viii. 1, specially mentions how provinces were occasionally ruled by

Christian governors, and calls attention to a Phrygian city whose whole population including officials were Christians. He was writing of the last years of the third century. Such Christian officials must have had great allowances made to them, and they must have often availed themselves of the licence permitted to believers on the occasion of purely State ceremonials, which were literally permeated with references to the old State religion.

Instances and examples from the Old Testament books were adduced by the teachers of the gentler school of Christian life in support of the allowances made to believers to retain their court appointments and civil service offices, and to carry on their professions in spite of the idolatrous associations connected with these offices and callings.

Great saints such as Daniel--revered patriarchs such as Joseph--had been ministers of mighty idol-worshipping sovereigns, and must have been present at and given a certain countenance to official pagan ceremonies. Naaman, the eminent servant of the King of Syria, after he had accepted the worship of the God of Israel, even asked the great prophet Elisha permission to accompany his royal master into the temple of the god Rimmon, and to pay obeisance to the Syrian idol on State occasions; and asked that he might be forgiven for this apparent act of idolatry. In reply, Elisha simply bade him “go in peace” (2 Kings v. 18-19).

But in spite of these kindly allowances, these gentler rules and directions, the condition of Christians, even for those, and they certainly were in the majority, who followed the teaching of the more kindly and lenient school, was very hard and difficult. In the family life--in public life, the searchings of heart of a true believer must have been often very acute and distressing, and their position most precarious; and in those times when a wave of pagan fanaticism swept over the imperial court, the province, or the city, no maxims of earthly prudence and caution, however carefully followed out, would have been able to save them from prosecution; and prosecution was invariably followed by the breaking up of their homes, by rigorous imprisonment, confiscation of their property, loss of rank and position, too often by torture and death.

To turn once more to the sterner and smaller school of “Rigourists,” for these, after all, were “les âmes d’élite” of the Christians in the first three centuries; in later times such men and women possibly were termed fanatics, they have been often branded as wild and unpractical persons; but it was to these heroic souls after all that in great measure Christianity owed its final victory.

The wonderful and rapid spread of Christianity noticeable after the Milan toleration Edict of Constantine, A.D. 313, has often been commented upon with surprise. From being a persecuted and despised cult, Christianity became, long before the fourth century had run its course, _the religion_ of the Empire; it had previously gained evidently the hearts of the people in well-nigh all the provinces of the mighty Empire.

Now no imperial edicts--no mere favour and patronage of the Emperor and his court, could ever have won for Christianity that widespread and general acceptance among the people so noticeable within fifty years of the Milan proclamation of Constantine.[82] _Something_ more was needed. For a little over two hundred years the Christians had been sowing the seeds of a new and nobler view of life--“it had gradually taught the supreme sanctity of love--it had presented an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest as well as all that was noblest on earth; and one great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed.... Noble lives crowned by heroic deaths were the best arguments of the infant Church.”[83]

There is no doubt but that a deep impression had been gradually made upon the masses (_i.e._ the people generally of the Empire) by the undaunted behaviour under suffering, of the confessors in the two centuries which followed the death of Peter and Paul; and this impression was deepened by the events connected with the last terrible persecution of Diocletian. The extent of this last onslaught, the awful severity of its edicts, the fearful thoroughness with which these edicts were carried out, the numbers, the constancy and brave patience of the confessors, went home to the hearts of the indifferent; it affected even the enemies of the Church, and brought about a complete revulsion of feeling towards the once hated and despised sect.

And it must be remembered that the examples of the marvellous endurance of suffering, the constancy, the brave patience, the heroic deaths, were drawn in a vast majority of conspicuous cases from the school of Rigourists, from that company of men and women of intense, perhaps of exaggerated earnestness, who listened to and obeyed the burning words of a Tertullian or an Hippolytus, rather than to the gentler counsels of a Minucius Felix and the teachers who pointed out to Christians a way of living in the world which only rarely required such tremendous sacrifices as home and family, career and profession, even life itself--things very dear to men.

Surely no just historian would dare to speak slightingly of these splendid lives of utter sacrifice of self, when he reflects on the power which such lives have exercised over their fellow-men. The debt which Christianity owes to this stern school of Rigourists is simply measureless.

In the last half of the third century there arose a Christian poet--the first great songman who had appeared since the famous singers of the Augustan age had passed away. The popularity of Prudentius has been enduring; for centuries in many lands his striking and original poems have been read and re-read. Among his poems the most eagerly sought after have been the hymns descriptive of and in praise of the martyrs for the “Name’s” sake. These loved poems are known as “_Peri-Stephanôn_”--the Book of the (Martyrs’) Crowns.

It is the halo of glory surrounding these martyrs or confessors that especially strikes the historian. We see in these popular poems what a profound, what a lasting impression the sufferings of the martyrs had made on the peoples of the Roman Empire. The saint-sufferers, men or women, became soon an object of something more than reverence.

The heroic personages of Prudentius belong to no one land, to no solitary nationality. Nowhere was the truth of the well-known saying that “the blood of the martyr was the seed of the Church” more conspicuously exemplified than in the songs of Prudentius. It has been remarked with great force and truth that in the burning lilts of this great Spanish poet of the later years of the fourth century, we must perforce recognize something more than the inspiration of a solitary individual. We seem to hear in his impassioned words the echoes of the voice of the people.[84]

VIII

WHAT THE RELIGION OF JESUS OFFERED IN RETURN FOR THE HARDSHIPS CHRISTIANS HAD TO ENDURE IN THE EARLY CENTURIES

Such was the life of a Christian for nearly two hundred and fifty years after the deaths of Peter and Paul at Rome.

For _all_, as we have urged, even for the majority who were disciples of the gentler, less exacting school of teaching, but who generally accepted the yoke and burden of Christ, the life must have been very hard and difficult, at times even full of danger; while for _some_, _i.e._, for the disciples of the school of “Rigourists,” so hard--so austere--so full of nameless perils, that men now can scarcely credit that any could really have lived so difficult, so painful a life--could have listened to and striven in real earnest to obey such rules as the great Rigourist master, Tertullian, laid down for the faithful; as, for instance:

“Fast--because rigid fasting is a preparation for martyrdom; tortures will have no material to work on; your dry skins will better resist the iron claws; your blood, already exhausted, will flow less freely.”[85]

“Women, shun the marriage bond. To what purpose will you bear children, seeing you are longing to be taken out of this sinful world, and you are desirous to send your children before you[86] (to glory).”

“Ye women (take heed how you adorn yourselves), for I know not how the wrist that is accustomed to the (gemmed) bracelet will endure the roughness of the chain. I know not how the leg that has rejoiced in the golden anklet will endure the harsh restraint of the iron fetters. I fear the neck hung round with a chain of pearls and emeralds will leave scanty room for the sword of the executioner.” “Dear sisters, let us meditate on hardships, then when they come to us we shall not feel them; let us give up luxuries and we shall not regret them; for Christians now, remember, pass their time not in gold, but in iron. At this moment are the angels weaving for you robes of martyrdom.”[87]

* * * * *

But in return for all this, Christianity offered much--in truth, a splendid guerdon for the life of sacrifice. In the first place, the Christian was delivered from the dread spectre which constantly haunted the life of the pagan--_the fear of death_. Throughout life, sleeping and waking, to the pagan of all ranks and orders, death was an enemy. What the men of the pagan Empire in the early Christian centuries felt in respect of the great universal foe--what they thought of it--is well shown in the epitaphs on the pagan tombs of the first, second, and third centuries.[88]

Complete freedom from this ever-present dread was the immediate reward received by the believer: so far was death from being an enemy, that to the Christian it appeared as the best and most longed for friend. Again and again the Church was compelled to restrain rather than to encourage candidates for martyrdom. From Paul, who wrote how “he desired to depart and be with Christ, which was far better” (Phil. i. 23); from Ignatius, whose passionate desire for a martyr’s death appears and reappears, in his Letter to the Romans, in such words as “it is good for me to die for Jesus Christ, rather than to reign over the farthest bounds of the earth”; “Suffer me to receive the pure light when I come thither, then I shall be a man indeed”; “Let me be an imitator of the passion of my God” (_To the Romans_, vi.); from the thousand epitaphs in the catacomb tombs, which we can still read, we gather this knowledge--the absolute freedom of the Christian from that fear of death which weighed so heavily upon all pagan society.

The very expressions used by the disciples of the first centuries when speaking of the dread enemy,[89] bear curious witness to the new relation of the believer to the ancient foe of man; they spoke of death as “a passage into life”--as “a sleep.” The spot where the dead were laid was now termed “a cemetery”--“a place of sleeping”; burial was called “depositio”--the body laid up as it were in trust.

Cyprian the saintly, the martyr Bishop of Carthage, well voices the feelings of Christians in the matter of death the friend:[90] “Let us think what we mean when we speak of the presence of Christ (after death), of the increasing hosts of our friends, the loved, the reverenced, the sainted who are there. Cyprian cannot even mourn the departed--he only misses them as friends gone on a long journey. He is unable to bear the putting on black garments of mourning, in memory of those who wear the fadeless white.” “Put the terror of death quite away--think only of the deathlessness beyond.” “Let us greet the day which gives to each of us his own country ... which restores us to paradise. Who that has lived in foreign lands would not hasten to go back to his own country?... We look on paradise as our country.”

The wondrous joy which came to the Christian in the assemblies we have been picturing--the fact of the new Brotherhood--the feeling of the presence of the Master in their midst, watching over them--has been already dwelt upon at some length.

The blessed consciousness of _the forgiveness of all sin_, the knowledge that in repentance and in prayer they could ever wash anew their scarred robes white in the blood of the Lamb, was a source of perpetual and ever-recurring joy to the earnest Christian. The doctrine of the atonement ever would give them constant comfort and confidence in all the difficulties and dangers of common everyday life--“Though their sins were as scarlet they would become white as snow,” was an ancient Hebrew saying of Isaiah. It was one of the precious treasures inherited by the Christian from the Jewish Church. And in the sorely harassed and tempted life of the world of Rome the words would be often repeated by the believers, with the new striking Christian addition--“when washed in the blood of the Lamb,” and the memory of the beautiful saying would ever supply fresh courage for the conflict.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most powerful and sustaining of all the Christian beliefs, the one that never for an instant was absent from their thoughts, was the _hope_--aye, more than hope, the certainty that bliss indescribable awaited the soul of the happy redeemed _the moment_ it quitted the body--“To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise”--a wonderful promise, indeed, of the Redeemer, which must have brought ineffable sweetness and repose into thousands of storm-tossed hearts,--a promise which must have made up for many a hard and painful struggle. The life so hard and difficult--so full of dangers and perplexities--would soon come to an end, and then _at once_ the beatific vision would be their guerdon, and rest and peace and joy would be the portion of the redeemed souls for ever.

Our picture of the inner life of the Christian in the early Christian centuries would be incomplete were we not to allude to the influence, perhaps scarcely recognised but ever at work, of portions of the “Revelation” of S. John. Holding, of course, in the teaching of the Christian masters a very different position to the Gospels, which, of course, formed the authoritative basis of all Christian instruction, the “Revelation” occupied a peculiar and singularly influential place in the thoughts of the early harassed believers.

Many of the more mystical and obscure sections of that wonderful composition which was very generally accepted as the work of the beloved apostle, we may assume were little dwelt upon either in public teaching or in private meditation; the mystic prophecies of the seer were, comparatively speaking, but little read, and received then as now different interpretations; but interspersed with these prophecies, and not necessarily connected with them, occur passages of surpassing beauty, in which pictures of the heaven-life are painted by no mortal hand. It was these which arrested the imagination, and found a home in many a Christian heart. The passages which contained these pictures were no doubt repeated again and again by lonely harassed men and women in the silent watches of the night, in the public worship, in the study chamber, especially in the hour of danger and trial.

The _hope_ of a glorious eternity was vividly painted in several remarkable passages of S. John’s great Vision of Heaven and the future things. The disciples of the sterner school, who were trained so to speak for martyrdom, felt themselves specially addressed when the Seer told his vision of the thrones and of those who sat on them,--they would occupy the place of the souls of those who had been slain for the witness of Jesus (Rev. xx. 4); and again they would call to mind that when the Seer asked who were these arrayed in white robes, and whence came they? he was told that these were they which came out of great tribulation, and who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb; and that therefore were they before the throne of God, and that from their eyes God would wipe away all tears (Rev. vii. 13-17).

To the disciples of the gentler school, too, words of immortal hope were spoken often in the same Book which spoke as no writing of earth had ever spoken before of the heaven-life. The Seer heard as it were the voice of _a great multitude_, and said how blessed they were which are called to the marriage-supper of the Lamb; and the same Seer heard how there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying; and again repeated the glorious promise that His servants (_all_ His servants) should see His face, and that they should reign for ever and ever (Rev. xix. 6, 9, xxi. 4, xxii. 4, 5).

Moreover, they read and pondered over that most beautiful, most exhaustive promise made to _all_ His faithful servants,--not only to the martyr band,--“Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city (of God).” (Rev. xxii. 14, REVISED VERSION).

* * * * *

These and many other like sunlit sayings of the Book of Life in the Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation of S. John were ever ringing in the ears of the Christians of the first days, and telling them of the _immortal hope_ which was their blessed treasure,--words which sweetened their hard and too frequently painful lot, which made them feel that they had made a good exchange when they gave up the fleeting and often sinful pleasures of earth for the sure hope of the immortal joys of heaven. They felt how poor and tawdry after all were the things they had renounced in comparison with what awaited them when the short and weary period of human life came to an end.

In spite of what the believers renounced for the Name’s sake, notwithstanding the many daily trials and dangers to which they were ever exposed, they were strangely happy with a new happiness quite unknown in the old pagan world, with a joy no man could take from them. Pagan society, whenever it deigned to notice them, treated them with a contemptuous pity, which too often shaded into positive hatred. We see this in the “Acts” of the Martyrs from the questions put to them by the Roman officials when they were brought before the tribunals, simply because they were Christians. This was the estimate of the sect entertained by men like the great Antonine Emperors, Pius and Marcus. The summary of Fronto the famous rhetorician, Marcus’ tutor and friend, reproduced in the discourse of Cæcilius in the Dialogue of Minucius Felix, repeats too clearly the same disparaging view coloured with contempt and scarcely veiled hatred.

Nowhere is the pagan conception of the misery and wretchedness of the Christian life more clearly expressed than in the picturesque and graphic poem of Rutilius Namatianus,[91] a contemporary of Paulinus of Nola in the first years of the fifth century.

It is a comparatively late pagan criticism of Christianity, but it admirably expresses the common view of pagan society, and exactly coincides with the opinion of such eminent Romans as Marcus and his friend Fronto in the second century.

“Is there any sense,” writes Rutilius, “in living a wretched life for fear of becoming unhappy? these Christians love to torture themselves: they are more cruel even than the offended gods. I ask the question, has not the sect the secret of poisons more deadly than any possessed by Circe; for Circe only brought about a danger in the body, but these people change the very soul?”

The life of a Christian in the first two hundred and fifty years of the era was, however, as we have shown, emphatically no sad and mournful, no wretched existence. It was a life unspeakably bright and happy, undreamed of by any poet or philosopher in the many-sided story of paganism.