Aurelian; or, Rome in the Third Century

by William Ware

'You will now perhaps, Aurelian, desire to be told by what instruments Christianity hopes to work such changes. It is simply, O Emperor, by the power of truth! The religion which we preach uses not force. Were the arm of Aurelian at this moment the arm of Probus, he could do no more than he now does with one, which, as the world deems, is in the comparison powerless as an infant's. In all that pertains to the soul, and its growth and purification, there must be utmost freedom. The soul must suffer no constraint. There must be no force laid upon it, but the force of reason and the appeal of divine truth. All that we ask or want in Rome is the liberty of speech—the free allowance to offer to men the truth in Christ, and persuade them to consider it. With that we will engage to reform and save the whole world. We want not to meddle with affairs of state, nor with the citizen's relations to the state; we have naught to do with the city, or its laws, or government, beyond what was just now stated. We desire but the privilege to worship God according to our consciences, and labor for the moral welfare of all who will hear our words.

'And if you would know what the truth is we impart, and by which we would save the souls of men, and reform the empire and the world, be it known to you that we preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, whom God raised up and sent into the world to save it by his doctrine and life, and whom—being by the Jews hung upon a cross—God raised again from the dead. We preach him as the Son of God with power, by whom God has been revealed to mankind in his true nature and perfections, and through whom, he and he only is to be worshipped. In the place of Jupiter, we bring you a revelation of the God and Father of Christ Jesus our Lord—creator of the universe, who will call all men into judgment at last, rewarding or punishing according to what they have done. Through Jesus, we preach also a resurrection from the dead. We show, by arguments which cannot be refuted, that this Jesus, when he had been crucified and slain, and had lain three days in the tomb, was called again to life, and taken up to Heaven, as an example of what should afterwards happen to all his followers. Through him has immortality been plainly brought to light and proved, and this transporting truth we declare wherever we go. Through Jesus, we preach also repentance; we declare to men their wickedness; we show them what and how great it is; and exhort them to repentance, as what can alone save them from the wrath to come.

'This, O Emperor, is the great work which we, as apostles of Jesus, have to do, to convince the world how vile it is; how surely their wickedness, unrepented of, will work their misery and their ruin, and so lead them away from it, and up the safe and pleasant heights of Christian virtue. We find Rome sunk in sensuality and sin; nor only that, but ignorant of its own guilt, dead to the wickedness into which it has fallen, and denying any obligations to a different or better life. Such do we find, indeed, not Rome only, but the world itself, dead in trespasses and sin. We would rouse it from this sleep of death. We desire first of all, to waken in the souls of men a perception of the guilt of sin! a feeling of the wide departure of their lives from the just demands of the being who made them. The prospect of immortality were nothing without this. Longer life were but a greater evil were we not made alive to sin and righteousness. Life on earth, Aurelian, is not the best thing, but virtuous life: so life without end is not the best thing, but life without fault or sin. But to the necessity of such a life men are now insensible and dead. They love the prospect of an immortal existence, but not of that purity without which immortality were no blessing. But it is this moral regeneration—this waking up of men dead in sin, to the life of righteousness, which is the great aim of Christianity. Repentance! was the first word of its founder when he began preaching in Judea; it is the first word of his followers wherever they go, and should be the last. This, O Aurelian, in few words, is the gospel of Jesus—"Repent and live forever!"

'In the service of this gospel, and therefore of you and the world, we are content to labor while we live, to suffer injury and reproach, and if need be, and they to whom we go will not understand us, lay down our lives. Almost three hundred years has it appealed to mankind; and though not with the success that should have followed upon the labor of those who have toiled for the salvation of men, yet has it not been rejected everywhere, nor has the labor been in vain. The fruit that has come of the seed sown is great and abundant. In every corner of the earth are there now those who name the name of Christ. And in every place are there many more, than meet the eye, who read our gospels, believe in them, and rejoice in the virtue and the hope which have taken root in their souls. Here in Rome, O Aurelian, are there multitudes of believers, whom the ear hears not, nor the eye sees, hidden away in the security of this sea of roofs, whom the messengers of your power never could discover. Destroy us, you may; sweep from the face of Rome every individual whom the most diligent search can find, from the gray-haired man of fourscore to the infant that can just lisp the name of Jesus, and you have not destroyed the Christians; the Christian church still stands—not unharmed, but founded as before upon a rock, against which the powers of earth and hell can never prevail; and soon as this storm shall have overblown, those other, and now secret, multitudes, of whom I speak, will come forth, and the wilderness of the church shall blossom again as a garden in the time of spring. God is working with us, and who therefore can prevail against us!

'Bring not then, Aurelian, upon your own soul; bring not upon Rome, the guilt that would attend this unnecessary slaughter. It can but defer for an hour or a day the establishment of that kingdom of righteousness, which must be established, because it is God's, and he is laying its foundations and building its walls. Have pity too, great Emperor, upon this large multitude of those who embrace this faith, and who will not let it go for all the terrors of your courts and judges and engines; they will all suffer the death of Macer ere they will prove false to their Master. Let not the horrors of that scene be renewed, nor the greater ones of an indiscriminate massacre. I implore your compassions, not for myself, but for these many thousands, who, by my ministry, have been persuaded to receive this faith. For them my heart bleeds; them I would save from the death which impends. Yet it is a glorious and a happy death, to die for truth and Christ! It is better to die so, knowing that by such death the very church itself is profited, than to die in one's own bed, and only to one's self. So do these thousands think; and whatever compassion I may implore for them, they would each and all, were such their fate, go with cheerful step, as those who went to some marriage supper, to the axe, to the stake, or the cross. Christianity cannot die but with the race itself. Its life is bound up in the life of man, and man must be destroyed ere that can perish. Behold then, Aurelian, the labor that is thine!'

Soon as he had ceased, Porphyrius started from his seat and said,

'It is then, O Romans, just as it has ever been affirmed. The Galileans are atheists! They believe not in the gods of Rome, nor in any in whom mankind can ever have belief. I doubt not but they think themselves believers in a God. They think themselves to have found one better than others have; but upon any definition, that I or you could give or understand, of atheism, they are atheists! Their God is invisible; he is a universal spirit, like this circumambient air; of no form, dwelling in no place. But how can that without effrontery be called a being, which is without body and form; which is everywhere and yet nowhere; which, from the beginning of the world has never been heard of, till by these Nazarenes he is now first brought to light, or, if older, exists in the dreams of the dreaming Jews, whose religion, as they term it, is so stuffed with fable, that one might not expect, after the most exact and laborious search, to meet with so much as a grain of truth. Yet, whatever these Galileans may assert, their speech is hardly to be received as worthy of belief, when, in their very sacred records, such things are to be found as contradict themselves. For in one place—not to mention a thousand cases of the like kind—it is said that Jesus, the head of this religion, on a certain occasion walked upon the sea; when, upon sifting the narrative, it is found that it was but upon a paltry lake, the lake of Galilee, upon which he performed that great feat!—a thing to which the magic of which he is accused—and doubtless with justice—was plainly equal; while to walk upon the sea might well have been beyond that science. How much of what we have heard is to be distrusted also, concerning the love which these Nazarenes bear to Rome. We may well pray to be delivered from the affection of those, whose love manifests itself in the singular manner of seeking our destruction. He who loves me so well as to poison me that I may have the higher enjoyment of Elysium, I could hardly esteem as a well-wisher or friend. These Jewish fanatics love us after somewhat the same fashion. In the zeal of their affection they would make us heirs of what they call their heavenly kingdom, but in the meanwhile destroy our religion, deprive us of our ancient gods, and sap the foundations of the state.

'Romans, in spite of all you have heard of another sort, I hope you will still believe that experience is one of your most valuable teachers, and that therefore you will be slow to forsake opinions which have the sanction of venerable age, under which you have flourished so happily, and your country grown to so amazing a height of glory and renown. I think you would deserve the fate which this new-made religion would bring you to, if you abandoned the worship of a thousand years, for the presumptuous novelty of yesterday. Not a name of greatness or honor can be quoted of those who have adorned this foreign fiction; while all the great and good of Greece and Rome, philosophers, moralists, historians, and poets, are to be found on the side of Hellenism. If we cast from us that which we have experienced to be good, by what rule and on what principle can we afterward put our trust in anything else? And it is considerable, that which has ever been asserted of this people, and which I doubt not is true, that they have ever been prying about with their doctrines and their mysteries among the poor and humbler sort, among women, slaves, simple and unlearned folks, while they have never appealed to, nor made any converts of, the great and the learned, who alone are capable of judging of the truth of such things.

'Who are the believers here in Rome? Who knows them? Are the sacred Senate Christians? or any distinguished for their rank? No; with exceptions, too few to be noticed, those who embrace it are among the dregs of the people, men wholly incapable of separating true from false, and laying properly the safe foundations of a new religion—a work too great even for philosophers. And not only does this religion draw to itself the poor and humble and ignorant, but the base and wicked also; persons known, while of our way, to have been notorious for their vices, have all of a sudden joined themselves to the Christians; and whatever show of sanctity may then have been assumed, we may well suppose there has not been much of the reality. Long may it boast of such members, and while its brief life lasts make continually such converts from us. As to the amazing pretences they make of their benevolence in the care of the poor, and even of our poor, doing more offices of kindness toward them—so it is affirmed—than we ourselves—who does not see the motive that prompts so much charity, in the good opinion they build up for themselves in those whom they have so much obliged, and who cannot in decency do less afterward than oblige them in turn, by joining their superstitions—superstitions of which they know nothing before they adopt them, and as little afterward.

'But I will not, O Emperor, weary out your patience again—already so long tried—and will only say, that the fate which has all along and everywhere befallen these people, might well warn them that they are objects of the anger rather than the favor and love of the Lord of Heaven, of which they so confidently make their boast. For if he loved them would he leave them everywhere so to the rage and destruction of their enemies—to be reviled, trodden upon, and despised, all over the earth? If these be the signs of love, what are those of hate? And can it be that he, their Lord of Heaven, hath in store for them a world of bliss beyond this life, who gives them here on earth scarce the sordid shelter of a cabin? In truth, they seem to be a community living upon their imaginations. They fancy themselves favorites of Heaven—though all the world thinks otherwise. They fancy themselves the greatest benefactors the world has ever seen, while they are the only ones who think so. They have nothing here but persecution, contempt, and hatred, and yet are anticipating a more glorious Elysium than the greatest and best of earth have ever dared to hope for. We cannot but hope they may be at sometime the riddle to themselves which they are to us. This is a benevolent wish, for their entertainment would be great.'