Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

What was the position of these preachers towards the various deities and their worshippers who occupied the Roman empire? It is obvious that it was one of an absolute uncompromising hostility. And it is plain that, on the other side, all who did not closely and impartially examine their doctrine, would count them to be “godless,” and treat them accordingly.

This, the barest outline of the primary and fundamental belief as to the all-important being of God, on which all further development of teaching rested, is sufficient to exhibit the intense opposition between Christianity and that which it was attempting to displace in the matter of belief.

But belief becomes concrete and actual in worship. What was the worship offered by the nations of the Roman empire to their various gods? From end to end this vast region was covered with magnificent temples, rich with the offerings of successive generations, wherein day by day and often many times a day sacrifices of living animals were offered by priests appointed to that end. I only refer here to this rite of sacrifice, because I have dwelt sufficiently upon it in a former place. The varieties of the worship accompanying it were great, but the substance of the rite identical; the number and names and offices of the deities to whom it was offered were bewildering.[184] The customs and traditions which encircled these various temples and the rites offered in them struck their roots into the family, the social, and the political life of the various peoples among which they stood.

What, as over against this “palpable array of sense,” was the Christian worship which the new teachers brought with them?

It was withdrawn into the innermost recess of the Christian society itself. For many generations they had not public churches, but were reduced to meet in secret. And those who shared the Christian membership received, in assemblies held in the silence of the early morning, under cover of some private house, a victim which they adored as the very Body and Blood of the God who for their sakes had become incarnate, for their sakes also had suffered His Body to be broken, and His Blood poured out. Instead of the sacrifices of slain animals, whose blood was sprinkled upon the worshippers, the Christian received the Immaculate Lamb of God, offered upon a mystical altar, in commemoration of that one Sacrifice by virtue of which he was a Christian.

If the contrast in belief between the one Christian God and the many gods of heathendom was great, the contrast between heathen sacrifices and the one Christian Sacrifice was at least as great—perhaps the more wonderful in this, that while natural reason fought in every human breast for the doctrine of the Divine Unity, no reason nor thought of man could ever have imagined a Sacrifice at once so tremendous and so gracious as that which the Christian worshipped, wherein the Victim which received his homage contained and imparted his life.

But if the doctrine of the Divine Unity destroyed the heathen gods, and so rendered its adherents liable to be called “godless” by their worshippers, no less did the doctrine of the Christian Sacrifice, which abolished at a stroke the whole worship of heathendom, create the keenest antagonism; they who were without gods were said to be without altars; they who never presented themselves at the heathen sacrifices were accounted as outcasts and sacrilegious men who renounced all piety.

Yet complete and thorough as the antagonism drawn forth in these two great points of belief and worship, perhaps the third constituent element of the Christian society, its government, was even more calculated to awaken the jealousy and excite the resentment, if not of the various peoples which composed the empire, at least of the Roman rulers.

The priests who ministered in the multitudinous temples to the various deities of the Roman world, were as various as the objects of their worship. No common hierarchy held together the priests of Egyptian, Asiatic, Hellenic, Roman gods, and all the intermediate gradations. But far more than this, there was an absence of hierarchy in the particular or national gods of each several country; the priest of Jupiter had nothing to do with the priest of Apollo, the priest of Juno, and the rest. The conception of many gods had introduced unnumbered weaknesses, anomalies, and incongruities into the arrangements of their ministers. When that which was worshipped was divided, the ministers of the several parts became rivals, with this grand result, as it affected the civil power, that it stood in one great mass of solid unity over against different religions, varying in their objects, crossing each other, contradicting each other. Thus it was that the original independence of divine worship had been lost; no one of these various priesthoods could maintain any real opposition to the civil ruler; no one of them presented any body of concordant doctrine which man’s mind could approve, or his heart accept. That which ought to be most sacred among men was by internal contradictions become weak and contemptible.

How, on the other hand, stood the case of the Christian society as to government?