The death of Stephen produced a great impression. The converts solemnized his funeral in the midst of tears and groans.[8.26] The separation between the new sectaries and Judaism was not yet absolute. The proselytes and the Hellenists, less strict in the matter of orthodoxy than the pure Jews, felt that they ought to render public homage to a man who had been an honor to their body, and whose peculiar opinions had not shut him out from the pale of the law.
Thus dawned the era of Christian martyrs. Martyrdom was not a thing entirely new. To say nothing of John Baptist and of Jesus, Judaism, at the epoch of Antiochus Epiphanus, had had its witnesses faithful unto the death. But the series of brave victims which opens with St. Stephen has exercised a peculiar influence upon the history of the human mind. It introduced into the western world an element which was wanting to it, absolute and exclusive Faith—this idea, that there is but one good and true religion. In this sense, the martyrs began the era of intolerance. It may be said, with great probability, that any one who gives his life for his faith would be intolerant if he were master. Christianity, after it had passed through three centuries of persecutions and became in its turn dominant, was more persecuting than any religion had ever been. When we have poured out our own blood for a cause, we are but too strongly led to shed the blood of others for the conservation of the treasure we have won.
The murder of Stephen was not, moreover, an isolated fact. Taking advantage of the weakness of the Roman functionaries, the Jews brought a real persecution[8.27] to bear down upon the Church. It seems that the vexations pressed hardest upon the Hellenists and the proselytes whose free tendencies enraged the orthodox. The Church of Jerusalem, already so strongly organized, was obliged to disperse. The apostles, according to a principle which seems to have taken strong hold of their minds,[8.28] did not leave the city. It was probably so with all the purely Jewish group, with those who were called the “Hebrews.”[8.29] But the great community, with its meals in common, its diaconal services, its varied exercises, ceased thenceforth, and was never again reconstructed upon its first model. It had lasted three or four years. It was for nascent Christianity an unequalled good fortune that its first attempts at association, essentially communist, were so soon broken up. Attempts of this kind engender abuses so shocking, that communist establishments are condemned to crumble away in a very short time,[8.30] or very soon to ignore the principle on which they are created.[8.31] Thanks to the persecution of the year 37, the cenobitic Church of Jerusalem was saved from the test of time. It fell in its flower, before interior difficulties had undermined it. It remained like a splendid dream, the memory of which animated in their life of trial all those who had formed part of it, like an ideal to which Christianity will incessantly aspire to return, without ever succeeding.[8.32] Those who know what an inestimable treasure for the members still existing of the St. Simonian Church is the memory of Ménilmontant, what friendship it creates between them, what joy gleams from their eyes as they speak of it, will comprehend the powerful link established between the new brethren by the fact of having loved and then suffered together. Great lives have nearly always to remember a few months during which they felt God—months which, though existing only in memory, delight all the after years of their lives.
The leading part, in the persecution we have just recounted, was played by that young Saul whom we have already found contributing, as far as in him lay, to the murder of Stephen. This furious man, furnished with a permission from the priests, entered into houses suspected of concealing Christians, took violent hold of men and women, and dragged them into prison or before the tribunals.[8.33] Saul prided himself on there being no one of his generation so zealous as himself for the traditions.[8.34] Often, it is true, the mildness, the resignation of his victims astonished him; he experienced a sort of remorse; he imagined hearing these pious women, hoping for the Kingdom of God, whom he had thrown into prison, say to him during the night, with a gentle voice: “Why persecutest thou us?” The blood of Stephen, by which he was almost literally stained, sometimes disturbed his vision. Many things he had heard said of Jesus went to his heart. This superhuman being, in his ethereal life, whence he sometimes issued to reveal himself in short apparitions, haunted him like a spectre. But Saul repulsed such thoughts with horror; he confirmed himself with a sort of frenzy in the faith of his traditions, and he was dreaming of new cruelties against those who attacked them. His name had become the terror of the faithful; the fiercest outrages, the most sanguinary perfidies, were dreaded at his hands.[8.35]
CHAPTER IX.
FIRST MISSIONS.—PHILIP THE DEACON.
The persecution of the year 37 had for its result, as always happens, the expansion of the doctrine it was wished to arrest. Until then the Christian preaching had scarcely extended beyond Jerusalem; no mission had been undertaken; inclosed within its lofty but narrow communion, the mother Church had not radiated around itself nor formed any branches. The dispersion of the little supper-table scattered the good seed to the four winds. The members of the Church of Jerusalem, violently driven from their quarters, spread themselves throughout Judea and Samaria,[9.1] and preached everywhere the kingdom of God. The deacons in particular, disengaged from their administrative functions by the ruin of the Community, became excellent evangelists. They were the active young element of the sect, in opposition to the somewhat heavy element constituted by the apostles and the “Hebrews.” One single circumstance, that of language, would have sufficed to create in these latter an inferiority in respect to preaching. They spoke, at least as their habitual tongue, a dialect which the Jews themselves did not use at a few leagues distance from Jerusalem. It was to the Hellenists that fell all the honor of the grand conquest, the recital of which is henceforth to be our principal object.
The theatre of the first of these missions, which was destined soon to embrace all the basin of the Mediterranean, was the region round about Jerusalem, within a circle of two or three days' journey. Philip the Deacon[9.2] was the hero of this first holy expedition. He evangelized Samaria with great success. The Samaritans were schismatics; but the young sect, after the example of their Master, was less susceptible than the rigorous Jews upon questions of orthodoxy. Jesus, it was said, had shown Himself on different occasions not altogether unfavorable to the Samaritans.[9.3]
Philip appears to have been one of the apostolical men most preöccupied with theurgy.[9.4] The accounts which relate to him carry us into a strange and fantastic world. It is by prodigies that are explained the conversions which he made among the Samaritans, and in particular at Sebaste, their capital. This country was itself filled with superstitious ideas about magic. In the year 36, that is to say two or three years before the arrival of the Christian preachers, a fanatic had excited quite a serious emotion among the Samaritans by preaching the necessity of returning to primitive Mosaism, of which he pretended to have found the sacred utensils.[9.5] A certain Simon, of the village of Gitta, or Gitton,[9.6] who afterwards rose to a great reputation, began about that time to make himself known by his wonderful operations.[9.7] It is painful to see the Gospel finding a preparation and a support in such chimeras. Quite a large multitude were baptized in the name of Jesus. Philip had the power of baptizing, but not that of conferring the Holy Ghost. This privilege was reserved to the apostles. When the tidings came to Jerusalem of the formation of a group of believers at Sebaste, it was resolved to send Peter and John to complete their initiation. The two apostles came, laid their hands upon the new converts, prayed over their heads; the latter were immediately endowed with marvellous powers attached to the conferring of the Holy Ghost. Miracles, prophecy, all the phenomena of illuminism, were produced, and the Church of Sebaste had nothing on this score to envy that of Jerusalem.[9.8]