We have no space here to develop this argument, but it is the argument that had great weight with ourselves personally, and, by the grace of God, was the chief argument that brought us to believe in the truth of Christianity, and in the church as the fulfilment of the synagogue. The apostles and early apologists continually, in one form or another, appeal to this standing miracle, this long-continued manifestation of the supernatural, as the basis of their proof of Christianity. They adduced older traditions than any the pagans could pretend to, and set forth a faith that had continued from the first man, which had once been the faith of all mankind, and from which the Gentiles had fallen away, and been plunged, in consequence, into the darkness of unbelief, and subjected to all the terrors of the vilest, most corrupt, and abominable superstitions. They labored to show that the Gentiles, in the pride of their hearts, had forsaken the God that made them, creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, visible or invisible, for Satan, for demons, and for gods made with their own hands, or fashioned by their own lusts and evil imaginations. They pursued, indeed, the same line of argument that Catholics pursue against Protestants, only modified by the fact that the Protestant falling away, so clearly foretold by St. Paul in his Epistles, is more recent, less complete, and Protestants have not yet sunk so low as had the Gentiles of the Roman empire.
But it was not enough to establish the truth of Christianity in the Roman mind. Christian morals are above the strength of nature alone; yet the pagans were not only induced to give up their own principle of morals, and to accept as true the Christian principle, but they gave up their old practices, and yielded a practical obedience to the Christian law. Those same Romans changed their manner of life, and attained to the very summits of Christian sanctity. The philosophers gave many noble precepts, preserved from a purer tradition than their own, but they had no power to get them practised, and our author himself says they had no influence on the people; yet they enjoined nothing above the forces of nature. The Christians came, taught the people a morality impracticable to nature even in its integrity, and yet what they taught was actually practised even by women, children, and slaves. How was this? It was not possible without supernatural aid, or the infusion of grace which elevates the soul above the level of nature, enabling it at once to act from a supernatural principle, and from a supernatural motive. All who have attempted the practise of Christian perfection by the strength of nature alone, have sadly failed. Take the charitable institutions, societies for relieving the poor, providing for the aged and infirm, protecting the fatherless and widows, for restoring the fallen, and reforming the vicious or criminal, established by non-Catholics—they are all comparative, if not absolute failures. Though modelled after institutions of the church, and supported at lavish expense, none of them succeed. They lack some essential element which is efficacious in Catholic institutions, and that element is undoubtedly supernatural grace, for that is all Catholics have that they have not in far greater abundance. They have humanity, natural benevolence, learning, ability, and ample wealth—why do they not succeed? Because they lack supernatural charity, and the blessing of God that always accompanies it. No other reasons can be assigned.
Mr. Lecky thinks the persecutions by the state, which the early Christians had to endure, or that the spread of Christianity in spite of them, are not worth anything in the argument. In the first place, he pretends that the persecutions were not very severe, and were for the most part confined to particular localities, and rarely became general in the empire; they were of brief duration, and came only at distant intervals, and the number of martyrs could not have been great. In the second place, the persecutions rather helped the persecuted religion, as persecution usually does. Rome, in reality, was tolerant, and most of the pagan emperors were averse to harsh measures, and connived at the growth of the new religion, which they regarded as one of the innumerable superstitions hatched in the East, and which must soon pass away.
Rome tolerated for conquered nations their national religion, or worship, but no religion except the state religion for Romans. The national gods recognized by the senate, and whose images were allowed to stand by the side of the Roman gods, might be worshipped; but no Roman citizen was allowed to desert the state religion, and nowhere in the empire was any religion tolerated that was not the national worship of some people subject or tributary to Rome. Now, Christianity was no national religion, and was hostile to the state religion, and utterly irreconcilable with it; for it there was no toleration; it was prohibited by the laws of the empire as well as by the edicts of the emperors. The Christians might at first be overlooked as too insignificant to excite hostility, or they might have been regarded, since they were chiefly Jews, as a Jewish sect; they might also, as they were a quiet, peaceable people, obeying the laws when not repugnant to the law of God, performing all their moral, social, and civil duties, and never mingling in the affairs of state, have been connived at for a time. But they had no legal protection, and if complained of and brought before the tribunals, and proved to be Christians, they had no alternative but to conform to the national religion or suffer death, often in the most excruciating forms; for the Romans were adepts in cruelty, and took delight in watching the writhings and sufferings of their victims. Even Trajan, while he prohibited the search for them, ordered, if accused and convicted of being Christians, that they should be put to death. Such being the law, the prefect or governor of a province could at any time, without any imperial edict, put the law in force against the Christians, if so disposed; and that they did so in all the provinces of the empire, frequently and with unsparing severity, we know from history. The Christians were safe at no time and nowhere in the empire, and it is probable that the number of victims of the ten general persecutions were by far the smaller number of those who suffered for the faith prior to the accession of Constantine. We place no confidence in the calculations of Gibbon or our author, and we have found no reason for believing that the Christian historians, or the fathers, exaggerated the number of those who received the crown of martyrdom.
It is a great mistake to suppose that paganism had lost its hold on the Roman mind till long after the Christians had become a numerous body in the empire. There were, no doubt, individuals who treated all religions with indifference, but never had the pagan superstitions a stronger hold on the mass of the people, especially in Rome and the western provinces, than during the first two centuries of our era. The republic had been transformed into the empire, and the government was never stronger, or the worship of the state more intolerant, more fervent, or more energetically supported by the government. The work of Romanizing the various conquered nations was effected under the emperors, and the signs of decline and dissolution of the empire did not appear till near the close of the third century. The Roman state and paganism seemed to be indissolubly linked together—so closely that the pagans attributed to the rise and progress of Christianity the decline and downfall of both. Certain it is, that paganism lost its hold on the people or the state only in proportion to the progress of Christianity; and the abandonment of the heathen gods and the desertion of the heathen temples were due to the preaching of the Gospel, not a fact which preceded and prepared the way for it. Converts are seldom made from the irreligious and indifferent classes, who are the last, in any age, to be reached or affected by truth and piety.
The fact is, that paganism fought valiantly to the last, and Christianity had to meet and grapple with it in its full force, and when supported by the strongest and most effective government that ever existed, still in the prime and vigor of its life. The struggle was harder and longer continued than is commonly supposed, and by no means ended with Constantine. Paganism reascended the throne—in principle, at least—under Constantius, the son, and avowedly under Julian, the nephew of the first Christian emperor. Every pagan statesman saw, from the first, that there was an irrepressible antagonism between Christianity and paganism, and that the former could not prevail without destroying the latter, and, of course, the religion of the state, and apparently not without destroying the state with it. The intelligent and patriotic portion of the Roman people must have regarded the spread of Christianity very much as the Protestant leaders regard the spread of Catholicity in our own country. They looked upon it as a foreign religion, and anti-Roman. It rejected the gods of Rome, to whom the city was indebted for her victories and the empire of the world. We may be sure, then, that the whole force of the state, the whole force of the pagan worship, backed by the passions and fanaticism of the people, whether of the city or the provinces, was exerted to crush out the new and offensive worship; and, whether the numbers of martyrs were a few more or a few less, the victory obtained by Christianity against such fearful odds is not explicable without the assumption of supernatural aid—especially when that victory carried with it a complete change of morals and manners, and the practice in not a few who underwent it of a heroic sanctity, or virtues which are confessedly above our natural strength.
No false or merely natural religion could have survived, far less have vanquished, such opposition as Christianity encountered at every point. The very fact that it thrived, in spite of the fearful persecution to which it was subjected, is a proof of its truth and divinity. We grant the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, but persecution fails only when it meets truth, when it meets God as the resisting force. We know the strength of superstition and the tenacity of fanaticism; but we deny that persecution has ever increased or multiplied the adherents or aided the growth of a false religion. There is no example of it in history. It is only the truth that does not succumb; and even they who profess the truth, when they have lost the practice of it, have yielded to the spirit of the world, and have ceased to be faithful to God, fail to stand before persecution, as was seen in the almost entire extinction of Catholics in the European nations that accepted the Protestant Reformation. The inefficacy of persecution to extinguish the doctrine persecuted is a commonplace of liberalism; but history proves the contrary, and hence the fact that Christianity, instead of being extinguished by the heathen persecution, spread under it, and even gained power by it, is no mean proof of its truth and its supernatural support.
The author obtains his adverse conclusion by substituting for the Christianity to which Rome was actually converted, and which actually triumphed in the empire, a Christianity of his own manufacture, a rationalistic Christianity, which has nothing to do with Christ Jesus, and him crucified; a Christianity despoiled of its mysteries, its doctrinal teachings, its distinctive moral precepts, and reduced to a simple moral philosophy. It is with him a theory, a school; not a fact, not a law, not an authority, not a living organism, nor of an order essentially different from paganism. His Christianity has its starting point in paganism, and only marks a particular stage in the general progress of the race. He does not see that it and paganism start from entirely different principles, and come down through separate and hostile lines, or that they have different ancestors. He does not understand that Christianity, if a development at all, is not the development of paganism, but of the patriarchal and Jewish religion, which placed the principle of duty in man's relation to God as his creator and final cause, not in the assumption of man's own divinity or godship. Hence he finds no need of supernatural aid to secure its triumph.
The author, placing Christianity in the same line with paganism, supposes that he accounts sufficiently for the conversion of Rome by the assumption that the Christians placed a stronger emphasis on certain doctrines held by the pagan philosophers, and were actuated by a greater zeal and enthusiasm than were those philosophers themselves. Yet he does not show the origin of the greater zeal, nor its character; and he entirely misapprehends the enthusiasm of the early Christians. They were, in no received sense of the word, enthusiasts, nor were they, in his sense of the word, even zealots. They in no sense corresponded to the character given them in The Last Days of Pompeii. They were neither enthusiasts nor fanatics; and their zeal, springing from true charity, was never obtrusive nor annoying. We find in the earlier and later sects enthusiasts, fanatics, and zealots, who are excessively offensive, and yet are able to carry away the simple, the ignorant, and the undisciplined; but we never find them among the early orthodox Christians, any more than you do among Catholics at the present day. The early Christians did not "creep into houses and lead away silly women," nor assault people in the streets or market-place, and seek to cram Christianity down their throats, whether they would or not, but were singularly sober, quiet, orderly, and regular in their proceedings, as Catholics have always been, compelling not people to hear them against their will, and instructing in the faith only those who manifested a desire to be instructed. The author entirely mistakes both the Christian order of thought and the character of the early Christians who suffered from and finally triumphed over the pagan empire.