Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ

by David Francis Bacon

“Such is the moral of all human tales;

’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,——

First freedom, and then glory——when that fails,

Wealth, vice, corruption,——barbarism at last,

And history, with all her volumes vast,

Hath but one page.”

An allusion to such a man, in such a book as this, could not be justified, but on this satisfactory ground;——that the changes which he wrought in the Roman government, and the conquests by which he spread and secured the influence of Roman civilization, seem to have done more than any other political action could do, to effect the general diffusion, and the perpetuity of the Christian faith. A glance at these great events, in this light, will show to us the first imperial Caesar, as Christ’s most mighty precursor, unwittingly preparing the way for the advance of the Messiah,——a bloody and all-crushing warrior, opening the path for the equally resistless triumphs of the Prince of Peace. Even this striking characteristic, of cool and unscrupulous ambition, became a most glorious means for the production of this strange result. This same moral obtuseness, too, about the right of conquest, so heinous in the light of modern ethics, but so blameless, and even praise-worthy in the eyes of the good and great of Caesar’s days, shows us how low was the world’s standard of right before the coming of Christ; and yet this insensibility became, in the hands of the God who causes the wrath of man to praise him, a doubly powerful means of spreading that faith, whose essence is love to man.

Look over the world, then, as it was before the Roman conquest, and see the difficulties, both physical and moral, that would have attended the universal diffusion of a new and peaceful religious faith. Barbarous nations, all over the three continents, warring with each other, and with the failing outworks of civilization,——besotted tyranny, wearing out the energies of its subjects, by selfish and all-grasping folly,——sea and land swarming with marauders, and every wheel of science and commerce rolling backward or breaking down. Such was the seemingly resistless course of events, when the star of Roman fortune rose on the world, under whose influence, at once destructive and benign, the advancing hosts of barbarity were checked and overthrown, and their triumphs stayed for five hundred years; the elegance of Grecian refinement was transplanted from the unworthy land of its birth, to Italian soil, and the most ancient tracks of commerce, as well as many new ones, were made as safe as they are at this peaceful day. The mighty Caesar, last of all, casting down all thrones but his, and laying the deep basis of its lasting dominion in the solid good of millions, filled up the valleys, leveled the mountains, and smoothed the plains, for the march of that monarch, whose kingdom is without end.

The connection of such a political change with the success of the Christian enterprise, and with the perfect development and triumph of our peaceful faith, depends on the simple truth, that Christianity always flourishes best in the most highly civilized communities, and can never be so developed as to do full justice to its capabilities, in any state of society, short of the highest point of civilization. It never has been received, and held uncorrupt, by mere savages or wanderers; and it never can be. Thus and therefore it was, that wherever Roman conquest spread, and secured the lasting triumphs of civilization, thither Christianity followed, and flourished, as on a congenial soil, till at last not one land was left in the whole empire, where the eagle and the dove did not spread their wings in harmonious triumph. In all these lands, where Roman civilization prepared the way, Christian churches rose, and gathered within them the noble and the refined, as well as the humble and the poor. Spain, Gaul, Britain and Africa, as well as the ancient homes of knowledge, Egypt, Greece and Asia, are instances of this kind. And in every one of these, the reign of the true faith became coeval with civilization, yielding in some instances, it is true, on the advance of modern barbarism, but only when the Arabian prophet made them bow before his sword. Yet while within the pale of Roman conquest, Christianity supplanted polytheism, beyond that wide circle, heathenism remained long undisturbed, till the victorious march of the barbarian conquerors, over the empire of the Caesars, secured the extension of the gospel to them also;——the vanquished, in one sense, triumphing in turn over the victors, by making them the submissive subjects of Roman civilization, language, and religion;——so that, for the first five hundred years of the Christian era, the dominion of the Caesars was the most efficient earthly instrument for the extension of the faith. The persecution which the followers of the new faith occasionally suffered, were the results of aberrations from the general principles of tolerance, which characterized the religious policy of the empire; and after a few such acts of insane cruelty, the natural course of reaction brought the persecuted religion into fast increasing and finally universal favor.

If the religion, thus widely and lastingly diffused, was corrupted from the simplicity of the truth as it was in Jesus, this corruption is to be charged, not against the Romans, but against the unworthy successors of the apostles and ancient fathers, who sought to make the severe beauty of the naked truth more acceptable to the heathenish fancies of the people, by robing it in the borrowed finery of mythology. Yet, though thus humiliated in its triumph, the victory of Christianity over that complex and dazzling religion, was most complete. The faith to which Italians and Greeks had been devoted for ages,——which had drawn its first and noblest principles from the mysterious sources of the antique Etruscan, Egyptian and Phoenician, and had enriched its dark and boundless plan with all that the varied superstitions of every conquered people could furnish,——the faith which had rooted itself so deeply in the poetry, the patriotism, and the language of the Roman, and had so twined itself with every scene of his nation’s glory, from the days of Romulus,——now gave way before the simple word of the carpenter of Nazareth, and was so torn up and swept away from its strong holds, that the very places which through twenty generations its triumphs had hallowed, were now turned into shrines for the worship of the God of despised Judah. So utterly was the Olympian Jove unseated, and cast down from his long-dreaded throne, that his name passed away forever from the worship of mankind, and has never been recalled, but with contempt. He, and all his motley train of gods and goddesses, are remembered no more with reverence, but vanishing from even the knowledge of the mass of the people, are