CHAPTER III. THE CONVERSION OF ROME.

There is no fact in the history of the human mind more remarkable than the complete unconsciousness of the importance and the destinies of Christianity, manifested by the Pagan writers before the accession of Constantine. So large an amount of attention has been bestowed on the ten or twelve allusions to it they furnish, that we are sometimes apt to forget how few and meagre those allusions are, and how utterly impossible it is to construct from them, with any degree of certainty, a history of the early Church. Plutarch and the elder Pliny, who probably surpass all other writers of their time in the range of their illustrations, and Seneca, who was certainly the most illustrious moralist of his age, never even mention it. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius have each adverted to it with a passing and contemptuous censure. Tacitus describes in detail the persecution by Nero, but treats the suffering religion merely as “an execrable superstition;” while Suetonius, employing the same expression, reckons the persecution among the acts of the tyrant that were either laudable or indifferent. Our most important document is the famous letter of the younger Pliny. Lucian throws some light both on the extent of Christian charity, and on the aspect in which Christians were regarded by the religious jugglers of their age, and the long series of Pagans who wrote the lives of the Emperors in that most critical period from the accession of Hadrian, almost to the eve of the triumph of the Church, among a crowd of details concerning the dresses, games, vices, and follies of the Court, supply us with six or seven short notices of the religion that was transforming the world.

The general silence of the Pagan writers on this subject did not arise from any restrictions imposed upon them by authority, for in this field the widest latitude was conceded, nor yet from the notions of the dignity of history, or the importance of individual exertions, which have induced some historians to resolve their task into a catalogue of the achievements of kings, statesmen, and generals. The conception of history, as the record and explanation of moral revolutions, though of course not developed to the same prominence as among some modern writers, was by no means unknown in antiquity,(634) and in many branches our knowledge of the social changes of the Roman Empire is extremely copious. The dissolution of old beliefs, the decomposition of the entire social and moral system that had arisen under the Republic, engaged in the very highest degree the attention of the literary classes, and they displayed the most commendable diligence in tracing its stages. It is very curious and instructive to contrast the ample information they have furnished us concerning the growth of Roman luxury, with their almost absolute silence concerning the growth of Christianity. The moral importance of the former movement they clearly recognised, and they have accordingly preserved so full a record of all the changes in dress, banquets, buildings, and spectacles, that it would be possible to write with the most minute detail the whole history of Roman luxury, from the day when a censor deprived an elector of his vote because his garden was negligently cultivated, to the orgies of Nero or Heliogabalus. The moral importance of the other movement they altogether overlooked, and their oversight leaves a chasm in history which can never be supplied.

That the greatest religious change in the history of mankind should have taken place under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians, who were profoundly conscious of the decomposition around them, that all of these writers should have utterly failed to predict the issue of the movement they were observing, and that, during the space of three centuries, they should have treated as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or for evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of man, are facts well worthy of meditation in every period of religious transition. The explanation is to be found in that broad separation between the spheres of morals and of positive religion we have considered in the last chapter. In modern times, men who were examining the probable moral future of the world, would naturally, and in the first place, direct their attention to the relative positions and the probable destinies of religious institutions. In the Stoical period of the Roman Empire, positive religion had come to be regarded as merely an art for obtaining preternatural assistance in the affairs of life, and the moral amelioration of mankind was deemed altogether external to its sphere. Philosophy had become to the educated most literally a religion. It was the rule of life, the exposition of the Divine nature, the source of devotional feeling. The numerous Oriental superstitions that had deluged the city were regarded as peculiarly pernicious and contemptible, and of these none was less likely to attract the favour of the philosophers than that of the Jews,(635) who were notorious as the most sordid, the most turbulent,(636) and the most unsocial(637) of the Oriental colonists. Of the ignorance of their tenets, displayed even by the most eminent Romans, we have a striking illustration in the long series of grotesque fables concerning their belief, probably derived from some satirical pamphlet, which Tacitus has gravely inserted in his history.(638) Christianity, in the eyes of the philosopher, was simply a sect of Judaism.

Although I am anxious in the present work to avoid, as far as possible, all questions that are purely theological, and to consider Christianity merely in its aspect as a moral agent, it will be necessary to bestow a few preliminary pages upon its triumph in the Roman Empire, in order to ascertain how far that triumph was due to moral causes, and what were its relations to the prevailing philosophy. There are some writers who have been so struck with the conformity between some of the doctrines of the later Stoics and those of Christianity that they have imagined that Christianity had early obtained a decisive influence over philosophy, and that the leading teachers of Rome had been in some measure its disciples. There are others who reduce the conversion of the Roman Empire to a mere question of evidences, to the overwhelming proofs the Christian teachers produced of the authenticity of the Gospel narratives. There are others, again, who deem the triumph of Christianity simply miraculous. Everything, they tell us, was against it. The course of the Church was like that of a ship sailing rapidly and steadily to the goal, in direct defiance of both wind and tide, and the conversion of the Empire was as literally supernatural as the raising of the dead, or the sudden quelling of the storm.

On the first of these theories it will not, I think, be necessary, after the last chapter, to expatiate at length. It is admitted that the greatest moralists of the Roman Empire either never mentioned Christianity, or mentioned it with contempt; that they habitually disregarded the many religions which had arisen among the ignorant; and that we have no direct evidence of the slightest value of their ever having come in contact with or favoured the Christians. The supposition that they were influenced by Christianity rests mainly upon their enforcement of the Christian duty of self-examination, upon their strong assertion of the universal brotherhood of mankind, and upon the delicate and expansive humanity they at last evinced. But although on all these points the later Stoics approximated much to Christianity, we have already seen that it is easy to discover in each case the cause of the tendency. The duty of self-examination was simply a Pythagorean precept, enforced in that school long before the rise of Christianity, introduced into Stoicism when Pythagoreanism became popular in Rome, and confessedly borrowed from this source. The doctrine of the universal brotherhood of mankind was the manifest expression of those political and social changes which reduced the whole civilised globe to one great empire, threw open to the most distant tribes the right of Roman citizenship, and subverted all those class divisions around which moral theories had been formed. Cicero asserted it as emphatically as Seneca. The theory of pantheism, representing the entire creation as one great body, pervaded by one Divine soul, harmonised with it; and it is a curious fact that the very phraseology concerning the fellow-membership of all things in God, which has been most confidently adduced by some modern writers as proving the connection between Seneca and Christianity, was selected by Lactantius as the clearest illustration of the pantheism of Stoicism.(639) The humane character of the later Stoical teaching was obviously due to the infusion of the Greek element into Roman life, which began before the foundation of the Empire, and received a new impulse in the reign of Hadrian, and also to the softening influence of a luxurious civilisation, and of the long peace of the Antonines. While far inferior to the Greeks in practical and realised humanity, the Romans never surpassed their masters in theoretical humanity except in one respect. The humanity of the Greeks, though very earnest, was confined within a narrow circle. The social and political circumstances of the Roman Empire destroyed the barrier.

The only case in which any plausible arguments have been urged in favour of the notion that the writings of the Stoics were influenced by the New Testament is that of Seneca. This philosopher was regarded by all the mediæval writers as a Christian, on the ground of a correspondence with St. Paul, which formed part of a forged account of the martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul, attributed to St. Linus. These letters, which were absolutely unnoticed during the first three centuries, and are first mentioned by St. Jerome, are now almost universally abandoned as forgeries;(640) but many curious coincidences of phraseology have been pointed out between the writings of Seneca and the epistles of St. Paul; and the presumption derived from them has been strengthened by the facts that the brother of Seneca was that Gallio who refused to hear the disputes between St. Paul and the Jews, and that Burrhus, who was the friend and colleague of Seneca, was the officer to whose custody St. Paul had been entrusted at Rome. Into the minute verbal criticism to which this question had given rise,(641) it is not necessary for me to enter. It has been shown that much of what was deemed Christian phraseology grew out of the pantheistic notion of one great body including, and one Divine mind animating and guiding, all existing things; and many other of the pretended coincidences are so slight as to be altogether worthless as an argument. Still I think most persons who review what has been written on the subject will conclude that it is probable some fragments at least of Christian language had come to the ears of Seneca. But to suppose that his system of morals is in any degree formed after the model or under the influence of Christianity, is to be blind to the most obvious characteristics of both Christianity and Stoicism; for no other moralist could be so aptly selected as representing their extreme divergence. Reverence and humility, a constant sense of the supreme majesty of God and of the weakness and sinfulness of man, and a perpetual reference to another world, were the essential characteristics of Christianity, the source of all its power, the basis of its distinctive type. Of all these, the teaching of Seneca is the direct antithesis. Careless of the future world, and profoundly convinced of the supreme majesty of man, he laboured to emancipate his disciples “from every fear of God and man;” and the proud language in which he claimed for the sage an equality with the gods represents, perhaps, the highest point to which philosophic arrogance has been carried. The Jews, with whom the Christians were then universally identified, he emphatically describes as “an accursed race.”(642) One man, indeed, there was among the later Stoics who had almost realised the Christian type, and in whose pure and gentle nature the arrogance of his school can be scarcely traced; but Marcus Aurelius, who of all the Pagan world, if we argued by internal evidence alone, would have been most readily identified with Christianity, was a persecutor of the faith, and he has left on record in his “Meditations” his contempt for the Christian martyrs.(643)

The relation between the Pagan philosophers and the Christian religion was a subject of much discussion and of profound difference of opinion in the early Church.(644) While the writers of one school apologised for the murder of Socrates, described the martyred Greek as the ’buffoon of Athens,’(645) and attributed his inspiration to diabolical influence;(646) while they designated the writings of the philosophers as “the schools of heretics,” and collected with a malicious assiduity all the calumnies that had been heaped upon their memory—there were others who made it a leading object to establish a close affinity between Pagan philosophy and the Christian revelation. Imbued in many instances, almost from childhood, with the noble teaching of Plato, and keenly alive to the analogies between his philosophy and their new faith, these writers found the exhibition of this resemblance at once deeply grateful to themselves and the most successful way of dispelling the prejudices of their Pagan neighbours. The success that had attended the Christian prophecies attributed to the Sibyls and the oracles, the passion for eclecticism, which the social and commercial position of Alexandria had generated, and also the example of the Jew Aristobulus, who had some time before contended that the Jewish writings had been translated into Greek, and had been the source of much of the Pagan wisdom, encouraged them in their course. The most conciliatory, and at the same time the most philosophical school, was the earliest in the Church. Justin Martyr—the first of the Fathers whose writings possess any general philosophical interest—cordially recognises the excellence of many parts of the Pagan philosophy, and even attributes it to a Divine inspiration, to the action of the generative or “seminal Logos,” which from the earliest times had existed in the world, had inspired teachers like Socrates and Musonius, who had been persecuted by the dæmons, and had received in Christianity its final and perfect manifestation.(647) The same generous and expansive appreciation may be traced in the writings of several later Fathers, although the school was speedily disfigured by some grotesque extravagances. Clement of Alexandria—a writer of wide sympathies, considerable originality, very extensive learning, but of a feeble and fantastic judgment—who immediately succeeded Justin Martyr, attributed all the wisdom of antiquity to two sources. The first source was tradition; for the angels, who had been fascinated by the antediluvian ladies, had endeavoured to ingratiate themselves with their fair companions by giving them an abstract of the metaphysical and other learning which was then current in heaven, and the substance of these conversations, being transmitted by tradition, supplied the Pagan philosophers with their leading notions. The angels did not know everything, and therefore the Greek philosophy was imperfect; but this event formed the first great epoch in literary history. The second and most important source of Pagan wisdom was the Old Testament,(648) the influence of which many of the early Christians traced in every department of ancient wisdom. Plato had borrowed from it all his philosophy, Homer the noblest conceptions of his poetry, Demosthenes the finest touches of his eloquence. Even Miltiades owed his military skill to an assiduous study of the Pentateuch, and the ambuscade by which he won the battle of Marathon was imitated from the strategy of Moses.(649) Pythagoras, moreover, had been himself a circumcised Jew.(650) Plato had been instructed in Egypt by the prophet Jeremiah. The god Serapis was no other than the patriarch Joseph, his Egyptian name being manifestly derived from his great-grandmother Sarah.(651)

Absurdities of this kind, of which I have given extreme but by no means the only examples, were usually primarily intended to repel arguments against Christianity, and they are illustrations of the tendency which has always existed in an uncritical age to invent, without a shadow of foundation, the most elaborate theories of explanation rather than recognise the smallest force in an objection. Thus, when the Pagans attempted to reduce Christianity to a normal product of the human mind, by pointing to the very numerous Pagan legends which were precisely parallel to the Jewish histories, it was answered that the dæmons were careful students of prophecy, that they foresaw with terror the advent of their Divine Conqueror, and that, in order to prevent men believing in him, they had invented, by anticipation, a series of legends resembling the events which were foretold.(652) More frequently, however, the early Christians retorted the accusations of plagiarism, and by forged writings attributed to Pagan authors, or, by pointing out alleged traces of Jewish influence in genuine Pagan writings, they endeavoured to trace through the past the footsteps of their faith. But this method of assimilation, which culminated in the Gnostics, the Neoplatonists, and especially in Origen, was directed not to the later Stoics of the Empire, but to the great philosophers who had preceded Christianity. It was in the writings of Plato, not in those of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, that the Fathers of the first three centuries found the influence of the Jewish Scriptures, and at the time when the passion for discovering these connections was most extravagant, the notion of Seneca and his followers being inspired by the Christians was unknown.

Dismissing then, as altogether groundless, the notion that Christianity had obtained a complete or even a partial influence over the philosophic classes during the period of Stoical ascendancy, we come to the opinion of those who suppose that the Roman Empire was converted by a system of evidences—by the miraculous proofs of the divinity of Christianity, submitted to the adjudication of the people. To estimate this view aright, we have to consider both the capacity of the men of that age for judging miracles, and also—which is a different question—the extent to which such evidence would weigh upon their minds. To treat this subject satisfactorily, it may be advisable to enter at some little length into the broad question of the evidence of the miraculous.

With the exception of a small minority of the priests of the Catholic Church, a general incredulity on the subject of miracles now underlies the opinions of almost all educated men. Nearly every one, however cordially he may admit some one particular class of miracles, as a general rule regards the accounts of such events, which are so frequent in all old historians, as false and incredible, even when he fully believes the natural events that are authenticated by the same testimony. The reason of this incredulity is not altogether the impossibility or even extreme natural improbability of miracles; for, whatever may be the case with some, there is at least one class or conception of them which is perfectly free from logical difficulty. There is no contradiction involved in the belief that spiritual beings, of power and wisdom immeasurably transcending our own, exist, or that, existing, they might, by the normal exercise of their powers, perform feats as far surpassing the understanding of the most gifted of mankind, as the electric telegraph and the prediction of an eclipse surpass the faculties of a savage. Nor does the incredulity arise, I think, as is commonly asserted, from the want of that amount and kind of evidence which in other departments is deemed sufficient. Very few of the minor facts of history are authenticated by as much evidence as the Stigmata of St. Francis, or the miracle of the holy thorn, or those which were said to have been wrought at the tomb of the Abbé Paris. We believe, with tolerable assurance, a crowd of historical events on the testimony of one or two Roman historians; but when Tacitus and Suetonius describe how Vespasian restored a blind man to sight, and a cripple to strength,(653) their deliberate assertions do not even beget in our minds a suspicion that the narrative may possibly be true. We are quite certain that miracles were not ordinary occurrences in classical or mediæval times, but nearly all the contemporary writers from whom we derive our knowledge of those periods were convinced that they were.

If, then, I have correctly interpreted the opinions of ordinary educated people on this subject, it appears that the common attitude towards miracles is not that of doubt, of hesitation, of discontent with the existing evidence, but rather of absolute, derisive, and even unexamining incredulity. Such a fact, when we consider that the antecedent possibility of at least some miracles is usually admitted, and in the face of the vast mass of tradition that may be adduced in their favour, appears at first sight a striking anomaly, and the more so because it can be shown that the belief in miracles had in most cases not been reasoned down, but had simply faded away.

In order to ascertain the process by which this state of mind has been attained, we may take an example in a sphere which is happily removed from controversy. There are very few persons with whom the fictitious character of fairy tales has not ceased to be a question, or who would hesitate to disbelieve or even to ridicule any anecdote of this nature which was told them, without the very smallest examination of its evidence. Yet, if we ask in what respect the existence of fairies is naturally contradictory or absurd, it would be difficult to answer the question. A fairy is simply a being possessing a moderate share of human intelligence, with little or no moral faculty, with a body pellucid, winged, and volatile, like that of an insect, with a passion for dancing, and, perhaps, with an extraordinary knowledge of the properties of different plants. That such beings should exist, or that, existing, they should be able to do many things beyond human power, are propositions which do not present the smallest difficulty. For many centuries their existence was almost universally believed. There is not a country, not a province, scarcely a parish, in which traditions of their appearance were not long preserved. So great a weight of tradition, so many independent trains of evidence attesting statements perfectly free from intrinsic absurdity, or even improbability, might appear sufficient, if not to establish conviction, at least to supply a very strong _primâ facie_ case, and ensure a patient and respectful investigation of the subject.

It has not done so, and the reason is sufficiently plain. The question of the credibility of fairy tales has not been resolved by an examination of evidence, but by an observation of the laws of historic development. Wherever we find an ignorant and rustic population, the belief in fairies is found to exist, and circumstantial accounts of their apparitions are circulated. But invariably with increased education this belief passes away. It is not that the fairy tales are refuted or explained away, or even narrowly scrutinised. It is that the fairies cease to appear. From the uniformity of this decline, we infer that fairy tales are the normal product of a certain condition of the imagination; and this position is raised to a moral certainty when we find that the decadence of fairy tales is but one of a long series of similar transformations.

When the savage looks around upon the world and begins to form his theories of existence, he falls at once into three great errors, which become the first principles of his subsequent opinions. He believes that this earth is the centre of the universe, and that all the bodies encircling it are intended for its use; that the disturbances and dislocations it presents, and especially the master curse of death, are connected with some event in his history, and also that the numerous phenomena and natural vicissitudes he sees around him are due to direct and isolated volitions, either of spirits presiding over, or of intelligences inherent in, matter. Around these leading conceptions a crowd of particular legends speedily cluster. If a stone falls beside him, he naturally infers that some one has thrown it. If it be an aërolite, it is attributed to some celestial being. Believing that each comet, tempest, or pestilence results from a direct and isolated act, he proceeds to make theories regarding the motives that have induced his spiritual persecutors to assail him, and the methods by which he may assuage their anger. Finding numerous distinct trains or series of phenomena, he invents for each appropriate presiding spirits. Miracles are to him neither strange events nor violations of natural law, but simply the unveiling or manifestation of the ordinary government of the world.

With these broad intellectual conceptions several minor influences concur. A latent fetichism, which is betrayed in that love of direct personification, or of applying epithets derived from sentient beings to inanimate nature, which appears so largely in all poetry and eloquence, and especially in those of an early period of society, is the root of a great part of our opinions. If—to employ a very familiar illustration—the most civilised and rational of mankind will observe his own emotions, when by some accident he has struck his head violently against a door-post, he will probably find that his first exclamation was not merely of pain but of anger, and of anger directed against the wood. In a moment reason checks the emotion; but if he observes carefully his own feelings, he may easily convince himself of the unconscious fetichism which, is latent in his mind, and which, in the case of a child or a savage, displays itself without reserve. Man instinctively ascribes volition to whatever powerfully affects him. The feebleness of his imagination conspires with other causes to prevent an uncivilised man from rising above the conception of an anthropomorphic Deity, and the capricious or isolated acts of such a being form his exact notion of miracles. The same feebleness of imagination makes him clothe all intellectual tendencies, all conflicting emotions, all forces, passions, or fancies, in material forms. His mind naturally translates the conflict between opposing feelings into a history of the combat between rival spirits. A vast accumulation of myths is spontaneously formed—each legend being merely the material expression of a moral fact. The simple love of the wonderful, and the complete absence of all critical spirit, aid the formation.

In this manner we find that in certain stages of society, and under the action of the influences I have stated, an accretion of miraculous legends is naturally formed around prominent personages or institutions. We look for them as we look for showers in April, or for harvest in autumn. We can very rarely show with any confidence the precise manner in which a particular legend is created or the nucleus of truth it contains, but we can analyse the general causes that have impelled men towards the miraculous; we can show that these causes have never failed to produce the effect, and we can trace the gradual alteration of mental conditions invariably accompanying the decline of the belief. When men are destitute of critical spirit, when the notion of uniform law is yet unborn, and when their imaginations are still incapable of rising to abstract ideas, histories of miracles are always formed and always believed, and they continue to flourish and to multiply until these conditions have altered. Miracles cease when men cease to believe and to expect them. In periods that are equally credulous, they multiply or diminish in proportion to the intensity with which the imagination is directed to theological topics. A comparison of the histories of the most different nations shows the mythical period to have been common to all; and we may trace in many quarters substantially the same miracles, though varied by national characteristics, and with a certain local cast and colouring. As among the Alps the same shower falls as rain in the sunny valleys, and as snow among the lofty peaks, so the same intellectual conceptions which in one moral latitude take the form of nymphs, or fairies, or sportive legends, appear in another as dæmons or appalling apparitions. Sometimes we can discover the precise natural fact which the superstition had misread. Thus, epilepsy, the phenomenon of nightmare, and that form of madness which leads men to imagine themselves transformed into some animal, are, doubtless, the explanation of many tales of demoniacal possession, of incubi, and of lycanthropy. In other cases we may detect a single error, such as the notion that the sky is close to the earth, or that the sun revolves around the globe, which had suggested the legend. But more frequently we can give only a general explanation, enabling us to assign these legends to their place, as the normal expression of a certain stage of knowledge or intellectual power; and this explanation is their refutation. We do not say that they are impossible, or even that they are not authenticated by as much evidence as many facts we believe. We only say that, in certain conditions of society, illusions of the kind inevitably appear. No one can prove that there are no such things as ghosts; but if a man whose brain is reeling with fever declares that he has seen one, we have no great difficulty in forming an opinion about his assertion.

The gradual decadence of miraculous narratives which accompanies advancing civilisation may be chiefly traced to three causes. The first is that general accuracy of observation and of statement which all education tends more or less to produce, which checks the amplifications of the undisciplined imagination, and is speedily followed by a much stronger moral feeling on the subject of truth than ever exists in a rude civilisation. The second is an increased power of abstraction, which is likewise a result of general education, and which, by correcting the early habit of personifying all phenomena, destroys one of the most prolific sources of legends, and closes the mythical period of history. The third is the progress of physical science, which gradually dispels that conception of a universe governed by perpetual and arbitrary interference, from which, for the most part, these legends originally sprang. The whole history of physical science is one continued revelation of the reign of law. The same law that governs the motions of a grain of dust, or the light of the glowworm’s lamp, is shown to preside over the march of the most majestic planet or the fire of the most distant sun. Countless phenomena, which were for centuries universally believed to be the results of spiritual agency, portents of calamity, or acts of Divine vengeance, have been one by one explained, have been shown to rise from blind physical causes, to be capable of prediction, or amenable to human remedies. Forms of madness which were for ages supposed to result from possession, are treated successfully in our hospitals. The advent of the comet is predicted. The wire invented by the sceptic Franklin defends the crosses on our churches from the lightning stroke of heaven. Whether we examine the course of the planets or the world of the animalculæ; to whatever field of physical nature our research is turned, the uniform, invariable result of scientific enquiry is to show that even the most apparently irregular and surprising phenomena are governed by natural antecedents, and are parts of one great connected system. From this vast concurrence of evidence, from this uniformity of experience in so many spheres, there arises in the minds of scientific men a conviction, amounting to absolute moral certainty, that the whole course of physical nature is governed by law, that the notion of the perpetual interference of the Deity with some particular classes of its phenomena is false and unscientific, and that the theological habit of interpreting the catastrophes of nature as Divine warnings or punishments, or disciplines, is a baseless and a pernicious superstition.

The effects of these discoveries upon miraculous legends are of various kinds. In the first place, a vast number which have clustered around the notion of the irregularity of some phenomenon which is proved to be regular—such as the innumerable accounts collected by the ancients to corroborate their opinion of the portentous nature of comets—are directly overthrown. In the next place, the revelation of the interdependence of phenomena greatly increases the improbability of some legends which it does not actually disprove. Thus, when men believed the sun to be simply a lamp revolving around and lighting our world, they had no great difficulty in believing that it was one day literally arrested in its course, to illuminate an army which was engaged in massacring its enemies; but the case became different when it was perceived that the sun was the centre of a vast system of worlds, which a suspension of the earth’s motion must have reduced to chaos, without a miracle extending through it all. Thus, again, the old belief that some animals became for the first time carnivorous in consequence of the sin of Adam, appeared tolerably simple so long as this revolution was supposed to be only a change of habits or of tastes; but it became more difficult of belief when it was shown to involve a change of teeth; and the difficulty was, I suppose, still further aggravated when it was proved that, every animal having digestive organs specially adapted to its food, these also must have been changed.

In the last place, physical science exercises a still wider influence by destroying what I have called the centre ideas out of which countless particular theories were evolved, of which they were the natural expression, and upon which their permanence depends. Proving that our world is not the centre of the universe, but is a simple planet, revolving with many others around a common sun; proving that the disturbances and sufferings of the world do not result from an event which occurred but 6,000 years ago; that long before that period the earth was dislocated by the most fearful convulsions; that countless generations of sentient animals, and also, as recent discoveries appear conclusively to show, of men, not only lived but died; proving, by an immense accumulation of evidence, that the notion of a universe governed by isolated acts of special intervention is untrue—physical science had given new directions to the currents of the imagination, supplied the judgment with new measures of probability, and thus affected the whole circle of our beliefs.

With most men, however, the transition is as yet but imperfectly accomplished, and that part of physical nature which science has hitherto failed to explain is regarded as a sphere of special interposition. Thus, multitudes who recognise the fact that the celestial phenomena are subject to inflexible law, imagine that the dispensation of rain is in some sense the result of arbitrary interpositions, determined by the conduct of mankind. Near the equator, it is true, it is tolerably constant and capable of prediction; but in proportion as we recede from the equator, the rainfall becomes more variable, and consequently, in the eyes of some, supernatural, and although no scientific man has the faintest doubt that it is governed by laws as inflexible as those which determine the motions of the planets, yet because, owing to the great complexity of the determining causes, we are unable fully to explain them, it is still customary to speak of “plagues of rain and water” sent on account of our sins, and of “scarcity and dearth, which we most justly suffer for our iniquity.” Corresponding language is employed about the forms of disease and death which science has but imperfectly explained. If men are employed in some profession which compels them to inhale steel filings or noxious vapours, or if they live in a pestilential marsh, the diseases that result from these conditions are not regarded as a judgment or a discipline, for the natural cause is obvious and decisive. But if the conditions that produced the disease are very subtle and very complicated; if physicians are incapable of tracing with certainty its nature or its effects; if, above all, it assumes the character of an epidemic, it is continually treated as a Divine judgment. The presumption against this view arises not only from the fact that, in exact proportion as medical science advances, diseases are proved to be the necessary consequence of physical conditions, but also from many characteristics of unexplained disease which unequivocally prove it to be natural. Thus, cholera, which is frequently treated according to the theological method, varies with the conditions of temperature, is engendered by particular forms of diet, follows the course of rivers, yields in some measure to medical treatment, can be aggravated or mitigated by courses of conduct that have no relation to vice or virtue, takes its victims indiscriminately from all grades of morals or opinion. Usually, when definite causes are assigned for a supposed judgment, they lead to consequences of the most grotesque absurdity. Thus, when a deadly and mysterious disease fell upon the cattle of England, some divines, not content with treating it as a judgment, proceeded to trace it to certain popular writings containing what were deemed heterodox opinions about the Pentateuch, or about the eternity of punishment. It may be true that the disease was imported from a country where such speculations are unknown; that the authors objected to had no cattle; that the farmers, who chiefly suffered by the disease, were for the most part absolutely unconscious of the existence of these books, and if they knew them would have indignantly repudiated them; that the town populations, who chiefly read them, were only affected indirectly by a rise in the price of food, which falls with perfect impartiality upon the orthodox and upon the heterodox; that particular counties were peculiarly sufferers, without being at all conspicuous for their scepticism; that similar writings appeared in former periods, without cattle being in any respect the worse; and that, at the very period at which the plague was raging, other countries, in which far more audacious speculations were rife, enjoyed an absolute immunity. In the face of all these consequences, the theory has been confidently urged and warmly applauded.

It is not, I think, sufficiently observed how large a proportion of such questions are capable of a strictly inductive method of discussion. If it is said that plagues or pestilences are sent as a punishment of error or of vice, the assertion must be tested by a comprehensive examination of the history of plagues on the one hand, and of periods of great vice and heterodoxy on the other. If it be said that an influence more powerful than any military agency directs the course of battles, the action of this force must be detected as we would detect electricity, or any other force, by experiment. If the attribute of infallibility be ascribed to a particular Church, an inductive reasoner will not be content with enquiring how far an infallible Church would be a desirable thing, or how far certain ancient words may be construed as a prediction of its appearance; he will examine, by a wide and careful survey of ecclesiastical history, whether this Church has actually been immutable and consistent in its teaching; whether it has never been affected by the ignorance or the passion of the age; whether its influence has uniformly been exerted on the side which proved to be true; whether it has never supported by its authority scientific views which were afterwards demonstrated to be false, or countenanced and consolidated popular errors, or thrown obstacles in the path of those who were afterwards recognised as the enlighteners of mankind. If ecclesiastical deliberations are said to be specially inspired or directed by an illuminating and supernatural power, we should examine whether the councils and convocations of clergymen exhibit a degree and harmony of wisdom that cannot reasonably be accounted for by the play of our unassisted faculties. If institutions are said to owe their growth to special supernatural agencies, distinct from the ordinary system of natural laws, we must examine whether their courses are so striking and so peculiar that natural laws fail to explain them. Whenever, as in the case of a battle, very many influences concur to the result, it will frequently happen that that result will baffle our predictions. It will also happen that strange coincidences, such as the frequent recurrence of the same number in a game of chance, will occur. But there are limits to these variations from what we regard as probable. If, in throwing the dice, we uniformly attained the same number, or if in war the army which was most destitute of all military advantages was uniformly victorious, we should readily infer that some special cause was operating to produce the result. We must remember, too, that in every great historical crisis the prevalence of either side will bring with it a long train of consequences, and that we only see one side of the picture. If Hannibal, after his victory at Cannæ, had captured and burnt Rome, the vast series of results that have followed from the ascendancy of the Roman Empire would never have taken place, but the supremacy of a maritime, commercial, and comparatively pacific power would have produced an entirely different series, which would have formed the basis and been the essential condition of all the subsequent progress; a civilisation, the type and character of which it is now impossible to conjecture, would have arisen, and its theologians would probably have regarded the career of Hannibal as one of the most manifest instances of special interposition on record.

If we would form sound opinions on these matters, we must take a very wide and impartial survey of the phenomena of history. We must examine whether events have tended in a given direction with a uniformity or a persistence that is not naturally explicable. We must examine not only the facts that corroborate our theory, but also those which oppose it.

That such a method is not ordinarily adopted must be manifest to all. As Bacon said, men “mark the hits, but not the misses;” they collect industriously the examples in which many, and sometimes improbable, circumstances have converged to a result which they consider good, and they simply leave out of their consideration the circumstances that tend in the opposite direction. They expatiate with triumph upon the careers of emperors who have been the unconscious pioneers or agents in some great movement of human progress, but they do not dwell upon those whose genius was expended in a hopeless resistance, or upon those who, like Bajazet or Tamerlane, having inflicted incalculable evils upon mankind, passed away, leaving no enduring fruit behind them. A hundred missionaries start upon an enterprise, the success of which appears exceedingly improbable. Ninety-nine perish and are forgotten. One missionary succeeds, and his success is attributed to supernatural interference, because the probabilities were so greatly against him. It is observed that a long train of political or military events ensured the triumph of Protestantism in certain nations and periods. It is forgotten that another train of events destroyed the same faith in other lands, and paralysed the efforts of its noblest martyrs. We are told of showers of rain that followed public prayer; but we are not told how often prayers for rain proved abortive, or how much longer than usual the dry weather had already continued when they were offered.(654) As the old philosopher observed, the votive tablets of those who escaped are suspended in the temple, while those who were shipwrecked are forgotten.

Unfortunately, these inconsistencies do not arise simply from intellectual causes. A feeling which was intended to be religious, but which was in truth deeply the reverse, once led men to shrink from examining the causes of some of the more terrible of physical phenomena, because it was thought that these should be deemed special instances of Divine interference, and should, therefore, be regarded as too sacred for investigation.(655) In the world of physical science this mode of thought has almost vanished, but a corresponding sentiment may be often detected in the common judgments of history. Very many well-meaning men—censuring the pursuit of truth in the name of the God of Truth—while they regard it as commendable and religious to collect facts illustrating or corroborating the theological theory of life, consider it irreverent and wrong to apply to those facts, and to that theory, the ordinary severity of inductive reasoning.

What I have written is not in any degree inconsistent with the belief that, by the dispensation of Providence, moral causes have a natural and often overwhelming influence upon happiness and upon success, nor yet with the belief that our moral nature enters into a very real, constant, and immediate contact with a higher power. Nor does it at all disprove the possibility of Divine interference with the order even of physical nature. A world governed by special acts of intervention, such as that which mediæval theologians imagined, is perfectly conceivable, though it is probable that most impartial enquirers will convince themselves that this is not the system of the planet we inhabit; and if any instance of such interference be sufficiently attested, it should not be rejected as intrinsically impossible. It is, however, the fundamental error of most writers on miracles, that they confine their attention to two points—the possibility of the fact, and the nature of the evidence. There is a third element, which in these questions is of capital importance: the predisposition of men in certain stages of society towards the miraculous, which is so strong that miraculous stories are then invariably circulated and credited, and which makes an amount of evidence that would be quite sufficient to establish a natural fact, altogether inadequate to establish a supernatural one. The positions for which I have been contending are that a perpetual interference of the Deity with the natural course of events is the earliest and simplest notion of miracles, and that this notion, which is implied in so many systems of belief, arose in part from an ignorance of the laws of nature, and in part also from an incapacity for inductive reasoning, which led men merely to collect facts coinciding with their preconceived opinions, without attending to those that were inconsistent with them. By this method there is no superstition that could not be defended. Volumes have been written giving perfectly authentic histories of wars, famines, and pestilences that followed the appearance of comets. There is not an omen, not a prognostic, however childish, that has not, in the infinite variety of events, been occasionally verified, and to minds that are under the influence of a superstitious imagination these occasional verifications more than outweigh all the instances of error. Simple knowledge is wholly insufficient to correct the disease. No one is so firmly convinced of the reality of lucky and unlucky days, and of supernatural portents, as the sailor, who has spent his life in watching the deep, and has learnt to read with almost unerring skill the promise of the clouds. No one is more persuaded of the superstitions about fortune than the habitual gambler. Sooner than abandon his theory, there is no extravagance of hypothesis to which the superstitious man will not resort. The ancients were convinced that dreams were usually supernatural. If the dream was verified, this was plainly a prophecy. If the event was the exact opposite of what the dream foreshadowed, the latter was still supernatural, for it was a recognised principle that dreams should sometimes be interpreted by contraries. If the dream bore no relation to subsequent events, unless it were transformed into a fantastic allegory, it was still supernatural, for allegory was one of the most ordinary forms of revelation. If no ingenuity of interpretation could find a prophetic meaning in a dream, its supernatural character was even then not necessarily destroyed; for Homer said there was a special portal through which deceptive visions passed into the mind, and the Fathers declared that it was one of the occupations of the dæmons to perplex and bewilder us with unmeaning dreams.

To estimate aright the force of the predisposition to the miraculous should be one of the first tasks of the enquirer into its reality; and no one, I think, can examine the subject with impartiality without arriving at the conclusion that in many periods of history it has been so strong as to accumulate around pure delusions an amount of evidence far greater than would be sufficient to establish even improbable natural facts. Through the entire duration of Pagan Rome, it was regarded as an unquestionable truth, established by the most ample experience, that prodigies of various kinds announced every memorable event, and that sacrifices had the power of mitigating or arresting calamity. In the Republic, the Senate itself officially verified and explained the prodigies.(656) In the Empire there is not an historian, from Tacitus down to the meanest writer in the Augustan history, who was not convinced that numerous prodigies foreshadowed the accession and death of every sovereign, and every great catastrophe that fell upon the people. Cicero could say with truth that there was not a single nation of antiquity, from the polished Greek to the rudest savage, which did not admit the existence of a real art enabling men to foretell the future, and that the splendid temples of the oracles, which for so many centuries commanded the reverence of mankind, sufficiently attested the intensity of the belief.(657) The reality of the witch miracles was established by a critical tribunal, which, however imperfect, was at least the most searching then existing in the world, by the judicial decisions of the law courts of every European country, supported by the unanimous voice of public opinion, and corroborated by the investigation of some of the ablest men during several centuries. The belief that the king’s touch can cure scrofula flourished in the most brilliant periods of English history.(658) It was unshaken by the most numerous and public experiments. It was asserted by the privy council, by the bishops of two religions, by the general voice of the clergy in the palmiest days of the English Church, by the University of Oxford, and by the enthusiastic assent of the people. It survived the ages of the Reformation, of Bacon, of Milton, and of Hobbes. It was by no means extinct in the age of Locke, and would probably have lasted still longer, had not the change of dynasty at the Revolution assisted the tardy scepticism.(659) Yet there is now scarcely an educated man who will defend these miracles. Considered abstractedly, indeed, it is perfectly conceivable that Providence might have announced coming events by prodigies, or imparted to some one a miraculous power, or permitted evil spirits to exist among mankind and assist them in their enterprises. The evidence establishing these miracles is cumulative, and it is immeasurably greater than the evidence of many natural facts, such as the earthquakes at Antioch, which no one would dream of questioning. We disbelieve the miracles, because an overwhelming experience proves that in certain intellectual conditions, and under the influence of certain errors which we are enabled to trace, superstitions of this order invariably appear and flourish, and that, when these intellectual conditions have passed, the prodigies as invariably cease, and the whole fabric of superstition melts silently away.

It is extremely difficult for an ordinary man, who is little conversant with the writings of the past, and who unconsciously transfers to other ages the critical spirit of his own, to realise the fact that histories of the most grotesquely extravagant nature could, during the space of many centuries, be continually propounded without either provoking the smallest question or possessing the smallest truth. We may, however, understand something of this credulity when we remember the diversion of the ancient mind from physical science to speculative philosophy; the want of the many checks upon error which printing affords; the complete absence of that habit of cautious, experimental research which Bacon and his contemporaries infused into modern philosophy; and, in Christian times, the theological notion that the spirit of belief is a virtue, and the spirit of scepticism a sin. We must remember, too, that before men had found the key to the motions of the heavenly bodies—before the false theory of the vortices and the true theory of gravitation—when the multitude of apparently capricious phenomena was very great, the notion that the world was governed by distinct and isolated influences was that which appeared most probable even to the most rational intellect. In such a condition of knowledge—which was that of the most enlightened days of the Roman Empire—the hypothesis of universal law was justly regarded as a rash and premature generalisation. Every enquirer was confronted with innumerable phenomena that were deemed plainly miraculous. When Lucretius sought to banish the supernatural from the universe, he was compelled to employ much ingenuity in endeavouring to explain, by a natural law, why a miraculous fountain near the temple of Jupiter Ammon was hot by night and cold by day, and why the temperature of wells was higher in winter than in summer.(660) Eclipses were supposed by the populace to foreshadow calamity; but the Roman soldiers believed that by beating drums and cymbals they could cause the moon’s disc to regain its brightness.(661) In obedience to dreams, the great Emperor Augustus went begging money through the streets of Rome,(662) and the historian who records the act himself wrote to Pliny, entreating the postponement of a trial.(663) The stroke of the lightning was an augury,(664) and its menace was directed especially against the great, who cowered in abject terror during a thunder-storm. Augustus used to guard himself against thunder by wearing the skin of a sea-calf.(665) Tiberius, who professed to be a complete freethinker, had greater faith in laurel leaves.(666) Caligula was accustomed during a thunderstorm to creep beneath his bed.(667) During the games in honour of Julius Cæsar, a comet appearing for seven days in the sky, the people believed it to be the soul of the dead,(668) and a temple was erected in its honour.(669) Sometimes we find this credulity broken by curious inconsistencies of belief, or semi-rationalistic explanations. Livy, who relates with perfect faith innumerable prodigies, has observed, nevertheless, that the more prodigies are believed, the more they are announced.(670) Those who admitted most fully the reality of the oracles occasionally represented them as natural contending that a prophetic faculty was innate in all men, though dormant in most; that it might be quickened into action by sleep, by a pure and ascetic life, or in the prostration that precedes death, or in the delirium produced by certain vapours; and that the gradual enfeebling of the last was the cause of the cessation of the oracles.(671) Earthquakes were believed to result from supernatural interpositions, and to call for expiatory sacrifices, but at the same time they had direct natural antecedents. The Greeks believed that they were caused by subterranean waters, and they accordingly sacrificed to Poseidon. The Romans were uncertain as to their physical antecedents, and therefore inscribed no name on the altar of expiation.(672) Pythagoras is said to have attributed them to the strugglings of the dead.(673) Pliny, after a long discussion, decided that they were produced by air forcing itself through fissures of the earth, but he immediately proceeds to assert that they are invariably the precursors of calamity.(674) The same writer, having recounted the triumph of astronomers in predicting and explaining eclipses, bursts into an eloquent apostrophe to those great men who had thus reclaimed man from the dominion of superstition, and in high and enthusiastic terms urges them to pursue still further their labour in breaking the thraldom of ignorance.(675) A few chapters later he professes his unhesitating belief in the ominous character of comets.(676) The notions, too, of magic and astrology, were detached from all theological belief, and might be found among many who were absolute atheists.(677)

These few examples will be sufficient to show how fully the Roman soil was prepared for the reception of miraculous histories, even after the writings of Cicero and Seneca, in the brilliant days of Augustus and the Antonines. The feebleness of the uncultivated mind, which cannot rise above material conceptions, had indeed passed away, the legends of the popular theology had lost all power over the educated, but at the same time an absolute ignorance of physical science and of inductive reasoning remained. The facility of belief that was manifested by some of the most eminent men, even on matters that were not deemed supernatural, can only be realised by those who have an intimate acquaintance with their works. Thus, to give but a few examples, that great naturalist whom I have so often cited tells us with the utmost gravity how the fiercest lion trembles at the crowing of a cock;(678) how elephants celebrate their religious ceremonies;(679) how the stag draws serpents by its breath from their holes, and then tramples them to death;(680) how the salamander is so deadly that the food cooked in water, or the fruit grown on trees it has touched, are fatal to man;(681) how, when a ship is flying before so fierce a tempest that no anchors or chains can hold it, if only the remora or echinus fastens on its keel, it is arrested in its course, and remains motionless and rooted among the waves.(682) On matters that would appear the most easily verified, he is equally confident. Thus, the human saliva, he assures us, has many mysterious properties. If a man, especially when fasting, spits into the throat of a serpent, it is said that the animal speedily dies.(683) It is certain that to anoint the eyes with spittle is a sovereign remedy against ophthalmia.(684) If a pugilist, having struck his adversary, spits into his own hand, the pain he caused instantly ceases. If he spits into his hand before striking, the blow is the more severe.(685) Aristotle, the greatest naturalist of Greece, had observed that it was a curious fact that on the sea-shore no animal ever dies except during the ebbing of the tide. Several centuries later, Pliny, the greatest naturalist of an empire that was washed by many tidal seas, directed his attention to this statement. He declared that, after careful observations which had been made in Gaul, it had been found to be inaccurate, for what Aristotle stated of all animals was in fact only true of man.(686) It was in 1727 and the two following years, that scientific observations made at Rochefort and at Brest finally dissipated the delusion.(687)

Volumes might be filled with illustrations of how readily, in the most enlightened days of the Roman Empire, strange, and especially miraculous, tales were believed, even under circumstances that would appear to give every facility for the detection of the imposture. In the field of the supernatural, however, it should be remembered that a movement, which I have traced in the last chapter, had produced a very exceptional amount of credulity during the century and a half that preceded the conversion of Constantine. Neither the writings of Cicero and Seneca, nor even those of Pliny and Plutarch, can be regarded as fair samples of the belief of the educated. The Epicurean philosophy which rejected, the Academic philosophy which doubted, and the Stoic philosophy which simplified and sublimated superstition, had alike disappeared. The “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius closed the period of Stoical influence, and the “Dialogues” of Lucian were the last solitary protest of expiring scepticism.(688) The aim of the philosophy of Cicero had been to ascertain truth by the free exercise of the critical powers. The aim of the Pythagorean philosophy was to attain the state of ecstasy, and to purify the mind by religious rites. Every philosopher soon plunged into magical practices, and was encircled, in the eyes of his disciples, with a halo of legend. Apollonius of Tyana, whom the Pagans opposed to Christ, had raised the dead, healed the sick, cast out devils, freed a young man from a lamia or vampire with whom he was enamoured, prophesied, seen in one country events that were occurring in another, and filled the world with the fame of his miracles and of his sanctity.(689) A similar power, notwithstanding his own disclaimer, was popularly attributed to the Platonist Apuleius.(690) Lucian has left us a detailed account of the impostures by which the philosopher Alexander endeavoured to acquire the fame of a miracle-worker.(691) When a magician plotted against Plotinus, his spells recoiled miraculously against himself; and when an Egyptian priest endeavoured by incantations to evoke the guardian dæmon of the philosopher, instead of a dæmon the temple of Isis was irradiated by the presence of a god.(692) Porphyry was said to have expelled an evil dæmon from a bath.(693) It was reported among his disciples that when Iamblichus prayed he was raised (like the saints of another creed) ten cubits from the ground, and that his body and his dress assumed a golden hue.(694) It was well known that he had at Gadara drawn forth from the waters of two fountains their guardian spirits, and exhibited them in bodily form to his disciples.(695) A woman named Sospitra had been visited by two spirits under the form of aged Chaldeans, and had been endowed with a transcendent beauty and with a superhuman knowledge. Raised above all human frailties, save only love and death, she was able to see at once the deeds which were done in every land, and the people, dazzled by her beauty and her wisdom, ascribed to her a share of the omnipresence of the Deity.(696)

Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the wave of credulity that brought with it this long train of Oriental superstitions and legends. In its moral aspect it was broadly distinguished from the systems around it, but its miracles were accepted by both friend and foe as the ordinary accompaniments of religious teaching. The Jews, in the eyes of the Pagans, had long been proverbial for their credulity,(697) and the Christians inherited a double measure of their reputation. Nor is it possible to deny that in the matter of the miraculous the reputation was deserved. Among the Pagans the theory of Euhemerus, who believed the gods to be but deified men, had been the stronghold of the Sceptics, while the Platonic notion of dæmons was adopted by the more believing philosophers. The Christian teachers combined both theories, maintaining that deceased kings had originally supplied the names of the deities, but that malevolent dæmons had taken their places; and without a single exception the Fathers maintained the reality of the Pagan miracles as fully as their own.(698) The oracles, as we have seen, had been ridiculed and rejected by numbers of the philosophers, but the Christians unanimously admitted their reality. They appealed to a long series of oracles as predictions of their faith; and there is, I believe, no example of the denial of their supernatural character in the Christian Church till 1696, when a Dutch Anabaptist minister named Van Dale, in a remarkable book,(699) which was abridged and translated by Fontenelle, asserted, in opposition to the unanimous voice of ecclesiastical authority, that they were simple impostures—a theory which is now almost universally accepted. To suppose that men who held these opinions were capable, in the second or third centuries, of ascertaining with any degree of just confidence whether miracles had taken place in Judæa in the first century, is grossly absurd; nor would the conviction of their reality have made any great impression on their minds at a time when miracles were supposed to be so abundantly diffused.

In truth, the question of the reality of the Jewish miracles must be carefully distinguished from that of the conversion of the Roman Empire. With the light that is furnished to us by modern investigations and habits of thought, we weigh the testimony of the Jewish writers; but most of the more judicious of modern apologists, considering the extreme credulity of the Jewish people, decline to make the question simply one of evidence, and occupy themselves chiefly in endeavouring to show that miracles are possible, that those recorded in the Biblical narratives are related in such a manner, and are so interwoven with the texture of a simple and artless narrative, as to carry with them an internal proof of their reality; that they differ in kind from later miracles, and especially that the character and destinies of Christianity are such as to render its miraculous origin antecedently probable. But in the ages when the Roman Empire was chiefly converted, all sound and discriminating historical investigation of the evidence of the early miracles was impossible, nor was any large use made of those miracles as proofs of the religion. The rhetorician Arnobius is probably the only one of the early apologists who gives, among the evidences of the faith, any prominent place to the miracles of Christ.(700) When evidential reasoning was employed, it was usually an appeal not to miracles, but to prophecy. But here again the opinions of the patristic age must be pronounced absolutely worthless. To prove that events had taken place in Judæa, accurately corresponding with the prophecies, or that the prophecies were themselves genuine, were both tasks far transcending the critical powers of the Roman converts. The wild extravagance of fantastic allegory, commonly connected with Origen, but which appears at a much earlier date in the writings of Justin Martyr and Irenæus, had thrown the interpretation of prophecy into hopeless confusion, while the deliberate and apparently perfectly unscrupulous forgery of a whole literature, destined to further the propagation either of Christianity as a whole, or of some particular class of tenets that had arisen within its border,(701) made criticism at once pre-eminently difficult and necessary. A long series of oracles were cited, predicting in detail the sufferings of Christ. The prophecies forged by the Christians, and attributed by them to the heathen Sibyls, were accepted as genuine by the entire Church, and were continually appealed to as among the most powerful evidences of the faith. Justin Martyr declared that it was by the instigation of dæmons that it had been made a capital offence to read them.(702) Clement of Alexandria preserved the tradition that St. Paul had urged the brethren to study them.(703) Celsus designated the Christians Sibyllists, on account of the pertinacity with which they insisted upon them.(704) Constantine the Great adduced them in a solemn speech before the Council of Nice.(705) St. Augustine notices that the Greek word for a fish, which, containing the initial letters of the name and titles of Christ, had been adopted by the Early Church as its sacred symbol, contains also the initial letters of some prophetic lines ascribed to the Sibyl of Erythra.(706) The Pagans, it is true, accused their opponents of having forged or interpolated these prophecies;(707) but there was not a single Christian writer of the patristic period who disputed their authority, and there were very few even of the most illustrious who did not appeal to them. Unanimously admitted by the Church of the Fathers, they were unanimously admitted during the middle ages, and an allusion to them passed into the most beautiful lyric of the Missal. It was only at the period of the Reformation that the great but unhappy Castellio pointed out many passages in them which could not possibly be genuine. He was followed, in the first years of the seventeenth century, by a Jesuit named Possevin, who observed that the Sibyls were known to have lived at a later period than Moses, and that many passages in the Sibylline books purported to have been written before Moses. Those passages, therefore, he said, were interpolated; and he added, with a characteristic sagacity, that they had doubtless been inserted by Satan, for the purpose of throwing suspicion upon the books.(708) It was in 1649 that a French Protestant minister, named Blondel, ventured for the first time in the Christian Church to denounce these writings as deliberate and clumsy forgeries, and after much angry controversy his sentiment has acquired an almost undisputed ascendancy in criticism.

But although the opinion of the Roman converts was extremely worthless, when dealing with past history or with literary criticism, there was one branch of miracles concerning which their position was somewhat different. Contemporary miracles, often of the most extraordinary character, but usually of the nature of visions, exorcisms, or healing the sick, were from the time of Justin Martyr uniformly represented by the Fathers as existing among them,(709) and they continue steadily along the path of history, till in the pages of Evagrius and Theodoret, in the Lives of Hilarion and Paul, by St. Jerome, of Antony, by St. Athanasius, and of Gregory Thaumaturgus, by his namesake of Nyssa, and in the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, they attain as grotesque an extravagance as the wildest mediæval legends. Few things are more striking than the assertions hazarded on this matter by some of the ablest of the Fathers. Thus, St. Irenæus assures us that all Christians possessed the power of working miracles; that they prophesied, cast out devils, healed the sick, and sometimes even raised the dead; that some who had been thus resuscitated lived for many years among them, and that it would be impossible to reckon the wonderful acts that were daily performed.(710) St. Epiphanius tells us that some rivers and fountains were annually transformed into wine, in attestation of the miracle of Cana; and he adds that he had himself drunk of one of these fountains, and his brethren of another.(711) St. Augustine notices that miracles were less frequent and less widely known than formerly, but that many still occurred, and some of them he had himself witnessed. Whenever a miracle was reported, he ordered that a special examination into its circumstances should be made, and that the depositions of the witnesses should be read publicly to the people. He tells us, besides many other miracles, that Gamaliel in a dream revealed to a priest named Lucianus the place where the bones of St. Stephen were buried; that those bones, being thus discovered, were brought to Hippo, the diocese of which St. Augustine was bishop; that they raised five dead persons to life; and that, although only a portion of the miraculous cures they effected had been registered, the certificates drawn up in two years in the diocese, and by the orders of the saint, were nearly seventy. In the adjoining diocese of Calama they were incomparably more numerous.(712) In the height of the great conflict between St. Ambrose and the Arian Empress Justina, the saint declared that it had been revealed to him by an irresistible presentiment—or, as St. Augustine, who was present on the occasion, says, in a dream—that relics were buried in a spot which he indicated. The earth being removed, a tomb was found filled with blood, and containing two gigantic skeletons, with their heads severed from their bodies, which were pronounced to be those of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius, two martyrs of remarkable physical dimensions, who were said to have suffered about 300 years before. To prove that they were genuine relics, the bones were brought in contact with a blind man, who was restored to sight, and with demoniacs, who were cured; the dæmons, however, in the first place, acknowledging that the relics were genuine; that St. Ambrose was the deadly enemy of the powers of hell; that the Trinitarian doctrine was true; and that those who rejected it would infallibly be damned. The next day St. Ambrose delivered an invective against all who questioned the miracle. St. Augustine recorded it in his works, and spread the worship of the saints through Africa. The transport of enthusiasm with which the miracles were greeted at Milan enabled St. Ambrose to overcome every obstacle; but the Arians treated them with a derisive incredulity, and declared that the pretended demoniacs had been bribed by the saint.(713)

Statements of this kind, which are selected from very many that are equally positive, though not equally precise, suggest veins of thought of obvious interest and importance. We are now, however, only concerned with the fact, that, with the exception of one or two isolated miracles, such as the last I have noticed, and of one class of miracles which I shall proceed to describe, these prodigies, whether true or false, were wrought for the exclusive edification of confirmed believers. The exceptional miracles were those of exorcism, which occupied a very singular position in the early Church. The belief that certain diseases were inflicted by Divine agency was familiar to the ancients, but among the early Greeks the notion of diabolical possession appears to have been unknown. A dæmon, in the philosophy of Plato, though inferior to a deity, was not an evil spirit, and it is extremely doubtful whether the existence of evil dæmons was known either to the Greeks or Romans till about the time of the advent of Christ.(714) The belief was introduced with the Oriental superstitions which then poured into Rome, and it brought in its train the notions of possession and exorcism. The Jews, who in their own country appear to have regarded it as a most ordinary occurrence to meet men walking about visibly possessed by devils, and who professed to have learnt from Solomon the means of expelling them, soon became the principal exorcists, accomplishing their feats partly by adjuration, and partly by means of a certain miraculous root named Baaras. Josephus assures us that he had himself, in the reign of Vespasian, seen a Jew named Eleazar drawing by these means a dæmon through the nostrils of a possessed person, who fell to the ground on the accomplishment of the miracle; while, upon the command of the magician, the devil, to prove that it had really left his victim, threw down a cup of water which had been placed at a distance.(715) The growth of Neoplatonism and kindred philosophies greatly strengthened the belief, and some of the later philosophers, as well as many religious charlatans, practised exorcism. But, of all classes, the Christians became in this respect the most famous. From the time of Justin Martyr, for about two centuries, there is, I believe, not a single Christian writer who does not solemnly and explicitly assert the reality and frequent employment of this power;(716) and although, after the Council of Laodicea, the instances became less numerous, they by no means ceased. The Christians fully recognised the supernatural power possessed by the Jewish and Gentile exorcists, but they claimed to be in many respects their superiors. By the simple sign of the cross, or by repeating the name of their Master, they professed to be able to cast out devils which had resisted all the enchantments of Pagan exorcists, to silence the oracles, to compel the dæmons to confess the truth of the Christian faith. Sometimes their power extended still further. Dæmons, we are told, were accustomed to enter into animals, and these also were expelled by the Christian adjuration. St. Jerome, in his “Life of St. Hilarion,” has given us a graphic account of the courage with which that saint confronted, and the success with which he relieved, a possessed camel.(717) In the reign of Julian, the very bones of the martyr Babylas were sufficient to silence the oracle of Daphne; and when, amid the triumphant chants of the Christians, the relics, by the command of Julian, were removed, the lightning descended from heaven and consumed the temple.(718) St. Gregory Thaumaturgus having expelled the dæmons from an idol temple, the priest, finding his means of subsistence destroyed, came to the saint, imploring him to permit the oracles to be renewed. St. Gregory, who was then on his journey, wrote a note containing the words “Satan, return,” which was immediately obeyed, and the priest, awe-struck by the miracle, was converted to Christianity.(719) Tertullian, writing to the Pagans in a time of persecution, in language of the most deliberate earnestness, challenges his opponents to bring forth any person who is possessed by a dæmon or any of those virgins or prophets who are supposed to be inspired by a divinity. He asserts that, in reply to the interrogation of any Christian, the dæmons will be compelled to confess their diabolical character; he invites the Pagans, if it be otherwise, to put the Christian immediately to death; and he proposes this as at once the simplest and most decisive demonstration of the faith.(720) Justin Martyr,(721) Origen,(722) Lactantius,(723) Athanasius,(724) and Minucius Felix,(725) all in language equally solemn and explicit, call upon the Pagans to form their opinions from the confessions wrung from their own gods. We hear from them, that when a Christian began to pray, to make the sign of the cross, or to utter the name of his Master in the presence of a possessed or inspired person, the latter, by screams and frightful contortions, exhibited the torture that was inflicted, and by this torture the evil spirit was compelled to avow its nature. Several of the Christian writers declare that this was generally known to the Pagans. In one respect, it was observed, the miracle of exorcism was especially available for evidential purposes; for, as dæmons would not expel dæmons, it was the only miracle which was necessarily divine.

It would be curious to examine the manner in which the challenge was received by the Pagan writers; but unhappily, the writings which were directed against the faith having been destroyed by the Christian emperors, our means of information on this point are very scanty. Some information, however, we possess, and it would appear to show that, among the educated classes at least, these phenomena did not extort any great admiration. The eloquent silence about diabolical possession observed by the early philosophers, when discussing such questions as the nature of the soul and of the spiritual world, decisively show that in their time possession had not assumed any great prominence or acquired any general credence. Plutarch, who admitted the reality of evil dæmons, and who was the most strenuous defender of the oracles, treats the whole class of superstitions to which exorcism belongs with much contempt.(726) Marcus Aurelius, in recounting the benefits he had received from different persons with whom he had been connected, acknowledges his debt of gratitude to the philosopher Diognetus for having taught him to give no credence to magicians, jugglers, and expellers of dæmons.(727) Lucian declares that every cunning juggler could make his fortune by going over to the Christians and preying upon their simplicity.(728) Celsus described the Christians as jugglers performing their tricks among the young and the credulous.(729) The most decisive evidence, however, we possess, is a law of Ulpian, directed, it is thought, against the Christians, which condemns those “who use incantations or imprecations, or (to employ the common word of impostors) exorcisms.”(730) Modern criticism has noted a few facts which may throw some light upon this obscure subject. It has been observed that the symptoms of possession were for the most part identical with those of lunacy or epilepsy; that it is quite possible that the excitement of an imposing religious ceremony might produce or suspend the disorder; that leading questions might in these cases be followed by the desired answers; and that some passages from the Fathers show that the exorcisms were not always successful, or the cures always permanent. It has been observed, too, that at first the power of exorcism was open to all Christians without restraint; that this licence, in an age when religious jugglers were very common, and in a Church whose members were very credulous, gave great facilities to impostors; that when the Laodicean Council, in the fourth century, forbade any one to exorcise, except those who were duly authorised by the bishop, these miracles speedily declined; and that, in the very beginning of the fifth century, a physician named Posidonius denied the existence of possession.(731)

To sum up this whole subject, we may conclude that what is called the evidential system had no prominent place in effecting the conversion of the Roman Empire. Historical criticisms were far too imperfect to make appeals to the miracles of former days of any value, and the notion of the wide diffusion of miraculous or magical powers, as well as the generally private character of the alleged miracles of the Patristic age, made contemporary wonders very unimpressive. The prophecies attributed to the Sibyls, and the practice of exorcism, had, however, a certain weight; for the first were connected with a religious authority, long and deeply revered at Rome, and the second had been forced by several circumstances into great prominence. But the effect even of these may be safely regarded as altogether subsidiary, and the main causes of the conversion must be looked for in another and a wider sphere.

These causes were the general tendencies of the age. They are to be found in that vast movement of mingled scepticism and credulity, in that amalgamation or dissolution of many creeds, in that profound transformation of habits, of feelings, and of ideals, which I have attempted to paint in the last chapter. Under circumstances more favourable to religious proselytism than the world had ever before known, with the path cleared by a long course of destructive criticism, the religions and philosophies of mankind were struggling for the mastery in that great metropolis where all were amply represented, and in which alone the destinies of the world could be decided. Among the educated a frigid Stoicism, teaching a majestic but unattainable grandeur, and scorning the support of the affections, the hope of another world, and the consolations of worship, had for a time been in the ascendant, and it only terminated its noble and most fruitful career when it had become manifestly inadequate to the religious wants of the age. Among other classes, religion after religion ran its conquering course. The Jews, although a number of causes had made them the most hated of all the Roman subjects, and although their religion, from its intensely national character, seemed peculiarly unsuited for proselytism, had yet, by the force of their monotheism, their charity, and their exorcisms, spread the creed of Moses far and wide. The Empress Poppæa is said to have been a proselyte. The passion of Roman women for Jewish rites was one of the complaints of Juvenal. The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts became familiar facts in all the great cities, and the antiquity of the Jewish law the subject of eager discussion. Other Oriental religions were even more successful. The worship of Mithra, and, above all, of the Egyptian divinities, attracted their thousands, and during more than three centuries the Roman writings are crowded with allusions to their progress. The mysteries of the Bona Dea,(732) the solemn worship of Isis, the expiatory rites that cleansed the guilty soul, excited a very delirium of enthusiasm. Juvenal describes the Roman women, at the dawn of the winter day, breaking the ice of the Tiber to plunge three times into its sacred stream, dragging themselves on bleeding knees in penance around the field of Tarquin, offering to undertake pilgrimages to Egypt to seek the holy water for the shrine of Isis, fondly dreaming that they had heard the voice of the goddess.(733) Apuleius has drawn a graphic picture of the solemn majesty of her processions, and the spell they cast upon the most licentious and the most sceptical.(734) Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus were passionately devoted to them.(735) The temples of Isis and Serapis, and the statues of Mithra, are among the last prominent works of Roman art. In all other forms the same credulity was manifested. The oracles that had been silent were heard again; the astrologers swarmed in every city; the philosophers were surrounded with an atmosphere of legend; the Pythagorean school had raised credulity into a system. On all sides, and to a degree unparalleled in history, we find men who were no longer satisfied with their old local religion, thirsting for belief, passionately and restlessly seeking for a new faith.

In the midst of this movement, Christianity gained its ascendancy, and we can be at no loss to discover the cause of its triumph. No other religion, under such circumstances, had ever combined so many distinct elements of power and attraction. Unlike the Jewish religion, it was bound by no local ties, and was equally adapted for every nation and for every class. Unlike Stoicism, it appealed in the strongest manner to the affections, and offered all the charm of a sympathetic worship. Unlike the Egyptian religions, it united with its distinctive teaching a pure and noble system of ethics, and proved itself capable of realising it in action. It proclaimed, amid a vast movement of social and national amalgamation, the universal brotherhood of mankind. Amid the softening influence of philosophy and civilisation, it taught the supreme sanctity of love. To the slave, who had never before exercised so large an influence over Roman religious life, it was the religion of the suffering and the oppressed. To the philosopher it was at once the echo of the highest ethics of the later Stoics, and the expansion of the best teaching of the school of Plato. To a world thirsting for prodigy, it offered a history replete with wonders more strange that those of Apollonius; while the Jew and the Chaldean could scarcely rival its exorcists, and the legends of continual miracles circulated among its followers. To a world deeply conscious of political dissolution, and prying eagerly and anxiously into the future, it proclaimed with a thrilling power the immediate destruction of the globe—the glory of all its friends, and the damnation of all its foes. To a world that had grown very weary gazing on the cold and passionless grandeur which Cato realised, and which Lucan sung, it presented an ideal of compassion and of love—a Teacher who could weep by the sepulchre of His friend, who was touched with the feeling of our infirmities. To a world, in fine, distracted by hostile creeds and colliding philosophies, it taught its doctrines, not as a human speculation, but as a Divine revelation, authenticated much less by reason than by faith. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness;” “He that doeth the will of my Father will know the doctrine, whether it be of God;” “Unless you believe you cannot understand;” “A heart naturally Christian;” “The heart makes the theologian,” are the phrases which best express the first action of Christianity upon the world. Like all great religions, it was more concerned with modes of feeling than with modes of thought. The chief cause of its success was the congruity of its teaching with the spiritual nature of mankind. It was because it was true to the moral sentiments of the age, because it represented faithfully the supreme type of excellence to which men were then tending, because it corresponded with their religious wants, aims, and emotions, because the whole spiritual being could then expand and expatiate under its influence, that it planted its roots so deeply in the hearts of men.

To all these elements of attraction, others of a different order must be added. Christianity was not merely a moral influence, or a system of opinions, or an historical record, or a collection of wonder-working men; it was also an institution definitely, elaborately, and skilfully organised, possessing a weight and a stability which isolated or undisciplined teachers could never rival, and evoking, to a degree before unexampled in the world, an enthusiastic devotion to its corporate welfare, analogous to that of the patriot to his country. The many forms of Pagan worship were pliant in their nature. Each offered certain advantages or spiritual gratifications; but there was no reason why all should not exist together, and participation in one by no means implied disrespect to the others. But Christianity was emphatically exclusive; its adherent was bound to detest and abjure the faiths around him as the workmanship of dæmons, and to consider himself placed in the world to destroy them. Hence there sprang a stern, aggressive, and at the same time disciplined enthusiasm, wholly unlike any other that had been witnessed upon earth. The duties of public worship; the sacraments, which were represented as the oaths of the Christian warrior; the fasts and penances and commemorative days, which strengthened the Church feeling; the intervention of religion in the most solemn epochs of life, conspired to sustain it. Above all, the doctrine of salvation by belief, which then for the first time flashed upon the world; the persuasion, realised with all the vividness of novelty, that Christianity opened out to its votaries eternal happiness, while all beyond its pale were doomed to an eternity of torture, supplied a motive of action as powerful as it is perhaps possible to conceive. It struck alike the coarsest chords of hope and fear, and the finest chords of compassion and love. The polytheist, admitting that Christianity might possibly be true, was led by a mere calculation of prudence to embrace it, and the fervent Christian would shrink from no suffering to draw those whom he loved within its pale. Nor were other inducements wanting. To the confessor was granted in the Church a great and venerable authority, such as the bishop could scarcely claim.(736) To the martyr, besides the fruition of heaven, belonged the highest glory on earth. By winning that bloodstained crown, the meanest Christian slave might gain a reputation as glorious as that of a Decius or a Regulus. His body was laid to rest with a sumptuous splendour;(737) his relics, embalmed or shrined, were venerated with an almost idolatrous homage. The anniversary of his birth into another life was commemorated in the Church, and before the great assembly of the saints his heroic sufferings were recounted.(738) How, indeed, should he not be envied? He had passed away into eternal bliss. He had left upon earth an abiding name. By the “baptism of blood” the sins of a life had been in a moment effaced.

Those who are accustomed to recognise heroic enthusiasm as a normal product of certain natural conditions, will have no difficulty in understanding that, under such circumstances as I have described, a transcendent courage should have been evoked. Men seemed indeed to be in love with death. Believing, with St. Ignatius, that they were “the wheat of God,” they panted for the day when they should be “ground by the teeth of wild beasts into the pure bread of Christ!” Beneath this one burning enthusiasm all the ties of earthly love were snapt in twain. Origen, when a boy, being restrained by force from going forth to deliver himself up to the persecutors, wrote to his imprisoned father, imploring him not to let any thought of his family intervene to quench his resolution or to deter him from sealing his faith with his blood. St. Perpetua, an only daughter, a young mother of twenty-two, had embraced the Christian creed, confessed it before her judges, and declared herself ready to endure for it the martyr’s death. Again and again her father came to her in a paroxysm of agony, entreating her not to deprive him of the joy and the consolation of his closing years. He appealed to her by the memory of all the tenderness he had lavished upon her—by her infant child—by his own gray hairs, that were soon to be brought down in sorrow to the grave. Forgetting in his deep anguish all the dignity of a parent, he fell upon his knees before his child, covered her hands with kisses, and, with tears streaming from his eyes, implored her to have mercy upon him. But she was unshaken though not untouched; she saw her father, frenzied with grief, dragged from before the tribunal; she saw him tearing his white beard, and lying prostrate and broken-hearted on the prison floor; she went forth to die for a faith she loved more dearly—for a faith that told her that her father would be lost for ever.(739) The desire for martyrdom became at times a form of absolute madness, a kind of epidemic of suicide, and the leading minds of the Church found it necessary to exert all their authority to prevent their followers from thrusting themselves into the hands of the persecutors.(740) Tertullian mentions how, in a little Asiatic town, the entire population once flocked to the proconsul, declaring themselves to be Christians, and imploring him to execute the decree of the emperor and grant them the privilege of martyrdom. The bewildered functionary asked them whether, if they were so weary of life, there were no precipices or ropes by which they could end their days; and he put to death a small number of the suppliants, and dismissed the others.(741) Two illustrious Pagan moralists and one profane Pagan satirist have noticed this passion with a most unpleasing scorn. “There are some,” said Epictetus, “whom madness, there are others, like the Galilæans, whom custom, makes indifferent to death.”(742) “What mind,” said Marcus Aurelius, “is prepared, if need be, to go forth from the body, whether it be to be extinguished, or to be dispersed, or to endure?—prepared by deliberate reflection, and not by pure obstinacy, as is the custom of the Christians.”(743) “These wretches,” said Lucian, speaking of the Christians, “persuade themselves that they are going to be altogether immortal, and to live for ever; wherefore they despise death, and many of their own accord give themselves up to be slain.”(744)

“I send against you men who are as greedy of death as you are of pleasures,” were the words which, in after days, the Mohammedan chief addressed to the degenerate Christians of Syria, and which were at once the presage and the explanation of his triumph. Such words might with equal propriety have been employed by the early Christian leaders to their Pagan adversaries. The zeal of the Christians and of the Pagans differed alike in degree and in kind. When Constantine made Christianity the religion of the State, it is probable that its adherents were but a minority in Rome. Even in the days of Theodosius the senate was still wedded to Paganism;(745) yet the measures of Constantine were both natural and necessary. The majority were without inflexible belief, without moral enthusiasm, without definite organisation, without any of those principles that inspire the heroism either of resistance or aggression. The minority formed a serried phalanx, animated by every motive that could purify, discipline, and sustain their zeal. When once the Christians had acquired a considerable position, the question of their destiny was a simple one. They must either be crushed or they must reign. The failure of the persecution of Diocletian conducted them inevitably to the throne.

It may indeed be confidently asserted that the conversion of the Roman Empire is so far from being of the nature of a miracle or suspension of the ordinary principles of human nature, that there is scarcely any other great movement on record in which the causes and effects so manifestly correspond. The apparent anomalies of history are not inconsiderable, but they must be sought for in other quarters. That within the narrow limits and scanty population of the Greek States should have arisen men who, in almost every conceivable form of genius, in philosophy, in epic, dramatic and lyric poetry, in written and spoken eloquence, in statesmanship, in sculpture, in painting, and probably also in music, should have attained almost or altogether the highest limits of human perfection—that the creed of Mohammed should have preserved its pure monotheism and its freedom from all idolatrous tendencies, when adopted by vast populations in that intellectual condition in which, under all other creeds, a gross and material worship has proved inevitable, both these are facts which we can only very imperfectly explain. Considerations of climate, and still more of political, social, and intellectual customs and institutions, may palliate the first difficulty, and the attitude Mohammed assumed to art may supply us with a partial explanation of the second; but I suppose that, after all has been said, most persons will feel that they are in presence of phenomena very exceptional and astonishing. The first rise of Christianity in Judæa is a subject wholly apart from this book. We are examining only the subsequent movement in the Roman Empire. Of this movement it may be boldly asserted that the assumption of a moral or intellectual miracle is utterly gratuitous. Never before was a religious transformation so manifestly inevitable. No other religion ever combined so many forms of attraction as Christianity, both from its intrinsic excellence, and from its manifest adaptation to the special wants of the time. One great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed; but that it should do so was precisely what might have been expected.

To these reasonings, however, those who maintain that the triumph of Christianity in Rome is naturally inexplicable, reply by pointing to the persecutions which Christianity had to encounter. As this subject is one on which many misconceptions exist, and as it is of extreme importance on account of its connection with later persecutions, it will be necessary briefly to discuss it.

It is manifest that the reasons that may induce a ruler to suppress by force some forms of religious worship or opinion, are very various. He may do so on moral grounds, because they directly or indirectly produce immorality; or on religious grounds, because he believes them to be offensive to the Deity; or on political grounds, because they are injurious either to the State or to the Government; or on corrupt grounds, because he desires to gratify some vindictive or avaricious passion. From the simple fact, therefore, of a religious persecution we cannot at once infer the principles of the persecutor, but must examine in detail by which of the above motives, or by what combination of them, he has been actuated.

Now, the persecution which has taken place at the instigation of the Christian priests differs in some respects broadly from all others. It has been far more sustained, systematic, and unflinching. It has been directed not merely against acts of worship, but also against speculative opinions. It has been supported not merely as a right, but also as a duty. It has been advocated in a whole literature of theology, by the classes that are especially devout, and by the most opposing sects, and it has invariably declined in conjunction with a large portion of theological dogmas.

I have elsewhere examined in great detail the history of persecutions by Christians, and have endeavoured to show that, while exceptional causes have undoubtedly occasionally occurred, they were, in the overwhelming majority of cases, simply the natural, legitimate, and inevitable consequence of a certain portion of the received theology. That portion is the doctrine that correct theological opinions are essential to salvation, and that theological error necessarily involves guilt. To these two opinions may be distinctly traced almost all the sufferings that Christian persecutors have caused, almost all the obstructions they have thrown in the path of human progress; and those sufferings have been so grievous that it may be reasonably questioned whether superstition has not often proved a greater curse than vice, and that obstruction was so pertinacious, that the contraction of theological influence has been at once the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance. The notion that he might himself be possibly mistaken in his opinions, which alone could cause a man who was thoroughly imbued with these principles to shrink from persecuting, was excluded by the theological virtue of faith, which, whatever else it might involve, implied at least an absolute unbroken certainty, and led the devotee to regard all doubt, and therefore all action based upon doubt, as sin.

To this general cause of Christian persecution I have shown that two subsidiary influences may be joined. A large portion of theological ethics was derived from writings in which religious massacres, on the whole the most ruthless and sanguinary upon record, were said to have been directly enjoined by the Deity, in which the duty of suppressing idolatry by force was given a greater prominence than any article of the moral code, and in which the spirit of intolerance has found its most eloquent and most passionate expressions.(746) Besides this, the destiny theologians represented as awaiting the misbeliever was so ghastly and so appalling as to render it almost childish to lay any stress upon the earthly suffering that might be inflicted in the extirpation of error.

That these are the true causes of the great bulk of Christian persecution, I believe to be one of the most certain as well as one of the most important facts in history. For the detailed proof I can only refer to what I have elsewhere written; but I may here notice that that proof combines every conceivable kind of evidence that in such a question can be demanded. It can be shown that these principles would naturally lead men to persecute. It can be shown that from the time of Constantine to the time when the rationalistic spirit wrested the bloodstained sword from the priestly hand, persecution was uniformly defended upon them—defended in long, learned, and elaborate treatises, by the best and greatest men the Church had produced, by sects that differed on almost all other points, by multitudes who proved in every conceivable manner the purity of their zeal. It can be shown, too, that toleration began with the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines, expanded in exact proportion to the growing latitudinarianism, and triumphed only when indifference to dogma had become a prevailing sentiment among legislators. It was only when the battle had been won—when the anti-dogmatic party, acting in opposition to the Church, had rendered persecution impossible—that the great body of theologians revised their arguments, and discovered that to punish men for their opinions was wholly at variance with their faith. With the merits of this pleasing though somewhat tardy conversion I am not now concerned; but few persons, I think, can follow the history of Christian persecution without a feeling of extreme astonishment that some modern writers, not content with maintaining that the doctrine of exclusive salvation _ought_ not to have produced persecution, have ventured, in defiance of the unanimous testimony of the theologians of so many centuries, to dispute the plain historical fact that it _did_ produce it. They argue that the Pagans, who did not believe in exclusive salvation, persecuted, and that therefore that doctrine cannot be the cause of persecution. The answer is that no sane man ever maintained that all the persecutions on record were from the same source. We can prove by the clearest evidence that Christian persecutions sprang chiefly from the causes I have alleged. The causes of Pagan persecutions, though different, are equally manifest, and I shall proceed shortly to indicate them.

They were partly political and partly religious. The Governments in most of the ancient States, in the earlier stages of their existence, undertook the complete education of the people; professed to control and regulate all the details of their social life, even to the dresses they wore, or the dishes that were served upon their tables; and, in a word, to mould their whole lives and characters into a uniform type. Hence, all organisations and corporations not connected with the State, and especially all that emanated from foreign countries, were looked upon with distrust or antipathy. But this antipathy was greatly strengthened by a religious consideration. No belief was more deeply rooted in the ancient mind than that good or bad fortune sprang from the intervention of spiritual beings, and that to neglect the sacred rites was to bring down calamity upon the city. In the diminutive Greek States, where the function of the Government was immensely enlarged, a strong intolerance existed, which extended for some time not merely to practices, but to writings and discourses. The well-known persecutions of Anaxagoras, Theodorus, Diagoras, Stilpo, and Socrates; the laws of Plato, which were as opposed to religious as to domestic freedom; and the existence in Athens of an inquisitorial tribunal,(747) sufficiently attested it. But long before the final ruin of Greece, speculative liberty had been fully attained. The Epicurean and the Sceptical schools developed unmolested, and even in the days of Socrates, Aristophanes was able to ridicule the gods upon the stage.

In the earlier days of Rome religion was looked upon as a function of the State; its chief object was to make the gods auspicious to the national policy,(748) and its principal ceremonies were performed at the direct command of the Senate. The national theory on religious matters was that the best religion is always that of a man’s own country. At the same time, the widest tolerance was granted to the religions of conquered nations. The temples of every god were respected by the Roman army. Before besieging a city, the Romans were accustomed to supplicate the presiding deities of that city. With the single exception of the Druids, whose human sacrifices it was thought a matter of humanity to suppress,(749) and whose fierce rebellions it was thought necessary to crush, the teachers of all national religions continued unmolested by the conqueror.

This policy, however, applied specially to religious rites practised in the countries in which they were indigenous. The liberty to be granted to the vast confluence of strangers attracted to Italy during the Empire was another question. In the old Republican days, when the censors regulated with the most despotic authority the minutest affairs of life, and when the national religion was interwoven with every detail of political and even domestic transactions, but little liberty could be expected. When Carneades endeavoured to inculcate his universal scepticism upon the Romans, by arguing alternately for and against the same proposition, Cato immediately urged the Senate to expel him from the city, lest the people should be corrupted by his teaching.(750) For a similar reason all rhetoricians had been banished from the Republic.(751) The most remarkable, however, and at the same time the extreme expression of Roman intolerance that has descended to us, is the advice which Mæcenas is represented as having given to Octavius Cæsar, before his accession to the throne. “Always,” he said, “and everywhere, worship the gods according to the rites of your country, and compel others to the same worship. Pursue with your hatred and with punishments those who introduce foreign religions, not only for the sake of the gods—the despisers of whom can assuredly never do anything great—but also because they who introduce new divinities entice many to use foreign laws. Hence arise conspiracies, societies, and assemblies, things very unsuited to an homogeneous empire. Tolerate no despiser of the gods, and no religious juggler. Divination is necessary, and therefore let the aruspices and augurs by all means be sustained, and let those who will, consult them; but the magicians must be utterly prohibited, who, though they sometimes tell the truth, more frequently, by false promises, urge men on to conspiracies.”(752)

This striking passage exhibits very clearly the extent to which in some minds the intolerant spirit was carried in antiquity, and also the blending motives that produced it. We should be, however, widely mistaken if we regarded it as a picture of the actual religious policy of the Empire. In order to realise this, it will be necessary to notice separately liberty of speculation and liberty of worship.

When Asinius Pollio founded the first public library in Rome, he placed it in the Temple of Liberty. The lesson which was thus taught to the literary classes was never forgotten. It is probable that in no other period of the history of the world was speculative freedom so perfect as in the Roman Empire. The fearless scrutiny of all notions of popular belief, displayed in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius, or Lucian, did not excite an effort of repression. Philosophers were, indeed, persecuted by Domitian and Vespasian for their ardent opposition to the despotism of the throne,(753) but on their own subjects they were wholly untrammelled. The Greek writers consoled themselves for the extinction of the independence of their country by the reflection that in the sphere of intellect the meddling policy of the Greek States was replaced by an absolute and a majestic freedom.(754) The fierceness of the opposition of sects faded beneath its influence. Of all the speculative conflicts of antiquity, that which most nearly approached the virulence of later theological controversies was probably that between the Stoics and the Epicureans; but it is well worthy of notice that some of the most emphatic testimonies to the moral goodness of Epicurus have come from the writings of his opponents.

But the policy of the Roman rulers towards religious rites was very different from, and would at first sight appear to be in direct opposition to, their policy towards opinions. An old law, which Cicero mentions, expressly forbade the introduction of new religions,(755) and in the Republican days and the earliest days of the Empire there are many instances of its being enforced. Thus, in A.U.C. 326, a severe drought having led men to seek help from new gods, the Senate charged the ædiles to allow none but Roman deities to be worshipped.(756) Lutatius, soon after the first Punic war, was forbidden by the Senate to consult foreign gods, “because,” said the historian, “it was deemed right the Republic should be administered according to the national auspices, and not according to those of other lands.”(757) During the second Punic war, a severe edict of the Senate enjoined the suppression of certain recent innovations.(758) About A.U.C. 615 the prætor Hispalus exiled those who had introduced the worship of the Sabasian Jupiter.(759) The rites of Bacchus, being accompanied by gross and scandalous obscenity, were suppressed, the consul, in a remarkable speech, calling upon the people to revive the religious policy of their ancestors.(760) The worship of Isis and Serapis only gained its footing after a long struggle, and no small amount of persecution. The gross immorality it sometimes favoured, its wild and abject superstition, so thoroughly alien to the whole character of Roman life and tradition, and also the organisation of its priesthood, rendered it peculiarly obnoxious to the Government. When the first edict of suppression was issued, the people hesitated to destroy a temple which seemed so venerable in their eyes, and the consul Æmilius Paulus dispelled their fears by seizing an axe and striking the first blow himself.(761) During the latter days of the Republic, edicts had commanded the destruction of the Egyptian temples. Octavius, however, in his younger days, favoured the new worship, but, soon after, it was again suppressed.(762) Under Tiberius it had once more crept in; but the priests of Isis having enabled a patrician named Mundus to disguise himself as the god Anubis, and win the favours of a devout worshipper, the temple, by order of the emperor, was destroyed, the images were thrown into the Tiber, the priests were crucified, and the seducer was banished.(763) Under the same emperor four thousand persons were exiled to Sardinia, as affected with Jewish and Egyptian superstitions. They were commissioned to repress robbers; but it was at the same time added, with a characteristic scorn, that if they died through the unhealthiness of the climate, it would be but a “small loss.”(764)

These measures represent together a considerable amount of religious repression, but they were produced exclusively by notions of policy or discipline. They grew out of that intense national spirit which sacrificed every other interest to the State, and resisted every form of innovation, whether secular or religious, that could impair the unity of the national type, and dissolve the discipline which the predominance of the military spirit and the stern government of the Republic had formed. They were also, in some cases, the result of moral scandals. When, however, it became evident that the internal condition of the Republic was unsuited for the Empire, the rulers frankly acquiesced in the change, and from the time of Tiberius, with the single exception of the Christians, perfect liberty of worship seems to have been granted to the professors of all religions in Rome.(765) The old law upon the subject was not revoked, but it was not generally enforced. Sometimes the new creeds were expressly authorised. Sometimes they were tacitly permitted. With a single exception, all the religions of the world raised their heads unmolested in the “Holy City.”(766)

The liberty, however, of professing and practising a foreign worship did not dispense the Roman from the obligation of performing also the sacrifices or other religious rites of his own land. It was here that whatever religious fanaticism mingled with Pagan persecutions was displayed. Eusebius tells us that religion was divided by the Romans into three parts—the mythology, or legends that had descended from the poets; the interpretations or theories by which the philosophers endeavoured to rationalise, filter, or explain away these legends; and the ritual or official religious observances. In the first two spheres perfect liberty was accorded, but the ritual was placed under the control of the Government, and was made a matter of compulsion.(767) In order to realise the strength of the feeling that supported it, we must remember that the multitude firmly believed that the prosperity and adversity of the Empire depended chiefly upon the zeal or indifference that was shown in conciliating the national divinities, and also that the philosophers, as I have noticed in the last chapter, for the most part not only practised, but warmly defended, the official observances. The love of truth in many forms was exhibited among the Pagan philosophers to a degree which has never been surpassed; but there was one form in which it was absolutely unknown. The belief that it is wrong for a man in religious matters to act a lie, to sanction by his presence and by his example what he regards as baseless superstitions, had no place in the ethics of antiquity. The religious flexibility which polytheism had originally generated, the strong political feeling that pervaded all classes, and also the manifest impossibility of making philosophy the creed of the ignorant, had rendered nearly universal among philosophers a state of feeling which is often exhibited, but rarely openly professed, among ourselves.(768) The religious opinions of men had but little influence on their religious practices, and the sceptic considered it not merely lawful, but a duty, to attend the observances of his country. No one did more to scatter the ancient superstitions than Cicero, who was himself an augur, and who strongly asserted the duty of complying with the national rites.(769) Seneca, having recounted in the most derisive terms the absurdities of the popular worship, concludes his enumeration by declaring that “the sage will observe all these things, not as pleasing to the Divinities, but as commanded by the law,” and that he should remember “that his worship is due to custom, not to belief.”(770) Epictetus, whose austere creed rises to the purest monotheism, teaches as a fundamental religious maxim that every man in his devotions should “conform to the customs of his country.”(771) The Jews and Christians, who alone refused to do so, were the representatives of a moral principle that was unknown to the Pagan world.

It should be remembered, too, that the Oriental custom of deifying emperors having been introduced into Rome, to burn incense before their statues had become a kind of test of loyalty. This adoration does not, it is true, appear to have implied any particular article of belief, and it was probably regarded by most men as we regard the application of the term “Sacred Majesty” to a sovereign, and the custom of kneeling in his presence; but it was esteemed inconsistent with Christianity, and the conscientious refusal of the Christians to comply with it aroused a feeling resembling that which was long produced in Christendom by the refusal of Quakers to comply with the usages of courts.

The obligation to perform the sacred rites of an idolatrous worship, if rigidly enforced, would have amounted, in the case of the Jews and the Christians, to a complete proscription. It does not, however, appear that the Jews were ever persecuted on this ground. They formed a large and influential colony in Rome. They retained undiminished, in the midst of the Pagan population, their exclusive habits, refusing not merely all religious communion, but most social intercourse with the idolaters, occupying a separate quarter of the city, and sedulously practising their distinctive rites. Tiberius, as we have seen, appears to have involved them in his proscription of Egyptian superstitions; but they were usually perfectly unmolested, or were molested only when their riotous conduct had attracted the attention of the rulers. The Government was so far from compelling them to perform acts contrary to their religion, that Augustus expressly changed the day of the distribution of corn, in order that they might not be reduced to the alternative of forfeiting their share, or of breaking the Sabbath.(772)

It appears, then, that the old Republican intolerance had in the Empire been so modified as almost to have disappeared. The liberty of speculation and discussion was entirely unchecked. The liberty of practising foreign religious rites, though ostensibly limited by the law against unauthorised religions, was after Tiberius equally secure. The liberty of abstaining from the official national rites, though more precarious, was fully conceded to the Jews, whose jealousy of idolatry was in no degree inferior to that of the Christians. It remains, then, to examine what were the causes of the very exceptional fanaticism and animosity that were directed against the latter.

The first cause of the persecution of the Christians was the religious notion to which I have already referred. The belief that our world is governed by isolated acts of Divine intervention, and that, in consequence, every great calamity, whether physical, or military, or political, may be regarded as a punishment or a warning, was the basis of the whole religious system of antiquity.(773) In the days of the Republic every famine, pestilence, or drought was followed by a searching investigation of the sacred rites, to ascertain what irregularity or neglect had caused the Divine anger, and two instances are recorded in which vestal virgins were put to death because their unchastity was believed to have provoked a national calamity.(774) It might appear at first sight that the fanaticism which this belief would naturally produce would have been directed against the Jews as strongly as against the Christians; but a moment’s reflection is sufficient to explain the difference. The Jewish religion was essentially conservative and unexpansive. Although, in the passion for Oriental religions, many of the Romans had begun to practise its ceremonies, there was no spirit of proselytism in the sect; and it is probable that almost all who followed this religion, to the exclusion of others, were of Hebrew nationality. The Christians, on the other hand, were ardent missionaries; they were, for the most part, Romans who had thrown off the allegiance of their old gods, and their activity was so great that from a very early period the temples were in some districts almost deserted.(775) Besides this, the Jews simply abstained from and despised the religions around them. The Christians denounced them as the worship of dæmons, and lost no opportunity of insulting them. It is not, therefore, surprising that the populace should have been firmly convinced that every great catastrophe that occurred was due to the presence of the enemies of the gods. “If the Tiber ascends to the walls,” says Tertullian, “or if the Nile does not overflow the fields, if the heaven refuses its rain, if the earth quakes, if famine and pestilence desolate the land, immediately the cry is raised, ‘The Christians to the lions!’ ”(776) “There is no rain—the Christians are the cause,” had become a popular proverb in Rome.(777) Earthquakes, which, on account of their peculiarly appalling, and, to ignorant men, mysterious nature, have played a very large part in the history of superstition, were frequent and terrible in the Asiatic provinces, and in three or four instances the persecution of the Christians may be distinctly traced to the fanaticism they produced.

There is no part of ecclesiastical history more curious than the effects of this belief in alternately assisting or impeding the progress of different Churches. In the first three centuries of Christian history, it was the cause of fearful sufferings to the faith; but even then the Christians usually accepted the theory of their adversaries, though they differed concerning its application. Tertullian and Cyprian strongly maintained, sometimes that the calamities were due to the anger of the Almighty against idolatry, sometimes that they were intended to avenge the persecution of the truth. A collection was early made of men who, having been hostile to the Christian faith, had died by some horrible death, and their deaths were pronounced to be Divine punishments.(778) The victory which established the power of the first Christian emperor, and the sudden death of Arius, were afterwards accepted as decisive proofs of the truth of Christianity, and of the falsehood of Arianism.(779) But soon the manifest signs of the dissolution of the Empire revived the zeal of the Pagans, who began to reproach themselves for their ingratitude to their old gods, and who recognised in the calamities of their country the vengeance of an insulted Heaven. When the altar of Victory was removed contemptuously from the Senate, when the sacred college of the vestals was suppressed, when, above all, the armies of Alaric encircled the Imperial city, angry murmurs arose which disturbed the Christians in their triumph. The standing-point of the theologians was then somewhat altered. St. Ambrose dissected with the most unsparing rationalism the theory that ascribed the national decline to the suppression of the vestals, traced it to all its consequences, and exposed all its absurdities. Orosius wrote his history to prove that great misfortunes had befallen the Empire before its conversion. Salvian wrote his treatise on Providence to prove that the barbarian invasions were a Divine judgment on the immorality of the Christians. St. Augustine concentrated all his genius on a great work, written under the impression of the invasion of Alaric, and intended to prove that “the city of God” was not on earth, and that the downfall of the Empire need therefore cause no disquietude to the Christians. St. Gregory the Great continually represented the calamities of Italy as warnings foreboding the destruction of the world. When Rome sank finally before the barbarian hosts, it would seem as though the doctrine that temporal success was the proof of Divine favour must be finally abandoned. But the Christian clergy disengaged their cause from that of the ruined Empire, proclaimed its downfall to be a fulfilment of prophecy and a Divine judgment, confronted the barbarian conquerors in all the majesty of their sacred office, and overawed them in the very moment of their victory. In the conversion of the uncivilised tribes, the doctrine of special intervention occupied a commanding place. The Burgundians, when defeated by the Huns, resolved, as a last resource, to place themselves under the protection of the Roman God whom they vaguely believed to be the most powerful, and the whole nation in consequence embraced Christianity.(780) In a critical moment of a great battle, Clovis invoked the assistance of the God of his wife. The battle was won, and he, with many thousands of Franks, was converted to the faith.(781) In England, the conversion of Northumbria was partly, and the conversion of Mercia was mainly, due to the belief that the Divine interposition had secured the victory of a Christian king.(782) A Bulgarian prince was driven into the Church by the terror of a pestilence, and he speedily effected the conversion of his subjects.(783) The destruction of so many shrines, and the defeat of so many Christian armies, by the followers of Mohammed; the disastrous and ignominious overthrow of the Crusaders, who went forth protected by all the blessings of the Church, were unable to impair the belief. All through the middle ages, and for some centuries after the middle ages had passed, every startling catastrophe was regarded as a punishment, or a warning, or a sign of the approaching termination of the world. Churches and monasteries were built. Religious societies were founded. Penances were performed. Jews were massacred, and a long catalogue might be given of the theories by which men attempted to connect every vicissitude of fortune, and every convulsion of nature, with the wranglings of theologians. Thus, to give but a few examples: St. Ambrose confidently asserted that the death of Maximus was a consequence of the crime he had committed in compelling the Christians to rebuild a Jewish synagogue they had destroyed.(784) One of the laws in the Justinian code, directed against the Jews, Samaritans, and Pagans, expressly attributes to them the sterility of the soil, which in an earlier age the Pagans had so often attributed to the Christians.(785) A volcanic eruption that broke out at the commencement of the iconoclastic persecution was adduced as a clear proof that the Divine anger was aroused, according to one party, by the hostility of the emperor to the sacred images; according to the other party, by his sinful hesitation in extirpating idolatry.(786) Bodin, in a later age, considered that the early death of the sovereign who commanded the massacre of St. Bartholomew was due to what he deemed the master crime of that sovereign’s reign. He had spared the life of a famous sorcerer.(787) In the struggles that followed the Reformation, physical calamities were continually ascribed in one age to the toleration, in another to the endowment, of either heresy or Popery.(788) Sometimes, however, they were traced to the theatre, and sometimes to the writings of freethinkers. But gradually, and almost insensibly, these notions faded away. The old language is often heard, but it is no longer realised and operative, and the doctrine which played so large a part in the history of the world has ceased to exercise any appreciable influence upon the actions of mankind.

In addition to this religious motive, which acted chiefly upon the vulgar, there was a political motive which rendered Christianity obnoxious to the educated. The Church constituted a vast, highly organised, and in many respects secret society, and as such was not only distinctly illegal, but was also in the very highest degree calculated to excite the apprehensions of the Government. There was no principle in the Imperial policy more stubbornly upheld than the suppression of all corporations that might be made the nuclei of revolt. The extent to which this policy was carried is strikingly evinced by a letter from Trajan to Pliny, in which the emperor forbade the formation even of a guild of firemen, on the ground that they would constitute an association and hold meetings.(789) In such a state of feeling, the existence of a vast association, governed by countless functionaries, shrouding its meetings and some of its doctrines in impenetrable obscurity, evoking a degree of attachment and devotion greater than could be elicited by the State, ramifying through the whole extent of the empire, and restlessly extending its influence, would naturally arouse the strongest apprehension. That it did so is clearly recognised by the Christian apologists, who, however, justly retorted upon the objectors the impossibility of showing a single instance in which, in an age of continual conspiracies, the numerous and persecuted Christians had proved disloyal. Whatever we may think of their doctrine of passive obedience, it is impossible not to admire the constancy with which they clung to it, when all their interests were the other way. But yet the Pagans were not altogether wrong in regarding the new association as fatal to the greatness of the Empire. It consisted of men who regarded the Roman Empire as a manifestation of Antichrist, and who looked forward with passionate longing to its destruction. It substituted a new enthusiasm for that patriotism which was the very life-blood of the national existence. Many of the Christians deemed it wrong to fight for their country. All of them aspired to a type of character, and were actuated by hopes and motives, wholly inconsistent with that proud martial ardour by which the triumphs of Rome had been won, and by which alone her impending ruin could be averted.

The aims and principles of this association were very imperfectly understood. The greatest and best of the Pagans spoke of it as a hateful superstition, and the phrase they most frequently reiterated, when speaking of its members, was “enemies” or “haters of the human race.” Such a charge, directed persistently against men whose main principle was the supreme excellence of love, and whose charity unquestionably rose far above that of any other class, was probably due in the first place to the unsocial habits of the converts, who deemed it necessary to abstain from all the forms of public amusement, to refuse to illuminate their houses, or hang garlands from their portals in honour of the national triumphs, and who somewhat ostentatiously exhibited themselves as separate and alien from their countrymen. It may also have arisen from a knowledge of the popular Christian doctrine about the future destiny of Pagans. When the Roman learnt what fate the Christian assigned to the heroes and sages of his nation, and to the immense mass of his living fellow-countrymen, when he was told that the destruction of the once glorious Empire to which he belonged was one of the most fervent aspirations of the Church, his feelings were very likely to clothe themselves in such language as I have cited.

But, in addition to the general charges, specific accusations(790) of the grossest kind were directed against Christian morals. At a time when the moral standard was very low, they were charged with deeds so atrocious as to scandalise the most corrupt. They were represented as habitually, in their secret assemblies, celebrating the most licentious orgies, feeding on human flesh, and then, the lights having been extinguished, indulging in promiscuous, and especially in incestuous, intercourse. The persistence with which these accusations were made is shown by the great prominence they occupy, both in the writings of the apologists and in the narrations of the persecutions. That these charges were absolutely false will now be questioned by no one. The Fathers were long able to challenge their adversaries to produce a single instance in which any other crime than his faith was proved against a martyr, and they urged with a just and noble pride that whatever doubt there might be of the truth of the Christian doctrines, or of the Divine origin of the Christian miracles, there was at least no doubt that Christianity had transformed the characters of multitudes, vivified the cold heart by a new enthusiasm, redeemed, regenerated, and emancipated the most depraved of mankind. Noble lives, crowned by heroic deaths, were the best arguments of the infant Church.(791) Their enemies themselves not unfrequently acknowledged it. The love shown by the early Christians to their suffering brethren has never been more emphatically attested than by Lucian,(792) or the beautiful simplicity of their worship than by Pliny,(793) or their ardent charity than by Julian.(794) There was, it is true, another side to the picture; but even when the moral standard of Christians was greatly lowered, it was lowered only to that of the community about them.

These calumnies were greatly encouraged by the ecclesiastical rule, which withheld from the unbaptised all knowledge of some of the more mysterious doctrines of the Church, and veiled, at least, one of its ceremonies in great obscurity. Vague rumours about the nature of that sacramental feast, to which none but the baptised Christian was suffered to penetrate, and which no ecclesiastic was permitted to explain either to the catechumens or to the world, were probably the origin of the charge of cannibalism; while the Agapæ or love feasts, the ceremony of the kiss of love, and the peculiar and, to the Pagans, perhaps unintelligible, language in which the Christians proclaimed themselves one body and fellow-members in Christ, may have suggested the other charges. The eager credulity with which equally baseless accusations against the Jews were for centuries believed, illustrates the readiness with which they were accepted, and the extremely imperfect system of police which rendered the verification of secret crimes very difficult, had no doubt greatly enlarged the sphere of calumny. But, in addition to these considerations, the orthodox were in some respects exceedingly unfortunate. In the eyes of the Pagans they were regarded as a sect of Jews; and the Jews, on account of their continual riots, their inextinguishable hatred of the Gentile world,(795) and the atrocities that frequently accompanied their rebellions, had early excited the anger and the contempt of the Pagans. On the other hand, the Jew, who deemed the abandonment of the law the most heinous of crimes, and whose patriotism only shone with a fiercer flame amid the calamities of his nation, regarded the Christian with an implacable hostility. Scorned or hated by those around him, his temple levelled with the dust, and the last vestige of his independence destroyed, he clung with a desperate tenacity to the hopes and privileges of his ancient creed. In his eyes the Christians were at once apostates and traitors. He could not forget that in the last dark hour of his country’s agony, when the armies of the Gentile encompassed Jerusalem, and when the hosts of the faithful flocked to its defence, the Christian Jews had abandoned the fortunes of their race, and refused to bear any part in the heroism and the sufferings of the closing scene. They had proclaimed that the promised Messiah, who was to restore the faded glories of Israel, had already come; that the privileges which were so long the monopoly of a single people had passed to the Gentile world; that the race which was once supremely blest was for all future time to be accursed among mankind. It is not, therefore, surprising that there should have arisen between the two creeds an animosity which Paganism could never rival. While the Christians viewed with too much exultation the calamities that fell upon the prostrate people,(796) whose cup of bitterness they were destined through long centuries to fill to the brim, the Jews laboured with unwearied hatred to foment by calumnies the passions of the Pagan multitude.(797) On the other hand, the Catholic Christians showed themselves extremely willing to draw down the sword of the persecutor upon the heretical sects. When the Pagans accused the Christians of indulging in orgies of gross licentiousness, the first apologist, while repudiating the charge, was careful to add, of the heretics, “Whether or not these people commit those shameful and fabulous acts, the putting out the lights, indulging in promiscuous intercourse, and eating human flesh, I know not.”(798) In a few years the language of doubt and insinuation was exchanged for that of direct assertion; and, if we may believe St. Irenæus and St. Clement of Alexandria, the followers of Carpocrates, the Marcionites, and some other Gnostic sects, habitually indulged, in their secret meetings, in acts of impurity and licentiousness as hideous and as monstrous as can be conceived, and their conduct was one of the causes of the persecution of the orthodox.(799) Even the most extravagant charges of the Pagan populace were reiterated by the Fathers in their accusations of the Gnostics. St. Epiphanius, in the fourth century, assures us that some of their sects were accustomed to kill, to dress with spices, and to eat the children born of their promiscuous intercourse.(800) The heretics, in their turn, gladly accused the Catholics;(801) while the Roman judge, in whose eyes Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and heresy were but slightly differing modifications of one despicable superstition, doubtless found in this interchange of accusations a corroboration of his prejudices.

Another cause of the peculiar animosity felt against the Christians was the constant interference with domestic life, arising from the great number of female conversions. The Christian teacher was early noted for his unrivalled skill in playing on the chords of a woman’s heart.(802) The graphic title of “Earpicker of ladies,”(803) which was given to a seductive pontiff of a somewhat later period, might have been applied to many in the days of the persecution; and to the Roman, who regarded the supreme authority of the head of the family, in all religious matters, as the very foundation of domestic morality, no character could appear more infamous or more revolting. “A wife,” said Plutarch, expressing the deepest conviction of the Pagan world, “should have no friends but those of her husband; and, as the gods are the first of friends, she should know no gods but those whom her husband adores. Let her shut the door, then, against idle religions and foreign superstitions. No god can take pleasure in sacrifices offered by a wife without the knowledge of her husband.”(804) But these principles, upon which the whole social system of Paganism had rested, were now disregarded. Wives in multitudes deserted their homes to frequent the nocturnal meetings(805) of a sect which was looked upon with the deepest suspicion, and was placed under the ban of the law. Again and again, the husband, as he laid his head on the pillow by his wife, had the bitterness of thinking that all her sympathies were withdrawn from him; that her affections belonged to an alien priesthood and to a foreign creed; that, though she might discharge her duties with a gentle and uncomplaining fidelity, he had for ever lost the power of touching her heart—he was to her only as an outcast, as a brand prepared for the burning. Even to a Christian mind there is a deep pathos in the picture which St. Augustine has drawn of the broken-hearted husband imploring the assistance of the gods, and receiving from the oracle the bitter answer: “You may more easily write in enduring characters on the wave, or fly with feathers through the air, than purge the mind of a woman when once tainted by the superstition.”(806)

I have already noticed the prominence which the practice of exorcism had acquired in the early Church, the contempt with which it was regarded by the more philosophic Pagans, and the law which had been directed against its professors. It is not, however, probable that this practice, though it lowered the Christians in the eyes of the educated as much as it elevated them in the eyes of the populace, had any appreciable influence in provoking persecution. In the crowd of superstitions that were invading the Roman Empire, exorcism had a prominent place; all such practices were popular with the masses; the only form of magic which under the Empire was seriously persecuted was political astrology or divination with a view to discovering the successors to the throne, and of this the Christians were never accused.(807) There was, however, another form of what was deemed superstition connected with the Church, which was regarded by Pagan philosophers with a much deeper feeling of aversion. To agitate the minds of men with religious terrorism, to fill the unknown world with hideous images of suffering, to govern the reason by alarming the imagination, was in the eyes of the Pagan world one of the most heinous of crimes.(808) These fears were to the ancients the very definition of superstition, and their destruction was a main object both of the Epicurean and of the Stoic. To men holding such sentiments, it is easy to perceive how obnoxious must have appeared religious teachers who maintained that an eternity of torture was reserved for the entire human race then existing in the world, beyond the range of their own community, and who made the assertion of this doctrine one of their main instruments of success.(809) Enquiry, among the early theologians, was much less valued than belief,(810) and reason was less appealed to than fear. In philosophy the most comprehensive, but in theology the most intolerant, system is naturally the strongest. To weak women, to the young, the ignorant, and the timid, to all, in a word, who were doubtful of their own judgment, the doctrine of exclusive salvation must have come with an appalling power; and, as no other religion professed it, it supplied the Church with an invaluable vantage-ground, and doubtless drove multitudes into its pale. To this doctrine we may also, in a great degree, ascribe the agony of terror that was so often displayed by the apostate, whose flesh shrank from the present torture, but who was convinced that the weakness he could not overcome would be expiated by an eternity of torment.(811) To the indignation excited by such teaching was probably due a law of Marcus Aurelius, which decreed that “if any one shall do anything whereby the weak minds of any may be terrified by superstitious fear, the offender shall be exiled into an island.”(812)

There can, indeed, be little doubt that a chief cause of the hostility felt against the Christian Church was the intolerant aspect it at that time displayed. The Romans were prepared to tolerate almost any form of religion that would tolerate others. The Jews, though quite as obstinate as the Christians in refusing to sacrifice to the emperor, were rarely molested, except in the periods immediately following their insurrections, because Judaism, however exclusive and unsocial, was still an unaggressive national faith. But the Christian teachers taught that all religions, except their own and that of the Jews, were constructed by devils, and that all who dissented from their Church must be lost. It was impossible that men strung to the very highest pitch of religious excitement, and imagining they saw in every ceremony and oracle the direct working of a present dæmon, could restrain their zeal, or respect in any degree the feelings of others. Proselytising with an untiring energy, pouring a fierce stream of invective and ridicule upon the gods on whose favour the multitude believed all national prosperity to depend, not unfrequently insulting the worshippers, and defacing the idols,(813) they soon stung the Pagan devotees to madness, and convinced them that every calamity that fell upon the empire was the righteous vengeance of the gods. Nor was the sceptical politician more likely to regard with favour a religion whose development was plainly incompatible with the whole religious policy of the Empire. The new Church, as it was then organised, must have appeared to him essentially, fundamentally, necessarily intolerant. To permit it to triumph was to permit the extinction of religious liberty in an empire which comprised all the leading nations of the world, and tolerated all their creeds. It was indeed true that in the days of their distress the apologists proclaimed, in high and eloquent language, the iniquity of persecution, and the priceless value of a free worship; but it needed no great sagacity to perceive that the language of the dominant Church would be very different. The Pagan philosopher could not foresee the ghastly histories of the Inquisition, of the Albigenses, or of St. Bartholomew; but he could scarcely doubt that the Christians, when in the ascendant, would never tolerate rites which they believed to be consecrated to devils, or restrain, in the season of their power, a religious animosity which they scarcely bridled when they were weak. It needed no prophetic inspiration to anticipate the time, that so speedily arrived, when, amid the wailings of the worshippers, the idols and the temples were shattered, and when all who practised the religious ceremonies of their forefathers were subject to the penalty of death.

There has probably never existed upon earth a community whose members were bound to one another by a deeper or a purer affection than the Christians, in the days of the persecution. There has probably never existed a community which exhibited in its dealings with crime a gentler or more judicious kindness, which combined more happily an unflinching opposition to sin with a boundless charity to the sinner, and which was in consequence more successful in reclaiming and transforming the most vicious of mankind. There has, however, also never existed a community which displayed more clearly the intolerance that would necessarily follow its triumph. Very early tradition has related three anecdotes of the apostle John which illustrate faithfully this triple aspect of the Church. It is said that when the assemblies of the Christians thronged around him to hear some exhortation from his lips, the only words he would utter were, “My little children, love one another;” for in this, he said, is comprised the entire law. It is said that a young man he had once confided to the charge of a bishop, having fallen into the ways of vice, and become the captain of a band of robbers, the apostle, on hearing of it, bitterly reproached the negligence of the pastor, and, though in extreme old age, betook himself to the mountains till he had been captured by the robbers, when, falling with tears on the neck of the chief, he restored him to the path of virtue. It is said that the same apostle, once seeing the heretic Cerinthus in an establishment of baths into which he had entered, immediately rushed forth, fearing lest the roof should fall because a heretic was beneath it.(814) All that fierce hatred which during the Arian and Donatist controversies convulsed the Empire, and which in later times has deluged the world with blood, may be traced in the Church long before the conversion of Constantine. Already, in the second century, it was the rule that the orthodox Christian should hold no conversation, should interchange none of the most ordinary courtesies of life, with the excommunicated or the heretic.(815) Common sufferings were impotent to assuage the animosity, and the purest and fondest relations of life were polluted by the new intolerance. The Decian persecution had scarcely closed, when St. Cyprian wrote his treatise to maintain that it is no more possible to be saved beyond the limits of the Church, than it was during the deluge beyond the limits of the ark; that martyrdom itself has no power to efface the guilt of schism; and that the heretic, who for his master’s cause expired in tortures upon the earth, passed at once, by that master’s decree, into an eternity of torment in hell!(816) Even in the arena the Catholic martyrs withdrew from the Montanists, lest they should be mingled with the heretics in death.(817) At a later period St. Augustine relates that, when he was a Manichean, his mother for a time refused even to eat at the same table with her erring child.(818) When St. Ambrose not only defended the act of a Christian bishop, who had burnt down a synagogue of the Jews, but denounced as a deadly crime the decree of the Government which ordered it to be rebuilt;(819) when the same saint, in advocating the plunder of the vestal virgins, maintained the doctrine that it is criminal for a Christian State to grant any endowment to the ministers of any religion but his own,(820) which it has needed all the efforts of modern liberalism to efface from legislation, he was but following in the traces of those earlier Christians, who would not even wear a laurel crown,(821) or join in the most innocent civic festival, lest they should appear in some indirect way to be acquiescing in the Pagan worship. While the apologists were maintaining against the Pagan persecutors the duty of tolerance, the Sibylline books, which were the popular literature of the Christians, were filled with passionate anticipations of the violent destruction of the Pagan temples.(822) And no sooner had Christianity mounted the throne than the policy they foreshadowed became ascendant. The indifference or worldly sagacity of some of the rulers, and the imposing number of the Pagans, delayed, no doubt, the final consummation; but, from the time of Constantine, restrictive laws were put in force, the influence of the ecclesiastics was ceaselessly exerted in their favour, and no sagacious man could fail to anticipate the speedy and absolute proscription of the Pagan worship. It is related of the philosopher Antoninus, the son of the Pagan prophetess Sospitra, that, standing one day with his disciples before that noble temple of Serapis, at Alexandria, which was one of the wonders of ancient art, and which was destined soon after to perish by the rude hands of the Christian monks, the prophetic spirit of his mother fell upon him. Like another prophet before another shrine, he appalled his hearers by the prediction of the approaching ruin. The time would come, he said, when the glorious edifice before them would be overthrown, the carved images would be defaced, the temples of the gods would be turned into the sepulchres of the dead, and a great darkness would fall upon mankind!(823)

And, besides the liberty of worship, the liberty of thought and of expression, which was the supreme attainment of Roman civilisation, was in peril. The new religion, unlike that which was disappearing, claimed to dictate the opinions as well as the actions of men, and its teachers stigmatised as an atrocious crime the free expression of every opinion on religious matters diverging from their own. Of all the forms of liberty, it was this which lasted the longest, and was the most dearly prized. Even after Constantine, the Pagans Libanius, Themistius, Symmachus, and Sallust enforced their views with a freedom that contrasts remarkably with the restraints imposed upon their worship, and the beautiful friendships of St. Basil and Libanius, of Synesius and Hypatia, are among the most touching episodes of their time. But though the traditions of Pagan freedom, and the true catholicism of Justin Martyr and Origen, lingered long, it was inevitable that error, being deemed criminal, should be made penal. The dogmatism of Athanasius and Augustine, the increasing power of the clergy, and the fanaticism of the monks, hastened the end. The suppression of all religions but one by Theodosius, the murder of Hypatia at Alexandria by the monks of Cyril, and the closing by Justinian of the schools of Athens, are the three events which mark the decisive overthrow of intellectual freedom. A thousand years had rolled away before that freedom was in part restored.

The considerations I have briefly enumerated should not in the smallest degree detract from the admiration due to the surpassing courage, to the pure, touching, and sacred virtues of the Christian martyrs; but they in some degree palliate the conduct of the persecutors, among whom must be included one emperor, who was probably, on the whole, the best and most humane sovereign who has ever sat upon a throne, and at least two others, who were considerably above the average of virtue. When, combined with the indifference to human suffering, the thirst for blood, which the spectacles of the amphitheatre had engendered, they assuredly make the persecutions abundantly explicable. They show that if it can be proved that Christian persecutions sprang from the doctrine of exclusive salvation, the fact that the Roman Pagans, who did not hold that doctrine, also persecuted, need not cause the slightest perplexity. That the persecutions of Christianity by the Roman emperors, severe as they undoubtedly were, were not of such a continuous nature as wholly to counteract the vast moral, social, and intellectual agencies that were favourable to its spread, a few dates will show.

We have seen that when the Egyptian rites were introduced into Rome, they were met by prompt and energetic measures of repression; that these measures were again and again repeated, but that at last, when they proved ineffectual, the governors desisted from their opposition, and the new worship assumed a recognised place. The history of Christianity, in its relation to the Government, is the reverse of this. Its first introduction into Rome appears to have been altogether unopposed. Tertullian asserts that Tiberius, on the ground of a report from Pontius Pilate, desired to enrol Christ among the Roman gods, but that the Senate rejected the proposal; but this assertion, which is altogether unsupported by trustworthy evidence, and is, intrinsically, extremely improbable, is now generally recognised as false.(824) An isolated passage of Suetonius states that in the time of Claudius “the Jews, being continually rioting, at the instigation of a certain Chrestus,”(825) were expelled from the city; but no Christian writer speaks of his co-religionists being disturbed in this reign, while all, with a perfect unanimity, and with great emphasis, describe Nero as the first persecutor. His persecution began at the close of A.D. 64.(826) It was directed against Christians, not ostensibly on the ground of their religion, but because they were falsely accused of having set fire to Rome, and it is very doubtful whether it extended beyond the city.(827) It had also this peculiarity, that, being directed against the Christians not as Christians, but as incendiaries, it was impossible to escape from it by apostasy. Within the walls of Rome it raged with great fury. The Christians, who had been for many years(828) proselytising without restraint in the great confluence of nations, and amid the disintegration of old beliefs, had become a formidable body. They were, we learn from Tacitus, profoundly unpopular; but the hideous tortures to which Nero subjected them, and the conviction that, whatever other crimes they might have committed, they were not guilty of setting fire to the city, awoke general pity. Some of them, clad in skins of wild beasts, were torn by dogs. Others, arrayed in shirts of pitch, were burnt alive in Nero’s garden.(829) Others were affixed to crosses. Great multitudes perished. The deep impression the persecution made on the Christian mind is shown in the whole literature of the Sibyls, which arose soon after, in which Nero is usually the central figure, and by the belief, that lingered for centuries, that the tyrant was yet alive, and would return once more as the immediate precursor of Antichrist, to inflict the last great persecution upon the Church.(830)

Nero died A.D. 68. From that time, for at least twenty-seven years, the Church enjoyed absolute repose. There is no credible evidence whatever of the smallest interference with its freedom till the last year of the reign of Domitian; and a striking illustration of the fearlessness with which it exhibited itself to the world has been lately furnished in the discovery, near Rome, of a large and handsome porch leading to a Christian catacomb, built above ground between the reigns of Nero and Domitian, in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the principal highways.(831) The long reign of Domitian, though it may have been surpassed in ferocity, was never surpassed in the Roman annals in the skilfulness and the persistence of its tyranny. The Stoics and literary classes, who upheld the traditions of political freedom, and who had already suffered much at the hands of Vespasian, were persecuted with relentless animosity. Metius Modestus, Arulenus Rusticus, Senecio, Helvidius, Dion Chrysostom, the younger Priscus, Junius Mauricus, Artemidorus, Euphrates, Epictetus, Arria, Fannia, and Gratilla were either killed or banished.(832) No measures, however, appear to have been taken against the Christians till A.D. 95, when a short and apparently not very severe persecution, concerning which our information is both scanty and conflicting, was directed against them. Of the special cause that produced it we are left in much doubt. Eusebius mentions, on the not very trustworthy authority of Hegesippus, that the emperor, having heard of the existence of the grandchildren of Judas, the brother of Christ, ordered them to be brought before him, as being of the family of David, and therefore possible pretenders to the throne; but on finding that they were simple peasants, and that the promised kingdom of which they spoke was a spiritual one, he dismissed them in peace, and arrested the persecution he had begun.(833) A Pagan historian states that, the finances of the Empire being exhausted by lavish expenditure in public games, Domitian, in order to replenish his exchequer, resorted to a severe and special taxation of the Jews; that some of these, in order to evade the impost, concealed their worship, while others, who are supposed to have been Christians, are described as following the Jewish rites without being professed Jews.(834) Perhaps, however, the simplest explanation is the truest, and the persecution may be ascribed to the antipathy which a despot like Domitian must necessarily have felt to an institution which, though it did not, like Stoicism, resist his policy, at least exercised a vast influence altogether removed from his control. St. John, who was then a very old man, is said to have been at this time exiled to Patmos. Flavius Clemens, a consul, and a relative of the emperor, was put to death. His wife, or, according to another account, his niece Domitilla, was banished, according to one account, to the island of Pontia, according to another, to the island of Pandataria, and many others were compelled to accompany her into exile.(835) Numbers, we are told, “accused of conversion to impiety or Jewish rites,” were condemned. Some were killed, and others deprived of their offices.(836) Of the cessation of the persecution there are two different versions. Tertullian(837) and Eusebius(838) say that the tyrant speedily revoked his edict, and restored those who had been banished; but according to Lactantius these measures were not taken till after the death of Domitian,(839) and this latter statement is corroborated by the assertion of Dion Cassius, that Nerva, upon his accession, “absolved those who were accused of impiety, and recalled the exiles.”(840)

When we consider the very short time during which this persecution lasted, and the very slight notice that was taken of it, we may fairly, I think, conclude that it was not of a nature to check in any appreciable degree a strong religious movement like that of Christianity. The assassination of Domitian introduces us to the golden age of the Roman Empire. In the eyes of the Pagan historian, the period from the accession of Nerva, in A.D. 96, to the death of Marcus Aurelius, in A.D. 180, is memorable as a period of uniform good government, of rapidly advancing humanity, of great legislative reforms, and of a peace which was very rarely seriously broken. To the Christian historian it is still more remarkable, as one of the most critical periods in the history of his faith. The Church entered into it considerable indeed, as a sect, but not large enough to be reckoned an important power in the Empire. It emerged from it so increased in its numbers, and so extended in its ramifications, that it might fairly defy the most formidable assaults. It remains, therefore, to be seen whether the opposition against which, during these eighty-four years, it had so successfully struggled was of such a kind and intensity that the triumph must be regarded as a miracle.

Nearly at the close of this period, during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, St. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, wrote a letter of expostulation to the emperor, in which he explicitly asserts that in Asia the persecution of the pious was an event which “had never before occurred,” and was the result of “new and strange decrees;” that the ancestors of the emperor were accustomed to honour the Christian faith “like other religions;” and that “Nero and Domitian alone” had been hostile to it.(841) Rather more than twenty years later, Tertullian asserted, in language equally distinct and emphatic, that the two persecutors of the Christians were Nero and Domitian, and that it would be impossible to name a single good sovereign who had molested them. Marcus Aurelius himself, Tertullian refuses to number among the persecutors, and, even relying upon a letter which was falsely imputed to him, enrols him among the protectors of the Church.(842) About a century later, Lactantius, reviewing the history of the persecutions, declared that the good sovereigns who followed Domitian abstained from persecuting, and passes at once from the persecution of Domitian to that of Decius. Having noticed the measures of the former emperor, he proceeds: “The acts of the tyrant being revoked, the Church was not only restored to its former state, but shone forth with a greater splendour and luxuriance; and a period following in which many good sovereigns wielded the Imperial sceptre, it suffered no assaults from its enemies, but stretched out its hands to the east and to the west; ... but at last the long peace was broken. After many years, that hateful monster Decius arose, who troubled the Church.”(843)

We have here three separate passages, from which we may conclusively infer that the normal and habitual condition of the Christians during the eighty-four years we are considering, and, if we accept the last two passages, during a much longer period, was a condition of peace, but that peace was not absolutely unbroken. The Christian Church, which was at first regarded simply as a branch of Judaism, had begun to be recognised as a separate body, and the Roman law professedly tolerated only those religions which were expressly authorised. It is indeed true that with the extension of the Empire, and especially of the city, the theory, or at least the practice, of religious legislation had been profoundly modified. First of all, certain religions, of which the Jewish was one, were officially recognised, and then many others, without being expressly authorised, were tolerated. In this manner, all attempts to resist the torrent of Oriental superstitions proving vain, the legislator had desisted from his efforts, and every form of wild superstition was practised with publicity and impunity. Still the laws forbidding them were unrevoked, although they were suffered to remain for the most part obsolete, or were at least only put in action on the occasion of some special scandal, or of some real or apprehended political danger. The municipal and provincial independence under the Empire was, however, so large, that very much depended on the character of the local governor; and it continually happened that in one province the Christians were unmolested or favoured, while in the adjoining province they were severely persecuted.

As we have already seen, the Christians had for many reasons become profoundly obnoxious to the people. They shared the unpopularity of the Jews, with whom they were confounded, while the general credence given to the calumnies about the crimes said to have been perpetrated at their secret meetings, their abstinence from public amusements, and the belief that their hostility to the gods was the cause of every physical calamity, were special causes of antipathy. The history of the period of the Antonines continually manifests the desire of the populace to persecute, restrained by the humanity of the rulers. In the short reign of Nerva there appears to have been no persecution, and our knowledge of the official proceedings with reference to the religion is comprised in two sentences of a Pagan historian, who tells us that the emperor “absolved those who had been convicted of impiety,” and “permitted no one to be convicted of impiety or Jewish rites.” Under Trajan, however, some serious though purely local disturbances took place. The emperor himself, though one of the most sagacious, and in most respects humane of Roman sovereigns, was nervously jealous of any societies or associations among his subjects, and had propounded a special edict against them; but the persecution of the Christians appears to have been not so much political as popular. If we may believe Eusebius, local persecutions, apparently of the nature of riots, but sometimes countenanced by provincial governors, broke out in several quarters of the Empire. In Bithynia, Pliny the Younger was the governor, and he wrote a very famous letter to Trajan, in which he professed himself absolutely ignorant of the proceedings to be taken against the Christians, who had already so multiplied that the temples were deserted, and who were arraigned in great numbers before his tribunal. He had, he says, released those who consented to burn incense before the image of the emperor, and to curse Christ, but had caused those to be executed who persisted in their refusal, and who were not Roman citizens, “not doubting that a pertinacious obstinacy deserved punishment.” He had questioned the prisoners as to the nature of their faith, and had not hesitated to seek revelations by torturing two maid-servants, but had “discovered nothing but a base and immoderate superstition.” He had asked the nature of their secret services, and had been told that they assembled on a certain day before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god; that they made a vow to abstain from every crime, and that they then, before parting, partook together of a harmless feast, which, however, they had given up since the decree against associations. To this letter Trajan answered that Christians, if brought before the tribunals and convicted, should be punished, but that they should not be sought for; that, if they consented to sacrifice, no inquisition should be made into their past lives, and that no anonymous accusations should be received against them.(844) In this reign there are two authentic instances of martyrdom.(845) Simeon, Bishop of Jerusalem, a man, it is said, one hundred and twenty years old, having been accused by the heretics, was tortured during several days, and at last crucified. Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, was arrested, brought to Rome, and, by the order of Trajan himself, thrown to wild beasts. Of the cause of this last act of severity we are left in ignorance, but it has been noticed that about this time Antioch had been the scene of one of those violent earthquakes which so frequently produced an outburst of religious excitement,(846) and the character of Ignatius, who was passionately desirous of martyrdom, may have very probably led him to some act of exceptional zeal. The letters of the martyr prove that at Rome the faith was openly and fearlessly professed; the Government during the nineteen years of this reign never appears to have taken any initiative against the Christians, and, in spite of occasional local tumults, there was nothing resembling a general persecution.

During the two following reigns, the Government was more decidedly favourable to the Christians. Hadrian, having heard that the populace at the public games frequently called for their execution, issued an edict in which he commanded that none should be punished simply in obedience to the outcries against them, or without a formal trial and a conviction of some offence against the law, and he ordered that all false accusers should be punished.(847) His disposition towards the Christians was so pacific as to give rise to a legend that he intended to enrol Christ among the gods;(848) but it is probable that, although curious on religious matters, he regarded Christianity with the indifference of a Roman freethinker; and a letter is ascribed to him in which he confounded it with the worship of Serapis.(849) As far as the Government were concerned, the Christians appear to have been entirely unmolested; but many of them suffered dreadful tortures at the hands of the Jewish insurgents, who in this reign, with a desperate but ill-fated heroism, made one last effort to regain their freedom.(850) The mutual hostility exhibited at this time by the Jews and Christians contributed to separate them in the eyes of the Pagans, and it is said that when Hadrian forbade the Jews ever again to enter Jerusalem, he recognised the distinction by granting a full permission to the Christians.(851)

Antoninus, who succeeded Hadrian, made new efforts to restrain the passions of the people against the Christians. He issued an edict commanding that they should not be molested, and when, as a consequence of some earthquakes in Asia Minor, the popular anger was fiercely roused, he commanded that their accusers should be punished.(852) If we except these riots, the twenty-three years of his reign appear to have been years of absolute peace, which seems also to have continued during several years of the reign of Marcus Aurelius; but at last persecuting edicts, of the exact nature of which we have no knowledge, were issued. Of the reasons which induced one of the best men who have ever reigned to persecute the Christians, we know little or nothing. That it was not any ferocity of disposition or any impatience of resistance may be confidently asserted of one whose only fault was a somewhat excessive gentleness—who, on the death of his wife, asked the Senate, as a single favour, to console him by sparing the lives of those who had rebelled against him. That it was not, as has been strangely urged, a religious fanaticism resembling that which led St. Lewis to persecute, is equally plain. St. Lewis persecuted because he believed that to reject his religious opinions was a heinous crime, and that heresy was the path to hell. Marcus Aurelius had no such belief, and he, the first Roman emperor who made the Stoical philosophy his religion and his comfort, was also the first emperor who endowed the professors of the philosophies that were most hostile to his own. The fact that the Christian Church, existing as a State within a State, with government, ideals, enthusiasms, and hopes wholly different from those of the nation, was incompatible with the existing system of the Empire, had become more evident as the Church increased. The accusations of cannibalism and incestuous impurity had acquired a greater consistency, and the latter are said to have been justly applicable to the Carpocratian heretics, who had recently arisen. The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius may have revolted from the practices of exorcism or the appeals to the terrors of another world, and the philosophers who surrounded him probably stimulated his hostility, for his master and friend Fronto had written a book against Christianity,(853) while Justin Martyr is said to have perished by the machinations of the Cynic Crescens.(854) It must be added, too, that, while it is impossible to acquit the emperor of having issued severe edicts against the Christians,(855) the atrocious details of the persecutions in his reign were due to the ferocity of the populace and the weakness of the governors in distant provinces; and it is inconceivable that, if he had been a very bitter enemy of the Christians, Tertullian, writing little more than twenty years later, should have been so ignorant of the fact as to represent him as one of the most conspicuous of their protectors.

But, whatever may be thought on these points, there can, unhappily, be no question that in this reign Rome was stained by the blood of Justin Martyr, the first philosopher, and one of the purest and gentlest natures in the Church, and that persecution was widely extended. In two far distant quarters, at Smyrna and at Lyons, it far exceeded in atrocity any that Christianity had endured since Nero, and in each case a heroism of the most transcendent order was displayed by the martyrs. The persecution at Smyrna, in which St. Polycarp and many others most nobly died, took place on the occasion of the public games, and we may trace the influence of the Jews in stimulating it.(856) The persecution at Lyons, which was one of the most atrocious in the whole compass of ecclesiastical history, and which has supplied the martyrology with some of its grandest and most pathetic figures, derived its worst features from a combination of the fury of the populace and of the subserviency of the governor.(857) Certain servants of the Christians, terrified by the prospect of torture, accused their masters of all the crimes which popular report attributed to them, of incest, of infanticide, of cannibalism, of hideous impurity. A fearful outburst of ferocity ensued. Tortures almost too horrible to recount were for hours and even days applied to the bodies of old men and of weak women, who displayed amid their agonies a nobler courage than has ever shone upon a battle-field, and whose memories are immortal among mankind. Blandina and Pothinus wrote in blood the first page of the glorious history of the Church of France.(858) But although, during the closing years of Marcus Aurelius, severe persecutions took place in three or four provinces, there was no general and organised effort to suppress Christianity throughout the Empire.(859)

We may next consider, as a single period, the space of time that elapsed from the death of Marcus Aurelius, in A.D. 180, to the accession of Decius, A.D. 249. During all this time Christianity was a great and powerful body, exercising an important influence, and during a great part of it Christians filled high civil and military positions. The hostility manifested towards them began now to assume a more political complexion than it had previously done, except perhaps in the later years of Marcus Aurelius. The existence of a vast and rapidly increasing corporation, very alien to the system of the Empire, confronted every ruler. Emperors like Commodus or Heliogabalus were usually too immersed in selfish pleasures to have any distinct policy; but sagacious sovereigns, sincerely desiring the well-being of the Empire, either, like Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian, endeavoured to repress the rising creed, or, like Alexander Severus, and at last Constantine, actively encouraged it. The measures Marcus Aurelius had taken against Christianity were arrested under Commodus, whose favourite mistress, Marcia, supplies one of the very few recorded instances of female influence, which has been the cause of so much persecution, being exerted in behalf of toleration;(860) yet a Christian philosopher named Apollonius, and at the same time, by a curious retribution, his accuser, were in this reign executed at Rome.(861) During the sixty-nine years we are considering, the general peace of the Church was only twice broken. The first occasion was in the reign of Septimus Severus, who was for some time very favourable to the Christians, but who, in A.D. 202 or 203, issued an edict, forbidding any Pagan to join the Christian or Jewish faith;(862) and this edict was followed by a sanguinary persecution in Africa and Syria, in which the father of Origen, and also St. Felicitas and St. Perpetua, perished. This persecution does not appear to have extended to the West, and was apparently rather the work of provincial governors, who interpreted the Imperial edict as a sign of hostility to the Christians, than the direct act of the emperor,(863) whose decree applied only to Christians actively proselytising. It is worthy of notice that Origen observed that previous to this time the number of Christian martyrs had been very small.(864) The second persecution was occasioned by the murder of Alexander Severus by Maximinus. The usurper pursued with great bitterness the leading courtiers of the deceased emperor, among whom were some Christian bishops,(865) and about the same time severe earthquakes in Pontus and Cappadocia produced the customary popular ebullitions. But with these exceptions the Christians were undisturbed. Caracalla, Macrinus, and Heliogabalus took no measures against them, while Alexander Severus, who reigned for thirteen years, warmly and steadily supported them. A Pagan historian assures us that this emperor intended to build temples in honour of Christ, but was dissuaded by the priests, who urged that all the other temples would be deserted. He venerated in his private oratory the statues of Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, Orpheus, and Christ. He decreed that the provincial governors should not be appointed till the people had the opportunity of declaring any crime they had committed, borrowing this rule avowedly from the procedure of the Jews and Christians in electing their clergy; he ordered the precept “Do not unto others what you would not that they should do unto you” to be engraven on the palace and other public buildings, and he decided a dispute concerning a piece of ground which the Christians had occupied, and which the owners of certain eating-houses claimed, in favour of the former, on the ground that the worship of a god should be most considered.(866) Philip the Arab, who reigned during the last five years of the period we are considering, was so favourable to the Christians that he was believed, though on no trustworthy evidence, to have been baptised.

We have now reviewed the history of the persecutions to the year A.D. 249, or about two hundred years after the planting of Christianity in Rome. We have seen that, although during that period much suffering was occasionally endured, and much heroism displayed, by the Christians, there was, with the very doubtful exception of the Neronian persecution, no single attempt made to suppress Christianity throughout the Empire. Local persecutions of great severity had taken place at Smyrna and Lyons, under Marcus Aurelius; in Africa and some Asiatic provinces, under Severus; popular tumults, arising in the excitement of the public games, or produced by some earthquake or inundation, or by some calumnious accusation, were not unfrequent; but there was at no time that continuous, organised, and universal persecution by which, in later periods, ecclesiastical tribunals have again and again suppressed opinions repugnant to their own; and there was no part of the Empire in which whole generations did not pass away absolutely undisturbed. No martyr had fallen in Gaul or in great part of Asia Minor till Marcus Aurelius. In Italy, after the death of Nero, with the exception of some slight troubles under Domitian and Maximinus, probably due to causes altogether distinct from religion, there were, during the whole period we are considering, only a few isolated instances of martyrdom. The bishops, as the leaders of the Church, were the special objects of hostility, and several in different parts of the world had fallen; but it is extremely questionable whether any Roman bishop perished after the apostolic age, till Fabianus was martyred under Decius.(867) If Christianity was not formally authorised, it was, like many other religions in a similar position, generally acquiesced in, and, during a great part of the time we have reviewed, its professors appear to have found no obstacles to their preferment in the Court or in the army. The emperors were for the most part indifferent or favourable to them. The priests in the Pagan society had but little influence, and do not appear to have taken any prominent part in the persecution till near the time of Diocletian. With the single exception of the Jews, no class held that doctrine of the criminality of error which has been the parent of most modern persecutions; and although the belief that great calamities were the result of neglecting or insulting the gods furnished the Pagans with a religious motive for persecution, this motive only acted on the occasion of some rare and exceptional catastrophe.(868) In Christian times, the first objects of the persecutor are to control education, to prevent the publication of any heterodox works, to institute such a minute police inspection as to render impossible the celebration of the worship he desires to suppress. But nothing of this kind was attempted, or indeed was possible, in the period we are considering. With the exception of the body-guard of the emperor, almost the whole army, which was of extremely moderate dimensions, was massed along the vast frontier of the Empire. The police force was of the scantiest kind, sufficient only to keep common order in the streets. The Government had done something to encourage, but absolutely nothing to control, education, and parents or societies were at perfect liberty to educate the young as they pleased. The expansion of literature, by reason of the facilities which slavery gave to transcription, was very great, and it was for the most part entirely uncontrolled.(869) Augustus, it is true, had caused some volumes of forged prophecies to be burnt,(870) and, under the tyranny of Tiberius and Domitian, political writers and historians who eulogised tyrannicide, or vehemently opposed the Empire, were persecuted; but the extreme indignation these acts elicited attests their rarity, and, on matters unconnected with politics, the liberty of literature was absolute.(871) In a word, the Church proselytised in a society in which toleration was the rule, and at a time when municipal, provincial, and personal independence had reached the highest point, when the ruling classes were for the most part absolutely indifferent to religious opinions, and when an unprecedented concourse of influences facilitated its progress.

When we reflect that these were the circumstances of the Church till the middle of the third century, we may readily perceive the absurdity of maintaining that Christianity was propagated in the face of such a fierce and continuous persecution that no opinions could have survived it without a miracle, or of arguing from the history of the early Church that persecution never has any real efficacy in suppressing truth. When, in addition to the circumstances under which it operated, we consider the unexampled means both of attraction and of intimidation that were possessed by the Church, we can have no difficulty in understanding that it should have acquired a magnitude that would enable it to defy the far more serious assaults it was still destined to endure. That it had acquired this extension we have abundant evidence. The language I have quoted from Lactantius is but a feeble echo of the emphatic statements of writers before the Decian persecution.(872) “There is no race of men, whether Greek or barbarian,” said Justin Martyr, “among whom prayers and thanks are not offered up in the name of the crucified.”(873) “We are but of yesterday,” cried Tertullian, “and we fill all your cities, islands, forts, councils, even the camps themselves, the tribes, the decuries, the palaces, the senate, and the forum.”(874) Eusebius has preserved a letter of Cornelius, Bishop of Rome, containing a catalogue of the officers of his Church at the time of the Decian persecution. It consisted of one bishop, forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, fifty-two exorcists, readers, and janitors. The Church also supported more than fifteen hundred widows, and poor or suffering persons.(875)

The Decian persecution, which broke out in A.D. 249, and was probably begun in hopes of restoring the Empire to its ancient discipline, and eliminating from it all extraneous and unpatriotic influences,(876) is the first example of a deliberate attempt, supported by the whole machinery of provincial government, and extending over the entire surface of the Empire, to extirpate Christianity from the world. It would be difficult to find language too strong to paint its horrors. The ferocious instincts of the populace, that were long repressed, burst out anew, and they were not only permitted, but encouraged by the rulers. Far worse than the deaths which menaced those who shrank from the idolatrous sacrifices, were the hideous and prolonged tortures by which the magistrates often sought to subdue the constancy of the martyr, the nameless outrages that were sometimes inflicted on the Christian virgin.(877) The Church, enervated by a long peace, and deeply infected with the vices of the age, tottered beneath the blow. It had long since arrived at the period when men were Christians not by conviction, but through family relationship; when the more opulent Christians vied in luxury with the Pagans among whom they mixed, and when even the bishops were, in many instances, worldly aspirants after civil offices. It is not, therefore, surprising that the defection was very large. The Pagans marked with triumphant ridicule, and the Fathers with a burning indignation, the thousands who thronged to the altars at the very commencement of persecution, the sudden collapse of the most illustrious churches, the eagerness with which the offer of provincial governors to furnish certificates of apostasy, without exacting a compliance with the conditions which those certificates attested, was accepted by multitudes.(878) The question whether those who abandoned the faith should afterwards be readmitted to communion, became the chief question that divided the Novatians, and one of the questions that divided the Montanists from the Catholics, while the pretensions of the confessors to furnish indulgences, remitting the penances imposed by the bishops, led to a conflict which contributed very largely to establish the undisputed ascendancy of the episcopacy. But the Decian persecution, though it exhibits the Church in a somewhat less noble attitude than the persecutions which preceded and which followed it, was adorned by many examples of extreme courage and devotion, displayed in not a few cases by those who were physically among the frailest of mankind. It was of a kind eminently fitted to crush the Church. Had it taken place at an earlier period, had it been continued for a long succession of years, Christianity, without a miracle, must have perished. But the Decian persecution fell upon a Church which had existed for two centuries, and it lasted less than two years.(879) Its intensity varied much in different provinces. In Alexandria and the neighbouring towns, where a popular tumult had anticipated the menaces of the Government, it was extremely horrible.(880) In Carthage, at first, the proconsul being absent, no capital sentence was passed, but on the arrival of that functionary the penalty of death, accompanied by dreadful tortures, was substituted for that of exile or imprisonment.(881) The rage of the people was especially directed against the bishop St. Cyprian, who prudently retired till the storm had passed.(882) In general, it was observed that the object of the rulers was much less to slay than to vanquish the Christians. Horrible tortures were continually employed to extort an apostasy, and, when those tortures proved vain, great numbers were ultimately released.

The Decian persecution is remarkable in Christian archæology as being, it is believed, the first occasion in which the Christian catacombs were violated. Those vast subterranean corridors, lined with tombs and expanding very frequently into small chapels adorned with paintings, often of no mean beauty, had for a long period been an inviolable asylum in seasons of persecution. The extreme sanctity which the Romans were accustomed to attach to the place of burial repelled the profane, and as early, it is said, as the very beginning of the third century, the catacombs were recognised as legal possessions of the Church.(883) The Roman legislators, however unfavourable to the formation of guilds or associations, made an exception in favour of burial societies, or associations of men subscribing a certain sum to ensure to each member a decent burial in ground which belonged to the corporation. The Church is believed to have availed itself of this privilege, and to have attained, in this capacity, a legal existence. The tombs, which were originally the properties of distinct families, became in this manner an ecclesiastical domain, and the catacombs were, from perhaps the first, made something more than places of burial.(884) The chapels with which they abound, and which are of the smallest dimensions and utterly unfit for general worship, were probably mortuary chapels, and may have also been employed in the services commemorating the martyrs, while the ordinary worship was probably at first conducted in the private houses of the Christians. The decision of Alexander Severus, which I have already noticed, is the earliest notice we possess of the existence of buildings specially devoted to the Christian services; but we cannot tell how long before this time they may have existed in Rome.(885) In serious persecution, however, they would doubtless have to be abandoned; and, as a last resort, the catacombs proved a refuge from the persecutors.

The reign of Decius only lasted about two years, and before its close the persecution had almost ceased.(886) On the accession of his son Gallus, in the last month of A.D. 251, there was for a short time perfect peace; but Gallus resumed the persecution in the spring of the following year, and although apparently not very severe, or very general, it seems to have continued to his death, which took place a year after.(887) Two Roman bishops, Cornelius, who had succeeded the martyred Fabianus, and his successor Lucius, were at this time put to death.(888) Valerian, who ascended the throne A.D. 254, at first not only tolerated, but warmly patronised the Christians, and attracted so many to his Court that his house, in the language of a contemporary, appeared “the Church of the Lord.”(889) But after rather more than four years his disposition changed. At the persuasion, it is said, of an Egyptian magician, named Macrianus, he signed in A.D. 258 an edict of persecution condemning Christian ecclesiastics and senators to death, and other Christians to exile, or to the forfeiture of their property, and prohibiting them from entering the catacombs.(890) A sanguinary and general persecution ensued. Among the victims were Sixtus, the Bishop of Rome, who perished in the catacombs,(891) and Cyprian, who was exiled, and afterwards beheaded, and was the first Bishop of Carthage who suffered martyrdom.(892) At last, Valerian, having been captured by the Persians, Gallienus, in A.D. 260, ascended the throne, and immediately proclaimed a perfect toleration of the Christians.(893)

The period from the accession of Decius, in A.D. 249, to the accession of Gallienus, in A.D. 260, which I have now very briefly noticed, was by far the most disastrous the Church had yet endured. With the exception of about five years in the reigns of Gallus and Valerian, the persecution was continuous, though it varied much in its intensity and its range. During the first portion, if measured, not by the number of deaths, but by the atrocity of the tortures inflicted, it was probably as severe as any upon record. It was subsequently directed chiefly against the leading clergy, and, as we have seen, four Roman bishops perished. In addition to the political reasons that inspired it, the popular fanaticism caused by great calamities, which were ascribed to anger of the gods at the neglect of their worship, had in this as in former periods a great influence. Political disasters, which foreshadowed clearly the approaching downfall of the Empire, were followed by fearful and general famines and plagues. St. Cyprian, in a treatise addressed to one of the persecutors who was most confident in ascribing these things to the Christians, presents us with an extremely curious picture both of the general despondency that had fallen upon the Empire, and of the manner in which these calamities were regarded by the Christians. Like most of his co-religionists, the saint was convinced that the closing scene of the earth was at hand. The decrepitude of the world, he said, had arrived, the forces of nature were almost exhausted, the sun had no longer its old lustre, or the soil its old fertility, the spring time had grown less lovely, and the autumn less bounteous, the energy of man had decayed, and all things were moving rapidly to the end. Famines and plagues were the precursors of the day of judgment. They were sent to warn and punish a rebellious world, which, still bowing down before idols, persecuted the believers in the truth. “So true is this, that the Christians are never persecuted without the sky manifesting at once the Divine displeasure.” The conception of a converted Empire never appears to have flashed across the mind of the saint;(894) the only triumph he predicted for the Church was that of another world; and to the threats of the persecutors he rejoined by fearful menaces. “A burning, scorching fire will for ever torment those who are condemned; there will be no respite or end to their torments. We shall through eternity contemplate in their agonies those who for a short time contemplated us in tortures, and for the brief pleasure which the barbarity of our persecutors took in feasting their eyes upon an inhuman spectacle, they will be themselves exposed as an eternal spectacle of agony.” As a last warning, calamity after calamity broke upon the world, and, with the solemnity of one on whom the shadow of death had already fallen, St. Cyprian adjured the persecutors to repent and to be saved.(895)

The accession of Gallienus introduced the Church to a new period of perfect peace, which, with a single inconsiderable exception, continued for no less than forty years. The exception was furnished by Aurelian, who during nearly the whole of his reign had been exceedingly favourable to the Christians, and had even been appealed to by the orthodox bishops, who desired him to expel from Antioch a prelate they had excommunicated for heresy,(896) but who, at the close of his reign, intended to persecute. He was assassinated, however, according to one account, when he was just about to sign the decrees; according to another, before they had been sent through the provinces; and if any persecution actually took place, it was altogether inconsiderable.(897) Christianity, during all this time, was not only perfectly free, it was greatly honoured. Christians were appointed governors of the provinces, and were expressly exonerated from the duty of sacrificing. The bishops were treated by the civil authorities with profound respect. The palaces of the emperor were filled with Christian servants, who were authorised freely to profess their religion, and were greatly valued for their fidelity. The popular prejudice seems to have been lulled to rest; and it has been noticed that the rapid progress of the faith excited no tumult or hostility. Spacious churches were erected in every quarter, and they could scarcely contain the multitude of worshippers.(898) In Rome itself, before the outburst of the Diocletian persecution, there were no less than forty churches.(899) The Christians may still have been outnumbered by the Pagans; but when we consider their organisation, their zeal, and their rapid progress, a speedy triumph appeared inevitable.

But before that triumph was achieved a last and a terrific ordeal was to be undergone. Diocletian, whose name has been somewhat unjustly associated with a persecution, the responsibility of which belongs far more to his colleague Galerius, having left the Christians in perfect peace for nearly eighteen years, suffered himself to be persuaded to make one more effort to eradicate the foreign creed. This emperor, who had risen by his merits from the humblest position, exhibited in all the other actions of his reign a moderate, placable, and conspicuously humane nature, and, although he greatly magnified the Imperial authority, the simplicity of his private life, his voluntary abdication, and, above all, his singularly noble conduct during many years of retirement, displayed a rare magnanimity of character. As a politician, he deserves, I think, to rank very high. Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius had been too fascinated by the traditions of the Republic, and by the austere teaching and retrospective spirit of the Stoics, to realise the necessity of adapting institutions to the wants of a luxurious and highly civilised people, and they therefore had little permanent influence upon the destinies of the Empire. But Diocletian invariably exhibited in his legislation a far-seeing and comprehensive mind, well aware of the condition of the society he ruled, and provident of distant events. Perceiving that Roman corruption was incurable, he attempted to regenerate the Empire by creating new centres of political life in the great and comparatively unperverted capitals of the provinces; and Nicomedia, which was his habitual residence, Carthage, Milan, and Ravenna, all received abundant tokens of his favour. He swept away or disregarded the obsolete and inefficient institutions of Republican liberty that still remained, and indeed gave his government a somewhat Oriental character; but, at the same time, by the bold, and, it must be admitted, very perilous measure of dividing the Empire into four sections, he abridged the power of each ruler, ensured the better supervision and increased authority of the provinces, and devised the first effectual check to those military revolts which had for some time been threatening the Empire with anarchy. With the same energetic statesmanship, we find him reorganising the whole system of taxation, and attempting, less wisely, to regulate commercial transactions. To such an emperor, the problem presented by the rapid progress and the profoundly anti-national character of Christianity must have been a matter of serious consideration, and the weaknesses of his character were most unfavourable to the Church; for Diocletian, with many noble qualities of heart and head, was yet superstitious, tortuous, nervous, and vacillating, and was too readily swayed by the rude and ferocious soldier, who was impetuously inciting him against the Christians.

The extreme passion which Galerius displayed on this subject is ascribed, in the first instance, to the influence of his mother, who was ardently devoted to the Pagan worship. He is himself painted in dark colours by the Christian writers as a man of boundless and unbridled sensuality, of an imperiousness that rose to fury at opposition, and of a cruelty which had long passed the stage of callousness, and become a fiendish delight, in the infliction and contemplation of suffering.(900) His strong attachment to Paganism made him at length the avowed representative of his party, which several causes had contributed to strengthen. The philosophy of the Empire had by this time fully passed into its Neoplatonic and Pythagorean phases, and was closely connected with religious observances. Hierocles and Porphyry, who were among its most eminent exponents, had both written books against Christianity, and the Oriental religions fostered much fanaticism among the people. Political interests united with superstition, for the Christians were now a very formidable body in the State. Their interests were supposed to be represented by the Cæsar Constantius Chlorus, and the religion was either adopted, or at least warmly favoured, by the wife and daughter of Diocletian (the latter of whom was married to Galerius(901)), and openly professed by some of the leading officials at the Court. A magnificent church crowned the hill facing the palace of the emperor at Nicomedia. The bishops were, in most cities, among the most active and influential citizens, and their influence was not always exercised for good. A few cases, in which an ill-considered zeal led Christians to insult the Pagan worship, one or two instances of Christians refusing to serve in the army, because they believed military life repugnant to their creed, a scandalous relaxation of morals, that had arisen during the long peace, and the fierce and notorious discord displayed by the leaders of the Church, contributed in different ways to accelerate the persecution.(902)

For a considerable time Diocletian resisted all the urgency of Galerius against the Christians, and the only measure taken was the dismissal by the latter sovereign of a number of Christian officers from the army. In A.D. 303, however, Diocletian yielded to the entreaties of his colleague, and a fearful persecution, which many circumstances conspired to stimulate, began. The priests, in one of the public ceremonies, had declared that the presence of Christians prevented the entrails from showing the accustomed signs. The oracle of Apollo, at Miletus, being consulted by Diocletian, exhorted him to persecute the Christians. A fanatical Christian, who avowed his deed, and expiated it by a fearful death, tore down the first edict of persecution, and replaced it by a bitter taunt against the emperor. Twice, after the outburst of the persecution, the palace at Nicomedia, where Diocletian and Galerius were residing, was set on fire, and the act was ascribed, not without probability, to a Christian hand, as were also some slight disturbances that afterwards arose in Syria.(903) Edict after edict followed in rapid succession. The first ordered the destruction of all Christian churches and of all Bibles, menaced with death the Christians if they assembled in secret for Divine worship, and deprived them of all civil rights. A second edict ordered all ecclesiastics to be thrown into prison, while a third edict ordered that these prisoners, and a fourth edict that all Christians, should be compelled by torture to sacrifice. At first Diocletian refused to permit their lives to be taken, but after the fire at Nicomedia this restriction was removed. Many were burnt alive, and the tortures by which the persecutors sought to shake their resolution were so dreadful that even such a death seemed an act of mercy. The only province of the Empire where the Christians were at peace was Gaul, which had received its baptism of blood under Marcus Aurelius, but was now governed by Constantius Chlorus, who protected them from personal molestation, though he was compelled, in obedience to the emperor, to destroy their churches. In Spain, which was also under the government, but not under the direct inspection, of Constantius, the persecution was moderate, but in all other parts of the Empire it raged with fierceness till the abdication of Diocletian in 305. This event almost immediately restored peace to the Western provinces,(904) but greatly aggravated the misfortunes of the Eastern Christians, who passed under the absolute rule of Galerius. Horrible, varied, and prolonged tortures were employed to quell their fortitude, and their final resistance was crowned by the most dreadful of all deaths, roasting over a slow fire. It was not till A.D. 311, eight years after the commencement of the general persecution, ten years after the first measure against the Christians, that the Eastern persecution ceased. Galerius, the arch-enemy of the Christians, was struck down by a fearful disease. His body, it is said, became a mass of loathsome and fœtid sores—a living corpse, devoured by countless worms, and exhaling the odour of the charnel-house. He who had shed so much innocent blood, shrank himself from a Roman death. In his extreme anguish he appealed in turn to physician after physician, and to temple after temple. At last he relented towards the Christians. He issued a proclamation restoring them to liberty, permitting them to rebuild their churches, and asking their prayers for his recovery.(905) The era of persecution now closed. One brief spasm, indeed, due to the Cæsar Maximian, shot through the long afflicted Church of Asia Minor;(906) but it was rapidly allayed. The accession of Constantine, the proclamation of Milan, A.D. 313, the defeat of Licinius, and the conversion of the conqueror, speedily followed, and Christianity became the religion of the Empire.

Such, so far as we can trace it, is the outline of the last and most terrible persecution inflicted on the early Church. Unfortunately we can place little reliance on any information we possess about the number of its victims, the provocations that produced it, or the objects of its authors. The ecclesiastical account of these matters is absolutely unchecked by any Pagan statement, and it is derived almost exclusively from the history of Eusebius, and from the treatise “On the Deaths of the Persecutors,” which is ascribed to Lactantius. Eusebius was a writer of great learning, and of critical abilities not below the very low level of his time, and he had personal knowledge of some of the events in Palestine which he has recorded; but he had no pretensions whatever to impartiality. He has frankly told us that his principle in writing history was to conceal the facts that were injurious to the reputation of the Church;(907) and although his practice was sometimes better than his principle, the portrait he has drawn of the saintly virtues of his patron Constantine, which we are able to correct from other sources, abundantly proves with how little scruple the courtly bishop could stray into the paths of fiction. The treatise of Lactantius, which has been well termed “a party pamphlet,” is much more untrustworthy. It is a hymn of exultation over the disastrous ends of the persecutors, and especially of Galerius, written in a strain of the fiercest and most passionate invective, and bearing on every page unequivocal signs of inaccuracy and exaggeration. The whole history of the early persecution was soon enveloped in a thick cloud of falsehood. A notion, derived from prophecy, that ten great persecutions must precede the day of judgment, at an early period stimulated the imagination of the Christians, who believed that day to be imminent; and it was natural that as time rolled on men should magnify the sufferings that had been endured, and that in credulous and uncritical ages a single real incident should be often multiplied, diversified, and exaggerated in many distinct narratives. Monstrous fictions, such as the crucifixion of ten thousand Christians upon Mount Ararat under Trajan, the letter of Tiberianus to Trajan, complaining that he was weary of ceaselessly killing Christians in Palestine, and the Theban legion of six thousand men, said to have been massacred by Maximilian, were boldly propagated and readily believed.(908) The virtue supposed to attach to the bones of martyrs, and the custom, and, after a decree of the second Council of Nice, in the eighth century, the obligation, of placing saintly remains under every altar, led to an immense multiplication of spurious relics, and a corresponding demand for legends. Almost every hamlet soon required a patron martyr and a local legend, which the nearest monastery was usually ready to supply. The monks occupied their time in composing and disseminating innumerable acts of martyrs, which purported to be strictly historical, but which were, in fact, deliberate, though it was thought edifying, forgeries; and pictures of hideous tortures, enlivened by fantastic miracles, soon became the favourite popular literature. To discriminate accurately the genuine acts of martyrs from the immense mass that were fabricated by the monks, has been attempted by Ruinart, but is perhaps impossible. Modern criticism has, however, done much to reduce the ancient persecutions to their true dimensions. The famous essay of Dodwell, which appeared towards the close of the seventeenth century, though written, I think, a little in the spirit of a special pleader, and not free from its own exaggerations, has had a great and abiding influence upon ecclesiastical history, and the still more famous chapter which Gibbon devoted to the subject rendered the conclusions of Dodwell familiar to the world.

Notwithstanding the great knowledge and critical acumen displayed in this chapter, few persons, I imagine, can rise from its perusal without a feeling both of repulsion and dissatisfaction. The complete absence of all sympathy with the heroic courage manifested by the martyrs, and the frigid and, in truth, most unphilosophical severity with which the historian has weighed the words and actions of men engaged in the agonies of a deadly struggle, must repel every generous nature, while the persistence with which he estimates persecutions by the number of deaths rather than by the amount of suffering, diverts the mind from the really distinctive atrocities of the Pagan persecutions. He has observed, that while the anger of the persecutors was at all times especially directed against the bishops, we know from Eusebius that only nine bishops were put to death in the entire Diocletian persecution, and that the particular enumeration, which the historian made on the spot, of all the martyrs who perished during this persecution in Palestine, which was under the government of Galerius, and was therefore exposed to the full fury of the storm, shows the entire number to have been ninety-two. Starting from this fact, Gibbon, by a well-known process of calculation, has estimated the probable number of martyrs in the whole Empire, during the Diocletian persecution, at about two thousand, which happens to be the number of persons burnt by the Spanish Inquisition during the presidency of Torquemada alone,(909) and about one twenty-fifth of the number who are said to have suffered for their religion in the Netherlands in the reign of Charles V.(910) But although, if measured by the number of martyrs, the persecutions inflicted by Pagans were less terrible than those inflicted by Christians, there is one aspect in which the former appear by far the more atrocious, and a truthful historian should suffer no false delicacy to prevent him from unflinchingly stating it. The conduct of the provincial governors, even when they were compelled by the Imperial edicts to persecute, was often conspicuously merciful. The Christian records contain several examples of rulers who refused to search out the Christians, who discountenanced or even punished their accusers, who suggested ingenious evasions of the law, who tried by earnest and patient kindness to overcome what they regarded as insane obstinacy, and who, when their efforts had proved vain, mitigated by their own authority the sentence they were compelled to pronounce. It was only on very rare occasions that any, except conspicuous leaders of the Church, and sometimes persons of a servile condition, were in danger; the time that was conceded them before their trials gave them great facilities for escaping, and, even when condemned, Christian women had usually full permission to visit them in their prisons, and to console them by their charity. But, on the other hand, Christian writings, which it is impossible to dispute, continually record barbarities inflicted upon converts, so ghastly and so hideous that the worst horrors of the Inquisition pale before them. It is, indeed, true that burning heretics by a slow fire was one of the accomplishments of the Inquisitors, and that they were among the most consummate masters of torture of their age. It is true that in one Catholic country they introduced the atrocious custom of making the spectacle of men burnt alive for their religious opinions an element in the public festivities.(911) It is true, too, that the immense majority of the acts of the martyrs are the transparent forgeries of lying monks; but it is also true that among the authentic records of Pagan persecutions there are histories which display, perhaps more vividly than any other, both the depth of cruelty to which human nature may sink, and the heroism of resistance it may attain. There was a time when it was the just boast of the Romans, that no refinements of cruelty, no prolongations of torture, were admitted in their stern but simple penal code. But all this was changed. Those hateful games, which made the spectacle of human suffering and death the delight of all classes, had spread their brutalising influence wherever the Roman name was known, had rendered millions absolutely indifferent to the sight of human suffering, had produced in many, in the very centre of an advanced civilisation, a relish and a passion for torture, a rapture and an exultation in watching the spasms of extreme agony, such as an African or an American savage alone can equal. The most horrible recorded instances of torture were usually inflicted, either by the populace, or in their presence, in the arena.(912) We read of Christians bound in chairs of red-hot iron, while the stench of their half-consumed flesh rose in a suffocating cloud to heaven; of others who were torn to the very bone by shells, or hooks of iron; of holy virgins given over to the lust of the gladiator, or to the mercies of the pander; of two hundred and twenty-seven converts sent on one occasion to the mines, each with the sinews of one leg severed by a red-hot iron, and with an eye scooped from its socket; of fires so slow that the victims writhed for hours in their agonies; of bodies torn limb from limb, or sprinkled with burning lead; of mingled salt and vinegar poured over the flesh that was bleeding from the rack; of tortures prolonged and varied through entire days. For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men, and even weak girls, endured these things without flinching, when one word would have freed them from their sufferings. No opinion we may form of the proceedings of priests in a later age should impair the reverence with which we bend before the martyr’s tomb.

FOOTNOTES

1 The opinions of Hume on moral questions are grossly misrepresented by many writers, who persist in describing them as substantially identical with those of Bentham. How far Hume was from denying the existence of a moral sense, the following passages will show:—“The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praiseworthy or blameable ... depends on some internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.”—_Enquiry Concerning Morals_, § 1. “The hypothesis we embrace ... defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to the spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation.”—Ibid. Append. I. “The crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation, which, by the structure of human nature, we unavoidably feel on the apprehension of barbarity or treachery.”—Ibid. “Reason instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favour of those which are useful and beneficial.”—Ibid. “As virtue is an end, and is desirable on its own account without fee or reward, merely for the immediate satisfaction it conveys, it is requisite that there should be some sentiment which it touches, some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other.”—Ibid. The two writers to whom Hume was most indebted were Hutcheson and Butler. In some interesting letters to the former (Burton’s _Life of Hume_, vol. i.), he discusses the points on which he differed from them.

2 “The chief thing therefore which lawgivers and other wise men that have laboured for the establishment of society have endeavoured, has been to make the people they were to govern believe that it was more beneficial for everybody to conquer than to indulge his appetites, and much better to mind the public than what seemed his private interest ... observing that none were either so savage as not to be charmed with praise, or so despicable as patiently to bear contempt, they justly concluded that flattery must be the most powerful argument that could be used to human creatures. Making use of this bewitching engine, they extolled the excellency of our nature above other animals ... by the help of which we were capable of performing the most noble achievements. Having, by this artful flattery, insinuated themselves into the hearts of men, they began to instruct them in the notions of honour and shame, &c.”—_Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue._

3 “I conceive that when a man deliberates whether he shall do a thing or not do it, he does nothing else but consider whether it be better for himself to do it or not to do it.”—Hobbes _On Liberty and Necessity._ “Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions.”—Ibid. _Leviathan_, part i. ch. xvi. “Obligation is the necessity of doing or omitting any action in order to be happy.”—Gay’s dissertation prefixed to King’s _Origin of Evil_, p. 36. “The only reason or motive by which individuals can possibly be induced to the practice of virtue, must be the feeling immediate or the prospect of future private happiness.”—Brown _On the Characteristics_, p. 159. “En tout temps, en tout lieu, tant en matière de morale qu’en matière d’esprit, c’est l’intérêt personnel qui dicte le jugement des particuliers, et l’intérêt général qui dicte celui des nations.... Tout homme ne prend dans ses jugements conseil que de son intérêt.”—Helvétius _De l’Esprit_, discours ii. “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.... The principle of utility recognises this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.”—Bentham’s _Principles of Morals and Legislation_, ch. i. “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.”—Ibid. “Je regarde l’amour éclairé de nous-mêmes comme le principe de tout sacrifice moral.”—D’Alembert quoted by D. Stewart, _Active and Moral Powers_, vol. i. p. 220.

4 “Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good; pain is in itself an evil, and, indeed, without exception, the only evil, or else the words good and evil have no meaning.”—Bentham’s _Principles of Morals and Legislation_, ch. x.

5 “Good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us. Moral good and evil then is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law whereby good or evil is drawn on us by the will and power of the law maker, which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending our observance or breach of the law by the decree of the law maker, is that we call reward or punishment.”—Locke’s _Essay_,