In this region the Christian communities were not formally organized upon the communistic basis of the primitive Church, because all of them were in a nearly equally prosperous condition, and there were none among them who were "poor" in the sense of requiring assistance. The few that were in any way incapacitated for earning a livelihood were related by ties of blood to one or more families, able and always willing to afford them every needful comfort and assistance. But no Christian family was ever known to refuse anything for which a needy person asked, in money, clothing, food, or whatever they possessed; and in this respect it made little difference what might be the religion or nationality of the applicant. To refuse to give to one that asked would have seemed to any of these Christians to be a wicked, almost sacrilegious, violation of the very words of Jesus: "Give to him that asketh, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away." They regarded all property of Christians as in the ownership of the Church, and themselves only as stewards intrusted with the management of this or that portion thereof. Hence every call of presbyter or bishop for assistance to less fortunate communities, and every individual application for aid, was gladly and promptly responded to; and they regarded it as part of their profession of faith to find some healthful occupation for every one that was able and willing to do anything for the common good. In the cities of Cyrenaica were many Christians engaged in multiform avocations, but even there the Christian communities were so temperate and diligent that few among them wanted anything; and the union of the faithful furnished such a perfect safeguard against the ills of life that they were not only able to care for those of their own number who might be overtaken by any calamity, but were always able and willing to afford assistance to foreign communities less fortunately situated, when requested so to do. In short, all and far more than modern "poor-laws," Masonic, Odd-Fellows', and other eleemosynary associations, marine, life, and fire companies, have been enabled to do toward the amelioration of the condition of the unfortunate, was far more perfectly accomplished by these Christian communities, that recognized as a matter of faith the principle of all human charity which extends beyond mere alms-giving, that the average prosperity of the community should extend to each individual thereof when overtaken by any misfortune--a redeeming principle which Jesus and his apostles taught in its most perfect and effective form as the "communion of saints," the partnership or fellowship of the holy ([Greek: koinônia ton hagiôn]); community of property and rights among all who believe; a principle which good men have been vainly seeking to restore in some form ever since the subversion of Christianity, in the fourth century, by the agency of numberless nugatory statutes and associations; a divine truth which in its Christless forms of "communism," "socialism," and "Nihilism," now threatens the very existence of law and order throughout Christendom; a system perhaps impossible to any government which recognizes the legality of private-property rights, and is therefore committed to Mammon-worship.
But these Christians had learned a higher truth than any known to human laws: they were the owners of nothing; they were only stewards of their Lord's goods; the wealth which they accumulated and held for the common good was to them "true riches"; the wealth which any individual held for himself and his own private aggrandizement was the "mammon of unrighteousness." Hence no Christian could be in want while the community was prosperous; no community could suffer while any other communities accessible to them by land or sea had anything to spare; and the faith of Christ made the general prosperity of all Christians insure the individual prosperity of each one; so that there were no "rich" and no "poor" among them.
Plato's dreams of a perfect community ("Republic") admitted human slavery--Jesus Christ taught the freedom, equality, and fraternity of all men: Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" abolished marriage, and proposed to hold women in common--Jesus Christ elevated marriage into a sacrament; denied man's right to "hold" woman at all; proclaimed freedom and equality for her also, repudiating the universal idea that she was a chattel, and teaching that she is a soul endowed with the same rights, duties, and responsibilities as are inherent in the soul of man. Modern reformers propose to "divide" out all property, and limit individual acquisitions thereof; but Jesus proposed to divide out nothing, and to limit nothing; but, that all things should be accumulated, owned, and used in common, as every one hath need, just as air, and sunlight, and the boundless sea are common. The word "catholic" ([Greek: kata holos]) was unknown to Jesus and the New Testament; the word "common" ([Greek: koiyos]) was the key to all of his teachings, social, spiritual, and political.
The only relation which these Christians sustained to the "government" of Cyrenaica, or to that of Rome, was to pay the taxes demanded of them; and they had no concern as to who might be emperor or proconsul, except so far as these rulers might be disposed to persecute the Christians, or otherwise. They paid taxes, to avoid giving offense, even as Jesus himself had paid tribute, although born under Roman rule, and not a "stranger," and not liable to pay tribute; but they never acknowledged the Roman authority in any other way. It would have been an ineffaceable stigma on the character of a Christian to summon another Christian before a civil magistrate for any cause; they would not "go to law before the heathen." If any differences arose between any, they left it to some of the brethren to consider the matter and adjust it; and they considered themselves bound to abide by the settlement reached, by bonds of faith and love stronger than human statutes can be made. If any became careless of right and duty, or actively wicked, his nearest friends remonstrated with him, and, if he refused to abandon his sinful course, the presbyters reproved him; and, if this proved ineffectual in working out the needed reformation, they brought the offender before the Church, and either succeeded in drawing him back into the right way, or, if he proved incorrigible, they simply refused henceforth to fellowship with him, and held him as a publican and a sinner. They never had recourse to any temporal penalties to enforce the law of Christian brotherhood; knowing that no one who refused to be controlled without the use of force was a Christian, they publicly disowned him, and that was the end of it. For they had been taught from the beginning that the essential difference between the kingdom of heaven and every other kingdom established upon earth consisted in the fact that human governments recognize private property-rights in estates, rank, offices, prerogatives, and seek to enforce these legal, fictitious rights by temporal penalties, contrary to reason and justice; while Jesus denounced all such private rights as Mammon-worship, and all statutes enacted to enforce them as lies of the Scribes and Pharisees; and never fixed, and never authorized his apostles to fix, any temporal penalties whatever. They understood perfectly well that the necessary and inevitable result of all law-and-order systems is to produce a ruling class at the top of every political fabric to whom all of its benefits inure, an oppressed or enslaved people at the bottom upon whose weary shoulders rest all of the burdens and the waste of life, and between these extremes ecclesiasticisms and an army (always on the side of the ruling classes and against the multitudes) seeking to adjust their mutual legal rights and duties by the agency of bayonets and prayer--a system of laws creating fictitious rights, creating legal offenses by the disregard of these pretended rights, and denouncing legal penalties. But they knew that Jesus died as much for the children of Barabbas as for the offspring of Herod; and that every statute, custom, or superstition which attempts to make one of the babies "better" than the others is a fraud on our common humanity and a violation of the law of Christ. For the kingdom of heaven was organized upon the basis of community of rights and property among all who believe, thereby removing all inducements to commit such crimes as treason, larceny, and fraud, which exist only by force of the statutes creating and punishing them; for civilization itself is the parent of all crime except murder or lust, which might sometimes occur from the mere ebullition of brutal passion and instinct in low and base natures. Hence those Christians, who "called nothing they possessed their own," regarding themselves as only stewards of the Lord's goods, held by them for the common good of all believers, had no use for the Roman government or any other, and cared nothing for it except so far as taxes and persecutions, imposed or omitted, might affect the temporal welfare of individuals and of the communities of which they were members. They were citizens of a kingdom in but not of the world, desiring to be at peace with all worldly kingdoms. They knew that Jesus proclaimed a good news or gospel for the poor, the very foundation-stone of which is the absolute equality, liberty, and fraternity of man; and they learned from the same divine Teacher that kings, lords, nobles, all personal and class distinctions among men, are the mere creation of legal fiction, sustained by unjust force, like slavery and piracy, and do not exist in the nature of things or by the will of God; and that these laws are everywhere only the utterances of selfishness crystallized into the form of statutes, customs, or decrees, government over the people being nothing more nor less than an organized expression of faith in the ancient lie that private property (in estates, rank, or prerogatives) is the one thing sacred in human life, and that laws and penalties are necessary to maintain it; which faith is the idolatry of Mammon, the only paganism that Jesus denounced by name, and declared to be utterly antagonistic to the worship of God. They understood, therefore, that in place of attempting (as all human legislators have ever done) to provide a more perfect law-and-order system for the protection of private rights, our Lord designed to abolish all private property, and with it all the unjust laws and penalties by which the worship of Mammon is maintained. Hence, in place of teaching to men a better slave-code than the world had known before, Jesus taught freedom for all men. In place of teaching a more effective art of war, he proclaimed the gospel of peace, love, justice. In place of ordaining only more wise and just regulations for governing the intercourse of men with their female chattels, he elevated monogamic marriage into a holy sacrament, and applied to man and wife alike the same divine law of personal rights, duties, and responsibilities. In place of teaching better laws for the government of men by other men as erring, sinful, and selfish as themselves, he taught that all such laws and government are unnecessary to any people who believe that there is something more sacred, higher, and holier than private rights, and are willing by faith to renounce all human, statutory advantages in order to acquire divine truth.
So in beautiful Cyrenaica, while Greek and Roman, Egyptian and Jew, concerned themselves about politics, and struggled for offices, and toiled beyond measure for useless gain, the Christian communities pursued the calm and even tenor of their way, meeting on every Sabbath for religious services and instruction; closing each week-day's labor with a pleasant formula of evening prayer; training up their sons and daughters to despise all the false statutory and customary distinctions and vanities of worldly life "after which the Gentiles seek"; teaching them to seek knowledge, especially the knowledge peculiar to their faith; to love all men, especially the brethren; and to regard this earthly life as but the threshold of a higher, holier, and more perfect state of being that lay only a few brief, fleeting years away from every one of them. And so, while the sun arose and set; while the harvests were grown and garnered; while the pure and fadeless sea lapsed along the fertile garden of the Baucalis farm, and new lives came upon the stage of human action, and older ones were gathered into the rest appointed for all the living, peace and plenty, charity and love, purity and truth, blessed the dwellers at the stone cottage by the sea-side.
CHAPTER IV.
FINE TRAINING FOR A CHRISTIAN MAN!
The boy Arius increased in stature, and learned, even before he had learned the alphabet, to think that he knew and loved the Lord. For from the time that he could talk, daily, after the little family had completed their healthful tasks, they spent an hour in repeating to him, and in teaching him to repeat after them, some simple passage out of the New Testament, so that the child had memorized a whole gospel before he had learned to read the written text, and become familiar with the general course of the Old Testament Scriptures, particularly with the salient and beautiful narratives wherewith the sacred word abounds. After he grew older his father taught him both to speak and write the Latin and Hebrew equivalent of every word in the Greek text; so that Arius acquired the three languages together. The father watched with intense and painful anxiety to ascertain whether the singular affliction which his mother's terror of the python had entailed upon himself had been transmitted to his son, and rejoiced to see that, while some unmistakable traces thereof appeared in the boy's voice and manner, they were so slight as not only not to be unpleasantly obtrusive, but were even attractive, as perhaps every marked peculiarity, which is of a graceful character, is attractive in a man.
At twelve years of age, Arius was an unusually tall and slender lad, peculiar in the shape of his bold, shaggy head, peculiar in the length and litheness of his shapely neck, peculiar in the mesmeric luminosity of his dark and tender eyes, and in the singular but incisive sweetness of his voice. He spoke, wrote, and read Greek and Latin with fluency, and was well informed in the Hebrew tongue; and yet he was scarcely conscious of the fact that under his father's wise and careful training he had been a student almost from his infancy, so steadily, easily, and gradually, had he progressed in the acquisition of knowledge. The New Testament written on parchments in the uncial text; the "Pastor of Hermas," which, in those days, was thought to be of almost apostolical authority; and copies of some of the letters of Polycarp, Irenæus, and Clement, were almost the only books which Ammonius owned, as the cost of a library in those days was enormous. From these they would read a few verses at a time, and translate them into Latin as they went along. A presbyter at Cyrene loaned them the Old Testament, from which the boy copied and memorized such parts as his father directed him to learn, as having the directest bearing upon the life and doctrine of Jesus. The boy did his full share of labor in all the working of the farm, and took the bath daily in the little bay on which it fronted (as in fact all the family were accustomed to do), and at night father, mother, and son, read and translated from the Scriptures; and occasionally the boy was made to stand up and repeat by rote the Apostles' Creed, the Paternoster, the Prayer of Agur, the son of Jakeh, Paul's beautiful hymn in praise of Agape, or some other favorite passage, sometimes in one language and sometimes in another. In these little recitations, as often as the boy's feelings were enlisted, there came a peculiar and fascinating sibilation into his voice; his hand, chiefly the right hand, would move and wave with a strange, easy, vibrant motion, almost as if it involuntarily strove to accentuate the syllables of the sonorous text; his head would dart up and lean slightly forward from the long and shapely neck, like the crest of some splendid cobra, peering forward toward the hearer, and his dark eyes dilated with a strange mesmeric light; and altogether the lad had a very peculiar and impressive appearance. But these slight hereditary traces of the python's influence were never unpleasantly obtrusive, and the father did not think it to be necessary to impose upon the son that life-long self-restraint and self-consciousness which, in his own case, had been requisite to guard himself against serpentine manifestations of emotion. But his own long and careful effort and study in this respect qualified him to impart to the boy a marvelously distinct and peculiar accentuation, which made every word he uttered as clear and perfect as a pearl--as distinct and resonant as trumpet-notes.
But while Ammonius was thus cautious and diligent in training his son to acquire critical exactness in his knowledge of the philology and history of the sacred text, he was not the less anxious to imbue his mind with the very spirit that distills upon the faithful heart out of the words of uncorrupted truth. This he strove to do by continually spurring the boy's intelligence to seek for the real significance of our Lord's life and teachings, the differences between his philosophy and ethics and those of other renowned moralists and teachers; the essential differences between the kingdom which Jesus established in the world and all worldly kingdoms; the great fact, indeed, that Jesus taught not only the purest ethics in a few sweeping principles which cover the whole range of human life and experience, but taught also social and political truth essential to the establishment and maintenance of human rights and liberty. Yet the man's instructions were not dogmatic; they belonged to no sect or system of religion or of philosophy; they consisted chiefly in exciting in the mind of the youth an honest desire to know the truth, and of questions and suggestions designed to aid him in discovering it for himself. The manner of instruction generally pursued by Ammonius may be gathered from one or two of their evening exercises, like the following.