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CHRISTIAN HISTORY 
 
 IN ITS 
 
 Three Great Periods 
 
 EARLY CHRISTIANITY 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH HENRY V ALLEN 
 
 Author of "Hebrew Men and Times," "Our Liberal 
 Movement in Theology," &c. 
 
 Cujus omnis religio est sine scelere ac macula vivere 
 
 Lactantius 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS 
 
 1883 
 
Copyright, 
 By Joseph Henry Allen. 
 
 University Press: 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
EFACE 
 
 T 1 1HESE volumes, of which the first was originally 
 -■- published under the title "Fragments of Chris- 
 tian History," were prepared in the regular course of 
 duty in the department of Ecclesiastical History in 
 Harvard University. Taken together, the two em- 
 brace the entire development of Catholic Christianity, 
 coming down to the eve of the Eeformation. Their 
 plan requires for its completion a third volume, re- 
 viewing certain modern phases of religious life and 
 thought, which is now in preparation. The series 
 thus contains a general view, or outline, of the course 
 of study indicated in the Introduction, which I have 
 attempted to fill out in the University lecture-courses. 
 Taken in connection with " Hebrew Men and Times," 
 which serves as preface, and " Our Liberal Movement 
 in Theology," which serves as sequel, it gives a simi- 
 lar outline of the great religious tradition that has 
 come down to our own time. 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 The series is far, indeed, from being such a history 
 as its subject might well demand from the scholar- 
 ship of the present day ; not even such -as I might 
 possibly attempt, with a longer prospect of working 
 time. It is but a slender gleaning in a wide field, 
 which has been well reaped by stronger hands. Far 
 enough from taking the place of larger and more 
 learned works, it can serve, at best, as a key or guide 
 to younger students through a region which has its 
 special difficulties to the modern explorer. It can, 
 at best, make a little clearer to other minds a point 
 of view which has been of increasing interest to me 
 in the studies of the last thirty years, and in the 
 labors of the last five. 
 
 At all events, it exhibits, as fairly as I can give, a 
 view of the subject which I have never seen properly 
 worked out. In whatever way we regard the origin 
 and early growth of Christianity, whether as special 
 revelation or as historic evolution, it appears to me 
 that the key to it is to be found, not in its specula- 
 tive dogma, not in its ecclesiastical organization, not 
 even in what strictly constitutes its religious life, but 
 in its fundamentally ethical character. In either way 
 of understanding it, it is first of all a gospel for the 
 salvation of human life. It is not a Creed, which 
 perishes ; but a Force, which persists. 
 
 And to this primary notion of it everything else 
 has been subordinated to a degree that astonishes me 
 
PREFACE. V 
 
 more and more as I look into its original documents. 
 A motive so intense and so profound — however 
 crude and misinformed — as to dominate the reason 
 and imagination for more than a thousand years, and 
 to create a civilization which had (we may say) every 
 great quality except that of a voice for its own inter- 
 pretation, — which stifled thought in the interest of 
 morality, which reduced Art after its rich classic de- 
 velopment to a bald symbolism, and made a free 
 science or literature impossible, — whatever else we 
 may think of it, is certainly an amazing and unique 
 phenomenon in human history. From Constantine 
 to Dante that is, substantially, the fact we have to 
 study. The chapters which follow are designed as a 
 contribution to the right understanding of it. 
 
 These volumes are very far from claiming to be a 
 history. Yet just as little are they a compilation. 
 The judgments they express are such as have been 
 ripening during thirty years of reasonable familiarity 
 with most of the phases of the subject I have at- 
 tempted to present ; and they rest, in all cases, upon 
 the acquaintance I have been able to make with the 
 original sources of the history. I was so fortunate 
 as to begin these studies within reach of the Con- 
 gressional Library at Washington, which is (or was) 
 exceptionally rich in the earlier authorities ; and to 
 continue them as Dart of my stated labors here, with 
 the far ampler treasures of the University Library at 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 command. Of course I have availed myself, where 
 I could, of modern expositors and standard histori- 
 ans, — of which due acknowledgment is made in the 
 notes. My constant authorities, however, have been 
 the volumes of the Fathers, of the early historians, 
 and especially of Migne's Patrologia, both Greek and 
 Latin. I have endeavored to keep true to the maxim 
 which ought to govern such an exposition : that it 
 should include the secular as well as the religious 
 side of events ; that it should deal primarily with 
 intellectual and moral forces rather than speculative 
 opinions or institutional forms ; and that it should 
 rest at all points directly on original authorities, 
 wherever these are accessible. 
 
 A brief Chronological Outline has been added to 
 each volume, not as sufficient for the uses of the 
 student, but in order to make the bearing of allusions 
 and events more distinct to those who are not other- 
 wise familiar with the ground. To the student the 
 standard historians, especially Gieseler and Neander, 
 to the general reader Milman's histories and Green- 
 wood's Cathedra Petri, may be recommended to fill in 
 the sketch which is here attempted. But it cannot 
 be too strongly urged that some acquaintance with 
 Catholic historians, such as those indicated in my 
 brief list of authorities, is indispensable, if not to a 
 knowledge of the facts, at least to an apprehension of 
 the spirit and motive, of the earlier time. JSTo such 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 list is given for the period since the Eeformation ; 
 when, ecclesiasticism having been defeated, an un- 
 derstanding of the forces in the field must be sought 
 not so much in the special historians of this depart- 
 ment, as in the wider study of modern literature, 
 science, philosophy, and life. 
 
 In conclusion, I would say that the view I have 
 attempted to present claims a special interest and 
 value, as vindicating for historical Christianity a sig- 
 nificance often denied or overlooked in the current 
 thought of our time. This significance belongs to it 
 as an exhibition of the highest and most varied forms 
 of the religious life yet known, and is absolutely 
 independent on any theory of its origin, or on the 
 truth or falsity of any of its creeds. 
 
 J. H. A. 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
 December 31, 1882. 
 
Introduction : Study of Christian History 
 
 IX 
 
 I. The Messiah and the Christ i 
 
 II. Saint Paul 21 
 
 III. Christian Thought of the Second Century 47 
 
 IV. The Mind of Paganism 71 
 
 V. The Arian Controversy 100 
 
 VI. Saint Augustine 122 
 
 VII. Leo the Great 146 
 
 VIII. MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE 1 65 
 
 IX. Christianity in the East 185 
 
 X. Conversion of the Barbarians 204 
 
 XI. The Holy Roman Empire 227 
 
 XII. The Christian Schools 249 
 
 Chronological Outline 275 
 
 Index 279 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 
 
 AMONG those who accept Christianity as a revela- 
 tion, in the most definite sense they are able to 
 give that word, there are two contrary ways of regard- 
 ing it. One considers it as an interpolation in human 
 things, — a " scheme of salvation " introduced at a defi- 
 nite time, completely apart from anything that went be- 
 fore, except as the way may have been prepared for it by 
 a series of special providences. The other considers it as 
 a manifestation of the Divine life common to humanity, 
 coming in the fulness of time, and as much prepared 
 for by all that went before as a crop of fruit is ripened 
 b} r the sunshine and showers of the whole season. One 
 sees it as a communication from without ; the other, 
 as a development from within. In the illustrations I 
 shall attempt to give of it, I shall frankly take the lat- 
 ter view. 
 
 As soon, however, as we begin to follow up this view, 
 we find ourselves quite outside the limits of " ecclesias- 
 tical history" as usually defined. Our field is, in fact, 
 as broad as civilization itself: only that we deal not 
 so much with its external forms, its institutions and 
 events, but with its governing and directing forces in the 
 
X INTRODUCTION". 
 
 thought, heart, and conscience of its representative 
 men. What we call the history of dogma is really a 
 very curious and instructive chapter in the development 
 of speculative thought, — that record of intellectual effort 
 and error, opening out from Thales all the way down to 
 Hegel or Comte. What we call ecclesiastical polity is 
 really one of the most interesting chapters in the devel- 
 opment of social or political institutions, — those wa\ r - 
 marks, guides, and buttresses of the structure of civili- 
 zation itself. What we call church ceremonial is realty 
 the most skilful, the most subtile, the most effective ap- 
 peal to human imagination, as one of the chief governing 
 principles of conduct, — reaching all the way from sim- 
 ple decoration of altar or vestment to the splendors 
 of form, color, and vocal or instrumental harmony in 
 a great cathedral, or the tender impressiveness of a 
 Catholic procession. What we call hierarchical domi- 
 nation — resting on the terrors of eternity, and ever at 
 war with the powers of the world — is really the form 
 authority came to take in the struggle, bj r which the 
 expanding life of humanity has been lifted so many 
 degrees above the savage or the brute. What we call 
 canon law is really the summing up of several centu- 
 ries' effort, by rule and precedent, to construct a code 
 of morality, and with it to create a new social system, 
 amidst the wreck of ancient society, or in presence of the 
 brutal disorders of barbarian invasion. We allow for 
 the error, the false ambition, the priestly cunning, the 
 ecclesiastical tyranny, just as we allow for the violences, 
 the vices, and the shames that run through all the 
 record of human affairs. The\ T are incidents in that 
 wider, that universal 4w struggle for existence," which 
 is the appointed means whereby Divine Providence at- 
 tains its ends. 
 
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XI 
 
 Now, history shows us many well-defined and easily 
 distinguishable types of civilization, — Egyptian, Classic 
 Pagan, Mahometan, Indian ; and among these types the 
 •Christian civilization is to be reckoned, — as we hold, 
 the highest and most developed hitherto. Our present 
 business is to see, as clearly as we can, just what this is 
 in itself. In the study of comparative religions, which 
 is one of the boasts of our day, we should at least make 
 sure of one of the things to be compared. And this 
 will be best done, as it is done in natural history, by 
 patient, detailed, accurate study of its facts and fea- 
 tures. These, it is true, are found in what is some- 
 what intangible, — in the thoughts and lives of a great 
 many men, scattered along through a great period of 
 time. But, if we will think of it, the scientific method 
 of study — that is, of comparison and judgment, as 
 opposed to the method of heaping up mere multiplicity 
 of facts — is the true one, as Saint Paul himself sug- 
 gests, when he speaks of his new converts as olive-shoots, 
 grafted upon a hardy stock. It is no disparagement to 
 pine, beech, or maple, to claim that the olive has a 
 natural history of its own. 
 
 Again, as alreacVv hinted, this history is to be studied, 
 in the main, on its ethical or ideal side, and not merely 
 in the record of its facts and dates. Christianit}' has 
 been not merely a type, shaping men's lives uncon- 
 sciously, like the type, or law of growth, of any organic 
 product. This it has been also, in the highest, the di- 
 vine, which is also the purely scientific sense. But not 
 only this. It has been vividly conceived in the thought 
 of its believers as the true and only solution to the great 
 mystery of the universe. It has been adoringly received 
 in faith, as the symbol of the holiest the heart can love 
 or worship. It has been earnestly, humbly, obediently 
 
Xll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 accepted by the conscience, as the sovereign law of life. 
 In each one of these three wa}'s it has been held with 
 fanaticism and intolerance. But in each of these three 
 ways, also, it has been held humbly, reverently, piously, 
 valiantly, and has thus been a great power to move the 
 world. The right place to study it is not in its errors, 
 ignorances, bigotries, and crimes. It must be studied 
 in its great and brave sincerities, as witnessed by its 
 glorious martyr-roll, blood-stained, fire-scorched ; b} T its 
 record of heroic names, from those who bore the faith like 
 a flag before the despotisms of Rome or the barbarisms 
 of Germany and Scandinavia, down to the last mission- 
 ary who died for it in field or hospital ; in the lives of 
 its great patient thinkers, the prayers of its saints, the 
 glad, tender, or triumphant strains of its choruses and 
 hymns, the fidelity of many generations of humble, 
 trustful, victorious lives. These are what it is the his- 
 torian's chief business to set forth. These are what we 
 mean when we say it should be studied first of all on its 
 ideal side, and not in that which is false, cruel, turbu- 
 lent, and base. 
 
 Again, when we speak of a type of civilization, or a 
 type of mental life, we mean not something that is fixed 
 and still, as a crystallographer or a dogmatist might 
 understand it. The life we speak of pours in a gener- 
 ous flood from its unknown source to its unknown future. 
 Scientific criticism in these days does not spare anything 
 from its rigid search. Of course it rationalizes upon 
 the origins of Christianity, as it does upon everything 
 else. But, for our present purpose, we have nothing to 
 do with any of its speculations. Our business is with 
 the stream itself. Theology assumes for its postulate, 
 that the origin of all life is in God, — that is, in a source 
 that is everywhere present and always giving forth, in- 
 
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. Xlll 
 
 exhaustible, infinite, essentially one with perfect wis- 
 dom, justice, and love. 
 
 Just how these attributes of the Infinite Life were 
 embodied for their earthly manifestation in the person 
 of the Founder of Christianity, has been the most fruit- 
 ful ground of speculation and controversy. But, ante- 
 rior to all these speculations, it is well for us to have as 
 distinct a conception as we can of that large historic 
 life which we denominate Christian. And this, not by 
 theoretical distinctions or abstract definitions, but by 
 seeing it "manifest in the flesh": that is, not merely 
 in the "one greater Man" (as Milton calls him), of 
 whom that phrase was first used, but (as Leo the Great 
 interprets) in all of the innumerable company who have 
 received and have worthily shared that life. 
 
 Accordingly, the right study of Christian history con- 
 sists mainly in the study of moral forces : that is, 
 forces which bear on men on the side of character and 
 conduct. Of itself, state it as simply as we will, this 
 means a great deal. Conduct, saj's Matthew Arnold, 
 is at least three quarters of human life ; and when to 
 this we add character which it springs from, and aspi- 
 ration which makes its ideal, and the education of con- 
 science which gives its law, we have pretty nearly 
 mapped out the whole field of practical religion as 
 opposed to the purely theoretic. 
 
 Now we want a phrase which denotes sharply that 
 characteristic of religion most important to consider as 
 affecting human life. Such a phrase, for example, is 
 " enthusiasm of humanity," which we find in Ecce Homo, 
 as best describing the religion of Jesus and his disci- 
 ples. But it seems to me that the higher and broader 
 phrase ethical passion denotes better the quality I 
 mean. Whatever else religion may include, at any 
 
XIV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 rate it means this. A strong and victorious religious 
 movement takes place, when the ethical passion I speak 
 of is blended with the mode of thinking dominant at a 
 given time. Indeed, a better definition could hardly be 
 given of an historical religion than the coincidence of 
 these two, originating with some crisis in human af- 
 fairs. The passion itself is the essential motive force : 
 its association with one or another form of dogma seems 
 almost pure accident. 
 
 I do not, of course, claim that this noblest of the 
 passions is peculiar to Christianity among the religions 
 of the world. In its elements, it certainly is not. In de- 
 gree, at least, I think it is, — certainly in that line by 
 which, through Puritanism up to primitive Christian- 
 it}', we trace our own spiritual descent. As to this, 
 however, we need assume nothing at all. Christian^ 
 at all events has shown itself in the world primarily as 
 a moral force. It is this quality in it that we have first 
 of all to keep in view in the different phases of it we 
 shall meet. Its creed, its symbols, its institutions, are 
 what they are in the histoiy of mankind because they 
 are expressions of that force. They are superficial ; 
 the ethical passion the} r embody is fundamental. 
 
 It shows itself in many wrys : with Paul, in earnest 
 contrition and conviction of sin ; with Howard, in the 
 deep sense of evil and suffering among men ; with Savo- 
 narola, in flaming wrath against hypocrisy and injustice ; 
 with mystic and monastic, in rude austerities or ecstatic 
 fervors. It appears in the patient pondering of moral 
 problems, with the Schoolmen ; in willing and brave 
 self-sacrifice, with the Pilgrims ; in endurance of perse- 
 cution, with the Martyrs ; in heroism of battle, with the 
 Covenanters ; in recoil from a corrupt societ}', with the 
 Anchorites ; in rapturous visions of a reign of holiness, 
 
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XV 
 
 with the Saints. In all these shapes that intenser form 
 of moral emotion which we rightly name the ethical 
 passion may appear : its characteristic being, not 
 merely that conscience, as against pleasure or gain, is 
 taken for the law of life — which it has in common with 
 the Stoics ; but that conscience, so obeyed, becomes a 
 source of enthusiasm, a ground of faith and hope, an in- 
 spiration of the will. As what Mr. Arnold calls "the 
 lyrical cry " is not only a mark of genuine poetiy, 
 but makes the tone of true devotion, and so is the voice 
 of religion in the way of emotional fervor, appealing to 
 the Infinite ; so the ethical passion I have named is the 
 veiy heart of true religion on its man ward side, and is 
 the characteristic we have chiefly to seek and verif}' in 
 the stud}' of its history. 
 
 This suggests, again, the direction our stucty should 
 take : namely, that its field chiefly lies in the lives and 
 thought of individual men. A great deal has been 
 said of the philosophy of history, and of the stud}" of 
 histoiy as a science. But, in much of this discussion, 
 what is after all the chief glory, interest, and value of 
 historical study is apt to be overlooked. History studied 
 as science tends to degenerate at once to anthropology ; 
 studied as history, its great value will be found in its 
 appeal to imagination, its widening of the s}'inpatlrv, and 
 its education of the moral sense. Of course, we want 
 to know all that can be given in the wide view and nice 
 distinctions of philosoplry, in the accurate terms and 
 orderly arrangement of science. And we need not dis- 
 pute whether either of them is or is not a more valuable 
 study than history proper in itself. But, in respect of 
 our immediate purpose, they only serve as a framework 
 for the picture ; the} r merely outline the conditions under 
 which the study of history is to be had. 
 
XVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 This is the stucty of human life itself, — its action and 
 its passion ; of life on its personal, suffering, dramatic, 
 rejoicing, heroic side ; of its sin and holiness, its error 
 and its strength, its struggle and its grief. Nothing, 
 in fact, is more dramatic than the life shown us in the 
 field we enter, as soon as we pierce beyond the veil that 
 distance of time or strangeness of dialect has thrown 
 about it. The true way to know the men whose lives 
 are the history we would learn, is to come as close to 
 them as the barriers of time, distance, and language will 
 allow ; to seek alwa} T s the original sources first, at least 
 under the briefest guidance and exposition ; never to 
 satisfy ourselves with dissertations, abridgments, com- 
 pends, or " standard historians " ; to listen to each man's 
 words, so far as we have ability or opportunit}', in the 
 tongue he learned from his mother, and talked with his 
 own kinsfolk, and wrote with his own pen. A single 
 page, read in that way, brings us nearer to the man, gives 
 us better (so to speak) the feel of his pulse, the light of 
 his eye, and the complexion of his face, than whole 
 chapters of commentaiy and paraphrase. 
 
 We have all learned, long ago, that faith is a very 
 different thing from opinion. Yet we do not alwa}S 
 reflect how wrongly men's historical judgments are 
 colored by their opinions, or how shallow and poor those 
 judgments often are, from the mere lack of power to 
 comprehend — we might even say pardon — any very 
 strong and sincere conviction at all. Thus of Gibbon — 
 so masterlv in grasp, so unwearied in research, so sub- 
 tile in suggestion, our indispensable daily companion 
 and guide in a large part of the field we have to investi- 
 gate — the instances are rare in which he has not done 
 wrong to the topic or the character he was treating, and 
 let down the moral tone of a great man or a great event, 
 
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XV11 
 
 such as the record fairly gives, by his strange incapacity 
 of historic sympathy. 80 that, in a ver}- large part of 
 it, — not only in his famous chapters on early Chris- 
 tianity, but in his treatment of each critical epoch or 
 heroic life, — his work, indispensable for its outlines and 
 its facts, is a masterly and very perfect model of what 
 our study of the histoiy ought not to be. 
 
 Again, we must be clear of that besetting sin of theo- 
 logians, a controversial motive. We are not pledged, 
 in any sense, to uphold one set of opinions, or disparage 
 others. Our true business is to understand, if we can, 
 the men who held them, and why they held them. The 
 world of thought and belief has so shifted in all its 
 bearings, that we can never be quite sure we have the 
 mind of the earl}' age ; while the world of passion and 
 motive remains fundamentally the same. Very good 
 men have held in honest}* of heart opinions wholly false 
 and shocking to us. Their thin ghosts do not flit before 
 our bar for judgment. Na}*, when those men lived, they 
 were drawn 03* the tragic and terrible logic of their 
 opinions to acts in our view inconceivably hateful. In 
 all histor}* there is perhaps nothing quite so awful as the 
 religious wars, the infernal tortures of Inquisition and 
 dragonnade, the frightful persecutions of mere opinion, 
 deliberately inflicted, for centuries, in the name of faith ; 
 so that the very phrase " act of faith," translated into 
 Spanish, is perhaps of all human phrases ghastliest in its 
 suggestion. I have no more the will than the power to 
 exclude these horrors from our field, for the sake of a 
 serener view. Humanity does well to hate the name 
 and curse the memory of them. But our task, even for 
 these, is to see them in their causes ; to trace how they 
 were linked in fatally with the train of opinions and 
 events ; to see how bad men could have found means to 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION". 
 
 bring them to pass, and how good men could possibly 
 have been led to consent to them as a pardonable alter- 
 native from something worse. 
 
 A very large part of our histoiy is the record of con- 
 troversies, in which we have no occasion whatever to 
 take sides as partisans. Our business is rather to see, 
 if we can, how each side was an element in the necessary 
 evolution ; and how a gain in mind, morals, or society 
 is brought about, not by sudden victories of the truer 
 opinion, but by the very obstinate conflict itself, in which 
 each party fights toughly, whether for the gold or the 
 silver side of the shield of truth. We have our own 
 battles to fight ; and we cannot afford to revive the 
 passions of those ancient ones. 
 
 A word of the periods into which the history naturally 
 falls. The main points of departure — the nodal points, 
 so to speak, marking most visibly the coincidence of the 
 spiritual and secular evolution — are most conveniently 
 taken at the end of the eighth century, and at the end 
 of the fifteenth. The three periods so given, consid- 
 ered in reference to the type of Christian civilization 
 before spoken of, may be called the period of its struggle 
 for existence, of its dominance in a definite historic form, 
 and of its differentiation or expansion. The first ex- 
 tends from the origin of Christianity, through the time 
 of its conflict with Classic paganism on one hand, and 
 Barbaric paganism on the other, down to the founding 
 of the Christian empire of Charlemagne. The second 
 extends through what is called the Middle Age of Euro- 
 pean history, the period of feudal society, of the cru- 
 sades, of the Holy Apostolic Church dominant under the 
 great popes and the Holy Roman Empire dominant under 
 the great imperial houses, down to and including the 
 revival of art and learning, and the period of the great 
 
THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XIX 
 
 discoveries which initiated the broader life of the mod- 
 ern world. The third begins with the controversies of 
 the Protestant Reformation, and follows its results in the 
 liberalizing of thought, the development of speculative 
 philosophy and scientific criticism, the vast growth of 
 natural science (far more important to us in its effect 
 on men's habit of thought than in its wealth of fact or 
 its practical skill) , the great movements of modern so- 
 ciety and politics of the revolutionary period, in which 
 we are living now. 
 
 Naturally and rightly, these last are of vastly greater 
 consequence to us than anything in the past. More- 
 over, they are precisely the issues to which the great 
 evolution of religious life in the past has conducted 
 us. But no stage of it need be followed in the spirit 
 of dogmatists, pedants, or archaeologists. The life- 
 stream whose course we are endeavoring to trace 
 flows through channels, takes on forms and qualities, 
 that enter deeply into the spirit of our own life. Not 
 only, then, the echoes of the past are to be heard, but 
 its footsteps traced, and its spirit felt, and its lessons 
 heeded, on the spot where we stand, and in the moment 
 of time when we breathe. For us, its earliest tradition 
 is still alive. The record contained in so maivy ponder- 
 ous volumes is not an antiquarian curiosit}', like those 
 title-deeds lately turned up in bricks and tiles of Neb- 
 uchadnezzar's time ; but is like a merchant's ledger, 
 which lies always open to record the transactions of 
 to-day. 
 
 The antiquarian ma}' learn facts and dates ; but facts 
 and dates are not histoiy. They are at best the 
 "raw materials," which must be "cooked" (as our 
 friend in the stoiy-book sagely says) before the}' are 
 fit food for the human mind. It is the very business 
 
XX INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of histor} T to turn dead facts into live truths ; to assort, 
 co-ordinate, arrange them, find out their bearing on 
 one another, and their relation to the life they cover, — 
 often, it is true, as tombstones coA^er the forms once 
 warm with eager life. It is not that we disparage facts. 
 On the Contrary, the mind in search of truth hungers 
 and thirsts for them. But one must not be mistaken 
 for the other. A hundred thousand facts will veiy 
 likely go to the making of a single truth. 
 
 And for method, the simplest is the best : that is, 
 to fix a few marked lives and dates, " as nails in a sure 
 place." A very few, well fixed, will give us the lati- 
 tude and longitude of our facts, and save them from 
 being mislaid or lost. I once watched an artist be- 
 ginning to draw a portrait. He measured with a straight 
 stick one or two dimensions, marked them on his panel, 
 took rapidly the bearings with his eye, made a few swift 
 strokes ; and, almost in less time than it takes to tell, m} T 
 mother's face, dim and faint, began to be shadowed out 
 under his trained hand, which hours and days of patient 
 skill would be needed to complete, but with features and 
 expression already there. In some such way, if not with 
 an artist's skill, 3-et with his patient accuracy-, we may 
 so outline this vast and magnificent field of our inquiry 
 as never to lose from memory the features and expres- 
 sion of that life which we accept as a continual and yet 
 unfinished revelation in the flesh of the Universal Life. 
 
AUTHOEITIES. 
 
 Besides the references in the margin, some mention of a 
 few of the chief authorities may be useful to the student or 
 general reader. These are of three classes, — Original Docu- 
 ments, accessible, in general, only in large libraries ; Standard 
 Historians, whose works, in English, may be procured easily 
 and at moderate cost ; and Encyclopaedias. 
 
 Of original documents the most serviceable are — 
 
 The Fathers : especially the " Ante-Nicene Christian Li- 
 brary " (Clark, Edinburgh, 22 vols.), to which are added in the 
 same style several of the writings of Augustine, including the 
 DfrCivitate Dei; and the "Library of the Fathers" (Parker, 
 Oxford, 17 vols., one of the fruits of the Tractarian movement), 
 including several volumes of Chrysostom. To these should be 
 added, the Greek Ecclesiastical Historians — Eusebius, Socrates, 
 Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius — coming down to near the 
 end of the sixth century (Bagster, London, 6 vols.).' Several 
 brief compends of the Fathers have been prepared for English 
 readers, of which the most useful promises to be that compiled 
 by the Rev. George A. Jackson (Applet on, New York). 
 
 Below the date of Augustine, and before the period of the 
 Eeformation, there is little accessible in English except a por- 
 tion of the works of Anselm, and some of the mystical writers 
 of the later Middle Age. For the greater part of this interval, 
 of just eleven hundred years, the great collection, indispensable 
 to the uses of the student, is — 
 
 Migne : Patrologia, Greek and Latin, a complete library 
 of Christian literature, ecclesiastical and philosophical. The 
 Greek writers, with Latin translation in parallel columns, fill 
 161 vols., large octavo, and extend to the destruction of the 
 Greek Empire in 1453. The Latin writers embrace nearly 
 fifteen hundred names, from Tertullian to Innocent III. inclu- 
 sive, and are contained in 221 vols., four of which consist of 
 
XX11 AUTHORITIES. 
 
 full and elaborate Indices. The plates of a large part of this 
 splendid collection were destroyed by fire, but will soon be 
 replaced, if they have not been already. (Paris, 1844-1864.) 
 
 Of later writers of ecclesiastical Latin, the complete works 
 of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Duns 
 Scotus, with single writings of Eoger Bacon, Eaymond Lully, 
 and Occam, may be found in the Harvard College Library. 
 
 Among original authorities may also be included — 
 
 Mansi : a complete History of Councils, in 31 vols, folio, 
 down to and including the Council of Florence, 1439 (Florence, 
 1759-1798). 
 
 Baronius : Annals of the Papacy in 19 large folio vols., 
 down to the election of Innocent III. in 1198 (Lucca, 1738- 
 1746). This great work is continued by — 
 
 Katn aldus : 15 vols., extending to the election of Pius V. 
 in 1566 (Lucca, 1747-1756). 
 
 All of the above have been constantly in use in the prepar- 
 ation of the following chapters. The curious student will also 
 desire to know something of the Catholic historian Fleury, the 
 Jansenist Tillemont (both translated into English), and the 
 great work of the Magdeburg "Centuriators." He may even 
 find advantage in exploring the wealth of Catholic legend in the 
 prodigious tomes of the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum on one 
 hand ; or, on the other, in the Monumenta Germanica of Pertz, 
 which gives here and there the most entertaining glimpses we 
 can find into the obscurity of the Dark Ages.. Portions of 
 this latter are conveniently included in several volumes — as 
 the Monumenta Carolina (Charlemagne), and the Monumenta 
 Gregoriana (Hildebrand) — edited by Jaffe (Berlin, 1864-73). 
 
 Of the more recent standard historians the most useful to 
 the ordinary student are — 
 
 Gieseler : 5 vols., four containing the completed history 
 down to 1648, and the fifth consisting of Lectures edited since 
 the author's death. The special value of this work consists in 
 the citations from original authorities in the Notes, which 
 make at least three quarters of the bulk of the entire work, 
 and render it far more serviceable to a student of theology than 
 any of the others. The best edition, in English, is that pre- 
 
AUTHORITIES. Xxiii 
 
 pared by H. B. Smith (Harper, New York). An excellent 
 translation of the first three volumes, by Francis Cunningham, 
 was published in 1836 (Carey, Philadelphia), from the third 
 German edition. In the first volume, however, important 
 changes have been made in the later revision. 
 
 Neander : 5 vols., translated by Joseph Torrey, carrying 
 the history down to 1430. This is heavy and confused in nar- 
 rative, and has no perspective of political events, or the general 
 course of Christian civilization ; but it is, on the other hand, 
 of the highest value to the student of speculative theology and 
 church life (Crocker & Brewster, Boston). 
 
 Schaff : of which the first volume of a new recast has just 
 been published, covering the first century. This promises to 
 be a very labored and bulky history, of chief value in the study 
 of Christian antiquities and dogma (Scribner, New York). 
 
 AlzoG: the best recent Catholic historian, in 3 thick vols., 
 fair and moderate in spirit (Clarke, Cincinnati). 
 
 The most interesting and abundant resource for the early 
 legendary history of Christianity is the French Catholic work 
 of Rohrbacher (Paris, 29 vols. 8vo), of which a new and im- 
 proved edition in 12 vols. 4to is now in course of publication 
 (Palme, Paris). To Catholic authorities may be added the 
 charming volumes of Ozanam, and Count Montalembert's 
 " Monks of the West " (7 vols.), which has been translated into 
 English (Blackwood, Edinburgh). 
 
 There is also publishing (Fischbacher, Paris) an excellent 
 history in French, from the point of view of liberal Christian 
 scholarship, by Professor Chastel, of Geneva, to be completed 
 in 5 vols. Kenan's great work on the Origins of Christianity, 
 in 7 vols., extending through the reign of Marcus Aurelius, is 
 too well known to need further notice. Robertson (in 8 vols.) 
 is one of the most useful of the recent histories, coming down 
 to the time of the Reformation. And, for the first ten centu- 
 ries, a compact and excellent text-book, well illustrated, may 
 be found in a single volume, prepared by Philip Smith (Harper, 
 New York). The single-volume histories of Haase and of Kurtz 
 are convenient for reference, but too limited and technical in 
 their aim to help much in the study attempted here. 
 
XXIV AUTHORITIES. 
 
 To ecclesiastical historians proper should be added the fol- 
 lowing, of more general and popular interest : — 
 
 Milman : History of Christianity to the Downfall of Pagan- 
 ism (3 vols.), and History of Latin Christianity to the Pontifi- 
 cate of Nicholas V., 1447 (8 vols.). For admirable scholarship, 
 fluent narrative, and literary feeling, this makes the best of 
 church-histories for the general reader. The narrative is often 
 crowded and confusing in the later portion, the political view 
 is comparatively feeble and dim, and as a history of thought 
 the work is disappointing (Sheldon, New York). 
 
 Greenwood : " Cathedra Petri, a Political History of the 
 Great Latin Patriarchate," extending to the close of the Great 
 Schism, about 1420. An exceedingly vigorous and able narra- 
 tive of events in their political bearing chiefly, very full and 
 invaluable for the times especially of Charlemagne, Hildebrand, 
 and Innocent III. In the later portion it is simply a brief 
 summary. Allowance has often to be made for the author's 
 vehement hostility to the political system of the papacy, and 
 as a history of thought, or of civilization at large, the work has 
 little value. The author is a jurist, not a theologian. (Dick- 
 inson & Higham, London: 6 vols., 1856-1872). 
 
 Symonds : Rennaissance in Italy, just completed, in 5 vols., 
 is not only a brilliant and interesting work in itself, but is in- 
 dispensable for the study of the two centuries preceding the 
 Reformation (Smith, Elder, & Co., London). 
 
 The historical student will also desire to consult the most 
 elaborate work of Gfrorer on Hildebrand (7 vols.), and Rau- 
 mer's great history of the House of Hohenstaufen (6 vols.). 
 
 For the development of speculative thought in its bearing 
 on theology the most serviceable work is that of Ueberweg, 
 especially valuable for its full bibliography and literary details, 
 of which a translation has been prepared by Professor Morris 
 (Scribner, New York, 2 vols.). 
 
 For the period including and following the Reformation the 
 most valuable resource will be found in works of general his- 
 tory, philosophy, and literature. Special ecclesiastical histories 
 of this period — except of single groups of events, as of the times 
 of Luther, the Council of Trent, and the School of Port Royal 
 — are mostly delusive and unsatisfactory. 
 
AUTHOKITIES. XXV 
 
 Of Encyclopaedias and similar works of reference may be 
 mentioned the following : — 
 
 Herzog : this great work is now publishing in an enlarged 
 edition (Herzog- Plitt), to fill about 25 vols. (Hinrich, Leipzig). 
 It is invaluable not only as a library of ecclesiastical learning, 
 but as a critical and authoritative exposition of leading systems 
 of philosophy. A condensed translation is announced, under 
 the editorship of Professor Schaff (Scribner, New York, 3 vols.), 
 the first volume of which is lately published. 
 
 McClintock & Strong : a Biblical and Ecclesiastical Cy- 
 clopsedia, complete in 10 vols. The great number of titles, in- 
 cluding ecclesiastical biographies, and the very complete history 
 of Protestant sects — to say nothing of the biblical, dogmatic, 
 and expository material — make this, doubtless, the most con- 
 venient existing work of general reference for the field it covers 
 (Harper, New York, 1874-1881). 
 
 Smith : Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (2 vols.), and 
 Dictionary of Christian Biography (first eight centuries : 4 
 vols., of which two are already published, including the letter 
 H). These works are on the same scale of completeness, thor- 
 oughness, and ample learning, with the well-known series of 
 Classical Dictionaries prepared under the same editorship 
 (Murray, London ; Little, Brown, & Co., Boston). 
 
EARLY CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 OUK first task, in approaching the study of Chris- 
 tianity as an event and a vital force in history, 
 is to see it on the side of Judaism, out of whose soil 
 it sprang; and to trace — at present in its purely 
 historical or human aspect — the connection between 
 the old religious order and the new. This is best 
 seen in the transition, in religious history, from the 
 name Messiah, with all that it denotes as the cul- 
 minating of the old dispensation, to the name Christ, 
 with all that it denotes as the inspiration of the 
 new. 
 
 No revolution that we know in the affairs of man- 
 kind, especially in its spiritual history, has been so 
 significant as that suggested in the' connotation of 
 these two titles, of which each is a literal translation 
 of the other. One brings before us the passionate, 
 ever-baffled, and finally most disastrous hope of a 
 perishing people, — the narrow, intense, fierce patriot- 
 ism, that had its boundaries sharply defined in the little 
 state of Palestine ; the other, a world-wide spiritual 
 
2 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 empire, seated on the deepest foundations of faith and 
 reverence, and showing the ideal side of a manifold, 
 rich, powerful, and proud civilization, which has as 
 yet no ascertainable limit of duration. 
 
 While the uame Messiah is at best the title of a 
 hoped-for prince who might do for Jerusalem what the 
 empire of the Caesars did for Rome, — that is, estab- 
 lish it as the seat of enduring dominion founded on 
 " righteousness " in the Jewish sense of that word, as 
 the other was built upon the Roman Law, — the name 
 Christ has come, by successive changes and enlarge- 
 ments of its meaning, to be the title of the spiritual 
 or ideal leader of humanity. Nay, so instant and so 
 marked was this transition, as soon as the name had 
 passed from the local dialect into that Greek which 
 was the tongue of all known thought and culture, that 
 Paul (who did more than all other men to bring it 
 about) already uses that name to mean, not simply the 
 Person, however exalted and revered, but a Force 
 purely spiritual and ideal, — " Christ the power of 
 God and the wisdom of God." 
 
 It belongs more properly to an appreciation .of the 
 life and work of Paul to consider this transition as it 
 looks to the future, and opens the way to the new, 
 large development of a religion of Humanity. It is 
 our immediate task to consider it as it looks to the 
 past, and connects itself with the history of a pecu- 
 liar people. 
 
 That wonderful Messianic hope, which in the ways 
 of history was the indispensable preparation for the 
 advent of a gospel preached to every creature, emer- 
 ges amidst the desperate struggle of a little colony 
 
THE CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLOOK. 3 
 
 in Judaea to defend its altar and temple from the 
 stranger, and saves that struggle from despair. We 
 need not go over here the story of that time which we 
 call the Maccabaean period. It is, or should be, toler- 
 ably familiar. We can at best attempt to make rea- 
 sonably clear one or two points of view, which may 
 help us understand its bearing on the impending 
 revolution. 
 
 Standing at the date of the gospel history, we seem 
 to have fairly firm ground on an island in the great 
 ocean of the past, or at least to be swinging at a toler- 
 ably sure anchorage among its restless waves. The 
 prophecy of Malachi, with its abrupt menace of " the 
 great and dreadful day of the Lord," — the last head- 
 land laid down on the chart that most of us have 
 sailed by, — is four hundred years away : about as far 
 as from us the conquest of the Eastern Empire by the 
 Turks, the Wars of the Eoses, the break-up of feudal- 
 ism in France under Louis XL, the revival of letters 
 and arts in Italy, a few years before the discovery of 
 America by Columbus. A few dates like these may 
 serve to help our sluggish imagination, and show 
 what we mean by historical perspective. Near mid- 
 way, again, to where we are standing, is the glorious 
 revolt of the Maccabees, another point in the per- 
 spective to be fixed as firmly as we may : not quite 
 as far away as the Commonwealth in England, and 
 the Thirty Years' War in Germany. In other words 
 to the contemporaries of Jesus the hero of the strug- 
 gle was somewhat nearer than Oliver Cromwell is to 
 us, and the visions of Daniel were about as near as 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
4 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHEIST. 
 
 I am probably not mistaken in thinking that this 
 comparison of dates startles us a little by bringing 
 the events so close. But, in fact, they are much 
 closer than that. If oar daily walk took us past 
 Whitehall, or a stroll into the next village to the 
 hillside where Hampden fell, the events of that time 
 would come incomparably nearer to our imagination. 
 How was it, then, with the Jews of Palestine in the 
 time of Jesus, who had no other memories, who 
 knew no other landmarks, whose only science and 
 only dream lay within the strict limits of the inter- 
 pretation of the Scripture that embodied, confirmed, 
 and illustrated their one only hope ? Herod's wife 
 was great-grandchild of the hero's nephew; and 
 Herod's handiwork was there, unfinished, before their 
 eyes. The aged Simeon might as a child (to take the 
 average of several learned guesses) have known the 
 writer of Enoch, and he the writer of the visions of 
 Daniel. Three generations might thus touch hands 
 across the whole space that separates the Old and the 
 New.* The chasm is apt to look abrupt and impass- 
 able, like the gorge at Niagara; still, it is not so 
 very wide but that we may fly a cord across, and that 
 shall carry a strand, and that a cable, and the gulf 
 is bridged. 
 
 Looking now a little more carefully at the point of 
 time which we have succeeded in bringing so near, 
 we see that the stream of national, or rather race 
 
 * Thus I recollect as a child going to see an old man who had 
 been an officer in the " French and Indian War " (1756-1763) ; and 
 he, by fair possibility, might have known some one who had seen 
 the execution of Charles I. 
 
THREE STREAMS OF JEWISH LIFE. 5 
 
 life, flows in three pretty well defined channels, — in 
 fact, ever since the time of the earlier dispersion and. 
 the return of the pilgrim colony to Jerusalem, almost 
 six hundred years ago. In Egypt that stream is 
 widening out towards the placid lake of speculative 
 philosophy, which we call the new platonism of Philo, 
 — a great reservoir, which was pumped abundantly 
 long afterwards into the sluiceways of Christian the- 
 ology, to spread and dilute the river of the water of life 
 till it could float the heavy-laden bark of St. Peter. 
 Eastward in Babylon the stream loses itself, as it were, 
 in wide marshes, where it breeds in course of time 
 that monstrous growth of water-weed and tangle, with 
 flowers interspersed of rare and curious perfume, 
 which we call the Babylonish legend, or the later 
 Talmud. 
 
 With either of these our subject has very little to 
 do. The learning which interprets the schools of 
 Jewish thought in Alexandria has been thoroughly 
 worked up, so as to be easily accessible and (I was 
 going to say) cheap ; though it can never lose a certain 
 charm of its own in the blandly-flowing discourse of 
 Philo, or a very real interest to one who cares to trace 
 the sources of Christian theology.* The more remote 
 and intricate study of the Eastern branch has still less 
 present concern for us : it belongs really to the 
 strange and curious history of modern Judaism, — a 
 
 * Though Philo is called a Jew, and uses the Jewish scriptures 
 as the text of all his fluent expositions, his cast of thought is so 
 entirely Platonic or Grecian, that Ewald (in a conversation I had 
 with him some years ago) insisted that he was to be counted as 
 no Jew at all, but a Greek, quite outside the line of Hebrew 
 development. 
 
6 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 side-shoot, which has grown, independent of the main 
 trunk, into a vigorous, persistent, fantastic life of its 
 own. 
 
 So our subject narrows down to the course of the 
 central stream, what we may call the Palestinian 
 life of the Jewish people. This is, from the outset 
 down, intensely national, patriotic, local, — yet none 
 the less intensely confident in itself, disdainful of all 
 life or thought outside, and buoyed through great tides 
 of disaster by an immeasurable hope. Indeed, that 
 great miracle of patriotic valor, the achieving of a 
 real though brief independence by the Maccabees in 
 the face of the splendid monarchy of Syria, might 
 almost justify any extravagance of hope. 
 
 We call that hope Messianic. In a certain vague 
 large way it dates back to the elder prophets of Juclah, 
 Isaiah and Micah, who give not only hints, but splen- 
 did pictures and symbols, of the Lord's reign in right- 
 eousness and peace. When the flood of conquest had 
 flowed over the state of Judah, in the long Captivity 
 of Babylon those superb strains of prophecy had been 
 composed,* whose only fit interpretation yet is in the 
 gorgeous and tender harmonies of Handel's Messiah. 
 But now the prophecy becomes distinct, vivid, per- 
 sonal. Intelligent criticism is well agreed in setting 
 the visions of Daniel at the precise period of time 
 we are dealing with: in fact, it narrows the date of 
 their composition within some ten years, from 168 to 
 
 * Isaiah xl.-lxvi., the "Great Unknown" of the Captivity 
 (Ewald), sometimes spoken of as the younger Isaiah. The title 
 "Messiah" is here first given to Cyrus, as deliverer of the Jews 
 from Babylon (xlv. 1). 
 
SOURCE OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 7 
 
 178 before the Christian era. These visions, doubtless, 
 it is easiest for us to bring before our minds as songs 
 of patriotic hope and cheer, in the strain and stress 
 of a conflict all but desperate, rather than expound 
 them painfully in their detail, as they apply to the 
 nearer past and the immediate present. 
 
 What we have definitely to do with them, for the 
 purpose now in hand, is to see how they fixed — crys- 
 tallized, as it were — that patriotic hope about the 
 person of a Deliverer, who again was (like the "man 
 of sorrows " of the Prophet of the Captivity) hardly 
 to be distinguished in our criticism from Israel him- 
 self in his great agony. " I saw in the night visions, 
 and, behold, one like a son of man came in the clouds 
 of heaven, . . . and there was given him dominion, 
 and glory, and a kingdom : . . . his dominion is an 
 everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and 
 his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." 
 And again, "The kingdom and dominion . . . shall be 
 given to the people of the saints of the Most High, 
 whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all 
 dominions shall serve and obey Him." * 
 
 Now this promise comes close upon a description 
 which, by the universal understanding of interpreters, 
 points to the condition of the East among the suc- 
 cessors of Alexander, — that is, the immediate oppres- 
 sors of the Jews. There is no reason to doubt that 
 the coming of this " Son of Man in the clouds of 
 heaven " was passionately waited for, expected, longed 
 for, to appear from day to day, any more than that 
 
 * Daniel vii. 13, 14, 27. Compare Stanley ("Jewish Church," 
 Vol. III. p. 385 of Am. ed.), whose rendering is here followed. 
 
8 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 Christ's second advent was daily expected in the 
 Apostles' day, or has been and still is in ours. Most 
 likely some passing triumph of Judas, or Jonathan, 
 or Simon, the heroic brothers, brought from time to 
 time that fervent confidence and hope to rest on them. 
 And again, the hope deferred lay always ready to be 
 evoked anew, and applied to whatever champion 
 seemed at the moment likely to accomplish the un- 
 reasoning but fervid expectation. Thus, after a cen- 
 tury and a half of disappointment, it was just as 
 ready to centre upon Herocl the Great, whom Antony 
 and Augustus had set in secure dominion, — a painful 
 travesty, indeed, of the great Hope, when we think 
 who and what Herod was, a son of Edom and a ty- 
 rant; but how genuine, we see in the Herodian party 
 in the Gospels, and in a sober argument by Epipha- 
 nius, three centuries later, in its disproof. 
 
 In point of fact, we are apt to think too much of 
 the Messianic hope in a formal, dogmatic way, or in 
 the way, perhaps, of learned exposition. We asso- 
 ciate it too exclusively with the august strains of 
 prophecy on one side, and the yet more august series 
 of events that flowed from it on the other. We do 
 not always stop to think how simple, how natural, how 
 human it was, after all. In one sense it is a miracle 
 in history, a phenomenon without any exact parallel, — 
 the brooding tenacity, the passionate resolve, the re- 
 vival from defeat, the endurance through centuries of 
 humiliation, that characterize the Jews' faith in their 
 coming Deliverer. And so, again, it is a thing that is 
 and must remain without example, that a national 
 hope has been transfigured in the person of One who, 
 
FERVOR OF THE NATIONAL PASSION. 9 
 
 after near nineteen centuries, is still looked up to as 
 the spiritual Chief of humanity, and whose name has 
 been received as the symbol of what is Infinite and 
 Divine, nay, as a name of the Infinite himself. 
 
 But look at it, again, on its nearer side, and it is 
 not so hard to see — not only that it was altogether 
 human in its passion and limitation, not only that in 
 its wild frenzy it led straight to a tragedy of unex- 
 ampled horror ; but that in its elements it belonged 
 quite naturally to such a time and people. In its ve- 
 hement persistency, in its passionate devoutness, it is 
 fairly matched by the four centuries' struggle in which 
 the fighting tribe of Montenegro, under their bishop- 
 prince, have consecrated themselves to the crusade 
 against the Turk, — a struggle whose issues it is not 
 long since we were watching in the telegraphic bul- 
 letins of the day. In its temper of stern patriotism — 
 sombre, tender, unyielding, pathetically hopeless — 
 it is like that other amazing phenomenon of our time, 
 the life that smoulders in the ashes of thrice-desolated 
 Poland. 
 
 We do not always think how close these great his- 
 toric passions may come to our own life. There was 
 lately living quietly among us a princess of the blood 
 of old Lithuanian heroes — Antonia Jagiello — who, 
 with more than the heroism of a Deborah or a Judith, 
 led the forlorn hope at the head of her regiment on 
 the battle-fields of Hungary. Let me copy here a 
 picture which I find in a powerful French romance : 
 it is of the hapless insurrection of 1863, and it is a 
 young Pole that speaks, who visits his mother in 
 Paris, feeling himself dead to honor ever since he 
 
10 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 signed in prison a pledge not to persist in war against 
 the oppressor : — 
 
 " Before me was a figure in alabaster representing a 
 woman crouched and in chains, with the inscription, 
 Polonia exspectans et sperans, ' Poland waits and hopes.' 
 Above hung an ivory crucifix ; between the crucifix and 
 the crouching figure my portrait in medallion. Here 
 m}' mother had gathered all her love, — her God, her 
 country, and her child. How strange the position of 
 that portrait seemed ! What had that woman in chains, 
 that crucified God, to say to him ? What had he to an- 
 swer them? But no, I said, this portrait is not I. It 
 is that other, — he who had a faith, and is dead. And I 
 thought of these things with unfathomable pity, — that 
 hidden manna, that bread of life, held in a mother's 
 heart." 
 
 This is all over again the picture of that passion 
 which we have seen in the figure Judcea Capta seated 
 beneath a palm ; which the women of Judah had in 
 their hearts when they wore the turreted ornament 
 on their head, " the golden city," as a witness that 
 they should never forget the fallen and loved Jerusa- 
 lem. The Polish lady learns her son's forfeited honor, 
 disowns him, and dies. It is exactly the old Hebrew- 
 phrase, " cut off from his people." The terrible story 
 of Joseplms tells of a temper as stern and high, 
 among the women of Judah who fell in their country's 
 fall. And a passion as deep, though not vindictive 
 and fierce like that, lay doubtless in the heart of Jesus, 
 when he said, " Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! that killest 
 the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto 
 thee, how often would I have gathered thy children 
 
CHARACTER OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 11 
 
 together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her 
 wings, and ye would not ! Behold, your house is left 
 unto you desolate." And again, " Daughters of Jerusa- 
 lem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and 
 for your children." 
 
 Intense, narrow, patriotic, human as it was, tne 
 Messianic hope was very little ideal, had very little 
 of what we should call religious. So far as it looked 
 at all beyond the fact of triumph and independence, 
 it seems to have been entirely secular, even sordidly 
 practical. It meant meat and drink, olives, corn, and 
 vineyards, sheep, cows, and oxen, and a vigorous lord- 
 ing it over other people. -Wherever the Jewish im- 
 agination trusts itself in images of the future, it takes 
 very strongly to such realities as these. So much, at 
 least, we can get from a glimpse or two at that master- 
 piece of fancy running riot, the Babylonish Talmud, 
 with its monstrous banquets of behemoth and levia- 
 than, and its vast clusters of grapes, each clamorous 
 to be gathered before its fellow. The Messianic 
 kingdom was to be established in " righteousness," it 
 is true ; but, so far as consciously developed, a right- 
 eousness like that of the Scribes and Pharisees, — 
 quite sincere in its way, but wonderfully dry and 
 thin, resembling what we think of under that name 
 very much as lichen resembles flowers and grain. 
 
 But we need not dwell on this side of it: first, 
 because it is sufficiently apparent in the censures of 
 Jesus himself; and secondly, because the Jewish peo- 
 ple never since the Captivity fairly exhibited their 
 qualities in an independent national life. Forced in 
 upon itself by oppression or else antagonism on every 
 
12 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 side, the petty monarchy enjoyed at best such inde- 
 pendence as it could win from the mutual jealousies 
 of Syria and Kome. The real history of the Messi- 
 anic period is a history of almost constant struggle, 
 often heroic, and at critical periods in the highest de- 
 gree tragical. 
 
 That period, properly defined, includes about three 
 centuries. It begins with the revolt of the Macca- 
 bees and the visions of Daniel ; it ends with the 
 brief messianic reign of Bar-kochab (or Barcochbas) * 
 who perished in the final conquest of Jerusalem by 
 Hadrian, and the martyrdom of Babbi Akibah just a 
 hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus. With- 
 in this period — nay, in that brief space of restless 
 spiritual agitation between the death of Herod and 
 the fall of Jerusalem in A. D. 70 — I have seen it stated 
 that no less than fifty adventurers were more or less 
 widely recognized as Messiahs, and were known under 
 that claim to history. Lawless and turbulent insur- 
 gents, most of them, against Roman rule, or else the 
 fiercest and most stubborn of military leaders when 
 the storm of conquest and destruction fell. The 
 hard matter-of-fact rendering given in such events as 
 these, of a hope so fervid and ideal at the start, — a 
 rendering of it at once sordid and fierce, — it seems 
 necessary to bring into strong relief, if we would see 
 it as a natural thing in human annals, and at the same 
 time know the real background of that purely ethical 
 and spiritual interpretation, which at length displaced 
 it, and transfigured the Messiah to the Christ. 
 
 * This title signifies " Son of the Star," in allusion to Balaam's 
 prophecy (Numbers xxiv. 17). 
 
MESSIANIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS. 13 
 
 It does not belong properly to our task to attempt 
 a solution of that central problem of history, the ori- 
 gin of Christianity. Science is not content until it 
 has traced one by one the links of sequence that guide 
 from antecedent to result, and is sure that there is no 
 missing link. But science does not define or assign 
 the Cause, which it must always assume, or else 
 ignore, — historical science as much as any. This par- 
 ticular antecedent of Christianity, which we find in 
 the Messianic hope of the Jews, it is well for us to 
 see as distinctly as we can, — how it was, in the way 
 of historical perspective ; what it was, in the way of 
 historical imagination. When we would apply it to 
 explain anything in the rise of Christianity, we find 
 it, so to speak, not at the heart, but rather at the two 
 edges of the phenomenon we are seeking to explain. 
 We find it at every step in the gospel narrative, where 
 it makes an element in the mental atmosphere, with- 
 out which the course of that narrative would be man- 
 ifestly inconsequent and incredible ; and, when the 
 scene shifts to apostolic times, we find it just fading 
 away in all its grosser features, while it is getting 
 transfigured into a sacred memory and an ideal 
 truth. 
 
 The first thing we have to do, then, is to take the 
 record of the facts, if we can, absolutely without the 
 warp of any preconceived opinion, or any theological 
 dogmatism. Looking at them so, it appears plain that 
 what we may call the messianic consciousness of Jesus, 
 which is so intense and even predominant towards the 
 close of his ministry, was a comparatively late devel- 
 opment in him. To put it in theological phrase, his 
 
14 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 generation as Son of God was anterior to his appoint- 
 ment as Messiah of the Jews. In the language we 
 usually apply to human experience, his vocation as a 
 moral and spiritual teacher was recognized first ; and 
 only as an after result came his strong conviction that 
 he was the chosen Deliverer of his people, though by 
 a way they could not understand or follow. 
 
 At first they knew him only as a village enthusiast, 
 a Galilsean teacher, at best a Eabbi, like other inter- 
 preters of the Law, one of the school perhaps of Eabbi 
 Hillel or Eabbi Simeon, like them setting the weight- 
 ier matters of justice and mercy above the mint, anise, 
 and cumin of current exposition. For a background 
 to the understanding of his discourses, one should 
 know something of the wonderful well-meaning ped- 
 antry of the rabbinical interpreters, and something 
 too of the genuine and wholesome ethics which the 
 better sort, Hillel at their head, had tried to engraft 
 upon it. 
 
 But here was a new and astonishing phenomenon. 
 Their placid moralism, their commonplaces of natural 
 ethics, suddenly blazed out in a passionate and even 
 haughty conviction, — flooded too with a glow of 
 fervent trust, a wealth of human tenderness, a strain 
 of poetic beauty, which made it all, as it were, a new 
 revelation to his hearers, and "he taught them as 
 one having authority." All this is indicated, plainly 
 enough, in the austere morality, the sharp transitions, 
 the strange and winning sweetness, the tender and 
 bright imagery, the perfect expression of religious 
 trust, that make the Sermon on the Mount different 
 in kind from all other existing words, — from the calm 
 
SYMPATHY WITH THE POPULAR FEELING. 15 
 
 beatitudes of its opening to the stern and menacing 
 parable at its close. This we must take as the type of 
 the teaching of Jesus in its earlier stage, apart from 
 all critical questions that touch its literary form or the 
 sources of its doctrine. The swift flow and the vivid 
 personality we find in it are the very stamp, the very 
 person, so to speak, of the young prophet of Galilee. 
 
 But this is not the person of the Jewish Messiah, 
 even by the highest Christian interpretation we can 
 give that title. The consciousness of this special 
 mission was developed in the mind of Jesus later than 
 this, and gradually. If it had crossed his thought be- 
 fore, the scene of the Temptation seems to show that it 
 had been definitely put aside. But it lay, so to speak, 
 very near, and offered itself once and again. With- 
 out any doubt he had been nurtured in that fervent 
 patriotic hope whose peculiar home was Galilee, and 
 felt it as strongly as any of his countrymen. And, 
 again, the words of John the Baptist had greatly 
 quickened that restless and eager expectation in the 
 general mind, which began already passionately to 
 demand the coming of a Deliverer. Eemember, too, 
 how near, in the mental perspective, was that day of 
 sudden glory which had redeemed a martyr people 
 from a yoke more cruel and seemingly as strong as 
 that of Ptome ; and how the name of Elias the fore- 
 runner, mysteriously hinted by Malachi, and repeated 
 in more vehement strain in the prophecy of Enoch, 
 was already current in men's mouths. 
 
 Now it was not the words of purely religious teach- 
 ing in the discourse of Jesus, it was not the moral 
 loftiness, or the strong appeal to conscience, that 
 
16 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 made the people's heart acknowledge its King in him, 
 and so (as it were) flashed back the conviction upon 
 his own. It was rather those other signs of personal 
 power that went with his word. It was that his 
 presence, by some unexplained force, could stir great 
 multitudes, as the waves of the sea are moved by the 
 wind or lifted by the moon ; that his voice could 
 soothe brooding insanity, and control the wild de- 
 moniac, and charm away the. passion of despair or 
 grief; that healing went from his touch, and sick 
 men in his sight became conscious of new health and 
 strength, — it was these things that so wrought on 
 them that they "were ready to take him by force 
 and make him a king." 
 
 Now when a man becomes aware in himself of 
 some rare, perhaps unparalleled, personal power, — 
 power, too, of a sort that distinctly imposes on him a 
 special mission to his fellow-men, a task to fulfil 
 altogether his own, and a destiny apart from theirs, 
 * — this conviction is apt to come upon him with awe 
 and sadness and a certain terror. " All, Lord God ! " 
 said Jeremiah, " behold, I cannot speak, for I am a 
 child." But the Lord said, " Say not, I am a child ; 
 for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and 
 whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak." 
 
 This spiritual crisis, we may conceive, came to 
 Jesus not before but during his public ministry. It 
 is indicated by his shrinking from the observation 
 and contact of men ; by his spending whole nights 
 apart in prayer ; by the Transfiguration, in which he 
 is forewarned of " the decease which he must accom- 
 plish at Jerusalem." Before it, his words are such as 
 
THE ENTRANCE INTO JERUSALEM. 17 
 
 I have spoken of, — the deep conviction of moral 
 truth, the pure poetry of the religious life. After 
 it, we have his vehement appeals to the Jewish peo- 
 ple, his passionate denunciations of their timeserving 
 and false leaders, his brooding tenderness over the 
 near fate of Jerusalem, his whip of small cords for 
 the traders of the temple, his apocalyptic visions 
 of the coming terror, his vasme but awful hints con- 
 veyed in parables of the Virgins and of the impend- 
 ing Judgment. 
 
 These all belong to what we may call the later or 
 Messianic period of his ministry. I do not mean 
 that in its essential spiritual elements, in its assertion 
 of righteousness and mercy, not partiality and wrath, 
 as the heart of the Law, this second period was at all 
 altered from the spirit of the first ; but only that its 
 force was narrowed more and more in a single chan- 
 nel, towards a special end. How distinctly he may 
 have thought of a national rescue and triumph like 
 that of Judas the Maccabee as a possible thing, be- 
 fore the great shadow fell upon him in the Garden of 
 Gethsemane, we are not, perhaps, entitled to judge. 
 If he did think of it as possible, we may be sure it 
 was by way of divine miracle, not of human valor. 
 There was one hour when it would almost seem as if 
 he accepted this conception of the Messiah's work, 
 — when he rode into Jerusalem over palm-leaves and 
 garments strewn in the way. There was one moment 
 when a word from him might have raised a storm of 
 popular passion, and possibly have secured a few 7 days 
 of bloody triumph, like that which, forty years after- 
 wards, w 7 ent before the final tragedy, — when the 
 
16 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 made the people's heart acknowledge its King in him, 
 and so (as it were) flashed back the conviction upon 
 his own. It was rather those other signs of personal 
 power that went with his word. It was that his 
 presence, by some unexplained force, could stir great 
 multitudes, as the waves of the sea are moved by the 
 wind or lifted by the moon ; that his voice could 
 soothe brooding insanity, and control the wild de- 
 moniac, and charm away the passion of despair or 
 grief; that healing went from his touch, and sick 
 men in his sight became conscious of new health and 
 strength, — it was these things that so wrought on 
 them that they "were ready to take him by force 
 and make him a king." 
 
 Now when a man becomes aware in himself of 
 some rare, perhaps unparalleled, personal power, — 
 power, too, of a sort that distinctly imposes on him a 
 special mission to his fellow-men, a task to fulfil 
 altogether his own, and a destiny apart from theirs, 
 J — this conviction is apt to come upon him with awe 
 and sadness and a certain terror. " Ah, Lord God ! " 
 said Jeremiah, " behold, I cannot speak, for I am a 
 child." But the Lord said, " Say not, I am a child ; 
 for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and 
 whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak." 
 
 This spiritual crisis, we may conceive, came to 
 Jesus not before but during his public ministry. It 
 is indicated by his shrinking from the observation 
 and contact of men ; by his spending whole nights 
 apart in prayer ; by the Transfiguration, in which he 
 is forewarned of " the decease which he must accom- 
 plish at Jerusalem." Before it, his words are such as 
 
THE ENTRANCE INTO JERUSALEM. 17 
 
 I have spoken of, — the deep conviction of moral 
 truth, the pure poetry of the religious life. After 
 it, we have his vehement appeals to the Jewish peo- 
 ple, his passionate denunciations of their timeserving 
 and false leaders, his brooding tenderness over the 
 near fate of Jerusalem, his whip of small cords for 
 the traders of the temple, his apocalyptic visions 
 of the coming terror, his vague but awful hints con- 
 veyed in parables of the Virgins and of the impend- 
 ing Judgment. 
 
 These all belong to what we may call the later or 
 Messianic period of his ministry. I do not mean 
 that in its essential spiritual elements, in its assertion 
 of righteousness and mercy, not partiality and wrath, 
 as the heart of the Law, this second period was at all 
 altered from the spirit of the first ; but only that its 
 force was narrowed more and more in a single chan- 
 nel, towards a special end. How distinctly he may 
 have thought of a national rescue and triumph like 
 that of Judas the Maccabee as a possible thing, be- 
 fore the great shadow fell upon him in the Garden of 
 Gethsemane, we are not, perhaps, entitled to judge. 
 If he did think of it as possible, we may be sure it 
 was by way of divine miracle, not of human valor. 
 There was one hour when it would almost seem as if 
 he accepted this conception of the Messiah's work, 
 — when he rode into Jerusalem over palm-leaves and 
 garments strewn in the way. There was one moment 
 when a word from him might have raised a storm of 
 popular passion, and possibly have secured a few days 
 of bloody triumph, like that which, forty years after- 
 wards, went before the final tragedy, — when the 
 
20 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 
 
 But in the lapse of years, in the growth of other 
 sympathies and duties, and the keen interests of daily 
 life, all that was special and local in the Messianic 
 hope must inevitably thin out and disappear. How 
 it became transfigured in the minds of those who had 
 not known Jesus after the flesh, till for the Messiah 
 we have at length the Christ in history, belongs 
 rather to a study of the life and work of the Apos- 
 tle Paul, — who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews ; who 
 " for the hope of Israel " was bound in chains ; but 
 who was also the great free-thinker of the Apostolic 
 era, and has been the real interpreter, some would 
 say even the founder, of Christianity for the modern 
 world. 
 
II. 
 
 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 THERE is nowhere a finer challenge to the histori- 
 cal imagination — that is, to our power of seeing 
 things in a former time just as they really were — 
 than that offered by the very beginnings of Christian- 
 ity as an organized power, as a social force. Let us try 
 to take up that challenge as if the facts were all new 
 to us, and we had to study them for the first time. 
 
 First of all, what was the source of the indomitable 
 faith, the victorious moral force, which made that 
 little company of disciples the corner-stone of a new 
 order of civilization ? How was it that the incon- 
 spicuous gathering of about a hundred and twenty in 
 the upper chamber at Jerusalem had in it the seed of 
 a great growth, which spread its roots amidst the de- 
 cay of the old order of things, and flourished most 
 abundantly when all that splendid structure of art 
 and empire was a mass of mouldering ruin ? 
 
 A full answer to this question would cover the 
 whole ground of the early Christian history. With- 
 out attempting so much as that, it is enough to say 
 that every great political or social revolution will 
 have its type in the life, the character, the work, of 
 some one man ; and that the great moral and spiritual 
 force we are considering is typified, more than any- 
 
22 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 where else, in the vehement conviction, the ardent 
 temper, the impassioned eloquence, the organizing 
 skill, the personal experience, and the vivid religious 
 imagination of the Apostle Paul. 
 
 He is the man of genius and the man of power of 
 the first Christian age. Comte calls him, frankly, the 
 real founder of Christianity, holding the legend of 
 Jesus to be a pale and ineffectual myth. But in 
 Jesus himself, as already seen, there were — besides 
 the indefinable something which resides in person- 
 ality — at least two elements, one of vast personal 
 force, and the other of great historical significance : his 
 intense conception of purely moral truth and of re- 
 ligion as a life, and his equally intense conviction of 
 his calling as Messiah of the Jews. These were the 
 necessary antecedents of the revolution, looked at 
 from its purely human side. But, as soon as the 
 movement widens out beyond the narrow range of a 
 merely personal and local influence, then the life and 
 work of Paul come to be just as essential to any real 
 understanding of it. To show how that indispensable 
 service was enlisted, and how the new movement was 
 inspired and guided by it, is what we mean by an 
 intelligent study of his life. 
 
 The martyrdom of Stephen and the journey to Da- 
 mascus mark the critical moment of Paul's conver- 
 sion. The Council at Jerusalem, which is put some 
 fifteen years later, marks the critical moment when 
 Christianity burst the bounds of Judaism, and stood 
 before the world as an independent faith, — in short, 
 when the mind and influence of Paul had become 
 predominant. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY. 23 
 
 But for each of these moments there is a previous 
 question, before it becomes intelligible : for the first, 
 What was the bond of union among the first disci- 
 ples, that held them together so tenaciously and so 
 long ? and for the second, What was the attraction in 
 them that drew the gentiles that way, so that it was 
 a privilege to join their body, and there was a de- 
 mand for the grave concessions (as they regarded 
 them) which they felt bound to make ? 
 
 It is easy to answer both these questions hy saying 
 that it was all a miracle, and then to take the only 
 record we have as simply a statement of the fact. 
 For my part, I do not see any reason to doubt that 
 the early Church had extraordinary powers — such as 
 gifts of healing, insight, and fervent speech — which 
 they would necessarily think miraculous. "Every 
 good gift," says James, "comes from the Father of 
 lights." Similar gifts have been asserted, with sin- 
 cerity and often no doubt with truth, by various 
 bodies of religionists in every age. 
 
 But take the account as literally as we will, that is 
 only to cut the knot which we are trying to untie : 
 the facts, so seen, are ascertained, not understood. We 
 want, if we can, to see them just as they lay in the 
 minds of the witnesses, and as we should see them if 
 we could cross-question those witnesses. This we 
 cannot do. We can only look at the thing in a broad 
 way. We hold the facts, as it were, in solution in our 
 mind, and wait for them to crystallize in such shape 
 as shall most naturally represent them to our mind. 
 
 We listen, then, to the reports that spread abroad 
 that the crucified Jesus had actually reappeared in. 
 
24 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 the flesh ; we see the eager readiness with which those 
 reports were received and cherished ; and then the 
 lingering expectation that he might resume his public 
 career and assert a triumphant messiahship appears 
 to give way, almost insensibly, to a belief among his 
 followers that he had been taken up visibly into the 
 clouds, and would presently reappear, just as visibly, 
 to establish his victorious reign. 
 
 I take it for granted that this belief of theirs was 
 very precise and simple, and that there was nothing 
 in their habit of mind which made it at all difficult 
 for them to receive it so. As to the narratives of the 
 Resurrection and Ascension, I do not undertake to ex- 
 plain them all away, or in fact to explain them at all. 
 From the arguments of the early apologists, it is clear 
 that they were received as precise and literal fact by 
 the general body of believers. But no amount of tes- 
 timony would be enough, to the mind of the present 
 day, to convince men as a new fact that a body once 
 really dead had been restored to life ; still less, that it 
 had been actually seen to pass into the sky " with 
 flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the per- 
 fection of man's nature," as the later creed declares. 
 Such, at least, was not the view of Paul ; who, in- 
 deed, asserts very earnestly the reality of the resur- 
 rection and the glorified life of Jesus in the eternal 
 state, but with equal explicitness declares that not 
 flesh and blood, but a " spiritual body, " is that which 
 can really inherit the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 The first element of power in the early Church 
 was, then, a distinct and literal belief of certain facts, 
 coupled with a very positive and confident assurance 
 
GROWTH OF THE COMMUNITY. 25 
 
 that a definite prophecy was going to be fulfilled. 
 That such an assurance is a real power and a bond of 
 union, however shadowy its ground may appear to us, 
 we see in those sects of Adventists who have appeared 
 at intervals ever since, and who, after eighteen cen- 
 turies of disappointment, are probably as numerous in 
 our clay as ever. But we must conceive, if we can, 
 how intense and vivid, beyond all modern comparison, 
 this expectation of Christ's second coming must have 
 been in that aoe, and so assume it here as the first 
 unquestionable and all-powerful bond of union ; re- 
 membering, too, that at this point we are dealing only 
 with Jews, at the very heart of the long period of 
 intense and heated expectation which we have called 
 the Messianic Era. 
 
 But this is only one point. Why was it that a little 
 inner circle of Jews, — whose leaders were " unlearned 
 and ignorant men," more intensely Jewish, and (so to 
 speak) more bigoted and narrow than the average of 
 their countrymen,* — why was it that they could exert 
 such an immense power of attraction and persuasion 
 that in one day three thousand were added to their 
 number, and in a few months they reckoned a com- 
 munity of five thousand souls, and in a few years 
 multitudes were knocking hard for admission at their 
 doors, and in a few generations the whole Roman 
 empire was at their feet ? Never in all history has 
 there been the parallel case of a growth so genuine, 
 so vast, or so powerful, out of what was at the start 
 a purely moral movement, or a purely religious im- 
 pulse. 
 
 * See Acts ii. 46, iv. 13. 
 
 2 
 
26 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 A full answer to the question includes a great va- 
 riety of things : earnest faith, strong mutual attach- 
 ment, a common loyalty, skilful organization, good 
 lives, gifts of healing and the like (which they called 
 " powers," and which we call " miracles "), the con- 
 tagious enthusiasm that often comes from isolation 
 and from martyrdom. But the power of the organ- 
 ized movement at the start seems best explained by 
 what we are told of the socialistic sentiment and 
 theory of the early Church. " No man among them 
 believed that aught which he possessed was his own, 
 but they had all things common." That is, they did 
 really try to put in practice, in the most literal way, 
 those precepts of boundless and uncalculating gen- 
 erosity which are contained in the Sermon on the 
 Mount. 
 
 And this, if we will look at it, was of itself a 
 prodigious force. Its power is commonly seen not in 
 the well educated or in the well-to-do, who in general 
 know nothing of the socialistic sentiment and rather 
 hold it in contempt. But look at the prodigious 
 fanaticism it evoked in the first French Revolution ; 
 look at its terrific and obstinate strength in the Paris 
 Commune of 1871 ; look at the martyrdoms willingly 
 undergone for it in Russia at this day, where it has 
 been enthusiastically embraced by high-born men and 
 ladies delicately bred, who submit to persecution, con- 
 fiscation, exile more bitter than death ; * look at the 
 
 * " Students leave the lecture-rooms to mix with the peasants ; 
 princes leave their palaces to seek work in the factories ; noble 
 girls flee from their families to go into service as cooks and- seam- 
 stresses ; and, if they are disturbed in the midst of their propa- 
 ganda by the police, they wander with unbroken courage to 
 
THE MARTYRDOM OF STEPHEN. 27 
 
 grand, almost sublime, even if mistaken munificence 
 with which the workingmen of England and America 
 in these last years have borne one another's burdens, 
 so as to win some far-off victory in the battle of capi- 
 tal and labor ; — and then you see that the socialistic 
 sentiment is one of the great moral forces to move 
 human society to its foundations. Not sordid interest, 
 but uncalculating sentiment, is what carries the day 
 in the great crises of humanity. 
 
 The early disciples were hard-working, plain-speak- 
 ing people ; " not many great, not many rich, not 
 many mighty, not many noble were called." A part 
 of their working faith was a most generous, a most 
 unsparing doctrine of the sharing of goods and bur- 
 dens. Read the story of Ananias and Sapphira. 
 Read what Paul says of missionary and charitable 
 gifts. Read the Epistle of James, which in its de- 
 nouncing of the vanity, wealth, and fashion that began 
 to creep in, speaks the very heart of the first church 
 at Jerusalem, as it echoes the very thought of those 
 who assail most formidably a proud, rich, and dom- 
 inant ecclesiasticism at this day. 
 
 A crisis came to the affairs of the church at Jerusa- 
 lem, after six or eight years of unmolested growth, with 
 the death of Stephen. He was a sort of half-Greek, 
 a man of greater vigor, boldness, and mental breadth 
 than the rest, and is held to have been, in a sense, the 
 forerunner of Paul. His martyrdom shows the first 
 sharp collision caused by the Greek or foreign element 
 
 Siberia, march defiantly to the gallows, always setting the dan- 
 gerous, contagious example of triumphant martyrdom. Of what 
 use, then, are blows, chains, the scaffold 1 " 
 
28 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 asserting itself in the Church. Now Paul — at this 
 time known by the Jewish name of Saul — "was 
 consenting to his death." He was a man of thirty, in 
 the hot glow of a first conviction, trained austerely 
 as a Jew of the straitest sort, and doubtless thought 
 he ought to do something by way of testimony 
 against these disturbers of the comfortable religious 
 peace. 
 
 But his heart was very much larger than his creed. 
 How much he had been impressed in a quieter way 
 before, by the spectacle of that close-clinging and de- 
 voted life of the Christian community, nothing is 
 told. But the shock of that first martyrdom — the 
 noble head of Stephen, with a face " as it had been 
 an angel's," battered out of human likeness by jagged 
 stones flung from fierce and cruel hands of a mob of 
 bigots right there on the pavement before his eyes — 
 struck him like a blow. That was putting the whole 
 thing in quite another shape. Out of sheer wilful 
 consistency, as we may imagine, he proceeded to carry 
 out his commission, " breathing out threatening and 
 slaughter," and to put it in execution as far as Da- 
 mascus, some hundred and fifty miles away. And 
 then — we know the story : the blinding flash from 
 the sky ; the voice as of the very Crucified One in 
 his heart, in sorrow, rebuke, appeal ; the three days' 
 groping in darkness ; and then the sudden, eager, 
 glad embracing of a new life. 
 
 It is quite beside my purpose to give even a brief 
 sketch of Paul's life, or anything like an analysis of 
 his system of belief. A single glance we may be per- 
 mitted at his person, as described by the earliest wit- 
 
HIS PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 29 
 
 nesses : a man's physical frame and countenance are 
 often the best type of the personal force he carries. 
 
 Paul, then, according to the legends, was a man lit- 
 tle of stature — under five feet high they say, high- 
 shouldered, beetle-browed, stooping, with head bent 
 forward, his beard and hair at middle life of an iron- 
 gray ; his brow wide, his face thin, his eye deep and 
 somewhat sad ; the dark eye, the marked features, 
 we may imagine of the strong Jewish type. His 
 bodily presence was weak and his speech contempti- 
 ble, — so his enemies said. That his speech was hesi- 
 tating and slow, when not roused, we may believe 
 easily enough : it w T as so with Demosthenes ; it was 
 so with Mahomet, who, next to Paul, has shown the 
 most burning and effective eloquence of the Semitic 
 race, and in whom, like Paul, that barrier of hesitating 
 and imperfect utterance gave way on occasion to a 
 hot flood of passionate and eager words, that stirred 
 great tides of popular conviction. How vivid and 
 dramatic that eloquence of Paul's could be, we see in 
 the noble speech before Festus ; how dignified, seri- 
 ous, and apt, in the address on Mars' Hill. But these 
 were flashes of power, with misgivings and rebuffs 
 between. " I was with you," he says, " in weakness, 
 and fear, and much trembling." " Lest I should be 
 exalted above measure, there was given me a thorn in 
 the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me." This 
 thorn may have been (as Dr. Brown of Edinburgh 
 thinks) a dimness of sight — probably with much 
 pain — ever after the shock that blinded him on the 
 road to Damascus ; but perhaps we shall understand 
 it better if we connect it with that moral conflict of 
 
30 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 flesh and spirit, which I shall speak of later, as more 
 than all else the source of Paul's peculiar power. 
 
 We get a much more vivid notion of his interior 
 person (so to speak) from Paul's own words, than we 
 do of his bodily presence through doubtful tradition. 
 I will recall a few phrases which reflect the native 
 pride, the utter lack of vanity, the sensitiveness to 
 affront, the eager craving for sympathy, that go along 
 with such a temperament : — "It is a very small thing 
 that I should be judged of you, or any man's judg- 
 ment ; he that judgeth me is the Lord." " We have 
 labored night and day that we might not be charge- 
 able to any of you while we preached ; as you know, 
 these hands have provided for my necessities." " We 
 both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buf- 
 feted, and have no certain dwelling-place ; we work 
 with our own hands; we are made as the filth of 
 the earth, the offscouring of all things." And again : 
 " We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed ; 
 perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, yet not 
 forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; — servants 
 of God in much endurance, in afflictions, in necessi- 
 ties, in distresses, in stripes, imprisonments, tumults, 
 labors, watchings, fastings, — in honor and dishonor, 
 in good report and evil report ; deceivers, and yet 
 true ; unknown, and yet well known ; dying, and be- 
 hold we live; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, 
 yet making many rich ; having nothing, and yet pos- 
 sessing all things." The vehemence and the love of 
 paradox, which run so well with many veins of reli- 
 gious experience, show strongly here. 
 
 And again, of the way of life : that had fightings 
 
HARDSHIPS OF HIS LIFE. 31 
 
 without, and fears within. " Of the Jews," he says, 
 " five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice 
 I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Thrice 
 I suffered shipwreck : a night and a day I have been in 
 the deep ; in journey ings often, in perils of waters, 
 in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, 
 in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in 
 perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils 
 among false brethren ; in weariness and paiufulness, 
 in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings 
 often, in cold and nakedness ; and, besides all these 
 things, which are without, what comes upon me daily, 
 anxiety about all the churches." This, it will be re- 
 membered, is no idle complaint or appeal to pity, but 
 an indignant retort to those enemies of his at Corinth 
 who appear to have called him weak, irritable, and 
 " a fool." " What do you mean, to weep and break 
 my heart ? " he says at Csesarea ; " I am ready, not 
 only to be bound, but to die at Jerusalem." " It is 
 for the hope of Israel," he says at Borne, " that I am 
 bound with this chain." And to the Eoman gov- 
 ernor, " Would God that not only thou, but all that 
 hear me to-day, were both almost and altogether such 
 as I am, except these bonds." 
 
 In such words as these we already find hints of the 
 jealousies and disputes which followed him five and 
 twenty years, all the way from conversion to martyr- 
 dom. It was with much natural misgiving that the 
 disciples admitted him of their company at all and 
 very reluctantly that they let him speak frankly to 
 the Gentiles in their name. Even then (as we have 
 seen) taunting opponents would sneer at his stature, 
 
32 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 or gait, or the imperfections of his speech. Men of 
 narrower culture and less ardent temper would set 
 themselves against his innovations, and he must 
 " withstand them to the face," as he did Peter and 
 James at Antioch ; failing so of his own fond dream 
 of a communion in which diversities of gifts should 
 be reconciled in the bond of peace, and sharing, in- 
 stead, the numberless frets and irritations that beset 
 a divided party, outwardly bound together, inwardly 
 sundered and harassed. 
 
 The work he has painfully clone at Corinth is half 
 undone by jealous brethren, who throw out slurs 
 against his authority or his soundness in the faith. 
 Some officious intruder has "bewitched his foolish 
 Galatians " with scruples he thought silenced long 
 ago, and put him to the double task of defending his 
 own character, and. arguing all over again the first 
 principles of his gospel. And it is a symptom at 
 once painful and strange of those early controversies, 
 that more than a generation after his death his 
 memory was attacked, under a false name, by the 
 partisans of Peter; and phrases of his writings are 
 travestied in Antinomian discourses ascribed to the 
 arch-heretic Simon Mao-us. 
 
 Doubtless there would be something to say on the 
 other side, if we had the words of any who were near 
 enough to say it. We too, if we were near enough, 
 should most likely have found faults in what we 
 dimly see now as excellences ; should have shared 
 the jealous alarm of the earlier disciples at his daring 
 innovations on their faith ; should have resented his 
 off-hand claim of official equality and mental supe- 
 
HIS LAST JOURNEY. 33 
 
 riority; should have joined the rest in calling him 
 testy, irascible, and overbearing. But these small 
 personal traits fade in the perspective of time ; and 
 we remember only the strong, brave, ardent, tender- 
 hearted man, whose very faults of temperament were 
 a sort of goad in the work he had to do. We remem- 
 ber only that that eager and many-sided mind has 
 done for us the necessary task of transforming the 
 Galilsean idyll, the tragedy at Jerusalem, the narrow 
 Messianic hope, from a local tradition to an imperish- 
 able possession of mankind. 
 
 This is the verdict of history upon him, and it is 
 just. But it is also made easier to us by the fact that 
 it is through his own words Ave know him best. The 
 most transparent of men unconsciously idealizes his 
 thought and aim. In the very effort to interpret 
 himself to others, not only what is most real, but 
 what is best in him, comes clearest into view. So 
 that it is to Paul's advantage, as well as ours, that he 
 is his own interpreter. 
 
 A few words may tell us the noble and fit close of 
 the story. Some Jewish fanatics had conspired, and 
 sworn his death. Forty of them vowed that " they 
 would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul." 
 Rescued by the captain of the guard, he appealed to 
 Rome. Naturally, he " had a great desire these many 
 years" to visit the Eternal City, then the sovereign 
 centre of mind as well as empire. A stormy passage, 
 broken by shipwreck on the coast of Malta, brought 
 him among a few friends there whom he had once 
 met at Corinth : here was the little nucleus of the 
 Roman Church. After two years there, busy and 
 2* c 
 
34 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 unmolested, — a prisoner, as it were, on parole, — he 
 travelled, as the traditions say, westward into Spain, 
 and even to the " farthest isle," by which some under- 
 stand England, or even Ireland. "When, some time 
 later, Nero (as the people charged) set tire to Eome 
 in his brutal and insolent caprice, he turned the 
 charge upon the Christians, says Tacitus ; threw them 
 to wild beasts in the arena, or wrapped them in tarred 
 cloth and set them afire at night to light the imperial 
 gardens. Paul was brought more than once before 
 the judgment. " At my first answer," he said, " no 
 man stood with me, but all deserted me ; but the 
 Lord stood by me and strengthened me, and I was de- 
 livered from the lion's mouth." As a Roman citizen 
 he might not be cast to the beasts, or die a slave's 
 death on the cross, but was beheaded with the sword. 
 " I have fought a good fight," he said, while waiting 
 his doom. " I have finished my course, I have kept 
 the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a 
 crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous 
 judge, shall give me at that day."* 
 
 Recognizing that the forces which guide human 
 events are essentially moral forces, and have their 
 source in men's conviction, passion, and will, and 
 that events themselves are (in a sense) but the reflex, 
 at least the outgrowth, of personal character, I have 
 gathered thus a few scattered phrases in which Paul 
 lets in light on his temper, motive, and acts. Per- 
 
 * 2 Tim. iv. 7, 8, 16, 18. I say nothing about the genuineness 
 of the epistle, which is well known to be doubtful. But it is cer- 
 tainly easier to concede it to be Paul's, than to imagine it written 
 by anybody else. 
 
HIS OPINIONS AND WHITINGS. 35 
 
 haps, with all these, we should not appreciate the 
 strong hold he had on his friends by way of sympa- 
 thy, but for those touching words in the parting at 
 Miletus : " And when he had thus spoken, lie knelt 
 down and prayed with them all ; and they all wept 
 sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, sorrow- 
 ing most of all for the words he spoke, that they 
 should see his face no more." * 
 
 We see, then, that the immense influence which 
 went forth from Paul's life — perhaps the most re- 
 markable, considered in all its effects, that ever flowed 
 from the action of a single mind — had its main 
 source in the character of the man. His opinions 
 are of secondary consequence ; in fact, they belong- 
 as much to the time as to him, so far as they are 
 merely speculative. But, so far as they grow out of 
 his character, and express, not simply belief, but pas- 
 sionate conviction in him, they become most impor- 
 tant elements of power. They are the very avenues 
 and conductors by which, as from an electric pile, 
 that vivid force made itself effectually felt. 
 
 A word, first, of the documents in which these 
 opinions are found. It will be convenient to divide 
 Paul's epistles, roughly, into three groups ; assuming 
 the Thessalonians (I. and II.) as the earliest ; then the 
 four great epistles, Romans, Corinthians (I., II.), and 
 Galatians ; lastly, the Ephesians, Philippians, and Co- 
 lossians. That to the Hebrews is almost certainly 
 not his; and the three short "pastoral" letters to 
 Timothy and Titus are of doubtful genuineness, and 
 of less doctrinal account. 
 
 * Acts xx. 36-38. 
 
36 SAIXT PAUL. 
 
 Strictly speaking, only the main central group is 
 quite undisputed; but the first nine mentioned have 
 a close connection and a like interest. They mark 
 three stages of a well-defined system of thought, 
 which we know best by the name of Paul. This sys- 
 tem turns upon two points or pivots, — one of chief 
 importance in the history of speculative doctrine, the 
 other in the view of Christianity as a moral power 
 in the world. I shall attempt here only a brief and 
 imperfect exhibition of each. 
 
 I. Paul's doctrine of Christ is not only very marked 
 and striking in itself, but it shows exactly the transi- 
 tion from the Messiah-doctrine of the Jews to that 
 order of speculation which has been dominant in the 
 Church ever since. 
 
 In trying to understand this phase of opinion, we 
 must bear in mind that Paul had never known Jesus 
 as a man — " after the flesh," as he phrases it. If 
 he had, we should probably have never known any- 
 thing of his Christology. He claimed to have re- 
 ceived knowledge of his Lord direct, by revelation. 
 Such knowledge must have been strongly colored by 
 sentiment and imagination, especially in such a mind 
 as Paul's, impressed as he always was by the power- 
 ful and haunting remembrance of the vision near 
 Damascus. Whatever else we may think of Paul's 
 opinion on this matter, we must attempt, at any rate, 
 to conceive it as psychologically true. 
 
 We must remember, too, that he was first of all 
 and intensely a Jew, in belief, in habit, and in edu- 
 cation. His starting-place was not the simple and 
 unwarped desire of speculative truth, which we might 
 
THE CHEISTOLOGY OF PAUL. 37 
 
 look for in a thorough-bred Greek philosopher, but an 
 eager attachment to and apprehension of a particular 
 order of truth, developed in Hebrew schools, assum- 
 ing a distinct historic background, and a definite 
 grasp upon the future. The widening out and ideal- 
 izing of his earlier messianic creed we may conceive 
 as the work and the growth of those secluded years 
 in Tarsus, after his conversion, before Barnabas sum- 
 moned him to the front at Antioch.* 
 
 1. First of all, accordingly, we have the fervent ex- 
 pression, in " Thessalonians," of faith in the risen and 
 glorified Messiah, and the vivid assurance, which, if 
 not Paul himself, at any rate his hearers must have 
 taken as fact, to be literally and presently brought to 
 pass : f " The Lord himself shall descend from heaven 
 with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and 
 with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall 
 rise first ; then we that are alive and remain shall be 
 caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet 
 the Lord in the air : and so shall we ever be with the 
 Lord." I 
 
 This second coming of Christ has about it still the 
 vindictive temper, and the promise of a sweet revenge, 
 so characteristic of the elder creed : " It is a righteous 
 thing with God to recompense tribulation to them 
 that trouble you " ; and Jesus will be " revealed from 
 heaven, with his mighty angels, in naming fire taking 
 vengeance on them that know not God, .... who shall 
 
 * About a. d. 40-50. 
 
 t All the allusions to Christ in the first epistle, and most of 
 those in the second, are qualified by the expression li waiting,"' 
 "hope," " coming " (irapovaia), or the like. 
 
 t 1 Thess. iv. 16, 17. 
 
38 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 be punished with everlasting destruction from the pres- 
 ence of the Lord and from the glory of his power." * 
 This is the first stage of Paul's thought : it is simply 
 a vivid and expanded copy of that vision of Daniel, 
 repeated as a promise and a solace to a longing, wait- 
 ing, suffering church. 
 
 2. But this first close and impatient expectation 
 must pass away. Incessant cares, varieties of peril, 
 daily duties, the need of controversy, instruction, and 
 advice, all served to put off, thin out, refine this grosser 
 vision, and irradiate it with a purer, inner light. 
 
 In the " Corinthians " Christ is first of all a spiritual 
 lord and chief, " head of every man," soul of a body 
 having many members, the mystic "rock" of the old 
 covenant, the source of doctrine and authority, in 
 whose name believers are " washed, sanctified, justi- 
 fied," "by whom are all things, and we by him." 
 Paul knows him now in person : " Have I not seen 
 Jesus Christ our Lord ? " He speaks of " visions and 
 revelations of the Lord," which he distinguishes from 
 anything that can be had by sight of the eye or 
 knowledge after the flesh. 
 
 To the Galatians, again, he speaks of Christ as the 
 Deliverer who has " redeemed us from the curse of 
 the law" and has lifted off yokes and burdens: the 
 disciple is " no more a servant, but a son ; and, if a 
 son, then an heir of God through Christ." 
 
 But perhaps it is in the epistle to the Romans that, 
 after toiling through much knotty and tangled argu- 
 ment about the law of sin and the soul straggling in 
 bonds of flesh, he bursts (in the magnificent eighth 
 
 * 2 Thess. i. 6-9; compare 1 Thess. ii. 14-16. 
 
EPISTLES OF CAPTIVITY. 39 
 
 chapter) into the very noblest expression of grateful 
 joy in Christ as a pure spiritual presence, felt in the 
 soul, to reconcile, comfort, and uplift. It is still the 
 risen Christ in heaven, " at the right hand of God," as 
 in the old prophetic vision ; but it is now of a purely 
 gracious celestial force he speaks, manifesting itself 
 in the soul's own comfort, joy, victory, strength, and 
 peace. " I am persuaded that neither death nor life, 
 nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things 
 present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor 
 any other created thing,* shall be able to separate us 
 from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
 Lord." 
 
 3. The later letters have been called " epistles of 
 captivity." Paul writes as a " prisoner of the Lord " 
 from Borne, in declining strength, debarred from his 
 eager activities, very likely in clear anticipation of 
 the inevitable end. His thought of Christ is now 
 wholly reverent, vague, idealizing. He has given full 
 play to the imagination, fed both by the familiar 
 teaching of Jewish schools and by the forms of specu- 
 lative philosophy that had taken so strong hold on 
 the Jewish mind in Alexandria and elsewhere, which 
 had come to him, doubtless, in the way of his learned 
 education. Now, the Christ of his revering fancy 
 retains no more the sharp outline of the messianic 
 hope, retains but the faintest trace of human person- 
 ality ; he becomes a type of that Divine Energy which 
 it was the chief study of religious speculation then to 
 personify in some form less vague than the Infinite, 
 less precise than a Person or a Will. 
 
 * More strictly, " any different order of creation." 
 
40 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 Paul does not use the phraseology about the Divine 
 Word which presently became so familiar in Christian 
 philosophy ; but the Christ of the " Philippians " and 
 " Colossians " is a bright and vivid reflex of those 
 emanations of half-oriental imagination : " the bright- 
 ness of the Father's glory and express image of his 
 person" ; "in the form of God, though not claiming 
 equality with God " ; a pre-existent being, who " takes 
 upon him the form of a servant " ; " image of the in- 
 visible, first-born of the whole creation " ; " through 
 whom all things were created, in heaven or earth." 
 This eager, fervent, passionate expression of reverence 
 and homage, — cleaving still to the image of a suffer- 
 ing and glorified Saviour, to one who, " though he was 
 rich, yet for our sakes became poor," and " took on 
 him the condition of a slave," to die a slave's death 
 on the cross,* — retaining as it does the phrases that 
 had been the familiar utterance of Jewish hope, is 
 the final exaltation and idealizing of that hope. It 
 was the one thing which — by a splendid quickening 
 vision, by a great surge, as it were, of religious en- 
 thusiasm, and warm, passionate emotion — floated the 
 yet crude and hesitating thought of the Christian 
 body beyond the boundaries that held it, and made 
 possible the conquests of an aggressive faith. 
 
 II. The other point, still more important in con- 
 sidering Christianity as a moral power in the world, 
 is Paul's doctrine of Sin and Justification. I should 
 like, if I could, to get rid of all theological preposses- 
 
 * This is the image which more than any other impressed the 
 imagination of the early Church, and is most dwelt on in appeals 
 as to the character of Christ's sacrifice. 
 
THE GENTILE WORLD. 41 
 
 sion in regard to the meaning of those terms. Paul 
 was, first of all, a Jew, " a Hebrew of the Hebrews." 
 Now, whatever else the Hebrew tradition taught, it 
 certainly did teach the worship of "a Power, not 
 ourselves, that makes for righteousness." It certainly 
 did teach, along with much that was narrow, perverse, 
 grotesque, a very close and anxious obedience to a 
 " law of righteousness." By a thousand petty symbols 
 of ritual purification it enforced the notion of an ideal 
 purity as an attribute of God, and as the aim of man's 
 better life. And over against all this, conceived as it 
 was with the impassioned vividness characteristic of 
 the man, Paul saw — what ? 
 
 I will not speak in general terms of " a world lying in 
 wickedness," — the familiar exaggeration of the apolo- 
 gists, one side all black, the other all bright. It was 
 no such thing. The life of Agricola or Germanicus, 
 as afterwards of Trajan, shows that manhood and 
 public virtue were not extinct in Rome. The stories 
 of Eponina, of Arria, of the elder Agrippina, show 
 that womanly honor and domestic love still remained. 
 The correspondence of Pliny, and the later possibili- 
 ties of the Antonines and of Epictetus, show that 
 many of the graces of life, and some of its noblest 
 virtues, survived among those who either had heard 
 nothing of the new faith, or else deliberately preferred 
 the old. But I will say, for specific charges, read the 
 first chapter of " Komans " ; and, for comment, read 
 Tacitus, read Juvenal, read Seneca, read if you will 
 Petronius, written at the very time Paul lived "in his 
 own hired house " at Eome. 
 
 Against that insolent riot of indulgence his ethics, 
 
42 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 at once austere and humane, stands out in superb 
 relief. "What he calls Sin had a very real and intense 
 signification to his mind ; it forced a heavy burden 
 and challenge upon his conscience.* In what he says 
 of the Divine judgment of sin he does not once appeal, 
 except by vague allusion, to the terrors of a future 
 world, so strongly pronounced in the Jewish popular 
 imagination, and reflected so powerfully in the Apoca- 
 lypse and the parables of Jesus. He speaks of the 
 evil thing itself : the source of it, in human passion 
 and infirmity; the law of it, that it makes man its 
 slave; the result of it, in wretchedness, despair, and 
 death. 
 
 Paul's theory of moral evil is mixed up with some 
 traditional belief of inheritance from Adam ; with 
 some technical philosophy of a threefold nature, — 
 body, soul, and spirit ; with some shadowy view of a 
 " spiritual body " in the resurrection, to be free from 
 the corruption of grosser flesh. But, apart from all 
 matters of mere opinion, I do not know where we 
 could go for an equally keen and profound sense of 
 moral evil in itself. And, go where we will, I do not 
 think we can find anywhere so noble, so delicate, so 
 elevated, so austerely sweet, a code of ethics as we 
 find scattered through the writings of Paul. The 
 defects lie on the side of social questions as they 
 come to us among our political liberties in a more 
 complex civilization ; the errors are almost all from 
 a certain ascetic vein (not very dangerous to us), or 
 
 * Sin (a/xapTia) is conceived by Paul, in strict accord with the 
 realistic philosophy of the time, as an objective reality, and not 
 merely a phase of moral experience. See Komans vii. 17. 
 
THE ETHICS OF PAUL. 43 
 
 else from sundry odd prejudices and grossnesses of 
 the Jewish schools. 
 
 The Pauline ethics differs from that of the Gospel 
 in being not purely ideal or sentimental, but practi- 
 cal and definite. Tor it is to be noticed that the 
 Christian scriptures contain, not one type of ethics, 
 but two : one purely individual, ideal, spiritual, found 
 in the Gospels ; the other social and organic, assum- 
 ing the mixed duties and relations of a somewhat 
 complex society, found in the Epistles.* The back- 
 ground of the first is the simplicity of village life, or 
 else the austere purity of Hebrew worship ; the other 
 is incessantly conscious of sharp contrasts in human 
 condition, and of the corruption and cruelty of that 
 profligate age. And, in Paul's exposition of it, it is 
 matched, intentionally and intensely, point for point, 
 against the degrading doctrine and practice of the 
 gentile world. I am sorry that I cannot take time 
 to illustrate this ; but there is less need, since nine 
 tenths of the best Christian teaching on the subject 
 (it is hardly too much to say) is made up of illustra- 
 tion and expansion of the texts of Paul. 
 
 But, if this were all, it would not constitute, prop- 
 erly speaking, a moral force, any more than that 
 average tone of exposition just spoken of. It might 
 amount to no more than the eloquent declamation 
 of Stoics like Seneca, weak-kneed when the special 
 
 * It is worth while to notice here that the exaggeration of the 
 former type led to the various forms of Christian asceticism and 
 solitary life, while the other made the hase of ecclesiastical organ- 
 ization; and that they will be found represented respectively in 
 the distinction, so sharply drawn in later years, between the regu- 
 lar (or monastic) and the secular clergy. 
 
44 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 temptation came : indeed, it is believed by many, 
 with some show of likelihood, that Seneca was a seri- 
 ous student and correspondent of Paul ; or it might 
 amount to no more than the gloomy and sceptic sat- 
 ire of Tacitus or Juvenal. What made Paul's doc- 
 trine of sin a moral power among men was his ovm 
 conviction of sin. Here, again, I have to use a theo- 
 logical phrase, reluctantly, because there is no other. 
 But the fact itself is easy to see in a study of the 
 man. A certain nervous and morbid temperament, 
 native in him, was prone to exaggerate whatever 
 touched personal feeling; his strict training in the 
 Law made him intensely conscious of whatever bore 
 on personal conduct; a certain eagerness to assume 
 responsibility, to make any given task his own, is 
 seen in his hasty undertaking of the charge to crush 
 the Galilsean heresy at a blow. But here was the one 
 horrible thing which he could never hide or disguise : 
 that battered head, that crushed and bleeding form of 
 the martyr Stephen, and he standing by, eagerly " con- 
 senting to his death." That one thing, in his eyes, 
 made him — no, showed him — " the chief of sin- 
 ners " ; and it is as if we saw him with his head 
 bowed and his face hidden, when he says, " I am 
 meanest of the apostles, and not worthy to be called 
 an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God." 
 
 The germ of his moral power lay in this, then, that 
 he frankly rated himself — not simply by self-con- 
 demnation and regret, but by passionate and deep 
 contrition — among the very ones who most needed 
 the deliverance he announced. To exhibit this point 
 fully it would be necessary to show those symptoms 
 
HIS RELIGIOUS CONVICTION. 45 
 
 of a strange and eager craving for expiation by any 
 sort of religious rite, common alike in the Jewish 
 and Pagan world.* The real expiation, the only ex- 
 piation possible, Paul taught, — and he taught it with 
 conviction and with power because he knew it, — must 
 be found in a crisis of religious experience, and come 
 from an act of faith. All this is wrapped about in 
 " Galatians " with strange subtilties of argument that 
 mean nothing to us. It is joined in " Corinthians " 
 with technical points of anthropology, and curious 
 glimpses of personal experience. It is wrought up 
 in "Ptomans" into the most intense and passionate 
 expression of the burden and the terror of a soul 
 confronted with the awful law of holiness : " 
 wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from 
 the body of this death ? " And then the peace, sudden 
 and sweet as a child's sleep after an agony of fright, 
 when once the reconciling moment has come : " The 
 Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we 
 are the children of God ; and if children, then heirs, — 
 heirs of God and joint hews with Christ ! — that if we 
 suffer with him we may be also glorified together." 
 
 So, with all the wickedness and the bondage that 
 confronted him in the spectacle of the world as it 
 was, — the gods all dying or dead, old pagan faiths 
 fast fading out, political freedom perished, a frenzy 
 of vice and a gloom of superstition invading all the 
 sanctuaries of human life, — Paul was able to appeal 
 in the tone of absolute conviction, courage and hope. 
 Whatever was bitter and intolerable in the evil of 
 the world, he had shared it too. Whatever of good- 
 
 * See below, pp. 98, 99. 
 
46 SAINT PAUL. 
 
 ness men despaired of, he not only believed in, but 
 knew as a fact in his own life : it had broken upon 
 him as a great light out of a black cloud ; and so he 
 could change their sullen despondency into an im- 
 measurable and glorious hope. 
 
 For the present these are the elements of power 
 which we have to recognize in the life of Paul. I do 
 not add to them that activity in the building up of 
 churches, and their regulation, in which so much of 
 his work consisted : first, because, when the convic- 
 tion and the brotherhood are strong enough, they will 
 make their own organized forms at any rate ; and 
 secondly, because that model organization of the 
 church at Eome, which was presently to embody all 
 of Christianity that men knew or cared about, in- 
 cluded so many other elements of power that we 
 hardly think of it as an apostolic work at all. To 
 discuss the forms and the beliefs of the little religious 
 communities which were all Paul knew, would be 
 mere antiquarianism, It is in no antiquarian tem- 
 per, but as students of those great permanent forces 
 which did once and can again move the world, and 
 create new systems and societies on the ruins of the 
 old, that we should try to understand the genius, the 
 life, and the work of the Apostle Paul. 
 
III. 
 
 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND 
 CENTURY. 
 
 WHEN we shift our view to the second Christian 
 century, the first thing that arrests us is the 
 wide gulf that parts us from the comparatively clear 
 ground of the apostolic period. The interval between 
 the last of Paul's undisputed epistles and the first of 
 the extant apologists is something more than eighty 
 years. It is hardly too much to say that that whole 
 space is covered with a heavy mist, out of which, at 
 its close, a few well-defined figures are seen erneming. 
 Any bridge across it must be built, so to speak, " in 
 the air." We can erect our two towers, but the cables 
 will not meet. 
 
 Now this period of eighty years is precisely that 
 covered by unsettled controversies respecting the au- 
 thenticity, date, and authorship of the later New Tes- 
 tament writings, including all the Four Gospels ; or 
 illustrated by historical glimpses so dim and few that 
 a chance notice of Tacitus and an official letter of 
 Pliny become our most instructive documents. The 
 gulf hides, so to speak, the very secret of Christianity 
 itself; for, as we shall see further on, what we find in 
 germ only in the apostolic period — in particular, the 
 identification of the Logos with the person of Jesus — 
 
48 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 then took root and substance and form. This subter- 
 ranean life of the first Christian age has its most 
 touching symbol in the name which belongs to just 
 that period, when those germs were brooding there, — 
 "the Church of the Catacombs." Of course we do 
 not forget the beauty and interest of the few half- 
 legendary accounts we have of this period, or the 
 purely religious value of some of the writings of the 
 so-called Apostolic Fathers. But, for purposes of 
 strict consecutive history,- it is not too much to say 
 that we have to jump a gulf of more than eighty 
 years. 
 
 This statement should not be taken for more than 
 it distinctly asserts. Its limitation is in the phrase 
 "strict consecutive history." The period spoken of 
 has even a rich literature of its own, including all the 
 Gospels (probably), as well as several of the later 
 Epistles, the Apocalypse, and the Apostolic Fathers. 
 But the authorship or date of few if any of these is 
 quite undisputed ; while the events of the period are 
 almost all in good part legendary or apocryphal. The 
 existence of the gulf is recognized by all historians ; 
 but its importance in the history of doctrinal develop- 
 ment is not always sufficiently considered. 
 
 ISTow the existence of this gulf is not a thing to be 
 particularly wondered at. A very nearly parallel 
 case occurs close by in the strange intellectual slum- 
 ber which fell upon the Eoman mind after the storms 
 of the Bepublic had subsided to a sullen peace, and 
 which lasted for near a century. Virgil and Horace 
 had both found shelter from those storms in the 
 patronage of Augustus ; Ovid was born the year 
 
A PERIOD OF SILENCE. 49 
 
 that Cicero died. After these court poets passed 
 away, only here and there a satire, or a moral essay, 
 or a discourse of rhetoric, breaks the long silence, till 
 comparative liberty and security brought with it the 
 ►great writers of the silver age. Anecdote and legend, 
 often apocryphal and obscure, are what make most of 
 such history as we have of the earlier Caesars and 
 their age. So that the forty years during which Pal- 
 estine comes into strong relief — counting from 
 Matthew to Josephus — make a sort of oasis in a 
 century extraordinarily barren of events or men, 
 though in the full glare of all the imperial splendor 
 and all the ostentatious luxury of the Eome of the 
 Caesars. 
 
 I do not propose to go into any of the literary con- 
 troversies, or any of the curious antiquarian research, 
 that belong to this obscure period. My business is 
 simply with what we find in the condition of Chris- 
 tian thought at the end of it. For we must not, at all 
 events, suppose that thought was idle during all those 
 years. On the contrary, there must have been a 
 mental movement going on, whose activity and inten- 
 sity are but feebly reflected to us, — partly in a few 
 stray expressions gathered from epistle or anecdote, 
 but more distinctly (as hinted before) in the figures 
 seen emerging from the mist that overhangs the 
 gulf. 
 
 In fact, the period may be best described as one of 
 an intense, warm, brooding life. It was a period of 
 incubation, during which were evolved in dim embryo 
 the types that shaped the theological conflicts of many 
 an after age. Landed well on this side of it, we find 
 
50 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 the Logos doctrine fully developed, — shaped, indeed, 
 into a pretty well defined trinity in Justin and 
 Athenagoras, who appeal to intelligent pagans (like 
 Aurelius) to recognize it as a theism at least as good 
 as the Greek pantheon.* It is not of the slightest con- 
 sequence whether we date this Logos doctrine from 
 Philo, before the gospel times,! or fr° m John, towards 
 the end of the first century, or from Christian specu- 
 lative schools, early in the second. What we have to 
 observe is, that it has already reached a degree of 
 maturity to which later controversies or councils can 
 only add a few finishing touches by way of exacter 
 definition ; and that the mission of Jesus, on its divine 
 or providential side, has already become thoroughly 
 identified, in a certain personal, exclusive, and dog- 
 matic sense, with the advent of that Logos which, 
 existing with God from the beginning, and in its own 
 nature divine, " was made flesh " in him. The source 
 of this conviction is not at present under discussion ; 
 
 * This is not the same as the developed trinity of the later 
 creeds : in particular, the distinction between the Logos and the Holy 
 Spirit is quite undefined. The words of Justin are : " Both Him 
 [God] and the Son who came forth from him and taught us these 
 things, and the host of the other good angels, who follow and are 
 marie like to him, and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore." 
 Athenagoras says (Chap. 10), " Who would not be astonished, to 
 hear men called atheists, who speak of the Father God and of the 
 Son God and of the Holy Spirit, and who declare both their power in 
 union and their distinction in order ? . . . The Son [is] in the Father, 
 and the Father in the Son, by unity and power of Spirit. Mind 
 and Reason of the Father [is] the Son of God." This last expres- 
 sion should be particularly noted, as very characteristic of the 
 thought of the age. 
 
 t See the illustrations in " Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 374, 
 375. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF REDEMPTION. 51 
 
 but its existence at this time, with whatever empha- 
 sis or whatever fulness my words have already im- 
 plied, is the fact to be distinctly seen. The time I 
 refer to is from about a. d. 150, the date of Justin's 
 first Apology, to that of Athenagoras, about 175. 
 
 One other thing before we come to the sharper 
 characteristics of Christian thought at this time. The 
 descent of the Logos, in the person of Jesus, was for a 
 special work of redemption, or emancipation from the 
 dominion of Evil. This is, of course, a -simple com- 
 monplace of Christian theology. But look at it a 
 moment, attentively, and it seems to connect itself by 
 natural evolution with two things : first, the Jewish 
 expectation of a national deliverance, of which enough 
 has been said before ; and, second, the drift of Greek 
 speculation, more particularly during the three hun- 
 dred years previous. That vein of scepticism as to 
 ultimate truth, which crops out in Euripides and in 
 Socrates, took a new turn after the great speculative 
 period of Plato and his school : it turned men's minds 
 to moral problems, and the search for the " chief end 
 of man," or the highest good. Naturally, this made 
 them keenly conscious of existing evil ; and the prob- 
 lem of philosophy more and more was the problem of 
 escape from it, — the Epicureans by way of acquies- 
 cence, and the Stoics by way of defiance. The Epi- 
 cureans preached contentment and placidity of soul. 
 The Stoics kept asserting that evil is only in the 
 seeming, as if they hoped by incessant repetition to 
 convince themselves that it is so : in some of Cicero's 
 dialogues, for instance (as the Fifth Tusculan), it is 
 almost startling to find a rehearsal, as it were, of the 
 
52 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 early Christian creed of emancipation of the soul by 
 martyrdom for the truth. 
 
 "The whole creation," says Paul, "groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain together until now, waiting to be 
 delivered." So that the interest with which the claims 
 of Christianity were listened to from the first was 
 something more than a speculative interest in some 
 new theory as to the Divine nature and the law of 
 life. So far as the gospel was true at all, it was true 
 as a gospel of Salvation, — that is, of actual rescue 
 from an actual calamity. That calamity was felt to 
 be in the very conditions of life upon this earth, as 
 men have received them. That rescue receded more 
 and more, in men's thought, from the notion of any 
 special deliverance, such (for example) as the Jews 
 hoped, which did needful service as scaffolding for a 
 time. 
 
 The thought of it became inevitably, more and 
 more, an intense craving and yearning : as they be- 
 held, on one side, the political bondage, the insecurity 
 and terror, the frequent crises of great suffering, the 
 moral corruption of society, the doom of death that 
 overhung the world like a pall ; or dreamed, on the 
 other hand, of a possible realm of liberty and bliss. 
 The very despair that fell on their souls, when the 
 golden age that Yirgil looked for under Augustus, or 
 that Galilaean zealots promised in a revolt from Eome, 
 was set against the terrible reality men saw. Their 
 very despair made them long and ask more passion- 
 ately for whatever hope might be given them in the 
 faith which now claimed to be the one and final 
 refuge. 
 
TWO MODES OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. 53 
 
 We have, I say, to conceive of this, or something 
 like it, as the process going on, during those long years 
 of silence, in the class of minds most apt to entertain 
 such thoughts. The bland moralisms of Seneca, the 
 scornful satire of Juvenal, the caustic portraiture of 
 Tacitus, the frank urbanity of Pliny, the light mockery 
 of Lucian, need not deceive us as to what was really 
 brooding in the mind of the age. An anecdote of 
 Josephus, a hint in Plutarch's Morals, a reminiscence 
 of Justin, is far more likely to reflect the mood of 
 mind sure to show itself in the next great evolution 
 of human thought, than the phrases of those haughty 
 and cultured men. What comes into literature is not 
 merely, and not even so much, the emotion or opinion 
 of the hour ; but, rather, what has been brooded on in 
 silence for one generation, before it comes into speech 
 in the next, and then goes into the common inherit- 
 ance of mankind. 
 
 That this is the right view to take of the long 
 interval before spoken of is shown, at any rate, by 
 the very remarkable twofold nature of the phenome- 
 non before us, as soon as the mist is lifted, and we find 
 ourselves in daylight again, amongst articulating men. 
 The phenomenon, I repeat, is not single, but twofold. 
 It is signified to us in the names of the two groups 
 that stand most distinctly before us at the middle of 
 the second century : one, a school already fading or 
 becoming extinct, and known to us only through the 
 attacks or confutations of its opponents ; the other, a 
 company of men who speak to us very earnestly the 
 mind of the early Church, and have traced in clear 
 outline the speculative or moral doctrine to be filled 
 
54 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 in by later times. I mean the Gnostics and the 
 Apologists. 
 
 I shall not attempt to add another to the many ex- 
 positions of the tedious and fantastic schemes known 
 as Gnosticism. For myself, not only I can get into 
 my mind no intelligible meaning from those " endless 
 o-enealoo'ies," as Irenaeus states them, but I cannot 
 easily imagine that any sane mind should hold them 
 as sober matter of opinion, much less take them as the 
 real expression of objective truth. The form these 
 speculations took seems to me perfectly worthless as 
 serving to interpret to our mind what the cast of 
 opinion really was, except as an eccentric style of 
 mere symbolism, or mere analysis. I will say a word 
 of this presently. But, in the mean time, there are 
 two points which it seems to me no more than fair to 
 keep in view, if we would do justice to the men who 
 held to the Gnostic sects ; that is, if we would not 
 think of them as mere men of straw, lay figures, 
 decked with impossible habiliments, winch we have 
 no occasion to think of as serving any of the uses of 
 human life. 
 
 The first point is, that Gnosticism is a genuine and 
 legitimate outgrowth of the same general movement 
 of thought which shaped the Christian dogma. Quite 
 evidently, it regarded itself as the true interpretation 
 of the Gospel, and for a generation or more disputed 
 its title to be that interpretation on even terms with 
 the more orthodox view. Why it eventually failed, 
 even dishonorably failed, I shall consider presently. 
 
 Perhaps the chief thing that we find hard to recon- 
 cile to our mind is the extremely early date at which it 
 
WHAT WAS GNOSTICISM ? 55 
 
 appears. The Epistles of the Testament contain many 
 unmistakable hints and traces of it.* Within fifty 
 years after some of those epistles were written it was 
 already on the wane, and in thirty years more it was 
 dead. Yet in the interval it had been a full-fledged 
 philosophy, pretentious and superb as the New Pla- 
 tonism which it helped serve to introduce, and seems 
 to caricature. Not a vestige of it remains, except in 
 fragments and echoes in the writings of its assailants. 
 But, if we think of it. the very fact that its germs 
 already existed in the apostolic time is what helps 
 explain it. It was, in a sense, the double or anti- 
 type of Christianity, — a reflex in men's speculative 
 thought of the same Life which the Church embodied 
 in another way. 
 
 In the second place, it was unquestionably sincere, 
 
 — not a profane mockery and travesty of the truth. 
 It had not, apparently, the highest order of sincerity: 
 it does not appear that any of the Gnostics held any 
 truth so sacred that they were ready to die for it. 
 But that lay in their conception of truth itself. Men 
 do not die for an opinion : they die for a faith. Gnosis, 
 after all, was " opinion," not " knowledge," much less 
 faith. Still, it was an opinion bravely and loyally 
 held, in spite of odium and hostility ; and it persist- 
 ently called itself " Christian," at a time when the 
 Christian name was apt to invite official suspicion or 
 popular rage. Moreover — at least in its riper forms 
 
 — it had two marked features of a high order of sin- 
 cerity, even if not the highest. It had a discipline of 
 
 * See, for example, Colossians i. 15, et seq., especially the ex- 
 pressions irau rb irKripoifia (i. 19), and dycravpbs ttjs yvuxrews (ii. 3). 
 
56 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 its own, often scrupulously ascetic and severe ; and it 
 cultivated the religious sentiment, in harmony doubt- 
 less with its own style of thought, with abundant 
 seeming fervor. It had hymns of its own, whole vol- 
 umes of them, while orthodox Christians still con- 
 tented themselves with Jewish Psalms. Thus in all 
 outward seeming — except its incoherent variety of 
 sects — it might well appear not only Christian, which 
 in vehement profession (at least) it was, but a full- 
 grown, highly developed form of religion, amply en- 
 titled to hold its own with its antagonist. Nay, its 
 very variety of sects is something more than mere 
 license of speculation, or an untimely birth of " free 
 religion." It is a testimony to something ingenuous 
 and spontaneous in its acceptance of the Christian 
 name. It is at least as good an evidence of genuine- 
 ness and sincerity as that unity of creed, enforced by 
 ecclesiastical authority or social penalties, by which 
 the Church has always vindicated its claim of truth.* 
 So much it seemed necessary to say, for historical 
 justice' sake, of those outlying groups of independent 
 thinkers, who make the strangest problem of early 
 Christianity. But it is also necessary to go one step 
 further, — to say not only why Gnosticism failed as 
 an interpreter of the new religious life, but why it has 
 justly been under the ban of more serious believers. 
 And this is not because of the scandals and immoral- 
 ities charged against it. Odium at least as bad lay 
 just as heavily against the Christian body at large ; 
 
 * As an instructive commentary on the supposed unity and 
 harmony of the first Christian age, Epiphanius gives us a list of 
 forty-three distinct "heresies" (including the Gnostic), belonging 
 to the period under review. 
 
THE SPECULATIVE GNOSIS. 57 
 
 and, if that had gone down in the great persecution, 
 it would have gone down with a black stigma on its 
 name, which could never have been washed off. 
 What Irenseus said, at a distance and long after, in 
 theologic hate, may go for what it is worth. The 
 fatal thing in Gnosticism was that it made of reli- 
 gion a theory for the understanding, and not a life to 
 the soul. Its creed, or " gnosis," consisted in specula- 
 tions about the origin of existence, the origin of evil, 
 and the method of salvation, — by turns ascetic and 
 antinomian, like all mere speculative creeds. Con- 
 sidered in themselves, these speculations may have 
 been as good as men could invent then, — or now 
 either, for that matter, — vain and fantastic as they 
 appear to us. They were, in the main, a perfectly 
 legitimate following out of a mode of thinking, which 
 not only has the sanction of great names like Plato, 
 but is at bottom the same from which the Logos-doc- 
 trine itself was evolved. From the brightest ortho- 
 doxy to the blackest heresy is but a step. 
 
 In a matter vague and abstract like this, it is 
 always best to see how the same problem shows itself 
 to a modern mind. Read, then, that chapter in 
 " Ways of the Spirit," where an analysis is given of 
 the methods by which men have attempted to find 
 out God, — in other words, to trace the passage from 
 Absolute Beings to the manifold forms of actual Exist- 
 ence ; and notice how helpless the mind is at every 
 step, till it seems at length easiest to say, that there 
 is no real existence at all except pure Intellect, of 
 which matter or sensation is but a mood of experi- 
 ence. Now, imagine a keen and speculative mind, 
 
58 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 utterly void of the certitudes of science, to busy it- 
 self with that problem. I shall have to return to this 
 point again, when we come to the realist and nomi- 
 nalist discussions of the Schoolmen. So now I will 
 say only this. That great impassable gulf from 
 Infinite to Finite, which Plato made the sphere of 
 divine Intelligence, in which lived those eternal Ideas 
 that were the patterns of all material things, the 
 Gnostics attempted to bridge by way of symbol and 
 analysis, and to fill up with iEons, or " eternals," 
 having such names as Thought, Man, Soul, Wisdom, 
 and so on, giving these bleak conceptions a certain 
 fantastic life, and sequence by way of emanation or 
 evolution* 
 
 These phantom-existences, set by Valentin us in 
 pairs, male and female, thirty in all, and made to 
 succeed one another by some spectral process of gen- 
 eration, are said to be derived from the Jewish 
 Cabbala. Their names are the carrying out of a 
 notion we find in Plato's Parmenides, that everything 
 which exists in the realm of life, or fact, has its coun- 
 terpart or prototype in the region of Ideas, — which 
 are made to have, as it were, a shadowy life of their 
 own. Thus, in the scheme of Yalentinus : — 
 
 Depth (Father of All) and Silence (or Thought) begat 
 Mind (unconscious Intelligence V) and Truth ; which begat 
 Reason (Logos, conscious Intelligence) and Life; which begat 
 Man and Ecclesia (or Church) : i. e. the Ideal Society, f 
 
 * Words of like but inverse meaning, as if each were the other's 
 reflection in a mirror. Emanation begins with the highest form 
 of being and works downward ; Evolution with the lowest, and 
 works upward. 
 
 t These eight iEons make the Valentinian Ogdoad. 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 59 
 
 In these it will be noticed that the former of each 
 pair is a masculine name, and the latter a feminine ; 
 so that it was impossible to speak of them except as 
 " he " or " she." To us they are only names, like 
 the categories of modern metaphysics; but to the 
 Greek mind their very grammatical gender suggested 
 veritable forms of life, and logical analysis itself be- 
 came a sort of transcendental theogony. 
 
 We may put the problem of Gnosticism from 
 another point of view, something as follows. The age 
 of the world being generally assumed to be between 
 five and six thousand years (more precisely, 5200), 
 the question naturally occurs, What was there, then, 
 before that time (or, as they would put it, before Time 
 was) ? To this the only answer can be, The Infinite. 
 But, again, is this an infinite Void (the Unknowable), 
 or an infinite Fulness ? Infinite Fulness (irX'npw/xa), 
 replied the Gnostics ; and, to fill out the conception 
 of it, devised their wild genealogies and cosmogonies. 
 How, through the ^Eons Logos and Christ, these 
 were connected with the Christian scheme, and how, 
 through the Inferior Wisdom {Sophia Achamoth) with 
 the realm of Matter and of Evil, it belongs to a more 
 detailed exposition to set forth. 
 
 In short, Gnosticism is a philosophy of evolution, 
 
 vague, premature, with no substance of verifiable 
 
 fact or scientific method, and carried over from the 
 realm of things to that of abstractions or mere visions 
 and phantasms of things. Its favorite term " genesis " 
 — or Birth by natural process as opposed to intelli- 
 gent Creation — is attacked by the Apologists, ex- 
 actly as its counterpart " evolution " is attacked to-day, 
 
60 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 on the ground of incompatibility with moral freedom. 
 To illustrate this phase of it, I translate here a Gnos- 
 tic hymn of Valentinus, given by Hippolytus, which 
 one might fancy taken straight from Shelley's Prome- 
 theus or Goethe's Faust : * — 
 
 " All things on Spirit borne I see ! 
 Flesh from Soul depending, 
 
 Soul from the Air forth-going, 
 From JEther Air descending, 
 
 Fruits from the Depth o'erflowing : 
 So from the Womb springs Infancy." 
 
 All these speculations seem to me neither better 
 nor worse — though a good deal more poetic — than 
 the efforts to solve the problem of existence which 
 we find in more modern times. The fatal thing 
 about them is that they were made the substance or 
 the substitute of Religion. In calling them a phi- 
 losophy of Evolution, we have said in advance how 
 and where they failed. Schemes of evolution, taken 
 by themselves, do not give us the specific fact of Sin. 
 If not avowedly, at any rate by tendency and by im- 
 plication, they deny the fact of moral freedom. In 
 trying to account for Evil, they annihilate its nature 
 as the conscience apprehends it, — the wilful viola- 
 tion of divine law. 
 
 Here was the incurable weakness of Gnosticism, 
 its fatal Haw, What evil it recognized was in the na- 
 ture of things, in Matter as opposed to Mind. That 
 is, it was natural as opposed to moral evil ; to be 
 known by Thought, not by Conscience Of this we 
 
 * The rhythmic form of the Greek may be found in Bunsen's 
 " Christianity and Mankind," Vol. V. p. %. 
 
THE GNOSTICS AND THE APOLOGISTS. 61 
 
 shall see more when we come to Augustine's con- 
 flict with that final form of Gnosticism known as 
 Manichsean. At present, we have to do only with 
 the single point of its moral impotence. Gnosticism 
 was in its nature absolutely — nay, ridiculously — 
 incapable of what I have before called " ethical pas- 
 sion." To save society in those days, to re-create the 
 world, to inaugurate a new era of humanity — the 
 task which Christianity did in fact achieve — was 
 not a speculative, it was a moral problem* It de- 
 manded courage, faith, self-sacrifice ; a willingness to 
 go to the rack, the stake, the lions, rather than say a 
 false word, or do an act capable of a disloyal inter- 
 pretation. Such tests do not come to us in these 
 days, and we are apt to forget that they were needed 
 once. When Basilides said it was permitted to throw 
 incense on a pagan chafing-dish, or mutter a prayer 
 to Ceesar with a mental reservation, the doom of 
 Gnosticism was sealed. 
 
 Now, side by side with the Gnostics in the field 
 was another class of men and women whom we call 
 Confessors, and their spokesmen we call Apologists. 
 Those of them who died on the field are glorified in 
 the church record as saints and martyrs. Their tragic 
 and pathetic story is well told by Milman, and I shall 
 not abridge it here. Such names as Ignatius and 
 Polycarp, as Blandina and Perpetua, ought to be 
 sufficiently familiar. But it is very interesting to 
 notice the style of thought that runs through the 
 
 * It appears to me that in his very interesting exposition 
 Maurice misses this point, which is more distinctly seen by 
 Mansel. Maurice is a good deal of a gnostic himself, in the fervor 
 of his speculative faith. 
 
62 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 Christian writings of the latter half of the century. 
 We trace in them two things : a strong ethical reac- 
 tion against the speculative tendency just spoken of; 
 and what Mr. Maurice * has well indicated as a dis- 
 tinct effort to construct a religious system, able to 
 hold its own before the powers of the world, — dis- 
 tinct, that is, from the simple motive of seeking faith 
 and salvation in the religion itself. The moral reac- 
 tion it is fair enough to call the antithesis of Gnos- 
 ticism, and the constructive tendency its counterpart. 
 
 The most obvious symptom of the first is, of course, 
 the defence of the Christian society on moral grounds:! 
 the claim of purer lives, and the contrast with pagan 
 vices ; the vehement denial of unclean and criminal 
 acts charged against Christian assemblies ; the inces- 
 sant denunciations of paganism on the ground of its 
 corrupt mythology. 
 
 Each head of the defence emphasizes some point 
 of appeal to conscience, to the natural sense of right 
 and wrong. The weak side of the old society — its 
 easy indulgence to the flesh — is pitilessly exposed ; 
 and a certain austere sanctity of domestic morals, a 
 purity in the relation of man and wife, a tenderness 
 in the relation of parent and child, quite alien from 
 heathen custom, is especially dwelt on. The com- 
 mon virtues of life, as we should reckon them in any 
 orderly and decent condition of things, are pressed 
 in a way that shows what bitter calumnies were in 
 
 * "Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second Centuries." 
 t It is worth noting, that none of the writers of this period (1 
 think) except Irenseus claim miraculous powers for the Church, 
 though some assert that demons were busy on behalf of the pa- 
 gans. This does not, however, exclude wonders in some of the 
 martyrologies. 
 
ITS EXCEEDING GRAVITY OF TEMPER. 63 
 
 vogue, and with what serious pains the foundations 
 were getting laid for those grave moralities which 
 have been the real heart of Christian civilization 
 since. It would be tedious to go into illustration 
 of this ; but I think no one can read the Apology of 
 Justin, the Apostolic Constitutions, the grave homi- 
 lies of Clement, or even the loud tirades of Tertullian, 
 without feeling that a new life was growing up, or- 
 ganized, serious, strong, and wholesome ; a life which 
 flowed broadly below political changes on one side, 
 and theological controversies on the other ; a life 
 which was getting knit and braced, by vigilant dis- 
 cipline, against the time when it must abide the storm 
 of imperial persecution, or undertake the enormous 
 task of meeting the wild and brutal forces of the bar- 
 barian world. Either crisis would have been fatal, 
 unless there had been, at bottom, an absolute loyalty, 
 most assiduously cherished, in the great war of Good 
 and Evil. However imperfect its interpretation, or 
 its theory, yet the life of the Christian society was 
 staked on its unhesitating faith in a Power that makes 
 for righteousness.* 
 
 * It is hard to overstate the extreme seriousness, what some 
 would call puritanism, of the writings referred to. A brief chap- 
 ter on Smiling, by Clement of Alexandria (who allows it in mod- 
 eration), is, I think, the only relief to the rigor of the attitude in 
 which the Christians found themselves, in the battle of good and 
 evil which was upon them. The same severe temper is shown in 
 the bitter hostility of Tertullian (when a Montanist) against the 
 novel doctrine of Hennas, of a possible repentance and pardon 
 after baptism. (See Mossman's "Early Church," pp. 315-320.) 
 The most serious controversy of the Church, early in the third 
 century, was that sustained by Cyprian against the puritan ex- 
 clusiveness of the Novatians. 
 
64 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 It is important to recognize this feature first of all, 
 because it is disguised in part by the crudeness of 
 idea and the very simplicity of good faith with which 
 these defences are put forth. It is hard, for instance, 
 to conceive how Justin could have mistaken a large 
 part of what he says for argument ; or how Marcus 
 Aurelius could have kept the philosophic patience he 
 was so famous for, through Justin's long, irrelevant 
 harangue (as it must certainly have seemed to him) 
 about the Hebrew prophecies. 
 
 Again, in the face of the calm rationalism that for 
 centuries had screened or allegorized the old Greek 
 fables for all thinking men, the Apologists must needs, 
 in weary iteration, one after the other, repeat the dull 
 recital of the scandals of Olympus, — possibly, to some 
 good popular effect, — without hinting at anything 
 less offensive than the baldest literal understanding 
 of them, exactly as some modern free-thinkers have 
 treated the Old Testament. 
 
 The frankness and vigor, too, with which the no- 
 blest doctrines of natural theology are discarded, — 
 such as the immortality of the soul, which is thrust 
 aside to make way for the dogma of a miraculous re- 
 vival of the corpse, argued out in the oddest detail, 
 and (naturally) with the grossest ignorance of the 
 facts adduced in illustration, — serve to prejudice a 
 modern mind unfairly against the main argument 
 itself. I need hardly add the vituperative calumnies 
 of such writers as Tatian, in his clamor against Greek 
 philosophy, or the rhetoric of Tertullian, deepening 
 to vindictive exultation, — which is, after all, mere 
 rhetoric, — as he contemplates the pits of eternal 
 
RELATIONS WITH THE EMPIRE. 65 
 
 flame, into which the enemies of the Church shall 
 be cast. These things have left a stain upon the 
 memory of that age, quite plain enough in the view 
 of the average historian ; and therefore it is right 
 that they should be mentioned here, only to put in 
 clearer relief the testimony to the real power and 
 sincerity of the moral life they disfigure. 
 
 The relations of the Christian community to the 
 Eoman world at this period offer a very wide topic, 
 of which I can touch only a single point or two. It 
 is a familiar question, Why did the Eoman empire 
 deal so much more harshly with the Christian re- 
 ligion than with other local faiths, which it received 
 on easy terms into its wide pantheon ? And it is a 
 familiar answer, Because the Christian religion was 
 in its nature uncompromising, and at bottom carried 
 with it the destruction of Paganism itself, with the 
 imperial system closely bound up with it. This an- 
 swer, too, is illustrated by the refusal of the Chris- 
 tians to pay the customary official homage to Caesar, 
 which they held blasphemy, — refusal that in them 
 was held constructive treason ; and, still further, by 
 the fact that the Church was from the first a form 
 of polity as well as a system of belief, and held the 
 germ of a new organization of society (iroXiTela), 
 which was felt to be gradually crowding out the old. 
 All this, it is said, must have been clear to the mind 
 of a thoughtful pagan, like Aurelius ; and sufficiently 
 accounts for the fact that he, the most scrupulously 
 just of all the emperors of this period save one, and 
 most gravely resolved to heal the evils of the state, 
 was also sternest of all to put in force the laws against 
 the Christians. E 
 
66 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 To this statement, however, two things should he 
 added: that the earlier persecutions seem all — as we 
 see in the case of Polycarp — to have been a conces- 
 sion to popular clamor and the temper of the mob ; 
 and that this popular hate runs a great way back, long 
 before the least public danger could have been thought 
 of, from an obscure and petty sect. Thus in Paul's 
 church at Ptome were some of Nero's household ; Corn- 
 modus was capriciously indulgent to the Christians ; 
 the language of Trajan and Hadrian is at worst that 
 of impatient contempt.* I have spoken elsewhere of 
 the persecution under Nero, — a mere cowardly turn- 
 ing of the popular rage against a class that lay too 
 easily open to suspicion. Why was that ? and why 
 were the mob so ready always with the most abom- 
 inable charges against the Christians, — " (Edipodean 
 marriages and Thyestean feasts," as Athenagoras re- 
 ports ? 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to go behind the reports 
 to investigate the charges. There have been students 
 of these things, who have believed that the worst of 
 them were true, — that the sacred " mysteries " did 
 include the tasting of blood and sensual excess.f 
 Possibly, in instances. Cases of horror, frightful or 
 disgusting, have not been unknown in religious orgies 
 in modern times ; $ and Christians even then were 
 
 * The terra Trajan addresses to Ignatius is KaKohai/xov, which 
 Mr. Maurice translates "poor devil." 
 
 t The specific forms of these calumnies may be found in Ter- 
 tullian's AtlNationes and Apologeticus. For illustration of the style 
 of criticism referred to, see the very curious volume of Daumer. 
 
 X Take that of the Convuhionnaircs, for example, a century and 
 a half ago, which sprang from a sect with such grave antecedents 
 as the Jansenists. 
 
CALUMNIES AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS. 67 
 
 not slow to throw off the charge upon heretical assem- 
 blies. Think of the raw material that entered into 
 their composition, — in Syria and North Africa, for 
 example ; and that they called, avowedly, " not right- 
 eous, but sinners, to repentance." 
 
 But consider, too, how likely the religious language 
 of Christians was to invite, or at least give color to, 
 those charges. If the Apocalypse, for example, or 
 any of its imagery, was composed and current in the 
 time of Nero, what more likely than that its vague 
 threats of a sea of fire to engulf the guilty kingdoms 
 of the earth should have been caught up and used to 
 accuse the Christians of that vast conflagration in 
 which half Eome perished? What more likely — at 
 a time when the most innocent word easily took a 
 lewd signification * — than that the Christian language 
 about a God of love, and of greetings with a holy kiss, 
 should have been grossly but honestly misunderstood ? 
 What more likely than that the frank symbolism, 
 favorite and familiar to Christian lips, — " Except ye 
 eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, 
 ye have no life in you," — should have been quoted 
 to justify the most horrid accusation of cannibal ban- 
 quets at the table and the cup of sacrifice ? We know 
 how easily such stories spread, and what frenzy of 
 hate they will engender. 
 
 It is likely, too, as implied in a hint of Suetonius, 
 — nay, from what happened in the ferocious revolt 
 under Hadrian it is certain, — that the popular mind 
 made no distinction between Christian and Jew. It 
 was not so much, says Tacitus, the charge of the burn- 
 
 * Thus, in his own time, Erasmus says, it was not reckoned 
 comely to use the verb amo. 
 
68 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 ing, as of hatred against all mankind,* that embittered 
 the persecution under Nero. And the fresh memory 
 of the horrors in Cyprus and Palestine, more than fifty 
 years later, which Justin alludes to as the background 
 of his dialogue with the Jew Trypho, had its share in 
 keeping up the frenzy of popular hate and fear which, 
 more than any imperial policy, was the real ground of 
 the terror that always menaced the Christian body : 
 just as we may imagine the horrors of the Paris Com- 
 mune, in 1871, not only to sharpen the vigilance of 
 the German police against socialistic conspiracy now, 
 but to goad the enemies of socialism with the haunt- 
 ing, unforo-iyino- hate that is born of fear. 
 
 There is one other illustration of the Christian life 
 of this period, of which a word must be said in con- 
 clusion. I have spoken of the temper that runs 
 through most of the "Apologists," as a moral reac- 
 tion against the purely speculative views of Gnos- 
 ticism. Of course, that reaction ran out into crudi- 
 ties and excess. The hostility of Marcion against the 
 Old Testament ; the sect of " Alogi," or " Wordless " 
 Christians, who would hear nothing of any Logos at 
 all ; the harsh asceticism of the " Encratites " or 
 " wrestlers " against Satan, — are to be reckoned as 
 so many "heresies," more or less allied with Gnos- 
 ticism, yet of rather an ethical than speculative cast. 
 The exaggerated, untempered, and eccentric moral 
 phases exhibited hj Tertullian, Xeander explains by 
 calling him an " anti-gnostic," — making this the ex- 
 treme form the reaction took, and so accounting for 
 what most offends in him. 
 
 * Meri vale's interpretation of odio humani generis. 
 
MONTANISM. 69 
 
 As part of the same phenomenon, too, we must 
 reckon the blazing out of the spiritualistic fervor of 
 Montanism in the East,* which cut adrift, like Qua- 
 kerism or Methodism, from the formalities and the 
 sober traditions of the Christian body, and claimed 
 to be a new dispensation, under the immediate guid- 
 ance of the Holy Ghost, as promised in the last dis- 
 course of Jesus, — a sort of Gnosticism reversed (as 
 Baur explains it), finding in its dogma an account, 
 not of the beginning, but the end of all things. 
 
 That peculiar fanaticism has reappeared, in many 
 forms, from age to age, — always, it is probable, as a 
 protest against some exaggeration of formality and tra- 
 dition ; and the heat of it has always been absorbed, 
 to thaw out some gathering stiffness, or to warm some 
 pale intellectuality. The extravagant pretensions of 
 Montanism did no particular harm. But they occa- 
 sioned some scandal, and even alarm, at a time when 
 the Church was not used to dealing with such dis- 
 ordered symptoms. Its language w 7 as blasphemous, 
 perhaps, to the sober ear. It made more apparent 
 the value and the need of the restraints it despised ; 
 and so had its share, doubtless, in strengthening the 
 hands of authority, to the confirming of creed and 
 ritual. 
 
 This, then, is the condition to which we are brought 
 at the end of the second Christian century. One 
 great phase of purely speculative development has 
 been left behind. The growing life of Christendom 
 has been asserted, again and again, to have its roots 
 
 * Of which Mossman's " Early Christianity " gives a very ap- 
 preciative account. 
 
70 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 
 
 in morality, and for its law the law of personal holi- 
 ness, — however technically, ascetically, or imperfectly 
 understood. There is already a lengthening calendar 
 of saints, martyrs, and heroes, making a sacred and 
 powerful bond of union. There is a fast-growing 
 consciousness that Christianity is to be shaped and 
 developed into a community, understanding itself, 
 organic, with its own authoritative belief and law. 
 The pressure of imperial power and of popular sus- 
 picion still holds it in check from spreading too 
 vaguely, and melting away in fatal forms of com- 
 promise. And, for the expression of that life, we 
 have already the group of writers and teachers I 
 have named, whose lives are closing with the cen- 
 tury, — Irenseus, Clement, and Tertullian, to be im- 
 mediately followed by the equal or greater names of 
 Cyprian and of Origen. 
 
 In particular, the century from 150 to 250 was 
 decisive in the growth of Sacerdotalism. At the 
 former date, or a little later, Peter came to Rome, in 
 the form of the Clementine legend, to check the rival 
 schools of Valentinus and Marcion, — pure specula- 
 tion and pure individualism, which threatened to di- 
 vide the Christian body between them, — and brought 
 back the old church life from Palestine .* At the 
 latter date, Novatian, most orthodox of early theo- 
 logians, was worsted in his controversy with Cyprian 
 on the question of the Lapsed ; and the Church knew 
 that her work was the salvation of society, not merely 
 the rescue of the individual soul, which was the real 
 point at issue. 
 
 * See Gieseler, chap. v. ; "Hebrew Men and Times," p. 411. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 TN" our study of early Christianity, it is easiest and 
 -*■ most common to think of Paganism simply as 
 its antagonist, or opposite ; and to regard the process 
 going on as one purely of conquest or conversion. 
 It is so in the main. There was a new spirit at war 
 with the old institutions and beliefs. The eye catches 
 first and most readily the dramatic contrast, watches 
 with keenest interest the fortunes of the battle. The 
 radical difference is what we have seen something of 
 already, in the Christian thought of the second cen- 
 tury, and shall see more of in the sharper collisions 
 yet to come. 
 
 But this is not the only view. It is not even, 
 strictly speaking, the truest view. Leaven works in 
 the lump, not by destruction, but by co-operation. 
 Christianity was at work " like leaven," — like a new 
 element of great power suddenly set free, not to the 
 extinction or exclusion of those that were there be- 
 fore, but to the making of new compounds, in which 
 all their former potency abides under other names. 
 Nitrogen and hydrogen are not nearly so unlike in 
 their own apparent properties, as in the combinations 
 they make with the oxygen that attacks them both. 
 To understand the Christian movement justly, how- 
 
72 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 ever imperfectly, we must know something of the 
 material it wrought upon. And of this, not merely 
 its falsehood, unbelief, or moral decay ; but the posi- 
 tive side as well, — the serious thought, the vigorous 
 life, the genuine piety, that still had their place in 
 the mind of Paganism. 
 
 For it is to be seen, not only that the old Pagan 
 faiths had not died out at the coming of Christianity, 
 as we are apt to think ; but that what was best and 
 truest in them had taken a new start, as it were, and 
 a genuine pagan revival was to some extent keeping 
 pace with the stronger religious growth that at length 
 absorbed, or else suppressed it. For a time, however, 
 not only the two movements are not antagonistic to 
 each other ; they are, in a sense, independent efforts 
 after a similar ideal. The rapid and powerful process 
 of organization in Christianity itself would not have 
 been possible, unless a part of its work had been al- 
 ready done by its antagonist. The Providence itself 
 that wrought in it would not have been so clear, 
 without that spiritual and moral preparation which 
 was going on in the pagan world. 
 
 It has been common enough to recognize two forms 
 of this preparation. One is in the way of religious 
 craving after some good yet unattained. "We know," 
 says Paul, "that the whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain together until now, waiting to be 
 delivered." Of this I shall say a word presently. 
 The other is in the way of philosophic speculation, 
 which failed to interpret these longings for a higher 
 life, but did much to shape the mould in which the 
 victorious dogma was long after cast. Besides these 
 
CICERO. 73 
 
 is a third phase, which makes the object of our study 
 now. 
 
 Attention has been called * to the great contrast in 
 temper and spirit between the time of the fall of the 
 Roman Republic and that of the culmination of the 
 Empire two centuries later, between the time of Cicero 
 and that of Marcus Aurelius. In the earlier time we 
 have complete scepticism and negation. The foun- 
 tain of old belief seems to have quite run dry. As 
 to the forms of pagan ritual, once so venerable, Cicero 
 does not see how its diviners can look one another 
 soberly in the face. In his writings — by far the 
 broadest and completest reflection we have of the 
 mind of any ancient period — we find three phases, 
 or moods, so utterly distinct as to seem out of keep- 
 ing with any one era, not to say any one honest 
 mind. In his Speeches, he is the eloquent conserva- 
 tive, appealing profusely for popular effect to the im- 
 mortal gods, whose providence is too plain for cavil in 
 any crisis of the state, whose judgments are sure and 
 terrible to all who defy their law. In his Dialogues, 
 the very existence of these gods is an open question, 
 calmly debated in friendly philosophical discourse ; 
 while the ideal life of pious contemplation, the confi- 
 dent hope of immortal peace and communion of con- 
 scious spirits beyond the grave, appear to make the 
 sure foundation and deep background of his thought. 
 In his .Letters, both these phases disappear: the 
 friendly courtesy, the party passion, the personal mor- 
 tification or resentment, love or hate, are purely on a 
 
 * Boissier, La Religion Romaine, from which several of the fol- 
 lowing illustrations are taken. 
 4 
 
74 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 secular level ; even the confidences of intimate friend- 
 ship, or the sharpest sorrows of private life, give no 
 one hint of anything so distant and unreal as a reli- 
 gious interpretation to its riddle, or a ray of that com- 
 fort of which he is so eloquent when he robes himself 
 as a philosopher. For any personal conviction, any 
 guidance of conduct, any stay of character, religion 
 — if it means anything more than Roman justice or 
 Roman pride — is an absolute blank. And, beside 
 the best of his contemporaries, Cicero is a man of even 
 exemplary piety. 
 
 JSTow immediately after the age of Cicero, in the 
 first years of the new Empire, there are symptoms of 
 a profound change. Not only the head of the state 
 professes himself the patron of piety and morals, and 
 chooses a religious title, "Augustus," by which he is 
 to be most familiarly known to the minds of men : 
 speaking the most serious thought of his time, Virgil 
 dwells on the golden age which a divine providence 
 is just opening to mankind, in images and phrases 
 which many have thought borrowed directly from He- 
 brew prophets ; so that his name and verse became 
 the charm that won for the mind of Paganism a place 
 in the widening domain of Christian culture. And as 
 the Empire, in spite of calamity and crime, grew more 
 broad, magnificent, and strong, the same feeling deep- 
 ened into a religion of the Empire, all the more formi- 
 dable to the Christian faith because it was genuine 
 and sincere ; not merely, as we are too apt to think, 
 because it was cruel, degenerate, and corrupt. 
 
 This New Paganism, as we may call it, went along 
 with an increasing moral earnestness and religious 
 
THE STOICS. 75 
 
 fervor. The moral feeling might be capricious, blind, 
 and intolerant ; the religious fervor might run into 
 the wildest superstition. There was never a faith 
 yet that was not disgraced by its most zealous ad- 
 herents. But the contrast is hardly greater between 
 the implacable passions of the civil war and Virgil's 
 pious hopes of peace, than that between the blank 
 incredulity of Julius Caesar and his age and the se- 
 rene kindliness of Antoninus Pius, or the religious 
 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, — the noblest of 
 Stoics on the most aiumst of thrones. 
 
 o 
 
 The Stoic doctrine was the intellectual interpreta- 
 tion of the new pagan faith. In its speculations on 
 the origin of things, still more in its ethical ideal, it 
 is curiously near to some of the noblest phases of 
 Christian theology and morals. It is not likely, 
 though many argue still, that Seneca learned that 
 doctrine from the Apostle Paul ; but no one can 
 read the writings of both without feeling how much 
 is of a common spirit, if not from a common source. 
 And what in Seneca is mere ethical glow has within 
 a century become, in Antoninus and Aurelius, the 
 fervor of a genuine religious life. The " reign of 
 the Stoics," represented by such names as these, does 
 infinitely more honor to the faith that inspired it 
 than anything we find in the first half-century, at 
 least, of the Christian Emperors. We may even have 
 to come down as far as St. Louis of France to find 
 their parallel. 
 
 How far, on the other hand, may the Christian 
 theology and morals have been indebted to the doc- 
 trine of the Stoics ? A few words will serve to show 
 
76 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 their points of likeness, and their fundamental dif- 
 ference.* 
 
 The Stoic cosmogony shows itself as a compromise 
 between the conception of a pre-existent personal Cre- 
 ator, outside the universe which he brings into being, 
 — the idea of earlier philosophers and of the world 
 at large, — and the notion of Matter blindly guided by 
 Force, the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus. To 
 the Stoic the universe was not made hy God ; it was 
 God, and endowed with all the attributes necessary 
 to his conception of a Divinity, including power, in- 
 telligence, wisdom, and justice. This Divinity had 
 from eternity a fixed and unchanging purpose, which 
 was the Pronoia, or Providentia, — the everlasting 
 Reason appearing in the succession of events. Such 
 a Divinity differs from the Christian ideal chiefly 
 in the absence of personal love and care for his off- 
 spring ; and even as to this, the Pronoia is almost an 
 affectionate interest in Man, — not men. The fact 
 that this Being is identified with the universe is of 
 no account. It would be more true to say, that the 
 universe is identified with the Divinity. The world 
 is seen as the successive emanations and withdrawals 
 of the Divine Reason, the eternal Logos. It is the 
 systole and diastole of the Divine nature, alternately 
 developing, through the series of the four elements, 
 from fire — conceived as the primitive and natural 
 form of intelligent matter — into the other three, in 
 the order of their density, and back again to the form 
 of fire. Thus the fundamental conception is not cre- 
 ation, but evolution or emanation. 
 
 * Compare "Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 352-357. For some of 
 the following illustrations I am indebted to Prof. J. B. Greenough. 
 
THE STOIC ETHICS. 77 
 
 Of this animate universe, with its periodicity of 
 creation (if we may call it so) and extinction, every- 
 thing, even the soul of the Stoic sage, forms a part. 
 Virtue is the perfect adjustment of all the desires 
 and acts of the soul — in Christian phraseology, the 
 submission of the will — to the universal and per- 
 sistent Logos, the divine reason and providence. Vir- 
 tue is thus, necessarily, one and indivisible. This 
 ethical view is essentially the same with that of the 
 more rigid Christian sects. " Whosoever shall offend 
 in one point, he is guilty of all." All wrong-doing 
 and all right-doing must be alike in value. On this 
 side the razor's edge, it is all good ; on that side, all 
 evil. Growth in goodness, properly speaking, there 
 can be none. 
 
 All the Stoic paradoxes are the logical following 
 out of this view. A man either is, or he is not, in 
 harmony with the divine order of the universe. If 
 he is, he is " the wise man " (sapiens) ; if not, he is 
 "the fool" (stultus). These two are all. A man can- 
 not be approaching wisdom. He is no nearer to it 
 with a thousand excellences (virtutes) than with one, 
 — like the string of a piano, which makes a discord 
 till it is perfectly in tune. The " wise man " is the 
 perfect human being ; * that is, perfectly adjusted to 
 the rest of the universe of which he forms a part. 
 The one problem of life is to make the Divine Eeason 
 paramount and supreme in the sphere of one's own 
 conduct. " He has a truly great mind," say the 
 Stoics, " who surrenders himself wholly to God." His 
 
 * "Operis sic optimus omnis est opifex, solus sic rex, solus 
 formosus." 
 
78 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 assurance of the right is his only and sufficient re- 
 ward. To him can be no evil, and no pain : all is 
 reconciled in the universal Order. He alone is free, 
 or rich, or of a sound mind ; he, in truth, is the only 
 sovereign. 
 
 Of this serious and enlightened pagan gospel a sin- 
 gle point may he remarked. To say nothing of the 
 wealth of doctrine gathered about the Messianic idea 
 and the person of Jesus, Stoicism lacked the one thing 
 which made the Christian gospel a power in the 
 religious life of mankind. This was what we may 
 call Paul's method of salvation, of which the cardinal 
 points are conviction of sin and salvation by faith. 
 This method is as true, psychologically, as it was then 
 and is now essential to any genuine vigor of religious 
 life in the soul. If we allow ourselves to think of 
 Christianity as the development of a system of doc- 
 trine, we shall exactly miss its secret, — the one thing 
 that makes its triumph intelligible or its history 
 worth our study. Christianity as a scheme of doc- 
 trine may be doubtfully balanced against one or two 
 pagan schemes, Stoic or Neo-Platonic, from both of 
 which it borrowed very largely. But, as a method of 
 the divine life, it had a power from another source, for 
 lack of which Stoicism miserably failed. 
 
 We have before us, then, two features of the later 
 Paganism, which we may call the religion of the peo- 
 ple and the religion of the philosophers. To these we 
 may add a third influence, working powerfully in the 
 same general direction, and shown in the reform of 
 the Eoman Law. The period we are considering is 
 called by Gibbon "the learned and splendid era of 
 
TESTIMONY OF TERTULLIAN. 79 
 
 jurisprudence." It culminated, a little later, in the 
 great jurists of the third century ; but the expanding, 
 softening, humanizing process, carried out in the suc- 
 cessive Christian codes, was distinctly the fruit of 
 the early imperial age. The crude, stiff formalism of 
 the older code,* with its effete system of domestic 
 tyranny,! was shaped and tempered by larger max- 
 ims of equity, and by the humaner spirit that grew 
 up as national boundaries melted into the large sys- 
 tem of the Eoman world. 
 
 These three — piety among the people, Stoicism 
 with the philosophers, law reform among the jurists — 
 we must set over against the decay of faith, the moral 
 corruption, and the political languor which are the 
 symptoms most commonly taken note of in the pagan 
 empire. They are not the whole of the picture. They 
 are not, by any means, its more salient points. But, 
 hidden as they often are in the background, they serve 
 not only for relief to darker impressions; they are 
 quite necessary to be taken into account, to explain 
 the remarkable phenomenon of the extension of Chris- 
 tianity at the end of the second century. " We are a 
 people of yesterday," says Tertullian, in his tempest- 
 uous challenge to the pagan world; "yet we have 
 filled every place among you, — cities, islands, forts, 
 towns, assemblies ; your very camps, your tribes, com- 
 panies, palace, senate, forum. We leave you nothing 
 but your temples." 
 
 These words, we must remember, were written hot 
 
 * See illustrations in Gibbon, and in Maine's " Ancient Law." 
 t The patria potestas. See Troplong, De. C Influence du Chris- 
 Homme sur le Droit Civile des Romains, p. 62. 
 
80 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 from witnessing the martyrdoms of Carthage, not long 
 before the persecutions of Decius, which made the 
 signal of a war of extermination against the Christian 
 Church. To a cooler eye, that war must have seemed 
 likely to succeed. The persecution of Christianity by 
 the Roman emperors, it is true, was capricious and 
 occasional ; and it occurred at lono- enough intervals 
 — averaging some twenty years — to allow amply for 
 the peaceable spread of the new religion. Christianity 
 not as a moral force, or even as a system of dogma, 
 but only as a quasi-political structure dangerous to 
 the state, was the thing attacked. Moreover — to 
 judge from the edicts of Diocletian — quiet suppres- 
 sion was the thing aimed at : the atrocious cruelties 
 recorded by Eusebius were wilful acts of local gover- 
 nors, and the very execution of the edicts might be 
 systematically evaded (as by Constantius Chlorus) 
 without any rebuke from the central power. We 
 find nothing in these centuries to compare with the 
 virulence and ferocity with which the Reformers in 
 France and the Netherlands were hunted down ; still 
 less, to compare with the diabolical craft and efficiency 
 of the Spanish Inquisition. Pagan Rome showed 
 never such wary and patient cruelty as Papal Rome. 
 There was, however, one moment when its whole 
 weight bore on the rising faith to crush it. If Chris- 
 tianity triumphed in the end, it was by virtue of a 
 very wide sympathy and a very extensive preparation 
 in the mind of Paganism. And the moral ground 
 on which this rested was the same that had already 
 put forth that independent growth of conscience and 
 piety, just spoken of as the latest and best fruit of 
 the ancient creed. 
 
THE OLD ITALIAN WORSHIP. 81 
 
 If we look more carefully at the case before us, we 
 
 see that this later Paganism, the popular religion of 
 the Empire, grew up along with the great political 
 change which suddenly turned a grinding municipal 
 tyranny into a broad imperial system embracing 
 many states. Christian writers have always pointed 
 to that system as the manifest opening of the way by 
 Divine Providence to the march of the true religion. 
 We shall see, for example, how distinctly this thought 
 lies in the appeals to faith of Leo the Great. 
 
 It is just as true of the religious and moral con- 
 ditions as it is of the political conditions. The old 
 nature worship, formulated in the popular Italian 
 creed, and embodied in the state religion of republican 
 Borne, was as formal and rigid as the aristocratic code 
 of the old law ; inconceivably precise, minute, timid, 
 and often cruel. Ovid* relates the curious myth — 
 a grotesque parallel to the intended sacrifice of Isaac 
 and the substitution of a ram — in which the good 
 ISTuma palters with his deity, and evades the shocking 
 demand of human sacrifice, outwitting the divinity 
 in a play of words. " I demand," says Jupiter, " the 
 head" — "of a leek," says the pious king; "of a 
 live " — " fish," interposes Numa ; " man," insists the 
 god ; " one hair I give you." Jupiter laughs, and 
 Numa's point is gained. 
 
 Livy has many a story of the same grim half- 
 humorous formalism. Thus, to foil a prophecy that 
 the Gauls should occupy the soil of Eome, two cap- 
 tive Gauls, a man and a woman, are buried alive 
 within the city limits. Some soldiers in revolt think 
 
 * Fasti, iii. 339-344. 
 4* f 
 
82 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 to free their conscience from their military oath 
 by killing the consuls, to whom they have sworn 
 it. Papirius, on the eve of battle, is deceived by a 
 false official report of a favorable omen : the sacred 
 chickens have eaten heartily. Being told, later, that 
 the report was false, " The peril," said he, " is with 
 the officer who sent it ; him the gods will doubtless 
 punish justly ; as for myself, I am bound by the re- 
 port sent me in due form." Accordingly, he is victo- 
 rious in the battle, while the lying officer is killed. 
 
 Political sagacity or military sense, again, kept the 
 old formalism in check, so that it was rarely suffered 
 to stand in the way of policy. Its verbal juggles were 
 oftener used to patch up some atrocious state-craft or 
 treachery, like that by which the Eoman armies 
 escaped from the Caudine Forks, where the general 
 held as hostage, assuming to be a Samnite citizen, 
 insults the Eoman envoy, and so brings on a new 
 cause of war ; or else gave way to a rude rationalism, 
 as when a commander of the fleet orders the sacred 
 chickens that will not eat to be pitched overboard, 
 where at any rate they must drink. But the senti- 
 ment of it lay very deep in the popular heart. It is 
 a remarkable illustration of Bom an feeling that, on 
 the day of his triumph, Julius Caesar, the Epicurean 
 rationalist and the merciless destroyer, mounted on 
 his knees the long flight of stairs that led up to the 
 Capitol, that by this act of ostentatious humility he 
 might avert those divine judgments supposed to be 
 provoked by inordinate felicity. 
 
 It is not easy to see just how the Italians regarded 
 their popular divinities. Their worship (if we may 
 
GODS OF THE NURSERY. 83 
 
 call it so) seems often frank fetichism of the rudest 
 sort. Their very names, as Augustine recounts them * 
 seem as consciously make-believe as those in a fairy 
 story. Thus, as we should say, the babe is brought 
 to birth by the good fairy Light (Lutina) ; a second 
 (Levana) receives it in her arms ; ministering sprites 
 (Cuba, Mumina, Cunina) take charge of the offices of 
 sleeping, nursing, and laying the infant in the cradle ; 
 in due course he is given in charge of the attendant 
 fairies Walky, Talky, Eaty, Drinky, Outgo, Home- 
 come, and so on to others, whose names are about 
 equally ingenious and recondite, down to the sad 
 genius Waily (Ncenia), lamenting at the burial, f 
 
 In all this, which the excellent Christian saint 
 stigmatizes as idolatry and superstition, — to say 
 nothing of deities that to him are simply unclean 
 devils, — we should probably see nothing more than 
 the same childish, half-reverent fancy, which crowds 
 the infant lore of our day with similar innocent im- 
 personations. Human life is beset, and the natural 
 world is crowded, with very real powers, utterly 
 mysterious to us ; and what we call the old nature- 
 religions include, along with many a dismal super- 
 stition, some tender, trustful, crrateful recognition of 
 a living Force, to which mere natural science is apt 
 to blind us. What made these simple fancies hateful 
 and abhorrent to the Christian mind was that they 
 were part of the habit and the system wrought up 
 
 * De Civitate Dei, vi. 9. 
 
 t Among these names are Educa, Potina, Cuba, Abeona, Adeona, 
 Iterduca, Domiduca, and many others, for which see Keller, x. 3 
 (Dietz's Paris ed.). 
 
84 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 into the tremendous despotism of Eome. The pagan- 
 ism which included them had also its horrible and 
 revolting side, full of violence, cruelty, and corrup- 
 tion ; and so thev had to take their flight, alone with 
 the nymphs of mountain, wood, and wave, before the 
 wrath and hate of an austerer faith. 
 
 The great gods of Italian worship were no doubt 
 simply the powers of nature personified. Saturn is 
 the seed-time, Jupiter the sky, Juno the air, Janus 
 (Dianus) the sun-god, with his feminine partner Di- 
 ana, the moon ; Mars is the mighty, Venus is spring- 
 tide (later, beauty or love), and so on. Our asso- 
 ciations with these names come mostly from the 
 Greek fables, which Latin poets and mythologists 
 imported ready made. To the popular mind, most 
 likely, they were abstractions nearly as vague and 
 dim as our Electricity, Gravitation, and the like, — 
 except that they were objects of more real awe, and 
 were regarded with the same curious formalism we 
 have noted before. As has been said, they were di- 
 vine Functions (numina), rather than divine Persons. 
 As soon as the functions are dimly seen, or absorbed 
 by a growing positivism, the divinity becomes a scare- 
 crow or laughing-stock : thus we see how Plautus 
 makes fun of the mythological sanctities. 
 
 This list is filled out with names that to us are ab- 
 solutely no more than abstract qualities, — Honor, 
 Manhood, Terror, Fortune, Public Safety, — which 
 seem quite as real as the rest. But the deity, the 
 function, or the quality, is strictly localized. Each 
 town has its own divinity, potent there, void and im- 
 potent elsewhere. For instance, a vow having been 
 
ROMAN FORMALISM. 85 
 
 made to "Knights' Fortune," it must be paid in 
 another city, because no such divinity is known in 
 Eome. If a town is to be attacked, its gods are en- 
 treated, with a profusion of compliment and promise, 
 to forsake that place and take their abode in Rome : 
 a long formula is preserved,* which contains the right 
 phrases and etiquette of this " evocation." This com- 
 pliment performed, the Roman conscience is free ; the 
 holy places are " made profane " ; the attack, which 
 would have been sacrilege before, becomes a pious 
 act; if the deity refuses, the peril is his own.f Thus 
 Juno is solemnly evoked from Veii, and for the first 
 time becomes a great goddess of the Romans! And 
 from its first tutelar divinity, Mars, the victorious 
 state incorporates in its worship, one by one, the 
 deities of all conquered towns and nations, till its 
 pantheon includes all the gods and all the worships 
 of the pagan world. 
 
 Such a mythology as this is far enough from the 
 vivid and riotous fancy of the Greek. It is, in es- 
 sence, bald, hard, bleak, domineering. It lay in the 
 region of ritual and form. Its rites must be per- 
 formed strictly in accordance with rule and tradi- 
 tion ; and the way of performing them duly was the 
 secret tradition of a sacred order. Originally, the 
 father of the family was priest as well as autocrat in 
 
 * In Macrobius, Saturn., hi. 9. 
 
 t Hence the importance of using the exact title which a divinity 
 will acknowledge. There is a charm in " Open Sesame " in the 
 tale which cannot be shared by any other grain. The true name 
 of Rome, and that of its tutelar divinity, are said to have been 
 kept as a mystery, lest they should become known to an enemy, 
 who might thus disarm the city of its defence. 
 
86 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 his own household, and the ritual was closely bound 
 up with family dignities and aristocratic tradition. 
 
 Such formal devotion has little in it of what we 
 call religion : nothing of pious contemplation, little 
 if any fervor of devout emotion. Indeed, warmth of 
 religious sentiment, the emotional side of piety, it 
 distinctly repudiates and dreads ; as we may imagine 
 a stiff ritualist of the last century to abhor the early 
 fervors of Methodism. Such passions only interfere 
 with its fixed and rigid temper. They are merely 
 a detestable, most likely an outlandish superstition, 
 alien and hateful to the mind of a true-born Roman. 
 
 And, again, it became the centre of a very wide and 
 powerful organization of religious motives and ideas. 
 Rome won to itself, in ages of conquest, a monopoly 
 of religions, as well as a monopoly of political powers 
 and rights. The central, the real object of Roman 
 worship we may hold to have been Rome herself, — 
 as England was said to be the only religion of Lord 
 Palmerston. We may well believe it. The ancient 
 city was closely identified with the altar, the hearth - 
 fire, the sacred Name, which marked its peculiar wor- 
 ship.* Nothing less than that vast impersonal but 
 very real abstraction, the City itself, could be the 
 object of that vivid, intense, self-devoted, and narrow 
 loyalty which goes by the name of patriotism, and 
 made the civic virtue of the ancient State. Rome 
 was the object of a passionate devotion, a grateful 
 piety, a religious pride and veneration, which made 
 the most powerful and perhaps the holiest emotion a 
 Roman could know. 
 
 * See Coulanges, La Cite Antique. 
 
ROMAN TYRANNY. 87 
 
 But Eome — the "mother of his soul," the great 
 loved, revered, awful State, that put her sword in 
 his hand to strike, and set up her eagle as a symbol 
 for his military adoration and faith, and covered him 
 with her shield though he were the humblest citizen 
 in the remotest corner of the earth ; Eome, at whose 
 name the magistrate at Philippi trembles when Paul 
 appeals to her protection — was a haughty, tyrannical, 
 unjust sovereign to those stilled nationalities that 
 made up her imperial domain. Nothing in all the 
 history of despotism is more hateful than the dealings 
 of Eome with her conquered provinces ; no aristocracy 
 was ever more insolent, domineering, and profligate, 
 than the oligarchy of officials and ex-officials that 
 made the Eoman Senate in the latter clays of the 
 Eepublic* To believe Cicero's eloquent and gener- 
 ous harangues, — himself proud of his place in that 
 famous oligarchy, — the feelings of the provincials 
 towards Eome could hardly have been anything but 
 a helpless despair and hate. That divinity, to which 
 so many millions of human victims had been sacri- 
 ficed, could hardly have been, in their eyes, any thing- 
 else than an omnipotent, omnipresent, and inexorable 
 Demon. Ireland in her bloody memories of Crom- 
 well, Poland in her struggles following the Partition, 
 Greece under the brute despotism of Turkey, may 
 help us understand the condition of Syria, Macedonia, 
 Sicily, Gaul, or Spain, as provinces of the imperial 
 Eepublic. The word empire (imperiwn) in that day 
 meant simply military rule. By political tradition, 
 these provinces were held by the law of conquest, 
 * See Froude's " Julius Caesar." 
 
88 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 The municipal law that for centuries had grown up 
 as a system for a single city made the one type and 
 rule for a government as wide, almost, as the civilized 
 world. It was administered purely in the interest 
 and in the name of that one city ; and its executive 
 officers (pro-consul, pro-praztor} were simply her mili- 
 tary commanders or civil magistrates, who had served 
 their term at home. 
 
 The evil and iniquity of this system had been seen 
 a hundred years before the Empire had been estab- 
 lished in its place, — if by no others, by the great 
 tribunes Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, who both died 
 victims of the Roman aristocracy. A hundred years 
 of civil war had exterminated the old parties of the 
 Eepublic. The genius of Julius Caesar and the cau- 
 tious policy of Augustus had created a new system, in 
 which all rulers, magistrates, and commanders were 
 made subject to the one Chief of the Roman world. 
 It is not necessary to speak of the new evils which 
 now came in place of the old evils. In one word, 
 political freedom was extinct. But that freedom was 
 the very thing men hated and feared. For many 
 generations that freedom had meant violence at 
 home, and flagrant oppression in the provinces. 
 Whatever else the revolution in the state accom- 
 plished, it at least set the subject states free from the 
 irresponsible class despotism they had been suffering 
 under so long. It was a revolution that brought them 
 comparative prosperity and repose. 
 
 The phrase " peace of the Empire " * is the name 
 of what they felt to be an unspeakable relief and gain. 
 
 * The pax Romana. 
 
THE EMPEROR A GOD. 89 
 
 Their sovereign was no longer the hard, cruel, grasp- 
 ing, abstract impersonation of the City, with her far- 
 reaching hundred hands, like those of a Hindoo idol. 
 It was at least a Man, who could make his will 
 prevail over the petty persecution of innumerable 
 despots. As Paul appealed from Festus, so men 
 throughout the Empire could appeal from their local 
 tyrants, to Caesar. Whatever his personal vices or 
 crimes, at least he represented the unity of a sover- 
 eign state. To him all subjects, all states, were equal. 
 It was no great flight of imagination to make him in 
 men's eyes the type of a universal, impartial Provi- 
 dence, — "image of all," say the Christian Clementines. 
 
 In men's eyes he was more : he was, very literally 
 and simply, a god in human form. As a god, Virgil 
 says, sacrifice shall be offered monthly on his altar. 
 And Velleius Paterculus, who went with Tiberius 
 into Germany, tells in vivacious narrative how a bar- 
 barian drove his canoe across the stream, pressed 
 through the crowds that surrounded the imperial 
 command, gazed long and earnestly at him, and went 
 away saying, " To-day I have seen the gods." * 
 
 We do not enter readily into the state of mind 
 that made it easy and natural in that day to look on 
 a man as a real divinity ; that literally deified him 
 
 * So when Pope Alexander III., in flight from Barbarossa, 
 landed at Montpellier, a Saracen in the crowd pressed close to his 
 stirrup, so as to have a fair view of the Christians' god. The feel- 
 ing of the barbarian in Velleius is exactly reflected in that of the 
 Southern negroes during the civil war " What you know 'bout 
 Massa Linkura 1 " said one of them to an army officer, who was 
 criticising some act of the government. " Him like de Lord ; him 
 eberywhar." 
 
90 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 because he was, as we should say, the incarnation of 
 an idea. Though to us, too, the worship of Paul as 
 Mercury, and of Barnabas as Jupiter, at Lystra, ought 
 to make it, if not clear, at least credible. To us it is 
 a very crude mythology ; yet it certainly was one of 
 the forces that made it possible to reconcile men's 
 minds to a creed whose corner-stone was the Incarna- 
 tion of a Deity. The notion of a "man-god" — that 
 is, of a Divine Person in human form — was already 
 familiar to the pagan mind. The Emperor was 
 spoken of in language that reflects, or prefigures, with 
 strict exactness, that applied in the later creeds to 
 the human life of Christ. This belief in the visible 
 presence of divinity upon earth springs no doubt from 
 sources very different in the Christian and in the 
 Pagan mind ; but they ran closely parallel, and merged 
 in the faith that included both. The philosophical 
 elements that entered into the faith belong to the his- 
 tory of religious speculation, and we shall have more 
 to say of them further on. Just now it is enough to 
 say, that — however crude or impossible it may look 
 to us — there never was a faith in a deity actually 
 walking the earth and conversant among men more 
 positively, sincerely, or in its way devoutly held, than 
 this deification of the Eoman Emperor among the peo- 
 ple of the provinces.* 
 
 * The worship of the Emperor was forbidden in Rome, toler- 
 ated in Italy, universal in the provinces. Sixty districts or towns of 
 Gaul, each with its separate shrine, joined in a common ritual in 
 his service at a metropolitan temple close to the wall of Lyons 
 (see below). The assemblies here made a sort of provincial par- 
 liament, and sent regular reports to Rome ; having, however, no 
 power of independent legislation. 
 
WORSHIP OF THE EMPEROR. 91 
 
 For it was not court flattery, — the impious adula- 
 tion which craves " the thrift that follows fawning." 
 It was the expression of gratitude for a blessing too 
 great to have come from a merely human source, for de- 
 liverance from evils too great to be stayed by a human 
 hand. The wreck of old political institutions had 
 destroyed or set afloat those old local faiths that be- 
 longed to them ; and this rude but vigorous growth of 
 a popular religion had come to take their place, and 
 throve on their decay. 
 
 Very significantly, too, there is scarce a hint of it in 
 the more familiar literary sources of our history. Its 
 record is in scattered monuments and inscriptions, 
 only brought to light and deciphered within the last 
 few years ; just as our earliest contemporary records of 
 the popular Christian faith are in the monuments and 
 inscriptions of the Catacombs. From such sources we 
 learn that there was not only the vague popular ado- 
 ration, such as Tacitus speaks of when he ascribes 
 the working of miracles to the Emperor Vespasian. 
 There was also an organized worship of the Emperor, 
 with temple and ritual, and a consecrated order of 
 priests* Every year embassies went up from the 
 provinces to Rome to carry him their thanksgivings or 
 vows or expressions of religious homage. To be a 
 member of that priesthood, or head of such an em- 
 bassy, was a dignity held in reserve for men who had 
 discharged the highest official trusts in their native 
 district, a dignity to be recorded in inscriptions on 
 their funeral monuments. 
 
 * The official title of this priesthood was Flamen Romce Divorum 
 et Augusti. 
 
92 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 The religious vows were not merely the formal or 
 official language of diplomatic speech ; but plain men, 
 of humble life, of no official station or ambition, re- 
 corded their private reverence and homage, or that of 
 their households, — just as a pious Catholic might re- 
 cord his self-consecration to a patron saint, — in words 
 of pious gratitude for the blessings devoutly ascribed 
 to Csesar as author and giver of daily benefits.* While 
 each nation had its especial deity, he only, men said, 
 was one god over all the earth. 
 
 To us, who know that succession of Caesars main- 
 ly from the court scandal of Suetonius or the lurid 
 tragedy of the Annals of Tacitus, there is something 
 strange, and even pathetic, in this ascription of divine 
 honors to such names as Tiberius, Nero, or Domitian. 
 The habits of old faith, the terrible memories of con- 
 quest, the immense relief of comparative equity, secu- 
 rity, and quiet, are all necessary to be kept in mind, 
 to make it credible.! 
 
 In one way this imperial creed brought the Pagan 
 mind into most sharp and direct collision with the 
 Christian faith. The religion of the State became 
 more and more identified with the worship paid per- 
 sonally to the Emperor ; and any symbolic act of that 
 
 * See examples of these inscriptions in Coulanges, Institutions 
 Poliliques de Vancienne France. 
 
 t That the Roman State — still a Republic in name — should 
 have endured for fourteen years what it is charity to call the insane 
 freaks and caprices of one sickly and weak-minded youth, Nero, 
 is partly explained by the remorseless cruelty of the Roman temper 
 and manners, but chiefly hy the name of Caesar, which he inher- 
 ited, and by the deep horror left on men's minds from the century 
 of the Civil War. 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS. 93 
 
 worship — swearing to the name of Caesar, or casting 
 incense in the formal ritual — became in a special 
 way the test of political loyalty. To refuse it, under 
 whatever pretext, was constructive treason. It was 
 this, and not any hatred of the Christian system, or 
 inclination to persecute it as such, that so often put 
 the Christians under the ban of the State. Most of 
 the Emperors, it is quite clear, would have been glad 
 to evade any such attack on a class of safe, obedient, 
 trusty subjects, which the Christians generally were ; 
 so the early persecutions were spasmodic, of short 
 duration, and far apart. Even Trajan, who will not 
 have the Christians hunted out or betrayed by in- 
 formers, must submit them to the test of " worship- 
 ping my divinity." * In short, the more sincere and 
 the more fully developed this new state religion, the 
 more inexorably it must needs deal with any rival 
 creed. 
 
 It is to be noticed, also, that the antagonism spoken 
 of comes to a head about the middle of the second 
 century ; and that from that time forth it is open war, 
 with little truce, until the stronger faith prevails. At 
 first sight it is strange that this war should have been 
 declared by the wisest and most scrupulously just of 
 all the Emperors, — by Marcus Aurelius, who is ad- 
 dressed by Justin as if he was almost persuaded to be 
 a Christian, and whose ethics are as clear and austere 
 as those of Paul. But it was because Aurelius had 
 
 * So I understand the phrase supplicando diis nostris, comparing 
 it with imagini tuce supplicarent in the letter of Pliny. The spe- 
 cific act of sacrifice is the one thing demanded in the edicts of 
 Diocletian. 
 
94 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 religiously consecrated himself to the service of the 
 State, because he scrupulously endeavored to make 
 himself worthy of the worship which the state religion 
 enjoined, that he saw the more clearly how inevitable 
 and uncompromising the conflict had come to be. 
 
 It was in his time that the worship of the Emperor 
 came to its highest reach of sincerity and fervor. 
 The personal virtues of the " five good Emperors," of 
 whom he was the last, contrasted with the vices of 
 most that went before, had carried the grateful horn- 
 age rendered to Caesar to a certain loyal and devout 
 enthusiasm. As a picture of Napoleon might be found 
 sixty years ago in every French peasant's cottage, as an 
 image of the Virgin adorns the home of every hum- 
 blest Catholic devotee, so the figure or bust of the 
 good Emperor was to be found at the family altar of 
 every pious Eoman subject ; and the inscriptions of 
 veneration and homage become more fervent now 
 than ever.* The popular religion of the Empire had 
 now reached its completest development. And, if 
 there had been an abiding principle of life in it, 
 Christianity might have found a worthier rival, and a 
 more doubtful encounter. 
 
 But we have not far to look for the causes of its 
 rapid fall from this culminating point. We need not 
 suppose any wordy hollowness in the profession of 
 
 * "At this day" — that is, in the time of Constantine — "his 
 statues stand in many houses among the household gods ; he is 
 even now regarded as a divinity; priests, fellows, and chaplains 
 (flamines) are assigned him, and whatever antiquity has prescribed 
 of religious offices." Julius Capitolinus, Ch. 18 (in Coulanges). 
 The Christian Emperors, down to Gratian, were regularly deified 
 after their death, and had their due place in the Pagan pantheon. 
 
RELIGION OF THE HUMBLER CLASSES. 95 
 
 faith made by the imperial Stoic. But his ideal of 
 character seems exaggerated and strained, when 
 divorced from a positive religious creed, like that 
 which made the strength of Paul. At any rate, it 
 left exposed some weak spots. It is significant, that' 
 the " decline and fall of the Roman Empire " begins 
 with the reign of his successor. Aurelius himself 
 invites criticism by his indulgent fondness for Faus- 
 tina ; it was even a crime against the State to leave 
 that in the brutal hands of Commodus. 
 
 That crowned gladiator must rudely shock the 
 pious faith that rested on his father's calm humani- 
 ties. And Commodus was the pioneer in a century 
 mostly filled with the names of military adventurers 
 — twenty-five in all before we come to that of Dio- 
 cletian (the first who was worshipped as a god in 
 his own person) — on whose character and fortunes 
 that faith was completely wrecked. Whatever was 
 genuine in it was more and more rapidly absorbed in 
 the widening conquests of Christianity, whose type 
 of incarnation was by so many degrees more pure 
 and august. And the final battle of the creeds, at 
 the end of the third century, may be said to have 
 blotted out almost the very memory that the Pagan 
 Empire had ever so much as pretended to embody 
 any conception of justice, mercy, or religious truth. 
 
 There is another phase of the popular religion, 
 illustrated chiefly by funeral monuments and inscrip- 
 tions, showing more of the life of the humbler classes, 
 including slaves, respecting which a brief hint must 
 here suffice. The cruel lot of these poor creatures 
 was lightened by charitable societies and burial 
 
96 THE MIXD OF PAGANISM. 
 
 societies among themselves. The t inscriptions express 
 sometimes a pious and humble trust in terms curi- 
 ously like those of the Christian monuments ; some- 
 times the despairing or mocking temper we might 
 more naturally expect. The glimpse they give of 
 family affection and kindly feeling is often very 
 touching ; and helps us, better than almost any other 
 thing, to understand the " good ground " in the pop- 
 ular heart, where the new seed had its strongest 
 growth. 
 
 It has been necessary to speak of the long attempt 
 to create a religion amono- the ruins of the old Pa<ran 
 world chiefly on its formal side, — that which is 
 shown in its modes of worship and its professions of 
 belief. There is another side, which shows more of 
 what we may call the heart of Paganism ; and of this 
 a word remains to be said. 
 
 It is no lesson of antiquarian curiosity, but of the 
 latest experience, that religious passion is quite as 
 much to be dreaded as any other form of human 
 passion. Perhaps, indeed, no other passion has gen- 
 erated so much of frenzy, cruelty, and hate. The 
 ancient Eomans did well, from their point of view, 
 to look with dread and dislike on all excesses of 
 religious emotion, particularly that which invaded 
 from the East, always the hot-bed and nursery of 
 fanaticism. When the delirious rites of Bacchus 
 were first known in Eome, and especially their effect 
 on female worshippers, it was with a panic of genu- 
 ine terror that the Senate undertook to keep it at 
 bay, at the cost of tortures and bloody executions.* 
 * Liv. xxxix. 8-18 (b. c. 185). 
 
MAGIC AND HUMAN SACRIFICE. 97 
 
 This was about the time of the first contact of 
 Eome with the East. Two centuries later, under 
 Augustus and Tiberius, many an Oriental superstition 
 was well naturalized in Eome. Isis and Serapis 
 were fashionable divinities. Magic, sorcery, and all 
 manner of religious frenzy, were chronic symptoms 
 of the popular mind. Virgil's Pharmaccutria and 
 Horace's Canidia are the familiar types of these 
 wild superstitions. Their home was in the East. 
 And with them came to Eome the crueller rites, the 
 self-mutilations and the bloody sacrifices, that belong 
 to the worship of Cybele, Dionysus, and the rest. 
 
 Now sacrifice in the earlier time, among the Greeks 
 and Eomans, had little if any of the expiatory char- 
 acter afterwards given to it. There was not much, in 
 those days, of the feeling of remorse ; crime itself 
 was rather fatality than guilt ; the Furies that pur- 
 sued Orestes were charmed away by no slaughter of 
 an innocent victim, but by a grave decision of the 
 real nature of his deed. There was sacrifice of human 
 victims — by Druids in the woods of Gaul ; by bar- 
 barians on savage coasts ; by Greeks or Eomans in 
 moments of extreme terror ; by the Carthaginians, a 
 Tyrian colony, who thought to avert the ruin of their 
 city by slaying two hundred of their noblest children 
 before their Canaanitish gods. 
 
 But the ordinary act of sacrifice was simply an act 
 of thanksgiving, or an offering to avert some natural 
 calamity, not an atonement for the sin of the soul. 
 The father of the household, in killing the creature 
 destined for the daily meal, was priest as well as 
 provider, and set apart the due portion to the house- 
 
98 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 
 
 hold divinity. This was simply a deliberate but 
 rather awkward " grace before meat." " A tender 
 lamb from the fold shall often stain the altar " which 
 Tityrus has built to the divine benefactor (who " will 
 always be a god " to him) that has restored his farm. 
 This, as far as we see, was the old Greek or Roman 
 notion. The more solemn public acts of sacrifice 
 were acts of divination, not the atonement of national 
 guilt — of which there might seem great need. 
 
 The meagre simplicity of ancient rites, as well as 
 the timid scruple in their performance, and perhaps 
 a quickened intensity of moral feeling, had something 
 to do with the eager and passionate reception of for- 
 eign custom. The Eastern temper in such things was 
 fervid, passionate, often delirious, sometimes brutal. 
 How it allied itself with practice of magic, evoking of 
 spirits, and what we should call animal magnetism — 
 curiously like the practice of spiritists in our own 
 day — belongs more to the latest phase of Paganism, 
 and the extravagances of the Neo-Platonists. But the 
 bloody sacrificial rites of the East were quite in keep- 
 ing with the peculiar brutality of public temper which 
 we find in the earlier Empire. 
 
 These rites went all the way from personal mutila- 
 tions, more or less severe, to the ghastly performance 
 of the tauroholium, in which the worshipper stood in a 
 pit below a perforated platform, and was drenched 
 from head to foot in the shower-bath of blood that 
 gushed from the slaughtered bull above.* This hor- 
 rible ritual was held to be a ransom from all guilt, 
 and a pledge of blessedness in this life and the next.f 
 
 * The criobolium was the similar sacrifice of a ram. 
 
 t In ceternum renatm. (See Prudentius, Perist., x. 1011.) 
 
INCARNATION AND SACRIFICE. 99 
 
 As the worshipper, reeking and dripping with the 
 sanguine torrent, passed out through the crowd, others 
 pressed about him, to win some share, by a touch or 
 stain, in the magic efficacy of that atoning rite. It is 
 this strange custom of later Paganism, quite as much 
 as the Levitical tradition of the Old Testament, that 
 gives emphasis to the words written to the Hebrews : 
 " If the blood of bulls and goats sanctifieth, how much 
 more the blood of Christ ! " and again, " It is not pos- 
 sible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take 
 away sin." 
 
 We have, then, in the mind of Paganism at this 
 epoch, the tw r o characteristic religious ideas of the age 
 — Incarnation and expiatory Sacrifice — distinctly 
 conceived and plainly developed, though in forms 
 that make them more a travesty than a counterpart 
 of the same ideas in the Christian creed. The impor- 
 tant thing to notice in them is, that they are the ideas 
 of that age. They are not peculiar to Christianity : it 
 would be truer to say that in origin and essence they 
 are rather Pagan than Christian. That they had a 
 powerful effect in shaping the Christian belief, there 
 can be no doubt. At least, they predisposed the mind 
 of the Eoman world to accept that belief so broadly 
 and so easily as it did. The rapid decline of Paganism 
 in the third century, and the sudden change that 
 shows the whole Empire Christian at the end of it, 
 are facts to be accounted for on the common ground 
 of history so far as may be. The triumph of the latter 
 cannot be understood, as a human event, without an 
 understanding of those causes, working from within, 
 which predisposed mankind to receive it. 
 
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 THE one period of Christian history which most 
 fascinates the imagination at first sight, is that 
 when the new faith came to the throne of empire in 
 the person of Constantine the Great. 
 
 And this first attraction is fully borne out by the 
 real interest of the characters and events — though 
 not in the way we might have thought at first. To 
 the Christians, suddenly released from a great stress 
 and dread of persecution, it would seem, no doubt, the 
 coming of a perfect day, and the establishing of the 
 kingdom they had prayed for, once for all. But then 
 came the inevitable recoil and disappointment. Con- 
 stantine was no saint, at best, and a very doubtful 
 Christian ; but a victorious general, a suspicious and 
 wary politician ; a man of some very great and noble 
 qualities, indeed, but stained by one or two dark 
 crimes. The religion he protected was no sooner in a 
 place of security and power than smothered jealousies 
 burst out, and religious feuds began, and the Empire 
 rang with the noise of a controversy — often unintel- 
 ligible as it was disgraceful — whose fame is hardly 
 diminished to this day. 
 
 The Arian Controversy has these two points of 
 interest for us. It is in itself one of the most dra- 
 
DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE WORD. 101 
 
 matic and eventful chapters in the whole history of 
 human opinion, turning on the adventures, character, 
 and animosities of three or four leading actors, to- 
 gether with the lively passions of great multitudes 
 of partisans ; and, secondly, it fixed for a great many 
 generations the type of the dominant belief, giving an 
 answer to the question, What sort of a system, intel- 
 lectual or religious, should come to take the place of 
 the dying Paganism ? These two make, so to speak, 
 the pivots which sustain our interest and steady our 
 understanding of it. 
 
 It is not hard to trace in outline the development 
 of speculative opinion which prepared the way for 
 this extraordinary outburst of religious rage. This, 
 however, belongs to the history of doctrine, and need 
 not be dwelt on here. That the opinion became a 
 passion, and the motive of deadly controversy lasting- 
 through centuries, turned on circumstances in the 
 history, and on principles of human conduct, not 
 so directly obvious. First, however, a few words are 
 needed as to the nature of the controversy itself. 
 
 The doctrine of the Divine Word (Logos) as mani- 
 fest in the human life of Jesus had for some two 
 centuries been the accepted key to the interpretation 
 of the Christian Gospel. More or less vaguely, the 
 Word was held to take the place of the human soul 
 in him, or to be intimately united with it, so that, in 
 virtue of it, and the Divine nature which it implied, 
 he became the Christ. 
 
 But the term Logos itself has a double meaning. 
 On one hand, it is identical with the Divine Wisdom, 
 — which is, in fact, constantly used as its equivalent, 
 
102 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 botli by the Greek and Latin writers ; and in this 
 sense it is simply the name of an Attribute of the 
 Creator. On the other hand (by the habit of mind 
 already spoken of in considering the Gnostic genealo- 
 gies) it is easily, unconsciously, continually hyposta- 
 tized, — that is, regarded as an independent Substance, 
 or quasi-Personality ; and in this sense, as a pre- 
 existent Divine Person, is especially identified with 
 the Christ. 
 
 It is clear that we may make either of these con- 
 ceptions prominent, so as to overshadow or dwarf the 
 other ; and we shall do this according as the habit of 
 our mind is mystical on one side, or rationalizing on 
 the other. The mystic, reverential, imaginative mood 
 dwells upon the Attribute, which it tends more and 
 more to merge in absolute Divinity, in the direction 
 of a religious Pantheism. The rational, analytic, crit- 
 icising mood dwells upon the Substance, or Person 
 (hypostasis)* which it tends more and more to make 
 distinct and separate, and therefore a logically de- 
 pendent and inferior being. To the first, the Logos 
 as Divine Wisdom is necessarily coeternal with God 
 himself, as liidit with the source of light. To the 
 second, the Logos as a Divine Person is necessarily 
 inferior to and (so to speak) younger than the Infinite, 
 just as a son is younger than his father. To the first, 
 Christ is the Son of God figuratively, by eternal gen- 
 eration ; to the second, he is the Son of God literally, 
 as the " first-born of the creation." 
 
 This radical difference of mental constitution and 
 
 * Explained by Gregory of Nyssa as bearing the same relation 
 to the individual as Substance (ovcia) to the class. 
 
THEOLOGICAL PASSION. 103 
 
 habit repeats itself in all the phases of the contro- 
 versy that followed. The mystic tendency * appears 
 as an exaggerated orthodoxy, later known by the 
 names Monophysite and Monothelete, till it runs out 
 into the peculiar fanaticism of certain Oriental sects, 
 to whom Christ is the sole and essential Deity. The 
 rationalistic tendency f shows itself as a harassing 
 and incessant criticism, quite as intolerant as its 
 adversary, not repudiating but putting its own inter- 
 pretation on the accepted creed, exiled at length as 
 Nestorianism, under which name it subsists in the 
 East to this day. The narrow line of the church 
 faith, between these contrary drifts of opinion, has 
 its landmarks fixed in the decisions of the first four 
 General (or (Ecumenical) Councils. J 
 
 This central line of doctrine, it is almost needless 
 to say, runs a good deal nearer to the mystic than to 
 the rationalizing opinion. In religious controversy, 
 it is not half so important that men should under- 
 stand their creed, as it is that they should hold it in 
 some well-defined symbol appealing strongly to the 
 imagination. And we misunderstand both the age 
 of Martyrdom, and the age of Controversy that im- 
 mediately followed, unless we see how the fervor, 
 nay, often the frenzy, of a passionate conviction — so 
 nurtured by the incessant discipline of the Church 
 when belief in it was a matter of life and death — 
 will cling to what from outside seems a mere passion- 
 
 * Represented by the names of Sabellius, Apollinaris, and 
 Eutyches. 
 
 t Represented by Arms, Eunomius, and Nestorius. 
 
 t Viz. that of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), 
 and Chalcedon (451). 
 
104 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 less abstraction. The Dutch Republic, once free from 
 terror of the Spaniard, went straight into disputes 
 about predestination that risked its hard-bought liber- 
 ties, and cost the noble Barneveldt his head. "What 
 can be more a mere abstraction, a mere identical 
 equation in logic, than There is no God but God? 
 Yet the phrase in which it rings on the battle-field 
 to-day hurls masses of Moslem fanatics against Prus- 
 sian intrenchments, and piles them dead or dying in 
 the ditch, just as, seven hundred years ago, it hurled 
 myriads of Saracens against the steel-clad ranks of 
 the Crusaders. It is the symbol, not the thing, for 
 which men oftenest stake their lives. In deliberate 
 sober thought we choose the policy we think most 
 wise and safe, — the theory of State-rights or the 
 theory of the Republic one and indivisible ; but in 
 the fury of battle men think less of that than of the 
 visible sign of it, the Stars and Stripes against the 
 Stars and Bars ! 
 
 Now it happened once in Alexandria, not far from 
 the time we are approaching, that a certain Bishop 
 Alexander was zealously expounding to his audience 
 this cardinal point of Christian faith. They were 
 lately at rest from a time of persecution, ready and 
 hot for controversy. It was probably the exposition 
 of the religious symbol in some such cheap religious 
 rhetoric as most of us have heard : as that the glori- 
 ous Sun in heaven represents the Father ; his Light, 
 the eternal Word; his Heat, the life-giving Spirit; 
 and so on. But the smooth discourse was cut short 
 by the cry of heresy. " That is the false doctrine of 
 Sabellius ! " said a voice in the crowd. Now Sabel- 
 
SABELLIUS AND ARIUS. 105 
 
 lius, most pious and unsuspecting of heretics, had 
 preached, a few years before, a sort of " modal trin- 
 ity," very much to the same effect. The voice was 
 the voice of Arius, a presbyter, no friend of the bishop, 
 of temper restless and litigious, an uncomfortable an- 
 tagonist in a war of words. In person slender and 
 tall, of features fine-cut and rather sharp ; in manner 
 courteous ; careful and somewhat elegant in dress ; 
 ready of speech, and gifted with a certain keenness 
 to fasten on the weak point of his adversary's state- 
 ment, and follow it out in a teasing, exasperating way 
 to some point of real or seeming contradiction ; and, 
 withal, a man who would not be silenced or put 
 down. 
 
 It is not likely that either opponent could state his 
 point so as to be very clear to us, or, at any rate, so 
 as to seem at all solvable by the human mind. After 
 many centuries, and whole libraries of dispute, it is, 
 we may say, as far from being solved as ever. If 
 Christ is the Son, said Arius, he must be younger 
 than the Father, if only by a single moment out of ail 
 eternity, and so dependent on him ; or, in the test- 
 phrase of Arianism, " there was when the Son did not 
 yet exist." * Nay, was the reply, he is the eternal Son 
 of the eternal Father : to deny his equal eternity is to 
 say that the Sun in heaven can exist without giving 
 light and heat. 
 
 And so the dispute went on. It turned on a very 
 fine point, — one, we might say, invisible to the naked 
 eye ; and there was nothing for it but the incessant 
 
 * Not, " there was a time when " : the Logos was non-existent 
 only in eternity, before time was. 
 
 5* 
 
106 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 repetition and reiteration of the same words. The 
 discussion is very weary to follow, and it seems to 
 lead us nowhere. If we take the term Logos (which 
 is masculine in Greek) to signify merely an Attribute, 
 — conscious intelligence of the Eternal, — it is a sim- 
 ple and intelligible symbol to speak of it as the Son 
 by eternal generation. If we take it to mean a Per- 
 son, it seems impossible not to distinguish it, by some 
 grade of dignity or precedence, from the Eternal One. 
 The arguments of Arius seem the incessant sharp 
 rattling of a logic-mill, like those windy disputes of 
 Sophists in Plato : those of his opponents — we may 
 look through many a hundred of the pages that record 
 them, without finding one that any man now would 
 care to repeat or answer. 
 
 If we would understand the importance of the 
 Arian controversy, then, we must find it not in what 
 is wilful, personal, dramatic in the story, — least of 
 all in the speculative opinion on either side, what 
 seems so absolutely apart from anything that we un- 
 derstand or care about to-day ; but in what lies behind 
 it and around it. It is really the great feature, the 
 one visible feature, of the intellectual history of a 
 time critical as any in the religious and social desti- 
 nies of mankind. 
 
 Let us transport ourselves now to the time when 
 this controversy came to a head in the Council at 
 Nicsea (325). If we look back fifty years, we see the 
 vast intellectual and political system of Paganism — 
 to all outward appearance as vast and formidable as 
 ever — just preparing to put forth all its forces in a 
 final effort to suppress that threatening, unceasing, in- 
 
A COMPARISON OF CREEDS. 107 
 
 sidious growth of the Christian system, and on the 
 edge of its last, most obstinate, and most cruel perse- 
 cution. If we look forward fifty years, we find the 
 same Paganism idealized in a new and arrogant sys- 
 tem of philosophy, contending for intellectual and 
 political revival with a speculative zeal and moral 
 pretensions fully equal to the Christianity of the day, 
 — a sort of eclectic or transcendental free religion, as 
 brilliantly described in Kingsley's " Hypatia." 
 
 How was it, then, that in the middle of this cen- 
 tury of revolution, enveloped right and left by the 
 political forces, the philosophical systems, and the 
 menacing fanaticisms of the older civilization, Chris- 
 tians had time or heart to rage so furiously together ? 
 And how was it that, in spite of a conflict which 
 seemed to consume all its strength, Christianity came 
 out of it in a hundred years stronger than ever, the 
 only live organized power to stay the tides of barbar- 
 ism ; at the end of five hundred years, the base and 
 the ideal of a new Christian Empire, already rivalling 
 the power and dignity of the old ; at the end of a 
 thousand years, in possession of a dominion which 
 seemed to Dante then as secure as the circles of his 
 Hell, or the portals of his Paradise ? 
 
 There are two answers to this question, one con- 
 sisting in the nature of the thing itself which was at 
 issue between Paganism and Christianity ; the other 
 in a comparison of the two rival Christian creeds, 
 Arian and Athanasian. 
 
 First, it is not very hard to trace the genealogy of 
 opinion. The laws of thought are uniform, and intel- 
 lectual systems unfold naturally and easily by a 
 
108 THE AM AN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 method of their own. So far as mere opinion goes, I 
 do not see in the least why Paganism did not furnish 
 materials of a system quite as likely to satisfy a 
 thoughtful man of that day, as the Christianity of the 
 ■first three centuries. In fact, we see that it did so 
 satisfy many of the very best and wisest men of the 
 time : Tacitus, the stern historian ; his friend Pliny, 
 the courteous and accomplished Eoman gentleman ; 
 Plutarch, the biographer of pagan heroes and critic of 
 pagan morals ; both the Antonines, wisest and best of 
 statesmen ; Galen, the pious and enlightened physiolo- 
 gist ; Epictetus, most patient, shrewd, and austere of 
 moralists. 
 
 Why should such men burden themselves with 
 Jewish or Galilaean legends that to them must seem 
 foolish and incredible ? Did not the caustic wisdom of 
 Socrates, the high philosophy of Plato, the scientific 
 breadth of Aristotle, the elevated and pure theism of 
 Cicero, above all, the large life, the political experi- 
 ence, and the manifold culture of pagan antiquity, — 
 did not these furnish materials for a religious system 
 incomparably more broad, rich, and true than the nar- 
 row creed of Palestine ? 
 
 And then, too, could not a wise eclecticism adopt 
 and engraft upon it whatever seemed really worth j 
 retaining of the fervid religious life, the " enthusiasm 
 of humanity," the methods of mutual help, in the 
 Christian body ? So it seems, at least, to many en- 
 lightened and cultivated people of our own day ; and 
 so the thought must have crossed the mind of Paul, 
 himself an enlightened and cultivated man, when he 
 saw with a sort of amazement how God had chosen 
 
THE METHOD OF FAITH. 109 
 
 the foolish things of the world to confound the 
 wise, and weak things to confound the mighty, and 
 base things to bring to naught the haughty and 
 strong. 
 
 But no. The history of opinion is one thing ; the 
 history of faith is another thing. Faith belongs to 
 emotion, character, and will. It is capable of passion, 
 of enthusiasm, of obstinate courage. It can disdain 
 reason, and trample argument under foot. It cares 
 for reason or argument only as a weapon of attack : 
 its only weapon of defence is confidence in itself. It 
 has its own laws of growth, which resemble more the 
 spreading of flame than the skilful joining of archi- 
 tecture. It has its own methods of conquest, of which 
 the chief is to kindle and sedulously to nurture an 
 unreasoning devotion. 
 
 So it has been with all the great victorious faiths of 
 history, from Elijah to Mahomet, from Paul to Gar- 
 rison. What such men call reasoning is only the 
 expression of a passionate conviction ; the method of 
 instruction such men employ is the contagion of their 
 own ardent thought. In the great struggle against 
 Paganism, the inheriting of that power, the secret of 
 that method, was with the Christians, and not with 
 their opponents. What cool and unprejudiced reason 
 might have chosen or might have done is not to the 
 point. I have often asked myself, in the controversies 
 of our own day, whether reason might not have 
 brought better and safer results than fanaticism ; and 
 the only answer I could find was, that what we call 
 fanaticism is one of the great forces that impel man- 
 kind, while reason is not. Eeason at best may serve, 
 
110 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 in some small degree, as pilot or brakeman ; the flame 
 and vapor are from quite another source. 
 
 In the second place, it is part of the method of 
 faith, that it scorns anything that looks like compro- 
 mise with its opponents. Compromise may be had 
 after the victory is gained, but not while the fight is 
 going on. Now Arianism was, in fact, as a system, 
 very high-toned, nay almost extravagant, in its Chris- 
 tian profession. In asserting for Christ a super- 
 angelic pre-existence all but absolute and eternal, it 
 claimed for him as much as could be forced from the 
 very highest expressions of reverence in the Alex- 
 andrine phraseology of Paul or John ; infinitely more 
 than could be found in the earlier and more authentic 
 gospel. But observe. In that phrase all hut, there 
 lurked a flaw of heresy, of weakness, of compromise 
 with the common enemy. Surely, in the light of 
 simple reason, it were better to accept frankly the 
 simple humanity of Jesus,' to treat the nativity as a 
 myth, the miracles as legends, and the resurrection as 
 a glorious illusion ; or else to say, just as frankly, that 
 Jesus was God in the flesh, — his temptations, his suf- 
 ferings, his prayers, a mere dramatic exhibition, or a 
 mysterious by-play of his divine and human nature. 
 At least, the first is intelligible reason, and the last 
 is sublime faith in a glorified humanity. Either is 
 better than that nondescript illogical compromise 
 which is known as Arianism. 
 
 And again, it was something worse than a logical 
 flaw. Did it not make Christ the " Son of God," 
 after all, very much in the same way that Jupiter 
 was the son of Saturn, and Mars of Jupiter ? Did 
 
THE DRIFT OF ARIANISM. Ill 
 
 it not open the way for all the shocking possibilities, 
 for all the blasphemous compromises, of a mongrel 
 paganism, — nay, to all the horrible vices and cor- 
 ruptions that had grown out of the old worships of 
 paganism ? If Christians too are to worship a Divin- 
 ity who is after all not the Supreme God, what are 
 they better than their enemies ? Did they, too, not 
 worship sons of God, — Apollo, Hercules, Bacchus, 
 and the rest ? Had not some pagan emperors — the 
 brutal Commodus as well as the good Severus — con- 
 sented in advance to such a compromise, and even 
 admitted Jesus of Nazareth to the generous Koman 
 pantheon ? Had not the best of all the emperors, 
 Trajan and Aurelius, proved the impossibility of that 
 compromise by persecuting the Christian faith ? 
 
 We need not suppose that all these thoughts came 
 in at once, to make the feud so bitter as it proved to 
 be. But they all lay behind, more or less conscious- 
 ly, to make the controversy obstinate and bitter under 
 the successors of Constantine in a later age. For 
 then Arianism had come to be a court party. Its 
 perilous drift towards compromise was seen then, 
 plainly, on the side of politics, — where it seemed 
 somehow to Hatter the self-love and fondness for 
 power of a despotic house ; as it was seen, too, in 
 the fact which broadly marks its destiny in history, 
 that it kept strong hold of the speculative and sub- 
 tile Greek mind, and remained an apple of discord in 
 the East, taking many shapes and hues, one creed 
 having (we are told) no less than twenty-seven 
 anathemas appended to cover so many shadings of 
 dissent ; while the central, catholic, domineering, 
 
112 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 uncompromising faith held almost undisputed ground 
 in the West, where it became the basis of the most 
 vast and imposing spiritual dominion ever known. 
 
 The Nicene Creed, so called, is still the authentic 
 expression of that faith, as read in the liturgies of 
 to-day. It is true that the Nicene Creed was itself a 
 sort of compromise, prepared at the summons of Con- 
 stantine, whose motive was more than half political ; 
 and signed, with whatever demur, (it is stated, rather 
 doubtfully,) by Arius himself, who presently found 
 himself high in favor with the imperial court. But 
 its historical importance is very great ; and, as the 
 central act of a most extraordinary drama, it demands 
 a few words of mention. 
 
 We cannot do justice to the very perplexing char- 
 acter of Constantine, unless we think of him, with all 
 his faults, as a man of strong, generous impulses, very 
 much dominated at times by a vivid imagination. It 
 was something more than policy, it was a natural 
 effect of the impressive, nay, appalling situation in 
 which he found himself, — at the head of a force 
 largely Christian marching against the rude and fierce 
 Maxentius, who had mustered whatever there was in 
 Borne of fanatic attachment to the old religion or 
 fanatic hatred of the new, — that he saw, or seemed 
 to see, a flaming cross in the sky at noon, and set that 
 sign above the crimson banner, the Labarum, under 
 which his army went, cheerful and strong, to certain 
 victory. A triumph in open battle against the old gods 
 of Home in person ! What an appeal to excited imagi- 
 nation on one side, to despairing frenzy on the other ! 
 
 And again, when he traced the outline of his new 
 
CONSTANTINE, 113 
 
 capital, the most felicitous choice ever made for the 
 seat of a great Empire, lie asserted, and probably be- 
 lieved, that he was acting by Divine guidance. " I 
 must keep on," said he to his officers, amazed at the 
 wide plan he traced, " till the God who goes before 
 me stops." A man of strong imagination, lifted sud- 
 denly into a great success, comes (as Napoleon did) to 
 look on his own acts and destiny with a certain awe : 
 lie easily thinks himself a man of destiny. Sylla be- 
 lieved in his star, and Csesar in his descent from 
 gods ; and it was a like feeling, half reverent, half 
 superstitious, that impelled Constantine, under cir- 
 cumstances far more impressive and strange, to set 
 up in his new City that extraordinary symbol of 
 empire, the statue of Apollo, or the Sun-god, with 
 a head made in his own likeness, surrounded by 
 gilded rays, which, said popular belief, were nails of 
 the true cross, miraculously discovered to the em- 
 peror's mother. 
 
 It is interesting, too, and very touching, amid so 
 much that is pitiless and stern, to see how the con- 
 queror really wished to be the father of his people. 
 Deserted children, who before had been sold as slaves, 
 were adopted as the emperor's own.* It was a 
 shameful thing, he said, that any of his people should 
 perish of hunger, or be forced to crime by stress of 
 actual want. It was cruel that mothers and children, 
 brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, should be 
 torn apart in the slave-market : let that be forbidden 
 at any public sale. 
 
 * The first orphan asylum had been founded by Trajan, two 
 hundred years before. 
 
114 THE AEIAX CONTROVERSY. 
 
 This sentiment of justice, or humanity, could not 
 ripen into a firm policy then. At more than fifteen cen- 
 turies' distance we are only groping about the problem 
 now. It resulted in little else than making Constanti- 
 nople a privileged city, which in that day meant a city 
 of paupers and courtiers. The dry-rot of the Empire 
 was hardly checked. The heart of society was perish- 
 ing by slow T decay. The old Eoman valor was well- 
 nigh extinct. The Eoman state had to defend itself 
 by legions of Goths, whom it hired, cheated of their pay, 
 enslaved their children, and drove into a frenzy of 
 hate, till within fifty years from the building of the 
 splendid capital the emperor (Valens) was burned alive 
 in the hut to which he fled from the great disaster of 
 Adrianople (378), and the spell was forever broken 
 by which the name of Borne had charmed and awed 
 the barbarian world. 
 
 These calamities could not be foreseen or averted 
 by Constantine. Yet he must have felt the slippery 
 peril of his elevation. Some forty years before, Dio- 
 cletian — whose name is linked by a cruel destiny 
 w 7 ith the persecution of Galerius, which he would have 
 been only too glad to stay * — had tried to check the 
 break-up of that great military empire by dividing it 
 among four closely allied sovereigns. A tempest of 
 disorder, following his abdication, had compelled Con- 
 stantine to reduce it again under a single head. The 
 old gods of Eome had been, so to speak, literally met 
 and defeated in open battle under the standard of the 
 Cross. None of the ancient sanctities adhered to the 
 new dominion. Whatever Constantine's sincerity in 
 
 * See Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum, cli. xi. 
 
COUNCIL OF NICJEA. 115 
 
 accepting the faith under whose symbol he had con- 
 quered, at least the formula of that faith must not be 
 left to angry and endless disputes among the professors 
 of it ; and so he called together that most famous of 
 all Church Councils which met at Nicaea to settle 
 once for all the authentic creed (325). 
 
 Here, again, it is easiest to look upon the scene as 
 it appeared to the imagination and human feeling of 
 Constantine himself. When he advanced, tall and 
 stately, in imperial robes and attended by the impe- 
 rial guards, to preside in the sacred assembly, — he, 
 the champion of the Cross, the deliverer from per- 
 secution, the restorer of peace to a stormy world, — 
 there was no bound to the genuine homage of the 
 throng that saluted him, as if he had been a god in 
 human shape, or at least an angel, and " equal to an 
 apostle." And he on his part saw them there, scarred 
 veterans (as it were) of a long and terrible campaign, 
 living witnesses of a martyrdom in which many 
 of them had shared the torment, though not the 
 palm. So bruised and mutilated, this man wanting 
 an eye, and that an arm or leg, they seemed war- 
 worn soldiers, who, having served out their term, 
 were summoned once more to do battle for the faith. 
 To one old man, whose eye had been plucked out and 
 scarred by a firebrand, the emperor went up tenderly, 
 and kissed with his own lips the scorched and empty 
 socket, as if some healing virtue were in the scar ; or 
 rather, with a deep touch of human feeling, to say by 
 that symbol how near those horrors lay to his own 
 compassionate heart. It was wise and generous, too, 
 as well as politic, when he took all their memorials of 
 
116 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 personal grievances and burned them unread before 
 their eyes. " Let the God of all things judge," said 
 he. " Eespect yourselves and respect your office, as 
 I myself would cover up any fault of yours with my 
 official robe." 
 
 The discussion so auspiciously begun had the usual 
 fortunes of theological debate, — " like a battle by 
 night," says one of the old historians ; so little could 
 either party know the ground it stood on. It lasted 
 two months. It produced, by judicious compromise 
 and careful definition, what is known as the " Nicene 
 Creed," a document of some twenty lines, which was 
 signed by the delegates, three hundred and eighteen 
 in all. Some signed it under protest, or filed ex- 
 ceptions to particular phrases ; but to Constantine it 
 was a state paper of first-rate importance, not a mat- 
 ter of speculative nicety, and he firmly insisted that 
 all should sign. The test-word in it was the Greek 
 word rendered con-substantial ; * and this has been 
 the badge of orthodoxy ever since. 
 
 But the history of the Arian controversy was not 
 ended at Nicrea, only just begun. It lasted with great 
 violence some forty years, incessantly disturbing the 
 peace of the state. The terms of truce were not (so 
 to speak) officially defined before the Council of Chal- 
 cedon (451) ; the animosities of debate have not ab- 
 solutely disappeared at this day. For forty years, 
 however, it was an event in history, turning mostly 
 on the personal fortunes, efforts, and adventures of 
 
 * In Greek, b/xoovaios (homoousian) , i. e. "of the same essence." 
 The Greek word viroaracns (hypostasis), corresponding etymologi- 
 cally to " substance," was rendered in the Latin creed persona. 
 
ATHANASIUS. 117 
 
 Athanasius, who from this time forth becomes the 
 champion and representative of the dominant faith. 
 He had been Alexander's delegate in the Council, — 
 a young man then under thirty, of keen intellect, 
 indomitable temper, and a vehement partisan, " tur- 
 bulent, fiery, and imperious," his enemies said, " arro- 
 gant, revengeful, and uncapable of being quiet." His 
 attacks on his opponents are more like shrieks than 
 argument. " modern Jews and disciples of Caia- 
 phas S " he hails them. " Arians ! nay, hollow Ario- 
 maniacs, madmen ! They rob God of his wisdom 
 and his Word. They shed their cunning heresy as 
 the cuttle-fish sheds his blackness, to benighten the 
 ignorant and make their falsehood safe." " A heretic 
 is a wicked thing : his heart is depraved and impious 
 at every point." 
 
 Such are some of the amenities of this prince of 
 controversialists. They express, it must be owned, a 
 good deal more the heat than they do the light of 
 his opinions. They tell how he felt, much better 
 than what he thought. But it is these qualities, 
 more than largeness and breadth, that give men a 
 great place in the history of controversy. He is the 
 one man about whom are gathered the passions of 
 the struggle. Hostility, attack, the jealousy of ri- 
 vals, or government prosecution, he met with the 
 same defiance. 
 
 His life shows full of daring, of ready wit, of dra- 
 matic incident. As Bishop of Alexandria (where in 
 his childhood he had played boy-bishop, as Cyrus 
 played boy-king), he was charged with monstrous 
 crimes, — peculation and fraud, sacrilege and murder, 
 
118 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 — the murder of one Arsenius, whom his accusers (he 
 says) kept hid two years to give color to their charge. 
 One piece of evidence was the dead man's hand, used 
 by him, they said, in magic rites. Disdaining direct 
 reply, he led forth a man muffled in a cloak, and 
 asked, " Does any one here know Arsenius ? " He 
 was known to many. He uncovered the man's face : 
 it was Arsenius himself. Lifting the cloak on either 
 side, he showed first the right hand, then the left. 
 "Show me where the third was cut off," said he, 
 coolly. This was his whole defence. 
 
 Again, pushing up the Nile once in his little boat, 
 in flight from Julian, he was nearly overtaken by 
 armed men in pursuit. Heading boldly down stream, 
 he soon reached them, when they hailed him : " Is 
 Athanasius near ? " " Close by" said he ; and so 
 passed on unmolested, and lay safe hid in Alexan- 
 dria, while they toiled vainly towards the desert. 
 Five times an exile, twice in Gaul or Eome, once 
 in the deserts of Upper Egypt, once for four months 
 hiding in his father's tomb, he was at length allowed 
 to live eleven years in peace, till his death at the age 
 of seventy-six (373). 
 
 But it is far from my intention to give a biography 
 of Athanasius, or to tell the story of the time. One 
 is pretty safe to find in Gibbon a sufficiently accurate 
 travesty of the event : its real history is in thick vol- 
 umes of narrative and controversy of the old Greek 
 Fathers. There are only two points which I wish to 
 present in closing. 
 
 First, in the final defeat of the Arian party, Chris- 
 tianity was saved from being a political or speculative 
 
RESULTS OF THE CONTROVERSY. 119 
 
 sect, arid saved to be a great social and reconstructive 
 force. It is, perhaps, the misfortune of Arianism, that 
 judgment must go against it by default. We know 
 it mostly by report of its adversaries. But that judg- 
 ment is, that it began with disputatious quibbling 
 about words ; that it did not enlist the better reli- 
 gious feeling ; and that its strength, when it had any, 
 lay in the alliance of the Court. 
 
 The " Catholic faith," so called, on the other hand, 
 was very positive and explicit; unintelligible, no 
 doubt, but dogmatic and imperative, demanding and 
 receiving a loyalty that did not stay to reason. Christ 
 is very God of very God was the challenge thrown 
 down to all heresy and unbelief : a phrase that might 
 not satisfy the enlightened reason, but attracted the 
 fervent, passionate, exultant acceptance of whole pop- 
 ulations. Its root and strength were in that unrea- 
 soning — if you will, fanatic — loyalty. Its defence, 
 for forty years, lay in the intrepidity of a single man, 
 — ardent, whole-souled, uncompromising, the one 
 man then living who dared openly to defy an em- 
 peror's will. 
 
 Athanasius was not a great man ; perhaps he was 
 not a just man ; but he was, in his way, a very strong 
 man. He knew well how to appeal to men's im- 
 agination, sympathy, reverence. And the stamp he 
 gave to the creed of his day was just what was 
 wanted to keep the faith hot and intense, as a work- 
 ing force. 
 
 Again, there is a broader way in which this con- 
 troversy has told on Christian history. As against 
 his antagonists, the triumph of Athanasius was the 
 
120 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 triumph of Europe and of Eome. Rome was then 
 the one metropolitan church of the world unrent by 
 theological feuds, first and last a stanch defender of 
 the faith and of its exiled champion. The dividing 
 line between Eastern and Western Church, so sharply 
 drawn that at this very day the Pope prefers that the 
 infidel Turk should triumph rather than the Orthodox 
 Russian, begins to appear in history about this time. 
 The symbol of this division is a phrase (Jilioque) 
 which the Roman Church long after appended to the 
 Catholic creed, claiming that the Son is one with the 
 Father as the source of spiritual grace. 
 
 Now the quarrel is none of ours ; we are quite 
 neutral in the theological debate between " orthodox " 
 and " catholic." But it is a very great matter for us 
 — for better or worse, and (we may fairly claim) much 
 for the better — that our civilization, on its political, 
 religious, and social side, is the inheritance of the 
 West, and not the East. The overwhelming defeat 
 of the imperial army by the Goths, five years after 
 Athanasius's death, was the signal of the fall of that 
 avalanche of barbarian invasion which presently over- 
 whelmed the Roman world. Under the terror of that 
 disaster, the Empire took refuge with a chief of ortho- 
 dox piety, Theodosius the Great, part of whose work 
 was to give imperial prestige to the ecclesiastical 
 power — in the person of the great Ambrose — which 
 was presently going to be the salvation of the West. 
 
 More than anything else, it was just then impor- 
 tant that the power to organize society and create the 
 institutions of the future should be a moral power. 
 And that was the same as saying that it should rest 
 
THE REAL ALTERNATIVE. 121 
 
 on a religious conviction held with unreasoning fervor, 
 denned in a symbol positive enough to enlist like a 
 flag the passionate loyalty of multitudes of men. A 
 decaying civilization, a perishing social fabric, a polit- 
 ical framework battered and just yielding before a 
 frightful tempest of invasion, a decrepit Paganism, 
 guilty of vices that might not be named and cruelties 
 not to be recalled without horror, — these were on 
 one side; and on the other, the sublime faith, held 
 with whatever of unreason, turbulence, or feud, that 
 Almighty God had once lived bodily among men, 
 and that He did really in person lead them now in 
 the fight against His enemies. 
 
VI. 
 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 AUGUSTINE, called "greatest of the Fathers," 
 was born in North Africa in 354 ; was Bishop 
 of Hippo (now Bona) from the year 395 ; and died 
 during the siege of this important city by the Vandals, 
 in 430. His fame is very great in the history of 
 religious opinion. It rests mainly on his doctrine of 
 Predestination, and his theory of inborn Evil to be 
 overcome only by the sovereign grace of God. But 
 his influence belongs far more to his warm, devout, 
 and impassioned temperament, to his eager, incessant 
 activity in the offices of the Church, and to the 
 transparent exhibition which he has made of himself 
 in his Confessions, — a long and detailed account of 
 his religious life, made throughout in the form of an 
 act of devotion, or direct address to the Deity. 
 
 It is not easy for a modern mind to think of 
 Augustine as so great a man, intellectually, as he is 
 generally claimed to be, or as perhaps he really was. 
 In particular, he seems to want the power, which a 
 really great mind has, of making a clear, coherent 
 statement of opinion, especially of opinion which 
 he has outgrown and is controverting. It would, for 
 example, be worth a good deal to us if he had left us 
 an intelligible account of the Manichaean heresy, 
 
HIS OPINIONS AND CHARACTER. 123 
 
 from the point of view of a believer, or even of a past 
 believer in it. As to this, we are obliged to consider 
 it more in the view suggested from its enormous, 
 seemingly disproportionate consequence in the his- 
 tory of opinion — as an object of hate and terror 
 from its origin, about a hundred years before, down 
 even to the destruction of the Templars about nine 
 hundred years after the time of Augustine — than in 
 the violently refracted light thrown on it in his own 
 
 writings. 
 
 And again, his cardinal doctrine of Predestination 
 is a purely technical and unscientific account of the 
 origin of good and evil. With all his passion for 
 abstract discussion, it has no more real basis in the 
 science of thought than it has in the science of things. 
 And it must definitely pass away — in the form Au- 
 gustine gave to it, and which was all he cared for in 
 it — under the different habits of thought that come 
 from a different mode of investigation. In fact, he 
 had a very sincere, what we should call a holy horror 
 of science, in the only form of it known in his day. 
 Mathematicians and astronomers, he thought, were 
 prying impiously into the secrets of the Most High ; 
 and his repugnance to their line of study was only 
 less vehement than his repugnance to sin itself. 
 
 Still further, as Mr. Lecky shows, the influence of 
 Augustine in the development of character, in the 
 direction of moral goodness, itself requires to be 
 challenged, or at least to be taken with large abate- 
 ment. In the direction of personal piety it needs no 
 such abatement. Perhaps no other writings than his, 
 except the Hebrew Psalms, have done quite so much, 
 
124 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 directly or indirectly, to lift men's minds into the 
 temper of penitence, humility, and adoration. But 
 piety is not all ; it is not even the chief thing to be 
 considered. Paul puts charity before it. Now charity 
 — that human love which has no soil of human pas- 
 sion — i s of two sorts, and works in two directions. 
 As growing out of tenderness and sympathy, and lead- 
 ing to acts of mercy, Augustine was a noble example 
 of it. To personal opponents he was generous ; in 
 the treatment of heresy he was magnanimous ; in a 
 time of great calamity he was foremost to set the ex- 
 ample of self-sacrifice and devoted service in behalf of 
 the suffering and needy. 
 
 But there is another working-out of charity, which 
 consists in expanding men's notion of what goodness 
 is, and must go along with intellectual breadth as 
 well as pious fervor. It is not to condemn Augustine 
 personally, to say that the very glow of his religious 
 conviction, narrowed as it were to a focus upon a sin- 
 gle point of faith, made the effect of it perilous, in 
 some ways very mischievous, when the heat of it 
 caught a mind of baser temper and less generous zeal. 
 Hatred of sin in himself made him very tender of 
 sinners, in whose evil he saw the reflex of his own ; 
 but it could easily turn, in other men, into a fanatic 
 hatred of those whom their narrow judgment con- 
 demned of sin. Awe at the Divine sentence passed 
 on human guilt, in which he figured nothing less ter- 
 rible than flames of everlasting anguish, might easily 
 come in them to justify any violence of threat and 
 torture by which they could lessen the chances of 
 that appalling doom. And so that one enormous, un- 
 
HIS PLACE IN HISTORY. 125 
 
 speakable horror, which shadows as if with a bloody 
 pall the history of Christendom for thirteen hundred 
 years, — tortures of flame, rack, dungeon, haunting 
 suspicion, infamous betrayal for opinion's sake, — all 
 could find a sort of pretext, and in one sense had a 
 source, in the vehement, undiscriminating, unsparing 
 temper of Augustine's war on the heretic Pelagians 
 and the schismatic Donatists. 
 
 It is necessary to make these large qualifications at 
 the start, because really it is hard to speak of Augus- 
 tine's name and influence so as to avoid mere blank 
 laudation * He was a very strongly marked man, in 
 his way a great man. He is generally called the 
 greatest of the Fathers; that is, of the Christian 
 writers of the first six or eight centuries. Compari- 
 sons are difficult in such a case : there is no scale by 
 which souls can be accurately weighed ; though this 
 might be allowed without ranking him very high 
 among the great minds of the world. But he was, 
 unquestionably, what may be called one of the great 
 characters of history ; one of the very greatest moral 
 forces in the region both of character and of events 
 that grow from character. 
 
 Now, when we think of a man's place in history, 
 we are very apt to think of it as of the place of a 
 brick in a wall, or of a statue in a niche, — as if it 
 might be taken away with no other special loss ; as 
 if some other might have occupied it without much 
 
 * As a curious testimony to this eminence, it is said that at this 
 day the Moors near Bona (the modern Hippo) call him, in honor, 
 " the great Roman," and in pious memory of him visit every Fri- 
 day the ruins of the church where he was bishop. — Ozanam, Civi- 
 lisation au cinquieme Siecle, Vol. II. p. 2. 
 
126 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 change in the surroundings. But, in truth, a man 
 fills his place among human events very much as the 
 roots of a tree fill the interstices of the soil : they 
 either burrow a way by their own vital force, or a 
 way is made for them, inconceivably intricate, by the 
 seemingly chance adjustment of stones and mould. 
 More accurately still, he fills his place like a vital 
 organ in the body, itself a part of that living network 
 of tissues whose fibres and cells must be reckoned by 
 many millions, which it has helped and helps to 
 create. So that, when we are speaking of a very great 
 personal force, such as that of Augustine, it is not as 
 if it were something transferable, which might have 
 appeared, perhaps, in another century ; but something 
 that grew out of and acted back on the innumerable 
 and intricately mingled circumstances of the time. 
 
 What, then, were those circumstances ? I must 
 sketch them very broadly: we are already entering 
 the twilight of the Dark Ages ; and any slightest 
 glimpse we have of them shows that we are standing 
 at the boundary-line of two historic periods. The 
 life we are considering spans that line at midway, and 
 serves as our easiest transition from one period to 
 the other. 
 
 The year 395 was one of those inexplicable times 
 of panic, when prophecies fly about in the air, and a 
 superstitious fear exaggerates the real terror of coming 
 events. It was just three hundred and sixty-five 
 years, as men reckoned, since the crucifixion of Christ. 
 Thus the religion had endured for one prophetic cycle. 
 A crisis had come in its destinies. Some great change 
 was impending : its enemies said, to bring it to a 
 
A YEAR OF TERROR. 127 
 
 sudden end, and restore the old system of things ; its 
 friends said, to open before it a new era of strength, 
 perhaps to bring visibly the triumphant coming of 
 the Messiah, and his victorious reign.* 
 
 Various things happened just then, as always hap- 
 pen at such a time, to deepen the terror, to confirm 
 the hushed and eager expectation. That year the 
 great Theodosius died; and with him, says Gibbon, 
 died the genius of ancient Borne. Now first the per- 
 manent line of separation was drawn between the 
 Eastern and Western Empire, parted between his two 
 incapable sons. Within a month after his death, in 
 the dead of winter, vast hordes of barbarians, no 
 longer held back by the dread of his name, poured 
 across the frozen Danube to threaten Italy and Greece: 
 poured like a tide-wave, driven on by a great storm 
 of wilder invasion behind, — in front the Goths, after 
 them the terrible and hardly human Huns. 
 
 As that low thunder began to be heard along the 
 North, the spell of an unearthly horror seemed to 
 seize on men's minds, Pagan and Christian alike. Six 
 years before, the emperor had decreed by edict the 
 overthrow of Paganism ; and at a blow, or rather by 
 a hundred blows wildly struck at once throughout the 
 empire, temple and altar and consecrated image and 
 secret shrine went down. The work was done by 
 swarms of monks, who issued from the monasteries 
 of East and West, with eager, triumphant, iconoclastic 
 zeal. To quote the words of Gibbon, "In almost every 
 province of the Eoman world an army of fanatics, 
 without authority and without discipline, invaded the 
 
 * See De Civitate Dei, xviii. 54. 
 
128 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest 
 structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of 
 those barbarians, who alone had time and inclination 
 to execute such laborious destruction." 
 
 Now it was not, to either party in this wild cru- 
 sade, the mere destruction of temple, grove, altar, or 
 sacred image. Still less was it to them what it is to 
 us, the mere destruction of Greek and Eoman art. 
 To the Pagan mind the old gods were tutelar divini- 
 ties of land and city : their downfall left their walls 
 naked to the invader. To the Christian mind these 
 gods were Demons of awful and as yet unknown 
 power. They had been worsted, so far, in the life- 
 and-death struggle with a still mightier power, fer- 
 vently believed to be the very presence of Almighty 
 God himself. But suppose one shade of doubt as to 
 this ; or suppose that in his dark decree God chose 
 to leave his people for a season naked to their ene- 
 mies ! Who could tell what vengeance, what terror, 
 the " demons " they had fought against might yet have 
 it in their power to inflict ? * 
 
 Besides, had not they, too, been brought up to re- 
 vere before all earthly things the majesty of Borne ? 
 Was not that very imperial majesty itself sundered 
 before their eyes ? Were not rumors of peril such as 
 had not been dreamed of for near eight centuries, so 
 invincible had seemed the Eternal City, even now 
 echoing in their ears ? They could not look forward, 
 as we from a long, safe distance can look back, to see 
 how the storm should sweep over and water the earth, 
 making it bring forth a more generous growth ; and 
 * See De Civitate Dei, xx. 13 (compare ii. 10, x. 21). 
 
HIS CONVERSION. 129 
 
 how its lightnings should strike down or scorch away, 
 first of all, noxious things, that while they stayed made 
 any better world impossible. They were in the gloom 
 of its blackness, and the mutterings of its thunder 
 were close upon them. In a few years more, Eome 
 was taken and sacked by Alaric (410). The spell of 
 her great name was broken. Her desolation, to use 
 the lammao-e of the time, was as the desolation of 
 Babylon the great, and of Nineveh, which Jehovah 
 had cursed of old. In men's imagination, the fall of 
 Eome seemed almost the very dissolution of the globe. 
 
 History can only give us the incidents of the scene, 
 not the passion and the terror that belong to it.* The 
 record of a time is truly read in the minds of those 
 living at the time : not in the events, which must be 
 gathered and put together afterwards; but in the atmos- 
 phere, which can alone make the picture of them real. 
 This atmosphere we find, more than anywhere else, 
 in the writings of Augustine ; and it is to him we 
 must turn, in brief, to get such interpretation as we 
 may of the thought of the time. That thought we shall 
 find, for our present uses, in the three aspects under 
 which his writings have now to be considered. 
 
 I. His public life, as Bishop of Hippo in Africa, 
 began in that year of panic and dread, 395, and lasted 
 thirty-five years, till his death in 430. Ten years 
 before, at the age of thirty-one, was his conversion, — 
 an event of such note that it is commemorated in the 
 Koman calendar to this day. It may be worth while 
 
 * All that can be gleaned from the meagre annals of the time 
 will be found in Hodgkin's " Italy and her Invaders " (Oxford, 
 1880). 
 
 6* i 
 
130 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 here to give Ills own tender and dramatic account of 
 it. He had listened to the preaching of Ambrose, 
 and had been pondering with a friend the writings of 
 Paul in much agitation of mind ; and w T as strolling in 
 the garden, when he heard a voice saying, Tolle, lege; 
 tolle, lege : " Take, read ; take, read." At first he 
 thought it w T as spoken in some children's game ; but 
 suddenly it struck him that the voice must be an 
 angel's. " So, checking my tears, I rose, judging it to 
 be nothing else but a command to read the first words 
 of the book I should find on opening. For I had 
 heard of thy servant Antony, that coming in while 
 the gospel was read he took it as a warning to him- 
 self, Go sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and 
 come follow me; and by that word was at once turned 
 to thee. Eagerly then I returned to where my friend 
 sat, where I had left the volume when I came away. 
 I took it, opened it, and read silently the words my 
 eye first rested on : Let us walk honestly, as in the day ; 
 not in rioting and drunkenness, not in lewdness and 
 debauchery, not in strife and jealousy ; but put on the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh 
 to satisfy its lusts. I read no more, and had no need 
 of more ; for instantly, at the end of this sentence, a 
 calm light, as it were, entered my heart, and all the 
 darkness of doubt passed away." 
 
 Nothing is said here of any change of opinion, or 
 of the solution of any intellectual doubt that may 
 ever have troubled him. As far as such a thing 
 could be, it was a purely moral conversion, a change 
 of sentiment, emotion, and will. Eemorse for boy- 
 ish faults, such as stealing a neighbor's pears, or for 
 
MANICILEISM. 131 
 
 loose living in his youth, made only a part of it, — 
 most likely, only a small part of it. It was rather 
 a recoil against the whole theory of life by which he 
 had been living hitherto. Especially, it was closely 
 connected, in his own mind, with that marked in- 
 tellectual change which consisted in renouncing the 
 Manichsean philosophy, and accepting with great in- 
 tensity of conviction Paul's own doctrine of good 
 and evil.* 
 
 Just what this Manichsean opinion was, what was 
 its strange fascination to the most cultivated thought 
 of that time, and what made it the great bugbear of 
 true believers for a thousand years together, it is not 
 easy to state to a modern mind. Augustine's own 
 statement of it, as I have said before, is turbid, con- 
 fused, and unintelligible. But it must have some 
 meaning to us, if we could only get at it, seeing that 
 it makes so large and imposing a figure in the history 
 of opinion. 
 
 Its essential principle is commonly explained as 
 simple Dualism, in some such way as this. The 
 Universe consists of two vast realms — infinities, we 
 might call them — which are polar oppositeS : Light 
 and Darkness. Where they come in contact, there is 
 interminable strife. The darkness aspires to the light, 
 hungers for it, engulfs, or (it is Augustine's word) de- 
 vours a portion of it ; and from their contact is pro- 
 duced the visible world, including the nature of man. 
 
 * " In turmoil of mind (cestuans) I asked, Whence is Evil? "What 
 were the agonies of my laboring heart ! what groans, my God ! 
 And there were thine ears, when I knew it not. And when in si- 
 lence I made bold to ask, loud was the cry appealing to thy mercy, 
 dumb the anguish of my soul." — Con/., vii. 7. 
 
132 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 In him, again, the soul represents (or is born of) light, 
 and the body darkness. So man is the subject of a 
 divided empire ; and the conflict, for all we see, must 
 be eternal. 
 
 Now this may pass very well for a sort of poetry, 
 telling in symbols the story of that strife which we 
 see going on in the world about us, and are conscious 
 of, more or less, within us. But it is not easy to see 
 why Augustine should have hated it so, when once 
 he had left it behind ; why the Church should have 
 feared it so, that the first blood shed for heresy,* and 
 the most ferocious of Crusades,! should have been on 
 the charge of this deadly misbelief. At first sight it 
 does not seem so very different from Paul's own doc- 
 trine of the war of flesh and spirit ; it looks like 
 quite the same thing, in other terminology, with the 
 Church doctrine of Satan as the adversary of God, 
 w T hich was, in fact, derived from the same Oriental 
 source. For the Persian Mani — who had been 
 seized and flayed alive (according to the common 
 story) a hundred years before by the king of Persia 
 — had only set in more exaggerated and poetic strain 
 the old Zoroastrian scheme of Good and Evil, en- 
 grafting on it some wild mythology of creation, and a 
 scheme of redemption, which is only a strange phan- 
 tasmagory, coupled with some Gnostic tradition of a 
 Christ.J I do not know how, seen merely from the 
 outside, we could easily tell the difference between 
 
 * Of the Priscillianists in Spain, a. d. 385. 
 
 t That against the Albigenses, 1208-1229. 
 
 t The corapletest statement of the Manichaean doctrine that I 
 have seen is in Mosheim's " Commentaries " on the First Three 
 Centuries. 
 
EVIL PHYSICAL OR MORAL. 133 
 
 Augustine's earlier and later theoretic view, as touch- 
 ing the conflict of good and evil in human nature. 
 
 We must look at it, therefore, in another way, from 
 the point of view of religious experience. According 
 to the Manichsean view, the source of Evil is physi- 
 cal ; it exists in the nature of things. Man is subject 
 to it because he is part of the system of things. The 
 conflict is fought out, as it were, by vast impersonal 
 forces, which he can have no hand in guiding. And 
 so the system becomes one of Fatalism, — fatalism of 
 that most hopeless and unrelenting sort which makes 
 a man's soul (as it were) a mere shifting focus, where 
 the rays of light and darkness meet, and his destiny 
 is the plaything of their caprice. In other words, 
 its view is speculative and physical, not ethical. It 
 is of the conflict of Light and Darkness simply, not 
 of Eight and Wrong. " I had rather," says Augustine, 
 of his own Manichsean days, " that thine unchanging 
 Substance erred of necessity, than my own inconstant 
 nature by will ; and that Sin befell by immutable 
 law from heaven, that so man should be free of its 
 guilt, while in proud corruption of flesh and blood." 
 
 And thus the modern counterpart of Manichseism 
 — if we would understand it from the corresponding 
 thing in our own experience — is to be found in that 
 scientific fatalism which is one of the threatening 
 forms of modern thought, which we are well used to 
 in the speculations of certain pessimists and evolu- 
 tionists. I am anxious not to add to the rancor of 
 any prejudice that may happen to exist. Evolution 
 is the accepted dominant philosophy of the day. I 
 accept it too, so far as I am entitled to exercise 
 
134 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 private judgment on so large a matter; desiring in 
 all humility to know whatever there is true in it, 
 and seeming to find in it the explanation of more 
 dark facts in life than is found in any other system. 
 But the instant it takes the form of fatalism as to 
 the good or ill in human character, of helpless scep- 
 ticism as to the course of human destiny, or despair 
 of social progress, I surmise that there is something 
 wrong, and that man's mind is capable of something 
 better. 
 
 The insidious temptation to that way of thinking 
 we ought to be aware of in ourselves, if we would 
 judge the thought of Augustine and his contempora- 
 ries. We should see it not historically alone, as it 
 touched them, but in thoughts, images, and influ- 
 ences that reach us too. The gloomy imagination 
 of Shelley was strangely impressed by watching an 
 Alpine glacier that seemed " crawling " from its bleak 
 lair to swallow, like some monstrous dragon, the fer- 
 tile valley and the smiling life below ; and he thought 
 of it as -a symbol of the Fate which irresistibly over- 
 rides and crushes human hope. 
 
 Astronomers tell us the day is coming when all 
 this globe will be blasted, empty, frozen, incapable 
 of life ; and to some this suggests a certain chilling 
 despair as to the value and end of human effort. To 
 others again it seems, after all these ages of costly 
 and toilsome progress, as if civilization itself were 
 going to be the prey of those appalling wars that 
 have followed one another like thunder-shocks in 
 these last five and twenty years, and still threaten ; 
 or of the vices and miseries that like a cancer eat 
 
NATURE OF THE CONFLICT. 135 
 
 at its very heart. And, if a serious and devout 
 thinker, like Carlyle or Euskin, can be tempted 
 now to this intellectual despair, how was it in that 
 day, when the one only fabric of society, polity, and 
 art men knew seemed crumbling on ODe hand from 
 interior decay, and threatened on the other by the 
 irresistible avalanche of savage hordes ? The wild 
 strange heresy of the Manichees was as it were the 
 echo in their soul of that knell of doom which seemed 
 clanging from all things around, in the downfall of a 
 perishing world. 
 
 Now it is not the warped judgment of a church- 
 man ; it is the judgment of Comte in his masterly 
 outline of mediaeval history, it is the judgment of that 
 cool positivist, John Morley, in his apologetic essay 
 on Voltaire, that civilization was narrowly saved, at 
 this crisis of its fate, by the organized, valiant, ag- 
 gressive faith of Christendom. How its conflict was 
 carried on, and how its victory was gained, belongs to 
 the study of the next four centuries, ending with the 
 Christian Empire of Charlemagne. Just now, we are 
 standing at the moment of time which determined 
 what the nature of that struggle should be. And this 
 decision was precisely contained in the nature of that 
 change which passed upon the mind of Augustine in 
 the hour of his conversion. 
 
 It is hardly too much to say that that revolt of 
 his moral nature against the doctrine of the Mani- 
 chees had in it the germ and the key of that great 
 spiritual evolution. For the very point of it was that 
 it shifted the ground of conflict. The source of Evil, 
 it showed him, is not in the physical world ; it is in 
 
136 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 the moral world. The battle-ground is not the nature 
 of things ; it is the nature of man. The conflict of 
 good and evil is to be fought out in the soul. It is 
 not as if man's salvation were staked on some great 
 game j)layed by invisible combatants in the wide field 
 of the universe, — a game in which he has no hand 
 and cannot see the moves. It is narrowed down to 
 the field of his own mind ; and, whatever outside 
 forces are engaged in it, they are first of all, so to 
 speak, personified in his own reason, conscience, pas- 
 sion, and will. Just where and just because he is 
 most intensely conscious of his own personality, there 
 and therefore comes the great alternative of right or 
 wrong, of life or death. 
 
 - Now it is in the very conviction of sin itself that 
 one first has the true idea of good ; just as it is when 
 we would do good (as Paul says) that evil is present 
 too. For the two are counterparts ; so that not only 
 we cannot know one without the other, but we cannot 
 know either of them in any other way than through 
 that struggle against the other. Nay, more. We 
 cannot really know anything about God, of any con- 
 sequence for us to know, except as the power within 
 us " that makes for righteousness " in the struggle ; 
 that " works in us both to will and to do." The phys- 
 ical nature and conditions (so to speak) of Infinite 
 Good — what we call the Divine Attributes — are as 
 impossible for us to define as those of Infinite Evil. 
 And so in the very struggle itself we have an assur- 
 ance, the only assurance we can have, that the great 
 spiritual forces of the Universe itself are on our 
 side ; in short, that our salvation (which means our 
 
THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY. 137 
 
 " safety " in it) is the direct gift of Almighty God 
 himself. 
 
 This we may take to be the real sense of the 
 Pauline or Augustinian doctrine of justification by 
 faith, as seen in the light of personal experience, and 
 especially as against the Manichaean heresy. Au- 
 gustine stakes his position in that controversy on the 
 point of moral freedom. To him it is a shocking 
 thing to say that anything is originally and essentially 
 evil.* Evil is a corruption of some native good ; a 
 ruin, a fall, not a destiny from the beginning. To 
 attain the higher life is not a conquest of something 
 alien ; it is winning back our birthright. This con- 
 viction lay at the heart of Augustine's creed. To con- 
 ceive it, further, as a force in history, we must think 
 of it not as a mere form of philosophic speculation 
 with him, but as a vivid, intense, fiery conviction, 
 such as he conceived it in the moment of conversion, 
 and such as, in the heated warfare of opinion, he has 
 stamped the impression of it on the Christian mind. 
 
 II. I have dwelt thus out of seeming proportion 
 on Augustine's relation to the Manichaean controversy, 
 both because it is the most obscure in itself, and be- 
 cause it gives the exact point of view from which to 
 consider the two other chief intellectual tasks of his 
 life. Of these the first was his controversy with Pe- 
 lagius, — the great unending debate of Destiny and 
 Moral Freedom. 
 
 In one sense this controversy is impotent and futile, 
 turning on a question that necessarily remains un- 
 solved and unsolvable, the shuttlecock of metaphysics 
 
 * See the " Dialogue with Faustus." 
 
138 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 since thought began. At whatever point we start, — 
 divine foreknowledge, destiny, natural law, evolution, 
 — strict logic brings us straight to one or another 
 form of necessity. Eegarcled scientifically, moral lib- 
 erty is not even thinkable. On the other hand, no 
 sooner do we come to the facts of life, — action, con- 
 duct, the judgment of motives, responsibility for re- 
 sults, personal appeal, — than we take for granted at 
 every step that moral freedom which our theory de- 
 nies. Accept whatever theory you will of antecedent 
 and result, with its logical consequences, and you 
 are a fatalist at once, helpless sport of destiny. Try 
 to state to yourself any theory you will of human 
 action, and apply it to men's character and conduct, 
 the instant you say I will or I ought, you have come 
 upon other ground. You have admitted in terms that 
 fact of human life which is all your opponent really 
 contends for, however irreconcilable to your own his 
 way of stating it. Life incessantly re-creates the faith 
 which science as incessantly denies. 
 
 All this is very simple and elementary business. 
 Leaving now the platitudes of metaphysics, let us at- 
 tempt to see the great debate as it enters here upon 
 the field of history. It is very interesting to watch 
 the combatants : Augustine, with the hot blood of his 
 native Barbary coast; a small, thin man, nervous, 
 fiery, intense, goaded by memories of his own sins of 
 the blood, haunted b} r the thought of a Hand that had 
 been held out to snatch him from destruction, humbly 
 sensitive of his own helplessness in that crisis, and 
 clinging like Paul to the thought of a Divine Power 
 he must always lean on for strength, himself only the 
 
AUGUSTINE AND PELAGIUS. 139 
 
 meanest instrument of an Almighty Will ; Pelagius, 
 with the clear, cool head of his native Britain, large of 
 frame, slow of speech, grave, honest, weighty, his self- 
 mastery trained by strife of wind and ocean-wave, of 
 firm, resolute will, clear conscience, cheerful courage, 
 and masculine understanding * The two had kind 
 thoughts and respect for one another, for they had 
 met in personal debate;! but the controversy their 
 names represent lay as much in their radical differ- 
 ence of temperament as in the difference of theory 
 they started with. 
 
 It is of no use now to take up their arguments. As 
 it must always be in the field of action, vehement 
 conviction had the better of sober common-sense, and 
 Pelagius went back to the calmer life of his native 
 North. Was that a thing to regret ? At least it was 
 inevitable. The men who make the deepest mark on 
 history are the men who feel with a deep and intense 
 conviction that they are instruments of a higher 
 Power, their own will governed by a vast Force 
 behind them, impersonal and uncontrollable. This 
 seems to be the case even in direct ratio to their 
 weight of personality and vehemence of resolution: 
 with Paul, Augustine, Luther; with William of 
 Orange, Cromwell, Napoleon, — the men of God, or 
 else the men of Destiny. 
 
 And perhaps it was better so. Here I will quote 
 the historian Michelet. " To reduce Christianity," he 
 says, "to a mere philosophy, were to strike it with 
 
 * To complete the parallel, later belief added that the two great 
 antagonists were born in the same year. 
 
 t See Augustine's letter to Pelagius (Ep. 146). 
 
140 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 death, and to rob it of the future. What would the 
 dry rationalism of the Pelagians have availed when 
 the German invasion came ? Not that proud theory 
 of liberty needed then to be preached to the conquer- 
 ors of the Empire, but the dependence of man, the 
 al mightiness of God. To temper that fierce bar- 
 barism, all the religious and poetic fervor of Chris- 
 tianity was none too intense. The Eoman world felt 
 by instinct that it must seek its own refuge in the 
 ample bosom of Eeligion. That was its hope, its 
 only asylum, when the Empire that had called itself 
 eternal was passing away in its turn, with the nations 
 it had subdued. . . . The mystic doctrine triumphed. 
 As the barbarians came, the controversy ceased ; the 
 schools were closed and still. It was faith, simplicity, 
 patience, the world needed then." 
 
 The partisan applause of Augustine because his 
 doctrine triumphed, and the theological odium into 
 which his opponent fell, are both alike discreditable 
 to the occasion and the man. But — as afterwards 
 in the sharp warfare in which the Protestant Prefor- 
 mation was plunged — it was a time of crisis and 
 peril. At such a time men must look well to the 
 keenness of their weapons, and not spare blows in 
 the thick of the fight. It was well that that doctrine 
 triumphed which was likeliest to enlist men's pas- 
 sions on the side of religion and virtue. But Augus- 
 tine, any more than Calvin, cannot claim our full 
 verdict for all his acts. Of the two the first had 
 far the more generous, the tenderer, the broader 
 nature ; and of the two his theological scheme 
 more thoroughly and deeply made part of his own 
 
THE CITY OF GOD. 141 
 
 religious experience. He felt that, in a sense, every- 
 thing was at stake in the debate ; and this is his 
 claim for pardon, that his vehemence in controversy 
 stirred up hate against his opponents, and they even 
 charged him with using the arm of the law against 
 them, and exciting the persecution under which they 
 suffered. At least, the moderate and gentle temper 
 he began with gave way, and his name is unhappily 
 used to justify the vindictive, unreasoning malice that 
 has spurred on the hunting of heresy to this day. 
 
 III. Of the very great bulk of Augustine's writings 
 the largest part consists of exhortations, discussions, 
 expositions, that filled up the spaces of his routine 
 work during his five and thirty years of office. One 
 famous treatise stands out in strong relief from the 
 mass ; and for breadth of mind, largeness of view, 
 orderliness of argument, or mastery of style, his fame 
 rests chiefly on this, — " The City of God." 
 
 The book abounds in arguments that would seem 
 childish now. Its notion of sacred history is formal, 
 uncritical, and dogmatic. Its sketch of early events 
 is at once tediously minute and curiously incomplete. 
 Its reasoning on natural things shows all the igno- 
 rance and incompetency of an unscientific age. Its 
 expositions of Scripture are impossible to accept, its 
 personal testimonies of miracles and wonders impos- 
 sible to believe.* In other words, it has just the 
 intellectual defects, the bigotries, ignorances, and 
 superstitions, of the human mind at that day. 
 
 But it is not necessary to dwell on these. They 
 
 * See in particular the very curious and detailed account of 
 these miracles in Book xxii., chap. 8. 
 
142 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 are faults on the surface, sometimes running down 
 into the substance, of a great and noble work, — the 
 one really great work that the human mind produced, 
 we may say, for four or five centuries, at least within 
 the limits of the Western Empire. Its substance I 
 cannot dwell on ; of its temper and occasion a few 
 words remain now to be said. 
 
 The title of the book shows the splendid concep- 
 tion that lay in the mind of Augustine, — a concep- 
 tion which we may call the final culminating and 
 idealizing of the old Messianic hope. It set up, as it 
 were, a magnificent standard of faith, right on the 
 spot and at the time that must see the great battle 
 of Christ and Antichrist fought out. 
 
 The time of its composition was between the 
 fall of Eome under Alaric the Goth and the more 
 furious invasion of the Vandal Genseric. At that 
 moment of chief horror and despair, when the brav- 
 est were appalled at a disaster that so appealed to 
 men's imagination, when even believers began to ask 
 whether Christianity had not proved impotent to the 
 task of holding the defences Paganism had main- 
 tained so long,* Augustine threw down this sublime 
 challenge to their faith. 
 
 His tone is proud, confident, uncompromising, 
 triumphant in advance. It is attack, and not de- 
 fence. He puts point-blank the contrast of the " Two 
 Cities " as he calls them : the City of this World, the 
 abode of superstition, cruelty, violence, conquest, lust, 
 greediness, hate, — all illustrated in the record of 
 pagan Eome ; the City of God, with its marvellous 
 
 * See the Introduction, and compare Book xx., chap. 13. 
 
THE IDEAL STATE. 143 
 
 chronicle of prophecy and miracle, the saints and 
 heroes of its glorious calendar, its constant assurance 
 and proof of superhuman aid, its magnificent promise 
 of future ages that shall be its own, illustrated from 
 the sacred records of Hebrew faith. The two are 
 elaborately contrasted in their origin, their progress, 
 and their end, in the second and larger division of the 
 work ; the former part having already shown, in even 
 superfluous detail, how helpless Paganism had been 
 to secure blessing and safety to its adherents in this 
 world, and how empty was its promise for the world 
 to come. 
 
 The phrase itself City of God carries a suggestion 
 of the compact, highly organized municipalities of 
 Italy or Greece, and their capacity to call out and 
 sustain the most strenuous and devoted patriotism. 
 The ancient City stood for natural justice, armed and 
 codified, for a common welfare, and for protection 
 against assault. Its justice, perhaps, was class-priv- 
 ilege. For liberty it had only "liberties." But it 
 was at once the highest political conception men knew 
 then, the most sacred and revered type of authority 
 they could comprehend. And, in making it the key 
 to his argument, Augustine lias given, as it were, 
 the Eoman counterpart of that " Kingdom of Heaven " 
 which the Jews looked for in their Messiah's reign. 
 
 He offers, however, no such promise of a kingdom 
 upon earth. This ''kingdom of heaven is within." 
 The " City " is purely ideal, spiritual, heavenly. The 
 miseries of the good and bad, so far as human eye can 
 see, will continue alike and equal through the pres- 
 ent life to the end of time ; the visible separation 
 
144 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 
 
 will be hereafter. The blessedness of the righteous 
 on earth is peace ; the wretchedness of hell itself is 
 interior conflict, even if there were no everlasting 
 flame* In this fundamental thought of the "City 
 of God" we have, again, the complement of that 
 thought illustrated in Augustine's reaction against 
 Manichseism, which shifts the conflict of good and 
 evil to the world within, and stakes all in life that 
 is worth living for on the soul itself. This point of 
 contrast with Manichausm is urged in several places 
 in the " City of God." The blessing promised to good 
 men is not that they escape the anguish or the terror, 
 but that they are victorious over it. 
 
 If we can look back now a few years, to the time 
 of our own great national struggle, to those seasons 
 of disaster and defeat when to large numbers, brave 
 and fearful alike, the struggle itself seemed bootless 
 and hopeless ; and if we can remember the enormous 
 advantage then of our faith in an ideal Eepublic, 
 one and indissoluble, — that sublime ideal of political 
 justice and popular right which made the nation's 
 victory and strength ; then, I think, we may conceive 
 something of what it was, as the world plunged into 
 those long dark ages of barbarism and strife, to have 
 that one flag kept proudly flying above that one im- 
 pregnable fortress of the City of God ! 
 
 The ages that followed, when the Church was at 
 length victorious in its new empire, do not fulfil the 
 promise of that grand dream, any more than our new 
 
 * See the exquisite chapters, Book xix., ch. 13, 14 ; also the 
 brief but profound one, xix. 28 ; together with the noble and 
 sweet cadence with which the work concludes. 
 
THE CITY OF GOD. 145 
 
 Kepublic fulfils the hope of those who fought to save 
 it, and gave their lives freely in that hope. But we 
 can see at least that one great danger is past. We 
 know now better than we knew then the evil and 
 fatal nature of that which threatened the national 
 life. So it was when men could look back after- 
 wards, and see the strong lines in which Augustine 
 had traced the contrast between two orders of society. 
 And, in the appalling miseries and divisions that tor- 
 mented the world for several centuries, it is not likely 
 that one brave man, or one frightened woman, ever 
 once looked back regretfully for the protection that 
 could have been given by an Empire which had so 
 proved itself abominable and accursed 
 
VII. 
 
 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 TO deal intelligently with an epoch like that of 
 Leo the Great (440-461), it is especially necessary 
 to bear in inind the aggressive, militant, antagonistic 
 position of the Church in human history. Our the- 
 ory of Christianity may be a theory of development ; 
 but the facts we have to deal with are the incidents 
 of a loug, obstinate, often deadly struggle. That 
 struggle takes mainly three directions, — against Pa- 
 ganism, against Barbarism, and against corruptions 
 engendered in the Church itself. At present, we are 
 concerned only with the first. 
 
 Now, to make any conflict effective, the first con- 
 dition of all is that the force shall be a disciplined 
 force, and shall act with absolute singleness of pur- 
 pose, in absolute obedience to a single will. The 
 smooth theories of a time of peace will not suit a 
 period of war. Christianity as " free religion " would 
 have perished in a single generation. If we consent 
 to see that it was in any sense at that time a saving 
 power in the world ; if it was, in fact, the genius and 
 spirit that carried society without WTeck through 
 many generations of confusion and disaster, — we 
 shall be content to see the conditions on which that 
 
THE PAGAN REACTION. 147 
 
 work could "be done then. And of these the first of 
 all was that the Christian Church should be united, 
 organized, loyal, absolutely confident of itself, and 
 thoroughly understanding the work it had to do. 
 
 Now, if we only remember that the last great bat- 
 tle fought by Borne — that in which, with Goths for 
 allies, she succeeded in crippling the army of the 
 Huns, in a fight that cost, it is said, three hundred 
 thousand lives — was in the year 451 ; that the next 
 year the hordes of Attila, with recovered strength, 
 hovered like a flight of vultures above the plains of 
 Italy ; that three years later Genseric with his Van- 
 dals swept Kome almost clean of its vast treasures of 
 gold, silver, and bronze, and precious works of art ; 
 that these things happened in the very middle of 
 Leo's rule, while, within twenty-five years after his 
 death, the spectral sovereignty of Rome itself came 
 to an end, and the barbarian was lord of the Western 
 Empire, — we shall see distinctly that we have come 
 to the death-agony of the ancient State. And, as this 
 great agony was coming on, the East was racked and 
 vexed by the bitterest of theological debates, only sus- 
 pended at Chalcedon in 451 ; while in the West, and 
 at Alexandria, the intellectual centre of the empire, 
 there was a revival of classic Paganism which threat- 
 ened the very life of Christianity itself. 
 
 I cannot speak at length of the causes, only men- 
 tion some of the symptoms, of the extraordinary pagan 
 revival which followed for a generation or two the 
 edict of Theodosius closing the temples, and forbid- 
 ding the public worship of the gods. The last pagan 
 writer of vigorous Latin prose, Ammianus, ends his 
 
148 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 story with a vivid account of the desperate battle 
 about Adrianople (378), in which the Goths broke 
 once and for all the spell of the Eoman name. Three 
 years later, Paganism was nominally abolished by im- 
 perial edict. But five and twenty years after that, 
 while Alaric was training his Goths in Italy, Clau- 
 dian could celebrate alike, with easy courtliness, in 
 purely pagan fashion, the exploits of the brave Stili- 
 cho, and the holidays of Honorius who murdered him, 
 or recite in smooth epigram the miracles and mys- 
 teries of the Christian record ; while at Alexandria 
 Hypatia lent the charm of her beauty and eloquence 
 to the new Platonism that glorified the old gods of 
 Greece with transcendental finery, till she was torn 
 to pieces by a mob of monks (415). 
 
 The pagan games, with circumstances of barbarity 
 and horror of which I shall have more to say at an- 
 other time, were still celebrated in circus and amphi- 
 theatre. A certain insolent fashion of ignoring the 
 new creed, with the growing power built upon it, had 
 taken hold of the popular mind, and was still domi- 
 nant in literature and art. And, for the last strange 
 proof how vital and tough were the roots of old su- 
 perstition, when Alaric appeared before the gates of 
 Eome, Etruscan soothsayers were sent for, to see if by 
 their incantations they could yet save the city ; and 
 promised that they would do it, (we are told,) but at 
 the cost of human sacrifice, and of rites so horrid that 
 the people refused them at the hour of their greatest 
 terror. Even Pope Innocent the Eirst, then in Eome, 
 had consented, it is said, that this last appeal to the 
 pagan magic should be made. 
 
SURVIVAL OF THE PAGAN SPIRIT. 149 
 
 Now, at the time of this siege, the Empire had been 
 nominally Christian for about a hundred years. How 
 long the spirit and belief of Paganism remained after 
 this, it is of course impossible to say. The last great 
 work of Augustine's life was to argue in his " City of 
 God " against this very reaction, when it seemed as 
 if the new religion had failed to hold the ground con- 
 quered under the ancient gods of Eome. What he so 
 argued against was but a helpless and despairing cry. 
 The old wreck, swarming as it was with many evil 
 forms of life, was soon swept disastrously away. As a 
 clear-eyed man like Leo could see, even then, there 
 was only one power that could take its place. 
 
 To the common eye the struggle might look doubt- 
 ful, even yet. Paganism had lost its hold on men's 
 reason. On their conscience it never had any very 
 firm hold at all. But it held strong grasp on two 
 great springs of human action, their imagination and 
 their fear. We have just seen to what acts the terror 
 of the siege had nearly led. And, for the imagina- 
 tion, it had taken full possession of the forms of liter- 
 ature and art. Except for a few rude hymns feeling 
 their way to the common heart in a simple popular 
 rhythm, except for a few rude shapes and symbols 
 of Christian imagery, there was nothing to fill the 
 great void left by the perishing of ancient art. For 
 centuries yet, Christian poets clung helplessly, as 
 it were, to 
 
 " The fair humanities of old religion, 
 The power, the beauty, and the majesty 
 That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, 
 Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, 
 Or chasms and watery depths." 
 
150 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 After seven centuries of implacable monastic rule, 
 Dante has still a half-belief in Charon and Pluto; 
 and when the revival of letters came, a little later, 
 the old deities sprang, as it were, from the soil of the 
 new culture, and nourished in a sort of pallid life 
 down almost to our day. But that life had run in 
 all the veins of the ancient world, where each state 
 had its own divinity, and every formal act was a re- 
 ligious symbol; where the head of the State was a 
 god visible in the flesh, and the very places of public 
 amusement were temples of Mars and Venus, the 
 divinities of violence and lust. So that it was still, 
 in the middle of the fifth century, a hand-to-hand 
 struggle in which the Church was engaged, if not 
 with Paganism itself, in its cruel older forms, at 
 least with those compromises of its spirit found 
 under the names of Priscillianist and Manichaean, 
 against which Leo waged an unsleeping and un- 
 tiring war. 
 
 Again, we must look from his point of view, not 
 ours, at the controversies that divided and disgraced 
 the Christians of the East. It was not controversy 
 between the friends and opponents of the orthodox 
 belief. Each party eagerly and honestly claimed his 
 own to be the true exposition of the Xicene faith. 
 Thus Apollinaris, fervently maintaining the doctrine 
 of his friend Athanasius, who had sojourned with him 
 in some of his travels, fell into the heresy that Christ's 
 body was of heavenly, and not of human substance. 
 Maceclonius, taking the creed too literally in its lim- 
 itation as well as its assertion, was charged with sub- 
 ordinating the Spirit to the Father and the Son ; to 
 
NESTORIUS AND EUTYCHES. 151 
 
 meet which the Council at Constantinople expanded 
 that clause a little (in 381). Nestorius, holding 
 strongly to Christ's human nature, saw blasphemy in 
 the phrase " Mother of God " applied to Mary ; saying 
 that Jesus was divine not intrinsically, but was made 
 so by the indwelling Deity.* And in the storm of 
 controversy that burst out on this, hardly stayed by 
 the decree at Ephesus (431), Eutyches, an Alexan- 
 drian monk of seventy, went so far, in his hot ortho- 
 doxy, as to say that the divine nature in him quite 
 absorbed the human. 
 
 To us these disputes are battles in the thinnest of 
 air ; but then they were matters very literally of life 
 and death. Nestorius, who had himself been a hard, 
 high-handed ecclesiastic, was banished to the confines 
 of Egypt ; and so, living a long life of exile he left a 
 sect that bears his name down to our day. The party 
 of Eutyches took violent possession of the synod at 
 Ephesus (449), the " robber-synod," where they car- 
 ried their point not by acclamation only, but by blows ; 
 so that their chief opponent was literally beaten and 
 trampled to death, and the Eoman delegates sent by 
 Leo to maintain the primacy of Eome barely fled with 
 their lives. 
 
 Such was the state of things, so far as touched his 
 own immediate work, with which Leo had to deal. 
 It presents two sides of a conflict which we find in- 
 cessantly present in his writings. Now Leo was not, 
 
 * The terms by which he signified the operation of the Divine 
 nature in him were •'indwelling" (eW/070-is), " assumption" or 
 " adoption " {kvaX^is), " inworking " (ivepyeta), " inhumanizing * 
 (£vavdp<t>-Kr)(ris) , i. e. abiding in humanity. 
 
152 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 in any sort, a pietist, a sentimentalist, a recluse. He 
 was first of all a Roman statesman, with the clear 
 sagacity, the resolute will, the firm and inexorable 
 temper when a point must be carried, the wary vigi- 
 lance, the unswerving persistency, that had made the 
 Eomans masters of the world. He had this advan- 
 tage over them, besides, that his policy dealt with con- 
 victions, not with armies and state powers, so that 
 his clear intelligence had free range to act, moving 
 in the intangible region of ideas, where no friction 
 is ; while he was in full command of the intellectual 
 sympathies and the moral conviction which are al- 
 ways the deepest moving forces of the time. One 
 does not read a page of his writings without seeing 
 how complete his conviction is, and how perfect his 
 command of those springs of power. 
 
 Then he was a man of absolute courage, — not sim- 
 ply that easy "courage of his convictions" which 
 enables or compels one who has any strong convic- 
 tion at all to give it expression somehow without dis- 
 guise, but that personal physical courage as well, which 
 with a man dealing in theories and policies is much 
 more rare. This absolute courage it was which made 
 him meet without blenching, squarely as an equal, 
 the terrible Attila, when sent to intercede with him 
 for the trembling inhabitants of Borne, and, by what 
 seemed then a miracle, but was indeed only the mir- 
 acle of mind over brute force, won from him the 
 terms by which he left Italy unharmed ; then, two 
 years later, gained from the relentless Genseric such 
 conditions as still left security of life, when the city 
 for the second time was at the mercy of the barba- 
 
THE DELIVERER OF ROME. 153 
 
 rian. Perfect courage joined with dignity of office 
 never, perhaps, won a nobler victory. I copy here the 
 words of no eulogist, but of a clear and somewhat 
 severe critic of the growth of papal power. 
 
 " The emperor, the court, the wealthy, and the noble 
 had fled at the approach of danger ; the intrepid Bishop, 
 strong in faith and hope and love, alone remained at the 
 post of honor and of peril; and, when the satiated foe 
 had retired and left the city emptied of all its wealth 
 and substance, and almost reduced to a wilderness of 
 deserted habitations, there remained none to advise or 
 to cheer the famishing remnant but the undaunted 
 Bishop and his gallant clergy. These had never quitted 
 their posts ; these had faced the foe, and averted the 
 extremity of ruin ; and their example alone kept alive 
 the spark of life among the despairing multitude that 
 still clung to their desolate homes. It is in this spon- 
 taneous chieftainship that we recognize one of the most 
 effective elements of the subsequent political greatness 
 of the Roman bishops. The decaying mass of civil in- 
 stitutions became as manure at the root of the papacy. 
 Papal Rome drew nourishment from dissolution, courage 
 from despair. In desperate emergencies like that we 
 have just adverted to, no one will look into or scrutinize 
 too closely the claims and titles of the deliverer ; in 
 such times the duties of civil and spiritual government 
 are thrust into the hands best able to execute them ; 
 both duties are impelled into the same channel, and 
 flow on naturally and amicably together. To Leo it was 
 due that Rome was not converted into a heap of smoul- 
 dering ashes ; and, if natural justice were to decide the 
 question between the Church and the State, without 
 doubt the Pope was the rightful governor of Rome, 
 7* 
 
154 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 for without him there would have been no Rome to 
 govern." * 
 
 It is a mark of the real greatness of Leo, that these 
 striking and dramatic events do not appear to have 
 even ruffled the surface of his mind. They are mere 
 incidents in the discharge of his duty, perhaps dis- 
 tractions from what he felt to be his true work. It is 
 a mark of his wisdom, too. In his judgment of the 
 relative importance of things, he was wiser in his own 
 day than we should probably be in our judgment 
 now. It was of more moment to the world, just as it 
 was of more account to him, that the invisible foun- 
 dation should be made sure, than that this or that 
 should be the working-out of any political event. 
 
 The work to be done was to build up a new Rome 
 on the ruins of the old. And, for this new structure, 
 his one task was to care for the foundations. These 
 were laid in men's loyalty and belief and hope, and 
 must be constructed patiently alike in the storm or 
 calm of outward events. You look through his en- 
 tire correspondence, page by page ; and you find not 
 an allusion to events that even at this distance shed 
 such a powerful and lurid glare on the history of the 
 time. On the other hand, his letters f are full of the 
 official detail of his work as spiritual Head of the 
 Christian world, which lie fully believed himself to 
 be. On this one point there is never a word of con- 
 cession, never an instant of hesitation. We have no 
 business, just now, with his arguments, only with his 
 convictions. Whether Peter was chief of the apostles 
 
 * Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, Vol. I. pp. 426, 467. 
 
 t Of which about one hundred and eighty are preserved. 
 
HIS ECCLESIASTICAL THEORY. 155 
 
 in any official sense ; whether he ever came to Eome 
 and lived as bishop of the church there ; whether his 
 primacy, if he had it, descended to his successors, — 
 all these questions, of fruitful controversy once, are 
 nothing to the point. What w r e see is, that the 
 Church at Eome — partly by its metropolitan rank, 
 partly by the transfer of the court to Constantinople, 
 partly by the distractions of Italy, partly by the 
 steadily aggressive policy of its abler heads — had 
 come to have a dignity and authority that gradually 
 supplanted those of every other ; and that, in the 
 great ruin that had overtaken the Eoman state, men 
 came to lean more on its visible and compacted 
 strength. We also see, or seem to see, that this 
 power, so disciplined and firm, was the one thing 
 capable of saving to the world its old treasures of 
 thought and its traditions of social order. What is 
 now our best judgment of the time was then its in- 
 spiration and its faith, and gave it courage to abide 
 the bursting of the storm that was close upon it. 
 
 The strong heart of Leo held absolutely to that 
 conviction, whether as statesman or as Christian 
 believer is of little concern to us. In his singleness 
 of purpose, he probably could not have drawn any 
 nice line between his policy and his creed. His argu- 
 ments will not count for much with us. It is hardly 
 too much to say that he does not stoop to argument. 
 His tone is of assertion, instruction, authority, com- 
 mand. Several of his letters are treatises of some 
 length on disputed points : the famous one to Fla- 
 vian, which guided the decisions of the Council at 
 Chalcedon (451), would make a pamphlet of about 
 
156 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 twenty pages. Nowhere in any of them does he hint 
 that an opponent is to be met as an equal, on the fair 
 level of debate. The assumed grounds of his opinion 
 he is willing to explain ; but the opinion itself you 
 must take, whether you accept the argument or not. 
 
 In that particular debate, Eutyches had appealed 
 to Leo, and had gained at first his cordial support. 
 But when the point came to be better known, above 
 all, when the robber-synod at Ephesus showed in 
 what a temper it was held, then Leo was perfectly 
 uncompromising and distinct. He demanded at first 
 that the Council should be held in Italy ; and, when 
 that could not be had, wrote his letter of instructions, 
 taking at once the tone not of debater but of judge. 
 His dictum has been the test phrase of orthodoxy 
 ever since : that both natures, divine and human, 
 were blended, in their completeness, in the one Per- 
 son who was thus perfect God and perfect man ; 
 and his little treatise, in this letter, is to this day as 
 authentic and clear a statement as has been made, or 
 perhaps can be made, of what, by the very terms of 
 it, is absolute and unintelligible mystery.* We may 
 think as we will of the proposition. We may find in 
 it, if we will, an important metaphysical truth, where 
 we fail to see a dogmatic one. But at least we may 
 recognize its value as a symbol, or watchword, in the 
 crisis that w T as fast coming on. It is interesting to 
 remember that the decision at Chalcedon was in the 
 
 * Its terms are, Salvd igitur jiroprietate utriusque naturae [et sub- 
 stantia], et in unam coeunte personam (in the Greek, els *v -Kpoaunrov 
 awiovo-qs). — Leo I., Ep. xxviii. This is (I think) the first for- 
 mal use of TTpocrwTrov, corresponding to the Latin persona, and is 
 apparently a concession to Leo's influence and authority. 
 
THE DESTINY OF ROME. 157 
 
 very year of the great battle of Chalons* which 
 broke the power of the Huns, and saved Europe from 
 the fate of Asia ; and that, of these two events, Leo, 
 the greatest man of the time, seems utterly and 
 calmly careless of the one, while his whole heart is 
 full, and all his passion roused, by the subtile point 
 of transcendental theology determined in the other. 
 
 The permanent and real work of Leo's life was to 
 found a new Borne on the ruins of the old. At this 
 distance of time, it is easy for us to see how far 
 greater was the splendor, and vaster the sway, of the 
 spiritual empire that followed him, than of the politi- 
 cal dominion that went before. But, in that age of 
 ruin, it is very striking to see how distinctly it was 
 already prefigured to his mind. We must assume 
 that he, as a native Eoman, had in his heart all the 
 proud and passionate loyalty which for so many ages 
 had made Home's unbroken faith in her imperial 
 destiny. And perhaps it was in part the obstinate 
 resolve that that faith should not be defeated, which 
 made him so clear-eyed as to the coming glories of 
 the Eternal City. It is best to hear his expression of 
 it in his own words, which I copy from a sermon 
 delivered on the memorial day of St. Peter and St. 
 Paul. 
 
 "These are the men, O Rome, through whom the 
 gospel of Christ hath shone upon thee. These are thy 
 holy fathers and thy true shepherds, who have set thee 
 in heavenly kingdoms far more gloriously than those 
 who laid the first foundations of thy walls. These are 
 
 * Or rather, of Troyes, some fifty miles farther south. See 
 Hodgkin's " Italy and her Invaders," Vol. II. p. 138. 
 
158 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 they who have advanced thee to such glory that, as a 
 holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state, 
 thou shouldst hold a broader sway in faith of God than 
 in dominion of the earth. Whatever the victories that 
 have borne forward thy right of empire by land and sea, 
 3'et less the toil of war has yielded thee than the peace 
 of Christ. For the good, -just, and almighty God, who 
 never denied his mercy to human kind, and always, by 
 his abundant benefits, has instructed all men in the 
 knowledge of himself, by a more secret counsel and a 
 deeper love took pity on the willing blindness of wan- 
 derers and their proneness to evil, by sending his Word, 
 equal and co-eternal with himself. And, that the fruit 
 of this unspeakable grace might be shed through all the 
 earth, he with divine foresight prepared the Roman 
 realm, whose growth was carried to limits that bor- 
 dered upon the universe of all nations on every side. 
 But this city, knowing not the Author of her greatness, 
 while queen of almost every nation, was slave to the 
 errors of every people, and seemed to herself to have 
 attained great faith, because she had spurned no false- 
 hood. And so, the more strictly she was held in bonds 
 by Satan, so much the more marvellously she is set free 
 by Christ." 
 
 These words we read, not as the complacent homily 
 by which it is so easy to glorify a victory already 
 won, but as the strong faith that is itself the pledge 
 of victory in advance. It was in part an educated 
 belief with Leo, and in part the clear pointing of the 
 time. No blame to him, if it was also in part his 
 secular and patriotic creed. To a Roman it was the 
 right thing that Rome should be sovereign of the 
 earth. To a pious and strong-hearted Roman of that 
 
HIS POLICY. 159 
 
 age, the one thing needful at once and possible was, 
 that in her continued empire Rome should be a spirit- 
 ual sovereign, and not a temporal one. Rome, said 
 Jornandes, no longer held the world by arms, but by 
 men's imaginations. 
 
 This faith, this resolute purpose of Leo, it cannot 
 be denied that be carried into effect by diplomacy 
 and state-craft, as well as preached it for a religious 
 creed. In judging this, again, it is best to see the 
 situation as it really was. Leo was shrewd, wary, 
 persistent, determined, watchful of opportunity, after 
 the manner of statesmen. A large part of his policy 
 must be judged by the ethics of statesmanship, rather 
 than by the humbler private moralities. In this, 
 however, two things may be claimed for him : that 
 the motive of his game was nobler, and the stake he 
 played for higher, than that of the mere statesman ; 
 and that, while his policy was often stern and over- 
 bearing, it was never treacherous or cruel. As for 
 personal ambition, or selfish designs, as that phrase is 
 commonly understood, it does not appear that a 
 shadow of such a motive passed upon his mind, or a 
 shadow of such a suspicion ever rested upon his name. 
 Assuming the one end and aim of his policy which 
 he kept in view, all the acts of it were the natural, 
 straightforward, resolute carrying out of it. That he 
 meant to assert the spiritual sovereignty of Rome, and 
 the official supremacy of the post he held, explains 
 itself. That, with his high temper, he would have 
 yielded to it in another man's hands the simple 
 homage he claimed for it in his own, one may possi- 
 bly doubt. But, standing where he did, and seeing 
 
160 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 what he did, he believed in it with all his heart ; and 
 it was well for the world that he did so believe in it. 
 
 Thus he was on the watch from the first for an 
 occasion to put his theory into force. The occasion 
 was quickly found : a strong man, in fact, never has 
 to wait long for it. Two hundred years before, under 
 Tertullian and Cyprian, the churches in Africa had 
 been, in strength and eloquence, the worthy pioneers 
 of Latin Christianity. Later still, under Augustine, 
 their fame had far surpassed that of Eome, in every- 
 thing except the accident of their provincial situation 
 But they had been torn and rent by the schism of the 
 Donatists. Augustine himself had spent a great part 
 of his strength in incessant controversy ; and he was 
 now fifteen years dead, and Vandal buccaneers lording 
 it over the whole Barbary coast. The church at Eome, 
 and Leo, its vigorous head, made the natural court of 
 appeal for the afflicted province ; and so the first stone 
 was laid of that strong confederation which afterwards 
 grew to be the Catholic Empire of the West. 
 
 Again, the opportunity came, half by accident, that 
 led to official correspondence with the eastern coasts 
 of the Adriatic, — an opportunity which Leo was not 
 slow to improve. He always assumes his authority, 
 never defends it ; advises, urges, instructs, and in fact 
 exercises on the soil of Greece the jurisdiction which 
 the feebler Patriarch of Constantinople, leaning on 
 court influence, and jealous of a claim he had no 
 strength to enforce, found daily slipping from his 
 hand. This advantage Leo pushed, as we have seen, 
 to the extent of directing, almost (it would seem) of 
 dictating, the counsels at Chalcedon. He failed, how- 
 
HILARY OF ARLES. 161 
 
 ever, in the one point of securing the formal admis- 
 sion by the East of the claims of Eome. The Council 
 was careful to declare — in its celebrated twenty- 
 eighth canon, which he was equally careful to disown 
 — that Constantinople, the metropolis and official 
 capital of Christendom, held equal rank. And to that 
 declaration the East still adheres to-day. 
 
 The critical test, however, of Leo's theory was in 
 Gaul. That firmly allied with Eome, the West at 
 least was secure. Now the churches of Southern 
 Gaul were about as old as that of Eome ; claimed, in- 
 deed, to have been founded by Paul himself.* They 
 had been famous and strong from the very earliest 
 time. Their martyr record was of the noblest ; their 
 Irenseus, in the second century, of far more weight 
 than any Eoman name ; their St. Martin, in the fourth, 
 the purest and bravest of all who had carried the 
 faith into the barbarous West. Besides, that country 
 was earliest of all, under the old Eoman dominion, 
 to feel conscious of the germs of a new nationality. 
 " Eldest daughter of Eome " the flatteries of Catholic 
 pontiffs have delighted in calling her ; but a daughter 
 that long and often has contested vigorously the 
 mother's will. 
 
 Hilary of Aries, for some ecclesiastical offence, 
 had displaced one of his bishops, Celidonius, who 
 promptly appealed to Eome. Leo, as promptly, with- 
 out waiting to inquire, but eager to assert his juris- 
 diction, restored Celidonius to his place. Hilary, of 
 
 * One of the principal ones, at Treves, by the widow's son of 
 Nain, who had been miraculously raised, a second time, by the 
 laying on of Peter's staff. 
 
 K 
 
162 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 ruder temper than Leo and at least as resolute, gray- 
 haired but vigorous, at once took his staff, and went 
 upon foot, in midwinter,* all the way to Rome. He 
 was sure that Leo did not understand the merits of 
 the case. He would not be put off, he said, with the 
 smooth compliments that greeted him, and pushed 
 his plea so hotly that Leo arrested him for contempt, 
 and put him under guard. He broke bounds, how- 
 ever, and went back the way he came, noway ready 
 to submit, — deprived, meanwhile, of a large part of 
 the region he presided in. Still Leo's victory might 
 have hung doubtful, but that he prudently obtained 
 a decree from the worthless Valentinian III. (445), 
 who ruled in a sort of phantom sovereignty at Ra- 
 venna, declaring not only the subjection of Gaul and 
 of every other province to the Pope at Rome, but that 
 " to all men, whatever the authority of the Apostolic 
 See has ordained, or does, or shall ordain, shall be as 
 law." f 
 
 Those which I have recited were the most notable 
 occasions on which Leo asserted and maintained the 
 spiritual authority of Rome. They were the critical 
 acts of his sovereignty ; and they have sketched, in 
 vigorous outline, the pretensions of the Pontificate, 
 which have been continually reasserted, in precisely 
 the same direction and general terms, down to our 
 day. Nothing on earth has been so consistent or per- 
 sistent as this ecclesiastical policy of Rome. What- 
 
 * On this journey we may assume that he departed from his 
 usual winter custom of going barefoot. 
 
 t See the terms of the Decree in Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, 
 Vol. I. pp. 353, 351. 
 
GROWTH OF THE PAPACY. 163 
 
 ever we may think about it now, it had its uses and 
 necessities once ; and we shall see them the more 
 plainly as we get deeper into the shadow of barbarian 
 times, and then into the twilight of Feudalism. Just 
 now, it is our business to see only how they lay in 
 the mind and shaped the policy of one strong, reso- 
 lute, and sagacious man. 
 
 Even that, however, dealing as it did with great 
 things, would not have been what it was in the his- 
 tory of human events, except for the incessant, un- 
 tiring vigilance in little things. How little these 
 were, yet how important in his eyes, — the ordering 
 of a festival, the discipline of a churchman, the ex- 
 plaining of a phrase, the reiteration of a counsel or a 
 command, — one can see only in the details of his 
 homilies and his correspondence. In these, we watch 
 as it were the process by which that enormous fabric 
 of ecclesiastical power was woven, thread by thread, 
 till it seemed to wrap inseparably, like the membrane 
 of a living body, every limb and interior organ of the 
 great structure of mediaeval civilization. 
 
 We see the process ; but we see it only in one cor- 
 ner of its working, and for one moment of time. The 
 same thing was going on incessantly, untiringly, over 
 many a thousand miles, for many a hundred years, 
 still following the form and pattern that had been 
 traced by that strong hand, still appealing to and 
 guided by the very maxims and phrases that we have 
 heard from that resolute voice. The unity of counsel 
 in multiplicity of operations, which we call Catholi- 
 cism, — apparently as strong to-day, in its own sphere, 
 as a thousand years ago, and as able to send its ser- 
 
164 LEO THE GREAT. 
 
 vants to their post in hamlet or forest as then, as little 
 afraid as then of sword or fire or torture or starva- 
 tion, that great wonder of human history, the disci- 
 pline of a vast population, like an army loyal to one 
 flag and obedient to one word of command, — has 
 been the task of many ages and many men. In the 
 fifteen centuries of its existence it has produced enor- 
 mous good and enormous evil. But it is justice to 
 the name of Leo to say that the ideal good, without 
 the inseparable evil, was what lay in his heart and 
 made his strength ; and to recognize him as the one 
 man, in that day of terror and despair, who was wise 
 enough and strong enough to do its necessary task. 
 
VIII. 
 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 IT is hard for us to estimate fairly the value of a 
 thing so utterly alien from the modern mind as 
 the monastic spirit, with the ascetic practices and the 
 religious forms that grew out of it. To judge it out 
 of hand is easy enough from the modern point of 
 view, which puts in relief its corruptions and absurd- 
 ities, and contrasts it with what we know as the help- 
 ful and saving forces of society now. It is also easy 
 to recount the services of the monastic orders, for 
 several centuries, in the shelter of the weak, the 
 preservation of letters, the building up of intelligent 
 and free industry. What is not so easy is to appre- 
 ciate the strength and fervor of the monastic passion 
 itself, as a moral force, and its value as a factor in 
 history. 
 
 A series of careful studies, or else of brilliant and 
 impressive pictures, by such writers as Guizot, Monta- 
 lembert, and Charles Kingsley, aids very much to 
 bring this matter within the range of our modern 
 sympathy and understanding. For my present pur- 
 pose, however, I must avoid all these attractive 
 fields of illustration. I must also avoid for the 
 most part that great, strange field of Eastern ascet- 
 icism, with the exhibition it offers, sometimes tender 
 
166 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 and pathetic, often wild and repulsive, of cenobitic and 
 eremitic life in the region that gave it birth. My 
 object is simply to see how it entered as an element 
 into the larger life that was unfolding towards the 
 West. 
 
 As early as the time of Athanasins and Augus- 
 tine, monasticism had already powerfully affected the 
 imagination of Western Europe, and led the way to 
 some emulation of its fantastic austerities there.* It 
 was not, however, till early in the sixth century that 
 it was definitely embodied and organized as a social 
 force by St. Benedict, whose death, in 543, left his 
 monastery of Monte Casino the acknowledged type 
 and head of the Western monastic life. At this date, 
 then, it is to be recognized as a distinct and powerful 
 element in the new civilization. 
 
 My view of the subject, accordingly, will be by 
 way of retrospect, and very simple. I wish to speak 
 of Monasticism purely as a moral force, — the motive 
 it sprang from, and the way in which it acted on 
 men, mainly through their imagination and moral 
 sympathy. 
 
 First of all, we must go back a little, and remember 
 that Christianity very early showed itself as a hostile 
 and aggressive force, in sharp antagonism to the 
 beliefs and customs prevailing in the world. This 
 antagonistic attitude implies several things : deep 
 conviction both of personal guilt and of existing evil, 
 as in Paul ; a motive widely apart from philosophic 
 
 * The monastery of St. Honoratus, founded about 400, in the 
 island of Lerins (or St. Honore), off the southern coast of France, 
 was the chief head-quarters of early Western monasticism. 
 
THE FORLORN HOPE. 167 
 
 speculation, as shown in the controversy against the 
 Gnostics ; a symbol of faith accepted with absolute 
 loyalty, to fight under as a banner, as with the creed 
 of Athanasius ; a definite appointing of the field of 
 conflict in the individual conscience or conviction, 
 as with Augustine ; a powerful visible organization, 
 acting as one, like an army, under its official head, 
 which post of authority had been claimed and main- 
 tained by Leo. Each of these has already been sepa- 
 rately considered. 
 
 But, for its greatest efficiency, a fighting force needs 
 one other thing. It needs its outposts, its skirmish- 
 ers, its corps of desperate fighters ; men absolutely 
 reckless of all fears, and bound by no interests or 
 hopes except such as identify them with the strength 
 and life of the army itself ; volunteers, who make its 
 advance guard in battle and its forlorn hope at a 
 crisis ; a body of reserve, to whom life itself is a thing 
 utterly indifferent in comparison with the honor of 
 the service, and all other affection thin and cold 
 except that which makes it their one pride to fight 
 under the flag, and their joy to die for it. From 
 Marathon down to Plevna, it is safe to say that no 
 army has been great, and no military dominion 
 strong, that could not count on the absolute devotion 
 of such a reserve force, — a body to which danger 
 itself has an irresistible fascination, whose one mas- 
 ter-passion is warrior zeal, whose hot desire is for the 
 fiery delight of combat. 
 
 To say, then, that the Church was victorious in the 
 war it undertook, is to say that it had at its command 
 such a body of enthusiasts, a body of absolute loyalty 
 
168 MONASTICISM AS A MOEAL FORCE. 
 
 and fanatic zeal ; whose zeal, indeed, might outrun 
 prudence and turn to frenzy, yet for that very reason 
 could be counted on when the battle would be hope- 
 less without just that aid, — the sharp edge of attack, 
 the obstinate heroism of defence. In fact, the Church 
 had two such bodies of reserve : one for the time of 
 persecution in the conflict against Paganism, — the 
 Martyrs ; one for the time of organized conquest 
 that followed, in the conflict against Barbarism, — 
 the Monastics. It is necessary to say a word on the 
 motive common to them both. 
 
 We must not forget — at the earlier stage, espe- 
 cially, of the conflict we are considering — that Chris- 
 tianity presents itself to us in the form of a moral 
 reaction, or protest, against the gross inhumanities 
 and corruptions of Pagan society. This reaction would 
 be mild with some natures, violent with others. So 
 much we may easily understand. But what it was, 
 precisely, that it reacted against, requires some knowl- 
 edge of obscure authorities and some hardihood of 
 speech to show. We cannot always, it may be, trust 
 the eager invective of Christian apologists like Tertul- 
 lian ; though where he refers to plain and well-known 
 fact, we have no right to deny his witness. But we 
 have a right to judge the Pagan world out of its own 
 mouth; and then there are testimonies written be- 
 tween the lines of classic authors — such testimonies, 
 for instance, as the frescos at Pompeii — which help 
 us to an understanding of the darker facts. In Hor- 
 ace we have, mainly, an easy epicureanism, smooth 
 and fair, and only beginning to be withered at the 
 core ; in Juvenal, a stoicism no longer humane, but 
 
THE ROMAN SPECTACLES. 169 
 
 bitter and austere; in Petronius, who was Nero's 
 friend, a cynicism nakedly revolting. 
 
 These, however, are only hints of Roman manners, 
 and perhaps may be overcharged : it would be easy to 
 make a picture just as black of a Christian capital 
 to-day. But there are two points of public morality 
 at that period, which we can quite understand, and 
 which to the most placid temper now are full of hor- 
 ror : its brutal cruelty, and its beastly shamelessness. 
 Unless we do know these, we cannot understand the 
 violence, even fury, of the recoil against them. We 
 look at the statue of the dying gladiator, " butchered 
 to make a Roman holiday," and we cannot well avoid 
 a thrill of human pity. What have we to say, then, 
 that the wise and merciful Trajan, for whose salvation 
 Gregory prayed, remembering his patient kindness to 
 a widow suppliant, made the amphitheatre reek with 
 the blood of ten thousand such, to grace one holiday ? 
 Wild beasts, we are told, were often lacking in the 
 vast numbers needed to glut the Roman thirst for 
 blood ; but human victims, captives of war, were never 
 wanting. 
 
 This is but an item of the charge. It is hard for 
 us to understand or forgive the brutality of a Spanish 
 bull-fight, where dainty ladies applaud, or give the 
 signal for the blow. The Roman mob — men and 
 women, noble and base — looked on with the same 
 eager lust of blood, when the wild bull gored or the 
 famished tiger tore the delicate side of some modest 
 trembling Christian girl, set naked in the pit before 
 that gazing multitude, or else tangled in transparent 
 nets. Three times Blandina was thus exposed at 
 
170 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 Vienna, in Gaul, till a barbarian in mercy pierced her 
 breast with a sword. Perpetua and Felicitas, in 
 Carthage, were allowed out of pure horror to wrap 
 themselves in mantles, before the gladiator finally 
 despatched them with his " stroke of grace." These 
 were mere girls, maidens or young wives, on the 
 edge of womanhood, innocent, beautiful. 
 
 Eeligious frenzy, perhaps, made these horrors possi- 
 ble. But the blood-spoilt crowd of the amphitheatre 
 needed no such motive of a heated fanaticism. To 
 satisfy the lust of the eye, a drama representing the 
 death of Hercules on Mount (Eta was not complete 
 without a robust captive bound and burned on the 
 funeral pile, whose yells and writhings might coun- 
 terfeit those death-agonies. " We have seen it," says 
 Tertullian. And, with still beastlier ferocity, in the 
 masks and mummeries of the Eoman stage, the muti- 
 lations, rapes, and debaucheries, that stain the corrupt 
 mythology of Greece, were with a horrible realism 
 presented nakedly before the public eye.* 
 
 These hints will probably be enough to show what, 
 in some of its more shocking forms, it was that the 
 martyr church had to protest against. Nothing, it is 
 plain, except the martyr spirit, in its most vehement 
 and (if you will) fanatic form would have borne the 
 battle or gained the victory. I say nothing and I 
 know nothing about the frequency of these spectacles. 
 It is enough to know that they were possible, and that 
 
 * The better known authorities for these statements are Sue- 
 tonius, Martial, and Tertullian. Other authorities and details will 
 be found in Ozanam's Civilisation au Quatrieme Siecle. See also 
 Kenan's recent " English Conferences," and his Antechrist, ch. vii 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS. 171 
 
 they are what the world was forever delivered from 
 in the triumph of Christianity* Along with the 
 vivid picture given of these horrors in his " Anti- 
 christ," Kenan tells us of the contagion of the martyr 
 spirit, — how eagerly not only hardy fanatics, but 
 modest matron and maiden, pressed toward the con- 
 summation of that awful sacrifice, just as volunteers 
 press to the most hazardous post in battle or siege ; 
 and how the flame of that great passion burned away 
 all lesser thoughts of affection, duty, and shame. 
 
 Or take the following, from one of the earlier mar- 
 tyrologies. "My father," says Perpetua, "came from 
 the city, wasted with anxiety, to prevent me ; and he 
 said, ' Have pity, my daughter, on my gray hairs ; 
 have pity on thy father, if he is worthy the name of 
 father.' And so saying, he kissed my hands in his 
 fondness, and threw himself at my feet, calling me 
 in his tears no longer daughter, but lady. And I was 
 grieved for the gray hairs of my father, because he 
 only, of all our family, did not rejoice in my martyr- 
 dom. " It is difficult for us to take in the hardness of 
 this young mother, at once to her father and her babe. 
 It is more shocking still to think that to them the 
 fiery or bloody death was an escape from ignominy 
 which to them was far more dreadful. Eusebius tells 
 of a mother who esteemed it a happy chance to drown 
 herself with her three daughters, rather than trust the 
 mercy of their jailer ; and there is hardly a plea on 
 
 * Doubtless the Spanish bull-fights are almost as brutal, and 
 the autos dafe of the Inquisition were, as a form of human sacri- 
 fice, still more cruel. Still, these last appealed only to the pity 
 and terror of beholders, not to their beastlier passions. 
 
172 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 record more piteous in its suggestion, than where 
 Augustine argues that, by brutal treatment in their 
 prison, Christian maidens had not lost their honor in 
 the sight of God. 
 
 The extraordinary romance of St. Thekla, which we 
 may count as the earliest Christian novel, is quite pos- 
 sibly founded upon fact. She is a young lady of high 
 birth, who innocently and unconsciously — perhaps 
 without the writer's consciousness either — falls (as 
 we should say) in love with the Apostle Paul. Cast 
 off by her mother because she will not accept the hus- 
 band provided for her, she travels from place to place 
 as a Christian missionary, is exposed in the theatre to 
 lions, who fight with each other instead, till both are 
 killed ; the people then take sudden pity on her ; and 
 thus, miraculously saved, she finds refuge in a her- 
 mitage, where she lives a long life of pious solitude. 
 Thus a single life serves as link between the martyr 
 age and the age of monastic asceticism ; and the same 
 spirit is the inspiration of both. 
 
 In their most strongly marked features, however, it 
 must be said that they belong to two different periods. 
 The martyr age expired when Christianity came to 
 the throne with Constantine; asceticism was most 
 fervent, and its haunts most crowded, in the time im- 
 mediately following. One, in fact, blends insensibly 
 into the other. The eager, perhaps frantic temper, 
 trained through whole generations up to the heat of 
 martyr zeal, was not content to repose in the tame 
 quiet of a religious peace. The solitude, the austerity, 
 the self-inflicted torment, the denial of human kind- 
 ness, which might have been a refuge or a compromise 
 
THE ASCETIC MOTIVE. 173 
 
 at a time of real danger, became the accepted way of 
 working to that exalted temper. 
 
 What had been the passionate phase of a reaction 
 against pagan brutality, was now an intolerant and 
 hot protest against the love of ease and the lingering 
 sensuality that Paganism left behind. This intol- 
 erant protest had flashed out once or twice before, in 
 the hot anger and contempt felt towards those who 
 had "lapsed" under the storm of persecution, whom 
 it was held infamous, with whatever penance, to take 
 back to the bosom of the faithful ; and so had arisen 
 the Novatian schism and the schism of the Donatists,* 
 and the fury of the Circumcellions, who rushed in a 
 mad way upon their death, courting martyrdom, — 
 disorders whose tradition vexed the Church for more 
 than three centuries. The same temper, now that 
 Christianity was in the ascendant, showed itself in 
 the many forms of ascetic and monastic life. 
 
 It is not necessary to dwell here on the tempting 
 features of anecdote and adventure which illustrate 
 that way of life. Two points only we have to consider: 
 its power as a motive in the mind of the ascetics 
 themselves ; and its power as a moral force among 
 men, through imagination, sympathy, or emulation. 
 
 As to the former, I do not think w T e are content with 
 any theory of motives to account for asceticism, out- 
 side the moral quality of asceticism itself, and its 
 strange fascination to an order of feeling always pow- 
 erful in human nature. It is easy, but it is delusive, 
 to say that men deliberately set themselves by aus- 
 terities and penance to win for themselves peculiar 
 
 * Well called by Mr. Hodgkin " the Caraeronians of Aiiica." 
 
174 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 glories or joys in paradise. Possibly they may give 
 that for their own account of it, so deceiving them- 
 selves. But no profit-and-loss calculation like that 
 ever inspired that passion, of whose insanest extreme 
 we have so wonderful a picture in Tennyson's " St. 
 Simeon Stylites " : — 
 
 " Bethink thee, Lord! while thou and all the saints 
 Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth 
 House in the shade of comfortable roofs, 
 Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food, 
 And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have^talls, — 
 I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light, 
 Bow down one thousand and two hundred times, 
 To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints; 
 Or in the night, after a little sleep, 
 I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet 
 With drenching dews, or stiff in the crackling frost; 
 I wear an undressed goat-skin on my back ; 
 A grazing iron collar grinds my neck ; 
 And in my weak lean arms I lift the cross , 
 And strive and wrestle with thee till I die. 
 O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin! " 
 
 In these strange outbursts, which echo the very 
 passion and fervor of ascetic life, we find something 
 far deeper than the balanced reckoning of chances be- 
 tween paradise and hell. We find, in the first place, 
 a conviction of moral un worthiness morbidly intense ; 
 and in the next place, the flame of a peculiar passion, 
 that feeds on everything as fuel that it can lay hold 
 upon. 
 
 Of the first, the intense conviction of sin, it may 
 perhaps be said to be, in one or another form, the 
 source of all the moral power existing and operative 
 among men. It is not worth while to analyze it here, 
 
SINFULNESS OF THE FLESH. 175 
 
 where it simply takes on an extravagant, fantastic, 
 unfamiliar form. It becomes to us simply a morbid 
 phenomenon, one manifestation of a force known to 
 us in many other calmer and (it may be) more in- 
 structive ways. 
 
 Only, a word should be said of the root from which 
 it grew, in a notion of the essential iniquity of all 
 pleasures of sense, — an intense recoil from the ex- 
 treme sensualism of ancient life. "In me," says 
 Paul, " that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing." * 
 The ascetic life, says Sozomen, is "no compromise 
 between virtue and vice." This opinion of the radi- 
 cally evil nature of matter, and in especial the matter 
 of which our bodies are composed, must be presumed 
 in all our knowledge of the subject. 
 
 By a certain morbid logic, too, sensations repulsive 
 to the sense were thought a fit penance, and directly 
 pleasing to God. Thus, to take a few instances, 
 chiefly from the admiring Greek historians : — St. 
 Anthony would scarce suffer clean water to touch his 
 feet or hands. St. Arsenius would change the water he 
 used in weaving rushes but once a year. St. Hilarion 
 built himself a hut too small to let him stand upright or 
 lie at length. St. Hallas touched no bread for seventy 
 years, contenting himself with roots and herbs. St. 
 
 * This is quaintly shown in the following formula of confes- 
 sion : " I confess all the sins of my body, — of my skin, of my flesh, 
 of my bones and sinews, of my veins and cartilages, of my tongue 
 and lips, of my jaws, teeth, and hair, of my marrow, and any other 
 part whatsoever, whether it be soft or hard, wet or dry." No peti- 
 tion is more frequent, in some of the older rituals, than that God 
 would be pleased to accept our leanness and mortification of the 
 flesh. 
 
176 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 Senoch walled himself to the neck in a narrow cir- 
 cuit, too small to let him move or sit, and lived there 
 for years. St. Wulfilaich was hardly persuaded to 
 quit the pillar elevation in the north of Gaul, where 
 he stood barefoot, summer and winter, till his nails 
 dropped off with the bitter cold.* Some wore heavy 
 crosses, chains, or iron bands ; some had no covering 
 but their long, unwashed, and shaggy hair, living in 
 dens the life of beasts. The brawny St. Moses, to tire 
 down his sinful muscular strength, stood praying every 
 night for six years, without sleep. St. Stephen kept 
 on weaving baskets, while the surgeons were ampu- 
 tating a limb. These idle heroisms are the voice of 
 the ascetic conscience, morbidly acute ; but they are 
 also, like the training of our athletes, a test of what 
 may be done in battle or endured in the siege. 
 
 Of what may be called the ascetic passion, however, 
 something remains to be added. It is a very shallow 
 theory of life, to say that the main motive, with most 
 men, is the pursuit of happiness, — at least in any 
 sense in which happiness can be defined to the under- 
 standing, or chosen by the judgment. It is hardly an 
 exaggeration, on the other hand, to say that many 
 persons set their hearts on misery, and pursue it with 
 an obstinacy that we might call insane. I do not 
 think, for example, that the ascetic passion of a her- 
 mit or a monk is different at bottom or harder to un- 
 derstand — except for such moral quality as may be 
 in it — than the pining, wretched, eager self-denial of 
 
 * These practices, said his unflattering adviser, may be fit for 
 the great saints and holy men of the East ; but a poor ignorant 
 barbarian like you should not aspire to such high things. 
 
THE HABIT OF SACRIFICE. 177 
 
 a rich miser, the very type that takes its name from 
 "misery." And those argue weakly with human 
 nature as it is, who appeal first to men's desire of com- 
 fort and selfish ease. Hardihood and adventure, the 
 joy of conflict, defiance of danger, generous self-aban- 
 donment, are each and all more powerful motives in 
 real life, — not perhaps for weak characters, but at any 
 rate for strong ones. The six hundred who rode " into 
 the jaws of death," facing loaded cannon, do not show 
 it any more plainly than those other hundreds who 
 went the other day to risk their lives in pestilential 
 cities at the South; not more plainly than the father 
 or mother, of average conscience and self-denial, who 
 submits with never a thought to the innumerable priva- 
 tions which define the commonest conditions of duty 
 or (it may be) of indulgence to the child. 
 
 And so the habit of self-denial grows, till one may 
 come to feel — who has not known such ? — as if the 
 very sensation of pleasure itself were a sin. Occa- 
 sionally we know of lives that are literally made a 
 sacrifice, not so much to a mere notion of duty, how-, 
 ever morbidly scrupulous, as to a mood of mind in 
 which austerity itself, and self-torment, have come to 
 take the place of duty: not that they are chosen freely 
 as being right, but have grown into a moral necessity, 
 and so make the men their slaves. 
 
 Look at the heart of any such man, and you find 
 that the sacrifice, far from being a price weighed out 
 and duly paid, has come, by the mere cultivation of a 
 sense of duty, to be a delight in itself, as truly as the 
 enthusiasm of adventure or the contempt of danger. 
 It is, indeed, the very business of religious discipline 
 
 8* L 
 
178 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 to guide and train what may so come to be a mighty 
 master passion. And we should not fail, through any 
 shallow theory of pleasure, to see how prodigious a 
 force the Church enlisted, when it gave to what we 
 have called the ascetic passion recognition and a 
 sphere. The time would soon come when that great 
 force would be needed, no longer for defence or idle 
 contemplation, but for active service. 
 
 That time came, indeed, in a very dramatic way. 
 In the flush of his temporary triumph over Alaric, 
 Honorius had renewed at Eome, in 404, the old 
 splendor of the public games ; and, Christian as he 
 was, and against the warm protest of men's better 
 feeling, brought his show to a climax by a combat 
 of gladiators, a spectacle forbidden long before by 
 Christian law. When the sport was at its height, 
 the monk Telemachus, who had come (it is said) all 
 the way from Egypt to do it, threw himself into the 
 arena, between the swords of the combatants, and 
 was crushed under a shower of stones from the angry 
 mob, — " the only monk," says Gibbon, " who died a 
 martyr in the cause of humanity." This brave act 
 put a final stop to the brutal sport. 
 
 But Gibbon's comment is not true. Whole genera- 
 tions of Christian monks lived, and a great many of 
 them died, in cruel martyrdom, in working out that 
 long task by which the barbarian world — less cor- 
 rupt, no doubt, than the old Pagan society, but almost 
 inconceivable in its ferocity — was brought into the 
 pale of Christian civilization. Some features and con- 
 ditions of that task we shall have to consider at an- 
 other time. At present we have to do only with the 
 
THE MONK AS MISSIONARY. 179 
 
 way in which this great moral power was trained and 
 equipped to undertake it. 
 
 One feature of it, however, I must mention here. 
 It is the spectacle that offers itself to our imagina- 
 tion, as the face of the world slowly changes, from its 
 comparatively orderly and familiar look in the classic 
 age, to what it had become when the barbarian hordes 
 gave it the wild and strange complexion it wore so 
 long. We see the process at a great distance ; and, 
 so seen, the features of one age melt insensibly into 
 those of another, so that it is no hard thing to us to 
 call the change an unmixed good. But in the time 
 of it, as we must not forget, there were infinite details 
 of literally unspeakable horror, — details which you 
 find hints of in Gibbon's foot-notes, or can read at 
 more length in the half-barbaric authorities he cites, 
 Jornandes, Liutprand, Paulus Diaconus, and Gregory 
 of Tours. Now, when that three centuries' storm 
 settled down upon the Western world, innumerable 
 outposts were already held by religious zealots, whom 
 an ascetic fervor had scattered through Italy and Gaul, 
 and along the confines of Germany, some in solitary 
 hermitages, some in bands and brotherhoods, many 
 with a faith burning in them, and a yearning for the 
 souls of those wild barbarians, in whom they saw 
 — as Salvian did — more hopeful subjects of Christ 
 than in the corrupt and degenerate population they 
 had turned their backs upon. 
 
 Some of their religious retreats were the refuge of 
 cowards, — so it was charged ; of men who had cast 
 off all love of their country, who had lost the sense 
 of honor and public duty, who dared not look the 
 
180 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 times in the face.* Most likely. Among those who 
 simply sought religious solitude or religious fellow- 
 ship in those retreats, it would be hard to draw the 
 line between pure cowardice and genuine despair of 
 the perishing world they forsook, — despair that would 
 settle upon many a mind, doubtless, as if the end of 
 all things were really at hand, and the only remain- 
 ing duty were to make one's peace with God, as on a 
 death-bed. 
 
 But not so with those who undertook such tasks as 
 the time made possible. Many, probably most of 
 those who are worthily recorded as the saints — that 
 is, the moral heroes — of that evil time, were men 
 trained in monastic discipline, hardened to service 
 by the interior conflicts which that discipline im- 
 plied. 
 
 And we have not to forget, either, the immense 
 effect of these austerities, of the strange humanity 
 and tenderness often joined with them, of the strange 
 vision and the new ideal of sanctity, offered before 
 the eyes and powerfully affecting the imagination of 
 the rude, cruel, unsophisticated invaders. The more 
 familiar accounts of St. Martin in France and St. 
 Severinus in South Germany illustrate vividly this 
 moral reaction. 
 
 In general, Catholic writers do completer justice 
 than we do to this unfamiliar but most noble phase 
 of religious heroism. It is hard for a Protestant to 
 forget the strong repugnance which monastic life 
 called out in the time of its degeneracy. But we 
 
 * The ground taken by Valens (about 375), in his conscription 
 of monks for civil or military duty. 
 
SAINT BENEDICT. 181 
 
 are not concerned here with those later scandals and 
 controversies. We have only to see and understand 
 a very genuine exhibition of moral power among men 
 to whom that way was the best they knew, and at a 
 time when no better service could possibly be given 
 to the world. Some of these lives commend them- 
 selves easily to our judgment : as of Cassiodorus, the 
 minister and secretary of Theodoric ; and of Fortu- 
 natus, a genuine man of letters, whose verses, in- 
 scribed to that gentle recluse queen Badegoncla, or to 
 his friend Gregory of Tours, make the closing pages 
 in the great body of classic Latin poetry.* But hun- 
 dreds and thousands of them passed away unknown, 
 and only added each its drop or its rill to the vast 
 stream which was widening into the new civilization. 
 Of others, again, it must be said that their asceticism 
 was sheer idle pretence, and slid into intoxication and 
 madness. The perils of that way of life became quite 
 plain, even at this time ; and they needed a discipline 
 very sharp and severe to keep them in some sort of 
 check. The discipline which prevailed in Europe for 
 many generations, vigorous and wholesome, was that 
 of St. Benedict, established during the prosperous rule 
 of the Goth Theodoric. The anecdotes of his life we 
 need not dwell on : how as a child of twelve, with 
 the connivance of his maid, he ran away and hid in a 
 cave from his vicious schoolfellows, till he was given 
 up for dead ; how, to deliver himself once for all from 
 "the demon of the flesh," he stripped and rolled 
 among thorns till his skin was lacerated from head 
 to foot ; how, as head of his monastery, he ruled his 
 * See below, " The Christian Schools." 
 
182 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 monks so sharply that they turned against him and 
 tried to poison him in a bowl of wine ; how his fame 
 for sanctity grew, till he was obliged to flee again to 
 the rocky retreat of Monte Casino, where his most 
 famous of monastic houses continues an object of pil- 
 grimage to this day.* 
 
 Here he established his firm code of discipline on 
 the three-fold vow, not to be taken till after due pro- 
 bation and the severest tests of resolution, of Poverty, 
 Chastity, and Obedience. The first meant simple and 
 absolute community of goods : the religious house 
 might and afterwards did revel in enormous wealth ; 
 but the individual monk owned nothing. We shall 
 compare this presently with the later Mendicant 
 Orders, so that here we have only to notice the 
 pledge it gave of absolute devotion to the common 
 interest, and the enormous associated strength of the 
 brotherhood. The vow of Chastity at once forbade 
 all family ties, and put upon the conscience the task 
 through life of keeping np the ascetic discipline 
 
 * There is a pretty story of the occasion of this retreat. A bevy 
 of gay girls from Rome — whom no doubt the grim ascetics took 
 to be emissaries of the Devil — went out "for a lark " one day to 
 visit and perhaps cheer their dull abode ; and tried, with all co- 
 quetries and blandishments, to coax them back to the city, and to 
 carnal ways. In horror at what might possibly come of it, Bene- 
 dict made all haste to the rudest spot he could find among the 
 rugged spurs of the hills. 
 
 It was on a like occasion that an aged monk was observed to 
 look very earnestly at the sauciest and most fascinating of the 
 group ; and when his companions asked him why, replied, " Be- 
 cause it is revealed to me that she shall judge us all." Within a 
 short time, in fact, she became a penitent, and passed her life in the 
 austerest sanctity. For Benedict's miracles, see Migne's Patrologia, 
 cxlix. 965. 
 
THE VOW OF OBEDIENCE. 183 
 
 which had originated that mode of life. "VVe shall 
 see its immense consequences hereafter, when under 
 Hildebrand the monastic spirit gained complete rule 
 in the Church, and engaged in its sharpest-fought 
 battle against human nature. 
 
 For the present, then, I have but a word to say of 
 the vow of Obedience. It was in this that the West- 
 ern or Benedictine discipline differed most widely 
 from the ascetic life of the East, which (in its degen- 
 eracy at least) aimed only at piety and maceration ; 
 and it was in this that it rendered its essential ser- 
 vice to the modern world. For obedience, in the 
 rigidly practical rule of Benedict, meant steady, gen- 
 uine, useful work. "Labor are est or are" became the 
 monkish chime. Seven hours of manual labor were 
 required daily, besides study in the afternoon. The 
 old and feeble, who could do nothing else, were set to 
 copy manuscripts ; and so saved to the world not 
 only a host of religious works, but whole libraries of 
 ancient classics. The toil of the Benedictines has 
 become a proverb of literary industry. They had 
 abundant leisure for it. One monk is said to have 
 spent a lifetime illuminating a single letter. Im- 
 mense results came of this organized industry. It 
 rescued labor itself from the degradation of its old 
 servile memories, made it intelligent, skilful, and free, 
 as well as a religious duty. There were no such 
 estates in Europe, nowhere so thrifty farming or so 
 tasteful gardening, as the monasteries had to show. 
 It was the monks who were clearers of the forest, 
 drainers of the marsh, frontiersmen, pioneers of civil- 
 ization, founders of more than half the towns of 
 
184 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 
 
 France. They steadily recruited, through times of in- 
 conceivable peril, those armies of missionary-martyrs, 
 by which the barbarian world was tamed and trained 
 to a rude civilization. 
 
 The evils of monastic life are plain to see : its 
 enormous seeming waste of moral force, shed like 
 showers on the bare sand of the desert ; the wild and 
 ignorant fanaticism or religious madness it often ran 
 into ; its hardening of the heart in the selfish seek- 
 ing for salvation, so that the natural affections and 
 humanities were crushed, and the monks became in 
 due time the lit and merciless agents of the Inqui- 
 sition ; the temptation to indulge indolence, hypoc- 
 risy, and spiritual pride, with secret and abominable 
 vices demanding periodical reform. The memory of 
 such things makes us content that we shall never 
 know it any more. Still, it would not have had its 
 opportunity of evil, but for the immense service it 
 rendered at a critical period, when old things were 
 passing away, and new foundations must be laid in 
 the absolute courage, the denial of self-interest, the 
 strenuous virtue, the loyal obedience, which make the 
 ideal of that way of life ; when not science, strength, 
 and skill, but poverty, hardship, and self-denial were 
 the power that overcame the world. 
 
IX. 
 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST, 
 
 THE main stream of Christian civilization, as it 
 affects the great events of history and as it in- 
 terests us in particular, follows a westward course, 
 and is bounded for a thousand years within the 
 limits that contain the Catholic Empire of the Mid- 
 dle Age. The separation of East and West was 
 slowly coming about for at least three centuries, 
 before it became definite and final in the controver- 
 sies of the ninth century ; and the parting of the 
 Christian world into two jealous and hostile frag- 
 ments (879) lasted through many a peril that assailed 
 them both alike, till one was swallowed up in the 
 conquests of the Turk, and the other rent by the great 
 Protestant schism, with its innumerable sects. 
 
 There is something of pathos in calling to mind 
 that the most obstinate motive of a separation involv- 
 ing such tremendous historical consequences was the 
 persistence of the West in holding that the Holy 
 Ghost proceeds not from the Father only, but also from 
 the Son, — to us a pure piece of unintelligible meta- 
 physics, or else the statement of a very simple moral 
 fact ; and that, on the very eve of the ferocious assault 
 in which Constantinople fell, when terms of union 
 had been with difficulty negotiated at Florence to 
 
186 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 secure a Christian league against the infidel (1438), 
 these terms were repudiated by the fanatic sectaries 
 of the East, who chose the risk of Ottoman slavery 
 rather than accept the hated symbol of Western 
 heresy. 
 
 But we have to deal at present not with these criti- 
 cal events of history so much as with certain charac- 
 teristics that mark the contrast of the two ; and with 
 one or two phases of the Oriental Church that show 
 the position it holds in Christian history. 
 
 The contrast I speak of is exactly indicated, first, 
 by the division-line between the two languages, Greek 
 and Latin, in which the symbols of faith were re- 
 spectively set forth. Greek lends itself easily to 
 metaphysical discussions and nice logical distinctions, 
 which Latin could but imperfectly follow, at least till 
 it was tortured to metaphysical uses by the School- 
 men. The Greeks complained that the language of 
 their formulae could not be adequately rendered in 
 another tongue.* It is clear that, if the meaning of 
 the Christian symbol, much more the salvation that 
 comes of actual belief, turns on the hair-breadth dis- 
 
 * Thus the word hypostasis (to take a very familiar case), which 
 is used to express the distinctions in the Trinity, corresponds ety- 
 mologically to the Latin substantia, "substance"; but this word 
 means exactly what the theologians did not wish to say, and so 
 they chose the word persona instead (literally mask), which we 
 very inadequately render "person," — really meaning the part, or 
 character, acted in a play, as in our phrase dramatis -personal. Thus 
 the metaphysical terms oho'ia, (essentia), inroaraa-is (substantia), and 
 Trpoaooiroy (persona) are more or less interchangeable, and give rise 
 to endless discussion. According to Gregory of Nyssa, what oixria 
 is to the class, that virSo-Taais is to the individual. We find this 
 discussion going on, brisk as ever, in Peter Lombard (about 1160). 
 
CONTRASTS OF EAST AND WEST. 187 
 
 tinctions which can hardly be stated in words, and 
 are untranslatable at best, there is absolutely no end 
 of controversy. Leo the Great did wisely to cnt the 
 knot by laying down his own hard-and-fast definition, 
 which contented the West then, and does so to this 
 day ; while the East wrecked itself helplessly on the 
 successive sharp points that turned up in the crooked 
 channel of dispute, till it seemed to drift helplessly 
 on a sea of metaphysics. 
 
 Again, the West had a vigorous independent life 
 of its own, — political, municipal, ecclesiastical, — of 
 which Leo had the genius to seize the full advantage ; 
 while church life in the East was absolutely over- 
 shadowed by the imperial despotism, under which, as 
 in the shelter of a great forest, it throve with a cer- 
 tain pining, sickly, and distorted life of its own. Not 
 that passion was wanting to it, or a certain fanatic, 
 even ferocious courage : the religious riots of Constan- 
 tinople, Antioch, and Alexandria were bloody and 
 fierce as the old struggles of the Eoman forum. But 
 they were the disorderly, irresponsible action of a 
 mob, that might be crushed at any moment, and 
 periodically was, by the imperial military police, and 
 could never develop any disciplined courage of its own. 
 Indeed, how continually pressing, how closely haunt- 
 ing, the imperial despotism was, it is hard for us to 
 conceive, unless we remember that it inherited the 
 cruel and despotic traditions of a Csesar or a Diocle- 
 tian ; and that it left its methods of merciless exac- 
 tion to be adopted and followed up in the unspeakable 
 inflictions of Oriental tyranny to-day. Ecclesiastical 
 rule was as minute, as tyrannous, as irritating here, as 
 
188 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 ever it was in the West ; but, awed by the nearness 
 of the .Court, and dazzled by the paraphernalia of 
 Empire, it never had the free hand, even if it had the 
 wise and willing heart, to effect any one of the great 
 tasks of civilization. 
 
 What it could do, however, it did. The courage 
 and the devotedness of purpose were never wanting. 
 Long lines of saints show that the ecclesiastic spirit, 
 with its merits and its faults, was quite as fervent as 
 in the West. It had, in fact, a quality of its own, 
 which commands a genuine admiration. Looking at 
 its better side, we seem to see in it a sweetness of 
 piety, a gentleness of temper, a single-hearted moral 
 fervor, a purely religious courage, a capacity of warm 
 and long-abiding friendship, an absence of personal 
 ambition, which are not to be sure wanting, but are 
 less prominent traits, in the restless and energetic 
 Latin Church.* 
 
 These qualities answer well to the more dependent 
 position just spoken of; and maybe held, justly, to 
 have characterized the churches of Syria, Greece, and 
 Egypt to this day, — where they subsist, insulated, 
 helpless, non-resistant, disarmed, under the scornful 
 tolerance of the Mussulman. To these we may add a 
 certain simplicity of living often running into ascetic 
 poverty, a clinging family life, a quickness of social 
 sympathy, which seem to be their inheritance from an 
 earlier phase of Christian life than was transmitted 
 to the West, and which correspond with the primi- 
 tive and easy ecclesiastical code that permits, even 
 
 * In fact, we are hardly conscious of them there, until we come 
 to the later and greater period of the Religious Orders. 
 
PERIODS OF INTEREST. 189 
 
 if it does not require, the marriage of the humbler 
 clergy. 
 
 These general traits it is well to bear in mind, in 
 studying the somewhat depressed and monotonous 
 life of Eastern Christendom. While they show its 
 good side, they help to remind us, also, of the feeble 
 executive force it has always shown, the often hu- 
 miliating attitude in the presence of authority, and 
 the ignorant, gross, imbecile condition in which we 
 find its lower clergy at this day in Eussia, as well as 
 in Greece or Turkey. The political condition of the 
 East, too, from the first Gothic invasion clown, has 
 shown little else than a succession of despotisms, and 
 violent conquests, and wide-spread miseries, never 
 once relieved by a show of genuine popular courage, 
 or a vigorous national life. The Byzantine Empire, 
 down to its fall in 1453, has always been a synonyme 
 for indolent luxury, gaudy but meretricious splendor, 
 pampered despotism, political degeneracy, and moral 
 decay. Only a few broad features require our con- 
 sideration now. 
 
 As belonging to our present purpose, there are 
 three phases of this languid history, which may de- 
 tain our eye. These are, the period immediately fol- 
 lowing the first Arian controversy; the reign of 
 Justinian ; and the Image-Controversy, with the at- 
 tending circumstances that confirmed the separation 
 of East and West, — this last preceded and followed 
 by the vast catastrophe of the Mahometan invasion. 
 
 I. The fervor, the sweetness, and the purely re- 
 ligious intrepidity which I have* spoken of as char- 
 acterizing the Eastern Church, are seen nowhere to 
 
190 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 so great advantage as in the group of eminent and 
 saintly men who adorn its calendar towards the end 
 of the fourth century. There are many other names 
 hardly less worthy ; but, for purposes of illustration, 
 it is enough to mention four, who make a group 
 together. 
 
 Basil the Great, of Csesarea (329-379), eminently 
 deserves to lead the list. High-minded, cultivated, 
 self-denying, charitable, austere, bold before the face 
 of power,* writer of the sweetest homilies on Crea- 
 tion, Paradise, and the discipline of Providence, he is 
 the great organizer of eastern monastic life.f Next is 
 his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (330-391), the elo- 
 quent ascetic, the personal antagonist of Julian, the 
 vigorous champion of orthodoxy at the capital (where 
 he raised it from a despised sect to a great popular 
 enthusiasm), the contented exile when court intrigues 
 drove him from the city to the harder penance of writ- 
 ing odes and hymns, j Third is Gregory of Nyssa 
 (331-395), younger brother of Basil, a theologian and 
 commentator, a hard, clear, and serious thinker, a stu- 
 dent of Greek philosophy, whose treasures he would 
 gather" for Christian uses, called " father of fathers " by 
 an admiring council, the reconciler of divided churches, 
 the thoughtful, gentle-minded Platonist, liberal and 
 serene among sharp party conflicts. Last and most 
 eminent of all is the bright name of John Chrysostom 
 
 * Witness, especially, his intrepid correspondence with his old 
 schoolfellow, the Emperor Julian. 
 
 t Whose rules he lays down in replies to 313 Queries. 
 
 J Luke's genealogy, for instance, in hexameters, and Matthew's 
 in iambics ; besides the appalling chapters of Chronicles and Num- 
 bers, and a drama on the death of Christ. 
 
FOUR GREEK DIVINES. 191 
 
 (347-407), preacher of the "golden lips," held by 
 many to be the greatest of all religious orators of any 
 age, who would have been made Bishop of Antioch at 
 twenty-three but for his generous support of Basil ; 
 who as Patriarch of Constantinople joined absolute 
 simplicity and charity of living with steady defiance 
 of court power and an electric eloquence that rings in 
 his pages vivid and alive to-clay ; who in perfect 
 serenity and sweetness of soul blessed God for his 
 rod of chastisement, while he lay dying on the road 
 under the barbarous cruelty that dragged him in age 
 and infirmities into banishment. 
 
 In this group of brilliant and saintly names we 
 notice, first, that they are all near friends, and two 
 of them brothers ; and next, their short career, the 
 oldest living only to sixty-three, while the one who 
 passed into history as " great " died at fifty. They all 
 represent the very best of those qualities which seem 
 the family traits, so to speak, of Eastern Christianity. 
 It would be hard to find, in the writings of either of 
 them, a trace of sectarian rancor, or personal vindic- 
 tiveness, or spiritual pride, or dogmatic bigotry, or self- 
 ish ambition, or vanity of letters. All were humble- 
 minded and devout, ascetic in their training, austere 
 judges of themselves, utterly submissive to the Di- 
 vine will they worshipped. The strongest impression 
 one gets from their writings is their absolute lack of 
 self-reference or self-assertion, and the entire good 
 faith with which they not only assume that the 
 ascetic life is the true moral ideal, but make its rule 
 the law of conscience for themselves — the rule of 
 personal purity and rigid self-denial. 
 
192 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 But for a certain simplicity of courage, and a child- 
 like fearlessness, we might possibly miss in them the 
 more masculine virtues we look for in the religious 
 character. When Basil was threatened with confis- 
 cation, imprisonment, and death, his reply was, " Not 
 one of these things touches me. He who has no 
 goods cannot suffer any ]oss. He who is God's guest 
 cannot be an exile anywhere. For martyrdom I am 
 unworthy ; but death is only a friend to me, to bring 
 me sooner to God." 
 
 All were lovers of nature, and lovers of what was 
 beautiful in Greek art and letters. Their writings 
 have all become Christian classics, and have had 
 their share in preserving the marvellous vitality of 
 the Greek tongue : a vitality so great, that it has not 
 only been kept alive in the debased Bomaic ; but in 
 our own day Schliemann, as he tells us, has moved a 
 village audience in Ithaca to tears by reciting out of 
 Homer the meeting of Ulysses and Penelope, while 
 Xenophon and Demosthenes are used as reading 
 books in Athenian public schools to-day. That the 
 classic Greek is still so nearly the language of the 
 people as to be almost intelligible, easily mastered 
 by a few weeks' study, and rather gaining upon the 
 modern in current employ, is greatly due to its uses 
 as a sacred tongue, and to those writers whose ora- 
 tions and commentaries have further consecrated it 
 to that use. 
 
 We notice, too, that this era of oratorical splendor 
 and religious fame immediately follows the great con- 
 troversy, and that it belongs wholly to the defenders 
 of what was then called Orthodoxy. This fact has a 
 
JUSTINIAN. 193 
 
 certain value in the history of polemics as a phase of 
 human thought. It shows, not that their speculation 
 was more true, or their reasoning more honest, but 
 that they chose the side which best expressed the 
 warmth of devoted, unreasoning, and loyal faith. 
 
 II. The nearly forty years' reign of Justinian (527- 
 565) is very famous in history for two things; — 
 victory over the Vandals by Belisarius and over the 
 Goths by Narses, which seemed likely to make the 
 Empire whole again by reconquest of the West ; and 
 the codifying of Roman Law, which became a most 
 important element in the later civilization. Besides 
 these w T ere certain marked merits of administration. 
 Justinian, says Sismondi, first made economy a sci- 
 ence, and systematically encouraged industry. The 
 silk-worm was brought by travelling monks from 
 India ; trade was carried as far as China. The mag- 
 nificent dome of Santa Sophia testifies to this clay 
 how the piety and splendor of the capital were cared 
 for in the imperial policy. 
 
 Justinian himself has only the accidental glory of 
 these achievements. His greatest general died under 
 -his unjust and cruel jealousy ; and his chief merit 
 is perhaps the steady and generous support he gave to 
 the great jurists who labored on the Code. He was 
 himself an ascetic, a scholastic, and a pedant, " neither 
 beloved in his life," says Gibbon, "nor regretted at 
 his death"; busying himself with theological disputes, 
 in which he showed neither a schoolman's subtilty 
 nor a statesman's skill ; ruled by the strange, fascinat- 
 ing adventuress Theodora, whose name is shaded with 
 the blackest ignominy or else the blackest calumny, 
 9 m 
 
194 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 who upheld her half-way heresy in the face of his 
 ostentatious orthodoxy, and left her memory to the 
 mercy of bigots who never pardon or forget. 
 
 The brief revival which this reign offers of impe- 
 rial magnificence is darkened by its almost unpar- 
 alleled calamities. War against the barbarian means 
 extermination, or, at its mildest, devastation. The 
 Vandal Gfelimer surrendered, when he saw a morsel 
 of half-burnt dough snatched from between his neph- 
 ew's very teeth by a Moorish boy, — a type of the 
 ruin that spread through Italy and Africa. A glar- 
 ing comet amid these disasters seemed the scourge 
 of God hung visibly in the sky. An earthquake de- 
 stroyed, it is said, two hundred thousand lives in a 
 single city. A dreadful pestilence (bred, say the an- 
 nalists, from the bodies of reptiles left by a great 
 inundation of the Tiber) raged more than fifty years, 
 leaving hardly a spot or man untouched. At Justin- 
 ian's death, it has been reckoned, the population of the 
 Empire had been diminished (since Augustus, proba- 
 bly) by a hundred million lives. 
 
 The decision at Chalcedon (451) had settled the 
 standard of orthodoxy for the West, but had only 
 heated the jealousies between Antioch and Alexan- 
 dria. The partisans of a single nature in Christ never 
 failed to make points, or split them, that would make 
 against the accepted creed ; and numberless shades of 
 the " Monophysite heresy " prevailed, till these flick- 
 ering contests paled in the glare of Saracen invasion. 
 A compromise — the famous Henoticon — carefully 
 framed (482) to exclude the sharper lines of division, 
 had not long satisfied either party, since each had to 
 
MONOPHYSITE AND MONOTHELETE. 195 
 
 sacrifice the prominence of its favorite dogma, 
 Justinian, in bis desire to propitiate the more hereti- 
 cal sect, published a " confession," which went as far 
 as this: "Whosoever does not confess that our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, crucified in the flesh, is true God and 
 Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity, let such a 
 one be anathema"; and declared the body of Christ 
 incorruptible. They, on their part, admitted that, 
 while there is in Christ but one nature, yet that 
 nature is twofold : their test phrase was, that " God 
 was crucified." 
 
 These, with some obscure matters charged as heresy 
 against the Origenists, were the delicate differences 
 to be arranged at another Council in Constantinople 
 (553), which willingly enough accepted the very* 
 words of the Emperor's confession. But after his 
 death dissensions went on widening, with admixture 
 of strange travesties here and there, that seemed to 
 make a fourth divinity of Mary " Mother of God," till 
 all were swept away in a common ruin by the impla- 
 cable storm of Islamism. The last attempt to recon- 
 cile them was in the compromise (suggested 633) that, 
 though there were two natures in Christ, yet there 
 was only a single will. This seemed to satisfy for a 
 time, but was brought to an end by the sixth great 
 Council (680), which established as orthodox the doc- 
 trine of two wills. The Monotheletes, including the 
 Emperor himself, who had proposed the compromise, 
 were now denounced, and " peace," says Gieseler, drily, 
 " was thus restored to the Church." 
 
 This pitiful story seems fairly enough the logical 
 outcome of the attempt to stake man's faith on accu- 
 
196 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 racy of belief. Assuming that it is to be so, the nat- 
 ural inference surely is, that no degree of accuracy can 
 be excessive, and no difference of belief too small to 
 justify intolerant debate. To absolute sceptical in- 
 difference, the distinction of two natures and two 
 wills is not more insignificant than the act of casting 
 incense on a pagan chafing-dish, — the test which had 
 determined many an heroic martyr-death. One, how- 
 ever, is a point of speculative opinion ; the other, how- 
 ever slight, an act of free choice. One deals with logic 
 merely; the other with the conscience, where the 
 foundation of moral life is. One is dogmatic ortho- 
 doxy, the other is spiritual integrity. The orthodox 
 postulate, that lightness of belief is essential to sal- 
 vation, could not have been more perfectly carried 
 out to its logical absurdity, than in these incessant, 
 unintelligible, disastrous controversies, that cost the 
 Eastern Church its last chance of vigorous life. 
 
 III. The third phase of Eastern Christianity to be 
 recalled here is the extraordinary outburst of fanati- 
 cism called the Image Controversy, lasting more than 
 a hundred years, and shaking the Empire to its cen- 
 tre. This need not detain us long. It broke out 
 something more than a hundred years after the furi- 
 ous assault on Arabian tribal idolatry led by Mahomet. 
 The attack on Christian images began, in fact, with 
 the intolerant Mussulman fanaticism itself, which ex- 
 pelled all " idols " from the churches where it had 
 power through its rapid conquests in the East, es- 
 pecially in Syria, to the despair of Christian and the 
 vindictive delight of Jew. 
 
 The Emperor Leo III. (the Isaurian) was the first 
 
IMAGE CONTROVERSY. 197 
 
 "Iconoclast" of the Empire (718-741). He was a 
 man of military vigor, political good sense, and reso- 
 lute courage, one of the ablest and best of Byzantine 
 emperors. Image- worship had run to a violent su- 
 perstition, which worshipped statues of saints and mi- 
 raculous pictures, — such as that of the Virgin Mary 
 at Sozopolis, whose hand flowed with balsam, as well 
 as the visible symbol of the Cross, at which no one 
 scrupled. Images were taken from the churches by 
 command of Leo, and a council called by his successor 
 (754) echoed in its Acts the imperial will, holding it 
 especially profane that she who was " literally and 
 truly Mother of God, higher than the whole creation, 
 visible or invisible," should be represented by "a 
 figure out of any sort of wood, or colors laid on by a 
 workman's hand." 
 
 It is unnecessary to tell the furious resistance to 
 such decrees, amounting to rebellion and civil war ; 
 or how the fanaticism was fed by companies of monks, 
 and traded on by interested churchmen. By an odd 
 and childlike superstition, not only prayers were said 
 and offerings made to painted images, and lighted 
 candles set before them ; but the sacred bread, " the 
 body of the Lord," was put in their hands, as children 
 feed their dolls, and the color scraped from them was 
 mixed in the cup of communion. Some councils or 
 synods were found to sanction the custom of image- 
 worship. Imperial edicts against it were passed in 
 vain. Silent toleration and persecuting rigor were 
 tried in turn ; till, under a second Theodora (842), full 
 sanction of Church and State was given to the custom, 
 and a yearly festival was established to celebrate its 
 
198 CHRISTIANITY IX THE EAST. 
 
 final triumph. What quaint, abject, homely forms 
 the superstition took, is told us by all visitors to 
 Oriental churches at the present day. The dispute 
 was finally settled by the curious compromise which 
 permitted pictures (or colored medallions), but not 
 images, while the Latin Church admits them both, 
 — another rift of the breach between East and West 
 that went on widening hopelessly. Since this sepa- 
 ration,* the Eastern Church drifts out of the main 
 channels of history, and floats, in a certain idle and 
 sheltered way, in such shallows and coves as the 
 floods of fanaticism or conquest may have spared. Its 
 history will not detain us any longer. 
 
 To us the strange thing, the real tragedy in all 
 these disorders, — so puerile and futile the cause of 
 them appears to us, — is that they were the serious 
 and real interests of Eastern Christians, while the 
 storm was gathering in the South that soon swept 
 them to horrible destruction. We cannot watch with 
 their eyes the advancing tempest, or know how it 
 looked to them, because their eyes were holden, not 
 to see things as they were. An infatuation of secu- 
 rity possessed them, I suppose, in the august name 
 and traditions of the Empire, till the sweep of Ma- 
 hometan fanaticism had grown irresistible. For, in 
 the year 609, the Arab camel-driver Mahomet, in a 
 brooding, fitful way that we might take for mania, 
 had begun to talk of himself as a prophet of the One 
 
 * This was made final in 879, at a council in Constantinople, 
 which rejected, — 1. The Roman assertion of supremacy ; 2. The 
 claim that Bulgaria lay within the see of Rome; 3. The addition 
 of the phrase filioque to the Western creed. 
 
MAHOMET. 199 
 
 God. In 622 he fled for his life from Mecca, and 
 began to gather a force personally devoted to him. 
 In ten years more he died, just on the edge of an 
 enterprise that blazed out suddenly, like a conflagra- 
 tion. Syria, Egypt, Persia, were by 650 held by the 
 Moslem sword, and along the confines of" the Empire 
 the Crescent bore hard against the Cross. 
 
 I am not to repeat, in ever so rapid outline, the 
 story of those conquests, or discuss again the charac- 
 ter and career of the Arabian prophet. We have only 
 to look, very briefly, at the moral causes at work in 
 the sudden catastrophe. By common opinion, Ma- 
 homet is regarded now as more reformer than im- 
 postor, as a fanatic if ever there was one, partially 
 (perhaps) insane. At least the frenzy that we call 
 madness is often the most effective appeal to Oriental 
 races, and it was strong in him at times. Still, it 
 was not only vehement passion, often on the edge of 
 insanity. However distorted, it never quite lost the 
 glow of religious feeling and moral passion it started 
 with. He is said to have picked up very early in 
 life some crude notion of Christian doctrine from cer- 
 tain Ebionitish sects, heretical and zealously mono- 
 theist ; while his most indignant scorn was called 
 out by some monkish travesties of the trinity, already 
 alluded to. His career began with a furious attack 
 on the idols of the Arab Kaabah, and this iconoclastic 
 zeal he never abandoned. Indeed, among his followers 
 it is as hot and intolerant to-day as it was in the first 
 onslaught inspired by his voice. 
 
 A word of the field where this new fanaticism took 
 root, and the material on which it fed. To the most 
 
200 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 religious races on earth Arabia itself is a holy land. 
 There is Mount Sinai, its rugged summit scorched by 
 the visible presence of Jehovah ; the rock, where at 
 the stroke of Moses water gushed out for his fainting 
 people ; the well Zemzem, which the angel showed to 
 Hagar when Ishmael, father of the desert tribes, was 
 dying of thirst ; the black stone of Mecca, chief visi- 
 ble object of adoration to the faithful, which they say 
 fell from heaven. The Arab, we are told, claims a 
 license to plunder all other tribes of men, in retalia- 
 tion for Abraham's casting off of Ishmael. Whatever 
 the ground of it, the license is one all travellers feel 
 to-day. 
 
 On them, again, God has bestowed four peculiar 
 gifts : turbans for diadems, tents for walls and houses, 
 swords for intrenchments, and poems for laws. In 
 their worship they allow no images or pictures : 
 " Thank God," say they, " we have originals." The 
 same enormous conceit glorifies their Sacred Book. 
 No mortal man, they think, unless inspired, could 
 wield the vast fabric of their language, swollen with 
 unnumbered synonymes, having eighty names for 
 honey, two hundred for a serpent, a thousand for a 
 sword. Mahomet had never learned to read or write ; 
 yet the revelations he gave out from time to time are 
 held unrivalled by all poets or orators of that tongue : 
 " the greatest of miracles, equally stupendous with 
 the act of raising the dead, alone enough to convince 
 the world of its divine original." 
 
 No other creed has so worked up into a fanatic 
 passion the obscure feeling which lies at the heart 
 of most men, that their lives are ordered by a Destiny 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF ISLAM. 201 
 
 wholly out of their control. The Moslem faith teaches 
 that the day and hour of each man's death is written 
 down in the book of fate. No power can avert or 
 alter that. His freedom is only to choose the 
 worthiest way to die. Those who fall in battle would 
 have perished all the same, about their business or in 
 bed at home ; but basely so, most gloriously now. 
 It is their great privilege to have fallen so ; already 
 they are in the joys of paradise. Thus fatalism is not 
 the helpless spell upon the will it might be in a fee- 
 bler race, but a passion of absolute daring. " Islam," 
 Submission ; " Kismet," It is so decreed, — are the 
 watchwords both of that fierce courage in battle and 
 that helpless stupor in defeat or misery, alike charac- 
 teristic of the Moslem temper. 
 
 Both the strength and the impotence of Islamism 
 consist in its having drawn off all the moral forces of 
 the nature into that one channel, of a blind religious 
 frenzy ; in its absolute scorn of all civilized arts, its 
 absolute surrender to the sensual delights of civilized 
 luxury. The conqueror Omar (637) lay on the stone 
 steps where beggars slept ; the staff he leaned on was 
 his bow ; all his equipage, as he rode his one camel to 
 the shrine at Jerusalem was a sack of wheat, a basket 
 of dates, a wooden platter, and a water-skin. When 
 Mustapha, ten and a half centuries later (1683), lay 
 in his camp before Vienna, it w T as with pavilions of 
 green silk and all the luxuries that could be gathered 
 by an enormous army train, till this insolent array 
 was swept back by the splendid chivalry of Sobieski, 
 and Europe was saved. From that hour the formi- 
 dable wave of Mahometan conquest has ebbed, stead- 
 9* 
 
202 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 
 
 ily or fitfully, till the power which Luther thought 
 likely to bring the reign of Antichrist is hardly 
 propped from falling by Christian alliances. England 
 and Eussia, not Arabia or Turkey, control the desti- 
 nies of the East. 
 
 But, in its first fury, it had nearly extinguished 
 the degenerate Christian Empire. Twice Constanti- 
 nople was beset by an Arab fleet, — in 668 and 716 ; 
 and twice it was saved by the timely and terrible 
 defence of the unquenchable Greek fire, — floods of 
 blazing petroleum mixed with sulphur poured over 
 the surface of the waves. Meanwhile the invasion 
 spread westward, through Egypt; through the dis- 
 tracted states of Xorth Africa, where it crushed at 
 once Greek and Vandal, and both the rival parties in 
 the Church ; into the Gothic kingdom of Spain, where 
 it won almost the whole Peninsula, but was pushed 
 back by a religious passion equal to its own, and 
 driven out at length by Ferdinand and Isabella ; across 
 the Pyrenees into France, where at Tours, in 732, the 
 light horse of Abdelrahman broke all day long against 
 the steel-clad line of Charles Martel, like surf against 
 a belt of ice. The Arab host, when night fell, " folded 
 their tents and silently stole away." 
 
 This set the western limit of Saracen invasion. 
 "For," says the chronicler, " as the hammer breaks 
 and bruises iron and steel and all other metals, so did 
 Charles bruise and break in battle all these foes and 
 strange nations." The Arabs, as ever submissive to 
 their destiny, call that fatal field " the martyrs' pave- 
 ment " ; and to this day, say they, the sound is heard 
 which the angels of heaven make in so holy a place, 
 to call the faithful unto prayer. 
 
THE FAILURE OF ISLAM. 203 
 
 And thus the flood, which at one time looked irre- 
 sistible, was beaten back, both in East and West. 
 The great Saracen Empire, which once threatened to 
 envelop the whole of Christendom, still touches it at 
 both ends of its broken crescent, reaching nearly half 
 way round the Mediterranean. As far as the strength 
 of merely religious passion goes, that power was well 
 matched against its antagonist, and was perhaps even 
 its superior. But the bleak monotheism of Islam, its 
 sombre fatalism, its fanatical pride, its ferocious cru- 
 elty, its gorgeous and fitful luxury, never were allied 
 — except for one brief holiday of splendor at Cor- 
 dova — with the great intellectual forces, never with 
 the sober and resolute temper and the moral will, 
 which make religion deep and real, and are alone 
 competent to the world's best work. 
 
 Mahometanism broods upon its departed glories. 
 It keeps alive, as its one root of strength, its blind and 
 intolerant fanaticism. It is the creed of perhaps the 
 most recklessly daring fighters in the world. In 
 winning the inferior races, and training them to a 
 fervent worship of its own and a certain low level of 
 culture, it has showm an aptness, skill, and zeal quite 
 in advance of any Christian missions. But science 
 it treats with ignorant scorn. The arts of modern 
 life it takes at second hand, choosing always those of 
 mere luxury or else mere destruction. And so it has 
 no hold upon the future, only the memory of a bloody 
 and stormy past. 
 
X. 
 
 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 ONE of the most familiar of religious images is 
 that which figures the Christian movement as 
 a Warfare. The body of believers is likened to an 
 Army — in the temper of its service, the aim of its 
 movement, the symbol of its loyalty, in its discipline, 
 drill, and organization. A favorite Christian phrase 
 has always been "the Church militant"; and many 
 illustrations have already shown what meaning, and 
 how much, lies in that phrase : that it means, not 
 simply that the religious life is a warfare to us indi- 
 vidually, which in one view it always is ; but that, in 
 its largest sense, it is a movement of conflict and an- 
 tagonism, against very definite foes, and to certain 
 definite ends. This image we must still keep in view 
 a little longer. 
 
 How in its nobler sense that warfare was carried on 
 for some centuries, and by what sort of men, we have 
 seen already. We have now to consider it, in its 
 largest sense hitherto, as an invasion and a conquest. 
 We are to think of it as a Campaign, intricate in its 
 plan, wide in its field of operations, long in the carry- 
 ing out, conducted by wary and skilful strategy, and 
 brought to its close with a diplomacy equally adroit 
 and able. No other terms than these will fitly express 
 
A THREE CENTURIES' CAMPAIGN. 205 
 
 the intricate character, the mingled motives, the variety 
 of agents, the acts sometimes heroic and then again 
 quite questionable, by which that campaign was car- 
 ried through. 
 
 Indeed, these only express it feebly. For the field 
 includes all Western Europe, — that is, the entire front 
 of the advancing civilization. The time it covers is 
 three centuries. Its strategy is the steady policy of 
 the Church of Rome, administered by a long succession 
 of able and zealous pontiffs. Its agents are not only 
 that great host of devoted servants, numbering many 
 thousands, of whose discipline and zeal we have seen 
 something already in the monastic orders ; they in- 
 clude also barbarian chiefs and petty sovereigns, whose 
 policies, feuds, and even crimes are, with the heat 
 of fresh conversion, put at the service of the Church. 
 It is of this vast campaign that I am to attempt, not a 
 history, or outline, or even sketch, but only to hint 
 the nature of the forces that guided, impelled, and 
 fought it. 
 
 The three centuries just spoken of may be most 
 conveniently regarded as extending from the time of 
 Leo the Great, about 450, to the death of St. Boni- 
 face, Apostle of the Germans, in 755. Just midway 
 stands the remarkable and imposing figure of Gregory 
 the Great, — sometimes called the last of the Fathers, 
 and the real dividing-mark between the ancient and 
 middle age, — who died in 604. He may be held to 
 have first distinctly conceived this great work from 
 the point of view just indicated, and, more than any 
 other man, to have given it the impulse and the 
 stamp of his powerful moral nature. At his noble 
 
206 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 personal character we may glance briefly by and by. 
 At present, we have simply to fix this period of time 
 as a whole as definitely as may be, — its beginning, 
 middle, and end. Its beginning corresponds nearly 
 with the fall of the Western Empire ; its end is a lit- 
 tle before the refounding of that Empire in the person 
 of Charlemagne. 
 
 Eecall now those words of Leo, in which he recites 
 the glory God had bestowed on Rome in making it 
 the seat of military empire, as a preparation for the 
 greater glory that would belong to it as head of a 
 spiritual dominion broad as the earth itself. Those 
 words may serve as a key to the movement we are 
 about to consider, the Christian conquest of the bar- 
 barian nations. 
 
 But it may be worth while to reflect a moment on 
 the amazing realization of them which we have before 
 our eyes at the end of more than fourteen centuries. 
 Imperial Borne never had at its command so vast a 
 number of subjects, nor such absolute devotion, nor such 
 diplomatic skill, nor such willing obedience, nor such 
 wealth of voluntary gifts, nor such hold on the imagi- 
 nation and reverence of men, as Papal Borne, stripped 
 of the last vestige of temporal power, has to-day. 
 What no mere secular government can do, it can 
 command men to be martyrs. Its word is a spell of 
 authority as much in the heart of Africa or on the 
 Pacific coast as in the chambers of the Vatican. It 
 can by a whisper raise or quell a religious frenzy in 
 Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, or Quebec. It can 
 block the wheels of the strongest military power that 
 ever existed on earth, and does it to-day. It claims 
 
MILITARY EMPIRE OF ROME. 207 
 
 to hold, alone, the key to the great social problem, the 
 despair of moralists and statesmen, and with it to con- 
 trol the next great step of human evolution. 
 
 We may deny that claim ; we may hate, dread, or 
 defy the authority which still asserts itself in so many 
 ways. The one thing we cannot do is to despise it. 
 And among all matters of historical inquiry the one 
 that seems best worth our understanding, if we can, is 
 the course of events that laid the foundations of that 
 power so deep and strong. Some of the conditions of 
 its exercise we shall have to consider when we come 
 to speak of the mediaeval Empire-Church. Just now 
 we deal only with the period of its foundation. 
 
 The military empire of Home was about five hun- 
 dred years * in coming to its greatest breadth and 
 height. This was a process of conquest carried out 
 by the patriotic valor of the Eoman armies, and 
 guided by the vigorous policy — often kept in check 
 by the jealous dread — of the Eoman Senate. Again 
 and again conquests were undertaken reluctantly, and 
 carried out in self-defence, exactly as they are by 
 England in Asia and Africa to-day. In particular, 
 Eome was obliged to resist steadily, for two or three 
 centuries, the steady advance of barbarian tribes, in 
 that movement which threatened to cover as with a 
 flood the whole field of ancient civilization. She was 
 obliged to conquer, exterminate, enslave them ; to 
 draft them in her armies ; to keep them in check by 
 military colonies ; to adopt them in her political sys- 
 tem ; to humor and tolerate their religions ; to give 
 
 * Counting from the invasion of the Gauls (b. c. 390) to the 
 time of Trajan. 
 
208 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 them whatever share and stake was possible in the 
 wealth, art, skill, at her command. All her treasures 
 of military skill, of population, of state-craft, had been 
 spent in that struggle — with diminishing strength at 
 last, and vanishing hope ; and now the end had plainly 
 come. The Barbarian was master of the civilized 
 world, and all its treasures were at his feet. 
 
 We need not go at any length into the vast tragedy 
 of the Fall of Kome. It is with a single point only 
 of its historical significance that we have to do. Just 
 at this moment of time — the final collapse of the 
 ancient system — the vast conception came, like a 
 flash of genius as it were, upon such minds as Leo's, 
 to win back all that was lost, and more, but in another 
 way. Pagan Borne had attempted the conquest of 
 the barbarian world, and had failed. Christian Borne 
 should undertake to conquer the soul of Barbarism itself, 
 and in God's name would do it. Such was the mag- 
 nificent conception of Leo, of Gregory, of the English 
 Winfried surnamed Boniface. Not only the thought 
 itself was more amazing and grand than had ever 
 dawned on the mind of general or statesman. The 
 means by which it was carried out show a larger 
 political grasp, a more consummate generalship, a 
 steadier courage, a reach and subtilty of resource, a 
 firmness of policy, to which the perishing Empire had 
 shown no parallel. 
 
 The weapons of this warfare, too, were as original 
 as its conception was great and new. They were, in 
 the most literal, even tender and pathetic sense, the 
 weapons of Christian love. The barbarian world must 
 be w T on, if at all, by way of sympathy. It must be 
 
OUTSIDE VIEW OF THE BAEBARIAN. 209 
 
 conquered through its imagination, conscience, and 
 religious awe. The men who went out to that con- 
 quest must go animated and haunted with a great 
 yearning for saving souls. The power with which 
 they were clothed was the power of poverty, austerity, 
 obedience, and self-denial. 
 
 I do not use these words at random. Volumes of 
 the correspondence of these men have come down to 
 us, and they show the qualities I have named on 
 every page. They show, too, an incredible patience 
 of detail ; — such as we might vaguely imagine to be 
 needful if we try to shape out in our minds the con- 
 ditions of the task ; but such as we could not defi- 
 nitely conceive without those innumerable strange, 
 quaint, touching illustrations. I may attempt pres- 
 ently to restore a line or two of these faded memo- 
 ries ; but first we should try to see a little more 
 distinctly the outside aspect of the case. 
 
 There is a brief bright picture in one of Chryso- 
 stom's homilies, of the barbarian as he appeared in the 
 market-place of Constantinople, — restless, turbulent, 
 curious, bearded, thrusting at passers-by with the 
 stick he carries, tossing back his shock of hair " more 
 like a lion than a man." This is just before the great 
 real terror of the Gothic name. St. Jerome reflects, 
 from his convent in Bethlehem, the far-off vision of 
 the agony at the sack of Eome by Alaric, and the 
 haggard spectacle of vagrant, hungry, despairing troops 
 of men and women, high-born, delicately bred, used 
 to luxury, stripped of everything in that great deso- 
 lation. " I cannot see it wuthout tears," he says ; 
 " that power of old, and wealth unknown, have come 
 
210 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 to such need as to lack roof, food, and clothing ; and 
 still the hard and cruel heart of some men is not 
 softened : nay, they rip up their wretched rags and 
 wallets, to find gold among these poor captives." * 
 
 The monk Salvian, a few years later, had watched 
 in Gaul or Spain the Gothic and Vandal tide, wave 
 upon wave, and set himself to a serious study of bar- 
 barian frankness, simplicity, courage, ferocity, or craft, 
 compared with the various forms of civilized vice 
 generated in the corruption of Pagan society; and finds 
 the new rude population at least as hopeful subjects 
 for conversion as the old, which it justly displaced. 
 St. Augustine about the same time recites, in phrase 
 that I have before cited, the judgment of God in the 
 overthrow of that evil world. The dainty Sidonius 
 Apollinaris, writing from Toulouse (about 455), tells 
 jestingly of his seven-foot Gothic hosts (too big for 
 his hexameters), greased with rancid butter, reeking 
 of onion and garlic, and clad in shabby kilt and tar- 
 tan, f A little later, Jornandes gives, with the vivid- 
 ness of an eye-witness who had felt its terror, the 
 sketch which all historians since have copied, of the 
 hardly human Huns — more brutes than men, cling- 
 ing like cats to the backs of the horses' they scarce 
 ever left, with strange flat-nosed Mongol visages and 
 beaded gimlet-holes (as it were) in place of eyes — 
 who poured on like the flood and were swept back like 
 the ebb, but threatened at one time to put all Eu- 
 rope under the yoke of Asia. 
 
 * Introduction to the Commentary on Ezekiel. 
 t So St. Sturmi, exploring the wilderness for Boniface, smells 
 the evil odor of the barbarians afar off. 
 
GREGORY OF TOURS. 211 
 
 These are hints of the preliminary studies, sketches 
 of the field of operations, before the serious campaign 
 began. Of the century of wreck and waste that fol- 
 lowed, in the wake of Lombard and Frank invasion, 
 we have a full-length picture, grotesque in the sim- 
 plicity with which its horrors are drawn out, in the 
 pages of the excellent and pious Gregory, Bishop of 
 Tours, who bravely and patiently held his post in the 
 midst of them.* A single family group, taken from 
 his sketches and told in meagre outline, will help 
 us more, perhaps, than any generalization of them. 
 
 Clovis,f king of the Franks, had been converted 
 by his Burgundian bride Clotilda, and baptized by 
 St. Eemigius, who spoke to him the brave words, 
 " Meekly bow thy neck, Sicambrian ; adore what thou 
 hast burned, burn what thou hast adored." He was 
 of the true faith, and impartially destroyed both 
 Pagan Alleman and Arian Burgundian or Goth. J 
 " God overthrew his enemies daily under his hand," 
 says Gregory, " because he walked with an upright 
 heart before him, and did that which was pleasing in 
 
 * These have been condensed by Augustin Thierry in his six 
 brief and curious " Tales of the Merovingian Times." 
 
 t Barbaric, Chlodovig ; softened in lapse of time to Louis. 
 
 X The destruction of the premature but brilliant Arian civiliza- 
 tion of the Goths and Burgundians — assailed by the conquests of 
 Belisarius on one side, and crushed by the brutality of the Franks 
 on the other — is one of the obscurer tragedies of this evil time. 
 Some features of this civilization will be found hinted at below, 
 under the title " The Christian Schools." It is pathetic to read the 
 warning given (in the correspondence of Cassiodorus) by the great 
 Ostrogothic King Theodoric to the young Alaric of Toulouse, the 
 Visigoth, to beware of the quarrel with the Franks, in which, a 
 few years later, his kingdom perished. 
 
212 COX VERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 his eyes." And lie adds, a little further on, that, 
 " having slain many other princes, yea, his own nearest 
 kindred, of whom he had jealousy lest they should 
 take the kingdom from him, he extended his power 
 through all Gaul. And once having called together 
 his people, he is said to have spoken thus concerning 
 the kinsmen whom he had slain : ' Woe is me, who 
 remain as a pilgrim among strangers, and have no 
 kindred, who if adversity should come might give me 
 help.' This he said," adds Gregory, quaintly, " not 
 grieving at their death, but by craft, if perchance he 
 might find any still remaining whom he might put 
 to death." 
 
 His son Clotaire was of the same barbarian temper, 
 his many murders and many wives alike the scandal 
 of his Christian profession. One of his queens, 
 Eadegonda, whose father and brother he had killed 
 in war, escaped with some hazard and became a con- 
 secrated nun, founding with her dower a convent of 
 some celebrity, where with her friend, the poet Fortu- 
 natus, she found repose, — a little island of peace 
 amidst the tumultuous inundation. The last act of 
 Clotaire's brutality was to fasten in a hut and burn 
 alive on some suspicion his son Chramnes, with all 
 his family ; after which, at the tomb of St. Martin, 
 he confessed " all the acts which perchance he had 
 done amiss, imploring with deep groans that the 
 blessed saint would beseech the Lord's mercy for his 
 sins, and wash out by his intercession whatever he 
 had unreasonably done," " What a heavenly Lord is 
 this," he said when dying with fever, " who so destroys 
 mighty kings I " 
 
THE BARBARIAN FRANKS. 213 
 
 Of the sons of Clotaire, Gontran " the good " was 
 held (says Sismondi) " to be a man of humane tem- 
 per ; for, excepting his wife's physician, whom he cut 
 in pieces for failing- to cure her, two of his brothers- 
 in-law whom he assassinated, and another whom he 
 treacherously slew, there is hardly any cruel act 
 recorded of him, except it be his destroying the city 
 of Cominges, and slaughtering all the inhabitants, 
 men, women, and children." He was, moreover, a 
 strong friend of the monks and clergy, founded sev- 
 eral monasteries, and paid liberally for the expiatory 
 rites that would give his soul repose. 
 
 A great part of the tale is taken up with the jeal- 
 ousies, treacheries, and ambitions of the two barbarian 
 queens, Fredegond and Brunehild, — more famous far 
 than the two brothers whose wives they were, — with 
 the intrigues and murders that grew out of them. 
 But both were zealous champions of orthodoxy. 
 Fredegond spared no cost to purchase ransom for the 
 souls of her hired assassins, if they should fall ; and 
 Brunehild — who was tied to a wild horse in her old 
 age, and so torn to pieces — was a correspondent and 
 friend of Gregory the Great, and a stanch supporter 
 of his scheme for the conversion of the Saxons. 
 
 Such allies as these, for better or worse, the Church 
 had found in its campaign against barbarian pagan- 
 ism and Arian heresy ; just as half-pagan Frankish 
 chiefs like Charles Martel sought the alliance of 
 churchmen like Boniface against the wilder floods 
 that still beat upon their frontier. The service was 
 mutual, and each party was largely independent of 
 the other. Often, indeed, the Church could only give 
 
214 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 a Christian name, without changing the thing. Thus 
 Gregory the Great thinks it necessary to spare them 
 the old pagan temples, only sprinkling them with 
 holy water, and putting saints' relics in place of idols ; 
 and to adopt their old festivals, as Yule and Easter, 
 under new associations. 
 
 Many and strange were the scandals that came of 
 these conversions. " Here I have been baptized more 
 than twenty times," said an old man one day, when 
 the crowd was larger than usual, and the baptismal 
 robes gave out, " and every time they have given me 
 most beautiful clothes. These old rags to-day are 
 hardly fit for a ploughboy, not to say a warrior like 
 me." One new convert takes the opportunity to 
 pick the priest's pocket while the water is preparing 
 for his baptism. One proposes that a point of her- 
 esy shall be settled, not by " these long talks," but 
 promptly, by the ordeal of boiling water. " Is it 
 true," asks a barbarian chief, his foot already in the 
 sacred font, " that my ancestors the noble Frisians 
 are in hell ? " " Doubtless," replies the priest ; " they 
 died without the only saving faith." " Then " — draw- 
 ing back his foot — "I will not quit those brave men 
 to join the cowards of your paradise. We will follow 
 the ways of our fathers." And so, in comforting 
 vision, the priest soon after beheld the defiant chief 
 among his ancestors in the fiery pit. 
 
 It is a fair question to ask what such conversions 
 were really worth. To this the answer is, that the 
 first point was to bring those fierce tribes, in name at 
 least, within the Christian pale, and to substitute the 
 Christian for the pagan ideal. Everything was staked 
 
SAINT COLUMBAN. 215 
 
 on the success with which this preliminary work was 
 done. The hope of the world lay in those rude men ; 
 and their instructors felt it in a way which they pos- 
 sibly could not have explained to us so well as we 
 can understand it for them. Take the breadth of 
 modern thought and life, — science, enterprise, art, 
 wealth, power, — and set it against anything that 
 could possibly have grown from the degenerate Greek 
 or Eoman stock ; and you measure in part the service 
 that was done, when that rude vigor was grafted with 
 the shoot of a finer life, which would in time yield 
 such infinitely richer fruit. 
 
 Or, again, look away from the vague idealities 
 which are apt to fill the field of history to what the 
 Christian monks, scattered by tens of thousands all 
 through the great wilderness of barbarism, were ac- 
 tually doing there : the infinite serious patience with 
 which they went about their task ; the austerities of 
 the self-denial that trained them for it, and kept its 
 ideal from fading in them ; the hints of beastly and 
 violent ways which they attempted to keep in check ; 
 the strange power of fascination which these very 
 austerities exercised, to attract men to them. St. Co- 
 lumban establishes his post alone in the hill-country 
 near the Ehine, because the rule of Benedict is not 
 sufficiently austere ; and the more rigid the lines he 
 draws, the more men press to enter them.* This 
 
 * A brother who does not say Amen after grace must be pun- 
 ished with six stripes ; who neglects to cross himself after bless- 
 ing, twelve stripes ; who does not check a cough in reciting the 
 Psalm, or dents the sacramental cup with his teeth, six stripes; 
 who appeals from judgment to his superior, forty days' penance on 
 bread and water. A lay brother who gets drunk, or is sick from 
 
216 CONVERSION OF THE BARBAEIANS. 
 
 earth, says Columban, is non vita seel via, " not a life, 
 but a way," and to transgressors he made it very 
 hard. 
 
 I have said before that some of those men were mar- 
 tyrs for humanity. St. Pretextatus, who had bravely 
 sheltered his godson Merovig, is assassinated in his 
 own church by Fredegond's order. St. Wandregisil 
 keeps an angry mob at bay with pious words, and 
 will not appeal to any arm of flesh. St. Bavon hum- 
 bles himself in remorse before a slave he has once 
 owned, and for penance compels him to shave his 
 head, beat him with rods, and shut him up in prison. 
 St. Germanus strips himself to the shirt to clothe a 
 shivering beggar, and beggars himself to ransom cap- 
 tives. St. Sequanus goes out to live in a savage 
 wood inhabited by more savage men. " No sooner 
 did they see him, than from wolves they became 
 lambs ; from such as but now were a source of ter- 
 ror, they were thenceforth ministers of help ; and 
 what had been a resort of cruel demons and robbers 
 became the abode of innocence and virtue." Such 
 tales as these, with many a miracle and wonder in- 
 terspersed, and enforced by many a Christian homily, 
 and seasoned by many a subtile theological debate, 
 came (says Guizot) to be the mental diversion and 
 the moral instruction of whole populations, — their 
 Arabian Nights, their popular novel, their sermon 
 and essay, their daily newspaper. 
 
 Yes, the hope of the world lay in those rude men. 
 The future of humanity was staked upon such tasks 
 
 greediness, seven (Lays' bread and water; who eats or drinks in 
 honor of pagan idols, three years of such penance. 
 
GREGORY THE GREAT. 217 
 
 as those which attempted their conversion. When 
 Gregory the Great was yet a simple monk, — so each 
 of his biographers delights to repeat the tale, — he 
 saw in the market-place at Borne some captive Anglo- 
 Saxon boys, ruddy-faced, golden-haired, such as we 
 often see in the streets, and as the Italian painters 
 (Goethe says) take for their type of cherubs. Learn- 
 ing who they were, Non Angli scd angcli was his 
 famous reply, — " Not Angles but angels " ; and from 
 that hour he set his heart on their conversion. Now 
 the Saxons were rudest and fiercest of all the bar- 
 barous tribes ; and since their conquest of England, 
 near a century and a half before, — when they over- 
 threw the legendary realm of King Arthur, and drove 
 back the Christian Britons to the mountains of Wales 
 and the Western Isles, — had remained obstinately 
 Pagan. All English histories tell the story of Au- 
 gustine of Canterbury and his forty monks, sent by 
 Gregory (597), and their conversion of the Saxon; 
 and in Gregory's letters you may read how persist- 
 ently and hopefully he followed them up, when they 
 shrank from the terror of the unknown journey* 
 This was amid the very ferocity of the " Merovingian 
 times " before described. Their protector on the way 
 was the truculent Brunehild; and the act was one 
 which, more than any other, marks Gregory as the 
 head and chief in this long unbloody crusade. 
 
 Gregory is one of those men who are heroic from 
 the steady courage and persistency of will with which 
 
 * What is so well told in so accessible a book as Green's " His- 
 tory of the English People," it does not seem worth while to repeat 
 by way of narrative. 
 
 10 
 
218 COX VERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 they face great disasters, and cany a great burden of 
 duty through a hard and dangerous way. In reading 
 his correspondence, we feel painfully that we have 
 come upon a far lower intellectual level than we had 
 in Leo, a hundred and fifty years before. He dwells 
 rather pitifully on the marvels and terrors of saints' 
 bones, and makes much of the filings of St. Paul's or St. 
 Peter's chains, which he has enclosed in gold keys and 
 sends as gifts of magic efficacy to barbarian lord or 
 lady. But this childish way of thought is joined to 
 a very manful courage and sincerity in dealing with 
 the duties of his office. From that office he shrank 
 back at first, as well he might ; fled from the city ; 
 and yielded only when his retreat- was betrayed by a 
 miraculous light, and a white dove led the way to 
 his pursuers. Of high rank and luxurious tastes, he 
 cast those things absolutely away, starving himself to 
 permanent ill health by his austerities, and enforcing 
 such rigid monastic discipline in his own household 
 that, when he learned once that a brother had kept 
 (for keepsake, perhaps) three pieces of gold, he would 
 pardon him not even on his death-bed, but cast his 
 body with the coins upon a dunghill, saying, as Peter 
 to Simon Magus, " Thy money perish with thee ! " 
 
 These bitter rigors and self-denials were the answer 
 made, by a conscience highly strung, to the appeal of 
 the miseries that surrounded him in the city, thrice 
 desolated, by violence, flood, and pestilence. But it 
 is not the story of his fourteen years' rule (590-604), 
 rigid, charitable, energetic, and wise, that we have to 
 look at now ; only the astonishing industry and moral 
 energy of the man. His correspondence is immense. 
 
SAINT BONIFACE. 219 
 
 His homilies, commentaries, and moral treatises, in 
 many volumes, have earned him the title of " last of 
 the Fathers." This great amount of work he did with 
 a definite practical aim, with genuine humility, among 
 the distractions of office ; surrounded by what looked 
 to him a mere chaos of wild waves, amidst which the 
 ship he was pilot of was tossing helplessly ; suffering 
 too with illness and torments of " gout " (inflamma- 
 tory rheumatism, probably), and for years able only to 
 drag himself from bed for three hours in the day, to 
 attend the ceremonies of his priesthood. As he grew 
 old, he felt these pains and cares more heavily, — 
 poisoned, perhaps, with the malaria that already began 
 to infect the neighborhood of Kome. " Oppressed with 
 its burden," said he, " my soul sweats blood." Yet 
 he, more than any other one man, was the chief of 
 that great crusade, which he directed from his sick 
 bed ; a campaign, says Ozanam, fought out by " in- 
 valids and women and slaves." 
 
 The next very eminent leader in this campaign — 
 at the end of another century and a half — is the 
 English Winfried, otherwise St. Boniface of Germany, 
 who was martyred in 755. His work was a direct 
 though distant result of Gregory's great enterprise in 
 Saxon England. For the Saxons were at this time 
 chief and most formidable of all the barbarous nations ; 
 and, though Christian in England, still hung like a 
 heavy cloud all along the northeastern portion of 
 half-civilized France, fanatic in their old paganism, 
 till subdued by Charlemagne, with other outlying 
 tribes, many years later, in thirty-three bloody cam- 
 paigns. 
 
220 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 I do not know where we have a higher example of 
 blended sweetness and courage, with a native frank- 
 ness and nobleness of temper, than in the life of Boni- 
 face. It has been asked whether his courage was not 
 rather of a feminine sort, considering, perhaps, the 
 passive serenity of his death. But, from the time 
 when the first great passion seized him, at the age of 
 twenty-three, of giving himself to this service, till his 
 death at seventy-two, his life was spent by choice in 
 the rudest and most hazardous exposures. While 
 passively obedient to meekness in his devotion to the 
 authority of Rome, he is plain to bluntness in rebuk- 
 ing to the Pope himself the disorders he found in the 
 Christian capital: "These carnal men, these simple 
 Allemans, Boians, and Franks, if they hear of such 
 things at Rome as we forbid, will think them lawful, 
 and be offended. They hear of pagan dances, shouts, 
 and songs close by the church, at new-year, day or 
 night ; and that one will not lend his neighbor tool 
 or fire; and that women wear amulets, garters, and 
 bracelets, in pagan fashion, and sell the same. With 
 these carnal and ignorant people, such things are a 
 great hindrance to our doctrine. If you prohibit them 
 at Rome, it will be a great gain to you and to us." 
 And he warns the Pope of grosser scandals reported 
 within the church. " The pagan rites," answers Zach- 
 ary, " we j udge detestable and pernicious " ; and he 
 says they must be put down. The worse offences he 
 entreats Boniface "noway to believe." Tiiis frankness 
 of correspondence is an honor alike to both. 
 
 It was the yearning of kindred, no less than pure 
 missionary zeal, that drew the Saxon Winfried from 
 
BONIFACE AND CHARLES MAETEL. 221 
 
 the pleasant South of England, towards those un- 
 tamed Saxons of the Continent, whom he could ad- 
 dress in his and their mother tonorue.* 
 
 Now if we remember the place which this same 
 Saxon race has filled in history, — how it was the 
 steady support of the Lutheran Eeform on one side and 
 of English Puritanism on the other; how it makes 
 the mass and strength of the two great empires of 
 Britain and Germany to-day, and of the American Re- 
 public ; how its blood and its language have spread, 
 through its great genius for colonization, till they are 
 dominant over nearly a third of the earth's surface 
 and population, — we shall better appreciate the great- 
 ness of the work that was set on foot when Boniface 
 penetrated the wilds beyond the Ehine, to preach in 
 his native English there. 
 
 This work was distinctly understood to be the task 
 of civilization, and the saving of what men had then 
 best worth saving. We can still read the awkward 
 Latin of the safe-conduct given by Charles Martel to 
 this missionary monk, and signed with his hand and 
 seal. This is in 724, in the midst of the gathering 
 and disciplining of that confederation, with which 
 
 * The speech in which lie addressed them is almost intelligible 
 to our English ears to-day, as preserved in this fragment of his 
 baptismal vows : " Forsachis tu diobolas 1 — Ec forsacho diobolse. — 
 End allum diobol-gelde (fellowship)?: — Ec forsacho allum diobol- 
 gelde. — End allum dioboles werkum ? — End ec forsacho allum 
 dioboles werkum end wordum : Thunaer, ende Woden, ende Sax- 
 note, ende allem them unholdum the hira genotas sint (unholy 
 that are akin to them). — Gelobis tu in Got almehtigan fadaer? — 
 Ec gelobo in Got almehtigan fadaer. — Gelobis tu in Crist, Godes 
 suno? — Ec gelobo in Crist, Godes suno. — Gelobis du in Halogan 
 Gast ? — Ec gelobo in Halogan Gast." [This is a little mangled in 
 Migne, but restored by Ozanam.] 
 
222 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 eight years later he met Abclelrahman on the plain of 
 Tours, and dammed back the flood of Saracen con- 
 quest. The penniless unarmed monk and the power- 
 ful military chief respected one another as allies in 
 the defence of Christeudom, — neither more indispen- 
 sable than the other. As a token of the same alli- 
 ance, nearly thirty years later, Boniface anointed 
 with his own hand Charles's son Pepin as king of 
 the Franks (752), in place of the degenerate and 
 worthless house of Clovis, so sealing the compact of 
 the Monarchy and Church, and completing the first 
 act in the founding of the Christian Empire, which 
 we shall see presently as one of the essential steps of 
 civilization. 
 
 The service of those near thirty years was crowned 
 by the founding of the monastic school at Fulda, one 
 of the chief fountains of German culture* In his 
 ecclesiastical residence at Mentz, on the Rhine, he 
 might have found rest in his old a^e, and his life's 
 work well done. But the same great yearning drew 
 him towards those Low Countries where the cloud of 
 Paganism still hung heaviest. " Know, my son," said 
 he to his successor, " that the time of my death draws 
 near. Go on with the work I have begun ; finish the 
 church at Fulda, and, when my time is come, bury me 
 there ; prepare what is needful for my journey, and do 
 not forget, with my books, to send a winding-sheet." 
 And with these words he left him weeping. 
 
 And so he went to the rude Low Country toward 
 
 * See the curious account (copied in Kingsley's " Roman and 
 Teuton "), in Eigil's Life of Sturmi, of the discovery and selection 
 of this spot. — Migne, Patrologia, cv. 530. 
 
MARTYRDOM OF BONIFACE. 223 
 
 the North, where he lived by the river-side, and bap- 
 tized the converts who came to him as to John by 
 Jordan. But one day there came, instead of the band 
 of disciples he was looking for, a wild crew of Pagans, 
 who " with great din and horrid array of arms burst 
 upon the encampment of the saints." At first, his 
 young men would resist by force. " But the holy Bon- 
 iface, hearing the onset of the tumultuous crowd, fled 
 to the refuge of spiritual defence, taking (that is) the 
 relics of saints which he always had with him. So he 
 checked the young men, saying, ' Do not fight, my 
 children; do not bear arms against our adversaries, 
 which Holy Scripture forbids. We are taught to re- 
 turn not evil for evil, but even good for evil. The day 
 long desired is come, when we are bidden from the 
 toil and sorrow of this world to the joys of eternal 
 blessedness. Strengthen yourselves rather in the Lord, 
 and accept gratefully his offered mercy.' But, behold ! 
 before his words were ended, the furious troop rushed 
 upon them, and slew them in the blood of a happy 
 martyrdom." 
 
 The letter of the story we may often have to ques- 
 tion. But, without any doubt, it tells us the temper 
 of that long campaign, in which the victory was 
 gained, once for all, for civilization and intelligence. 
 The barbarian world, once nominally won to the 
 Church, would become the field of what we are to 
 know hereafter as mediaeval and modern Christianity. 
 
 But here, to make the sketch complete, we must 
 anticipate a little the course of time. Along with 
 the conquests of Charlemagne, — those pitiless con- 
 quests, in which (it was said) all were cut off who 
 
224 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 were " taller than the Emperor's sword, " — a sort of 
 nominal Christianity had been carried deep into the 
 Saxon forests, and a mongrel faith had driven back 
 the worship of Odin and Thor. Such as it was, how- 
 ever, and spite of many a formidable recoil of the old 
 superstition, it seems to have pledged those regions to 
 alliance with the Christian monarchy of the West. 
 
 Loyalty to their creed was like loyalty to their flag. 
 "With whatever misgiving and reluctance, the rude 
 Saxon, having once enlisted on the other side, stood 
 stanchly by the mightier Power that had foiled his 
 fathers' gods. The chief peril to those wavering con- 
 quests of the Church militant lay in the barbarous 
 realm beyond. The breach might be quickly healed 
 where it had been quickly broken ; and a Scandina- 
 vian or Slavonic horde might find itself in alliance 
 with all the passionate terrors of a lingering Paganism- 
 Early in the ninth century, Paschasius Radbert 
 (whom we shall hear of again, more than once) was 
 head of a celebrated school at Corbey. His favorite 
 pupil was a young man, Anschar, a warm disciple of 
 his brooding and mystical theology. In the fervid 
 visions of his youth, Anschar had beheld the visible 
 glory of the Lord, and had heard himself summoned 
 by celestial voices to spend his life for the conversion 
 of the heathen, and so to win the blessed crown of 
 martyrdom. His heart was brave, and his will firm ; 
 but his piety often took a sombre and penitential cast, 
 leading him to solitude and austerities, out of the 
 line of active duty. Conceiving himself to be fore- 
 appointed to some great enterprise, he waited for some 
 clear call to his real work. 
 
ANSCHAR, APOSTLE OF THE NORTH. 225 
 
 At twenty-four he found himself already engaged 
 in it. From the monastic school at New Corbey on 
 the Elbe, the Christian conquests begun by Boniface 
 were pushed by Anschar into the remoter north. At 
 Hamburg, where a fortress had been built among the 
 dense forests that made the pagan frontier, and after- 
 wards at Bremen, he had his bishopric. And here he 
 found native helpers. Harold Hlak, an exiled Dane, 
 had found refuge with the Emperor Louis, son of 
 Charlemagne, adopting the Christian faith, and his 
 return opened the way for a mission among his peo- 
 ple. Eoving Scandinavian traders, or freebooters, 
 had been as far as Micklagard, the "great city" of the 
 East ; and there, or aloni^ the Levant, or on the British 
 coast, or at the Frankish court, they had found the 
 worship of the " white Christ," whose invisible might 
 had broken the Saxon strength, and forced their old 
 religion to hide itself among wilder mountains, in 
 ruder forests.* The secret charm of a more powerful 
 faith ; the Eoman ritual, which seemed to them the 
 invocation of a new order of spirits ; intercourse with 
 their own Christian captives, and the sense that they 
 were dealing with a more skilled and educated race, 
 — all prepared them to welcome the new religion. At 
 their request, and under convoy of a trading fleet, 
 Anschar pursued his mission to the North. 
 
 Of the result we know not much more than that 
 he was favored by a strong party among the Swedes ; 
 that he was partly foiled by an attack of pirates, who 
 seized most of the royal gifts and holy vessels on the 
 
 * All this is told in a charming tale, " Anschar. A Story of the 
 North," by Richard John King (London). 
 
 10* 
 
226 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 way ; that he met the fierce hostility of the old Pa- 
 ganism, which stood savagely at bay in this its last 
 fortress ; that his church and bishopric at Hamburg 
 were laid waste with fire ; and that, after I0112 wan- 
 dering and peril, he died at sixty -four, grieving that 
 his Lord had not thought him worthy of the martyr's 
 crown. 
 
 These three, Gregory, Boniface, and Anschar, are 
 conspicuously the heroes of that long crusade, whose 
 glory belongs to many generations and many thou- 
 sands of faithful men. Their completed work is seen 
 in the great fact, made clear before the end of this 
 period, that all Western Europe, from Sicily on the 
 south to Norway or even Iceland on the north, is 
 allied in one spiritual empire, and embarked on the 
 career of a common civilization. 
 
XL 
 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 WE have seen in Christianity, from the begin- 
 ning, something more than a system of doc- 
 trine, more than a movement of religious or reforming 
 zeal. Its first announcement was that " the kingdom 
 of heaven is at hand." These words were taken very 
 literally to mean the regeneration of society, and the 
 founding of a Divine Order on earth. Its scheme was 
 social, and even political, quite as much as it was re- 
 ligious. The Church was organized for discipline and 
 authority, quite as much as it was for piety, charity, 
 or emotional appeal. Its success meant revolution in 
 the state, quite as much as conversion of the soul. 
 The Messianic hope of the reign of the chosen people 
 passed directly over to it as a heritage, and as an ele- 
 ment of power ; and was adopted in the sense that all 
 institutions and all authority among men are right- 
 fully subject to the law of Christ as interpreted by 
 the ministers of Christ. 
 
 The reign of Constantine had been in part a fulfil- 
 ment of that scheme. It was the task of a Christian 
 Emperor to make over the institutions of the Empire 
 after the Christian model ; at the very least, to make 
 himself the official defender of the faith. We have 
 seen how this view became idealized in Augustine's 
 
228 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 " City of God " ; and how it was expanded into the 
 conception of a spiritual Empire, co-ordinate with the 
 military dominion of Rome, we have heard from the 
 lips of Leo. We have followed, for the space of more 
 than three centuries, the conquests of that idea. We 
 have now to see the form it takes, as the period of 
 conquest is passed ; as the task of Christianity comes 
 to be the shaping out of a political constitution, and 
 the administration of secular power. 
 
 Our immediate object of study, then, is the Empire 
 which came into being at the end of the eighth cen- 
 tury. It is, in a very accurate sense, the goal towards 
 which organized Christianity has been tending for 
 about five hundred years. The great historic figures 
 of Constantine and Charlemagne stand — as in the 
 stately porch of St. Peter's — at the two extremities 
 of the course. As to the series of events that fill the 
 long interval, the task of the historian, from our point 
 of view, is to set forth as well as he can the motive 
 and spirit of the great Christian leaders. This is per- 
 haps not very difficult. We see pretty clearly what 
 was the ideal of society and life as they conceived it; 
 and, on the whole, we may fairly say that they v kept 
 that ideal pretty steadily in view, as the real aim of 
 their policy and conduct. 
 
 We are not quite so clear in our view of the great 
 social revolution now to be described. The circum- 
 stances are more perplexed. The motives are more 
 mixed. The responsibility of power compels a new 
 standard of judgment. Great events (such as the 
 conflicts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) 
 resulting from that revolution throw back their 
 
IMPERIAL ROME. 229 
 
 own light, sometimes very painfully, on the actors 
 in it. 
 
 Still, in the main, we must follow the same rule, — 
 to put ourselves in their place as well as we can. We 
 must not judge that new Christian alliance of Church 
 and Empire by the shape it actually took at any given 
 time ; still less by the horrible abuses, the travesties, 
 the corruptions, that came about long generations 
 after, which are too often the only material offered 
 for our judgment. 
 
 Nor, on the other hand, should we be misled by the 
 purely ideal and abstract way of regarding it which 
 we find in Dante, and in the great speculative church- 
 men who were his teachers. All that will come be- 
 fore our notice in due time. But, just now, we must 
 do it the justice of seeing it from the point of view of 
 the men who were the living actors in it. We must 
 take into our regard their ideal, as well as their very 
 coarse and hard surroundings, and the equally coarse 
 and hard temper bred by the passions of the struggle. 
 We must see, if we can, what they thought ought to 
 be done, what they thought could be done, and what 
 they really tried to do. 
 
 Now we must bear in mind — besides the ideal of 
 human society itself, which they held then, or which 
 we hold now — that there was before their eyes a 
 form of government actual, irresistible, invincible, 
 and by its innumerable agents present everywhere. 
 This was the government of Imperial Rome. We 
 must not underrate the importance of that fact, es- 
 pecially the powerful charm it always held upon 
 their imagination. " The peace of the Empire " was 
 
230 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 to them more than a phrase. For about two centu- 
 ries, from Augustus to Commodus, it had been the 
 symbol of a certain authority of law, a security of life, 
 a frequency and easiness of intercourse, a central, 
 controlling, and on the whole beneficent majesty, — 
 strongly relieved against old memories of conflict 
 everywhere, against the more dismal horror of the 
 century's civil war in Eome, the desolation, violence, 
 and fear men associated with outlying barbarism.* 
 The dominion of Eome, haughty and superb, included 
 all they knew of culture, art, splendor, civil order ; 
 all they thought of as lawful authority and power. 
 All the sanctities which ancient life had known, such 
 as they w T ere, had come to be embodied in that aw r ful 
 and supreme dominion. 
 
 Eome had been prefigured, too, in prophecy, as last 
 of the four great kingdoms of the earth ; and so its 
 name had to the Christian as well as the Pao;an mind 
 something of a superhuman spell. It might perse- 
 cute and afflict the subjects of the Church, as under 
 the best of emperors, Trajan and Aurelius. It might 
 attempt to extirpate them as enemies and traitors, as 
 under the worst of tyrants, Nero and Galerius. It 
 might stand to them as the visible type of Antichrist, 
 a kingdom of Satan, to be presently overthrown, as in 
 the imagination of St. Augustine. But even then 
 there was something about it of sanctity and awe. 
 Martyrs of the faith testified on one side to its cor- 
 ruption and iniquity ; but at the same moment legions 
 
 * See the very touching illustrations of this feeling given in 
 Hodgkin's "Italy and her Invaders," Vol. II. pp. 505-508. Com- 
 pare Claudian, In Rufinum, ii. 86-100. 
 
ROME AND THE BARBARIAN. 231 
 
 of Christian soldiers — as the " thundering legion " of 
 Aurelius — were righting in its defence. Their abso- 
 lute loyalty to it in idea and in theory is as strongly 
 marked as their absolute courage in defying its power 
 and enduring its torture. We must bear in mind, 
 then, that the Empire of Borne stood to them, as it 
 was exhibited by Leo the Great and as it stands to 
 the Catholic mind to-day, the type of sovereignty, — 
 irresistible, august, divine. 
 
 Again, we must think of this wide and powerful 
 dominion as it commanded the homage and vague 
 awe of barbarous tribes, who knew it only at a dis- 
 tance. They were not wanting in intelligence, any 
 more than in courage. Their imagination was all the 
 more apt to be overawed, since nothing could offer 
 itself for comparison with that mysterious source of 
 power whose effects they felt. The weakness of bar- 
 barism before it was not lack of bravery, or lack of 
 men, or even lack of discipline. It was lack of organ- 
 ization on a large scale. Wherever the barbarian 
 came in contact with it, or heard of it by remotest 
 rumor, — in African waste, or Parthian wild, or Ger- 
 man wood, — it was always and everywhere the same 
 Bo man eagle he met, the same compact force of 
 small,* tough, swarthy, nervous, disciplined, indom- 
 itable men, all trained alike to obey and to die for 
 that distant, dim abstraction, the Eternal City. He 
 met the same type of commander, — patient, resolute, 
 hardy : like Caesar, snatching a shield from a common 
 
 * " Men of such petty size (tantuke staturce) : for our littleness is 
 mostly held in contempt among the Gauls, in comparison with 
 their own bigness." — Caesar, B. G., ii. 30. 
 
232 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 soldier, to fight without helm or breastplate in the 
 van ; like Hadrian, bare-headed and on foot in the hot 
 dust of Egypt or the forests of Gaul, — and always 
 obedient to the spell of that invincible Name. 
 
 This, I say, must have been the effect on men's 
 imagination of those five hundred years of conquest ; 
 of those eight centuries during which no armed enemy 
 had entered the Roman gate ; of that genius for organ- 
 ization which created the same type of rule, obeyed 
 the same symbol of authority, established the same 
 code of law, wherever a Eoman force got footing on 
 the soil. The spell was all the stronger, because the 
 source of that authority was something mysterious, 
 vague, unseen. Or, if a barbarian embassy or captive 
 chief came to visit the Imperial City, the great circuit 
 of the walls and their invincible strength, the splen- 
 dor, wealth, and luxury, the strange spectacle of civil 
 order among a vast city population, could only, by 
 report of them, deepen and confirm the spell. Thus 
 for three centuries, while Gaul and Goth made the 
 chief strength of Eoman armies, no Gaul or Goth 
 conceived a thought of disloyalty to the Eoman name, 
 or of substituting his own authority for that he served 
 under. So Alaric was haunted by a voice, he said, 
 that gave him no quiet day or night, commanding him 
 to assault and capture Eome ; * but first he led his 
 soldiers six years up and down in Italy, as if held off 
 by the potent charm, and when at last he had taken 
 
 * " Non somnia nobis, 
 Nee volucres, sed clara palam vox erlita luco est : 
 Rnmpe omnes, Alarice moras ! hoc impiger anno, 
 Alpibus Italian ruptis, penetrabis ad Urbem." 
 
 Claudian, De Bello Getico, 546, 547. 
 
THE EMPIRE, SYMBOL OF SOVEREIGNTY. 233 
 
 the city and plundered it, within a year he was dead, 
 and his force dispersed. So Radagaisus, with his vast 
 host, had perished, lingering about Florence on his 
 way to the assault of Rome. So Attila, the " scourge 
 of God," had been deterred by the peaceable embassy 
 of Leo, who warned him of the sudden fate of all who 
 had offered violence to the holy city ; and the bar- 
 barian had yielded, saying that he saw behind the 
 venerable priest the apparition of an old man with a 
 terrible countenance and threatening gesture, — which 
 men thought was the Apostle Peter, but which we 
 may think was the spectre of the majesty of Rome ; 
 and, a few months later, he too died, choked by his 
 own blood. So Odoacer the Herulian giant, real 
 sovereign of Italy, to whom St. Severinus had foretold 
 dominion when he stooped to enter the hermit's hut, 
 held that dominion first as the loyal officer of the last 
 boy-tenant of the Roman throne, and then as " Patri- 
 cian " by appointment of the Eastern Emperor. So 
 Theodoric the Ostrogoth reigned thirty-three years 
 in Italy as representing the best training that the 
 Empire could give, and as guardian of the art and 
 culture that the Empire had been able to hand down. 
 The vague awe of Rome, as something mysterious, 
 far-off, and invincible, had thus stamped itself deep 
 on the barbarian mind. The Empire became the 
 symbol of superhuman, absolute, universal sovereignty, 
 so far as that mind could conceive such a thought ; 
 for which, indeed, no other symbol could possibly 
 occur. Accordingly — and it is one of the most curi- 
 ous traits of the barbarian mind — any badge of 
 authority, any military title, the official robe or coro- 
 
234 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 net bestowed by the Eoman Emperor long after the 
 Empire itself had been humiliated by disasters, dis- 
 sensions, and defeats, was prized by a Gothic or Frank- 
 ish chief as a dignity that no barbarian rank or mere 
 success of arms could possibly give. To go no further 
 back, the truculent Clovis, who did not scruple to 
 cleave the skull of foe or kindred with his own battle- 
 axe, took a serious and solemn delight in the title 
 Patrician sent him by the Emperor of the East ; he 
 clothed himself with the purple robe, paraded on 
 horseback with ring and coronet, and scattered with 
 his own hand among the crowd gold and silver coins 
 which he had caused to be struck, with the Emperor's 
 image on one side, and his own name as Consul and 
 Augustus on the other. Not that it added anything 
 to his power. As chief of the Frank confederacy he 
 was no doubt stronger, at any rate felt himself to be, 
 than Anastasius on his distant throne. But the patri- 
 cian rank and name gave him something that barbar- 
 ism could not give, — the prestige and sanction of an 
 authority linked with the memories and upheld by 
 the sanctities of a thousand years. 
 
 This reverence for Eoman prestige and authority 
 became a tradition with the Frankish house, alonsj 
 with their fierce zeal for the orthodox faith. And it 
 is curious to see, a few generations later, how the rude 
 affectation of Eoman dignity by the long-haired Mero- 
 vingian kings, who clad themselves in royal robes and 
 rode in state carriages drawn by oxen, ruined them 
 with their turbulent subjects ; who speedily adopted 
 for their kings such real chiefs as Charles Martel and 
 his shrewd, strong-handed son Pepin. So the long- 
 
DONATION OF PEPIN. 235 
 
 haired race of " do-nothing " sovereigns passed away, 
 and Pepin was crowned king by the hand of Boniface, 
 with the blessing of the Pope. Meanwhile the Em- 
 peror at Constantinople had since the fall of the 
 Western Empire held out the shadowy sceptre of 
 authority over Italy and the West, claiming the Pope 
 as subject. But Ravenna, his Italian capital, had 
 been swept up in the Lombard kingdom ; and Pepin, 
 who as the Pope's ally had beaten back the Lombards, 
 made over to the Pope the temporal rule of the terri- 
 tory about Rome. So the Head of the Church became 
 an Italian prince. The celebrated " Donation " of Pe- 
 pin thus founded the temporal sovereignty of the Pope 
 (755), which lasted eleven hundred years, till it was 
 absorbed, in 1870, into the new Kingdom of Italy. 
 
 This rapid recital is not meant for history, but to 
 give the point of view and the point of time we have 
 reached, at the moment of founding the Christian 
 Empire of the West. Our business is not with the 
 historical incidents, but with the policy, the aim, the 
 ideal, that lay in the mind of the actors ; that gave 
 direction to one of the most momentous revolutions 
 and shape to one of the greatest political constructions 
 that have been brought about in human affairs. 
 
 It is one of the happiest accidents of history that 
 associates the imposing personality of Charlemagne * 
 with this transition, and has made the title "great" 
 
 * It has come to be the fashion among historians to speak of 
 him simply by his personal name, Charles or Karl. But, as Head 
 of the revived Empire of the West, implying not only an actual 
 but a typical or ideal sovereignty, it seems best to retain that by 
 which he is most easily distinguished, which Mr. Freeman would 
 restrict to the Charlemagne of legend and romance. 
 
236 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 a part of the very name by which he is known. The 
 immediate circumstances that brought him to the 
 spot where his colossal figure stands like a monument 
 at the boundary of two ages were tragic, even some- 
 what pitiful, as most things look when seen too 
 nearly. The revolution did not take place without 
 violence and parties in the Church. Leo III. had 
 been attacked in some street procession, dragged from 
 his horse, thrown into prison, and nearly killed by the 
 cruel hands that clumsily tried to blind him and cut 
 out his tongue, and so disqualify him by personal mu- 
 tilation from holding the priestly office. He had taken 
 refuge with Charles in France; and the strong hand 
 of Charles had set him back securely in his place. 
 
 The next year — it was Christmas, of the year 800 
 — Charles visited him in Rome; and, as he knelt at 
 the high altar of St. Peter's in the vesper service, Leo 
 put on his head the imperial crown, and the people 
 joined in the salutation : To Charles crowned of God 
 Augustus, great and peace-giving Emperor of the Ro- 
 mans, life and victory ! This was the first act of con- 
 secration of the " Holy Roman Empire," whose course, 
 parallel with that of the Church, fills the central space 
 of mediaeval history, and whose stately name, veiling 
 a thin phantom of its authority, was not abolished 
 till after more than a thousand years, when Xapoleon 
 compelled Francis of Austria to abdicate the title, 
 holding himself, by force of his own arm, to be the 
 true and legitimate successor of Charlemagne. 
 
 At heart, Charles was no Roman patrician, but a 
 German chief. He delighted in border forays and 
 border tales. He gathered with a careful fondness 
 
CHAELEMAGNE. 237 
 
 the native German ballads. He lived the free life of 
 a huntsman in the woods, when not in the stir of 
 camp or court. He ranged incessantly from place to 
 place in his wide ill-defined dominion, choosing for 
 his capital not the royal town of Paris, much less 
 Eome, but Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), near his most 
 turbulent frontier, where he died, and where his sep- 
 ulchre remains until this day. He bore with an ill 
 grace the theatrical pomps and splendors of his office, 
 — unless it might be to rival in public ceremonial 
 the state of some distant sovereign whose embassy 
 was waiting on him. Only twice in his life he put 
 on the cumbrous robes of Eoman majesty, preferring 
 the Gallic trousers and the loose sheep-skin jacket of 
 his easy-going home-life. 
 
 He chafed, too, under the rigid rules of church-dis- 
 cipline, — that is, if he submitted to it at all. His 
 household was no model of manners or morals ; he 
 was at best an easy, fond, indulgent father, with a 
 heart more large than wise ; and he never quite gave 
 up the qnasi-polygamy which had made the old 
 scandal of Frankish chiefs. His broad, bluff, generous 
 humor, too, no doubt scandalized and perplexed his 
 spiritual instructors ; though there was nothing that 
 kept him nearer the heart of his own people, or that 
 we find it easier to pardon : no precisian or martinet, 
 but a large-souled and whole-souled man. 
 
 To these traits we should add the immense exter- 
 nal activity of his long reign : * relief of Eome from 
 Lombard pressure, till that kingdom was extinguished 
 in 774 ; war against the Saracens in Spain, where the 
 * Of forty-six years, extending in all from 768 to 814. 
 
238 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 hero Roland, favorite of romance, fell in the retreat 
 at Eoncesvalles ; thirty-three campaigns across the 
 Rhine, mainly against the pagan Saxons, who were 
 not reduced till after forty-five hundred prisoners 
 had been slaughtered in one bloody act of reprisal, 
 and ten thousand families, a third of the population, 
 dispersed in colonies in the heart of France. So the 
 conqueror finished what the monk began. 
 
 The toils of war are even outdone by the restless 
 industry of his" administration. This shows the 
 minute organizing of a civilized state, just emerging 
 from rude disorder. He orders tithes to be given to 
 the churches ; standard weights and measures to be 
 kept ; vines to be especially attended to ; shelter for 
 cattle, sheep, swine, and goats to be prepared in every 
 village. He gives special directions for the care of 
 stables, the curing of provisions, and the furnishing 
 of houses, not neglecting the condition of stock and 
 crops, or the price of eggs and poultry. He attends 
 to the keeping and training of hawks and hounds ; 
 directs the great wolf-hunts, when and how they shall 
 be carried on, the skins to be exhibited to him ; and 
 the housekeepers on his estates must understand 
 making cider, beer, and perry. I have counted a list 
 of more than a hundred herbs and fruit-trees which he 
 desires always to have kept in the imperial gardens* 
 Some of the largest stones used in building his own 
 cathedral at Aachen, it is said, he bent his sturdy 
 frame to bear. Messengers in his name must visit 
 every district four times a year, to correct or at least 
 report all irregularity. Every estate of a given size 
 * See the Capitulary De Villis Imperialibus, a. d. 812, § 70. 
 
PERSONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE EMPEROR. 239 
 
 must send one man to serve in the public defence. 
 Kules equally vigilant and precise lay down the duty 
 of the local clergy, or order periodical visits of the 
 bishop. He is as prompt to supersede a churchman 
 as an army officer, when found guilty of gross neglect.* 
 It is necessary to speak of these personal cares of 
 office, because the government had to be personal in 
 the strictest sense. Most likely, there was no other 
 mind clear enough to see the need, or conscience to 
 feel the burden, any more than there was another 
 hand strong enough to do the task. The weight of 
 that great personality is felt all the more, that his 
 empire fell to pieces so soon after his death. In one 
 sense it was premature, an experiment that had to 
 fail. The mere fact that he carried all that weight 
 would help to keep any other from growing up fit to 
 bear it after him. The real organization of European 
 society, which he attempted so heroically, had to 
 come about at a later age. The unwieldy empire 
 had to be broken up in fragments, so that a new 
 
 * Thus in the first of his Capitularies, §§ 6, 7 : " We ordain that, 
 according to the canons, every bishop shall give heed within his 
 own charge, that the people of God do no pagan rites; but that 
 they reject and put away all defilement of the gentiles, — profane 
 sacrifices for the dead, or fortune-tellers or diviners, or amulets 
 and charms, or incantations, or immolating of victims, which fool- 
 ish people do near churches with pagan rite in the name of holy 
 martyrs or confessors of the Lord ; who invite their saints rather 
 to wrath than mercy. We advise that each year every bishop 
 shall carefully visit his charge in circuit, and endeavor to confirm, 
 instruct, and watch the people, and forbid pagan rites, diviners, 
 fortune-tellers, auguries, amulets, incantations, and all defilements 
 of the gentiles." Churchmen are forbidden (Capit. Ann. 781) to 
 keep hawks or hounds, — the latter, lest those who appeal for char- 
 ity should be " torn by the bite of dogs." 
 
240 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 structure might strike innumerable roots into the 
 soil, and grow up in innumerable independent shoots. 
 The great need then was that the ideal of an orderly 
 and Christian State should be conceived in one pow- 
 erful mind, and its foundations should be laid by one 
 strong hand. The events of Charles's reign, and its 
 inordinate activities, are the mere incidents and sur- 
 roundings of the great work he really did, in creating 
 such an ideal of Christian sovereignty. 
 
 That this ideal lay very close to his heart, and was 
 always present to his thought, — whatever the defects 
 of its carrying-out, — appears in one very interesting 
 trait recorded by Eginhard. " He took delight," he 
 says, " in the books of St. Augustine, and especially in 
 those which are entitled Of the City of God" which 
 were read to him at meal-time. Those books, it is 
 true, do not give any plan or pattern of a Christian 
 State to be realized on earth, such as we might pos- 
 sibly expect. But they set forth with great em- 
 phasis the contrast of right and wrong, of the state 
 sacred and profane. They put in strong light the 
 corruption and violence that had destroyed the Pagan 
 Empire ; they bring into equal relief the virtues of 
 the Divine Kingdom, and the peace that grows out 
 of them. They set forth vividly the warning given in 
 the fall of Eome, crushed under its own vices and 
 feuds long before the assault of barbarian arms. 
 And, from the hint just given, as well as from the 
 incessant coupling of religious things with secular in 
 his laws, it is likely that these lessons and these 
 warnings had been taken very much to heart by 
 Charles, in his reflections on the duties of empire. 
 
THE IMPERIAL IDEA. 241 
 
 We may see the same thing, perhaps, in his shrink- 
 ing from those duties and from the name of Emperor. 
 His coronation took him by surprise. He protested, 
 says his biographer, that he would not have gone to 
 the church that day, if he had known what Leo had 
 in store for him. Possibly his sagacity foresaw the 
 use that would be made of that act by Leo's succes- 
 sors, to bolster up their enormous claim that the 
 Empire itself was in their gift, to bestow or revoke as 
 their policy might demand. It has been noticed that 
 an interval of more than a year passed, before he 
 claimed allegiance as Emperor ; and then he stays to 
 explain " how many and how great things are com- 
 prehended in that vow : not merely, as many even 
 now suppose, to the lord Emperor in his own lifetime, 
 and not to bring any enemy for hostility within his 
 realm, and not take part in or conceal any one's infi- 
 delity towards him ; but that every man may know 
 that this vow has bearing direct upon himself " ; and 
 so he goes on, in forty chapters, to recite a whole 
 code of civil and religious duty.* 
 
 That rude time could not show any very flattering 
 fulfilment of such an ideal. But there is no question 
 that the reign of Charlemagne did very much to 
 stamp that conception on the general mind ; to make 
 it part of the notion of what a state should be, as well 
 as to enshrine him in memory as a sort of model sov- 
 ereign. There have been many emperors and kings 
 who have come nearer the commonly received pat- 
 tern of Christian living ; but not one so dignified or 
 idealized in the imagination of the world. The Church 
 
 * See the 24 Sections of the Capitulary dated at Aachen, 802. 
 11 p 
 
242 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 puts him in the next rank to saintship, and in some 
 countries he has been frankly reverenced as a saint. 
 Miracles are recorded to have been wrought at his 
 tomb. Within a century of his death he is made the 
 hero of legend and marvel, and volumes of popular 
 romance already gather about his name. His mili- 
 tary adventures are transfigured to make him the 
 ideal Champion of Christendom, carrying his con- 
 quests as far as Jerusalem, as the great typical Cru- 
 sader. And he is so appealed to in the oration by 
 which Urban II. stirred the multitude at Clermont to 
 the first Crusade (1094). 
 
 The real man, in his hearty humor, his rude sports, 
 his cordial loves and enmities, and his serious wish 
 to do his work, is a much more interesting person 
 than this fabulous ideal. His traits are known to us, 
 as few men's are of a former age, by personal descrip- 
 tion and admiring anecdote. I copy here a few 
 sentences from his friend, favorite secretary, and 
 biographer, Eginhard, — the hero of the romantic tale 
 which tells how he won the love of his sovereign's 
 stalwart daughter, and how she once carried him on 
 her shoulder from a stolen visit, lest his footsteps 
 should betray him in the new-fallen snow : — 
 
 " In eloquence he was copious and ample, well able 
 to express plainly whatever he would. Not content 
 with his native speech, he bestowed pains in learning 
 foreign tongues. Latin he could speak as well as his 
 mother tongue ; Greek he could understand better than 
 pronounce. He was so ready of speech that one might 
 think him a schoolmaster. He studiously cherished 
 liberal arts, and bestowed the highest honors on the 
 
CARE OF EDUCATION AND CULTURE. 243 
 
 teachers of them. A great deal of time and labor he 
 spent in learning rhetoric and logic, and particularly 
 astronomy. He learned the art of reckoning, and with 
 eager curiosity would trace the path of the stars. He 
 made attempts to write, and used to carry tablets or 
 bits of bark, or keep them under his pillow, that he 
 might practise his hand at odd times in shaping out the 
 letters ; but this late and unseasonable effort had poor 
 success. As long as health permitted, he promptly 
 attended church, morning and evening, even in the 
 night at time of service, and took great care that all 
 should be done decently and in order ; and with great 
 diligence he improved the style of reading and chant- 
 ing. He was well skilled in both; though he never 
 read in public himself, and only sang softly, and in con- 
 cert with others." 
 
 Some copies add that he furnished eight hundred 
 and eighty-six churches at his own expense, and 
 restored in all three thousand seven hundred. He 
 gathered about him learned men and artists, tiring 
 them out with his incessant activity (says Guizot), 
 and through them giving strong impulse to every form 
 of culture. His imperial title challenged the regard 
 of other powers. Irene, reigning Empress of Con- 
 stantinople, proposed to unite East and West by mar- 
 riage, having already been the death of her husband 
 and son ; an alliance which Charles discreetly but 
 firmly declined. From Haroun-al-Easchid, Caliph of 
 Bagdad, he received an embassy, bringing, along with 
 command of the Holy Places, rich Oriental gifts, — 
 the first elephant ever seen in France,* with a Moorish 
 lion, a Numidian bear, eastern spiceries and drugs, " so 
 * It arrived at Aachen, July 16, 812. 
 
244 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 that the East might be thought to be stripped to fur- 
 nish out the West"; a set of chessmen, said to be still 
 preserved, and a clock of curious skill. * These em- 
 bassies marked a period of almost universal peace. 
 Free passage for western pilgrims was given to the 
 Holy Land. A fair was held yearly at Jerusalem for 
 a fortnight, and arts of peace flourished from India to 
 the farthest West. 
 
 From the Ebro to the Danube, the limits of 
 Charles's empire, the local names, it is said, inces- 
 santly recall his memory ; while to write his history 
 cme should know at once the mountain-passes of 
 Spain and the Alps, the Lombard towns, the old 
 monuments of France, and the legends of the Ehine. 
 His traditional beard and sceptre are travestied in 
 the popular figure of the King at cards, f Or, to see 
 the same figure on a larger canvas, barbarian tribes 
 (it is said) in their rude traditions keep the memory 
 of three great conquerors — Timour the Tartar, Alex- 
 ander, and Charlemagne. 
 
 But the interesting and instructive thing to us is 
 to see how far we have got in the development of the 
 Christian idea. And we find that we have got so far 
 as this. Organized Christianity has completed its 
 period of struggle and conquest. It has definitely 
 
 * At the twelve figures were twelve little doors, which opened 
 successively, letting drop so many balls to strike the hour ; and 
 when the circle was finished, a row of little knights in ivory 
 passed round and closed them all. The last two are not included 
 in the documents of the Monumenla Carolina. 
 
 t The game was invented to cheer the moody insanity of 
 Charles VI. of France ; and this unhappy prince, it is said, always 
 crossed himself when he touched the picture of the emperor-saint. 
 
LATER FORTUNES OF THE EMPIRE. 245 
 
 superseded those old forms of Pagan society which 
 had tried so hard to destroy it. What was worth 
 saving in those old forms it has adopted into itself : 
 something of the old art and culture, all the old ex- 
 ecutive and organizing skill. It has persevered, with 
 incredible energy and patience, till the intelligence 
 and heart of pagan barbarism have been brought dis- 
 tinctly to accept the Christian ideal and the Christian 
 law. That law and that ideal it has now succeeded 
 in implanting in the thought and embodying in the 
 institutions of an Empire which distinctly adopts 
 them as its own. This one moment has been achieved 
 of absolute coincidence and harmony between the two 
 great powers, spiritual and temporal, that together 
 rule the world. It is but for a moment ; but it marks 
 the passage to the next great era, when the task is 
 no longer conquest, but administration ; when it is 
 not an army or a campaign we have to do with, but 
 a government and a constitution. 
 
 A word remains to be said of the fortunes of the 
 Christian Empire founded by Charlemagne. That 
 perfect harmony of interest and motive between 
 Church and State which made its ideal* could be at 
 best but for a moment of unstable equilibrium. On 
 one side violences and passions thinly covered, on the 
 other natural jealousies and honest fears, were enough 
 to dissolve an alliance which was the harder to keep 
 the closer it had been knit. These are fatal dissolv- 
 ing forces in all human things. But, besides these, a 
 
 * This ideal theory of sovereignty makes the argument of Dante's 
 De Monarchid. It is amply stated and illustrated in Bryce's " Holy 
 Koman Empire," pp. 102-108 (7th ed.). 
 
246 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 great political revolution was impending, which the 
 Church must have seen with terror ; which it met, at 
 any rate, with masterly determination and craft. The 
 constitution that made its political scheme through 
 seven centuries was founded on forged decretal and 
 canon law. Its theory was Sacerdotalism, the abso- 
 lute sanctity, immunity, and authority of the priestly 
 Order. True to that theory, it would have overridden 
 and absorbed all other power whatsoever. It would 
 have established a universal Empire, supreme to 
 men's thought in heaven, earth, and hell, and so 
 laid mankind helpless at the feet of ecclesiastical 
 absolutism. 
 
 When the political fabric that Charles had pain- 
 fully built together was broken up, in the great 
 change we call the rise of Feudalism, the Church held 
 to its theory ; and, after an age of incredible corrup- 
 tion and disorder, declared open war upon the State. 
 The Empire, which was in theory one, holy, and indis- 
 soluble, ally and partner with the Church in the great 
 work of civilization, was matched against it in an ob- 
 stinate and bitter struggle of near two hundred years. 
 Its title of " Holy Eoman Empire," and its claim to 
 dominion over Italy, were maintained by a long line 
 of German kings. The proudest-tempered of them 
 all, Henry IV., wore himself out to beggary and death 
 (1073-1106) in a struggle with Hildebrand and the 
 successors trained in the school of Hildebrand. The 
 greatest of them all, Frederick Barbarossa, bent his 
 stubborn will to beg peace of Alexander III., and 
 his terrible Italian campaigns closed in the dra- 
 matic scene of his humiliation before the Pope at 
 
SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL SOVEREIGNTY. 247 
 
 Venice (1177). The most brilliant and accomplished 
 of them all, Frederick II., found himself thwarted 
 and foiled at every hand by that stern old man, of 
 nearly ninety, who ruled as Gregory IX. (1227-1241), 
 and held him under the invisible spell of excommuni- 
 cation. 
 
 That close alliance of Church and Empire was a 
 dream, out of which both awoke, to find themselves 
 deadly enemies. It need not have been so, perhaps, 
 if the boundaries of secular and spiritual power had 
 been more clearly drawn and honestly kept. Un- 
 questionably, the Empire observed those bounds bet- 
 ter than its ghostly rival. There was a political order, 
 a secular justice, a national independence, which in 
 good faith it made many efforts to establish. Tempo- 
 ral sovereignty, dealing with secular conditions only, 
 may be fairly just ; spiritual sovereignty, in human 
 hands, is necessarily tyrannical. A theory of suprem- 
 acy was growing up within the Church, assiduously 
 developed, incessantly urged and pressed, resting on 
 the deep foundations of imagination and religious 
 fear, which held that all human government existed 
 only by its sufferance ; which would have made any 
 independence in the State, nay, any decent secular 
 government at all, impossible. 
 
 Such as it was, however, after the fall of the great 
 imperial houses, the Holy Roman Empire retained 
 almost to our own day something of its sanctity and 
 prestige. A few great names — the names of Rodolph 
 and Sigismund, of Maximilian and Charles the Fifth 
 — illustrate its later fortunes. But in the great 
 dynastic wars and political revolutions its splendor 
 
248 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 steaclil} 7 faded out. Other forces held the field. Dig- 
 nity was left it when its strength decayed. A phan- 
 tom of authority long survived the substance of power. 
 And no shock was felt in the political system when 
 Napoleon, who had seized the imperial name as the 
 symbol of his conquests, compelled the last heir of 
 Augustus, of Constantine, of Charlemagne, to abdi- 
 cate the title in 1806, and the Holy Eoman Empire 
 was no more. 
 
XII. 
 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 I 1ST a poetical " Lament " on the division of the Em- 
 pire after the death of Louis the Pious, the 
 writer speaks of the good time past, when " a noble 
 realm wore its bright diadem as a wreath ; when there 
 was one Prince, and one subject people ; when all cities 
 flourished under one law and judgment; citizens were 
 bound in peace, the enemy repelled by their valor " ; 
 when " the cherishing care of the priesthood was emu- 
 lous in its task ; in frequent councils insuring right- 
 eous laws to the people ; and the word of salvation 
 sounded from far to a holy clergy, to noble prin- 
 ces, and to common men " ; when " everywhere young 
 men learned the book of God, and children's hearts 
 drank in the art of letters." * 
 
 * Floras Diaconus, Querela de Divisione Imperii post mortem Ludo- 
 vici Pii : — 
 
 Floruit egregio claro diademate regnum ; 
 Princeps unus erat, populus quoque subditus unus. 
 Lex simul et judex totas ornaverat urbes ; 
 Pax cives tenuit, virtus exterruit hostes. 
 Alma sacerdotum certatim cura vigebat, 
 Conciliis crebris, populis pia jura ministrans. 
 Hinc sacris cleris, hinc plebibus eximiisque 
 Principibus late resonabat sermo salutis. 
 Discebant juvenes divina volumina passim ; 
 Littereas artes puerorum corda bibebant. 
 11* 
 
250 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 Nothing so softens our notion of that rude time as 
 to be reminded in this way that there were tender 
 thoughts and vigilant care, then as now, concerning 
 the education of the young. The time which this 
 Christian poet looks back on regretfully was when 
 the schools flourished under the vigorous impulse of 
 Charlemagne himself, or were continued by his son ; 
 when they made, in one sense, the crowning work of 
 that Christian Empire which stood in men's minds as 
 the ideal of sovereignty. 
 
 The great Emperor had, in fact, not only made his 
 court the head-quarters of learning at that day, sparing 
 no cost to bring together eminent scholars like Alcuin 
 and Eginhard ; but he took delight in directing him- 
 self the instruction of children, examined their classes, 
 heard their essays, promised rewards to the diligent, 
 or menaced the idle with the loss of all his favor ; and 
 even undertook the task of superintending or (it is 
 said) practising with his own hand the copying and 
 elaborate ornamentation of manuscripts. Under the 
 same powerful impulse, a great work of editing went 
 on ; and famous writings were cleared of the blots 
 and blunders that had grown upon them in the ruder 
 times that went before. So that we have to look upon 
 this period as an early revival of letters. It gathered 
 up on one hand whatever could be gathered from the 
 past; and, on the other, it planted the seeds of a 
 new, vigorous, and remarkable growth of independent 
 thought. 
 
 o 
 
 These two views, then, remain to be taken of the 
 Christian Schools of the ninth century : first, looking 
 to the past, as they represented the learning and cul- 
 
THE CLASSIC TRADITION. 251 
 
 ture of the barbaric age ; next, looking to the future, 
 as they opened the way to a new development of 
 thought. The first must be treated very briefly ; the 
 second, in a little more detail. 
 
 The first thing we have to conceive, then, as dis- 
 tinctly as we can, is the course of that unbroken 
 stream of tradition, which had floated down the germs 
 of ancient culture through what we call the Dark 
 Ages. So far as this term is a fit one to use at all, it 
 belongs to the period from the latter part of the fifth 
 century to near the end of the eighth ; that is, from 
 the time of Leo the Great to that of Charlemagne.* 
 In Leo's time, we saw the great vigor of the pagan 
 reaction in art and letters ; and we know the obsti- 
 nacy of the pagan tradition in the world of imagina- 
 tion and poetry, down to a very late clay. In fact, 
 what we call the classical school, as distinct from the 
 romantic, holds avowedly to that tradition, even now. 
 
 The reasons of this immense vitality of the pagan 
 classic thought lie deeper than we are apt to think. 
 It may perhaps be more accurate to say that they are 
 strown thicker upon the surface, and are more care- 
 fully worked into the soil, than we are apt to think. 
 If we subtract from the school system of the present 
 day what belongs properly to our own time, — as 
 modern history, science, and literature, — we still see 
 how great a space is left, in what most strongly affects 
 the habit of mind, to the purely traditional culture of 
 
 * The tenth century, it is true, is in a sort of eclipse, deeper 
 perhaps than the darkness of either of the preceding; but this 
 appears to be from moral or social causes rather than intellectual. 
 What we may call the Catholic philosophy had, at all events, been 
 well established in the ninth. 
 
252 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 ancient languages and formal grammar. We may- 
 even doubt whether the most powerful educational 
 influences, even now, do not run in the old channel, 
 in our own best schools and colleges. Every educa- 
 tional reformer has been astonished, if not staggered, 
 at the dead-weight of resistance he has encountered 
 from classic prejudice. 
 
 It is, really, the momentum of more than two thou- 
 sand years' unbroken tradition that we are dealing 
 with. The methods we use to-day, if not the same 
 with, were at least developed step by step from, the 
 methods of children's schools in Athens and in Eome. 
 Our best instruction in morals is exactly what we find 
 in Plato's Lysis; the forms of words, the logic of 
 structure, that we teach now, are the same that chil- 
 dren were drilled in, conscientiously, in the Eoman 
 imperial schools. The same rules and forms were 
 carefully instilled as school-rudiments, the same lit- 
 erary tradition was sacredly held fast, in all the ages 
 that followed. They were retained with a clinging 
 and (as it were) desperate tenacity through the bar- 
 barian times, as if there were some peculiar sanctity 
 in this one living link of connection with the ancient 
 splendor. When Eome was almost famished, beg- 
 gared, and depopulated, there was still heart left to 
 celebrate a literary holiday. On one occasion a new 
 poem — a versifying of the Book of Acts — had to be 
 recited in public seven times over, occupying many 
 days in all, to satisfy crowds that could not all hear at 
 once, and that insisted on the repeating of favorite 
 passages. And, as Eome impressed the barbarian 
 imagination in other ways, so it imposed respect for 
 
CASSIODORUS. 253 
 
 ancient letters, mixed possibly with a little awe. 
 When the Goths were masters of Italy, it was pub- 
 licly ordered (about 530) that the revenues of the 
 public schools should be untouched. All else was 
 fair plunder in the rage of conquest ; but the generous 
 barbarian would not take away what was to feed the 
 life of coming generations.* 
 
 It would not be hard, though it might be pedantic, 
 to trace the series of names that make an unbroken 
 chain through the centuries of barbarism. I shall 
 mention only two or three. 
 
 Cassiodorus, who lived, according to some accounts, 
 to the great age of a hundred (463-5 6 3), f has been 
 called the chief instructor of the barbarian world. He 
 more than any other is the visible link between the 
 old world of culture and the new. Till the age of 
 seventy he was the confidential minister of Theodoric 
 and his successor, Gothic kings of Italy ; and his cor- 
 respondence, under their names, is the best picture 
 we have of that period of change. In particular, there 
 are two letters addressed to BoethiusJ the honored 
 counsellor and afterwards the victim of Theodoric, 
 which give a lively notion of the skill and intelli- 
 gence of the age. One is in praise of music; one 
 commissions him to send gifts to a Burgunclian prince, 
 a sun-dial and a water-clock ; and he takes occasion 
 to enlarge on these marvels of science, as we might on 
 the electric light or the telephone. Evidently the 
 argument is addressed not to Boethius, the most cul- 
 
 * Cassiodorus, Epist, ix. 21. Compare Ozanam, Civilisation des 
 Francs. 
 
 t More probably 468-563. % Lib. i. 45 ; ii. 40. 
 
254 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 tivated man of his age, but to the imagination of rude, 
 eager, curious men, such as made up these nations of 
 invaders. In the tumult and ruin of the time, it is 
 pathetic to see this eager clinging to the wealth of in- 
 telligence and art that seemed drifting to hopeless 
 wreck. It was carrying on the same task in another 
 way, when in his old age Cassiodorus withdrew to a 
 monastery of Southern Italy, and spent his thirty re- 
 maining years in arranging, copying, correcting, restor- 
 ing the treasures of classic learning, and in preparing 
 the manuals of instruction that were of chief authority 
 in the schools for the next few centuries. 
 
 I have already spoken of the Christian poets of this 
 dark period — such as Prudentius, Sidonius, and For- 
 tunatus ; and of the pains they took to copy the form 
 and preserve the diction of the Roman writers. We 
 are apt, perhaps, to think of the Latin hymns, from 
 Ambrose down, in very simple measures, accented and 
 sometimes rhymed, as if they were the only poetry of 
 the time ; as if the classical model had quite perished. 
 Nothing, on the contrary, strikes us oftener or sooner 
 in looking through the body of the Christian litera- 
 ture, than the fond, abundant, often skilful handling 
 of the metres of Virgil and Horace : in simple hymns, 
 in narrative, in elegy, in familiar playful or occasional 
 address, — sometimes a little awkward in phrase, with 
 false quantities now and then that rasp the ear ; but 
 with serious painstaking that the literary art should 
 not be lost. These poetic essays belong to every cen- 
 tury, coming below the time and including the name 
 of Charlemagne himself, who was a diligent learner 
 in all arts of refinement, and whose epitaph on his 
 
CICERO AND VIRGIL. 255 
 
 personal and dear friend, Pope Adrian I. (to whom he 
 had renewed and extended his father's grant in 774), 
 is but a specimen of his very creditable skill.* 
 
 Doubtless, the value of this large body of Christian 
 verse is not chiefly what it is in itself as poetry. It 
 is rather a testimony to the faithful, patient, skilful 
 school-instruction that w^ent on from age to age. 
 There was no contempt of pagan letters. The grave 
 tone of Cicero's moral dialogues, and especially the 
 prophetic strain of Virgil's fourth eclogue, in which 
 he predicts a golden age of righteousness and peace, 
 wholly won the Christian heart. Virgil's, it was said, 
 was the golden key that opened to all classic antiquity 
 the door of the Mediaeval Church.f 
 
 Another thing is very noticeable in the large body 
 of early Christian literature, — that is, from the fifth 
 century to the ninth. It is the vast amount of com- 
 
 * If we were to set any date for the dying out of the classic 
 literary tradition, it would be that assigned in the "Lament" al- 
 ready quoted. It is not until now that letters are quite overlaid 
 by theology ; it is not till about five centuries later that that heavy 
 atmosphere has rolled quite away. 
 
 t This fondness for the name and memory of Virgil is illustrated 
 in a legend which tells how St. Paul, on landing at Puteoli, went 
 to pay his homage at the poet's tomb. The following verses are 
 said at one time to have been chanted in the cathedral of 
 Mantua : — 
 
 Ad Maronis mausoleum 
 Ductus.fudit super eum 
 Piae rorem lacrimse : 
 " Quern te " inquit " reddidissem, 
 Si te vivum invenissem, 
 Poetarum maxime ! 
 
 And the chapel above the tomb used to be pointed out as the spot 
 where Virgil went to hear mass. 
 
256 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 nient and homily on the books of Scripture, the only- 
 recognized authority in religion, history, or morals; 
 and especially dwelling on the historical record of 
 Scripture, all the way down from the Creation. In 
 itself this is not surprising in an age ignorant of 
 almost everything else. Still, one is led to think 
 there was a motive in thus incessantly directing the 
 mind of barbarian converts to the detail of Hebrew 
 annals, often far from edifying.* This motive we 
 shall find, if we reflect that those barbarians were 
 men, so to speak, without a past, — except it might 
 be a very near and bloody one. To the barbarian mind 
 the past closes up behind, like a bank of mist, hiding 
 all but a few distorted and exaggerated forms. Thus 
 — to take historic examples — the same Theodoric 
 whom Cassiodorus served, and the Brunehild who 
 figures in the recital of Gregory of Tours, become 
 mythologic hero and heroine in the Nibelungen ; or, to 
 go farther back, the same Odin who ranks chief among 
 the immortals in Scandinavian fable is held by some 
 writers to have been the purely human leader of a 
 migration out of Asia not many generations before. 
 
 This great void in the barbaric mind must be filled, 
 or this wild phantasmagory displaced, by the Chris- 
 tian tradition. The rude tribe-life must be bound by 
 religious association to the remotest past that could 
 be conceived then, and widened to the broadest fel- 
 lowship that might be consecrated by a common 
 origin. Such crude ethnology as their teachers could 
 
 * Ulfilas, in translating the Bible for his Gothic converts, omit- 
 ted " Samuel " and " Kings," since the barbarian passion for fight- 
 ing had no need of such stimulus or sanction. 
 
MILDNESS OF THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGY. 257 
 
 explain thus entered as an element in that long task 
 of education. 
 
 This is as convenient a place as any to state an 
 impression which flatly contradicts the notion some 
 of us have got from other sources, as to the spirit of 
 religious teaching in this period. The many volumes 
 — some scores of thousands of pages — of early 
 Catholic theology leave upon my mind a strong feel- 
 ing of surprise at finding so little appeal to the vulgar 
 terrors of the future world. I do not mean by this 
 that the doctrine implied all along was not as grim 
 and terrible as it has ever been. It is assumed, we 
 may say, as a matter of course, that there is no salva- 
 tion out of the true Church. It is taken for granted 
 that the penalty of sin or unbelief is everlasting 
 death, — or, a good deal worse, everlasting torment. 
 But this lurid background is a background merely. It 
 is not forced, as we might expect, upon the imagination 
 of the believer. Eather, it is made simply an appeal 
 to his conscience, and is, on the whole, greatly ob- 
 scured by the emphasis laid on other things. No 
 doubt cases might be quoted to qualify this state- 
 ment. A few are readily recalled : a rhetorical flour- 
 ish of Tertullian ; an appeal or two of the somewhat 
 harsh and gloomy Ambrose ; a chapter in Augustine's 
 " City of God " ; and a paragraph of some twenty lines 
 from a homily of Boniface to the barbarians, — hardly 
 a faint echo, all told, of the terrors of the Apocalypse. 
 But I should say (not as a fact, but as an impression) 
 that there is more " blood-theology " and " hell-fire " 
 — that is, the vivid setting forth of everlasting tor- 
 ment to terrify the soul — in one sermon of Jona- 
 
 Q 
 
258 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 than Edwards, or one harangue at a modern "re- 
 vival," than can be found in the whole body of 
 homilies and epistles through all the Dark Ages put 
 together. Purely speculative doctrine, such as the 
 Trinity or the Sacrament, is abundantly urged. No 
 emphasis can be strong enough to state the need of 
 strict accuracy of one's belief as to the most abstract, 
 mystic, unprovable, unintelligible points of faith, 
 with an implied menace of dreadful consequences to 
 the lack of faith. And the moral doctrine taught we 
 may often censure as overstrained and unwholesome, 
 or else coarse and low. But, set beside more modern 
 dispensations, the Catholic exposition of this period 
 is surprisingly merciful and mild. The Church had 
 other and better business in hand, than to add the 
 terrors of eternity to those of time, which were black 
 enough already. 
 
 The sacred task of education, with its strong im- 
 pelling motive, is brought even more vividly before 
 us in the next name on the list, that of " the Vener- 
 able Bede" (673-735). I wish there were time to go 
 a little into the detail of the sweet and patient labor 
 of his life, or at least to repeat the gentle and pathetic 
 story of his death. * Bede, or Baeda, with whom the 
 title " venerable " has grown to be almost part of his 
 name, is best known to us as the historian of the 
 Saxon Church, from Augustine of Canterbury to 
 within three years of his own death. That, however, 
 is only a chapter of his very voluminous works. 
 These include extended homilies and comments on 
 
 * It is well told in Green's " History of the English People " — 
 with some slight affectations of speech, as Mr. Green's manner is. 
 
BEDE. — ALCUIN. 259 
 
 almost all the Bible, and — more to our point — a 
 considerable treatise on the learning of the day. It 
 begins with an essay on Orthography, the essential 
 basis of true learning then, when trained proof-readers 
 there were none, and all accuracy of speech was in 
 danger of being lost by unskilful copyists. Then come 
 the rules of Metre ; and then a series of treatises on 
 the Beckoning of Time, — a very perplexed thing 
 when there was no true astronomy, and when so 
 many festivals turned on arbitrary reckoning. Thus 
 the topic includes the whole science of arithmetic as 
 then known, and such knowledge of the sun and 
 moon as could be given, and the cause of eclipses, 
 and expositions of the calendar ; and these lead, 
 again, to some simple lore of meteorology, and the 
 cause of thunder, and how tides are affected by the 
 moon. Certainly we have not much to learn of nat- 
 ural science from these crude essays of near twelve 
 centuries ago. But we see, at least, that there were 
 leisure and intelligence to observe such things ; and 
 again we honor the high aim and motive of these 
 pious teachers. 
 
 The next name brings us down to the time we 
 have been looking back from. Alcuin, most famous 
 of all these teachers and men of learning, was born 
 in the year of Bede's death, and died ten years before 
 his friend and pupil Charlemagne (735-804). He 
 also was an Englishman, caught on his return from 
 Italy by the all-embracing Empire, and detained for 
 his life-work at Charles's court, or at his monastery- 
 school in Tours. He is the author of a great many 
 of the pious and occasional verses I have mentioned ; 
 
260 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 and it is a little odd to hear him address the king as 
 " my David," speak of himself as " Flaccus," and call 
 his other friends by such names as " Homer " and the 
 rest. Some of his letters and one or two dialogues 
 turn on " enigmas," or plays upon words, riddles, and 
 quaint forms of speech. These sportive efforts do not 
 much disturb his gravity : the wit we may call pon- 
 derous and slow, the gravity genuine and sincere. 
 His correspondence is a very long one, and includes 
 some of our most curious pictures of the time. But 
 you are more struck with the great share it gives to 
 serious counsel : at least a third are letters of advice ; 
 at least half, if we include all the appeals to religious 
 and moral motive. Cheerful in the main, and always 
 showing how close to his heart is the thou«-ht of 
 friendship, he never forgets, or lets you forget, that 
 he is first of all a teacher. His longest dialogue, and 
 most vivacious,* is a compend of Latin grammar. 
 
 The above names do not give us the history, but 
 they will serve to illustrate the course, of the Chris- 
 tian Schools down to the time of Charlemagne. One 
 thing in particular should be noticed in regard to 
 them. They are strictly schools of instruction, not 
 of investigation or of philosojDhic thought. Their 
 foundation is wholly on precedent, or else on dogma. 
 Their task is simply to co-operate with the Church in 
 its great work of civilization. Their instructions they 
 take unquestioning from the Church, when not given 
 outright in the literary tradition. A little they may 
 
 * Except an entertaining chapter of quirks and repartees in a 
 conversation between Alcuin and the boy Pepin, son of Charle- 
 magne 
 
MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT UNDER THE EMPIRE. 261 
 
 have done in the development of doctrine : as when 
 Bede comments on the texts of Paul, or Alcuin dis- 
 cusses the Adoptian heresy.* Aside from such in- 
 stances as these, we do not find a ray of original 
 thought or independent speculation in what has 
 proceeded from any of these schools. Their great 
 teachers were content to be learners, f Their work was 
 to instruct the childhood of a powerful race, and thus 
 prepare the way for what it should do in its maturity. 
 
 This task of preparation may be said to have come 
 to a natural term with the formation of the Christian 
 Empire. That event marks, in a sense, the political 
 manhood of the race ; and, in a sense still more qual- 
 ified, its mental emancipation. It will be found, in 
 the history of literature, that the chief productive 
 periods of the human mind have generally come a 
 little after some great political event, or series of 
 events, that powerfully appealed to men's imagina- 
 tion ; that shifted their mental bearings, so to speak, 
 and compelled them to see all things in a new light. 
 So it was with the age of Pericles, in the generation 
 next after the great Persian war. So it was with 
 the Augustan age, following the collapse of parties in 
 Eome. So it was with the Elizabethan age, following 
 the violent shocks of the Eeformation. The ninth 
 century was no such brilliant period of literature and 
 
 * See below, page 262. 
 
 t Their modest course of preparatory instruction was the 
 Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic; their narrow circle of 
 the sciences was the Quadrivium : Arithmetic, Geometry, Astron- 
 omy and Music ; as in the memorial verses : — 
 *^ Gram, loquitur; Dia. vera docet; Rhet. verba colorat ; 
 ' Mas. canit ; Ar. numerat ; G. ponderat ; As. colit astra. 
 
262 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 art as those ; yet its great fertility and comparative 
 independence of intellect are naturally and justly to 
 be associated with the momentous revolution in the 
 State before described. 
 
 An occasion as well as a cause, however, is to be 
 sought for any marked phase of mental activity ; and 
 the nature of the occasion will determine the charac- 
 ter of the phase. In this case, what we notice is a 
 remarkable and sudden development of speculative 
 philosophy, running in the old channels of theology, 
 but widely overflowing its banks, and forming the 
 head-water of streams that continued a great way 
 farther down. 
 
 And for this we find not one occasion only, but 
 two. The controvers}^ with the Adoptionists, which 
 was carried on at Frankfort in 794, and determined 
 five years later at Aachen, had served to launch the 
 Western mind upon the shoreless sea of transcenden- 
 tal metaphysics. In itself, the Adoptian heresy * was 
 a form of Nestorianism which need not detain us 
 here. It was developed in Spain by contact with the 
 rigid and unimaginative monotheism of the Arabs, 
 intolerant of mystic speculation ;f and had been car- 
 
 * Making Christ son of God by adoption. 
 
 t Another view, given by Peyrat (Les Re'formaleurs an I2me Steele), 
 is, that the view of Christ called " Adoptian " — and, in general, 
 the " Arianism " of the German tribes — was derived from no Ori- 
 ental source, but was native to the Gothic races which now occu- 
 pied the country near the Pyrenees. It was a view which might 
 naturally take the place of their belief in Balder, son of Odin, who 
 had suffered death from the machinations of the Adversary, but 
 was to return as Prince of a coming reign of peace. In this view, 
 Christ was not made out of nothing (as held by Arius), but was Son 
 of God, so to speak, in the ordinary sense. 
 
DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. 263 
 
 ried over into France, to the perplexity of the priest- 
 hood and the confusion of unsophisticated faith. It 
 was easily vanquished in the church councils of that 
 pious time ; but left a mental unrest that would be 
 sure to show itself in some other way. 
 
 That other way was soon found. In the course of 
 the Greek metaphysical discussions of the Trinity, 
 some three or four hundred years before, certain writ- 
 ings had turned up, said to be by Dionysius the Are- 
 opagite, the one educated man at Athens that had been 
 converted by Paul's address on Mars' Hill. Copies 
 of them had found their way into France, where, tra- 
 dition would have it, the same Dionysius had been 
 one of the first teachers of Christianity, and w r as, in 
 fact, the St. Denys whose name has rung since on so 
 many a French battle-field. Very little was known 
 of the contents, for these were in Greek ; and this, es- 
 pecially metaphysical Greek, few scholars of that day 
 were competent to understand. 
 
 Among the rest, a copy beautifully written and 
 adorned had been sent as a complimentary gift from 
 the Eastern Emperor Michael to Louis, son of Charle- 
 magne. It lay a good while in the imperial library, 
 unread, — as presentation copies sometimes will ; and 
 was overlooked in the disorders of Louis's unhappy 
 reign. But his son Charles, who goes in history by 
 the name of Bald, had inherited some of his mother's * 
 brilliant gifts and his grandfather's love of letters ; and 
 his court was the home of the most famous scholar of 
 his age, John the Scot, known in the history of phi- 
 
 * The Empress Judith. His medallion shows something too of 
 her beauty. 
 
264 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 losopliy as Scotus Erigena, that is, Irish-born .* For 
 the British schools of learning, and especially the Irish 
 schools, had been out of the reach of storms that blew 
 upon the Continent ; and we have already seen how 
 the English Becle, Winfried, and Alcuin had had a large 
 share in keeping up the tradition of letters in Europe. 
 
 Of all the Christian Latin writers, Scotus Erigena 
 was perhaps ablest up to this time, at any rate since 
 Augustine, and certainly the most independent in his 
 speculative temper. The poet, whose Lament I began 
 by quoting, calls him " a man vain of speech, and gar- 
 rulous, who has dared, forsooth, to define presumptu- 
 ously of the Divine foreknowledge and decree ; . dis- 
 puting by arguments of philosophy, without reason 
 rendered, or alleging any authority of. the Scriptures 
 or holy Fathers ; held in admiration, I hear, as a 
 scholar and man of learning ; who possesses all his 
 hearers and admirers with his empty wordiness and 
 windy talk, so that they no longer obey the authority 
 of holy Scripture or the Fathers, but follow rather his 
 fantastic babblings." This language sounds quite 
 familiar : the bigotry of ignorance, or theologic terror 
 of free thought, could not be more neatly expressed. 
 
 This famous scholar was set by Charles the Bald 
 (about 850) to interpret the obscure writings of the 
 
 * His was the famous repartee which illustrates the court man- 
 ners of those days. As he sat opposite Charles at dinner, he 
 offended the nicer code of French manners, — possibly, passing 
 his cup once too often, — which led the king to say, " What is the 
 difference between a Scot and a Sot ? " "Just a board's width," 
 lie instantly replied. [Quid distat inter Scotum et Sottum ? — Tabula 
 tantum]. At which the good-natured monarch laughed with the 
 rest. 
 
THE DIONYSIAN WRITINGS. 265 
 
 Alexandrian mystic who passed under the name of 
 Dionysius the Areopagite ; and it is not, perhaps, 
 unfair to ascribe the extraordinary freedom of his 
 own speculations to the intoxication of that contact. 
 
 Of the false Dionysius little need be said. He rep- 
 resents a line of independent tradition, that had come 
 down, parallel with the orthodox dogma, from the 
 early time of Gnosticism. It cropped out in many an 
 Eastern heresy. It had blended more or less in the 
 theology of many who did not forfeit their place of 
 honor in the Church. Origen was not held free from 
 the taint of it. Synesius, the famous " squire-bishop " 
 of Ptolemais, held his Platonism as clear as his ortho- 
 doxy, and in his letters to Hypatia he addresses her 
 as his teacher, his sister, his mother in philosophy. 
 Particularly it throve in those schools of New-Plato- 
 nists who tried to build up a spiritualized and diluted 
 Paganism. Their hazy speculations, their incessant 
 allegorizing, liken them to the Swedenborgians ; their 
 ecstasies and trances, giving them direct visions of 
 divine things, their animal magnetism and natural 
 magic, are the express counterpart of modern Spir- 
 itism. These acts, or nervous states, they had cul- 
 tivated as part of their philosophic piety; and they 
 make a curious double, reflex, or travesty of those high 
 forms of Christian mysticism that have appeared from 
 age to age. 
 
 In form, the Dionysian writings are fervently, we 
 might say emulously, Christian. Jesus is " a most 
 divine and super-essential soul"; the theosophic sys- 
 tem they teach is the revelation of the Eternal Word. 
 As we might anticipate, the Latin language reels and 
 12 
 
266 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 staggers in its effort to carry the weight of transcen- 
 dental speculation, to find its way in the mazes of in- 
 cessant allegory.* 
 
 Of the four Books, the first is on the " Celestial 
 Hierarchy," — one vast field of allegorizing on the 
 scripture symbols of angels and archangels, cherubim, 
 seraphim, thrones, powers, and dominions, that answer 
 to the Gnostic genealogies. The second gives the 
 "Ecclesiastical Hierarchy": that is, not of ranks and 
 orders in the Church, but (as I understand it) the re- 
 flex or parallel, as it were, of the celestial order in 
 variously gifted souls. The third, " on Divine Names," 
 deals with such topics as being, life, likeness, unlike-: 
 ness, motion, rest, and similar abstractions, setting 
 forth, in particular, that Evil is nothing in itself, nor 
 produced from anything that is, but is pure negation, 
 — a doctrine which seems to have had a profounder 
 effect than any other on the views of the translator. 
 A very brief book follows " On Mystical Theology," 
 closing with an astonishing period, in which all im- 
 aginable attributes are denied of the Universal Being, 
 which is above all possible conceptions of human 
 thought, as it is itself the crown of all things.! 
 
 * For example : " Ut ascendamus in deiformosissimam eorum 
 simplieitatem per mysticas reformatories, et simul omnis ierarchi- 
 cae scientia? principium laudabimus in divinitus preefata religi- 
 
 ositate et teletarchicis gratiarum actionibus Omnia igitur, 
 
 quae sunt, participant providentiam, ex superessentiali et causa- 
 lissima divinitate mana^em." — Lib. i. cap. 4. 
 
 t " Neque anima est, neque intellectus, neque phantasiam aut 
 
 opinionem aut verbum aut intelligentiam liabet quoniam 
 
 et super omnem positionem est perfecta et singularis omnium 
 causa, super omnem ablationem excellentia omnium simpliciter 
 perfectione, et summitas omnium." — Lib. iv. cap. 5. 
 
SCOTUS ERIGENA. 267 
 
 I do not give this as a summary of that famous 
 scheme of transcendental theology ; only to hint what 
 ranges of speculation were thrown open by it. The 
 writings of the false Dionysius have been held to be 
 the real fountain-head of the vast flood of Scholastic 
 theology; and Scotus Erigena has been called first 
 and greatest of the Schoolmen. I have not, however, 
 to deal here with this line of speculation as a system 
 of opinion. Of that we shall have more to say, when 
 we come to the great age of Scholasticism. All we 
 have to do now is to see its effect on the mind of the 
 time we are dealing with, — the reality of its influ- 
 ence, and the nature of it.* 
 
 That influence is seen not so much in the questions 
 that come up for discussion as in the treatment of 
 those questions, and the nature of the arguments 
 employed. As a system of doctrine, Scotus set his 
 opinions forth in his most labored work, a long philo- 
 sophic dialogue "On the Division of Things," — a 
 treatise of mixed logic and metaphysics. The exposi- 
 tion of this belongs to a history of philosophy. In 
 
 * An interesting example of the speculative temper of the day 
 is found in the correspondence of Servatus Lupus, Ahbot of Fulda, 
 who writes to Gottschalk of the beatific vision, doubting whether 
 we can see the Ljivine glory in the resurrection with our fleshly 
 eyes. "In this vision will consist at once our secure blessedness 
 and our blessed security ; and for beholding it, the Truth admon- 
 ishes that the eyes not of the body but of heart and mind be made 
 clear." These words are the very echo of the Dionysian writings, 
 or of St. Augustine. A little before, he has been discussing the 
 quantity of Latin syllables ; a little after, he sets pitifully forth to 
 Hincmar the desolate condition of his estate. " We have," he 
 says, " to wear patched and worn-out clothes, and stay our hunger 
 almost always with garden-stuff and market vegetables." See 
 also his urgent letters on the same subject to Charles the Bald. 
 
ZbS THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 the history of theology his place is known as the 
 antagonist of Gottschalk in the famous controversy 
 on Predestination ; and a few words on this become 
 necessary, as part of the general history of the time. 
 
 Gottschalk was a Saxon monk, who had long 
 brooded in his solitude over the works of Augustine, 
 then of unquestioned authority ; until he startled the 
 theological mind of the day by the fervor, almost the 
 fanaticism, of his assertion of a " double predestina- 
 tion," of the elect to life eternal, of the reprobate to 
 everlasting death. This doctrine is, in moral tone, 
 like that form of Calvinism which we should call 
 Hopkinsian, — a doctrine of unspeakable horror to 
 those who do not hold it, but of ardent and obstinate 
 conviction to those who do ; a doctrine which is the 
 necessary logical result to all who hold consistently 
 the view at once of absolute Divine foreknowledge 
 and of an endless hell. 
 
 Of Gottschalk himself hardly anything remains 
 except his two Confessions, which consist of little else 
 than a very positive statement of that one thing. He 
 is spoken of in a letter from Hincmar to Pope Nicho- 
 las, as " a man of high-strung temper (animo elatus), 
 impatient of repose, fond of new phrases, burning with 
 quenchless thirst of reputation, vehement and frac- 
 tious." We should have called him rather moody, 
 gloomy, and intractable. " He was condemned in a 
 council at Mentz," Hincmar goes on to say, and " by 
 their order severely beaten with rods." To that rude 
 and secular clergy this was easier than a contest of 
 logic. They would rather fight in battle (and very 
 likely did), or hunt with hawks and hounds. 
 
GOTTSCHALK. 269 
 
 Gottschalk, in fact, was far too confident of his 
 opinion to trust it to the mercy of any logic. The 
 judgment of God, to the mind of that age, was best to 
 be known by ordeal. " Set me here," said he, " four 
 vessels in a row ; fill one with boiling water, one with 
 heated oil, one with hot pitch, and one with blazing 
 fire ; and let me, to prove this faith of mine, which 
 indeed is the Catholic faith, go into and pass through 
 each one of them." This grim fatalism had its natu- 
 ral effect, in wild despair with some, in reckless anti- 
 nomianism with others. 
 
 Hincmar himself, the great domineering prelate, 
 tried his hand at the sad, impracticable dogmatist, and 
 thought to bring him over by a compromise which 
 taught God's foreknowledge and predestination of the 
 good, his foreknowledge and permission only of the 
 evil. But such weakness was not for Gottschalk, who 
 chose rather to be shut up in prison, and in fact 
 ended his days there, deluded by visions, his morbid 
 temper made really insane, but sturdily holding his 
 rigid creed. As with Calvin, he saw nothing in all 
 the world, evil or good, salvation or damnation, that 
 was not the express act of God. 
 
 So, as the ablest philosopher of the day, Scotus 
 Erigena was drawn into the debate. But, in oppos- 
 ing Gottschalk's doctrine of arbitrary destiny, he 
 opposed just as much the church doctrine of creation 
 and the fall, of sin and judgment. His language was 
 as devout, and his claim of authority as sincere ; but 
 the whole dogmatic scheme melted away in the mist 
 of his abstractions. True philosophy, said he, is true 
 religion ; true religion is true philosophy. To him, 
 
270 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 there is nothing arbitrary anywhere ; no room seems 
 left for what we should call freedom, human or divine, 
 only one broad " Stream of Tendency." Harmony 
 with that is apparently the real freedom he asserts. 
 That universal life, that flood of eternal light, pours 
 with absolute impartiality upon all ; it falls on men, 
 according to their nature, whether for blessing or 
 curse. As a blind eye cannot see the light, as an 
 inflamed eye is only pained by the light which yet is 
 meant for blessing to all, so with the ignorant or sin- 
 ful soul. " There is no misery," he said, " except 
 eternal death ; eternal death is ignorance of the truth, 
 and there is no misery but ignorance of the truth ; 
 and where the truth is unknown there is no life." 
 
 There is, again, no beginning of creation with God, 
 and no end of things except that all shall be received 
 back into the one source of life. In his own essence 
 God cannot be known : his personality is simply " an 
 act of man's imagination " ; the revelation of Scrip- 
 ture is only figurative and symbolic. Existence itself 
 is more and more abstract as it becomes more real ; 
 in its highest form it cannot even be conceived. The 
 divine trinity is Being, Wisdom, Life ; and to this 
 answers the trinity in man's nature, — to be, to know, 
 to will. The " division of nature " is fourfold : — 
 1. That which creates and is uncreated, — the First 
 Cause; 2. That which is created and creates, — sec- 
 ond causes ; 3. That which is created and does not 
 create, — things as known in time and space ; 4. That 
 which neither creates nor is created, — under which 
 head will come the world of Evil. This logical for- 
 mality is the groundwork of an immense amount of 
 
DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 271 
 
 allegorical interpretation ; it is also the formal pat- 
 tern, or type, of the ponderous discussions known as 
 the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Age. 
 
 Much of the language I have quoted is familiar 
 to us now ; but it was strange and alarming then, 
 particularly in the inference which Scotus seems to 
 draw. His theory denies the possibility of Evil, 
 which to the common mind is the most real of exist- 
 ences. His logic leads us straight to a pantheistic 
 Fatalism, as that he opposed declares an arbitrary 
 Destiny. Everything is swallowed up in the vague 
 impersonality of Pantheism. All life is one. Human 
 freedom is lost in the Divine necessity. Guilt itself 
 is the only penalty of guilt. Nay, evil itself, of any 
 sort, is only the negation of good : it is nothing of 
 itself ; and, being nothing, of course it could neither 
 be predestined nor foreknown. To which we may 
 add, that it could not be committed, either. 
 
 But our business is not with his philosophical sys- 
 tem, or with the events of his life, which are very 
 obscure ; only with his place in history. It is proba- 
 ble that he took part in the discussion raised by 
 Eadbert's doctrine, that the bread and wine of the 
 Eucharist are literally the body and blood of Christ ; * 
 
 * This discussion (of which an eminently satisfactory account 
 is given by Neander) opens in the period we have been reviewing, 
 and embraces several names hardly less eminent than those 
 already cited, particularly the great encyclopedist of the age, 
 Rabanus Maurus, and the keen theologian Ratramnus (or Ber- 
 tram). The doctrine, however, belongs strictly to the mediaeval 
 system of thought, and will be more appropriately considered else- 
 where. The same may be said of the discussion respecting the 
 Forged Decretals, — associated with the names of Radbert and 
 Hincmar, — which first appeared during this century (about 850). 
 
272 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
 
 and one may imagine the cheerfulness with which 
 he would bring allegory to bear on that great mys- 
 tery. To him, the Eeal Presence is not in the bread 
 and wine only, but in all things. The striking thing 
 to notice is the positive and (as it were) unconscious 
 tone in which he sets aside all authority except that 
 of reason. " Authority," he says, " proceeds from right 
 reason ; reason by no means from authority. All 
 authority not approved by right reason is invalid. 
 Eight reason needs to be strengthened by no agree- 
 ment with authority." 
 
 These are brave nineteenth-century words. It is 
 likely that their reach and force were not felt then, 
 whatever uneasy jealousy they may have stirred. It 
 does not appear that Scotus lost favor in court or 
 school ; or that the death he was said to have suf- 
 fered — stabbed with styles (pricked to death, as we 
 should say, with steel pens) by a mob of students — 
 had any other motive than the sharpness of his dis- 
 cipline. Some have called him " a saintly man 
 through and through " ; others have carped at his 
 fame, as " a liar, a fool, a madman, and a heretic." l A 
 glance through his writings shows a wide contrast 
 between his purely intellectual method — whether 
 we call it religious mysticism or speculative pan- 
 theism — and all the church theologians from Augus- 
 tine down. So that to us the interest in him is not 
 merely as a scholar or a philosopher, the father of 
 mediaeval speculation, but, still more, as the fore- 
 runner, by nearly a thousand years, of the newest 
 forms of transcendental free thought. 
 
 I have spoken of the time of Charlemagne and his 
 
THE INVASION OF FEUDALISM. 273 
 
 successors of the next half-century as an age of early 
 revival ; and have indicated some of the causes and 
 results that seem to justify this view. In one sense, 
 the revival was not only early, but premature, and it 
 faded quickly. Hardly anything seems left, a cen- 
 tury later, of what had such vigor and promise. As 
 when wheat is sown in autumn, the fields were green 
 a little while, and then buried under a sudden change 
 of season. The real growth, and the real harvest, 
 came after the winter that followed. The change 
 that passed over the face of society with the breaking- 
 up of the short-lived Empire, aucl that seemed to 
 undo the whole fabric so painfully built together, — 
 nay, to overwhelm learning, religion, and morality in 
 a common wreck, — we call by the general name of 
 Feudalism, whose relations with the Church make 
 the plot of the vast drama which we know as the 
 history of the Middle Age. 
 
 12* 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 
 
 [Many of the earlier dates are uncertain. The mark t denotes the year 
 of death ; ►£< indicates the name of a Pope.] 
 
 
 Emperors. 
 
 
 b. c. 30. 
 
 Augustus. 
 
 
 A.D. 14. 
 
 Tiberius. 
 
 25. Pilate in Judaea. 
 30. The Crucifixion. 
 
 37. 
 
 Caligula. 
 
 Conversion of Paul. 
 
 41. 
 
 Claudius. 
 
 Simon Magus. 
 50. Council at Jerusalem. 
 
 54. 
 
 Nero. 
 
 
 
 64. 
 
 Conflagration of Rome. First Persecution. 
 Death of Paul. 
 
 69. 
 
 Vespasian. 
 
 70. Destruction of Jerusalem. 
 
 79. 
 
 Titus. 
 
 
 81. 
 
 Domitian. 
 
 Cerinthus. 
 
 95. Persecution ; death of Clement. 
 96. Nerva. 
 
 98. Trajan. Edict against Secret Societies. 
 100. Pliny in Bithynia : Correspondence with Trajan. 
 
 Apostolic Fathers : Ignatius 1 115. 
 117. Hadrian. Polycarp 1 165. 
 
 Gnostics: Basilides (c. 130). 
 Valentinus (c. 150). 
 138. Antoninus Pius. Marcion (c. 150). 
 
 Apologists : Justin 1 168. 
 
 Athenagoras 1 180. 
 161. Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 Montanism (chiefly in Asia Minor). 
 
 177. Martyrs of Lyons (Pothinus, Blandina). 
 Alexandrian School: Pantaenus t202. 
 180. Commodus. Clement 1220. 
 
 Western Church: Irenaeus (Gaul) 1202. 
 193. Septimius Severus. Tertullian (Africa) t220. 
 
276 CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 
 
 200. 202. Martyrs of Carthage (Perpetua, Felicitas.) 
 211. Caracalla. 
 
 218. Elagabalus. Christian Writers. 
 
 222. Alexander Severus. Hippolytus t236. 
 
 238. Invasion of Franks. Origen 1 254. 
 
 241. " of Burgundians. Cyprian 1 258. 
 
 249-251. Decius. Persecution. 
 
 JSovatian Schism. Sabellius t260. 
 
 Paul the Hermit 1351. Paul of Samosata 1 275. 
 260. Gallienus. Edict of Toleration. 
 270. Aurelian. Captivity of Zenobia. 
 
 272. Goths settled in Dacia. 
 284. Diocletian (to 305) : two Augusti and two Caesars. 
 300. General Persecution. 
 
 306. Constantine. 312. Defeats Maxentius. 
 
 Lactantius t330. 
 313. Edict of Milan. Donatist Schism. 
 314-336. ^Sylvester I. 
 
 Arian Controversy. 325. Council of Nicoza. 
 
 Eusebius t 340. 
 337. Constantius. Eastern Monasticism. 
 
 Athanasius 1 373. 
 St. Anthony (251-356). Basil, 329-379. 
 361. Julian (the Apostate). Gregory Naz., 330-391. 
 
 364. Valentinian, Valens. UMlas, 311-381. 
 
 375. Goths in Mcesia. Gregory Nyss., 331-395. 
 
 378. Battle of Adrianople. Chrysostom, 347-407. 
 
 379. Theodosius. 381. Council of Constantinople. 
 
 Suppression of Pagan Worship. St. Martin in Gaul. 
 
 Ambrose, 340-397. 
 395. Arcadius (East) and Honorius (West). 
 
 Jerome, 340-420. 
 400. 410. Sack of Rome by Alaric. Augustine, 354-430. 
 
 Pelagian Controversy. 
 408-450. Theodosius II. 423-455. Valentinian III. 
 429. Vandals in Africa. 431. Council of Ephesus. 
 440-461. ^Leo I. (the Great). 445. Edict of Valentinian. 
 451. Huns : Defeat of Attila. Council of Chalcedon. 
 Monophysite Controversy. 
 St. Severinus in Germany. 
 476. Odoacer. Fall of Western Empire. 
 
 482. Henoticon of Zeno. 484. Schism of East and West. 
 493-526. Theodoric : Gothic Kingdom of Italy (to 554). 
 496. Conversion of Clovis. 
 Merovinyian Kingdom in France. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 277 
 
 500. 493. Gothic Kingdom of Italy. 
 
 Cassiodorus, 468-563. 
 518-527. Justin, Emperor of the East. 
 
 519. Reconciliation of East and West. 
 Benedict at Monte Casino, 529-543. 
 627-565. Justinian. Reform of Roman Law. 
 533-548. Conquests of Belisarius. 
 554. Gothic kingdom destroyed by Narses. 
 568. Lombard Kingdom in Italy. 
 
 St. Columba at Iona 1 600. 
 Gregory of Tours, 540-595. 
 590-604. ^Gregory I. (the Great) ; Augustine in England, 597. 
 600. St. Columban in Gaul 1 615. 
 
 St. Gall in Switzerland f627. 
 622. Mahomet (Hegira). Isidore of Seville 1 636. 
 
 632-732. Conquests of Mahometanism. 
 
 MONOTHELETE CONTROVERSY. 
 
 668, 716. Constantinople besieged by Arabs. 
 687. Pepin (d'Heristal) founds the Carolingian House. 
 700. Bede (the Venerable), 672-735. 
 
 711. Saracen Conquest of Spain. 
 718-741. Leo III (Isauricus), Emperor. 
 
 Image Controversy. 
 732. Battle of Tours : Saracens defeated by Charles Martel. 
 
 St. Boniface in Germany 1 755. 
 741-752. >J< Zachary. 752. Coronation of Pepin. 
 755. Donation of Pepin (extended, 774). 
 771. Charles (Charlemagne), king of Franks. 
 772-795. ^Adrian I. 774. Conquest of Lombards. 
 
 Adoptian Controversy. 
 787. 2d Council of Niccea. 794. Council of Frankfort. 
 795-816. >fr Leo III. Alcuin, 735-804. 
 
 800. Charlemagne, Emperor of the West. 
 
 The Holy Roman Empire. 
 814. Louis I. (the Pious). Anschar, Apostle of the North, 1 865. 
 
 843. Partition of the Empire. Feudalism. 
 843-877. Charles II. (the Bald). Scotus Erigena t883? 
 
 858-867. ifa Nicholas I. Forged Decretals. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 I. The Messiah and the Christ, 1-20. — The Messianic hope, 2. 
 Chronological outlook, 3. Sources of the Messianic hope, 6 ; its charac- 
 ter, 8. A national passion (parallels), 9. The Messianic period, 12. 
 Sermon on the Mount, 14. Messianic consciousness of Jesus, 16. The 
 entrance into Jerusalem, 17. The hope transfigured by his death, 19. 
 
 II. Saint Paul, 21-46. —The primitive Church, 23; power of the 
 communistic sentiment, 25. Conversion of Paul, 28. His personal char- 
 acteristics, 29; his trials and contentions, 30; jealousies towards him, 
 32; his death, 34. Writings of Paul, 35; his Christology, 36; his doc- 
 trine of sin and justification, 40; his conviction of sin and assurance of 
 salvation, 44. 
 
 III. Christian Thought of the Second Century, 47-70. — A 
 gulf of eighty years, 48 ; development of doctrine during this period : the 
 Logos, 50. " A longing for Redemption, 51 ; how conceived, 52. The 
 Gnostics, 54; the problem of Gnosticism, 57; scheme of Valentinus, 58; 
 failure of Gnosticism, and why, 60. The Apologists, 61; character of 
 their Defence, 62; seriousness of the Christian mind at this period, 63. 
 Relations to the Roman world, 65; calumnies against the Christians, 66; 
 Montanism; results of this period, 69. 
 
 IV. The Mind of Paganism, 71-99. — A Pagan Revival, 72; Cicero, 
 73; a religion of the Empire, 74. Doctrine of the Stoics, 75; cosmogony, 
 75; ethics, 76. Law Reform, 78. Persecution of Christianity, 80. The 
 old Italian religion, 81; gods of the Nursery, 83; the great gods, 84; Rome 
 as an object of worship, 86 ; her tyranny, 87. Peace of the Empire, 88; 
 the Emperor deified, 89; formal worship of the Emperor, 91; collision 
 with Christianity, 92; Marcus Aurelius, 93; degradation and decline of 
 this worship, 95. Oriental superstitions, 96; sacrifices, 97; the taurobo- 
 Uum, 98. Ideas of Incarnation and Sacrifice, 99. 
 
 V. The Arian Controversy, 100-121. — Accession of Constantine, 
 100. Doctrinal development meanwhile, 101 ; analysis of the Logos-idea, 
 102. Sabellius and Arius, 105. Christianity and Paganism, 107. The 
 
280 INDEX. 
 
 method of Faith, 109. Character of Arianism, 110. Constantine, his 
 character and circumstances, 112; at the Council of Nicyea, 115; the Xi- 
 cene Creed, 116. Athanasius, his adventures and character, 117. lie- 
 suits of the Controversy, 119; the triumph of Orthodoxy, 120. 
 
 VI. Saint Augustine, 122-115. — His doctrine and character, 122; 
 his place in history, 125. Circumstances of his life, 126 ; terror of the time, 
 127. His Conversion, 129; a reaction against Maniehseism, 130; the 
 Manichrean dualism, 131; a system of fatalism, 133; nature of the crisis, 
 135; source of Evil, 136. The Pelagian Controversy; destiny and moral 
 freedom, 137; Augustine and Pelagius, 138; issue of the controversy, 
 139. The City of God, 111; time of its completion, 142; the ancient city, 
 143; moral effect of the work, 144. 
 
 VII. Leo the Gkeat, 146-164. — Character of the period; a Pagan 
 reaction, 147. Controversies of the Fifth Century, 150 ; Nestorius and 
 Eutyches; the "robber-synod," 151. Character of Leo, 152; the saviour 
 of Rome, 153 ; conception of his work, 154; the Council of Chalcedon, 156 ; 
 faith in the destinies of Rome, 157; his ecclesiastical policy, 159; Hilary 
 of Aries, 161. Creation of the Papal Power, 163. 
 
 VIII. Monasticism as a Moral Force, 165-184. — Christianity as 
 a conflict, 165; need of a reserve force, 166; enormous evils of Pagan so- 
 ciety, 168 ; horrors of the Roman spectacles, 169. The martyr-spirit: 
 Perpetua, 171. The ascetic motive, 173; Simeon Stylites, 174; the moral 
 craving and habit of sacrifice ; examples of Eastern asceticism, 175. The 
 monk Telemachus, 178. The monk and the barbarian, 180; Benedict (of 
 Nursia) at Monte Casino, 181 ; the monastic vow, 183. 
 
 IX. Christianity in the East, 185-203. — Contrast of East and West, 
 185; in language, 186; in political life, 187. Qualities of Eastern reli- 
 gious life. 188; illustrated by four great divines, 190 ; effect on the vitality 
 of the Greek language, 192. Reign of Justinian, 193; his conquests and 
 public works, 194; Monophysite and Monothelete controversies, 195. 
 Image-Controversy, 196 ; forms of image-worship, 197. Mahomet, 198; 
 spread and conquests of Islamism, 199; its strength and Aveakness, 201. 
 
 X. Conversion of the Barbarians, 204-226. — A larger concep- 
 tion of the Christian work, 205; a three centuries' campaign, 206; com- 
 parison of Imperial and Papal Rome, 207; spirit of the enterprise, 208. 
 The Barbarian as he appeared: testimonies, 209. Clovis and his House, 
 211; the "Merovingian times," 212. The Conversions: examples; what 
 were they worth? 214. Gregory the Great, 217; conversion of the 
 Saxons, 218. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, 219. Anschar, the 
 Apostle of the North, 224. 
 
 XI. The Holy Roman Empire, 227-248. — The imperial idea, 228; 
 Rome as it impressed the barbarian mind, 231 ; the barbarian conquerors, 
 233; Clovis as Patrician, 234. Donation of Pepin, 235. Coronation of 
 Charlemagne, 236 ; his conquests and administration : details, 237 ; his 
 
INDEX. 
 
 281 
 
 ideal of sovereignty, 240 ; reverence for his memory, 244. The period of 
 organization, 244; ultimate divorce and rivalry of Church and Empire, 
 245 ; the mediaeval conflict, 246 ; later fortunes of the Empire, 247. 
 
 XII. The Christian Schools, 249-273. — Partition of the Em- 
 pire, —the loss to civilization. 249 ; its care for learning, 250; the classic 
 tradition, 251; the imperial Schools, 252. Cassiodorus as minister of 
 Theodoric, 253 ; as a monastic recluse, 254. The barbarian mind; how 
 instructed, 256 ; mild doctrine of the Church, 257. The Venerable Bede, 
 258. Alcuin: his writings, 260; the Adoptian controversy, 262. Writ- 
 ings of Dionysius (the Areopagite), 263; Scotus Erigena, 264. Gott- 
 schalk: controversy on Predestination, 268; doctrine of the non-existence 
 of Evil, 271. The intellectual development is checked by the invasion 
 of Feudalism, 273. 
 
 Adoptian Controversy, 262. 
 
 Adrianople, battle of, 114, 120, 
 148. 
 
 JEons of the Gnostics, 58, 59. 
 
 Alaric, 129, 148, 232. 
 
 Alcuin, 260. 
 
 Alexandrian Jews, 5; theology, 50. 
 
 Ambrose, 120. 
 
 Anschar, Apostle of the North, 224. 
 
 Apollinaris, 150. 
 
 Apologists, character of their de- 
 fence, 62, 68. 
 
 Apostolic Fathers, 48. 
 
 Arabia, 200. 
 
 Arian Controversy, 100-121 ; civ- 
 ilization of Goths and Burgundi- 
 ans, 211, n. 
 
 Arianism. 110; its drift, 111. 
 
 Arius, 105. 
 
 Asceticism, its motive, 175. 
 
 Athanasius, 117; his adventures 
 and character, 118. 
 
 Augustine, 122-145; his character, 
 123, 125; circumstances of his 
 time, 126 ; his conversion, 130 ; 
 controversy with Manichaeism, 
 132 ; with Pelagius, 137; the City 
 of God, 141. 
 Attila and Leo, 152, 233. 
 Babylon, Jews in, 5. 
 
 Barbarians, their aspect, 209; the 
 barbarian mind, 256. 
 
 Bar-cochab, 12. 
 
 Basil (the Great), 190. 
 
 Basilides (the Gnostic), 61. 
 
 Bede (the Venerable), 258. 
 
 Belisarius, his conquests, 193. 
 
 Benedict, St., founder of monastic 
 rule, 181. 
 
 Boniface, Apostle of the Germans, 
 219 ; his catechism, 221 ; his death, 
 223. 
 
 Byzantine Empire, 189. 
 
 Ca;sar, 82, 88^ 
 
 Calvin and Augustine, 140. 
 
 Cassiodorus, 181, 253. 
 
 Chalcedon, Council of, 147, 194. 
 
 Charges against Christians, 66, 67. 
 
 Charity, what it means, 124. 
 
 Charles Martel, 202, 234; relations 
 with Boniface, 223. 
 
 Charles (Charlemagne), 235; his 
 coronation, 236 ; conquests and 
 administration, 237 ; effects of his 
 reign, 240; character and mem- 
 ory, 244. 
 
 Charles the Bald, 263. 
 
 Church, causes of its early growth, 
 25 ; its relations to the Roman 
 world, 65, 92. 
 
282 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Cicero, as representing Pagan 
 thought, 73. 
 
 Circumcellions, 173. 
 
 City of God, 141 ; the ancient city, 
 143. 
 
 Classic tradition, 251. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria, 63. 
 
 Clovis, his conversion, 211; his de- 
 scendants, 212; as Patrician, 234. 
 
 Columban, his monastic rule, 215. 
 
 Commodus, 95. 
 
 Communistic spirit of early Church, 
 26. 
 
 Confessors, 61. 
 
 Constantine, 100, 227; his charac- 
 ter, 112 ; legislation, 113 ; at the 
 Council of Nicaea, 115. 
 
 Council of Nica?a, 106, 115; of 
 Ephesus, 151 ; of Chalcedon, 116, 
 156 ; later councils, 195, 196. 
 
 Creed, Nicene, 116. 
 
 Daniel, 4; date, 6; predictions, 7. 
 
 Destiny and moral freedom, 139; 
 Mahometan doctrine of, 201. 
 
 Diocletian, 80, 114. 
 
 Dionysius the Areopagite, 263, 265. 
 
 Divinities of Rome, 84. 
 
 Donatist Schism, 125, 173. 
 
 Dualism (Manichaean), 131. 
 
 East (Christianity in), 185-203; 
 separation from the West, 186, 198. 
 
 Education a care of the State, 250 
 
 Eginhard (Einhard), biographer of 
 Charlemagne, 240, 242. 
 
 Emanation or Evolution, 58. 
 
 Emperor (Roman ), as a Divinity, 89. 
 
 Empire, Peace of the, 88; ideal of, 
 227 ; restored under Charlemagne, 
 236; mediaeval, 247. 
 
 Empire (Holy Roman), 227-248. 
 
 Ephesus, Council of, 151; robber- 
 synod, 156. 
 
 Ethics of New Testament, 43. 
 
 Eutyches, 151, 156. 
 
 Evil, Pauline doctrine of, 42; 
 
 Gnostic doctrine, 66 ; Manichaean, 
 
 133. 
 Faith, the method of, 109. 
 Filioque, 120, 186. 
 Formalism of Roman religion, 81. 
 Fulda, foundation of, 222. 
 Gnosticism, its early appearance, 
 
 54; its character, 55; its problem, 
 
 57; its doctrine, 59; its failure 
 
 (cause of), 60. 
 Goths, their victor}' over Valens, 
 
 114, 120; their Arian civiliza- 
 tion, 211, n. 
 Gottschalk, 268. 
 Gracchi, the, 88. 
 Greek language, its subtilty, 186; 
 
 its vitality, 192. 
 Gregory of Nazianzus, 190; of 
 
 Nyssa, id ; of Tours, 211; the 
 
 Great, 205, 217. 
 Henoticon of Zeno, 194. 
 Herod, 4. 
 
 Hilary of Aries, 161. 
 Hincmar, 208. 
 Huns, as described by Jornandes, 
 
 210 ; their defeat at Troyes, 157. 
 Hypatia, 118, 265. 
 Hypostasis, 102, 116. 
 Image- worship, 197; controversy, 
 
 196-198. 
 Interval after the Pauline period, 
 
 its importance in history 47. 
 Islamism, 201. [84. 
 
 Italian worship, 81; the great gods, 
 Jerome, 209. 
 Jesus of Nazareth, his messianic 
 
 consciousness, 13, 16; his moral 
 
 teaching, 14; the entrance into 
 
 Jerusalem, 17. 
 Justification by faith, 45, 137. 
 Justin Martyr, 63, 64, 68. 
 Justinian, reign of, 193, 194. 
 Law, Roman, reform of, 78. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 283 
 
 Leo the Great, 146-164; his char- 
 acter, 152; deliverance of Rome, 
 153 ; faith in the destiny of Rome, 
 157, 206; assertion of papal 
 claims, 160. 
 Leo, the Isaurian, 197. 
 Logos, doctrine of, 40, 51, 76, 101 ; 
 
 how interpreted, 106. 
 Maccabsean period, 3. 
 Mahomet, 196. 
 Malachi, 3. 
 Mani (or Manes), founder of Man- 
 
 ichaeism, 132. 
 Manichaeism, 131 ; a system of fatal- 
 ism, 133. 
 Marcion, 68. 
 Mariolatry, 151, 195. 
 Martyrs, 171. 
 
 Messiah and Christ, 1-20. 
 Messianic predictions, 6 ; hope, its 
 character, 8, 11 ; period, 12 ; how 
 transformed, 19, 37, 142. 
 Miracles in the early Church, 23. 
 Monasticism, 105-184; in the 
 West, 166 ; its root in the moral 
 nature, 175 ; monastic vows, 182. 
 Monks as missionaries, 180. 
 Monophysite (single-nature), and 
 Monothelete {sinyle-ivill), 195. 
 Montanism, 69. 
 Mythology : Roman compared with 
 
 Greek, 85. 
 Nestorius, 151. 
 New Paganism, 74. 
 New Platonism, 148, 265. 
 Nicsea, Council of, 106, 115. 
 Nicene Creed, 112, 116. 
 Numina (functions of divinity), 84. 
 Nursery-gods of Rome, 83. 
 Odoacer (or Odovaker), 233. 
 Ovid, myth of Numa, 81. 
 Paul (the Apostle), 21-46; his 
 character, 22, 30; person, 29; 
 trials, 32; death, 34; writings, 35 ; 
 
 doctrine of Christ, 36 ; of sin and 
 justification, 40. 
 Pagan virtues, 41 ; worship, destruc- 
 tion of, 127. 
 Paganism, Mind of, 71-99; revi- 
 val of, 74 ; its weakness, compared 
 with Christianity, 107 ; suppressed 
 by Theodosius, 127 ; reaction, 147; 
 its hold on the imagination, 149. 
 Papal power, its growth, 163; its 
 
 extent, 206. 
 Paschasius Radbert, 224, 271. 
 Pelagius, 137. 
 
 Persecution of Christianity, 66, 80. 
 Philo, 5, 50. 
 Radegonda, 212. 
 Redemption, the gospel of, 51. 
 Religion of Rome, 86; it discour- 
 ages emotion, 96 ; of the humbler 
 classes, 95. 
 Resurrection, 24 ; doctrine of, 64. 
 Rome as a divinity, 87; taken by 
 Alaric, 129 ; its spiritual nnd 
 military empire, 206 ; how viewed 
 by the barbarians, 231. 
 Sabellius, 105. 
 Sacrifice of Christ, 19 ; in Antiquity, 
 
 81, 97, 99. 
 Saints of the ascetic period, 175; 
 
 of the missionary period, 216. 
 Salvation, how taught by Paul, 45 ; 
 
 the aim of the gospel, 52. 
 Saracen conquests, 202. 
 Scandinavia, how converted, 225. 
 Schools, imperial, 252; of the ninth 
 
 century, 261. 
 Scotus Erigena, 264, 267-271. 
 Second Century, Christian 
 
 Thought of, 47-70. 
 Second coining of Christ, 19, 25, 37. 
 Simeon Stylites, 174. 
 Simon Magus, 32. 
 Son of God, interpretation of the 
 phrase, 102. 
 
284 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Spectacles at Rome, 148, 169. 
 Stephen, martyrdom of, 28, 44. 
 Stoic doctrines, 75 ; cosmogony, 76 ; 
 
 morals, 77; failure of, 78. 
 Symbol, value of, 104. 
 Tatian, 64. 
 Taurobolium, 98. 
 Telemachus, the monk, 178. 
 Tertullian, 60, 68; his testimony 
 
 79, 168. 
 
 Thekla, St. 172. 
 
 Theodosius, 120, 127. 
 
 Tours, battle of, 202. 
 
 Trajan, 66, 93, 128. 
 
 Valentinus, the Gnostic, 55, 60. 
 
 Vandals, 160, 194. 
 
 Virgil, his anticipation of a golden 
 age, 74; regard of him in Chris- 
 tian tradition, 255. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 
 
/(zr 
 
BW901.A426v.l 
 
 Christian history in its three great 
 
 Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00066 7032