The Conversion of Rome.
[Footnote 196]
[Footnote 196:
1. History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By W. E. H. Lecky. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.
2. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By the same. From the London edition. New York: Appleton & Co., 1868. 2 vols. 8vo.]
Two irreconcilable systems of morals have disputed the empire of the earliest times. The one is founded on the fact that God creates man; the other on the assumption that man is himself God, or, at least, a god unto himself. The first system finds its principle in the fact stated in the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth;" the second finds its principle in the assurance of Satan to Eve, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." The first system is that of the Biblical patriarchs, the synagogue, the Christian church, and all sound philosophy as well as of common sense—is the theological system, which places man in entire dependence on God as principle, medium, and end, and asserts as its basis in us, HUMILITY, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The other system is the gentile or pagan system, or that which prevailed with the Gentiles after their falling away from the patriarchal religion. It assumed, in its practical developments, two forms, the supremacy of the state and the supremacy of the individual; but in both was asserted the supremacy of man—or man as his own lawgiver, teacher, and master, his own beginning, middle, and end, and therefore, either individually or collectively, man's sufficiency for himself. Its principle or basis, then, is PRIDE.
Mr. Lecky adopts, as we have shown in our former article, the pagan, or, more properly, the satanic system of morals, at least as to its principle, though in some few particulars he gives the superiority to Christian morals, particulars in which Christians advanced further than had advanced the best pagan school before the conversion of Rome, but in the same direction, on the same principle, and from the same starting-point. He nowhere accepts the Christian or theological principle, and rejects everywhere, with scorn, Christian asceticism, which, according to him, is based on a false principle—that of appeasing the anger of a malevolent God. He accepts Christianity only so far as reducible to the pagan principle.
The only points in which Christian morals—for Christian dogmas, in his view, have no relation to morals, and are not to be counted—are a progress on pagan morals, are the assertion of the brotherhood of the race and the recognition of the emotional side of human nature. But even these two points, as he understands them, are not peculiar to Christianity. He shows that some of the later Stoics, at least, asserted the brotherhood of the race, or that nothing human is foreign to any one who is a man—that all good offices are due to all men; and whoever has studied Plato at all, knows that Platonism attached at least as much importance, and gave as large a scope to our emotional nature, as does Christianity. Christian morals have, then, really nothing peculiar, and are, in principle, no advance on paganism. The most that can be said is that Christianity gave to the brotherhood of the race more prominence than did paganism, and transformed the Platonic love, which was the love of the beautiful, into the love of humanity. This being all, we may well ask, How was it that Christianity was able to gain the victory over the pagan philosophers, and to convert the city of Rome and the Roman empire?
Mr. Lecky adopts the modern doctrine of progress, and he endeavors to prove from the historical analysis of the several pagan schools of moral philosophy, that the pagan world was gradually approaching the Christian ideal, and that when Christianity appeared at Rome it had all but attained it, so that the change was but slight, and, there being a favorable conjuncture of external circumstances, the change was easily effected. The philosophers of the empire had advanced from primitive fetichism to a pure and sublime monotheism; the mingling of men of all nations and all religions in Rome, consequent on the extension of the empire over the whole civilized world, had liberalized the views, weakened the narrow exclusiveness of former times, and gone far towards the obliteration of the distinction of nations, castes, and classes, and thus had, in a measure, prepared the world for the reception of a universal religion, based on the doctrine of the fraternity of the race and love of humanity.
All this would be very well, if it were true; but it happens to be mainly false. The fact, as well as the idea of progress, in the moral order, is wholly foreign to the pagan world. No pagan nation ever exhibits the least sign of progress in the moral order, either under the relation of doctrine or that of practice. The history of every pagan people is the history of an almost continuous moral deterioration. The purest and best period, under a moral point of view, in the history of the Roman republic, was its earliest, and nothing can exceed the corruption of its morals and manners at its close. We may make the same remark of every non-Catholic nation in modern times. There is a far lower standard of morals reached or aimed at in Protestant nations to-day than was common at the epoch of the Reformation; and the moral corruption of our own country has increased in a greater ratio than have our wealth and numbers. We are hardly the same people that we were even thirty years ago; and the worst of it is, that the pagan system, whether under the ancient Greco-Roman form or under the modern Protestant form, has no recuperative energy, and the nation abandoned to it has no power of self-renovation. Pagan nations may advance, and no doubt, at times, have advanced, in the industrial order, in the mechanic arts, and in the fine arts, but in the moral, intellectual, and spiritual order, never.
Mr. Lecky confines his history almost entirely to the moral doctrines of the philosophers; but even in these he shows no moral melioration in the later from the earlier, no progress towards Christian morals. In relation to specific duties of man to man, and of the citizen to the state, the Christian has, indeed, little fault to find with the De Officiis of Cicero; but we find even in him no approach to the Christian basis of morals. The Greeks never have any conception of either law or good, in the Christian sense. The
was only a rule or principle of harmony; it had its reason in the
, or the beautiful, and could not bind the conscience. The Latins placed the end, or the reason and motive of the moral law, in the honestum, the proper, the decent, or decorous. The highest moral act was virtus, manliness, and consisted in bravery or courage. The rule was, to be manly; the motive, self-respect. One must not be mean or cowardly, because it was unmanly, and would destroy one's self-respect. We have here pride, not humility; not the slightest approach to the Christian principle of morals, either to the rule or the motive of virtue as understood by the Christian church.
Yet Mr. Lecky tells us the moral doctrines of the philosophers were much superior to the practice of the people. He admits the people were far below the philosophers, and were very corrupt; but we see no evidence that he has any adequate conception of how corrupt they were. What the people were we can learn from the satirists, from the historians, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, especially from the De Civitate Dei of St. Augustine, and the writings of the early Greek and Latin fathers. Our author acknowledges not only that the philosophers were superior to the people, but also that they were impotent to effect their moral elevation or any moral amelioration of their condition. Nothing more true. How, then, if Christianity was based on the pagan principle of morals, was in the same order with paganism, and differed from it only in certain details, or, as the schoolmen say, certain accidents—how explain the amelioration of morals and manners which uniformly followed whenever and wherever it was received?
If, as the author holds, Christianity was really only a development of the more advanced thought of the pagan empire, why did it not begin with the philosophers, the representatives of that advanced thought? Yet nothing is more certain than that it did not begin with them. The philosophers were the first to resist it, and the last to hold out against it. It spread at first among the people, chiefly among the slaves—that is, among those who knew the least of philosophy, who were least under the influence of the philosophers, and whose morals it is confessed the philosophers did not and could not elevate. This of itself refutes the pretence that Christianity was an offshoot of heathen philosophy. If it had been, and its power lay in the fact that the empire in its progress was prepared for it, its first converts should have been from the ranks of the more advanced classes. But the reverse was the fact. "You see your calling, brethren," says St. Paul to the Corinthians, "that not many are wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong; and the mean things of the world, and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen, and things that are not, that he might destroy the things that are; that no flesh should glory in his sight." [Footnote 197] So said the great teacher of the Gentiles, as if anticipating the objection of modern rationalists. Evidently, then, the pretended preparation of the Roman empire for Christianity must count for nothing, for Christianity gained its first establishments among those whom that preparation, even if it had been made, had not reached.
[Footnote 197: Cor. i. 26.]
We cannot follow step by step the author in the special chapter which he devotes to the conversion of Rome, and the triumph of Christianity in the empire. We have already indicated the grounds on which he explains the marvellous fact. He denies all agency of miracles, will recognize no supernatural aid, and aims to explain it on natural principles or by natural causes alone. Thus far he has certainly failed; but let us try him on his own ground. We grant that the breaking down of the hundred nationalities and fusing so many distinct tribes and races into one people, under one supreme political authority, did in some sense prepare the way for the introduction of a universal religion. But it must be remembered that the fusion was not complete, and that the work of amalgamating and Romanizing the several nations placed by conquest under the authority of Rome was only commenced, when Christianity was first preached in the capital of the empire. Each conquered nation retained as yet its own distinctive religion, and to a great extent its own distinctive civilization. Gaul, Spain, and the East were Roman provinces, but not thoroughly Romanized, and it was not till after Christianity had gained a footing in the empire that provincials out of Italy were admitted to the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship. The law recognized the religion of the state, but it tolerated for every conquered nation its own national religion. There was as yet nothing in the political, social, or religious order of the empire to suggest a universal religion, or that opened the way for the introduction of a catholic as distinguished from a national religion. All the religions recognized and tolerated were national religions. Christianity was always catholic, for all nations, not for any particular nation alone. If, then, at a subsequent period, the boasted universality of the empire favored the diffusion of Christianity, it did not favor its introduction in the beginning. In all other respects there was, as we read history, no evangelical preparation in Rome or the Roman empire. The progress, if progress it may be called, of the Gentiles, had been away from the primitive religion reasserted by Christianity, and in a direction from, not towards, the great doctrines and principles of the Gospel. What of primitive tradition they had retained had become so corrupted, perverted, or travestied as to be hardly recognizable. They had changed, even with the philosophers, the true basis of morals, and the corrupt morals of the people were only the practical development of the principles adopted by even the best of the Gentile philosophers, as rationalism is only the development of principles adopted by the reformers, who detested it, and asserted exclusive supernaturalism. Even the monotheism of some pagan philosophers was not the Christian doctrine of one God, any more than simple theism—the softened name for deism—or even theophilanthropy is Christianity. The Christian God is not only one, but he is the creator of the world, of all things visible and invisible, the moral governor of the universe, and the remunerator of all who seek him. The God of Plato, or of any of the other philosophers, is no creative God, and the immortality of the soul that Plato and his master Socrates defended had hardly any analogy with the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel. The Stoics, whom the author places in the front rank of pagan moralists, did not regard God as the creator of the world, and those among them who held that the soul survives the body, believed not in the resurrection of the flesh, nor in future rewards and punishments. Their motive to virtue was their own self-respect, and their study was to prove themselves independent of the flesh and its seductions, indifferent to pleasure or pain, serene and unalterable, through self-discipline, whatever the vicissitudes of life. The philosophers adopted the morality of pride, and aimed to live and act not as men dependent on their Creator, but as independent gods, while the people were sunk in the grossest ignorance and moral corruption, and subject to the most base and abominable superstitions. Such was the pagan empire when Christianity was first preached at Rome, only much worse than we venture to depict it.
Now, to this Roman world, rotten to the core, the Christian preachers proclaimed a religion which arraigned its corruption, which contradicted its cherished ideas on every point, and substituted meekness for cruelty, and humility for pride, as the principle of morals. They had against them all the old superstitions and national religions of the empire, the religion of the state, associated with all its victories, supported by the whole power of the government, and by the habits, usages, traditions, and the whole political, military, social, and religious life of the Roman people. They could not move without stepping on something held sacred, or open their mouths without offending some god or some religious usage; for the national religion was interwoven with the simplest and most ordinary usages of private and social life. If a pagan sneezed, no Christian could be civil enough to say, "Jupiter help you," for that would recognize a false god. Yet the Christian missionaries did succeed in converting Rome and making it the capital of the Christian world, as it was, when they entered it, the capital of the heathen world. You tell me this mighty change was effected, circumstances favoring, by natural and human means! Credat Judaeus Appelles, non ego.
The cause of the success, after the preparation named, which turns out to have been no preparation at all, were, according to the author, principally the zeal, the enthusiasm, and the intolerance or exclusiveness of the Christians, the doctrines of the brotherhood of the race and of a future life, and their appeals to the emotional side of human nature. He does not think the conversion of Rome any thing remarkable. The philosophers had failed to regenerate society in the moral order, the old religions had lost their hold on men's convictions, the old superstitions were losing their terrors, and men felt and sighed for something better than any thing they had. In fact, minds were unsettled, and were ready for something new. This description, not very applicable to Rome at the period in question, is not inapplicable to the Protestant world at the present time. Protestants are no longer satisfied with the results, either dogmatic or moral, of the Reformation, and the thinking portion of them wish for something better than any thing they have; yet not, therefore, can we conclude that they can easily, or by any purely human means, be converted to the Catholic Church; for they have—with individual exceptions, indeed—not lost their confidence in the underlying principle of the Reformation, or opened their minds or hearts to the acknowledgment of the principle, either of Catholic dogma or of Catholic morals. It is not so much that they do not know or misconceive that principle, but they have a deep-rooted repugnance to it, detest it, abhor it, and cannot even hear it named with patience. So was it with the pagan Romans. The whole pagan world was based on a principle which the Christian preacher could not speak without contradicting. The Christian ideal was not only above, but antagonistic to the pagan ideal, and, consequently, the more zealous the Christian missionary, the more offensive he would prove himself. His intolerance or exclusiveness might help him whose faith was strong, yet little heeded in practice; but when faith itself was not only wanting but indignantly rejected, it could only excite anger or derision.
The apostle had no point d'appui in the pagan traditions, and it was only rarely that he could find any thing in heathen authors, poets, or philosophers that he could press into his service. The pagan, no doubt, had natural reason, but it was so darkened by spiritual ignorance, so warped by superstition, and so abnormally developed by false principles, that it was almost impossible to find in it anything on which an argument for the truth could be based. The Gospel was not in the pagan order of thought, and the Christian apologists had to support it by appealing to a line of tradition which the Gentiles had not, or had only as corrupted, perverted, or travestied. The only traditions they could appeal to were those of the Hebrews, and they found it necessary, in some sort, to convert the pagans to Judaism, before they could convince them of the truth of the Gospel. This was any thing but easy to be done; for the Gentiles despised the Jews and their traditions, and the Jews themselves were the most bitter enemies of the Christians, had crucified the founder of Christianity, and rejected the Christian interpretation of their Scriptures.
The doctrine of the brotherhood of the race taught by the church was something more than was taught by the philosophers, in fact, another doctrine; and, though it had something consoling to the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, yet these are precisely the classes with whom old traditions linger the longest, and prejudices are the most inveterate and hardest to be overcome. They are the classes the most opposed to innovations, in the moral or spiritual order. The Protestant reformers proved this, and the peasantry were the last to accept the new gospel they preached, and rarely accepted it at all but through the influence or compulsion of their princes and nobles. We see, also, now, in Protestant countries, that, the peasantry having become Protestant, are far more difficult to convert than persons by birth or education belonging to the upper classes. Yet, it was precisely among the lower classes, or rather the slave class, that the Christian missionary had his greatest success; though the emancipation and equality he preached were spiritual only, not physical or social.
The doctrine of future life the church taught was coupled with two other doctrines hard for pagans to receive. The mere continuance of the spirit after the death of the body was, in some form, no doubt, held by the whole pagan world, a few sceptics excepted; but the resurrection of the body, or that what had once ceased to live would live again, was a thing wholly foreign to the pagan mind. Plato never, to my recollection, once hints it, and could not with his general principles. He held the union of the soul with the body to be a fall, a degradation from its previous state, the loss of its liberty; regarded the body as the enemy of the soul, as its dungeon, and looked upon death as its liberation, as a restoration to its original freedom and joy in the bosom of the divinity. The pagans had, as far as I can discover, no belief in future rewards and punishment in the Christian sense. They believed in malevolent gods, who, if they failed to appease their wrath before dying, would torture them after death in Tartarus; but the idea that a God of love would doom the wicked to hell, as a punishment for their moral offences or sins, was as hard for them to believe as it is for Mr. Lecky himself. Yet Christianity taught it, and brought the whole empire to believe it. Christianity, while it delivered the pagans from the false terrors of superstition, replaced them by what to the pagan mind seemed even a still greater terror.
In what the author says of appeals to the emotional side of our nature, he shows that he has studied paganism with more care and less prejudice than he has Christianity. The emotions, as such, have for the Christian no moral or religious value. The love the Gospel requires is not an emotional love, and Christian morals have little to do with the moral sentiment which Adam Smith asserted, or the benevolence which Hucheson held to be the principle of morality. There is no approach to the Christian principle in the fine-spun sentiment of Bernardine Saint-Pierre, Madame de Staël, or Chateaubriand. Sentimentalism, in any form, is wholly foreign to Christian morals and to Christian piety, and neither has probably a worse or a more dangerous enemy than the sentimentalism so rife in modern society, and which finds its way even into the writings of some Catholics. The sentiment of benevolence may be a mobile, but it is never the motive of Christian virtue. No doubt, one of the great causes of the success of Christianity was the inexhaustible charity of the early Christians, their love for one another, their respect for and tenderness to the poor, the forsaken, the oppressed, the afflicted, the suffering. But that charity had not its origin in our emotional nature, and though it may be attended by sentiment, is itself by no means a sentiment; for its reason and motive was the love of God, especially of God who had assumed our nature, and made himself man for man's sake, and died on the cross for man's redemption. The Christian sees God in every fellow-man who needs his assistance, or to whose wants he can minister. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." The Christian finds his Lord, the Beloved of his soul, wherever he finds one for whom Christ died, to whom he can be of service.
This charity, this love, may be mimicked by the sentiment of benevolence, but it does not grow out of it, is not that sentiment developed or intensified; it depends on the great central mystery of Christianity, that of "the Word made flesh," and can never be found where faith in the Incarnation is wanting, and faith is, always and everywhere, an intellectual act, not a sentimental affection. If it were a natural sentiment or emotion, why was it to be found among Christians alone? The heathen had all of nature that Christians have; they even recognized the natural brotherhood of the race, as does the author; how happens it, then, if Christianity is only a development of heathenism, and Christian charity is only a natural sentiment, that you find no trace of it in the pagan world? There is no effect without a cause, and there must have been something operating with Christians that was not to be found in paganism, and which is not included even in nature.
The pagans, like modern Protestants, worshipped success, and regarded success as a mark of the approbation of the gods. Misfortune, ill-luck, failure was a proof of the divine displeasure. Cromwell and his Roundheads interpreted uniformly their victories over the royalists as an indisputable proof of the divine approval of their course. It never occurred to them that the Almighty might be using them to chastise the royalists for their abuse of his favors, or to execute vengeance on a party that had offended him, and that, when he had accomplished his purpose with them, he would break them as a potter's vessel, and cast them away. The heathen looked upon the poor, the needy, the enslaved, the infirm, the helpless, and the suffering, as under the malediction of the gods, and refused to offer them any aid or consolation. They left the poor to struggle and starve. They did not do even so much for them as to shut them up in prisons called poor-houses. They looked with haughty contempt on the poor and needy, and if they sometimes threw them a crust, it was from pride, not charity, without the least kindly sympathies with them. As with modern non-Catholics, poverty, with them, was regarded and treated as a misfortune or as a crime.
Yet the Christians looked upon the poor with love and respect. Poverty, in their eyes, was no misfortune, no crime, but really a blessing, as bringing them nearer to God, and giving to the Christian more abundant in this world's goods an opportunity to do good, and lay up treasures in heaven. The Christian counts what he gives to the poor and needy as so much treasure saved, and placed beyond the reach of thieves and robbers, or any of the vicissitudes of fortune. Whence this difference between the pagan and the Christian, we might say, between the Catholic and non-Catholic? It cannot come from the simple recognition of the natural brotherhood of the race, for the natural ties of race and of kindred fail to call forth a love so strong, so enduring, so self-forgetting as Christian charity. Indeed, Christian charity is decidedly above the forces of nature. The brotherhood that gives rise to it is not the brotherhood in Adam, but the closer brotherhood in Christ; not in generation, but in regeneration. Give, then, as large a part as you will to Christian charity, in the conversion of Rome, you still have offered no proof that the conversion was effected by natural causes, for that charity itself is supernatural, and not in the order of natural causes.
Mr. Lecky wholly fails to adduce any natural causes adequate to the explanation of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of Christianity over paganism. He cannot do it, for this one sufficient reason, that paganism was impotent to reform itself, and yet it had all the natural causes working for it that Christianity had. The Christians had no more of nature than had the pagans, while all the natural advantages, power, wealth, institutions, human learning and science, the laws, habits, customs, and usages of the entire nation, or aggregation of nations, were against them. How, then, not only do by nature what the same nature in paganism could not do, or by nature alone triumph over nature clothed with so many advantages, and presenting so many obstacles? Why should nature be stronger, and so much stronger, in Christians than in Pagans, that a few illiterate fishermen from the lake of Genesareth, belonging by race to the despised nation of the Jews, could change not only the belief, but the moral life of the whole Roman people? Clearly, the Christians could not succeed without a power which paganism had not, and therefore not without a power that nature does not and cannot furnish.
The author denies the supernatural, and seeks to combat the argument we use by showing that several eastern superstitions, especially the worship of Isis, were introduced into Rome about the same time with Christianity, and gained no little currency, in spite of the imperial edicts against them. This is true, but there was no radical difference between those eastern superstitions and the state religion, and they demanded and effected no change of morals or manners. They were all in the order of the national religion, were based on the same principle, only they were a little more sensual and corrupt. Their temporary success required no other basis than Roman paganism itself furnished. And the edicts against their mysteries and orgies were seldom executed. It needs no supernatural principle to account for the rapid rise and spread of Methodism in a Protestant community, for it is itself only a form of Protestantism. But Christianity was not, and is not, in any sense, a form or development of paganism; in almost every particular, it is its direct contradictory. It was based on a totally different principle, and held entirely different maxims of life. A worshipper of Bacchus or Isis could without difficulty conform to the national or state religion, and comply with all its requirements. The Christian could conform in nothing, and comply with no pagan requirements. He could take no part in the national festivities, the national games, amusements, or rejoicings, for these were all dedicated to idols. There is no analogy in the case.
Mr. Lecky denies that the conversion of Rome was a miracle, and that it was effected on the evidence of miracles. He admits that miracles are possible, though he confounds miracles with prodigies, and says there is five times more proof in the case of many miracles than would be required to prove an ordinary historical fact; but he rejects miracles, not for the want of proof, nor because science has disproved them, but because the more intelligent portion of mankind have gradually dropped them, and ceased to believe in them, as they have dropped the belief in fairies, dwarfs, etc. The enlightened portion of mankind, it must be understood, are those who think like Mr. Lecky, and profess a Christianity without Christ, moral obligation without God the creator, and hold effects are producible without causes. We confess that we are not of their number, and probably shall never be an enlightened man in their sense. We believe in miracles, and that miracles had not a little to do with the introduction and establishment of Christianity. As the author admits them to be possible, and that many are sustained by far greater proof than is needed to prove ordinary historical events, we hope that it will be allowed, that, in believing them, we are not necessarily involved in total darkness. But we have no space, at present, to enter upon the general question of miracles—a question that can not be properly treated without treating the whole question of the natural and the supernatural.
The author tells us that the early Christians at Rome rarely appealed, if at all, to miracles as proofs either of their doctrines or their mission. Yet that they sometimes did would seem pretty certain from the pains the pagans took to break the force of the Christian miracles by ascribing them to magic, or by setting up analogous or counter miracles of their own. Certain it is, however, that they appealed to the supernatural, and adduced not only the miracle of the resurrection of our Lord, which entered into the very staple of their preaching, and was one of the bases of their faith, but to that standing miracle of prophecy, and of a supernatural providence—the Jewish, people. The very religion they preached was supernatural, from beginning to end, and they labored to prove the necessity of faith in Christ, who was crucified, who rose from the dead, and is Lord of heaven and earth. There is no particular miracle or prophecy adduced to prove this that cannot, indeed, be cavilled at; but the Hebrew traditions and the faith of the Jewish people could not be set aside. Here was a whole nation whose entire life through many thousand years had been based on a prophecy, a promise of the Messiah. This prophecy, frequently renewed, and borne witness to by the national organization, the religious institutions, sacrifices, and offerings, and the entire national and moral life through centuries, is a most stupendous miracle. When you take this in connection with the traditions preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, which go back to the creation of the world—developing one uniform system of thought, one uniform doctrine, one uniform faith, free from all superstition; one uniform plan of divine providence, and throwing a marvellous light on the origin, duty, and end of man—you find a supernatural fact which is irresistible, and sufficient of itself to convince any unprejudiced mind that Christianity is the fulfilment of the promises made to Adam after his expulsion from the Garden, to the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to the Jewish people.
We have no space here to develop this argument, but it is the argument that had great weight with ourselves personally, and, by the grace of God, was the chief argument that brought us to believe in the truth of Christianity, and in the church as the fulfilment of the synagogue. The apostles and early apologists continually, in one form or another, appeal to this standing miracle, this long-continued manifestation of the supernatural, as the basis of their proof of Christianity. They adduced older traditions than any the pagans could pretend to, and set forth a faith that had continued from the first man, which had once been the faith of all mankind, and from which the Gentiles had fallen away, and been plunged, in consequence, into the darkness of unbelief, and subjected to all the terrors of the vilest, most corrupt, and abominable superstitions. They labored to show that the Gentiles, in the pride of their hearts, had forsaken the God that made them, creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, visible or invisible, for Satan, for demons, and for gods made with their own hands, or fashioned by their own lusts and evil imaginations. They pursued, indeed, the same line of argument that Catholics pursue against Protestants, only modified by the fact that the Protestant falling away, so clearly foretold by St. Paul in his Epistles, is more recent, less complete, and Protestants have not yet sunk so low as had the Gentiles of the Roman empire.
But it was not enough to establish the truth of Christianity in the Roman mind. Christian morals are above the strength of nature alone; yet the pagans were not only induced to give up their own principle of morals, and to accept as true the Christian principle, but they gave up their old practices, and yielded a practical obedience to the Christian law. Those same Romans changed their manner of life, and attained to the very summits of Christian sanctity. The philosophers gave many noble precepts, preserved from a purer tradition than their own, but they had no power to get them practised, and our author himself says they had no influence on the people; yet they enjoined nothing above the forces of nature. The Christians came, taught the people a morality impracticable to nature even in its integrity, and yet what they taught was actually practised even by women, children, and slaves. How was this? It was not possible without supernatural aid, or the infusion of grace which elevates the soul above the level of nature, enabling it at once to act from a supernatural principle, and from a supernatural motive. All who have attempted the practise of Christian perfection by the strength of nature alone, have sadly failed. Take the charitable institutions, societies for relieving the poor, providing for the aged and infirm, protecting the fatherless and widows, for restoring the fallen, and reforming the vicious or criminal, established by non-Catholics—they are all comparative, if not absolute failures. Though modelled after institutions of the church, and supported at lavish expense, none of them succeed. They lack some essential element which is efficacious in Catholic institutions, and that element is undoubtedly supernatural grace, for that is all Catholics have that they have not in far greater abundance. They have humanity, natural benevolence, learning, ability, and ample wealth—why do they not succeed? Because they lack supernatural charity, and the blessing of God that always accompanies it. No other reasons can be assigned.
Mr. Lecky thinks the persecutions by the state, which the early Christians had to endure, or that the spread of Christianity in spite of them, are not worth anything in the argument. In the first place, he pretends that the persecutions were not very severe, and were for the most part confined to particular localities, and rarely became general in the empire; they were of brief duration, and came only at distant intervals, and the number of martyrs could not have been great. In the second place, the persecutions rather helped the persecuted religion, as persecution usually does. Rome, in reality, was tolerant, and most of the pagan emperors were averse to harsh measures, and connived at the growth of the new religion, which they regarded as one of the innumerable superstitions hatched in the East, and which must soon pass away.
Rome tolerated for conquered nations their national religion, or worship, but no religion except the state religion for Romans. The national gods recognized by the senate, and whose images were allowed to stand by the side of the Roman gods, might be worshipped; but no Roman citizen was allowed to desert the state religion, and nowhere in the empire was any religion tolerated that was not the national worship of some people subject or tributary to Rome. Now, Christianity was no national religion, and was hostile to the state religion, and utterly irreconcilable with it; for it there was no toleration; it was prohibited by the laws of the empire as well as by the edicts of the emperors. The Christians might at first be overlooked as too insignificant to excite hostility, or they might have been regarded, since they were chiefly Jews, as a Jewish sect; they might also, as they were a quiet, peaceable people, obeying the laws when not repugnant to the law of God, performing all their moral, social, and civil duties, and never mingling in the affairs of state, have been connived at for a time. But they had no legal protection, and if complained of and brought before the tribunals, and proved to be Christians, they had no alternative but to conform to the national religion or suffer death, often in the most excruciating forms; for the Romans were adepts in cruelty, and took delight in watching the writhings and sufferings of their victims. Even Trajan, while he prohibited the search for them, ordered, if accused and convicted of being Christians, that they should be put to death. Such being the law, the prefect or governor of a province could at any time, without any imperial edict, put the law in force against the Christians, if so disposed; and that they did so in all the provinces of the empire, frequently and with unsparing severity, we know from history. The Christians were safe at no time and nowhere in the empire, and it is probable that the number of victims of the ten general persecutions were by far the smaller number of those who suffered for the faith prior to the accession of Constantine. We place no confidence in the calculations of Gibbon or our author, and we have found no reason for believing that the Christian historians, or the fathers, exaggerated the number of those who received the crown of martyrdom.
It is a great mistake to suppose that paganism had lost its hold on the Roman mind till long after the Christians had become a numerous body in the empire. There were, no doubt, individuals who treated all religions with indifference, but never had the pagan superstitions a stronger hold on the mass of the people, especially in Rome and the western provinces, than during the first two centuries of our era. The republic had been transformed into the empire, and the government was never stronger, or the worship of the state more intolerant, more fervent, or more energetically supported by the government. The work of Romanizing the various conquered nations was effected under the emperors, and the signs of decline and dissolution of the empire did not appear till near the close of the third century. The Roman state and paganism seemed to be indissolubly linked together—so closely that the pagans attributed to the rise and progress of Christianity the decline and downfall of both. Certain it is, that paganism lost its hold on the people or the state only in proportion to the progress of Christianity; and the abandonment of the heathen gods and the desertion of the heathen temples were due to the preaching of the Gospel, not a fact which preceded and prepared the way for it. Converts are seldom made from the irreligious and indifferent classes, who are the last, in any age, to be reached or affected by truth and piety.
The fact is, that paganism fought valiantly to the last, and Christianity had to meet and grapple with it in its full force, and when supported by the strongest and most effective government that ever existed, still in the prime and vigor of its life. The struggle was harder and longer continued than is commonly supposed, and by no means ended with Constantine. Paganism reascended the throne—in principle, at least—under Constantius, the son, and avowedly under Julian, the nephew of the first Christian emperor. Every pagan statesman saw, from the first, that there was an irrepressible antagonism between Christianity and paganism, and that the former could not prevail without destroying the latter, and, of course, the religion of the state, and apparently not without destroying the state with it. The intelligent and patriotic portion of the Roman people must have regarded the spread of Christianity very much as the Protestant leaders regard the spread of Catholicity in our own country. They looked upon it as a foreign religion, and anti-Roman. It rejected the gods of Rome, to whom the city was indebted for her victories and the empire of the world. We may be sure, then, that the whole force of the state, the whole force of the pagan worship, backed by the passions and fanaticism of the people, whether of the city or the provinces, was exerted to crush out the new and offensive worship; and, whether the numbers of martyrs were a few more or a few less, the victory obtained by Christianity against such fearful odds is not explicable without the assumption of supernatural aid—especially when that victory carried with it a complete change of morals and manners, and the practice in not a few who underwent it of a heroic sanctity, or virtues which are confessedly above our natural strength.
No false or merely natural religion could have survived, far less have vanquished, such opposition as Christianity encountered at every point. The very fact that it thrived, in spite of the fearful persecution to which it was subjected, is a proof of its truth and divinity. We grant the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, but persecution fails only when it meets truth, when it meets God as the resisting force. We know the strength of superstition and the tenacity of fanaticism; but we deny that persecution has ever increased or multiplied the adherents or aided the growth of a false religion. There is no example of it in history. It is only the truth that does not succumb; and even they who profess the truth, when they have lost the practice of it, have yielded to the spirit of the world, and have ceased to be faithful to God, fail to stand before persecution, as was seen in the almost entire extinction of Catholics in the European nations that accepted the Protestant Reformation. The inefficacy of persecution to extinguish the doctrine persecuted is a commonplace of liberalism; but history proves the contrary, and hence the fact that Christianity, instead of being extinguished by the heathen persecution, spread under it, and even gained power by it, is no mean proof of its truth and its supernatural support.
The author obtains his adverse conclusion by substituting for the Christianity to which Rome was actually converted, and which actually triumphed in the empire, a Christianity of his own manufacture, a rationalistic Christianity, which has nothing to do with Christ Jesus, and him crucified; a Christianity despoiled of its mysteries, its doctrinal teachings, its distinctive moral precepts, and reduced to a simple moral philosophy. It is with him a theory, a school; not a fact, not a law, not an authority, not a living organism, nor of an order essentially different from paganism. His Christianity has its starting point in paganism, and only marks a particular stage in the general progress of the race. He does not see that it and paganism start from entirely different principles, and come down through separate and hostile lines, or that they have different ancestors. He does not understand that Christianity, if a development at all, is not the development of paganism, but of the patriarchal and Jewish religion, which placed the principle of duty in man's relation to God as his creator and final cause, not in the assumption of man's own divinity or godship. Hence he finds no need of supernatural aid to secure its triumph.
The author, placing Christianity in the same line with paganism, supposes that he accounts sufficiently for the conversion of Rome by the assumption that the Christians placed a stronger emphasis on certain doctrines held by the pagan philosophers, and were actuated by a greater zeal and enthusiasm than were those philosophers themselves. Yet he does not show the origin of the greater zeal, nor its character; and he entirely misapprehends the enthusiasm of the early Christians. They were, in no received sense of the word, enthusiasts, nor were they, in his sense of the word, even zealots. They in no sense corresponded to the character given them in The Last Days of Pompeii. They were neither enthusiasts nor fanatics; and their zeal, springing from true charity, was never obtrusive nor annoying. We find in the earlier and later sects enthusiasts, fanatics, and zealots, who are excessively offensive, and yet are able to carry away the simple, the ignorant, and the undisciplined; but we never find them among the early orthodox Christians, any more than you do among Catholics at the present day. The early Christians did not "creep into houses and lead away silly women," nor assault people in the streets or market-place, and seek to cram Christianity down their throats, whether they would or not, but were singularly sober, quiet, orderly, and regular in their proceedings, as Catholics have always been, compelling not people to hear them against their will, and instructing in the faith only those who manifested a desire to be instructed. The author entirely mistakes both the Christian order of thought and the character of the early Christians who suffered from and finally triumphed over the pagan empire.