CONCLUSION

Constantine’s accession proved to be, like the coming of Alexander, a turning-point in the history of the world. His so-called conversion put into the hands of the Catholic Church a weapon for the suppression of all rivalry, of which she was not slow to make use. Already in his reign many of the heathen temples were torn down[[1217]], and under the rule of his morose and gloomy successor, Constantius, the work of demolition went on apace[[1218]]. The accession of the philosophic Julian gave the worshippers of other gods than Christ a short respite, and even allowed some of the temples destroyed in the former reigns to be restored by or at the expense of the Christians[[1219]]. Julian’s heroic death in Persia again threw the crown into the hands of a Christian emperor, whose reign of seven months gave him little time, as he perhaps had small inclination, for persecution[[1220]]; but under his successors Valentinian and Valens, heathen sacrifices were forbidden under severe penalties. The end came under Gratian, when the temple estates were confiscated, the priests and vestals deprived of the stipends which they had hitherto received from the public treasury, and the heathen confraternities or colleges were declared incapable of receiving legacies[[1221]]. Only a few rich men like the Vettius Agorius Praetextatus whom we have seen among the worshippers of Mithras, or the Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, whose learned and patriotic life has been so well described by Sir Samuel Dill[[1222]], could henceforth venture to practise, even with maimed rites, the faiths condemned by the Court and the Church.

As for the Gnostic sects, which since Hadrian’s time had striven with such success as we have seen to combine magic and other ancient beliefs with Christianity, they found but short shrift at the hands of the triumphant Church. By an edict issued by Constantine before his own reception into the Church, all their “houses of prayer” were confiscated for the benefit of the Catholic Church, their meeting even in private forbidden, and their books seized and burned[[1223]].

“Thus,” says Eusebius, “were the lurking places of the heretics broken up by the emperor’s command, and the savage beasts they have harboured (I mean the chief authors of their impious doctrines) driven to flight. Of those whom they had deceived, some, intimidated by the emperor’s threats, disguising their real feelings, crept secretly into the Church. For since the law directed that search should be made for their books, those of them who practised evil and forbidden arts were detected, and these were ready to secure their own safety by dissimulation of every kind[[1224]].”

Throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire all but a very few Roman nobles thus professed the faith of Christ. In the words of the dying Julian, the Galilaean had conquered.

From this time until our own, Christianity has reigned in the West with no serious rival. In the VIIth century, when Mahommed’s Arabs, flushed with the enthusiasm of a new faith which owed something at least to the relics of Gnosticism, poured in upon an Empire wearied out alike by perpetual war against the barbarians and by its own civil and religious dissensions, the Church was compelled to abandon to them her conquests in Africa and the East. In Europe, however, she continued in unchecked supremacy, gathering to herself and assimilating the barbarians who at one time seemed likely to extinguish all civilization; and she thus became a bond uniting many nations and languages in one community of faith and thought. She even succeeded in keeping alive the remains of that Greek art and learning which still form our best and proudest intellectual possession, and if during her reign many of the precious monuments of antiquity perished, the fault was not entirely hers. In every respect, her rule was supreme; and such enemies as she had in Europe were those of her own household. The Manichaeans who, as has been said, once bid fair to deprive her of some of her fairest provinces, never dared to make open war upon her, and their secret defection was punished by an unsparing use of the secular arm. The German Reformation of the XVIth century has probably left her stronger than before, and the few losses that she has suffered in the Old World have been more than compensated by the number of lieges she has succeeded in attaching to herself in the New.

In the days of her infancy, and before she thus came into her inheritance, Christianity borrowed much from the rivals over which she was in the long run to reign supreme. Her outward observances, her ritual, and the organization of her hierarchy, are perhaps all due to the associations that she finally overcame. The form of her sacraments, the periods of her fasts and festivals, and institutions like monachism, cannot be explained without reference to those religions from whose rivalry she so long suffered. That, in such matters, the Church should take what was useful to her was, as said above, part of her consciously expressed policy, and doubtless had much to do with her speedy triumph. To show that her dogmas also took many things from the same source would involve an invasion into the domain of professional theology, for which I have neither authority nor desire. But if, at some future time, investigation should show that in this respect also Christianity owes something to her forerunners and rivals, the argument against her Divine origin would not thereby be necessarily strengthened. That, in the course of her development, she acquired characteristics which fitted her to her environment would be in strict conformity with the laws which appear to govern the evolution of all institutions; and if the Power ruling the universe chooses to work by law rather than by what seems to us like caprice, such a choice does not show Him to be lacking either in wisdom or benevolence.

As was said at the outset, everyone must be left to place his own interpretation on the facts here attempted to be set forth. But if, per impossibile, we could approach the study of the origins of Christianity with the same mental detachment and freedom from prejudice with which we might examine the worship of the Syrian Jupiter Dolichenus or the Scandinavian Odin, we should probably find that the Primitive Church had no need of the miraculous powers which were once assigned as the reason for her gradual and steady advance to all but universal dominion. On the contrary, it may be that Christianity would then appear as a link—although a most important and necessary link—in a regular chain of events which began more than three centuries before she emerged from her birthplace in Palestine into that Roman world which in three centuries more was to be hers of right. No sooner had Alexander’s conquests made a world-religion possible, than there sprang up, as we have seen, in his own city of Alexandria, a faith with a far higher and purer idea of Divinity than any that had until then been known in the West. Then the germs already present in small fraternities like those of the Orphics and the Essenes blossomed forth into the fantastic and unwholesome growths, as we must needs think them, of that Gnosticism which marked the transition of the ancient world from Paganism to Christianity. Lastly there came in from the countries under the influence of Rome’s secular enemy, Persia, the heresy of Marcion, the religion of Mithras, and the syncretistic policy of Manes and his continuators. Against all these in turn, Christianity had to struggle in a contest where the victory was not always on her side: and if in time she overthrew them all, it can only be because she was better fitted to the needs of the world than any of her predecessors or contemporaries.

INDEX