, or the beautiful, and could not bind the conscience. The Latins placed the end, or the reason and motive of the moral law, in the honestum, the proper, the decent, or decorous. The highest moral act was virtus, manliness, and consisted in bravery or courage. The rule was, to be manly; the motive, self-respect. One must not be mean or cowardly, because it was unmanly, and would destroy one's self-respect. We have here pride, not humility; not the slightest approach to the Christian principle of morals, either to the rule or the motive of virtue as understood by the Christian church.
Yet Mr. Lecky tells us the moral doctrines of the philosophers were much superior to the practice of the people. He admits the people were far below the philosophers, and were very corrupt; but we see no evidence that he has any adequate conception of how corrupt they were. What the people were we can learn from the satirists, from the historians, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, especially from the De Civitate Dei of St. Augustine, and the writings of the early Greek and Latin fathers. Our author acknowledges not only that the philosophers were superior to the people, but also that they were impotent to effect their moral elevation or any moral amelioration of their condition. Nothing more true. How, then, if Christianity was based on the pagan principle of morals, was in the same order with paganism, and differed from it only in certain details, or, as the schoolmen say, certain accidents—how explain the amelioration of morals and manners which uniformly followed whenever and wherever it was received?
If, as the author holds, Christianity was really only a development of the more advanced thought of the pagan empire, why did it not begin with the philosophers, the representatives of that advanced thought? Yet nothing is more certain than that it did not begin with them. The philosophers were the first to resist it, and the last to hold out against it. It spread at first among the people, chiefly among the slaves—that is, among those who knew the least of philosophy, who were least under the influence of the philosophers, and whose morals it is confessed the philosophers did not and could not elevate. This of itself refutes the pretence that Christianity was an offshoot of heathen philosophy. If it had been, and its power lay in the fact that the empire in its progress was prepared for it, its first converts should have been from the ranks of the more advanced classes. But the reverse was the fact. "You see your calling, brethren," says St. Paul to the Corinthians, "that not many are wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong; and the mean things of the world, and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen, and things that are not, that he might destroy the things that are; that no flesh should glory in his sight." [Footnote 197] So said the great teacher of the Gentiles, as if anticipating the objection of modern rationalists. Evidently, then, the pretended preparation of the Roman empire for Christianity must count for nothing, for Christianity gained its first establishments among those whom that preparation, even if it had been made, had not reached.
[Footnote 197: Cor. i. 26.]
We cannot follow step by step the author in the special chapter which he devotes to the conversion of Rome, and the triumph of Christianity in the empire. We have already indicated the grounds on which he explains the marvellous fact. He denies all agency of miracles, will recognize no supernatural aid, and aims to explain it on natural principles or by natural causes alone. Thus far he has certainly failed; but let us try him on his own ground. We grant that the breaking down of the hundred nationalities and fusing so many distinct tribes and races into one people, under one supreme political authority, did in some sense prepare the way for the introduction of a universal religion. But it must be remembered that the fusion was not complete, and that the work of amalgamating and Romanizing the several nations placed by conquest under the authority of Rome was only commenced, when Christianity was first preached in the capital of the empire. Each conquered nation retained as yet its own distinctive religion, and to a great extent its own distinctive civilization. Gaul, Spain, and the East were Roman provinces, but not thoroughly Romanized, and it was not till after Christianity had gained a footing in the empire that provincials out of Italy were admitted to the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship. The law recognized the religion of the state, but it tolerated for every conquered nation its own national religion. There was as yet nothing in the political, social, or religious order of the empire to suggest a universal religion, or that opened the way for the introduction of a catholic as distinguished from a national religion. All the religions recognized and tolerated were national religions. Christianity was always catholic, for all nations, not for any particular nation alone. If, then, at a subsequent period, the boasted universality of the empire favored the diffusion of Christianity, it did not favor its introduction in the beginning. In all other respects there was, as we read history, no evangelical preparation in Rome or the Roman empire. The progress, if progress it may be called, of the Gentiles, had been away from the primitive religion reasserted by Christianity, and in a direction from, not towards, the great doctrines and principles of the Gospel. What of primitive tradition they had retained had become so corrupted, perverted, or travestied as to be hardly recognizable. They had changed, even with the philosophers, the true basis of morals, and the corrupt morals of the people were only the practical development of the principles adopted by even the best of the Gentile philosophers, as rationalism is only the development of principles adopted by the reformers, who detested it, and asserted exclusive supernaturalism. Even the monotheism of some pagan philosophers was not the Christian doctrine of one God, any more than simple theism—the softened name for deism—or even theophilanthropy is Christianity. The Christian God is not only one, but he is the creator of the world, of all things visible and invisible, the moral governor of the universe, and the remunerator of all who seek him. The God of Plato, or of any of the other philosophers, is no creative God, and the immortality of the soul that Plato and his master Socrates defended had hardly any analogy with the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel. The Stoics, whom the author places in the front rank of pagan moralists, did not regard God as the creator of the world, and those among them who held that the soul survives the body, believed not in the resurrection of the flesh, nor in future rewards and punishments. Their motive to virtue was their own self-respect, and their study was to prove themselves independent of the flesh and its seductions, indifferent to pleasure or pain, serene and unalterable, through self-discipline, whatever the vicissitudes of life. The philosophers adopted the morality of pride, and aimed to live and act not as men dependent on their Creator, but as independent gods, while the people were sunk in the grossest ignorance and moral corruption, and subject to the most base and abominable superstitions. Such was the pagan empire when Christianity was first preached at Rome, only much worse than we venture to depict it.
Now, to this Roman world, rotten to the core, the Christian preachers proclaimed a religion which arraigned its corruption, which contradicted its cherished ideas on every point, and substituted meekness for cruelty, and humility for pride, as the principle of morals. They had against them all the old superstitions and national religions of the empire, the religion of the state, associated with all its victories, supported by the whole power of the government, and by the habits, usages, traditions, and the whole political, military, social, and religious life of the Roman people. They could not move without stepping on something held sacred, or open their mouths without offending some god or some religious usage; for the national religion was interwoven with the simplest and most ordinary usages of private and social life. If a pagan sneezed, no Christian could be civil enough to say, "Jupiter help you," for that would recognize a false god. Yet the Christian missionaries did succeed in converting Rome and making it the capital of the Christian world, as it was, when they entered it, the capital of the heathen world. You tell me this mighty change was effected, circumstances favoring, by natural and human means! Credat Judaeus Appelles, non ego.
The cause of the success, after the preparation named, which turns out to have been no preparation at all, were, according to the author, principally the zeal, the enthusiasm, and the intolerance or exclusiveness of the Christians, the doctrines of the brotherhood of the race and of a future life, and their appeals to the emotional side of human nature. He does not think the conversion of Rome any thing remarkable. The philosophers had failed to regenerate society in the moral order, the old religions had lost their hold on men's convictions, the old superstitions were losing their terrors, and men felt and sighed for something better than any thing they had. In fact, minds were unsettled, and were ready for something new. This description, not very applicable to Rome at the period in question, is not inapplicable to the Protestant world at the present time. Protestants are no longer satisfied with the results, either dogmatic or moral, of the Reformation, and the thinking portion of them wish for something better than any thing they have; yet not, therefore, can we conclude that they can easily, or by any purely human means, be converted to the Catholic Church; for they have—with individual exceptions, indeed—not lost their confidence in the underlying principle of the Reformation, or opened their minds or hearts to the acknowledgment of the principle, either of Catholic dogma or of Catholic morals. It is not so much that they do not know or misconceive that principle, but they have a deep-rooted repugnance to it, detest it, abhor it, and cannot even hear it named with patience. So was it with the pagan Romans. The whole pagan world was based on a principle which the Christian preacher could not speak without contradicting. The Christian ideal was not only above, but antagonistic to the pagan ideal, and, consequently, the more zealous the Christian missionary, the more offensive he would prove himself. His intolerance or exclusiveness might help him whose faith was strong, yet little heeded in practice; but when faith itself was not only wanting but indignantly rejected, it could only excite anger or derision.
The apostle had no point d'appui in the pagan traditions, and it was only rarely that he could find any thing in heathen authors, poets, or philosophers that he could press into his service. The pagan, no doubt, had natural reason, but it was so darkened by spiritual ignorance, so warped by superstition, and so abnormally developed by false principles, that it was almost impossible to find in it anything on which an argument for the truth could be based. The Gospel was not in the pagan order of thought, and the Christian apologists had to support it by appealing to a line of tradition which the Gentiles had not, or had only as corrupted, perverted, or travestied. The only traditions they could appeal to were those of the Hebrews, and they found it necessary, in some sort, to convert the pagans to Judaism, before they could convince them of the truth of the Gospel. This was any thing but easy to be done; for the Gentiles despised the Jews and their traditions, and the Jews themselves were the most bitter enemies of the Christians, had crucified the founder of Christianity, and rejected the Christian interpretation of their Scriptures.
The doctrine of the brotherhood of the race taught by the church was something more than was taught by the philosophers, in fact, another doctrine; and, though it had something consoling to the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, yet these are precisely the classes with whom old traditions linger the longest, and prejudices are the most inveterate and hardest to be overcome. They are the classes the most opposed to innovations, in the moral or spiritual order. The Protestant reformers proved this, and the peasantry were the last to accept the new gospel they preached, and rarely accepted it at all but through the influence or compulsion of their princes and nobles. We see, also, now, in Protestant countries, that, the peasantry having become Protestant, are far more difficult to convert than persons by birth or education belonging to the upper classes. Yet, it was precisely among the lower classes, or rather the slave class, that the Christian missionary had his greatest success; though the emancipation and equality he preached were spiritual only, not physical or social.