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 Shahan, Thomas Joseph, 
 
 1857- 
 
 1932. 
 
 
 The beginnings of 
 
 
 nVxy-^ e-l- 4 an-i i- xt 
 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 Veey Rev. THOMAS J. SHAHAN, S.T.D., J.U.L., 
 
 Professor of Church History in the Catholic University^ 
 Washington, 
 
 NEW^JYORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO: 
 
 be:k2:ige:r brothers, 
 
 IHnters to the Holy Apostolic See. 
 
IRibtl ©bstat. 
 
 EEMIGIUS LAFORT, 
 
 Censor Librorum. 
 
 ITmprimatur. 
 
 t JNO. M. FARLEY, 
 
 Archbishop of Neio York. 
 
 New York, July 9, 1903. 
 
 Copyriglit, 1903, by Benziger Brothers. 
 
CARISSIMO . PATRI 
 ANTIQVAE . INTEGRITATIS • VIRO 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The studies and discourses that are herein offered 
 to the public deal with some general conditions of 
 Christian Hfe in the first three centuries of our era. 
 Though already printed, at intervals and amid the 
 pressure of grave academic duties, it is hoped that a 
 certain unity of doctrine, purpose, and interest will 
 not be found wanting to their collection as a series. 
 In one way or another they illustrate certain phases 
 and circumstances of those wonderful centuries before 
 Constantine the Great, when the constitution and 
 the institutions of the new rehgious society were de- 
 veloping on all sides within the vast Empire of Rome. 
 The teachings of Jesus Christ were the pure, sweet 
 leaven that permeated the decaying and unhappy 
 society of antiquity, saved from its mass of corruption 
 some germs of goodness and truth, of beauty and 
 justice, and strengthened the State against those 
 shocks that would otherwise have reduced it to pri- 
 maeval barbarism. A perennial charm must therefore 
 attach to any narrative of the problems and vicissi- 
 tudes of this era. This is particularly true of the 
 sufferings of the infant churches, and the social changes 
 their rapid growth could not fail to work in the Roman 
 society that seemed to contain them, but of which, 
 
 vii 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 unknown to it, they were themselves the containing 
 and sustaining soul, according to an admirable saying 
 of the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetus. 
 
 It is not without some diffidence and a clear sense 
 of the shortcomings of these pages that the author 
 commits them to the indulgence of his readers. 
 
 At the same time he seizes the occasion to thank 
 the American Catholic Quarterly Review, the Ave Maria, 
 the Josephite, the Catholic Times, the New Century, 
 and the Catholic University Bulletin for the courteous 
 permission to reprint articles that appeared originally 
 in those publications. 
 
 Thomas J. Shahan. 
 
 Catholic University of America, 
 
 Washington, D. C, July 15, 1903. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface • vii 
 
 The Beginnings of Christianity 7 
 
 St. Paul : Teacher of the Nations 55 
 
 A Bishop of Rome in the Time of Domitian (a.d. 
 
 81-96) 81 
 
 The Christian Martyrs op Lyons and Vienne (a.d. 
 
 177) 103 
 
 Slavery and Free Labor in Pagan Rome 121 
 
 The Origin op Christmas. 137 
 
 Women in the Early Christian Communities 157 
 
 Women in Pagan Antiquity 167 
 
 St. Agnes of Rome 181 
 
 The Church and the Empire (a.d. 250-313) 211 
 
 I. (a) In the West 219 
 
 (6) In the Orient 226 
 
 (c) Constituents op the Christian Society 238 
 
 II. Causes op the Rapid Spread op Christianity. 242 
 
 A Christian Pompeii 265 
 
 The ' ' Roman Africa " op Gaston Boissibr 311 
 
 The Columbus op the Catacombs 363 
 
 Alphabetical Index 441 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHEISTIANITT. 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 There are not wanting reasons of a modern and 
 immediate nature which make it henceforth useful 
 and consoHng to reflect on the earhest history of the 
 Church, and in a special manner on the period of her 
 foundation by the apostles and their successors. 
 The nineteenth century saw the almost complete loss 
 of every external advantage that Catholicism had 
 acquired through popular affection and public pohcy 
 since the days of Constantino. The French Revolu- 
 tion was like a hurricane, after which only the hulk 
 of the ^^Navicella" floated on the troubled waters of 
 human life. Within one generation the mysteries 
 of several ancient Oriental civilizations have been 
 unveiled with a detail and an accuracy almost be- 
 yond belief. Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and remote 
 India have yielded up with their languages an exten- 
 
8 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 sive knowledge of their history and their institutions. 
 The remotest prehistory of the peoples of Europe has 
 been laid bare, and in the process have arisen noble 
 sciences Hke philology, anthropology, and ethnology. 
 Scholarly travel has chosen for its special object the 
 rudest embryonic beginnings of human culture in 
 every zone and clime. Thus we find ourselves in 
 presence of an historical temper of mind that is very 
 general, and whose first query is the natural and sal- 
 utary one concerning the origin of things. Epochs 
 of humanity, Hke the stages of the earth's growth, 
 have each their own cachet. In a critical and crea- 
 tive age, with so Httle left of the simple unques- 
 tioning habit of faith, it was impossible that the origin 
 of so vast an institution as Christianity should not 
 engage the attention of a multitude of students. It 
 was impossible, too, that there should not follow a 
 great diversity of views and opinions according as 
 bias, heredity, prejudice, human weakness, or insuffi- 
 cient knowledge affected the mind of the historical 
 critic. 
 
 The soil of Rome, long neglected, has given up a 
 multitude of monuments of a primitive Christian 
 society that goes back without question to the years 
 that immediately followed Christ's death. And the 
 interpretation of these wonderful remnants of an 
 early Christian community has again caUed the at- 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 9 
 
 tention of scholars and travellers to the first days of 
 that same society when it was spreading, silently but 
 rapidly, through every ward of the Mediterranean 
 cosmopolis, and even beyond, into lands where the 
 speech and the writ of Rome did not run. 
 
 Then, too, the steady, consistent disintegration of 
 the original bases of Protestantism, and the infinite 
 discussion which that process has called up regard- 
 ing the books of the New Testament and the primi- 
 tive elements of Christian faith, have not failed to 
 bring into evidence the teachings, the works, and the 
 writings of many apostoUc men, and to place before 
 the eye of the imagination the fields in which they la- 
 bored. No doubt, the apphcation to the science of 
 history of the methods of the study of the natural 
 sciences has largely furthered this remarkable move- 
 ment. But many will believe that the incredible 
 resurrection of the CathoUc Church within this cen- 
 tury, and especially her growth in North America, are 
 to be counted appreciable motives in the awakening 
 of curiosity as to the first establishment of Chris- 
 tianity in the Old World. Nor must we omit the far- 
 reaching influence of certain sociological teachings 
 that contravene Christianity, plainly deny or ehmi- 
 nate its essential principles, criticise its economico- 
 social history, and thereby lay the axe at the root of 
 our modern society, which still presupposes as basic 
 
10 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 and organic no few Christian principles, beliefs, in- 
 stitutions, and habits of thought. 
 
 Neither the sixteenth nor the eighteenth century 
 fulfilled the brilHant academic promises of ^^fehcitas" 
 that each made to mankind. What they offered as 
 final theology and final philosophy has fallen into the 
 same moral bankruptcy that Mr. Mallock and M: 
 Brunetiere are now predicting of dogmatic Protes- 
 tantism and the self-sufficiency of the natural sciences: 
 The result is a certain not unnatural reaction in favor 
 of that aged and universal institution which has been 
 the mother and the nurse of all modern societies, and 
 which still goes on its beneficent way, with the same 
 sure power, the same generous bestowal of peace 
 and joy, of rest and consolation, of private and pub- 
 lic weal, in every society where it is left free to dis- 
 play its mandate as the representative of Jesus 
 Christ. Hence the cries of disappointment which so 
 multiply on all sides, disappointment with the pre- 
 posterous claims of mere knowledge as the power of 
 salvation, with the transient victories of false and 
 misleading philosophies, with the earth as a sufficient 
 abiding-place for man. The very absolutism and 
 arrogance of such contentions have led to the quick 
 demonstration of their emptiness or insufficiency — 
 they were like leaky cisterns or broken reeds, useless 
 in the hour of need, or hke those desert apparitions 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 11 
 
 that promise water and shade and cool breezes, but 
 in reahty offer to the parched traveller only the same 
 flaming horizon, the same dreary waste of sand as 
 before. And in proportion as this temper of disap- 
 pointment spreads and finds expression, so must 
 increase respect and admiration for the Catholic 
 Church, which, alone of human institutions, has never 
 been blown about by every gust of doctrine, since she 
 possesses in herself the needed ballast of conviction, 
 a sure criterion of what is true, useful, permanent, 
 adaptable, and assimilable in the general experience 
 of mankind. 
 
 For such and similar reasons the story of her foun- 
 dation and first growth will always have a profound 
 human interest and value. There can be nothing 
 more worthy of attention than the little band of apos- 
 tles as they confront the orhis terrarum — the Grseco- 
 Roman world. Nor can there be anything more 
 instructive and consoling than to learn by what 
 means and against what odds their immediate suc- 
 cessors planted the Christian society in every corner 
 of that ancient world; by what a combination of pub- 
 lic and private force this purely spiritual society was 
 opposed; how it flourished in itself and developed 
 organically its constitution, despite all obstacles from 
 within and without ; finally, how it shattered or sur- 
 vived every opposition, sat coequal upon the throne 
 
12 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 of the Csesars and divided with them the allegiance 
 of mankind. 
 
 I. 
 
 When the apostles went forth to teach all nations 
 the doctrine of the crucified Jesus, nearly all earthly- 
 power was possessed by the City of Rome. In the 
 course of eight hundred years she had grown from a 
 Httle stone fort on the Palatine to the most powerful 
 and perfect state the world has yet seen. From the 
 Atlantic to the Euphrates, from the Rhine and the 
 Danube to the Cataracts of the Nile, her will was su- 
 preme; and if she recognized these hmits, it was 
 because beyond them there was little worth fighting 
 for. Step by step, piecemeal, she had put together 
 this massa imperii, subduing first the little towns 
 in the surrounding plains and hills, and then breaking 
 in turn the power of Macedonia and Carthage, of 
 Mediterranean Asia and Parthia, of Northern Africa 
 and Egypt, until there remained but one symbol of 
 universal dominion — the Eagles of Rome; one su- 
 preme owner of the habitable earth and arbiter of 
 civiHzed mankind — the Roman people. By cen- 
 turies of self-sacrifice and endurance, by prodigies of 
 patience and wisdom, by a rock-hke confidence in 
 their city, by a kind of kenosis of self in favor of the 
 common weal, by frugahty and foresight, these shep- 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 13 
 
 herds, herders, vintners, and kitchen-gardeners made 
 themselves heirs of the vast immemorial Oriental des- 
 potisms of Egypt, Assyria, and Parthia, with a hun- 
 dred minor kingdoms. The same virtues made them 
 the masters of Gaul, Spain, and Britain, i.e., of the 
 most fertile soil of Europe and of the two great rivers 
 that almost bind the Black Sea to the Atlantic — ^the 
 Rhine and the Danube. All the golden streams of 
 the world's commerce flowed now to one poHtical 
 centre, bearing Homeward with equal thoroughness 
 all the confluents of art, hterature, and luxury. The 
 glorious dreams of Alexander the Great were trans- 
 lated into realities when Roman '^Conquistadori" 
 sat at Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, Saragossa, 
 Lyons, and York. In the eventful struggle for the 
 Mediterranean that began with the Great Persian 
 War the first epoch was fittingly closed by the de- 
 feat of the Orient and the creation of a self-conscious 
 Occident. But scarcely had the City of Rome en- 
 slaved the universal earth when the chains of her own 
 slavery were forged at her own hearth. The noise of 
 falling kingdoms alternates with the uproar of civil 
 discord during the century that precedes the birth of 
 Christ, and when these ever-memorable conflicts are 
 over, the power of Csesar is securely anchored. All 
 the reins of empire are in the hands o£ the young Oc- 
 ta^dus. For a while Csesar will call himself only 
 
14 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 princeps, the foremost citizen of the city; for a while 
 the Senate holds a formal but unsubstantial equality. 
 All the great magistracies of the City are centred now 
 in Csesar and his heirs. The scarred legions of a hun- 
 dred battle-fields are his; his the richest provinces, 
 uncontrolled revenues and fleets; his, too, the leg- 
 islative power, since the servile Senate no longer 
 dares to refuse registration of every desire or sug- 
 gestion of Csesar. Wearied of self-government, with 
 every enemy prostrate, at the acme of her glory and 
 power, Rome abandoned all to the hands of one man, 
 made perpetual and irrevocable that dictatorship to 
 wliich in the past she had occasionally, but only 
 occasionally, entrusted her supreme interests. The 
 world, governed directly and immediately by Rome, 
 reacted in turn upon the proud City, and where once 
 a race of sturdy Italian freemen administered an 
 humble commonwealth upon ancestral soil, there 
 arose a new cosmopolitan government in which all 
 the passions, vices, and interests of the captive world 
 had a growing share. 
 
 "Graecia capta ferum victorem coepit." 
 
 Flattery and corruption, ambition and hatred and 
 envy, stood guard around the imperial throne. The 
 poHshed and conscienceless Greek, the frivolous and 
 boastful Gaul, the debauched Syrian, an almost 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 15 
 
 nameless body of ex-slaves, were the true rulers of 
 the world. The original Roman people had in great 
 part made way for them, being cut off in long foreign 
 wars, greatly decimated in the civil struggles that 
 brought about the fall of the Republic, or hopelessly 
 confounded with the descendants of those captives 
 and foreigners that Rome had been absorbing during 
 more than a century of universal conquest. 
 
 But the City in turn fascinated all who came in 
 contact with her. She hfted men to her own high 
 level. Those born to hate her became her humble 
 slaves, ready to die for one whom the world now 
 called the Golden City, the City Eternal, the Royal 
 Queen, to whose ''Genius" all the deities of all the 
 races had done homage, and whose astoimding 'Tor- 
 tune" dominated the imagination of all. Indeed, 
 well might they call her the Golden City, the City 
 Eternal! The stranger who entered her gates 
 walked entranced through long rows of marble pal- 
 aces, the happy homes of victorious generals, pow- 
 erful lawyers, merchant-princes, when they were not 
 hired out to a mob of Oriental kings and potentates. 
 Splendid porticoes, temples, and baths dotted the 
 City, and her public squares or fora were filled with 
 forests of statues. Masterpieces of art and the curios 
 of all past or conquered civilizations were to be seen 
 at every turn — the fruits of foreign skill, or rather of 
 
16 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 a long robbery of the world, carried on with iron per- 
 sistency for centuries. If this Rome was the abode 
 of an army of spies and informers, she was also the 
 home of literature and art and general human cul- 
 ture, such an abode as no city has ever been ; for the 
 relations of London to England, or Paris to France, 
 express but feebly the intellectual supremacy of the 
 City in the palmy days of her greatness. Within her 
 walls she sheltered perhaps a milUon and a half of 
 people, but her empire was over two thousand miles 
 long and over three thousand miles broad, with a cal- 
 culated population of one hundred to one hundred 
 and twenty milhons, and a subdued and docile terri- 
 tory in extent somewhat more than one-half that of 
 the United States before 1870. 
 
 One may well wonder how this huge mass of em- 
 pire, made up so late, by force, out of so much wreck- 
 age of nations, states, and races, could be governed 
 with success. Rome was not a Adctorious nation, 
 but a victorious city, and where she could she in- 
 troduced her own municipal institutions, admirably 
 fitted, as a rule, to the local circumstances of an- 
 tique hfe. Then she was no doctrinaire, and where 
 the native fierceness or raw simphcity of the van- 
 quished forbade her usual policy, she governed them 
 in a way suited to their temper and her real power. 
 Her provinces were usually complexus of cities, each 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 17 
 
 responsible for its own suhurhium, and in each 
 province the chief Roman magistrate, whatever his 
 title, wielded the entire power of Rome, civil and 
 mihtary. He governed immediately and directly in 
 the interests of the City, which looked on the whole 
 world as the ^^farm of the Roman people," precisely 
 as any subject city of hers looked on its suburban ter- 
 ritory. These interests demanded peace and pru- 
 dent administration of the sources of revenue; 
 hence the increase of population and of the general 
 welfare of the great provinces in the century or two 
 that followed the birth of Christ. From the Golden 
 Milestone in the very heart of Rome there branched 
 out to the ends of her empire a huge network of com- 
 munication, great roads paved with basaltic or lava 
 blocks, some remnants of which yet remain and show 
 the deep ruts of the chariot- wheels or the heavy trucks 
 that for centuries rattled over them, bearing countless 
 thousands on purposes of state or commerce or cu- 
 riosity, or transferring war material and the rare 
 products of the far Orient. The government post 
 and a system of inns completed the means of transit, 
 which was so perfect that only in our own day has it 
 been surpassed by the discovery of the uses of steam. 
 All this, however, was subservient to one paramount 
 influence for unity — the Greek tongue. While the 
 Roman kept the Latin for the use of camp and law, 
 
18 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 of administration and commerce, he adopted the 
 Greek as the vehicle of poHte intercourse. For three 
 or four centuries it had been the language of authority 
 in the Orient and of refinement everywhere. Even 
 the Jews had submitted to its charm, and outside of 
 Judaea, in Greek lands at least, preached the Law of 
 Moses in the accents of Homer. 
 
 The final result of such conditions could only be 
 the gradual extinction of all national peculiarities — 
 the cliief object of Rome, or rather of the Caesars, 
 who aimed henceforth at a general world-citizenship, 
 an organization of humanity under the benign direc- 
 tion of that City which the gods, or fate, or her own 
 fortune and power had made supremely responsible 
 for the welfare of men. Velleities of national inde- 
 pendence were crushed out, as at Jerusalem, and 
 anomalies of national religions, Hke the Druids, were 
 sternly and thoroughly suppressed. The worsliip 
 of the imperial '' Genius" and the general acceptance 
 of the Roman jurisprudence, with its uniform and 
 almost mathematical equity, helped on this process 
 of assimilation. And when we remember the colo- 
 nization en masse of abandoned or ruined cities, the 
 generous extension of the Roman citizensliip, the 
 cementing action of commerce, and the levelling in- 
 fluence of the legions, we cease to wonder that before 
 Jesus Christ was born, pohtically the low places were 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 19 
 
 filled up, the high mountains laid low, and the social 
 ground made ready for a new city — the city of Man 
 or the city of God, that was the problem of the future. 
 The Peloponnesian War had wiped out all difference 
 between Dorian and Ionian. The campaigns of 
 Alexander had opened the Orient to Greek culture, 
 and hellenized the enormous basin of the Mediterra- 
 nean as well as the great pathways to the Orient. 
 The last act in the preparation of that poHtical unity 
 which facilitated the success of the Gospel was the one 
 that placed all earthly power in the hands of Rome. 
 It was the end and acme of state-building in antiq- 
 uity, and furnished the needed basis for the subhme 
 social and religious revolution then at hand. 
 
 How slow and uncertain might have been the 
 spread of the Christian rehgion if its apostles had been 
 obHged at every step to deal with new governments, 
 new prejudices, new languages! Hence the Christian 
 Fathers saw in the splendid unity of the empire some- 
 thing providential and divine. The elder Pliny 
 might imagine that this unity was the work of the 
 gods bestowing pohte intercourse and civiUzation on 
 all mankind, but Christian writers hke Origen (contra 
 Celsum, II. 30) and Prudentius (contra Symmachum, 
 II. 609) saw in it the removal of the most difficult 
 obstacles to the propagation of Christianity, viz., the 
 diversity of language and the destruction of national 
 
20 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 barriers. When St. Paul tells us (Rom. x. 18): 
 ^'Verily their sound hath gone forth into all the earth, 
 and their words unto the ends of the whole world/ ^ 
 he expresses a fact which the Christian society has 
 always looked upon as an historical marvel, a prima 
 fade evidence of the innate truth and charm of the 
 apostolic preaching. In his apology against Celsus 
 the erudite Origen appeals to the character of the 
 apostles and to their circumstances as in itself a strong 
 proof of the divine origin of Christianity. 
 
 A few poor fishermen, rustic and unlettered, go 
 forth at the bidding of one of their countrymen to 
 conquer for him, not the temporal authority, but, 
 what is much more difficult, the spiritual mastery of 
 this great Roman world! They are but a handful, 
 and Jews at that, whom the masters of Roman liter- 
 ature delight in depicting as the most contemptible 
 in the Roman state. They are of the lowest in a 
 world where birth and wealth are everything, and they 
 were born and bred in a remote and mountainous 
 region, where those schemes of ambition that are 
 easily nourished in great cities could scarcely suggest 
 themselves to men. Their Master had died a felon's 
 death, and they themselves had abandoned Him in 
 the supreme hour, having hoped to the last that He 
 would revive a temporal kingdom of Israel. 
 
 Yet suddenly they are filled with a boundless en- 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 21 
 
 thusiasm. The apparitions of Jesus have trans- 
 formed them from rude Galilean fishermen into elo- 
 quent apostles of a universal religion. The men who 
 could not watch an hour with their divine Master, 
 much less withstand the taunts of the angry mob, 
 are now fearless before the supreme council of their 
 own national priesthood and boldly proclaim the 
 basic principle of the new dispensation: ''It is better 
 to obey God than men." Their discourse is strangely 
 effective; hundreds and then thousands are carried 
 away by it, and give up all to follow men whom 
 but a brief while ago they passed without notice in 
 the streets of Jerusalem. Severe persecution only 
 strengthens them in their convictions, and before 
 they are forced to flee the city they have converted 
 to the society of Jesus Christ no insignificant number 
 of the national clergy itself. Their speech and their 
 counsel, when obliged to face great problems affecting 
 immediately the future of this society of Christ, are 
 stamped with a rare wisdom. In the days of transi- 
 tion from the old to the new, while the synagogue, 
 in the words of St. Augustine, was breathing its last, 
 they behaved towards it with piety and with that 
 rare precision of tact and good sense that usually 
 mark men of experience and judgment. The Acts 
 tell us but little of those few years in which the apos- 
 tles were founding the Church of Jerusalem, but what 
 
22 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 they reveal shows us men utterly different from the 
 timid and doubting disciples whom Jesus led about 
 in His hfetime, and whose rusticity and worldliness 
 shine out so plainly in the gospels. But now they 
 are men who have seen the risen Jesus in His glory, 
 conversed with Him, been filled with His grace, and 
 shared in the effusion of His holy spirit on the Day 
 of Pentecost. 
 
 The hour comes when they must quit the Holy City 
 and go out into a world they know not and which 
 knows not them. Was it a light or indifferent thing 
 for a Jew to abandon the Temple, which held all that 
 he reputed dear and sacred? The oracles of God were 
 there, and the pledges of His promises. There, too, 
 were the solenm feasts of the only true religion upon 
 earth ere the fulfilment of the prophecies. Thither 
 came yearly from the ends of the world a multitude of 
 Jews, to adore God after the consohng manner of their 
 fathers. Its white walls and golden roofs shone afar 
 from Moriah and gladdened the eyes of the weary pil- 
 grim when they did not shine before his imagina- 
 tion. So deep were the roots which this extraordi- 
 nary edifice had cast in the hearts of the chosen people 
 that since its destruction, in spite of their sad vicis- 
 situdes, they have never ceased to weep bitter tears 
 on the Friday of every week over the few remaining 
 stones of its once proud walls. But these men of 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 
 
 Galilee, with never a spark of Gentile sympathies or 
 Hellenism in their hearts, with no natural love for the 
 cruel and oppressive eagles of Rome, go out forever 
 from the one corner of earth that is dear to them, the 
 sepulchres of their fathers, the homes of their families, 
 the sites of the Resurrection and the Judgment, out 
 into endless conflict and incalculable sufferings, out 
 into a world of odious and repulsive idolatry. It 
 was a sublime act of daring, and whoever reflects that 
 neither before nor since has the hke been seen will not 
 wonder that Christians have been prone from the be- 
 ginning to surround this step with due veneration. 
 Thereby the rehgion of Christ was carried beyond the 
 boundaries of the Jewish state, and preached through- 
 out the vast empire of Rome as the complement and 
 perfection of Judaism, the alone-saving truth, the di- 
 vine balm of doubt and spiritual unrest, and the sav- 
 ing ointment for a corrupting society. Soon won- 
 derful missionaries are joined to the apostles — Bar- 
 nabas and John, Marcus the Evangelist and Philip; 
 married couples, too, like Andronicus and Junias, 
 Aquila and Prisca; and in an incredibly brief time 
 the crucified and risen Jesus has been preached on the 
 fertile plains between the Euphrates and the Tigris, 
 throughout the valleys and the tablelands of Syria 
 and Asia Minor. His doctrine is known in the Delta 
 of the Nile and up the great river in Ethiopia, in the 
 
24 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 African oasis of Cyrene and in the island of Cyprus, in 
 Spain and Gaul, and finally at Rome, where it was 
 probably carried quicker than to any other site on 
 earth. The bitterest enemy of the Christians, Saul, 
 is converted by Jesus Himself, and made a vessel of 
 election, thereby furnishing in one famous and supe- 
 rior person to the first feeble commimities an irresisti- 
 ble evidence of the truth and the power of their faith. 
 If not many great and noble according to the world 
 belong to this doctrine that is gainsaid everywhere, 
 still men and women from every class of society are 
 represented — ^those of Csesar^s household; the pro- 
 consul of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus; the noble women 
 of Beroea; the principal women of Thessalonica ; 
 Lydia, the seller of purple in Thyatira ; the physician 
 Luke; the scholar Apollo; Dionysius, a judge of the 
 Athenian Areopagus, as well as the nameless multi- 
 tude who joined it in all the Jewries that stretched 
 from the Tigris to the Tagus. 
 
 It is in vain that misguided men question the au- 
 thority of the Acts of the Apostles, whence we learn 
 the first conquests of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
 From one extravagant opinion to another they have 
 been obliged to recede, until to-day what passes for 
 enlightened criticism recognizes the general trust- 
 worthiness of this fascinating narrative. Its abso- 
 lute rehability has never been doubted by a much 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 25 
 
 greater authority, the Catholic Church, to which we 
 owe the tradition of the text, and which is herself 
 contemporaneous with the work. Even Renan, so 
 ready to diminish or offset the analogies and the 
 germs of the Church's constitution, cannot deny 
 that the hand of St. Luke is visible in the book, that 
 ''its view of the yet brief history of the Christian 
 society is that of the official historians of the Court of 
 Rome." It was read in the infant churches, which 
 were not made up of inexperienced men of one race 
 fixed to the soil, but were rather formed from a hun- 
 dred nationahties, with a large proportion of Hellen- 
 istic Jews. These men were capable, by their tongue, 
 their origin, and their personal experience, of detect- 
 ing any imposture foisted upon them, if only by com- 
 parison with the numerous texts of this work circu- 
 lated in the East and the West long before the end 
 of the first century. St. John the Apostle was still 
 alive, and to be consulted in Ephesus, or in any of 
 the original sees of Asia Minor which he founded and 
 nourished with special love. 
 
 It will not do to sneer at the Grecized Jews, at their 
 archaic Macedonian dialect, or their uncouth pro- 
 nunciation. Some remnants of inscriptions do not 
 betray the culture of a numerous class, and long 
 before the time of Christ there were Jews like the one 
 whom Aristotle knew, Hellenes in all but blood. 
 
26 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 The Asmonsean and Herodian families were often 
 Greek at heart, and hundreds of such men were 
 among the first disciples of the apostles. Could not 
 the churches that produced St. Clement and the Are- 
 opagite, St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Justin, rec- 
 ognize a literary fraud that must have been attempted 
 on an enormous scale? Or was that age so devoid of 
 criticism to which we owe those perfect editions of 
 the texts of Homer and Vergil, and so many other 
 Greek and Latin classics, which modern scholarship 
 aims at reproducing? Or were there wanting ripe 
 scholars in the earliest Christian communities, men 
 of standing and influence not unhke the Jew Philo, 
 and that other Jew Josephus? Were not Apollo and 
 Mark men of the rarest eloquence, the true propa- 
 gandists, according to Renan? Could a confused and 
 misleading story of the origin of the Church and their 
 own share in it have easily obtained absolute cur- 
 rency during their lifetime and in their own commu- 
 nities, and leave behind no trace of the disturbances 
 it necessarily created? Truly, the contradictions that 
 follow the denial of the credibility of the Acts are so 
 much greater than those supposed to arise from the 
 ancient and universal belief, that we may safely wait 
 until we are dispossessed by some arguments known 
 to the law or the equity of imbiassed literary criticism. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 27 
 
 II. 
 
 What could it be that so charged the hearts of the 
 apostles with unheard-of vigor and energy? What 
 was the source of that calm, unchanging joy wliich 
 shines from the pages of the genuine history and cor- 
 respondence of the infant society? It was a colossal 
 faith in the person of Jesus Christ and His works, His 
 life, His doctrine, and His promises — no mere admira- 
 tion of His conduct, no vague, undefined velleity of a 
 remote imitation, no simple confidence in His power, 
 sanctity, and future coming. It was a faith with an 
 objective content, whose main elements and outlines 
 are clearly set forth in the genuine writings of the 
 apostles, faith in their mission by Him whom they 
 never tired of preacliing, faith in the fidelity of His 
 support and His ultimate victory, faith in the specific 
 purpose of a society they were sent to " found and to 
 estabhsh " in the words of the most ancient Christian 
 writers, i.e., to organize as a self-propagating and 
 self-preserving entity, in order to hand down to re- 
 motest times the history, doctrine, and authority of 
 Jesus Christ. The apostles were no vapid dreamers, 
 but men of action — elevated and transfigured, in- 
 deed, but with clear and fixed purposes that culmi- 
 nated in the estabhshment of a universal religious 
 association. Hence in the New Testament one sees 
 
28 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 them everywhere; traveiling, preaching^ organizing 
 little knots and bands of believers — an activity so 
 marked that their immediate disciple, Clement of 
 Rome, recalls it as their chief occupation. This stu- 
 pendous faith found expression in a personal devotion 
 to Jesus Christ that ravished all souls and filled heart- 
 weary multitudes with a presentiment of spiritual 
 peace and refreshment to be had at the same source. 
 The Temple of Janus was shut, it is true, but the ex- 
 ternal peace of Rome covered much mental commo- 
 tion. '' Csesar, in thy peace what things I suffer! " 
 cries Epictetus. The minor political arenas of the 
 world were closed, that mankind might for once 
 watch the splendid game of world-government as con- 
 ducted on a suitable scale upon the few acres of marly 
 soil that spread on either side of the Tiber. The gods 
 of the nations were without prestige, for they had not 
 been able to hold their own against the fortune of 
 Rome. The great philosophies offered consola- 
 tion, as philosophy always does, but to a chosen few 
 only, and in an insufficient way. The superb art of 
 Greece had taken the road of exile. Henceforth it 
 can only imitate — it will create no more. The 
 sources of its inspiration are dried up; there is no 
 longer in it any power of consecration. It is no 
 longer a spiritual strength or a rehgious consolation, 
 for the popular faith on which it stood has universally 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 29 
 
 collapsed. The feeling of the powerful and opulent 
 can be guessed from the bitter words of their chief 
 writer, Tacitus, that man is the wretched toy of an 
 insolent fate. The outlook of the statesman was so 
 disheartening that Tiberius congratulated the Senate 
 on the disruption of the Germanic Confederation of 
 Maroboduus as an event of greater import than the 
 Athenian defeat of Phihp, or the Roman victories 
 over Pyrrhus or Antiochus. On this sated and 
 wearied world the preaching of the apostles and their 
 disciples made a vivid impression, with its assertion 
 of a new kingdom and a new ruler in the yet uncon- 
 quered province of the human heart. The eloquent 
 universal praise and the steadfast adoration of this 
 new personality, the great deeds done in His name, 
 the assertion of His eternal kingship, the adhesion in 
 every city of miscellaneous multitudes, convinced new 
 multitudes that the person of Jesus was divine and 
 worthy of all the devotion bestowed upon it. It was 
 the intensity and eloquence of this devotion in St. 
 Paul that nearly persuaded King Agrippa to become 
 a Christian. In many a later persecution it was the 
 personal devotion of the martyrs to Jesus Christ that 
 moved the onlooking pagans to consider what man- 
 ner of person He might be for whom men so joyfully 
 laid down their lives. Who can read the letters of 
 St. Ignatius of Antioch, especially that to the Romans, 
 
30 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 without being moved by the fine exalted mysticism 
 of his speech, without feehng that a new and irresist- 
 ible passion, the personal love of God for man and man 
 for God, has been introduced among men, and that, 
 like an atmosphere or a perfume, it must soon trans- 
 form the hearts of all who admit it, and eventually 
 renew from within every society in which its believers 
 multiply? 
 
 The personal memories of Jesus worked marvels in 
 the hearts of the apostles. To beheve this we do not 
 need to recall the old tradition that the cheeks of 
 Peter were furrowed by the tears that he shed when 
 he recalled that divinely sad glance of Jesus. We do 
 not need to recollect that Christ vouchsafed a per- 
 sonal apparition to St. Paul, as though this grace were 
 needed to make him an equal apostle with the others. 
 How could they ever forget the incomparable Master 
 and Teacher with whom they had so long dwelt in 
 sweet intimacy? They knew now that it was God 
 Himself with whom they had crossed the hills of Gal- 
 ilee, who had walked with them through its valleys 
 and its villages, who had sailed with poor fishing folk 
 in their humble boats on Genesareth. With the com- 
 pelling magic of affection they recalled surely His 
 mien. His gestures. His gait, His sweet gravity, the 
 liquid eyes, twin homes of love and sorrow, and that 
 familiar speech that was wont to fight in the heart of 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 31 
 
 every listener a flame of faith and love. He went 
 about doing good, He spoke as one having power, 
 grace was about Him as an atmosphere — how could 
 the apostles fail to renew in those divinely efficient 
 memories their hearts sore-tried in the multitudinous 
 conflict that they were directing? What is hke unto 
 memory? It is Hke the sword that reaches the inner- 
 most divisions of the soul, and pierces us in the re- 
 motest of our spiritual fortresses. Or again it is hke 
 the wings of the morning on which we may fly from 
 all that is Httle and vile and hemming, and rest in the 
 bosom of God Himself. The true sphere of man is 
 himself, not the world about him, and his true wealth 
 or poverty is the memories of the past, with their 
 sweetness or their horror. Jesus knew that the mem- 
 ory of Himself would be for all time the most potent 
 confirmation of faith. So He established on the last 
 night of His earthly fife a simple rite, a frugal meal or 
 banquet, fixing Himself its essentials. This He left 
 not only to His apostles, but especially to all those 
 who in future ages would heed their call and join 
 themselves to His kingdom. Thus He f ocussed upon 
 His person forever the attention of all mankind in 
 that mystic moment when divine love emptied it- 
 self for love of man, and human hate outdid itself in 
 the death of the God-Man. We can see from the 
 earliest documents of Christianity that this mystic 
 
32 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 banquet was the great driving heart of the society, its 
 vivifying sun, the secret of its inexhaustible strength. 
 The Httle house-churches of Jerusalem, the upper 
 chambers where the brethren met to break bread, the 
 descriptions of such banquets in St. Paul, the con- 
 fession of the Christian deaconesses to the Younger 
 Phny, the pages of the earhest Christian writers, the 
 numerous old frescoes of the Christian catacombs at 
 Rome, and a long series of other indications, show 
 that here was the chief source of the apostoHc en- 
 ergy, here Jesus dwelt forever among them. The 
 momentary transfiguration on Thabor, seen by a 
 few only, was now the daily joy of all, replete with 
 infinite personal revelations, illuminations, and 
 suggestions, to them who had known Him in the 
 flesh. 
 
 While the effusion of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost 
 confirmed in an extraordinary degree the faith of the 
 infant Church, it brought to the apostles and disci- 
 ples a number of charismatic gifts, special graces given 
 to them as public teachers, for the more rapid attain- 
 ment of a certain external growth, efficiency, and or- 
 ganic consistency in the new religion. God with- 
 drew before their discourse the barrier of differing 
 tongues and idioms. They enjoy the gifts of proph- 
 ecy and miracles, especially of healing and of exor- 
 cism of evil spirits, and in their exercise of these high 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 33 
 
 gifts we see a prudence and a practical beneficence 
 which resembles the conduct of Jesus. 
 
 Another element of the apostolic success is their in- 
 comparable enthusiasm. There is a natural contagion 
 in the mere expression of overpowering conviction, 
 and the annals of eloquence teem with examples of 
 multitudes, even nations, yielding obedience to the 
 flaming words of some Demosthenes or Hortensius, 
 some St. Bernard or Peter the Hermit. But the 
 apostolic enthusiasm was no mere trick of human elo- 
 quence, for they tell us themselves that they spoke 
 not in the persuasive words of human speech. In 
 an age of finical perfection of language their discourse 
 was doubtless rude and unadorned. Their tongues 
 betrayed their origin as Peter's did his, and their 
 Jewish profiles would not tempt many to expect from 
 them a philosophy of salvation. The enthusiasm of 
 the apostles was something different; it was the 
 steady flame of pure faith and love running out in 
 absolute, uncalculating devotion. We all know the 
 mental habit of men who have devoted themselves 
 to one purpose and who pursue it without ceasing or 
 wavering. They may walk in the shadow forever, 
 but an interior fight illumines their souls and trans- 
 figures and sanctifies the object of their endeavors, 
 be it some mystery of philosophy, or art, or human 
 science, some wrong to avenge, some justice to be 
 
34 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 obtained. Leonardo da Vinci walking the streets of 
 Milan for his head of Christ, Bernard PaUssy casting 
 to the flames the furniture of his poor workshop as a 
 last holocaust to his fleeting dream of beauty, Colum- 
 bus following his glorious ideal from one rebuff to an- 
 other, are familiar examples of this highest and most 
 efficient state of the heart, in which it overleaps the 
 poor barriers of space and time, lays hold by antici- 
 pation of the cherished object, Hves with it and for 
 it, and compels the astonished body, like a sturdy 
 slave, to outdo itself in endurance and sacrifice. Such 
 was the mental temper of the apostles, only im- 
 measurably higher in degree, as much as divine faith 
 surpasses human confidence. They knew whom they 
 were serving, and through what an unspeakable 
 tragedy they were missionaries on the great highways 
 of the East and the West. They walked forever in 
 the shadow of Calvary, and their ears were forever 
 haunted by the parting accents of their Master: " Go- 
 ing therefore, teach all nations.'^ 
 
 Henceforth no scorn shall chill their resolution, no 
 apathy or dulness dim their courage. The world 
 lay before them, its first great spiritual conquerors, 
 sunk in the shadows of idolatry, with only here and 
 there a point of light, the little Jewries scattered over 
 the Roman Empire and beyond, and those few chosen 
 Gentile souls who were true to the law of nature and 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 35 
 
 the impulses of the Holy Spirit. Before their genera- 
 tion was over, this world had recognized the king- 
 ship of Jesus Christ, and a peaceful revolution had 
 been accomphshed, the immensity of whose import 
 no one could yet fathom, but which rightly forms the 
 division-hne between the Old World and the New, 
 between an imperfect and stumbhng humanity in 
 which the animal element was supreme and a hu- 
 manity awakened, self-conscious, transmuted, in 
 which the spirit was henceforth dominant, and which 
 had henceforth its universal ideal, reahzed, hving, 
 eternal, tangible, attainable, enjoyable, in the person 
 of its Mediator and its Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
 
 Indeed, the world was ready for their message of 
 salvation. It was no savage or semi-cultured epoch 
 into which Christianity was born, but one of elegant 
 civihzation, perfect in all the appointments of speech, 
 literature, art, communication and administration. 
 It was an enhghtened age, and the most progressive 
 materially that has preceded our own. It was curi- 
 ous, critical, sceptical, with a view over the world of 
 man and nature such as had not yet been reached. 
 And having touched the summit of external power, 
 this age began to turn inward upon itself, and to ask 
 itself the meaning of hfe and death, of man and 
 things, of the real uses of victory and defeat, of truth 
 and goodness and beauty. The writers of the time 
 
36 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 show that many looked to the Orient and especially to 
 Judsea for a Saviour, so powerful had been the Old 
 Testament propaganda in the basin of the Mediter- 
 ranean. The Sibyls, those strange intermediaries 
 between Jew and Gentile, sang of an approaching 
 age of gold, of an immortal reign of justice, of a Vir- 
 gin and a celestial Child who were to be the authors of 
 all future happiness. The popular pliilosophy. Sto- 
 icism, was of Oriental origin and borrowed much of 
 its practical value from Semitic etliics. The eyes of 
 the world were fixed on Judsea, if only because its 
 mountains were the last refuge of ancient national 
 Hberty, and men were selUng dearly on those sacred 
 hills the great jewel of personal and religious free- 
 dom. The theology and the etliics of Israel were 
 making proselytes among heart-weary men and 
 women in every city and in every class of society. 
 A general spirit of unrest pervaded mankind, the re- 
 sult of excessive public materialism unbalanced by 
 any extra-mundane tendencies, and of a shattered 
 faith in national and municipal gods. An undefined 
 but aching sense of sin, a wild inarticulate cry for 
 personal redemption, the individual need of expia- 
 tion and internal purification, were borne in on every 
 breath from the Orient. There is a deep significance 
 in the old legend that at the hour of Christ's agony 
 certain mariners on the Mediterranean heard, borne 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 37 
 
 on the blast, the cry: ''Great Pan is dead.'' The 
 ancient travesties of rehgion typified by the Greek 
 nature-god called Pan had, indeed, finished their 
 long career of failure and despair, and we may well 
 repeat the fine fines of the modern poet : 
 
 " Earth outgrows the mystic fancies 
 Sung beside her in her youth, 
 And those debonair romances 
 Sound but dull beside the truth. 
 Phoebus' chariot-course is run;; 
 Look up, poets, to the sun: 
 Pan, Pan is dead. 
 
 "Christ hath sent us down the angels, 
 And the whole earth and the skies 
 Are illumed by altar-candles 
 Lit for blessed mysteries; 
 And a priest's hand through creation 
 Waveth calm and consecration'; 
 And Pan is dead." 
 
 But if the victory of the apostles was rapid, it was 
 not therefore entirely natural. It was far from being 
 an easy evolution of a cosmopofitan tendency. The 
 final establishment of the Christian society met with 
 superhimian obstacles, so great and varied that they 
 more than offset the circumstances that favored it. 
 The Christian Church has always taught that her 
 original victories constituted a moral miracle suffi- 
 cient to compel the attention of every seeker after 
 truth, and to force them to look into her claims. 
 
38 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 III. 
 
 Within a hundred years after the death of Christ 
 His religion might rightly be called a universal one. 
 It had spread widely toward the Orient, crossed the 
 Jordan, was flourishing in the great commercial cities 
 of Syria and out on the great Syrian steppe. It 
 had penetrated into Persia and away beyond, into 
 remotest India. Trustworthy evidence shows that 
 there were few Jewish communities into wliich the 
 name and history of Christ had not gone, and the 
 Jews since the last captivity were settled throughout 
 the entire Orient. It was strong enough in Alex- 
 andria to draw the attention of the Emperor Hadrian 
 on his visit to that city, in the early part of the sec- 
 ond century, and it was quickly carried over the en- 
 tire Delta and along the great river, not only among 
 the Grseco-Romans, but also among the Old-Coptic 
 villagers who intermingled with their masters. From 
 golden Antioch it radiated throughout northern 
 Syria, followed all the roads of commerce that 
 branched from there to the Caspian, up into the 
 mountainous tablelands of Armenia, across the 
 mighty snow^-crowned ridges of the Taurus into Cap- 
 padocia, Galatia, Bithynia, and along the northern 
 and southern coasts of Asia Minor. Peter and Paul, 
 Barnabas and Mark, Timothy and John, had gone 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 39 
 
 over all these great highways and sowed the good 
 seed in their day. Every Christian community sent 
 out in turn its swarms of nameless missionaries, who 
 penetrated the remotest valleys and cHmbed into the 
 most inaccessible regions. 
 
 Throughout the first and second centuries of 
 Christianity there is observable a universal propa- 
 ganda that transports Christian men and women in 
 all directions and makes use of the political unity to 
 organize and secure the unity of faith. Who can read 
 unmoved the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch to 
 the Christian communities of Asia Minor and Rome? 
 What a picture they show of widespread Christianity, 
 with identical government and faith! And the pages 
 of the Church historian Eusebius show us the same 
 conditions throughout all Asia Minor in the follow- 
 ing century, i.e., before the year 200 a.d.: bishops 
 preaching, travelhng, holding synods, discussing 
 with pagans, Jews, and heretics. Within the last 
 decade we have found the curious tombstone of one 
 of these old missionary bishops, Abercius of Hierop- 
 olis, a city of Phrygia. Its inscription, prepared by 
 himself, shows a man who had travelled the world 
 from the Tiber to the Tigris in the interests of Chris- 
 tianity, and who rejoiced that he had found among 
 all these brethren no other faith than that of St. Paul. 
 This army of missionaries was yet needed, and we 
 
40 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 know that they possessed for long decades no small 
 share of the charismatic gifts of the apostolic period. 
 In the West the churches of southern Italy re- 
 ceived the faith of Christ at a very early date, being 
 really a portion of the Greek world by language, in- 
 stitutions, and traditions. Its progress was slower 
 in northern Italy, but within the apostohc times it 
 had surely made some headway in Gaul, or what is 
 known as southern France, in Spain, and the islands 
 of the Mediterranean. Long before the end of the 
 second century it was firmly established in northern 
 Africa, and by the year 200 a.d. there was scarcely 
 a prominent city in the Mediterranean world that 
 did not have its Christian bishop with a clergy and a 
 flourishing community. This was done without any 
 human aid, in spite of every human hindrance, by 
 the purely peaceful means of preaching and example. 
 They had few writers and they depended little on the 
 written page. One of the greatest of the first Chris- 
 tian missionaries, St. Irenseus of Lyons, tells us that 
 the barbarian Kelts and Britons had the law of Jesus 
 written on their hearts without paper or ink. They 
 had the Christian Scriptures, no doubt, and venerated 
 them, but they knew that the true guarantor of faith 
 was the apostolic office and succession, that there 
 alone could be found the criterion that enables men 
 easily to distinguish among the claims of a hundred 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 41 
 
 sects the original doctrine of Jesus. For that rea- 
 son they kept with care the list of the apostolic 
 churches, and consulted them in cases of need or 
 doubt, and especially the Church of Rome, whose 
 episcopal succession is the oldest and surest that we 
 have, and was made out \vith great care, before SS. 
 Peter and Paul were a hundred years dead, by St. 
 Irenseus of Lyons and by Hegesippus, a Palestinian 
 traveller. In other words, the first Hst of the bishops 
 of Rome was not made out by Roman Christians, 
 who knew it too well, but by a Greek Asiatic and a 
 Jew, who felt its need as the sure and sufficient pledge 
 of the maintenance of the Catholic doctrine. 
 
 If the Christian missionaries could move easily from 
 one place to another, and could find men and women 
 speaking a common tongue — the Greek, — they had 
 not therefore converted them. In the great cities, 
 as in the rural districts, among the most refined popu- 
 lations as well as among the semi-barbarians of the 
 empire, they found two great sources of almost in- 
 superable obstacles — the social order and the religious 
 condition. These obstacles they overcame before their 
 death, and it is this victory which Christians call a 
 moral miracle of the highest order. The conduct of 
 the greatest intellectual adversaries of Christianity 
 is in itself an indirect proof that its first propagation 
 throughout the world was, morally speaking, an event 
 
42 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 that transcended all human experience and analogy. 
 These exacting critics leave nothing undone to trans- 
 form the great victory of Jesus Christ over the 
 Gr2eco-Roman world into the stages of a natural and 
 easy evolution in which every circumstance favors 
 the Christian cause and operates equally to the detri- 
 ment of the pagan rehgion and society. 
 
 Foremost among them is Edward Gibbon, the 
 mirror of the philosophic irreligion of the eighteenth 
 century, an arrogant and splenetic man who spurned 
 the saving gift of faith, and consumed talent of the 
 very highest order in the service of a shallow scepti- 
 cism. For him Christianity is a phenomenon to be 
 explained by a brief catalogue of natural situations 
 and contemporary advantages. He ignores habit- 
 ually or minimizes the true issue. With a constant 
 uncharity he attributes or suggests motives that really 
 exist only in his own imagination or heart. He Hfts 
 by the potent magic of words the secondary to the 
 plane of the principal, and gives to the transitory or 
 local or accidental in Christianity the supreme re- 
 sponsible role of a principal or an efficient cause. He 
 emphasizes with the delicate patient care of a minia- 
 turist every detail favorable to his own contentions, 
 and cloaks in rhetorical silence whatever would reduce 
 their value. By this long unbroken process of cari- 
 cature he has given to the world an account of the 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 43 
 
 first Christian ages that is a compound of rhetorical 
 
 mimmism, exaggeration, and distortion. In it every 
 
 paragraph is charged with infinite injustice. These 
 
 Hterary wrongs are often, of course, very delicate and 
 
 elusive. The whole picture of primitive Christianity 
 
 as drawn by Gibbon is about as like the original facts 
 
 as the misshapen Cahban was like the fairy nymph 
 
 Ariel. There is in this extraordinary man something 
 
 of Milton^s graceful and humane BeHal: 
 
 " He seemed 
 For dignity composed and high exploit'; 
 But all was false and hollow ; though his tongue 
 Dropped manna and could make the worse appear 
 The better reason." 
 
 He is the most expert special pleader known at the 
 bar of liistory, owing to his enormous reading and 
 maliciously retentive memory, his fine rare skill in 
 summarizing, his unequalled architectonic talent in 
 disposing his materials, and the supreme gift of a 
 rhetoric at once solemnly and finically gorgeous. He 
 climbs the cathedra of history and thunders therefrom 
 like an Egyptian priest reciting the good and evil 
 deeds of some dead Pharaoh. He is a compound of 
 Rhadamanthus and Momus, foremost master of that 
 dread art of satire which is often only the expression 
 of pride and hate, rather than of justice or equity. 
 He " sapp'd a solemn creed with solemn sneer " at an 
 unfortunate psychological moment wiien it lay hum- 
 
44 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 bled in the dust by an astounding series of causes. 
 But he is frequently inexact and careless in state- 
 ments, as every new edition of his work shows. He 
 is incurably afflicted with a cheap and fflppant ra- 
 tionahsm that runs always, animal-Hke, terre-a-terre, 
 and can see notliing noble, divine, providential in the 
 world's history. He has outUved Voltaire because 
 he was graver and deeper than that protagonist; but 
 he belongs to the same school that stubbornly weaves 
 the web of facts on a fixed pattern and takes the har- 
 mony and brilliancy of its own coloring for the real 
 face of history. Gibbon may well assign as causes 
 of the rapid spread of Christianity the zeal of the early 
 Christians, their belief in a future hfe of rewards and 
 punishments, the power they claimed of working 
 miracles, their pure and austere morality, their unity 
 and discipline. But he leaves out the very soul of 
 the Christian rehgion, the love of Jesus Christ crucified, 
 which was in every martyr's heart and mouth, and 
 who so often appeared to them in their noisome pris- 
 ons in ravisliing visions like that of St. Perpetua. He 
 has studied in vain the documents and monuments 
 of those days who does not see that it was by the di- 
 vine alchemy of love that Jesus transmuted the stony 
 pagan heart into the living breathing Christian heart, 
 and stamped it forever with His name, and sent it 
 forth among mankind, the seat and source of infinite 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 45 
 
 divine ardors and fancies— a weak and fleshly vessel, 
 indeed, but interpenetrated with celestial virtue, 
 and capable of shedcUng forever a healing spiritual 
 aroma through a fainting and decaying world. 
 Why should the beUef in future punishments attract 
 the Greeks and Romans, who, according to Gibbon 
 himself, were abandoning their immemorial Styx and 
 Tartarus? How could the Christian morality be 
 attractive to the immoral masses whose hves it stig- 
 matized, and to its impenitent rulers? The causes 
 that Gibbon assigns are as much effects as causes. 
 Their own origin needs first to be explained, above 
 all their combination in Christianity and at that time. 
 As Cardinal Newman has well put it (Grammar of 
 Assent, pp. 445 and 446): ''If these causes are ever 
 so available for his purpose, still that availableness 
 arises out of their coincidence, and out of what does 
 that coincidence arise? Until this is explained noth- 
 ing is explained, and the question had better be let 
 alone. These presumed causes are quite distinct 
 from each other, and I say the wonder is how they 
 came together. How came a multitude of Gentiles 
 to be imbued with Jewish zeal? How came zealots 
 to submit to a strict ecclesiastical regime? What 
 connection has such a regime with the immortality 
 of the soul ? Why should immortality, a philosoph- 
 ical doctrine, lead to belief in miracles, which is called 
 
46 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 a superstition of the vulgar? What tendency have 
 miracles and magic to make men austerely virtuous? 
 Lastly, what power has a code of virtue as calm and 
 enlightened as that of Antoninus to generate a zeal 
 as fierce as that of Machabeus? Wonderful events 
 before now have apparently been nothing but coin- 
 cidences; certainly, but they do not become less won- 
 derful by cataloguing their constituent causes, unless 
 we show lK)w»they come to be constituent/' 
 
 There is no parallel to this in the spread of Mo- 
 hammedanism. The doctrine of Islam was spread 
 by the sword. The idolaters, the heathen, were ex- 
 terminated, the Jews and Christians allowed to live, 
 but in the most humiUating subjection and sur- 
 rounded with odious restrictions. The lot of the 
 Oriental churches under Islam was the saddest im- 
 aginable. There have been wars innumerable among 
 Christians in the name of religion, but they are usually 
 against the law of Jesus, while according to Moham- 
 med the sacred war ought i o be chronic. Islam is a 
 national travesty of some of the best elements of 
 Judaism and Christianity, elevated to the dignity of 
 a universal religion. It is a poor, weak, grotesque 
 worship, such as might arise in the brain of a vision- 
 ary cataleptic and among a half -savage people. It 
 identifies Church and State. It is a wretched replica 
 of Byzantine Caesaropapism, and in all essential 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 47 
 
 points is only a low-grade, universalized Arabism. 
 It was the sense of political greatness, of national 
 destiny, that made its first followers fanatically brave. 
 They fell upon peoples long unaccustomed to any 
 resistance, in a moment when the military strength 
 and system of the Empire were weakened by long 
 wars, at a crisis when its own provinces turned 
 traitor and admitted the enemy for the sake of re- 
 venge, because of the religious oppression and the 
 civil despotism of Constantinople. How different 
 is all this from the spiritual victory of Christianity 
 with all its elevating influences and the embellish- 
 ment and perfection of all human life with which it 
 comes in contact! 
 
 In the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans 
 St. Paul puts his finger on the chief source of opposi- 
 tion to the preaching of Christianity, the frightful 
 immorality of the Roman world. That is the usual 
 source of hatred for the preacher of the Gospel, 
 whether it comes from the Iroquois or the Chinese or 
 some mediaeval barbarian chief. Renan will not 
 admit that it was as bad as St. Paul depicts it. But 
 the rare examples of virtue that he cites are scattered 
 over a long time, and only serve to intensify the moral 
 horror of the reality. The imperfect but less inmioral 
 religions of Greece and Rome had become corrupted 
 by their contact with the vile worships of Syria and 
 
48 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 Egypt, which made even the army of the Empire 
 their channel of propagation to the remotest West. 
 These orgiastic rehgions of debauch drove out in turn 
 the mysteries of Greece, and enthroned their horrid 
 symbols in every community of the Roman world. 
 Words fail to express, the tongue refuses to utter, the 
 wretched depths of moral degradation which human 
 society had reached in the days of the first propaga- 
 tion of Christianity. The very worst vices were 
 sheltered in the temples dedicated to the worship of 
 the gods. Unnatural vice and general infanticide, 
 profligacy and hcentiousness in every shape, went un- 
 checked, nay, were become laudable customs of so- 
 ciety. The popular amusements, the stage, the cir- 
 cus, the arena, were one wild orgy of immorahty; 
 unfeeling cruelty to the weak and the helpless was 
 the order of the day. Not only did the gladiators 
 die by thousands in single combats to make a Roman 
 holiday, but whole armies of men were compelled to 
 bloody combat, for the pleasure of the populace. It 
 has been said by a great scholar that ''if the inner 
 life were presented to us of that period which in 
 political greatness and art is the most brilHant epoch 
 of humanity, we should turn away from the sight 
 with loathing and detestation. The greatest admirer 
 of heathen writers, the man endowed with the finest 
 sensibilities for beauty and form, would feel at once 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 49 
 
 that there was a great gulf fixed between us and them 
 which no Tvilhngness to make allowance for the dif- 
 ference of age and countries would enable us to pass.'' 
 A hundred human interests were opposed to the 
 spread of the new doctrine. The owners of the 
 pythonical girl and the silversmiths of Ephesus were 
 only types of a great multitude whose local and tem- 
 poral interests were affected by Christianity, and who 
 pursued its missionaries with the fiercest hatred. All 
 the ministers of luxury and extravagance, all the mul- 
 titudes who hved by the temples and the abominable 
 superstitions of the age, all the traffickers in human 
 flesh, were its sworn enemies. Though the offspring 
 of Judaea, for several reasons it was the object of 
 Jemsh hate and opposition, and the Jews of the time 
 were still a world-wide power with which the Empire 
 itself deigned to reckon. Apostate brethren, angry 
 excommunicated members, jealous pubHc teachers 
 or so-called philosophers, the pagan priesthood, pro- 
 fessional spies and informers, the very members of 
 his own family, were the daily cross of the primitive 
 Christian. He walked as with a charmed fife amid a 
 world of enemies. 
 
 Withal, the little comimunities grew with incredi- 
 ble rapidity. Whole provinces Hke Bithynia were 
 Christian before Christ was one hundred years dead. 
 Before the end of the second century the most peace- 
 
50 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fill of religions had filled every city with its adherents, 
 and one of its writers could threaten Roman society 
 with desolation if the Christian multitude abandoned 
 it. With its doctrines of equahty, humihty, charity, 
 a future Hfe, one understands with ease how it ap- 
 pealed to the world of slaves and lowly people. To 
 these it brought a priceless balm, the assurance of an- 
 other and a happier hfe, where the iniquitous condi- 
 tions of the present would be abolished or reversed. 
 And yet with almost equal strength it attracted the 
 hearts of many among the wealthy and the power- 
 ful. Among the first converts were Pharisee priests, 
 a Roman proconsul, a scholarly physician, a Greek 
 judge, noble Jewish matrons, women of refinement. 
 A fourth-century legend tells how at the birth of Christ 
 a foimtain of oil burst forth from the soil of Rome. 
 A cistern of sweet waters had, indeed, broken out in 
 the social desert of the Grseco-Roman hfe, and al- 
 ready the renown of its virtues was noised abroad to 
 the ends of the earth. In spite of the external splen- 
 dor and grandeur of their conditions, a multitude of 
 the better classes were suffering profoundly from the 
 emptiness, the insufficiency, the growing horror of 
 life. Only too often they went out of it by the dark 
 but open door of suicide, and there is a profound 
 truth in the picture of their mental sadness and de- 
 spair that Matthew Arnold offers us : 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 51 
 
 " On that hard pagan world disgust 
 And secret loathing fell; 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes. 
 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad in furious guise 
 Along the Appian way. 
 
 " He made a feast, drank deep and fast. 
 And crowned his brow with flowersg 
 No easier nor no quicker passed 
 The impracticable hours." 
 
 Unwittingly the aristocratic writer Tacitus is the 
 first to reveal the names of Roman nobles who took 
 refuge in the teachings of Jesus: Pomponia Grsecina, 
 the wife of the Roman conqueror of Britain; Flavins 
 Clemens, the Roman consul, with his wife and niece; 
 the two Flavise Domitillse, whose Christianized fam- 
 ily cemetery may yet be seen at Rome. Before the 
 year 100 a.d. the family of the Acilii Glabriones, 
 the proudest in Rome, was Christian. Henceforth 
 the epitaphs of the Catacombs show us the descend- 
 ants of Cicero and Atticus and Seneca among the 
 humble adorers of Jesus, often themselves blessed 
 martyrs— like Cseciha and Agnes. In the oldest 
 parts of the oldest Catacombs we come across the 
 broken epitaphs of Christian iEmihi, CorneUi, Max- 
 imi, Attici, Pomponii, Bassi, and many others of the 
 foremost famihes of repubhcan Rome. The pagan 
 
52 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 priests, the philosophers, the magistrates, might 
 sneer at the rustic, uncultured, and gross mob of 
 Christians; the latter knew that before the altar of 
 many a little Christian church there knelt with them 
 the near relatives of the rulers of the world. The 
 rulers of the world themselves were more than once 
 attracted by the doctrine and the society of Jesus. 
 Long before Constantine, the Christians could claim 
 the Emperor Phihp the Arabian as one of their body, 
 while the Abgars and the Tigranes, kings of Edessa 
 and of Armenia, were Christians before the end of the 
 third century, as was also the Greek king of the 
 Crimean Bosphorus. It is an old Christian tradition 
 that Tiberius desired to place Christ among the gods, 
 but was prevented by the Senate. So, too, the Em- 
 peror Hadrian is said to have built many temples to 
 Christ in which no statue was placed. The Emperor 
 Marcus Aurehus was attracted by the healing powers 
 of the Christian bishops, as was his near successor, 
 Septimius Severus. Caracalla was brought up by a 
 Christian nurse, with Christian playmates. Com- 
 modus had a Christian wife. Although Ms prime 
 minister, Ulpian, was so anti-Christian that he is said 
 to have codified the legislation hostile to the Church, 
 Alexander Severus placed the portrait of Christ in his 
 private chapel, and commended the concord and pru- 
 dence of the Christian bishops to Ins generals and 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 53 
 
 magistrates as models for their administration. An 
 early legend made Christians of the wife and daugh- 
 ter of Decius, perverting no doubt the real fact of the 
 Christianity of the wife and daughter of Diocletian. 
 A hundred years before Constantine, the Christians 
 had become the problem of the Empire. As they mul- 
 tiplied, the state wavered again and again in its treat- 
 ment of them. Pagan Caesars and Christian bishops 
 were indeed mutually exclusive of one another, as 
 Decius very clearly saw. The former could never 
 break away from the antique view of state suprem- 
 acy and all-sufficiency. On the other hand, learned 
 Christians were forecasting little by little the dawn 
 of a reconcihation that to some, however, seemed 
 the last word of folly and spiritual blindness. 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS/ 
 
 With its own subtle sense of justice the Christian 
 Church has conferred from very remote antiquity the 
 title of doctor or teacher on certain famous bishops 
 like Augustine or Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen or 
 Chrysostom. She has recognized in these men sanc- 
 tity of Hfe, depth and purity, vastness and perti- 
 nency of doctrine, evident vocation, and large disci- 
 pleship. And these have sufficed in her eyes to make 
 her single out such men and Hft them up on the great 
 cathedrae of authority, whence their very words in 
 all future time become spiritual law and guidance, as 
 once the opinions of an Ulpian or a Papinian sufficed 
 for the citizen of Rome or Antioch. The world has 
 always yearned for instruction. Man is an animal 
 docile, a teachable animal. Whether it be poet, 
 prophet, lawgiver, king, judge, philosopher, or his- 
 
 » Discourse delivered on the occasion of the Commemoration 
 of the Conversion of St. Paul (Jan. 25, 1899), feast of the 
 Faculty of Theology. 
 
 55 
 
56 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 torian,— man has always admired, sometimes too 
 ardently, those who have loosened the bonds of his 
 ignorance and taught him necessary truths, useful 
 arts, the reasons of things, the mysteries of life and 
 death. Of all the Greek myths, that of Prometheus, 
 the teaching-god, is the most human-natural; he 
 must be cold indeed who can read unmoved the woe- 
 ful plaint of this bright spirit, riveted by jealous Zeus 
 "with clenching teeth of adamant" to the stony face 
 of Caucasus! 
 
 To this immemorial gratitude of our race we owe 
 the names and deeds of a Solon and a Lycurgus, a 
 Numa, a Socrates, an Herodotus, to speak only of 
 those wortliies whom the classic peoples have em- 
 balmed in their memories as their best and greatest 
 teachers. 
 
 It was not, therefore, without reason that the Chris- 
 tian Church symbolized her gratitude for the services 
 of her great teachers by the selection of an ancient 
 term, which she elevated from mean surroundings, 
 and consecrated henceforth to the illustrious com- 
 pany of those who teach the things of God, the soul, 
 human conduct, the future life, the nature, quahties, 
 beauties, and uses of all being, — notably of man, the 
 world, and all the infinite relations of the creature 
 to the Creator. 
 
 We are gathered to-day to make our yearly com- 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 57 
 
 memoration of the selection of such a teacher at a 
 turning-point of the world's history. Only, a teacher 
 immeasurably greater than any Augustine or Chrys- 
 ostom, one at whose feet they confessed themselves 
 happy to listen and learn, a teacher whose calling 
 was directly from the mouth of God Himself, whose 
 doctrine was acquired by no slow process of human 
 training, but poured from above into his capacious 
 mind, even as the drawer of water fills his vase or urn 
 from the generous outpouring of the fountain. 
 
 Paulus Doctor Gentium! Paul the Teacher of the 
 Nations! This is an ancient title, so ancient that it 
 comes down to us from those dim ages when the first 
 Christians were making, not writing, history. It is 
 embedded in the oldest and sweetest prayers of the 
 Roman Church. It must have echoed in the cen- 
 turies of persecution from the mouth of a Pius or a 
 Cornelius as he besought the intercession of the 
 founders of his see. It is solemnly acknowledged 
 by the original churches as often as they make men- 
 tion of the episcopal supremacy, the ^^pontificium" 
 of St. Peter. Indeed, more than once he lays claim 
 to it himself, directly, as in the Epistle to the Gala- 
 tians (c. ii.) and indirectly in the account of his con- 
 version that the Acts furnish us (c. ix.). It is as 
 a teacher that he makes his first public appearance 
 in the Christian comiuunities, as autodidact, as 
 
58 ST, PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 laaTtocxtoXos, the equal of any of the twelve in 
 knowledge and commission. And throughout the 
 documents that have come to us from his hand he 
 maintains at its original high rating the office of 
 teacher, whether he be summarizing in vigorous and 
 luminous traits the history of human morals, or 
 expounding the philosophy of human wrong and 
 imperfection, or pleading for a fugitive slave, 
 or reviewing the astounding dealings of God with 
 Israel. 
 
 But no teacher becomes such without preparation. 
 He may be called out of the regular order, and his 
 doctrine may be delivered to him, Mum teres atque 
 rotundum, from a superior and infallible source. Yet 
 he is a man, with a mind and a heart. He has be- 
 hind him infancy and boyhood and youth. There 
 are in him indestructible elements of heredity, pa- 
 rental, racial, mental. And he has hved in given 
 surroundings, long, intimately, unsuspectingly, — 
 among other men who themselves are mouthpieces 
 of old tradition and custom. His mind and heart 
 have each their own hfe-history, very even and une- 
 ventful, it may be, — and then again, perhaps, very 
 checkered, broken, and stormy. Still, in either case, 
 there is in every human soul an organic growth, an 
 unfolding as of a flower or a fruit. Indeed, what 
 flower or fruit suffers the thousand delicate, shifting, 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 59 
 
 elusive influences that the mind of a child does, — 
 influences more varied, more constant than the play 
 of shadow and sunHght, the motion of the atmos- 
 phere, the flowing ether, the heaving of the sea? 
 
 So this Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, in that hollow 
 of the Mediterranean where the Hellene and the Sem- 
 ite were wont to meet as at a conmion outpost, bore 
 all his life the traces of liis early education. It col- 
 ored his teaching, his arguments, his language, his 
 similes. He was an Hellenistic Jew, but not hke that 
 Jew whom Aristotle knew and who was an Hellene in 
 very spirit and temper, not like those Asmonseans 
 and Herodians who w^ere even then frittering away 
 the last relics of the traditions of Israel. No, Paul was 
 a Jew, intus et in cute, of the soundest " stock of Israel, 
 of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, 
 as touching the Law a Pharisee.'^ He had gone 
 through the primary schools of the Jewish quarter at 
 Tarsus, had learned the text and the interpretation 
 of the Law, perhaps been the equal of Josephus, who 
 was a learned teacher of it at the age of fourteen. 
 Thrice a day he had turned his face to the Holy City 
 and poured out the glorious benedictions of the 
 Schmone-Esre, the Jewish Credo, the very text which 
 one may yet read in any Jewish book of prayer. 
 Twice a day he had piously uttered the Schma, the 
 confession of Jahve's unity and power and glory taken 
 
60 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 from Deuteronomy and Numbers — the Doxology of 
 Judaism. He had worshipped regularly in the syn- 
 agogue by the blue and tideless waters that laved the 
 wharves of his native town. There he read the Scrip- 
 tures through in a three years' course, commented on 
 them and heard them commented on. He observed 
 the three signs of a strict Jew — the fragments of 
 white wool on the four corners of his cloak that kept 
 the commandments before him, the little roll of 
 parchment containing the Law hung up on the right- 
 hand door-post of his room, the Tepliillim or the 
 parchment slip of the Law fastened upon his right 
 arm, and the Tephilla or similar slip bound tight 
 upon his forehead. In the observance of Sabbaths, 
 foods, fastings, purifications, none was stricter than 
 Saul of Tarsus. And when he went up, between thir- 
 teen and sixteen, to the advanced school or academy 
 of Gamahel at Jerusalem, every Pharisee and Scribe 
 rejoiced, for now a new strength appeared upon the 
 horizon, even a youth of destiny. He was indeed a 
 little Origen of the Jews, whose bosom seemed al- 
 ready the abiding-place of the Holy Spirit — a re- 
 freshing fountain of prophecy so long dried up. 
 
 Nevertheless, in all these years he had not escaped 
 the omnipresent influences of Hellas. Since Alex- 
 ander, the Orient was slave to the charm and the 
 puissance of Greek letters, Greek art, and Greek 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 61 
 
 philosophy. Parthian kings assisted at the plays of 
 Euripides, and the Greek drama left the impress of 
 its genius even beyond the Indus and as far as the 
 sacred waters of the Ganges. Asia Minor, though 
 only its fringes were Greek in blood, counted numer- 
 ous cities of Greek origin scattered among the ancient 
 inhabitants of its high valleys and tablelands. This 
 was notably the case along all the great roads by sea 
 or by land. And Tarsus was at the juncture of two 
 such roads, the seaway coming eastward from the 
 Hellespont and northward from Tyre, Sidon, or 
 Csesarea, and the landway that came down through 
 the deep and narrow passes of CiHcia. In the time 
 of Paul it was even an academic centre. The Stoic 
 Zeno had once hved there and caught from life-worn 
 and world-wise Orientals the germs of his powerful 
 doctrine. Roman law was doubtless taught in its 
 schools, or in not distant Berytus. There is some 
 sHght smattering of Greek culture, not in style or 
 thought, but in fragments of poetry or proverbs, in 
 the great Apostle. He knows considerable about the 
 law of the Empire. He has not the pastoral sim- 
 plicity of Amos, or the love of nature of Isaias, but 
 draws his metaphors from the camp, the arena, the 
 lives of soldier and wrestler and runner, from the city- 
 world, the world of resolve and action. When he 
 was not earning his living by weaving the coarse 
 
62 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 Glician cloth made of goats' hair, he must have had 
 leism-e to move about among the splendid monuments 
 of old Greek civilization, temples, baths, markets, 
 porticoes, liippodromes, fountains, statues, inscrip- 
 tions. Here, too, perhaps, in this old centre of Greek 
 and Oriental philosopliies, in tliis minor university- 
 town, he imbibed that supreme contempt for the 
 "wisdom of the world,'' 'Hhe disputers of the world," 
 the "loftiness of human speech," the "persuasive, 
 the learned words of human wisdom." Such phrases 
 refer not to human reason, but to the impotency of 
 philosophy to usurp the office of religion. One day 
 in Athens the disputers will call him, in turn, a " sower 
 of words," and turn a contemptuous back upon his 
 glorious message. But his teaching will grow^, and 
 Justinian will at last close their useless schools that 
 a Nero is now flattering. 
 
 The soul of Paul, then, must have undergone a 
 remarkable formation. It was filled with intense 
 rehgious enthusiasm from youth. It was forced into 
 profound acquaintance with the theology of Juda- 
 ism. Its fibre was hardened Hke fine steel by hourly 
 conflict with self, by reasoned contempt of human 
 wisdom and glory, above all by the worship of an 
 ideal Messias of Israel who should one day reward 
 him and his for their most painful finical fidelity to 
 the Law, their long sorrowing exile among these 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 63 
 
 infidel Greeks and Asiatics — a Messias who should 
 come, even soon, in splendor and majesty and power, 
 and inaugurate in the Holy City the final reign of the 
 just and the saints, of all those who had been loyal 
 and true as adamant in the midst of wretched apos- 
 tasy and pitiful composition and accommodation. 
 
 It was a mighty time, big with the new humanity, 
 one to which all the ages had been looking forward 
 as to their complement, the very fulness of time. 
 The melodious Mantuan and the aged Simeon echo 
 the same cry of the bursting human heart. The 
 forces of the earth were erasing or eUminating one 
 another in favor of Rome. The political world was 
 taking on an entirely new bent and trend, to last for 
 many a day — nay, to our own time, just as when the 
 material cover of earth was finally warped and swollen 
 and sunk into its actual shape. The agitation of 
 the times threw out extraordinary characters — 
 Syllas, Pompeys, Csesars, Herods, Augusti — in the 
 mad race for the prize of universal dominion. It was 
 truly a struggle of godhke giants of personaHty. 
 
 But for firmness and tenacity of purpose, clear 
 vision of his scope and the means to realize it, utter 
 self-abandoning devotion to a cause infinitely higher 
 and holier than liimself; for long-biding patience, 
 intense sustained activity, iron will that laughs all 
 obstacles away; for thorough dominancy of men 
 
64 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS, 
 
 and situations^ and the power to compel the whole 
 army of his workers witliin the Hnes laid down by his 
 own personal genius — in a word, for all the qualities 
 of a commander, St. Paul is more than equal to any 
 man of his time. This is the view of St. Chrysostom, 
 perhaps the most sympathetic and observant of the 
 students of St. Paul, out of whose delicate analysis 
 more than one modern has drawn. 
 
 In St. Paul character shines out dominant, supreme. 
 Out of whatever loom came that great heart and 
 mind, they were of one pattern, fitted perfectly to 
 one another. He is a man, rude and hard and stern, 
 if you will, but certain, self-identical, reliable. 
 There is in him no shiftiness of the ordinary apostate, 
 no plasticity of the standard Greek. It is always 
 yea, yea, or nay, nay. He sees all things in one clear, 
 strong, unwavering hght, a hght that so permeates 
 his conscience and floods its remotest corners that he 
 may not be false to it. Through all theorizing and 
 casuistry of human ingenuity, Jew and Greek, he 
 sees the original golden threads of duty and right- 
 eousness that lead directly from the soul to God. And 
 seeing them he seizes them and holds them forever- 
 more. 
 
 It is because St. Paul, as a disciple of Judaism, de- 
 veloped every native energy of his being that he was 
 one day pre-eminently fitted for the office of a teacher; 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 65 
 
 because in him the most ideal Judaism of the last days 
 came to the front that he was fitted above all other 
 Jews to be specially called by Jesus; because in his 
 heart met the tides of Pharisaism and Hellenism, 
 that he was chosen to be the saving unction of the 
 latter. Who else of the Pharisees had the magnani- 
 mous soul capable of penning the first chapter of the 
 Epistle to the Romans, of announcing an apostleship 
 for obedience to the faith in all nations for the name 
 of Jesus Christ, of declaring himself debtor to the 
 Greeks and to the barbarians, i.e., to all humanity? 
 
 II. 
 
 The world was indeed the only fit school for a man 
 of his training. Alexander wept because he had no 
 more worlds to conquer; Paul was heart-broken be- 
 cause he could not offer to his Master, Christ, every 
 one of those miniature worlds called men, in whom 
 alone the outer world has meaning, praise, end, and 
 dignity. For over thirty years this extraordinary 
 teacher travelled the highways and the by-ways of 
 the Orbis Terrarum, the Grseco-Roman world of an- 
 tiquity. It is doubtful if any official or legionary was 
 more frequently on the great strata or roads that 
 bound the principal cities; certain that none trav- 
 elled them more foot-sore, worn, and weary, but 
 
66 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 radiant with faith and beaming with resolution. Who 
 knows as he that narrow strip of Syrian coast, north- 
 ward from Cffisarea, scarcely more- than a ribbon of 
 stony pathway in some places? How often he read 
 the pompous inscriptions of dead conquerors on the 
 rocks above him! There is the Gulf of Issus on 
 whose shores Darius staked and lost the Orient! 
 There are the Gates of Syria and the Gates of Cilicia 
 through which all Eastern conquerors have passed to 
 reach the highlands of Asia Minor and thence the 
 Hellespont! How often he crossed and recrossed 
 the iEgean and the Mediterranean, moving among 
 the islands famous in ancient story! There is the 
 coast of proconsular Asia with its five hundred Greek 
 cities, its rich trade with East and West piled up in 
 Miletus and Smyrna and Ephesus, its countless ate- 
 hers of Ehodian sculptors, the remnants of whose 
 works now fill the museums of a world, its schools of 
 philosophers, poets, and rhetoricians, — all its golden 
 human Hfe, abundant, throbbing, and varied! There, 
 too, is old IHon, on the slope of Ida, between Simois 
 and Scamander; and if the Apostle knew Homer, 
 perhaps some verses of that strange shadowy struggle 
 of men and gods crossed his mind as the timid shore- 
 keeping galley drifted by, so close, perhaps, that his 
 eyes could rest on ''Mseander's crooked arms" and 
 t'Xanthus' gulfy flood/' 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 67 
 
 It was a time of infinite curiosity and endless pere- 
 grination, this golden age of peace and wealth, but 
 in Paul of Tarsus there is no trace of things that were 
 then and to him minor and insignificant. On every 
 journey he is the herald of Jesus Christ. Whether 
 he toils among the mountains of Cappadocia, or the 
 plateaux of Galatia, or the swamps of Lycaonia; 
 whether he goes from one Macedonian town to an- 
 other, or crosses the Midland Sea to face great Caesar 
 himself, he is everywhere and always teacher, mis- 
 sionary, apostle, prophet, founder. In all history 
 there is no such example of sustained concern and 
 anxiety for the growth of an idea. And if the origins 
 of our religion are mean and humble as far as power 
 and wealth go, they are grandiose, subhme, if we 
 reflect on the men who planted it, the hardships they 
 bore, the contempt they Hved down, the hatred they 
 turned to love, the love they lifted to the enthusiasm 
 of martyrdom. 
 
 What a world it was! The external order was 
 faultless; the Roman Peace was everywhere observed, 
 save by a wandering pirate or some irreducible brig- 
 ands. Arts and letters and philosophy flourished on 
 all sides. Commerce grew and industry flourished, 
 and the court-poets could flatter the brain of the 
 vast machine that the golden age of Saturn had 
 come, precisely at the time when the Jews looked 
 
68 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 for a Messias who was to break the wings and crush 
 the talons of that Roman eagle which looked down 
 exultantly from the gates of the Holy City. 
 
 But withal it was a hard and a wicked world. 
 And when its apologists have said all that can be 
 said for it, there remains yet so sad a picture that 
 the heart instinctively shudders, a picture of might 
 priming right without the defence of eternal pro- 
 test, of labor despised and poverty trampled upon, 
 of slaves without rights, children without moral 
 training, and women without honor or respect. 
 The moral sense was all but dead. Philosophy 
 had lost its power over the multitudes, even if it 
 served to console or guide an unhappy few. Let- 
 ters were yet a thing of joy, a refuge. But when 
 did letters ever fill the cravings of the soul that is 
 morally weak and unsettled? Moral advice never 
 flowed more elegantly than from the Hps of Seneca, 
 yet who followed it? He himself as little as any 
 one, The Stoics themselves felt that what was 
 wanted was a model, a perfect just man, in whom 
 every virtue should see mirrored all its possibih- 
 ties. It was this personaHty which Christianity 
 offered. It bridged by the hfe of Christ the hope- 
 less gulf between the abstract and the concrete. 
 And then it sent forth into the world universal 
 teachers hke Paul, who lived over again, as men. 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 69 
 
 the life of their divine Teacher, and shed on all 
 sides the aroma of His infinite virtue. 
 
 III. 
 
 As a teacher St. Paul has had no equal in the 
 history of humanity. Overflowing with the con- 
 sciousness that his doctrine is not of man, but of 
 God, he knows no wavering, but goes straight to 
 the point at issue— Jesus Christ is God and Man. 
 He was crucified and rose again. In Him our 
 broken and weakened nature was dipped, as it 
 were, in a refreshing bath, and a new love and 
 energy added to it. We are again, by these mys- 
 teries, cliildren of the Father now appeased, and 
 brothers of the Son of God, who has atoned through 
 all eternity for the shortcomings of human nature, 
 has wiped out the contractual slavery under Satan, 
 and reopened the narrow but straight path to eter- 
 nal Hfe, to reunion with the juridical head of our 
 race, Christ Jesus, foreshadowed by Adam's origi- 
 nal headship and responsibility. 
 
 It is a deep and subtle teaching, so deep that 
 the plummet of thought has not yet fathomed 
 its last recesses, so subtle that it furnishes food 
 for minds of every type and cahbre. This first 
 commentator on the Life of Christ rose at one 
 
70 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 bound to the highest empyrean of thought, and 
 exhausted all the fundamental capacities of the 
 mind as against the Hfe and spirit of Jesus. Paul 
 may defend his conclusions by a sublime dialectic 
 of his own, very peculiar and very forceful. He 
 has not reached them by any slow-winding stair- 
 case of digressive thought. Paul has seen; it has 
 been revealed unto him, in the blinding hght of 
 that dread hour amid the flowery fields and apple- 
 orchards and flowing waters that surround Damas- 
 cus, in the cabinet of Ananias, in those three years 
 of meditation and self-searching beyond the Hues 
 of Greek and Jewish hfe, — among the aboriginal 
 Saracens or Bedouins of the Arabian desert. Here 
 he has learned to know the difference between 
 the spirit of the law, its scope and character, and 
 the 'ugly thorny hedge which degenerate doctors 
 had built up about it. Here God transformed, 
 in the silence and peace of nature, the proud and 
 ardent soul into an instrument of choice, supple, 
 devoted, courageous, intelligent. He shed the 
 fantastic theology of the Pharisees; he rose to a 
 sublime conception of the One God as Father, 
 all-merciful, the parent of all humanity. He 
 learned that Judaism was not the end of creation, 
 but a step, a phase, a temporary refuge, a beacon, 
 a pulpit, and that man, humanity, all hfe, all the 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 71 
 
 crowding ages that shall ever be — this was the 
 reason of the Messias, His kingdom, His triumph, 
 and His glory. 
 
 In long and tender colloquies with his divine 
 Master Paul rose above all mankind, and took 
 on something of the personal manner and authority 
 of Christ Himself. In the same breath he is dust 
 and ashes, and then again he thunders and flashes 
 truth after truth, warning after warning, appeal 
 after appeal. His bosom is the channel of divinest 
 thoughts and ardors, and at times he swoons away 
 — the frail vessel of the flesh is all but consumed 
 by these terrific fires. He stands an interme- 
 diary between the soul and God, like the very bind- 
 ing link of religion, and he is filled with the most 
 solenm consciousness that on his vicarious tongue 
 and action depends the fate of a world. He is like 
 one of those narrow estuaries through which the 
 waters of an ocean are driven, whose bed and shores 
 are torn and churned and gashed by the elemen- 
 tal conflict of wind and waves. 
 
 Not only is this man a devoted teacher, holding 
 back nothing of himself; he is also a man of single 
 purpose. His own person sinks away and is lost 
 — he is voice, hand, channel, only an instrimient 
 fitted to the will of Jesus Christ. Faith and love 
 have all but drowned his individual self: he is 
 
72 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 willing to be an anathema, a castaway, a thing of 
 scorn and pity for his brethren, because his own 
 love hath so loved them. 
 
 He is also a teacher of sublime courage. Men 
 admire to-day whoever stood out in former ages 
 for truths we now perceive in their entirety — 
 Galileo, HarvTy, Jenner, any forerunner of the true, 
 the good, and the beautiful as we taste or know 
 them. But how faint the merit of all such when 
 compared with the courage of a man Hke Paul! 
 His teaching was unpopular, new, and difficult. 
 It was full of rock-like principles about wliich the 
 powers of earth must one day rage and the peoples 
 shout vain things. It cut in between man and 
 wife, between father and son, between the spiritual 
 and the temporal, between the soul and the body, 
 between God and Satan, between the City of Sin 
 and the New Jerusalem. Scarcely had it been 
 formulated when men nailed its Founder to a gib- 
 bet that He took for a throne. And scarcely had 
 it got across the borders of Palestine when all 
 life and society were filled with uproar, when there 
 was a cry thoughout all himaanity: ^^To your 
 tents, Israel!'^ — and almost in the twinkling of 
 an eye there stood over against one another the 
 hosts of organized society and the little band of 
 brethren who knew that now the hour had come 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS, 73 
 
 to go out from kin and home and neighbor, and 
 seek the new Land of Promise. 
 
 We can only admire from afar the unparalleled 
 courage of the man who broke down- that alliance 
 of earth-powers, and freed the soul of humanity 
 from the vain terrors and superstitions and still 
 vainer errors and prejudices that held it hke a 
 crust. 
 
 He is not a teacher from his cathedra alone, a 
 Plato or a Zeno; he is a man of action. See how 
 he follows up the openings for Christ at Corinth, 
 in Galatia, in Macedonia! See how he forecasts 
 his journeys to Rome, to Spain! See how he bears 
 about in his heart the needs of the poor, over- 
 taxed, decaying city of Jerusalem, how he is anx- 
 ious over schisms, elections, friendships, new doc- 
 trines! He has caught from the heart of Jesus 
 Christ something of His undying enthusiasm of 
 humanity. 
 
 A teacher must be called by higher authority, 
 so great are the responsibilities toward society, so 
 supreme are the demands made upon the office, 
 so far-reaching, for good or evil, the effects of its 
 administration. Almost at death^s door, St. Pat- 
 rick took up the pen in his aged and palsied fingers 
 to prove that he had not entered Ireland without a 
 proper calling. St. Paul himself avers that no one 
 
74 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 may minister unless called of God, like Aaron. 
 Again and again he recalls his own vocation, given 
 through Christ. His secretary puts down the 
 history of it 'in the note-book of their travels. It 
 is his pride and support; he will even go up to 
 Jerusalem to the chief of the Church and the prin- 
 cipal apostles, to have their juridical approbation, 
 lest he run in vain, or outside of the new so- 
 ciety. 
 
 Yet his calling was an extraordinary one. How 
 often since then has it happened in the history of the 
 Church that the greatest things have been done, 
 not by those born in the faith, but by men who 
 have drifted into it by many long and painful wan- 
 derings! It is the mystery of the eleventh hour, 
 of the vocation of our ancestors, of the corner- 
 stone that the builders rejected, the mysterious 
 law of the success of failure, of the triumph of 
 minorities. Justin, Athenagoras, Clement, Cyp- 
 rian, Augustine, — to speak only of very ancient 
 examples, — are not these the later teachers of the 
 Christians, and did they not all go through the 
 preliminary schools of paganism? 
 
 For all students of theology St. Paul has a real 
 domestic significance. He is the father of Chris- 
 tian theology. In him are contained radicitus, in 
 germ, all the ecclesiastical sciences — the inter- 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 75 
 
 pretation of Scripture, the basic theories of Chris- 
 tian doctrine, the principles of morality and the 
 details of conduct, the origins of the public wor- 
 ship or liturgy, the first chapters of Christian his- 
 tory, the spirit and method of apologetics, the prim- 
 itive institutions of Christian life and practice. 
 What Homer was to the Greek mind, the source of 
 all progress and evolution; what Vergil was to the 
 Roman mind, the mentor of Roman virtue, the 
 index of Roman fortune — that and infinitely more 
 St. Paul was to the Christian mind. In him Jesus 
 Christ raised up and inspired an infalhble law- 
 giver and teacher, as a sure corner-stone to 
 His little society, about which all the weak, uncer- 
 tain human elements of the time must coalesce. 
 
 St. Paul is, moreover, the parent of all 
 great Christian literature. Justin and the Apol- 
 ogists, Clement of Rome, Irenseus, — all the leading 
 Christian thinkers are dominated by him in the 
 second century. Old Abercius of Hieropohs is 
 right in asserting his leadership, and Renan is 
 wrong in saying that his influence paled in that 
 century. The heresy of Marcion and its vigorous 
 refutation show that during all the sub-apostolic 
 time St. Paul was the focus of Catholic theological 
 life. The story of Paul and Thecla shows how 
 well he was remembered about the middle of the 
 
76 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 second century, when legend had already begun 
 to spin its web about his life-story. Augustine, 
 Chrysostom, the great Cappadocian Fathers, Pat- 
 rick, Gregory, Bernard, are great torches lit along 
 the ages from his flame. Of St. Patrick the cau- 
 tious and judicious Tillemont said that no other 
 saint so recalled the Apostle Paul. The great 
 Christian Councils of the first six centuries are 
 dominated by his theology, and it has been well said 
 that in spirit and guidance he is their true president. 
 
 In his pastoral epistles he has left us, as it were, 
 the first manual of clerical conduct. And all later 
 works, like the Apologia of Gregory Nazianzen, 
 the De Sacerdotio of Chrysostom, the Regula Pas- 
 toralis of Gregory the Great, the De Contemptu 
 Mundi of Innocent III. are but echoes, adaptations 
 of these first chapters of formation and guidance. 
 
 Finally, he is to us the model of our deahngs 
 with the people of God. He has flammantia verba 
 and scBva indignatio for evil, but only pity for the 
 sinner. He is full of compassion and gentleness 
 for the poor, the humble in society, the outcast. 
 For those who are Christ's liis heart overflows with 
 love; for those who are not yet of Christ he is 
 thoughtful, ingenious, laborious, — he must win 
 them or perish in the attempt. For Jew and Gen- 
 tile he has reason and argument, history and phi- 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 77 
 
 losophy, when occasion demands it. He takes up 
 the discussion in the Areopagus; perhaps he con- 
 versed with Seneca. In his Roman apartment 
 all were free to come and go, and he was no indo- 
 lent dreamer in those years. 
 
 There opens before us a world not unlike that 
 into which Paul went down and came out victo- 
 rious — a world to be won again for Jesus Christ 
 by the example of our lives and by the victories 
 of the mind; a world as proud and self-satisfied 
 as any Rome or Greece, yet gentler, milder, more 
 refined and accessible. On the other hand, it is 
 harder to convert it to the Christian view of things, 
 for it has once fallen away, and the saving dew does 
 not often fall twice on the same pastures. To 
 speak to this world, to be believed by it, we must 
 appropriate something of the spirit and the methods 
 of the Apostle of the Gentiles. It must be con- 
 vinced of our genuine affection for it. It must see 
 in us the natural virtues it admires and practises. 
 It must find in us elevation of view, breadth 
 and abundance of human sympathies, gentlemanli- 
 ness, genuine tolerance, courtesy of mind, heart, 
 and tongue, a large and hopeful patience in God^s 
 wise management of His own work. We must, in 
 very fact, according to our talent and our circum- 
 stances, become all things to all the men of our 
 
78 ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 age, if we would truly take up the mission and the 
 teaching of the Apostle of the Nations. 
 
 God grant that the number of such disciples of 
 St. Paul increase, and that under the segis of his 
 spirit and his faith there may be again an united 
 Christendom, the only worthy outcome of the labors 
 of so subhme a guide and teacher! God grant us, 
 as time goes on, an ever larger number of men de- 
 voted to the work of the ministrj^, possessed with 
 one purpose, filled with the old and the new learn- 
 ing, passionately fond of their own age and their 
 own country, with great hearts to feel for the needs 
 of both, sure and clever instincts to adapt what is 
 needful, enlightened minds to execute the same, 
 and transcendent enthusiasm to sustain them in 
 their work and to inflame with the same consum- 
 ing spirit each his own time and generation! 
 
 Impendar et superimpendar! Let this be the cry 
 of every noble soul who would live for others, not for 
 himself ! Let it be your answer to every tempta- 
 tion to a life of ease and security when the vast con- 
 flict calls for zeal, fiery and mordant, but breath- 
 ing love and self-sacrifice! Let no cynicism, do- 
 mestic or foreign, dim the freshness and the 
 impact of your ardor! Let no tale of worldly-wise 
 rationalizing experience relegate you to the rear as 
 camp-followers! Rather be ever well up in the 
 
ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS. 79 
 
 front, along the red ridge of battle, where alone 
 the prizes of success are to be had! Mors acerha^ 
 fama perpetiuij stabit vetus memoria facti. 
 
 There are yet mighty deeds to be done for Jesus 
 Christ, even the reconquest of an apostate and dis- 
 illusioned world; and they can only be done in the 
 uncalculating warrior spirit that sustained St. Paul 
 and enabled him to create anew for liis divine Mas- 
 ter a real world, the inner world of the soul, behef, 
 ideals, hopes, that world of which things and sciences 
 are only the beautiful but transitory envelope. 
 
A BISHOP OF ROME IN THE TIME OF 
 DOMITIAN (A.D. 81-96). 
 
 Out of the wreck of the earliest Christian literature 
 there has come down to us a document of great price 
 — the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians. 
 From time immemorial it has been attributed to 
 the third successor of St. Peter, although the in- 
 scription of this golden letter bears the name of the 
 whole Church at Rome : 
 
 ''The Church of God sojourning in Rome to the 
 Church of God sojourning in Corinth, to them that 
 are called and sanctified by the will of God through 
 Our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be to you, and peace 
 from Almighty God through Jesus Christ be mul- 
 tipHed.'' 
 
 The personal note is so developed in its few but 
 weighty pages, the assimilation in one heart of the 
 great truths of the Old and the New Testament is so 
 pronounced, the style is so unique, and the tone of 
 authority so firm, that from all antiquity the epis- 
 tle has been recognized as very specially this ancient 
 
 81 
 
82 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 Pope's own composition. Less than a hundred 
 years after its reception, Dionysius of Corinth 
 informs us that it was read every Sunday in his 
 church as the Epistle of Clement. St. Irenseus, 
 his contemporary, calls it the very important 
 letter of the Roman Church to the Corinthian 
 Church in the days of Clement. Hegesippus, an- 
 other contemporary, living at Rome about a.d. 170, 
 knows it as the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthi- 
 ans. Its genuineness is beyond a doubt: in addi- 
 tion to the above, it was clearly before a writer of 
 the first quarter of the second century, St. Polycarp 
 of Smyrna; for its phraseology reappears in his fa- 
 mous Epistle to the PhiHppians. As Polycarp was 
 a disciple of St. Ignatius of Antioch, we are thereby 
 assured that the Epistle of Clement was current in 
 all the Mediterranean lands almost on the morrow of 
 its promulgation in the community at Corinth. This 
 illustrates the method and rapidity with which the 
 apostohc correspondence was carried on. Indeed, 
 for a long time all Christian Uterature is epistolary 
 in character. 
 
 In the last decade of the first century the Corin- 
 thians had given notable scandal by their rebellious 
 disposition in the matter of the election of a bishop 
 and presbyters. St. Clement, at the first lull in 
 the persecution of Domitian, chides them for the 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN, 83 
 
 jealousy and envy which they have thus laid bare to 
 a scoffing and malicious world. In calm and stately 
 language the Old Testament examples of submission, 
 humihty, and peaceableness are brought forward as 
 a reproof of the seditious temper of the Corinthians. 
 Among other arguments, the conduct of the Re- 
 deemer, the analogy of all creation that moves in 
 perfect order and harmony; the imitation of God, 
 who wills humility, union, and concord; the example 
 of earthly government, the conduct of the apostles, 
 the deadliness of schisms, are in turn urged upon the 
 ringleaders of the opposition, to whom a final appeal 
 is made for the restoration of order. They should 
 exile themselves, if needed; for the concord of hearts 
 is as necessary in the Church as faith and good 
 works. He recommends to the Corinthians his leg- 
 ates, the first ambassadors ever sent by a pope, in 
 a tender formula that sums up the intention and 
 spirit of the epistle : 
 
 "Send back to us speedily our envoys Claudius 
 Ephebus and Valerius Bito, with Fortunatus as well, 
 in peace and joy; in order that they may the sooner 
 bring the news of that peace and concord which we 
 desire and pray for; in order that we, too, may the 
 sooner rejoice over your return to quiet and order. 
 The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with you and 
 with all in every place who have been called by God 
 
84 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 through Him. Through whom be unto Him glory, 
 honor, power, majesty, and dominion everlasting from 
 the ages that are past for ever and ever. Amen.'' 
 In more than one respect the Epistle of Clement 
 recalls the writings of St. Paul; according to very 
 ancient traditions of the Roman Church, he was the 
 personal disciple of both its holy founders. Numer- 
 ous echoes of the Pauline epistles haunt the ear of 
 the reader in every paragraph. There is the same 
 proleptic habit of speech, the same Semitic absence 
 of concern for those processes of thought that are 
 common to the Greeks and Romans, and to us their 
 intellectual offspring. It is truly the work of an Hel- 
 lenistic Jew, of a man whose Semitic soul spoke 
 perforce in the idiom of Homer and Demosthenes, 
 but lived with Moses and Isaias. Had we nothing 
 else from this wonderful half-century of transition, 
 we should know that a mighty religious current was 
 then forming in the world, along which the Good 
 Tidings of redemption were being borne, away from 
 the ancient maternal hegemony of the Synagogue, 
 into the hearts of Greeks and Romans, who yet 
 moved about in forum and agora unconscious that 
 Jesus was already predestining them to apostleship 
 and martyrdom. In passing, we may say that it 
 disproves thoroughly the modern contention that 
 the Roman Church was then divided into a Petrine 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN, 85 
 
 and a Pauline faction; Clement speaks of both with 
 equal affection, and quotes both. Had any such 
 dissension existed at Rome, that Church would 
 scarcely have read to the Church of Corinth this 
 solemn lesson of concord. 
 
 In this earhest apostolic letter of the Popes the 
 critical historian of theology will find the germs of 
 every science that the Church has cherished and 
 nurtured in her long career. It is the oldest docu- 
 ment of canon law, the first non-inspired chapter of 
 church history, the earliest interpretation of those 
 principles of moral theology that lie embedded in 
 the Old and the New Testament. It contains the 
 oldest Preface of the Mass that we know, and is, 
 therefore, most precious material for the history of 
 Christian worship. It is an irreproachable witness 
 to the books of the New Testament as revealed 
 and inspired; the student of pastoral theology could 
 read no more admirable specimen of that calm self- 
 possession and ^' sweet reasonableness" that ought 
 to denote among men the guide of souls. 
 
 How refreshing it is, in the dearth of satisfactory 
 accounts of the earliest days of Christianity, to meet 
 with the following pen-picture of the persecutions 
 of Nero and Domitian — to see before us Peter at 
 Rome in the language of one who saw him there, to 
 see Paul on his way to Spain, to behold the Grcus 
 
86 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 Maximus crowded to the vomitories, and the horrid 
 joy of its ferocious multitude as they looked down 
 on noble matrons and tender maidens tossed on the 
 horns of wild bullS; or made to act out in their bodies 
 the cruellest scenes of Greek mythology! After a 
 touching description of the evils that jealousy and 
 envy had worked in the Old Dispensation, the writer 
 comes suddenly down to the living present : 
 
 ''But enough of these examples from days of old. 
 Let us take those great ones who are nearest to our 
 time, — let us take the grand example which our own 
 generation supplies. It was for jealousy and envy 
 that the greatest and most righteous pillars of the 
 Church were persecuted and fought even unto the 
 death. Let us set before our eyes the good apos- 
 tles: Peter, who for unrighteous jealousy submitted 
 not to one nor two but many labors, and who, hav- 
 mg thus borne witness, passed to the appointed place 
 of glory; Paul, who by reason of jealousy and envy 
 was able to point by his example to the prize of pa- 
 tience. Seven times was he thrown into prison; he 
 was driven into exile, he was stoned; then, when he 
 had preached in the East and the West, he attained 
 the noble renown which his faith won for him, teach- 
 ing righteousness to the whole world, and coming to 
 the farthest limits of the West. Lastly, he bore 
 witness before rulers: and thus passed from the 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN. 87 
 
 world, after proving himself a marvellous pattern of 
 virtue. 
 
 " To these men of holy conversation we must add a 
 goodly company of elect souls who gathered around 
 them, and who, when by reason of jealousy they were 
 subjected to countless indignities and tortures, stood 
 forth as a noble example among us. It was by 
 reason of jealousy that women were persecuted and 
 were subjected, under the guise of Danaides and 
 Dirces, to dreadful and unholy violence, until they 
 won the goal for which their faith struggled, and 
 they received, despite their feebleness, a noble prize." 
 
 There is a lyric ring about several chapters of this 
 epistle that recalls the noblest utterances of Eze- 
 chiel or David. When Clement would persuade his 
 Corinthians to observe the subordination of souls 
 so admirably illustrated by him from the Old and 
 the New Testament, he adds to his arguments the 
 analogy of nature: 
 
 "The heavens obey Him, moving in peace accord- 
 ing to His ordinance. Day and night complete the 
 course which He has appointed them, giving no hin- 
 drance one to the other. The sun, the moon, and the 
 stars in their twinkling dance, preserve due concord 
 and never swerve aside, while according to His plan 
 they unfold the courses assigned to them. The 
 earth teems with produce at her proper seasons in 
 
88 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 obedience to His will; and sendeth forth food in 
 abundance for men and beasts and all the Hving 
 creatures upon her face, without variance and with- 
 out any change from what He has appointed/' 
 
 In his burning eagerness to restore the Church of 
 Corinth to its pristine harmony, the Bishop of Rome 
 does not hesitate to appeal to the example of the 
 legionaries of Rome, whose obedience to their chiefs 
 was proverbial. Were it true, as some maintain, 
 that St. Clement is the same person as the con- 
 temporary Christian consul, Flavins Clemens, these 
 words of his would possess an added interest: 
 
 ^'Let us serve, therefore, brethren, with all deter- 
 mination under His faultless commands. Let us 
 take a lesson from the soldiers who serve under our 
 rulers; and let us mark the order, the promptitude, 
 the submissiveness with which they execute the 
 orders they receive. They are not all prefects, or 
 rulers of thousands, or rulers of hundreds, or rulers 
 of fifties, and so on; but every man in his own rank 
 executes the orders he receives from his superiors. 
 The great cannot exist without the small, nor the 
 small without the great. There is a kind of connec- 
 tion between all things, and herein Ues their ser- 
 viceableness. To take our body as an example : the 
 head without the feet is nothing, even as the feet 
 without the head are nothing; in truth, the smallest 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN, 89 
 
 members of our body are necessary and useful to the 
 whole body. But all the members agree in submit- 
 ting to one authority, that the soundness of the 
 whole may be preserved " 
 
 Strong with all these arguments from revelation, 
 reason, and experience, he approaches the delicate 
 question of the constitution of the Church, that now 
 for the first time since the death of SS. Peter and 
 Paul was up for discussion. It is instructive to note 
 that he reaches this point only about the middle of 
 the epistle, in the forty-second chapter, after he has 
 exhausted all his powers of persuasion. Clement is 
 an admirable Christian judge. He has had long ex- 
 perience in those domestic weekly courts of the 
 primitive communities, in which, every Monday, the 
 quarrels and discords of the " saints " were heard by 
 the bishop and his presbyters, in order that all might 
 be ready to approach the mystic banquet on the 
 following Sunday. He will not lay down any law 
 so long as he can hope to recall the erring by the way 
 of the heart; in this new teaching no murmuring 
 and recrimination ought to follow the sentence of 
 one who judges in the person and place of Christ: 
 
 "The apostles were taught the Gospel for our 
 sakes at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus 
 Christ was sent out from God, and the apostles from 
 Christ. Both, therefore, issued from the will of God 
 
90 A BISHOP OF ROMS 
 
 -mth due order. Having, therefore; received His in- 
 structions and being finally established through the 
 Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and being 
 confident in the Word of God, they went forth with 
 full conviction from the Holy Spirit, and preached 
 that the kingdom of God was to come. And so, as 
 they preached in the country and in the towns, they 
 proved by the Spirit the first-fruits of their work in 
 each place, and appointed them to be bishops and 
 deacons among them that should believe." 
 
 At last, with infinite charity, but without any con- 
 cession to the rebelHous element at Corinth, this 
 man of ''sweet reasonableness" utters his decision 
 with the directness of a Roman magistrate, but in a 
 spirit that was new to the tribunals of Rome. In 
 this first and ever-memorable decision of a Roman 
 bishop we have a perfect model of those decisions 
 and provisions that henceforth will go to make up 
 the law of the new Christian society, the canon law. 
 Obedience is based on the known will of the mild 
 and loving Redeemer. Not imperial constitution or 
 rescript, but the Revealed Word of God, is here the 
 source of authority and the measure of submission. 
 Slavish fear and ruinous hypocrisy are no more the 
 motives of compliance with law, but an intimate 
 conviction that the existing order of the churches 
 comes down from the divine Master and is essential 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN, 01 
 
 to the religion itself. A rational humility and a 
 willingness to accept the great new principle of soli- 
 darity in Jesus are laid down as the corner-stone of 
 the new social edifice. Thereby was opened the 
 career of a novel, all-transforming jurisprudence 
 that never ceased thenceforth to develop side by side 
 with the jurisprudence of Rome, and to show to the 
 world in the persons of a Clement, a Pius, a Victor, 
 a Calixtus, a Cornehus, men no less distinguished in 
 the annals of justice than a Salvian, a Gains, an 
 Ulpian, and a Papinian. 
 
 "No less did our apostles know through Our Lord 
 Jesus Christ that there would be strife over the dig- 
 nity of the bishop's office. For this very reason, 
 having received complete foreknowledge, they ap- 
 pointed the said bishops and deacons, and ordained 
 that at their death their ministry should pass into 
 the hands of other tried men. We hold, therefore, 
 that it is an act of injustice to thrust out from their 
 ministry men who, with the good will of the entire 
 Church, received their position at the hands of apos- 
 tles, or of other honored men of a later time, and 
 who, in all humility, ministered to the flock of Christ 
 without offence, peaceably and without presump- 
 tion, and who have on many occasions been well 
 reported by all. For we shall be guilty of no small 
 sin if we reject men who have holily and without 
 
92 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 offence offered the gifts pertaining to the bishop's 
 office. [He means here the holy sacrifice of the 
 Mass.] Blessed are the priests who have departed 
 hence in time past; for they continued till their time 
 was fulfilled and their work had borne fruit: they 
 have no fear of being removed from their appointed 
 place. We must needs beware; for ye have taken 
 upon you to put some men out of their office, although 
 they walk discreetly and have held their position 
 without offence. '' 
 
 When we read these pages, that even now seem 
 dimmed with the tears of apostolic eyes and charged 
 with the agonies of an apostolic heart, we do not 
 wonder that nearly all the most ancient legislation 
 of the Christian churches that has come down to us, 
 whether apocryphal or interpolated, should have 
 sheltered itself under the name of Clement of Rome, 
 as though to commend its spirit, its trend, and its de- 
 details, by the authority of so profound a master of 
 the principles of Christian society. 
 
 With persistency he returns to his task; for this 
 epistle is more like a long conversazione between a 
 loving father and his wayward children than any- 
 thing else. He would have the Corinthian Christians 
 zealous and ardent, but against the comimon enemy, 
 not against one another : 
 
 *'Be contentious, brethren, be jealous concerning 
 
m THE TIME OF DOMITIAN. 93 
 
 the things that belong unto salvation. Ye have ex- 
 amined the Holy Scriptures; they are true, they 
 were given through the Holy Spirit: ye know that 
 in them there is written nothing that is imrighteous 
 or false. Ye will not find in them that righteous 
 men have been removed from the company of the 
 holy. . . . Why, then, are there strifes and angers 
 and parties among you? Have we not one God and 
 one Christ? Was not one Spirit shed forth upon us? 
 Have we not one calHng in Christ? Why do we rend 
 and tear asunder the members of Christ and are di- 
 vided against our own body? Why have we reached 
 such a pitch of madness that we forget we are mem- 
 bers one of another? ... It is shameful, beloved, 
 very shameful; nay, more, it is im worthy of your 
 education in Christ — ^that it should be reported that 
 the Church of Corinth, so long and firmly estab- 
 hshed as it is, should be divided against its presby- 
 ters at the bidding of one or two ringleaders. Nor 
 has this report come only to us: it has reached even 
 those who hold not with us; so that ye cover the 
 name of the Lord with blasphemies because of your 
 folly, and are laying up danger for yourselves be- 
 sides." 
 
 Toward the end of his epistle the writer ceases to 
 argue. In his person the Church of Rome convokes 
 the Church of Corinth before the altar of the cross. 
 
94 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 The Bishop of Rome betakes himself to prayer — a 
 last and irresistible weapon in the Christian's ar- 
 mory. But to no ordinary private prayer: it is the 
 solemn and public service of the Catholic Church 
 that we hear, and in particular one of those grand- 
 iose Prefaces of the Mass such as were sung in the 
 earliest days of Christianity, when the personal en- 
 thusiasm for Jesus was like a clear new flame in the 
 hearts of His priests; when every meeting of Chris- 
 tians was one long dithyrambic service, during which 
 the evil world and the reign of Antichrist faded 
 from this lower consciousness, to give place to the 
 vision of a victorious and rewarding Christ, en- 
 throned above the sun and the stars, and looking 
 down with ineffable tenderness on His disciples as 
 they moved upward and onward beneath the whips 
 and stings of hfe, the offscourings of tliis world, the 
 scandal of the Jew and the stumbling-block of the 
 Greek. These sublime phrases, a cento of Old Tes- 
 tament passages and texts, are, perhaps, the oldest 
 document of the holy Mass outside of the inspired 
 writings. They are also like a flash-light picture of 
 the daily hfe and temper of the Christians of Rome, 
 nay, of the entire Roman Orient, as will be seen at 
 once by all who are famihar with those venerable 
 and archaic liturgies that go back to within hailing 
 distance of tliis very time: 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN. 95 
 
 "We call upon Thee, Master, to be our helper 
 and defender! [Ps. cxix. 114.] Save such of us a^ 
 are m affliction; have pity on the humble; raise up 
 the fallen; show Thyself to such as are in want; heal 
 the sick; convert those of Thy people that are in 
 error; feed the hungry; ransom our prisoners- 
 raise up the feeble; comfort the weak-hearted. Let 
 all the Gentiles know that Thou art God alone [I 
 Kings viii. 60], and that Jesus Christ is Thy Son 
 and that we are Thy people and the sheep of Thy 
 pasture. [Ps. c. 3.] Thou didst manifest the per- 
 petual constitution of the universe by Thy works 
 therein. Thou, Lord, didst create the" world! 
 Thou art faithful throughout all generations; Thou 
 art righteous in Thy judgments; Thou art wonder- 
 ful in Thy strength and splendor; Thou art wise to 
 create and cunning to establish the things that are 
 made; Thou art good in Thy works which are seen, 
 and faithful with such as put their confidence in 
 Thee; Thou art merciful and full of compassion. 
 Oh, do Thou forgive us our transgressions and our 
 unrighteousnesses, our faults and our weaknesses' 
 Impute not to Thy servants and Thine handmaids 
 all their sin; but cleanse us thorouglily by Thy 
 truth, and direct our steps that we may walk in holi- 
 ness and righteousness and simpUcity of heart, and 
 that we may do that which is good and well pleas-^ 
 
96 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 ing in the sight of Thee and of our rulers. [Ps. cxix. 
 133; Deut. xiii. IS.] Yea, Lord, cause Thy face 
 to shine upon us for blessing [Ps. Ixvi. 2], mth 
 peace, that we may be covered by Thy mighty hand 
 and be delivered from all sin by Thy high arm. 
 [Ex. vi. 1.] Save us from them that hate us with- 
 out a cause. Grant peace and concord to us and all 
 that dwell upon the earth, as Thou gavest it unto our 
 fathers when they called upon Thee in faith and 
 truth with holiness; that we may obey Thy al- 
 mighty and all-holy Name, and render submission to 
 our rulers and governors upon the earth.^' 
 
 This epistle was written less than seventy years 
 after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The death of 
 Augustus was not a century away. This writer had 
 seen and conversed with SS. Peter and Paul, and 
 had been an eye-witness of those terrible scenes of 
 the persecution of Nero that Tacitus describes. On 
 his way to some Christian service in the domestic 
 hall of Pudens or the family cemetery of Lucina 
 or Domitilla, this man might have often met the 
 stern historian of the atrocities of Nero and Domi- 
 tian. He might have seen that Irish kinglet whom 
 Agrippa, the father-in-law of Tacitus, kept attached 
 to his person. The younger PHny was yet a fre- 
 quenter of the Roman tribunals, perhaps a careless 
 observer; for later on, when he was confronted with 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN. 97 
 
 the propaganda of Christianity in Bithynia, he seems 
 to have regretted his lost opportunities. The verses 
 of Juvenal and Martial were still fresh on the lips of 
 the spoiled youth of Rome. 
 
 On one occasion Clement must have been called 
 on to perform an act of hospitality that was most 
 pleasing to Our Lord. It is related, apropos of Do- 
 mitian, by Hegesippus, a Christian historian of the 
 end of the second century: The Emperor had heard 
 that certain descendants of the '' brethren" of Christ 
 were preaching another kingdom among the Jews. 
 He had them brought to Rome, where they showed 
 him their hands worn with toil, and assured him that 
 all they owned between them was one small field: 
 the kingdom they preached was the kingdom of 
 heaven. Thereupon he dismissed them with con- 
 tempt. Clement and the Roman Christians surely 
 received and sheltered these descendants of the 
 ''brethren" of the Lord. 
 
 Long ages afterward the posterity of the families 
 related to Jesus were held in honor throughout the 
 whole Church. Origen speaks of them in the third 
 century, and perhaps they still enjoyed high dis- 
 tinction in the Church of the Nazarenes that retained 
 its Jewish peculiarities as late as the fourth century. 
 If Stephanos, the assassin of Domitian, were a 
 Christian, as later rumor had it, Clement would have 
 
98 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 mourned over that desperate act of a freedman of 
 the Domitillas. Nowhere in the literature of early 
 Christianity is the duty of civil obedience, even to 
 the most lawless rulers, more firmly inculcated than 
 in this letter to the Church of Corinth. Perhaps it 
 is so because Clement had already heard angry mur- 
 murings among his flock at the insensate conduct of 
 the apocalyptic beast. 
 
 "We may also believe that Clement would visit 
 often the sepulchres of Peter and Paul, — the latter 
 on the Ostian Way, the former on the outskirts of 
 the Vatican Hill, beside a temple of Apollo, where 
 now rises the vast Basilica of St. Peter. His pre- 
 decessor, Anacletus, had already built on the site a 
 memoria, or little church; and doubtless the monu- 
 ment of St. Paul that the Eoman priest Gains 
 speaks of, about a.d. 200, was already built. He 
 would be seated on Sundays in the venerable Chair, 
 or cathedra, of Peter that is yet preserved in liis great 
 church, especially when he celebrated annually the 
 feast of the apostle. 
 
 For that matter, the Roman memories of the first 
 vicar of Jesus Christ were yet numerous enough and 
 attached to fixed objects and localities. There was 
 the four-square dungeon of the Mamertine; there 
 was the house of Pudens where Peter gathered the 
 Christian people; there was yet in use the wooden 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN, 99 
 
 altar of the apostle^ now at the Lateran ; there were 
 the localities of '^Domine; quo vadis/' and the ^^Fas- 
 ciola/' or bandage; there was the house of Aquila 
 and Priscilla, now Santa Prisca; there was Peter^s 
 ancient place of baptizing ^'ad Nymphas/^ happily 
 rediscovered in the Ostrian cemetery. The house of 
 that other Clement, the martyr-consul, must have 
 been yet a meeting-place of the Christians, whose 
 younger adepts already began to affect the name of 
 Peter in baptism. Other httle churches were siorely 
 in the houses of the mysterious LuciQa and the an- 
 cestors of St. Cecilia; in the house of the greatest of 
 the Roman nobles, Manius AciUus Glabrio; and in 
 the houses of others who had also fallen a prey to 
 the rapacity or suspicions of the persecutor Domi- 
 tian. The very old Catacomb of Priscilla, we know, 
 has held the proofs of this fact until the present day. 
 It was in the days of Clement that the city was 
 finally made a thing of perfect beauty, and stood 
 shining in her dress of precious marbles, intoxicating 
 from afar all hearts and inflaming all imaginations 
 with the tales that rumor spread abroad, though 
 helpless to equal the reality. Men pored over the 
 pages of past history, and examined the constitu- 
 tions and policies of all former states, only to pro- 
 claim that now at last the flood of change was fixed; 
 now at last an abiding city had been built — the 
 
100 A BISHOP OF ROME 
 
 Lucky, the Happy, the Eternal, the Golden Queen 
 seated upon her Seven Hills. 
 
 And yet, Root of Illusion that nothing can sear 
 in the heart of man! in that hour her fate was sealed. 
 Strange quiverings of prophecy were even then 
 shooting through her mighty frame, as when Ti- 
 berius, worn with his exertions, pointed to the teem- 
 ing North and bade the Senate make provision be- 
 times. Something, too, seems to have moved the sad 
 old man to call upon Christ; for respectable tradi- 
 tion has it that he wanted Him put among the gods 
 of Rome, but the Senate feared His infinite charm. 
 Nevertheless, this despised Christ was to be the final 
 conqueror of the Senate and the city and their raging 
 enemies beyond the Rhine and the Danube I 
 
 Claudius and Fortunatus and Bito, as they passed 
 out the Appian Gate on their way to Brundusium to 
 take ship for Greece, bore in the epistle of Clement a 
 spiritual djmamite that shook irreparably the only 
 solid foundation of any society — the hearts of its 
 members. Here were the best elements of Judaism 
 and the loving reverence of the Law allied to those 
 new things which Jesus had brought — a divine per- 
 fection of both, and an extension of the same to all 
 mankind. But these new things were now set forth 
 in a language that Greek and Roman could under- 
 stand, with happy borrowings from their philosophy 
 
IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN. 101 
 
 and literature and customs, and even their cherished 
 fables; the whole moulded by a hand of genius into 
 unity and infused . with the purest spirit of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 For centuries this letter of a Bishop of Rome was 
 read regularly in the Church of Corinth, and the influ- 
 ence on the early Christian world of this majestic 
 Roman document cannot be overestimated. In it 
 Peter and Paul lived on, speaking and acting in each 
 successor. Through it, more than through any other 
 early document, the note and criterion of "aposto- 
 Hcity " were enforced upon the churches. The Church 
 of Rome has many titles to the gratitude of mankind, 
 but none older or more venerable than this first 
 authoritative interpretation of the constitution of 
 the Catholic Church; all the more remarkable as her 
 decision was unasked for, and the beloved disciple 
 was still living and founding churches in Asia Minor. 
 
THE CHEISTIAN MARTYES OF LYONS AND 
 VIENNE (A.D. 177): 
 
 Many a reader of these pages has stood upon the 
 hill of Fourvi^res at Lyons and gazed from the plat- 
 form of the great modern shrine of Our Lady upon 
 the mighty city that spreads away beneath her lov- 
 ing gaze. Long the centre of the silk industries of 
 France, the huge town is yet one of the world's great 
 markets; and its favored position at the meeting of 
 the waters of the Saone and the Rhone assures for 
 an illimitable future its ancient coign of vantage. 
 In the Middle Ages Lyons was an outpost of Ger- 
 many; more than once it hung on slight contingen- 
 cies that this heart of uncertain and shifting Bur- 
 gundy should be finally Teutonic. A General Coun- 
 cil was held there in 1245, at which the great canon- 
 ist Innocent IV. excommunicated the second Fred- 
 eric, after a famous discourse on the five sorrows of 
 his own soul and the five wounds of the Church. 
 
 We are not concerned here with the mediaeval 
 fimction of this splendid city as a factor in the poli- 
 
 103 
 
104 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 tics and religion of central Europe, in the gathering 
 and distributing of the wares and manufactures of 
 the East and the West, in the transmission and modi- 
 fication of institutions from Roman to German Hfe, 
 and vice versa. A history of Lyons would be a his- 
 tory of the marvellous smelting of barbarism and 
 antique civiHzation in the fifth and sixth centuries, 
 such as the contemporary Gregory of Tours has out- 
 lined in his inimitably fresh and truthful book. 
 
 But German barbarism was still a remote threat in 
 the middle of the second century after Christ. The 
 philosophers of Rome, her captains and statesmen 
 and priests, were more concerned about the spread 
 along the river of the new doctrines of a despised 
 Jew named Jesus the Christ. Yearly new commu- 
 nities cropped up to whom His ''Name" was the 
 symbol of a new fife and to whom His ''Work " was 
 the sole ideal worthy of the human heart. The tem- 
 ples were being abandoned, the sacrifices neglected, 
 and the numerous trades that prospered by both 
 began to suffer. A hundred vices, grown venerable 
 by toleration, scented from afar their conqueror and 
 prepared for resistance. The genial worsliip of 
 Greece, the grave and ancient rites of Rome herself, 
 the fantastic mummeries of the Orient, made com- 
 mon cause against the newcomer. Year after year 
 complaints went up to the venerable senate, peti- 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 105 
 
 tions were sent to the emperor, the mihtary authori- 
 ties were besought, the lawyers rummaged the deci- 
 sions and opinions of their predecessors, in order to 
 cast out the adepts of the new religion, who boldly 
 confessed themselves by the pecuhar name of Chris- 
 tians. The growing evils of Roman society were 
 laid at their door, and the wisest complained 
 
 " That Heaven rains plagues upon the guilty earthj; 
 That Pestilence is let loose, and Famine stalks 
 O'er kingdoms, withering them to barrenness; 
 That reeling cities shake and the swoln seas 
 Engulf our navies, or with sudden inroad 
 Level our strong-wall'd ports." 
 
 It was in vain that the disciples of Jesus bade men 
 look into their upright and blameless lives; that 
 they abstained from sedition and intrigue; that they 
 left uncared for no sorrow or misery of their own and 
 their pagan neighbors; that they surpassed the 
 classic ideals of Pythagoras and Plato and Seneca; 
 that their mutual affection astounded those world- 
 worn and life-weary men of the Empire who had lost 
 all respect for humanity. They were, indeed, the 
 soul of that ancient society, even then stricken to 
 death; though as yet it heard not, or heeded not, the 
 dread response of the decree of fate. More than a 
 century must elapse before this primary truth could 
 be accepted by the proud rulers of the world; just 
 now the Christians were a cancer to be cut out or 
 
106 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 burned out from the body politic threatened by 
 them with corruption and ruin. 
 
 And so it was a right glad message of permission 
 and encouragement that Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 161- 
 180) sent across the sea, via Marseilles, to the men of 
 Lyons that they should stamp out the Christian 
 impiety and atheism. He had just finished his great 
 campaign against the German Quadi, during which 
 the white oxen of Rome, so ran the epigram, had 
 sent him word that they feared his victory, for on 
 his triumphal return they would of a certainty be 
 all immolated by him. Perhaps he had already put 
 down in his '^ Meditations" that the Christians were 
 guilty of an immoral stubbornness against the su- 
 premacy of the state; though that did not prevent 
 him from calhng on their God for water in a hopeless 
 drouth, or from summoning a Christian bishop to 
 heal an imperial princess. Falsehood has ever a 
 special right to inconsistency. 
 
 For several reasons the original records of the 
 Christian persecutions have not come down to us, 
 except in a few cases, and these often in fragmentary 
 or imperfect shape. Of some no account was kept, 
 or the brief and hurried notes of the appointed scribe 
 were lost. It was at best a poor humble domestic 
 hterature, subject to the rabid violence of the mob, 
 even if it could escape the natural enemies of all 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 107 
 
 writing — timC; the moth, fire, water, removal, ig- 
 norance. Of the numberless victims who died in the 
 Colosseum or the Circus Maximus for Hberty of con- 
 science only a few are known to us by name, and of 
 them only a few are better known by their genuine 
 acts. The persecution of Diocletian was particu- 
 larly the cause of the disappearance of most of the 
 ancient Christian writings. During the last years of 
 the third and the first of the fourth century many of 
 them were handed over to the imperial police, to pro- 
 tect the Holy Scriptures, whose superior authority 
 and dignity these rude mercenaries were usually 
 unable to understand. 
 
 There is, therefore, a certain pathos about all the 
 genuine acts of the early Christian martyrs; but 
 about the victims of the persecution at Lyons there 
 is something more — the imstinted admiration of the 
 entire Church then and afterward; a savor of simple 
 joy and childlike eagerness to be through with the 
 dread experience and to rest in the bosom of the 
 Lord; an extraordinary calm of spirit; an absence 
 of rancor against their tormentors; and an ele- 
 vation of soul that place them on a level with the 
 noblest witnesses who ever laid down their lives 
 for the love of Jesus. Their story is told by one 
 of themselves, in a letter to the Churches of Asia 
 Minor, as the inscription shows : 
 
108 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 ''The servants of Christ who sojourn in Vienna 
 and Lugdunum of Galha, to the Brethren through- 
 out Asia and Phrygia who hold the same faith and 
 hope with us of redemption, peace, and grace and 
 glory from God the Father and Christ Jesus our 
 Lord/' 
 
 It would have entirely perished, like so many 
 other Christian documents of the time before Con- 
 stantine, had not the great historian Eusebius de- 
 cided to give large excerpts from it in the fifth book 
 of his history. Its opening paragraph refers to the 
 Ugly mutterings before the storm — ^'Hhe variety 
 of sufferings endured by the blessed martyrs, which 
 we are neither able to state with accuracy nor in- 
 deed is it possible for them to be embraced in writ- 
 ing.'^ They were excluded from all public places — 
 the baths and markets and streets; yet the grace of 
 God acted as their general, and ranged them in 
 strong battle-array against the Evil One, and en- 
 abled them to bear all reproaches, to make light of 
 all oppression, and to show ''that the sufferings of 
 the present time are not to be compared with the 
 glory that shall be revealed in us/' 
 
 "First, they nobly endured all that had to be 
 borne at the hands of the mob and rabble; they 
 were hooted, assaulted, pulled about, plundered, 
 stoned, and forced to barricade themselves in; 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE, 109 
 
 in fact, they suffered every indignity which an 
 infuriated mob is accustomed to inflict upon its 
 supposed adversaries and foes. At length, being 
 brought into the forum by the chiliarch and chief 
 men of the city, they were examined in the presence 
 of the whole multitude; and having confessed 
 [their Christianity], were put into prison to await 
 the arrival of the governor.'' 
 
 One Vettius Epagathus, a most upright citizen, 
 protested in vain that there was nothing impious 
 or sacrilegious among the Christians — precisely 
 what the two deaconesses had told Pliny in Bithy- 
 nia some sixty-five years before. He was asked 
 from the judgment-seat if he, too, was a Christian; 
 and on confessing it, was ranged ''in the order of 
 the martyrs, '^ while the mob jeered at him as the 
 lawyer of the Christians. The writer of the letter 
 saw the holy martyr before him as he wrote; for 
 he exclaims that ''he was and is a genuine disciple 
 of the Christ, following the Lamb whithersoever 
 He goeth.'' Then follows an account of the pre- 
 liminary examination, always a moment of dread 
 for the bishop and the priests and deacons who 
 had been day and night laboring with the chosen 
 victims, that no fear or pusillanimity might seize 
 them at the last moment. 
 
 "Thereupon the rest were scrutinized, and the 
 
110 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 first witnesses were forward and ready, who with 
 all eagerness completed the confession of their 
 witness. Likewise the unready and untrained 
 were made manifest; moreover, also the weak who 
 were unable to bear the strain of a great contest. 
 Of these about ten miscarried, who both caused us 
 great grief and sorrow unmeasured, and also hin- 
 dered the eagerness of the others who were imar- 
 rested, and who, although suffering all terrors, were 
 nevertheless constantly present with the confessors 
 and would not leave them. Then, indeed, were we 
 all greatly anxious, through uncertainty as to their 
 confession, — not dreading the punishments to be 
 endured, but fixing our gaze on the end, and fearing 
 lest any might fall away. Each day, however, 
 those who were worthy were arrested and filled up 
 the others^ places; so that there were gathered 
 together from the two Churches all the zealous ones 
 through whose instrumentahty especially our affairs 
 had been estabhshed. They arrested also certain 
 heathen domestic slaves of ours, — for the governor 
 ordered that we should all be examined in public; 
 and these falling into a plot of Satan, and fearing the 
 tortures which they saw the saints suffering, on 
 being instigated to this course by the soldiers, 
 falsely accused us of Thyestean banquets and GEdi- 
 podean intercourse, and of other deeds of which it 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. Ill 
 
 is not lawful for us either to speak or think, nor even 
 to believe that the like is ever done amongst man- 
 kind. These statements being reported, all were 
 infuriated against us; so that if there were any who 
 from ties of kinship had hitherto been lenient, 
 even these were now greatly enraged and mad with 
 anger against us. Then that was fulfilled which 
 was spoken by Our Lord: fThe hour cometh that 
 whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth a 
 service to God.' ^' [St. John xvi. 2.] 
 
 In the long struggle that now followed between 
 physical force and moral courage there come to 
 Hght all the distinctive features of Christian martyr- 
 dom from Nero to Diocletian. Had we only this 
 touching story, we should know in a general way 
 the ordinary course of procedure against the 
 Christians. The story of the sufferings of Sanctus 
 can never be read with dry eyes. When asked his 
 name, his race, his city, his condition, whether slave 
 or free, he replied in Latin: ^'I am a Christian." 
 As the letter is written in Greek to Greek-speak- 
 ing Christians, there is here an archaic souvenir of 
 the days of union between Latins and Greeks ere 
 wealth and success and the goods and ideas of 
 this world finally sundered the holy bond of char- 
 ity between them. Very lovely also is the narra- 
 tive of the bravery of Biblias, a woman who had 
 
112 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE, 
 
 fallen away at the first examination before the 
 magistrate, but came forward later on, and bore 
 away with glory the palm of martyrdom. 
 
 The anonymous writer reaches the limit of his 
 inspiration in the Hnes that he devotes to the little 
 slave Blandina and her unexampled courage and 
 perseverance. Perhaps the most earnest and 
 truthful phrases that ever fell from the lips of a far 
 different writer, Ernest Renari, are those in which 
 he describes Blandina as the highest type of those 
 Christian women who freed their sex from its moral 
 slavery by such exhibitions of an ineradicable 
 purpose to return no more to the abyss that they 
 had left behind. Blandina looked to the great pa- 
 gan mob of Lyonese that summer day as indeed 
 something ''worthless and uncomely and despica- 
 ble.'' Yet; says the writer of this superb tragedy, 
 she was deemed worthy of great glory by God be- 
 cause of her enduring love for Him. 
 
 "For while we were all afraid for her, and her 
 earthly mistress, who was herself also one of the 
 witnessing combatants, dreaded lest she should 
 be unable through bodily weakness boldly to 
 make confession, Blandina was filled with such 
 power that she was set free from and contrasted 
 with those who tortured her with every kind of 
 torture in turn from morning to evening; and 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 113 
 
 who confessed that they were conquered, since they 
 had nothing left which they could any longer do 
 to her; and that they marvelled at breath re- 
 maining in her when her whole body was lacer- 
 ated and laid open, testifying that one of the tor- 
 tures by itself was sufficient to end hfe, let alone 
 so many and such great ones. But the blessed 
 woman, Hke a noble athlete, gained her strength 
 by her confession, finding refreshment and free- 
 dom from pain in saying, ^I am a Christian/ and 
 'We do nothing vile/ " 
 
 These bloody scenes had now lasted several 
 days. The aged Bishop Pothinus, over ninety years 
 of age, had died in prison of the abuses received. 
 A great band of holy witnesses had been despatched 
 with every refinement of cruelty. The writer, 
 transfiguring the language of the circus, says they 
 were hke a wreath of many-colored flowers that 
 was offered to the Father by these noble athletes, 
 in the hope of receiving at His hand the splendid 
 wreath of incorruption. Alexander the physician, 
 from Phrygia, died a hero's death, after he had 
 for several days encouraged by word and look these 
 pioneers of the Christian state. Attains, a man of 
 repute in the city, had also died in the most pain- 
 ful torments. After having been paraded about 
 the arena with a placard on his breast bearing the 
 
114 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 words, ^'This is Attalus the Christian/' he had been 
 remanded to prison, only to be brought out on an- 
 other day, placed upon an iron chair and roasted 
 to death. As the hot odor from his poor body 
 was borne aloft, he said to the crowd, in Latin: 
 ''Lo, tliis it is to eat men, and you are doing it; 
 we neither eat men nor practise any wickedness." 
 The writer here returns to the true leader of this 
 extraordinary band of men and women before whom 
 that day capitulated unconsciously the power that 
 deemed itself the Queen of the World. 
 
 "Finally, on the last day of the gladiatorial 
 games, Blandina was again brought forward with 
 a lad of about fifteen, named PonticuSc These 
 two had been brought in each day to witness the 
 punishment of the others, and had been pressed 
 to swear by the idols. And because they remained 
 constant and set them at naught, the populace 
 grew furious, so that they respected neither the 
 youth of the boy nor the sex of the woman; but 
 they made them pass through every form of ter- 
 rible suffering, and through the whole round of 
 punishments, urging them to swear after each 
 one; but they were unable to effect this. For 
 Ponticus, excited to zeal by his sister, so that even 
 the heathen saw that it was she who encouraged 
 and strengthened him, yielded up his spirit after 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 115 
 
 nobly enduring every punishment. And the blessed 
 Blandina, last of all, like a noble mother who had 
 excited her children to zeal and sent them for- 
 ward as conquerors to the King, recapitulated in 
 herself all the conflicts of her children and hast- 
 ened to them; rejoicing and exulting in her death 
 like one invited to a bridal feast rather than thrown 
 to the beasts. For after the scourging, after the 
 beasts, after the frying, she was at last enclosed in 
 a net and exposed to a bull; and having been many 
 times tossed by the beast, and being no longer sen- 
 sible of her sufferings on accoimt of her hope and 
 firm hold on the things entrusted to her and her 
 converse with Christ, she also was sacrificed; even 
 the heathen themselves confessing that never yet 
 amongst them had a woman suffered such manifold 
 and great tortures." 
 
 We are not told by the writer of the letter what 
 the Christians did when these dread scenes were 
 over. But we know otherwise that they were wont 
 to meet frequently and recite before one another 
 these tales of heroism, that acted as whips and spurs 
 for the undecimated remainder. Without bitter- 
 ness they listened to these simple but burning 
 paragraphs ere they were folded and sealed, and 
 delivered, with his letters of credit, to the mes- 
 senger who should bear them across the Mediter- 
 
116 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 ranean to the high tablelands of Phrygia, where 
 the face of Paul was yet vividly clear to the com- 
 munities he had established, and where a stern and 
 solemn fervor of faith and hope still possessed the 
 souls of a large percentage of the native popula- 
 tion. As he descended the hill of Fourvieres the 
 messenger-deacon would no doubt hear every dying 
 echo of those victory-psalms that Milman has so 
 touchingly paraphrased in that death-chant of 
 Margerita which fittingly closes his noble poem on 
 " The Martyrs of Antioch " : 
 *'' Sing to the Lord! let harp and lute and voice 
 
 Up to the expanding gates of heaven rejoice, 
 
 While the bright martyrs to their rest are borneg 
 
 Sing to the Lord! their blood-stain' d course is run, 
 
 And every head its diadem hath won, 
 Rich as the purple of the summer morn ; 
 
 Sing the triumphant champions of their God, 
 
 While burn their mounting feet along their skyward road! 
 
 " Sing to the Lord! for her in Beauty's prime 
 Snatched from this wintry earth's ungenial clime, 
 
 In the eternal spring of paradise to bloom ; 
 For her the world displayed its brightest treasure, 
 And the airs panted with the songs of pleasure. 
 
 Before earth's throne she chose the lowly tomb, 
 The vale of tears with willing footsteps trod, 
 Bearing her cross with Thee, Incarnate Son of God. 
 
 " Sing to the Lord ! it is not shed in vain. 
 
 The blood of martyrs. From its freshening rain 
 
 High springs the Church like some fount-shadowing palm'; 
 The nations crowd beneath its branching shade ; 
 Of its green leaves are kingly diadems made ; 
 
 And wrapt within its deep embosoming calm 
 Earth sinks to slumber like the breathless deep, 
 And war's tempestuous vultures fold their wings and sleep. 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 117 
 
 *' Sing to the Lord! no more the angels fly- 
 Far in the bosom of the stainless sky 
 
 The sound of fierce, licentious sacrifice. 
 From shrined alcove and stately pedestal 
 The marble gods in cumbrous ruin fall ; 
 
 Headless in dust the awe of nations lies, 
 Jove's thunder crumbles in his mouldering hand, 
 And mute as sepulchres the hymnless temples stand." 
 
 The bodies of the martyrs were exposed for six 
 days in the arena; then they were burned and re- 
 duced to ashes by the pagans, and the ashes were 
 cast into the Rhone that flowed close by. It was 
 thought thereby to conquer the Christian God and 
 to deprive the martyrs of their boasted new birth, 
 or the resurrection. The pagans spread it about 
 that thus 'Hhey would have no hope of a resur- 
 rection, through trusting in which they bring in to 
 us a foreign and strange religion, and despise terri- 
 ble sufferings, and are willing with joy to die. Now 
 let us see whether they will rise again, and if their 
 God is able to succor them and rescue them out of 
 our hands." Similar language had been used 
 twenty years before at Smyrna to the proconsul 
 Arrius Antoninus, after the execution at the stake of 
 the blessed Polycarp of Smyrna, the disciple of St. 
 John. We are standing, indeed, at the outer jedge 
 of the apostolic times. 
 
 It was in the latter part of July and the earlier 
 days of August that these events took place, very 
 
118 THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 
 
 probably in the year a.d. 177. By ancient custom 
 the different provinces of Gaul met annually at this 
 date to consult on provincial business, and to wor- 
 ship at the shrine of Rome and Augustus. The 
 great altar of the latter, a shining marble cube above 
 a mound of green turf, rose near the junction of the 
 rivers, and was dominated by a huge statue of Augus- 
 tus, around which were disposed sixty smaller stat- 
 ues symbohcal of the sixty '' cities" of Gaul — or, 
 rather, of the sixty Keltic clan-tribes to whom these 
 '' cities" were their ancient seats of power. On that 
 day the martyrs could hear not only Greek and 
 Latin but genuine Keltic accents that would have 
 been understood in Ireland or Britain. Perhaps, for 
 purposes of barter or commerce, some woad-painted 
 Britons or Picts, some gigantic, long-haired, ruddy- 
 featured Scoti from Ireland were there. Nay, it is 
 not impossible that some Christian Irish would have 
 been present; a few years later St. Irenseus, the 
 successor of the martyred Pothinus in the see of 
 Lyons, could T\Tite that the Gospel had made its way 
 among the Kelts, who held it in reverence written 
 on their hearts without paper or ink — ^i.e., by oral 
 preaching. 
 
 Among such Kelts may have been some pre- 
 Patrician Irish Christians. The laws of Rome were 
 yet translated into Keltic for the inhabitants of 
 
THE MARTYRS OF LYONS AND VIENNE. 119 
 
 Gaul, and all memories of Druid lore and magic had 
 not perished. Curious old Keltic gods stood about 
 the amphitheatre while the blood of these Christians 
 was flowing Uke water; the Romanized grandchildren 
 of exiled Druids could compare with their own huge 
 wicker cages of human victims this hecatomb of 
 Greeks and Latins which outrivalled the archaic 
 rites of blood that Caesar had suppressed on this very- 
 soil . Indeed, it is far from improbable that among 
 the forty-eight whom ancient tradition declares to 
 have died for Christ on that occasion were some 
 genuine Kelts either from the continent or the isl- 
 ands. The well-known ardor and intelligence of 
 the race would have easily led them into the society 
 of the Lamb; and their equally well-known con- 
 tempt of death and rooted belief in immortality 
 would only confirm their presence among these first- 
 fruits in Jesus of the Church of Gaul. Be this as 
 it may, all Christendom has ever held in loving 
 veneration these pioneers of the new religion along 
 the far-flung fine of its proseljrtism; and cherishes 
 yet, after seventeen centuries, the admirable proems 
 verbal of their martyrdom — a statement which for 
 simpUcity, feeUng, and classic picturesqueness could 
 not be surpassed by any modern account of similar 
 proceedings in the Middle Kingdom. 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN 
 ROME. 
 
 I. 
 
 How often do we reflect on the horrors of the old 
 pagan social order! Its overthrow was the greatest 
 boon ever conferred upon the human race. It was 
 so anti-natural and anti-social that it hemmed and 
 stifled every activity of the ordinary individual, re- 
 duced him to the condition of a helpless cog or 
 wheel in the general social mechanism, and made 
 the few everywhere and in all things the bene- 
 ficiaries of the lives, the toil, the very being of the 
 many. The divine cry of Jesus, Misereor super tur- 
 ham, "I have pity on the multitude," wrung from 
 His lips by the contemplation of common human 
 suffering, was more than justified by the actual 
 conditions of social fife that then obtained through- 
 out the Roman Empire, and seemed destined rather 
 to grow worse than better with the lapse of time. 
 
 The true social canker of antiquity was the condi- 
 
 121 
 
122 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 
 
 tion of the laboring man, whether slave or free. 
 It had come about that labor had passed into the 
 control of the most oppressive of all trusts — the 
 slavery-trust, by which the productive, distributive, 
 and consumptive powers of all ancient society were 
 regulated with the greatest possible injustice to its 
 unfortunate victims and the no less moral detriment 
 of the masters. 
 
 The slave was the machine of pagan society. Its 
 most learned scholar, Varro, called him '^a speak- 
 ing instrument." One half of the Grseco-Roman 
 population was enslaved, and of the other half fully 
 one quarter was made up of the poor free proletariat, 
 too proud to work, if it could find work, yet com- 
 pulsorily idle through the skilful organization of the 
 vast armies of slaves by their shrewd Roman mas- 
 ters. "Armies" is not too big a word. When a 
 quasi-ruined man like C. Csecilius Isidorus died, he 
 could leave among his assets 4116 slaves. He was 
 a wretchedly poor man who owned only one or two 
 slaves. The poet Horace had only three to wait on 
 him at the table, and only nine to look after his little 
 Sabine viUa. Even in the Christian times of St. 
 John Chrysostom the average rich man would own 
 from one thousand to twelve hundred slaves. In 
 his "Banquet of Trimalchio" the poet Petronius 
 shows us the Roman master listening to the daily 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 123 
 
 register of slave births on his estates — e.g., ''thirty 
 boys, forty girls." 
 
 Of course the actual number of slaves told off for 
 . purely domestic purposes or for the uses of luxury 
 was large, but in relation to their multitude was 
 smaW, hence the question of their employment 
 was a serious one. In spite of himself the Roman 
 became a manufacturer. He had always a turn for 
 business, and every Roman child was taught the 
 sense and use of figures from its infancy, was accus- 
 tomed to the keeping of household accoimts, and to 
 the balancing of debit and credit columns. It was a 
 nation of peasants and gardeners that had con- 
 quered the world, hence their pecuhar name for aU 
 territory outside of their own little city and sub- 
 urbs — ^''prsedium populi Romani," the farm of the 
 Roman people. Their slaves were set to work at 
 every possible occupation; they were weavers and 
 bakers, tailors and carpenters. They stored the 
 native and foreign wheat in granaries, and the oil in 
 taU earthen vases that they afterwards piled moun- 
 tain-high, outside the walls. Storehouses of ready- 
 made clotliing, of every value, were filled by their 
 handiwork. When a capital of five hundred dol- 
 lars warranted the keeping of one slave, and that 
 slave cost only one hundred dollars if it were a man, 
 fifty if it were a woman, what wonder that the great 
 
124 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 
 
 capitalists who had absorbed the wealth of Greece, 
 Asia, and Africa were able to keep regiments of help- 
 less men toiling forever at their behest ! 
 
 Indeed, it was a toil forever! There was no 
 limit of law or custom, no certain hours of rest by 
 day or night. As the life of the slave was preca- 
 rious, the capital, as well as the interest of his cost, 
 must be soon gotten out of his carcass — he was 
 more quickly worn out than a wheat- vessel or one 
 of the heavy wagons that rolled daily over the blue 
 lava blocks of the Appia Nova or the Salaria Vetus. 
 His labor was less costly and more lucrative than 
 that of the free man, for strikes were out of the 
 question, and flight was punished with excessive 
 rigor. Even the surveillance of slaves was done by 
 other slaves, thus reducing to a minimum the ex- 
 pense of the system, and abrogating all free labor 
 whatsoever, even of a clerical or administrative 
 nature. 
 
 Occasionally in the Roman inscriptions or epi- 
 taphs, of wliich many thousands have reached us, 
 we hear of corporations of workingmen, their names 
 and meetings and banquets; but these are most 
 hkely chefs d'ateliers, men who had other slaves 
 under them. So httle account was taken of the 
 slave's personahty that when, e.g., a bakery or a 
 purple factory was the object of a legacy or an in- 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 125 
 
 heritance, the law took it to mean the slaves con- 
 nected therewith, just as the furniture of a house 
 or the implements of a smithy accompany it with- 
 out further ado. 
 
 This human machinery, the quickest, most deli- 
 cate, and most intelligent that was ever devised, 
 though not the most durable, could be owned by 
 societies and companies, could be exploited like any 
 of the necessaries of hfe. The slave could be hired 
 out for a day or a year, could be sent to a school of 
 law or medicine that he might be helpful on the dis- 
 tant Cappadocian ranch, in the copper -mines of 
 Palestine or the silver-mines of Spain. Whole vil- 
 lages of slaves were established in the heart of im- 
 mense latifundia, that the other thousands of slaves 
 who worked these vast wheat or corn lands might 
 not want for any of the advantages that could pro- 
 long their lives or keep them from becoming a 
 charge on the owner or owners. We are told by 
 Plutarch that at certain crises in the affairs of Rome 
 Crassus bought up the best lots all over the city to 
 sell them at an enormous advance. Too shrewd to 
 build up the territory at his own risk, he let out 
 the services of his building-trust, the five hundred 
 best carpenters and architects in the city. 
 
 Thus every branch of industry was in the hands 
 of the slaves, and through them a few men reaped 
 
126 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 
 
 the fruit of the toil of milHons. It is said that six 
 men, in the reign of Nero, owned all Roman Africa. 
 At the same time, not more than two thousand men 
 at Rome owned all the property of the civilized 
 world from the Rhine to the Euphrates. What 
 wonder that when such a plutocrat died, the em- 
 peror compelled him to make the state his heir! 
 Not only industry, but commerce and lucrative 
 business of every land were thus seized on. The 
 poor free individual was shut out of all concurrence 
 except that of vice and shame. If one were to stand 
 on the corner of any street leading to the Forum and 
 look upon the many trades and occupations that 
 made the scene lively, he would behold only the 
 work of slaves. The woollens and cottons, the fin- 
 ished garments in yonder bottega were the work of 
 slaves. The olive-hued Syrian who sold them, the 
 tall and lanky Copt who kept the books, the huge 
 German who rolled about the bales of cloth, were 
 slaves. The chatty barber across the street, full of 
 palatine gossip from liis brethren on the hill of 
 power, was a child of Athens, and could quote you 
 his Aristophanes from beginning to end. That 
 blond money-changer over at the triumphal arch, 
 with his blue eyes and his thick shock of yellow 
 hair, was a Gaul — his tables are up against the sculp- 
 tured bodies of Dumnorix, Vercingetorix, and Julius 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 127 
 
 Civilis. That bronzed and hardy seaman, just 
 back from Carthage or Alexandria, is a Frisian, or a 
 Venete from Brittany, not too discontented with 
 his office as captain of a wheat-fleet. In some way 
 ancient slavery was more tolerable than its modern 
 counterpart, for all ran the risk of falling into its 
 abyss. Neither color nor race, neither former dig- 
 nity nor ancestry, could effectually preserve one 
 from becoming a slave. On the other hand, it must 
 be admitted, the means of escaping from it were 
 more numerous than in modern slavery. Especially 
 was this the case with what is known as freedmen, 
 manumitted slaves. Yet even they were forever 
 bound to their former masters, sometimes by oner- 
 ous conditions of freedom, more regularly by the 
 law that prescribed for their master the first right 
 in the inheritance of his freedman, and also com- 
 pelled the latter to come to the master's financial 
 help on certain occasions. 
 
 II. 
 
 Was there, then, no free labor in the city of Rom- 
 ulus? Out of its one and a half million inhabitants 
 we have seen that fully seven to eight hundred 
 thousand were slaves. Of the remaining half, per- 
 haps four hundred thousand formed the proletariat, 
 
128 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 
 
 i.e., the poor but free inhabitants of the city, the 
 awful mob into wliich the original plebeians had 
 grown, the refuse of victories, triumphs, and ovations, 
 the declasses of the world feeding on the crumbs and 
 offal of the world's high banquet-table. Some of 
 them lived as cHents or hangers-on of the great fam- 
 ilies both old and new, surrounded the litters of the 
 golden youth of Rome or the shining courtesans 
 from Greece or Asia, or bore aloft the gilded poles 
 with the medallions of ancestry in ivory or mosaic. 
 Others found an easy berth in the service of some 
 temple, or as a lictor or scribe for some magistrate. 
 The numerous bureaux of the great city, the double 
 treasury of the Senate and the Emperor, the tax 
 and customs offices, the quarters of the praetor and 
 the qusestor, the edile and the great lawyers, kept 
 alive an insolent multitude. 
 
 Most of this class lived by very crooked and 
 shameful means. They turned mimics or comedians, 
 priests of Isis or Adonis, soothsayers, astrologers, 
 gladiators, dancers, buffoons, jockeys. They were ad- 
 venturers and'' promoters " of every enterprise from 
 Mount Atlas to the shores of Britain. A few of the 
 proletariat did indeed earn an honest living — they 
 appeared as members of ''societies for the humble 
 and lowly,'' worked by the side of their slave breth- 
 ren, ate and lived with them, and in death were not 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 129 
 
 separated: their cinerary urns reposed side by side 
 in the little crypts that common contributions had 
 bought and sustained in out-of-the-way spots off the 
 great arteries of imperial traffic. 
 
 Thus the poor free man was compelled to a fife of 
 Idleness with consequent personal disgrace and self- 
 contempt. He became actually a cehbate — why 
 should he marry and bring up a family whom no 
 future tempted, no opening attracted, whose prog- 
 eny could only swell the ''rabblement" and ''tag- 
 rag people" of Rome? At the best he was de- 
 scended from the hardy local peasantry of Rome, 
 whom the patricians, like Coriolanus, ever reckoned 
 "woollen vassals, things created to buy and sell 
 with groats, to show bare heads in congregations, 
 to yawn, be still and wonder.'' At the worst 
 they were just in from Puteoli, or Brindisi, or 
 Marseilles, the wreckage of the latest war or the 
 victims of the latest Verres. One hour their poor 
 plaint would echo in the streets or before some 
 thriving lawyer of long phrases and short ful- 
 filment, then they would drift into the tower-like 
 tenements of the Suburra, to be transformed into 
 the ''Roman people." Of them Montesquieu could 
 rightly say that they had no share in the Roman 
 state, except a claim to support allowed from fear 
 and kept up by custom. 
 
130 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME, 
 
 Economically, slavery proved at Rome, as else- 
 where, the falsest basis of public life. This poor 
 free population, thrown out of its Italian farms by 
 the disorders and injustices of the closing century 
 of the Republic, gathered in congested masses at 
 Rome. Every province sent a percentage of simi- 
 larly situated men. Tacitus complains that Rome 
 had become a kind of social sewer for the world, and 
 satirists likened it to a sea into which debouched all 
 the rivers of humanity. Long after them, the Chris- 
 tian bishop Leo the Great could compare the old 
 pagan city to "an ocean of stormiest depth and a 
 forest of raging beasts.'' The riches that were won 
 early from the perfected machine of slavery were 
 now spent upon the support of this huge army of 
 the proletariat. Food was distributed to them regu- 
 larly, every month or oftener. In the time of Pom- 
 pey 320,000 had a right to these "distributions." 
 Caesar reduced their number by about one-half, but 
 they again reached the figures of Pompey's time 
 during the reigns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. 
 One-fifth of all indirect taxation went to the support 
 of this idle mob. High stands were erected in dif- 
 ferent regions of the city whence the panis gradilis, 
 or "step-bread," was issued to them by tickets that 
 authorized the withdrawal of so much wheat from 
 the great public granaries by the Tiber. When the 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 131 
 
 imperial fortune was at its flood it is thought that 
 twelve dollars' worth of wheat per capita was given 
 out yearly; when we recollect the cheapness of 
 wheat and the purchasing power of coin, the fact is 
 noteworthy. Sometimes oil and meat were added. 
 When on one occasion an emperor proposed to dis- 
 tribute a monthly allowance of wine to the ''Roman 
 people/' he was withheld only by the suggestion 
 that he would be obliged to add geese and pullets. 
 In the great games silver was sometimes showered 
 on the mob, sometimes tickets good for food, wine, 
 even jewels, paintings, ships, houses, and estates. 
 Did the emperor celebrate any anniversary, was a 
 new one created, then large presents of money 
 must be given to the mob and especially to the 
 soldiers, from whose pockets it soon went into the 
 till of the caupo, or saloon-keeper, one of the only 
 trades left to the poor free man. In one year Au- 
 gustus gave out to each of this class over one hun- 
 dred and twenty dollars, Marcus AureHus nearly 
 twice as much. The habit spread from the Caesars 
 to the nobles and the rich, and the whole city was 
 often one vast dining-hall, so much so that Tertul- 
 lian's ire is moved at the ''stinking breath" of this 
 "mutable rank-scented mob." Sometimes their 
 rents were paid for a year ahead by some individual 
 anxious for their favor; sometimes all the barbers 
 
132 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 
 
 in the city were retained for the service of the "Ro- 
 man people." Between the imposing games that 
 took up half the year and the solemn funerals of the 
 rich and noble, the remaining leisure of the prole- 
 tariat was heavily drawn on. When one of them 
 got ready to climb down from his high perch in the 
 Suburra, he went with his basket to the nearest rich 
 man's dormis, or palace, where he got his morning 
 meal. Thence he would stroll to the neighboring 
 square, where he would get his month's hon, or 
 ticket for wheat of Africa or Egypt or Sicily. His 
 dinner awaited him at some one of the many public 
 feasts, or at some private celebration, some marriage, 
 or coming of age, some dedication of a temple or a 
 statue, some reading of a new poem or the installa- 
 tion of some relative in a fat government office at 
 Alexandria or Antioch. Did he care for a little 
 amusement? There were the splendid architec- 
 tural piles known as the baths of Agrippa or Cara- 
 calla, where, besides the care of the person, popular 
 recreation of the most exquisite kind was provided 
 for in gymnasiums and libraries. On the temple- 
 spaces, with their broad sweeps of white marble steps, 
 or in the long porticoes with their elegant mono- 
 liths of pink or gray marble of Baveno or Syene, he 
 would meet his equals fresh from the excitement of 
 the Circus or the slaughters of the Colosseum, if, in- 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 133 
 
 deed, they had not rather come from a few 
 hours' sitting at the nasty ''continuous vaude- 
 ville" performances of the pantomime theatres— 
 that soupape of Roman virility and good for- 
 tune. Thus his life was of pleasure and idleness 
 all made up, enhanced by the salubrity of the cli- 
 mate and the security of the state. Truly Cicero 
 could well say that the Roman "plebs" led a happy 
 Hfe, since it was abundantly supplied with all the 
 good things of the world, and was freed from any of 
 the carking cares of existence. One of the em- 
 perors, Vopiscus tells us, used to say that nothing 
 amused him so much as the ''Roman people" after 
 a great banquet. 
 
 It had come to this, that the monopoly of all 
 earnest and useful labor had made of the poor free 
 multitude at Rome (and the example of Rome was 
 all-powerful in the Empire) a fattened beast, with 
 all the low passions of a beast. Caesars came and 
 went; for the proletariat it was only a question of 
 the " full basket " and the gayeties of life. They had 
 helped to rob the slave of his natural liberty and his 
 imprescriptible human rights. The slave, in turn, 
 dug the grave of the Empire. There came a turn in 
 the fortune of Rome: the power of Persia rose in 
 the far Orient, the hordes of Northern and Eastern 
 barbarians were in motion toward the Rhine and 
 
134 SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 
 
 the Danube, impelled by internal revolutions in 
 China. The slave-market was no longer crowded, 
 the wheat-supply was threatened, the vast farms or 
 ranches of Italy and Gaul were less productive. 
 Pestilence and earthquake and famine and seditions 
 fell, flail-like, on the trembling provinces. Then 
 appeared all the secret curses of the slave-trust: 
 the rich, after being made for three or four centuries 
 to bear the burden of state socialism in the feeding 
 and amusing of an ignorant and malicious prole- 
 tariat, were now compelled to pay the expenses of 
 the state administration. The taxes were collected 
 directly from them, which opened their eyes to the 
 evils of a timocratic state. And when they turned 
 to the ^f citizens" to reimburse them, they had only 
 the impoverished mobs of the cities and the broken- 
 hearted descendants of those slaves who once culti- 
 vated the great ranches of the rich men of Rome. 
 Neither in the cities nor in the country districts was 
 there bravery or good will. On every border of the 
 Empire its enemies were welcomed and aided. The 
 slaves sulked or rebelled, or were concihated only 
 by the quasi-abandonment of the great estates into 
 their hands as ^'coloni" or serfs. The proletariat 
 would neither fight with vigor nor bear with pa- 
 tience the reverses of fortune. The armies of Rome 
 were made up, perforce, of German mercenaries, just 
 
SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME. 135 
 
 fresh from the woods and the swamps beyond the 
 Rhine, in reality only the advance-guard of the end- 
 less procession of Goths, Vandals, Schwabs, Heruls, 
 Lombards, who were soon to carve free and pleasant 
 kingdoms for themselves out of the ruins of the great- 
 est state of antiquity. 
 
 The fall of the Roman state was not, it is true, 
 owing to slavery alone, and to its attitude toward free 
 labor; but these were essential causes, as all men 
 now see. Happy we, if we keep in mind the stern 
 lesson of history that is well put in the rather trite 
 verse of Goldsmith: 
 
 " 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
 Where wealth accumulates and men decay." 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 In the history of institutions there is nothing 
 more instructive, more replete with dramatic in- 
 terest, more typical of the workings of Christianity 
 than the evolution of the Church year. From 
 the day when a few sorrowing Jews gathered in 
 an upper room of the Holy City to celebrate the 
 first anniversary of the Death and Resurrection of 
 their Founder it has developed among countless 
 peoples and through many vicissitudes of culture 
 and time into an admirable cycle, in which, as 
 on some huge stage, the whole moving history of 
 Christ and His Chiu-ch is portrayed on a scale so 
 sublime and cosmic, so conisistent and poetic, that 
 even as a human creation it ranks among the 
 highest products of man's genius. The heart of 
 this splendid system, in and through which the 
 Christian worship has reached its perfection, is 
 the Resurrection of the crucified Jesus. Around 
 it have arisen in time manifold new exhibitions 
 
 of an unchanging faith in Him — the suave efflores- 
 
 137 
 
138 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 cence of piety and devotion as nurtured in the 
 Church and adapted to the needs of men and ages. 
 Among these festivals, though not the first in 
 rank nor the oldest, Christmas claims still, in some 
 respects, a pre-eminence, as the day on which the 
 Saviour was born upon this weary and sin-laden 
 earth, and the tidings of joy were proclaimed that 
 the secular reign of error and oppression was draw- 
 ing to an end, and the era of truth, justice, and 
 spiritual liberty was nigh to the dawning. 
 
 It is certain that at the end of the third cen- 
 tury A.D. the birth of Christ was celebrated in 
 both the Eastern and Western churches. It is 
 equally certain that at the beginning of the fifth 
 century that feast was celebrated in the whole 
 Christian Church (if we except the Donatists and 
 the city of Jerusalem) on the 25th of December. 
 But between these points there was much differ- 
 ence as to the day on which the birth of Our Lord 
 was to be celebrated. The Acts of the Passion of 
 St. Philip of Heraclea show that the feast of 
 Epiphany was observed in the Eastern Church at 
 the end of the third century. Now it is sure that 
 throughout the greater part of the fourth century 
 the Easterns included the birth of Christ among 
 the four reasons for that feast. Thus at that period 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 139 
 
 the churches of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine cele- 
 brated the Nativity of Christ on the 6th of January. 
 St. Epiphanius, a writer of the latter half of 
 the fourth century, is very positive as to the birth 
 of Jesus on the latter date. St. Chrysostom, 
 preaching on Christmas Day, 388, to the people 
 of Antioch, defends the feast from the reproach 
 of novelty, although he admits that in Syria it 
 was then scarcely ten years old. Other Orientals 
 of the early part of the third centiu'y, like Clement 
 of Alexandria and Origen, seem to be ignorant of 
 any celebration of the birth of Christ. The lan- 
 guage of the latter almost excludes the supposi- 
 tion of such a feast in the capital of Egypt, while 
 the former speaks of it in connection with some 
 Gnostic heretics, who placed the date in April or 
 May. The act of St. John Chrysostom was not 
 an isolated one. In 379 St. Gregory Nazianzen, 
 in union with the Emperor Theodosius the Great, 
 introduced the feast into Constantinople; in 382 
 St. Gregory of Nyssa, brother of the great St. 
 Basil, introduced it into Pontus and Cappadocia. 
 Clearly it was the authority of the Roman See 
 that, indirectly at least, compassed these notable 
 liturgical acts. It is no small matter that, in face 
 of local oppositions, Constantinople and Antioch 
 should insert in the calendar a specific Roman feast. 
 
140 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 The tradition of the 25th of December as the 
 birthday of Our Lord is much earlier and more 
 positive at Rome than in the Orient. St. Augus- 
 tine speaks of it as an old custom in his time, and 
 in this he is supported by St. Jerome, as well as 
 by the Cappadocians SS. Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, 
 and Gregory of Nyssa. St. Chrysostom justified 
 its introduction into Antioch by the example of 
 Rome, wiser in this matter than the Orient. His 
 judgment seems to have been influenced by a copy 
 of the Augustan census of Judea, which, accord- 
 ing to him, was kept in a public place at Rome, 
 and proved the birth of Our Lord at the Roman 
 date. The Apostolic Constitutions, an episcopal 
 manual compiled between a.d. 350 and 425, but 
 containing a much earlier discipline, mention the 
 25th of December as the feast of the Nativity. 
 Cave even cited Theophilus of Csesarea, a second- 
 century writer, for this date; the passage cited 
 is from the acts of a council held at Csesarea in 
 Palestine about a.d. 190. These acts have come 
 down to us through the writings of St. Bede, the 
 famous historian of the English Church in the 
 first quarter of the eighth century. Their genuine- 
 ness is yet somewhat doubtful, though the newest 
 studies on St. Bede show that he was well versed 
 in the most ancient Christian literature. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 141 
 
 Very lately there has been discovered in a 
 Greek monastery of the island of Chalcis a copy 
 of the commentary of Hippolytus on Daniel, in 
 the fourth book of which it is very clearly 
 stated that Christ was born on the 25th of De- 
 cember. Possibly this is an interpolation, as 
 some critics maintain. If it were genuine, we 
 would have here a local tradition of the Roman 
 Church in the early part of the third century 
 vouched for by one of its most brilliant writers 
 and officers. Such a tradition, so soon fixed in 
 the public worship of the Roman Church, would 
 bring us within hailing distance of the apostolic 
 memories and ordinances. Unexceptionable from 
 every point of view is the notice in the Philocalian 
 Calendar of a.d. 336 that Jesus was born in Beth- 
 lehem of Juda on December 25th. Shortly after, 
 about the middle of the fourth century (354), we 
 find St. Liberius receiving at Rome, on Christmas 
 Day, the vows of Marcellina, the sister of St. 'Am- 
 brose. With all these evidences of ancient origin 
 it seems strange that the little ecclesiastico-as- 
 tronomical tract De Pascha Computus of the year 
 243, written either in Italy or Africa, is silent 
 about the feast of the 25th of December, or rather 
 says positively that the birth of Jesus took place 
 on March 28th; 'Hhe day on which God created 
 
142 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 the sun was the fittest day for the birth of the 
 Sun of justice." 
 
 The feast of Epiphany appears for the first time, 
 as stated, toward the end of the third century, 
 and particularly at Heraclea in Thrace, once the 
 metropolitan see of Byzantium. Shortly after the 
 year 200 a feast of the birth of the Lord was 
 celebrated at Alexandria by Basilidian Gnostics, 
 which fact no doubt moved the ecclesiastical au- 
 thorities to introduce a similar one among the 
 orthodox. Previous to the Council of Nicsea (325) 
 there is no trace of Epiphany in the West; it is 
 not found on the calendar of the Donatists, who 
 separated from the Church between 312 and 320. 
 Apparently it made its way into the Western 
 churches at the same period that Christmas was 
 adopted in the Orient. Only, the W^estern 
 churches laid stress, not on the birth of Christ, 
 but on the manifestation of His divinity to the 
 Magi, on His baptism, and on the miracles of 
 Cana. It was celebrated in Gaul a.d. 360, as 
 we know by a passage in Ammianus Marcellinus 
 (XXI. 2, 5) concerning Julian the Apostate. A 
 Council of Saragossa in Spain (380) ordains in 
 its fourth canon that no one shall be absent from 
 the daily church service during the eight days 
 that precede Christmas and up to the Sunday 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 143 
 
 within the octave of Epiphany. Dr. Baeiimer 
 thinks that we have in this canon and in certain 
 statements of St. Csesarius of Aries the earUest 
 evidence of the Advent preparation for Christ- 
 mas. In the very ancient and curious manuscript 
 roll belonging to Prince Antonio Pio of Savoy 
 there are some forty prayers dating from the fifth 
 century; one of them reads as follows: ''Grant, 
 we beseech Thee, omnipotent God, the prayers 
 of Thy people! Let Thy justice shine from heaven, 
 and the whole earth bring forth joy so that on 
 the coming [Advent] of the Redeemer of the 
 world. Thy Son, our souls may be filled with 
 abundance of blessings!" Some of these very 
 prayers are yet in use in the divine office accord- 
 ing to the Ambrosian rite; others are still to be 
 seen in the Leonine Sacramentary, a Roman Mass- 
 book of the latter half of the fifth century or the 
 early part of the sixth. Another fragment of 
 the rotidus just mentioned, lately published by 
 the illustrious Ceriani, librarian of the Ambro- 
 siana at Milan, contains a lovely Christmas prayer 
 which lets in much fight on the purity and 
 sublimity of ancient Roman Christian theological 
 thought: 
 
 '10 God, who didst lie shrouded [velatus] with- 
 in a bodily shelter, and bemg made known [re- 
 
144 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 velatus] didst leave intact that original cloister, 
 go forth, we beseech Thee, as the Saviour of the 
 world and the Redeemer of mankind, so that 
 while we adore the glory of Thy dual nature, we 
 may, with one accord and correct faith, praise the 
 unity of Thy divine majesty/' 
 
 The origin of the feast of Christmas has been 
 the subject of much investigation within the last 
 few years. Usener, Probst, Duchesne, and others 
 have consecrated much skill and labor to the 
 question and added something to the efforts of 
 Cotelier, Martene, Tillemont, Bingham, and Bene- 
 dict XIV., among the older schoolmen of history. 
 What was the motive of its introduction? Leav- 
 ing aside the supposition that it was celebrated 
 earlier than the third century, and holding in 
 abeyance the question whether it represents the 
 actual date of the birth of Christ or not, two mo- 
 tives have been urged for its celebration at this 
 peculiar time. One is that it was meant to offset 
 the Saturnalia, a licentious pagan carnival cele- 
 brated from the 17th to the 23d of December. 
 But the very date, after the Saturnalia, precludes 
 this, and there is no evidence to justify this sup- 
 position. The other is that it was established to 
 counteract the pagan feast of the invincible Sun 
 {natalis Solis invicti), celebrated^ according to the 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 145 
 
 Julian Calendar, on the 25th of December. This 
 may have been among the motives of the feast, 
 especially as the Mithraic cult of the sun was in 
 great vogue during the third century and per- 
 plexed the Christians by its proselytism and its 
 imitation of their peculiar institutions. Mgr. 
 Duchesne suggests that astronomico-symbolical 
 motives may have had something to do with the 
 date. According to very ancient Christian be- 
 lief Christ died on the 25th of March, and as He 
 must have lived an integral number of years, dat- 
 ing from His incarnation, the latter must have 
 taken place on a similar date, whence His birth 
 on the 25th of December. But these are the hy- 
 potheses of critics and students. Far more prob- 
 able is it that the Roman practice of the fourth 
 century represents an accurate preservation of 
 the true date, based on documents now lost. Of 
 the numerous chronological controversies of the 
 second and third centuries very little has come 
 down to us outside of the titles of books. The 
 exterior growth of the habit of celebrating the 
 birthdays of the emperors would naturally lead 
 to a more positive tribute to the King of kings 
 and the Lord of lords, who had laid aside, for the 
 relief of humanity, all the majesty of deity. 
 
146 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 "That glorious form, that light unsufferable, 
 And that far-beaming blaze of majesty, 
 Wherewith He wont at Heaven's high council-table 
 To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, 
 He laid aside, and here with us to be 
 Forsook the courts of everlasting day, 
 And chose with us a house of darksome clay." 
 
 It may be worth while recaUing that as early 
 as the third century the natalis Petri de Cathedra, 
 or birthday (i.e.^ feast) of the Chair of St. Peter, 
 was celebrated at Rome by the faithful. So, 
 too, the natalis, or birthday, (unto Christ) of 
 many a martyr was celebrated with such splen- 
 dor as the conditions allowed. Among so many 
 ''birthdays'^ what is more natural than the cele- 
 bration of the birth of the true Imperator of the 
 Christians, from whom His vicar held jurisdic- 
 tion, of the King of martyrs whose expiation began 
 with His birth? Certain it is that the third cen- 
 tury saw the growth of a more intense and clear 
 consciousness among Christians that they were 
 the true kingdom of God, and that Jesus Christ 
 was their glorious and invincible Ruler. Per- 
 haps from this period dates the habit of counter- 
 signing the Acts of the Martyrs with the words 
 ''In the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ." At 
 Rome, more easily than elsewhere, the frequency 
 and majesty of imperial ceremony would deepen 
 the Christian sense of the Eternal Kingship of 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 147 
 
 Jesus, and suggest a formal, if domestic, recog- 
 nition of it. Not improbably it was long a Chris- 
 tian family feast in the humble space that shel- 
 tered the Chair of Peter and its temporary occu- 
 pant before the war of extermination waged, 
 about A.D. 300, against the persons, property, 
 and documents of the Roman Church. Only those 
 who habitually deal with the history of the early 
 Christian ages know by how many slender but 
 firm roots the Roman Church is connected with 
 the beginnings of Christianity. 
 
 The idea of a series of saints^ days immediately 
 after Christmas seems to have originated at Rome 
 between 350 and 380, to be taken over soon by 
 the Orient. They were formerly the feasts of 
 St. Stephen, protomartyr; St. Peter, prince of 
 the apostles; St. James the Apostle (Minor), 
 St. John the Apostle, St. Paul the Apostle, with 
 December 31st vacant, and on the first of Jan- 
 uary St. Basil. Father Nilles and Dr. Baeumer 
 explain that these saints are placed here by a 
 kind of convmientia; it seemed suitable that the 
 King of kings should be surrounded at once by 
 His chief courtiers, counsellors, ministers and ser- 
 vants. For several of these saints the Church 
 was ignorant of their natalitia, or day of entry 
 into the joy of paradise; hence they were suitably 
 
148 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS, 
 
 honored in the immediate presence of Him, who 
 had chosen them as His agents. The thought is 
 kin to that which made the ancient Christian 
 mosaicists of Rome place the apostles as '^ asses- 
 sors" with Jesus Christ in the scene of Final Judg- 
 ment. The above-mentioned order is given in 
 the funeral oration of St. Gregory of Nyssa over 
 his brother, St. Basil. It is confirmed by a very 
 old Syriac martyrology, written a.d. 412, now 
 in the British Museum, and published in 1865-66 
 by the Syriac scholar William Wright. From 
 all this it is clear that there existed at the end 
 of the fourth century a local Roman calendar of 
 feast-days, and that the immediate post-Christ- 
 mas feasts are, or once were, borrowed from it. 
 With many other valuable Roman documents it 
 is long since lost, and scholars exercise their learn- 
 ing and ingenuity in piecing together what seem 
 to be its remnants. 
 
 A very strong proof for the antiquity of the 
 Christmas festival is found in the fact that from 
 time immemorial when it falls on Friday there is 
 neither fasting nor abstinence on that day. There- 
 by the Church placed Christmas on a level with 
 her most ancient feasts, the Sundays, Easter, and 
 Pentecost. Formerly the feast was vested with 
 many privileges. The intervening days, as far 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS, 149 
 
 as Epiphany inclusive, were public holidays. 
 Servants and slaves had a day of repose on the 
 occasion of the feast. The shepherds and peas- 
 ants were obliged to attend the city churches. 
 Games and shows were prohibited. There was 
 always a sermon on the significance of the mys- 
 tery, and some of the best efforts of St. Leo, St. 
 Augustme, St. Peter Chrysologus, and other fathers 
 were pronounced on that day. Of the ancient 
 privileges of Christmas only two have survived 
 in the church law, one of eating meat when it falls 
 on Friday, and the other, peculiar to the priests, 
 of celebrating three Masses in honor of the three- 
 fold generation of Christ, viz.: from all eternity 
 in the bosom of the Father, in time in the womb 
 of the Blessed Virgin, and in the souls of the just. 
 
 The practice of celebrating three Masses has 
 its origin at Rome. It was so old at the begin- 
 ning of the sixth century that the Liber Pontifi- 
 calis, compiled at the time, referred it to Pope 
 Telesphore of the second century. The very old 
 Mass-books, caUed the Gelasian and Gregorian 
 Sacramentaries, contain each three Masses for the 
 day. Anciently they were said at the time and 
 in the order in which they are prescribed in the 
 Missal, i.e., at midnight, before the aurora, and 
 
150 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 after sunrise. We know that in the sixth cen- 
 tury, and probably earlier, the Pope was wont 
 to say these three Masses at St. Mary Major's, 
 St. Anastasia's (whose feast occurred that day), 
 and at St. Peter^s. Curiously enough, the preface 
 of the Nativity, several collects, and many parts 
 of the Masses remain identically what they were 
 fourteen hundred years ago, so jealous is the 
 Church of her liturgy and so capable of preserv- 
 ing it from substantial alteration. The midnight 
 vigil of Christmas is the last relic of a very conmion 
 custom in the first Christian ages of celebrating 
 nocturnal vigils for the feasts of the saints. The 
 attendant disorders discredited them, so that only 
 the venerable vigil of the Nativity escaped. In 
 the early middle ages all the people were expected 
 to attend the midnight Mass and to communicate, 
 under pain of three years' excommunication, as 
 a means of compelling the performance of what 
 we now call Easter duty. Perhaps this is the 
 meaning of the tradition that the Emperor Justin 
 (the first or the second) ordered Christmas to be 
 everywhere celebrated, no doubt by confession 
 and communion, for it was a common feast long 
 before the time of either Justin. 
 
 At an early date legend and fancy seized upon 
 the feast and decked it out with charming mjrths. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS, 151 
 
 There are some few left from the Grseco-Roman 
 time, such as the story that at Christ's birth the 
 Temple of Peace at Rome collapsed; that a spring 
 of oil burst out in the Trastevere and flowed the 
 whole day long into the Tiber; that Augustus 
 saw in the air the Blessed Virgin with the child 
 in her arms and dedicated to them an altar of the 
 First-bom God. Pretty fancies! not unnatural 
 in a people who project back upon their pagan 
 past some small share of their new Christian con- 
 sciousness. It was the Germanic peoples, how- 
 ever, who were destined to make the fortune of 
 Christmas. It fell at a time when they were wont 
 to celebrate their pagan sacrifices, and the mission- 
 aries prudently gave their traditional customs a 
 Christian sense and direction. The rich cheer, 
 the abundant presents, the lavish hospitality 
 of their old pagan days were not abolished. Nor 
 were the numerous Scandinavian ceremonies in 
 honor of Yule, the log, the candle, the boar's head, 
 the common feasting. The Lord of Misrule and 
 the Abbot of Unreason continued the carnivalesque 
 character of the northern Yuletide, whHe the 
 mince pies and spice cakes recall the gross and 
 barbarous wassailings of the primitive Goth and 
 Saxon. Under men like Gregory, Augustine and 
 Theodore of Canterbury, Aldhelm and Daniel of 
 
152 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 Winchester, such habits were gradually modified, 
 and within a short time the fierce pirates of the 
 Northern seas gave to God saintly men like Wil- 
 frid, Willibrod, Winfred (Boniface), and saintly 
 women like Eadburg, Hilda, Lioba, and countless 
 others. '^It is only by a long course of training 
 that the fancy and imagination can be brought 
 to rim in the new groove of thought," says Brother 
 Azarias in his "Development of English Thought." 
 ''To that end does the Church bring to bear all 
 her teaching and discipline. By degrees she weeds 
 out the tares of the old faith and plants the new. 
 But there are also in every race and age elect souls 
 who are impatient of such slow formation and 
 leap at once into the front rank of Christian heroes 
 and heroines." 
 
 The public feasts of the Church were among 
 the most powerful influences for good that the 
 mediaeval Church possessed. In the absence of 
 great cities and extensive commerce they served 
 to gather the people together, to break doVn the 
 isolation in which the noble and the peasant habit- 
 ually lived. For a short while private war ceased, 
 Christian charity prevailed, and the voice of the 
 preacher was listened to by vast multitudes, who 
 for another year perhaps would not again visit 
 the haunts of men. The Church made the most 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 153 
 
 of such occasions. Hence we need not be sur- 
 prised to find that Christmas was at an early date 
 one of the great feasts on which the mystery plays 
 were executed. We possess a certain number of 
 them yet, just as they were carried out in France 
 and Southern Germany. They are quaint and 
 comical to our modern taste, but were full of mean- 
 ing to our ancestors, whose faith was so much more 
 direct and intense. 
 
 In the Christmas plays the Sibyl exchanges 
 views with Daniel and Jeremias, while Vergil is 
 enlightened alternately by Isaias and John the 
 Baptist. The stage was the public square, and 
 the unities were poorly observed; yet our mod- 
 ern theatre is deeply indebted to these mediaeval 
 mystery plays, which were the work of church- 
 men both as writers and actors, though the 
 Church herself cannot be said to have encouraged 
 them. Akin to the mysteries are the Noels, or 
 religious canticles sung by the people on Christmas 
 Eve, and of which lovely carols France possesses 
 yet a rich collection. They were originally meant 
 to while away the long vigil of Christmas, when 
 the great logs burned slowly in the fireplace and 
 the storm raged lustily without. The simple habits 
 of other days have in great measure passed away, 
 
154 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 
 
 but the canticles of our forefathers, inherited by 
 them from still earlier ages, yet live to entrance 
 the hearers of the midnight Mass and to bear wit- 
 ness to the pious sense and the delicate ear of men 
 whom we too lightly undervalue. The Middle 
 Ages had a great '^ Bible of Noels," which seems 
 to have been of Greek origin. In his spiritual 
 letters St. Francis of Sales has more than one 
 thought in common with these old mediaeval singers. 
 We may be tempted to smile at what seems to 
 us the uncouth, uncultured conception of this great 
 Christian festival on the part of our forefathers. 
 But the spirit of the Church was ever the same, 
 and though her children may at times have fallen 
 below it, we have yet the splendid pages of her 
 liturgy and the public instructions of her priests 
 to show that within the sanctuary there reigned 
 at all times the most profound and spiritual views 
 of the nature and celebration of this feast. The 
 education of proud and barbarous nations was 
 no easy task, and only those will scoff at their 
 weakness and the motherly indulgence of the 
 Church who ignore by what infinite patience and 
 by what manifold solicitude the hot, ebullient 
 natures of noble barbarians are soothed and toned 
 into sympathy with the habits of perfect society 
 and the restraints of a sublime religion. The old 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS. 155 . 
 
 Puritan showed an ignorance of human nature 
 as common in the sects as it is rare in the Church 
 when he suppressed the innocent and natural en- 
 joyments of the English people at this period. 
 With the new and vigorous life of Catholicism 
 and the consequent healthier view of human social 
 relations, the cold and sombre spirit of earlier days 
 (not wanting, I confess, in a certain arid grandeur 
 and rough directness) is giving way on all sides 
 to views of life and humanity more kindly, more 
 tolerant and liberal, more in keeping with the glad 
 burden of that angelic song which has been the 
 Church's watchword from the most ancient times. 
 
WOMEN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN 
 COMMUNITIES. 
 
 To the cursory reader of the Gospel scarcely any- 
 thing is more striking than the infinite tenderness 
 and the immeasurable pity which Jesus manifested 
 at all times to the weaker vessels of humanity. He 
 loved to dwell surrounded by the little children; 
 rough treatment of them annoyed Him; He com- 
 pared His kingdom to their pure hearts ; He rejoiced 
 that the little and the humble were let into the se- 
 crets of the Father, and He proposed to His disciples 
 as the model of ecclesiastical authority the simple, 
 direct, and candid hearts of little children. 
 
 With the women of the Jews He was no less gentle 
 
 and pitiful. Already His love of the little ones must 
 
 have captivated the female heart. He was HimseK 
 
 the only Son of Mary. His most consoling words 
 
 were for the women of Jerusalem, His most touch- 
 
 ,ing miracles for the widow of Nairn, the Hsemor- 
 
 rhaissa, and the daughter of Jairus. He rendered 
 
 a delicate homage to the office of woman when he 
 
 drew- from the pains of travail one of the most pro- 
 
 157 
 
 u 
 
158 WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 
 
 found and human-sorrowful of His illustrations. 
 And in the sublime scene of the rehabiUtation of the 
 fallen sister from Magdala He defied for her all the 
 social convenances and executed a moral revolution. 
 He began His miraculous career at the wedding of 
 a young Galilsean bride. In return the women of 
 the Jews were His stanchest defenders. Some, Hke 
 Salome, the wife of Zebedee, clung to Him from the 
 beginning to the end. Others, hke Joanna the 
 wife of Chusa, Herod's steward, and Susanna gave 
 of their riches for His support, went about with Him 
 and the apostles through cities and towns wherever 
 the good news was spread by the Master. They 
 anointed His head and feet; they rejoiced more than 
 all others when He rode triumphantly into Jerusalem ; 
 they sorrowed at the gathering clouds which were 
 soon to burst over Him; they stood afar off and 
 wept as He passed on to His doom; they remained 
 when aU others had fled; they were the first at the 
 sepulchre, the first human witnesses of the Resur- 
 rection, the first apostles of Christianity, since it was 
 they who first carried the glad tidings that Jesus 
 hveth for evermore, and that faith in Him and His 
 promises is neither vanity nor delusion. 
 
 By a law of history the great institutions which 
 most affect mankind bear always certain ineffaceable 
 
WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 159 
 
 ear-marks of their origins — the aroma^ as it were, 
 of their primitive surroundings and the best indices 
 of the spirit and aims of their founders. The female 
 sex, which plays so conspicuous a part in the life of 
 Christ, is no less active in the earliest formative 
 period of His church. On the morrow of the Ascen- 
 sion we find them at Joppe, a little circle of Christian 
 seamstresses, imder the care of Dorcas, paying back 
 by the coats and garments they made the ser- 
 vices rendered them by the deacons established to 
 take care of the needy and neglected. Their dwell- 
 ings at Jerusalem were among the first churches in 
 which the brethren broke bread from house to house 
 and took their meat with gladness and simplicity of 
 heart. When Peter was delivered by the angel it 
 was to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mar- 
 cus, that he went, where many were gathered to- 
 gether and praying. After the dispersion of the 
 apostles we find in the meagre records of their his- 
 tory numerous facts that show how important a 
 share women had in the success of their evangelical 
 labors. The Lady Electa would seem, according to 
 the second epistle of St. John, to have been the cen- 
 tre of an important community. 
 
 I need only to refer to the ancient and venerable 
 local traditions of Rome which preserve the memory 
 of the relations between St. Peter and the females 
 
160 WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 
 
 of the house of Pudens, and those which concern the 
 ancient house of Prisca on the Aventine. The 
 Christian world has never seen devotion superior to 
 that which the earliest Christian matrons of Rome 
 manifested. Their praises are in Clement of Rome 
 and the Shepherd of Hermas, i.e., in the earliest 
 non-canonical literature of the Christians. But it 
 is in the life of St. Paul that the Christian female 
 apostolate finds its best-known models. This time 
 they are taken not from the Jewish and Syrian 
 women, the Galilsean neighbors of Christ, and the 
 female relatives of rough fishermen, but from among 
 the elegant and refined society of Greek cities. 
 When St. Paul began to preach at Philippi, he spoke 
 to the women who had assembled by the river-side to 
 pray, no less honorable persons, no doubt, than 
 the noble women of Thessalonica, and the still more 
 noble and honorable women of Beroea, who shortly 
 after received his words with joy. It was at Phi- 
 lippi that he met and converted Lydia of Thyatira, 
 the purple dealer, whose heart the Lord specially 
 opened ''to attend to those things which were said 
 by Paul,'' and whose hospitality and generosity 
 the Apostle felt bound to accept. 
 
 We may believe that there was no less devotion 
 to the Apostle among the cultivated matrons of 
 
WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 161 
 
 Ephesus and Corinth, though he was afterward 
 obliged to utter severe reproofs to some of the latter. 
 Yet he seems to have preserved the greatest regard 
 for the women of Philippi, since in none of his epistles 
 do we find stronger expressions of affection for his 
 converts than in that to the Philippians. He calls 
 them his joy and his crown, and in the same breath 
 utters the names of Evodia and Syntyche. He 
 speaks of his '^ sincere companion" and the other 
 women who liave labored with him and Clement in 
 the Gospel, and whose names are written in the 
 book of life. Among the most distinguished of his 
 Athenian converts was the woman named Damaris. 
 In the Epistle to the Romans he gives us an insight 
 into the little circle of females whom he had not yet 
 seen, but whose reputation for Christian zeal had 
 gone abroad, like the faith of the Romans, into the 
 whole world. There is his helper in Christ, Prisca, 
 the same as Priscilla, the Roman Jewess who with 
 her husband, Aquila, had befriended Paul during 
 their exile at Corinth, who laid down their necks 
 for him, and to whom all the churches of the Gentiles 
 were indebted. There is Mary, ''who hath labored 
 much among you.'' 
 
 There are Tryphena and Tryphosa, in whom some 
 modern critics recognize ladies of the imperial fam- 
 ily, and Persis, ''the dearly beloved, who hath much 
 
162 WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 
 
 labored in the Lord/' There is the mother of Rufus, 
 so dear to Paul that he calls her his own mother, and 
 finally there are Julia and the sister of Nereus, to- 
 gether with Olympias, not counting the unnamed 
 women of the households of Aristobulus and Narcis- 
 sus, and of Nero himself. Of Mary and Persis, Try- 
 phena and Tryphosa, he positively says that they 
 have much labored in the Lord, and this is why he 
 is so bold in commending to them the person and 
 mission of their sister Phoebe, " who is in the ministry 
 of the Church that is in Cenchrea, and who has 
 assisted many and myself also/' 
 
 This is a precious page from the earhest records 
 of Christianity, and the names of women are in- 
 scribed on it in immortal lines. They are the 
 mothers of the infant churches, the laborers, the 
 helpers, the ministers, the providers, and the con- 
 solers. They are ranked by the Apostle for devo- 
 tion and hard work with the bishops and priests and 
 chief men of his missions. From the women of 
 Pome and Philippi he no doubt received a very large 
 share of the funds he expended on his missions and 
 charities. They kept aUve his teachings and 
 sought out new hearers for the word of truth. By 
 a delicate and subtle instinct woman recognized 
 from the beginning all that Christianity meant for 
 her, and no one labored with more zeal and intelli- 
 
WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 163 
 
 gence to spread and explain the new teachings 
 which recognized in her an equal and opened such 
 illimitable avenues to the exercise of her peculiar 
 virtues and capabilities. In all the culture-lands 
 bathed by the waters of the Mediterranean thou- 
 sands of females, very frequently of the highest 
 classes, enrolled themselves under the banner of 
 Jesus and proceeded to revolutionize the ethnic 
 inner Hfe of as many thousand famihes. 
 
 The Roman world, as we shall see, was tolerant 
 of a greater pubUc freedom for women than the old 
 Greek world. The latter, indeed, permitted them 
 to belong to private societies of succor, insurance, 
 amusement, and even for reUgious purposes, but in 
 the former they had conquered still greater hberties. 
 They could join the numerous corporations per- 
 mitted and registered in the office of the city prefect, 
 could even found them and preside over them. 
 They were not forbidden to become proselytes of 
 the Jews, nor to join the grotesque cults of Asia. 
 This large civil and rehgious Hberty of woman in the 
 early imperial epoch was of the utmost benefit to 
 the new rehgion. It was some time before the State 
 suspected what Christianity meant for Gentihsm, 
 and in the meantime the propaganda had been 
 carried on with unrelaxing zeal witMn and without 
 the Empire. Everywhere it began with a few 
 
164 WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 
 
 chosen families, and everywhere the females of these 
 famiUes appear as very active and stirring in the 
 fm-therance of its interests. They make long jour- 
 neys like Phoebe; they give abundantly like Lydia; 
 they teach and instruct Uke the Phihppian helpers 
 of Paul and Clement; they give prestige and pohtical 
 protection hke the noble dames of Thessalonica 
 and Beroea; they are the nuclei of combat against 
 heresy Hke Electa; they capture the heads of the 
 great Roman famihes hke Tryphena and Tryphosa; 
 they provide shelter for the celebration of Mass hke 
 the daughters of Pudens, and they create the first 
 landed interests of the Church by turning over to her 
 their family cemeteries hke Lucina and Priscilla and 
 Ceciha. Columbus discovered a new world in the 
 physical order. He broke down the mysterious 
 ocean waU, and gave over to the intellect of man 
 things hidden from the hoariest antiquity. But 
 Christianity discovered a new social world when it 
 brought forth woman from the depths of her degra- 
 dation, enforced or voluntary, and placed her trans- 
 muted, purified, and elevated heart among the new 
 psychic forces destined to alter profoundly the an- 
 cient social constitution of the world. 
 
 Outside of the canonical writings of the New 
 Testament, the earhest record of the human Church 
 is the noble letter written to the Corinthians by 
 
WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 165 
 
 St. Clement, the fourth Bishop of Rome. After 
 referring to the deaths of SS. Peter and Paul, he 
 is moved at once to glorify certain women who 
 had suffered cruel and unholy insults for the sake of 
 Christ, but had safely reached the goal in the race of 
 faith and received a noble reward, feeble though they 
 were in body. Almost, if not quite, contemporary 
 is the shepherd of Hermas, in which earliest picture 
 of Roman Christian society Grapte is represented 
 as having charge of all the widows and orphans in 
 the city, and worthy of hearing the special revelations 
 of the shepherd angel to the ex-slave Hermas. 
 
 The apocryphal accounts of the apostolic journeys 
 abound with traits of female devotion and energy in 
 the Christian cause. Though they are very fre- 
 quently of heretical origin, overlaid and colored with 
 the thoughts and expressions of later ages, yet it 
 cannot be doubted that much of their contents is 
 historical truth. Among these apocrypha the Acts 
 of St. Paul and Thecla are pre-eminent not only for 
 their pathos and great age, since they existed already 
 in the time of TertulHan, but also for the vivid pic- 
 ture they give us of the genesis of an apostolic con- 
 version. Thecla is a heathen maiden of Asia Minor 
 who happens to overhear the preaching of St. Paul 
 on virginity and straightway accepts the Christian 
 doctrine, to the great disgust of her mother and 
 
166 WOMEN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. 
 
 lover. When Paul is banished from the city, she is 
 condemned to be burned at the stake, but escapes 
 miraculously and follows the Apostle to Antioch in 
 Syria, where she is again made to undergo great suf- 
 ferings for Christ's sake, and where she succeeds 
 in converting a noble lady in whose veins flows the 
 blood of the Ptolemies. Thecla distributes among 
 the poor the wealth which her royal convert show- 
 ers on her, and later on begins the Christian apos- 
 tolate by donning male garments after receiving 
 from St. Paul the commission to teach. Eventually 
 she takes up her residence at Seleucia, in Asia Minor, 
 where she gathers 'about her a body of Christian vir- 
 gins and widows and founds one of the most famous 
 of the early female monasteries. There are wild, 
 incredible details in this legend, yet it is so ancient 
 and corresponds so closely to the New Testament 
 picture of the early Christian women that we cannot 
 but feel that there is in it a solid substratima of 
 truth, and that, later follies and exaggerations aside, 
 Thecla is a true portrait of the devoted Greek women 
 who abandoned all for Christ and His pure teachings, 
 and gave up their lives and fortunes to the fearless 
 propaganda of the new doctrines. 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY: 
 
 A GREAT Christian writer has said that of all the 
 victories of Christianity there is none more salutary 
 and necessary, and at the same time none more 
 hardly and painfully won, than that which it has 
 gained — gained alone and everywhere — though with 
 a daily renewed struggle, over the unregulated in- 
 clinations which stain and poison the fountains of 
 life. Its divinity here shows itself by a trium^ph 
 which no rival philosophy, no adverse doctrine, has 
 ever equalled or will ever aspire to equal. 
 
 The improvement of the lot of woman was 
 surely the greatest social conquest of the religion 
 of Christ — greater even than the alleviation and 
 abolishment of slavery. On it, as on a corner- 
 stone, arose the new Christian society. Aristotle 
 long since remarked that wherever the institu- 
 tions that concern the female sex are faulty, the 
 State can enjoy only a very imperfect prosperity, 
 for the family relations are the great beams on 
 
 which society reposes, and whatever tends to 
 
 167 
 
168 WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 
 
 strengthen them makes in the same measure for 
 the soUdity of the social framework that rests 
 thereon. This fundamental truth had become 
 greatly obscured in the pre-Christian ages. With a 
 few honorable and partial exceptions the condition 
 of woman was everywhere that of a weak and de- 
 graded being, unequal to man, existing only for his 
 pleasure and utility. '' The Christian doctrine/' says 
 Balmes in his ''European Civilization," ''made the 
 existing prejudices against woman vanish forever; 
 it made her equal to man by unity of origin and 
 destiny and in the participation of the heavenly 
 gifts; it enrolled her in the universal brotherhood of 
 man with his fellows and with Jesus Christ; it con- 
 sidered her as the child of God, the coheiress of Jesus 
 Christ; as the companion of man and no longer as 
 a slave and the vile instrument of pleasure. Hence- 
 forth that philosophy which had attempted to de- 
 grade her was silenced; that unblushing literature 
 which treated woman with so much insolence found 
 a check in the Christian precepts and a reprimand 
 no less eloquent than severe in the dignified manner 
 in which all the ecclesiastical writers, in imitation of 
 the Scriptures, expressed themselves on woman." 
 In connection with the new and improved conditions 
 of woman in the early Christian Church, her new dig- 
 nity and responsible offices, and the consequent social 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 169 
 
 elevation which fell to her, it may be well to offer as 
 a background a brief retrospect of her condition in 
 ancient society. 
 
 Nearly all the ancient systems of law which have 
 come down to us exhibit woman in a dependent po- 
 sition. In the Mosaic law divorce was permitted 
 to the husband alone; the vow of a woman might 
 be disallowed by her father or husband; daughters 
 could only inherit in the absence of sons; the wife 
 accused of adultery might be tried by the ordeal of 
 bitter water. The Jew was allowed, because of the 
 hardness of his heart, to practise polygamy, though 
 in the post-exilic times this custom seems to have 
 been less in vogue. Divorce was permitted for ex- 
 tremely frivolous reasons, though the husband was 
 forbidden to take back the divorced woman after the 
 death of her second husband or after a second divorce. 
 Women were not allowed to take any active share 
 in the worship, yet they took part in religious dances 
 and processions, and there seems to have been re- 
 ligious women who voluntarily attached themselves 
 to the temple service. While the law protected the 
 honor and estate of the wife, the sensual and vicious 
 Jew only too often yielded to all the vices of his 
 abandoned Syro-Phoenician neighbors. The duties 
 of a mother and a housewife were the chief occu- 
 
170 WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 
 
 pations of the Jewish woman; the harder labors of 
 the field fell seldom upon her. Without being as 
 high as her Teutonic or Christian sister, the Jewish 
 woman stood on a higher level than the Greek. 
 More than once she appears in the annals of her peo- 
 ple as a deliverer in the persons of Judith, Esther, 
 Deborah, and the like. 
 
 Much light has been thrown on the place of woman 
 in ancient Egypt by the labors of modern scholars 
 in deciphering the abundant mass of legal documents 
 written in demotic characters, among which are an- 
 cient marriage contracts that go back to the eighth 
 century B.C. From the "Cours du droit Egyptien'^ 
 (Paris, 1884-86) of M. Eugene Revillout we learn 
 that woman in the times of the early Egyptian dy- 
 nasties occupied an elevated position, could con- 
 tract as the equal of man, acquire, sell, and perform 
 other legal transactions without male intervention. 
 Not infrequently the husband was obliged to give 
 her a mortgage on his present and future goods; she 
 could enter into bilateral contracts with him at the 
 usurious rate of 30 per cent., and thus eat up in a 
 few years all his estate. Though polygamy was 
 not forbidden, if the husband took another wife dur- 
 ing the lifetime of the first the administration of all 
 his present and future goods passed to the eldest son 
 by the first marriage. The position of the wife was 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 171 
 
 guaranteed by a written notarial contract of a re- 
 ligious character. On the ancient Egyptian monu- 
 ments the wife or '^housemistress" is seen seated by 
 the side of the husband, and the royal succession 
 could pass to females, who were treated as the legiti- 
 mate kings. But the Macedonian masters of Egypt 
 eventually restricted the ancient Coptic freedom of 
 the women, and gradually submitted them, in the 
 cities at least, to the prevailing Greek laws and 
 usages. The history of woman has few sadder 
 pages than those which narrate the closing years of 
 the reign of the Seleucides. 
 
 The Celtic peoples also looked upon woman as in- 
 ferior to man. Though the ancient laws of Ireland 
 have been much modified by Christian influences, 
 the romantic literature remains yet to show us the 
 estimation of the female sex among our ancestors. 
 M. D'Arbois de Jubainville, in the preface to the fifth 
 volume of his "Cours de Litterature Celtique," teUs 
 us that there were two kinds of marriage in ancient 
 Erin, one temporary and for a year, while the other 
 was permanent. Marriage was at all times a sale of 
 the woman by her father, or in his stead by her near- 
 est male relative. The children might be put to 
 death by the father if weakly or misshapen. The 
 wife was looked on much as the farmer considers 
 
172 WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 
 
 his sheep or cattle. One man was worth seven fe- 
 male slaves or twenty-one horned cattle. By the 
 law of gavelkind they could inherit only in the ab- 
 sence of male heirs. Very early the laws of dis- 
 tress were modified in their favor. The causes of 
 divorce were many and trivial. Women were 
 obliged to go to war, and one of the tenderest traits 
 of Irish history is the establishment by Adamnan of 
 the "Law of the Innocents/' by which woman and 
 the clergy were freed from military service. 
 
 In his valuable introduction to O'Curry's'^ Lectures 
 on the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish/' 
 Mr. W. K. Sullivan has collected a number of texts 
 to show that among the ancient Irish the office of 
 judge was held occasionally by women. These were 
 perhaps akin to the mysterious and influential Druid- 
 esses of Gaul and the Teutonic prophetesses. Some 
 faint trace of these Matriarchs or "Women of the 
 Judgments" has come down to us in the "sover- 
 eign lady of the thoughts " of the mediaeval knight 
 and the female judges in the Courts of Love. 
 
 Aristotle is witness, in his Poetics, that among 
 barbarian peoples woman and the slave were on the 
 same footing, and whoever takes the pains to read 
 Westermarck's "History of Human Marriage" (Lon- 
 don, 1892) will find collected there a mass of details 
 from the history of ancient and modern uncivilized 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 173 
 
 peoples that amply justify the assertion of the 
 Greek philosopher. Among the peoples of the ex- 
 treme Orient woman has always occupied an inferior 
 position. It is not necessary to indicate here what 
 degradation Islam has brought to woman. Let us 
 look at the ^^ Sacred Books of the East'^ in the splen- 
 did translation brought out under the supervision 
 of Max Mueller. Everywhere in Persia, India, and 
 China woman is a being of inferior quality, existing 
 only for the pleasure and comfort of man, and ob- 
 taining her salvation only through him. According 
 to the '' Institutes of Vishnu'' a woman cannot be a 
 witness and cannot execute a legal document. Her 
 duty is to live in harmony with her husband, pre- 
 pare his food, to collect wealth, to be careful and 
 saving in her habits, to lead a reserved life, and never 
 undertake to act by herself. She is forever under 
 the guardianship of some male, as, indeed, were 
 women in the Scandinavian kingdoms until modern 
 times. Her only hope of eternal bliss is in the ab- 
 solute subjection to her husband. Add to this that 
 her life was filled with a thousand superstitious prac- 
 tices. Though these laws say that she is to be hon- 
 ored by the family, especially on holidays and festi- 
 vals, and that the curse of an ill-treated woman 
 wreaks ruin, yet, according to them, she is evidently 
 only a higher servant of man, whose interests are 
 
174 WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY, 
 
 paramount at all times. The " Laws of Manu" (fifth 
 century b-.c.) are the most ancient code of Hindoo 
 jurisprudence we possess. They represent woman 
 as unfit for freedom, a wrathful, dishonest, malicious 
 being, whose mutable temper and natural heartless- 
 ness make it necessary to keep her in dependence 
 night and day. ''In childhood a female must be 
 subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when 
 her lord is dead to her sons — a woman must never 
 be independent. . . . Though destitute of virtue, or 
 seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good quali- 
 ties, a husband must be constantly worshipped as a 
 god by a faithful wife. . . . Through their passion 
 for men, through their mutable temper, through their 
 natural heartlessness they become disloyal towards 
 their husbands, however carefully they may be 
 guarded in this world. Knowing their disposition, 
 which the Lord of creatures laid in them at the crea- 
 tion, to be such, every man should most strenuously 
 exert himself to guard them." 
 
 One of the weakest sides of the old Hellenic world 
 was the low view it took of the nature and calling of 
 woman. We have no perfect record of her state in 
 Hellenic society, but such details as can be collected 
 from the ancient writers and the monuments may 
 be found in the ''Heathenism and Judaism'' of Doel- 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 175 
 
 linger and in the antiquarian romance of ''Charicles" 
 by Professor Becker. She was httle esteemed and 
 treated as a child, shut out from social life and con- 
 fined to the women's apartments, or gynoeconitis, 
 which was often locked by the husband on his de- 
 parture. He rarely ate with his family, and if vis- 
 itors came the wife dared not appear. Special offi- 
 cers were deputed to look after the women. They 
 could not go out unaccompanied, and in some cities 
 durst not stir abroad until sunset. They were a 
 lower order of beings, neglected by nature in heart 
 and intellect, prone to evil, only fitted for the pleas- 
 ure of the lords of creation. Greek literature 
 abounds with mockery and persiflage of woman, and 
 this tone is observable not only in the mysogonist 
 Euripides and the comedian Menander, but even in 
 the grave philosopher Aristotle, who deliberately 
 rates her as man's inferior, more than a slave or a 
 child, yet without any of the necessary political vir- 
 tues—neither courageous nor just. Where her dower 
 was great or her natural character strong she might 
 create a more tolerable position for herself; But 
 such cases were few. We rarely hear of the Greek 
 woman in political life. She was legally a minor for 
 life, could conclude no bargain or transaction on her 
 own account. Whatever a man did by the counsel 
 or request of a woman was void of legal value. 
 
176 WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 
 
 There was no provision for her education — it was 
 given by the mother and consisted of the merest do- 
 mestic instruction, with some knowledge of music 
 and dancing. The mind was undeveloped, for all 
 public intercourse was forbidden by law or custom. 
 The Greek maiden up to the day of her marriage 
 lived in the utmost seclusion, and from thenceforth 
 was busied with the cares of the household — the 
 clothes, stores and kitchens, the children, the slaves 
 and the sick. She was thrown back on her own 
 thoughts and on the company of her still weaker de- 
 pendents. Both Aristotle and Sophocles were of 
 opinion that 
 
 "A modest silence is the honor of woman." 
 
 And Pericles was of the opinion that the chief care 
 of Athenian women ought to be that neither good 
 nor evil should be spoken of them — utter self-efface- 
 ment. The condition of woman at Rome was much 
 superior to that which she held in the Greek lands. 
 We are not speaking here of the multitude of female 
 slaves whose unions the law did not recognize. But 
 for the free-born woman marriage meant a life-long 
 union, with mutual joys and sorrows and equal ob- 
 ligations. She had a share in all that belonged to 
 the husband and participated in certain religious 
 acts. She was absolute mistress of the household, 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 177 
 
 the instructress of the children and the guardian of 
 the domestic honor. In the later times of the re- 
 public she could appear in court and give evidence 
 or offer her intercession. She visited freely the thea- 
 tres, banquets, and baths. The original jurispru- 
 dence had been very severe, however, in her regard. 
 She was by marriage completely in the power of the 
 husband, only his daughter before the law. He 
 might punish or even slay her with slight formality. 
 The ancient laws of Rome contemplated for her, like 
 the laws of India and Scandinavia, a life-long guar- 
 dianship. But in time she avoided both the hus- 
 band's power and the agnatic control by successive 
 favorable interpretations of the old laws, and at the 
 time of Christ had almost completely emancipated 
 herself from any male control of her person or for- 
 tune. Her influence was felt in the imperial house- 
 hold, the army and the public administration. She 
 was dictatrix of fashion and entered freely all cor- 
 porations. Then began that gigantic debauch which 
 fills those pages of history that narrate the decay of 
 the republican and the rise of imperial Rome. The 
 Roman women were the mistresses of the masters of 
 the world. The treasures of the vanquished lay at 
 their feet and every powerful passion found a facile 
 satisfaction. The tributes of nations were squan- 
 dered on their adornment, and some writers trace 
 
178 WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 
 
 one cause of the later financial crash under Diocle- 
 tian to the vast sums of gold shipped to the Orient 
 for rare jewels and stuffs. Divorces became the or- 
 der of the day. Many Roman dames counted their 
 years by their marriages. The population decreased 
 and the public morality was at its lowest ebb. It 
 was in vain that the emperors attempted to stem 
 the growing evils — the degradation of woman had 
 gone too far. The names of Clodia, Julia, Messalina, 
 recall the most shameful pages of the history of mor- 
 als. Such writers as Friedlaender and Baudrillart 
 have described this glittering period of decay with a 
 masterly touch, but nothing can surpass the fierce, 
 dark, suppressed wrath of the contemporary aristo- 
 crat Tacitus as he depicts for us the sublimely wicked 
 orgies of the female world of his time. The absence 
 of any serious instruction, the idle futile life at such 
 splendid seaside resorts as Baise, the shameless ex- 
 cesses of the theatres, the obscene mimic plays, the 
 world of Oriental singers, dancers, and jugglers who 
 filled the city, the cruelty of the gladiatorial games, 
 the darkened consciences of the men who admin- 
 istered the world from the Palatine hill, the count- 
 less mob of slaves and flatterers, had all combined to 
 utterly destroy the female character at Rome when 
 the light of the Gospel first shed its mild beams on the 
 most glorious and most wicked of the seats of men. 
 
WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 179 
 
 Yet it was in that very city of Rome and among 
 those same Roman matrons that Jesus Christ was 
 soon to make his most brilHant conquests. As though 
 they had touched the very depths of the moral 
 abyss, a reaction had been setting in within the 
 higher circles of the Roman female world. The spir- 
 itual teachings of Judaism and its simple direct 
 monotheism had won many a woman's heart, sick 
 of gold and power and blood, thirsting for the 
 higher goods of life. They were not strangers to 
 philosophy. The books of Plato and the Stoics 
 were often noticed on the silken cushions of their 
 luxurious couches. Outside those who were swept 
 away in the mad swirl of society were many who 
 did not belie the grave religiosity of the ancient 
 Roman woman, who followed every new light and 
 prayed now to Venus and Diana, now to Isis and 
 Cybele, until they recognized in the teachings of the 
 crucified Jew the celestial balm for their agitated 
 and blindly suffering hearts. From that time they 
 threw themselves with the most splendid enthusiasm 
 into the work of Christian prosel3rtism. At every 
 step in the early history of the Roman Church we 
 are struck by the figures of grave devoted matrons, 
 whose houses are turned into churches, whose 
 family sepulchres are made burial grounds for the 
 Christian multitude, who lavish their enormous 
 
180 WOMAN m PAGAN ANTIQUITY. 
 
 wealth to support poor Christians at the ends of the 
 earth; who are prodigal of self-sacrifice, and co- 
 operate in modest but active devotion to rear the 
 City of God within the City of Antichrist. 
 
 In the pages of Tacitus we read of the retirement 
 from society of Pomponia Grsecina, and modern 
 criticism has recognized in her one of the first Ro- 
 man converts to Christianity. Among those of 
 Csesar's household of whom St. Paul speaks with 
 respectful tenderness were two women, bound to 
 Vespasian and Domitian by close ties of blood, the 
 two Flavise Domitillse. The noble Petronilla, of 
 the same Aurelian stock, was another member of 
 the gentle sweet-tempered band. The mysterious 
 Lucina, whose memory is yet so fresh at Rome, 
 was another, perhaps a guiding spirit, the strange 
 name, no doubt, hiding some prouder patronymic. 
 The archaeologist gets vague glimpses of other noble 
 dames whom the sublime simplicity, sweetness, and 
 fulness of Christ's teachings had won, but he does 
 not talk of them to an incredulous world until he has 
 the irrefragable proofs in hand. He believes that 
 the Balbi, the Probi, the Bassi, the Glabriones were 
 in part already Christian, and the stones of the 
 catacombs are yielding up the evidences — ^their own 
 Christian epitaphs. 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME.* 
 
 There is something astounding, overwhelming, iif 
 the reflection that sixteen hundred years after her 
 death the memory of a gentle maiden of old Rome 
 should yet be a potent spiritual watchword through- 
 out the world; should suffice, for example, to arrest 
 the thoughts and move the hearts of a great multi- 
 tude of men and women in the very core of this 
 newest and greatest of world-cities. The imagination 
 is confused and thrown back upon itself when it tries 
 to seize, on the one hand, the spectacle of the Golden 
 City by the Tiber, so long the royal mistress of the 
 habitable or civilized world of antiquity, and, on the 
 other, the youthful representative of triumphant 
 democracy, exulting in the sense of destiny, glow- 
 ing with consciousness of power, throbbing with a 
 thousand mighty energies — without a doubt the 
 highest expression of organized humanity since the 
 sceptre fell from the aged hand of Rome and the 
 eagles of victory fled from her tottering banners. 
 
 * Sermon preached in St. Agnes' Church, New York, Jan- 
 uary 26, 1902. 
 
 181 
 
182 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 Indeed, it is a long cry from the newest to the 
 oldest; from the head of the vast procession of civ- 
 ilization to the far horizon where it was first organ- 
 ized and set in motion. As we gaze on the scene the 
 mind is troubled by infinite comparison and suggestion 
 and the heart is equally solicited by considerations 
 of the most far-reaching and pregnant character. 
 
 What is there in common between the latest 
 phase of human society and that terrible decade of 
 expiring polytheism when a half dozen barbarian 
 emperors of Rome disputed, for the last time, the 
 onward march of Christianity? It would seem that 
 in the multitude of changes that have followed one 
 another since those decisive days, nothing could have 
 remained the same. States and cultures, languages 
 and literatures, have driven one another off the 
 stage without ceasing; the stage of life itself has 
 been widened beyond the wildest suspicions of the 
 ancients. Time and space, the common equip- 
 ment of humanity, have no longer the same meaning 
 as in the days of St. Agnes. 
 
 Though it is a trite, still it is a true observation, 
 that only one institution — the Catholic Church — 
 remains to bind us with the old Roman state. 
 
 This it does by its long history of teaching and 
 governing, its continuous and conscious self-identity, 
 its genuine and effective love of our common human- 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 183 
 
 ity, its unremitting efforts to uplift to a high level 
 every estate and condition of that humanity. It 
 is the only cosmopolitan force that has survived the 
 revolutions of nigh two thousand years. In the 
 light of this indisputable fact we may well believe 
 the inmiemorial contention of Christian philoso- 
 phers and historians that the Roman Empire itself 
 was raised up by God to prepare the way for a reli- 
 gion that should embrace all men, and dominate 
 all time, and overcome all limitations of space, all 
 human barriers of whatever kind. 
 
 For that reason we rightly maintain that the glo- 
 ries and the humiliations of this religion, its victories 
 and its defeats, its progress and its decay, its diffi- 
 culties and its problems, are of interest to all mankind. 
 They are all pages from the story of a society that 
 transcends, now as then, all common conditions of 
 mankind, and offers on earth a weak but real image 
 of that heavenly city where there is no more history, 
 for there is no more time; no more discord, for all 
 is perfect love; no more wrong, for the Sun of Jus- 
 tice is its light; no more ambition, for the vision of 
 the All-Holy and the AU-Good fills up the measure 
 of each one's desire. Alone, the Catholic religion, 
 by the conquest of aU hearts, has planted therein 
 this idea of a common humanity, has elevated to 
 the power of universal forces a passion for the ab- 
 
184 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 stract right, a living irresistible enthusiasm for good- 
 ness, a sure and permanent public opinion that eats 
 away injustice like an acid. Before she appeared on 
 this earth, noble intellects had dimly seen the out- 
 luies of goodness and truth, had even set down in 
 immortal Greek and Latin ideals of justice and 
 sanctity, had vaguely grasped the notion of a com- 
 mon humanity where equality should reign and 
 earthly happiness should be absolute. But these 
 were the Utopian dreams of a few thinkers who 
 walked apart from the rest of men, and their 
 thoughts were cold, inefficient, sterile, like the 
 efforts of a sorely wounded man to better his 
 condition. With inevitable rapidity the whole 
 situation changed after the death of Jesus Christ. 
 At once there seemed to be let loose among 
 men a tide, as it were, of personal goodness that 
 made its way into every condition of ancient 
 life. Within a hundred years of His death there 
 could be seen in every city of the Empire men 
 and women whose lives would have ravished the 
 admiration of Pythagoras and Socrates. By mul- 
 titudes they accepted and lived out in their daily 
 lives sublime formulae of conduct that were lately 
 the despair of the most learned and virtuous. 
 Mysteriously, but surely and easily, the secret of a 
 just holy and upright life had been found. 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 185 
 
 Some sweet, strong, healing light had burst in 
 upon all ranks and estates of mankind. Men and 
 women were everywhere rising from a spiritual 
 death and walking freely and joyously in a con- 
 scious restoration to life and well-being. So it went 
 on for centuries, without boastfulness or arrogance, 
 but also without flinching — from talking about a 
 perfect life men and women had begun to live that 
 perfect life. 
 
 In the light of our transmuted views and opinions 
 one would think that they should have met with 
 universal admiration, yet it was the contrary. 
 The annals of history do not record any wilder, more 
 general and unreasoning opposition of man to man 
 than the story of the first three centm-ies of the 
 Catholic religion. Its pious. God-fearing, law-abid- 
 ing, innocent members were hunted like wild 
 beasts, now by the mobs of great cities, now by the 
 state itself, now by the powerful and numerous Jew- 
 ries of the time, now by their own families and rela- 
 tives. To be a Christian was to live an object of 
 contumely and hatred, to walk always in the shadow 
 of a sudden and cruel death, an outlaw in the society 
 that had cast down all barriers between men, an 
 exile in a commimity of 100,000,000 of citizens. 
 
 Every engine of force, every form of social com- 
 pulsion, every influence of literature, every imag- 
 
186 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 inable constraint of a penal character, was set 
 in motion to overcome these Christian men and 
 women of long ago, so long ago that the ordinary 
 imagination reaches thither with difficulty. 
 
 But force and complusion were, for the first time 
 in human history, insufficient. In the long and 
 awful appeal to public opinion the Christian virtues 
 at last won the day as against the political virtues 
 of Greece and Rome. The mild and gentle figure 
 of the Good Shepherd was set up in New Rome that 
 consecrated the victory, and in the Old Rome the 
 cross of Jesus Christ replaced the Roman lance in 
 the hand of Constantino. 
 
 The prisons gave up their Christian inmates; the 
 executioners laid down their cruel irons; the mines 
 of Spain and Africa and Palestine sent forth from 
 their cold recesses the followers of Jesus. East and 
 west the deserts and the mountains and the islands 
 of the seas swelled the processions of men and women 
 who returned in multitudes to their homes, singing 
 canticles of joy and gratitude. 
 
 "Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea, 
 Jehovah has triumphed, His people are free." 
 
 It was the first general conflict of the Catholic 
 Church with the power and spirit of the world. And 
 if you reflect a moment on all that it meant for her 
 you will not wonder that she cherishes dearly the 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 187 
 
 names of all the great combatants who fell on her 
 side, that for her they are dearer than the heroes of 
 Marathon or Thermopylae; that for them she finds 
 forever fresh accents of praise that surpass the elo- 
 quence even of Pericles. Henceforth it is as clear 
 as the sun in heaven that there are two orders — the 
 spiritual and the temporal, and that the latter can- 
 not force the former, cannot extirpate or assimilate 
 it. The precept of Jesus Christ, "Give unto Caesar 
 the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things 
 that are God's," is now written by Caesar on the 
 books of his own law. At last there is an impreg- 
 nable rock of personal freedom, the conscience of 
 man and woman, a fortress conquered for humanity 
 by every frail girl who laid her head on the block for 
 love of Jesus, by every noble matron who renounced 
 the good things of earth to join in heaven the com- 
 pany of the blessed. When it came to that pass that 
 in every city of the Roman world women and chil- 
 dren of every rank sought death with equal avidity, 
 it was clear to all right-thinking Roman men that 
 the bases of their state were long since rotten and that 
 its ruin or its transformation was at hand. 
 
 The martyrs had died for Jesus Christ as God; 
 thereby they overthrew polytheism, by the consent 
 of all an inferior and degrading religion and the root 
 of all superstition. 
 
188 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 The civilized world had henceforth a correct idea 
 of God whereby to regulate the relations of man- 
 kind with its Creator and Preserver. The martyrs 
 died for the divinity of Jesus Christ and for the 
 reality of His human nature. Thereby they were 
 for the Church the highest and for all time the most 
 efficient witness of the fundamental doctrines of 
 Christianity. By their death the ancient world was 
 cleared of a thousand horrid bloody customs, insti- 
 tutions, and public vices. And if the eyes of the 
 more spiritual and mystic Christians were not des- 
 tined ever to see the New Jerusalem on earth, they did 
 see the triumph of truth and virtue and the downfall 
 of oppression and hypocrisy. At last the taunt of 
 the pagan was silenced — ^the God of the Christians 
 did move to succor them. At Saxa Rubra by the 
 Milvian Bridge, near Rome, the sun went down on 
 one world, the world of paganism, and rose on an- 
 other, the world of Christianity. As time wore on, 
 the Church saw clearly that her own history was one 
 of the surest means of consolation and guidance. 
 The era of the martjn-s was like the first epoch of her 
 vast career, and furnished her with an absolute and 
 certain proof that the Holy Spirit was with her, that 
 Jesus Christ was truly living and reigning in the 
 world, that the divine Father had not forgotten His 
 children even in the furnace of tribulation. 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 189 
 
 Those three centuries of severest trial stand out 
 henceforth in the life of the Church as a corner-stone 
 of fact, a bed-rock of conviction, a "pillar and 
 foundation" of her confidence in the final success 
 of her mission, her teaching, her ideals. 
 
 After all every martyrdom was in its own true 
 way a repetition of the sublime sacrifice of Jesus 
 Christ on Calvary. Jesus Christ was the king of 
 the martyrs, and His death the result of the union 
 of the powers of the world — Herod and Pilate and 
 Caiphas — to repress the only religious teaching that 
 could unite all mankind in an intimate and benefi- 
 cent way with the common Father of all. With 
 the Christian martyrs began that wonderful Imita- 
 tion of Christ that since .hen has never failed to 
 win numberless adherents. It was along this pain- 
 ful way that Jesus drew upward to Himself His first 
 adherents. When wc open the blood-stained pages 
 of their trials and deaths, it is the figure of Jesus that 
 dominates the scene. For His name they die ; usu- 
 ally they need only utter the one word, "I am a 
 Christian," to seal their doom. 
 
 In the prisons His Passion is read to them by the 
 servants of the Church, His encouragements to firm- 
 ness are repeated. His example set before them. On 
 the way to the scene of death they chant His power 
 and glory, His beauty and goodness. Many times 
 
190 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 He appears to them in their noisome dungeons that 
 for the moment ^are transformed into halls of light 
 and joy. In the heart-rending agonies of execution 
 they often fall into an ecstatic state and pass away 
 sustained by the immediate presence of their Lord 
 and Master. 
 
 The ignorant and dull become quick-witted in their 
 replies to the great and learned of Rome; the timid 
 and the humble are filled with a vigor and boldness 
 that more than aught else troubled the masterful 
 authorities of a city that had hitherto broken every 
 resistance, and now stood puzzled and worried 
 before this new line of opposition that defied all her 
 ancient and approved arts of government. 
 
 Amid the gasping and the moaning of the victims 
 the Holy Spirit often seized the hearts of the by- 
 standers and impelled the nobler among them to 
 step forward and tak«: the places of the dying, pro- 
 claiming that they beli'^\xd in the truth and useful- 
 ness of a religion whose followers were ready to die 
 for it. For ten who gave up their lives as many 
 more went down into the arena and emphasized the 
 new and revolutionizing truth that any human 
 government must henceforth be ready to perish in a 
 sustained conflict with genuine faith in Christ Jesus, 
 Son of God, Saviour of men, risen from the dead, 
 reigning in heaven at the right hand of the Father. 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME, 191 
 
 Finally, their precious remains were laid away in 
 the deep and kind bosom of mother earth, with the 
 psalms, chants, and prayers that we yet repeat over 
 our dead. More frequently their name and fame 
 were left to God— why imitate the pompous inscrip- 
 tions of those pagans above ground? Here in these 
 dark, silent halls the angels would easily find their 
 own. At most a rude line or two, some symbol of 
 faith and hope, like an anchor or a dove or a palm- 
 branch, some fond word of a parent, brother, or sis- 
 ter, perhaps a lover— Farewell, sweet soul I Fare- 
 well, most dear companion! No note of hatred or 
 rancor, no legacy of revenge, no phrase of cynicism 
 or pessimism. These were precisely the enemies 
 that they had worsted, each one, in his or her mem- 
 orable duel with the crowned and sceptred Death 
 above them. 
 
 And when it was all over, when the bloody work 
 of the day was done, the court-room closed, the law- 
 yers and executioners gone to their rest, and the 
 laboring spirit freed from its maimed and broken 
 shell, faithful men wrote down the sublime story and 
 bedewed the parchment with tears, not of sorrow, 
 but of joy; for they wrote no story of death, but of 
 birth, rebirth in Christ Jesus— the Natalis dies, or 
 birthday of the martyr. 
 
 The following Sunday the renmant of the Church, 
 
192 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 like the survivors of a great storm, gathered in their 
 meeting-place and at the appointed time there rose 
 up the deacon of the little body. He read the pro- 
 ceedings of the martyr's death and note was taken of 
 the day, and the bishop from his seat gave due 
 praise in the name of the community and urged all 
 present to equal steadfastness, for sin was abundant 
 and scandal frequent, and life was short and uncer- 
 tain, and they bore about the great treasure of faith 
 and constancy in vessels of fragile clay. 
 
 Doubtless more than one will wonder what could 
 sustain men and women in such incredible sufferings. 
 Their love of Jesus Christ was very personal and im- 
 mediate — they were His by a baptism that had 
 made a deep impression on them, since it cut away 
 and destroyed the awful burdens of the past. He 
 was to them the pure Sun of Justice in a world of 
 obscenity, sin, and oppression of every kind. He was 
 the sole object worthy of affection to those who had 
 tasted of all the world's pleasures, but in vain, and 
 found the soul's thirst quenched by Him alone. A 
 multitude of men and women folt their state, with all 
 its greatness, hastening to decay and ruin, and them- 
 selves with it. In the possession of the Holy Spirit 
 of God they found the assurance of personal salva- 
 tion amid circumstances that everywhere threat- 
 ened the end of all things. Daily they read the 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 193 
 
 Scriptures of the Old and the New Testament. In 
 the latter they foimd the absolute exemplar of their 
 lives, the solution of the moral or ethical problems 
 of their times, the proof and evidence of faith in 
 Jesus Christ, a mysterious fountain of graces flowing 
 from the lips of that divine Master. They found in 
 it the warrant of the mysterious banquet where they 
 replenished their spiritual strength and felt them- 
 selves intimately one with the risen and triumphant 
 Christ. A sense of joy and victory, spiritual indeed, 
 but habitual, pervaded their lives and made them 
 more often dwellers in the world of heaven than in 
 that of earth. 
 
 Did they read daily the Psalms of the Old Testa- 
 ment? In spite of the rude semi-popular translations 
 into the Greek and Latin of the streets and the pub- 
 lic places, the shops and the wharves, they found 
 therein the person of Jesus Christ described in ad- 
 vance by the Royal Singer of Israel. Deep in their 
 hearts they cherished these marvellous prophecies 
 as the corner-stone of faith, and they rose from hear- 
 ing them with enkindled resolution and a contempt 
 for the flimsy apparatus of religion that was thrust 
 upon them by pagan society. 
 
 And were not their sorrows like those of Christ 
 foretold by the holy David ? 
 
 The philosophy of affliction, that exudes from the 
 
194 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 Psalms like some strong balm or ointment, fell upon 
 ardent and expectant souls. They were transfig- 
 ured by it and came forth among men no longer 
 the citizens of a low and mean earth, but the citi- 
 zens of a city not built by hands, and members of 
 the Jerusalem that is above. 
 
 Now they knew what history meant, whither hu- 
 manity was drifting, what was the reason of evil and 
 sorrow, what were its remedies, what the purpose of 
 life, what the utility, the reason of death. Each in 
 his or her own soul walked with the holy prophet 
 through the valley of doubt and temptation and 
 came out with him on the sunny uplands of faith 
 and hope and love. Religion became an intimately 
 personal thing with them, and in their transmuted 
 hearts there was no longer a place for the goods of 
 the world that hated the one thing they held dear, 
 and pursued it to exterminate it. 
 
 This world was sunk in malignity when it was not 
 rotten to the core. It was blind, perverse, unjust. 
 One ray shone through its accumulating iniquity 
 and revealed in light inaccessible a wise and holy 
 Judge, at whose bar the multitudinous wrongs of hu- 
 man life should be redressed. Now they were dwell- 
 ers in mighty Babylon where all things offended 
 them, but there stood the two open doors of 
 death, natural and violent, through either of which 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 195 
 
 they would gladly walk when it was the Father's 
 will. 
 
 In reality this long multitudinous conflict was 
 between a society that believed only in this world 
 and a society that believed in a world to come; 
 between men and women who believed that the 
 silent grave was the sure end of life, and other men 
 and women who believed that it was only the vesti- 
 bule of life; between a society built on the rock of 
 Christian faith and one founded on the weak and 
 shifting opinions and devices of men. The former 
 had a government, a philosophy, an ethics, a litera- 
 ture, an art, all based on the principle that beyond 
 this earth there was no other existence, or at least 
 none that man could certainly know and usefully 
 strive for. In time the highest and sole ideal, the 
 only sufficient scope, of human activity, came to be 
 the common weal, the social fabric, the state itseK. 
 In one way or another the civil order became the real 
 god of that old society into which East and West had 
 been for centuries merging around the Mediterra- 
 nean. Compromise and concession were its ordinary 
 weapons in all that pertained to the other world, a 
 growing tolerance and indifference of religious belief. 
 So long as the official ritual of the state's inherited 
 religion was acknowledged, the subject of the state 
 might adore with impunity one god or ten thousand, 
 
196 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 might follow the dictates of pure philosophy or the 
 wildest extravagances of Oriental worship. But nov/ 
 there had been growing in the very heart of that 
 ancient state, under the shadow of its oldest monu- 
 ments and symbols, a new view of man's relations to 
 the other world. The Christian held that the one 
 and only God had revealed Himself and His will to 
 all mankind; that He had done this, indeed, many 
 centuries before, though in an imperfect way, and to 
 one people alone; that now He had made Himself 
 known to the whole world through His beloved Son 
 Jesus Christ; that this Son of God had really dwelt 
 among men in the flesh and had died for their re- 
 demption; that He had renewed the ancient divine 
 laws against the false, debasing worship of many 
 gods, and had left a new and perfect code of conduct 
 based on His own absolutely holy life; that the re- 
 ligious element in life and society was the indis- 
 pensable one; that instead of being the last care of 
 the social authority, what we thought of God should 
 be the foremost, as being the true source of perfect 
 morality and the only reliable bond of human society 
 itself. 
 
 From the laws and justice of the Roman state they 
 appealed to the higher law, the original justice of the 
 Creator of all men. Year in and year out, at the 
 tribunal of praetor or proconsul, they convoked these 
 
ST AGNES OF ROME. 197 
 
 judges to meet them on a certain day — the Last Day 
 — before an omniscient^ hol}^, and impartial Judge. 
 So intense was their belief in the immortality of the 
 individual soul, in the truth of the divine promises of 
 Jesus, in the moral horror of the social life about 
 them that they threw their lives from them as a worn 
 garment, and in every violent death saw a triumph 
 more far-reaching than any Alexander or Caesar had 
 ever won. To their eyes the average world about 
 them was so sunk in vice and wrong, so lost to the 
 most ordinary sentiments of truth and justice, so 
 conscienceless in all that pertained to the plain du- 
 ties of man towards his Creator and Preserver, so 
 blind to the simplest obligations of respect and ser- 
 vice of the True God, that to longer stay in such a 
 world was unbearable, and the hour of their disso- 
 lution a welcome and blessed hour. On the other 
 hand, the pagan society looked on them as a genuine 
 curse of life. The irreligious but superstitious mob 
 of every city made them responsible for all the 
 natural misfortunes of the time — famine, pestilence, 
 flood, conflagration — and decimated them again and 
 again in its fits of ungovernable fury. The thinkers, 
 the magistrates, and the philosophers might smile at 
 the reasoning of the mob, but they put the Christian 
 to death for a reason of a higher order — he denied 
 the sole and absolute supremacy of the state. His 
 
198 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 real crime was his political, not his religious, obsti- 
 nacy, what they held to be his perverse stubborn- 
 ness in face of the social order itself. He dared to 
 maintain a higher principle than was known to the 
 pubhc authority, and to set his personal conviction 
 above the common reason of the community. In 
 other words, the Christian martyr contended for a 
 new thing in the history of humanity, for liberty of 
 conscience. No more perfect formulae of that great 
 principle were ever uttered than were put forth in 
 those days by the learned men of the Christians. All 
 men know how the memorable conflict ended with 
 the triumph of Christianity — the blessed Agnes her- 
 self was one of the last victims of the cruel struggle, 
 though so glorious a one that all Christianity forever 
 repeats the praises of the delicate maiden who wit- 
 nessed so successfully for Jesus Christ. 
 
 Nevertheless, paganism, though driven from the 
 public offices and places of honor, was far from 
 vanquished. Historians draw for us a vivid pic- 
 ture of the long conflicts that it sustained before 
 it yielded all hope of a formal reinstatement. And 
 when, at last, it saw the Roman world finally 
 Christian, it saw also the coarser forms of its own 
 religion coming from the mysterious homes of 
 barbarism to contest with Christianity the peaceful 
 possession of its conquest. 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. , 199 
 
 For a thousand years, indeed, during the long 
 epoch that was the childhood and youth of the 
 great modern nations, the political control of the 
 world was wrested from the hands of paganism. 
 Men believed in a Christendom, an earthly society 
 of all Christian peoples bound in amity and charity 
 and mutual helpfulness, inspired by the Gospel 
 of Jesus Christ and the spirit of His holy Church, 
 whose aim was the life eternal with God and His 
 saints, whose ideals were all spiritual, grandiose, 
 uplifting man out of the narrowness and insuf- 
 ficiency of this life. But when the barbarian 
 nations had been led by the hand of the mediaeval 
 Church within the reach of the ciilture and per- 
 fection of old Greece and Rome, the evil principles 
 and corrupting spirit of paganism that had never 
 utterly died away began to reassert themselves. 
 They had only seemed to die — in their monuments, 
 in their literature, in the praxis of government, in 
 the letter of law, in the human heart itself, they 
 had found a safe and untroubled refuge. 
 
 So it is now four hundred years that the original 
 conflict of Christianity and paganism is again on 
 the 'stage of life. This is the last and irreducible 
 formula or law that explains sufficiently the phe- 
 nomena of political, social, and religious changes 
 that fill the pages of all modern history. Grad- 
 
200 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 ually the measure of human duty, responsibility, 
 endeavor, of the scope and purposes of hfe, of all 
 idealism, of the nature and uses of pleasure, of 
 the place and calling of the human body, of the 
 sacreclness and solemnity of human life, has been 
 made to square with the conviction that with the 
 death of the body there is an end of all things. 
 I know that there are many forms of this genuine 
 materialism and atheism, ranging from the crassest 
 and vilest to the most refined and elegant. So, 
 too, in the days of St. Agnes there were repre- 
 sentatives of the earthly philosophy of Epicurus 
 who spoke in language of varying degrees of frank- 
 ness^ — yet they were all disciples of personal pleas- 
 ure and comfort, and each saw in her an example 
 of monumental folly. In the measure that the 
 unity and authority, the prestige and social action 
 of the Catholic Church have grown weak the tem- 
 per and the forms of paganism have grown strong. 
 Gradually the ground is being cleared of all the 
 middle forms of Christianity. A minority falls 
 away to Catholicism, the great majority accept 
 the yoke of paganism. There is no truer expres- 
 sion of human life than the average literature of 
 the day. Outside of the Catholic Church, does 
 it not bear, to a very great extent, the hallmark 
 of paganism? Will any one maintain that in the 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 201 
 
 average romance or novel, in biography, history, 
 travel, in philosophy and social studies, the prin- 
 ciples and the spirit of Christianity are prevalent? 
 In our great universities, every one of them strain- 
 ing to run a glorious race in the near futiu-e, every 
 one, or nearly every one of them, endowed with 
 means that a century ago would have looked fabu- 
 lous, is Christian theology honored, represented 
 by strong and large and earnest faculties, or is 
 it not rather said that there is no use for Christian 
 theology in our busy material world, since it does 
 not always bring material gain and advantage? 
 Can any one who has an inkling of the history of 
 institutions doubt that it is the great miiversities 
 of the land that fashion its future? Must a 
 prophet arise to make this clear to Catholics? 
 What the universities think and say to-day are 
 to-morrow principles of action for the multitude. 
 Little by little, in every state, the popular educa- 
 tion is being shaped by them, i.e., the temper and 
 the ideals of the whole people. What their 
 brilliant writers, investigators, orators, inventors, 
 poets, their men of high and fascinating genius, 
 their masters of English style and their teachers 
 of trenchant personality, hold forth to an admiring 
 world as the true values of life, as the real reme- 
 dies for our woes and sorrows, as the sure keys 
 
202 ST. AGNES OF ROME, 
 
 to the problems that have been agitating mankind 
 for untold centurieS; will surely be believed. And 
 being believed, with the simple directness of our 
 American people, these thoughts will soon be put 
 into action, and so our institutions and habits, 
 our views of God and man and society, in an in- 
 credibly short time, will differ but little from those 
 of a Petronius or a Gallio. 
 
 Oh, beware ! you who have fought, yourselves and 
 your ancestors, for many a long and hopeless decade 
 the good fight for the saving teachings of the Holy 
 Catholic Church; beware how you abandon them 
 lightly at the opening of the great new temporal 
 life that lies before us! In many ways it is a new 
 heaven and a new earth that unfold their charms 
 and their possibilities, but of what value will it 
 all be if in the ages to come the corrupting prin- 
 ciples of paganism, its fatal philosophy of the 
 sufficiency of this life, once more work the ruin that 
 lies to its discredit in the past? Step by step, 
 through this His holy Church, ordinarily, Jesus 
 Christ gave back to mankind the original freedom 
 and happiness that paganism had destroyed. His 
 Holy Spirit breathed continuously on the mori- 
 bund society of the ancients, and lo! bondage and 
 slavery lost their real sting, and human equality 
 was proclaimed — the first and only genuine Dec- 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 203 
 
 laration of the Rights of Man. Human labor was 
 sanctified by the daily toil of the Man-God, and 
 poverty was no longer a stigma when He had 
 chosen it for His bride. In Him the native dig- 
 nity of man was restored. 
 
 "Christianity sanctified each individual/' says 
 one of the greatest of our historians, "inasmuch 
 as it taught him to live and die for Christ. It 
 sanctified the family, because it thoroughly pene- 
 trated domestic life, and filled it with the aroma 
 of piety and devotion. It sanctified the married 
 couple, the children, the household, by binding 
 them together in true mutual love; thereby, little 
 by little, all society was gradually transformed 
 by it from within, filled with hitherto unsuspected 
 ideas, and fitted out with new strength and capac- 
 ity. The Church was the herald and intermediary 
 of a superior morality and culture; she gave back 
 again to the slave the dignity of man; she ennobled 
 daily toil, hitherto so despised; she called the poor 
 and humble to the side of the rich and noble, and 
 designated them as the equals of the latter; she 
 taught man how to despise at once the advantages 
 of life and the terrors of death. Through her, 
 humility, continency, and chastity became honor- 
 able things. She created new men and filled them 
 with new life, made them conscientious citizens, 
 
204 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 true fathers, loving children, trustworthy servants, 
 characters truly great and noble in every state of 
 life. In all of these she formed the Christian ideal, 
 and went on forever finishing and perfecting it. 
 In the midst of ancient society she opened an 
 ever-flowing fountain of consolation and spiritual 
 elevation for all the oppressed and imfortunate. 
 Very truly indeed she renovated the face of the 
 world/' 
 
 Moreover, Jesus Christ made each one respon- 
 sible for his brother, thereby wiping out that aw- 
 ful Cain-like principle that each one must suffice 
 for himself. Is not this the right of the strongest, 
 the diabolical philosophy that life and its joys 
 and duties are only to the strong, that the fiercest 
 competition in trade is as permissible as the fiercest 
 struggle for political supremacy — only, woe to 
 the conquered! Oh, no! the divine eyes of Jesus 
 swept the whole stage of life, and He enunciated 
 a law that must forever dominate all Christian 
 energizings and activities of whatever kind, the 
 law of charity, the Golden Rule, the principle of 
 a common brotherhood, the conviction of a mutual 
 responsibility as members of one great family 
 raised by the Death of the Man-God from the 
 depth of degradation to the vision of God Himself. 
 In that society the death of a little maiden for 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 205 
 
 the common good is as ennobling and generous 
 an act as the death of a Socrates or a Thrasea 
 Psetus— nay, more so, for she has found an army of 
 imitators where the martyr of Philosophy and 
 the martyr of the Republic stood almost alone. 
 They died for themselves, and their example was 
 sterile; — for, sublime as was their death, it was 
 the death of mere men. But in Agnes, by the 
 holy and sublime law of Christian association, 
 every true follower of Jesus dies for Him in spirit 
 and desire, because, weak as was the body and 
 tender the age of the martyr, she was indissolubly 
 boimd in common membership with all true 
 Christians beneath one common head, Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 Dearly beloved brethren, it is long since we have 
 known what it is to endure suffering in our bodies 
 for the sake of our religion, long since we have 
 made acquaintance with the dungeon, the stake, 
 the block, political and social ostracism, the es- 
 tate of the pariah and wanderer among men for 
 the cause of faith. Perhaps this is one reason 
 why the eyes of the Christian faith are no longer 
 as keen as of old, why we no longer scent danger 
 where it abounds. The tide of paganism rises 
 about us, in art, in education, in the life of the 
 common man that is lived out in industrv and 
 
206 ST, AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 commerce, in political principles and situations, 
 in views of God, man, the soul, society, life and 
 death — what they are, why they are, and what 
 is the just and proper attitude of each individual 
 towards them. We are, unconsciously perhaps, 
 unlearning at a rapid rate the old Christian phi- 
 losophy of life and putting in its place a new and 
 un-Christian, one day to be anti-Christian, phi- 
 losophy. Think you that when the hour of trial 
 comes, as it must come, when the usual stern call 
 goes forth for the choosing between this life and 
 the life to come, we shall all share the principles 
 and be ensouled by the spirit of St. Agnes? Is 
 it possible that, as long ago in the rich and popu- 
 lous cities of Carthage and Alexandria, so, too, in 
 this great world-city, only a small number shall 
 be found steadfast, faithful imto death in whatever 
 form it may come? If so, it will be because we, 
 their predecessors, fell away, in our hearts, in our 
 admirations, in our compromises and compla- 
 cencies, to the essence of paganism — its spirit. 
 For the multitudes, under any form of govern- 
 ment, that spirit means the pleasures and com- 
 forts of this life. In the measure that we adore 
 these things we belong to the persecutors of Agnes, 
 since now, as then, there is no middle way. Is it 
 necessary to add that pleasure, for societies as 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 207 
 
 well as for individuals, ends in weariness and 
 emptiness, in a ruinous scepticism, and that 
 hitherto every society infested with scepticism 
 has gone to the wall in conflict with a society in- 
 spired by faith? 
 
 The saints of Catholicism are rightly cherished 
 by us for their superior virtue, for their merits be- 
 fore God and man, for their imitation now of one 
 phase, now of another of the life of Jesus Christ. 
 But no few of them are forever memorable as 
 S3^mbols and types, as summing up in their persons 
 and careers w^hole epochs of conflict, great per- 
 manent interests of religion, immovable principles 
 of conduct, solenm and fundamental lines of 
 righteousness. It is a great warfare that the 
 Catholic Church carries on from century to cen- 
 tury, and she needs great landmarks or monu- 
 ments to look up to, amid the dust and changes 
 of a battle that is forever shifting its field 
 or arena, but never its stake and meaning. 
 An Athanasius, struggling single-handed against 
 a w^orld of opponents for the divinity of Jesus 
 Christ, is forever a fixed star of hope in her 
 firmament. A Gregory the Seventh dying in exile 
 and abandonment for the liberty of holy Church 
 rouses forever her courage in the centuries that 
 follow. A Thomas of Aquino moving with dignity 
 
208 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 and equity between the contending claims of rea- 
 son and authority is forever a guide in long cen- 
 turies of scholastic discord and mental confusion. 
 In the story of St. Agnes we may behold one 
 phase of the long conflict with paganism — the 
 triumph of Christianity over the obscenity and 
 impurity of the ancient life. Not, indeed, that 
 carnal wickedness no more existed, but it was 
 driven from the seat of authority. It was hence- 
 forth personal, individual, not a public and ap- 
 proved power. It was no longer enthroned in 
 the very temples of religion, no longer the chief 
 social factor in human life. It was compelled 
 to hide its face and walk abashed and degraded. 
 It was hunted away from the presence of children 
 and growing youth. Its vile public worship was a 
 thing of the past; its pestilential breath no more 
 infested shamelessly the haunts of men — the 
 streets and squares and meeting-places. For 
 long, long centuries the philosophy of polytheism 
 had been drifting into an apotheosis of the flesh 
 and all its lower and more perilous instincts. It 
 had become as a very Moloch to whom all the 
 higher goods of life had been sacrificed — modesty, 
 chastity, self-respect, the intimate inborn sense 
 of human dignity. It had defied aU law, and set 
 itself in the place of law under the guise of ancient 
 
ST. AGNES OF ROME. 209 
 
 and common custom. Slowly, but surely, it had 
 extinguished in the statesmen the light of wisdom, 
 in the army the love of fatherland, in the family 
 the sanctity of natural affection. Look nowhere 
 else for the decline of the greatest state of antiq- 
 uity, in some respects the noblest creation of hu- 
 man genius! Deliberately it walked down from 
 the heights into the poisonous valley of death. 
 It was most certainly ruined by its own impuri- 
 ties, but above all by its adoration of merely car- 
 nal instincts and passions. This is always the 
 last word of paganism, which is a religion of de- 
 scending and destructive forces, never of uplift- 
 ing and constructive energies. The paganism of 
 Rome had an innate contempt and fierce hatred 
 for the Christian doctrine and discipline of vir- 
 ginity — many of the most famous Christian mar- 
 tyrs were made to perish because they would not 
 adore the shameless gods and goddesses of the 
 common brothel. And so the Catholic Church 
 has always looked with especial fondness and 
 pride on the last victim of genuine pagan secular- 
 ism, St. Agnes. In this weak body, in this brief 
 span of years, what a superior moral beauty, what 
 an incredible wisdom! After that scene of blood, 
 every Christian priest could stand forth and cry 
 out that the very children of Catholicism could 
 
210 ST. AGNES OF ROME. 
 
 overcome the hosts of paganism. It was, no 
 doubt, amid tears of joy that the Sunday after her 
 death the Bishop of Rome recalled the wonderful 
 steadfastness of the purest, noblest, and sweetest 
 maiden of the community, and that every listener 
 felt that Jesus Christ was visibly and lovingly 
 jjresent with them. What they could not know 
 was that relief was near, that they had already 
 won the victory. But in the wonderful and lov- 
 ing justice of God the symbol of that victory, the 
 name that through sixteen centuries should ex- 
 press to all men and women the real meaning of 
 the persecution of the Christian religion by the 
 Roman state in its own glorious seat of power, was 
 the name of Agnes — of all names the one least 
 dreaded by the civil power of Rome. And yet 
 this was eminently just, for she symbolized Chris- 
 tian morality, with all its freshness, wholesome- 
 ness, and helpfulness, while the City of Rome, in 
 that day, stood for all that was contrary to the 
 real well-being of its citizens, the solid growth of 
 the body politic and the inalienable freedom of 
 the human conscience. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE A.D. 250-312. 
 
 What was the actual condition of the Christian 
 Church when, early in the fourth century, the 
 Edicts of Nicomedia were issued against her? 
 The question is an extremely important one, for 
 in the succeeding age imperial favor, subtlest 
 heresies, multitudes of semi-Christians, and de- 
 crease of charity gave quite another physiognomy 
 to the Christian body. On the other hand, the 
 sources of our information for the later period 
 flow so fully that we cannot mistake the essential 
 outlines of faith, discipline, and organization, 
 while there remain only fragmentary evidences 
 for the heroic age of Christianity, over every one 
 of which a jealous and interested criticism main- 
 tains the strictest watch. It is the intention of 
 the writer to draw an outline of Christianity in 
 those early ages, not precisely from the genetic 
 point of view, but rather to present the religion 
 of Christ as it must have seemed to an intelligent 
 and impartial observer in the closing years of the 
 
 211 
 
212 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 third century — such, perhaps, as it may have ap- 
 peared to the son of Constantius Chlorus while 
 he travelled in the body-guard of the Illyrian 
 Csesar through Egypt and Syria, or hastened in 
 memorable flight across the heart of the empire 
 from Byzantium to York. The moment is a 
 propitious one, for both within and without the 
 Church certain lines of evolution had then reached 
 their last term. The subtle, poisonous influence 
 of the Orient, conveyed through a hundred forms 
 of Docetism and Gnosticism, had been dissipated 
 by the united and intelligent efforts of the Christian 
 episcopate and the writings of learned Christians. 
 The episcopate itself, now a mighty network, fre- 
 quently co-ordinate with the municipal system 
 of the empire, was fully conscious of its own na- 
 ture and mission. An immense sympathy, wide 
 as the world and supremely intense, pulsated 
 throughout the whole body from the humblest 
 episcopi gentium on the borders of Scythia or 
 Arabia to the successor of the Fisherman. Con- 
 flict and contradiction had drawn out all the la- 
 tent energies of the Christian system, and as the 
 mind wanders over the contents of the Christian 
 literature of the period, the thinker is astonished 
 at seeing that all the domestic and mixed ques- 
 tions which will eventually convulse Christendom, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 213 
 
 and even yet disturb the peace of mankind, were 
 in those dim days troubling the minds of our pred- 
 ecessors. Whoever will turn over the volumi- 
 nous index of a book as remarkable as dangerous * 
 may convince himself that within the first three 
 centuries the Christian Church had been called 
 on to face, at least in embryonic form, the most 
 painful internal and external problems, and that 
 she solved them with a firmness and accuracy 
 that betray a rounded and plenary consciousness 
 of her sublime mission and her supreme authority. 
 Among the thousand scattered communities of 
 Christians there was a strong sense of mutual 
 fraternity, of solidary fellowship — the outcome of 
 the common teachings and sufferings of ten gen- 
 erations. Never since then has there been so 
 little jealousy, so little mutual distrust, so loving, 
 frequent, and intimate communication, ignoring 
 all the local and transitory interests of earthly 
 
 ^ Renan: Les Origines du Christianisme (8 vols. Paris, 1891). 
 On the Christian side there is, as yet, no such brilliant and 
 comprehensive synthesis of a multitude of excellent mono- 
 graphs. But the Origines Chretiennes of the learned Abb 6 
 Duchesne; the works of Professor Probst of Breslau on doc- 
 trine, prayer, liturgy, the sacraments, and discipline in the 
 first three centuries; the Histoire des Persecutions by Allard; 
 the Geschichte der roemischen Kirche by Hagemann; the Hip- 
 polytus und Callistus of Doellinger, contain valuable anti- 
 dotes to the Renanesque virus. Priceless material is stored 
 up in the Bulleiino di Archeologia Cristiana of De Rossi. 
 
214 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 politics. Antioch and Alexandria recognized with- 
 out demur the spiritual hegemony of Rome, and 
 with maternal affection the latter sheltered in 
 her bosom the multitudinous Christian visitors 
 whom business or curiosity or piety led to the 
 Golden Queen.* 
 
 On the other hand, the relations of the Homan 
 state to Christianity, after much uncertainty and 
 tergiversation, had at last reached a crucial point, 
 when the opposing claims of Christ and Caesar 
 must be settled, either by peaceful means or by 
 the dread and dangerous arbitrament of blood. 
 Perhaps it was the clear sense of the finality of 
 his act which made the politic son of Diodes hesi- 
 tate so long on the eve of the combat, and exhaust 
 every weaker makeshift before opening the last 
 campaign of ethnicism against the sweet and hum- 
 ble law of Christ. It was surely this conviction 
 
 * Cf . Eusebius H. E., viii. 7. St. Athanasius: On the 
 Opinion of Dionysius, c. 13. De Synodis, c. 43. Euseb. H. 
 E., vii. 30; iv. 23; v 24. Fresh light has been thrown on 
 the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome by the discovery of the 
 second-century epitaph of Abercius. See Lightfoot, The 
 Apostolic Fathers, SS. Ignatius and Polycarp, vol. i., pp. 493- 
 601, and the Catholic Times of Philadelphia, April 29, 1893, 
 p. 4: "The Inscription of Abercius." Proofs of the Roman 
 supremacy are gathered in the first volume of Harnack's 
 Dogmengeschichte, and illustrated by Hagemann in Die roem- 
 ische Kirche (Freiburg, 1864) and Schroedl, Papstgeschichte 
 (Mainz, 1888). Cf. Rivington, The Primitive Church and the 
 See of Peter (London, 1894). 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 215 
 
 which caused the warfare to be carried on against 
 the Christians not as offending citizens of a com- 
 mon state, but as hostile belHgerents.* The su- 
 preme hour had come for the death-struggle 
 between Christian monotheism and the motley 
 polytheism of the Gentile world, between the prin- 
 ciples of individual spiritual liberty of conscience 
 and absolute civic omnipotence, between the City 
 of God and the City of Man. The Roman State 
 of the first century looked upon the Christians 
 with a supercilious contempt, scarcely distinguish- 
 ing them from the vile herd that congregated in 
 the Jewries of the Suburra and the Trastevere. 
 As the evil grew, and the sensual, mongrel popu- 
 lations of the great cities began to suspect what 
 Christianity meant, sedition and uproar so filled 
 the empire that the governors were forced to in- 
 tervene in the interests of public order, and usually, 
 with a fine Roman arbitrariness, punished in the 
 interest of peace the first visible cause, however 
 innocent. But it was not alone the sensuous, 
 soft life of the mob that Christianity threatened; 
 the new religion was a constantly increasing peril 
 for the old ethnic state based upon a vast and 
 
 * ".The divine martyrs throughout the world . . . were 
 dealt with no longer by common law^ but attacked like enemies 
 of war."— Eus. H. E., viii. 10. 
 
216 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 intricate system of idolatry, on which it had 
 grown to universal supremacy, and for which it 
 felt that clinging sjnnpathy which exists between 
 institutions that have grown up on the same soil, 
 under the same influences, and with the same 
 scope. Between that state and Christianity there 
 could be no alliance, and the lawyer's mind of 
 Tertullian saw deeper into the true position than 
 that of the scholarly apologist Melito.^ So it 
 came about in the third century that those in 
 whom the true Roman consciousness was live- 
 liest, and who clung with the most idolatrous pas- 
 sion to the invincible and eternal Majesty of the 
 City, were firmly persuaded that the progress of 
 the Christian idea meant the surrender of the old 
 urban supremacy and the abdication of her secu- 
 lar glories before a mean and nameless multitude, 
 obedient in every city to irresponsible heads, and 
 actuated by ideals utterly strange, if not directly 
 hostile to the ends of the Roman state. This ever- 
 growing mass had in all large centres an episcopus 
 and an ecclesiaj and avoided the capitoUum and 
 the fora. It held, with a strange unanimity, doc- 
 
 ^ " Sed et Caesares credidissent Christo si, aut Caesares non 
 essent necessarii saeculo, aut si et Christiani potuissent esse 
 Caesares." — Apologeticum, c. 21, Compare the vague fear of 
 Celsus that the Christians will ruin the state, Origen adv. Cel- 
 sum, viii. 68, and Athenagoras, Legatio, ii. 3. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 217 
 
 trines most unintelligible to the Roman states- 
 men. Its teachings concerning the poor, celibacy, 
 woman, and slavery affected the existing frame- 
 work of society at a hmidred points. The pro- 
 found ineradicable devotion to their chiefs, whether 
 dead or alive, excited the sombre jealousy of the 
 emperor, who claimed for the Roman Majesty, 
 in him incorporate, all the devotion and sympathy 
 of every citizen. 
 
 Frequent invasion, successful insurrection, blight- 
 ing pests, and rapid internal decay added to the 
 gravity of the situation, and we need not wonder 
 that, in such a frame of mind, an otherwise good 
 emperor like Decius, blind in his devotion to the 
 tottering State, and urged on by the jealous phi- 
 losophers and the interested temple priesthoods, 
 undertook the eradication of the hated sect. But 
 he came too late to the task. The pusillus grex 
 had been shielded for over two centuries from 
 a systematic onslaught that, humanly speaking, 
 might have utterly scattered it at an earlier date, 
 and Decius died, confessing that the cosmopolitan 
 Christian association, with its centre beneath the 
 shadow of the Palatine, was a graver danger to 
 the empire than any c hange of dynasty.^ Hence- 
 
 *Cum multo patientius et tolerabilius audiret levari ad- 
 versus se semulum principem quam constitui Romse Dei 
 sacerdotem. St. Cyprian, Ep. 55, 9 (ed. Hartel), p. 630. 
 
218 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE, 
 
 forward, Christianity is, in a sense, on a political 
 level with the Empire. In the long series of irregu- 
 lar successions and counter revolutions that fill 
 the period subsequent to the brave death of De- 
 cius, the only united body in the Empire seems 
 to be the Christians, and their influence is felt and 
 accepted in opposing camps, in the stress of public 
 misfortune, and even at the tribunal of Caesar. 
 Henceforth they fill the armies, and the highest 
 officers of the Empire are entrusted to them. They 
 are in the councils of the Illyrian emperors, and 
 the conversion of Caesar is no longer looked on as 
 impossible or improbable. The females of the 
 imperial court are won over to a religion of all 
 others the most sympathetic and favorable to 
 their sex. The very camps are redolent with an 
 atmosphere of Christianity, and it is already in 
 possession of the highest fruits of a perfect society 
 among men — varied literature, native art and 
 architecture, wTitten legislation, representative as- 
 semblies, domestic annals, and an enlightened 
 public opinion based on the ancient traditions 
 and the historic evolution of the Christian world. ^ 
 It is at this period of transition, in the lull that 
 
 * De Broglie, VEglise et VEtat au IVieme siecle, 6 vols., 
 Paris, 1860-66, vol. i., c. i. Mason, The Persecution of Diocle- 
 tian, Cambridge, 1876, Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantins 
 (2d ed.), Leipzig, 1880. Gregg, The Persecution of Decius, 
 London, 1897. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE, 219 
 
 follows the events of a.d. 250-251, and before the 
 outbreak of the final hurricane, that we desire 
 to sketch the Christian society, its numbers, the 
 causes of its rapid progress, its system of government, 
 its bonds of unity, and its external life and action. 
 
 No domain of history has been scrutinized by 
 more sharp eyes, or has been subjected to more 
 diverse appreciations. No field of historical re- 
 search counts to-day more patient, well-equipped 
 scholars. For these reasons a summary retro- 
 spect of the true condition of Christianity at this 
 time may interest the general reader and awaken 
 in him fresh sympathy for those great men who 
 upbore its banner in the darkest hour of conflict, 
 confiding only on the justice of their cause and the 
 right arm of the Almighty — we mean the Dionysii, 
 the Cornelii, the Sixti, the Cyprians, the Lucii, 
 the Eusebii, the Fabiani, and however else may 
 have been called the leaders of that glorious 
 militia which lifted the walls of Sion amid the 
 smoking carnage of battle and the horrid din of 
 infernal opposition. 
 
 I. 
 
 (a) In the West. 
 
 The Number of the Christians. — The rapid spread 
 of Christianity in the West is evident from the 
 
220 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 testimony of Tacitus, who speaks of a multitudo 
 ingens as existing at Rome in the time of Nero.^ 
 It was thence that the faith was carried, at mi- 
 certain epochs of the first or second centuries, 
 to Gaul, Africa, Spain, Britain, and the islands 
 of the Mediterranean. The language of Tertul- 
 lian, in his apologetic writings,^ though some- 
 what rhetorical, must yet be substantially re- 
 liable, and his statement concerning the Britanno- 
 rum inaccessa Romanis loca Christo vera suhdita^ 
 is borne out by the well-known phrase of St. 
 Irenseus about the barbarian nations who had 
 the law written in their hearts without ink or 
 paper. ^ 
 
 ^ Igitur primo correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum 
 multitudo ingens, baud perinde crimine incendii quam odio 
 humani generis convieti sunt, Annales xv., 44. 
 
 2 Obsessam voriferantur civitatem : in agris, in castellis, 
 in insulis Christianos; omnem sexum, setatem, conditionem, 
 etiam dignitatem transgredi ad hoc nomen quasi detrimento 
 maerent. Afologeticuni, c. 1. Hesterni sumus et vestra 
 omnia implevimus, urbes, insulas, castella, municipia, castra 
 ipsa, tribus, decurias, palatium, senatum, forum: sola vobis 
 relinquimus templa, c. 37. 
 
 3 Cui ordinationi assentiunt multae gentes barbaronim, 
 eorum qui in Christum credunt, sine charta et atramento 
 scriptam habentes per spiritum in cordibus salutem, et vete- 
 rem traditionem custodientes. Adv. haer., iii., 4, 2. Taking 
 these words together with the reference of Tertullian to 
 British Christians, it seems to us that there is much more 
 than modem critics allow in the story of the conversion of 
 the British king (chieftain?) Lucius in the latter half of the 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 221 
 
 We have no means of calculating exactly the 
 proportion of the Western Christians to the pagan 
 population at the close of the third century. The 
 number of bishops would afford some clew if it 
 were known. The Acts of the pseudo-Synod of 
 Sinuessa, compiled toward the end of the fifth 
 century, relate that in the year 303 there were 
 three hundred Italian bishops gathered near that 
 city to condemn the Roman bishop MarceUinus 
 for his supposed fall.^ If these acts represented 
 any local traditions, the above number would 
 indicate a large Christian population in Italy at 
 this time. We have yet the episcopal lists of the 
 Councils of Aries (314) and Nice (325), but in 
 faulty condition. While the number of bishops 
 present at the latter is usually put down at 318, 
 the ancient authorities variously estimate the 
 number at Aries from 33, surely too small for a 
 synod called by St. Augustine plenarium uni- 
 verscB ecclesioe concilium, to 600, too great a num- 
 ber for the united churches of Italy, Gaul, and 
 Africa, to furnish at that time. About the year 
 250, the Roman Church counted nearly one hun- 
 
 second century. See Liber Pontificalis (ed. Duchesne), vol. 
 i., pp. cii. 59, 136, and the articles "Lucius" and "Eleuthe- 
 rius," in Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography. 
 
 ^ Hefele, History of the Councils, i., 143. Mansi, Coll. Am- 
 plissima Conc.^ i.^ 1250. 
 
222 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 dred and fifty clerics, and supported from com- 
 mon funds fifteen hundred widows and orphans.* 
 We learn from Eusebius, that at a Roman synod, 
 in 251, there were present sixty bishops, and 
 more priests and deacons, while a Carthagenian 
 synod of the same year was visited by "very 
 many bishops." St. Cyprian likewise informs us 
 that several years earlier a Numidian synod held 
 in the Lamhesitana Colonia counted ninety bishops 
 among its members.^ 
 
 The Roman Synod of 313, in the affair of Do- 
 natus, counted among the judges fifteen Italian 
 bishops, and three from Gaul, while Csecilius and 
 Donatus brought each ten African bishops with 
 him.^ We may imagine that these bishops did 
 not represent any small or insignificant places, 
 since as early as 343, the sixth canon of the council 
 of Sardica forbade, as an abuse, the location of 
 bishops in small sees, ne vilescat nomen episcopi 
 et audoritas. The Liher Pontificalis mentions 
 forty-six episcopal ordinations at Rome, during 
 six and a half years, in the very troublous and 
 interrupted pontificates of Marcellus, Eusebius, 
 and Miltiades. 
 
 ^ Eusebius, Hist. Ecc, vi., 43. Letter of Cornelius of Rome 
 to Fabius of Antioch. 
 
 ^Euseb., ibid. Cyprian, ep. 59 (ed. Hartel). 
 "Optatus, De Schismate Donatist, lib. i. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 223 
 
 The latter figures argue a very large Christian 
 population at Rome before the persecutions of 
 Diocletian began. Eusebius even tells us that 
 Maxentius stopped the persecutions to please the 
 people, and his famous words in the eighth book 
 of his history on the extraordinary increase of the 
 Christians must be taken to include the city of 
 Rome, which had ever been the chief centre of 
 Christian interests.^ 
 
 A very large part of the Roman lower classes 
 at this time may have been Christians, as they 
 were able to fill the city with sedition and uproar 
 because of internal dissensions and disputed papal 
 elections.^ The inscriptions of the catacombs 
 justify the inference that many of the middle 
 classes had accepted the teachings of Christ, 
 though but few of the Roman aristocracy had 
 openly professed the faith. At the beginning 
 of the fourth century the Roman Church had 
 twenty-five titles or quasi-parishes for the pur- 
 poses of baptism and penance, and some twenty 
 
 »H. E. viii., cc. 1, 14. 
 
 2 In the famous case of the disputed election between Euse- 
 bius and Heraclius, the epitaph of St. Eusebius, recovered 
 by De Rossi, tells us: *'Hinc furor, hinc odium sequitur, dis- 
 cordia, lites, seditio, caedes, solvuntur foedera pacis," etc. 
 See Northcote and Brownlow, Roma Sotteranea, I., p. 343. 
 
224 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 cemeteries for the burial of the dead.^ All this 
 argues a large Christian element, and we cannot 
 be far wrong in putting down the contemporary 
 Christians of Rome at about one hundred thousand 
 in a population variously estimated from eight 
 hundred thousand to a million and a half. 
 
 There were certainly as many more in the rest 
 of Italy. At this period Africa had about two 
 hundred bishops/ and though the bishoprics of 
 Spain were fewer, there was perhaps the same 
 proportion of Christians in each province — about 
 one hundred thousand, if we take the small scale 
 of five hundred souls for each bishop of Africa. 
 In Africa the rapid spread of the Donatist heresy 
 proves the great number of Christians early in 
 the fourth century. In 330 the Donatists had 
 two hundred and seventy bishops at a synod, i.e., 
 one for every Catholic diocese. The Spanish sy- 
 nod of Elvira (about 300) speaks as though Chris- 
 tians were to be found in every walk of life. There 
 is in its utterances a consciousness of long-estab- 
 lished authority. It speaks of the copia puel- 
 
 ^ Ldber Pontificalis (ed. Duchesne), i., 164. "Hie (Marcellus) 
 . . . XXV. titulos in urbe Roma constituit, quasi dioeceses, 
 propter baptismum et poenitentiam multorum qui converte 
 bantur ex paganis, et propter sepulturas martyrum." 
 
 'Miinter, Primordia Ecclesice AfricancB. Hafnise, 1829, p. 
 24. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 225 
 
 hrum among the Christians, and the danger of mar- 
 rying outside the faith. The insistence on the 
 frequentation of the Mass might indicate a great 
 increase in numbers, and consequent lukewarm- 
 ness on the part of the faithful.^ 
 
 The number of Christians in Gaul cannot have 
 been very great at this time, and they were per- 
 haps confined chiefly to the valley of the Rhone, 
 the southern seacoast, and the Roman stations 
 on the Rhine. Sulpicius Severus, himself a Gallo- 
 Roman, tells us that Christianity was slow in pene- 
 trating into Gaul: ^^Religione Deiserius trans Alpes 
 siisceptaJ' The similar testimony of Gregory of 
 Tours is borne out by the inscriptions and the 
 study of the ancient episcopal lists of Gaul.^ 
 There were bishops of Treves and Cologne at 
 Aries (314), as well as three bishops from Britain, 
 but a half-century later the latter country had 
 only three at the synod of Rimini (359). We hear 
 of persecutions under Diocletian at St. Albans 
 and Caerleon in Britain, but the scanty references 
 to them do not justify us in supposing a consid- 
 erable Christian population. 
 
 ^ Hefele, I. 145. In the Melanges Renier the Abb^ Du- 
 chesne has shown that this important S}Tiod was held about 
 the year 300. 
 
 2 See Duchesne, Memoire sur Vorigine des diochses episco' 
 jpaux en Gaule, Paris, 1890. 
 
226 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 The apostolic churches of Greece and Mace- 
 donia seem to have held their own during the third 
 century. We do not hear of any notable increase, 
 but this may be owing to the gradual disappear- 
 ance of Greek influences from Roman public life, 
 as well as to the stubborn resistance of Hellenism 
 on its own natal soil. It was only in the ninth 
 century that paganism was eventually extirpated 
 in the remote parts of the Peloponnesus/ The 
 churches of Corinth and Byzantium were flourish- 
 ing at the end of the second century, and Chris- 
 tianity had already been well established in many 
 of the islands, as in Crete and Melos. 
 
 (h) In the Orient. 
 The diffusion of Christianity was naturally much 
 greater in the Orient. It was long looked on as 
 an Eastern cult, scarcely distinguishable from 
 Judaism. Its professors were usually from the East, 
 where its first communities were established, and 
 where it acquired its distinctive name. In the 
 West the barbarian lands were an almost impas- 
 sable barrier, but the entire East was the seat of 
 ancient culture and refinement — precisely the 
 
 ^ Constantine Porphyrogen, De Adm. regni, c. 50. For 
 the details of the gradual extirpation of paganism after Con- 
 stantine, see Schultze, Der Untergang des Heidentums. (Jena, 
 1892.) 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 227 
 
 field for a religion which appealed to all the higher 
 and purer instincts of humanity. A letter of Pliny 
 to Trajan early in the second century shows what 
 astonishing progress the new religion had made 
 in Bithynia and Pontus, and casts a strong light 
 on the missions of Paul and Barnabas in Asia 
 Minor. ^ Fifty years later, the magician Alex- 
 ander of Abonoteichos found the same provinces 
 full of atheists and Christians, and in the Easter 
 controversy several bishops of this region took a 
 notable part.^ In the latter half of the third cen- 
 tury Gregory Thaumaturgus is said to have almost 
 entirely converted the pagan population in certain 
 parts of Pontus, and his Epistola Canonica, one of 
 the earliest and most venerable documents of dio- 
 cesan legislation, supposes many well-established 
 Christian communities. We learn from Philos- 
 torgius ^ that at this time the Goths captured many 
 Christian ecclesiastics on the occasion of their in- 
 roads into Cappadocia and Galatia. 
 
 The cities of the w^estern seaboard of Asia Minor, 
 Ephesus, Smyrna, Tralles, Sardes, Rhodes, and 
 others, contained a very large Christian popula- 
 tion. Already in the middle of the third centurj^ 
 
 1 Pliny, Epp., Lib. X., 93. 
 ' Lucian, Pseudomantis, c. 25. 
 
 ' Philostorgius, H. E., ii. 15. Routh, ReliquicB Sacrcs^ iii. 
 256. 
 
228 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 the city of Apamsea in Phrygia * seems thoroughly 
 Christian, and used a Christian seal. The acts 
 of St. Pionius of Smyrna (middle of third century) 
 reveal a city largely Christian, in which prejudice 
 had nearly died out. The apostolic activity of 
 St. John, St. Paul, and of St. Timothy; the mul- 
 titude of Jews who dwelt in these towns; the pe- 
 culiar susceptibility to Christian influence of the 
 numerous Greek artists who inhabited this region, 
 contributed greatly to the increase of the Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 In the first three centuries we learn the names 
 of only about thirty episcopal sees in this quarter; 
 but that they were much more numerous is evi- 
 dent from the fact that about one hundred bishops 
 of Asia Minor took part at the Council of Nice 
 
 * "Thenceforward (from a.b. 112) for three hundred years 
 Phrygia was essentially a Christian land. There began the 
 public profession of Christianity; there are found, from the 
 third century, on monuments exposed to the public gaze, the 
 terms Chrestianos or Christianos; there the formulas of epi- 
 taphs convey veiled references to Christian dogmas; there, 
 from the days of Septimius Severus, great cities adopt bibli- 
 cal symbols for their coins, or rather adapt their old tradi- 
 tions to biblical narrations. A great number of the Christians 
 of Ephesus and Rome came from Phrygia. The names most 
 frequently met with on the monuments of Phrygia are the 
 antique Christian names (Trophimus, Tychicus, Tryphenus, 
 Papias, etc.), the names special to the apostolic times and of 
 which the martyrologies are full." — Renan, Origines du Chris- 
 tianisme, iii. 363, 364. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 229 
 
 (325). It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say 
 that one-tenth of the twenty millions of Asia Minor 
 were Christians at the beginning of the persecu- 
 tion of Diocletian. 
 
 The Christian population of Syria must have 
 been proportionately as large as that of Asia Minor. 
 It was the first land into which the Jewish pros- 
 elytes penetrated; its cities, notably Damascus 
 and Antioch, were filled with Jews. Here, too, 
 a very large share of the early Christian literature 
 arose. The early Syriac translation of the sacred 
 books of the Christians (the Peschitta), the com- 
 pilation of such episcopal manuals as the Apostolic 
 Constitutions, and such romances as the Recogni- 
 tions of Clement, the tireless activity of Pamphilus 
 and his school of transcribers in copying the Scrip- 
 tures—prove that there were many communities 
 of wealthy and intelligent Christians. From the 
 end of the first century Antioch was recognized 
 by them as the head of all the churches of Syria, 
 a position, to which her size, situation and history 
 fully entitled her. Syria was the highway of Chris- 
 tian missionaries going east or west or north, and 
 the number of its seaports made it an excellent 
 field for proselytism; on the other hand, the coarse 
 and sensuous character of its idolatry furnished 
 the Christians the most tangible of arguments in 
 
230 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 favor of monotheism. The discoveries of M. De 
 Vogiie in Northern and Central Syria have put it 
 beyond a doubt that at the beginning of the fourth 
 century there was a very large percentage of Chris- 
 tians of rank and wealth in the splendid capital of 
 the Orient.^ The small kingdoms of Osrhoene, 
 Adiabene, and Edessa were in great measure Chris- 
 tian at the end of the second century. In fact 
 the first national conversion to Christianity that 
 we know was that of the Abgars of Edessa, a line 
 of kings whose Jewish sympathies go back more 
 than a century earlier.^ 
 
 The entire population of Palestine was much 
 reduced in the early imperial period, and perhaps 
 it did not amount to more than six hundred and 
 fifty thousand. Among them there existed yet, 
 and for many years after, the small church of the 
 Nazarene Christians.^ But the vast majority be- 
 longed to the Universal Church. The Jews pre- 
 served for a long time a peculiar autonomy, es- 
 pecially on their native soil. The rabbinical 
 
 * De Vogiie, La Syrie Centrale, Architecture civile et reli- 
 gieuse, du I. au VII. sikcle. Paris, 1865. 
 
 ^ Chronicon Edessenum in the Bibliotheca Orientalis of As- 
 semani. For the many interesting questions connected with 
 the origin of Christianity in these regions, see Tixeront, Les 
 Origines de VEglise d'Edesse, Paris, 1888. 
 
 ^St. Jerome, Ep. 74 (89) ad Augustinum. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 231 
 
 schools nurtured the vague hope of a glorious tem- 
 poral Messiah; and their patriarchs were clothed 
 with a mixed temporal and spiritual power, which 
 was so great in the time of Origen that the Jews 
 pointed to it to show that the sceptre had not yet 
 passed from Judah.^ Still from the beginning of 
 the third century we notice that there is a kind 
 of renaissance in Christian proselytism. The 
 death of the bishop Narcissus removed a venerable 
 but aged administrator. Alexander, a Greek, who 
 had come on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, succeeded 
 him. He seems to have been a man of great lit- 
 erary activity, and the earliest public library of 
 Christendom was his creation. There is reason 
 to believe that from this time many pilgrims came 
 yearly to Jerusalem, which some ancient Chris- 
 tians looked on as the centre of the earth. Their 
 number may have been one of the reasons why 
 the city arose about this time, even before the 
 victory of Constantine, to a greater influence than 
 it had enjoyed as a colony of Hadrian.^ 
 
 The frequent and bloody persecutions of the 
 Alexandrine Christians are clear evidence that 
 they were numerous. The cosmopolitan char- 
 
 * See Schiirer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of 
 Jesus Christ, vol. i., part ii. p. 276. 
 
 2 Euseb., Hist. Ecc, vi., 8, 20; vi., 14, 19, 32. 
 
232 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 acter of the city, the Paris of antiquity, with its 
 multitudinous traders and travellers from Britain 
 to India, furthered the Christian proselytism in a 
 city of philosophers, students, and inquirers. We 
 find here, from the latter half of the second cen- 
 tury, a kind of Christian university, the famous 
 catechetical school, which drew many pagans to 
 its lectures. The history of the Arian heresy in 
 its incipient stage shows a very large body of Chris- 
 tians at Alexandria early in the fourth century, 
 where, at the same time, we hear of parishes (as 
 at Rome), of hundreds of consecrated virgins, and 
 similar indications of a flourishing community. 
 The Egypto-Meletian schism is proof that the 
 Coptic church was widespread throughout the 
 Delta and along the Nile, and the same conviction 
 results from the reading of the acts of the Coptic 
 martyrs. 
 
 Early in the fourth century Alexander of Alex- 
 andria was able to gather a hundred bishops in 
 the preliminary synod that condemned the teach- 
 ings of Arius. Altogether it has been calculated 
 that Egypt contained, in the time of Diocletian, 
 about the same percentage of Christians as Asia 
 Minor, i.e., about one milHon, or the eighth part 
 of the population. In this may rightly be included 
 the long strip of Libyan territory and the Pentap- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE, 233 
 
 olis. Ancient Christian catacombs have been dis- 
 covered in the territory of Cyrenaica, which be- 
 tray the presence of numerous Christians.^ 
 
 Beyond the limits of the empire, Armenia, the 
 first of the great kingdoms to accept Christianity 
 as the religion of the state, was thoroughly Chris- 
 tian before the victory of Saxa Rubra (a.d. 312). 
 The work of Gregory the Illuminator was then 
 going on over the whole plateau of this vast border- 
 land, where Roman and Parthian, Byzantine and 
 Persian, fought so long and so fiercely for abso- 
 lute dominion. Its sparse population of three 
 millions lived in somewhat feudal relations with 
 the great nobles and the king. The aristocracy 
 must have become Christian at the same time, 
 since we learn from Eusebius that Maximinus 
 Daza made war against Armenia (312) for having 
 embraced Christianity, and an ancient tradition 
 says that Gregorj^ ordained four hundred bishops 
 before his death. ^ 
 
 ^Eusebius (H. E., viii. 8) speaks of "multitudes of Chris- 
 tian martyrs" in Egypt during the last persecution. One 
 group condemned to the copper-mines of Palestine included 
 seventy, and another one hundred and thirty men. The 
 language and conduct of Dionysius of Alexandria, in the pre- 
 vious generation, show a very large Christian population, not 
 only at Alexandria, but throughout the Delta of the Nile. 
 On the catacombs of Egypt and Cyrenaica, see Kraus, Real- 
 Encyclopddie, ii. 136. 
 
 2 Agathangelos and Moses of Khorene (Langlois, Historiens 
 
234 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Persia is the country to which the apocryphal 
 but very ancient Acts of the Apostles Simon and 
 Jude, Thomas and Matthew, point as 'Hhe dark 
 and bloody ground" of their apostolate. The 
 Jews were there in larger numbers than elsewhere 
 in the world outside of Judaea.^ The border-lands 
 of Mesopotamia and the small Syro-Greek king- 
 doms were filled with Christian communities, and 
 Greek and Roman influences prevailed largely 
 at the court of the last kings of the Parthian dy- 
 nasty.^ The great persecution begun by the new 
 national dynasty of the Persians under Schapur 
 (Sapor) 11. reveals a sense of fear on the part of 
 the Magians, and the number of the martyrs, 
 variously calculated from sixteen to one hundred 
 and ninety thousand, shows how the Christian 
 faith had already honeycombed the Zoroastrian 
 cult. John, a bishop of the Persian Church, as- 
 sisted at the Council of Nice, and some years later 
 
 de VArmenie, Paris, 1867). See also Acta SS. Sept viii. 295- 
 413, and Le Quien, Oriens Christianus, vol. i, Eusebius (H. 
 E,, ix. 8) speaks of the whole Armenian people as being ''Chris- 
 tians, and zealous in their piety toward the Deity." 
 
 ^ The statistics of the Jewish Diaspora in the early imperial 
 period are collected in the above-cited work of Schiirer. On 
 the apostolic missions in Persia, see Lipsius, Die Apokryphen 
 Apostelgeschichten, 4 vols. 
 
 ^ The origins of these national churches in the border-lands 
 of Rome and Persia are ably discussed in the above-cited work 
 of Tixeront, and the polemic reply of the Abb6 Martin. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 235 
 
 the Persian Christians were numerous enough 
 to induce Constantine to intercede for them with 
 Schapur.^ 
 
 In antiquity the Hmits of the territory known 
 as Arabia were only vaguely known, and the suc- 
 cess of the Roman arms was never complete enough 
 to warrant the establishment of colonies. The 
 nomadic manners of the Arabs or Saracens, and 
 the fanatic Jewries on the border, were great ob- 
 stacles to the spread of the Christian religion, yet 
 we find about the middle of the third century 
 "very many bishops" assembled at Bostra, a for- 
 tified Roman camp on the plateau of the Hauran, 
 to try the case of the bishop Beryllus in presence 
 of Origen. A Roman general, stationed in this 
 neighborhood, sought the instruction of that great 
 Christian teacher, as did Julia Mammsea, the 
 mother of Alexander Severus. Finally, a contem- 
 porary Roman emperor, Philip the Arab, came 
 from the vicinity of Bostra, and we know by the 
 testimony of Eusebius that he was commonly 
 reputed a Christian. The doctrines of Judaism 
 had long since made some progress among the 
 tribes of the desert, as we learn from Sozomen, 
 and they were the usual leverage for Christian 
 
 ^ See Hefele, History of the Councils, vol. i., and Tillemont, 
 Mem. p. servir d Vhist. ecclesiastique, vii. 76. 
 
236 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 proselytism. That the monks and ascetics who 
 fled to these remote regions made deep impres- 
 sions on the children of the desert is evidenced 
 by the strange story of Queen Mavia and the soli- 
 tary Moses. 
 
 Isolated Christian captives there were among 
 the Saracens, as among the Goths, in the middle 
 of the third century. Eusebius relates the tender 
 charity and concern of the Roman See in regard 
 to these unfortunates.^ It is very probable that 
 there were communities of Christians in the Mala- 
 bar peninsula before the time of Constantine, and 
 the history and teachings of Manes reveal the 
 presence of Christianity on the outermost limits 
 of Persia.^ 
 
 Trade and war, travel and lettered curiosity, 
 must have scattered a sporadic knowledge of its 
 tenets in every part of the world which was in 
 any way known to the peoples of Grseco-Roman 
 
 ^ Euseb., H. E., vi. 33, 21, 34. Sozomen, Hist. Ecc, vi. 
 38. "Why need I speak of the multitude that wandered in 
 the deserts and mountains (of Arabia), and perished by hun- 
 ger, and thirst, and cold, and sickness, and robbers, and wild 
 beasts?" Dionysius of Alexandria, in Euseb., H. E,, vi. 42. 
 The Roman Church redeemed many of these unfortunates 
 from the captivity of the Saracens, Euseb., vii. 5. 
 
 2 See ''The Christians of St. Thomas" in The Catholic Ti77ies 
 of Philadelphia, April 15, 1893, and the articles on Manes 
 and Manichaeans, in Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biog- 
 raphy. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE 237 
 
 culture. It is literally true that in omnem terram 
 exivit sonus eorum. The pages of Eusebius are 
 full of the conviction that Christianity had already 
 become numerically a huge power on the earth, 
 with which henceforth all rulers must count. He 
 quotes for us the Edict of Maximinus Daza in 
 which he admits that ''nearly all men" had deserted 
 the service of the gods (H. E., ix. 9). He tells 
 us of the incredible increase of Christianity in the 
 days immediately preceding the persecution of 
 Diocletian. He paints the public rejoicings in 
 every city at the release of the martyrs, and the 
 great activity in church-building and works of 
 benevolence consequent on the cessation of the 
 persecution.^ It is impossible to read these pages 
 and not feel that what the genius of Melito of 
 Sardes and Origen had foreseen was now come to 
 pass:^ the empire had become Christian in this 
 
 * ' How can any one describe those vast assemblies, and 
 the multitude that crowded together in every city, and the 
 famous gatherings in the house of prayer, on whose accoimt, 
 not being satisfied with the ancient buildings, they erected 
 from the foundations large churches in all the cities." — Euseb., 
 H. E., viii. 1. 
 
 2 Melito boldly parallels the rapid spread of Christianity 
 •with the contemporary growth of the Roman name and 
 power, and insinuates that they are related as cause and ef- 
 fect, Euseb., H. E., iv. 26; Otto, Corpus Apologetarum, ix. 
 p. 412. The number and influence of the Christians in the 
 Orient might easily justify the vague conviction of Origen 
 
238 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE, 
 
 sense, that the religion of Christ now stood out 
 the only compact, united, vigorous, and aggressive 
 religious power in the empire. It had not yet 
 the majority. The religious philosophies and the 
 ethnic cults lasted on, but without hope, or co- 
 hesion, or balance, or distinct aim. The battle 
 was won, and the division of the spoils might be 
 left till the morrow.* 
 
 From the above or similar data Gibbon reckons 
 the Christian population of the empire before the 
 conversion of Constantino at about five millions 
 or one-twentieth of the population; Keim, Zockler, 
 and Chastel, at about sixteen millions; while 
 Schultze puts ten millions as the minimum figure 
 in a population of about one hundred millions.^ 
 The Christians were surely more numerous than 
 
 that the religion of Christians would one day be mistress of 
 the empire, "since it was daily winning a multitude of souls/' 
 Adv. Celsum, viii. 68 (Migne, P. G., xi. 1620). On the char- 
 acter and opinions of this very remarkable bishop of the 
 second century, see Melito von Sardes, by C. Thomas (Osna- 
 briick), 1893. 
 
 *The details of the gradual extirpation of paganism are 
 given in the learned and rare work of Beugnot, Histoire de la 
 destruction du Paganisme en Occident, Paris, 1835, and Chas- 
 tel, Histoire de la destruction du Paganisme dans V Empire 
 d' Orient, Paris, 1850. The works of M. Boisser, La Fin du 
 Paganisme, Paris, 1891, and 0. Seeck, Der Untergang der 
 griechisch-roemischen antiken Welt, Berlin, 1901, are written 
 from different viewpoints, but are both valuable. 
 
 'Schultze, op. cit., i., p. 22. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 239 
 
 the Jews, who numbered some four millions within 
 the empire at this period; hence the figures of Gib- 
 bon must be looked on as too low, especially as the 
 Orient alone would easily furnish, from modern 
 calculations, a greater number. 
 
 (c) Constituents of the Christian Society. 
 
 The Christian society of the third century was 
 made up of many elements. No doubt the poor 
 and the humble were in a great majority. But 
 it would be as much of an error to think that 
 slaves were very numerous in it as to imagine that 
 any large portion of the Roman aristocracy had ac- 
 cepted the teachings of Christ. The legal position of 
 the former made it difficult and dangerous to prac- 
 tise a religion which their masters did not approve, 
 and the public duties and ambitions of the latter 
 found in Christianity a most embarrassing obstacle. 
 In the higher classes, especially, the neglect of 
 the Roman religion was less easily tolerated than 
 in the motley multitude. 
 
 The bulk of the Christian population seems 
 usually to have been made up of the middle classes 
 — ^the free poor, the small tradesman or patron, 
 artisans, workers in metal and marble, Greek and 
 Oriental foreigners,* etc. 
 
 *See Allard, Les Esclaves Chretiens, Paris, 1876. It is the 
 
240 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 There was a great deal of travel in the early im- 
 perial epoch/ and every large church counted 
 on its feast-days men of many nationalities within 
 its walls. At Alexandria and Antioch, at Nicomedia 
 and Trier the great offices of state were frequently 
 filled by Christians. They had a splendid church 
 at Nicomedia, built upon an elevation, and the 
 Old Basilica at Antioch was not without a certain 
 magnificence. St. Optatus of Milevi informs us 
 
 impression which the Acts of the Martyrs, i.e., those of St. 
 Justin, and the complexion of the Roman Church before Con- 
 stantine make upon us. The Acts of St. Pionius of Smyrna 
 show a large and free Christian population in that city about 
 A.D. 250. And the wealth of the Roman Church came neither 
 from slaves nor entirely from her noble members. On the 
 percentage of the nobility in the primitive Church, see the 
 Bulletins of De Rossi, s.v. Nobilitas, the work of Dom Gu^ 
 ranger, Sainte Cecile et la Societe Romaine aux deux 'premiers 
 sikcles (3d ed ), Paris, 1890, and Lanciani, Pagan and Christian 
 Rome. The kings of Edessa were Christian from the end of 
 the second century at least. Those of Armenia were converted 
 a century later, and in the meantime the little Greek state of 
 the Bosphorus (Crimea) had become largely Christian. It 
 was commonly believed that the Emperor Philip the Arab 
 and his family were Christian, and such, too, seem to have 
 been Julia Mammaea, the distinguished mother of Alexander 
 Severus, and Salonina, the wife of Gallienus. The wife and 
 daughter of Diocletian were Christians before the outbreak 
 of the persecution. When "Csesar's household" did not es- 
 cape, we need not wonder that many Csecilii, Valerii, Anicii, 
 Glabriones, Annii, Probi, Bassi, Gra^cini, and like families 
 were won over to Christianity. 
 
 *See Weltverkehr und Kirche in den drei ersten Jahrhunder- 
 ten, by Th. Zahn (Hanover, 1877). 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE, 241 
 
 that early in the fourth century they had over 
 forty churches at Rome, and Eusebius tells us that 
 before the last persecution there was a very great 
 activity in church-building throughout the em- 
 pire. The churches began already to possess the 
 cemeteries in their own right, and they formed 
 corporations capable of holding property from 
 the time of Gallienus. The little ''house-churches" 
 had long since given way to a peculiarly Christian 
 style, for the basilica form was not first adopted 
 by the Christians after the downfall of paganism 
 — it is considerably older, and some maintain that 
 it is the product of Christian architectural prog- 
 ress in the third century, the outcome of a com- 
 bination of '-'house-church,'' catacomb-chapel, and 
 private domestic hall.^ Yet, while it is clear that 
 Christianity was very widespread in the last 
 quarter of the third century, we must make due 
 reservations; it was met with chiefly in the cities, 
 much less in the open country; its votaries were 
 far more numerous in the East than in the West; 
 their public status was in a transition crisis from 
 the primitive period when the powerful and con- 
 temptuous state scarcely distinguished them from 
 the mob of Jews to the hour when the terrified 
 
 ^ See the article on Basilicas in the Encyclopddie of Kraus. 
 
242 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 administration recognized that the whole world 
 was honeycombed with the new doctrines and 
 the hour of final conflict was at hand. The latter 
 point is very clear from the history of Paul of 
 Samosata, and the opening reflections of Eusebius 
 in the eighth book of his Church History, as well 
 as from the epitaph of Pope Eusebius and cer- 
 tain remarks of St. Cyprian in the golden booklet 
 De Lapsis, 
 
 II. 
 
 Causes of the Rapid Spread of Christianity.* 
 
 (a) Proselytism. — The words of Christ (Luke iv. 
 18; 19; ix. 2) could leave no doubt in the minds 
 of the apostles as to the chief means by which 
 they were to found the kingdom of God in the 
 hearts of men. It was by oral preaching, by per- 
 sonal appeal and instruction. They understood 
 from the beginning that they were above all 
 ''ministers and captains" of the Word (Acts v. 
 12). The earliest Christian writers present the 
 evayyeXioVj the Kr/pvyfiaj the public official proc- 
 lamation of the history and the teachings of Jesus 
 
 ^ The writer takes for granted the co-operation of super- 
 natural agencies, and the impossibility of explaining by- 
 natural causes alone the long and successful resistance, and 
 the ultimate survival, of Christianity. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 243 
 
 Christ as the ordinary means of propagating faith 
 in Him. The earliest bits of Christian biography, 
 the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, are usually 
 styled preachings or circuits, and in the Christian 
 literature of the first three centuries the inculca- 
 tion of Christianity is called a teaching, a bearing 
 of witness/ In the days of the first vivid en- 
 thusiasm the Christians saw many quasi-inspired 
 men, called prophets, who wandered up and down 
 the world, filled with a holy zeal, discoursing with 
 more than human eloquence, often rapt beyond 
 themselves, omnipresent, tireless, aggressive, well 
 fitted to introduce the leaven of truth into a tim- 
 orous or hesitating community, and to confirm in 
 the accepted faith the dubious and wavering. 
 The generation of these ardent souls did not pass 
 away with the apostolic times; they lived on into the 
 second century. There are echoes of their missions 
 in Papias, Polycarp, Ignatius, and Hermas. ''The 
 Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" shows them 
 yet active in the service of the Catholic Church,^ 
 and a valuable passage of Eusebius leads us to 
 believe that they were still numerous in the middle 
 
 ^Mark xvi. 15; II. Tim. iv. 17,; Titus i. 3. The apoc- 
 ryphal Acts of the Apostles are collected and examined in 
 the great work of Lipsius, Die Apokrijphen Apostelgeschichten. 
 
 2 See Funk, Opera Patrum Apostolicorum (2 vols., 8vo. 
 Tiibingen, 1902). 
 
244 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 of the second Christian century.* The apostles 
 left, indeed, a regularly constituted hierarchy,' 
 but in the pioneer days of Christianity every con- 
 vert was a preacher, devoured with the desire of 
 compelling all men to enter the kingdom of God 
 ere the fatal hour of the Second Coming of the Son 
 of man.^ The duty of preaching rested chiefly 
 upon the bishops,^ and the pages of Eusebius show 
 
 ^ "For, indeed, most of the disciples of that time, animated 
 by the divine word with a more ardent love for philosophy 
 (i.e., the perfect Christian life), had already fulfilled the com- 
 mands of the Saviour and had distributed their goods to the 
 needy. Then starting out upon long journeys, they performed 
 the office of evangelists, being filled with the desire to preach 
 Christ to those that had not yet heard the word of faith, and 
 to deliver to them the divine gospels. And when they had 
 only laid the foundations of the faith in foreign places, they 
 appointed others as pastors, and entrusted them with the nur- 
 ture of those that had recently been brought in, while they 
 themselves went on again to other countries and nations with 
 the grace and co-operation of God. For a great many won- 
 derful works were done by them through the power of the 
 divine Spirit, so that at the first hearing whole multitudes of 
 men eagerly embraced the religion of the Creator of the uni- 
 verse."— Euseb., H. E. vii. 38. 
 
 2 Epistle of St. Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, c. 42, 
 and the Epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch. Cf. Lightfoot, 
 The Apostolic Fathers (London, 1890). 
 
 5 This is well expressed by St. Hilary of Poitiers: "Ut cres- 
 ceret plebs et multiplicaretur, omnibus inter initia conces- 
 sum et evangelizare et baptizare ... at ubi omnia loca cir- 
 cumplexa est ecclesia, conventicula constituta sunt, et rec- 
 tores, et caetera officia in ecclesia sunt ordinata." — Comm. 
 in Ephes.,4:. 
 
 * Recognitions of Clement, iii, 67. ApostoLic Constitutions, 
 il 26. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 245 
 
 US that in the second and third centuries they were 
 men of great eloquence and address, and extremely- 
 active in disseminating the Christian teachings. 
 The Catholic Church counts to-day among her 
 brightest glories such pioneer preachers and ad- 
 ministrators of the divine mandatum as Clement of 
 Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Melito of Sardes, Abir- 
 cius Marcellus, Dionysius of Corinth and his name- 
 sake of Alexandria, Alexander of Jerusalem, 
 Theophilus of Antioch, ApoUinarius of Hierapolis, 
 the Roman bishops Victor, Cornelius, Dionysius, 
 and a host of others whose names and missionary 
 work Eusebius either ignored or did not see fit 
 to hand down. We see in St. Justin a second-cen- 
 tury type of the Christian proselytizer, clothed 
 in the coarse cloak of the philosopher, holding 
 open school in the upper rooms of a friend's house, 
 disputing with Cynics and Jews in the streets of 
 Rome or the porticoes of Ephesus — bland, insin- 
 uating, supple in argument, broken to all the dia- 
 lectic exercise of the time, conciliating and adapt- 
 ing, explaining with fullest freedom the most holy 
 arcana of the society, at once Jew, Greek, and 
 Roman, that he might gain all to Christ.^ Not 
 
 ^ Acts of the Martyrdom of St. Justin and his companions. 
 Ruinart, Acta Martyrum Sincera (ed. Ratisbon, 1859), p. 105. 
 See his Apology and Dialogue with Trypho in Otto, Corpus 
 Apologetarum (vols, i., ii.). 
 
246 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE, 
 
 only the bishops, but the priests and deacons, had 
 a special mission to teach and instruct, to guide 
 the catechumens, to console the confessors and 
 prepare them for martjrrdom, to collect their last 
 words, describe the scenes of their holy deaths, 
 and form in the faith of Christ the new converts 
 that every execution led into the Church.^ 
 
 Perhaps there is in all ecclesiastical history no 
 more striking example of proselyting zeal than 
 the great Origen. From his youth he burned to 
 spread the law of Christ, and took up the public 
 catechetical schools of Alexandria when they 
 stood in grave peril of suppression or decay. He 
 formed in this earliest of Christian seminaries the 
 greatest Christians of the age; he attracted mul- 
 titudes of pagans; by word and example he stirred 
 up the sluggish depths of men's natures, and re- 
 vealed to the astonished gaze of Christians and 
 pagans the endless adaptability of the new religion 
 to the most manifold relations of society, literature, 
 civil government, and human progress. He 
 travelled many a weary mile across the sands of 
 Arabia to convert a Roman general, and crossed 
 the sea to expound Christianity to Julia Mam- 
 
 ^ " Cruciate, torque te, damnate, atterite nos. . . . Pluries 
 efficimur quoties metimur a vobis. Semen est sanguis marty- 
 rum." — ^TertuUian, Apologeticum, c. 5. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 247 
 
 msea, the empress mother of the most noble and 
 sympathetic of the pagan line of emperors. His 
 predecessor, Pantsenus, had gone on a similar mis- 
 sion to India; in fact, the school of Alexandria 
 was a centre of the most intelligent proselytism 
 up to the time of Constantine. We could not 
 ask for any better proof of it than the famous letter 
 of Bishop Theonas of Alexandria to Lucian, the 
 Christian provost of the imperial chamberlains 
 of Diocletian.^ 
 
 But it was not only the Church authorities who 
 carried on the proselytism for Christ. All the 
 faithful were soldiers of the Lord, and their life 
 was looked on as a militia — an existence of de- 
 fensive and offensive warfare.^ The most frequent 
 
 *See Routh, Reliquiae Sacrae, iii. 439. It contains the 
 proof that a great many of the chief officers of Diocletian's 
 household were Christians, but its chief interest lies in the 
 directions given for gradually turning the attention of the 
 emperor to the Christian faith. "lUe tamen praecipuus inter 
 vos erit et dihgentissimus cui libros servandos princeps man- 
 daverit ... si igitur ex credentibus in Christum ad hoc 
 ipsum oflScium advocari contingat, non spemat et ipse lit- 
 teras seculares et gentilium ingenia, quae principem oblec- 
 tant. Laudandi oratores . . . laudandi historic! . . . inter- 
 dum et divinas scripturas laudari conabitur, . . . laudabitur 
 et interim evangelium, apostolusque (i.e., St. Paul), pro di- 
 vinis oraculis: insurgere potent Christi mentio, expHcabitur 
 paulatim ejus sola divinitas; omnia haec cum Christi ad- 
 jutorio pro venire possent." 
 
 ^ Jesu Christo regi eterno milito, says the martyr Marcellus 
 to the judg?. Ruinart, Acta Sincera, etc. Maturus is called 
 
248 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 scene of these holy combats was the family. The 
 influence of a converted mother or sister was 
 enormous. The change in the female conduct, 
 the suavity and devotion of their lives, the in- 
 creasing tenderness and pity in their dealings with 
 the slave, the poor, and the unfortunate, the moral 
 elevation and refinement of their whole being 
 could not escape the notice of the other members 
 of the family circle. We may gather from the 
 pages of Tacitus the impression that the conver- 
 sion of a woman like Pomponia Grsecina made on 
 Roman society.^ That of Priscilla, Lucina, Csecilia, 
 the Flavise Domitillse and the Acilise Glabriones 
 could scarcely do less. 
 
 Yet, not unfrequently, the most bitter oppo- 
 sition came precisely from the family of the con- 
 vert; it was so in the time of Tertullian, and some- 
 
 generosissimus pugil Christi in the Acts of the Martyrs of 
 Vienne, Militia Dei sumus, Tert., De Oratione, c. 19. Ex- 
 hort ad Martyres, c. 3. Compare II. Tim. ii. 3; I. Cor. ix. 
 24; I. Tim. i. 18; II. Cor. x. 3. 
 
 ^ " Longa huic Pomponiae aetas, et continua tristitia fuit, . . . 
 per quadraginta annos, non cultu nisi lugubri, non animo nisi 
 moesto egit. Idque illi, imperitante Claudio impune, mox 
 ad gloriam vertit." Annates, xiii. 32. Before this she had 
 been traduced as superstition is externae rea, and acquitted 
 by the domestic council. This superstition was Christianity, 
 the exitiabilis swperstitio of Tacitus (Ann. xiv. 44), the super- 
 stitio nova et malefica of Suetonius (Nero 16), and the super- 
 stitio prava et immodica of PUny (Epp. x. 96). 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 249 
 
 what later Origen classes parents among the 
 chief persecutors of the new religion.^ The prosely- 
 tism of the Christians is one of the chief objections 
 that Celsus raises against the faith, and in his re- 
 plies Origen manifests much pride in the persistent 
 devotion to Christ of poor and humble people of 
 all nations and classes. He points out that many 
 Christians gave themselves up entirely to mis- 
 sionary work.^ And when the pagan philosopher 
 insists that they are only the refuse of the popula- 
 tion, the apologist does not take any pains to deny 
 it, other than to point out that the Christians are 
 not without some wealthy and noble members, 
 especially among the female sex.^ 
 
 This domestic apostolate was greatly furthered 
 by the Christian slaves. The Acts of the Martyrs 
 
 ' "Sed ad Christianos quod spectat, senatum Romanum, 
 imperatores diversis temporibus, milites, populos, ipsos eomm 
 qui crediderunt parentes, in eorum doctrinam conspirasse." — 
 Contra Celsum, i. 3. 
 
 2 " Inde liquet quod Christiani, quantum in se est, curent ut 
 quo terrarum cunque sua doctrina spargatur quo fit ut qui- 
 dam id sibi negotium desumpserint, ut non solum urbes, sed 
 etiam vicos et villas obambularent, quo alios ad pium Dei 
 cultum adducerent." — Ihid., iii. 9. 
 
 ^Ihid.,\\\. 44, 55. "In privatis aedibus videre est lanifices, 
 sutores, fullones, imperitissimum quemque et rusticissimum 
 coram senioribus . . . nihil audere proloqui; ubi vero seor- 
 sum nacti fuerint pueros et mulierculas aeque ac ipsi imperi- 
 tas, mira qusedam disserunt," etc. Cf. ihid., i. 27, vj. 14, and 
 Peri Archon, iv. 1, 2- 
 
250 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 contain numerous evidences of the religious activity 
 of slaves, and the lives of St. Gregory Nazianzen, 
 St. Monica, and St. Paulinus of Nola offer evidence 
 of their devotion and authority. We know that 
 at one period they exercised much influence in 
 the household of Septimius Severus, that the wet- 
 nurse of his son Caracalla was a Christian/ and 
 that a certain Christian, Proculus, probably a 
 freedman, cured the emperor by the application of 
 oil. 
 
 "Would that we could know/' says M. Allard, 
 "the secret of those domestic missions which so 
 vexed the pagan soul of Celsus! We would stand 
 by the loom of the weaver and hear some uncul- 
 tured tongue expound the divine truths; we 
 would see young working girls gathered about 
 some venerable toiler and listening to her encomia 
 on the sweets of purity; we might even push aside 
 the great doors of bronze and, lifting the heavy 
 tapestries, see the child at the knee of a Christian 
 nurse, the youth listening to his pedagogue, the 
 
 * Cruel as Caracalla was, there are several reasons for be- 
 lieving that he was favorable to the Christians: his early edu- 
 cation, his aversion to sacrifices, his recalling of all those ban- 
 ished to the islands, his vexation at the punishment of his 
 Christian playmate, the comparative peace of the faithful 
 during his reign. (Cf. Caracalla in Dictionary of Christian 
 Biography.) 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 251 
 
 master learning from the overseer of his property, 
 the judge instructed by the martyr. What in- 
 timate confi dings! What touching revelations! 
 What sweetly burning tears! We would see then 
 the pure and divine side of that awful institution 
 of slavery, of which history has shown us only the 
 cruel and infamous reverse. One day it is a noble, 
 rich, illustrious family that enters the Church; 
 again, a young girl suddenly declares her intention 
 of leading a life of virginity; on another occasion 
 love and peace descend with the faith into a house- 
 hold where hitherto reigned a horrid rivalry in 
 vice; elsewhere a magistrate lays aside the trap- 
 pings of office to live an humble and charitable life: 
 all the while the world looks on and knows not the 
 secret springs of such strange resolutions, but some- 
 where and always there is a poor slave who divide* 
 with the Lord a secret that causes his heart to 
 overflow with heavenly gladness.^' * 
 
 ^ Paul AUard, Les Esclaves Chretiens, p. 300. An interest- 
 ing verification of the above is furnished by the sarcophagus 
 of Proxenes in the Villa Borghese at Rome. The original 
 decoration and the epitaph are purely pagan, but one of his 
 Christian freedmen, absent from Rome at the time of his 
 death, has left us the secret of his conversion in the following 
 mutilated words which he scratched on the tomb: Prosenes 
 
 RECEPTUS AD DeuM . . . REGREDIENS IN UrBE SCRIPSIT 
 
 Ampelius libertus. De Rossi, Inscriptiones ChristiancB 
 Urbis RomcBj vol. i., n. 5 (an. 217), p. 9. 
 
252 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 (h) Corporate Union of Christians. — In spite of 
 the most active proseljrtism, the Christian reHgion 
 would have made but slow progress if its members 
 had not established some system of frequent as- 
 sembly, enabling them to meet regularly for mutual 
 edification and consolation. That they did so is 
 amply proved by the Acts of the Martyrs, the re- 
 pressive imperial legislation, the literary remains, 
 and the venerable monuments of the pre-Constan- 
 tinian period. But how was it possible for such 
 numerous bodies of men to meet in the midst of 
 great cities, when the very name of the Christians 
 was outlawed? From the time of Nero, Chris- 
 tianity was an illicit religion. Non licet esse vos 
 was the watchword of heathen society, and might 
 have been written over the door of every meeting- 
 place of the Christians. To the traditional Roman 
 statesman the Christian appeared as one who 
 violated fundamental laws of the state. He in- 
 troduced a foreign superstition and a new cult 
 without the permission of the senate or the em- 
 peror. He was guilty of high treason by refusing 
 even the simplest act of worship to the genius of 
 perenduring Rome. He manifested an obstinacy 
 against the sacred state which was absolutely in- 
 comprehensible to the magistrates, when they 
 only asked an outward compliance, and cared 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 253 
 
 little or nothing for his intimate convictions. He 
 belonged to a forbidden society, and actions for 
 sacrilege and the practice of criminal magic could, 
 in the opinion of Roman lawyers, be brought 
 against him. In a word, he lived in a time when 
 all the civil and religious elements of society were 
 inextricably interwoven, and a new, exclusive, 
 proselytizing, universal religion could not help 
 offending at every step a civil order which was at 
 once the outgrowth and solid proof of idolatry.^ 
 It is true that there were long periods of peace for 
 the Christians under emperors like Commodus 
 and Caracalla, Alexander Severus and Gallienus, 
 and in the forty years preceding the last persecu- 
 tion the laws were on the statute-books, but were 
 not enforced. Fanaticism was wearied and silent. 
 The emperors discouraged or forbade pursuit of 
 Christians, who, on the other hand, were becom- 
 ing so numerous that nothing short of wholesale 
 extermination could uproot the evil. 
 
 ^ The legal position of Christianity in the early imperial 
 period is the subject of an exhaustive study by the Christian 
 epigraphist Le Blant: Sur les bases juridiques des poursuites 
 dirigees contre les Martyres, in the proceedings of the Academy 
 of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, vol. ii. (Paris, 1868), pp. 
 358-373. See also the article Christenverfolgungen in Kraus' 
 Real-Encyclopddie, i., p. 215. According to Lactantius (Div. 
 Inst., V. ii.), the great jurist Ulpian went so far as to codify 
 the numerous laws directed against the Christians in a work 
 entitled De officio proconsulis. 
 
254 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Nevertheless there was a period especially dur- 
 ing the second century when Christianity had not 
 yet wearied its persecutors, and when the laws 
 were regularly applied to work its eradication.^ 
 How did the vast network of Christian associations 
 manage to exist during this latter period without 
 being constantly broken up and forced to aban- 
 don the strong leverage which they had in their 
 regular reunions on stated days and in fixed 
 places? Much light has been thrown upon this 
 question within the last half-century by the re- 
 searches of archaeologists and illustrators of the 
 civil law. In the ancient world scarcely any in- 
 stitution was dearer to the masses of the people 
 than the right of association. While the demo- 
 cratic or republican spirit endured in Greece and 
 Rome this natural right was held sacred, and 
 we have a multitude of epigraphic evidences to 
 show that there existed a vast network of societies 
 for every imaginable purpose — trade guilds, re- 
 ligious sodalities, confraternities, collegia for every 
 grade and avocation among the bourgeois and 
 the poor, while the Roman patriciate found in 
 its traditions, its wealth, its business, and political 
 franchises, the consolation and strength that the 
 
 *Cf. Renan, Marc-Aurele, pp. 53, 302, and Allard, Hist, 
 des persecutions pendant les deux premiers siecles, i. 329-388. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 255 
 
 poor sought in their association or college.^ It 
 was a result of the Greek^s aversion to quiet family 
 life, that he threw himself with ardor into exter- 
 nal associations. Long before the coming of 
 Christ, men united at Athens, Rhodes, and on the 
 islands for purposes of business or pleasure, to 
 insure against loss by fire, and to honor some par- 
 ticular deity. The meetings were held in some 
 retired garden, surrounded with porticoes, and 
 provided wit^i a central altar of sacrifice. Digni- 
 taries, chosen by lot, and an elective president 
 carried on the government of the little state, for 
 such it was in many cases, the members being pas- 
 sionately attached to this second and artificial 
 family. There was a common treasury, and mu- 
 tual benevolence played a large share in the trans- 
 actions of these curious forerunners of our modern 
 social reunions. They were a kind of harmless 
 freemasonry, in which were preserved some of the 
 better traits of the old Hellenic life.^ Whether 
 the Romans adopted these associations from the 
 
 ^ Mommsen, De Collegiis et Sodaliciis Romanorum, Kiliae, 
 1843. Boissier, La Religion Romaine aux temps des Antonins, 
 Paris, 1884, vol. ii,, p. 238, Les Classes inferieures et les 
 Associations populaires. Doulcet, Rapports de VEglise et de 
 VEtat aux trois premiers siecles, Paris, 1883, pp. 152-164; Bois- 
 sier, Promenades Archeologigues, Paris, 1887 (Rome et Pom- 
 peii, p. 183). 
 
 2 Fouquet, Des Associations religieuses chez les Grecs. 
 
256 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Greeks or formed them from natural inclination, 
 they existed in great numbers in the period im- 
 mediately before and after Christ. In the earlier 
 times they had a religious character, but became 
 eventually, in the last days of the Republic, the 
 prey of political demagogues, and were thence- 
 forward, under the dictators and the emperors of 
 the first two Christian centuries, the object of much 
 repressive legislation/ They were either com- 
 
 ^ Trajan was so severe on the collegia that he would not allow 
 the citizens of a Bithynian city to unite in forming a fire bri- 
 gade, Pliny, Epp. x. 93. It is worth noting, as an index of 
 the profound democratic current in the Church, that in every 
 century she has encouraged the formation and protected the 
 rights of a multitude of particular societies, confraternities, 
 institutes, associations, guilds, sodalities, etc. The more 
 absolute the sway and influence of Christianity, the deeper 
 the respect of individual rights and the larger the freedom 
 of the citizen. On this score the much maligned Middle Ages, 
 with their rich and beneficent puUulation of private associa- 
 tions, may challenge the golden days of the military despot- 
 ism of the old and the new Csesars, or the blighting and crush- 
 ing bureaucracy of New Rome or modern Europe. See the 
 eloquent admission of Renan, Les Apotres (vol. ii. of Les Ori- 
 gines du Christianisme) , p. 363: 
 
 "Nos grandes soci^tes abstraites ne sont pas suffisantes 
 pour repondre k tous les instincts de sociabilite qui sont dans 
 I'homme. Laissez le mettre son coeur h quelque chose, cher- 
 cher la consolation oft il la trouve, se cre^r des fr^res, con- 
 tracter des liens de cceur. Que la main froide de I'etat 
 n'intervienne pas dans ce royaume de la liberte. La vie, la 
 joie ne renaitront dans le monde que quand notre defiance 
 contre les collegia, ce triste heritage du droit romain, aura 
 disparu." 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 257 
 
 pletely forbidden, or allowed only with the greatest 
 difficulty. 
 
 Whereas originally every trade and industry, 
 every god indigenous or foreign, every nation or 
 city or great family had its special body of asso- 
 ciates bearing its name and serving its interests, 
 the military rulers of the city allow henceforth 
 only the very poorest and the most wretched to 
 unite, and then only for purposes of mutual burial.^ 
 The men of antiquity held very dear a proper 
 burial among their own, and scarcely anything 
 is more touching than the pains which they took 
 to secure it. The Csesars, therefore, could not 
 take from the poor man or the slave their only 
 chance possible of obtaining decent sepulture, 
 with the post-mortem honors of flowers, libations, 
 and anniversary banquets. They were permitted 
 to combine for this purpose, and this is the origin 
 of the famous collegia tenuiorum or the collegia 
 funeraticia, which suggested to the outlawed mem- 
 bers of the Christian religion a legal issue from 
 their proscribed condition, or at least the securing 
 of a legal right to meet publicly, under cover of 
 attending to the business of a mutual burial as- 
 sociation. 
 
 ^ See some remnants of the ancient legislation in the Cor- 
 pus juris civilis, xlvii. 22. De collegiis et corporibus. 
 
258 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Such colleges had a constitution, or lex collegii, 
 a regular election of officers, a treasury, or area 
 communis, a schola, or place of meeting. They 
 collected from each new member a fixed sum on 
 entering, and at the death of a member a small 
 tax was levied on the survivors. On the other 
 hand, they looked about for rich friends and pa- 
 trons, from whose gifts and legacies they might 
 pay a fixed sum to all who attended the funeral, 
 and offer to the societaires frequent anniversary 
 feasts. They were supposed to meet monthly. 
 They buried their dead, sometimes in columhariay 
 or square chambers filled up on all four sides with 
 small niches for the rn^ns containing the ashes, 
 sometimes in their own small cemeteries. Where 
 the body was lost or irrecoverable, they gave an 
 imaginary funeral {funus imaginarium). These 
 humble associations furnished the needed frame- 
 work for the public life of the Christians, who 
 could not be ignorant of them, as thousands of 
 their proselytes came from just such societies. 
 The Christians desired very much to bury their 
 dead apart, when possible, not only from the cor- 
 porate affection they bore to one another, but 
 because they did not burn the remains of their 
 dead as did most pagans. Moreover, the gather- 
 ings of these societies were often large; they in- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 259 
 
 eluded both sexes, and men of all classes; there 
 were many of them in the city, and in time the 
 laws were so softened as to permit their meeting 
 for religious purposes as often as they wished. 
 Later on there sprang up beside them tolerated 
 societies of cultores deorum, or votaries of some 
 particular god or goddess, and in the third cen- 
 tury, during the relaxation of persecution, the 
 latter societies became quite numerous. A friori, 
 therefore, it is not improbable that the Christians 
 could associate in this manner, the only legal out- 
 let left to them, as far as we know.^ That they 
 
 * M. Gaston Boissier sums up satisfactorily the points of 
 contact between the pagan and the Christian burial clubs: 
 ''Les ressemblances sont en effet tres nombreuses entre les 
 associations des deux cultes. Les Chretiens possedent aussi 
 une caisse commune, alimentee par les contributions des 
 fideles; chez eux aussi les contributions se payent tous les 
 mois; ils n'ont pas moins de souci de la sepulture de leurs 
 morts, et I'Eglise a de depenser une grande partie de ses reve- 
 nue k construire ses immenses cimetieres. Des deux c6t6s le 
 respect de la hierarchic sociale se m^le k un grand esprit 
 d'6galit6; les morts de toute condition sont confondus dans 
 les columbaria comme dans les catacombes. C'est le suf- 
 frage de tous qui nomme les chefs, et il va quelquefois cher- 
 cher le plus humble pour le mettre a la premiere place. Au 
 moment ou de pauvres affranchis arrivent aux dignites les 
 plus elevees des colleges, un ancien esclave, le banquier Cal- 
 liste, s'asseoit sur la chaise de Pierre que devait occuper un 
 Cornelius. Enfin, les repas communs ont autant d'impor- 
 tance dans les reunions des Chretiens que dans les associations 
 paiennes; I'Eglise celebre dans toutes ses f6tes le festin frater- 
 nel des agapes, et, pour honorer des martyrs, les fideles dinent 
 
260 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 actually did is in^nuated by a text of Textullian 
 in the thirty-ninth chapter of his Apology. He 
 is speaking precisely of licit and illicit associations, 
 and is trying to prove that the Christians belong 
 to the first category. ''Our treasure/' says he, 
 "when we have one, is not made up of the 
 large contributions of ambitious persons who seek 
 honor; it is not by putting up our religion at 
 auction that we increase our wealth. Each one 
 brings monthly a modest contribution. He pays 
 if he wishes to, and as he wishes, or, rather, as he 
 can; no one is compelled to give. The contri- 
 butions are voluntary. We look upon that money 
 as a pious fund which we do not spend in eating 
 or drinking nor in indecent orgies. It helps to 
 feed the poor and to bury them, to rear the or- 
 phans of both sexes, and to support the aged." 
 When we compare these apposite words of Ter- 
 tullian with one of the textus classici on the burial 
 societies, we cannot help feeling that he is refer- 
 ring to a similar organization of the Christian 
 body.* It is true that the Christians were not 
 
 sur leurs tombeaux k I'anniversaire de leur mort." — La Re- 
 ligion Romaine, ii., p. 300. 
 
 ^ "Mandatis principalibus prsecipitur prsesidibus provinciarum 
 ne patiantur esse collegia sodalicia, neve milites in castris 
 collegia habeant. Sed permittitur tenuioribus stipem men- 
 struam conferre dum tamen semel in mense coeant, ne sub 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 261 
 
 afraid to proclaim their numbers openly. Ter- 
 tullian himself, in a famous passage already cited 
 (ApoL, c. 37), vaunts their multitude, and the 
 imperial police could not be ignorant of the fre- 
 quent councils held in the latter quarter of the 
 second century. But at the beginning of the 
 third century the Church became the possessor of 
 landed estates in the shape of cemeteries, once 
 the property of individuals, but which a series 
 of circumstances threw into her hands. Her in- 
 creasing wealth demanded some secure title by 
 which it might be protected from the xmfaithful 
 steward * as well as from the pagan informer or the 
 apostate. This title was at hand in the character 
 of a burial association, which form of reunion be- 
 came extremely popular at this very juncture, and 
 was extended by imperial rescript from Rome to 
 the provinces. Such a privilege was of the highest 
 importance for the propagation of Christianity. 
 It gave the religion, in times of peace, a working 
 legality, to say the least. It permitted public 
 meetings, the excavation of catacombs, election 
 
 praetextus hujusmodi illicitum collegium coeat, quod non 
 tantum in urbe sed et in Italia et in provinciis locum habere 
 divus quoque Severus rescripsit." — Digest, XXXXVII. 22, 1. 
 ^ "Nicostratum multorum criminum reum . . . Ecclesice de- 
 posita non modica abstulisse . . . Spoliati ab illo pupilli, frau- 
 datae viduse, pecunice quoque ecclesice denegatse." — St. Cyprian, 
 Evp. 50-32 (ed. Hartel). 
 
262 THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 
 
 of officers, mutual consultation, enrolment of nobles, 
 women, foreigners, slaves, etc. Her wealthy mem- 
 bers might easily assume the role of patrons that 
 others of the same class played in the pagan cor- 
 porations. 
 
 The regular distributions of the Church to the 
 clergy, the widows, the poor, and the strangers 
 could easily be carried on at these semi-legal meet- 
 ings, for the pagans were wont to give out special 
 rations and even money on such occasions. It 
 is worth noticing that the Liher Pontificalis at- 
 tributes to this period and to Callixtus, the deacon 
 of Zephyrin, the establishment or renovation of 
 THE CEMETERY par excellence, to which his name 
 was afterwards attached.^ And the mentions of 
 ecclesiastical property at Rome and elsewhere 
 become henceforth more numerous, yet so that 
 the areae and cemeteria form the nucleus of the 
 growing estates of the infant churches. Thus, 
 when Gallienus restores the confiscated property 
 of the Christians, the cemeteries figure at the 
 head of the list, and when Maxentius does the 
 same, forty years later, the burial-places are still 
 the solid block of ecclesiastical wealth. De Rossi 
 conjectures that the bishop was always inscribed 
 as syndic or agent of these associations, in accord- 
 
 ^ Liber Pontificalis (ed. Duchesne), i. 141. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE. 263 
 
 ance with a prescription of the civil law, and he 
 elucidates with much skill, by the aid of this sup- 
 position, the very tangled chronology of the Roman 
 episcopal succession in the first decade of the fourth 
 century/ 
 
 ^ The arguments of De Rossi are neatly summed up by 
 Northcote and Brownlow in their Roma Sotterranea, i., pp. 
 103-9. On the interesting question of the Roman confra- 
 ternities cf. Mommsen and Marquardt, Romische Staatsver- 
 waltung, iii. 131-142; and Boissier, La Religion Romaine 
 aux temps dcs Antonins (Paris, 1884), vol. ii., pp. 239-304. 
 Loening in his Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenrechts, and Al- 
 lard in his Histoire des Persecutions pendant la premiere moitie 
 du Ille siecle, give valuable details on the use of the civil 
 right of association among the Christians. See also Cagnat, 
 L'Armee Romaine d'Afrique (Paris, 1892), p. 457, for the mili- 
 tary colleges and savings associations. 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII/ 
 
 Oriental history offers no more splendid and 
 picturesque pageant than the story of Syria. 
 Placed midway between East and West, across 
 the path of the world's great conquerors, it has 
 had a fateful share in all the great dynastic and 
 religious revolutions of the past. If its people 
 have been more or less passive observers, humble 
 victims of great ambitions, the soil itself has been 
 the theatre on which the mightiest games of state- 
 craft and conquest have been played out. In the 
 course of ages it has been the prey of Assyrians, 
 from whom it takes its name; of Egyptians, Per- 
 sians, Greeks, Romans, Armenians, Arabs, Tur- 
 comans, Mongols, Mamelukes, and the Ottoman. 
 
 The original independence of the small king- 
 doms into which it was once divided was lost 
 
 * The reader may consult with profit the monumental work of 
 Count Melchior de Vogiie, U Architecture civile et religieuse de la 
 Syrie Centrale (Paris, 1865-77) ; also, the preface of R.ev. George 
 Williams to Neale's posthumous Patriarchate of Antioch (London, 
 1873), and Choisy, L'Art de hdtir chez les Byzantins (Paris, 
 1882). 
 
 265 
 
266 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 some eight centuries before our era, since when 
 the inhabitants of this rich land have known only 
 changes of servitude. Under the successors of 
 Alexander the Great the arts and sciences of 
 Greece were introduced among the Semitic peoples 
 of Syria, and a Western culture and refinement 
 superimposed upon the older Oriental civiliza- 
 tions. In time the Roman legion supplanted the 
 Macedonian phalanx, and for several centuries 
 Syria partook of the Roman destinies, becoming 
 an integral part of the vast mass of Mediterranean 
 empire which the military genius and statesman- 
 ship of Rome had welded and riveted in almost in- 
 dissoluble cohesion. Roughly speaking, it was on 
 the soil of Syria, between the Tigris and the great 
 inland sea, that Rome and Parthia disputed the 
 mastery of the world in the ever-memorable days 
 from Sylla to Trajan, and four centuries later the 
 same blood-soaked soil was trampled by the locust- 
 like armies of Persia, swooping down upon the 
 defenceless provinces of the decaying Roman 
 State. Rome and Persia mutually exhausted one 
 another in three centuries of almost incessant war- 
 fare, only to clear the way for Mohammed and the 
 fanatic children of the desert. Since about the middle 
 of the seventh century of our era Islam has held 
 almost imbroken sway over Syria, interrupted only 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 267 
 
 by the ephemeral conquests of Byzantine Emperors 
 and the Crusaders.' With Islam the national Semi- 
 tism of Syria has revived, and of the thousand 
 years of Grseco-Roman culture there remain but 
 ruins and souvenirs. 
 
 The long, broad stretch of land which forms 
 the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean is 
 cut up from north to south by several parallel 
 mountain ranges intercepted at short intervals 
 by natural passes, through which the rivers of 
 the western seaboard discharge their waters. It 
 was in antiquity a land of noble forests, but is 
 now comparatively bare of trees. The valleys and 
 plains are naturally fertile, but demand much 
 irrigation. Long centuries ago artificial systems 
 were extensively applied, notably on the eastern 
 boundaries; the Arab conquest has now cast a 
 blight upon the land, the desert encroaches on 
 the tilled soil, and with it the predatory Bedouin, 
 the natural enemy of the industrious peasantry. 
 
 Here and there on the eastern slopes toward 
 the Euphrates there are isolated oases, but as a 
 rule the eye rests only on long stretches of steppes 
 and swamps, which were once good arable land, 
 producing barley, wheat, and corn, and guarded 
 from the Saracen tribes by the Roman castles 
 
268 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 
 
 built far in the interior of the tribesmen's country 
 as a sort of desert pohce. In the better culti- 
 vated western parts of Syria there is a considerable 
 trade in raw silks, tobacco, soap, wines, sponges, 
 oranges, and olives. But its commercial impor- 
 tance has sadly diminished since the discovery 
 of America and the consequent abandonment of 
 the overland routes to India. Palmyra and Petra 
 in the early ages of our era, Aleppo and Syrian 
 Tripoli in mediseval times, enjoyed the commer- 
 cial supremacy which suddenly passed to Lisbon 
 and the nations of the West. The population, 
 once ten millions, has sunk to less than two mil- 
 lions, of which the vast majority is Mohammedan. 
 The minority is divided between the Jews and 
 Christians. There are some half-heathen Ansarieh 
 in the North and a small remnant of the curious 
 mediseval tribe of the Assassins. 
 
 Syria is pre-eminently the land of ruins. Even 
 the ancient Canaanite and Phoenician peoples 
 have left their mark in the great olive and wine 
 presses of stone and the profound artificial caverns 
 in the mountain sides. The Hittites and the As- 
 syrians, the Nabatsean princes and the Ghassanides 
 have also left traces of their passage on inscribed 
 stones and on the massive rock walls of the passes 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 269 
 
 in the hills. It was only the other day that the 
 Holy City of the warlike Hittites was recognized 
 not far from Horns, the ancient Emesa. But by 
 far the greater part of the ruins of Syria are those 
 of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They 
 stretch away mile upon mile, a very luxuriance of 
 shattered walls of granite and toppling columns 
 of marble. They are the precious quarries out of 
 which the Arab has built his mosques and his 
 dwelling-places, and out of which modern scholars 
 draw the most useful information upon matters 
 of ancient history, legends, mythology, art, and 
 the manners and habits of the Grseco-Roman 
 world. 
 
 Under the cloudless skies of this charming land 
 and among an unprogressive or nomadic people 
 these splendid relics of remote ages have been 
 suffered to exist, subject to few other adverse in- 
 fluences than the local earthquakes and the natural 
 wear and tear of the passing centuries. Here 
 and there the domed tombs of Arab saints, the 
 castles of the Crusaders and the minarets of the 
 Mohammedan mosques relieve the monotony of 
 ruined temples, tombs, villas, and cities, once the 
 architectonic dress of the most elegant and hu- 
 mane of civilizations. The ruins of ancient Tyre 
 are yet visible beneath the encroaching waves of 
 
270 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 the Mediterranean, and in the neighborhood stand 
 yet the walls and pillars of the great cathedral 
 whose dedication sermon was preached by Eusebius, 
 and whose beauties have been described by the 
 same eloquent pen in the first quarter of the fourth 
 century. The site of Sidon, the Venice of an- 
 tiquity, is yet visible, and the immense shell heaps, 
 the refuse of the great purple-dying factories, still 
 encumber the earth. 
 
 The traveller may yet trace the remains of an- 
 cient Antioch, the Queen of the Orient, its huge quad- 
 rilateral, its three hundred towers, the great rock 
 citadel, the embankment of Justinian, and other his- 
 torical landmarks familiar to the readers of ancient 
 history. The marble colonnades of Baalbek and 
 Palmyra are still in part erect. Whole cities still 
 stand in silent desolation, crumbling by inches, 
 like the magnificent Apamsea (Hamah) and the 
 great rock city of Petra, with its temples, colon- 
 nades, palaces, and tombs hewn out of the face 
 of the red sandstone cliffs, a replica of the Bud- 
 dhist rock temples of EUora and Ajanta. Wher- 
 ever one goes in this marvellous land he stumbles 
 upon extensive ruins, whose names and destination 
 are too often undecipherable. He moves sadly 
 among marble porticos and fallen palaces, and 
 finds on all sides 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 271 
 
 Weed and wallflower grown 
 Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped 
 On what were chambers, arch crush' d, column 
 Strewn in fragments, choked-up vaults, frescoes 
 Steeped in subterranean damps, where the owl peeped, 
 Deeming it midnight. 
 
 Among the debris of the Grseco-Roman civili- 
 zation in the Orient the most interesting and val- 
 uable fare, without doubt, the ruined Christian 
 cities of Northern, Central, and Southeastern Syria: 
 The latter group is situated in the Hauran, the 
 ancient Itursea, on the border of the Arabian 
 desert; the second group within the triangle formed 
 by the towns of Hamah, Aleppo, and Antake, in 
 the north, corresponding to the ancient Apamsea, 
 Bercea, and Antioch. Within these limits, the 
 local tradition says, are the ruins of three hundred 
 and sixty-five Christian cities. There are at least 
 one hundred sites clearly recognizable by the 
 modern archaeologist. They are no ordinary ruins, 
 but cities almost intact, with their dwellings, 
 churches, tombs; their kitchens, wine- and oil- 
 presses; their regular alignment of streets; their 
 gardens and opulent villas. Everything is as the 
 day they were deserted, excepting such displace- 
 ments as have been caused by earthquakes and 
 the elements. In many places one needs only to 
 
272 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 
 
 restore the woodwork and the interior decorations, 
 replace the fallen stones in their courses and clear 
 away the drifted earth and the shrubbery to see 
 again the every-day life of the Christian Sjrrians 
 from the fourth to the sixth centuries, for this is 
 the period to which, with an absolute certainty, 
 all this wealth of architecture belongs. 
 
 On many of the buildings there are dates in- 
 scribed over the doors or windows, in Greek letters, 
 and according to the Syrian era of the Seleucides, 
 easily reducible to our Christian era. The earliest 
 date is a.d. 331, and the latest a.d. 565. On all 
 sides the eye rests upon Christian symbols, the 
 cross, the monogram of Christ, the Alpha and 
 Omega. Pious quotations from the Psalms are 
 carved over the lintels of the doors and on the 
 walls of the elegant sepulchres. Many churches, 
 if roofed and floored, might be used at once, the 
 pillars and arches, the apse, the vestries, the altar 
 foimdations, are so perfect. Elsewhere through- 
 out the ancient world the chief monuments of the 
 private life of the ancients have disappeared, and 
 we acquire an insight into it only through their 
 literature and the remnants of artistic decoration. 
 Here we have the very dwellings of the ancients 
 and can study certain phases of their private life 
 in its minutest details and in several of its most 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 273 
 
 important relations. These monuments are to the 
 student of ancient Christian manners and behef 
 what Pompeii is to the student of the classic world 
 of Greece and Rome. 
 
 ''Walking through these deserted streets, aban- 
 doned courts, and lonely porticoes/' says M. De 
 Vogue, ''where the vine embraces every mutilated 
 column, the soul is oppressed with thoughts sim- 
 ilar to those that Pompeii suggests. It is true 
 that the climate of Syria has not protected these 
 treasures as tenderly as the ashes of Vesuvius 
 those of Pompeii, yet we are more profoundly 
 impressed by their novelty, since the civilization 
 spread out before us is much less known than that 
 of the Augustan age. 
 
 "These hundred cities and villages scattered 
 over as many square miles of territory, form an 
 ensemble from which it is impossible to separate 
 any part; it is all so intimately correlated, and 
 reveals in every detail the same style, the same 
 obscure Christian epoch from the fourth to the 
 seventh century. As though by magic we are 
 again in those remote ages and Hve their life; not 
 the humble, timid, dolorous life of the catacombs, 
 but an easy, opulent, artistic life, such as is led in 
 great marble houses, splendidly furnished, pro- 
 vided with galleries and covered porticoes, gardens, 
 
274 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 vineyards, wine-presses, and all the appurtenances 
 of comfort. There are large subterraneous kitchens 
 and stables, elegant baths and broad squares sur- 
 rounded by colonnades. Over the greater part of 
 the gateways are seen crosses and the monogram 
 of Christ, while Christian inscriptions are to be 
 read on all sides. Unlike the vain pagan inscrip- 
 tions, they seldom mention proper names — only 
 pious sentences, scriptural phrases, symbols, and 
 dates are inscribed on the stone. The very selec- 
 tion of texts betrays a period quite subsequent 
 to the victory of the Church. There is a tone 
 of victory resonant in every line from the verse 
 of the psalmist, cut in great red letters on the 
 lintel among splendid sculptures, to the humble 
 graffito of the obscure Christian painter who tries 
 his brush on the wall of a sepulchre, and in his 
 unconscious enthusiasm traces in Greek the words 
 of the Labarum: By this sign shalt thou conquer." 
 
 It was meet and natural that the first artistic 
 efflorescence of Christianity should take place on 
 the soil of Syria. It was at Antioch, in the im- 
 mediate neighborhood of these monuments, that 
 the name of Christians was first applied as a term 
 of opprobrium to the followers of Jesus. It was 
 at Damascus that their great Apostle Paul was 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 275 
 
 converted and began his wondrous career. It 
 was along the Syrian coast, among the numerous 
 Jewries, that the faith was first preached outside 
 Judsea. The ancient Clementine Homilies and 
 Recognitions, an extremely venerable Christian 
 romance, have their scene on the Syrian coast. 
 Several of the most important documents of early 
 Christian hterature were written here — Syriac 
 translations of the Scripture, Greek apocryphal 
 legislation of the apostles, apocryphal gospels, 
 ancient and popular hymns, catechisms, gospel 
 harmonies, and the like. Later a splendid school of 
 Christian literature sprang up, represented by such 
 men as St. James of Nisibis, St. Ephrem, James 
 of Sarug, the author of the Edessene Chronicle, 
 and others whose works are eagerly studied to- 
 day. It was on this soil that the best Chris- 
 tian schools were opened and flourished longest — 
 Caesarea, Edessa, Nisibis. The first Christian Em- 
 peror, Philip the Arab, came from the Syrian city 
 of Bostra, in the Hauran. The Syrian Arche- 
 laus first refuted in person the author of Mani- 
 chseism. Monasticism flourished here as early as 
 in Egypt, and the Syrian Church was the first to 
 carry the faith to Persia, India, among the wan- 
 dering Saracen tribes at the end of the fourth cen- 
 tury, and in the seventh as far as China. The last 
 
276 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 refuge of the immoral heathen cults was in the 
 Syrian sanctuaries, and the last Christian blood 
 spilled by the heathen mobs was shed in Syria. 
 The first Christian kingdom was the little Syrian 
 state of the Abgars of Edessa in the second century. 
 
 Most of these Christian monuments are grouped 
 topographically on the plateau of the Hauran, in 
 the southeastern part of Syria, and in the centre, 
 within the triangle formed by the towns of Hamah, 
 Aleppo, and Antake. For the present we confine 
 ourselves to the latter group, in many respects 
 the more instructive and touching. Hamah is the 
 ancient Apamsea of Syria, one of the several towns 
 which bore that name. 
 
 The Macedonian Seleucides lavished untold 
 sums on its construction. Even to-day long rows 
 of marble pillars mark the lines of the streets and 
 the rich materials of its construction lie around 
 in immense heaps of cornices and friezes, plinths 
 and fluted shafts. There are few places where 
 the elegant Hellenic culture has left more splendid 
 traces of its passage. From Hamah the traveller 
 reaches the Arab village of El-Barah, where many 
 of the most important of the ancient Christian 
 ruins are to be seen. 
 
 El-Barah itself and the neighboring villages 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 277 
 
 of Bechoulla, Moudjeleia, Khirbet-Hass, Dana, and 
 others offer to the curious investigator a sight not 
 easily forgotten. On all sides of the plateau and 
 on the crests of all the neighboring hills arise the 
 imposing ruins of churches, houses, baths, and 
 tombs, relics of the refined civilization of Chris- 
 tian Syria from thirteen to fifteen centuries ago. 
 Outside of Pompeii we meet nowhere such abun- 
 dant remains of the domestic architecture of the 
 ancients. In many cases the houses only need 
 the replacement of the slanting roof and the 
 floors to be again habitable. They are constructed 
 without mortar, cement, or clamps, out of great 
 blocks of white limestone, which is found in deep 
 strata throughout this region and hardens by ex- 
 posure. Usually they are two stories in height. 
 In the Orient the limits of domestic and public life 
 are much more sharply defined than in the West; 
 hence we find the outer walls of these dwellings 
 without windows or openings, save the occasional 
 traces of balconies, which perhaps supported a 
 wooden kiosk, as is the custom in the East. The 
 rigid street line is broken only by a covered vesti- 
 bule, on one side of which is a little opening for 
 the inspection of visitors and on the other a niche 
 destined to hold a lamp. 
 Passing through the vestibule we enter a large 
 
278 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 
 
 court; on the opposite side of which, facing the 
 south, rises the elegant facade of the house, with 
 its two rows of superimposed columns, united by 
 low parapets of stone. These porticoes are richly 
 sculptured, and there is an air of classic grace and 
 solidity about the whole edifice. The pent roof 
 is wanting, and the floors, but the traces of the 
 supports of the beams are yet visible, and some- 
 times the stone floors are yet intact, resting on 
 parallel lines of arcades. Even the outhouses 
 and the perishable appurtenances of the great villa 
 are yet in existence, and their form and destina- 
 tion easily distinguishable. 
 
 The kitchens, the stables, the wine- and olive- 
 presses, the courtyards for the laborers and ser- 
 vants, the shape and limits of the family gardens, 
 are there, often almost complete, in some cases 
 wanting only the portions that time has destroyed. 
 The hand of man has spared these edifices. It 
 is the border region of the Bedouin and the peas- 
 ant, and the tents of the former were ever in past 
 centuries more nimierous than the poor huts of 
 the latter. At Moudjeleia, near El-Barah, is a 
 curious kitchen cut out of the solid rock, with a 
 staircase of the same art, a great stone fireplace, 
 and niches, rings, and other culinary furniture cut 
 out of the same material. In the same village 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 279 
 
 is a stable built in similar fashion, with stone 
 mangers. 
 
 At El-Barah the traveller may see one of the 
 numerous wine-presses of the country, a huge 
 basalt vat, with stone supports for the simple but 
 perfect machinery, which has not changed in 
 character since the time these presses were built. 
 When we read over the door the Latin inscrip- 
 tion laudatory of the gifts of Bacchus, we are sud- 
 denly reminded of the awful visitation which has 
 fallen upon Syria since the nuddle of the seventh 
 century of our era. The streets of El-Barah were 
 narrow and cheerless. They ran between rows 
 of windowless walls, and their large polygonal 
 blocks were crossed at intervals by little channels 
 to prevent the horses from shpping. We can trace 
 yet the ruts of the chariot wheels on these ancient 
 pavements, and aroimd the town are yet to be 
 seen long lines of rough-hewn pillars, which mark 
 the once jealously kept boundaries of these ele- 
 gant villas. 
 
 In fact all these ruins seem to belong to villa- 
 communities or pleasure-demesnes. Nowhere are 
 there any traces of theatre, stadia, or hippodromes, 
 so essential to the municipal life of the Grseco- 
 Homan. No inscriptions put up by the senate 
 
280 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 and people or by the decurions have been found, 
 no tablets expressing the gratitude of the munici- 
 pality for the erection of baths or theatres, the 
 reparation of aqueducts, roads, bridges, and the 
 like. 
 
 This group of the Christian ruins of Syria seems 
 made up of the sumptuous villegiature of the neigh- 
 boring Antioch. The ruins which dot the hills 
 between the humid plain on which the Queen of 
 the Orient was partly built and the vast desert 
 of slopes in the direction of the Euphrates are those 
 of the summer houses of the rich Christians of 
 Antioch. Even to-day in the changeless Orient 
 the Beyrouth merchant must have his summer 
 house on the slopes of Libanus. In those days 
 Antioch had a population of about one million, 
 one-tenth of which was Christian at the opening 
 of the fourth century. She was the mistress of 
 the Orient, and her streets and squares swarmed 
 with a conglomerate multitude gathered from 
 Britain to the boundaries of India and China. 
 
 In the whole neighborhood there were no more 
 charming or restful sites than the crests of the 
 Eastern hills, where there was an abundance of 
 stone and wood, a fertile soil and a picturesque 
 combination of mountain, slope, and valley. The 
 richest example of those suburban ruins is that 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII 281 
 
 of Deir-Lobat (Convent of Elizabeth), which may 
 once have been a Christian convent, but was orig- 
 inally a private villa. It differs from the other 
 ruins of domestic architecture about El-Barah in 
 internal arrangement. All the rooms open on a 
 long central hall, which bears yet the traces of 
 its ancient stucco ornamentation. In the cellars 
 cut in the solid rocks are seen yet the great stone 
 jars for the preservation of wine or oil. At- 
 tached to the imposing ruins are large gardens, 
 in which are the family sepulchres, some of them 
 hewn out of the solid rock. There is one of es- 
 pecial grace, a little, open temple supported by 
 twelve colonnettes; covering the sarcophagi of two 
 members of the family. It is or was (for it has 
 fallen lately) built in one corner of the spacious 
 garden, and the Roman archaeologists have taken 
 advantage of this discovery to illustrate the man- 
 ner in which the rich families of Rome began the 
 formation of the Roman cemeteries about their 
 own family burial-places. 
 
 Over two of the doorways in the central hall 
 of this villa the monogram of Christ, i.e., the two 
 first letters of His name in Greek (X P), is sculp- 
 tured. This shows the Christian nature of the 
 edifice. It is by similar symbols and by the nu- 
 
282 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 merous inscriptions on the doors and windows 
 of the houses, as well as by the ruins of the 
 churches, that we are able to detect the Chris- 
 tian origin of this interesting phase of civilization. 
 Over the doorways of most of the villas and 
 houses, or on the window cornices, the monogram 
 of Christ is found surrounded by elegant tracery, 
 sometimes between the Greek Alpha and Omega, 
 and once between two peacocks, the sjnnbols 
 of resurrection and immortahty. Pious sentences 
 in Greek, often verses of the Psalms, are inscribed 
 on the lintels of the doorways or over the windows, 
 such as one may yet read over the doorways in 
 the ancient Catholic cities of Germany and Italy. 
 Thus, over a door at El-Barah, '' Christ is forever 
 triumphant/' Over another at Roueiha, "There 
 is but one God; Christ is God." Over the outside 
 door of a house at Dellouza, ''Lord, be gracious 
 to this house and to all who dwell in it "; and over 
 the inside door, ''If God be with us, who is against 
 us? Glory be Thine forever." 
 
 At Khirbet-Hass, over a doorway, is the sig- 
 nificant formula, "Ichthys (the symbolical fish, 
 the Son of God, our Saviour, the Blessed Eucha- 
 rist). Alleluia." These are the thoughts of the first 
 generation, which had come through the persecu- 
 tion of Diocletian and shared in the triumph of 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 283 
 
 Constantine and the long-thirsted-for peace of 
 the Church (312 a.d.). We hear again from 
 these dumb stones the heart-stirring tones of 
 Eusebius in the famous chapters on the battle of 
 the Milvian Bridge. In fact, the oldest of the 
 Christian portal inscriptions (at Refadi) is dated 
 A.D. 331, within twenty years of the defeat of 
 Maxentius, and reads: ^^Thalaris built this house. 
 Christ, be gracious! There is only one God." 
 The architecture of these houses is so homoge- 
 neous that the general description of one suffices 
 for all, and the calculation of the date to which 
 any one belongs would suffice to locate the whole 
 complex within its proper limits; yet in this cen- 
 tral group there are more than thirty buildings 
 bearing the date of their erection sculptured on 
 the fagade. There is no date earlier than a.d. 
 331 and none later than a.d. 565. Within these 
 limits were constructed all the monuments whose 
 vast ruins yet cumber the ground. 
 
 Sometimes the name of the architect is in- 
 cised together with the date. Thus we find the 
 architect Damas mentioned on a building dated 
 Jan. 29, a.d. 378; Domnus, with the date of Aug. 
 1, A.D. 431, and Airamis, Aug. 13, a.d. 510. Else- 
 where is the quaint inscription, "The power of 
 God and Christ built this house. The Lord was 
 
284 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 the architect/^ It is remarkable that the door- 
 ways have withstood the ravages of time better 
 than the other parts of the buildings. In the sec- 
 tion of the ruins about El-Barah there are some 
 fifty standing in perfect order, owing to their mas- 
 sive construction. Over one at Deir-Seta is the 
 inscription, " There is one God who succours all, 
 A.D. 412,^' and in the village built at the foot of 
 the Convent of St. Simeon Stylites we read over 
 a great portal: '^Simeonf. God bless our going 
 in and coming out.'' This invocation of a saint 
 is not alone. Over some doorways, especially 
 in the churches, the initials of the names of Christ, 
 Michael, and Gabriel are sculptured, and the same 
 are found occasionally over the vestibules of 
 tombs and in the upper chambers of the church 
 towers. 
 
 It would seem as if there was a design to assert 
 the cultus of the angels in an orthodox manner. 
 In the fourth century the Council of Laodicea 
 had to interfere with an heretical form of this 
 cultus. 
 
 It need not surprise us to find here the ruins 
 of public baths. They were an indispensable neces- 
 sity among the ancient Grseco-Roman peoples. 
 Though the early Christians deprecated the abuses 
 of the baths, they never forbade them. The 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 285 
 
 Apostolic Constitutions, a work compiled in this 
 period and for the use of the episcopate of Syria 
 and Asia Minor, regulates in a Christian manner 
 the frequentation of the baths. At El-Barah they 
 were all the more necessary since there were neither 
 rivers nor springs in the vicinity, and the popula- 
 tion had to depend largely on the use of cisterns. 
 Among the buildings still partly perfect is an 
 ancient bath. 
 
 The visitor may yet make out the vestibule, 
 the wicket where the small bathing fee was paid, 
 the common hall, the sweating-baths, and the tepid- 
 room. The hot-water baths, the great cistern and 
 the reservoir near the furnaces, the stone conduits 
 for the water after it had passed over heated peb- 
 bles, are still visible. The Arabs give the name of 
 cafe to a neighboring building with an upper and 
 a lower portico. It may well be, for the luxury 
 of the ancient Roman baths reached a degree 
 scarcely credible in our modern world. 
 
 A special interest attaches to the numerous 
 ruins of tombs and sepulchres which meet one at 
 every step on these silent, deserted hills. Some- 
 times they are subterranean, and everything about 
 them, even the little porticoes, is cut out of the 
 
286 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 solid rock. The doors and hinges of such sepul- 
 chres are of black basalt, the white limestone 
 wearing away too easily. There are several speci- 
 mens of diminutive temples, graceful cediculce, 
 with columns and baldacchinos. At Roueiha the 
 eye is especially pleased with two classic tombs 
 whose severe and simple lines stand out with 
 sharp distinctness against the cloudless blue of the 
 sky and the stretches of green pasturage. In many 
 tombs the square mortuary chamber is termi- 
 nated by a pyramid, which would seem to have 
 been illuminated on certain occasions. 
 
 There are also domic tombs, with little cupo- 
 las resting upon the walls and certain springing 
 projections, in which the architect traces the 
 earliest Christian use of the pendentives which 
 made St. Sophia possible. The domic tombs 
 of the Arabs in the Orient seem to have been 
 copied from these models. Scattered over the 
 same area are many single sepulchres, stone sar- 
 cophagi of Egyptian style, made of single blocks 
 of stone, with sloping covers decorated with up- 
 right ornaments at the corners and a cross in the 
 centre. From the earliest ages the Christians 
 paid special care to the resting-places of their 
 dead. The bodies of the departed were temples 
 of the Holy Ghost, vehicles of immortal souls and 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 287 
 
 destined to rise again. The liens of commun- 
 ion were not broken by death, but strengthened 
 by the mutual offices of prayer and inter- 
 cession. 
 
 The Christian unity, welded by the fires of per- 
 secution and general outlawry, grew still more 
 compact through this incessant intercourse with 
 the spiritual world, where the hunted Christian 
 saw the enthroned Christ, the prophets, angels, 
 apostles, and saints, the absence of all evil and 
 wrong, the final triumph of the suffering brethren 
 and saints. It was in this spirit that the Roman 
 faithful loved to haunt the catacombs, to adorn 
 the resting-places of the dead, and later to bury 
 the martyrs beneath the altars of the Christian 
 sacrifice. The rich Antiochene Christians of the 
 fourth and fifth centuries did not differ from their 
 Roman brethren. The tombs are more elegant 
 and solid, as becomes people of wealth, merchant 
 princes, officers of the State. But there are no 
 laudatory inscriptions, no cynical scoffings at life 
 and fate, no helpless moanings, such as the Greek 
 and Roman funereal epigraphy offers us in abun- 
 dance. The cross or the monogram of Christ is 
 usually sculptured on the doors or the walls of the 
 sepulchre. Pious inscriptions from the Psalms are 
 met with frequently. Thus, at Moudjeleia, *'Be- 
 
288 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 cause Thou, Lord, art my hope ; Thou hast made 
 the most High my refuge. There shall no evil 
 come to thee, nor shall the scourge come near thy 
 dwelling" (Ps. xc. 9-10). At Hass, ^'Blessed be 
 he that cometh in the name of the Lord. The 
 Lord is God, and He hath shone upon us'' (Ps. 
 cxvii. 26, 27). On the cornice of one of the cupola 
 tombs at Roueiha we meet the following naive 
 epitaph: '^Bizzos, son of Pardos. I have lived 
 well, I have arrived well, I repose well. Pray for 
 me.'' It recalls the Live in Christ, live in the Lord, 
 of the Roman catacombs. The tombs of Diog- 
 enes, at Hass, and Eusebius, the Christian, not 
 far from Antioch, are worthy of special mention. 
 The epitaph on the latter tomb reads: '^fTo Eu- 
 sebiusf the Christian. Glory be to the Father, 
 the Son, and the Holy Ghost. August 27, a.d. 
 369." This use of the Christian name near the 
 city where it first took its origin is remarkable. 
 The doxology sounds like a defiance to the tri- 
 umphant Arians, the contemporary, Valens, the 
 Emperor, and Euzoius, the Bishop of Antioch 
 and once the intimate friend of Arius himself. We 
 seem to hear the echoes of that awful battle for 
 the divinity of Christ, which was nowhere fiercer 
 than in Syria, the land of its true origin, and es- 
 pecially at Antioch, the stronghold of the earliest 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 289 
 
 critical and rationalizing school in the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 The clearest evidence of the character of these 
 villa-conimunities is found in the number of Chris- 
 tian churches yet lifting their venerable walls, 
 which could be easily repaired and made to bear 
 wooden roofs, in accordance with the original plans. 
 The finest monuments in these ruined cities and 
 villages are always the churches. They possess the 
 best sites, and the grounds allotted to them were 
 ample, as can be seen from the numerous ecclesias- 
 tical buildings frequently gathered about the house 
 of God. 
 
 Long before the advent of Constantine the 
 Christians had public edifices of their own. Dio- 
 cletian destroyed their splendid church in the 
 highest part of Nicomedia. There were forty 
 churches at Rome in the first quarter of the fourth 
 century, and such churches as St. Csecilia, St. 
 Mary across the Tiber, St. Praxedes, and St. Pu- 
 dentiana are very much older, to say the least. 
 With the conversion of Constantine came a com- 
 plete renovation of the old ecclesiastical edifices. 
 New ones were built; the temples and temple 
 lands fell frequently to the Church; the piety and 
 zeal of the emperors, bishops, and faithful con- 
 tributed largely. Before the end of the fourth 
 
290 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 century the Christians could boast that they had 
 an architecture of their own. While following 
 the noble traditions of the old classic art, they 
 introduced of a necessity many modifications and 
 improvements, though they kept the general forms 
 of the basilica, or public court-house, and the round 
 or octagon temple. 
 
 The Christian church differed substantially from 
 the pagan temple. The latter was the myste- 
 rious abode of the idol, entered only by the mem- 
 bers of his priesthood, obscurely lighted, removed 
 usually from the public thoroughfares — the share 
 of the people being only that of passive onlookers. 
 But the Christian church was a meeting-place 
 of Christ's mystic body. Its members were a 
 spiritual priesthood' by participation, though the 
 power of offering the commemorative sacrifice, 
 and a certain defined authority, were restricted 
 to a chosen number. The Christians, unlike the 
 pagans, had a doctrine and a discipline to learn 
 and observe. They were one family knit by the 
 bond of love, had a common spiritual banquet, 
 and the obligation to hear the word of their 
 founder preached. Thus from the beginning the 
 Christian architecture had within it the germs 
 of a fruitful evolution, even though it borrowed 
 the shell of the classic basilica or temple. 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 291 
 
 The Christians at once enlarged the bema, 
 made it the apse for the altar and the clergy. 
 They added the vestibule and the front court for 
 the faithful in various states of probation, the 
 sacristy and treasury for the preparations for the 
 sacred rites and to receive the offerings of the faith- 
 ful. They built side naves for room and opened 
 more windows in the clere-story for light. They 
 introduced large fountains in the open court for 
 the purposes of ritual ablution. We have a good 
 description of the early Christian basilica of this 
 period in the Church History of Eusebius, apropos 
 of the dedication (a.d. 314) of the cathedral of 
 Tyre. He mentions the outer wall surrounding 
 a court, just as one sees before the Roman basilica 
 of St. Cecilia, the central fountain for the ablu- 
 tions which has since dwindled down to the holy- 
 water font at the church door, the vestibules, the 
 naves, the windows of the clere-story, with their 
 wooden trellis-work, the cedar roof, the altar, and 
 the railing of precious wood, with the elegant mo- 
 saic pavements. 
 
 The other Christian churches of Sjria were no 
 doubt similar to that of Tyre. In fact, at El- 
 Barah and in the neighboring ruins one can yet 
 trace many of the ancient details of the Christian 
 churches. The monolith columns, often grouped 
 
292 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 and forming great pillars to support the roof, are 
 yet standing in some places. There are churches 
 which yet possess clere-story and fagade in spite 
 of earthquake and storm. The jutting corbels to 
 support the rafters are still in place. The ele- 
 gant apse, with its sculptured arch, fascinates 
 the beholder. Even the diaconicum or sacristy 
 and the gazophylacium or treasury have escaped 
 destruction, the former opening on the choir and 
 the latter on one of the lateral naves. It was to 
 this treasury or bureau that the people brought 
 their gifts, which were entered on the church books 
 and read out by the deacon from the altar — a cus- 
 tom as old as the time of St. Cyprian, and by the 
 Church of Africa borrowed perhaps from the 
 mother Church of Rome. 
 
 To complete the early Christian Church in 
 some of the specimens yet extant we would only 
 have to add the cubic mass of the altar, the rail- 
 ing of sculptured wood, with the uprights and 
 curtains to be drawn at the consecration, and a 
 lattice-work through the centre of the main nave 
 to separate the men from the women. It is not 
 easy to judge whether the roof was finished in 
 open woodwork or in coffered compartments. 
 Certainly the roof was often painted and gilded, 
 so much so as to be a distraction to the auditory 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 293 
 
 of even such preachers as St. John Chrysostom. 
 The fagade of these churches is usually an orna- 
 mented reproduction of a transverse cut of the 
 nave or naves, following faithfully the main out- 
 lines of the latter. The doors are protected by 
 porches with columns, and the monogram of 
 Christ or some pious symbol is sculptured above 
 the hntel. We do not meet with many inscrip- 
 tions in this group of ecclesiastical ruins, and none 
 of the churches are dated, though their approx- 
 imate age may easily be gathered from the study 
 of their details. These buildings are quite large, 
 from 100 to 200 feet in length, about the size of 
 an ordinary parish church. Yet one was scarcely 
 sufficient for each community. The early Greek 
 Church was wont to have but a single altar and 
 to allow but one Mass on feast days. Hence we 
 find three churches at El-Barah, two at the neigh- 
 boring Moudjeleia, and two or three close by at 
 Roueiha. This grouping of small churches is 
 nothing new in Christian architecture — it has 
 been noticed in Armenia and Russia; we are all 
 well acquainted with the "Seven Churches" of 
 Ireland. This is another indication of the strong 
 influence that the Orient exercised on the early 
 Irish, as well in their art as in their ecclesiasti- 
 cism. 
 
294 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 
 
 Naturally the churches were numerous among 
 a population nearly all Christian; the local tradi- 
 tions say that there were once three himdred 
 within the triangle formed by Hamah, Aleppo, 
 and Antake. We can well believe this, for we 
 know from Theodoret, a famous Syrian bishop 
 and scholar of the fifth century, that his diocese 
 of Cyrrhus, only forty miles square, contained 
 eight hundred churches. The ornamentation of 
 this Syro-Christian architecture breathes through- 
 out a spirit at once classic and Christian. The 
 cornices, friezes, and capitals are trimmed with 
 the acanthus leaf. The egg-ornament and den- 
 tilated foliage are frequently met with. Simple 
 but meaningful symbols of Christian teaching 
 are everywhere reproduced, such as the mono- 
 gram of Christ and the cross. There are still 
 others which transport us to the catacombs, and 
 show that the religious art cycle of Rome was com- 
 mon to the Christian communities throughout 
 the Empire — ^thus the ivy-leaf punctuation on the 
 inscriptions, the Agnus Dei with the cross stand- 
 ing upon his haunches, the little circular loaves 
 of bread with the sign of the cross indented on 
 them, the bunches of grapes and sheaves of 
 wheat to represent the Eucharist, the palms of 
 victory. 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 295 
 
 Elsewhere we see the Alpha and Omega and 
 plain Greek crosses. On a tomb are seen once- 
 sculptured lion heads. We cannot say what sculp- 
 tures of human figures there were; such were 
 most likely to be destroyed by the Mohammedans. 
 Over one of the side doors at Kalb-Louzeh are see 
 two mutilated himaan busts representing the arch- 
 angels Michael and Gabriel, whose names are in- 
 cised above. The church seems to have been built 
 in the sixth century. 
 
 Among the earliest accessories of the Christian 
 church were certain constructions of secondary 
 importance, such as towers, baptisteries, chapels, 
 clergy-houses, and the like. The early Syro-Chris- 
 tian architecture offers us many well-preserved 
 specimens of such buildings. The earliest ex- 
 ample of a tower attached to a Christian church 
 is found at Tafkha, in Northern Syria, where the 
 ruined basilica (a.d. 350-450) has a three-story 
 tower. At Kalb-Louzeh and Tourmanim, there 
 are also towers, not detached from the church, 
 as is usually the case in the West at a later period, 
 but worked into the general plan of the facade. 
 At Kliirbet-Hass the bases of lateral towers are 
 seen at each side of the choir. It is not so easy 
 to say whence the idea of these towers came to 
 the Syrian builders. Some have sought it in the 
 
296 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 influence of Indian and Assyrian models, others 
 in an ancient tradition that Christ was buried in 
 a pyramidal tomb, such as yet exist in Syria. In 
 the neighborhood of Palmyra tall, square towers 
 with several stories have been found which were 
 used as family sepulchres. Perhaps, after all, 
 these towers were meant only to enclose the stair- 
 cases leading to the open gallery above the main 
 entrance. It is not impossible that they were 
 meant for bells— large bells of molten metal ap- 
 pear in the West at the end of this period— or for 
 trumpets; at least, in the fourth century the latter 
 served to call the monks to prayer. The Syrian 
 churches had baptisteries attached to them; a 
 notable hexagonal specimen thirty feet in diam- 
 eter is still in part erect at Deir-Seta. 
 
 Many of the basiUcas were provided with chapels, 
 some of which are in a tolerable state of preser- 
 vation. Around the larger churches are yet the 
 unroofed buildings for the use of the clergy and 
 the church functionaries. Some of these edifices, 
 as at El-Barah, were originally erected for libraries 
 and schools, which, in the Orient at least, have 
 been always connected with the churches. The 
 necessity of providing capable men who could 
 preach the Christian doctrine and administer the 
 church affairs forces us to suppose these schools, 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII, 297 
 
 if we did not otherwise know of their existence. 
 They appear first at Alexandria, but in the third 
 and fourth centuries it is Syria which offers us 
 the best and largest establishments of this kind — 
 Antioch, Csesarea, Jerusalem, Edessa, and Nisibis. 
 There are positive traces of a catechetical school 
 at Rome in the second century, and from the 
 beginning of the fourth we can follow the evolu- 
 tion of the Lateran school and the growth of its 
 library, long the resting-place of the papal archives. 
 Among the canons attributed to the sixth gen- 
 eral council of Constantinople (a.d. 680) is one 
 to the effect that presbyters in country towns and 
 villages should have schools to teach all such chil- 
 dren as were sent to them, for which they should 
 expect no reward nor take anything, except the 
 parents of the children thought fit to make a vol- 
 untary oblation. That this was only an ancient 
 custom is clear from the observation of Socrates 
 on the education of Julian, that in his youth the 
 latter frequented the church "where in those days 
 the school was kept." 
 
 The oldest of the dated churches of Syria are 
 to be found in the southern group, in the Hauran. 
 Here the ancient church of St. George, at Ezra, 
 bears the date of a.d. 515. The cathedral church 
 
298 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 of Bostra, which rises among the ruins of a city 
 famous in the annals of early church history, seems 
 to have been built at the same time. 
 
 It would be useless to mention more than a few 
 of the ruined basilicas of this central region of 
 Syria, they differ so little in their general archi- 
 tecture. Those of Hass, Kalb-Louzeh, and Tour- 
 manim may serve as examples. Of the first only 
 one wall is standing, but that suffices to show that 
 the church was unsurpassed in the neighborhood 
 for elegance and solidity. The arched window- 
 caps are made of single blocks of stone, and at 
 the end of the ruined wall are traces which show 
 that the church contained a private loggia over 
 the choir, perhaps for some distinguished individ- 
 uals. It appears to belong to the period from 
 A.D. 350-400, and is thus one of the oldest of the 
 region. In fact, the materials of a pagan temple 
 have been utilized in its construction. In the 
 same district the church of Kalb-Louzeh, in a state 
 of almost perfect preservation, offers an excellent 
 occasion to study the outlines and details of a 
 Christian basilica. Only the wall of a lateral nave 
 and a corner of the facade are wanting. The church 
 is 114X54, the main nave 25 feet broad and 
 the side aisles with the walls 12} feet. The in- 
 terior length is 84 feet, the rest being taken up 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 299 
 
 by a vestibule. The roof did not rest on columns, 
 but on six great pillars set far apart, and leaving 
 the auditorium as unobstructed as possible. The 
 traces of the chancel railing and the lofty iconos- 
 tasis are still visible in the choir, which is raised 
 some three feet from the floor of the church. The 
 sacristy and treasury are standing, and the ini- 
 tiated visitor recognizes the credence-table in a 
 little mural niche within the apse. Over the 
 sacristy and treasury are two rooms whose use is 
 not clear. Though more beautiful, the church at 
 Kalb-Louzeh is less complete than the church 
 of Tourmanim, whose fine porch, loggia, towers, 
 and side walls are yet in good order, though it now 
 serves as a quarry for the Arabs. The dimensions 
 are 120 X 60 feet and the breadth of the main nave 
 30 feet. It is built on a kind of sub-basement, 
 and the ornamentation of the interior was quite 
 varied, consisting of acanthus leaves, serrated 
 and dentilated patterns, oval mouldings, and the 
 like. 'Tor a church of the sixth century, '^ says 
 a competent critic, ''it is wonderful how many 
 elements of later buildings it suggests. Even 
 the western towers seem to be indicated, and 
 except .the four columns of the gallery, there 
 is very little to recall the style out of which it 
 
300 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 The most marvellous of all the Christian archi- 
 tectural creations in Syria is the great complex 
 of buildings on and near the Kalaat-Seman, some 
 twenty miles east of Antioch. Only St. Peter's 
 at Rome and the unexecuted mediaeval plans of 
 Siena and Bologna surpass them in grandeur. 
 On a steep plateau looking over the valley of the 
 Afrin and commanding a view of dozens of de- 
 serted villages and villas, rise the stupendous ruins 
 of a series of churches built in honor of St. Simeon 
 Stylites, one of the most renowned of the early 
 Christian solitaries. Though these ruins have 
 served at a later date as a huge Mohammedan 
 fortress, they stand in unimpaired majesty and 
 wrest unstinted admiration from all who make 
 the difficult journey to behold them. Simeon 
 Stylites (a.d. 390-459) was the most remarkable 
 of the ancient pillar saints, an almost faultless 
 model of mortification and self-renouncement. 
 After several years of the ordinary solitary life he 
 took up his abode upon the narrow summit of a 
 column which was carried by successive degrees 
 to a height of forty-five feet. Here he spent some 
 thirty-seven years on a space scarcely six feet 
 square, protected from falling by a balustrade. 
 Every week a priest climbed up to this strange 
 eyrie with the Blessed Eucharist, which was almost 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 301 
 
 the only food of the holy man. His days were 
 spent in prayer with outstretched arms and in 
 catechetical preaching to the multitudes of Chris- 
 tians, Arabs, Persians, and people from the re- 
 motest Orient, who came to ask the aid of his 
 prayers. Numerous miracles are recorded of him, 
 and his courage in defence of orthodoxy and jus- 
 tice was recognized in the highest imperial circles. 
 In one sense he was the St. Bernard of his age; 
 the Roman world looked on him with admiration 
 and saw in his discourses the direct communica- 
 tions of heaven. When he died (a.d. 459) all civil 
 and ecclesiastical Antioch came forth to bear back 
 his remains to the queenly city, assured that they 
 were a mightier bulwark against the Sassanides 
 than any which human art could devise. The 
 State was aged and decaying, confronted with 
 insoluble problems, but it was Roman and Chris- 
 tian, and in its faith and secular experience found 
 yet the means to hold off the locust-like multitudes 
 of Persia and Arabia. 
 
 The death of Simeon did not put an end to the 
 immense pilgrimages to the mountain and the 
 column, now become objects of veneration from 
 their long association with the saint. A com- 
 munity of monks was settled on the spot and vast 
 
302 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 edifices built for the accommodation of the visit- 
 ing multitudes. The plateau was levelled and 
 the huge complex of churches, whose white ruins 
 are yet standing, uplifted in honor of Simeon. 
 In the centre a splendid two-story octagon screen, 
 completely open to the sky, was built around the 
 holy column, like a huge reliquary in stone. 
 From this octagon there radiated four great 
 churches, one towards each point of the compass. 
 Between the octagon and each of these churches 
 great open arches permitted the sight of the 
 column from all sides. Moreover, there was space 
 sufficient left between the octagon and the abut- 
 ting churches for the peasantry to lead about 
 their cattle and sheep for the blessing of the 
 saint, who, tradition said, was seen occasionally 
 in person, floating in the air, dressed in his long 
 cloak and peculiar mitre. Other arches opened 
 from the octagon upon the chapels which were 
 built at its points of junction with the walls of 
 the churches, and upon the external porticoes 
 built around each of the four superb basilicas. 
 The octagon, still standing, is over 100 feet 
 throughout in diameter, and over 80 feet in 
 height. The column, made of three blocks placed 
 on a pedestal hewn out of the bed-rock, has 
 fallen, but the base and a chipped fragment may 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 303 
 
 Btill be seen. The main church, the only one with 
 an apse, is the eastern arm of the cross. Its 
 length is 140 feet and in time a wall of separation 
 was built, shutting it off from the octagon. The 
 main entrance was at the extremity of the 
 southern arm, and is yet admirably preserved. 
 The great double entrance suggests the multitudes 
 who once came here. The western arm of the 
 monument is built upon a sharp declivity of the 
 monument, the necessary level being obtained, 
 as at Assisi, by powerful terraces and substruc- 
 tures, from which there is a splendid view of the 
 valley of the Afrin, the lake of Antioch, and the 
 crests of Amanus. There are traces of splendid 
 coffered ceilings, mosaic pavements, and orna- 
 ments, fragments of stucco and painting. Rich 
 marbles and sculptured woods were of course em- 
 ployed, as in the other churches of Syria and 
 Palestine. 
 
 It would be too tedious to describe the great 
 courts, the conventual or clerical buildings, the 
 sacristies, treasuries, tombs, and cemeteries whose 
 vast ruins are yet more than half intact. The 
 imagination is almost overwhelmed as it tries to 
 reconstruct this magnificent work of genius finished 
 at once without any sign of afterthought or res- 
 toration. It is the most complete architectural 
 
304 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 monument of the Christian Orient, and offers to 
 the historian and the antiquarian the most per- 
 fect example of the condition of the arts in Syria 
 at the end of the fifth century, which is the true 
 epoch of its construction. 
 
 This summary account of the Christian ruins 
 of Central Syria would be incomplete without a 
 mention of the great religious hostelries of which 
 some examples are still in excellent preservation. 
 At the foot of Kalaat-Seman is the village of Deir- 
 Seman, in which the ruins of a vast Christian hos- 
 telry or inn are to be seen. Such buildings were 
 absolutely needed for the multitudes who could 
 not be accommodated on the plateau or in private 
 dwellings. They were usually called Pandocheia, 
 and were scarcely more than large halls, only more 
 elegant and roomy than similar monuments else- 
 where. The pilgrim house at Lourdes recalls im- 
 perfectly the internal arrangement. The hos- 
 telry at Deir-Seman was a building of two stories, 
 with external porticoes. Over the door is yet to 
 be read the inscription: ''Christ, Michael, Gabriel. 
 This hostelry was finished on the 22d of July, a.d. 
 479. Christ be gracious to us. Simeon, son of 
 . . . was the builder." At Tourmanim, whose 
 church we have already described, are the ruins 
 of a similar establishment. Like that at Deir- 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 305 
 
 Seman, it is a two-story building, with outside 
 porticoes to both stories, the whole constructed 
 of huge blocks of stone, and enclosing courtyards 
 and cisterns. Such houses for pilgrims were not 
 uncommon elsewhere. The Acts of Archelaus 
 show that they were in existence in these regions 
 two hundred years earlier, at the end of the third 
 century, and in the fourth century we find these 
 creations of Christian charity at Rome, Porto, 
 Constantinople, Edessa, C2esarea in Cappadocia, 
 Hippo, and Lyons. In fact, every bishop was 
 obliged to maintain a house for the hospitable 
 shelter of strangers. Julian the Apostate at- 
 tempted to galvanize the dying polytheism by 
 establishing similar refuges for the heathen. But 
 he came too late; the all-embracing ingenious 
 charity of the Christians had preoccupied every 
 channel of social beneficence. They had filled 
 the world with hospitals, refuges for the sick and 
 blind and poor and old, for the lepers and the 
 foundlings; in a word, for every form of human 
 need and misery. And in so doing they had only 
 carried on the example of cosmopolitan charity, 
 of which from the beginning the Roman Church 
 was the chief exponent, closely imitated by Cyp- 
 rian at Carthage and Dionysius at Alexandria. 
 Not the least factor in the conversion of the hea- 
 
306 A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 then world were the splendid far-reaching system 
 and spirit of Christian charities. So true is it 
 that men are oftener drawn by the chords of Adam 
 than by their abstract convictions. 
 
 It is evident that in Christian Syria from the 
 fourth to the sixth centuries God and divine wor- 
 ship held a prominent place in public life. The 
 church is always the largest and most elegant 
 building in the city or village, while the private 
 dwellings, though solid and commodious, are want- 
 ing in the luxurious richness of ornament and dis- 
 play lavished on the ecclesiastical buildings. 
 Christianity, one sees, is triumphant and con- 
 scious of its victory. Mediaeval Catholicism was 
 never more outspoken than this Syrian society. 
 Its faith is bold and assertive, its piety frank and 
 ardent. There is not a figure nor an inscription 
 which could offend the most delicate soul. Only 
 belief in God and His immediate, loving care, only 
 simple and heartfelt prayers, strike the passer-by. 
 In the light of these new discoveries it would be 
 worth while to examine carefully the S5nriac and 
 Greek writers of that land and epoch. They 
 would certainly throw light upon the ruined archi- 
 tecture of the country, and in turn borrow illus- 
 tration from it. We may well believe that the 
 bishops and priests had much to do with this mag- 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 307 
 
 nificent development of art. There is a passage 
 in a letter of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, north 
 of Antioch, which shows how large a share these 
 fifth-century bishops took in the public life of the 
 time: ''I have erected from my ecclesiastical 
 revenues public porticoes, I have built two bridges 
 on the largest scale. I have provided baths for 
 the people. I found the city without supply from 
 the river, and I furnished an aqueduct, so that 
 water was as abundant as it had been scarce 
 hitherto. Not a cloak, not a half penny have I 
 accepted from any one; not a loaf of bread, not 
 an egg has any one of my household accepted ever 
 yet. Saving the tattered clothes in which I am 
 clad I have allowed myself nothing." The conduct 
 of Theodoret at Cyrrhus and of Synesius, his con- 
 temporary, at Ptolemais, reveals the Oriental 
 episcopate of the fifth century as no less public- 
 spirited men than their brethren of Gaul and Italy 
 during the barbarian invasions. The Roman 
 State had no more devoted and patriotic sup- 
 porters than the highly cultured ecclesiastics who 
 bore the brunt of the human floods that the North 
 and the Orient rolled down upon the accumulated 
 civilization of a thousand years. 
 
 The Christian architecture of Syria interests 
 us not only for the grace of its proportions, the 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 
 
 richness of the decoration, the solemnity and noble 
 elegance of the parts, but also because the study 
 of it reveals the earliest genesis of the Gothic ec- 
 clesiastical style. Here in the Orient we find the 
 first germs of the evolution of the peculiarly Chris- 
 tian architecture, the use of buttresses, the em- 
 ployment of pillars to support the roof, the pro- 
 nounced ogival arches, the pendentives that per- 
 mit the construction of light and elegant domes. 
 The towers of the middle ages were anticipated 
 in principle on the soil of Syria. The apse of the 
 eastern arm of Kalaat-Seman recalls the best 
 Romanesque, while the clere-stories and the cor- 
 bels to support the jutting colonnettes that aid 
 in bearing the weight of the roof are more Gothic 
 than Roman. Architects have noticed that the 
 same mathematical formulas have been employed 
 in the construction of these monuments as in im- 
 perial Rome and the cities of the middle ages — a 
 conclusive proof of the transmission of certain 
 principles from the most ancient guilds of masons 
 and builders. The West at all times has borrowed 
 largely from the Orient. The Byzantine Court 
 of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries was 
 the centre of artistic skill, as is shown by the ele- 
 gant presents it was wont to send to the Roman 
 Church and the Frankish kings, Throughout the 
 
A CHRISTIAN POMPEII. 309 
 
 middle ages Constantinople remained the wealthiest 
 and most refined city of the Christians. Its 
 artists and builders came West not only after the 
 conquests of Mohammed and under the Icono- 
 clasts, but in the time of Charlemagne and the 
 Saxon Ottos. They followed in the w^ake of the 
 returning Venetians; St. Mark's at Venice and 
 St. Front at Perigueux are proofs of it. When 
 at the end of the eleventh century Syria fell into 
 the hands of the Crusaders, El-Barah was yet en- 
 tire, and became a Latin see with a priest of 
 Narbonne for its first occupant. In this manner 
 the Gothic architecture is originally the work of 
 Orientals. Its first unknown creators came from 
 the Orient, with no intention of creating new 
 models, but only of reproducing the elegant monu- 
 ments scattered in rich profusion over the soil of 
 Asia Minor and Syria, but nowhere more abun- 
 dantly than in the latter country. 
 
THE ".ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON 
 BOISSIER. 
 
 During more than a half century the civil and 
 military employes of France have been recon- 
 structing the long-vanished life of their Algerian 
 colony. They have defined its limits as a Roman 
 possession; retraced its systems of roads, aque- 
 ducts, irrigation, and military defence; unearthed 
 its ancient works of art and the splendors of its 
 architecture; collected and classified its inscrip- 
 tions; located and counted its cities and its sources 
 of wealth. In a word, they have restored to the 
 eye of the mind, in minute and faithful detail, 
 the land. and the society which were the scene of 
 the riches and the glory of Carthage, of the hard- 
 earned triumphs of Scipio Africanus, Pompey, 
 and Julius Csesar, and which, after some centuries 
 of peaceful prosperity, beheld in rapid succession 
 every misfortune that Moor, Vandal, or Arab 
 could inflict upon it. Around the shores of the 
 
 Mediterranean great states and mighty civiliza- 
 
 311 
 
312 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER, 
 
 tions have for ages innumerable succeeded one 
 another, each building upon the wreck of its pred- 
 ecessor, and becoming in turn the stepping-stone 
 for the ambitions and ideals of its successor. But 
 nowhere about the blue waters of the Inner Sea 
 has the awful tragedy of the life of nations and 
 races been acted out on a larger scale than on that 
 furnished by the long strip of narrow seashore, 
 arid desert, and mountainous uplands, known from 
 time immemorial as Africa. Never, on so small a 
 spot, have there been given to man so many public 
 lessons of war and peace, success and adversity, 
 love and hate, jealousy and ambition, pride and 
 humiliation, as here. On this checker-board of 
 the world one can observe better than elsewhere 
 the origin, acme, decline, and decay of a state. 
 Within its narrow area opposing religions have 
 contended for the spirit of man almost from the 
 dawn of history. Cultures and languages have 
 chased one another across this shining arena just 
 as the hot simooms of the desert lift in turn the 
 long stretches of sand, and with scarcely greater 
 traces of their passage. From the unknowable 
 aborigines down to the zouaves of France, what 
 a procession of humanity unrolls its long lines 
 from the Nile to Mount Atlas— Egyptian, Per- 
 sian, Mede, Phoenician, Greek, Kelt and Kelti- 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 313 
 
 berian, Roman, Teuton, Saracen, and Turk! It 
 has been ever ''Dark Africa," a land of night and 
 mystery; ever beckoning men to pierce its veil 
 of secrecy, and ever lifting against them its im- 
 passable barriers of rock and sand. 
 
 In a book no less entertaining than useful, M: 
 Gaston Boissier relates the great labors by which 
 within fifty years the enterprise, public and pri- 
 vate, of Frenchmen has won back to the domain 
 of historical science the long-lost province of Roman 
 Africa. M. Boissier does not pretend to treat of 
 Egypt and the Cyrenaica, even within the limits 
 of the Roman domination. He confines himself 
 strictly to the territory known to the ancients 
 as Africa proper {AcppiKij if \6igo5), from the pil- 
 lars of Hercules to the basin of the Great Syrtis, 
 or from the western slopes of Mount Atlas to the 
 territory of Barka. Here, during more than eight 
 centuries, from the end of the second Punic War 
 (B.C. 201) to the battle of Sufetula (a.d. 647), the 
 influence of Rome grew, flourished, and decayed. 
 It is, therefore, properly called Roman Africa, and 
 the volume before us relates what scholars have 
 been able to gather from modern researches 
 among its ruins concerning its civil physiognomy 
 during the memorable centuries when it was the 
 brightest jewel in the imperial crown. 
 
314 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 Who were the aborigines of these mountains 
 and deserts whom an all-compehing fate brought 
 under the yoke of Rome? Our most ancient au- 
 thority is the Jugurtha of Sallust, in which that 
 historian claims to have learned from an historical 
 work of one of their kings, Hiempsal II., that they 
 were descended from the remnants of the army 
 of Hercules, disbanded in Spain after the hero's 
 death. The Persians, Medes, and Armenians of 
 that army crossed the straits to Africa. The 
 former intermarried with the semianimal Getulian, 
 and from them descended the Nomads or Nu- 
 midians, who eventually settled in the territory 
 known after as Carthage. From the intermar- 
 riage of the Medes and Armenians with the Liby- 
 ans came the Mauri or Moors. It is probable, 
 thinks M. Boissier, that Hiempsal knew as much 
 about the origin of his barbarous subjects as any 
 chief of the modern Kabyles or Touaregs, and 
 that the pages translated for Sallust from the 
 royal history were only the Greek dress of a vague, 
 dim legend in which figured some African deity 
 with attributes like those of Hercules. Never- 
 theless, any Algerian market-day will show a re- 
 markable diversity of types, and it may be that 
 this is owing to emigration from across the straits, 
 as well as from the deserts to the south or east. 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 315 
 
 Certain it is that the ancient Berber or Libyan 
 tongue has been rediscovered, that its peculiar 
 alphabet and Ogham-like funerary literature are 
 now known to some extent, and that it extended 
 its domain far into the heart of Africa, if it be not 
 yet a spoken tongue and identical with the tepr 
 nagh of the Touaregs. 
 
 It is at the end of the second Pimic War that 
 these hardy tribesmen come first within the ken 
 of authentic history. The necessities of self-de- 
 fence and the barbarian love of plunder had 
 ranged them now on the side of Carthage and 
 now on that of Rome. The rivalries and mutual 
 jealousy of Syphax and Gula ended in the over- 
 throw of the former and the establishment in the 
 good graces of Rome of Massinissa, the son of the 
 latter. A man of infinite wiles and resources, 
 rising fresh and undaunted from complete defeat, 
 Moor to the marrow in his fiery passions and rest- 
 less energy, Massinissa lived to the age of ninety, 
 the powerful ally of Rome. From his capital 
 of Cirta, set upon a jutting plateau or tongue- 
 like hill, all garlanded with myrtle-clad eminences 
 and odorous olive groves, he harassed the Queen 
 of the Mediterranean, by turns pirate and raider, 
 now leading a wild razzia among the villas or 
 country-seats of the Punic merchant princes, and 
 
316 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 again flying on the wings of the wind to the moun- 
 tain fastnesses of his home. The curule chair 
 and the crown of gold, the palm-embroidered toga 
 and the ivory baton of power, were conferred on 
 him by Rome, but the Berber had to pay, like 
 many others, the bitter price of his disguised servi- 
 tude. Witness the romance of his Sophonisba, so 
 admirably portrayed in the frescoes of Pompeii. 
 After his death, the true relations with Rome of 
 the once free tribes became clear. They had been 
 enmeshed by the arts of the City, and from equal 
 allies had become her proteges. The sons and 
 grandsons of Massinissa chafed sorely under the 
 surveillance of Rome, more hateful than their 
 loose subjection to Carthage, and the embers of 
 unrest and opposition broke out at last into the 
 Jugurthan War, that helium magnum et atrox 
 variaque victoria, which Sallust has painted in 
 immortal colors, forgetting no essential trait of 
 African life, but intent mostly on stigmatizing 
 forever in a calm, cool, objective way, after the 
 manner of Thukydides, the ineptness, venality, 
 corruption, and utter degeneracy of the little body 
 of oligarchs who mismanaged from the banks of 
 the Tiber the true interests of the Roman people 
 in their African provinces. Jugurtha was ^'a 
 genuine barbarian chief — bold, reckless, faithless. 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 317 
 
 and sanguinary — but fickle and wavering in policy, 
 and incapable of that steadiness of purpose which 
 can alone command success." He would long 
 since have been forgotten were it not for the 
 genius of his Roman portrait-painter, and his 
 tragic death (b.c. 104) in the Mamertine, over 
 whose roof Marius led his veterans, in the pomp 
 of triumph, while the grandson of Massinissa lay 
 gasping beneath in the double shadows of prison 
 and death. His grandson, Juba I., embraced 
 the side of Pompey in the civil wars, and paid for 
 his unhappy forecast on the field of Thapsus (b.c. 
 46). Both he and Petreius, the Pompeian gen- 
 eral, died in a suicidal duel, and his son, Juba II., 
 succeeded to the doubtful honors of the Numidian 
 kingship. For this Juba the kingdom of Maure- 
 tania was created. He married Cleopatra Selene, 
 the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and took 
 up his residence at lol, which he rebuilt and 
 called Csesarea, and which is now the coast city of 
 Cherchell, somewhat west of Algiers. The sense 
 of Roman prepotency and the charm of Greek 
 culture and manners, brought close to him by as- 
 sociation with the well-bred daughter of Antony 
 and Cleopatra, made another man of Juba II. 
 He cultivated literary, musical, and dramatic 
 tastes, took to history, and was known as "the 
 
318 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 best historian among kings/' and became the pa- 
 tron of men of letters, artists, and architects. 
 Cherchell yields, from time to time, traces of his 
 baths, theatres, and porticoes; above all, numer- 
 ous statues have been found there, fine repUche 
 of the masterpieces of Athens, Rhodes, Pergamos, 
 and Antioch. Juba and Cleopatra found a solace 
 in the arts of peace and in self-culture for the 
 stormy greatness of their ancestors. But even 
 this self-effacement could not stay the hand of 
 fate. Their son Ptolemy was called to Rome by 
 Caligula, where he succeeded in offending the van- 
 ity of the Emperor, and was starved to death 
 under very cruel circumstances. With him ended 
 the Numidian line and the tribal glories of Libya. 
 Thenceforth Mauretania became, like Numidia, a 
 Roman province, under the administration of im- 
 perial procurators. 
 
 Long before the name or fame of Rome had 
 crossed the Mediterranean the Libyan tribesmen 
 had come into close contact with a people dis- 
 tinct from the Romans in blood, language, his- 
 tory, tastes, and ambitions. They were the 
 Phoenicians, the great traders of antiquity, who 
 had ventured from port to port, from island to 
 island, until they had learned to brave the terrors 
 of the high sea, and carried their commerce to 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 319 
 
 all the shores bathed by its waters. They were 
 the first public carriers of antiquity. The silver, 
 iron, and tin needed by the peoples of the Mediter- 
 ranean were gotten through them. They were 
 the intermediaries for the arts of Egypt and As- 
 syria, and the spices and jewels of the far Orient. 
 Their own temper was more commercial than ar- 
 tistic, but they quickly appreciated the money 
 value of that love of the beautiful innate even 
 in the savage breast; hence the "arts" of Sidon 
 and the dyes of Tyre were famous even in the days 
 when the Homeric chants were being welded to- 
 gether. They catered to wealth and luxury; set 
 up their wares in the ports of Greece, Italy, 
 Spain, Gaul, and Africa; bought, sold, bartered, 
 and even turned pirates and kidnappers when a 
 fair prize hove in sight, or a beautiful boy or 
 girl lingered too long and lovingly on their 
 galleys, gazing at the wealth of "Ormuzd or of 
 Ind." In time they began to feel the need of 
 fortified sites for their regular markets, and so 
 this wonderful people built its trade-centres all 
 around the coasts of the Mediterranean, while 
 they dared to circumnavigate Africa, and to 
 reach the ports of Brittany by way of the At- 
 lantic. 
 Their history, outside of their native soil, is 
 
320 THE "ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 summed up in one word — Carthage. Originally 
 an emporium or factory, such as those in which 
 the Portuguese and the Anglo-Indian empires 
 had their beginnings, Carthage was the daughter 
 of Tyre and Utica (the Old City), in contradistinc- 
 tion to which it became known as the New City 
 (Carthada). The site chosen was admirable — a 
 small hill about two hundred feet high, jutting 
 out upon the wide expanse of ocean, and con- 
 nected by a ridge of elevated ground with the 
 mountainous mainland. On one side of this ridge 
 lay a vast lake, now a salt-marsh, and on the 
 other a great lagoon, now the harbor of Tunis, 
 but which the skill of these merchant-kings con- 
 verted early into a double port of great strength. 
 Thus situate between mountains, sea, lake, and 
 fortified harbor, she seemed to defy the world — a 
 very Gibraltar for the protection of the ten thou- 
 sand galleys that scudded in all directions to and 
 fro from her busy wharves. Carthage was never 
 a military city. The land was originally peace- 
 fully bought, and a tribute paid for years to the 
 owners of the soil. When necessity forced her 
 to war with the surrounding tribes, or to protect 
 her trading settlements abroad, she hired mer- 
 cenaries to do the fighting at the bidding and di- 
 rection of some great families of the city. Seated 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 321 
 
 at his counters about the inner port, conversing 
 on his commercial prospects on the Byrsa (or 
 Bozra of his forefathers), or enjoying an ele- 
 gant ease in his rich villa beneath the shadows of 
 the tall mountains landward, the Carthaginian 
 thought only of balances and credits, of cargoes 
 and lading-space, of mines and factories, of new 
 fields for trade and new objects of commerce. He 
 cared little for history or literature, and, strange 
 to say, though he taught the arts of commerce, 
 luxury, civilization on every shore, his own name 
 has been preserved to us by his enemies. It has 
 been well said that ''vast as is the space which 
 the fame of Carthage fills in ancient history, the 
 details of her origin, her rise, her constitution, 
 commerce, arts, and religion are all but unknown.'' 
 Her libraries were one day disdainfully aban- 
 doned to the tender mercies of the Numidian 
 princes, and the only echo of their contents is 
 found in the Jugurtha of Sallust, for whom some 
 of these Punic records were translated before their 
 final disappearance. What we know of the great 
 Punic city is handed down by Greeks like Aris- 
 totle and Polybius, or by Romans like Livy. But 
 the former, though liberal and accurate, are 
 not extensive in their treatment, and the latter 
 are biassed by a fierce political animosity, the 
 
322 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 natural outcome of that "helium maxime om- 
 nium memorahile quae unquam gesta sunt" (Livy, 
 xxi. 1). Diodoms, Appian, Justin, and the lost 
 works of Trogus Pompeius and Theopompus fill 
 out the list of writers who tell us something about 
 Carthage. Strange fate! Though the soil of 
 Africa yields up daily fresh evidences of all kinds 
 to the prosperity of that land under Roman rule, 
 scarcely anything turns up to confirm the re- 
 ports of former Punic glory. When Scipio Afri- 
 canus burned the city to the ground (b.c. 146) at 
 the end of the third Punic War, he did his work 
 well, for of the two cities that successively occu- 
 pied that site there remains but here and there a 
 bit of wall, a broken cistern, a dust of marble and 
 ashes, over which the plough was one day driven 
 and the sacred salt scattered for an eternal male- 
 diction. It was reserved for the Pere Delattre, 
 that tireless investigator, to discover some long- 
 lost relics of the Punic greatness. They are tombs 
 of uncemented stone, with triangular stone cover- 
 cles. The brittle dust of the bodies they contain 
 vanishes beneath the first glance, leaving only 
 a few weapons, or objects of luxury, or vessels 
 and lamps destined to contain food and light for 
 the last long journey— the Punic viaticum. There 
 are also many funerary tablets, or stelae, dedicated 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 323 
 
 to Tanit, the great goddess of the Carthaginians, 
 called Juno or Diana by the Romans, and Dea 
 Coelestis by the Carthaginians. Many a primitive 
 Christian had reason to hate her name. She was 
 mistress of the city, and death was the ordinary 
 penalty of refusing to honor her divinity. These 
 stelae are found in thousands, and were doubtless 
 set up on the wall or within the enclosure of the 
 square courts which served the Semitic Phoeni- 
 cians as temples instead of the round cellae of the 
 Greeks and Romans. 
 
 No pages of ancient history equal in human 
 interest the relation of the long struggle between 
 Rome and Carthage for the empire of the sea. It 
 is the golden age of Roman virtue, when the fru- 
 gality and hardihood of the legionaries were 
 equalled by the patriotism and self-sacrifice of the 
 nobles, and municipal devotion was carried to 
 the highest pitch known to history. The military 
 constitution of Carthage was weaker than that 
 of Rome, and her near allies were alien in blood 
 and sympathies and tongue; yet by herculean 
 efforts she rose again and again from crushing 
 defeats, and developed in the stress of adversity 
 marvellous qualities of endurance and recovery, 
 unsuspected in a race of rich farmers and shipping- 
 clerks. But she was unequal to the steady im- 
 
324 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 pact of Rome, where the voice of fate and the 
 needs of poHcy had raised the implacable cry of 
 Carthago delenda est. The day came at last, after 
 more than a centm^y of bloody struggle, when 
 the daughter of Tyre, owing to luxury and dis- 
 sension, went down in disaster, leaving to posterity 
 only her glorious name and such details as her 
 enemies chose to preserve of her municipal splen- 
 dor and her proud aristocracy, her prosperous 
 colonies and foreign conquests, her island refuges 
 and resting-places, her motley mercenary armies 
 and her costly fleets, her plantations, factories, 
 and mines, her tributes and customs and tolls — 
 the veriest picture of a great modern empire, 
 strong with all its strength and weak with all its 
 weaknesses. Men will never cease, however, to 
 admire the last noble struggle, when, penned up 
 between the mountains and the sea, like a lion- 
 ess at the mouth of her lair, Carthage gathered 
 herself for a last resistance within her triple land- 
 ward walls, ready to die, so it might be with such 
 glory as became the great rival of Rome and the 
 ancient lineage of Tyre and Sidon. It is Appian 
 who has preserved the details of the magnificent 
 duel, doubtless from Polybius, for the pages 
 of his narrative bear the traces of the exactness, 
 the calm, unmoved precision of that prince of po- 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 325 
 
 litical historians. From the hill of Byrsa one may 
 trace yet, book in hand, the outlines of the walls, 
 the place of the tremendous inner rampart, with 
 its stables for elephants and horses, and its bar- 
 racks for infantry and cavalry. One may see 
 where Scipio drew up his land lines of circimavalla- 
 tion, and shut up on their peninsular rock the last 
 great Semites of Africa. One may yet see, deep 
 under the tideless waters of the gulf, the great 
 rocks of the dike or breakwater built by him to 
 blockade the fleet which the despairing genius 
 of Carthage had built up almost out of her dying 
 members, and for which she had cut, with super- 
 human exertion, a new exit to the sea. There 
 are yet the outlines of the famous port, the outer 
 one for the merchant ships, and the inner one, 
 with its own high walls, for the war galleys, each 
 in its dock of marble, with roof of stone and pillars 
 of Ionic form, perhaps the noblest marine por- 
 tico that architect ever designed. There is yet, 
 in the enceinte of the inner port, the little island 
 where the admiral from his high tower watched 
 the movement within and without, and the imag- 
 ination is free to repeople the quays and wharves, 
 the boulevards and squares of the vicinity with 
 every element of Oriental life — physical, economic, 
 and social; moral, political, and religious. It 
 
326 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 will still, perhaps, fall far beneath the color, variety, 
 and brio of actuality. 
 
 In the early spring of B.C. 146, Carthage van- 
 ished from the earth. Famine and pestilence 
 had done good work during the preceding winter, 
 but they had not quenched every spark of courage 
 in the hearts of the devoted citizens. Even when 
 the city was captured, they fought on in the three 
 narrow streets that led to the citadel, defending 
 one by one the huge six-story houses that bordered 
 them. For six days the Romans pushed on slowly 
 from roof to roof, or on beams laid over the streets, 
 putting all to the sword, while relays of legion- 
 aries dragged away with hooks the heaps of the 
 slain, or took the places of their colleagues 
 wearied with slaughter. The streets were reek- 
 ing mountains of blood and ashes and human 
 flesh, over which the soldiers drove their horses, 
 and the clarion called again and again to the des- 
 perate charge. Only the Fall of Jerusalem recalls 
 such another example of the indomitable resources 
 of Semitic despair. The captured sections were 
 set on fire, to clear the scene of action, and thus 
 at last Scipio stood before the citadel in which 
 were massed some fifty or sixty thousand of the 
 people, scarcely a tenth of the normal population. 
 Life was granted to them. One last act re- 
 
THE "ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 327 
 
 mained in this great human tragedy. Several 
 hundred Roman deserters, with Hasdrubal, the 
 governor of the city, his wife and children, had 
 taken refuge in the Temple of Esculapius. For 
 the former there was no quarter. Yielding to 
 famine, they set fire to the temple, whereupon 
 liasdrubal rushed forth and surrendered himself. 
 His life was spared; but his brave wife, standing 
 on the highest steps of the temple that over- 
 looked the flaming city, the placid blue sea, and 
 the distant hills, reproached the coward in bitter 
 terms, and immediately cast her children and her- 
 self into the devouring flames. Carthage was 
 levelled with the ground; even her suburbs and 
 near allied townships suffered the same fate. The 
 plough was driven over the site of a city older per- 
 haps than Rome, and where but yesterday 700,000 
 souls drew breath of life. The formal curse was 
 pronoimced on it that neither house nor corn- 
 field might ever reappear on the spot. Where 
 the industrious Phoenicians had bustled and traf- 
 ficked for many hundred years, Roman slaves pas- 
 tured henceforth the herds of their distant mas- 
 ters. When the remains of the Carthaginian city 
 wall were recently excavated, they were found 
 to be covered with a layer of ashes four or five 
 feet deep, filled with half-charred pieces of wood, 
 
328 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 fragments of iron and projectiles, — sad confirma- 
 tion of the narrative of history. Scipio himself 
 could not repress sentiments of melancholy as he 
 gazed upon the wreck of his fallen enemy, and 
 we are told that the verses of Homer concerning 
 the fall of Troy came to his mind like a presenti- 
 ment of retribution: 
 
 "Ecrcrerai rijjiap orav TtoroXaoXri "IXio? iptf, 
 Kai Tlpiauo's Kai AtroJ evjifxeXioo Hpiajxoio. 
 
 The Republic was more or less embarrassed 
 by the disappearance of Carthage. It had enough 
 of conquests, and the administration of these 
 waterless plains and treeless mountains seemed 
 a useless item on the budget. Glory and ambition 
 were not so powerful motives as we sometimes 
 imagine among the Romans. One war led to 
 another, one conquest imposed another, and it 
 was rather by political necessity than by free de- 
 sire that they became masters of the world. For 
 a long time they used a system of little buffer- 
 kingdoms or chieftaincies which had their advan- 
 tages, but caused infinite trouble by their internal 
 dissensions or velleities of independence. They 
 were eventually obliged to extend their provincial 
 system over all conquered territory. This was 
 soon the case in Africa, where they could trust 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER, 329 
 
 neither the Punic population, smarting from de- 
 feat and humiliation, nor the restless, capricious, 
 avaricious tribesmen of less than Punic faith. 
 Expedition after expedition was sent out in pur- 
 suit of the latter, until all the gorges and passes 
 of Atlas had been traversed, and camps and forti- 
 fied places built on the southern slopes of these 
 great ranges, in face of the deserts and their 
 oases, so far to the south that their ruins, it is 
 said, are yet in front of every French expedition 
 undertaken in these regions for scientific or mili- 
 tary purposes. Little by little the proconsular 
 province of Africa grew beyond the narrow Africa 
 vetus that satisfied Scipio, until it came to embrace 
 all the present Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, and a part 
 of Morocco, and extended in length from the sands 
 of Cyrenaica to the Atlantic, in depth far into the 
 Sahara. 
 
 In the division of the provinces between Augus- 
 tus and the Senate, Africa had fallen to the latter^s 
 share, and was governed by a proconsul. But 
 within fifty years Caligula withdrew from that 
 official the command of the regular troops, and 
 at the same time established the province of 
 Numidia, with a legate at its head, in whose hands 
 the civil and military jurisdiction, though dis- 
 tinct in themselves, were placed. The procon- 
 
330 THE "ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER, 
 
 sulate was still a place of honor, given only to men 
 of senatorial rank, by the Senate, and but for one 
 year. It yielded a salary of some $40,000, though 
 that sum was never sufficient for the expenses of 
 the office. Hence it was usually given only to 
 members of very wealthy and influential families. 
 The legate of Numidia was also chosen from sena- 
 torial rank, but by the emperor, and for an indefi- 
 nite time. Towards the Atlantic a double prov- 
 ince of Mauretania was formed, Mauretania Csesa- 
 reensis, with Csesarea or Cherchell for capital, and 
 Mauretania Tingitana, with Tingis or Tangier for 
 seat of government. These latter provinces were 
 governed by procurators, treated as part of the 
 imperial private domain, and had only auxiliary 
 native troops to protect them. The legate or 
 governor of Numidia was thus the chief representa- 
 tive of Roman might and right, more responsible 
 than any other official for order and peace and 
 the general welfare. 
 
 Practically, Africa was governed by the soldiers. 
 The African or Numidian legion, in its best days, 
 counted over 6000 men, and with its auxiliary 
 cavalry and infantry made a body of about 12,000. 
 Carthage had its special garrison, and the two 
 Mauretanias were defended by some 15,000 native 
 troops, in all 27,000 men for a muth larger terri- 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 331 
 
 tory than now needs about 48,000 soldiers of the 
 French army. These troops were stationed at 
 the proper posts, — among the disaffected natives, 
 at the entrance to defiles and gorges, in oases, on 
 high table-lands, wherever nature or experience 
 suggested. The French officers have rarely been 
 called upon to better the selections of their pred- 
 ecessors. Every camp was protected by a four- 
 square wall, flanked with square or round towers, 
 and these castella or burgi were the refuges for the 
 people and their flocks whenever some wild razzia 
 swept up from the Sahara or the Soudan. The 
 camps were connected with one another by a sys- 
 tem of telegraph towers, on which lights were 
 burned, or elevated and depressed, according to 
 a system of aerial telegraphing. Great roads, 
 heavily macadamized and covered with broad 
 blocks of granite, bound the military stations to- 
 gether, and at the first alarm, horse and infantry 
 were out and away over them, in hot chase of 
 the marauders, ready to traverse half Africa, 
 till they got back the booty or chastised the 
 robbers. In cases of general revolt, when the 
 private vendettas of the Berber chiefs ceased for 
 a moment, legions were hurried over, at great 
 expense, from Spain or Syria, or the Danube. 
 By skilful placing, rapid movements, energy and 
 
332 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER, 
 
 daring, knowledge of the soil and the people, 
 and mutual support the commanders of these 
 stationary troops of Africa held the land for 
 centuries. 
 
 In military history there is scarcely anything 
 more interesting than the story of the famous legion 
 of Africa, the Legio Tertia Augusta, one of the 
 original republican legions, incorporated by Au- 
 gustus into his ranks, named after him, and, as it 
 seems, especially devoted to the new Caesar. At 
 his death this legion was located in Africa. At 
 the end of the third century it was still in Africa, 
 and its peculiar life, and the city of Lambesa 
 where it lived, are well worth a few lines in this 
 summary of African conditions under the Em- 
 pire. Originally located at Tebessa (Theveste), 
 it was eventually removed to Lambesa to ward 
 off the inroads of the tribes of Mount Aures and 
 the Sahara. Here are yet the vast ruins of its 
 camp, situate on a hillside, close to running 
 water, in full view of the surrounding plains. Its 
 dimensions are over sixteen hundred feet in length 
 and about fourteen hundred in breadth. Like 
 all Roman camps, it was surrounded by a wall, 
 some twelve feet in height, until very lately. Two 
 main roads crossed it at right angles, and at the 
 point of their meeting stand yet the ruined walls 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER, 333 
 
 of the marble prsetorium. The northern wall is 
 pierced by three doors, the central one of which 
 is quite ornamental, with lateral niches for statues, 
 and military emblems overhead. In the neigh- 
 borhood are the bases of overturned statues, the 
 walls of baths, halls, and other buildings. In front 
 of the prsetorium are the sites of the altar, where 
 the chiefs of the legion examined the auspices, 
 the tribunal where they rendered justice, and the 
 mound of turf from which they harangued the 
 soldiers. The building dates from a.d. 268, and 
 though built during the full decadence of Roman 
 art, and wanting in elegance, preserves much of 
 the ancient majesty. It has been conjectured, 
 from the absence of tiles, that the prsetorium was 
 not inhabited. In fact, it was only a great open 
 atrium. The general, with his officers and sol- 
 diers, lived about a mile away from the camp, a 
 spot which had once, no doubt, been the site of 
 the canahae legionis, or the sutler's quarters, but 
 in time became a municipality, entitling itself 
 proudly Respuhlica Lamhaesitanorum. Here are the 
 remains of two fora, a colonnade, a capitolium, 
 elegant temples, porticos, and baths; all the signs, 
 in fact, of peace and luxury, strange equipments 
 for so rude a life as that of a frontier legionary in 
 Africa. Dux foemina facti. It had long been a 
 
334 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 vexed question whether the wives of the chief 
 officers should be allowed to accompany their hus- 
 bands to the provinces, and the Senate was often 
 divided as to its propriety, some maintaining that 
 they were causes of disorder in peace and terror 
 in war; others, that they did much more harm 
 when left alone in the city. The question for the 
 common soldiers arose as often as a legion was 
 left in garrison. At the end of the second century 
 Septimius Severus permitted the legionaries to 
 retain their wives. Unions formed during mili- 
 tary service, formerly illegal, were now more than 
 tolerated, and the children inscribed in the tribe 
 Pollia. Thus it came about that at Lambesa, as 
 at many other points, a military city arose, about 
 which we have abundant information, owing to 
 the mass of inscriptions with which the ground 
 of the camp and the city is almost littered. From 
 these books of stone we learn the daily life, the 
 history of the legion, the names of its legates and 
 subaltern officers. It had its gala days, such as 
 the visit of Hadrian in the second quarter of the 
 second century. We see that it recruited its ranks 
 from the children born to the soliders, that they 
 were in love with their service, and received abun- 
 dant pay. We learn of the existence of mutual 
 insurance societies among soldiers and officers, of 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 335 
 
 pension funds by which the common veteran re- 
 ceived as much as $500 on retiring from service, 
 not to speak of his savings from his pay, imperial 
 gifts, and other sources. Every class of subal- 
 terns had its own mess, its special schola, with its 
 own fimd, from which money was forthcoming not 
 only in case of death, but even for journeys to 
 Rome in search of advancement. In a word, the 
 inscriptions of Lambesa permit us to reconstruct 
 with great accuracy the real life and feelings of the 
 common soldier imder favorable auspices. Yet 
 his life was far from an idle one. Long wars like 
 that of Tacfarinas and Mazippa in the time of Ti- 
 berius, and the endless raids of the never-subdued 
 tribes of the hills and deserts, kept him ever on 
 the alert. He was not in Gaul or Germany, where 
 the enemy was before him, but in Africa, where 
 the enemy lived near by, on all sides, in semi- 
 peaceful relations, but ever ready to swoop down 
 like a hawk upon an unguarded farm, or villa, 
 or town, and carry off booty and captives. The 
 redemption of captives is mentioned in these 
 stone records, and they are thus a strange con- 
 firmation of that touching letter of St. Cyprian, 
 in which he tells us of the collection of $4,000 
 that he took up in his cathedral to redeem Chris- 
 tian brethren who had been carried off in some 
 Berber raids: 
 
336 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 It is impossible to travel within the limits of 
 Roman Africa without being struck by the signs 
 of former prosperity. Along the wastes of sand 
 and stretches of thin pasturage, thousands of ruins 
 meet the eye. Here are the sites of great cities, 
 with populations of from twenty to one hundred 
 thousand, towns, villages, and hamlets, once rich 
 and prosperous; there are the outlines of villas, 
 farms, domains. Everywhere are visible evidences 
 of a public and private life of the highest order, 
 columns, plinths, mosaics, inscriptions, tessellated 
 floors and sculptured walls, wells, cisterns, foun- 
 tains, terraces — all the details of the most cultured 
 existence. In spite of obstacles from men and 
 nature, the Romans made the soil flourish like a 
 paradise, and under them the population grew, 
 the harvests increased, and abundance filled the 
 land as long as the City was herself well governed 
 and prosperous. The nomadic instincts of the 
 people, even of those who were partially civilized 
 and attached to the soil, were a great hindrance 
 at first. There is perfect truth in those verses 
 of Vergil, in which he describes the African shep- 
 herd, taking suddenly with him his dog, his arms, 
 his household, and his flocks, and burying himself 
 in the desert: 
 
 "Saepe diem noctemque et totum ex ordine mensem 
 Pascitur, itque pecus longa in deserta sine uUis 
 Hospitiis, tantum campi jacet!" (Georg. III. 343.) 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 337 
 
 Long before the Arab and Berber, the Numi- 
 dian and the Getulian had the same instincts and 
 habits. The Romans managed to cm'b these 
 wandering tribes, and to fix them in hamlets, 
 which soon became towns, and to widen the mar- 
 gins of arable land, and to increase the belts of 
 orchard and vineyard and olive-grove. When 
 they first came as administrators of the land, it 
 grew little outside of the wild alfa and the dwarf 
 palm, and had much the same aspect and climate 
 as it has to-day. But they treasured the water. 
 They enlarged the natural springs, or discovered 
 new ones, and piped every veinlet of running water. 
 They sheltered the fountains under marble porti- 
 coes, and caused their waters to dance in every 
 smallest hamlet over marble steps and terraces, 
 and to fall into great basins for popular use and 
 refreshment. The rich built fountains or repaired 
 or decorated them, and dying, left behind a grate- 
 ful public whose thankfulness is yet visible in the 
 great slabs of marble on which they inscribed the 
 good deeds of their benefactors. The earth was 
 probed for wells where they were wanting. Cis- 
 terns, private and public, were constructed on 
 an enormous scale, and even the sluggish turbid 
 rivers were danamed to make lakes and reservoirs, 
 whose use was prescribed by law, and made known 
 
338 THE *' ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 by public inscriptions set up where all could read 
 them. All that the soil needed was industry and 
 water. The latter they furnished on the largest 
 and most economic scale. Their own energy and 
 hardihood encouraged the native, who found his 
 toil remunerative and ennobling. Pliny has left 
 us a picture, true to-day, of the homely African 
 laborer turning up the soil with his primitive 
 plough-share to which are attached his little ass 
 and his wife. The soil is light, but fertile, and 
 the first rains cause the seeds to sprout and the 
 trees to blossom, and the vines to swell with sap, 
 as nowhere else. The markets were numerous, 
 not only in every city and seaport, but far inland. 
 The domains of private individuals had often 
 their own special markets, authorized by the 
 Senate, where the wheat and the wine and the oil 
 were stored up, somewhat as in the great elevators 
 along the lines of our Northwestern railroads. 
 
 The products of Africa were precious, for when 
 Sicily and Sardinia failed to furnish food for the 
 City, the nourishment of its million or more souls 
 fell upon Egypt and Africa. Between them they 
 had to furnish in equal shares two-thirds of the 
 wheat needed for Roman consumption, i.e., over 
 5,000,000 bushels. Its collection and delivery 
 were entrusted to a special authority, the prae- 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 339 
 
 fectiis annonae, with procurators and fixed ports, 
 and, in time, special fleets and a special service 
 of sailors. When the corn-fleets were due at Pu- 
 teoli or Ostia, the citizens crowded the wharves 
 and quays and welcomed from afar the first light 
 galleys that preceded and announced the coming 
 of the annona or food supply for the year. The 
 Annona Sanda was soon a goddess, with bare 
 shoulder and arms, a crescent upon her forehead, 
 ears of corn in one hand, and cornucopise at her 
 feet. She was the patron of the corn and wheat 
 ports, and of the population who lived by the 
 transportation of these cereals. Africa was, in 
 those days, looked on as the soul of the republic, 
 and Juvenal only expressed the feeling of all Rome 
 when he insists that the harvesters of Africa shall 
 be justly dealt with 
 
 "Parce et messoribus illis 
 Qui saturant Urbem circo scenaeque vacantem." 
 
 After the conquest of Africa many of the original 
 owners of the soil were scattered in slavery, or 
 driven to the fastnesses of the hills. The aban- 
 doned lands were sold or given away, and in the 
 early imperial times much of them passed into the* 
 hands of the imperial family, by will, or confisca- 
 tion, or by confusion of the imperial domain with 
 the ager puUicus. Old Roman families, like the 
 
340 THE "ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 Lollii and the Arii Antonini, established them- 
 selves at an early date on vast latifundia. Ad- 
 venturers and fortunate soldiers took up estates, 
 like the Cromwellians in Ireland, and soon all 
 Roman Africa was in the hands of a few great 
 landlords, who alone had the capital necessary 
 to cultivate the soil and carry on the victualling 
 of Rome. We are told that under Nero six men 
 owned half of Roman Africa, and that he put them 
 all to death, in order to confiscate their lands. 
 The lives of these Roman land-owners were regal 
 in their splendor. A happy chance has revealed 
 to us a fair portrait of their daily life. On the 
 road from Constantino to Setif, in Algeria, an 
 Arab laborer came across obstructions to his 
 plough which proved to be the ruins of a great 
 bath, some 2600 feet square, with twenty-one 
 large halls, a magnificent atrium, a vast swimming- 
 bath, and all the appurtenances of the most lux- 
 urious establishment of the kind. All this gran- 
 deur was for the accommodation of one man, but 
 a man of princely estate, with villages and ham- 
 lets dependent on him, multitudes of slaves, and 
 a host of agents, bailiffs, and the like. 
 
 Among the ruins was discovered a great mosaic, 
 on which figure his house with its domed wings, 
 its central tower and its long lines of outhouses. 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER, 341 
 
 Above the house is written the name of this great 
 gentleman, Pompeianus. His stables are shown, 
 and the names of his favorite horses are given: 
 Delicatus, Pullentianus, Titos, Scholasticus. Of Al- 
 ius he says: ^'Unus es, ut mons exultas," and of his 
 racer PoUdoxus he puts down: '^Vincas, non vin- 
 cas, te amamus, Polidoxe.'^ Africa was the para- 
 dise of jockeys in the Roman times. They were 
 usually Moors, to the manner born. They learned 
 their trade on such estates as those of Pompei- 
 anus, and amassed enormous fortunes at Rome and 
 elsewhere, where the horse-races of the circus were 
 the greatest passion of the people. We have yet 
 odd proofs of this passion in the prayers and im- 
 precations inscribed by the jockeys on plaques of 
 lead and inserted in the curious African tombs 
 through orifices intended for libations or suppli- 
 cations. On the mosaic of Pompeianus are also 
 shown his antelope park and his entire hunting 
 outfit, with the houses of his chief herdsman, 
 chief forester, etc. Not even his lady^s arbor is 
 wanting, for she is seen seated beneath a 
 tree, elegantly dressed, with fan in hand, and 
 waited on by a young attendant or admirer. 
 Overhead is written Filosofi locus, whether in 
 mild satire or as a compliment, it is not easy to 
 say. 
 
342 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 These private estates were surpassed in size and 
 importance by the imperial domains. The latter 
 were called Saltus, for they had been originally 
 great stretches of woodland and pasturage, which 
 had maintained their ancient name long after 
 they had become vineyard, olive-grove, and wav- 
 ing fields of wheat and corn. They were like our 
 immense Western ranches. One of them, Enfida, 
 contained some 330,000 acres. They were man- 
 aged from Carthage by a system of procurators 
 and sublet to condudores, who let them out again 
 in small lots, or cultivated them directly, and at 
 the same time extorted from the coloni of these 
 domains whatever they could. These coloni seem 
 to have been holders of poor or inferior or aban- 
 doned lands, for their leases apparently ran on 
 indefinitely, while that of the conductores ceased 
 every five years. But the latter were wealthy 
 and oppressed the former, compelhng them to 
 work gratuitously beyond the fixed number of 
 days. An inscription found on the site of the 
 Saltus Burunitanus, in the valley of the Bagrada, 
 reveals some curious details concerning these im- 
 perial estates. It is the history of an appeal to 
 the Emperor Commodus by the coloni of the estate 
 against the iniquitous decision of a procurator in 
 favor of the conductores, and in opposition to a 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 343 
 
 law of Hadrian fixing the obligatory labor of the 
 coloni at six days yearly. Not only do we see 
 here what an army of officials, managers, ad- 
 ministrators, notaries, bookkeepers, and the like 
 this great domain employed, but we find in the 
 inscription, put up by the coloni in gratitude for 
 a favorable reply, traces to show that the insti- 
 tution of the colonatuSj or obligatory service of 
 the soil, existed in Africa at the end of the second 
 century, though hitherto it had been supposed 
 to date from the beginning of the fourth. Be- 
 sides these landed estates, the imperial treasury 
 governed nearly all the known mines of the 
 Roman world. Africa had many of gold, silver, 
 copper, and lead, and to Christians they are of 
 great interest, for we have yet the letters that the 
 Christian martyrs addressed to St. Cyprian from 
 the depths of these sombre galleries, where they 
 froze in winter and roasted in summer, badly 
 fed, badly clothed, but solaced by their devotion 
 to Jesus Christ, and by the letters of bishops 
 like Cyprian, which ^'made the horrid moun- 
 tains to bloom like smiling plains, and the 
 frightful stench of the lamps in the galleries to 
 smell like the perfumes of flowers.'' The mines 
 of Sigus, whence these letters were sent, have 
 not yet been found, but the quarries of Numidian 
 
344 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 marble, so precious and famous in imperial times, 
 are still worked as of old. At Chemtou there 
 are yet above ground blocks of marble, quar- 
 ried over fifteen hundred years ago, with their 
 numbers and marks, showing their destination 
 and the exact shaft or gallery from which they 
 came. 
 
 Wherever Rome planted her victorious eagles, 
 she introduced, as a rule, a municipal system sim- 
 ilar to her own. In Africa she enlarged the cities 
 of ancient date and built new ones. The An- 
 tonines and Severi were the chief promoters of 
 African prosperity; during their reign the cities 
 multiplied, the villages became towns, and the 
 towns developed into municipalities and large col- 
 onies. Withal, the work went on slowly. Even 
 Eoman Carthage, after the fruitless attempt of 
 the Gracchi to rebuild her, and the more suc- 
 cessful one of Julius Caesar and Augustus, took a 
 long time to reach the rank of third city of the 
 Empire. But the patience and devotion of the 
 Romans worked wonders here as elsewhere, and 
 covered the soil with a network of cities unsur- 
 passed even in Asia Minor .for number and 
 wealth. That they were numerous is sho^vn from 
 the fact that in the fifth century the African 
 church had between four and five hundred episco- 
 
THE "ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 345 
 
 pal sees, and their wealth is evidenced by the 
 countless ruins which loom up on all sides. One 
 of these ruined cities attracts in a special manner 
 the archaeologist and the historian, for, though 
 utterly overthrown, it still contains the vestiges 
 in situ of most of its public buildings. The little 
 city of Timgad, the ancient Thamugadi in Numi- 
 dia, lies on the road between Batna and Tebessa, 
 a picturesque mass of walls and columns scattered 
 over the slope of one of the foot-hills of Mount 
 Aures. Close by is a narrow defile in the hills 
 to defend which the site was originally chosen. 
 With the spread of the Roman peace, Timgad 
 ceased to be a fortified castle or burg, and be- 
 came an open city, perhaps a great market place 
 for the neighboring tribes, for few private houses 
 have been found within its limits. The entrance 
 to these instructive ruins is guarded by an elegant 
 and graceful arch, like that of Septimius Severus 
 at Rome, and we gather from the inscription 
 which once decorated its facade that the town 
 itself owed its origin to the act of Trajan, in the 
 year 100 a.d. In 117 a.d. the principal buildings 
 of the forum were finished, and not too hastily, 
 since after eighteen centuries so much of the work 
 is still standing. The principal street, broad and 
 straight, has been cleared for several himdred 
 
346 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER, 
 
 feet, and we may admire the remnants of the sohd 
 paving, the sidewalks with their long arched por- 
 ticoes, the sites of the public fountains and other 
 appurtenances of a luxurious municipal life. The 
 ruts worn in the streets by trade and travel are 
 still visible as we go up to the forum. Pass- 
 ing through a monumental entrance and up a 
 flight of ten steps we stand in this centre of the 
 social and pohtical life of an African city of eigh- 
 teen centuries ago. It is small, but the ancients 
 did not especially admire our great public squares. 
 They loved to chat together in the forum, to avoid 
 under its porticoes the rain and the sun, to discuss 
 business and politics at the bases of the forest of 
 imperial statues which it contained, to cast dice 
 on the squares inlaid for that purpose on the mar- 
 ble floor of the enclosure. The forum of Timgad 
 had an elevated sidewalk, covered by porticoes 
 supported by elegant columns. One descended 
 by steps into the open space crowded with statues 
 in honor of the imperial family, benefactors, pro- 
 tectors, and notable citizens. On the east side 
 stood the basilica, or Hall of Justice, in the apse 
 of which was probably a colossal statue of the 
 founder Trajan. On the west side stood once a 
 statue of Fortuna Augusta, flanked on one side by 
 the assembly hall of the municipal Curia, and on 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 347 
 
 the other by a temple, in front of which ran a ter- 
 race, interrupting the colonnade of the portico, and 
 from which the public discourses were probably 
 delivered. 
 
 The forum was to the African all that the 
 agora ever was to the Greek colonists, the lungs of 
 the body public. This Roman institution entered 
 everywhere into the life of the conquered people, 
 not by force, but by its own charm and its innate 
 suitableness to the life of the ancients. Here was 
 the scene of the activity of whatever elements 
 of political life were left to the vanquished; here 
 their decurions and duumvirs, their ediles and 
 questors and priesthoods met for business or for 
 pleasure; here were to be had such bits of gossip 
 as were wafted from Rome or Antioch or Alexan- 
 dria or Carthage, with the news of the desert, the 
 movement of crops and harvests, the latest lit- 
 erature, and the last imperial scandal or aristo- 
 cratic bankruptcy. The worst emperors were 
 hardest on those nearest to them, and the prov- 
 inces, as a rule, enjoyed peace and security under 
 the head of the state; or if they suffered, it was 
 from causes not always under his control. The 
 imperial authority was welcomed by the old prov- 
 inces exhausted by republican misrule. The wor- 
 ship of the imperial genius, for a time the chief of 
 
348 THE "ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 Roman cults, was largely a creation of the provin- 
 cial instinct, which thereby shared the general 
 glory of the state, and through the local adminis- 
 tration of that cult kept up the semblance and 
 the souvenir of national unity. This was espe- 
 cially the case with such cities as Timgad, 
 founded by an emperor, endowed by others with 
 many privileges and gifts, protected against the 
 encroachments of older and neighboring cities. 
 To such the genius of Rome and Augustus was 
 sheltering authority itself, nothing less than the 
 very soul of peace and concord and security. We 
 may well believe that the imperial feasts were 
 celebrated in Timgad with rare magnificence. 
 What a vision of splendor it would have been to 
 stand on the steps of its forum, some emperor^s 
 birthday, and watch the crowded streets and inner 
 porticoes; to see the multitudes crushed against 
 the marble columns and the bases of the count- 
 less statues; the magistrates in white-embroidered 
 togas amid their lictors and servants; the flower- 
 crowned priests with purple-trimmed garments sur- 
 rounding their gods and their pledges of divine 
 favor and authority; the bands of handsome 
 young men bearing aloft on tall spears the gilt- 
 bronze busts and medallions of the imperial 
 family; to hear the shrill notes of the trumpets 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA^' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 349 
 
 marshalling the detachments of legionaries from 
 Lambesa and the swarthy Numidian cavalry from 
 the deserts; to behold all that joyous procession, 
 endless in life, color, and motion, move on to the 
 temple of the dead emperors, there to take part 
 in the sacrifices of beeves and sheep, the burning 
 of incense, the heaping of flowers, and the shouts 
 and salutations of adoration! 
 
 Whence came the funds that erected these 
 costly edifices? They were mostly paid for by 
 private individuals. In the old Roman world 
 municipal charges were bought by the ambitious, 
 instead of being dearly remunerated by the 
 people. In a prosperous age, like that of the An- 
 tonines, men loved the places of trust, and fortu- 
 nate merchants, soldiers, and adventurers paid 
 gladly the summa honoraria, or price of honors, 
 into the public treasury. Their wealth redeemed 
 their base or unfortunate birth, and enabled them 
 to place their children in the highest rank, 
 and to perpetuate, by theatres, basilicas, baths, 
 fountains, and other useful public monuments, 
 their memory. This is one of the causes of the 
 multitude of Latin inscriptions erected by the 
 donors of these monuments, or by the grateful 
 recipients, and which are happily so loquacious 
 that we learn from their lengthy story names, 
 
350 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 dates, factS; and institutions that otherwise had 
 perished. 
 
 There remain yet at Timgad extensive ruins of 
 the market, the capitol, and the city theatre — all 
 of marble. The market was evidently one of 
 great size and beauty, decorated with statues and 
 inscriptions, provided with fountains and por- 
 ticoes — an ideal place of business, and capable 
 of relieving the forum in case of great pressure of 
 people. The capitol stood on a little elevation 
 behind the market. To have such a building was 
 the ambition of every city of the Empire. It was 
 the living symbol of unity and peace, and usually 
 contained, besides the statues of Jupiter, Juno, and 
 Minerva, certain rare treasures or heirlooms of 
 value. It was at once temple, treasury, and 
 political centre, and sustained at the ends of the 
 world the religion, the pride, and the courage of 
 the holders of the Roman imperium and the rep- 
 resentatives of the Roman majestas. Its columns, 
 capitals, friezes, and balustrades at Timgad lie 
 buried in the sand and vegetation of centuries, 
 but they are, even in their desolation, eternal 
 witness to the solidity of the Roman State, and 
 the power of arts and letters to overcome the 
 fiercest savagery. Of the theatre, built against 
 the side of the hill, there remain distinct traces, 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 351 
 
 the sub-basement and broken columns of the 
 facade, with some lines of the stage and the seat- 
 ing-space. The theatre was surely an element 
 of Roman culture, even on the edge of the Sahara, 
 but in practice it could only fire to fever heat the 
 hot blood of the children of the desert. The 
 mimes and pantomimes, the lascivious dances 
 and tableaux and recitations are fortunately gone; 
 the occasional discovery of a mutilated text of 
 some one of these old vaudeville plays is enough 
 to excite the philologians of our day. But the 
 Christian morality of those African fathers who 
 so sternly denounced these excesses still lives and 
 flourishes, after having changed the face of whole 
 worlds and purified entire civilizations. Near by, 
 on another eminence, stand the ruins of a Byzan- 
 tine fort, lone proof of the brave but vain 
 attempts of Eastern Rome during the sixth and 
 seventh centuries to maintain her African in- 
 heritance against Islam. The fanatic Arab, joined 
 by Jew, Moor, and heretic, was too strong for 
 the feeble but dignified Constantinople, and the 
 fate of war gave back to the Semitic Mussulman 
 those deserts and hills which it had once trans- 
 ferred to the Aryan Roman, and which are yet, as 
 they always were and will be, perhaps forever, a 
 bone of contention among the powers of this world. 
 
352 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 Perhaps the most exquisite pages in the book of 
 M. Boissier are those on the Uterature of Roman 
 Africa. Here he is at home, and gives the usual 
 evidence of his fine, intelHgent criticism, keen 
 discrimination, and knowledge of the history of 
 Latin literature. The cities of Roman Africa 
 were not without schools, though their ruins are 
 never found, owing to the fact that the ancients 
 held school under the porticoes or on the top- 
 most stories of their houses. Still we know that 
 even small municipalities, like that in which St. 
 Augustine was born, had their schools, and the 
 African inscriptions reveal the love of study 
 among the youth, and the sacrifices made by the 
 parents to provide them with an education. Car- 
 thage was of course the chief centre of studies, 
 but the ambitious young men of Africa were rest- 
 less until they had reached Rome. They seem 
 to have been especially turbulent, for there are 
 laws in the Digests providing for their expulsion 
 from the city when found incorrigible. The Latin 
 literature of Africa began no doubt with the Julian 
 colonists, but we first find traces of it in the life 
 of Septimius Severus, the grandfather of the em- 
 peror, whose literary culture Statins extols in the 
 Silvse (iv. 5, 45): 
 
 "Non sermo poenus, non habitus tibi, 
 Externa non mens: Italus, Italus." 
 
THE ''ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 353 
 
 Cornelius Fronto and the grammarian Sulpicius 
 Apollinaris were bright Hghts of the Uterary circle 
 under the Antonines, but they were, like many 
 others, de- Africanized by long residence at Rome. 
 M. Boissier sees in Apuleius the best type of the 
 African litterateur, and he devotes several skilful 
 pages to the dissection of the literary remains of 
 this author. Apuleius was born on the confines 
 of the Roman province, probably of Numidian 
 or Moorish descent. From his parents, who were 
 people of rank, he inherited about $80,000, which 
 he spent in travel, on teachers, friends, and per- 
 haps in the usual dissipations of classic youth. 
 He picked up his education at Carthage, Athens, 
 and Rome, in which latter city he first learned 
 Latin, a language that he never spoke well. After 
 following for some time the calling of an advo- 
 cate at Rome he returned to Carthage, where we 
 find him a favorite lecturer or conf6rencier in 
 the theatre, treating especially of philosophy, that 
 disciplina regalis tain ad bene dicendum quam ad 
 bene vivendum reperta. Of these public lectures 
 there is extant an anthology called Florida, con- 
 taining extracts on history, philosophy, nature, 
 and practical life. On one of his excursions from 
 Carthage, Apuleius met with a curious adventure 
 that brought him before the courts on a charge of 
 
354 THE "ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER, 
 
 witchcraft, a reputation which he long enjoyed 
 among the Christians of Africa. To this adventure 
 we owe his Apologia, a work filled with garrulous 
 self-complacency and a lively sense of his own 
 superiority. The chief work of Apuleius is his 
 '^Metamorphoses/Mn eleven books, an ethical novel 
 of a fantastic and satirical character, containing 
 the history of a young man accidentally trans- 
 formed into an ass, which shape he can only lose 
 by the eating of roses. It is written in imitation 
 of a work of that other brilliant declaimer, 
 Lucian. Many stories are inserted in the course 
 of the narration, and especially the myth or pop- 
 ular tale of Cupid and Psyche. The substance 
 of these tales is undoubtedly Greek, or Indo- 
 European; they were surely not collected by 
 Apuleius among the mapalia of his African neigh- 
 bors. They are the same old charming tales 
 found in every land, and their motives are ever 
 the same, whether treated by Petronius and 
 Apuleius, or by Boccaccio and Lafontaine. The 
 former are, indeed, strictly speaking, the only 
 novelists of the classic Latin period, and the dif- 
 ference of their style and language is remarkable. 
 The first is an elegant and refined Latin, whose 
 perfect speech comes naturally to him. He speaks 
 the ordinary language of his well-bred neighbors, 
 
THE "ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER, 355 
 
 only better than they do. His power of keen and 
 accurate observation, his knack of hnming a char- 
 acter or a situation in a few sententious lines, his 
 fine insight into human nature, his regard for his- 
 torical truth in the delineation of his characters 
 and their discourse, his refined wit and genial 
 humor, prove him a writer of the first rank, and 
 give his obscene Banquet of Trimalchion a right 
 to life that its vileness would otherwise have long 
 since deprived it of. The style of Apuleius, on 
 the contrary, is wildly fantastic and turgid, and 
 his '^Metamorphoses'' have been well characterized 
 as ''an inexhaustible torrent of verbiage, a bewil- 
 dering medley of classical and popular Latin, the 
 diction of all periods and of all varieties of litera- 
 ture, along with various foreign elements.'' But 
 the book is full of minute and effective touches, 
 and its constant variation lends a zest to the 
 affected style and the florid bombastic phraseology. 
 For the rest, it is merely the accident of the sub- 
 ject-matter which can cause us to compare the 
 fine Roman gentleman of Nero's time with the 
 African rhetorician of the end of the second cen- 
 tury. The Latin was the mother tongue of the 
 Roman novelist, and he wrote it with that ex- 
 quisite purity which is acquired only by daily con- 
 verse with the best-bred and the most-refined 
 
356 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 society of one's day. But, in the time of Apuleius, 
 Latin literature was no longer the expression of 
 the life, ideals, fancies, or experiences of Roman 
 society. It had grown artificial, the product of 
 the schools of rhetoric, a thing of laws and rules 
 and system, narrow in its choice of subjects, stilted 
 and cold in its treatment of them, without color 
 or freshness or anything of that charming ease 
 and natural simplicity which are the marks of 
 the best productions of the golden age of Latinity. 
 Apuleius, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, Arnobius, Lac- 
 tantius, all African writers of the best repute, were 
 all rhetoricians. Indeed, from the middle of the 
 second century, all Latin literature is both rhetor- 
 ical and religious, in a pagan or a Christian sense. 
 But while in Gaul it aims at a certain level and 
 takes on a certain average perfection, it is highly 
 individualized in Africa, where the violent and 
 passionate Tertullian contrasts with the calm and 
 patient St. Cyprian, and the verbose and difficult 
 Apuleius differs so widely from the pure Cicero- 
 nian elegance of Lactantius. 
 
 Africa produced many poets, but not one who 
 drank deeply of the Pierian spring. Among the 
 African inscriptions there are many in metre, and 
 some of them are quite lengthy. But the African 
 poets as a rule seem to have laughed to scorn the 
 
THE "ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 357 
 
 obstacles of number, quantity, and even accent. 
 Their verses are halt, stiff, defective, and when 
 they are fairly grammatical, are hard and artificial, 
 as shown by the examples in the Latin anthol- 
 ogy. Nevertheless the Christian poet, Dracontius, 
 though late in date, deserves more favorable men- 
 tion. It was his misfortune to hve under the Van- 
 dal rule, and still worse, to have praised in verse 
 the Homan Emperor. For this he was cast into 
 prison and left to languish in chains and rags. As 
 a solace in his seclusion he composed a " Carmen 
 do Deo,'' a kind of hymn on the mercy of God, in 
 which there are touching passages and several 
 fine descriptions of natural scenes and sounds. 
 M. Boissier does not mention the metrical ''In- 
 structions" and the Carmen Avologeticum of 
 Commodianus, perhaps because he does not be- 
 lieve him to be an African, as do many patrolo- 
 gists, because of his Latinity and his use of African 
 writers. These poems, the earhest Christian met- 
 rical compositions in Latin, are very rude indeed, 
 and the verse, based sometimes on quantity and 
 sometimes on accent, has only the appearance of 
 the hexameter. But the poems are filled with 
 Christian zeal, in spite of some unorthodox views, 
 and are otherwise worthy of note because of the 
 marked tendency to alliteration, assonance, and 
 
358 THE "ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 vhynie which they betray. Of TertuUian and 
 St. Cyprian M. Boissier says nothing, doubtless 
 because the plan of his work forbade an exhaust- 
 ive treatise on African writers, or rather, per- 
 haps, because they are didactic writers, and he 
 aims merely at discussing the African writers of 
 Latin literature in its strictest sense. 
 
 Few fields of archaeological study have attracted 
 more workers, or furnished a greater harvest than 
 Roman Africa. The brilliant pages of M. Boissier 
 are only the summing up of long years of patient 
 toil, borne by French, German, and Italian scholars. 
 Foremost in this work are the editors of the eighth 
 volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 
 (Berhn, 1881, in folio), which, with its supplement 
 (ib. 1891), contains over twenty thousand inscrip- 
 tions that throw the clearest light on the details 
 of law, administration, religion, society, and fam- 
 ily in northern Africa during a period of several 
 hundred years. They need to be studied by men 
 well versed in Roman history, Latin literature, 
 and archaeology, and trained according to the 
 severe historical discipline of the best modern 
 schools. Interpreted by such men, the inscrip- 
 tions reveal a multitude of facts, and open up 
 whole sections of history formerly unknown or 
 misunderstood. In this line Monmisen, Willmanns, 
 
THE " ROMAN AFRICA'' OF GASTON BOISSIER. 359 
 
 Renier, Cagnat, Delattre, and others have labored 
 with much success, and laid the scientific foun- 
 dations for all future progress. Such researches 
 have made possible the great work of Tissot, 
 La Geographie comparee de la province romaine 
 d'Afrique (Paris, 1884-1888, 2 vols, in 4°), to 
 which M. Boissier owes the most of his topographi- 
 cal descriptions. Another monumental work con- 
 structed on the principles of modern historical 
 research is the Histoire de Vart dans Vantiquite 
 of MM. Perrot and Chipiez, which resumes in a 
 scientific way the latest and most reliable dis- 
 coveries of an artistic nature, within and without 
 the boundaries of the Empire. In the exhaustive 
 studies on UArmee Romaine d^Afrique (Paris, 
 1892, 3 vols.), M. Rene Cagnat has given us the 
 best monograph on the military administration 
 of that province, and treated exhaustively all the 
 questions to which the huge mass of military in- 
 scriptions gives rise. The African histories of 
 Boissier and Mercier, and the scholarly works of 
 Solomon Reinach, Stephen Gsell, Carton, Rouvier, 
 Milvoy, Schmidt, Babelon, Schirmer, and many 
 others, have also contributed much to the elucida- 
 tion of unsettled problems, while the local archaeo- 
 logical societies of Constantine and Oran, with 
 the various Annuaires, BulletinSy Archives, Rap- 
 
360 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 ports, etc., of private and public associations fo 
 archaeological purposes, have given shelter to count- 
 less details that might easily have been lost to 
 the synthetic gatherer when he appeared. Since 
 nearly all the site of ancient Carthage is now 
 the property of the Catholic Church, it was but 
 meet that one of her priests, Pere Delattre, should 
 take an active part in the restoration of the ancient 
 life of that city and the territory where once she 
 reigned as mistress. Though this missionary's 
 work lies chiefly along the lines of the Christian 
 and ecclesiastical archaeology of Africa, and of 
 Carthage especially, he is still a very useful and 
 indefatigable helper in the department of Roman 
 and Punic antiquities. In the latter, indeed, he 
 is a pioneer, for the latest discoveries and their 
 illustration are due to him. 
 
 M. Boissier's brilliant popularization of these 
 labors and studies, of which I have tried to give 
 the general outlines and the spirit, conveys no 
 adequate notion of the sum of attainments which 
 must be possessed by the actual laborers and 
 gatherers in these fields. To a more than ordinary 
 knowledge of the natural sciences, and to an ex- 
 cellent training in physical and political geog- 
 raphy, one must join an accurate and exhaustive 
 knowledge of the local history of the territory in 
 
THE "ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 361 
 
 which he is working — a knowledge which he must 
 often put together himself, since its only materials 
 are precisely the stones, mounds, depressions, and 
 general physical wreckage on which he has fallen. 
 He must have a large endowment of the imagina- 
 tive faculty — a rare and delicate quality of that 
 gift, which may be used for good or evil ends, but 
 without some share of which no historian ought 
 to undertake the mental reconstruction of a van- 
 ished society. To this he must add a hardy bodily 
 constitution, much nervous energy, skill in dealing 
 with the natives, and power to sustain privation, 
 disappointment, and failure. Finally, he needs to 
 be an idealist by temperament, since the worldly 
 reward of such labors is not great in an age when 
 the Punic merchant-soul seems to have awakened 
 to new life, not on the rocky promontories of 
 Africa, but on all the seas and in all the ports of 
 a world which has more than doubled since Car- 
 thage was its carrier and its broker. 
 
 Such men are truly martjo-s of science, and 
 while it is to the honor of France that she produces 
 them in great numbers, it is also a proof that she 
 is still an idealist nation, and that she still prizes 
 above riches and conquests the general ideals of 
 an elevated humanity — glory, learning, art, science, 
 and the unceasing perfection of the mind of man, 
 
362 THE ''ROMAN AFRICA" OF GASTON BOISSIER. 
 
 that admirable mirror in which he may see the 
 myriad-sided present, the endless vistas of the 
 past, and from the consciousness of the one and 
 the accurate story of the other, forecast the fate 
 of his kind in the similar situations of the 
 future. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 I. 
 
 John Baptist De Rossi was bom at Rome, Feb- 
 ruary 23, 1822, of parents distinguished for sta- 
 tion and piety.* As a child he loved to read the 
 lives of the saints, especially of the earlier ones, 
 and satisfied his youthful curiosity by long ex- 
 cursions through an Italian leggendario, which 
 happened to contain, what is rare in works of pure 
 piety, some account of the authorities or original 
 sources whence the sketches of the saints were 
 drawn. This may have been the original impulse 
 that turned his mind to critico-historical inves- 
 tigations which became at a very early period 
 an absorbing passion. Speaking in later life of 
 
 ^ The biographical items for this sketch of the pubhc career 
 of De Rossi are drawn from the Albums or proceedings of 
 the festivities on the occasions respectively of his sixtieth 
 and seventieth birthdays (1882, 1892) and from the brochure 
 Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Fondatore della Scienza di Archeo- 
 logia Sacra: Cenni Biografki, per P. M. Baumgarten (Rome, 
 1892). 
 
364 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 his early days, he was wont to assert that archae- 
 ology was surely his vocation, since he could 
 not remember that any attraction for other 
 sciences ever asserted itself in him: His studies 
 were made, like those of the other Roman 
 youths, at the Collegio Romano and the Sapienza 
 or Pontifical University. In the former he dis- 
 tinguished himself by aptitude in the study of 
 the classics, never so foreign to the Italian as to 
 the northern mind, and profited no little by the 
 epigraphic instruction of the classic archaeologists 
 Secchi and Bonvicini. By a subtle natural in- 
 stinct he was drawn to the study of epigraphy, 
 for which the materials stared at him from every 
 corner of the old papal stronghold, and we may 
 date from his early college days the growth of that 
 marvellous insight into the spirit and the rules 
 which governed the ancient Romans in the com- 
 position and erection of those multitudinous in- 
 scriptions whose marble and bronze relics are for- 
 ever coming to light beneath the pick of the ex- 
 cavator. At the Sapienza he followed the study 
 of law, more for the sake of the position it fur- 
 nished than with any thought of living by it, and 
 after an exceptionally brilliant course, in which 
 he was always the leader of his class, was de- 
 clared, in 1843, doctor utriusque juris ad honorem. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 365 
 
 A mere chance threw him in the way of the 
 famous Mai, and by his influence the young De 
 Rossi was made Scriptor or official copyist to the 
 administration of the Vatican Archives, an office 
 which he held until his death and which enabled 
 him to acquire a valuable acquaintance with a 
 multitude of archaeological treasures hidden away 
 most jealously from less fortunate men. In the 
 long years that he spent transcribing, collating, 
 and disposing the rare parchments of that unique 
 collection, his extraordinary memory grasped 
 countless indications that aided him afterwards 
 in his peculiar labors among the rudera of Chris- 
 tian antiquity. Surely it was the guiding hand 
 of Providence that set the ambitious and ardent 
 youth, not on the tedious and dangerous road 
 of the diplomatic career, but on the sequestered 
 paths that finally led out among the solitudes of 
 the Appian Way and along the deserted banks 
 of Tiber, where her yellow waves gnaw their tor- 
 tuous road to the sea. And surely, again, it was 
 a disposition of Providence that kept him a life- 
 time at the official and professional study of the 
 written records of the past, and absolutely 
 forced upon him the conviction that the written 
 documents were to be used pari passu with the 
 material monuments, and that the facts of 
 
366 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 Christian antiquity could never be properly illu- 
 minated until the combined light of both were cast 
 upon them. 
 
 It would seem that in the family of De Rossi 
 the Catacombs were a frequent subject of con- 
 versation, and awakened, almost from infancy, 
 an unquenchable curiosity in the mind of John 
 Baptist. We hear that his father eagerly sought 
 the rare work of Antonio Bosio, Roma Botterranea, 
 as a premium for his gifted son, and that the 
 favorite excursion of De Rossi and his brother 
 Michele, when scarcely out of their teens, was out 
 on the lonely wastes of the Campagna, prying 
 around among the entrances to the deserted ceme- 
 teries, whither the ancient Christians were tracked 
 like rabbits, or gazing down the lucernaria or loop- 
 holes that once let in air and light to this subter- 
 raneous world, and yet serve as buoys to mark 
 the location of the main pathways across the 
 ocean of ruins that lie beneath. What a fascina- 
 tion there is in this Roman soil! While the 
 grassy mounds and sunken ditches that mark the 
 humble refuges of the early Christian flock were 
 inflaming the piety of the youthful De Rossi, the 
 classical memories of Thrasea Psetus and Helvi- 
 dius Priscus, of Arnold da Brescia and Cola di 
 Rienzi were firing other Roman youths of the same 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 367 
 
 age. While the genius of De Rossi was planning 
 the discovery of the little Christian communities, 
 those protoplasms around which the mediaeval 
 Christendom was one day compacted, hundreds 
 of his companions were conspiring for the violent 
 restoration of that old republic of blood, iron, and 
 robbery over whose recent grave the first Chris- 
 tians began their memorable propaganda. In this 
 fated city there goes on for evermore a warfare of 
 the spirit and the flesh, and the passionate outcry 
 and reaction of the conquered world break 
 violently in upon the alleluias and litanies of the 
 Church, even as the hoarse shouts of the pagan 
 rabble sullied the holy purity of the Christian ser- 
 vice in the bowels of the Campagna. 
 
 It was not without some difficulty that De 
 Rossi obtained his father's consent to the indul- 
 gence of these antiquarian tastes, which seemed 
 to promise very poor results, either of fame or 
 advancement. In the end, however, he became 
 the disciple of the Padre Marchi, a well-known 
 Jesuit numismatist, whose discovery of the tomb 
 of SS. Protus and Hyacinthus in the catacomb 
 of St. Agnes, on the Nomentan Way, entitles him 
 to an eminent place in the annals of Christian archae- 
 ology. Still greater gratitude is owing him for 
 the formation of the young De Rossi, long his 
 
368 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 inseparable companion and colaborer in those 
 sacred mines whose galleries are hallowed by the 
 blood of martyrs innumerable and the pious foot- 
 falls of pilgrims still more innumerable, and 
 whose walls are impregnated with the holy aspira- 
 tions of three great epochs of human culture. 
 Padre Marchi was the last of the old Une of Chris- 
 tian archaeologists which began at the end of the 
 sixteenth century with Macarius, Ciacconio, De 
 Winghe, and Bosio; was continued in the seven- 
 teenth in the persons of Fabretti, Boldetti, Buona- 
 rotti, Lupi, Marangoni, and Bottari, and in the 
 early decades of this century was represented in 
 France by De Caumont, Didron, Greppo, Raoul- 
 Eochette, Martin, and Cahier; in Germany by 
 Augusti, Binterim, and Miinter; in Italy by Sarti 
 and Settele. He was the official guardian, or cus- 
 tode, of the catacombs, and, as such, inherited 
 much practical knowledge and traditional lore con- 
 cerning them. He had himself begun a great work 
 on the monuments of early Christian art, of which 
 only one volume was ever published. Political 
 vicissitudes and his own discovery of the quali- 
 ties of De Rossi made him abandon the work to 
 his young disciple, who had quickly caught the 
 enthusiasm of the old Jesuit, and brought to the 
 holy cause youth, talent, learning, industry, voca- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 369 
 
 tion, and the divine intuitions of genius. The 
 world-famous discoveries of De Rossi in the Cata- 
 combs of St. CaUixtus— those subtle, almost pro- 
 phetic calculations by which he laid open a vast 
 and intricate city beneath the vineyards and the 
 garden patches of the Roman suburbs— are too 
 well known to need rehearsal here. Suffice it 
 to say that early in the fifties men recognized a 
 new star in the firmament of learning, and that 
 public attention was thenceforth fastened on the 
 young archaeologist as one who had struck out 
 a new path, and would soon modify the methods 
 and conclusions of all past workers in Christian 
 archeology. He interested Pius IX. in his work, 
 and obtained the creation of a special commission 
 for the excavations, in which he was ever the guid- 
 ing spirit and counsel. All his great publications 
 were begun or planned about this time, and the 
 rest of his life devoted to the elevation of his 
 favorite study to the recognized rank of a true 
 science— one of the few which the Catholic Church 
 can say that she has completely won over to her 
 side. 
 
 No one was better known in the great archives 
 and libraries of Europe than De Rossi. Since 
 1853 he visited frequently the principal collections 
 
370 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 of mediseval manuscripts in Italy, France, Ger- 
 many, Switzerland, and England. The archivists 
 of Berne, Paris, Venice, Milan, and many other 
 cities welcomed his visits and threw open their 
 treasures to the one man in Europe who could 
 compare them intelligently with those of the Vat- 
 ican and make the old parchments give up the 
 mysteries of the past. So high and unique was 
 his reputation that foreign governments entrusted 
 most precious manuscripts to their representatives 
 at Rome for his use, and deemed themselves 
 honored when he had illustrated their contents 
 or their history. As his fame grew, learned 
 bodies in Europe and America showered honorific 
 titles and memberships on him; orders and crosses 
 and medals were offered for his acceptance; gov- 
 ernments, universities, and national academies vied 
 with the papacy to do honor to the founder of 
 the new science of Christian Archaeology. His 
 name became a household word throughout Chris- 
 tendom as that of the famous wizard who had 
 conjured up before our eyes long-buried cities, 
 and made the men and women of ancient days 
 move as in a mighty kinetoscope. Among all 
 his distinctions the proudest was that of Prefect, 
 or Curator of the Christian Museum attached to 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 371 
 
 the Vatican Library — a life office created espe- 
 cially for him by Leo XIIL, who was no less his 
 friend and admirer than Pius IX. The latter 
 had offered to put him at the head of the Archives 
 after the unfortunate incident of Theiner, but De 
 Rossi, with characteristic modesty and prudence, 
 begged the Pope to permit him to decUne. 
 
 In 1882 his sixtieth birthday was celebrated 
 with extraordinary enthusiasm, shared equally by 
 kings and republics, by Catholics and non-Catholics. 
 It recalled those splendid coronation scenes of 
 the Renaissance, when the Italian world burst 
 out in spontaneous apotheosis of the poet who 
 best voiced the multitudinous aspirations of its 
 great heart. Only, instead of on the Capitol, men 
 were gathered at the Lateran; instead of a crown 
 of laurel, they offered conviction and gratitude; 
 instead of the perishable allurements of verse and 
 song, they crowned the hard-won victories of a 
 discoverer who had gone out upon a dark and un- 
 known sea, with only the compass of genius, and 
 given back to the Christian world its earliest prov- 
 inces that the great cleft of the middle times had 
 forced into a well-nigh mythical obscurity. A 
 similar scene was repeated on the occasion of his 
 seventieth birthday, in April, 1892, when his bust 
 was unveiled in the little fourth-century basilica 
 
372 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 of SS. Sixtus and Caecilia/ that rises over the Cat- 
 acomb of St. CaUixtus, amid the plaudits and con- 
 gratulations of a large assembly, among which 
 were many representatives of the governments 
 and universities of Europe and of academic bodies 
 and learned societies from both sides of the ocean. 
 The learning of two hemispheres bowed down 
 before the humble and honest Christian investi- 
 gator, and it sends a thrill of enthusiasm through 
 the coldest veins to think that human science was 
 once more doing homage to a model of Christian 
 faith on the blood-stained floor of St. Callixtus, 
 and that our proud century looked not unsym- 
 pathetically on this new curving of the altitudes 
 of the human mind beneath the sweet servage 
 of Christ. 
 
 In modest and touching language the aged archae- 
 ologist reviewed his work in the catacombs, and 
 thanked the eminent scholars who had come 
 
 ^ The bust, of white Serravezza marble, is the work of Lu- 
 chetti, and is ornamented with the following inscription: 
 
 lOHANNI . BAPTISTAE • DE . ROSSI 
 
 QVO • DVCE • CHRISTIANA • VETVSTAS 
 
 IN • NOVVM • DECVS • EFFLORVIT 
 
 PONTIFICVM • HEROVMQVE • PRIMAEVAE • ECCLESIAE 
 
 ILLVXERE • TROPHAEA 
 
 NATALI • EIVS • SEPTVAGESIMO 
 
 CVLTORES • MARTYRVM • ET • SACRAE • ANTIQVITATIS 
 
 MAGISTRO • OPTIMO • P • A • MDCCCXCII 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 373 
 
 from afar to greet him, and to console his declining 
 years with approval and acceptance of his labors. 
 There is an echo of the Nunc Dimittis in the proud 
 joy with wliich he referred to his numerous 
 progeny of disciples already equipped for work, 
 and ready to occupy the field when the maestro 
 laid down his arms. Shortly afterwards he was 
 stricken with paralysis, from which his physical 
 frame never recovered, though his intellect re- 
 mained undimmed to the last. He had reached 
 a green old age, and enjoyed all the honors that 
 could fall to a scholar's lot. He had shed lustre 
 upon the Church of Rome, both as head of the 
 Christian body and as a local community, and 
 caused the name of Johannes Baptista De Rossi 
 Romanus to be pronounced everywhere with ven- 
 eration and respect. The world was better for 
 his labors, and the spirit of peace and conciliation 
 had made much progress by reason of his com- 
 manding genius and all-embracing charity. As 
 his strength failed, it was hoped that the country 
 air would revive him, and Castel Gondolfo, the 
 summer residence of the popes, was placed at his 
 disposal by order of Leo XIII. But he never 
 rallied, and on September 20th he peacefully 
 passed away. His remains were brought back 
 to Rome and temporarily buried at San Lorenzo: 
 
374 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 But it is said that a nobler resting-place is in 
 store, and that he will be buried in the papal crypt 
 at St. Callixtus, like a hero on the field of battle. 
 Charlemagne was not more properly entombed 
 beneath the dome of Aix-la-Chapelle, nor Chateau- 
 briand on the wave-beaten rock of St. Malo, than 
 De Rossi will be in the heart of the great Chris- 
 tian cemetery which his genius discovered and 
 rebuilt. He did many difficult things in his life, 
 but nothing to compare with the restoration of 
 The Cemetery par excellence, the centre at once 
 of early Christian life at Rome, the nucleus of the 
 landed wealth of the Roman Church, and the 
 mausoleum for a hundred years of her most cele- 
 brated pontiffs. He died working, dictating, and 
 commenting, hke Irish Columba and English Bede, 
 and his eyes closed upon the pageant of the church 
 militant only to open on that of the church trium- 
 phant, whose vicissitudes and memories he had 
 so accurately and piously illustrated upon earth. 
 
 " Nee puer Iliaea quisquam de gente Latinos 
 In tantum spe toilet avos ; nee Romula quondam 
 XJllo SB tantum tellus jactabit alumno." 
 
 II. 
 
 De Rossi was one of those rare men in whom 
 the entire knowledge of the civilization of the past 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 375 
 
 ages seems to be mirrored, an encyclopaedist or 
 polyhistor, to whom the whole range of human 
 thought and endeavor along the lines of intellect- 
 ual culture was thoroughly familiar. Before the 
 Renaissance such men were rarer still, for, though 
 the mediaeval world produced men of great emi- 
 nence, whose imprint on human society will never 
 fade, it was still an age of action and creation. 
 It had little leisure or capacity for the calm sur- 
 vey of the classic past and its own origins, and 
 perhaps less taste for cultures that were purely 
 pagan, or at least mixed. There was still a 
 touch of the rugged Tertullian in the mediaeval 
 Christian. Therefore we cannot class the great 
 archaeologist with St. Thomas or St. Bonaventm-e 
 or Dante. His place is with men like Peiresc, 
 Sirmond, Maffei, Mabillon, Montfaucon, and their 
 congeners. He is not an artist like those who 
 built the cathedrals of Cologne or Strasburg, but, 
 like Cellini and Francia, a worker in detail, yet 
 with high ideals, and a definite purpose into which 
 every act of his life fits with perfect neatness and 
 propriety. His writings cover the entire period 
 of Graeco-Roman civilization, and he was no less 
 familiar with its pagan than with its Christian 
 side. The Rome of Augustus and the Rome of 
 Damasus and Leo were equally well known to 
 
376 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 him. During more than fifty years he gave to 
 the pubhc a multitude of writings, great and small, 
 in which he shed new light on Christian antiquities, 
 on the inscriptions of the ancients, both Greek 
 and Latin, both heathen and Christian; on the 
 laws, manners, and habits of Rome; on manu- 
 scripts and ancient handwriting; on mediaeval art 
 and bibliography. He carried on at the same 
 time a vast system of excavations, organized the 
 Christian Museum of the Lateran, pushed forward 
 the cataloguing of the Vatican archives, and kept 
 a school after the manner of the old philosophers. 
 Indeed, merely to describe intelligently the out- 
 lines of his life work is no easy task, and might 
 well occupy the space of one or more large 
 volumes. Still by classifying the numerous works 
 of his pen we may hope to present something 
 like a fair general view of his enormous literary 
 activity. 
 
 De Rossi was pre-eminently an epigraphist. 
 The science of inscriptions was his first love; out 
 of his devotion to the monumenta literata sprang 
 all his other researches, and to them were finally 
 referred his most striking conquests in the do- 
 main of antiquity. Inscriptions engraved, painted, 
 scratched, or stamped; pagan and Christian, public- 
 historical; domestic, and artistic; on stone, bronz;^ 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 377 
 
 ivory, wood, or copper; on buildings, coins, or 
 antiquarian objects; whether found on the original 
 materials, patiently gathered from the printed 
 works of the ancients, or dug out of old mediaeval 
 collections, he was first in every department, and 
 labored in all with equal intelligence, devotion, 
 and success. Epigraphy, which was formerly but 
 an ancillary science to history, and an armory of 
 apologetic weapons to the Christian, became in 
 his hands an independent study, with proper and 
 peculiar methods, principles, and conclusions of 
 value for themselves. 
 
 The passion of inscriptions has been always 
 strong among powerful and cultured peoples, as 
 the modern discoveries in Assyria, Egypt, Persia, 
 and India abundantly testify. Inscriptions were 
 the heralds of Hellenism in its day of pride, as 
 they are to-day the witnesses of the range of its 
 influence. But never were they more numerous 
 than in the palmy days of imperial Rome, when 
 they stared at the citizen from the arches and the 
 statues of the fora, and looked down on him from 
 a hundred basilicas and temples in every city of 
 the mighty East- West world. The walls, the 
 roads, the aqueducts; the boundaries of domains, 
 public and private; the seats in the theatres, the 
 weights and measures, the weapons and curios; 
 
378 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 the rough marble in blocks and the tiles on the 
 roofs — every material object of public or private 
 life afforded a space, great or small, to the insatia- 
 ble ''man of letters." Public acts, like treaties, 
 alliances, plebiscita, law edicts, senatus-consulta, 
 and imperial constitutions, were eternalized in 
 bronze, while private transactions were preserved 
 with no less care on durable material, as the 
 banker^s accounts, the rent rolls, the tavern bills, 
 and political manifestos of Pompeii show us. 
 Sometimes whole annals or biographies were written 
 out on stone, as we see by the Parian Marmor- 
 chronik and the famous Monumentum Ancyranum. 
 Only one familiar with the texts and details of 
 early imperial history can imagine what a multi- 
 tudinous mass of inscriptions must have existed 
 intact before the downfall of the ancient culture. 
 But they perished miserably at the hands of those 
 two great enemies of human achievements, cruel 
 man and relentless time. One ground them into 
 the earth, and the other swept away all reminis- 
 cences of their ancient estate, so that the same 
 silent desolation spread over those relics of Roman 
 greatness which Rome herself had so often brought 
 upon the greatness of older civilizations than her 
 own. Still they did not perish unheeded. For 
 various reasons the ancients, especially the re- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 379 
 
 fined litterati of Alexandria, made collections of 
 inscriptions, and such useful and pious labors 
 were carried on by Latin scholars, both pagan 
 and Christian. There are the clearest evidences 
 that such mixed Corpora of epigraphical material 
 existed in the West in the fifth and sixth centuries, 
 and that they were favorite books for the com- 
 pilers of epigrams and the writers of funeral, 
 sacred, or honorary inscriptions. They contained 
 careful transcriptions of many old epigraphs in 
 elegiac, lyric, or epic metre. Often the original 
 lettering was accurately reproduced, and the pre- 
 cious chronological notes or indices of the time 
 when the original was executed were preserved. 
 But even this bridge was in time broken down, and 
 those priceless early collections are represented 
 to us now by manuscripts of the Carolingian 
 epoch, chiefly pilgrim books or itineraries of wan- 
 dering monks and travellers, who jotted down 
 among other miscellanea out of the older Corpora, 
 then worn, decayed, or neglected, such ancient 
 Latin inscriptions as were likely to be of use or 
 interest in their own little circles beyond the Alps. 
 The merest chance has preserved to us a very 
 few specimens of this literary work in manuscripts 
 that belonged originally to Einsiedeln, Lorsch, 
 Milan, Klosterneuburg, Gottweich, Verdun, etc. 
 
380 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 Their text is now corrupt; there are great breaks 
 in them; they are often mutilated, and in the 
 worst possible condition; but they are the in- 
 valuable link that connects the modern science 
 of Christian epigraphy with the past, while they 
 are also of importance for the history of the col- 
 lection of Latin inscriptions in general. It is well 
 known that between the Renaissance of Charle- 
 magne and the Italian Renaissance little or noth- 
 ing was done for the preservation of the old in- 
 scriptions, which cast such rare light on the his- 
 tory, literature, and manners of the society that 
 set them in place. A few names shine out, re- 
 lieving this long neglect: Rienzi, Poggio Brac- 
 ciolini, the wonderful Ciriaco di Ancona, and his 
 counterpart in devotion to Christian epigraphy, 
 Petrus Sabinus. But with the Italian Renais- 
 sance came an astonishing, if excessive and harm- 
 ful, awakening of piety toward the old classic 
 world. Its smallest relics and fragments were 
 collected and commented on with a sacred en- 
 thusiasm. Humanists and travellers, states and 
 cities, popes and kings and little potentates, col- 
 lected personally or by commission great numbers 
 of inscriptions, chiefly Latin, and arranged for 
 public or private use a new kind of museum, the 
 lapidary galleries of the Renaissance. The six- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 381 
 
 teenth century saw the local gatherers at work, 
 and also the first attempt at a printed collection 
 made by the humanist, Conrad Peutinger, whose 
 name remains attached to one of the most curious 
 documents of antiquity — the Tabula Peutingerii, 
 or road map of the Roman Empire. Bankers 
 like the Fuggers, and rulers like Charles V. and 
 Frederick of Austria, caught the contagion, and 
 from that time the collection of inscriptions has 
 gone on with almost unabated vigor. Until very 
 recently a strict line of demarcation was not made 
 by collectors between the pagan and the Chris- 
 tian. Previous to this century, however, the 
 former owe most to the zeal of Apians, Martin 
 Smetius, Scaliger, Muratori, Maffei, and many 
 others too numerous to mention, while the latter 
 owe a deep debt of gratitude to such men as Bosio, 
 Gruter, Sirmond, Doni, Cardinal Francesco Bar- 
 berini, Suaresius, Gori, Zaccaria, Marini, and Mai, 
 and to the different custodi of the catacombs in 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 In the first half of this century Marini, Mai, 
 and Borghesi sustained the honor of the Italian 
 name in the science of epigraphy, but their light 
 pales before that of De Rossi, in whom occasion, 
 genius, industry, and vocation conspired to pro- 
 duce the greatest epigraphist of all time, though 
 
382 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 he would himself be the last to deny his debt to 
 the great workers who preceded him, and of 
 whose printed and unprinted collections he made 
 such constant use. It is totally foreign to our 
 purpose to present here the results of his labors 
 as an epigraphist; let it suffice that we give a 
 brief account of the two great works in which can 
 most easily be seen specimens of his peculiar tal- 
 ent and monuments of his industry, the Corpus 
 Inscriptionum Latinarum and the Inscriptiones 
 Christiance. The former work was often begun in 
 previous centuries, but as often abandoned. In 
 time the French Academy put its hand to the 
 work of collecting all the Latin inscriptions of 
 antiquity, but owing to untoward circumstances 
 laid it aside. Finally the Royal Academy of 
 Berlin took up the difficult task, and has carried 
 it on well-nigh to completion.^ Early in the fifties 
 it made a formal application to De Rossi for aid 
 in the work, and with the permission and en- 
 couragement of the Vatican authorities, he con- 
 sented. Together with Henzen he edited the 
 sixth volume of the Corpus, containing the pagan 
 or non-Christian inscriptions of Rome and Latium, 
 
 ^ Corpus InscripHonum Latinarum, consilio et auctoritate 
 Academiae Litter arum regice Borussicae editum, Berolinii, in 
 folio, vol. i.-xv., 1863-1885; vol. i. of Second Edition, 1893. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 383 
 
 and personally made many learned contributions 
 to the entire work. His knowledge of the manu- 
 script collections of inscriptions was of the greatest 
 service at all times, as well as his free access to 
 the Vatican archives, his familiarity with the 
 topography of Rome and the suburbs, and his 
 fine scent in reconetructing, which was the real 
 secret of his genius. 
 
 It is not enough to know where the old inscrip- 
 tions are, in what galleries, museums, archives, 
 books, and manuscripts the originals, whole or 
 fragmentary, and their copies are to be found. 
 Nor is it enough to read the language of the mar- 
 bles and the bronzes with ease and intelligence. 
 For a great epigraphist it requires something 
 more. Much of the material has come down to 
 us in a very imperfect shape, broken, disjointed, 
 scattered, like the shreds of a letter thrown to the 
 winds. Then there are the forgeries and the in- 
 terpolations or mutilations to guard against, and 
 the transcription errors of ancient copyists to cor- 
 rect. There are imperfect lines to piece out at 
 the beginning or the end, and words to supply in 
 the context, all of which must be done within cer- 
 tain narrow limits of space or grammar. There 
 are the frequent abbreviations, never quite the 
 same, even in epochs that follow closely upon one 
 
384 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 another. The magistracy, the law formulas, the 
 military service, the priesthoods, and the sepul- 
 chral system have each their peculiar sigla or 
 literae singulares, by which commonly recurring 
 notions are most easily expressed. And when 
 all this is mastered, when the text is finally re- 
 stored, and we can read at last what men once 
 found worthy to say of themselves and their deeds, 
 only a small part of the task is accomplished. 
 There must come a teacher who shall interpret 
 all this, and drawing upon an almost limitless 
 treasure of philological, literary, historical, and ar- 
 tistic lore, cause the cold marble and the hard 
 bronze to speak, and give up the secrets of the 
 men who erected them. The epigraphist must 
 be archaeologist at once- and antiquarian, lawyer, 
 and philosopher, and be equally at home in the 
 palace and the forum, among the soldiery and 
 the priests, as in the wine-shops of the Suburra 
 and among the motley crowd that surges along 
 the wharves of Tiber. No detail of ancient life, 
 public or private, is useless to him, and out of his 
 enormous collection of facts and observations and 
 readings he is forever drawing the items needed 
 to strengthen a hypothesis or to weld together 
 some long chain of reasoning. 
 It was precisely here that the wide classical 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 385 
 
 reading of De Rossi, his fine memory and his sys- 
 tematic arrangement of notes, came to his aid, 
 and enabled him to illustrate his epigraphic texts 
 with a truly marvellous wealth of apposite cita- 
 tions, out of which, again, he knew how to draw 
 the most striking lights upon the question at is- 
 sue. His profound knowledge of the patristic 
 texts was also of great help to him, since much of 
 the old classic life and thought is imbedded in 
 them. But his superiority to most others lay 
 in two things: the application of the geographical 
 method to the study of the inscriptions, and the 
 skill with which he used every contemporary doc- 
 ument of any nature whatsoever when engaged 
 on a text. Quite early in the Renaissance the 
 wise idea had made its way that the inscriptions 
 ought to be arranged in geographical families; 
 i.e., that they ought to be restored as much as 
 possible to those conditions of time and space in 
 which they arose, so as to enable us to hear their 
 natural interpreters — the contemporary and local 
 history, language, and manners — and to recon- 
 struct the actual surroundings of these dumb wit- 
 nesses of antiquity, that have, indeed, a voice, 
 but for which an artificial throat and an artificial 
 atmosphere must be prepared ere we can hear its 
 tones. As early as 1842 De Rossi had proposed 
 
386 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 a return to this system in almost the first work 
 of his juvenile pen, and he lived to see it trium- 
 phant in one of the noblest works that have issued 
 from the brain of man, and which includes over 
 one hundred and fifty thousand inscriptions, il- 
 lustrating, with rarest accuracy, the history of 
 Rome from the earliest days when the treaty with 
 Gabii was painted on shields of bull's hide, down 
 to the hour when the kingly Goth sat as master 
 on the Capitol and bade his brother barbarians 
 spare the records of their fallen ruler. ^ 
 
 One turns with pleasure to the Inscriptiones 
 Christiance, in which the second of De Rossi's 
 great epigraphical merits is best illustrated. After 
 all, the classical world is fairly well known and 
 much of its literature has reached us. Its monu- 
 ments are widely scattered and tell their own 
 story very often. Occasionally entire sections 
 come to the surface, as in Algiers and in Rome 
 itself. Finally, in the popular memory there 
 lives no small share of intelligence of the spirit 
 and the deeds of ancient Rome and her subject 
 world. How different is it with the history of 
 Christianity within the same limits of time! In 
 iterature we can boast only of a collection of frag- 
 
 ^ J. P. Waltzing : Le recueil general des inscriptions latines, 
 et Vepigraphie latine depuis cinquante ans. Louvain, 1892. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 387 
 
 ments, precious beyond imagination, but which 
 are only a tithe of what once was, and are oftener 
 the voice of defence and apology than of calm, 
 full exposition of belief. Of monuments, until 
 De Rossi arose, there was the greatest dearth, and 
 among Christians the continuity of race and cul- 
 ture and habitat has been so often broken that 
 outside of the Church herself we cannot look for 
 any vivid consciousness of the remote past. 
 Over the history of the early Church there lies a 
 deep twilight, out of which there loom, vague and 
 indistinct, a few figures and situations. The 
 want of an honest, synthetic view of those primi- 
 tive days was not felt while the Christian unity 
 was unbroken, but in the last three centuries no 
 lost art has been more keenly deplored than the 
 knowledge of the life and manners of the early 
 Christian world. The value of the inscriptions 
 was always recognized. They were, in fact, one 
 of the earhest forms of Christian hterary effort, 
 and the titulus put up to St. James of Jerusalem, 
 and the inscribed group of the Hamorrhoissa, at 
 Paneas, have a claim on our veneration only less 
 than that due to the earliest literary remains of 
 the post-apostolic age.^ 
 
 1 Cf. Piper: Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie. Gotha, 
 1867. 
 
388 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 There seem to have been collections of Chris- 
 tian inscriptions and epigrams before the peace 
 of the Church, and the fact is quite certain for 
 the fourth and fifth centuries. The pious trav- 
 ellers of the Carolingian age preserved much of the 
 material of these old collections, and for a long 
 time their parchments, together with the writings 
 of men like Venantius Fortunatus, Isidore of Se- 
 ville, Alcuin, and others like Hibernicus Exul, 
 Sedulius Scotus, and the monks of Bobbio, were 
 the only literary sources whence a knowledge of 
 Christian inscriptions could be got. There were 
 the churches, it is true, and the sepulchres of 
 martyrs and confessors and holy bishops and 
 popes; there was also a multitude of inscribed 
 objects over the whole Christian world, but who 
 could visit them all? Outside of a few in the Liber 
 Pontificalis of Rome and a larger number in its 
 namesake of Ravenna, we know of no attempt 
 to collect the epitaphs of even a series of bishops. 
 In the later Middle Ages the collecting of Chris- 
 tian inscriptions and epitaphs was almost utterly 
 neglected. Here and there in the annals or 
 chronicles of the time occasional reference is made 
 to inscriptions or epitaphs, but on the whole the 
 science was utterly neglected, though the use of 
 inscriptions was by no means diminished. Not 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 389 
 
 all the chiefs of the Italian Renaissance were 
 pagan-minded. From its opening some atten- 
 tion was paid to the collecting and commenting 
 of the ancient Christian inscriptions that fell well 
 within the limits of the classic age. Not to speak 
 of earlier attempts, we have large and valuable col- 
 lections made at the end of the fifteenth century 
 by Ciriaco di Ancona and Petrus Sabinus. Among 
 the great names of the counter-reformation, that 
 of Antonio Bosio must always be held in honor, not 
 alone for his rediscovery of a world of ancient 
 theological evidence, but for his great zeal in 
 copying and collecting all the old Christian inscrip- 
 tions that he came across. Others followed him, 
 like Doni, Gori, Muratori, Maffei, and Marini, 
 gathering mostly the inscriptions to be found 
 above ground, only rarely adding from the vast 
 stock of those that lay mouldering beneath their 
 feet. It was among these men that appeared the 
 idea of a Corpus of Christian inscriptions which 
 should illustrate the ancient Christian life and 
 serve as a weapon of polemic and apologetic war- 
 fare. Often planned and begun, it was aban- 
 doned as often as the similar enterprise in the 
 province of heathen inscriptions, until the proper 
 man came in the person of De Rossi. 
 The finest epigraphical training on Roman soil, 
 
390 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 an accurate knowledge of Roman topography 
 and of the contents of every Roman gallery and 
 collection, public or private, a consuming passion 
 to piece together the splendid mosaic of the old 
 Christian life, intelligent piety toward the very 
 dust of antiquity, a patient, orderly, persevering 
 mind, a vocation cherished by his earliest sur- 
 roundings, and a special gift of divination, or 
 moments of lightning-like introspection, in which 
 the disjecta membra that lay before him took shape 
 beneath his prophetic glance ere they vanished 
 again into quasi-nothingness, like the old lucumo- 
 nes beneath the glaring eye of an Etruscan sim, — 
 such were some of the qualities that this young 
 man of twenty brought to the herculean task that 
 he planned, in part executed, and for the com- 
 pletion of which he has left the materials num- 
 bered and ordered like the great blocks of some 
 unfinished Roman palace that encumber even 
 yet the old marble Emporium by the Tiber. 
 
 In the science of Christian inscriptions De 
 Rossi towers above all his predecessors by the 
 knowledge of the sources and the superiority of 
 his system. Under his direction the Roman 
 catacombs have yielded thousands of inscriptions, 
 whole or fragmentary, and the sum of Christian 
 epigraphic material has been more than doubled. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 391 
 
 He has himself visited innumerable sites above 
 and below ground, and carefully copied the 
 epitaphs, epigrams, dedications, and the like that 
 are found there. The manuscript collections of 
 Christian inscriptions have been catalogued by 
 his skilful hand, numbered according to age and 
 value, their additions to the body of inscriptions 
 noted, and a great deal of valuable incidental in- 
 formation extracted from them for the formation 
 and guidance of the Christian epigraphist. At 
 the same time he was distinguished for his knowl- 
 edge of all books, museums, correspondence, and 
 men who could in any way throw light on his 
 science. In other words, he had completely 
 mastered the heuretic of Christian inscriptions; 
 that is, he had surveyed the world of letters, lo- 
 cated the whereabouts of his material, and mapped 
 out the roads and the paths that led to them. 
 Precisely here is the other great merit of De 
 Rossi as an epigraphist. He was a man of 
 method. Not only did he make the most arduous 
 preparations, remote and proximate, for his work, 
 but he invented new principles of procedure, or 
 rehabihtated old ones fallen into desuetude. 
 When we watch the splendid — almost infallible — 
 skill with which he conducts his epigraphic dem- 
 onstrations, the studied moderation of every 
 
392 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 claim until conviction bursts spontaneous from 
 the artful page, the marshalling of every available 
 help, and the broad, serried march of all that sum 
 of fact, suggestion, comparison and parallel — a 
 sentiment of wonder clamors for expression, and 
 we cry out, with the poet, that the art is even 
 greater than the artist. 
 
 If chronology and geography are the eyes of 
 history, they are especially serviceable in the 
 science of inscriptions, which are necessarily la- 
 conic, compressed, and general in their speech. 
 In the classic inscriptions the data of time and 
 place are very often given, or because of their 
 great numbers and artistic perfection can be cal- 
 culated from extrinsic and intrinsic comparison. 
 But such means of control are too often wanting 
 in the case of Christian inscriptions, especially 
 of the earlier times. They are rude in execution, 
 long since torn from their surroundings, or 
 scattered amid wreckage of every kind in the 
 catacombs. They are comparatively few, and 
 rarely bear any chronological ear-marks. Many 
 a primitive Christian believed that this world in 
 maligno positus was to be of short duration, and 
 that human existence was, at best, but the mora 
 finis, a beneficent staying of the divine hand up- 
 lifted to strike an unholy mass of corruption. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 393 
 
 The enthusiasm of Jesus Christ burned fresh, 
 vivid, and sweet in their breasts, and they longed 
 to be joined with Him whose remembrance alone 
 made tolerable their life amid the seething sin and 
 shame of heathen society. Hence they paid little 
 attention to the aids of human chronology. With 
 their eyes fixed on the celestial bourne, they 
 counted the beginning of life to be the day of re- 
 lease from the prison of the flesh, and there is an 
 echo of that other-world enthusiasm in many 
 ancient acts of the martyrs that begin with Reg- 
 nante Domino nostro Jesu Christo, as though they 
 despised any other pitiful human measure of time. 
 ^'Qui saeculo nuntiasse se meminit," says St. Cyp- 
 rian, ^'nullum sceculi diem novit, nee tempora ter- 
 rena jam computat qui aeternitatem de Deo sperat." 
 On the other hand, the theological and social value 
 of the Christian inscriptions depends largely on 
 their age, and we are most anxious to know pre- 
 cisely those little items of years, months, and days 
 to which the primitive Christian was so indifferent. 
 Much has been done before De Rossi by earlier 
 Christian epigraphists, but he sununed up and 
 greatly increased their results in the first volume 
 of the Inscriptiones Christianae.^ There he sub- 
 
 ^ Inscriptiones Christiance Urhis Romce sepfimo saeculo an- 
 iiguiores. Romse, in folio, vol. i., 1861; vol. ii., pars i.,1888. 
 
394 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 mitted nearly fourteen hundred inscriptions, that 
 bear some kind of a date {nota temporis), to a 
 rigorous external and internal examination, from 
 the famous Latin tablet of a.d. 71 down to epi- 
 taphs and epigrams of the end of the sixth cen- 
 tury, the terminus ad quern of his great collection. 
 In every case he develops the grave arguments 
 that lead him to attribute a Christian character 
 to the inscription before him and to assign it to 
 a fixed year of the Christian era. In his restitu- 
 tion of the text and in his rich commentary he 
 displays on every page the qualities that ever dis- 
 tinguished him as an epigraphical writer — patient 
 compilation of all the facts, orderly distribution 
 according to immediate importance, vast read- 
 ing, out of which he drew the newest and aptest 
 parallels and luminous comparisons — those peculiar 
 arguments which are to archaeology what the 
 syllogism is to metaphysics. So skilful is the 
 demonstration, so perfect the distribution of lights 
 and shades, so modest the claims for his victori- 
 ous proofs, that one is tempted to fear that he 
 is being influenced by a kind of personal magic 
 on the part of his author and that he reads 
 through a charmed haze in which objects have no 
 longer their right proportion or color. Only the 
 amount of the new knowledge, the exactness of 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 395 
 
 the references, the deference paid the writer by 
 great masters of his own art, the natural persua- 
 sion of his argument, even his translucent Latin 
 style, that reflects the noble candor of his soul, 
 dispel the impression that such superiority not 
 unnaturally awakens. The first volume of this 
 monumental work contains, besides a long preface 
 on the history of the collections of Christian in- 
 scriptions, an exhaustive treatise on the chron- 
 ological data furnished by the inscribed monu- 
 ments of Christianity, the eras, the jasti consulares, 
 the cycles, solar and lunar, and the indictions. In 
 this masterpiece of difficult erudition he brings 
 together, from all sides, whatever may illustrate 
 the use of these data, not only among Christians 
 but in the surrounding society, and leaves a se- 
 cure foundation for the labors of all future scholars 
 among these disjecta membra of Christian an- 
 tiquity. The plan of this great work includes 
 all the inscriptions of the Orhis Christianus within 
 the first six centuries of our era, taking them as 
 the period when Christianity was conterminous with 
 Gra3CO-Roman culture. In the execution of this 
 plan three dominant ideas are constantly kept in 
 view, viz., the restoration of the inscriptions to 
 their original sites, their chronological sequence, 
 and the apologetic, theological, or antiquarian use 
 
396 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 to be derived from them. To satisfy at once the 
 demands of his science and the natural curiosity 
 of the Christian world, he divides his collection 
 into six great parts: I. The inscriptions bearing 
 a certain date (this is the only part finished, and 
 contains some 1374 inscriptions, besides frag- 
 ments and addenda). II. The public historical 
 and sacred inscriptions and all others which 
 throw light on the doctrine, manner, etc., of the 
 early Christians. III. The inscriptions arranged 
 in geographical and topographical order, by na- 
 tions, provinces, cities, and cemeteries. IV. 
 Those whose original location is unknown. V. 
 The forged inscriptions and those whose early 
 Christian origin is doubtful. VI. The contem- 
 porary inscriptions of the Jews. No doubt much 
 of this vast plan-work was finished by the maes- 
 tro ere he died, but as yet only two huge folios, 
 the first volume and the first part of the second, 
 have appeared. We have already outlined the 
 contents of the initial volume. The published 
 part of the second is entirely taken up with an 
 account of the mediaeval manuscript collections 
 of Christian inscriptions. Some of these MSS. 
 date from the Carolingian era, and are sources 
 of incalculable value, not only for the epitaphs, 
 honorary inscriptions, and other epigrammata they 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 397 
 
 contain, but also for their topographical references 
 to the ancient basilicas, cemeteries, and localities 
 of general interest to Christian pilgrims at Rome. 
 They complete or explain the information already 
 gained from the catacombs or the lapidary gal- 
 leries, and are themselves illustrated, and per- 
 fected by the metrical anthplogies of the same 
 epoch. .■^^'^"' 
 
 Our Irish f orefalt^^-s , were- foremost in the 
 mania for these written remnants of antiquity, 
 and no small part of ancient Christian inscrip- 
 tional verse is found imbedded in the metrical 
 epigrams of Hibernicus Exul, Sedulius Scotus, 
 the seventh-century monks of Bobbio and others. 
 In this volume we find printed or reprinted a great 
 Corpus of old manuscript codices from the eighth 
 to the sixteenth centuries, in which is preserved 
 much epigraphic material otherwise unknown or 
 lost, and which represent the mediseval tradition 
 of this science. These ancient manuscripts needed, 
 indeed, to be reproduced at the head of the second 
 part of the Inscriptiones Chrisiiance, that the 
 world might see what was already known of 
 early Christian inscriptions ere the evidences of 
 the stones themselves were heard. It was all the 
 more necessary, as too often the lapidary remains 
 are mutilated and can only be pieced out by 
 
398 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 
 
 comparison with their ancient copies yet extant 
 in the manuscripts, or with similar materials 
 scattered through the Carolingian anthologies and 
 itineraries. Only the epigraphists and the inti- 
 mate friends of De Rossi know what labors this 
 second volume exacted — how many long journeys, 
 vigils, protracted studies, and profound researches 
 it cost to erect this vestibule of the temple of 
 Christian epigraphy, truly grandiose and faultless 
 in its outline. By far the greater part of the ma- 
 terial contained in the ancient collections is met- 
 rical; hence the utility of the long preface on 
 Christian metrical inscriptions which opens the 
 second volume, and makes a most scholarly page 
 on the origin of Christian poetry. For their 
 models the primitive Christians had the great 
 schoolbook of the Empire — the divine Vergil; and 
 more than one fine cento, thoroughly Christian in 
 sentiment, was made up of odds and ends of the 
 Mantuan. Not all the Christians were satisfied 
 with such unadorned expressions of emotion as 
 were conveyed by the soror carissima, fiUa dulcis- 
 sima, vivas in Deo, etc. Some ambitioned a more 
 resounding phrase, and borrowed with national 
 piety the grave religious lines of their own pure 
 poet, who was able, even after another thousand 
 years, to furnish thoughts and style to a Dante. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 399 
 
 That the Greek Christians showed metrical skill 
 in their inscriptions is proven by several examples, 
 notably by the epitaphs of Alexander Antonii, of 
 Pectorius of Autim, and by the now famous Vati- 
 can epitaph of Abercius of Hieropolis, in Phrygia. 
 The latter memorial brings us back to the reign of 
 Marcus Aurelius, and shows us a section of the 
 Roman world in the second century, where the 
 Christians could fearlessly put up their funeral 
 tablets by the roadside in a populous province and 
 invoke the protection of Roman law for their im- 
 munity. The Christian use of titidi rhythmici at 
 Rome and in Roman Africa during the third cen- 
 tury is proven from texts pilfered out of Com- 
 modian and from the epitaph of the virgin Severa 
 set up at Rome by her deacon-brother Severus. 
 After the peace of the Church the art of the epi- 
 graphist was in honor, and the rude scratchings 
 of the fossor gave way to the elegant lettering of 
 a Furius Dionysius Philocalus, while the brief, 
 endearing terms and the touching hatchments 
 of the primitive loculi were cast into the shade 
 by the sculptured sarcophagus and the florid 
 piety of its engraved verse. The flowers of 
 Christian poesy were now cultivated by men like 
 St. Damasus, St. Paulinus of Nola, St. Gregory 
 Nazianzen, and Prudentius, and their sweet petals 
 
400 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 scattered over the graves of the dead. The cruel 
 discipline of persecution was at last relaxed and 
 somewhat of earthly attachment makes itself visi- 
 ble in the gentle, loquacious melancholy of these 
 pious epitaphs. Soon they became the rage, and 
 Sidonius ApoUinaris speaks of the naeniae epitaphis- 
 iarum as though the art was being overdone. In 
 spite of the decay of letters it lived on, and the 
 literary remains of men Uke Venantius Fortunatus, 
 Ennodius, and Arator explain the elegance of such 
 sixth-century epitaphs as those of Accia Maria 
 Tulliana, and of the Anicii in old St. Peter's. 
 But the Time of Ignorance came for the penin- 
 sula in the seventh and eighth centuries, when 
 the skill of making ordinary Latin verse was lost, 
 and even the Roman Church was satisfied with a 
 rude and heavy prose, while the care of the old 
 metrical traditions was abandoned to the bar- 
 barians of Spain, Ireland, England, and Gaul. 
 Isidore and Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin, Dungal, 
 Shiel of Liege and the men of Bobbio, Hrabanus 
 and Florus and the Goth Theodulf, enshrine in 
 their writings a mass of ancient Christian epi- 
 taphs, whole and fragmentary, sacred and mixed. 
 So constant, indeed, is their use of earlier metrical 
 materials out of epigrams, epitaphs, and the like, 
 that it is not easy to say when their verse is na- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 401 
 
 tive inspiration and when it is borrowed from 
 some metrical collection of the fifth century, or 
 some scrapbook of a pilgrim just returned from 
 his round of the holy places of Italy and the 
 Orient. 
 
 The name of De Rossi is inseparably connected 
 with the Roman catacombs. For fifty years he 
 labored in their depths with holy enthusiasm and 
 rare intelligence. Under his directions the ex- 
 cavations took on a new character, and their re- 
 sults were shortly such as almost to justify the 
 assertion that a new science had been created, 
 and to rehabilitate a long-neglected branch of 
 Christian learning. He was not the discoverer 
 of the underground cemeteries of Rome: long 
 before him, since the close of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, the location of many was known to the 
 Roman authorities and the learned world. Still 
 earher, the long neglect of these venerable burial- 
 places had been broken in the fourteenth century 
 by odd visits of pious friars, and in the fifteenth 
 by the surreptitious meetings of members of the 
 semi-pagan Roman Academy. Early in the seven- 
 teenth century they found a choice spirit capa- 
 ble of illustrating their mysteries and shrewd 
 enough to seize the proper principles for the study 
 of this great complexus of graveyards, in which 
 
402 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 time and man had worked almost irreparable 
 havoc. This was Antonio Bosio, a Roman priest 
 of Maltese birth, who devoted thirty-six years of 
 his life to reconnoitring the location, number, 
 and monuments of the catacombs. His great 
 work, Roma Sotterranea, was not published till 
 after his death, in 1632-34, and though it created 
 much talk in the world of antiquarians and theolo- 
 gians, there arose no second Bosio to complete 
 the task until the advent of De Rossi. In the 
 meantime relic-hunters and curio-seekers travelled 
 the huge network in every direction, without in- 
 telligence or sympathy for the architecture and 
 the paintings, and did imspeakable harm by 
 their reckless excavations and by their neglect to 
 chronicle intelligently what they met with. The 
 catacombs were treated as a huge quarry. Price- 
 less inscriptions were taken away in cartloads 
 and sawed into slabs to pave the Roman churches 
 or inserted in the walls of private houses. Even 
 as late as the early part of this century men like 
 Marini could see epitaphs taken from the most 
 celebrated crypts without asking the excavators 
 for any further details. The corridors, or am^ 
 hulacra, were broken down and clogged up; the 
 lucernaria, or shafts for light and air, were 
 choked from above with refuse; rich material 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 403 
 
 treasures disappeared without leaving any trace; 
 the frescoes were detached from their original 
 site and perished in the transit to the upper air. 
 Nearly every indignity was offered to these holy 
 places in which a Damasus feared to repose even 
 in death. The custodi of the last two centuries, 
 and the learned Romans of the early part of this, 
 were active and practical men who spent much 
 time in the old cemeteries, but were chiefly taken 
 up with the research of material for polemics or 
 apologetics or for minor objects of antiquarian 
 interest. Even Padre Marchi, the guide and pre- 
 ceptor of De Rossi, was slow to adopt the new 
 methods which this young man of genius urged 
 on him from 1842. 
 
 The method of De Rossi was so simple that we 
 wonder to-day how it did not suggest itself at a 
 much earher date. It consists in two things — 
 topography and chronology. It was his habit to 
 locate first, with certain helps at his command, 
 the principal cemeteries usually situate along the 
 old Roman roads leading out from the city like 
 the spokes of a wheel. When he had done this, 
 he looked up their history in the books, manu- 
 scripts, and traditions at his command. Know- 
 ing their site and their history, his next object 
 was to find the historical crypts or the great 
 
404 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 
 
 chambers in which the most illustrious martyrs 
 were buried and venerated. There was a double 
 reason for this, since, on the one hand, they were 
 the keys to each necropolis, the subterranean fora 
 to and from which all corridors finally led; on 
 the other, they were most likely to contain en- 
 tire the booty of epitaphs, paintings, sculptures, 
 etc., for which he was likewise searching. It was 
 a kind of mimic warfare, in which he directed his 
 first efforts to the capture of the enemy^s citadel 
 and chief treasures. Once in a historical crypt, he 
 made the most perfect inventory of its structure, 
 the objects found, and of the process by which 
 he got there. Nothing escaped his practised eye, 
 which read books written largely on walls and 
 floors, where the ordinary observer stumbled or 
 tripped at every step. His inventory made, he 
 turned to a series of valuable documents come 
 down from the Middle Ages, and found, invari- 
 ably, new light upon the fragments of Christian 
 antiquity that he had so patiently dug up out of 
 the bowels of the earth. Little by little he con- 
 nected the great crypts, drew up the plan of the 
 connecting corridors, located the staircases that 
 led from one floor of the cemetery to another, 
 fixed the limits of the original burying-place and 
 the successive additions and modifications, gained 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 405 
 
 the old and the new levels, determined the rela- 
 tive situation of the whole underground structure, 
 with the little churches or basilicas and sepulchres 
 constructed immediately above ground, and took 
 note of the geological formation.' It is easier 
 to imagine than to describe the patience, memory, 
 skill, erudition, and self-command needed to carry 
 on at once all these minor lines of one great plan. 
 Whatever may be the difficulties of excavation 
 in the open air, they are vastly increased when 
 the work is carried on beneath the surface, where 
 want of room, light, and fresh air are only the 
 least of the obstacles, and not to be compared 
 with the difficulty of control of workers and ob- 
 jects, the ease with which valuable indications 
 may be skipped, and the constant fear lest the 
 roofs sag, or sudden pits open up, or a ruined wall 
 shde across the toilsome path of the fossor. Only 
 half of his work was done when the topography 
 of a cemetery lay before his eyes pretty much as 
 it looked when the traveller from the Orontes met 
 the pilgrim from the Thames or the Liffey on the 
 marble st airways that led from the richly deco- 
 
 ^Michele de Rossi, the brother of the arch^ologist, deserves 
 most honorable mention whenever the l^^te^/^ ^^ 'n ^l^i 
 was for fifty years an invaluable helper to his brother m all 
 ILTngs pertLing to the geology, engineering, and architec- 
 ture of the catacombs. 
 
406 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 rated overground basilica to the chief crypts, 
 where lay the embalmed bodies of popes and 
 martyrs, shrouded in gold brocade, entombed in 
 marble sarcophagi, and surrounded by hundreds 
 of venerators, amid the blaze of candles and the 
 grave, sweet chants of the litanies. There was 
 an equally difficult task to perform in fixing the 
 respective dates to which all these things belonged. 
 Independently of theological interests, there was 
 a pressing scientific need that the chronology of 
 the architecture and the art of the catacombs 
 should be accurately determined. Before De 
 Rossi, Bosio had grasped the idea that a true 
 thread in this labyrinth was a correct notion of 
 its topography, and De Rossi acknowledges this 
 with that grateful delight which he always mani- 
 fests when he can do honor to Bosio's judgment. 
 But to De Rossi alone belongs the merit of fixing 
 a certain chronology for the internal evolution 
 of the cemetery system of Christian Rome. The 
 principle of this chronology is set forth in the first 
 volume of the Inscriptiones ChristiancB, and con- 
 sists largely in the process de notis ad ignota. He 
 collected the epitaphs that bore a certain date, 
 and noted all their peculiarities. Hence he had 
 a starting-point for similar epitaphs undated, and 
 a first means of determining whether the crypt in 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 407 
 
 which they were found dated from the second or 
 the sixth century. The inscribed monuments 
 thus classified enabled him to fix approximately 
 the date of the paintings and sculptures on 
 which they are often found, and with which they 
 are often contemporary. The excavations and 
 constructions of the catacombs could also be 
 dated in the same way, since there are naturally 
 the closest relations of time between them and 
 the objects for which they were carried on. An- 
 other principle of his chronological method was 
 the restitution, as far as possible, to their original 
 sites, of all the ornaments and epitaphs that once 
 decorated them. This gave him a 'point d^appui 
 for the age of the corridor or crypt, surely as old 
 or older than the monimients found in it. In such 
 intricate and delicate processes the investigators 
 can neglect nothing found on the premises or ex- 
 tracted from a certain class of ancient authors 
 and traditions. Hence the extreme minuteness 
 of the chronological demonstrations of De Rossi. 
 At this remoteness from the early Christian world, 
 and at those depths in the earth, the student is 
 like the traveller lost in the primeval forest, to 
 whom every ray and sound and motion, however 
 faint, are welcome helps. Moreover, he felt that 
 he would never live to finish his great work, and 
 
408 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 he chose to leave the most elaborate examples 
 of his method for the instruction of his disciples 
 and as a fund of suggestions useful to future 
 archaeologists. Finally, he was an artist in anti- 
 quarian work, and he delighted in conquering the 
 difficulties of some obscure date, and in unravel- 
 ling with finished skill the last intricacies of a knot 
 that lay unopened for centuries. 
 
 One charm of De Rossi's writings on the old 
 Christian cemeteries is the skill with which he con- 
 ducts his investigation on two lines — one the descrip- 
 tion of the actual condition and the remaining 
 monuments of the cemeteries, and the other the use 
 of a number of old documents, out of which, as out 
 of a magician's hat, he seems to draw an infinity 
 of useful facts that corroborate or illustrate, or 
 fill up crevices or breaks, or serve as guides and 
 finger-posts or danger-signals — in a word, are a 
 kind of vade mecum, or familiar demon, which 
 help him out of every tangle. The tombs of the 
 martyrs, and especially the illustrious ones of 
 Rome, excited deep interest from the earliest days. 
 If the statement of the Liher Pontificalis — that 
 Anacletus built a memoria, or little chapel, over 
 the body of his predecessor, St. Peter — is not ab- 
 solutely reliable, no one can gainsay the second- 
 century Roman priest. Gains, when he shows 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF TEE CATACOMBS. 409 
 
 US the public sepulchres of St. Peter and St. 
 Paul, one on the Ostian Way and the other in 
 Vaticano. 
 
 We believe that there was a Christian cemetery in 
 the latter place from the very beginning, and that 
 a future time will show some illustrious Christian 
 dead gathered round Peter and Linus and Ana- 
 cletus under the bronze columns and the match- 
 less dome of the modern basilica. The Roman 
 Church had twenty-four or twenty-five under- 
 ground cemeteries at the end of the third century 
 — one for every ecclesiastical division or quasi- 
 parish — and no doubt there was a list of them, 
 their administration and expenses, as exact as 
 that kept fifty years earlier by St. Cornelius for 
 his priests, his poor, his widows and orphans. So 
 systematic and precise, so easily bureaucratic is 
 the Roman mind, that it is impossible to conceive 
 that church at any date without archives, cata- 
 logues, lists, and all the administrative parapher- 
 nalia of a governing body. The persecution of 
 Diocletian burst like a prairie-fire over the Roman 
 Church, and when she emerged, early in the 
 fourth century, there was scarcely a stick of wood 
 or a scrap of writing that remained. In the first 
 three centuries the longest pontifical vacancy was 
 about one year, during the persecution of Deciua. 
 
410 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 
 
 This time the See of Rome seems to have been 
 vacant for six years, nor do we find any traces of 
 that presbyteral government which took charge 
 of chm*ch affairs in the time of Decius. There 
 is, therefore, but the faintest hope that any new 
 documents will ever turn up to illustrate the pre- 
 Constantinian period of the ancient cemeteries of 
 Rome. Their place is taken necessarily by late 
 martyrologies, calendars, acts of the martyrs, 
 writings of Popes, historico-liturgical books of 
 the Roman Church, and by old topographies and 
 itineraries come down to us from the Carolingian 
 epoch. Among the old martyrologies the most 
 famous is that known as the Martyrology of St. 
 Jerome {Martyr ologium Hieronymianum) . In its 
 present shape it comes to us from Auxerre, in 
 France, where it underwent considerable remodel- 
 ling in the sixth century. But it is older than 
 that, and is surely an Italian compilation of the 
 fifth century, out of rare and reliable documents 
 furnished by the churches of Rome, Africa, Pales- 
 tine, Egypt, and the Orient. No mart5rrology 
 contains so many names and indications of saints 
 and martyrs of a very early period, and it is of 
 especial value for the study of the catacombs, 
 because it very frequently gives the roads and 
 the cemeteries where they were buried and ven- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 411 
 
 erated in the fifth century, while the cemeteries 
 were yet intact. By dint of transcription, how- 
 ever, and through the neglect or ignorance of 
 copyists, the text has become in many places hope- 
 lessly corrupt, and the restitution of its dates and 
 local and personal indications has been one of the 
 hardest crosses of ancient and modern church 
 archaeologists. Besides its very ancient notices of 
 the cemeteries, this martyrology is of great value 
 as embodying a catalogue of martyrs and basilicas 
 of Rome that surely goes back to the early part 
 of the fifth century, and perhaps a third-century 
 catalogue of the Roman Pontiffs.^ Several other 
 martyrologies of the eighth and ninth centuries 
 contain valuable references to the martyrs and the 
 cemeteries, especially that known as the Little 
 Roman martyrology, and which served as a basis 
 for the well-known compilation of Ado. 
 
 Next in importance comes an ancient Roman 
 Calendar^ published between the years 334-356, 
 written out and illustrated by a certain Furius 
 Dionysius Philocalus, who, doubtless, had no idea 
 that he would one day set wagging the tongues 
 
 ^ One of the last works of De Rossi was to prepare, in co- 
 operation with Duchesne, the text of this most tangled and 
 corrupted document for the latest volume of the Acta Sanc- 
 torum (1894). 
 
412 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 of two hemispheres. This calendar contains a hst 
 of the Popes, known formerly as the Bucherian 
 Catalogue, from the name of its first editor, and 
 the Liberian, from the Pope with whom it ends. 
 The whole book is now known as the "Chronog- 
 rapher of a.d. 354." Besides this ancient papal 
 catalogue, the book contains an official calendar, 
 civil and astronomical, lunar cycles, and a paschal 
 table calculated to 412, a list of the prefects of 
 Rome (254-354), the only continuous one known, 
 a chronicle of Roman history, the natalitia Ccesa- 
 rum, and other useful contents, which have caused 
 it to be dubbed the oldest Christian Almanac, It 
 contains numerous traces of having been drawn 
 up for the use of the Roman Church, and hence 
 the value of two of its documents for the ceme- 
 teries. They are, respectively, a list of the en- 
 tombments of Roman bishops from Lucius to Syl- 
 vester (253-335), with the place of their burial, 
 and a Depositio Martyrum, or list of the more 
 solemn fixed feasts of the Roman Church, with 
 indications of several famous martyrs and their 
 cemeteries. The importance of all this for the 
 original topography is too clear to need comment. 
 We will only add that closer examination of the 
 ecclesiastical documents of the Chronographer of 
 354 leaves us persuaded that they date from the 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 413 
 
 third century and represent the location of the 
 cemeteries at that time and the martyrs whose 
 cult was then most popular. 
 
 In the latter half of the fourth century Pope 
 St. Damasus (366-384) did much to beautify the 
 ancient Roman cemeteries and to decorate the 
 tombs of the most illustrious martyrs. As he pos- 
 sessed a fine poetic talent, he composed many 
 elegant inscriptions, which were engraved on 
 large marble slabs by his friend and admirer, 
 Furius Dionysius Philocalus, already known to 
 us as the calligrapher of the preceding document. 
 The lettering used by this remarkable man was 
 very ornamental, and as its exact like is not 
 found before or after, it has been styled the hie- 
 ratic writing of the catacombs. In time these in- 
 scriptions were copied by strangers and inserted 
 in various anthologies and travellers^ scrapbooks 
 or portfolios. Many of the original stones per- 
 ished from various causes, but were piously re- 
 newed in situ during the sixth century. To these 
 Damasan inscriptions De Rossi owes much, since 
 any fragment of them in a cemetery indicates an 
 historic crypt, and their copies in the manuscripts 
 are links for the construction of the chain of his- 
 tory that connects each great cemetery with the 
 modern investigator. 
 
414 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 To the above fontes, or sources of information 
 and control, De Rossi added the historico-liturgical 
 literature of the Roman Church from the fourth 
 to the eighth centuries — the period in which the 
 bodies of the most celebrated martyrs began to 
 be removed en masse from the catacombs, through 
 fear of the marauding Lombards. Such are the 
 Liber Pontificalis in its several recensions, the acts 
 of the martyrs, chiefly the Roman ones, the calen- 
 dars of the Roman Church constructed out of the 
 missals or sacramentaries, the antiphonaries, capit- 
 ularies of the gospels, and the like, in which not 
 infrequently there are hints and directions con- 
 cerning the cemeteries and the martyrs of renown 
 who were yet buried there. Finally, the maestro 
 extracted almost endless information from the 
 old Roman topographies of travellers and the 
 itineraries of pilgrims. Of the former we possess 
 yet two curious remnants, entitled Notitice re- 
 gionum urhis Romce and Curiosum urhis Romce, 
 as well as a list of oils collected at the shrines of 
 the Roman martyrs by an agent of Queen Theodo- 
 linda, and known as the Papyrus of Monza. An 
 old Syriac text of the sixth century and a note of 
 the innumercB cellulce martyrum consecratce in the 
 almanac of Polemius Silvius (499) complete the 
 list of strictly topographical authorities. Certain 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 415 
 
 itineraries of pilgrims from the seventh to the 
 ninth century are not less useful as indicating the 
 names and sites of the cemeteries, whether above 
 or below ground, and what bodies were yet en- 
 tombed therein, as well as the distances between 
 the cemeteries, and their position relative to the 
 great monuments of the city. 
 
 After the middle of the ninth century the his- 
 toric crypts had been emptied and the bodies 
 brought to Roman churches. Naturally, the 
 written references to the catacombs ceased with 
 the visitors, and a stray chapter in the Mirahilia 
 Urbis RomoB or an odd indication in the Lihri In- 
 dulgentiarum kept alive the memory of those holy 
 places which once attracted a world of pilgrims. 
 It is not easy to explain how one of the best of 
 the old itineraries, referable to the seventh cen- 
 tury, should have fallen into the hands of William 
 of Malmsbury, and been by him copied into his 
 account of the visit of the Crusaders to Rome imder 
 Urban II. Neither is it easy to explain why the 
 old itineraries of Einsiedeln, Wiirtzburg, and Salz- 
 burg make no mention of the tombs of such cele- 
 brated Roman martyrs as St. Clement the consul, 
 St. Justin the philosopher, Appollonius the Roman 
 senator, Moses, a famous priest of the time of St. 
 Cornelius, and many other celebrities of the early 
 
416 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 Roman Church; who were, in all likelihood, buried 
 in some of the many Roman cemeteries. What 
 the old pilgrims saw they related honestly and 
 faithfully; more they compiled from guides now 
 lost. They were not learned men, but pious 
 travellers, anxious to benefit their successors, 
 and unconsciously enabling us to form some 
 exact idea of the solemn cultus that they once 
 assisted at. 
 
 Such, in general, were the means which De 
 Rossi had at hand for the reconstruction of that 
 under-world of Christian Rome. But what pen 
 will relate his patient research in all these old 
 manuscripts and books? Or who can properly 
 estimate the fine ingenuity of cross-examination, 
 by which he laid bare the genesis of his authori- 
 ties? Scarcely a library in Europe did he leave 
 unvisited in his determination to bring together 
 every scrap of evidence as to the name, site, and 
 monuments of the Roman cemeteries, and his 
 very wanderings diffused a new enthusiasm in 
 every country, and brought new disciples yearly 
 to the modest home beneath the shadow of the 
 Capitol. It would take too long to enumerate 
 all the results of his excavations in the Roman 
 cemeteries. As far as published, they are to 
 be found in the three great folios of his Roma 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 417 
 
 Sotterranea ^ and in the Bulletino di Archeologia 
 Cristiana. The former includes only the results of 
 work done in St. Callixtus and the little network 
 of crypts and burial-places connected with it.^ 
 His intention was to take up all the cemeteries in 
 turn, and when death surprised him he was far 
 advanced with the pubhcation of his labors in St. 
 Domitilla. When the cemeteries had been exca- 
 vated and described, it would be time to think of 
 the great synthetic work that Settele and others 
 
 ^ La Roma Sotterranea Cristiana, descritta ed illustrata 
 dal cav. G. B. De Rossi, pubblicata per ordine dell a San- 
 tit^ di N. S. Pio IX. Roma: vol. i., 1864,; vol. ii., 1867 j 
 vol. iii., 1877. 
 
 2 The most famous of the discoveries in the cemetery of 
 Callixtus are, besides the identification of it, the crypt of Lu- 
 cina, the Papal crypt, with epitaphs and loculi of third-cen- 
 tury Popes, the crypt of St. Cecilia, the sepulchre of St. 
 Cornelius, the arenarium of St. Hippolytus, the epitaphs of 
 St. Eusebius and of Severus, and the cemeteries of St. Soteris 
 and St. Balbina, closely connected with that of Callixtus. I 
 forbear to speak here of the paintings and sculptures or of 
 the varium suppellectile, the lamps, medals, glasses, ivories, 
 and other sepulchral furniture of the Christians, in all of which 
 St. Callixtus is rich. The prefaces of the Roma Sotterranea 
 contain a complete history of the catacombs, their origin and 
 Christian character, their external vicissitudes, the order and 
 method of their construction, their decoration and use &a 
 places of worship and the gradual decline of their fame. The 
 results of the excavations, from an artistic and theological 
 view-point, are well summarized in a number of works, 
 notably in the Roma Sotterranea of Northcote and Brown- 
 low, and in the Ejyitaphs of the Catacombs, by the same 
 authors. 
 
418 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 sighed for; and which he himself looked forward 
 to in his dreams/ 
 
 III. 
 
 Though De Rossi did not live to finish his Roma 
 Sotterranea, he left abundant materials for that 
 purpose in his Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana, 
 a serial publication, which was like a continuous 
 appendix to the two great works we have hitherto 
 been describing. It consists of five series — from 
 
 i"It seems to me that the local and industrial labors of 
 aU Christian archaeologists will one day furnish the materials 
 for a gigantic work, more beautiful and useful than could 
 ever be hoped for in any minor synthesis of Christian antiq- 
 uities. I have in mind an Orbis Christianus, illustrated by 
 the monuments of the first six or seven centuries. Suarez 
 in the seventeenth, and Garampi in the eighteenth, sketched 
 a vast work, which should furnish us the series of the bishops 
 of every church of Christendom. I desire to see a great Chris- 
 tian geography, in which the origins of each church, the first 
 traces of the faith in each city and burgh, the proofs of its 
 development and full flowering in every province and nation 
 of the ancient world, shall be collected and disposed in geo- 
 graphical and historical order. That day the smallest shred 
 of an old epitaph, the least bit of an old sculpture, will be wit- 
 nesses of the highest importance as proving the presence of 
 Christians in such a place and such a century. The very 
 scarcity or even absence of these indications ought to nerve 
 us to fresh research on the lines of history and topography. 
 T hope the day will come when my Roma Sotterranea will be 
 but a part of an Orhe Cristiano Monumentale, for which both 
 I and other editors of the sacred monuments are but the pur- 
 veyors of material or builders of particular parts." — Roma 
 Sott., vol. i., p. 82. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 419 
 
 1863 to 1894 — and is ornamented by a multitude 
 of rare plates, maps, engravings, designs, and in- 
 scriptions that are found elsewhere with difficulty 
 or not at all. A complete copy of it is now a 
 rarity.^ For a time it was regularly translated into 
 French, first by Martigny and then by Duchesne. 
 It is a workshop or storehouse of materials, in 
 which De Rossi laid up countless essays, notes, 
 disquisitions on the written and unwritten monu- 
 ments and sources of Christian antiquity. There 
 is scarcely a Roman cemetery unmentioned here. 
 Those of Maximus, and Hermes, and Hippolytus, 
 of Generosa, Ciriacus, Peter, and Marcellinus, the 
 Ostriano, and the cemeteries of Callixtus, Balbina, 
 and Agnes have many pages devoted to them, 
 while much of his enormous and entirely novel 
 studies concerning the cemeteries of Domitilla 
 and Priscilla saw the light for the first time in its 
 columns. The overground cemeteries and the 
 suburban ones, as well as the various hypogei and 
 crypts, Jewish and heretical cemeteries, that in 
 the sacred grove of the Fratres Arvales, and even 
 Mithraic grottoes — all find welcome here, where 
 a great fund of observation and suggestion is 
 massed up against future need. Epitaphs and 
 
 ^Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana, del. Cav. Giovanni 
 Battista De Rossi, Roma, 1863-1894 (five series). 
 
420 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 inscriptions that in any way throw hght on his 
 cemetery work are copied here with extreme care, 
 and largely commented on, whether Roman or 
 foreign; early Christian or mediseval; classic, 
 Damasan, or graffiti; opisthograph, forged or de- 
 faced. 
 
 It is interesting to read on one page an essay 
 on the epigraphic traces of Christianity in Pompeii, 
 on another of the inscriptions that enable us to 
 trace back the Christian character of the Pom- 
 ponii Grsecini and the Acilii Glabriones to the first 
 preaching of the faith in Rome, on a third of the 
 invocations scratched by early Christian sailors 
 on a great rock in the port of Sira, and on a 
 fourth of the epitaphs of the African martyrs of 
 Milevi and Setif. The ancient Christian memo- 
 ries of SS. Peter and Paul, scattered through the 
 old Roman world, were always dear to De Rossi, 
 and he has noted a great number of them, from 
 the old bronze medallion of the founders of the 
 Roman Church down to the chair of St. Peter, 
 on which there is a long and elegant dissertation. 
 Famous sepulchres in the old Roman churches, 
 like those of Junius Bassus and St. Cyril, drew 
 from the maestro a fund of lore on the burial cus- 
 toms of the early Christians, while the origins of 
 the earliest Roman churches exercised always a 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 421 
 
 special charm on his antiquarian soul. He lingers 
 long and lovingly over the early history of St. 
 Clement and St. Maria in Trastevere, St. Prisca 
 and St. Pudentiana, the basilicas of Domitilla, 
 Petronilla, Nereus and Achilleus, Cosmas and 
 Damian, and the massive old fortress-church of 
 the Quattro Coronati. The fourth century was 
 in many ways a remarkable one in Eome. It 
 saw the gradual transfer of the balance of power, 
 both popular and legal, from pagan to Christian 
 hands — an act which left its impress on the public 
 monuments, like the Arch of Constantine, and 
 in the history of th'e great Roman families. In 
 the Bulletino we seem to watch this struggle as 
 though it took place to-day, and there are few 
 specimens of eloquence more simple and monu- 
 mental than the essays on the cessation of the 
 priesthood of the Fratres Arvales, and the Mithraic 
 cult. On the other hand, we are initiated into 
 some secrets of the wealth and prestige of the 
 Roman Church, when we see how the families 
 of the Aurelii, Flori, Uranii, Dasumii, Petronii, 
 Csecilii, and Secundi embraced the Christian doc- 
 trines and placed at the disposal of the Pope the 
 wealth inherited from long lines of pagan ancestors. 
 The theologian finds tidbits for himself in the 
 new and unique vindication of Liberius by means 
 
422 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 of an epitaph, in the many antiquarian references 
 to the cultus of the Blessed Virgin and to the in- 
 stitution of the consecrated virgins, in the sohd 
 inscriptional proofs of the invocation of the saints, 
 the veneration of the martyrs, whose autographs, 
 trials, life in the mines, and proselytizing zeal are 
 all exhibited to us as in a mirror. The lawyer 
 reads with avidity the notes on associations at 
 Rome, on the law covering burials, on the sepul- 
 chral jurisdiction of the pagan pontiffs, and of 
 the delimitation of public and private domain. 
 There is strong food for the patrologist in the 
 studies on the Philosophoumena, and for the his- 
 torian in the numerous notices of ancient MSS. 
 and the contents of old archives and libraries. 
 
 Here one may find, in distracting confusion, 
 accounts of old archaeologists and necrologies of 
 later ones, summaries of standard publications 
 on archseological subjects, and descriptions of 
 Christian museums, notably that of the Lateran. 
 The arts and the artists of the Middle Ages, es- 
 pecially those of Rome, their Uhlia pauperum and 
 their elegant mosaics, their tessellated pavements 
 and the slender grace of their campanili, tempted 
 him at times from the strict limits he had set him- 
 self; he even wandered into the preserves of the 
 Renaissance occasionally, and always returned with 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 423 
 
 fresh laurels, envied by the masters in those de- 
 partments. 
 
 De Rossi kept a watchful eye on the develop- 
 ment of Christian antiquarian science the world 
 over. Wherever the Christian faith had left its 
 imprint on a people, there must be more or less 
 evidence of its workings. Thus he followed every 
 find and excavation in Africa, Spain, Egypt, 
 Greece, Sicily, Germany, France, Italy, and the 
 Orient, ever eager to add to the treasures of Chris- 
 tian remains. In this manner the Bullettino has 
 become a great thesaurus for the study of early 
 Christian art, and there is many a ravishing page 
 in it on ancient crosses and medals, on rings and 
 spoons with Christian sigla; on wine- jars and oil- 
 bottles marked with the cross; on lamps and orna- 
 mental fishes; on Christian jewel-boxes and eucha- 
 ristic plates found as far away as Siberia; on the 
 trinkets of a Christian empress and the collar of 
 a Christian slave; on chalices and medal moulds, 
 combs, bells, fragments of a marble lattice to sep- 
 arate the sexes in church; leaden plaques with exor- 
 cisms, and a multitude of odds and ends of a 
 Christian life and culture that have utterly per- 
 ished save for these traces. Was ever more deli- 
 cate homage paid to a religion than this pious re- 
 tracting of the smallest vestiges of the past? 
 
424 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 "La pianta uomo cresce piu rohusta in Italia 
 che altrove net mondo/' says Alfieri; and De Rossi 
 is a proof of it. The same man who delved in 
 the bowels of the earth for the annals of the relig> 
 ious past was also one of the scribes of the Vati- 
 can library. Indeed, he was the dean of the lit- 
 tle body of those Vatican Scriptores, who recall 
 the monastico-literary brotherhoods of the Middle 
 Ages, and the notaries, who have ever surrounded 
 the Bishop of Rome from the very earliest days 
 of Christianity. The cataloguing of the Vatican 
 archives is an almost superhuman task; it has 
 been some centuries in execution. The last six 
 of the great folios, which contain the index as far 
 as it is completed, are the work of De Rossi's hand 
 and brain. I say brain, for it is no small task to 
 read over thousands of manuscripts, often in the 
 most wretched disorder, dispose them, describe 
 them in scientific language, assign them to their 
 proper epoch, note the peculiarities which dis- 
 tinguish them, and the like.* That is a work de- 
 
 ^Codicutn Laiinorum BibliotheccB VaticaiKs. Tomus x., 
 opera et studio J. B. De Rossi, scriptore linguae latinse, adju- 
 tore Odoardo Marehetti. 
 
 Pars i. (Nos. 7245-8066) ; Pars. ii. (8067-8471). Tomus xi. 
 (8472-9019), operam conferentibus Paolo Scapaticci scriptore 
 linguae Syriacae et Al. Vincenzi scriptore linguae Hebraicae. 
 Tomus xii. (9020-9445): Tomus xiii. (9446-9849). Indices 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 425 
 
 manding iron nerves and self-control no less than 
 the most varied acquisitions and a critical acu- 
 men of the rarest kind. A double series of the 
 Latin and Greek codices has already begun to issue 
 from the Vatican press. Of the former, the Pala- 
 tine (Heidelberg) manuscripts are the first to be 
 codified in printed form. The two Stevensons, 
 father and son, were charged with the work, and 
 De Rossi has contributed an admirable sketch of 
 the origin, evolution, and strange vicissitudes of the 
 Vatican Library and Archives from the dim da^vn- 
 ing of the power of the Bishop of Rome down to 
 the time of Innocent IIL* The rest of the history 
 of the library has been told by Father Ehrle in 
 his history of its transfer to and return from 
 Avignon, and the story of the Archives in the last 
 three centuries has been amply reviewed by M. 
 Gachard, a Belgian scholar. 
 
 tomonim xi., xii., xiii., codicum Latinorum Bibliothecae Vati- 
 caii£e cura et studio J. B. De Rossi, adjutore Josepho Gatti, 
 Pars I. Index auctorum, etc. Pars. II. Index rerum locorum, 
 hominum, etc. This huge manuscript inventory includes 
 the Latin manuscripts added to the archives since the begin- 
 ning of this century. Copied in splendid calligraphy, it serves 
 the^daily needs of the scholars who come to the archives from 
 all parts of the world. 
 
 ^De origine, historia, indicihus scrinii et bibliotheca: Sedis 
 AvostoUcce. Romfc, 1886. Published as preface (pp. i.-cxxxii.) 
 to the first volume of the printed Catalogue of Vatican Latm 
 MSS. {BMiotheca Apostolica Vatimna: Codices Lahni). 
 
426 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 Few things strike the visitor to Rome more 
 forcibly than the great and solemn mosaics of the 
 Byzantine type which are to be seen in the oldest 
 of the Roman churches. The art of mosaic is 
 a peculiarly Christian product, and, as such, could 
 not fail to engage the attention of such an 
 enthusiast for Christian art as De Rossi. He 
 began and , carried on almost to completion the 
 publication, in large folio volumes, of magnificent 
 chromo-lithographs of the Roman Church mosaics 
 prior to the fifteenth century. The collection 
 is entitled Musaici delle Chiese di Roma.^ Al- 
 ready twenty-three numbers of this unequalled 
 work have been issued. Their price, however, 
 puts them- beyond the reach of ordinary purses. 
 There is no keener delight for the student of the 
 past than to turn over these wonderful sheets 
 filled with figures of noble gravity. The enthroned 
 Christ, the adoring elders, apostles, and saints, 
 the allegorical lambs, running waters, palms, etc., 
 transport us almost to the gates of paradise. 
 We forget their imperfections for the sublime se- 
 renity and recollection of these strange figures that 
 haunt us forever from their station in the apses 
 
 ^ Musaici delle Chiese di Roma anteriori al secolo XV. Roma 
 Spithover, 1872-1892, Con testo bilingue, italiano-francese: 
 grandi tavole cromolitografiche (fasciculi i.-xxiii). 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 427 
 
 or on the facades, confessions; arches, and porches 
 of Rome's oldest basilicas and churches. 
 
 The minor writings of De Rossi cover a very- 
 wide field. His literary activity was of the most 
 miscellaneous kind, though its objects were by no 
 means heterogeneous; on the contrary, he always 
 kept well within the lines of classic and Christian 
 antiquarian culture.^ He was one of the mixed 
 commission which brought out the fine edition 
 of the works of Bartolomeo Borghesi, by order 
 of Napoleon III., and his intimate friendship with 
 the great numismatist enabled him to draw from 
 their correspondence much material for the eluci- 
 dation of the knotty questions concerning the 
 coins and inscriptions treated of in these splendid 
 folios.^ Valuable contributions from the pen of 
 De Rossi are scattered through dozens of Italian 
 and foreign learned periodicals and newspapers. 
 Gatti counted, in 1892, over three hundred such 
 essays, notes, reviews, and the like, from a few 
 pages in length to full book size. How much more 
 
 1 His disciple, Prof. Gatti, has drawn up a chronological 
 series of his minor writings, which is to be found in the Album 
 of 1892. A full catalogue of all the known works that issued 
 from the pen of De Rossi would fill over twenty-five closely 
 printed folio pages. 
 
 2 GEuvres Completes di Bartolomeo Borghesi, vols, i.-ix. Paris, 
 1862-1884. 
 
428 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 of the kind is scattered throughout his voluminous, 
 well-ordered correspondence of over ten thousand 
 numbers! He was inimitable in the art of pre- 
 senting the rarest information in terse, clear, and 
 limpid language, without seeking any other 
 pathos than what naturally arose from the state- 
 ment of unadorned truths, long denied, but at last 
 vindicated. He seemed to have reached at one 
 stride a certain perfection in these antiquarian 
 essays, as any one may see who will compare his 
 early treatises on The Christian Inscriptions of 
 Carthage and On the Christian Monuments that hear 
 the figure of a fish, with his later saggi on the can- 
 cellation from an inscription of the naine of a ves- 
 tal virgin become a Christian, on the find of Anglo- 
 Saxon coins in the Roman Forum, on the mag- 
 nificent Codex Amiatinus, or Bible of Ceolfrid, 
 and on the capsella argentea Africana, or silver 
 work-box found at Carthage and presented to Leo 
 XIII. by Cardinal Lavigerie. 
 
 He was not merely a writer, an excavator, a 
 hunter of Christian curios and oddments. The 
 organizing talent was strong in him. Insensibly 
 he drew men about him and assigned them tasks, 
 by the fulfilment of which they have grown great 
 in the world of letters. He thoroughly under- 
 stood the value of modern expositions and con- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 429 
 
 gresses, and the need of giving forth to the people 
 the safe conclusions of the scholar. At London 
 and Paris he exhibited plans of the catacombs, 
 and would have done the same at Chicago if age 
 and infirmities did not prevent him. The late 
 international scientific congresses of Catholics had 
 no better friend than this old archaeologist. He 
 understood well their spirit and their trend, and 
 contributed to those of Paris (1888, 1891) the 
 primeurs, or advance sheets, of his studies on the 
 Cemetery of Priscilla, long his favorite field of 
 labor, and in which the holy martyrs finally ob- 
 tained for him some of the sweetest delights that 
 a Christian scholar can hope to experience.^ It 
 is scarcely possible to read with dry eyes the nar- 
 rative of that long pursuit of fifty years crowned 
 with such final success. In his language, bristling 
 with technical terms, there is an intensity of de- 
 votion, an impatient directness of zeal, which be- 
 tray the Christian investigator as he tears off the 
 heart of his mystery the last thin shroudings, and 
 knows now what hitherto he firmly believed. There 
 are few higher joys— certainly none more exquisite. 
 The strained relations between the Vatican and 
 the new governors of Italy gave this quiet scholar 
 
 ^ These studies are found in the Comjptes rendus of the con- 
 gresses, and in substance in the Bulletiino. 
 
430 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 more than one occasion to do good in a lasting 
 though unostentatious way. Of late years an- 
 cient Christian monuments at Rome and elsewhere 
 in Italy have been in great danger of destruction 
 or defacement from the ignorance or ill-will of 
 the actual authorities. The world-wide fame of 
 De Rossi enabled him to interfere on several occa- 
 sions, and with success, as in the case of the 
 Churches of the Quattro Coronati at Rome and of 
 St. Severano at Naples. It is mainly to his labor 
 and skill that we owe the Christian Museum of 
 the Lateran, one of the most fascinating collec- 
 tions in Europe. The idea, it is true, cropped 
 out frequently during the last century, and vari- 
 ous attempts were made to make the Vatican 
 the centre for all such monuments. But under 
 Gregory XVI., and later under Pius IX., the 
 Lateran palace was set aside for this grand 
 enterprise, which was set in motion by Padre 
 Marchi, and has since been conducted by his more 
 illustrious disciple. In this great multitude of 
 ancient Christian objects, nothing is more strik- 
 ing or more valuable than the long lines of Chris- 
 tian epitaphs and inscriptions, arranged in chron- 
 ological and logical order, and illustrating, with 
 undeniable veracity, the beliefs of the primitive 
 Roman Christians, their disciphne, rites, manners, 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 431 
 
 and habits of life. In 1877 there were known 
 over 15,000 such monumenta litterata, whole or 
 broken, and De Rossi then asserted, in a public 
 discourse, that their number grew at the rate of 
 five hundred a year/ 
 
 De Rossi was never a professor, but one will 
 look in vain for a nearer approach in our day to 
 the old Hellenic teachers or the great scholastics 
 of the Middle Ages, who lived in the tenderest 
 intimacy with their pupils. His real chair was in 
 the depths of the catacombs or in the Lateran gal- 
 leries, where he practised his ingenious p.aievriKr}^ 
 like Socrates on the banks of the Ilissos or in the 
 streets of Athens, and forced the choicest minds 
 to disengage for themselves the true spiritual 
 realities that lay wrapped up with the fragments 
 of epitaphs and the smoke-stained frescoes of those 
 mysterious cities of the dead. He was always 
 surrounded by a little cosmopolitan circle of men, 
 drawn to Rome by the fame of the great scholar. 
 He met them off-hand in the streets, at home, on 
 his walks, in the catacombs, at the Lateran or at 
 St. Peter's. If teaching be the development of the 
 human faculties through the effusion of acquired 
 information, and the best method and incitement 
 be the simple exhibiti on of the professor's own 
 » n Miiseo Epigrafico Cristiano Pio-Lateranense. Roma, 1877. 
 
432 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 way of gaining knowledge, then De Rossi was one 
 of the greatest teachers of any age, and the grass- 
 grown ruins of Christian Rome were his Portico. 
 He fastened to himself with hoops of steel men 
 of the extremest religious and national tendencies — 
 Mommsen and Duchesne, Henzen and Bruzza. 
 The English Stevensons and American Frothing- 
 hams, Danes, Russians, Austrians, Orientals, came 
 in turn to experience welcome and instruction 
 from this patriarch of Roman antiquities. He 
 was a type of the true broadness and the sohdly 
 liberal sentiments of the Roman Catholic Church, 
 which seeks on all sides the eternal truth and holds 
 fast to it in all earnestness and charity. For years 
 he conducted the public meetings of the Society 
 for Christian Archaeology ^ and the Venerators 
 
 ^ The valuable proceedings of this body of disciples and 
 admirers of De Rossi have been for some years published in 
 the Bullettino, and form one of its chief attractions. The 
 monthly meetings of the society usually draw many learned 
 strangers and exercise a salutary influence on the study of 
 Christian antiquities. The Collegium Cultorum Sanctorum 
 Marty rum has its seat near the Vatican at the German Campo 
 Santo, where is situate a community of scholars who dwell on 
 the very site that Charlemagne acquired as a burial-place for 
 his Franks who died at Rome. Among the writer's most 
 pleasant souvenirs are the gentle courtesies and kindly helps 
 which he once received from these gentlemen, several of whom 
 are among the best Christian antiquarians of to-day. It would 
 be odious to distinguish, but the names of Monsignori de Waal, 
 Wilpert, and Kirsch deserve a special mention. 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 433 
 
 of the Holy Martyrs, and during the Roman sea- 
 son he might be heard once a month expounding 
 in the catacombs, or within some ruinous old ba- 
 silica of historic martyrs, before a motley crowd of 
 sight-seers and pilgrims, the plans, the curiosities, 
 or the history of this weird subterranean world. 
 
 "De sculptore, pictore, fusore, judicare nisi arti- 
 fex non 'potest, ^^ says the younger Pliny. Only one 
 who approached De Rossi in phenomenal acquisi- 
 tions could fitly judge of him as a savant. The 
 preceding pages are some witness to the extent of 
 his antiquarian knowledge, but no mere tale of 
 his writings can convey a just idea of that mind, 
 in which all the treasures of antique and mediaeval 
 culture were stored up with order and distinction. 
 He had read every ancient author of the Greek, 
 and Latin world, whether pagan or Christian, and 
 properly allocated what each conveyed toward 
 his main object — the illustration of the origins of 
 the Christian Church in the period of Grseco-Roman 
 civilization. Before him others had gone over 
 the same field, but none with the same method 
 and the same good fortune in the discovery of the 
 precious wreckage of original monuments. The 
 sum of the written remains of antiquity has been 
 considerably increased in this century by happy 
 finds or skilful restoration. Much light has been 
 
434 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS, 
 
 thrown on them — on the one hand by judicious 
 criticism and tireless research, on the other by 
 marvellous discoveries in the Orient — discoveries 
 which do not redound solely to the credit of classic 
 or pagan archaeology, but are of priceless worth 
 for early Christian life, literature, and belief. De 
 Rossi was contemporary with most of this prog- 
 ress, and it would not be too bold to say that 
 he was intimately acquainted with every item 
 of it that in any way interested the history of the 
 city of Rome, the catacombs, the ancient Chris- 
 tian literature, and the growth of Christian art. 
 
 As an investigator in new provinces of learning 
 he was distinguished by his scientific probity and 
 modesty. He was strictly honest in his method 
 and in its application, never trying to gloss over 
 weak points and never claiming for his arguments 
 a cogency they did not possess. Nor did he at- 
 tempt to read into his authorities conclusions 
 that they did not justify. On the other hand, 
 he was fearless and frank in maintaining what he 
 recognized as the truth, and did not let himself 
 be frowned down by pompous or malicious ig- 
 norance. His style was plain and direct, devoid 
 of ornament — a very model of historic narrative. 
 The fulness of his learning, the aptness of his 
 illustration, the ingenuity of his parallel and com- 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 435 
 
 ment, lent a strange eloquence to expositions 
 otherwise dry and solemn as a column of figures. 
 The Latin of De Rossi is grave, elegant, translu- 
 cent, racy. It breathes strong with repressed 
 feeUng; it moves like the discourse of a judge, 
 convinced where lies the truth, but anxious to 
 deal fairly with both sides; it is the speech of one 
 bred to the law, but whose mind dwells with de- 
 light upon the masterpieces of the golden Latinity. 
 It is the easy, correct, elegantly familiar Latin of 
 the fine Itahan scholar, equally removed from the 
 stilted involved speech of his Teuton colleagues 
 and the straight discourse and irreverent brevity 
 of certain English Latinists. Some of the prefaces 
 to his great works will hve long in the memories 
 of all who love the large and flowing language of 
 Latium, its superb majesty, its inimitable grace, 
 richness, and precision, its religious gravity, and 
 its memorable annals of conquest, temporal and 
 spiritual. De Rossi was not without his trials, 
 and his labors were at times misrepresented; but 
 he found a firm protector in the Papacy, as is il 
 lustrated by more than one little anecdote 
 circulates among his friends and admir 
 uncharitable controversy pained his i 
 rated with the sweet religious peace of the iioi> 
 places in which he spent so many days and nights 
 
436 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 among the martyr dead who await the resmrection 
 call. In this respect he was, indeed, sine felle pa- 
 lumhus. Though a man of firm Catholic faith, 
 he was supremely amiable and courteous in his 
 dealings with the many who did not share his be- 
 lief, and among his sincerest mourners are men 
 of the most extreme rationalistic training and 
 views. He was a man of principle, faithful and 
 devoted, known to the inner circle of cosmopolitan 
 Rome as 
 
 "The kindest friend, 
 The best condition'd and unwearied spirit 
 In doing courtesies, and one in whom 
 The ancient Roman honor more appears 
 Than any that draws breath in Italy." 
 
 Livy says, somewhere, that in studying antiquity 
 the soul becomes antique almost without an effort. 
 And De Rossi had so long studied the growth and 
 vicissitudes of papal Rome that his soul became 
 drenched with loyalty to that race of mighty rulers 
 who carried, and yet carry on within its walls, 
 the government of a world many times greater 
 than had ever ambitioned the proudest Csesar. 
 The path of earthly honor was open to him had 
 he chosen to abandon the Vatican. 
 
 "U'siede il successor del maggior Piero." 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 437 
 
 But no temptation could corrupt his fine sense 
 of honor, and he remained until death faithful 
 to the successor of Peter and Fabian and Damasus 
 and Vigilius. His Roman lineage was a matter 
 of just pride to him, and he sat for years in the 
 Roman municipality as the protector of the old 
 local interests of the city and the one scholar- 
 tribune whose veto even the fiercest of the new 
 iconoclasts felt bound to respect. As long as men 
 care for the history of the Eternal City; as long 
 as her basilicas, her cemeteries, her museums, and 
 her varied literature interest them, so long will 
 they recall the gentle and erudite spirit whose 
 magic touch shed a white light upon all the old 
 monuments of Rome, and whose scientific fiat 
 caused the rubbish of ages to disappear, and gave 
 over to the pilgrims of a new time and culture the 
 roads and pathways closed for over a thousand 
 years. Like some great mediaeval architects, he 
 finished none of the colossal enterprises that he 
 began; but his methods, example, and principles 
 are perenduring, and have revolutionized archae- 
 ological studies for many a year to come, while 
 a generation of his youngest disciples will pass 
 away before the Collectanea of the master are 
 exhausted. 
 
 Memoria bene redditoe vitce semjnterna. There 
 
438 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 is a pure, serene, altruism in certain lives whose 
 laborious course has been kept in steady orienta- 
 tion to truth and beauty and goodness. Nor do 
 we need to hear a George Eliot preach, 
 
 "The choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In lives made better by their presence, 
 And make undying music in the world, 
 Breathing us beauteous order that controls 
 With growing sway the growing life of man." 
 
 Between the true doctrines of Catholicism and 
 the natm-al aspirations and convictions of the 
 human heart there is just such a minute, accurate, 
 and catholic congruism as we should expect from 
 the Divine Founder of that religion. Beneficent 
 lives, however short, never melt into the general 
 void, but shed forever a sweet aroma within the 
 circle of their rememberers. This is the basis 
 of the Communion of Saints, and it is broad 
 enough to justify not only the interest of the 
 blessed ones in our lives and their ever-present 
 influences, but also the imbroken operation in 
 human affairs of all choice spirits who have ever 
 uplifted humanity or straightened out its tor- 
 tuous pathway. So Dante saw (Inf. iv. 116-120) 
 on the greensward outside the air that trembled 
 over the fatal abyss, the pagan just, whose writings 
 and great deeds yet have power to sway the souls 
 of men: 
 
THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 439 
 
 *'In luogo aperto, luminoso, ed alto, 
 Si che veder si potean tutti e quantif 
 Cold diritto, sopra il verde smalto 
 Mi fur mostrati gli spiriti magni, 
 Che del vederli in me stesso n'esalto." 
 
 Homer and Socrates, and Plato and Aristotle, 
 the martyrs and the doctors, and the great pilot- 
 bishops in the Wandering of the Nations; the 
 liberty and justice-loving Popes and priests of 
 the Middle Ages; the builders of Cologne and the 
 Sainte Chapelle, and the founders of the Italian 
 republics; Dante, and Columbus, and Joan of 
 Arc; Milton and Shakespeare — all these live on 
 forever in the hearts of men, in a sort of earthly 
 apotheosis — household divinities that shield our 
 spiritual hearths from a hundred devastating phi- 
 losophies and corrupting examples, and preach, in 
 season and out, the lessons of patience, unselfish- 
 ness, mutual helpfulness, enduring enthusiasm and 
 high idealism — in other words, that pure natu- 
 ral religion which is the basis of Christianity, 
 and which has been so long saturated with the 
 light of the latter that in its upper strata it is 
 scarcely distinguishable from the revelation of 
 Jesus. To this select assembly belongs henceforth 
 John Baptist De Rossi— an example, an inspira- 
 tion, an index, a complete and rounded specimen 
 of the union of learning and religion. Surely his 
 
440 THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS. 
 
 many merits won for him a speedy entrance into 
 the heaven he worked for, and we may well believe 
 that the last clouds of ignorance were quickly re- 
 moved from his noble mind, and that 
 
 "The great Intelligences fair 
 That range above our mortal state. 
 In circle round the blessed gate, 
 Received and gave him welcome there, 
 
 "And led him through the blissful climes, 
 And show'd him in the fountain fresh 
 All knowledge that the sons of flesh 
 Shall gather in the cycled times." 
 
ALPHABETICAL INDEX. 
 
 Abgars, Christian kings of 
 
 Edessa, 32 
 Acts of Paul and Thecla, 165 
 Advent, earliest notice of, 143 
 Africa, Roman conquest of, 
 326, 328 ; administration 
 of, 329; Roman cities in, 
 345 ; Roman legions in, 332, 
 334; Roman literature of, 
 352; prosperity of Roman, 
 336, 340; and Rome, 338; 
 French excavations and ex- 
 plorations in, 359 
 Agnes, Saint, 181 
 Alexandria, Christians in, 232 
 Ammianus, Marcellinus, 142 
 Angels, cultus of, 284 
 Antioch, Christians at, 229 
 Apostles, character of, 20; 
 leave Jerusalem, 22 ; rapidity 
 of missionary conquest, 23, 
 184, 219, 242; genuineness 
 of Acts, 24; secrets of suc- 
 cess, 27 ; and Roman world, 
 35; difficulties and obsta- 
 cles, 37, 41, 49; and episco- 
 pal office, 91 
 Apostolic Constitutions, 285 
 Apuleius, education of, 353; 
 
 metamorphoses of, 354 
 Arabia, Christians in, 235 
 Archaeology, first students of 
 
 Christian, 368 
 Architecture, Byzantine ori- 
 gins of Gothic, 308 
 Archives, Vatican, 365, 370, 
 371, 424 
 
 Aristotle, on the place of 
 
 woman, 175 
 Armenia, Christians in, 233 
 Arnold, Matthew, 50 
 Art, Greek, decay of, 28 
 Asia Minor, Christians in, 227 
 Associations, Christian, for 
 
 burial, 261 
 Attains the Christian, 113 
 Azarias, Brother, 132 
 
 Baths, Christians use public, 
 
 284 
 Bercea, women of, 160 
 Bishops, early Christian, 91, 
 
 245, 307 
 Blandina, sublime courage of 
 
 martyr, 112 
 Bosio, Antonio, 366, 402, 406 
 Boissier, Gaston, 313, 358, 360 
 Brethren of the Lord, 97 
 Britain, Christians in, 225 
 Browning, Mrs., 37 
 
 Calendar, earliest Roman 
 church, 411; Philocalian, 
 141, 411 
 
 Campagna, Roman, 365, 366 
 
 Canon law, spirit of primitive, 
 90 
 
 Carthage, storv of, 320 ; splen- 
 dor of, 325; 'and Rome, 324; 
 fall of, 326 
 
 Catacombs, history of, 402, 
 415; study of, 400; liturgy 
 in, 405 
 
 Catalogue, Liberian, 412 
 
 441 
 
442 
 
 ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 
 
 Catholicism, value of its his- 
 tory, 183; and Graeco- 
 Roman society, 185 
 
 Census of Judea, 140 
 
 Children, Jesus Christ and, 157 
 
 Christianity, triumphs of, 38, 
 49; and apostolic succession, 
 91, 101'; second-century mis- 
 sionaries of, 39,; in Italy and 
 Gaul, 40; among Kelts and 
 Britons, 40, 118; and the 
 Roman nobility, 50, 53, 161, 
 178, 180, 218, 421 1; and 
 woman, 167 ; and the family, 
 203}; third-century condi- 
 tions of, 212; spread of, in 
 Orient, 226?; in the West, 
 219; quasi-legal organiza- 
 tion of, 254; and Roman 
 senate, 29, 100; and Roman 
 emperors, 38, 52; and Roman 
 world, 105; constituent ele- 
 ments of, 239'; rapid diffu- 
 sion, reasons of, 27, 242 
 
 Christians, number of, about 
 A.D. 300, 238 
 
 Christmas Day, origin of feast, 
 144j earliest evidences for, 
 140; three Masses on, 149; 
 earliest legends of, 151 
 
 Chronology, beginnings of 
 Christian, 393 
 
 Church, and the Roman Em- 
 pire, 183, 214, 216'; earUest 
 constitution of, 89 
 
 Church feasts, public func- 
 tions of, 152; spiritual pur- 
 pose of, 154 
 
 Churches, primitive Christian, 
 241,296" ornamentation of , 
 294 
 
 Colonies, Roman military, 332; 
 agricultural, 342 ^ 
 
 Commerce, Phoenician, in- 
 fluence of, 318 
 
 Commodianus, Carmen Apolo- 
 geticum, 357 
 
 Communion of saints, 438 
 
 Constantine the Great, 52 
 
 Councils, Nicsea, 1423 Elvira, 
 
 224; Aries, 222; Rome, 222 ^ 
 pseudo, of Sinuessa, 221; 
 Sardica, 222 ; Csesarea, 140; 
 Saragossa, 142 
 
 Damasus, Pope, 413 
 
 Delattre, Pere, 360 
 
 De Rossi, John Baptist, edu- 
 cation of, 364 ; character of, 
 374, 434, 436, 439; as a 
 writer, 375, 394, 420, 422, 
 428; learning of, 385, 391, 
 423, 433 ; Latin style of, 435 ; 
 as a teacher, 373, 429, 431 ; 
 as a discoverer, 385, 404, 
 407, 408, 416, 417; and the 
 Catacombs, 365, 367, 369, 
 374, 401, 403'; and Chris- 
 tian epigraphy, 382, 390; 
 plan of Orbis Christianus. 
 395, 418; Roma Sotter- 
 ranea of, 402, 417; BuUet- 
 tino of, 417, 418; minor 
 writings, 427; devotion to 
 Eternal City, 437 
 
 De Rossi, Michele, 405 
 
 Diocletian, Christian family of, 
 53 
 
 Donatists, 138, 142, 222, 224 
 
 Emperors, Roman, 38, 52, 53, 
 
 97 
 Enthusiasm, contagion of 
 
 apostolic, 33 
 Epigraphv, growth of science, 
 
 376, 381; materials of 
 
 Christian, 379 ; difficulties 
 
 of, 383; development of 
 
 Christian, 398 
 Epiphany, earliest mention of, 
 
 138 
 Epistles of St. Paul, woman 
 
 in, 160, 164 
 Eucharist, the Holy, 31 
 
 Faith, objective source of 
 apostolic, 27 
 
 Gaul, Christians in, 225 
 Gibbon, Edward, 42 
 
ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 
 
 443 
 
 Gifts, charismatic, 32 
 
 Hegesippus, 41, 97 
 
 History, charm of African, 312 
 
 Inscriptions, collections of 
 Latin, 386; of Christian, 
 388, 396; science of Chris- 
 tian, 392; Irish collectors 
 of, 392, 400 
 
 Islam, and Christianity, 64 
 
 Jesus Christ, apostolic mem- 
 ories of, 27; and little chil- 
 dren, 157; and the martyrs 
 in prison, 190 
 
 Kelts and early Christianity, 
 40, 118 
 
 Lambesa, military colony of, 
 331 
 
 Legislation, anti - Christian, 
 earliest code of, 52 
 
 Liberty of conscience. Chris- 
 tians originate, 187, 198 
 
 Libraries, early Christian, 296 
 
 Literature, Afro-Roman, 352, 
 356; Afro-Christian, 356 
 
 Lyons, primitive Christians of, 
 104; letter of martyrs, 107 
 
 Manu, Laws of, 174 
 
 Marcellinus, Pope, pretended 
 fall of, 220 
 
 Marchi, Padre, 368 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 106 
 
 Martyrologies, Hieron5nnia- 
 num, 410; ancient Syriac, 
 148 
 
 MartjTS, the Christian, 187; 
 reason of their sufferings, 
 188, 189; and Last Judg- 
 ment, 197; secret of resist- 
 ance, 192; enthusiasm of, 
 393; and Roman society, 
 195; earlyRoman, 412, 415; 
 in African mines, 343; acts 
 of, 106, 107; sources of 
 martyrologies, 410, 414, 415; 
 
 and the city mobs, 108; 
 
 and city prisons, 110; and 
 
 their judges, 111; College 
 
 of Venerators of, 432 
 Mass, earliest preface of, 95 
 Mines, Christian martyrs in, 
 
 343 
 Mosaics, Roman church, 426 
 Museum, Christian Lateran, 
 
 430'; Christian Vatican, 370 
 Museums, Renaissance origin 
 
 of, 380 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, on Gibbon, 
 
 45 
 Nicomedia, Edicts of, 211 
 Noels, Bible of, 154 
 
 Organization, quasi-legal form 
 
 of Christian, 257 
 Origen, leader of Christian 
 
 proselytism, 247 
 
 Paganism, persistency of, 199; 
 impurities of, 208; its mod- 
 ern forms, 200 ; and modern 
 literature, 201 § detests vir- 
 ginity, 209 
 
 Palestine, Christians in, 231 
 
 Pax Romana, 67 
 
 Persecutions, of early Chris- 
 tians, 86; nature of, 185 
 popular origin of, 197, 215 
 cessation of, 186, 188 
 sources of, 249s legal bases 
 of, 252 
 
 Persia, Christians in, 234 
 
 Philippi, women of, 160 
 
 Philocalus, Furius Dionysius, 
 400, 411, 413 
 
 Philosophv, Greek, impotency 
 of, 26, 68 
 
 Pilgrimages, social and eco- 
 nomic function of, 305; 
 early Roman, 405 
 
 Pilgrim-houses, early monas- 
 tic, 300, 304 
 
 Plato, 73 
 
 Phny, Younger, letter of, 32 
 
444 
 
 ALPHABETICAL INDEX. 
 
 Polemius Silvius, almanac of, 
 
 414 
 Popes, primitive Vatican ceme- 
 tery of, 409 ; interpret prim- 
 itive constitutions of the 
 Church, 101; inculcate civil 
 obedience, 98; and the 
 Brethren of the Lord, 97 1; 
 authority of, 89, 93 
 Pothinus of Lyons, 113 
 Prayer, primitive Christian, 
 
 94, 143 
 Prisca, house of, 160 
 Proletariat, Roman, 130 
 Prophets, primitive Christian, 
 
 243 
 Proselytism, Christian, 245, 
 247, 250 
 
 R6nan, Ernest, 47 
 
 Roman Church, letter of, to 
 Church of Corinth, 81; first 
 to celebrate feast of Christ- 
 mas, 139 ; historico-liturgical 
 literature of, 414 
 
 Rome, imperial growth of, 12[; 
 administrations of, 16; 
 world-citizenship of, 18; 
 sense of decay, 29; sj)lendor 
 of, 99; 132, corruption of, 
 47, 178; slavery and free 
 labor in, 121; municipal 
 system of, 344; civilizing 
 function of, 347; and civic 
 generosity, 349 
 
 Rule, the Golden, 204 
 
 Sacramentaries, Roman, 149 
 Saint Agnes, 181 
 
 Bede, 140, 
 
 Csesarius of Aries, 143 
 
 Clement of Rome, Epistle 
 of, 81 ; its genuineness, 82, 
 96; and Old Testament, 
 83; and the theological 
 sciences, 85 
 
 John Chrysostom, sermon 
 on Christmas, 139 
 
 Hippolytus, Commentary on 
 Daniel. 141 
 
 Ignatius of Antioch, letters 
 
 of, 30 
 Irenseus of Lyons, 40, 41 
 Paul and Roman Church, 
 37; education of, 58; 
 character of, 63, 64; a 
 world-teacher, 65, 69, 73 ; 
 and Jesus Christ, 71 ; and 
 the theological sciences, 
 74; and Christian litera- 
 ture, 75 ; and the pastoral 
 office, 76'; and St. Clem- 
 ent of Rome, 84 
 Philip of Heraclea, acts of, 
 
 138 
 Peter, chair of, 146'; Roman 
 memories of, 98 
 Saints Peter and Paul, sepul- 
 chres of, at Rome, 98 
 Saints, reasons for cultus of, 
 
 207; birthdays of, 147 
 Schools, early Christian, 296 
 Sepulchres, Christian, in Syria, 
 
 285, 287 
 Sibyls and Christmas, 153 
 Slavery, ancient Roman, 121; 
 ruins free labor, 125; and 
 the proletariat, 127; and 
 the Roman Empire, 133 
 Slaves, number of, 122; zeal 
 
 of Christian, 249 
 Syria, Christians in, 230; topog- 
 raphy of, 267; in Christian 
 history, 275 ; a land of ruins, 
 268; deserted Christian 
 cities of, 272, 274, 276, 279, 
 298; Christian inscriptions, 
 282, 288 
 
 Taxation, method of Roman, 
 
 134 
 Theophilus of Csesarea, 140 
 Thessalonica, women of, 160 
 Timgad, in Roman Africa, 345 
 Towers, Svrian origin of Chris- 
 tian, 295, 299 
 
 Vettius Epagathus, 109 
 Vigils, origin of, 150 
 Voltaire and Gibbon, 44 
 
ALPHABETICAL INDEX. 
 
 445 
 
 Woman, in Roman world, 163, 
 165; at Rome, 176, 179; 
 among the Greeks, 174; 
 among the Jews, 169; in 
 Egyptian law, 170; in Mace- 
 donian law, 171 g among 
 
 the Kelts, 171; in Judea, 
 173; in the Gospel, 158; 
 primitive Christian, 248 
 Worship, early Christian, 306 
 
 Zeal, nature of apostolic, 27 
 
 PRINTKD BY BKNZIGER BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 
 

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 The beginnings of Christianity. 
 
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