Why did the Emperor Constantine embrace Christianity? Was it not mainly because he believed that it had a power to wipe away his own heinous crimes?[21] Even his old age “was disgraced by the opposite, yet reconcilable, vices of rapaciousness and prodigality.”[22] Although he acknowledged the Faith, he put off his baptism till he was on his death-bed, in order that he might continue to lead a wicked life as long as possible.[23] As an instrument for spreading God’s word he is even worse than that royal adulterer and murderer whom we are asked to look upon as a prototype of Christ and His prime ancestor.
On all these matters of history the learned Bishop Westcott is silent, although, as examples of Divine Providence, they would appear sufficiently remarkable. Lest Gibbon’s testimony be deemed untrustworthy on account of his anti-Christian bias, the following extract from a prize essay in Christian apologetics may be noted. Not only does it bear out some of the historian’s statements concerning the causes of the spread of Christianity, but it discloses the significant fact that the clergy increased their power and influence by working upon the emotions of wealthy women, and that £.s.d. and its female contributors were then, as now, a sine qua non.[24]—“Nine years after the conversion of Constantine to the Christian faith he promulgated that great edict which, more than any other enactment, may be said to have lain at the foundation of clerical power during the ensuing centuries, and relieved the Christian Church from that restriction under which, in common with the Jews, they had so long laboured—the incapacity of profiting by the testamentary liberality of their wealthy proselytes. To convince us of the abundance in which the stream of wealth flowed into the newly opened channel, and of the influence obtained by the clergy, in those days as in the present, over the piety and pliability of the weaker sex, more especially at Rome, we possess not only the testimony of a Pagan historian,[25] but the less suspicious evidence of an edict published by the Emperor Valentinian[26] fifty years after that of Constantine, addressed to Damasus, Bishop of that city, and imposing a limit to the extravagant donations of females. The clergy, moreover, might look for an increase of worldly substance not only from the prosperity of their friends, but from the downfall of their enemies; for the Theodosian code contains a series of stringent enactments by the Emperor Honorius,[27] in terms of which not only the deserted temples of Paganism, but even the meeting-houses and possessions of Donatists, Manichæan, and other heretical corporations, were made over to the Catholic Church.”[28]
There was yet another, and possibly the chief, cause for the ultimate spread of Christianity. In the chapter on comparative mythology I have described and commented upon the various rationalistic theories concerning the origins of Christian beliefs and ceremonies. As a matter of fact, Mithraism spread just as much, or more, until Christianity obtained the necessary political power to suppress it. Not only from these anti-Christian theories, but also from the admissions of apologists concerning them, it appears that Christianity gained ground, not so much because there was something new either in its dogma or in its promise, but rather because these were so closely paralleled in many pagan cults. Let us take, for example, the spread of Christianity in Egypt. “The Egyptians who embraced Christianity found that the moral system of the old cult and that of the new religion were so similar, and the promises of resurrection and immortality in each so alike, that they transferred their allegiance from Osiris to Jesus of Nazareth without difficulty. Moreover, Isis and the child Horus were straightway identified with Mary the Virgin and her Son.”[29] “The knowledge of the ancient Egyptian religion which we now possess fully justifies the assertion that the rapid growth and progress of Christianity in Egypt were due mainly to the fact that the new religion, which was preached there by St. Mark and his immediate followers, in all its essentials so closely resembled that which was the outcome of Osiris, Isis, and Horus that popular opposition was entirely disarmed.”[30] We have, then, here one of the main factors in the growth of Christianity. I cannot find that Bishop Westcott recognises this as a part of the preparation in which the hand of God can be traced; but advanced apologists very largely do so now, and hence the precious theory of progressive revelation.
We may now pass on to another very popular argument.
§ 5. The Noble Army of Martyrs.
My allusions to religious persecutions may remind some of my readers of the experiences of the early Christians, and of the witness to the truth of Christianity furnished by the “noble army of martyrs”; and they may say: “Admitting that there be nothing extraordinary in the mere fact of Christianity’s spread, you must allow that its power over men’s minds is little, if at all, short of miraculous. Men could not have given their lives for a falsehood.” This argument will not bear the slightest scrutiny. “Steadfastness under persecution says much for the sincerity, and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that which he believes.”[31] Supposing the noble army were a historical fact, the argument based upon it would be adequately met by pointing to the last Ghazi who ran amok in the hope of a speedy delivery from a dirty and ugly spouse on earth, and of reaping the reward of a clean and lovely houri in heaven.
But the noble army is not altogether a historical fact. The truth is that martyr-making became an ecclesiastical industry. The historian Gibbon estimates that at most about two thousand Christians fell in the Diocletian persecution—which was the only general persecution—and this estimate is now commonly accepted. “Since,” says Gibbon, “it cannot be doubted that the Christians were more numerous, and their enemies more exasperated, in the time of Diocletian than they had ever been in any former persecution, this probable and moderate computation may teach us to estimate the number of primitive saints and martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the important purpose of introducing Christianity into the world.”[32] Compare these figures with the numbers who have suffered death in modern times for the sake of introducing a non-Christian faith. The Bab Abbas Effendi suffered martyrdom for his zeal in 1850, and between that date and now the most conservative opinion on the Babi martyrdoms puts them at ten thousand. (N.B.—No hopes of wealth and honours, no imperial edicts, have assisted the really remarkable spread of Babism.) As a matter of fact, a considerable portion of the history of man is a history of his martyrdom. “Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past.”[33] If religious ladies could spare the time (from the absorbing occupation of reading the very latest works of fiction or the lives of the “grandes amoureuses”) to read Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, a book none the less interesting because it treats of historical facts, they would begin to realise that martyrs are not a Christian monopoly.