The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

CHAPTER X

TERTULLIAN

In his most famous chapter Gibbon speaks at one point of the affirmation of the early church that those who persisted in the worship of the dæmons "neither deserved nor could expect a pardon from the irritated justice of the Deity." Oppressed in this world by the power of the Pagans, Christians "were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph. 'You are fond of spectacles,' exclaims the stern Tertullian, 'expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers——' But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms."[[1]]

The passage is a magnificent example of Gibbon's style and method,—more useful, however, as an index to the mind of Gibbon than to that of Tertullian. He has abridged his translation, and in one or two clauses he has missed Tertullian's points; finally he has drawn his veil over the rest of the infernal description exactly when he knew there was little or nothing more to be quoted that would serve his purpose. He has made no attempt to understand the man he quotes, nor the mood in which he spoke, nor the circumstances which gave rise to that mood. Yet on the evidence of this passage and a sonnet of Matthew Arnold's, English readers pass a swift judgment on "the stern Tertullian" and his "unpitying Phrygian sect." But to the historian of human thought, and to the student of human character, there are few figures of more significance in Latin literature. Of the men who moulded Western Christendom few have stamped themselves and their ideas upon it with anything approaching the clearness and the effect of Tertullian. He first turned the currents of Christian thought in the West into channels in which they have never yet ceased to flow and will probably long continue to flow. He was the first Latin churchman, and his genius helped to shape Latin Christianity. He, too, was the first great Puritan of the West, precursor alike of Augustine and of the Reformation. The Catholic Church left him unread throughout the Middle Ages, but at the Renaissance he began once more to be studied, and simultaneously there also began the great movement for the purification of the church and the deepening of Christian life, which were the causes to which he had given himself and his genius.

Such a man may be open to criticism on many sides. He may be permanently or fitfully wrong in thought or speech or conduct; but it is clear that an influence so great rests upon something more profound than irritability however brilliant in expression. There must be somewhere in the man something that corresponds with the enduring thoughts of mankind—something that engages the mind or that wins the friendship of men—something that is true and valid. And this, whatever it is, is the outcome of many confluent elements—of temperament, environment and experience, perhaps, in chief. The man must be seen as his personal friends saw him and as his enemies saw him; what is more, they—both sets of them—must be seen as he saw them. The critic must himself, by dint of study and imagination, be played upon by as many of the factors of the man's experience as he can re-capture. Impressions, pleasures, doubts, hopes, convictions, friendships, inspirations—everything that goes to shape a man is relevant to that study of character without which, in the case of formative men, history itself becomes pedantry and illusion. Particularly in the case of such a man as Tertullian is it needful to repeat this caution. The impetuous dogmatism in which his mind and, quite as often, his mood express themselves, and his hard words, harder a great deal than his heart, no less than his impulsive convictions, "seem," as Gibbon put it, "to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age." On the other side, the church, which the historian in a footnote saddles with the responsibility of sharing Tertullian's most harsh beliefs, is at one with "the present age" in repudiating him on grounds of her own. Yet, questioned or condemned, Tertullian played his part, and that no little one, in the conflict of religions; he stood for truth as he saw it, and wrote and spoke with little thought of the praise or blame of his contemporaries or of posterity—all that he had abandoned once for all, when he made the great choice of his life. Questioned or condemned, he is representative, and he is individual, the first man of genius of the Latin race to follow Jesus Christ, and to re-set his ideas in the language native to that race.

Carthage

Tertullian was born about the middle of the second century A.D. at Carthage, or in its neighbourhood. The city at all events is the scene of his life—a great city with a great history. "Tyre in Africa" is one of his phrases for Carthage and her "sister-cities," and he quotes Virgil's description of Dido's town studiis asperrima belli.[[2]] But his Carthage was not that of Dido and Hannibal. It was the re-founded city of Julius Cæsar, now itself two hundred years old—a place with a character of its own familiar to the reader of Apuleius and of Augustine's Confessions,—a character confirmed by the references of Tertullian to its amusements and its daily sights. "What sea-captain is there that does not carry his mirth even to the point of shame? Every day we see the frolics in which sailors take their pleasure."[[3]] Scholars have played with the fancy that they could trace in Tertullian's work the influence of some Semitic strain, as others with equal reason have found traces of the Celt in Virgil and Livy. Tertullian himself has perhaps even fewer references to Punic speech and people than Apuleius, while, like Apuleius, he wrote in both Greek and Latin,[[4]] and it is possible that, like Apuleius, and Perpetua the martyr, he spoke both.

Jerome tells us that Tertullian was the son of a centurion.[[5]] He tells us himself, incidentally and by implication, that he was the child of heathen parents. "Idolatry," he says, "is the midwife that brings all men into the world;" and he gives a very curious picture of the pagan ceremonies that went with child-birth, the fillet on the mother's womb, the cries to Lucina, the table spread for Juno, the horoscope, and finally the dedication of a hair of the child, or of all his hair together, as the rites of clan or family may require.[[6]] Thus from the very first the boy is dedicated to a genius, and to the evil he inherits through the transmission of his bodily nature is added the influence of a false dæmon—"though there still is good innate in the soul, the archetypal good, divine and germane, essentially natural; for what comes from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed."[[7]] The children of Christian parents have so far, he indicates, a better beginning; they are holy in virtue of their stock and of their upbringing.[[8]] With himself it had not been so. It is curious to find the great controversialist of later days recalling nursery tales, how "amid the difficulties of sleep one heard from one's nurse about the witch's towers and the combs of the sun"—recalling too the children's witticisms about the apples that grow in the sea and the fishes that grow on the tree.[[9]] They come back into his mind as he thinks of the speculations of Valentinus and his followers.

His training

His education was that of his day,—lavish rhetoric, and knowledge of that very wide character which in all his contemporaries is perhaps too suggestive of manual and cyclopaedia[[10]]—works never so abundant in antiquity as then. But he was well taught, as a brilliant boy deserved, and his range of interests is remarkable. Nor is he overwhelmed by miscellaneous erudition, like Aulus Gellius for instance, or like Clement of Alexandria, to come to a man more on his own level. He is master of the great literature of Rome; he has read the historians and Cicero; he can quote Virgil with telling effect. Usque adeone mori miserum est? he asks of the Christian who hesitates to be martyred;[[11]] "a hint from the world" he says. Sooner or later, he read Varro's books, the armoury of every Latin Christian against polytheism.

He "looked into medicine," he tells us, and a good many passages in his treatises remind us of the fact.[[12]] It may help to explain an explicitness in the use of terms more usual in the physician perhaps than in the layman.

But his career lay not in medicine but in law, and he caught the spirit of his profession. It has been debated whether the Tertullian, whose treatise de castrensi peculio is quoted in the Digest, is the apologist or another, but no legal treatises are needed to convince the reader how thoroughly a lawyer was the author of the theological works. He has every art and every artifice of his trade. He can reason quietly and soundly, he can declaim, he can do both together. He is a master of logic, delighting in huge chains of alternatives. He can quibble and wrest the obvious meaning of a document to perfection, browbeat an opponent, argue ad hominem,[[13]] evade a clear issue, and anticipate and escape an obvious objection, as well as any lawyer that ever practised. Again and again he impresses us as a special pleader, and we feel that he is forcing us away from the evidence of our own sense and intelligence to a conclusion which he prefers on other grounds. His epigrams rival Tacitus, and there is even in his rhetoric a conviction and a passion which Cicero never reaches. The suddenness of his questions, and the amazing readiness of his jests, savage, subtle, ironic, good-natured, brilliant or commonplace,[[14]] impress the reader again and again, however well he knows him. Yet Tertullian never loses sight of his object, whatever the flights of rhetoric or humour on which he ventures. In one case, he plainly says that his end will best be achieved by ridicule. "Put it down, reader, as a sham fight before the battle. I will show how to deal wounds, but I will not deal them. If there shall be laughter, the matter itself shall be the apology. There are many things that deserve so to be refuted; gravity would be too high a compliment. Vanity and mirth may go together. Yes, and it becomes Truth to laugh, because she is glad, to play with her rivals, because she is free from fear."[[15]] Then, with a caution as to becoming laughter, he launches into his most amusing book—that against the Valentinians.

His style

Tertullian rivals Apuleius in brilliant mastery of the elaborate and artificial rhetoric of the day. He has the same tricks of rhyming clauses and balancing phrases. Thus: attente custoditur quod tarde invenitur;[[16]] or more fully: spiritus enim dominatur, caro famulatur; tamen utrumque inter se communicant reatum, spiritus ob imperium, caro ob ministerium.[[17]] Here the vanities of his pagan training subserve true thought. Elsewhere they are more playful, as when he suggests to those, who like the pagans took off their cloaks to pray, that God heard the three saints in the fiery furnace of the Babylonian king though they prayed cum sarabaris et tiaris suis—in turbans and trousers.[[18]] But when he gives us such a string of phrases as aut Platonis honor, aut Zenonis vigor, aut Aristotelis tenor, aut Epicuri stupor, aut Heracliti moeror, aut Empedoclis furor,[[19]] one feels that he is for the moment little better than one of the wicked. At the beginning of his tract on Baptism, after speaking of water he pulls himself up abruptly—he is afraid, he says, that the reader may fancy he is composing laudes aquae (in the manner of rhetorical adoxography) rather than discussing the principles of baptism.[[20]] His tract de Pallio is frankly a humorous excursion into old methods, in which the elderly Montanist, who has left off wearing the toga, justifies himself for his highly conservative and entirely suitable conduct in adopting the pallium. The "stern" Tertullian appears here in the character that his pagan friends had long ago known, and that his Christian readers might feel somewhere or other in everything that he writes. There is a good-tempered playfulness about the piece, a fund of splendid nonsense, which suggest the fellow-citizen of Apuleius rather than the presbyter.[[21]] But earnestness, which is not incompatible with humour, is his strong characteristic, and when it arms itself with an irony so powerful as that of Tertullian, the result is amazing. Sometimes he exceeds all bounds, as when in his Ad Nationes he turns that irony upon the horrible charges, which the pagans, knowing them to be false, bring against the Christians, while he, pretending for the moment that they are true, invites his antagonists to think them out to their consequences and to act upon them.[[22]] Or again take the speech of Christ on the judgment day, in which the Lord is pictured as saying that he had indeed entrusted the Gospel once for all to the Apostles, but had thought better of it and made some changes—as of course, Tertullian suggests, he really would have to say, if it could be supposed that the latest heretics were right after all.[[23]]

But, whatever be said or thought of the rhetoric, playful or earnest, it has another character than it wears in his contemporaries. For here was a far more powerful brain, strong, clear and well-trained, and a heart whose tenderness and sensibility have never had justice. In some ways he very much suggests Thomas Carlyle—he has the same passion, the same vivid imagination and keen sensibility, the same earnestness and the same loyalty to truth as he sees it regardless of consequence and compromise,—and alas! the same "natural faculty for being in a hurry," which Carlyle deplored, and Tertullian before him—"I, poor wretch, always sick with the fever of impatience"[[24]]—the same fatal gift for pungent phrase, and the same burning and indignant sympathy for the victim of wrong and cruelty.[[25]] The beautiful feeling, which he shows in handling the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, in setting forth from them the loving fatherhood of God,[[26]] might surprise some of his critics. Nor has every great Christian of later and more humane days been capable of writing as he wrote of victory in battle against foreigners—"Is the laurel of triumph made of leaves—or the dead bodies of men? With ribbons is it adorned—or with graves? Is it bedewed with unguents, or the tears of wives and mothers?—perhaps too of some who are Christians, for even among the barbarians is Christ."[[27]] There are again among his books some which have an appeal and a tender charm throughout that haunt the reader—that is, if he has himself passed through any such experience as will enable him to enter into what was in Tertullian's mind and heart as he wrote. So truly and intimately does he know and with such sympathy does he express some of the deepest religious emotions.[[28]]

His early life

From time to time Tertullian drops a stray allusion to his earlier years. He was a pagan—de vestris sumus—"one of yourselves" (Apol. 18); "the kind of man I was myself once, blind and without the light of the Lord."[[29]] A Roman city, and Carthage perhaps in particular, offered to a gifted youth of Roman ways of thinking endless opportunities of self-indulgence. Tertullian speaks of what he had seen in the arena—the condemned criminal, dressed as some hero or god of the mythology, mutilated or burned alive, for the amusement of a shouting audience,[[30]] "exulting in human blood."[[31]] "We have laughed, amid the mocking cruelties of noonday, at Mercury as he examined the bodies of the dead with his burning iron; we have seen Jove's brother too, with his mallet, hauling out the corpses of gladiators."[[32]] In later days when he speaks of such things, he shudders and leaves the subject rather than remember what he has seen—malo non implere quam meminisse.[[33]] He knew the theatre of the Roman city—"the consistory of all uncleanness" he calls it. "Why should it be lawful (for a Christian)," he asked, "to see what it is sin to do? Why should the things, which 'coming out of the mouth defile a man,' seem not to defile a man when he takes them in through eyes and ears?"[[34]] He speaks of Tragedies and Comedies, teaching guilt and lust, bloody and wanton; and the reader of the Golden Ass can recall from fiction cases wonderfully illuminative of what could have been seen in fact. When he apostrophizes the sinner, he speaks of himself. "You," he cries, "you, the sinner, like me—no! less sinner than I, for I recognize my own pre-eminence in guilt."[[35]] He is, he says, "a sinner of every brand, born for nothing but repentance."[[36]] To say, with Professor Hort, on the evidence of such passages that Tertullian was "apparently a man of vicious life" might involve a similar condemnation of Bunyan and St Paul; while to find the charge "painfully" confirmed by "the foulness which ever afterwards infested his mind" is to exaggerate absurdly in the first place, and in the second to forget such parallels as Swift and Carlyle, who both carried explicit speech to a point beyond ordinary men, while neither is open to such a suggestion as that brought against Tertullian. With such cases as Apuleius, Hadrian or even Julius Cæsar before us, it is impossible to maintain that Tertullian's early life must have been spotless, but it is possible to fancy more wrong than there was. The excesses of a man of genius are generally touched by the imagination, and therein lies at once their peculiar danger, and also something redemptive that promises another future.

Tertullian at any rate married—when, we cannot say; but, as a Christian and a Montanist, he addressed a book to his wife, and in his De Anima he twice alludes to the ways of small infants in a manner which suggests personal knowledge. In the one he speaks with curious observation of the sense-perception of very young babies; in the other he appeals to their movements in sleep, their tremors and smiles, as evidence that they also have dreams. Such passages if met in Augustine's pages would not so much surprise us. They suggest that the depth and tenderness of Tertullian's nature have not been fully understood.[[37]]

The evidence of nature

Meanwhile, whatever his amusements, the young lawyer had his serious interests. If he was already acquiring the arts of a successful pleader, the more real aspects of Law were making their impression upon him. The great and ordered conceptions of principle and harmony, which fill the minds of reflective students of law in all ages, were then reinforced by the Stoic teaching of the unity of Nature in the indwelling of the Spermaticos Logos with its universal scope and power. Law and Stoicism, in this union, formed the mind and character of Tertullian. In later days, under the stress of controversy (which he always enjoyed) he could find points in which to criticize his Stoic teachers; but the contrast between the language he uses of Plato and his friendliness (for instance) for Seneca sæpe noster[[38]] is suggestive. But that is not all. A Roman lawyer could hardly speculate except in the terms of Stoicism—it was his natural and predestined language. Above all, the constant citation of Nature by Tertullian shows who had taught him in the first instance to think.

When, years after, in 212 A.D., he told Scapula that "it is a fundamental human right, a privilege of Nature, that any and every man should worship what he thinks right," he had sub-consciously gone back to the great Stoic Jus Naturæ.[[39]] Nature is the original authority—side by side, he would say in his later years, with the inspired word of God,—yet even so "it was not the pen of Moses that initiated the knowledge of the Creator.... The vast majority of mankind, though they have never heard the name of Moses—to say nothing of his book—know the God of Moses none the less."[[40]] One of his favourite arguments rests on what he calls the testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ—the testimony of the soul which in its ultimate and true nature is essentially Christian; and this argument rests on his general conception of Nature. Let a man "reflect on the majesty of Nature, for it is from Nature that the authority of the soul comes. What you give to the teacher, you must allow to the pupil. Nature is the teacher, the soul the pupil. And whatever the one has taught or the other learnt, comes from God, who is the teacher of the teacher (i.e. Nature)";[[41]] and neither God nor Nature can lie.[[42]] An extension of this is to be found in his remark, in a much more homely connexion, that if the "common consciousness" (conscientia communis) be consulted, we shall find "Nature itself" teaching us that mind and soul are livelier and more intelligent when the stomach is not heavily loaded.[[43]] The appeal to the consensus of men, as the expression of the universal and the natural, and therefore as evidence to truth, is essentially Stoic.

Over and over he lays stress upon natural law. "All things are fixed in the truth of God,"[[44]] he says, and "our God is the God of Nature."[[45]] He identifies the natural and the rational—"all the properties of God must be rational just as they are natural," that is a clear principle (regula);[[46]] "the rational element must be counted natural because it is native to the soul from the beginning—coming as it does from a rational author (auctore)."[[47]] He objects to Marcion that everything is so "sudden"—so spasmodic—in his scheme of things.[[48]] For himself, he holds with Paul ("doth not Nature teach you?") that "law is natural and Nature legal," that God's law is published in the universe, and written on the natural tables of the heart.[[49]]

This clear and strong conception of Nature gives him a sure ground for dealing with antagonists. There were those who denied the reality of Christ's body, and declaimed upon the ugly and polluting features in child-birth—could the incarnation of God have been subjected to this?[[50]] But Nature needs no blush—Natura veneranda est non erubescenda; there is nothing shameful in birth or procreation, unless there is lust.[[51]] On the contrary, the travailing woman should be honoured for her peril, and counted holy as Nature suggests.[[52]] Here once more we have an instance of Tertullian's sympathy and tenderness for woman, whom he perhaps never includes in his most sweeping attacks and condemnations. Similarly, he is not carried away by the extreme asceticism of the religions of his day into contempt for the flesh. It is the setting in which God has placed "the shadow of his own soul, the breath of his own spirit"—can it really be so vile? Yet is the soul set, or not rather blended and mingled with the flesh, "so that it may be questioned whether the flesh carries the soul or the soul the flesh, whether the flesh serves the soul, or the soul serves the flesh.... What use of Nature, what enjoyment of the universe, what savour of the elements, does the soul not enjoy by the agency of the flesh?" Think, he says, of the services rendered to the soul by the senses, by speech, by all the arts, interests and ingenuities dependent on the flesh; think of what the flesh does by living and dying.[[53]] The Jove of Phidias is not the world's great deity, because the ivory is so much, but because Phidias is so great; and did God give less of hand and thought, of providence and love, to the matter of which he made man? Whatever shape the clay took, Christ was in his mind as the future man.[[54]]

Some of these passages come from works of Tertullian's later years, when he was evidently leaning more than of old to ascetic theory. They are therefore the more significant. If he wrote as a pagan at all, what he wrote is lost; but it is not pushing conjecture too far to suggest that his interest in Stoicism precedes his Christian period, when such an interest is so clearly more akin to the bent of the Roman lawyer than the Christian of the second century.

The goodness of the Creator

The rationality and the order of the Universe are commonplaces of Stoic teachers, and, in measure, its beauty. Of this last Tertullian shows in a remarkable passage how sensible he was. Marcion condemns the God who created this world. But, says Tertullian, "one flower of the hedge-row by itself, I think—I do not say a flower of the meadows; one shell of any sea you like,—I do not say the Red Sea; one feather of a moor-fowl—to say nothing of a peacock,—will they speak to you of a mean Creator?" "Copy if you can the buildings of the bee, the barns of the ant, the webs of the spider." What of sky, earth and sea? "If I offer you a rose, you will not scorn its Creator!"[[55]] It is surely possible to feel more than the controversialist here. "It was Goodness that spoke the word; Goodness that formed man from the clay into this consistency of flesh, furnished out of one material with so many qualities; Goodness that breathed into him a soul, not dead, but alive; Goodness that set him over all things, to enjoy them, to rule them, even to give them their names; Goodness, too, that went further and added delight to man ... and provided a helpmeet for him."[[56]]

Of his conceptions of law something will be said at a later point. It should be clear however that a man with such interests in a profession, in speculation, in the beauty and the law of Nature, could hardly at any time be a careless hedonist, even if, like most men converted in mid-life, he knows regret and repentance.

On the side of religion, little perhaps can be said. He had laughed at the gods burlesqued in the arena. To Mithras perhaps he gave more attention. In discussing the soldier's crown he is able to quote an analogy from the rites of Mithras, in which a crown was rejected, and in which one grade of initiates were known as "soldiers."[[57]] Elsewhere he speaks of the oblation of bread and the symbol of resurrection in those rites, "and, if I still remember, Mithras there seals his soldiers on the brow."[[58]] Si memini is a colloquialism, which should not be pressed, but the adhuc inserted may make it a more real and personal record.

To Christian ideas he gave little attention. There were Christians round about him, no doubt in numbers, but they did not greatly interest him. He seems, however, to have looked somewhat carelessly into their teaching, but he laughed at resurrection, at judgment and retribution in an eternal life.[[59]] He was far from studying the Scriptures—"nobody," he said later on, "comes to them unless he is already a Christian."[[60]] Justin devoted about a half of his Apology to prove the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in the life of Jesus—an Apology addressed to a pagan Emperor. Tertullian, in his Apology, gives four chapters to the subject, and one of these seems to be an alternative draft. The difference is explained by Justin's narrative of his conversion, in which he tells us how it was by the path of the Scriptures and Judaism that he, like Tatian and Theophilus, came to the church. Tertullian's story is different, and, not expecting pagans to pay attention to a work in such deplorable style[[61]] as the Latin Bible, which he had himself ignored, he used other arguments, the weight of which he knew from experience. In his de Pallio, addressed to a pagan audience, as we have seen, he alludes to Adam and the fig-leaves, but he does not mention Adam's name and rapidly passes on—"But this is esoteric—nor is it everybody's to know it."[[62]]

The martyrs

Tertullian is never autobiographical except by accident, yet it is possible to gather from his allusions how he became a Christian. In his address to Scapula[[63]] he says that the first governor to draw the sword on the Christians of Africa was Vigellius Saturninus. Dr Armitage Robinson's discovery of the original Latin text of the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, who suffered under Saturninus, has enabled us to put a date to the event, for we read that it took place in the Consulship of Præsens (his second term) and of Claudianus—that is in 180 A.D., the year of the death of Marcus Aurelius. These Acts are of the briefest and most perfunctory character. One after another, a batch of quite obscure Christians in the fewest possible words confess their faith, are condemned, say Deo Gratias, and then—"so all of them were crowned together in martyrdom and reign with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen." That is all. They were men and women, some of them perhaps of Punic extraction—Nartzalus and Cittinus have not a Roman sound. After this, it would seem that in Africa, as elsewhere, persecution recurred intermittently; it might be the governor who began it, or the chance cry of an unknown person in a mob, and then the people, wild and sudden as the Gadarene swine and for the same reason (Christians said),[[64]] would fling themselves into unspeakable orgies of bloodshed and destruction. What was more, no one could foretell the hour—it might be years before it happened again; it might be now. And the Christians were surprisingly ready, whenever it came.

Sometimes they argued a little, sometimes they said hardly anything. Christiana sum, was all that one of the Scillitan women said. But one thing struck everybody—their firmness, obstinatio.[[65]] Some, like the philosophic Emperor, might call it perversity; he, as we have seen, found it thin and theatrical, and contrasted it with "the readiness" that "proceeded from inward conviction, of a temper rational and grave"[[66]]—an interesting judgment from the most self-conscious and virtuous of men. On other men it made a very different impression—on men, that is, more open than the Cæsar of the passionless face[[67]] to impression, men of a more sensitive and imaginative make, quicker in penetrating the feeling of others.

Tertullian, in two short passages, written at different dates, shows how the martyrs—perhaps these very Scillitan martyrs—moved him. "That very obstinacy with which you taunt us, is your teacher. For who is not stirred up by the contemplation of it to find out what there is in the thing within? who, when he has found out, does not draw near? and then, when he has drawn near, desire to suffer, that he may gain the whole grace of God, that he may receive all forgiveness from him in exchange for his blood?"[[68]] So he wrote in 197-8 A.D., and fourteen years later his last words to Scapula were in the same tenor—"None the less this school (secta) will never fail—no! you must learn that then it is built up the more, when it seems to be cut down. Every man, who witnesses this great endurance, is struck with some misgiving and is set on fire to look into it, to find what is its cause; and when he has learnt the truth, he instantly follows it himself as well."[[69]] It would be hard to put into a sentence so much history and so much character. Et ipse statim sequitur.

The martyrs made him uneasy (scrupulo). There must be more behind than he had fancied from the little he had seen and heard of their teaching. "No one would have wished to be killed unless in possession of the truth," he says.[[70]] In spite of his laughter at resurrection and judgment, he was not sure about them. When he speaks in later life of the naturalis timor animæ in deum[[71]]—that instinctive fear of God which Nature has set in the soul—he is probably not himself without consciousness of sharing here too the common experience of men; and this is amply confirmed by the frequency and earnestness with which he speaks of things to come after death. Here however were men who had not this fear. Their obstinacy was his teacher. He looked for the reason, he learned the truth and he followed it at once. That energy is his character—to be read in all he does. Like Carlyle's his writings have "the signature of the writer in every word." "It is the idlest thing in the world," he says, "for a man to say, 'I wished it and yet I did not do it.' You ought to carry it through (perficere) because you wish it, or else not to wish it at all because you do not carry it through."[[72]] And again: "Why debate? God commands."[[73]] Tertullian obeyed, and ever after he felt that men had only to look into the matter, to learn and to obey. "All who like you were ignorant in time past, and like you hated,—as soon as it falls to their lot to know, they cease to hate who cease to be ignorant."[[74]]

Idolatry

Tertullian's tract On Idolatry illustrates his mind upon this decisive change. There he deals with Christians who earn their living by making idols—statuaries, painters, gilders, and the like; and when the plea is suggested that they must live and have no other way of living, he indignantly retorts that they should have thought this out before. Vivere ergo habes?[[75]] Must you live? he asks. Elsewhere he says "there are no musts where faith is concerned."[[76]] The man who claims to be condidonalis,[[77]] to serve God on terms, Tertullian cannot tolerate. "Christ our Master called himself Truth—not Convention."[[78]] Every form of idolatry must be renounced, and idolatry took many forms. The schoolmaster and the professor litterarum were almost bound to be disloyal to Christ; all their holidays were heathen festivals, and their very fees in part due to Minerva; while their business was to instruct the youth in the literature and the scandals of Olympus. But might not one study pagan literature? and, if so, why not teach it? Because, in teaching it, a man is bound, by his position, to drive heathenism deep into the minds of the young; in personal study he deals with no one but himself, and can judge and omit as he sees fit.[[79]] The dilemma of choosing between literature and Christ was a painful thing for men of letters for centuries after this.[[80]] So Tertullian lays down the law for others; what for himself?

Under the Empire there were two ways to eminence, the bar and the camp, and Tertullian had chosen the former. His rhetoric, his wit, his force of mind, and his strong grasp of legal principles in general and the issue of the moment in particular, might have carried him far. He might have risen as high as a civilian could. It was a tempting prospect,—the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them—and he renounced it; and never once in all the books that have come down to us, does he give any hint of looking back, never so much as suggests that he had given up anything. Official life was full of religious usage, full too of minor duties of ritual which a Christian might not discharge. Tertullian was not the first to see this. A century earlier Flavius Clemens, the cousin of Domitian, seems to have been a Christian—Dio Cassius speaks of his atheism and Jewish practices, and Suetonius remarks upon his "contemptible inertia," though he was consul.[[81]] In other words, the Emperor's cousin found that public life meant compromise at every step. This is Tertullian's decision of the case—it has the note of his profession about it. "Let us grant that it is possible for a man successfully to manage that, whatever office it be, he bears merely the title of that office; that he does not sacrifice, nor lend his authority to sacrifices, nor make contracts as to victims, nor delegate the charge of temples, nor look after their tributes; that he does not give shows (spectacula) at his own or the public cost, nor preside over them when being given; that he makes no proclamation or edict dealing with a festival; that he takes no oath; that—and these are the duties of a magistrate—he does not sit in judgment on any man's life or honour (for you might bear with his judging in matters of money); that he pronounces no sentence of condemnation nor any [as legislator] that should tend to condemnation; that he binds no man, imprisons no man, tortures[[82]] no man"—if all this can be managed, a Christian may be a magistrate.[[83]] Tertullian made his renunciation and held no magistracy. It may be said that, as he held none, it was easy to renounce it; but hopes are often harder to renounce than realities. So Tertullian left the law and the Stoics, to study the Scriptures, Justin and Irenæus[[84]]—the Bible and the regula fidei his new code, and the others his commentators. The Christian is "a stranger in this world, a citizen of the city above, of Jerusalem"; his ranks, his magistracies, his senate are the Church of Christ; his purple the blood of his Lord, his laticlave in His cross.[[85]]

But Tertullian could speak, on occasion, of what he had done. "We have no fear or terror of what we may suffer from those who do not know," he wrote to Scapula, "for we have joined this school (sectam) fully accepting the terms of our agreement; so that we come into these conflicts with no further right to our own souls."[[86]] The contest was, as he says elsewhere, "against the institutions of our ancestors, the authority of usage, the laws of rulers, the arguments of the wise; against antiquity, custom, necessity; against precedents, prodigies and miracles,"[[87]] and he did not need Celsus to remind him what form the resistance of the enemy might take. He knew, for he had seen, and that was why he stood where he did. But it is worth our while to understand how vividly he realized the possibilities before him.

There were the private risks of informers and blackmailers, Jews[[88]] and soldiers, to which the Christians were exposed.[[89]] They were always liable to be trapped in their meetings—"every day we are besieged; every day we are betrayed; most of all in our actual gatherings and congregations are we surprised."[[90]] How are we to meet at all, asks the anxious Christian, unless we buy off the soldiers? By night, says Tertullian, "or let three be your church."[[91]] Then came the appearance before the magistrate, where everything turned on the character or the mood of the official. Tertullian quotes to Scapula several instances of kindness on the bench, rough and ready, or high-principled.[[92]] Anything might happen—"then," wrote Perpetua, "he had all our names recited together and condemned us to the beasts."[[93]]

What followed in the arena may be read in various Acts of Martyrdom—in the story of Perpetua herself, as told in tense and quiet language by Tertullian. He, it is generally agreed, edited her visions, preserving what she wrote as she left it, and adding in a postscript what happened when she had laid down her pen for ever. The scene with the beasts is not easy to abridge, and though not long in itself it is too long to quote here; but no one who has read it will forget the episode of Saturus drenched in his own blood from the leopard's bite, amid the yells of the spectators, Salvum lotum! salvum lotum! nor that of Perpetua and Felicitas, mothers both, one a month or so, the other three days, stripped naked to be tossed by a wild cow. And here comes a curious touch; the mob, with a superficial delicacy, suggested clothing; rough cloths were put over the women, and the cow was let loose; they were tossed, and then all were put to the sword.

On martyrdom

"At this present moment," writes Tertullian, "it is the very middle of the heat, the very dog-days of persecution—as you would expect, from the dog-headed himself, of course. Some Christians have been tested by the fire, some by the sword, some by the beasts; some, lashed and torn with hooks, have just tasted martyrdom, and lie hungering for it in prison."[[94]] Cross, hook, and beasts[[95]]—the circus, the prison, the rack[[96]]—the vivicomburium,[[97]] burning alive—and meanwhile the renegade Jew is there with his placard of the "god of the Christians," an ugly caricature with the ears and one hoof of an ass, clad in a toga, book in hand[[98]]—the Gnostic and the nervous Christian are asking whether the text "flee ye to the next" may not be God's present counsel—and meantime "faith glows and the church is burning like the bush."[[99]] Yet, says Tertullian to the heathen, "we say, and we say it openly,—while you are torturing us, torn and bleeding, we cry aloud 'We worship God through Christ.'"[[100]] To the Christian he says: "The command is given to me to name no other God, whether by act of hand, or word of tongue ... save the One alone, whom I am bidden to fear, lest he forsake me; whom I am bidden to love with all my being, so as to die for him. I am his soldier, sworn to his service, and the enemy challenge me. I am as they are, if I surrender to them. In defence of my allegiance I fight it out to the end in the battle-line, I am wounded, I fall, I am killed. Who wished this end for his soldier—who but he who sealed him with such an oath of enlistment? There you have the will of my God."[[101]] "And therefore the Paraclete is needed, to guide into all truth, to animate for all endurance. Those, who receive him, know not to flee persecution, nor to buy themselves off; they have him who will be with us, to speak for us when we are questioned, to help us when we suffer."[[102]] "He who fears to suffer cannot be his who suffered."[[102]] The tracts On Flight in Persecution and The Antidote for the Scorpion are among his most impressive pieces. They must have been read by his friends with a strange stirring of the blood. Even to-day they bring back the situation—living as only genius can make it live.

But what of the man of genius who wrote them? At what cost were they written? "Picture the martyr," he writes, "with his head under the sword already poised, picture him on the gibbet his body just outspread, picture him tied to the stake when the lion has just been granted, on the wheel with the faggots piled about him"[[103]]—and no doubt Tertullian saw these things often enough, with that close realization of each detail of shame and pain which is only possible to so vivid and sensitive an imagination. He saw himself tied to the stake—heard the governor in response to the cry Christiana leonem[[104]] concede the lion—and then had to wait, how long? How long would it take to bring and to let loose the lion? How long would it seem? Through all this he went, in his mind, not once, nor twice. And meanwhile, what was the audience doing, while he stood there tied, waiting interminably for the lion? He knew what they would be doing, for he had seen it, and in the passage at the end of de Spectaculis, which Gibbon quotes, every item of the description of the spectator is taken in irony from the actual circus. No man, trained, as the public speaker or pleader must be, to respond intimately and at once to the feelings and thoughts, expressed or unexpressed, of the audience, could escape realizing in heightened tension every possibility of anguish in such a crowd of hostile faces, full of frantic hatred,[[105]] cruelty and noise. To this Tertullian looked forward, as we have seen, and went onward—as another did who "steadfastly set his face for Jerusalem." The test of emotion is what it has survived, and Tertullian's faith in Christ and his peace of mind survived this martyrdom through the imagination. Whatever criticism has to be passed upon his work and spirit, to some of his critics he might reply "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin."

So much did martyrdom mean to the individual, yet it was not merely a personal affair. It was God's chosen way to propagate his church—so it had been foretold, and so it was fulfilled. "Nothing whatever is achieved," says Tertullian to the heathen, "by each more exquisite cruelty you invent;[[106]] on the contrary, it wins men for our school. We are made more as often as you mow us down; the blood of Christians is seed."[[107]]

Sixteen centuries or so later, Thoreau in his Plea for Captain John Brown, a work not unlike Tertullian's own in its force, its surprises, its desperate energy and high conviction, wrote similarly of the opponents of another great movement. "Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."

On baptism

There were yet other possibilities in martyrdom. It was believed by Christians that in baptism the sins of the earlier life were washed away; but what of sins after baptism? They involved a terrible risk—"the world is destined to fire like the man who after baptism renews his sins"[[108]]—and it was often felt safer to defer baptism to the last moment in consequence. Constantine was baptized on his death-bed. "The postponement of baptism is more serviceable especially in the case of children;" says Tertullian, "let them become Christians when they shall be able to know Christ. Why should the innocent age hasten to the remission of sins?"[[109]] As to sins committed after baptism, different views were held. In general, as the church grew larger and more comprehensive, it took a lighter view of sin, but Tertullian and his Montanist friends did not, and for this they have been well abused, in their own day and since. They held that adultery and apostasy were not venial matters, to be forgiven by a bishop issuing an "edict," like a Pontifex Maximus, in the legal style, "I forgive the sins of adultery and fornication to such as have done penance, pænitentia functis."[[110]] The Montanist alternative was not so easy; God, they held, permitted a second baptism, which should be final—a baptism of blood. "God had foreseen the weaknesses of humanity, the strategems of the enemy, the deceitfulness of affairs, the snares of the world—that faith even after baptism would be imperilled, that many would be lost again after being saved—who should soil the wedding dress, and provide no oil for their lamps, who should yet have to be sought over mountain and forest, and carried home on the shoulders. He therefore appointed a second consolation, a last resource, the fight of martyrdom and the baptism of blood, thereafter secure."[[111]] This view may not appeal to us to-day; it did not appeal to Gnostic, time-server and coward. The philosophy of sin involved is hardly deep enough, but this doctrine of the second baptism cannot be said to lack virility.

But Tertullian himself did not receive the first baptism with any idea of looking for a second. Like men who are baptized of their own motion and understanding, he was greatly impressed by baptism. "There is nothing," he says, "which more hardens the minds of men than the simplicity of God's works, which appears in the doing, and the magnificence, which is promised in the effect. Here too, because, with such simplicity, without pomp, without any novel apparatus, and without cost, a man is sent down into the water and baptized, while but a few words are spoken, and rises again little or nothing cleaner, on that account his attainment of eternity is thought incredible."[[112]] It must be felt that the illustration declines from the principle. It may also be remarked that this is a more magical view of baptism than would have appealed to Seneca or to his contemporaries in the Christian movement, and that, as it is developed, it becomes even stranger.

Tertullian's description of baptism is of interest in the history of the rite. The candidate prepares himself with prayer, watching and the confession of sin.[[113]] "The waters receive the mystery (sacramentum) of sanctification, when God has been called upon. The Spirit comes at once from heaven and is upon the waters, sanctifying them from himself, and so sanctified they receive (combibunt) the power of sanctifying."[[114]] This is due to what to-day we should call physical causes. The underlying matter, he says, must of necessity absorb the quality of the overlying, especially when the latter is spiritual, and therefore by the subtlety of its substance more penetrative.[[115]] We may compare "the enthusiastic spirit," which, Plutarch tells us, came up as a gas from the chasm at Delphi,[[116]] and further the general teaching of Tertullian (Stoic in origin) of the corporeity of the soul and of similar spiritual beings. He illustrates the influence of the Spirit in thus affecting the waters of baptism by the analogy of the unclean spirits that haunt streams and fountains, natural and artificial, and similarly affect men, though for evil—"lest any should think it a hard thing that God's holy angel should be present to temper waters for man's salvation."[[117]] Thus when the candidate has solemnly "renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels,"[[118]] he is thrice plunged,[[119]] his spirit is washed corporeally by the waters "medicated" and his flesh spiritually is purified.[[120]] "It is not that in the waters we receive the Holy Spirit, but purified in water under the angel, we are prepared for the Holy Spirit.... The angel, that is arbiter of baptism, prepares the way for the Spirit that shall come."[[121]] On leaving the water the Christian is anointed (signaculum). The hand of blessing is laid upon him, and in response to prayer the Holy Spirit descends with joy from the Father to rest upon the purified and blest.[[122]]

Renouncing the world

Tertullian never forgot the baptismal pledge in which he renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels; and, for his part, he never showed any tendency to make compromise with them—when he recognized them, for sometimes he seems not to have penetrated their disguises. Again and again his pledge comes back to him. What has the Christian to do with circus or theatre, who has renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels, when both places are specially consecrated to these, when there, above all, wickedness, lust and cruelty reign without reserve?[[123]] How can the maker of idols, the temple-painter, etc., be said to have renounced the devil and his angels, if they make their living by them?[[124]] We have seen the difficulty of the schoolmaster here. The general question of trade troubles Tertullian—its cupidity, the lie that ministers to cupidity, to say nothing of perjury.[[125]] Of astrologers, he would have thought, nothing needed to be said—but that he had "within these few days" heard some one claim the right to continue in the profession. He reminds him of the source of his magical information—the fallen angels.[[126]] One must not even name them—to say Meditis fidius is idolatry, for it is a prayer; but to say "I live in the street of Isis" is not sin—it is sense.[[127]] Many inventions were attributed by pagans to their gods. If every implement of life is set down to some god, "yet I still must recognize Christ lying on a couch—or when he brings a basin to his disciples' feet, or pours water from the jug, and is girded with linen—Osiris' own peculiar garb."[[128]] In fact, common utility, and the service of ordinary needs and comforts, may lead us to look upon things (to whomsoever attributed) as really due to the inspiration of God himself "who foresees, instructs and gives pleasure to man, who is after all His own."[[129]] Thus common sense and his doctrine of Nature come to his aid. "So amid rocks and bays, amid the shoals and breakers of idolatry, faith steers her course, her sails filled by the Spirit of God."[[130]]

The Apology

Tertullian had been a lawyer and a pleader, as we are reminded in many a page, where the man of letters is overridden by the man of codes and arguments; and a lawyer he remained. The Gospel, for instance, bade that, if any man take the tunic, he should be allowed to take the cloak also. Yes, says Tertullian, if he asks—"if he threatens, I will ask for the tunic back."[[131]] A man, with such habits of mind, will not take violent measures to repel injustice, but he may be counted upon to defend himself in his own way. Tertullian, accordingly, when persecution broke out in the autumn of 197 in Carthage, addressed to the governor of the province an Apology for the Christians. It is one of his greatest works. It was translated into Greek, and Eusebius quotes the translation in several places. It is a most brilliant book. All his wit and warmth, his pungency and directness, his knowledge and his solid sense come into play. As a piece of rhetoric, as a lawyer's speech, it is inimitable. But it is more than that, for it is as full of his finest qualities as of his other gifts of dexterity and humour. It shows the full grown and developed man, every faculty at its highest and all consecrated, and the book glows with the passion of a dedicated spirit.

He begins with the ironical suggestion that, if the governors of provinces are not permitted in their judicial capacity to examine in public the case of the Christians, if this type of action alone their authority is afraid—or blushes—to investigate in the interests of justice, he yet hopes that Truth by the silent path of letters may reach their ears. Truth makes no excuse—she knows she is a stranger here, while her race, home, hope, grace and dignity are in heaven. All her eagerness is not to be condemned unheard. Condemnation without trial is invidious, it suggests injustice and wakes suspicion. It is in the interests of Christianity, too, that it should be examined—that is how the numbers of the Christians have grown to such a height. They are not ashamed—unless it be of having become Christians so late. The natural characteristics of evil are fear, shame, tergiversation, regret; yet the Christian criminal is glad to be accused, prays to be condemned and is happy to suffer. You cannot call it madness, when you are shown to be ignorant of what it is.

Christians are condemned for the name's sake, though such condemnation, irrespective of the proving of guilt or innocence, is outrage. Others are tortured to confess their guilt, Christians to deny it. Trajan's famous letter to Pliny, he tears to shreds; Christians are not to be hunted down—that is, they are innocent; but they are to be punished—that is, they are guilty. If the one, why not hunt them down? If the other, why punish? Of course Trajan's plan was a compromise, and Tertullian is not a man of compromises. If a founder's name is guilt for a school, look around! Schools of philosophers and schools of cooks bear their founders' names with impunity. But about the Founder of the Christian school curiosity ceases to be inquisitive. But the "authority of laws" is invoked against truth—non licet esse vos! is the cry. What if laws do forbid Christians to be? "If your law has made a mistake, well, I suppose, it was a human brain that conceived it; for it did not come down from heaven." Laws are always being changed, and have been. "Are you not yourselves every day, as experiment illumines the darkness of antiquity, engaged in felling and cutting the whole of that ancient and ugly forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts?"[[132]] Roman laws once forbade extravagance, theatres, divorce—they forbade the religions of Bacchus, Serapis and Isis. Where are those laws now? "You are always praising antiquity, and you improvise your life from day to day."[[133]]

In passing, one remark may be made in view of what is said sometimes of Tertullian and his conception of religion. "To Tertullian the revelation through the Christ is no more than a law."[[134]] There is truth in this criticism, of course; but unless it is clearly understood that Tertullian drew the distinction, which this passage of the Apology and others suggest, between Natural law, as conceived by the Stoics, and civil law as regarded by a Propraetor, he is likely to be misjudged. He constantly slips into the lawyer's way of handling law, for like all lawyers he is apt to think in terms of paper and parchment; but he draws a great distinction, not so familiar to judges and lawyers—as English daily papers abundantly reveal—between the laws of God or Nature and the laws of human convention or human legislatures. The weak spot was his belief in the text of the Scriptures as the ultimate and irrefragable word and will of God, though even here, in his happier hours, when he is not under stress of argument, he will interpret the divine and infallible code, not by the letter, but by the general principles to be observed at once in Nature and the book. Legis injustæ honor nullus est[[135]] is not the ordinary language of a lawyer.

The odious charges brought by the vulgar against the Christians then, as now in China, and used for their own purposes by men who really knew better, he shows to be incredible. No one has the least evidence of any kind for them, and yet Christian meetings are constantly surprised. What a triumph would await the spy or the traitor who could prove them! But they are not believed, or men would harry the Christians from the face of the earth (c. 8). As to the idea that Christians eat children to gain eternal life—who would think it worth the price? No! if such things are done, by whom are they done? He reminds his fellow-countrymen that in the reign of Tiberius priests of Saturn were crucified in Africa on the sacred trees around their temple—for the sacrifice of children. And then who are those who practise abortion? "how many of those who crowd around and gape for Christian blood?" And the gladiatorial shows? is it the Christians who frequent them?

Atheism and treason were more serious charges. "You do not worship the gods." What gods? He cannot mention them all—"new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adoptive, special, common, male, female, rustic, urban, nautical and military"—but Saturn at any rate was a man, as the historians know. But they were made gods after they died. Now, that implies "a God more sublime, true owner (mancipem), so to speak, of divinity," who made them into gods, for they could not of course have done it themselves; and meanwhile you abolish the only one who could have. But why should he?—"unless the great God needed their ministry and aid in his divine tasks"—dead men's aid! (c. 11). No, the whole universe is the work of Reason; nothing was left for Saturn to do, or his family. It rained from the beginning, stars shone, thunders roared, and "Jove himself shuddered at the living bolts which you put in his hand." Ask the spiders what they think of your gods and their webs tell you (c. 12). To-day a god, to-morrow a pan, as domestic necessity melts and casts the metal. And the gods are carried round and alms begged for them—religio mendicans—"hold out your hand, Jupiter, if you want me to give you anything!"[[136]] Does Homer's poetry do honour to the gods (c. 14)—do the actors on the stage (c. 15)?

Christians are not atheists. They worship one God, Creator, true, great, whose very greatness makes him known of men and unknown.[[137]] Who he is, and that he is one, the human soul knows full well—O testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ! But God has other evidence—instrumentum litteraturæ. He sent into the world men "inundated with the divine spirit" to proclaim the one God, who framed all things, who made man, who one day will raise man from the dead for eternal judgment. These writings of the prophets are not secret books. Anyone can read them in the Greek version, which was made by the seventy elders for Ptolemy Philadelphus. To this book he appeals,—to the majesty of Scripture, to the fulfilment of prophecy.

Zeno called the Logos the maker of all things—and named him Fate, God, mind of Jove, Necessity. Cleanthes described him as permeating all things. This the Christians also hold to be God's Word, Reason and Power—and his Son, one with him in being, Spirit as He is Spirit. This was born of a Virgin, became man, was crucified and rose again. Even the Cæsars would have believed on Christ, if Cæsars were not needful to the world, or if there could be Christian Cæsars.[[138]] As for the pagan gods, they are dæmons, daily exorcised into the confession of Christ.

But the charge of Atheism may be retorted. Are not the pagans guilty of Atheism, at once in not worshipping the true God and in persecuting those who do? As a rule they conceive, with Plato, of a great Jove in heaven surrounded by a hierarchy of gods and dæmons.[[139]] But, as in the Roman Empire, with its Emperor and its procurators and prefects, it is a capital offence to turn from the supreme ruler to the subordinate, so "may it not involve a charge of irreligion to take away freedom of religion, to forbid free choice of divinity, that I may not worship whom I will?" Every one else may; but "we are not counted Romans, who do not worship the god of the Romans. It is well that God is God of all, whose we are, whether we will or no. But with you it is lawful to worship anything whatever—except the true God."

But the gods raised Rome to be what she is. Which gods? Sterculus? Larentina? Did Jove forget Crete for Rome's sake—Crete, where he was born, where he lies buried?[[140]] No, look to it lest God prove to be the dispenser of kingdoms, to whom belong both the world that is ruled and the man who rules. Some are surprised that Christians prefer "obstinacy to deliverance"—but Christians know from whom that suggestion comes, and they know the malevolence of the dæmon ranks, who are now beginning to despair since "they recognize they are not a match for us" (c. 27).

For the Emperor Christians invoke God, the eternal, the true, the living. They look up, with hands outspread, heads bared, and from their hearts, without a form of words, they pray for long life for the Emperor, an Empire free from alarms, a safe home, brave armies, a faithful senate, an honest people and a quiet world (c. 30). They do this, for the Empire stands between them and the world's end. (It was a common thought that the world and Rome would end together.) Christians however honour Cæsar as God's vice-gerent; he is theirs more than any one's, for he is set up by the Christians' God. They make no plots and have no recourse to magic to inquire into his "health" (c. 35).[[141]] In fact "we are the same to the Emperors as to our next-door neighbours. We are equally forbidden to wish evil, to do evil, to speak evil, to think evil of anyone." So much for being enemies of the state (c. 36).

Christians do not retaliate on the mob for its violence, though, if they did, their numbers would be serious. "We are but of yesterday, and we have filled everything, cities, islands, camps, palace, forum," etc.; "all we have left you is the temples." But "far be it that a divine school should vindicate itself with human fire, or grieve to suffer that wherein it is proved" (c. 37). Christians make no disturbances and aspire to no offices. They are content to follow their religion and look after the poor, the shipwrecked, and men in mines and prisons. "See how they love each other!" say the heathen.[[142]] They are not, as alleged, the cause of public disasters; though if the Nile do not overflow, or if the Tiber do, it is at once Christianos ad leonem! But they are "unprofitable in business!" Yes, to pimps, poisoners and mathematicians; still they are not Brahmans or solitaries of the woods, exiles from life, and they refuse no gift of God. "We sail with you, take the field with you, share your country life, and know all the intercourse of arts and business" (cc. 42, 43). They are innocent, for they fear God and not the proconsul. If they were a philosophic school, they would have toleration—"who compels a philosopher to sacrifice, to renounce, or to set out lamps at midday to no purpose?" Yet the philosophers openly destroy your gods and your superstitions in their books, and win your applause for it—and they "bark at your princes." He then points out how much there is in common to Christians and philosophers, and yet (in a burst of temper) how unlike they are. No, "where is the likeness between the philosopher and the Christian? the disciple of Greece and of heaven? the trafficker in fame and in life? the friend and the foe of error?" (c. 46). The Christian artisan knows God better than Plato did. And yet what is knowledge and genius in philosopher and poet, is "presumption" in a Christian! "Say the things are false that protect you—mere presumption! yet necessary. Silly! yet useful. For those who believe them are compelled to become better men, for fear of eternal punishment and hope of eternal refreshment. So it is inexpedient to call that false or count that silly, which it is expedient should be presumed true. On no plea can you condemn what does good" (c. 49).

Yet, whatever their treatment, Christians would rather be condemned than fall from God. Their death is their victory; their "obstinacy" educates the world; and while men condemn them, God acquits them. That is his last word—a deo absolvimur (c. 50).

Such, in rough outline, is the great Apology—not quite the work of the fuller or baker at whom Celsus sneered. Yet it has not the accent of the conventional Greek or Latin gentleman, nor that of the philosophic Greek Christian. The style is unlike anything of the age. Everything in it is individual; there is hardly a quotation in the piece. Everything again is centripetal; Tertullian is too much in earnest to lose himself in the endless periods of the rhetorician, or in the charming fancies dear to the eclectic and especially to contemporary Platonists. Indeed his tone toward literature and philosophy is startlingly contemptuous, not least so when contrasted with that of Clement.

For this there are several reasons. First of all, like Carlyle, Tertullian has "to write with his nerves in a kind of blaze," and, like Carlyle, he says things strongly and sweepingly. It is partly temperament, partly the ingrown habit of the pleader. Something must be allowed to the man of moods, whose way it is to utter strongly what he feels for the moment. Such men do a service for which they have little thanks. Many moods go in them to the making of the mind, moods not peculiar to themselves. In most men feelings rarely find full and living expression, and something is gained when they are so expressed, even at the cost of apparent exaggeration. The sweeping half-truth at once suggests its complement to the man who utters it, and may stir very wholesome processes of thought in the milder person who hears it.

The philosophers

In the next place the philosophers may have deserved the criticism. Fine talk and idle talk, in philosophic terms, had disgusted Epictetus;[[143]] and for few has Lucian more mockery than for the philosophers of his day—Tertullian's day—with their platitudes and their beards, their flunkeyism and love of gain. Clement of Alexandria, who loved philosophy, had occasional hard words for the vanity of its professors.[[144]] For a man of Tertullian's earnestness they were too little serious. Gloriæ animal[[145]] is one of his phrases—a creature of vainglory was not likely to appeal to a man who lived in full view of the lion and the circus. He had made a root and branch cleavage with idolatry, because no men could die like the Christians unless they had the truth. The philosophers—to say nothing of their part now and then in stirring the people against the Christians—had made terms with polytheism, beast-worship, magic, all that was worst and falsest in paganism, "lovers of wisdom" and seekers after truth as they professed themselves to be. Ancient Philosophy suggests to the modern student the name of Heraclitus or Plato; but Tertullian lived in the same streets with Apuleius, philosopher and Platonist, humorist and gloriæ animal. But even Plato vexed Tertullian.[[146]] The "cock to be offered to Æsculapius" was too available a quotation in a world where the miracles of the great Healer were everywhere famous. The triflers and the dogmatists of the day used Plato's myths to confute the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. And of course Plato and Tertullian are in temperament so far apart, that an antipathy provoked by such causes was hardly to be overcome.

Again, Tertullian remarks frequently that heresy has the closest connexion with philosophy. Both handle the same questions: "Whence is evil, and why? and whence is man and how? and whence is God?"[[147]] Marcion, for instance, is "sick (like so many nowadays and, most of all, the heretics) with the question of evil, whence is evil?"[[148]] and turns to dualism. Or else "the heretics begin with questions of the resurrection, for the resurrection of the flesh they find harder to believe than the unity of the Godhead."[[149]] What Celsus, a typical product of contemporary philosophy, thought of the resurrection of the flesh we have seen—a "hope of worms!" Lastly, there was a strong tendency in the church at large for re-statement of the gospel in the terms of philosophy; and in such endeavours, as we know, there is always the danger of supposing the terms and the philosophy of the day to be more permanent and more valid than the experience which they are supposed to express. In Tertullian's century there seemed some prospect that every characteristic feature of the gospel would be so "re-stated" as to leave the gospel entirely indistinguishable from any other eclectic system of the moment. Jesus became a phantom, or an æon; his body, sidereal substance, which offered, Clement himself said, no material resistance to the touch of St John's hand. God divided, heaven gone, no hope or faith left possible in a non-real Christ even in this life—Christians would be indeed of all men most miserable, and morality would have no longer any basis nor any motive. What in all this could tempt a man to face the lions? It was not for this that Christians shed their blood—no, the Gnostics recommended flight in persecution. It is easy to understand the sweeping Viderint—Tertullian's usual phrase for dismissing people and ideas on whom no more is to be said—"Let them look to it who have produced a Stoic and Platonic and dialectic Christianity. We need no curiosity who have Jesus Christ, no inquiry who have the gospel."[[150]]

It was natural for Clement and his school to try to bring the gospel and philosophy to a common basis—a natural impulse, which all must share who speculate. The mistake has been that the church took their conclusions so readily and has continued to believe them. For Tertullian is, on his side, right, and we know in fact a great deal more about Jesus than we can know about the Logos.

The Præscription of heretics

Accordingly a large part of Tertullian's work, as a Christian, was the writing of treatises against heresy. He has in one book—de Præscriptionibus Hæreticorum—dealt with all heretics together. The Regula Fidei, which is a short creed,[[151]] was instituted, he says, by Christ, and is held among Christians without questions, "save those which heretics raise and which make heretics." On that Regula rests the Christian faith. To know nothing against it, is to know everything. But appeal is made to Scripture. We must then see who has the title to Scripture (possessio),[[152]] and whence it comes. Jesus Christ while on earth taught the twelve, and they went into the world and promulgated "the same doctrine of the same faith," founding churches in every city, from which other churches have taken faith and doctrine—he uses the metaphors of seed and of layers (tradux) from plants. Every day churches are so formed and duly counted Apostolic. Thus the immense numbers of churches may be reckoned equivalent to the one first church. No other than the Apostles are to be received, as no others were taught by Christ. "Thus it is established that every doctrine which agrees with those Apostolic mother-churches, the originals of the faith, is to be set down to truth, as in accordance with what the churches have received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God."[[153]] But have the churches been faithful in the transmission of this body of doctrine? Suppose them all to have gone wrong, suppose the Holy Spirit to have been so negligent—is it likely that so vast a number should have wandered away into one faith? Again let Marcion and others show the history of their churches. Let their doctrines be compared with the Apostolic, and their varieties and contradictions will show they are not Apostolic. If then Truth be adjudged to those who walk by the Regula, duly transmitted through the church, the Apostles and Christ from God, then heretics have no right of appeal to the Scriptures which are not theirs. If they are heretics, they cannot be Christians; if they are not Christians, they have no right (ius) to Christian literature. "With what right (iure) Marcion, do you cut down my wood? By what licence, Valentinus, do you divert my springs? ... This is my estate; I have long held it; I am first in occupation; I trace my sure descent from the founders to whom the thing belonged. I am the heir of the Apostles."[[154]]

In this, as in most human arguments, there are strands of different value. The legal analogy gave a name to the book—præscriptio was the barring of a claim—but it is not the strongest line. Law rarely is. But Tertullian was not content to rule his opponents out of court. He used legal methods and manners too freely, but he knew well enough that these settled nothing. As a rule he had much stronger grounds for his attack. He wrote five books against Marcion to maintain the unity of the Godhead and the identity of the Father of Jesus, the God of the Old Testament and the God of Nature. His book against the Valentinians has a large element of humour in it—perhaps the best rejoinder to the framers of a cosmogony of so many æons, none demonstrable, all fanciful,—the thirty of them suggest to him the famous Latin sow of the Æneid.[[155]] Against Hermogenes he maintains the doctrine of the creation of the world from nothing. The hypothesis that God used pre-existing matter, makes matter antecedent and more or less equal to God. And then, in legal vein, he asks a question. How did God come to use matter? "These are the three ways in which another's property may be taken,—by right, by benefit, by assault, that is by title, by request, by violence." Hermogenes denies God's title in this case; which then of the other means does he prefer?[[156]]

The incarnation of Christ

His best work in the controversial field is in his treatises, On the Flesh of Christ, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, and On the Soul. The first of these, above all, will appeal to any reader to whom the historic Jesus is significant. Much has changed in outlook and preconceptions since Tertullian wrote, but his language on the reality of Jesus, as an actual human being and no sidereal or celestial semblance of a man, on the incarnation, and the love of God, still glows and still finds a response. "Away," he pictures Marcion saying, "Away with those census-rolls of Cæsar, always tiresome, away with the cramped inns, the soiled rags, the hard stall. Let the angelic host look to it!"[[157]] And then he rejoins, Do you think nativity impossible—or unsuitable—for God? Declaim as you like on the ugliness of the circumstances; yet Christ did love men (born, if you like, just as you say); for man he descended, for man he preached, for man he lowered himself with every humiliation down to death, and the death of the cross. Yes, he loved him whom he redeemed at so high a price. And with man he loved man's nativity, even his flesh. The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the discipline of justice, of purity, of pity, of patience, of all innocence—these are not folly, and they are bound up with the truth of the Gospel. Is it unworthy of God? "Spare the one hope of all the world, thou, who wouldst do away with the disgrace of faith. Whatever is unworthy of God is all to my good."[[158]] The Son of God also died—"It is credible because it is foolish. He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible." And how could all this be, if his body were not true? "You bisect Christ with a lie. The whole of him was Truth."[[159]] The gospel narrative from beginning to end implies that Christ's body was like ours—"he hungered under the devil, thirsted under the Samaritan woman, shed tears over Lazarus, was troubled[[160]] at death (for, the flesh, he said, is weak), last of all he shed his blood." How could men have spat in a face radiant with "celestial grandeur"? Wait! Christ has not yet subdued his enemies that he may triumph with his friends.

Jesus is to come again, as he was, as he is, sitting at the Father's right hand, God and man, flesh and blood, the same in essence and form as when he ascended; so he shall come.[[161]] And men will be raised in the flesh to receive judgment. A storm overhangs the world.[[162]] What the treasure-house of eternal fire will be, may be guessed from the petty vents men see in Etna and elsewhere.[[163]] There will be white robes for martyrs; for the timid a little portion in the lake of fire and sulphur.[[164]] All that Gibbon thought would "offend the reason and humanity of the present age" in the last chapter of the de Spectacutis may recur to the reader. But, continues Tertullian in that passage, my gaze will be upon those who let loose their fury on the Lord himself—"'This,' I shall say, 'is he, the son of the carpenter or the harlot, Sabbath-breaker, Samaritan, demoniac. This is he whom you bought from Judas; this is he, whom you beat with the reed and the palms of your hands, whom you disfigured with your spittle, to whom you gave gall and vinegar. This is he whom his disciples stole away, that it might be said he had risen,—or the gardener took him away, that his lettuces might not be trodden by the crowds that came.'" "A long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms," is Gibbon's judgment.

A mind less intent on polemic will judge otherwise of Tertullian and his controversies. There is, first of all, much more of the philosophic temper than is commonly supposed. He does not, like Clement and other Greeks, revel in cosmological speculations as to the Logos, nor does he loosely adopt the abstract methods of later Greek philosophy. But in his treatment of the Soul, of moral order and disorder, and of responsibility, he shows no mean powers of mind. He argues from experience, and from the two sources, from which he could best hope to learn most directly the mind of God, Nature and the Scriptures. The infallibility of the Scriptures is of course a limitation to freedom of speculation, but it was an axiom of the early church, and a man of experience might accept it, bound up as it was with sound results in the martyr-death and the changed life. Tertullian will get back to the facts, if he can; and if he judges too swiftly of Nature and too swiftly accepts the literal truth of Scripture,—while these are drawbacks to our acceptance of his conclusions, there is still to be seen in him more independence of mind than in those Greek Fathers for whom Greek philosophy had spoken the last word in metaphysics. It is psychology that interests Tertullian more, and moral questions, and these he handles more deeply than the Stoics. He stands in line with Augustine and Calvin, his spiritual descendants.

If he speaks more of hell than certain Greeks do, it is not unnatural. The man, who saw such deaths in the amphitheatre as he describes in the Passion of Perpetua, who remembered the expressions he had then seen on the faces of the spectators, who knew too well the cruelty that went with Roman lust, could hardly help believing in hell. What was the origin of evil? asked philosopher and heretic. What is its destiny? and what are you to do with it now? asked Tertullian; and, in all seriousness, the answer to the former question is more likely to be found when the answers of the latter are reached. At any rate the latter are more practical, and that adjective, with what it suggests of drawback and of gain, belongs to Tertullian.

On conduct

His application of the test of utility to belief is obviously open to criticism. "It is expedient," said Varro, "for men to be deceived in religion." No, Tertullian would have said, it is more expedient for them to know the truth; and he backed his conviction by his appeal to Nature, on the one hand, Nature, rational through and through, and ever loyal to law, to fixity of principle, and on the other hand by reference to the verification of his position yielded by experience—once more the martyr-death and the transformed character. These fundamental ideas he may have misused in particulars, if not in matters more essential; but, if he is wrong from the beginning in holding them, human knowledge, progress and conduct become fortuitous and desultory at once. Nature and verification from life are substantially all we have. To these of course Tertullian added revelation in a sense distinct.

From the question of conduct we pass naturally to the great cleavage of Tertullian with the church. A change had come in church practice and government since the days when the Teaching of the Apostles represented actual present fact,—perhaps even since the Apology of Aristides. The church had grown larger, it had developed its organization, and it was relying more on the practical men with a turn for administration, who always appear when a movement, begun by idealists, seems to show signs of success. The situation creates them, and they cannot be avoided. They have their place, but they do not care for ideas. Thus in the church the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of gifts, was succeeded by the ministry of office, with its lower ideals of the practical and the expedient. The numbers of the church swelled, and a theory began to spread, which Cyprian took up later on, and which was almost inevitable on his principles, that the church was an ark, with beasts clean and beasts unclean within it. This theory answered to the actual facts, hardly to the ideal, and Tertullian rejected it.[[165]] Conduct at once suggested the theory, and responded to it. Christians fell into adultery and apostasy, and while at first this meant "delivery to Satan," restoration became progressively easy. The Shepherd of Hermas extended second chances, till Tertullian fiercely spoke of "that apocryphal shepherd of adulterers.[[166]]"

From Phrygia came the suggestion of reformation. Our evidence as to the history of Montanism in its native land is derived from hostile sources, and the value of it must partly depend on the truth of the witnesses and partly on their intelligence, and of neither have we any guarantee at all. That they are clearly hostile is plain from the fragments in Eusebius. That they understood the inner meaning of what they condemned, we have no indication. Montanus, however, asserted Christ's promise of the Paraclete—his enemies allege that he identified himself with the Paraclete, a statement which might be used to show how quotation may lead to suggestio falsi. But the coming of the Paraclete was not in fact a synonym for fanaticism and the collection of money, as the enemies of Montanus hinted. It meant the bracing of Christian life and character, and the restoration of prophecy, new revelation of truth, power and progress. It appealed to the Christian world, and the movement spread—probably with modifications as it spread. The oracles of Montanus and of two women, Prisca and Maximilla, became widely known, and they inculcated a stern insistence on conduct, which was really needed, while they showed how reformation was to be reached. To use language of more modern times, involves risk of misconception; but if it may be done with caution, we may roughly say that the Montanists stood for what the Friends call the Inner Light, and for progressive revelation—or, at any rate, for something in this direction. The indwelling of God was not consistent with low living; and earnest souls, all over the world, were invested with greater power and courage to battle with the growing lightness in the church and to meet the never-ceasing hostility of the world—the lion and the cruel faces of the amphitheatre.

Ecstacy

Yet Montanism failed for want of a clear conception of the real character of primitive Christianity. Aiming at morals, Montanists conceived of life and the human mind and God in a way very far from that of Jesus. They laid a stress, which is not his, on asceticism and on penance, and they cultivated ecstasy—in both regions renouncing the essentially spiritual conception of religion, and turning to a non-Christian view of matter. They thus aimed at obtaining or keeping the indwelling spirit of Jesus, known so well in the early church, but by mechanical means; and this, though the later church in this particular followed them for generations, is not to be done. Still, whatever their methods and their expedients, they stood for righteousness, and here lay the fascination of Montanism for Tertullian.

Throughout his later life Tertullian, then, was a Montanist, though the change was not so great as might be expected. Some of his works, such as that On Monogamy, bear the stamp of Montanism, for re-marriage was condemned by the Montanists. Elsewhere his citation of the oracles of Prisca suggests that a book belongs to the Montanist period; or we deduce it from such a passage as that in the work On the Soul where he describes a vision. The passage is short and it is suggestive.

"We have to-day among us a sister who has received gifts (charismata) of the nature of revelations, which she undergoes (patitur) in spirit in the church amid the rites of the Lord's day falling into ecstasy (per ecstasin). She converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord, and sees and hears mysteries, and reads the hearts of certain persons, and brings healings to those who ask. According to what Scriptures are read, or psalms sung, or addresses made, or prayers offered up, the matter of her visions is supplied. It happened that we had spoken something of the soul, when this sister was in the spirit. When all was over, and the people had gone, she—for it is her practice to report what she has seen, and it is most carefully examined that it may be proved—'amongst other things,' she said, 'a soul was shown to me in bodily form and it seemed to be a spirit, but not empty, nor a thing of vacuity; on the contrary, it seemed as if it might be touched, soft, lucid, of the colour of air, and of human form in every detail."[[167]]

Such a story explains itself. The corporeity of the soul was a tenet of Stoicism, essential to Tertullian, for without it he could not conceive of what was to follow the resurrection. He spoke of it and we can imagine how. It would hardly take a vision to see anything of which he spoke. The sister however was, what in modern phrase is called, psychopathic, and the vision occurred, controlled by the suggestion that preceded it.

Conclusion

It must be admitted that there is in some of his Montanist treatises, particularly where he is handling matters of less importance, such as re-marriage, fasting, and the like, a bitterness of tone which is not pleasant. As long as his humour and his strong sense control his irony, it is no bad adjunct of his style, it is a great resource. But it declines into sarcasm, and "sarcasm," as Teufelsdröckh put it, "is the language of the devil"; and we find Tertullian, pleading for God and righteousness, in a tone and a temper little likely to win men. But the main ideas that dominate him still prevail—conduct, obedience, God's law in Nature and in the book, the value of the martyr-death.

Little is to be got by dwelling on his outbursts of ill temper; they hardly do more than illustrate what we knew already, his intensity, his sensibility, his passion. They form the negative side of the great positive qualities. Let me gather up a few scattered thoughts which come from his heart and are better and truer illustrations of the man, and with them let chapter and book have an end.

Conduct is the test of creed (de Præscr. Hær. 43). To lie about God is in a sense idolatry (de Præscr. 40). Security in sin means love of it (de Pudic. 9). Whatever darkness you pile above your deeds, God is light (de Pænit. 6). What we are forbidden to do, the soul pictures to itself at its peril (de Pænit. 3). Truth persuades by teaching, it does not teach by making things plausible (adv. Valent. 1). Faith is patience with its lamp lit—illuminata (de Pat. 6). Patience is the very nature of God. The recognition of God understands well enough the duty laid upon it. Let wrong-doing be wearied by your patience (de Pat. 3, 4, 8). There is no greater incitement to despise money than that the Lord himself had no wealth (de Pat. 7). Love is 'the supreme mystery (sacramentum) of faith (de Pat. 12). Faith fears no famine (de Idol. 12). Prayer is the wall of faith (de Or. 29). Every day, every moment, prayer is necessary to men.... Prayer comes from conscience. If conscience blush, prayer blushes (de exh. cast. 10). Good things scandalize none but the bad mind (de virg. vel. 3). Give to Cæsar what is Cæsar's—his image on the coin; give to God what is God's—his image in man, yourself (de Idol. 15).

But to this there is no end, and an end there must be. By his expression of Christian ideas in the natural language of Roman thought, by his insistence on the reality of the historic Jesus and on the inevitable consequences of human conduct, by his reference of all matters of life and controversy to the will of God manifested in Nature, in inspiration and in experience, Tertullian laid Western Christendom under a great debt, never very generously acknowledged. For us it may be as profitable to go behind the writings till we find the man, and to think of the manhood, with every power and every endowment, sensibility, imagination, energy, flung with passionate enthusiasm on the side of purity and righteousness, of God and Truth; to think of the silent self-sacrifice freely and generously made for a despised cause, of a life-long readiness for martyrdom, of a spirit, unable to compromise, unable in its love of Christ to see His work undone by cowardice, indulgence and unfaith, and of a nature in all its fulness surrendered. That the Gospel could capture such a man as Tertullian, and, with all his faults of mind and temper, make of him what it did, was a measure of its power to transform the old world and a prophecy of its power to hold the modern world, too, and to make more of it as the ideas of Jesus find fuller realization and verification in every generation of Christian character and experience.

Chapter X Footnotes:

[[1]] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. 15 (vol. ii, p. 177, Milman-Smith); Tertullian, de Spectaculis, 30.

[[2]] Both of these in de Pallio, 1. It may be noted that in allusions to Dido's story he prefers the non-Virgilian version, more honourable to the Queen; Apol. 50; ad martyras, 4.

[[3]] adv. Valentin. 12.

[[4]] References to his Greek treatises (all lost) may be found in de cor. mil. 6; de bapt. 15; de virg. vel. 1.

[[5]] De viris illustribus, sub nomine.

[[6]] de anima 39.

[[7]] Ibid. 41.

[[8]] Ibid. 39.

[[9]] adv. Valent. 3, in infantia inter somni difficultates a nutricula audisse lamiæ turres et pectines Solis; ibid. 20, puerilium dicibulorum in mari poma nasci et in arbore pisces.

[[10]] e.g. he alludes to a manual on flowers and garlands by Claudius Saturninus, and another on a similar subject, perhaps, by Leo Ægyptius; de cor. mil. 7, 12. Apart from the Christian controversy on the use of flowers, we shall find later on that he had a keener interest in them than some critics might suppose; adv. Marc. i, 13, 14.

[[11]] de juga, 10.

[[12]] de anima, 2; cf. ibid. 10, quotation of a great anatomist Herophilus who dissected "six hundred" subjects in order to find out Nature's secrets; also ibid. 25, a discussion of childbirth to show that the soul does not come into the child with its first breath; ibid. 43, a discussion of sleep. Scorpiace, 5, surgery.

[[13]] e.g. the end of adv. Hermogenem.

[[14]] Puns, e.g., on areæ, ad Scap. 3; on strophæ, de Spect. 29; on pleroma, adv. Val. 12. See his nonsense on the tears, salt, sweet, and bituminous, of Achamoth, a Valentinian figure, adv. Val. 15; on "the Milesian tales of his Æons," de Anima. 23.

[[15]] adv. Valent. 6.

[[16]] adv. Valent. 1.

[[17]] de baptismo, 4.

[[18]] de oratione, 15

[[19]] de anima, 3.

[[20]] de bapt. 3 (end)

[[21]] On de pallio see Boissier, La Fin da Paganisme, bk. iii, ch. 1.

[[22]] ad Natt, i, 7; the charges were incest, and child-murder for purposes of magic.

[[23]] de Præscriptione, 44 (end). Similarly of resurrection, virgin-birth, etc..—recogitavi.

[[24]] de Patientia, 1, miserrimus ego semper æger caloribus impatientiæ.

[[25]] Cf. his tone as to the scortum, unexampled, so far as I know, in Latin literature, and only approached in Greek perhaps by Dio Chrysostom—the publicæ libidinis hostiæ (de Spect. 17), publicarum libidinum victimæ (de cult. fem. ii, 12). He alone of all who mention the strange annual scene on the stage, which Cato withdrew to allow, has pity for the poor women.

[[26]] de Pænitentia, 8.

[[27]] de corona, 12.

[[28]] I refer especially to such passages as de Carne Christi, 4-9, 14; de Resurr. Carnis, 7, 12, etc.

[[29]] de Pænit. 1, hoc genus hominum quod et ipsi retro fuimus, cæci, sine domini lumine.

[[30]] Apol. 15, cf. ad Natt. i, 10, another draft of the same matter.

[[31]] de Spect. 19, eamus in amphitheatrum ... delectemur sanguine humano (ironically).

[[32]] Apol. 15. The burning-iron was to see whether any life were left in the fallen.

[[33]] de Spect. 19 (end).

[[34]] de Spectaculis, 17.

[[35]] de Pænit. 4.

[[36]] de Pænit. 12, peccator omnium notarum, nec ulli rei nisi pænitentiæ natus.

[[37]] de anima, 19 and 49. Add his words on the wife taken away by death, cui etiam religiosiorem reservas affectionem, etc., de exh. cast. 11.

[[38]] de anima, 20. Cf. ibid. 17, on the moderation of the Stoics, as compared with Plato, in their treatment of the fidelity of the senses.

[[39]] ad Scap. 2. Tamen humani iuris et naturalis potestatis est unicuique quod putaverit colere.

[[40]] adv. Marc. i, 10, major popularitas generis humani.

[[41]] de testim. animæ, 5.

[[42]] de test. an. 6.

[[43]] de jejunio, 6.

[[44]] de spectaculis, 20.

[[45]] de cor. mil. 5, Naturæ deus noster est.

[[46]] adv. Marc. i, 23.

[[47]] de anima, 16.

[[48]] adv. Marc. iii, 2; iv, 11.

[[49]] de cor. mil. 6, et legem naturalem suggerit et naturam legalem.

[[50]] Cf. de carne Christi, 4.

[[51]] de anima, 27.

[[52]] de carne Christi, 4, ipsum mulieris enitentis pudorem vel pro periculo honorandum vel pro natura religiosum.

[[53]] de Resurr. Carnis, 7.

[[54]] Ibid. 6.

[[55]] adv. Marcion. i, 13, 14. Compare the beautiful picture at the end of de Oratione, of the little birds flying up, "spreading out the cross of their wings instead of hands, and saying something that seems to be prayer."

[[56]] adv. Marc. ii, 4.

[[57]] de cor. mil. 15.

[[58]] de præscr. 40, et si adhuc memini, Mithra signat, etc.

[[59]] Apol. 18. Hæc et nos risimus aliquando. De vestris sumus.

[[60]] de test. animæ, 1.

[[61]] So Arnobius (i, 58, 59) and Augustine felt. Tertullian does not complain of the style himself, but it was a real hindrance to many.

[[62]] de Pallio, 3, Sed arcana ista nec omnium nosse.

[[63]] ad Scap. 3.

[[64]] "The devils entered into the swine." Cf. p. 164.

[[65]] Pliny to Trajan, 96, 3, pertinaciam et inflexibilem obstinationem.

[[66]] Marcus Aurelius, xi, 3. Cf. Aristides, Or. 46, who attributes authádeia, to oi en tê Palaistíne dussebeîs.

[[67]] Hist. August. M. Anton. 16, Erat enim ipse tantæ tranquillitatis ut vultum nunquam mutaverit mærore vel gaudio.

[[68]] Apol. 50, Illa ipsa obstinatio quam exprobratis magistra est. Quis enim bib contemplatione eius concutitur ad requirendum quid intus in re sit? quis non ubi requisivit accedit? ubi accessit pati exoptat, etc.

[[69]] ad. Scap. 5. Quisque enim tantam tolerantiam spectans, ut aliquo scrupulo percussus, et inquirere accenditur, quid sit in causa, et ubi cognoverit veritatem et ipse statim sequitur.

[[70]] Scorpiace, 8 (end).

[[71]] de testim. animæ, 2. Cf. de cult. fem. ii, 2, Timor fundamentum salutis est.

[[72]] de Pænitentia, 3.

[[73]] de Pænit. 40. Quid revolvis? Deus præcipit.

[[74]] ad Natt. i, 1.

[[75]] de Idol. 5.

[[76]] de cor mil. 11, non admittit status fidei necessitates.

[[77]] de Idol. 12.

[[78]] de virg. vel. i, Dominus noster Christus veritatem se non consuetudinem cognominavit.

[[79]] de Idol. 10.

[[80]] See the correspondence of Ausonius and Paulinus.

[[81]] Dio Cassius, 67, 14; Suetonius, Domit. 15; Eusebius, E.H. iii, 18. See E. G. Hardy, Studies in Roman History, ch. v., pp. 66, 67.

[[82]] To obtain evidence—legal in the case of slaves.

[[83]] de Idol. 17.

[[84]] Cf. adv. Valentin. 5.

[[85]] de cor. mil. 13, clavus latus in cruce ipsius. There is a suggestion of a play upon words.

[[86]] ad Scap. i, opening sentence of the tract.

[[87]] ad Nat. ii, 1.

[[88]] Apol. 7. Cf. Scorp. 10, synagogas Judæorum fontes persecutionum.

[[89]] Cf. de fuga, 12; ad Scap. 5.

[[90]] Apol. 7.

[[91]] de fuga, 14, sit tibi et in tribus ecclesia.

[[92]] ad Scap. 4.

[[93]] Passio Perpetuæ, 6.

[[94]] Scorpiace, 1.

[[95]] Apol. 30.

[[96]] Scorp. 10.

[[97]] de anima, 1.

[[98]] Apol. 16; ad Natt. i, 14.

[[99]] Scorpiace, 1; the reference is to Moses' bush, nec tamen consumebatur.

[[100]] Apol. 21.

[[101]] Scorpiace, 4 (end).

[[102a]] de fuga, 14 (both passages).

[[102b]] de fuga, 14 (both passages).

[[103]] de pudicitia, 22.

[[104]] For this cry in various forms see Apol. 40; de res. carn. 22; de exh. castit. 12; de spect. 27, conventus et cætus ... illic guotidiani in nos leones expostulantur.

[[105]] Scorpiace, 11, ecce autem et odio habimur ab omnibus hominibus nominis causa; de anima, 1, non unius urbis sed universi orbis iniquam sententiam sustinens pro nomine veritatis.

[[106]] Cf. de anima, 1, de patibulo et vivicombirio per omne ingenium crudelitatis exhauriat.

[[107]] Apol. 50, semen est sanguis Christianorum.

[[108]] de Bapt. 8.

[[109]] Ibid. 18.

[[110]] Ironic chapter in de pudicitia, 1. The edict is a technical term of the state, and the Pontifex Maximus was the Emperor, till Gratian refused the title in 375 A.D.

[[111]] Scorpiace, 6; cf. de Bapt. 16.

[[112]] de Bapt. 2.

[[113]] Ibid. 20.

[[114]] Ibid. 4.

[[115]] Ibid. 4.

[[116]] Cf. p. 102.

[[117]] de Bapt. 5.

[[118]] de Spectac. 4; de cor. mil. 3.

[[119]] de cor. mil. 3, ter mergitamur.

[[120]] de Bapt. 4.

[[121]] Ibid. 6.

[[122]] de Bapt. 8. For other minor details as to food and bathing see de cor. mil. 3.

[[123]] de Spectac. 4.

[[124]] de Idol. 6.

[[125]] de Idol. 11. Cf. Hermas, Mandate, 3, on lying in business.

[[126]] de Idol. 9.

[[127]] Ibid. 20.

[[128]] de cor. mil. 8.

[[129]] Ibid. 8.

[[130]] de Idol. 24, inter hos scopulos et sinus, inter hæc vada et freta idololatriæ, velificata spiritu dei fides navigat.

[[131]] de fuga, 13.

[[132]] Apol. 4.

[[133]] Apol. 6.

[[134]] Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God (Gifford Lectures) ii, p. 163.

[[135]] ad Natt. i, 5.

[[136]] Cf. pp. 20-22.

[[137]] Apol. 17, ita eum vis magnitudinis et notum hominibus obicit et ignotum.

[[138]] Apol. 21.

[[139]] Chapters 22 to 24 give a good summary of his views on dæmons.

[[140]] Celsus refers to Christian discussion of this; Origen, adv. Cels. iii 43.

[[141]] Cf. ad. Scap. 2, with argument from end of world.

[[142]] c. 39 vide, inquiunt, ut invicem se diligant.

[[143]] Epictetus, D. iii, 23.

[[144]] Clement, Strom. vi, 56, philautía.

[[145]] de anima, 1.

[[146]] Cf. de anima, 6, 17, 18, 23, etc.

[[147]] de Præscr. 7.

[[148]] adv. Marc. i, 2.

[[149]] de res. carnis, 2.

[[150]] de Præscr. 7.

[[151]] de Præscr. 13.

[[152]] de Præscr. 15.

[[153]] de Præscr. 21.

[[154]] de Præscr. 37, Mea est possessio. Cf. definition which says possessions appellantur agri ... qui non mancipatione sed usu tenebantur et ut quisque occupaverat possidebat. Tertullian improves this title as he goes on.

[[155]] This gibe is in adv. Marc. i, 5; there are plenty without it in adv. Val.

[[156]] adv. Hermog. 9, iure, beneficio, impetu, id est dominio precario vi.

[[157]] de carne Christi, 2.

[[158]] de carne Christi, 5, Quodcunque deo indignum est mihi expedit.

[[159]] de carne Christi, 5, prorsus credibile est quia ineptum est, ... certum est quia impossibile.... Quid dimidias mendacio Christum? Totus veritas fuit.

[[160]] de carne Christi, 9, trepidat perhaps represents the agonía of Luke.

[[161]] de res. carnis, 51.

[[162]] de pænit. 1.

[[163]] de pænit. 12.

[[164]] Scorpiace, 12

[[165]] de Idol. 24 (end), Viderimus enim si secundum arcæ typum et corvus et milvus et lupus et canis et serpens in ecclesia erit.

[[166]] de Pud. 20.

[[167]] de anima, 9.