CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT
The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.
Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere along the bay of Naples.
But they were only part of the story.
Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.
There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore had been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of years ago.
Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the anointed, as the Greek missionaries called him, had been on this earth only a short time ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.
And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the Roman governor.
We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular appeal of this new faith.
It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives beheld the rays of a new hope.