Cara Dei soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum.”
There is a moment in the history of the Roman empire when it comes before us with the most imposing grandeur. The imperial rule has been definitively accepted by that proud old aristocracy under which the city of the seven hills was built up from a robber fortress to be the centre of a world-wide confederation; while on their side the nations all round the Mediterranean bow with an almost voluntary homage before the sceptre of their queen. If the north be still untameable, it has learnt to dread the talons of the Roman eagle, and cowers murmuring in its forests and morasses; if the Parthian still shoot as he flies from the western Cæsar's hosts, he has at least expiated in the ruin of Ctesiphon the capture of Crassus and the dishonour of Mark Antony. But far more than this. On the Cæsar in his undisputed greatness has dawned the real sublimity of the task which Providence had assigned to him; to mould, [pg 240] that is, under one rule of equal beneficence the many tongues and many nations which a course of conquest often the most unjust had brought to own his sway. And this point of time is when after the great warrior Trajan comes Hadrian the man of culture; in whom seems implanted the most restless curiosity, carrying him with the speed of a soldier and the power of a prince over every climate from Carlisle to Alexandria, from Morocco to Armenia, in order that he may see in each the good of which so many varying races of men are capable, and use them all for his grand design. To him Rome is still the head; but he has learnt to esteem at their due value the members of her great body. The first fifteen years of his reign are almost entirely spent away from Rome, in those truly imperial progresses wherein the master of this mighty realm, when he would relieve himself of his helmet, walks like the simple legionary,[195] bareheaded in front of his soldiers, under the suns of the south, examining, wherever he comes, the whole civil and military organisation, promoting the capable and censuring the unworthy, scattering benefits with unsparing hand. York has known him as a protecting genius; Athens blends his name with that of her own Theseus as a second founder; wayward Alexandria exalts him, at least for the time, as a granter [pg 241] of privileges; the extreme north and utmost south acknowledge alike the unsparing zeal and majestic presence of their ruler. At that moment Rome is still Roman. While the Augustan discipline still animates her legions, the sense of the subordination of the military power to the civil spirit of a free state is not wholly lost; her proconsuls and præfects have passed out of those plundering magnates, who replenished in the tyranny of a year or two from a drained province the treasures they had squandered in a life of corruption at Rome, into the orderly and yet dignified magistrates accountable to the Republic's life-president[196] for their high delegated power. Perhaps the world had never yet seen anything at once so great and so beneficent as the government of Hadrian. But one thing was wanting to the many-tongued and many-tempered peoples ruled by him, that they should of their own will accept the worship of one God, and so the matchless empire receive the only true principle of coherence and permanence in the common possession of one religion. And the thoughtful student of history can hardly restrain himself from indulging his fancy as to what might then have been the result, and into how great a structure provinces worthy of being kingdoms might then have grown by the process of an [pg 242] unbroken civilisation instinct with the principles of the pure Christian Faith. Then the northern flood of barbarism and the eastern tempest of a false religion, which together were to break up the fabric of a thousand years, might have been beaten back from its boundaries, and from them the messengers of light have so penetrated the world in all directions that the advance of the truth should not have been impeded by any great civil destruction, but the nations of Europe have developed themselves from their Roman cradle by a continuous growth, in which there had been no ages of conquest, violence, and confusion, no relapse into chaos, no struggle back into an intricate and yet imperfect order, but the serene advance from dawn to day.
So, however, it was not to be. The time of probation in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, wherein a sort of toleration had seemed to be allowed to Christians, passed away, and the beginning of a far different destiny broke upon the empire. With the accession of Marcus Aurelius the great old enemies, the North and the East, awoke from their trance in fresh vigour. A Parthian war of four years, a German war of twelve, with pestilence, earthquakes, and famines through a large part of the empire, try to the utmost the vigour and temper of one of the most upright sovereigns known to heathenism. Marcus Aurelius meets both enemies with equal courage and [pg 243] ability, but he dies prematurely, and leaves the rule carried so temperately by four great sovereigns successively adopted to empire at mature age, in the untried hands of the heir of his blood, a youth of nineteen, born in the purple. In this at least the great Roman was wanting both to Stoic greatness and to Roman duty. And it was a fatal error. During thirteen years this son of the most virtuous heathen shows himself the most vicious of tyrants. At a single bound Rome passes from a ruler more just than Trajan to a ruler more abandoned than Nero; and in the palace of Marcus Aurelius endures an emperor who has a double harem of three hundred victims;[197] who spares the blood of no senator, and respects the worth of no officer.
When a revolution, similar to that which swept away Domitian, has removed Commodus, the Roman world is not so fortunate as to find a second Trajan to take his place. Three great officers who command in Syria, Illyricum, and Britain, contend for the prize, and when victory has determined in favour of Septimius Severus, he rules for eighteen years with a force and capacity which may indeed be compared with Trajan's, but with a deceit and remorseless severity all his own. At one time forty senators are slaughtered for the crime of having looked with favour upon that pretender to the empire who did not succeed. Nor is this a [pg 244] passing cruelty, but the fixed spirit of his reign. The sway of the sword is openly proclaimed. That the army is everything is not only acted on, but laid down as a guiding principle of state to his children. The unbroken discipline of her legionaries had hitherto indeed proved the salvation of the state; but this Septimius fatally tampers with, and in so doing sows the seeds of future anarchy and dissolution.
His death in 211 places the empire in the hands of a youth of twenty-three, all but born in the purple, like Commodus, and his rival in tyranny and dissoluteness of every kind. Caracalla is endured for six years, and being killed by a plot in the camp, is succeeded by his murderer Macrinus. He again, after a year, gives place to a Syrian boy of fourteen, who took at his accession the honoured name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, but is known to posterity as Heliogabalus. Once more during a space of four years the crimes of Commodus and Caracalla are repeated, or even exceeded. Indeed in these years from 218 to 222 the story of shame and degradation reaches its lowest point. But the soldiers of the prætorian camp themselves rise against Heliogabalus, massacre him with his mother, and place on the throne his cousin Alexander Severus, at the age of fourteen. Now Alexander has for his mother Mammæa, if not a Christian, at least a hearer of Origen, who gives her son from his earliest youth a virtuous [pg 245] education, who surrounds him on the perilous height of the Roman throne with the arms of her affection and her practical wisdom. Alexander rules for thirteen years, a period equal to that of Commodus, and little less than that of Nero. Younger than both at his accession and his death, his reign offers the most striking contrast to theirs. Of all heathen rulers he stands forth as the most blameless. It is a reign which, after the obscene domination of Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, with the savagery between them of Septimius Severus immediately preceding it, seems like a romance of goodness. Simple and admirable in his private life, he rivals Marcus Aurelius in his zeal for the administration of justice, for the choice of good governors, for devotion to the public service; and, happier than Marcus Aurelius, on his name rests no stain of persecution. “He suffered the Christians to be,”[198] are the emphatic words of his biographer; concerning which it has been well remarked that little as this seems to say, it had been said of no one of his predecessors, though several had not persecuted the Church.[199] And therefore this expression must mean that he left them in an entire liberty as to religion. It is indeed the exact contradiction of what, thirty years before, Tertullian had stated respecting the law in the time of Septimius Severus; [pg 246] for one of his complaints in pleading for Christians was, “your harsh sentence ‘that we are not allowed to exist,’ is an open appeal to brute force.”[200]
Alexander Severus, the darling of his people, perished by the hands of some treacherous soldiers suborned by his successor Maximin; and with him ends this period of seventy-four years, which we will consider together, in order to estimate the progress of the Christian Faith. A time of more remarkable contrasts in rulers cannot be found. It begins with Marcus Aurelius, and it ends with Alexander Severus, the two most virtuous of heathen princes; between them it contains Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, the three generally reputed the most vicious; while the definitive course which the history of the empire took is given to it by another, Septimius Severus, of great abilities and mixed character, who gained the empire as a successful soldier, and was true to his origin in that he established the ultimate victory of pure force over every restriction of a civil constitution: an African unsparing of blood, who sat on the throne of Augustus, and worked out the problem of government which the founder of the empire had started by preparing the result of Diocletian.
The rule of Commodus and his successors fully revealed the fatal truth, that the five princes who from the accession of Nerva had governed as if they were really responsible to the senate, had only been a fortunate chance; that this time of prosperity rested upon no legal limitation of rights between those things wont to exist only in severance,[201] the sovereign's power and the subject's freedom; that it was no result of a constitution which had grown up under a mutual sense of benefit arising from authority exercised conscientiously, and obedience cordially rendered. The age which Tacitus[202] at its commencement had called “most blessed” was indeed over, and as soon as the second Antonine left the scene, a state of things ensued in which tyranny and cruelty were as unchecked as under Nero or Domitian at their worst. It became evident that all had depended on the sovereign's personal character. From Marcus to Commodus the leap was instantaneous; and so, again, afterwards the short-lived serenity and order of Alexander's rule passed at his death into a confusion lasting for more than forty years, which threatened to break up the very existence of the empire.
But in Rome from the accession of Commodus in 180 to the death of Heliogabalus in 222 we find a profound corruption of morals, an excess of [pg 248] cruelty, and a disregard of civil rights, which could scarcely be exceeded. Tacitus, at the beginning of Trajan's reign, burst forth into indignation at the thought that it had cost Rusticus and Senecio their lives, in Domitian's time, to have praised Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus, and that their very writings had been publicly burned, as if that fire could extinguish the voice of the Roman people, the liberty of the senate, and the conscience of mankind. “Truly great,” he cried, “was the specimen of patient endurance which we exhibited.”[203] What words, then, would he have found to express the degradation of servile spirit in that selfsame city a hundred years later, when Plautianus, the favourite minister of Septimius Severus, at the marriage of his daughter with Caracalla, caused a hundred persons of good family, some of them already fathers, secretly to be made eunuchs, in order that they might serve as chamberlains to the imperial bride.[204] Or to take another example; as Quintillus, one of the chiefs of the senate, both by birth and by the employments which he had held, a man of advanced years and living retired in the country, was seized in order to be put to death, he declared that his only surprise was that he had been suffered to live so long, and that he had made every preparation for [pg 249] his burial. A third incident will show both the sort of crimes for which men were punished, the protection given by the law to the individual, and the spirit and temper of the senate. It had condemned Apronianus, proconsul of Asia, without giving him a hearing, because his nurse had dreamt that he was one day to reign, concerning which he was reported to have consulted a magician. Now, in reading the informations laid against him, it was found that a witness deposed that during the consultation some senator who was bald had stretched out his head to listen. Upon this all the bald senators, even those who had never gone to the house of Apronianus, began to tremble, while the rest put their hands to their heads to make sure that they had still their hair. However, a certain Marcellinus fell under special suspicion, whereupon he demanded that the witness should be brought in, who could not fail to recognise him if guilty. The witness looked round upon them all for a long time without saying a word, until upon a sign that a certain senator made him, he declared it was Marcellinus, who forthwith was hurried out of the senate to be beheaded, before Severus was even informed of it. As he went to execution he met four of his children, to whom he said that his greatest grief was to leave them living after him in so miserable a time.[205] It was not without reason that Tertullian [pg 250] at this very moment encouraged the martyrs to be constant, with the reflection that there was no one who might not, for the cause of man, be made to suffer whatever nature would most shrink from suffering in the cause of God. “The times we live in are proofs,” he cried, “of this. How many and how great are the instances we have seen, in which no height of birth, no degree of rank, no personal dignity, no time of life, have saved men from coming to the most unexpected end, for some man's cause, either at his own hands, if they stood against him, or if for him, by the hands of his adversaries.”[206]
It was a time at which the extremes of reckless cruelty, of profuse luxury, of shameless dissoluteness, met together; in which women were forbidden by an express law to expose themselves on the arena as gladiators; in which, when the emperor Severus would legislate against adultery, a memorial was handed to him with the names of three thousand persons whom his law would touch.[207] Such was the character of the time which followed at once on the empire's golden age; the time in which the Church of God was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes, and building up her divine polity amid the worthlessness of the world's greatest empire, and the instability of all earthly things.
II. In the last review which we took of her material progress we said that to the eye of Pius Antoninus she would not yet appear from her multitude as a power in the state. But before the end of the seventy-four years which we are here considering as one period, it was otherwise. Already in the reign of Commodus, Eusebius states that the word of salvation was bringing to the worship of the one God men out of every race, so that in Rome itself many distinguished for wealth and rank embraced it with their whole families.[208] A few years later, when Tertullian writes his apology, he makes the heathen complain “that the state is overrun with us, that Christians are found in the country, in forts, in islands; that every sex and age and condition and rank come over to them.”[209] And again; “we are of yesterday, and have already filled every place you have, your cities, islands, forts, boroughs, councils, your very camps, tribes, corporations, the palace, senate, and forum. Your temples only we leave you. For what war should we not be equal, we who are so ready to be slaughtered, if our religion did not command us rather to suffer death than to inflict it.” Elsewhere he speaks of Christians as “so great a multitude of men as to be almost the majority in every city.” Now make whatsoever allowance we will for Tertullian's vehemence, such statements, laid before [pg 252] adversaries, if they had not a great amount of truth in them, would bring ridicule on his cause rather than strengthen it. Tertullian besides wrote at the time of the general persecution set on foot by Septimius Severus against the Christian Faith, which itself was a proof of what importance it had assumed. We may perhaps put the first twenty years of the third century as the point at which, having passed through the period when it was embraced by individuals with a several choice, it was become the faith of families, and one step only remained, that it should become the faith of nations.[210]