CHRISTIANITY IN CONFLICT WITH HELLENISM.

The saddest passage of the world's annals, and also the grandest, according as we fix our regards on its losses and decays, or on the new creations which it witnessed, is the period embraced in the first four centuries of the Christian era. The lover of classic antiquity — Christian though he be in heart and creed-contemplates with a sigh* the downfall of ancient temples and the ruin of rites and beliefs involved in the death of Hellenism. On the other hand, the most fervent admirer of those vanished splendors, “the fair humanities of old religion," contrasting, on its social side, what perished with what replaced it, in the order of time, must confess that the world was well rid of polytheistic uses, and humanity abundantly compensated for all æsthetic and poetic losses by the spiritual life which streamed from the new dispensation.

The histories which treat of this period have been written, for the most part, from an ecclesiastical point of view, and inspired by dogmatic or pragmatical interests. That of Gib

*The sigh which breathes so pathetically from Schiller's" Gods of Greece."

bon, written in a spirit of historic indifference, with no apologetic or polemic bias, will always maintain its place, and, so far as it covers the ground, approve itself as a faithful report of the facts of the time. But in Gibbon, also, I miss the faculty of historic divination, the sense which discerns the deeper meaning of the facts recorded, which interprets historic results in the light of their bearing on the whole of human destiny. We have no history of the origins of the Christian Church from a humanitarian or, if I may use so pedantic a phrase, from an anthropocosmic point of view; no history inspired by the questions, What is humanity's debt to the Church? what is Christianity's place in the education of humankind? The time and the man for such a history have not yet arrived. Meanwhile, the histories we have will be found most instructive, when studied in that

sense.

The Christian Church and the Roman empire were contemporary, or nearly contemporary, births. The latter came armed from the throes of a naval conflict in the waters of the Ambracian Gulf: the former sprang to life, a babbling babe, in a garret of an inland city, shut in by inhospitable hills. What shall be the fortunes respectively of these newcomers on the stage of history? The one is backed and omened by a pedigree of heroes and seven centuries of victory; the other, by the humble if saintly life and tragic death of one who had recently perished as a malefactor. To balance this inequality, the latter is inspired by a faith in its own future, immeasurable, indomitable: the other derives its sole guaranty from favoring circumstance.

Could not the two unite in one dominion? There was a moment when such a coalition seemed possible. The Emperor Tiberius is said to have proposed to the Roman senate the admission of Christ to a place in the Pantheon, and his consequent solemn recognition as one of the gods of the State. It is a curious question, what would have been the effect of such recognition, had that proposition been accepted, had Christianity enjoyed at the start the sanction of

imperial power. Its spread might have been more rapid, but the strength that was in it, its latent moral force, would never have asserted itself. It needed the hardening by fire to which the wantonness of imperial cruelty subjected it in its infancy, in order to become the world-subduing power it was destined to be. It could not accept as a gift what it felt itself entitled to by divine right. It could not "borrow leave to be," but must conquer for itself—not with sword, like armed Islam in a later age, but by miracles of patience, by suffering and dying-an unprecarious throne. Constitutionally exclusive, it must put all things under it. It must reign supreme; it must reign alone.

Such a consummation seemed, from a worldly point of view, an impossibility. For, though the dominant religion was inwardly dead, though polytheism as a faith, as personal conviction, had lost its hold of educated minds, it was still politically seized of the Roman State, and not to be evicted but with mortal agony and throes that upheaved the world. Theodor Keim* calls attention to the fact that the Roman religion, unlike all others, originated not with priest or prophet, but with the secular power. It was, therefore, from the first, indissolubly linked with the State. Conceive, then, a government, powerful as none ever was before or since in all the elements of civil strength, and jealous as it was powerful, impatient of opposition, prompt to crush whatever opposed,—a government whose sleepless vigilance and omnipresent police not a thing that occurred in any corner of its wide dominion could escape,-a government whose head was also the head of the national religion, himself an object of worship, to refuse which worship was treason to the State, to such a government comes this vagabond from the East, from a land universally despised, and seeks to establish itself in the capital of the empire. Ignominiously repulsed, it continues to advance. Smitten and cast out, it steadily prevails, and, having entered as an outlaw, ends as sovereign of the world. Its triumph is the supreme miracle of history. The fierce rebuff which Christianity encountered, at the

In his Rom und Christenthum,

point where it first emerges into secular history, revealed, on the part of the Christians, a power of endurance which should have taught the secular authorities that the "pestilent" novelty was not to be disposed of in that fashion. Meanwhile, by the light of those cruel fires in the gardens of Nero, the "disciples" might see how wide was the chasm which then divided their Church from the State. Three centuries were required to bridge that gulf, and this the Church accomplished by casting into it the children of her bosom, over whose mangled bodies humanity made the dire passage from the old world to the new.

An inscription at the entrance of the Catacombs of St. Sebastian, in Rome, tells of one hundred and seventy-four thousand martyrs who there repose in peace. It is not necessary to suppose that all these were the immediate victims of civil persecution. But, in any view, this record of a single city suggests an estimate very different from that which Gibbon would have us accept as the number of those who suffered martyrdom throughout the vast extent of the empire.* The precise number does not concern us, nor even the approximate number; enough that torture and death were the frequent penalty of the Christian confession in those centuries, torture and death the most excruciating that human ingenuity could devise, and that these were voluntarily incurred and unflinchingly borne by the victims. It was not their belief that the government quarreled with, it was not their doctrine that was punished, but their insubordination in refusing to sacrifice. In the view of the government, the Christians were a political party, insurgents against the State, whose head they refused to honor in the way prescribed. It was not a question of opinion, but one of obedience. Will you or will you not sacrifice to the emperor? Will you "swear by the genius," that is, acknowledge the divinity of Cæsar? To the government official it was simply a token of submission to rightful authority, but to the Christian it meant something else: it meant that Cæsar was before Christ, that Cæsar was God. With that under

*Somewhat less than two thousand persons." See Milman's Gibbon, Vol. I., p. 599.