The doctrine of future life the church taught was coupled with two other doctrines hard for pagans to receive. The mere continuance of the spirit after the death of the body was, in some form, no doubt, held by the whole pagan world, a few sceptics excepted; but the resurrection of the body, or that what had once ceased to live would live again, was a thing wholly foreign to the pagan mind. Plato never, to my recollection, once hints it, and could not with his general principles. He held the union of the soul with the body to be a fall, a degradation from its previous state, the loss of its liberty; regarded the body as the enemy of the soul, as its dungeon, and looked upon death as its liberation, as a restoration to its original freedom and joy in the bosom of the divinity. The pagans had, as far as I can discover, no belief in future rewards and punishment in the Christian sense. They believed in malevolent gods, who, if they failed to appease their wrath before dying, would torture them after death in Tartarus; but the idea that a God of love would doom the wicked to hell, as a punishment for their moral offences or sins, was as hard for them to believe as it is for Mr. Lecky himself. Yet Christianity taught it, and brought the whole empire to believe it. Christianity, while it delivered the pagans from the false terrors of superstition, replaced them by what to the pagan mind seemed even a still greater terror.
In what the author says of appeals to the emotional side of our nature, he shows that he has studied paganism with more care and less prejudice than he has Christianity. The emotions, as such, have for the Christian no moral or religious value. The love the Gospel requires is not an emotional love, and Christian morals have little to do with the moral sentiment which Adam Smith asserted, or the benevolence which Hucheson held to be the principle of morality. There is no approach to the Christian principle in the fine-spun sentiment of Bernardine Saint-Pierre, Madame de Staël, or Chateaubriand. Sentimentalism, in any form, is wholly foreign to Christian morals and to Christian piety, and neither has probably a worse or a more dangerous enemy than the sentimentalism so rife in modern society, and which finds its way even into the writings of some Catholics. The sentiment of benevolence may be a mobile, but it is never the motive of Christian virtue. No doubt, one of the great causes of the success of Christianity was the inexhaustible charity of the early Christians, their love for one another, their respect for and tenderness to the poor, the forsaken, the oppressed, the afflicted, the suffering. But that charity had not its origin in our emotional nature, and though it may be attended by sentiment, is itself by no means a sentiment; for its reason and motive was the love of God, especially of God who had assumed our nature, and made himself man for man's sake, and died on the cross for man's redemption. The Christian sees God in every fellow-man who needs his assistance, or to whose wants he can minister. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." The Christian finds his Lord, the Beloved of his soul, wherever he finds one for whom Christ died, to whom he can be of service.
This charity, this love, may be mimicked by the sentiment of benevolence, but it does not grow out of it, is not that sentiment developed or intensified; it depends on the great central mystery of Christianity, that of "the Word made flesh," and can never be found where faith in the Incarnation is wanting, and faith is, always and everywhere, an intellectual act, not a sentimental affection. If it were a natural sentiment or emotion, why was it to be found among Christians alone? The heathen had all of nature that Christians have; they even recognized the natural brotherhood of the race, as does the author; how happens it, then, if Christianity is only a development of heathenism, and Christian charity is only a natural sentiment, that you find no trace of it in the pagan world? There is no effect without a cause, and there must have been something operating with Christians that was not to be found in paganism, and which is not included even in nature.
The pagans, like modern Protestants, worshipped success, and regarded success as a mark of the approbation of the gods. Misfortune, ill-luck, failure was a proof of the divine displeasure. Cromwell and his Roundheads interpreted uniformly their victories over the royalists as an indisputable proof of the divine approval of their course. It never occurred to them that the Almighty might be using them to chastise the royalists for their abuse of his favors, or to execute vengeance on a party that had offended him, and that, when he had accomplished his purpose with them, he would break them as a potter's vessel, and cast them away. The heathen looked upon the poor, the needy, the enslaved, the infirm, the helpless, and the suffering, as under the malediction of the gods, and refused to offer them any aid or consolation. They left the poor to struggle and starve. They did not do even so much for them as to shut them up in prisons called poor-houses. They looked with haughty contempt on the poor and needy, and if they sometimes threw them a crust, it was from pride, not charity, without the least kindly sympathies with them. As with modern non-Catholics, poverty, with them, was regarded and treated as a misfortune or as a crime.
Yet the Christians looked upon the poor with love and respect. Poverty, in their eyes, was no misfortune, no crime, but really a blessing, as bringing them nearer to God, and giving to the Christian more abundant in this world's goods an opportunity to do good, and lay up treasures in heaven. The Christian counts what he gives to the poor and needy as so much treasure saved, and placed beyond the reach of thieves and robbers, or any of the vicissitudes of fortune. Whence this difference between the pagan and the Christian, we might say, between the Catholic and non-Catholic? It cannot come from the simple recognition of the natural brotherhood of the race, for the natural ties of race and of kindred fail to call forth a love so strong, so enduring, so self-forgetting as Christian charity. Indeed, Christian charity is decidedly above the forces of nature. The brotherhood that gives rise to it is not the brotherhood in Adam, but the closer brotherhood in Christ; not in generation, but in regeneration. Give, then, as large a part as you will to Christian charity, in the conversion of Rome, you still have offered no proof that the conversion was effected by natural causes, for that charity itself is supernatural, and not in the order of natural causes.
Mr. Lecky wholly fails to adduce any natural causes adequate to the explanation of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of Christianity over paganism. He cannot do it, for this one sufficient reason, that paganism was impotent to reform itself, and yet it had all the natural causes working for it that Christianity had. The Christians had no more of nature than had the pagans, while all the natural advantages, power, wealth, institutions, human learning and science, the laws, habits, customs, and usages of the entire nation, or aggregation of nations, were against them. How, then, not only do by nature what the same nature in paganism could not do, or by nature alone triumph over nature clothed with so many advantages, and presenting so many obstacles? Why should nature be stronger, and so much stronger, in Christians than in Pagans, that a few illiterate fishermen from the lake of Genesareth, belonging by race to the despised nation of the Jews, could change not only the belief, but the moral life of the whole Roman people? Clearly, the Christians could not succeed without a power which paganism had not, and therefore not without a power that nature does not and cannot furnish.
The author denies the supernatural, and seeks to combat the argument we use by showing that several eastern superstitions, especially the worship of Isis, were introduced into Rome about the same time with Christianity, and gained no little currency, in spite of the imperial edicts against them. This is true, but there was no radical difference between those eastern superstitions and the state religion, and they demanded and effected no change of morals or manners. They were all in the order of the national religion, were based on the same principle, only they were a little more sensual and corrupt. Their temporary success required no other basis than Roman paganism itself furnished. And the edicts against their mysteries and orgies were seldom executed. It needs no supernatural principle to account for the rapid rise and spread of Methodism in a Protestant community, for it is itself only a form of Protestantism. But Christianity was not, and is not, in any sense, a form or development of paganism; in almost every particular, it is its direct contradictory. It was based on a totally different principle, and held entirely different maxims of life. A worshipper of Bacchus or Isis could without difficulty conform to the national or state religion, and comply with all its requirements. The Christian could conform in nothing, and comply with no pagan requirements. He could take no part in the national festivities, the national games, amusements, or rejoicings, for these were all dedicated to idols. There is no analogy in the case.
Mr. Lecky denies that the conversion of Rome was a miracle, and that it was effected on the evidence of miracles. He admits that miracles are possible, though he confounds miracles with prodigies, and says there is five times more proof in the case of many miracles than would be required to prove an ordinary historical fact; but he rejects miracles, not for the want of proof, nor because science has disproved them, but because the more intelligent portion of mankind have gradually dropped them, and ceased to believe in them, as they have dropped the belief in fairies, dwarfs, etc. The enlightened portion of mankind, it must be understood, are those who think like Mr. Lecky, and profess a Christianity without Christ, moral obligation without God the creator, and hold effects are producible without causes. We confess that we are not of their number, and probably shall never be an enlightened man in their sense. We believe in miracles, and that miracles had not a little to do with the introduction and establishment of Christianity. As the author admits them to be possible, and that many are sustained by far greater proof than is needed to prove ordinary historical events, we hope that it will be allowed, that, in believing them, we are not necessarily involved in total darkness. But we have no space, at present, to enter upon the general question of miracles—a question that can not be properly treated without treating the whole question of the natural and the supernatural.
The author tells us that the early Christians at Rome rarely appealed, if at all, to miracles as proofs either of their doctrines or their mission. Yet that they sometimes did would seem pretty certain from the pains the pagans took to break the force of the Christian miracles by ascribing them to magic, or by setting up analogous or counter miracles of their own. Certain it is, however, that they appealed to the supernatural, and adduced not only the miracle of the resurrection of our Lord, which entered into the very staple of their preaching, and was one of the bases of their faith, but to that standing miracle of prophecy, and of a supernatural providence—the Jewish, people. The very religion they preached was supernatural, from beginning to end, and they labored to prove the necessity of faith in Christ, who was crucified, who rose from the dead, and is Lord of heaven and earth. There is no particular miracle or prophecy adduced to prove this that cannot, indeed, be cavilled at; but the Hebrew traditions and the faith of the Jewish people could not be set aside. Here was a whole nation whose entire life through many thousand years had been based on a prophecy, a promise of the Messiah. This prophecy, frequently renewed, and borne witness to by the national organization, the religious institutions, sacrifices, and offerings, and the entire national and moral life through centuries, is a most stupendous miracle. When you take this in connection with the traditions preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, which go back to the creation of the world—developing one uniform system of thought, one uniform doctrine, one uniform faith, free from all superstition; one uniform plan of divine providence, and throwing a marvellous light on the origin, duty, and end of man—you find a supernatural fact which is irresistible, and sufficient of itself to convince any unprejudiced mind that Christianity is the fulfilment of the promises made to Adam after his expulsion from the Garden, to the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to the Jewish people.