Constantine having established the “creed,” required its universal reception. But the Arians refused; and the bishops prevailed on him to issue edicts against them, as enemies of truth, forbidding their public meetings, and giving their places of worship to the orthodox. He banished Arius, and decreed that his books should be burnt; and that whosoever should dare to keep any of them, as soon as this was proved, should suffer death! In two or three years after, the emperor recalled Arius, and repealed his severe laws against his heresy, which prevailed under his son and successor, Constantius. Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria, became the champion of orthodoxy; and thus two parties arose among the clergy.
Decrees and state power authorised inquisition and persecution; and “Hence,” says Dr. Mosheim, “arose endless animosities and seditions, treacherous plots, and open acts of injustice and violence, between the two contending parties. Council was assembled against council, and their jarring and contradictory decrees spread perplexity and confusion throughout the Christian world.” One fact will illustrate the spirit of party in this age: eighty orthodox bishops having waited on the Emperor Valerius, to complain of his appointing an Arian bishop of Constantinople, they were murdered by his order, on shipboard, at sea, A.D. 370.
Popery prevailed amid all the contentions; and, A.D. 410, four bishops, deputed from Carthage, obtained an edict from the Emperor Honorius, which doomed to death every one who differed from the Catholic faith. From this edict serious persecutions arose. But, A.D. 451, the council of Chalcedon resolved, “that the same rights and honours conferred on the bishop of Rome, were due to the bishop of Constantinople,” confirming his jurisdiction, which he had before claimed, over all the provinces of Asia.
Imperial dominion, however, was now declining, under a succession of feeble princes. At the opening of the fifth century, Constantinople was the eastern capital, in which Arcadius presided as emperor, while Rome continued the western metropolis; though Honorius kept his court at Ravenna. Swarms of savage hordes, from the northern regions of Europe, under the names of Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, overran the richest provinces, sacking cities, and committing every species of barbarity and cruelty. Some of these barbarians had embraced the name of Christ from Arian teachers; and many of those bishops who held the true divinity of Christ were tortured, banished, or massacred with their people.
Religion became still more corrupted; and public worship consisted chiefly in the performance of ceremonies, differing but little from those of the pagan Greeks and Romans. Both of them had a splendid ritual, gorgeous robes, tiaras, mitres, wax tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, and many such circumstances of pageantry, were to be seen equally in the heathen temples and in Christian churches. To engage the admiration of the ignorant population, pictures and statues of Christ, of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus in her arms, and of numerous saints, were set up in the churches, to be admired and worshipped. An invincible efficacy, in expelling evil spirits and healing diseases, was attributed to the presence of the bones of martyrs. The riches and magnificence of the churches exceeded all bounds; and the altars and the chests for the relics of saints were made of the richest materials, some of solid silver.
Everything in the forms of the Catholic religion appeared to produce false ideas, or to excite the worst passions of the human heart. Hence superstition and intolerance, and dreadful persecution among the different parties. Mr. Gibbon states, of the party called Donatists, that “three hundred bishops, with many thousands of the inferior clergy, were torn from their churches, stripped of their ecclesiastical possessions, banished to the islands, and proscribed by the laws, if they presumed to conceal themselves in the provinces of Africa.”
“Religion in the sixth century became still more corrupt; it lay expiring,” as Dr. Mosheim remarks, “under an enormous heap of superstitious inventions. The worship of Christians was now paid to the remains of the true cross, to the images of the saints, and to bones, whose real owners were extremely dubious. The progress of vice among the clergy was truly shocking. In those very places which were consecrated to the advancement of piety, and the service of God, there was little else to be seen but ghostly ambition, insatiable avarice, pious frauds, intolerable pride, and a superstitious contempt of the natural rights of the people, with many other evils still more enormous.”
Episcopal claims continued to be the subjects of constant disputes, especially between the patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople. John of Rome visited the eastern capital, A.D. 525, to serve his own purpose, but charged by Theodore, the Gothic king of Italy, to engage the emperor Justin to cease from persecuting the Arians. With a crowd of the nobility and clergy, the emperor met him, and bowed down to the very ground before the vicar of the blessed Peter, and coveting the honour of being crowned by him, received at his hands the imperial diadem! The patriarch invited the Pope to perform Divine service in the great church together with him; but he would neither accept the invitation, nor even see the patriarch, till he agreed not only to yield him the first place, but to seat him on a kind of throne above himself, alleging no other reason than because he was the Roman High Priest! The patriarch indulged him in every thing he required, and they celebrated Easter together, with extraordinary pomp and solemnity. The Pope officiated in the Latin tongue, according to the rites of the Latin church.
Pre-eminence being thus acknowledged by the patriarch of Constantinople to the pontiff of Rome, it cannot be matter of wonder that Justinian, the nephew and successor of the emperor Justin, in his epistle to the new Pope, John II., writes, A.D. 533, “We hasten to SUBJECT and to unite to your holiness all the priests of the whole East. Nor do we suffer anything which belongs to the state of the church, however manifest and undoubted, that is agitated, to pass without the knowledge of your holiness, the head of all the holy churches!”
This pre-eminence was given more fully, two years after, in a memorial to the pontiff, by “the bishops and clergy of Constantinople.” It was addressed—“To our most holy lord, and most blessed father of fathers, Agapetus, archbishop of the Romans and patriarch, the bishops of the oriental diocese, and those who dwell in the holy places of Christ our Lord, with the residents and other classes assembled in this royal city.” Plain Christians may wonder at all this sacerdotal blasphemy, so utterly at variance with all that they read in the New Testament, except of the predicted Antichrist!