CHAPTER VIII.

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.

_The Church's Battle for Independence over against the Roman Empire._

In the period before Christ, the two Powers, as well in every polity over the earth as in the vast conglomerate called the Roman Empire, beginning together, grew up in fast alliance. Such a thing as the Civil Power in any particular polity putting under ban and persecuting the religion of its people was unknown. In the Roman city, as originally constituted, the union with religion, as an everyday work of life, was especially intimate and strong. It subsisted no less when Rome ruled from Newcastle to Babylon; for under the supremacy of the Emperor as Pontifex Maximus all the various nations were allowed the free exercise of their ancestral rites. Such was the state of the relation between the two Powers at the Day of Pentecost; such it had been from the first creation of human society. A foreign conqueror might, it is true, persecute the gods and the priests of a nation which he conquered, as Cambyses, when, with the zeal of a Persian worshipper of the single Sun-god, he burst upon the gods of Egypt; but this state of things usually passed away, when conquest became settled into possession; and in the Roman Peace each country and city was in stable possession of its gods, its rites, its temples, and among the rest the Jew might everywhere have his synagogue for his own people and worship God.

Close and permanent as the alliance between the two powers of civil government and religious worship, founded in the original constitution of human things, had been up to the time of Christ, yet in the minds of the people the two functions of civil government and of worship had ever been distinct. It is true that in matter of practice the ever growing moral corruption of Gentilism had tended to subordinate worship to government, the priest to the ruler. Nevertheless, though the Emperor was Imperator to his army, the possessor of tribunitial and consular power in the State, and likewise Pontifex Maximus in religion, such a concentration of distinct powers in his single person did not efface in the minds of the many peoples subjected to his sway the distinction itself of the powers wielded by him. A vast number of various priesthoods subsisted in the different countries untouched and unmeddled with by him. He was, in fact, by virtue of his religious pontificate, annexed to his civil principate, the conservator of all these rites, religious customs, and priesthoods. The meddling with them was a violation of his pontificate. Anubis in Egypt, Astarte in Syria, Cybele in Phrygia, Minerva at Athens, no less than Jupiter on the capitol, found their defender and guardian on the Palatine Mount, while Augustus did not disdain to have a daily sacrifice offered for him in the temple at Jerusalem, for the Jewish worship was part of the Roman constitution. He was patron as well as suppliant.

Thus at the time the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost there was strict alliance in all the provinces of the world-empire between secular rule and religious worship; an alliance in which worship was, it is true, subordinate to secular rule, but fostered and guarded by it. The eye of a Trajan would, no doubt, discern a common element in all the religions of which he was the official guardian, and it was even for the security of the immortal gods at Rome that Anubis should bark in Egypt, though he would not be allowed with impunity to deceive the matrons of Rome,[182] and that Astarte, under the public authority, should have trains of female priestesses in Syria. The fixed idea of the Roman Emperors might be said to have been to keep these party-coloured provinces, with their ancestral gods and rites, in due and legitimate enjoyment of their own property, without encroaching on that of their neighbours. And Marcus Aurelius was not deterred by his philosophic pantheism from offering multitudes of white oxen for the success of the Roman arms, but he sanctioned the perpetration of the most fearful tortures upon Christian confessors in the arena of Lyons, and imputed their patience of death to a sort of Galilean obstinacy. Why did he, who sacrificed to Jupiter, while he was an outspoken Positivist, persecute belief in Christ?

Let us endeavour to give a distinct and adequate answer to this question.

The subsisting alliance between civil authority and religious worship, which existed in the Roman world, whatever the particular gods worshipped, and rites and customs practised in the various countries composing it might be, was interrupted and snapped asunder by the proclamation of the Gospel as an universal religion. It is true that in the first twelve years, while the Apostles addressed themselves to the Jewish people, wherever they might be, inviting them to accept Jesus as the Christ, the liberty to do this, within the various synagogues, might be covered by the liberty accorded to the Jewish race everywhere on Roman soil to practise their own religion as a thing handed down to them from their ancestors. So long as it was a question of Jewish law--in the words of the Roman proprætor, the brother of Seneca, at Corinth--the protection of an undoubtedly sanctioned religion, to use the phrase of Tertullian, would veil from censure the action of the Apostles; but as soon as, and in proportion as the kingdom of Christ came forth to the Gentiles as an universal religion--so soon as Christ was declared to them to be the Son of God, the Saviour of the world--so soon as men were distinguished as Christians, as they were already at Antioch, that is, recognised to be not a Jewish sect, but the adherents of a substantive religion with distinct belief, which was repudiated by the mass of Jews, a religion of universal import, which was founded on the Person of a Redeemer, the God-man who had come into the world, lived as a man, died, and risen again, and who called upon all men to be His followers, whether Jews or Gentiles, it became evident that the toleration, nay more, the support and guarantee for all religions which were subsisting equally for the various peoples of the Roman Empire, did not apply to the followers of the new religion. St. Paul, for instance, as a ringleader of the Galilean sect, was punishable and was punished by the Jewish Sanhedrim, as infringing what they considered the orthodox Jewish belief, and this conduct of the Jewish authority, everywhere pursued towards the Christians, drew upon them the attention of the Roman magistrates. The culmination of this conduct and policy was seen as to its result in the persecution set on foot by Nero, under Jewish instigation, and the act of Nero seems to have had the permanent effect of establishing the illicitness of the Christian faith, in the sight of Roman law. The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, as the seat of Jewish worship, completely established the severance of the Christian people from the Jews, and gave them religious independence with all its honour and all its perils.

For what was their position towards that universal heathendom which surrounded them on all sides?

Take the three great constituents of belief, of worship, and of government, which we been have considering in their several departments, in their relations with each other, and in their co-inherence.

Heathendom, under the sway of Tiberius, lay stretched out over the vast regions of the empire in numberless varieties of costume which covered an identity of substance. The dark mysterious forms of Egyptian gods, the gods of Greece arrayed in human shapes of consummate loveliness, the voluptuous rites of Syrian goddesses, the sober and homely deities of ancient Rome vested somewhat awkwardly in the robes of their Grecian congeners, the local deities, mountain oreads and river naiads, which had their seat in every city and district of civilised or semi-barbarous provinces, the representatives of oriental traditions, philosophies, and religions,--all these had part in a worship offered by some or other subjects of Rome. And now went forth from city to city preachers who proclaimed to all who would hear them that there was one God alone who had made out of nothing, by an act of the purest free-will, the heavens and the earth, and that He made also of one blood the human inhabitants of this earth. And they declared that this one God was not only the Creator of all matter and of all spirit, of all men in all nations, but that in order to redeem them from a terrible slavery into which they had fallen, He had sent His own Son, one in nature with Himself, in human form among them, to die the death of a malefactor upon the cross, which was the legal punishment of the slave in the Roman law for capital crimes; nor only to die, but by rising again in the same body in which He had died, to attest the truth of His mission, and to gather all men together, the freeman and the slave, the Roman conqueror and the most abject of his serfs, in one religious community. Thus the same one God who was Creator, was proclaimed to be Redeemer. And, further, the name of this God, communicated in the very rite which admitted into membership with the religion, disclosed a third Divine Person, whose work was pre-eminently a work belonging to the one God alone, for it was to sanctify, by His presence in their hearts, all its members.

Thus these preachers proclaimed, as the basis of all they taught to their hearers, belief in a God who was One[183] and who was Three; who was single and alone, but outside the conception of number, and who was at once Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier altogether.

And they proclaimed this to peoples who had every conceivable variety of gods, male and female, to whom various functions, down to the lowest employments in the service of mankind, were assigned, according to the caprice or the inherited traditions of their worshippers.

What was the position of these preachers towards the various deities and their worshippers who occupied the Roman empire? It is obvious that it was one of an absolute uncompromising hostility. And it is plain that, on the other side, all who did not closely and impartially examine their doctrine, would count them to be "godless," and treat them accordingly.

This, the barest outline of the primary and fundamental belief as to the all-important being of God, on which all further development of teaching rested, is sufficient to exhibit the intense opposition between Christianity and that which it was attempting to displace in the matter of belief.

But belief becomes concrete and actual in worship. What was the worship offered by the nations of the Roman empire to their various gods? From end to end this vast region was covered with magnificent temples, rich with the offerings of successive generations, wherein day by day and often many times a day sacrifices of living animals were offered by priests appointed to that end. I only refer here to this rite of sacrifice, because I have dwelt sufficiently upon it in a former place. The varieties of the worship accompanying it were great, but the substance of the rite identical; the number and names and offices of the deities to whom it was offered were bewildering.[184] The customs and traditions which encircled these various temples and the rites offered in them struck their roots into the family, the social, and the political life of the various peoples among which they stood.

What, as over against this "palpable array of sense," was the Christian worship which the new teachers brought with them?

It was withdrawn into the innermost recess of the Christian society itself. For many generations they had not public churches, but were reduced to meet in secret. And those who shared the Christian membership received, in assemblies held in the silence of the early morning, under cover of some private house, a victim which they adored as the very Body and Blood of the God who for their sakes had become incarnate, for their sakes also had suffered His Body to be broken, and His Blood poured out. Instead of the sacrifices of slain animals, whose blood was sprinkled upon the worshippers, the Christian received the Immaculate Lamb of God, offered upon a mystical altar, in commemoration of that one Sacrifice by virtue of which he was a Christian.

If the contrast in belief between the one Christian God and the many gods of heathendom was great, the contrast between heathen sacrifices and the one Christian Sacrifice was at least as great--perhaps the more wonderful in this, that while natural reason fought in every human breast for the doctrine of the Divine Unity, no reason nor thought of man could ever have imagined a Sacrifice at once so tremendous and so gracious as that which the Christian worshipped, wherein the Victim which received his homage contained and imparted his life.

But if the doctrine of the Divine Unity destroyed the heathen gods, and so rendered its adherents liable to be called "godless" by their worshippers, no less did the doctrine of the Christian Sacrifice, which abolished at a stroke the whole worship of heathendom, create the keenest antagonism; they who were without gods were said to be without altars; they who never presented themselves at the heathen sacrifices were accounted as outcasts and sacrilegious men who renounced all piety.

Yet complete and thorough as the antagonism drawn forth in these two great points of belief and worship, perhaps the third constituent element of the Christian society, its government, was even more calculated to awaken the jealousy and excite the resentment, if not of the various peoples which composed the empire, at least of the Roman rulers.

The priests who ministered in the multitudinous temples to the various deities of the Roman world, were as various as the objects of their worship. No common hierarchy held together the priests of Egyptian, Asiatic, Hellenic, Roman gods, and all the intermediate gradations. But far more than this, there was an absence of hierarchy in the particular or national gods of each several country; the priest of Jupiter had nothing to do with the priest of Apollo, the priest of Juno, and the rest. The conception of many gods had introduced unnumbered weaknesses, anomalies, and incongruities into the arrangements of their ministers. When that which was worshipped was divided, the ministers of the several parts became rivals, with this grand result, as it affected the civil power, that it stood in one great mass of solid unity over against different religions, varying in their objects, crossing each other, contradicting each other. Thus it was that the original independence of divine worship had been lost; no one of these various priesthoods could maintain any real opposition to the civil ruler; no one of them presented any body of concordant doctrine which man's mind could approve, or his heart accept. That which ought to be most sacred among men was by internal contradictions become weak and contemptible.

How, on the other hand, stood the case of the Christian society as to government?

And here as for a long time the Christian altar lay concealed from the sight of the heathen, and they knew not Him who was offered on it, so for a long time the Christian ruler was withdrawn from recognition. They did not even surmise that which grew up gradually and silently in the midst of them: the establishment, that is, of a _new_ spiritual power, of _one_ power for all nations, of a spiritual governor in every city, a member of this one power. It may safely be said that while Trajan did not apprehend the existence of any such power in his empire, Decius had come to the knowledge of it, and he liked it so little that it was said of him by an eye-witness how he would rather hear of a competitor for his throne than of a Bishop being set at Rome in the See of Peter.

But from the beginning the power was there, concealed in the humility of the mustard seed, while it rested upon the authority of Him who had dropped the seed into the soil.

This power of spiritual government was _new_, in that it sprung from the Person of our Lord Himself, and until He communicated the charge contained in it, did not exist. It was pointed out in type and prophecy to Adam, to Noah, and to Moses, but realised in Him at His resurrection. Thus, whereas these priesthoods which it came to displace were the ultimate form of corruption into which the original worship instituted by God when man fell had sunk, the Redeemer, in the work of His dispensation, sent forth this pastorship of spiritual rule afresh from Himself, gave it to Peter and His Apostles, and propagated it through them upon earth.

For this reason, as coming from one who was Lord of all, it was one for all nations. Corresponding to the unity of the Triune God, and the unity of the Christian Sacrifice, it was one in its origin, its duration, its effect. What greater contrast could there possibly be than between the diversity and contradiction of heathen priests ministering in numberless religions, and the unity of the Christian priesthood, a replication in every instance of Christ's person, between worships varying with every country in their bearers and their rites, and the unity of the Christian episcopate, a replication of His charge to feed His sheep, resting on one Sacrifice as unique as its own rule.

And, again, that which was one in origin, duration, and effect, stretched itself forth and dilated itself to embrace every city, placing at its head a spiritual ruler, who was distinct but not separate from his fellows; who preached one doctrine and ministered to one worship, as he also participated in one power.

If we embrace in one view the three constituents on which we have touched--belief, worship, and government--and contemplate the Christian people which is its outcome, how total a contrast does it present in the Christian habit of life to that of the heathen. The Christian worships a single God, who by the greatest of mysteries is at once one and three; who has a triple personality; he partakes of a worship in which that God, offered first as a Victim for him, becomes his Food; he is governed by one who bears the person of that God, whose priesthood is the foundation of his rule, and whose teaching is bound up with both rule and worship. That which the heathen called nature was to the Christian the ever-living operation of a creative hand hiding under shapes which met the senses an illimitable power, wisdom, and goodness; and the majesty of the God whom he thus adored was presented to him in the holiest rite of his worship as the Victim who redeemed him, and the Food which nourished his spiritual life. Greek and Egyptian, Syrian and African, Roman and barbarian, it was difficult to say from which he was most removed in all his thoughts of God and man, and the world around.

But to the whole body of people thus created it was the shifting of the basis on which the heathen State rested, because it was the discovery of the one Lord from whom all rule descended, and in whose name it was administered. The Roman ruled not in virtue of the principle that one God had made all the nations of the earth of one blood, and partitioned the kingdoms of the earth among them, but by virtue of the fact that the children of the wolf-cub had been the strongest in fight and the firmest in discipline, and had reduced a hundred peoples beneath their sway. The Roman himself worshipped and protected in others the worship of ancestral, that is, national gods, and the God of the Christians claimed not to be national, and to dethrone them all. The Roman, and the nations he held in subjection, believed in a multitude of traditionary doctrines respecting the earth and its inhabitants, and the powers presiding over them, some true and some false, mixed up in each case with peculiar and national interests, and all these the Christian swept away in the sublime belief, austere at once and tender, of a single Being who created, sustained, and ruled all, with the love of a Creator for all, while He kept watch over every thought, word, and action of every rational creature; that is, who was Judge and Rewarder, as well as Creator. And, lastly, this new Christian people held as the very bond of its existence that being the Body of Christ, it was to embrace all nations, and be co-extensive with the earth, co-enduring with man's race.

This was the people and the power which, having been more or less concealed during five generations from the watchful eyes of Roman statesmen, may be said to have come forth and shown itself by the multiplication of its numbers and the tenacity of its purpose, and the fixity of its doctrines in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and which five more generations of Romans, until the time of Constantine, either watched with ever-increasing anxiety, or tolerated in the mistaken hope of assimilating, or finally contended with for life or death in fearful persecutions.

And this was the people and power before which the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, when he saw it in the persons of women and slaves and aged men, who sacrificed their lives for their belief, lost his philosophic indifference, and persecuted it as if he had been a voluptuous profligate like Nero, or a cruel tyrant like Domitian.

That the belief, the worship, and the spiritual government which carried both, had been from their first appearance in the reign of Tiberius independent of the imperial rule, whose officer crucified their Founder, under the title of the King of the Jews, we have seen in all the preceding chapters. But how was this independence actually acquired and maintained? By what talisman did the Christians compel the emperors to acknowledge that there were things of God to be rendered to God, as well as things of Cæsar to be rendered to Cæsar? For when this fight began the Emperor claimed all things, the things of Cæsar as Emperor, and the things of God as Pontifex Maximus.

Melito, Bishop of Sardis, addressing an apology for the Christian faith to Marcus Aurelius, besought him to "protect a philosophy which was nurtured together and began together with Augustus;"[185] and, in fact, it was at the moment when Augustus closed the temple of Janus, and proclaimed that there was peace in the Roman world, that our Lord was born at Bethlehem. Thirty-three years after, He was crucified by the governor of a province who represented the person of the Emperor Tiberius, and on the ground that he had infringed the rights of that emperor by calling Himself King of the Jews. Forthwith, when "Peter rose up in the midst of the brethren" to propose the appointment of a twelfth apostle, that he might take the place of the traitor who had betrayed his Master to death, we are told the number of the persons together was about a hundred and twenty. This number, then, indicated those disciples of our Lord who had been gained during His ministry, and were then at Jerusalem. We have another indication of numbers, where it is said that our Lord, before His ascension, was seen by "more than five hundred brethren at once,"[186] which would indicate the larger number of His adherents in Galilee.

These two statements give a notion as to the extent to which the teaching of our Lord had been accepted when the event of His public execution took place, which was intended by those who brought it about to effect the destruction of His claim to teach the world, and which was calculated, according to all human judgment, to produce the effect intended.

The empire of Augustus, and "the philosophy nurtured and begun together with it," took their several courses, and at the end of three hundred years the greatest man who had sat upon the throne of Augustus in all that interval came to the conclusion that the Christian Church was become the power of the time. What makes the greatness of Constantine, we have been told, makes him one of those characters in the world's history who are the individual expression of the spirit of their time, is, that he understood his time, that he perceived the weakness and powerlessness of the heathen world, the inward dissolution of the old beliefs; that the Christian faith was alone the substantial power of the time, the Christian faith, as the Corpus Christianorum, in the strong, flexible, and yet compact organisation of the Catholic Church, as seen in its one episcopate. Constantine knew Christianity only in this form; and the majestic unity into which the episcopate of the Church had already grown was for him so imposing that he saw in the Christian Church[187] the power through which the Roman empire, greatly needing a regeneration, could alone be made capable of it. That was the real power which could give a new basis to the State when it was falling into self-dissolution.

To indicate the greatness of the change involved in the action of the Roman emperor, we may here use the words of St. Gregory the Great to the Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbert, when he wrote to him at the end of the sixth century: "Illustrious Son, guard carefully the grace which thou hast received by a divine gift; hasten to extend the Christian faith among the peoples subject to thee, for He will render the name of your glory yet more glorious to your posterity, whose honour you seek and preserve in the world. For so Constantine, most pious emperor of old, calling back the Roman commonwealth from the perverted worship of idols, subjected it with himself to Jesus Christ, our omnipotent Lord God."[188]

But what had passed in the interval, since the officer of Tiberius crucified the Head, that the successor of Tiberius, Constantine, should recognise the Body as the only power which could hold together his tottering State?

What had happened was such facts as these.

After the Jews had spent their utmost malice in persecuting the Christian messengers, first at Jerusalem, upon St. Stephen's death, and then throughout the empire, wherever the authority of the Sanhedrim could reach them, Nero, the last emperor of the family of Augustus, moved by Jewish instigation, turned upon Christians the accusation of burning Rome, and slew what the Roman historian calls a "huge multitude" of them, with torments so atrocious that pity for them began to arise even among those who hated them.

Secondly, at the distance of another generation, Domitian slew his cousin, even while he held the consulate, and an unknown number of other Christians, on the imputed charge of impiety, that is, of deserting the heathen gods.

Thirdly, twenty years later, in the time of Trajan, we learn, by his correspondence with Pliny, that the mere profession of the Christian faith was a capital crime; and the punishment of Ignatius, in the Roman amphitheatre, made his name famous to all future generations. We know not to how many in the reign of Trajan the profession of the Christian faith was the sacrifice of life. But the Bishop of Antioch, if the most illustrious, was far from the only victim.

Fourthly, an abundance of martyrs in the reign of his successor, Hadrian, testifies the continuance and the exercise of this law proscribing the Christian profession. The noble Roman matron who witnessed the execution of her seven children is an instance how savage a man of letters and curious taste could be, when there was a question of Christian realities crossing his feelings as a heathen.

Fifthly, the reign of Marcus Aurelius, noblest of heathen rulers, is conspicuous for the number of its martyrs, in Asia Minor and in Gaul, as well as at Rome; for the increasing number of the Christians had now brought the religion into general notice. It is of this time that Irenæus, an eye-witness, shortly himself to be one of those he commemorates, writes "that the Church in every place, on account of that love which she bears to God, sends forward a multitude of martyrs in every time to the Father; while all the rest (by which he means the various sects), not only are not able to show this thing among them, but do not even say that such a martyrdom is necessary.... For the reproach of those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, and endure all penalties, and are done to death for their affection towards God and their confession of His Son, these the Church alone continuously maintains, often thereby weakened, and straightway increasing its members, and becoming entire again."[189] Of this time Eusebius writes, that by the attacks made in various cities through the enmity of the populace calling upon the magistrates to execute the laws, "martyrs almost numberless were conspicuous through the whole world."[190]

Sixthly, after another generation, in the time of Septimius Severus, Eusebius states that there were martyrdoms in every part of the Church. This is the time of which Tertullian writes that Christians were now everywhere, and from their numbers would have been able to wage a civil war with their persecutors, had their religion permitted them. Of this also an eye-witness, Clement of Alexandria, says, "It was a good remark of Zeno about the Indians, that he would rather see one Indian roasted than hear any number of arguments about the endurance of pain. But we have every day a rich stream displayed before our eyes of martyrs roasted, impaled, and beheaded. All these the fear of the law has been a tutor to lead to Christ, and has wrought them up to show their piety by shedding their blood. 'God hath stood in the congregation of gods, and being in the midst of them He judgeth gods.' Who are these? They who are superior to pleasure; they who conquer sufferings; they who know each thing which they do; possessors of true knowledge, who have mastered the world."[191] This was the time when Origen, a youth of seventeen, tried to share with his father, Leonides, the martyr's crown, while death, as the result of sufferings undergone in confession, was reserved for him fifty years later in the persecution under Decius. Many writings of Tertullian bear witness of the persecution of his own time, respecting which he says: "You crucify and impale Christians; you tear open their sides with hooks; we lay down our necks; we are driven before wild beasts; we are burnt in fires; we are banished into islands."[192]

Again, we pass thirty years, in which, while emperors hold their hands, yet individual Christians suffer under the law which proscribes their religion in general, and then we come to a seventh persecution of great severity under the Emperor Maximinus, which lasts for three years. After another interval of ten years we reach the great persecution of Decius, the eighth in number, which aims with decision at the general destruction of the Christian clergy and people.

The ten years which commence with the reign of Decius contain also two general persecutions under the Emperors Gallus and Valerianus. It is in this period that three Popes, Fabian, Lucius, and Stephen, Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, and Laurence, Deacon at Rome, are crowned with martyrdom. The extant letters of Cyprian and Dionysius of Alexandria bear witness to the wide extent of suffering inflicted upon all classes.

Upon this succeeds the longest period of rest which occurs during the three centuries, and is terminated by the persecution commenced in the year 303 by Diocletian, which is likewise the longest, and also the most universal, and the most severe of all.

No human record preserves the names or assigns the numbers of all those who sacrificed their lives for the sake of their Master in these ten persecutions, and in the intervals of comparative peace which lay between them; in all of which it needed but the execution of the empire's existing laws to imperil any Christian life. A persecution meant that the sovereign power called upon the several governors of provinces and magistrates in cities to execute the law.

Thus the period from the Crucifixion in the year 29, to the Edict of Toleration in 313, a space of 284 years, bears one character. It is that of opposition by the great world-empire to the free propagation of the religion of Christ. Not only is every human motive which can have force upon the mind of man set against this propagation, but at constantly recurring times men and women and children give up the joys of home, the security of civilised life, wealth, peace, social happiness, in order to maintain and profess their belief in a crucified man as Son of God and Saviour of the world. To this end a great multitude during ten generations sacrifice life itself, and that often not by simple death, but under torments the most severe and prolonged which the ingenuity of savage enemies can invent.

Martyrdom was the ripe fruit of the Christian mind carried to its highest degree of excellence; the imitation of a crucified Lord in finished perfection. The martyr expressed in his own soul and body the truth uttered concerning his Lord, that "though He was a Son, yet learnt He obedience through the things that He suffered." The martyrs were the choice soldiers and champions of the great army of faith which arose upon the earth between Augustus and Constantine. It was by the sufferings of these three hundred years that the Church won, over against the persistent enmity of the Civil Power, the inestimable right of liberty in her faith, her worship, and her government.

But how did the army itself arise of which the martyrs were the champions? When I attempt to collect in one view the history of these first three centuries, what I find most wonderful is, not that they who believed in a crucified Head were ready as His members to suffer in and for Him, but that men and women of the most various nations, characters, and ranks, came to accept a crucified Head. Martyrdom is the outcome of a perfect faith--but the faith itself, whence was it, and how came it? Hear the Apostle who laboured more abundantly than all others describe his own work: "Christ sent me to preach the Gospel, not in wisdom of speech, lest the cross of Christ should be made void. For the word of the cross to them indeed that perish is foolishness, but to them that are saved, that is to us, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of our preaching to save them that believe. For both the Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For see your vocation, brethren, that there are not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the wise, and the weak things of the world hath God chosen that He may confound the strong. And the base things of the world and the things that are contemptible hath God chosen, and things that are not that He might bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in His sight. But of Him are you in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and justice, and sanctification and redemption, that, as it is written, he that glorieth may glory in the Lord. And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not in loftiness of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of Christ. For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling; and my speech and my preaching was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in showing of the spirit and of power; that your faith might not stand on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. Howbeit we speak wisdom among the perfect, yet not the wisdom of this world, neither of the princes of this world, that come to nought: but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, a wisdom which is hidden, which God ordained before the world, unto our glory: which none of the princes of this world knew, for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of Glory. But as it is written, That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for them that love Him. But to us God hath revealed them by His Spirit."[193]

Thus St. Paul wrote to some of his early converts about the year 50. The records which would have described by a continuous and detailed history the labours of the Apostles and their successors in the two centuries and a half which followed these words, have almost entirely perished. Their result subsists in the conversion of the Roman world, and the recognition of the kingdom of Christ by the kingdom of Cæsar. These words describe the process. We have no more to say than this, and no less. The Church has not to show in all this period great and renowned men among her members; she has not to show men distinguished for their science; she has not to show men who made themselves of mark in public life, who had wealth, or influential connections, or anything which makes power according to the natural constitution of the world.[194] Even her great writers were not yet come; of those whose writings have come down to us, Tertullian and Origen were her sole men of genius. Among those who sat in the chair of Peter, there had as yet arisen no one such as the great Leo, whose word was equal to the power which he swayed. Her schools of theology scarcely existed; no golden tongue among her preachers had yet spoken "with lips of flame;" no heathen rhetorician, converted in the middle of life, had become the great doctor for future ages, a fountain at once of philosophy and theology. She knew and she preached nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and the effect was that no such contrast exists in all history as that supplied by the weakness of that company, the number of whose names was about 120, who met to elect a successor to the traitor apostle, and the grandeur of that body represented by the 318 Fathers at Nicæa, on whom the majesty of the Roman people waited in the person of Constantine. For behind those Fathers was the Christian people, converts of every race, from the haughtiest patrician of Cornelian blood to the humblest slave of Egypt, who had heard and obeyed the call to believe on Jesus Christ and Him crucified. There had been ten generations of youths and maidens who had offered to Him the very flower of human beauty and superhuman purity; mothers who had surrendered their children, husbands who had lost both wives and children, bishops maimed, or one-eyed, for the love of Christ, who had laboured in mines, a host of missionaries who had been treated as "the offscourings of the world," all for the sake of that Crucified One, who was ever before their eyes, and in their hearts; to whom they were joined by suffering with Him, and who promised them, in recompense for those sufferings, that which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, but God had revealed by His Spirit.

For no greater change can be conceived for man to accept, than to pass from the life which a Pomponia Græcina or a Callista would lead in her Roman or her Grecian home, into the life of a Lucina burying martyred apostles, or the death of a Callista, in a dungeon of the third century; between the prosperous Cæcilius in the midst of the wealth and luxury of Carthage, and the Cyprian who, after ten years of apostolic labour, uttered his _Deo gratias_ upon the Proprætor's sentence of death. Nor must we take only as samples those who were conspicuous for their work as Christians, even though it were accompanied by sufferings. We must take rather the staple of the common Christian life in its opposition to the discarded heathendom--the life of charity, of poverty, of chastity pursued by those of humblest position, over against the hatred, the avarice, the impurity out of which they came. The acceptance of such a law as the Christian law, founded upon such a belief as the Christian belief, is in any one case the result of a power quite beyond man, whatever his learning, eloquence, or persuasiveness from any natural gift may be, to bring about in his fellow-men. What, then, was that power shown in instances innumerable--shown when the acceptance of Christ crucified as the exemplar of life involved the risk of losing life, and all which made life naturally sweet or even tolerable, involved a living crucifixion? The state of virginity, confession of any kind, and finally martyrdom, made the highest point of this life; but we must look upon the great mass of the Christian people as that which produced such fruits. The Martyrs, whatever their number, were no doubt relatively few in comparison with those who were not martyred. They were "the first-fruits of the threshing-floor which the world would offer to the Redeemer;" how numerous must have been the grains of wheat out of which they were chosen? They were "the new leaven and the salt of humanity, which by the offering of their bodies and the pouring out their blood would sanctify the whole mass;"[195] but how great was the spiritual power which had descended into that mass? Surely Chrysostom had good reason when he selected the creation of the Christian people as that one miracle of Christ which no heathen gainsayer could deny.

What we find, then, as an ultimate fact in the historical conversion of the heathen world, is this internal action of the Holy Spirit in the preaching of the Apostles and their successors, by which the Christian people was formed in spite of the world around them; in spite of seductions from the pride of life, the desire of the eyes, the terrible empire of sensuous beauty; in spite of terrors which involved every suffering as well us every privation of lawful enjoyments.

All that vast development of doctrine, worship, and government, which we have been endeavouring to trace out, has been from first to last originated, accompanied, and maintained by the action of the Holy Spirit upon each individual heart. Here at last is the power which we seek in vain to detect as lodged in any natural gift possessed by the preacher. The heart is that sanctuary of liberty which no human power can invade: the heart's free acceptance of the belief offered to it is the result which no human power can win. If the Church's one Episcopate has thrown the net of Christ over the whole empire, and into regions more or less barbarous beyond it; if the Church's one doctrine has grown out into palpable form, scattering the gods of heathendom with the demons who lurked under their masks, and uplifting the strong personality of the divine Triad, in spite of pantheism, to universal adoration; if the Church's one worship has come forth from the catacombs into the light of day, and the celebration over a martyr's body in an obscure vault to a celebration in lordly temple, rich with marble and precious stones; the one adequate cause for all is the manifestation of spirit and of power, the cross set up in the heart of man before it was applied to living members of the body: it is a process inexplicable save upon the supposition of divine power. That world which by wisdom knew not God, which philosophy had failed to convert, was converted in a great proportion of its subjects by the foolishness of God which was wiser than men, and the weakness of God which was stronger than men. A crucified God was the palmary test of this foolishness and weakness; the army of martyrs was its witness; the empire's recognition of the Church's freedom in doctrine, worship, and government, was the victory which it gained.

Those who lived in the midst of this great movement fully recognised its wonderful character. Thus Clement of Alexandria, in his address to the Greeks, exclaimed: "The power of God casting its beams upon the earth with incredible rapidity and most attractive kindness has filled everything with the seed of salvation. For the Lord could not have brought about so great a work in so small a time without a divine goodwill and affection; despicable in appearance, worshipped in deed; purifier, Saviour, propitious, the Divine Word, the most manifest truly God, equal to the Lord of the universe, for He was His Son, 'and the Word was in God.' Nor was He disbelieved when first announced; nor when He took upon Him human form and fashioned Himself after the flesh, and acted the saving drama of the manhood, was He ignored. For He was a lawful combatant and a fellow-combatant with His creature; and when swifter than the sun He dawned upon us at the Father's will. He was communicated most speedily to all men, and with the utmost ease caused God to shine upon us; showing whence He was Himself, and who He was by what He taught and by what He did; bearer to us of the treaty and the reconciliation, our Saviour Word, a fountain of life and of peace, poured over the whole face of the earth; through whom the world has become a very sea of blessings."[196]

No less were eye-witnesses struck with the impotence of philosophy in comparison with the doctrine of the cross. Thus the same Clement in another place says: "The heaven-taught wisdom is that alone which is with us, from which spring all the sources of wisdom; such, I mean, as lead to the truth. For certainly when the Lord who was to teach us came to men He had innumerable pointers of His way, to announce, to prepare, to precede Him, from the very foundation of the world. They pre-signified Him by action and by word, they prophesied His coming, the where and the when, and His signs. From afar off the Law provides for Him, and Prophecy; then His precursor declares His presence; then the heralds teaching the power of His appearance signify it. [But philosophers[197]] pleased their own only, and not all these, for Socrates pleased Plato, and Plato Xenocrates, and Aristotle Theophrastus, and Zeno Cleanthes. They persuaded those only who embraced their own sect. But the word of our Teacher did not remain in Judea alone, as philosophy did in Greece. It was poured over the whole world, persuading from nation to nation, village to village, city to city, whole houses of Greeks at once and of barbarians, and each one of the hearers by himself, and bringing over to the truth not a few of the philosophers themselves. Now, as for the Greek philosophy, if any one in authority offers it hindrance, forthwith it disappears; whereas our doctrine, from its very first announcement, has been thwarted by kings and tyrants, and magistrates, and governors, with all their satellites and men innumerable, who make war upon us, and do their utmost to cut us off. For all which it flourishes the more. For it does not die out like a human doctrine, nor fade away like a weak gift, since no gift of God is weak; but it continues unhindered, having the prophecy that it shall be persecuted to the end."[198]

If such was the marvel of conversion, viewed in itself, it is well also to listen to another eye-witness of the consequences which this change of life brought with it. The heathen objected that Christians ought to be thankful for the sufferings which they wanted. Tertullian replied:

"Well, it is quite true that it is our desire to suffer, but it is in the way that the soldier longs for war. No one indeed suffers willingly, since suffering necessarily implies fear and danger. Yet the man who objected to the conflict both fights with all his strength, and, when victorious, he rejoices in the battle, because he reaps from it glory and spoil. It is our battle to be summoned to your tribunals, that there, under fear of execution, we may battle for the truth. But the day is won when the object of the struggle is gained. This victory of ours gives us the glory of pleasing God, and the spoil of life eternal. But we are overcome--yes, when we have obtained our wishes. Therefore we conquer in dying: we go forth victorious at the very time we are subdued. Call us, if you like, Sarmenticii and Semaxii, because, bound to a half-axle stake, we are burnt in a circle heap of faggots. This is the attitude in which we conquer; it is our victory-robe; it is for us a sort of triumphal car. Naturally enough, therefore, we do not please the vanquished; on account of this, indeed, we are counted a desperate, reckless race. But the very desperation and recklessness you object to in us, among yourselves lift high the standard of virtue in the cause of glory and of fame. Mucius, of his own will, left his right hand on the altar: what sublimity of mind! Empedocles gave his whole body at Catana to the fires of Etna: what mental resolution! A certain foundress of Carthage gave herself away in second marriage to the funeral pile: what a noble witness of her chastity! Regulus, not wishing that his one life should count for the lives of many enemies, endured these crosses over all his frame: how brave a man, even in captivity a conqueror! Anaxarchus, when he was being beaten to death by a barley-pounder, cried out, 'Beat on, beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; no stroke falls on Anaxarchus himself.' O magnanimity of the philosopher, who even in such an end had jokes upon his lips! I omit all reference to those who with their own sword, or with any other milder form of death, have bargained for glory. Nay, see how even torture-contests are crowned by you. The Athenian courtezan, having wearied out the executioner, at last bit off her tongue, and spat it in the face of the raging tyrant, that she might at the same time spit away her power of speech, nor be longer able to confess her fellow-conspirators, if, even overcome, that might be her inclination. Zeno, the eleatic, when he was asked by Dionysius what good philosophy did, on answering that it gave contempt of death, was, all unquailing, given over to the tyrant's scourge, and sealed his opinion even to the death. We all know how the Spartan lash, applied with the utmost cruelty, under the very eyes of friends encouraging, confers on those who bear it honour proportionate to the blood which the young man shed. O glory legitimate because it is human, for whose sake it is reckoned neither reckless fool-hardiness nor desperate obstinacy to despise death itself and all sorts of savage treatment, for whose sake you may, for your native place, for the empire, for friendship, endure all you are forbidden to do for God! And you cast statues in honour of persons such as these, and you put inscriptions upon images, and cut out epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never perish. In so far as you can by your monuments, you yourselves afford a sort of resurrection to the dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from God is insane if for God he suffers. But go zealously on, good presidents; you will stand higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians at their wish. Kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent. Therefore it is of God's permitting (not of your mere will) that we thus suffer. For but very lately, in condemning a Christian woman to infamy rather than to the lion, you made confession that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and any death. Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. Many of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death, as Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Chances, as Diogenes, Pyrrhus, Callinicus. And yet their words do not find so many disciples as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very obstinacy you rail against is the preceptress; for who that contemplates it is not excited to inquire what is at the bottom of it? Who, after inquiry, does not embrace our doctrines? and when he has embraced them, desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the fulness of God's grace, that he may obtain from God complete forgiveness by giving in exchange his blood? For that secures the remission of all offences. On this account it is that we return thanks on the very spot for your sentences. As the divine and human are ever opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you we are acquitted by the Highest."[199]

Origen, in replying to the attacks of a very subtle and able Platonic philosopher of the second century, appeals again and again to the divine power shown forth in the conversion of so many, and among them of those who had previously been the slaves of sin. Heathen philosophy could boast of two converts, Phædo and Polemo; on which he says, "We assert that the whole habitable world contains evidence of the works of Jesus, in the existence of those churches of God which have been founded through Him by those who have been converted from the practice of innumerable sins. And the name of Jesus can still remove distractions from the minds of men, and expel demons, and also take away diseases, and produce a marvellous meekness of spirit and complete change of character, and a humanity, and goodness, and gentleness in those individuals who do not feign themselves to be Christians for the sake of subsistence or the supply of any mortal wants, but who have honestly accepted the doctrine concerning God and Christ and the judgment to come."

Celsus, unable to resist the miracles which Jesus is recorded to have performed, had on several occasions spoken of them slanderously as works of sorcery, to which Origen had severally replied. But he also pointed out how far greater a divine power is manifested in healing the maladies of the soul than in raising the daughter of Jairus, or the son of the widow of Nain, or Lazarus four days dead; for indeed these miracles were the symbols of the greater things which our Lord promised to do by His Apostles. "I would say that, agreeably to the promise of Jesus, His disciples performed even greater works than these miracles of Jesus, which were perceptible only to the senses. For the eyes of those who are blind in soul are ever opened, and the ears of those who were deaf to virtuous words listen readily to the doctrine of God and of the blessed life with Him; and many too who were lame in the feet of the 'inner man,' as Scripture calls it, having now been healed by the word, do not simply leap, but leap as the hart, which is an animal hostile to serpents, and stronger than all the poison of vipers. And these lame who have been healed received from Jesus power to trample with those feet in which they were formerly lame upon the serpents and scorpions of wickedness, and generally upon all the power of the enemy; and though they tread upon it, they sustain no injury, for they also have become stronger than the poison of all evil and of demons."

On this point he dwells further. The Jew introduced by Celsus argued that our Lord was a man. Origen replied: "I do not know whether a man who had the courage to spread throughout the entire world His doctrine of religious worship and teaching could accomplish what He wished without the divine assistance, and could rise superior to all who withstood the progress of His doctrine--kings and rulers, and the Roman Senate and governors in all places, and the common people. And how could the nature of a man possessed of no inherent excellence convert so vast a multitude? For it would not be wonderful if it were only the wise who were so converted; but it is the most irrational of men and those devoted to their passions, and who, by reason of their irrationality, change with the greater difficulty so as to adopt a more temperate course of life. And yet it is because Christ was the power of God and the wisdom of the Father that He accomplished and still accomplishes such results, although neither the Jews nor Greeks who disbelieved His word will so admit. And, therefore, we shall not cease to believe in God, according to the precepts of Jesus Christ, and to seek to convert those who are blind on the subject of religion, although it is they who are truly blind themselves that charge us with blindness; and they, whether Jews or Greeks, who lead astray those that follow them, accuse us of seducing men--a good seduction, truly, that they may become temperate instead of dissolute, or at least may make advances to temperance; may become just instead of unjust, or at least may tend to become so; prudent instead of foolish, or be on the way to become such; and instead of cowardice, meanness, and timidity, may exhibit the virtues of fortitude and courage, especially displayed in the struggles undergone for the sake of their religion towards God, the Creator of all things."

The wonder of the formation of the Christian community itself was never absent from the mind of those who were eye-witnesses of the heathendom in the bosom of which it arose. The place now occupied in the minds of men by the sins of professing Christians was then occupied by the sins of heathens in the midst of whom Christians formed so striking a contrast. Origen refers to the moral miracle as supported and in part explained by the material miracle, which, like every writer of those centuries, he presupposed and dwelt upon as a fact which was manifest before the eyes of every one--a fact which might be ascribed to sorcery, but could not be denied.

"I think," he says, "the wonders wrought by Jesus are a proof of the Holy Spirit's having then appeared in the form of a dove; and I shall refer not only to His miracles, but, as is proper, to those also of the Apostles of Jesus. For they could not without the help of miracles and wonders have prevailed on those who heard their new doctrines and new teachings to abandon their national usages and to accept their instructions at the danger to themselves even of death." And elsewhere: "Christians, who have in so wonderful a manner formed themselves into a community, appear at first to have been more induced by miracles than by exhortations to forsake the institutions of their fathers and to adopt others which were quite strange to them. And, indeed, if we were to reason from what is probable as to the first formation of the Christian society, we should say that it is incredible that the Apostles of Jesus Christ, who were unlettered men of humble life, could have been emboldened to preach Christian truth to men by anything else than the power which was conferred upon them, and the grace which accompanied their words and rendered them effective; and those who heard them would not have renounced the old established usages of their fathers, and been induced to adopt notions so different from those in which they had been brought up, unless they had been moved by some extraordinary power and by the force of miraculous events."[200]

This power of miracles, as inherited by the disciples from their Lord, is thus recorded by Irenæus:[201]--

"They who are truly His disciples, having received the grace from Him, effect it in His name for the good of others in proportion as each individual has received the gift from Him. Some with true and permanent effect expel demons, so that in many cases the very persons who have been delivered from the evil spirits believe and are in the Church. Some have foreknowledge of future events, visions, and prophetic utterances. Others heal sick people by the imposition of their hands and make them whole. Dead, too, have been raised to life, and have remained with us many years. What shall I say? It is impossible to express the number of the graces which the Church throughout the whole world, having received them from God, effects every day for the good of the nations in the name of Jesus Christ who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And in this she neither seduces any nor works for filthy lucre; for what she has freely received she freely imparts."

In the time of Irenæus, Clement, Tertullian, and Origen, the proof from the rapid growth of the Church in spite of the world's opposition was by no means complete. Moreover, the greatest and most general persecutions, those of Decius, Gallus, Valerian, and Diocletian, came after this. Probably the struggle between the Church and the Empire was not understood in all its bearings before the time of Decius. But we possess two treatises of Athanasius, composed in his youth, about the year 320. They are extremely beautiful both in style and matter; and in parts of them Athanasius contemplates the whole preceding history of the Church and the effects of her preaching the cross of Christ. I take as a specimen what he says about certain miraculous effects worked by the name and the cross of Christ, for the truth of which he appeals to universal experience.[202]

"When did men begin to desert the worship of idols except from the time that the true God, the Word of God, appeared among men? When did the oracles which were everywhere among the Greeks cease and come to nought, save from the time that the Saviour manifested Himself upon earth? When did the gods and heroes of the poets begin to be condemned as mere mortal men, save from the time that the Lord set up His trophy against death, and preserved incorruptible the body which He had taken by raising it from the dead? And when was the deceit and madness of demons despised, save when the Word, the power of God, the Lord of all, and of these among all, in His condescension for the weakness of men, appeared upon the earth? When did the art and the schools of magic begin to be trodden underfoot, save upon the manifestation of the Word among men? In a word, when did the wisdom of the Greeks become foolish, save when the true Wisdom of God showed Himself on the earth? For of old the whole world and every spot in it was filled with the false worship of idols, and men held that there were no gods but idols. But now through all the world men desert the superstition of idols and fly to Christ, and worship Him as God, through whom they recognise the Father whom they knew not. And observe this wonder. The religions were different and numberless; each place had its own idol, and he that was invoked as god there could not pass to the next spot to persuade his neighbours to worship him, but could only just maintain his own worship; for no one worshipped his neighbour's god, but kept to his own idol, thinking that he was the lord of all; whereas the one and same Christ is worshipped everywhere by all; and what the impotence of idols could not do to persuade its neighbours, this Christ has done, persuading not only those near, but simply the whole world to worship one and the same Lord, and through Him God His Father.

"Of old, also, everything was full of the deceit of oracles, and those in Delphi, and Dodona, and Boeotia, and Libya, and Egypt, and the Kabiri, and the Pythia, were admired in men's imagination; but from the time that Christ is preached everywhere, this their madness also is stopped, and no one any longer acts the prophet. And of old the demons deceived men with spectres, taking possession of fountains and rivers, of wood and stones, and so astonishing the foolish with deceits. All these sights have vanished since the Divine Epiphany of the Word; for a man using only the sign of the cross scatters all their tricks. Of old men deemed those whom the poets called Zeus, and Kronos, and Apollo, and the heroes, to be gods, and were drawn into error by worshipping them; but now that the Saviour has appeared among men, these have been reduced to the nakedness of mortal men, while Christ has been recognised as alone true God, God the Word of God. What shall I say of the magic which had so much vogue among them? Before the Word was spread among us, it prevailed and worked among Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Indians, and astonished the beholders; but it was convicted and utterly brought to nought by the presence of the truth and the appearance of the Word. But as to the Grecian wisdom and the big words of the philosophers, I think it needs no word from us when the strange sight is before the eyes of all, that all the volumes written by the Greek wise men were not able to persuade even a few neighbours of immortality and virtuous life; while Christ, only by a few cheap words in the mouth of men who had no wisdom of the tongue, has persuaded numerous assemblies of men throughout the whole world to despise death and to have immortal longings, to pass by time and see eternity, earth's glory to esteem as dust and ashes, and grasp instead of it a crown in heaven.

"These are not mere words of ours, but appeal to the test of experience for their reality. Let any one who will go and see the proof of virtue in Christian virgins and the youths who cultivate purity, and the assurance of immortality in the vast multitude of martyrs. He that will try the truth of what we have said, let him upon the appearance of demons, the deceit of oracles, and magic wonders, use the sign of the cross which they mock at, with the mere name of Christ, and he will see how the demons fly, the oracles stop, the whole array of magic and trickery disappears. Who, then, and how great is this Christ who has by His mere name and presence cast His shade over and annihilated all these things everywhere, who prevails over all alone, and has filled the whole world with His teaching? Let the Greeks who mock and blush not say. Is He a man? how then has one man been too much for the power of all their gods, and convicted them by His own power of being nothing? Do they call Him a magician? but how can all magic be destroyed by a magician, and not rather be confirmed? For if He prevailed over some magicians, or was superior to one only, He might well be deemed by them to have surpassed the others by greater art; but if His cross carried off the victory over all magic absolutely, and the very name of the thing, it is plain that the Saviour is not a magician, since the demons invoked by other magicians fly from Him as their Lord. If He only drove away some demons, He might be thought to have power over the inferior by the chief of the demons, as the Jews mocking said of Him. But if all the fury of the demons is displaced and scattered by naming Him, it is plain they are wrong, and that our Lord and Saviour Christ is not, as they think, some demoniacal power. If, then, the Saviour is neither simple man, nor magician, nor a demon, but by His own Godhead has annulled and frustrated all the imagination of poets, the display of demons, and the wisdom of Greeks, it must be plain and confessed by all that He is truly the Son of God, the Word, and Wisdom, and Power of the Father. Hence His works are not human, but above man's range, and are recognised to be the works of God in truth by their manifest effects, and by the comparison of them with the works of man."

Athanasius speaks in these words for the whole period preceding him. The apologists of the early Church before him[203] lay the most stress in proving her divine character upon five things--the predictions of the Old Testament, the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles, the miraculous power continuing on in Christians, the rapid propagation of the Church, and the steadfast endurance of confessors under persecution. Our Lord Himself laid the greatest weight upon the proof arising from prophecy, and from the works of power, themselves announced in prophecy, which He did, "the works of the Christ." His answer to the disciples of John the Baptist included both. In fact, He came among a people possessing a divinely appointed priesthood and office of teaching, which He expressly acknowledged when He said, "The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in the chair of Moses; all things, therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do." But He did not in any way attach Himself to this authority, much less submit to it in His office of teaching. If we reflect on the fact that He did not submit Himself to the authority which He acknowledged to be divine, yet claimed supreme authority, it is obvious that without miracles He could claim no authority as the Christ. And He said so most plainly Himself when He summed up, as it were, the whole bearing of His ministry towards the Jewish authorities in the words, "If I had not done among them such works as no man ever did, they should not have sin; but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father."

Thus, as in His own life, so likewise in the life of His people, miracles and prophecy were of necessity the double external witness to His mission, as martyrdom, including under it every degree of confessorship, was the great internal witness.

And every ancient Christian writer alleges the existence and the exercise of miraculous power in the Church. But there is also another fact; not only all Christians, but Jews and heathens of every class, the bitterest opponents of the Christian faith, agreed in one point, namely, that superhuman[204] power was at work in the world, and in the whole life of man, by which works exceeding man's ability, and often transgressing the laws of nature, were wrought. They were eye-witnesses of these works. About a great number of them, so far at least as the fact was concerned, they could not be deceived, though they might be deceived as to the nature of the cause.

Without martyrdom and also without miracles the conversion which took place between the Day of Pentecost and the Edict of Toleration in 313 was not even conceivable. Let us consider the bond which connects the two together.

The Christian faith itself rests upon two miracles. The first is the assumption of human nature by the Divine Word, the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity, in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This act of the divine condescension is so transcendent in all its bearings as not merely to surpass the order of nature, but to be, as it were, the parent of miraculous power in all that supernatural order which it creates and maintains. It is the fontal source of grace to man, of his first creation in grace, the first Adam himself being the image of the Second who was to be, and for whose sake the whole creation was made. Take away from the Christian faith that "Gospel of Mary" which St. Luke has recorded in the mission of the Angel Gabriel to her, and that faith is not only altered, but it ceases to be. Everything which the Christian believes and hopes depends, in fact, upon that miracle of miracles, the union of the divine nature with the human in the Person of Jesus Christ. Therefore all His children are born of a miracle, nurtured upon a miracle, live and hope and suffer and die in faith of a miracle, so great, so peculiar, so inconceivable beforehand, that all other miracles are but its progeny.

But, secondly, the very existence of this first miracle was guaranteed and made known by another--the resurrection of Jesus Christ in that very Body bearing the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear in which He was crucified. It was faith in this resurrection which sent forth a College of twelve unlettered men to convert the world, and by that faith they converted it, so far at least that the diadem of its emperors was surmounted by the cross of Christ. They and their successors who went forth in the same faith were misused, calumniated, persecuted, tormented to death in every shape and fashion, until Constantine saw the token in the sky and placed it on his banner.

What, then, we have said as to the Incarnation we may also say as to the Resurrection of Christ; take it away, and the Christian people have no longer a foundation on which to rest. They would simply cease to be.

They are, therefore, doubly the children of miracle.

They were thus from the beginning--and they could not but be--instinct with the sense of miracle.

But these two miracles were no less the ground of martyrdom and of all that life, consisting in the endurance and even choice of suffering, hardship, privation of every kind, of which martyrdom is the seal and crown. The connection between miracle and martyrdom seems to be this: The Incarnation of our Lord is the very reason of miraculous power being exhibited in the world, just as His assumption of human nature is itself the miracle of miracles. The purpose of all miracle is to bring home to the creature a special action of the Creator as Governor of the world, but the head and crown as well as the starting-point of such special action is, in our actual world, the miracle of the Incarnation.

Again, the original need of miraculous action springs from the moral darkness superinduced by the Fall, which the Incarnation repairs. The angelic world, while under probation, or any world of rational creatures unfallen, needs no miracles. And all miracles anterior to Christ are part of a chain of events leading on to Him, just as all martyrs before Christ have their reason of existence in Him alone. The occasion of martyrdom is the enmity between the seed of the serpent and the Seed of the Woman, and miracle is from beginning to end the hand of God showing itself in the contest. "All the just," says St. Augustine,[205] "who have been from the beginning of the world have Christ for their Head. For they believed in the future coming of that One whom we believe to have come, and they were healed by faith in the same One by faith in whom we are healed, that He might be head of the whole city Jerusalem." And the most inspired of Christian poets, when he beheld the great rose of Paradise flowering with the saints of all times, divided them by their preceding or following the coming of Christ:

"Da questa parte, onde 'l fiore è maturo Di tutte le sue foglie, sono assisi Quei che credettero in Cristo venturo Dall' altra parte, onde sono intercisi Di vôto i semicircoli, si stanno Quei ch' a Cristo venuto ebber li visi."

--_Paradiso_, c. 32, 22.

In like manner the Apostle commences his illustration of the life of faith by the martyrdom of Abel, "who being dead yet speaketh." Thus the one life pleasing to God from the beginning to the end is identical in its substance, and shows the oneness of the divine plan, commencing its execution in the very family of the first man. There the just loses his life for his justice' sake, and Abel becomes the type of Christ and of all who follow the Divine Master. So St. John the Baptist, marking the transition from the old covenant to the new, the precursor of our Lord, with the triple aureole of virginity, doctorship, and martyrdom, gives up his life to maintain the sanctity of marriage.

Further, the Passion of our Lord is the source of martyrdom; and union with Him, especially in the act of His Passion, is the cause of all the effects which martyrdom produces. As He said, in reference to His coming Passion, of Himself, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remaineth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit;" so Tertullian said of His people, "The blood of Christians is seed." In martyrdom lies the perpetuation of faith in Christ. He stands in the midst of the ages, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, working backwards and forwards. The shedding of Abel's blood, the first blood shed, and the blood of the brother shed by the brother, points to the shedding of Christ's blood; and so in the interval between Abel and Christ the blood of all the just ones is shed for the hope of Christ. As all martyrdom preceding Him was for the hope of Him, so all following is in remembrance and participation of Him.

There is a strong parallel between miracle and martyrdom as to their principle, their witness, their power, and their perpetuity.

1. First, as to _principle_. The conception of miracle springs at once from the doctrine of God the Creator, Orderer, and Maintainer of the universe, united with the doctrine of the Fall of man and the ignorance thence superinduced, and requiring to be dissipated by an objective confirmation of the truth. This confirmation is produced when He suspends that order of nature which He has impressed on things. "The divine power can at any time, without prejudice to His providence, do something beyond the order impressed on natural things by God. This is the very thing which He sometimes does to manifest His power. For in no manner can it be better shown that all nature is subject to the divine will than by this, that sometimes He does something beyond the order of nature; for by this it is made to appear that the order of things proceeded from God, not by a necessity of His nature, but by His free-will."[206]

On the other hand, the conception of miracles is incompatible with the notion of a power evolving itself by a strict necessity in the universe. This involves at the same time the rejection of the notion of sin as a violation of the eternal law. For the evolution itself is the only law admitted, and is incapable of sin, which arises from the misuse of the liberty of the will. A world evolved by eternal necessity denies any liberty to the will. In this the Positivist and Materialist of the present day only take the position which the Stoic took of old. All the three deny miracle, because they deny creation.

And the principle of martyrdom is the intimate union between Christ and Christians, whereby the Head and His members form one Body. The community in suffering rests on this. At the head of persecution is the statement of our Lord Himself (the narrative of which, it may be remarked, is given three times in the Acts), "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" Thus a martyr said to martyrs, "He who once conquered death for us is ever conquering death in us. You know that you are contending under the eyes of your present Lord; that by the confession of His name you reach His own glory. For He is not as if He was only looking at His servants, but He wrestles Himself, He combats Himself in them; in the contest of our struggle, Himself both crowns and is crowned."[207]

The martyr Felicitas underwent in prison the sufferings of premature childbirth. One of the attendants remarked to her, "You who so much show your suffering now, what will you do when you are thrown before the wild beasts, which you despised when you refused to sacrifice?" And she answered, "It is I who suffer now that which I suffer; but then there will be another in me who will suffer for me, because I also shall be suffering for Him." On which St. Augustine comments: "It was He who caused women to suffer with faith and the courage of men who deigned in His mercy for their sake to be born of a woman.... Eve's penalty was not absent, but Mary's grace was present. What she owed as a woman was exacted; what she needed in help was given by the Virgin's Son."[208]

2. As to the _witness_ of miracles, in matter of fact the objective proof of our Lord's mission as Messias and Son of God was based, both in His own life and in the propagation of His faith, upon miracles viewed in a double light--first, as they are in themselves, and secondly, as the fulfilment of prophecy. "To confirm doctrines which surpass natural knowledge He showed visibly works which surpass natural power, by the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, and, what is more wonderful, the inspiration of human minds, so that untaught and simple men, filled with the gift of the Holy Spirit, obtained in an instant the utmost wisdom and readiness of speech; so that not by the violence of arms, not by the promise of pleasures, but amid the tyranny of persecutors, an innumerable multitude, not merely of simple, but of the wisest men was drawn into the Christian faith. They preached doctrines surpassing man's understanding; they set a restraint on carnal pleasures; they taught contempt for everything that is in the world. It would be the most marvellous of all marvels if the world without miracles had been led to the belief of doctrines so difficult, the working of deeds so arduous, the hoping of rewards so exalted, by simple and ignoble men."[209]

The witness of martyrdom is expressed in its very name, that they who suffered death for the sake of Christ were simply called witnesses. The analogy with miracles is very strong indeed, the one being the witness of God attesting the truth of His messengers by visible signs, which suspend or reverse the order which He has Himself established as a general rule; the other being the witness of men who suffer all those things from which the nature of man recoils in order to attest the truth of God.

3. As to the _power_ exercised by miracles over the minds of men, the victory over idolatry and the whole heathen life, which was the reflection of that idolatry, could not have been accomplished--all other powers remaining in the Church--without this one. In fact, a diabolic spiritual power, termed by our Lord "the strong man armed," being, as the result of the Fall, in possession of his captive, could only be cast out by One stronger than he, the Son of God Incarnate. The series of miracles wrought by His disciples were the arms which He used. His name alone when invoked by them is attested in numberless instances to have had a supernatural effect.

As to the power exercised by martyrdom, the whole history is full of that victory over idolatry and the heathen life which was accomplished by the suffering of our Lord's disciples in His name and in community with Him. Over and above the effect which the voluntary endurance of suffering for conscience' sake has upon the minds of men, martyrdom merited the propagation of the faith as if our Lord's Passion required to be repeated in His members for the growth of His Body. Such is the fact expressed by St. Paul in the words, "I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ in my flesh for His Body, which is the Church." And, again, "As the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so also by Christ doth our comfort abound." In this martyrdom threw a light upon the divine government of the world; and as the reversibility of guilt had formed the history of fallen man, so the reversibility of merit formed the history of man redeemed. Thus over against the abyss of judgment lies the abyss of grace, the treasure-house of the Church, of which the King of martyrs holds the key. That treasure-house is the communion of saints. The power of martyrdom is one of its great exhibitions. Its source is the Incarnation of the Son. Taking the mass of sufferings undergone by the mystical Body of Christ in the process of its growth, there is nothing in the web of human guilt, how intricate soever it may be, from the beginning to the end of the world, which has not its counterpart in the reversibility of merit, all derived from the Passion of the Incarnate Son.

4. As to the _perpetuity_ of the miraculous power, the same reason exists through the whole course of the Church's preaching for the signs in her following them that believe. The promise is most clearly recorded at the conclusion of St. Mark's Gospel, without limit of time or place. The performance in this first age, when she had to meet all the tyranny of rulers and all the rage of unbelievers, is recorded also. The promise clearly extends to the whole time over which the command relating to it extends: "Go ye unto the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature."

As to the perpetuity of martyrdom, it is clear, to use St. Paul's expression, that what is wanting of the sufferings of Christ will not be made up until His Body is completed "in the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

In all these respects the two great powers of miracle and martyrdom, united in their origin, seem to run into and complete each other. The witness of God and the witness of man concur in the formation of the kingdom of His Son.

It may also be noted that all those who reject God as Creator, Judge, and Remunerator proclaim as a first principle that a miracle is impossible, while they have the same dislike to martyrdom as the great adversary is said to have for holy water.

I have now, then, answered the question which I put above--How came the Roman Emperor to allow to Christians the liberty to render to God the things of God, that is, to believe, to worship, and to be governed according to the law of Christ? It was done by an internal action of the Holy Spirit, forming by a process of individual conversion in the minds of an innumerable multitude a certain type of Christian character, an image in each one of the Founder of the line; and at the same time by an external action of the same Holy Spirit co-operating in this conversion "with signs following." Never before were the divine and the human societies pitted against each other in so absolute a conflict. Perhaps it is even the only period as yet in the 1850 years of Christian life in which the Battle of the Standards, of poverty, affliction, and contempt on the one side, of the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life on the other, has been completely carried out--completely in that the representation on each side embraced the whole society. For if any would not be poor, afflicted, and despised in those times, either they could not become Christians, or becoming so in times of comparative peace, they were speedily scattered by the winnowing flail of persecution. But on the other side, the combative heathenism from Tiberius to Maxentius was pre-eminently corrupt. It should be added, that in the 1850 years, never has there been so astonishing a result as the advance of the Christian Church, from those who met in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost to those who received from Constantine perfect civil freedom to believe that doctrine, to exercise that worship, to be governed by that Episcopate, which formed together the greatest conceivable contradiction to the heathen world of Augustus. It was the result of ten generations, sanctified by suffering and multiplied by martyrdom.

There is another point of view also in which this period should be regarded. What did these champions of conscience do for that very civil order of things to which in their character of Christians they had so often to refuse obedience, and to say simply, in the words of their first leader, "We ought to obey God rather than men"?

They conferred upon all future generations of men an inestimable benefit, for they established the doctrine that the individual man has rights which the collective society of men may not violate. They overthrew the autocracy of the State, which had crushed out the heart of humanity.

During those ages, after the conversion of the original Roman commonwealth into the Cæsarean empire, there was no guarantee of civil liberty. From the city which only refused fire and water to its guiltiest citizens, the Empire had grown into a power wherein a charge of majestas justified the application of every torment to the accused; and the charge of majestas was ever at hand in the case of a Christian. If Augustus, though he slaughtered without mercy when his interests were concerned, studied to give his rule the aspect of moderation, the emperors his successors became more and more uncontrolled. Not only had they legislative power, but the imprisonment and the execution of any obnoxious person was entirely in their hands. In this long period of 284 years, Christians without number suffered loss of goods, confinement in loathsome dungeons, separation from their families, and finally death itself under torment and insult, because they would worship Christ as God, because they would not swear by the genius of the Emperor, because they would not burn a few grains of incense on the altar of an idol, because one who had dedicated herself to God would not marry, because a soldier would not carry out an impious command, for any of the innumerable reasons for which they were offensive to the world, which the world called "their hatred of the human race," that being the phrase of the day for the Kulturkampf.

Thus they suffered and they died, and in so suffering and dying they constructed a new basis of civil liberty. For this it was which the Church's creation of the Spiritual Power betokened. It meant the establishment of the Christian conscience not merely in the individual, but in the great world-wide corporation of the Church, which thus formed an impregnable citadel of defence against civil absolution, by cutting off from it the triple domain of the Church's priesthood, teaching, and jurisdiction. What heathenism had destroyed by corrupting the worship of the one true God into a multitude of false gods, the Church restored by setting up the worship of the Blessed Trinity; and the priesthood, which unutterable degradations had humbled in the dust of human passions and vices, the Church took from the Body of her Lord, dyed red in blood, and invested with the imperishable sanctity of the Priest after the order of Melchisedek; and that kingship which Nero and Domitian, Elagabalus and Galerius, had stained with unspeakable crimes, it renewed in the example of those princes over all the earth who ruled not as the kings of the Gentiles, but as Fathers in God. Christian monarchy is the Church's work, and the Christian State became possible because the Christian people in times of authority which was cruel, and of majesty which was selfish, had shown the example of rulers who governed for their people's sake, governed by the authority of One who created the government of His people when He said by the Lake of Galilee to the disciple who should be the type and mould and origin of the episcopate for ever, "If thou lovest Me, feed My sheep."

This was a purifying and ennobling of civil society wrought by the Church over and above its spiritual end. The kingdom of heaven, whilst it limited, also invigorated the earthly kingdom, showing that Christians alone are freemen, by exercising the highest of all freedoms in belief, in worship, and in obedience to spiritual government, and in the conduct which is their united result.

Retracing the ground we have traversed, we find that the Church, between the Day of Pentecost and the Edict of Toleration, passed unscathed and victorious through five great trials, which were calculated to test to the utmost the power vested in her. Two of these conflicts--that with Judaism and that with heresy--were internal, and three--the conflict with idolatry, that with Greek and Oriental philosophy, and that with the civil power of the Roman Empire--were external. Moreover, while one of these conflicts--that with the enmity of the unbelieving Jews, and the spirit which urged the obligation of the ceremonial law upon the Christian Church--raged chiefly in the first forty years, and was greatly assuaged in its influence by the destruction of the city and temple of Jerusalem, the remaining four contests lasted continuously, and acted with collective force against the Church during the whole period. For as to heresy, it was rife from the time of the Apostles themselves. Those who became Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles, were all themselves exposed to the danger of intellectual and moral seduction: we find, indeed, that some of the most distinguished converts yielded to it, such as Tatian and Tertullian. Those especially who in middle age had passed over from heathen customs and a youth perhaps spent in the study of Hellenic literature and philosophy into the Christian confession, would naturally remain all their lives liable to the danger of false teaching, if they were not guarded from it by the utmost purity of life, and not only sincerity but humility of mind. Certainly no period of the Church's history shows a greater number of sects than this.

Another enemy which the Church had from the beginning, and which continued in the utmost force through the whole time, was idolatry, and that whole contexture of life of which it was first the prolific source, then the vigilant nurse and the constant support. Every part of Gentile life was flavoured by the spirit of the false worship--the passions of the young, the ambitions of middle life, the avarice of age. Its power was all around the Church, to corrupt morals, to pervert belief, to sensualise worship. As we have seen above, Christian writers dwell upon the fact that vast numbers of those who became Christians had previously been stained with heathen vices: those who had yielded to all manner of sensual passions became chaste: those who had revelled in pride of intellect became humble. But what a force of opposition to the spread of the Christian religion did the moral state of the great cities in which it had its principal seats present! Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and Carthage were the very centres of all moral corruption when the Christian seed was dropped upon them. This glamour of the heathen life was an enemy the intensity and ubiquity of whose power lasted without intermission from the beginning to the end of the time.

From the beginning likewise to the end the heathen philosophy, whether Greek or Oriental, or in that amalgam of both which probably formed the texture of cultured minds in this period, was a most dangerous and influential foe. Against this also the Apostles themselves warn their converts. From a very early time indeed the Gnostic sects put up the pantheistic unity of the philosophic God against the Christian Trinity in Unity. They tried to convert the Divine Logos into an æon. Led by their doctrine that the essential seat of evil was in matter, they attacked Christ in His human nature, denying the verity of His Body. They constructed divine theogonies with all the brilliance of the Eastern imagination and all the cleverness of Greek subtilty; and many who resisted the foulness of heathen idolatry were led away by fantastic schemes of spiritual unity--by pantheism in one of its many shapes. This enemy also lasted through the whole period: the Gnostic systems passed into the Neoplatonic, perhaps the most dangerous enemy which the Church encountered in the three hundred years, and Arianism itself was but a modification of Gnostic error.

But heresy, idolatry, and philosophy were helped throughout by that jealousy of the Civil Power, the most marked perhaps in the best rulers, such as Trajan and Decius, which abhorred above all things the formation of an independent religious community in its bosom. How would an emperor of cultivated tastes and incessant curiosity, such as Hadrian, exult over the divisions of heresies and the varying systems of philosophy, looking down on them all from his superior height! Irenæus observed that heresies had no martyrs--the State did not persecute them. And philosophy did not die for its belief; its essence was free thought--that is, the license to change to-morrow what it asserted to-day. But how would a monarchy which scrupled to authorise a guild of firemen in a provincial city, lest it should form the nucleus of a secret society, abhor the growth of a Church which had its centre in Rome and a governor in every city, bound to the centre at Rome by the accord of a common faith, a common worship, and the undivided rule of a single people, the _corpus Christianorum_! Therefore heresy, idolatry, and philosophy were the friends and allies of the Civil Power throughout this time. It patronised them, and it could use all their influence, their resources, and their intellect against the insurgent Church, while all the time it had at its command every punishment which force can inflict on those who disregard the laws of an empire. To be a Christian was to violate the Roman majestas.

Over against these five enemies the Church received her spiritual authority from the Person of her Lord; she planted it through her episcopate over the earth; she maintained her one doctrine in the teaching of that episcopate, her one worship in the sacrifice which it everywhere offered; she worked out her independence in her organic growth of structure, in the mode of her teaching, in her resistance to error of every sort and kind; and, finally, the empire which had used every arm against her, acknowledged her doctrine, her worship, and her government, and her essential independence in all these as the kingdom of Christ, when Constantine appeared at the Nicene Council, not to control, but to carry into effect its decision, and when he wrote concerning it, "The sentence of the three hundred bishops is nothing else but the decision of God; especially since the Holy Spirit, by His action upon the minds of such men, has brought into full light the divine will."[210]

When the Emperor of Rome, the successor of Tiberius, gave official utterance to such words, he showed that the blood of martyrs shed through ten generations, the endurance of confessors, the labours of priests who refused the joys of domestic life in their imitation of the Virgin's Son, the continence of those who carried out in themselves the vow of the Virgin Mother of that Son, and what is included in all these, the generation of the Christian people, had done their appointed work; and so the kingdom of Cæsar recognised the kingdom of Christ.

FOOTNOTES:

[182] See Josephus, Jud. Antiq., l. 18, c. 4.

[183] See St. Basil, Ep. 141.

[184] For instances, see the utmost incredible account in De Civitate Dei vi. 9; and, again, Clement of Alexandria, Cohortatio, p. 81 (Potter's ed.); what I have said is in exact accordance with St. Athanasius, de Inc. Verbi, sec. 46.

[185] A fragment of this apology is preserved for us in Eusebius' History, iv. 26.

[186] 1 Cor. xv. 6.

[187] As Baur, Die drei ersten Jahrhunderte, p. 464, attests.

[188] St. Greg. I Epist. xi. 66.

[189] Irenæus, iv. 33, 9.

[190] Eusebius, Hist., v. 1.

[191] Clement, Strom., ii. 20, p. 494, tous gnôstikous, tous tou kosmou meizonas.

[192] Apologeticus, cap. 12.

[193] 1 Cor. i. 17, ii. 9.

[194] See Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, i. 557.

[195] Panegyric of the Martyrs by the Deacon Constantine.

[196] Clement of Alex., Cohortatio, sec. 10, p. 85. It might be fruitful to compare the view of the world taken by the Christian Clement with that taken by the pessimist Schopenhauer.

[197] The words inserted seem here to have fallen out of the text.

[198] Clement of Alex., Strom. vi., at the end.

[199] Tertullian, Apology, 50; Edinburgh translation.

[200] Cont. Cels., 1, 67; 2, 48; 2, 79; 1, 46; 8, 47; Edinburgh translation.

[201] Irenæus, 2, 32.

[202] Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, c. 46-48.

[203] Gieseler, i. 208.

[204] As admitted by Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms., iii. 458, 459, and see the argument of Celsus in Origen, 8, 45.

[205] On Psalm xxxvi. 3.

[206] St. Thomas, Cont. Gent., 3, 99.

[207] St. Cyprian, Ep. 8.

[208] Sermon 281.

[209] St. Thomas, Contra Gent., 1, 6.

[210] Constantine's letter to the Church of Alexandria, recorded by Socrates, Hist. 1, 9.

INDEX.

ADAM, Father and Head of his race, 3; does not lose the Headship by his fall, 11; is likewise Priest and Teacher of his race, 14-16; created in full possession of language, 5; has an infused knowledge of the animal creation, 5; has the Image and Likeness of God both as an Individual and as Head of his race, 6; subserves the mystery of the Incarnation, 8; as does the whole society founded in Adam and his children, 55.

Æschylus, his rigid statement of satisfaction due for sin, 260.

Alexandria: its catechetical school, 345; becomes a Christian university, 385; its succession of ten distinguished presidents, 386.

Altar, the heathen, on which beasts were sacrificed, bômos, the Christian, on which the Unbloody Sacrifice is offered, thusiastêrion, 232.

Apostolate, the powers conveyed to it by Christ, 136, 138, 139, 149-151; summary of these powers, 154, 155, 159; (See PRIMACY and EPISCOPATE).

Aquinas, St. Thomas, his doctrine of the subordination of the Temporal to the Spiritual Power, grounded upon the superiority of the end pursued by the latter, 123; Miracles a proof that the order of things proceeds from God, not by necessity of nature, but by His free-will, 450; the conversion of the world without miracles would have been the most marvellous of all marvels, 452; marks that sacrifice must be offered to God alone, 256; his statement of the supernatural government tending to a supernatural end, 94-96; sums up patristic doctrine on the Eucharist in his hymn, Lauda Sion, 274.

Athanasius, St., represents the principles on which the ante-nicene Church maintained the faith, 389; how he states the authority of Scripture, 370; the rule of faith, 392; what he thinks of private judgment, 393; his tests of heresy, 393; on ecclesiastical definitions, 394; says Scripture and Tradition are united in the Church's magisterium, 395; how he accounts for the cessation of idolatry, oracles, and magic, 440-443.

Athenagoras, his conversion, 383.

Augustine, St., his description of the "Connection of Ages" down to Christ, and from him, xxx-xxxii; witnessed the Catholic Church, but did not foresee Christendom, xxxiv; his description of the Two Cities, xxxvii; attests that the shedding of blood in sacrifice from the beginning points to the sacrifice of Christ, 15, 255; that the Christian Sacrifice is the principle of unity to Christ's mystical Body, 276; how he understood the "One Episcopate," 280; mentions thousands of bishops as existing in 314 A.D., 216; why he saw in the Church the Godhead of its Founder, 280; his testimony to the force of the Catholic Church upon his mind, 165, 229; the number, names, and offices of heathen deities, 407; the seven churches in the apocalypse signify the fulness of the one Church, 174; his rule that what has been always kept in the Church, without being ordered by a council, is of apostolical authority, 296; complains of judgments as to secular matters being pressed upon him, 306; forbids the words of the creed to be written down, 348; comments on an answer of St. Felicitas, 451.

BABYLON, type of the kingdom of force, xxvi; identified with heathen Rome by St. Peter and St. John, xxix.

Basil, St., places the nature of God outside the conception of number, 406.

Baur, Die drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 364, 366; Constantine's view of the Church, 416; sees the episcopal idea in the angels of the seven churches, 174.

Bernard, St., his comment on the sheep committed to Peter, 178.

Bianchi, Potestà della Chièsa, on the honour given by the Gentiles to their priesthood, 60, 63, 64; how St. Jerome says that bishops, priests, and deacons succeed the high-priest, priests, and Levites of the Mosaic hierarchy, 191; the bishop's office an archê, 219; selects five points of the Church's organic growth, 296; the Apostles follow their Lord's example in placing power in a head, 298; distribution of episcopal jurisdiction from the beginning, 300; on the Church's hearing and deciding causes, 303; on the criminal and penitential forum, 304; the Apostles prohibited Christians from pleading before secular tribunals, 306; jurisdiction, 307; election of bishops in the first three centuries, 309; bishops sent out from Rome to convert the nations, 219, 310; the Church's administration of temporal goods, 312, 313.

Bossuet, his six points of the original human society, 29; what he thinks of a State without a religion, 41; the Christian people's relation to Christ, 101, 108.

CATECHETICAL SCHOOLS, at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, 386, 387.

Chamard, Dom, L'Etablissement du Christianisme, quoted, 217.

Christ, His action as at once and always King, Lawgiver, and Priest, the subject of this volume, xx; kingdom of Christ as prophesied, xxi-xxviii; as fulfilled, xxix-xl; His High-priesthood consists in two acts, 239; His people answer to Him in the triple order established by Him as the Priest, the Prophet, and the King, 101.

Chrysostom, St., his epitome of the Church's course preceding his own time, 230; Christ's one undeniable miracle that He founded the race of Christians, 231; contrast of the race with that out of which it was formed, 232; the incessant conflict amid which it was done, 233; dwells on the presence of Christ's physical Body in the Eucharist, 275; the Eucharist one sacrifice, everywhere, and for ever, 277.

Cities, the Two, date from the Fall, 14; city of the devil, prevailing, leads to the Deluge, 17; described by St. Augustine, xxxvii.

Clement of Alexandria, his conversion, and great ability, 385; attests the persecution in his time, 419; on the power of the kêrugma, 429; impotence of philosophy contrasted with it, 430; exposes the heathen deities, 407.

Clement, St., of Rome, his letter to the Church of Corinth, the first Papal Pastoral, 184; called most authoritative by Irenæus, 185; likens Christian obedience to Roman military discipline, 186; speaks of minute regulations as to religious ordinances given by Christ, 187; makes all spiritual order to descend from above, 188; argues for the Christian order _à fortiori_, as compared with the Mosaic, 189; says the Apostles established bishops everywhere, with rule of succession, 190; attests the continuation of the Mosaic hierarchy in the Christian, 191; says Christian ordinances are to be observed more accurately than Mosaic, 193; describes the descent of power from above in the first sixty years, 194-196; confirms in this the Scriptural records, and supplies details, 197; exercises the primacy in the lifetime of St. John, 197-200; St. Clement and St. Ignatius complete and corroborate each other, 203; insists on the care with which our Lord instituted the government of His Church, 238; marks St. Paul to have been martyred by Nero's deputies, 367.

Council of Arles, 375; its testimony to the Pope's authority, 397; says the Apostles Peter and Paul sit for ever in the Roman see, 398; Constantine acknowledges its judgment as that of Christ, 398.

Council of Trent, its description of the Christian sacrifice, 265, 268.

Coelestine, Pope, St., how the law of supplication establishes the law of belief, 329.

Cyprian, St.--every city has its bishop in his time, 217; meaning of his aphorism on the oneness and solidarity of the Episcopate, 222; which he compares with the divine Unity in the Trinity, 224; his testimony as to the election of bishops in his own time, 308; sees Christ present in the martyrs, 450.

DANIEL, the prophet, his vision of the kingdom of God set up on earth, xxiii-xxviii.

Dante, the great statue, xxix; St. John the Evangelist, 172; the saints before and after Christ form the great rose of Paradise, 448.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, description of the Roman Pontifical College, 61.

EPISCOPATE, the One, planted in every city by the Apostles, 194; attested by St. Ignatius, 202; by Eusebius the historian, 207; who gives the succession at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, 210; by Tertullian, 212; by Irenæus, 213; each city and small town had its bishop before the peace of the Church, 216; the bishop said to wield a government, 218; bishops sent out from Rome to convert the nations, 219; episcopal government universal, 220; but the One Episcopate much more than this, 222; a regimen ruling one flock through the whole world, 224-226; the undivided rule of a single people, the Corpus Christianorum, 462; set forth by De Marca, 222; by St. Leo the Great in A.D. 446, 223; co-exists with the Primacy, 227; considered a miracle by St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine, 228; contrasted with national churches, 180, 181, 237; Christian government, worship, belief, and practice wrapt up together herein, 238; organic growth of the One Episcopate in mother and daughter churches, 296; developed in provincial councils, 302; exercised in decisions of coercive power, 303; exhibited in election of bishops, 307; the whole a derivation of the mission of Christ, 311; gradually clothes itself in temporal goods, 312-316; the living personal authority that to which the assistance of the Holy Ghost is promised from beginning to end, 335; our Lord's missionary circuits the germ, 340; the mission carried on by the Apostles, 341-343; personal authority exhibited in the system of catechesis, 344; the use of a creed, 347; the dispensing of sacraments, 349; the inflicting of penance, 351; the dispensing of the Scriptures, 352; all this continued during fifteen hundred years, 355-359; gift of infallibility lodged in the magisterium, 387, 389; which is the Church's divine government and concrete life, as attested by Athanasius, 395.

Eusebius, of Cæsarea, notes three periods in the first ninety years, 206, 207; sum of his testimony as to the three great sees and the episcopate, 209; records that Peter came to Rome in the reign of the Emperor Claudius, 209; and the martyrdom of the two Apostles, 210; attests the divine power by which the Church was planted, 211; the Paschal Lamb sacrificed once a year, but Christians are ever satisfied with the Body of the Lord, 270; contrasts the divine polity and philosophy of the Church with the incessant variation of heresies, 221; attests the multitude of martyrs everywhere in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, 418.

FISH, the sacred symbol in the catacombs of Christ's person and work, 287.

Franzelin, Cardinal, the Church's teaching office, 330-335; that which is essential, the perpetual succession of living men, 339; the revelation made by Christ to the Apostles complete as to its substance, 361; the act of Christ's High Priesthood in the Incarnation, 239; the reality of the Body and Blood of Christ on the altar asserted by St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Justin, and St. Irenæus, 269; the physical Body of Christ in the Eucharist insisted on by the Fathers, 274.

Friedländer admits the universal belief in miracles of Jews and heathens as well as Christians, 445.

GIESELER, five things on which the apologists laid stress, 444.

Gregory the Great, St., his letter to King Ethelbert, 416; the whole Church represented by the sevenfold number of the churches, 174; repeatedly speaks of the see of the chief of the apostles as the see of one in three places--Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, 297.

Gregory of Nazianzum, calls his office as bishop a government, 218.

Gregory VII., St., on the union of Church and State, 127.

HAGEMANN, Die römische Kirche, how Constantine looked at the Church, 293; speaks of particular tendencies in local churches, 376.

Heinrich, Dogmatische Theologie, 387.

Heresy, its principle, as opposed to that of orthodoxy, 378; the apostolic writings full of warnings against it, 380; its incessant attacks through the second century, 382.

Hergenröther, on the development of synodical institutions, 302.

Hilary, St., attests that every church has its bishop, 217.

IGNATIUS of Antioch, St., contemplates the whole Episcopate in the mind of Christ, as the mind of the Father, 173, 202; corroborates St. Clement of Rome, 200, 203; states the organic unity of a local church, 203.

Innocent I., Pope, St., grounds the wide jurisdiction of the See of Antioch on its being the first see of the chief of the apostles, 296.

Irenæus, St., quoted, 185, 202; describes the propagation of the Church, 213; barbarians believing in Christ follow the order of tradition without pen or paper, 220; the Church's deposit of doctrine like the principle of life in a body, 339; bears witness to the multitude of martyrs everywhere, 418; and of miracles, 438.

JOHN, ST., does not record the institution of the Eucharist, but adds what may be considered a comment upon it, 134; records promises made to the Apostles, 149-151; the universal pastorship conferred on Peter, 152; how his expressions sum up both the universal mission of the apostolate, and the supreme pastorship of Peter, 177; his double warning as to the many things concerning Jesus not written, 157; his vision of the heavenly court as the Eucharistic Sacrifice, 324-327; his vision of our Lord in the government of the Church through his bishops, 171-175; identifies heathen Rome with Babylon, xxix.

Josephus, 402; States Poppæa to have been a Jewish proselyte, 366.

Jurisdiction, how partitioned in the Episcopate, stated by De Marca, 222; by St. Leo the Great, 223; Bianchi, 306; necessary in any kingdom, 278-280.

Justin Martyr, St., says the presence of Christ's Body and Blood on the altar is as real as the Incarnation itself, 269; the tale of his conversion, 382.

KINGDOM of Christ, thirteen characteristics of, 103-107; foretold by Daniel, xxii-xxviii; subsists from age to age by its own force, 131; disposed to the Apostolic College, 144; jurisdiction necessary to it, 278; as it appeared in A.D. 29 and A.D. 325, 291; recognised by Constantine at the Council of Arles, A.D. 314, 398; and at the Nicene Council, 290, 463; consists in three things, Sacerdotium, Magisterium, Jurisdictio, answering to worship, belief, and government in the people which is its outcome, 411; the intimate cohesion of these three, 87-90; the perfect antagonism which they constituted in Christians to the Pagan empire, 404-411; the five conflicts which the kingdom underwent in the three centuries, 459-463.

Kleutgen, on the two meanings of _tradition_, 344; on the word of God, written and unwritten, 361; on the special gift of the Apostolic Body, 361.

LASAULX, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen and Römer, und ihr Verhältniss zu dem einem auf Golgotha, extracts from, 245-253; on human sacrifices, 259-262.

Leo the Great, St., illustrates the "One Episcopate" of St. Cyprian, 223; his perfect picture of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his day, 223.

Leo XIII. in his encyclical June 1881, declares civil power to be a vicegerency from God, 20.

Lightfoot, Dr., suggests that the Primacy belongs not to the bishop but to the Church of Rome, 205.

Luke, St., records the institution of the priesthood, 133; the power given to the Apostles, 139, 159; vast importance of the conversation which he alone records about the disposition of the kingdom, and its ruler, 141-147; distinguishes Peter from the other Apostles, as much as St. Matthew and St. John, 148; his reticence as to the place to which St. Peter went, when delivered from prison, and its reason, 373.

MAGISTERIUM, of the Church, shown in her teaching, 316; which at first was oral only, based upon authority, 317; three classes of truths forming the divine and apostolical tradition, 319; the period of exclusively oral teaching specially exhibits the Church's teaching office, 320; seen in the rite of baptism, 321; in the Eucharistic Liturgy, 322; in the rite of ordination, 328; fullness of the magisterium shown in these rites, 329; not changed or diminished by the writings of the New Testament, 330-335; consists in the unchangeable principle of a living personal authority, 335; thus expressed by Irenæus, 213; acts of the magisterium which preceded the New Testament, 336; is the continuation of Christ's personal teaching, 340; and of the apostolic mission, 341; and abides in all ages, 343; is shown in five things, the system of catechesis, the use of a Creed, the dispensing of sacraments, the enjoining of penance, the handling of Scripture, 343-355; unimpeached through fifteen centuries, 355; its principle, a divine authority establishing a kingdom, 360; it transmits the word of God, written or unwritten, 361; which is complete, as to its substance, from the beginning, 361; the defence against error lodged in it, 387; consists in the Church's divine government and concrete life, 389; employs the whole word of God, written or unwritten, as its Rule of Faith, 395.

Maine, Sir Henry, author of "Ancient Law," quoted upon original society, 46; the patriarchal theory, 47, 49; family, the unit of ancient society, not the individual, 50-54; universal belief, or assumption of blood-relationship, 51; the Roman _patria potestas_, a relic of the original rule, 53; union of government with religion, 53; property sprung out of joint-ownership, 53.

Marca, De, his statement of jurisdiction in the Episcopate, 222.

Mark, St., the only Evangelist who does not record special powers given to Peter, 156; records the institution of the priesthood, 133; the powers given to the Apostolic Body, 138, 154.

Martin, Dr., Bishop of Paderborn, on the High-priest's office, 75.

Martyrdom, an essential element in the world's conversion, 445; its occasion the enmity between the serpent's seed and the Woman's Seed, 447; before Christ looks to Christ, and after Christ looks back on Him, 448; parallel with miracles in principle, witness, power, and perpetuity, 449-455; martyrs, champions of a great army, 421; endure for God what heroes endure for natural goods, 431-434; fill up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ, until His mystical Body is completed, 453, 454; hated by all who deny a Creator, Judge, and Remunerator, 455; the Deacon Constantine's panegyric, 427.

Matthew, St., records the institution of the priesthood, 133; the transmission of spiritual power, 136; the special promises to Peter, 137; distinguishes the Apostolate and the Primacy, 154-155.

Melito, of Sardis, calls the Christian faith a philosophy nurtured together and begun together with Augustus, 414.

Miracles, their existence alleged by every ancient Christian writer, 445; by Jews and Heathens of every class, 445; by Origen, who insists on miracles of conversion as greater than bodily miracles, 435; and that miracles only could account for the conversions wrought, 438; attested by Irenæus, of his own time, 439; by Athanasius, of the sign of the cross, and the name of Christ, 442; connection between miracles and martyrdom, as to their principle, witness, power and perpetuity, 449-454; the Christian faith rests upon two miracles, the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ, 445-447; the absolute necessity of miracles to substantiate the mission of Christ, 444; the Incarnation, the reason of miraculous power, 447; and the Fall of man its necessity, 447.

Möhler, on the use of the Creed, 347; on the first Christian writers, 381; on the Roman catechetical school, 386.

NÄGELSBACH, original kingship springs from fathership, 48; sacrifice, an essential of Greek piety, 244; the Greek seeks a living personal God, 244.

Newman, Cardinal, describes the system of catechesis, 345; his history of the Arians referred to, 349; notes on St. Athanasius quoted, 390-395; his treatise on the Rise and Successes of Arianism, a storehouse of information, 397; says that particular authors do not speak _ex cathedra_, nor as a Council may speak, 388.

Nicene Council, occasion of its convocation, 289; Constantine recognised therein the Church as a divine kingdom, 290; and the solidarity of the Episcopate, 292; compared with the Roman Senate, 293; its force as to the relation between Church and State, 294; its sixth Canon, 297; Constantine, acknowledging its sentence as the decision of God, recognised the kingdom of Christ in the world, 463.

Noah, refounds the human race, 18; his first act, an act of sacrifice to which God attaches an universal covenant with his race, 18-21; is Father, King, Priest, and Teacher of his race, 22; among whom he establishes Marriage, Sacrifice, Civil Government, and the alliance of Government with Religion, 22-24.

ORIGEN, insists on the divine power shown in converting sinners, 434; on miracles of conversion as greater than bodily miracles, 435; on the spread of the Church and the conversion of sinners viewed together, 436; not possible without miracles, 437; as the soul vivifies and moves the body, so the word arouses and moves the whole body, the Church, 359; sets up a catechetical school at Cæsarea in Palestine, 386.

Ovid, his statement of the power of vicarious sacrifice, 261.

PANTÆNUS, his conversion, labours, and renown, 384.

Paul, St., six names whereby he describes his commission, 168; the Church to him "the Body of Christ," 162-165; says mission is necessary to every herald of the Gospel, 164; attests the grace given by ordination, 165; places in the one Christian Ministry the seat of dogmatic truth, 162; sees an inseparable bond in unity, truth, and government, 167; how he records the institution of the Priesthood, 132; appoints bishops, 165, 217.

Peter, St., the six privileges recorded to have been bestowed on him, in which his primacy consists, 160; speaks of Rome under the name of Babylon, xxix.

Phillipps' Kirchenrecht, 130.

Philo, describes the concourse of Jews to Jerusalem, 78; quoted upon sacrifice, 248.

Plato, makes piety to consist in prayer and sacrifice, 243.

poimainein, force of the word, to be Shepherd, 177-178.

Power, the Spiritual, a derivation from the Person of Christ, out of the union of the divine and human natures in him, 103, 111, 162; creates the supernatural society for a supernatural end, 93; to which the present life is subordinated, 94; and which is beyond the provision of temporal government, 96; a kingdom subsisting by its own force from age to age, 131; divine truth maintained by the perpetual operation of its one hierarchy in the Body of Christ, 162-164; has in Scripture five qualities, 175; the coming from above, 175; completeness, 176-179; unity, 179-181; independence of civil government, 181; perpetuity to the end of time, 182; the transmission of such a power witnessed in the Church's history from A.D. 39 to A.D. 325, 184-237; the resting of this power upon the Sacrifice of His Body instituted by Christ, 238-243, 263-286; its independence as to government shown in its organic growth, 295-316; its independence as to teaching shown in its communication of doctrine, 316-339; in its mode of positive teaching, 340-355; in its mode of resisting error, 359-399; in its conflict with the Roman empire's civil power, 400-463; the creation of such a power by the direct action of God foretold by the Prophet Daniel, 600 years before Christ, xxi-xxviii.

Powers, the Two, appear united in the Headship of Adam, 11-13; and again in Noah, 19; in whom civil government is established by divine authority, 20; it is a common good of all his race, 38-40; the two Powers ever in alliance through all gentilism, 41-42; civil government springs as little from those governed, as fathership from children, 48-52; "Law originally is the parent's word," 53; relation of the two Powers from the beginning, 56, 108; Gentile deification of the State, 58; relation of the two Powers in the Mosaic Law, 67, 72-82; Analogy between them, 95; subjection of the spiritual to the civil power, the final result of gentilism, 70; the spiritual power has a new basis in the Person of Christ, 110; co-operation of the two Powers as stated by St. Gregory VII., 126; Christians subject to both Powers, 111; amity intended by God between them, 114; their separate action not intended, 115; persecution of the spiritual by the temporal not intended, 119; the indirect spiritual power over temporal things, 124; the ideal relation of the two Powers, and the various deflections from it described under the image of marriage, 128; alliance of the two Powers in the Roman empire at the advent of Christ, 400; how and why the civil power acknowledged the triple spiritual liberty of belief, worship, and government, 455, 462.

Priesthood, begun in Adam, 15; and afresh in Noah, 22; carried on from them through all the race, 56; distinguished from the Civil Power in the Roman Republic, 60; united afterward to the Principate, but still distinct, 62; the College of Pontifices reverse a tribunicial law, 63; the distinction from civil power in it runs through all ancient nations, 64; witness to the unity of man's race, 65; the Aaronic, 72; special offices of the High-priest, 72; part of the High-priest through the whole history from Moses to Christ, 75; his jurisdiction under the Roman empire, 77; the Jewish priesthood and worship, a prophecy and preparation for Christ, 80; the High-priest's treatment of Christ, 82; the Christian priesthood springs from the Person of Christ, 86; as the human race from Adam, 111; institution of the Christian Priesthood, 132-135; all the mission of Christ collected in his Priesthood, 135; the Christian hierarchy succeeds the Mosaic, 191; Priesthood of the Church springs from the two acts of Christ's High Priesthood, 242; priesthood, teaching, and jurisdiction cohere inwardly, 87, 287-288; acknowledged equally by Constantine, 462.

Primacy, the, of the Church, instituted by Christ himself, 137, 143-148, 152-153, 176-179; the words conveying it compared with those which convey the Apostolate, 154; the witness of St. Matthew to the distinction between Apostolate and Primacy, 155; the witness of St. Luke to the same distinction, 155; the witness of St. John to the same distinction, 155, 156; summary of its powers as given in the Gospels, 160; how St. Paul bears witness to it, 166-168; exercised by St. Clement in the lifetime of St. John, 197-200; the two forces of the Primacy and the Hierarchy exist from the beginning, 90; are exactly expressed by St. Leo in the year 446, 223; hold the Church together in the ante-nicene period, 375; are the joint result of our Lord's words, 161.

RENAUDOT, the Eucharistic Liturgy, 323.

SACERDOS, in the language of the third century, signifies the bishop, as offering the sacrifice of the altar, 217, 279; as ekklêsia signifies a diocese, 304.

Sacrifice, rite of bloody, appears in the family of the first man, and dates from his fall, 15; unintelligible without the notion of sin, 15; its prevalence among the Gentiles, 243-250; specialities of the rite, described by Lasaulx, 250-253; associated with prayer, 253; with the sense of guilt, 254; enacted by God at the Fall as a perpetual prophecy, 256; the most striking characteristic of the world before Christ, 257; human, 259-261; enaction of, a divine act, 263; the Christian Sacrifice counterpart of the original institution, 264; and fulfilment of the whole Mosaic ritual, 264; its prodigious meaning and power, 267-274; presence of Christ's physical Body in it, according to St. Chrysostom, 275; is the principle of unity to Christ's mystical Body, according to St. Augustine, 276; the double act of Christ's High-priesthood thereby impressed on the world, 276; fulfils over the world the parable, I am the true Vine, 280-286; the Eucharistic, picture of, by an apostle, 324.

Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, 370, 424.

Sophocles, his sense of the power of vicarious sacrifice, 260.

Stöckl, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, 377.

TACITUS, his _compages_ of the Roman empire, xxxiv; says that Poppæa was surrounded with fortune-tellers, 366.

Taparelli, Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale, philosophical basis on which the spiritual society rests, 98.

Tatian, history of his conversion, 383.

Tertullian, history of his conversion, 384; marks Domitian as a persecutor of the Church, 372; attests the persecution in his time, 420; sufferings which followed on conversions, 431-434; describes the first propagation of the Church, 211-213; compares the Church to a single vine planted in all lands, 239; the apostles sheltered by their position as Jews, 364; marks the Jews as sources of all calumny against Christians, 368.

Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, his conversion and writings, 384.

Tradition, has two meanings, (1) the _unwritten_ word of God, (2) the whole doctrine of salvation as handed down, 344; divine and apostolical tradition, 319; announcing the acts and words of Christ, part of, 337; various parts of tradition in its full sense, 338.

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