CHAPTER X. THE DANGER OF FALSE LEGENDS AND PERSECUTION.
Mankind has been too long imposed upon by falsehood; it is therefore time that we should come to the knowledge of the few truths that can be distinguished from amidst the clouds of fiction which cover Roman history from the times of Tacitus and Suetonius, and with which the annals of the other nations of antiquity have almost always been obscured.
Can any one, for example, believe that the Romans, a grave and modest people, could have condemned Christian virgins, the children of persons of the first quality, to common prostitution? This is assuredly very inconsistent with the noble austerity of that nation from whom we received our laws, and who punished so rigorously the least transgression of chastity in their vestals. These shameful stories may indeed be found in the Actes Sincères of Ruinart. But should we believe those acts before the “Acts of the Apostles”? The Actes Sincères tell us from Bollandus that there were in the city of Ancira seven Christian virgins, each of them upwards of seventy, whom the governor, Theodectes, ordered to be deflowered by the young men of the place; but these poor maidens having escaped this disaster—as indeed there was great reason they should—he compelled them to assist stark naked at the mysteries of Diana, at which, by the way, no one ever assisted but in a veil. St. Theodotus, who, though indeed nothing more than an innkeeper, was not the less pious for that, besought God devoutly that he would be pleased to take away the lives of these holy maidens lest they should yield to temptation. God heard his prayer. The governor ordered them all to be thrown into a lake with stones about their necks; immediately after which they appeared to Theodotus, and begged of him, “that he would not suffer their bodies to be devoured by the fishes.” These, it seems, were their own words.
Hereupon the innkeeper saint and some of his companions went in the night-time to the side of the lake, which was guarded by a party of soldiers, a heavenly torch going all the way before, to light them. When they came to the place where the guards were posted, they saw a heavenly horseman armed cap-a-pie, with a lance in his hand, who fell upon the soldiers and dispersed them, while St. Theodotus drew the dead bodies of the virgins out of the water. He was afterwards carried before the governor, who ordered his head to be struck off, without the heavenly horseman interfering to prevent it. However disposed we may be to pay all due reverence to the true martyrs of our holy religion, we must confess it is very hard to believe the story of Bollandus and Ruinart.
Need I add to this the legend of young St. Romanus? Eusebius tells us, that having been condemned to be burnt, he was accordingly thrown into the fire, when some Jews, who were present, made a mock of Jesus Christ, who suffered his followers to be burnt when God had delivered Shadrac, Meshach, and Abednego out of the fiery furnace. No sooner had the Jews uttered this blasphemy than they beheld St. Romanus walking triumphant and unhurt forth from the flaming pile; this being reported to the emperor, he gave orders for his being pardoned, telling the judge that he would not have an affair upon his hands with God—a strange expression for Diocletian! The judge, however, notwithstanding the emperor’s clemency, ordered St. Romanus to have his tongue cut out; and, though he had executioners at hand, commanded the operation to be performed by a surgeon. Young Romanus, who had from his birth labored under an impediment of speech, no sooner lost his tongue than he spoke distinctly, and with great volubility. Upon this, the surgeon received a severe reprimand; when, in order to show that he had performed his operation, secundum artem, he laid hold of a man who was going by, from whom he cut just the same portion of tongue as he had done from St. Romanus, on which the patient instantly died, for, adds our author very learnedly, “Anatomy teaches us that a man cannot live without his tongue.” If Eusebius did really write such stuff, and it has not been added by some other hand, what degree of credit can we give to his history?
We have the relation of the martyrdom of St. Felicitas and her seven children, who are said to have been condemned to death by the wise and pious Antoninus, but without giving us the author’s name, who, most probably, possessed of more zeal than veracity, had a mind to imitate the history of the Maccabees. He begins his relation in the following manner: “St. Felicitas was by birth a Roman, and lived in the reign of Antoninus.” It is clear by these words that the author did not live at the same time with St. Felicitas. He says that they were judged before the prætor in the Campus Martius, whereas the Roman prefect’s tribunal was not in the Campus Martius, but in the Capitol, for, although the Comitia had been held there formerly, yet at this time it was used only as a place for reviewing the soldiers, for chariot races, and for military games. This alone is sufficient to detect the fiction.
The author adds furthermore, that after sentence was passed, the emperor committed the care of seeing it executed to different judges, a circumstance which is entirely repugnant to the usual forms in those times, and in every other.
We also read of St. Hippolytus, who is said to have been drawn in pieces by horses, as was Hippolytus, the son of Theseus. But a punishment of this kind was not known among the ancient Romans; and this fabulous story took its rise wholly from the similitude of names.
And here we may make one observation, that in the multitude of martyrologies, composed wholly by the Christians themselves, we almost always read of a great number of them coming of their own accord into the prison of their condemned brother, following him to execution, saving the blood as it flows from him, burying his dead body and performing miracles with his relics. Now, if the persecution was levelled only at the religion, would not the authors of it have destroyed those who thus openly declared themselves Christians, administered comfort and assistance to their brethren under sentence, and were moreover, charged with working enchantments with their inanimate remains? Would they not have treated them as we have treated several different sects of Protestants, whom we have butchered and burnt by hundreds, without distinction of age or sex? Is there amongst all the authenticated accounts of the ancient persecutions a single instance like that of St. Bartholomew, and the massacre in Ireland? Is there one that comes near to the annual festival, which is still celebrated at Toulouse, and which for its cruelty deserves to be forever abolished, where the inhabitants of a whole city go in procession to return thanks to God, and felicitate one another, for having, two hundred years ago, massacred upwards of four thousand of their fellow subjects?
With horror I say it, but it is an undoubted truth, that we, who call ourselves Christians, have been persecutors, executioners, and assassins! And of whom? Of our own brethren. It is we who have razed a hundred towns to their foundations with the crucifix or Bible in our hands, and who have continually persevered in shedding torrents of blood, and lighting the fires of persecution, from the reign of Constantine to the time of the religious horrors of the cannibals who inhabited the Cévennes; horrors which, praised be God, no longer exist.
Indeed, we still see at times some miserable wretches of the more distant provinces sent to the gallows on account of religion. Since the year 1745 eight persons have been hanged of those called predicants or ministers of the gospel, whose only crime was that of having prayed to God for their king in bad French, and giving a drop of wine, and a morsel of leavened bread, to a few ignorant peasants. Nothing of all this is known in Paris, where pleasure engrosses the whole attention, and where they are ignorant of everything that passes, not only in foreign kingdoms, but even in the more distant parts of their own. The trials in these cases frequently take up less time than is used to condemn a deserter. The king wants only to be informed of this, and he would certainly extend his mercy on such occasions.
We do not find that the Roman Catholic priests are treated in this manner in any Protestant country: there are above a hundred of them,[29] both in England and Ireland, publicly known to be such, and who have yet been suffered to live peaceably and unmolested, even during the last war.
Shall we then always be the last to adopt the wholesome sentiments of other nations? They have corrected their errors, when shall we correct ours? It has required sixty years to make us receive the demonstrations of the great Newton: we have but just begun to dare to save the lives of our children by inoculation, and it is but of very late date that we have put in practice the true principles of agriculture; when shall we begin to put in practice the true principles of humanity, or with what face can we reproach the heathens with having made so many martyrs, when we ourselves are guilty of the same cruelties in the like circumstances?
Let it be allowed that the Romans put to death a number of Christians on account of their religion only: if so, the Romans were highly blamable; but shall we commit the same injustice, and while we reproach them for their persecutions, be persecutors ourselves?
If there should be any one so destitute of honesty, or so blinded with enthusiasm, as to ask me here, why I thus undertake to lay open our errors and faults, and to destroy the credit of all our false miracles and fictitious legends, which serve to keep alive the zeal and piety of many persons; and should such a person tell me that some errors are absolutely necessary; that, like ulcers, they give a vent to the humors of the body, and by being taken away would compass its destruction, thus would I answer him:
“All those false miracles by which you shake the credit due to real ones, the numberless absurd legends with which you clog the truths of the Gospel, serve only to extinguish the pure flame of religion in our hearts.” There are too many persons, who, desirous of being instructed, but not having the time for acquiring instruction, say: “The teachers of my religion have deceived me, therefore there is no religion: it is better to throw myself into the arms of Nature than those of Error; and I had rather place my dependence on her law than in the inventions of men.” Others again unhappily go still greater lengths; they perceive that imposture has put a bridle in their mouths, and therefore will not submit even to the necessary curb of truth; they incline towards atheism, and run into depravity because others have been impostors and persecutors.
Such are undeniably the consequences of pious frauds and superstitious fopperies. Mankind in general reason but by halves: it is certainly a very vicious way of arguing to say, that because the golden legend of Voraginus, and the “Flower of Saints” of the Jesuit Ribadeneira, abound in nothing but absurdities, therefore there is no God: that the Catholics have massacred a great number of Huguenots, and the Huguenots in their turn have murdered a great number of Catholics, therefore there is no God: that certain bad men have made use of confession, the holy communion, and all the other sacraments, as a means for perpetrating the most atrocious crimes, and therefore there is no God. For my part, I, on the contrary, should conclude from thence that there is a God, who after this transitory life, in which we have wandered so far from the true knowledge of Him, and have seen so many crimes committed under the sanction of His holy name, will at length deign to comfort us for the many dreadful calamities we have suffered in this life; for if we consider the many religious wars, and the forty papal schisms, which have almost all of them been bloody; if we reflect upon the multitude of impostures, which have almost all proved fatal; the irreconcilable animosities excited by differences in opinions, and the numberless evils occasioned by false zeal, I cannot but believe that men have for a long time had their hell in this world.