presented itself of a public trial.
It was the want of this—the absence of this long and careful training alluded to in the beautiful and evangelical letter describing the Lyons and Vienne martyrdoms, which was the cause of many of the earlier failures, and shrinking from the agony of martyrdom, of some of the Lyons sufferers.
II
That great and severe master Tertullian, writing about A.D. 200, gives us some details of the austerities practised by those in training for a martyr’s death. We will quote a very few of his burning words here.
“Blessed martyrs designate, think,” he wrote, “how in peace soldiers (he was speaking of the training of the unconquered legions of Rome) inure themselves to war by toils, marching in heavy armour, running over the exercise yard, working at the ditches, framing the heavy ‘testudo,’ engaging in numberless arduous labours, so that when the day of battle comes, the body and mind may not shrink as it passes from the robe of peace to the coat of mail, from silence to clamour, from quiet to tumult. In like manner, oh blessed ones! count whatever is hard in this lot of yours which you have taken up, as a discipline of mind and body. You are about to pass through a noble struggle in which the living God is the President, the Holy Ghost is the trainer, in which the prize is an eternal crown of angelic life.... Therefore your Master Jesus Christ has seen good before the day of conflict ... to impose on you a hard training that your strength may be greater” ... “the harder the labours in the training of preparation, the stronger is the hope of victory, ... for valour is built up by hardship.”[112]
In other places Tertullian quotes S. Paul in such passages as: “We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope” (Rom. v. 3, 4); and again: “Therefore I take pleasure” (2 Cor. xii. 10) “in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake” ... “always bearing about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus” (2 Cor. iv. 10); and again (2 Cor. iv. 16, 17, 18), “Though our outward man perisheth yet the inward man is renewed day by day.... For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.”[113]
In his treatise on “Idolatry” Tertullian enters even more into detail on this question of “training for martyrdom.” He enjoined that every kind of austerity should be practised,—for instance, that hunger and thirst should be endured as an habitual observance.
This fervid exhortation closes with the singular words: “An over-fed Christian will be more necessary to bears and lions, perchance, than to God; to encounter wild beasts it will surely be his duty to train for emaciation.”
All this and much more in this curious “Study” of Tertullian partake of exaggeration, but it throws considerable light on the manner on which martyrdom was positively trained for, and the body prepared for the endurance of terrible suffering, a suffering invariably closed by death. Every example of such a bravely patient endurance—every “resistance unto blood”—the Christian guides and leaders of the first 250 years felt was of inestimable value for the propagation of their cause. Every public defeat and recantation, on the other hand, would be a grave injury to their work; so the pagan government strained, as we have remarked, every nerve to make recantation easy; while the Christian masters, on the contrary, did everything which ingenuity could invent or fervid devotion suggest to train up athletes who in the supreme public trial might win the prize of martyrdom.
They were successful—in spite of many defeats. These schools of martyrdom produced in Rome and in the provinces a countless succession of brave men and women of all ranks, of all ages—who, to the amazement of the pagan world, through pain and agony again and again won the martyr’s blood-stained glorious crown. It was quite a novel experience in the world, and the effect which it had worked on the rank and file of men and women was only clearly seen after the Peace of the Church. The people of Rome, from what they had seen, were persuaded with an intense persuasion, no one doubting that a Faith which could produce such heroes was surely based on something which was true and real.
Some eighty or at most ninety years before Tertullian lived and wrote, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, where he was doomed to be exposed to the wild beasts in the great amphitheatre, wrote his famous letter to the Roman Church.
The date of the letter is about A.D. 107–10. The little writing was highly esteemed in the early Church. It may be fairly styled a vade mecum of martyrs in the age of persecution. It accurately embodies the thoughts and aspirations which the “School of Martyrs” we have been picturing taught its pupils. We will give some of these thoughts as a fitting conclusion to this little study on “Preparation for Martyrdom” as practised during the first two hundred and fifty years.
This Letter of Ignatius breathes in its nervous and impassioned words a complete fearlessness, though the awful trial lay immediately before him; it tells of an intense and impassioned desire on the part of the writer to be allowed to bear his witness to the love of Christ—to be permitted “to resist unto blood” (Heb. xii. 4). The whole of the short letter is, in fact, a passionate cry for martyrdom.
Ignatius wrote somewhat as follows:
“Dear Roman Congregation,—Do nothing which may hinder me from finishing my course. If you keep silence, God will speak through me.” (He evidently feared that, through the intercession of powerful friends whom the great teacher knew he possessed in the capital, the death sentence might be postponed, possibly annulled.)
“Pray”—he wrote—“that I may have strength to do as well as to say. If only you will keep silence and leave me alone,—I am a word of God; but if you desire my life—then shall I be again a mere cry. It is good to get from the world unto God that I may rise unto Him.
“I would that all men should know that of my own free will, I die for God.... Let me be given to the wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of God (or of Christ). Bear with me.... Now am I beginning to be a disciple.... Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body. Come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me. Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ!... Him I seek who died on our behalf. Him I desire who rose again for our sake.... Suffer me to receive the pure light: when I am come thither, then I shall be a man. Let me be an imitator of the Passion of my God....”
“I write unto you in the midst of life, yet lusting after death. My desire (or my love of life) has been crucified, there is (now) no fire of earthly longing in me but only water, living and speaking in me and saying within me, ‘Come to the Father.’ I have no delight in the food of corruption or in the delights of life. I desire the bread of God which is the flesh of Christ, ... and for drink I desire His blood, which is love incorruptible.”
This was the new marvellous spirit in which the early Christian martyrs met and welcomed with a strange intense gladness, torture, ignominy, death. This was the spirit which the great pagan statesmen who sat at the helm of the Empire in Rome dreaded with a nameless dread, and longed to crush and to destroy, the new spirit which the wisest and most far-seeing among them felt was ever ringing the death-knell of the pagan cult, the cult they connected with the genesis, the power, and the very life of the Roman system, the cult which deified Rome and worshipped the genius of Rome’s Emperor.
PART III
THE GREAT NUMBER OF MARTYRS IN THE FIRST TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS
Introductory
Considerable stress has been laid in the preceding pages on the question of the duration of the periods of persecution and the consequent number of martyrs who suffered in these periods. It has commonly been assumed that after the death of Nero a lengthened period of quiet was enjoyed by the Church of Rome as in the provinces, and that the sect of Christians was generally left unmolested during the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and indeed of Domitian, until quite the last years of his life.
It has been shown that this was by no means the case, and that the Christians were harassed more or less all through this period of supposed quiet.
And after, through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, the rapidly growing Christian community was perpetually persecuted by an unfriendly and suspicious government, often at the instigation of a jealous and hostile populace. Again and again these attacks, probably at first mostly local and partial, flamed out into a general and bitter persecution.
In the days of Antoninus Pius the harrying of Christians even grew more and more general and cruel, and when Marcus Antoninus became Emperor, the sufferings of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth became decidedly more acute and pronounced, and a terrible period of persecution set in and became the lot of the Christian subjects of Rome.
We have awful examples of this bitter “Antonine” persecution in the sad records, undoubtedly genuine, of the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, of the Scillitan martyrs in North Africa, of the heroic Mauritanian victims, in the striking and pathetic acts of Perpetua and her companions.[114]
Again it has been not unfrequently urged, and very largely believed, that the Christian traditions exaggerated the number of martyrs who suffered during the long though occasionally interrupted periods of persecution. As regards this early period, the first two centuries, the age we are now especially dwelling on, this supposition, very generally more or less accepted, is absolutely baseless. Indeed, the exact contrary is the case.
So far from exaggerating the numbers of confessors of “the Name,” or painting in too vivid colours the story of their martyrdom, the earlier Christian writers dwell very little either on the number of the confessors or on their sufferings. It does not appear that any mention of martyrs or confessors of the second century appears in the oldest extant Church calendars; no allusion in these lists is recorded of martyrs until after the middle of the third century. Only in the case of some celebrated martyrs and confessors is an exception made. As a rule, save in very special cases, no anniversary of second-century martyrs appears to have been kept. It is only from the general tone of the earliest Christian writings[115] that we gather that the community was exposed to an ever-present danger, and that the shadow of persecution was ever brooding over the heads of the followers of “the Name.”
By far the most definite account of the great numbers of Christians, the way in which they were looked upon by the imperial government, and the severe measures taken against them, are to be found in the notices of great pagan historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, and more accurately and precisely in the Letter of Pliny to Trajan and in the Emperor’s reply, on which we have already dwelt with some detail.
On the important and interesting question respecting the “number” of martyrs generally, one very weighty piece of evidence has been curiously neglected and ignored.
This evidence comes from the Catacombs, which have been in later years the subject of so much careful and painstaking research, a research that is still proceeding. In these investigations perhaps nothing has assisted the great scholars who have devoted themselves to the work, so much as the so-called “Itineraries” or “Pilgrim Guides” to this great network of subterranean cemeteries beneath the suburbs of Rome. In the fifth, sixth, and two following centuries we know that vast numbers of Pilgrims, not only from Italy but from distant countries, visited Rome, especially with the view of reverently visiting and praying at the shrines of the brave confessors of the Faith who suffered in the days of persecution, from the time of Nero to the accession of Constantine the Great to power.
To assist these pilgrim crowds, a certain number of “Itineraries” were composed. Some few of them have come down to us; these curious and interesting Pilgrim “Hand-Books” have been usually unearthed (in comparatively speaking modern times) in certain of the greater monastic libraries.[116]
They date from the last years of the fifth century onwards, and were written—the copies we possess—mostly in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. No doubt these “Itineraries” were copied from still older documents, and it is likely that more will be discovered. But these that we possess have been of incalculable service to the researches of men like Marchi, De Rossi, Marucchi, and their companions.
The information contained in these Pilgrim Guide-Books has been found to be in most cases singularly accurate, and the details set forth have been found most strikingly to correspond with what has been discovered. Not only have the more famous shrines alluded to been identified, but even the general details have been proved to have been largely correct. One detail, however, in these ancient “Pilgrim Itineraries” has not received the attention it deserved, and which in a most striking way confirms the point urged above, that the numbers of martyrs in Rome (for we are dwelling here especially on Rome) has been greatly underrated by most historians.
I
We will briefly glance through the testimony of the “Itineraries” on this point, touching upon each of the principal Catacombs in order. As a rule the “Pilgrim Itineraries” class the different groups of cemeteries (Catacombs) under the different heading of the Roman road in the immediate vicinity of which they were excavated. Thus cemeteries are classed together which are situated on the “Via Aurelia,” the “Via Portuensis,” the “Via Appia,” the “Via Salaria Nova,” etc. This topographical arrangement was drawn up evidently for the convenience of these pilgrim travellers, who were thus guided in turn round the principal shrines.
On the Right Bank of the Tiber in the Trastevere Quarter
The Via Vaticana. (The Vatican Cemetery.)
The allusion referred to here is to the crypts existing beneath the great basilica of S. Peter.—“No man knows what the number is of the holy martyrs who rest in this Church” (Etenim nullus hominum scit numerum sanctorum Martyrum qui in eadem ecclesia pausant).—Itinerary of William of Malmesbury.
This “Guide” was probably published for the use of the Crusaders. It was evidently made from a much older document, for many of the shrines alluded to in it belonged to Catacombs which in William of Malmesbury’s time had been long forgotten.
The Via Aurelia. (The road leading to Civita Vecchia.)
After speaking of the shrines of certain celebrated confessors buried in a cemetery hard by this road, we read how “these lie buried with many (other martyrs)” (cum multis sepulti jacent).—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
Of this “Itinerary,” the full title of which is “De Locis SS. Martyrum quæ sunt foris civitatem Romæ,”—the MS. was found in the Salzburg Library.
The Via Portuensis. (The road leading to Portus, the ancient port of Rome, constructed by Claudius.)
Certain famous shrines are particularised, after which follow the words: “Then you go down into a cave (or crypt), and you will find there an innumerable multitude of martyrs” (invenies ibi innumerabilem multitudinem martyrum); and again, alluding to another spot, “that cave (or crypt) is filled with the bones of martyrs.”
The cemeteries on the Via Portuensis include the cemeteries of Pontianus and S. Felix.—Salzburg Itinerary.
Cemeteries (Catacombs) on Left Bank of the Tiber (Rome proper)
The Via Ostiensis. (The road leading to Ostia.)
After alluding to the sepulchre of S. Paul and other shrines, such as S. Adauctus, mention is made of a martyr Nomeseus, with many others (cum plurimis aliis).
The Via Ardeatina. (A road on the right or west of the Via Appia.)
The “Guide” speaks of various shrines and proceeds to say: “Not far off lie S. Petronilla and Nereus and Achilles and many other martyrs.”—Itinerary of William of Malmesbury.
The Via Appia. (The “Queen of Roads” leads through Albano on to Capua.)
(1) After enumerating various notable shrines, such as that of S. Cecilia, we read: “There we come upon a countless multitude of martyrs” (Ibi innumerabilis multitudo martyrum).
(2) Further on, mention is made of “80 nameless martyrs who rest here.”—Salzburg Itinerary.
(1) In another “Itinerary” describing the cemeteries of the Appian Way we read of “800 martyrs who are stated to rest in the great Callistus group of Catacombs.”
(2) And here again the expression is used, “with many martyrs.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
The Via Latina (leads out of the ancient Porta Capena to the left of the Appian Way).
The “Itinerary” here referred to speaks of some three groups of cemeteries, in two of which, it states, after particularising some famous shrines, that “many martyrs rest there.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
The Via Labicana (leads out of the ancient Esquiline Gate).
The “Pilgrim Guide” here referred to mentions that, in the group of cemeteries situate on this road, “many martyrs rest.” In another place it alludes to “many other martyrs”; in another, “30 martyrs.”—Itinerary of Salzburg.
Another “Pilgrim Guide” tells us of “a countless multitude of martyrs” buried in this group of Catacombs.—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
Another “Itinerary,” after specifying some famous names, mentions that here were “other martyrs unnumbered.”—Itinerary of Einsiedeln.
The Via Tiburtina. (The road which through the Tiburtina Gate, now the Porta S. Lorenzo, leads to Tivoli.)
The “Guide” speaks of the Church of S. Laurence and the two basilicas in the cemetery adjacent. It says: “Many martyrs rest there”; and again, in the cemetery hard by, mentions “a multitude of saints” buried there.—Itinerary of Salzburg.
Another “Itinerary,” describing these cemeteries, records that “with S. Cyriaca and S. Symphorosa are buried many martyrs.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
The Via Nomentana (leads out of the old Porta Collina to the town of Nomentum (Mentana). The modern Porta Pia is close to the old gate).
After describing the group of cemeteries lying round the Basilica of S. Agnes, and mentioning some of the better-known saints, the “Itinerary” says: “Many others sleep there.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
The Via Salaria Nova (leads in a northerly direction out of the old Porta Collina (Porta Pia now). The great Cemetery (Catacomb) of Priscilla is a little way out of the city on this road).
The “Itinerary” is speaking of the old Basilica of S. Sylvester; its ruins are in the Priscilla Catacomb. There, it says, “a multitude of saints rest”; and further on, still speaking of the same Basilica of S. Sylvester, says that “under the altar with certain famous confessors there are a multitude of saints.”—Itinerary of Salzburg.
Another “Guide,” writing of the great ones who rest in the “Priscilla” Cemetery, adds how they sleep there “with many saints.” Hard by, the same “Guide” tells us how one of the confessor-sons of S. Felicitas in the same spot rests “with many saints”; and again alludes to “the many martyrs buried there.” And once more, speaking of the shrine of S. Sylvester, relates that “very many more saints and martyrs lie hard by.” In one grave, the “Guide” adds, “373 are buried.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
William of Malmesbury, copying—as we said—from a much older “Pilgrim Guide,” after enumerating the names of the more prominent martyrs, adds, “and there are innumerable other saints buried there” (alii innumerabiles).—William of Malmesbury.
The Via Salaria Vetus. (This road was in the immediate neighbourhood of the last mentioned, the “Via Salaria Nova.”)
The “Itinerary,” describing the group of cemeteries on this road, writes, after mentioning the better-known names of saints: “These are buried with many martyrs”; and further on relates how “230 martyrs are interred here.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
William of Malmesbury, writing of the same group, relates that “in the one grave 260 martyrs rest,” and “in another 30.”—William of Malmesbury, Itinerary.
The Via Flaminia. (This ancient road leads out of the modern Porta del Popolo, is a direct continuation of the modern Corso. It is the great road communicating with North Italy.)
There is only one Cemetery or Catacomb on this road, that of S. Valentinus. The “Guide” relates how the martyr S. Valentinus rests there together “with other martyrs unnamed.”—Itinerary of Salzburg.
Another “Guide” says: “Many saints are buried here.”—De Locis SS. Martyrum.
II
Of somewhat less weight than the testimony of the “Itineraries” or “Pilgrim Guide” books, but still of great importance as throwing a strong sidelight upon the evidence we have massed together on the subject of the large numbers of the martyrs and confessors of Rome interred in the Catacombs, are the Monza “Catalogue” and “Labels” once attached to the little phials of oil brought to Theodelinda from the sacred shrines of Rome.
We have elsewhere briefly described this curious and absolutely authentic relic.[117] Theodelinda asked for relics from the shrines of the Cemeteries (Catacombs) of Rome; Pope Gregory the Great in the last years of the sixth century sent to her a little of the oil from the lamps which in his days were ever kept burning before each of the shrines in question.
The original “Catalogue” (Notitia) of these oils, and the “Labels” (Pittacia) once attached to the phials which held the oils, are preserved in the Cathedral of Monza.
The “Catalogue” (or Notitia) is preceded by the following words:
“Nōt. de olea scōrum (sanctorum) martyrum qui Romæ in corpore requiescunt—id est,” etc. Here follows the List of Martyrs from whose shrines a little of the oil (contained in the lamps always burning before them) was taken.
In several instances, notably after such names as S. Agnes, S. Cecilia, SS. Felix and Philippus and S. Cornelius, occur the following expressions:—
“Et aliaram multarum Martyrum”—“et multa millia scorum”—(sanctorum) “et alii Sci (Sancti), id est CCLXII.” ... “in unum locum et alii CXXII. et alii Sci XLVI.”—“et aliorum multi scor” (sanctorum).
In other words, the “Catalogue” and the “Labels” on the phials relate how the sacred oil was taken from lamps burning before the graves (the shrines) of S. Agnes and of “many other martyrs buried close by”; of S. Cornelius and “of many thousands of saints” resting in the immediate neighbourhood of his tomb; of S. Philippus and of “many other saints sleeping near his shrine,” etc.
In three instances the exact numbers of the nameless martyrs are given, viz.: 262, 122, and 46. The expression “many thousands” which occurs in this venerable memorial of the reverent feeling of Christians of the sixth century towards the noble and devoted confessors of the Faith, is of course an exaggerated one; it may even be termed a rhetorical expression; but it bears its undoubted testimony to the deeply rooted belief of Christians who lived in the centuries which immediately followed the Peace of the Church, that in this sacred City of the Roman dead an enormous number of martyrs was buried, besides those whose names and stories were, as it were, household words in every land where Jesus Christ was adored.
III
There is a celebrated inscription of Pope Damasus (A.D. 366–84) preserved in one of the collections of the epitaphs he placed in the Catacombs (the Sylloge Palestina), an inscription originally placed in the Papal Crypt of the “Callistus” Cemetery, which speaks especially of “a number of martyrs buried together” near that sacred spot. The epitaph commences as follows:
“Hic congesta jacet quæris si turba piorum
Corpora sanctorum retinent veneranda sepulchra
Sublimes animas rapuit sibi Regia cœli.”[118]
Prudentius (Perist. i. 73) (end of fourth century) beautifully alludes to the veil of oblivion which has fallen over the hidden graves of these numberless nameless martyrs:
“O vetustatis silentis obsoleta oblivio
Invidentur ista nobis, fama et ipsa extinguitur.”
And again (Perist. ii.):
“Vix Fama nota est, abditis
Quam plena sanctis Roma sit,
Quam dives urbanum solum
Sacri sepulchris floreat.”
The martyrs traditionally interred in the various Catacombs of Rome, and whose graves were reverently and persistently visited by crowds of pilgrims to Rome from foreign lands after the Peace of the Church during the fourth, fifth, and following centuries, represent the victims of the various periods of persecution during the first three centuries.
It is by no means intended to press the traditional statements contained in the Pilgrim Itineraries quoted in this chapter respecting the vast number of martyrs interred in the Catacombs of Rome.
These statements are probably somewhat exaggerated, but the undisputed fact remains that a very great number of these victims of the various persecutions were certainly interred in this hallowed city of the dead; and the unvarying tradition of the number of martyrs so interred must be taken into account, and gravely reckoned with, wherever the question of the number of Christian victims is considered.
BOOK IV
THE ROMAN CATACOMBS
THE “COME AND DINE” OF THE LAST CHAPTER OF ST. JOHN’S GOSPEL—THE MYSTIC REPAST OF THE SEVEN DISCIPLES
CEMETERY OF CALLISTUS—II CENTURY. (A FAVOURITE PICTURE IN THE CATACOMBS)