Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

And here as for a long time the Christian altar lay concealed from the sight of the heathen, and they knew not Him who was offered on it, so for a long time the Christian ruler was withdrawn from recognition. They did not even surmise that which grew up gradually and silently in the midst of them: the establishment, that is, of a new spiritual power, of one power for all nations, of a spiritual governor in every city, a member of this one power. It may safely be said that while Trajan did not apprehend the existence of any such power in his empire, Decius had come to the knowledge of it, and he liked it so little that it was said of him by an eye-witness how he would rather hear of a competitor for his throne than of a Bishop being set at Rome in the See of Peter.

But from the beginning the power was there, concealed in the humility of the mustard seed, while it rested upon the authority of Him who had dropped the seed into the soil.

This power of spiritual government was new, in that it sprung from the Person of our Lord Himself, and until He communicated the charge contained in it, did not exist. It was pointed out in type and prophecy to Adam, to Noah, and to Moses, but realised in Him at His resurrection. Thus, whereas these priesthoods which it came to displace were the ultimate form of corruption into which the original worship instituted by God when man fell had sunk, the Redeemer, in the work of His dispensation, sent forth this pastorship of spiritual rule afresh from Himself, gave it to Peter and His Apostles, and propagated it through them upon earth.

For this reason, as coming from one who was Lord of all, it was one for all nations. Corresponding to the unity of the Triune God, and the unity of the Christian Sacrifice, it was one in its origin, its duration, its effect. What greater contrast could there possibly be than between the diversity and contradiction of heathen priests ministering in numberless religions, and the unity of the Christian priesthood, a replication in every instance of Christ’s person, between worships varying with every country in their bearers and their rites, and the unity of the Christian episcopate, a replication of His charge to feed His sheep, resting on one Sacrifice as unique as its own rule.

And, again, that which was one in origin, duration, and effect, stretched itself forth and dilated itself to embrace every city, placing at its head a spiritual ruler, who was distinct but not separate from his fellows; who preached one doctrine and ministered to one worship, as he also participated in one power.

If we embrace in one view the three constituents on which we have touched—belief, worship, and government—and contemplate the Christian people which is its outcome, how total a contrast does it present in the Christian habit of life to that of the heathen. The Christian worships a single God, who by the greatest of mysteries is at once one and three; who has a triple personality; he partakes of a worship in which that God, offered first as a Victim for him, becomes his Food; he is governed by one who bears the person of that God, whose priesthood is the foundation of his rule, and whose teaching is bound up with both rule and worship. That which the heathen called nature was to the Christian the ever-living operation of a creative hand hiding under shapes which met the senses an illimitable power, wisdom, and goodness; and the majesty of the God whom he thus adored was presented to him in the holiest rite of his worship as the Victim who redeemed him, and the Food which nourished his spiritual life. Greek and Egyptian, Syrian and African, Roman and barbarian, it was difficult to say from which he was most removed in all his thoughts of God and man, and the world around.

But to the whole body of people thus created it was the shifting of the basis on which the heathen State rested, because it was the discovery of the one Lord from whom all rule descended, and in whose name it was administered. The Roman ruled not in virtue of the principle that one God had made all the nations of the earth of one blood, and partitioned the kingdoms of the earth among them, but by virtue of the fact that the children of the wolf-cub had been the strongest in fight and the firmest in discipline, and had reduced a hundred peoples beneath their sway. The Roman himself worshipped and protected in others the worship of ancestral, that is, national gods, and the God of the Christians claimed not to be national, and to dethrone them all. The Roman, and the nations he held in subjection, believed in a multitude of traditionary doctrines respecting the earth and its inhabitants, and the powers presiding over them, some true and some false, mixed up in each case with peculiar and national interests, and all these the Christian swept away in the sublime belief, austere at once and tender, of a single Being who created, sustained, and ruled all, with the love of a Creator for all, while He kept watch over every thought, word, and action of every rational creature; that is, who was Judge and Rewarder, as well as Creator. And, lastly, this new Christian people held as the very bond of its existence that being the Body of Christ, it was to embrace all nations, and be co-extensive with the earth, co-enduring with man’s race.

This was the people and the power which, having been more or less concealed during five generations from the watchful eyes of Roman statesmen, may be said to have come forth and shown itself by the multiplication of its numbers and the tenacity of its purpose, and the fixity of its doctrines in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and which five more generations of Romans, until the time of Constantine, either watched with ever-increasing anxiety, or tolerated in the mistaken hope of assimilating, or finally contended with for life or death in fearful persecutions.

And this was the people and power before which the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, when he saw it in the persons of women and slaves and aged men, who sacrificed their lives for their belief, lost his philosophic indifference, and persecuted it as if he had been a voluptuous profligate like Nero, or a cruel tyrant like Domitian.

That the belief, the worship, and the spiritual government which carried both, had been from their first appearance in the reign of Tiberius independent of the imperial rule, whose officer crucified their Founder, under the title of the King of the Jews, we have seen in all the preceding chapters. But how was this independence actually acquired and maintained? By what talisman did the Christians compel the emperors to acknowledge that there were things of God to be rendered to God, as well as things of Cæsar to be rendered to Cæsar? For when this fight began the Emperor claimed all things, the things of Cæsar as Emperor, and the things of God as Pontifex Maximus.