The Beginnings of Christianity E-Book

Thomas J. Shahan

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 414

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This title might lead one to expect a history of the rise of Christianity to the opening of the second century or possibly covering the first three centuries, but actually the book is a collection of essays and addresses on topics connected with the history of Christianity. These essays, written by the renown Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Catholic University at Washington, D.C., do not give a connected account of the events of early Church history, but many valuable insights. Among the subjects treated are St. Paul, Teacher of the Nations; Slavery and Free Labor in Pagan Rome, The Origin of Christmas, Women in the Early Christian Communities, etc. Considered not as a narrative, but as a series of historical discourses , the volume is interesting from its fluency and eloquence and abundance of fact and incident.

Leseprobe

The Beginnings of Christianity

THOMAS J. SHAHAN

The Beginnings of Christianity, Thomas J. Shahan

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783988680310

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

PREFACE.1

THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY.2

ST. PAUL: TEACHER OF THE NATIONS.24

A BISHOP OF ROME IN THE TIME OF DOMITIAN (A.D. 81-96).35

THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS OF  LYONS AND VIENNE (A.D. 177):45

SLAVERY AND FREE LABOR IN PAGAN ROME.54

THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTMAS.61

WOMEN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES.69

WOMAN IN PAGAN ANTIQUITY.. 74

ST. AGNES OF ROME.81

THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE A.D. 250-312.94

A CHRISTIAN POMPEII.112

THE 'ROMAN AFRICA' OF GASTON BOISSIER.131

THE COLUMBUS OF THE CATACOMBS.153

PREFACE.

The studies and discourses that are herein offered to the public deal with some general conditions of Christian life 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 religious society were developing 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 primaeval barbarism. A perennial charm must therefore attach to any narrative of the problems and vicissitudes 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, unknown to it, they were themselves the containing and sustaining soul, according to an admirable saying of the anonymous author of the Letter to Diogenites.

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.

THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY.

There are not wanting reasons of a modern and immediate nature which make it henceforth useful and consoling to reflect on the earliest 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 policy since the days of Constantine. The French Revolution 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 beyond belief. Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and remote India have yielded up with their languages an extensive 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 like 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 salutary one concerning the origin of things. Epochs of humanity, like the stages of the earth's growth, have each their own cachet. In a critical and creative age, with so little left of the simple unquestioning 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 insufficient 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 called the attention of scholars and travelers 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 regarding the books of the New Testament and the primitive elements of Christian faith, have not failed to bring into evidence the teachings, the works, and the writings of many apostolic men, and to place before the eye of the imagination the fields in which they labored. No doubt, the application to the science of history of the methods of the study of the natural sciences has largely furthered this remarkable movement. But many will believe that the incredible resurrection of the Catholic Church within this century, and especially her growth in North America, are to be counted appreciable motives in the awakening of curiosity as to the first establishment of Christianity in the Old World. Nor must we omit the far-reaching influence of certain sociological teachings that contravene Christianity, plainly deny or eliminate 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 and organic no few Christian principles, beliefs, institutions, and habits of thought.

Neither the sixteenth nor the eighteenth century fulfilled the brilliant academic promises of "felicitas" 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 Protestantism 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 public weal, in every society where it is left free to display its mandate as the representative of Jesus Christ. Hence the cries of disappointment which so multiply on all sides, disappointment with the preposterous 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 like those desert apparitions that promise water and shade and cool breezes, but in reality offer to the parched traveler only the same flaming horizon, the same dreary waste of sand as before. And in proportion as this temper of disappointment 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 foundation 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 apostles as they confront the orbis terrarum — the Graeco-Roman world. Nor can there be anything more instructive and consoling than to learn by what means and against what odds their immediate successors planted the Christian society in every corner of that ancient world; by what a combination of public 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 survived every opposition, sat coequal upon the throne of the Caesars 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 little 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 supreme; and if she recognized these limits, 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 Mils, 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 supreme owner of the habitable earth and arbiter of civilized mankind — the Roman people. By centuries of self-sacrifice and endurance, by prodigies of patience and wisdom, by a rock-like confidence in their city, by a kind of kenosis of self in favor of the common weal, by frugality and foresight, these shepherds, herders, vintners, and kitchen-gardeners made themselves heirs of the vast immemorial Oriental despotisms of Egypt, Assyria, and Parthia, with a hundred 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 political centre, bearing Romeward with equal thoroughness all the confluents of art, literature, and luxury. The glorious dreams of Alexander the Great were translated 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 defeat of the Orient and the creation of a self-conscious Occident. But scarcely had the City of Rome enslaved 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 Caesar is securely anchored. All the reins of empire are in the hands of the young Octavius. For a while Caesar will call himself only 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 Caesar and his heirs. The scarred legions of a hundred battle-fields are his; his the richest provinces, uncontrolled revenues and fleets; his, too, the legislative power, since the servile Senate no longer dares to refuse registration of every desire or suggestion of Caesar. 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 which 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 polished and conscienceless Greek, the frivolous and boastful Gaul, the debauched Syrian, an almost 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 lifted 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 astounding " Fortune" 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 palaces, the happy homes of victorious generals, powerful 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 a long robbery of the world, carried on with iron persistency 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 culture, 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 million and a half of people, but her empire was over two thousand miles long and over three thousand miles broad, with a calculated population of one hundred to one hundred and twenty millions and a subdued and docile territory in extent somewhat more than one-half that of the United States before 1870.

One may well wonder how this huge mass of empire, made up so late, by force, out of so much wreckage of nations, states, and races, could be governed with success. Rome was not a victorious nation, but a victorious city, and where she could she introduced her own municipal institutions, admirably fitted, as a rule, to the local circumstances of antique life. Then she was no doctrinaire, and where the native fierceness or raw simplicity of the vanquished forbade her usual policy, she governed them in a way suited to their temper and her real power. Her provinces were usually complexes of cities, each responsible for its own suburbium, and in each province the chief Roman magistrate, whatever his title, wielded the entire power of Rome, civil and military. 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 territory. These interests demanded peace and prudent 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 communication, 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 curiosity, 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, of administration and commerce, he adopted the Greek as the vehicle of polite 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 chief object of Rome, or rather of the Caesars, who aimed henceforth at a general world-citizenship, an organization of humanity under the benign direction 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 independence were crushed out, as at Jerusalem, and anomalies of national religions, like the Druids, were sternly and thoroughly suppressed. The worship 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 colonization en masse of abandoned or ruined cities, the generous extension of the Roman citizenship, the cementing action of commerce, and the levelling influence of the legions, we cease to wonder that before Jesus Christ was born, politically the low places were 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 Mediterranean as well as the great pathways to the Orient. The last act in the preparation of that political 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 antiquity and furnished the needed basis for the sublime social and religious revolution then at hand.

How slow and uncertain might have been the spread of the Christian religion if its apostles had been Obliged at every step to deal with new governments, new prejudices, new languages! Hence the Christian Fathers saw in the splendid unity of the empire something providential and divine. The elder Pliny might imagine that this unity was the work of the gods bestowing polite intercourse and civilization on all mankind, but Christian writers like 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 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 facie 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 literature 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 enthusiasm. The apparitions of Jesus have transformed them from rude Galilean fishermen into eloquent 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 transition 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 apostles were founding the Church of Jerusalem, but what they reveal shows us men utterly different from the timid and doubting disciples whom Jesus led about in His lifetime, 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 solemn 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 consoling manner of their fathers. Its white walls and golden roofs shone afar from Moriah and gladdened the eyes of the weary pilgrim when they did not shine before his imagination. So deep were the roots which this extraordinary edifice had cast in the hearts of the chosen people that since its destruction, in spite of their sad vicissitudes, 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 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 like been seen will not wonder that Christians have been prone from the beginning to surround this step with due veneration. Thereby the religion of Christ was carried beyond the boundaries of the Jewish state and preached throughout the vast empire of Rome as the complement and perfection of Judaism, the alone-saving truth, the divine balm of doubt and spiritual unrest, and the saving ointment for a corrupting society. Soon wonderful missionaries are joined to the apostles — Barnabas 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 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 superior person to the first feeble communities an irresistible 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 Caesar's household; the proconsul 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 multitude who joined it in all the Jewries that stretched from the Tigris to the Tagus.

It is in vain that misguided men question the authority 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 trustworthiness of this fascinating narrative. Its absolute reliability has never been doubted by a much 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 hundred nationalities, with a large proportion of Hellenistic Jews. These men were capable, by their tongue, their origin, and their personal experience, of detecting any imposture foisted upon them, if only by comparison with the numerous texts of this work circulated 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 pronunciation. 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.

The Asmonean 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 Areopagite, St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Justin, recognize 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 unlike the Jew Philo, and that other Jew Josephus? Were not Apollo and Mark men of the rarest eloquence, the true propagandists, 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 currency during their lifetime and in their own communities, 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 unbiassed literary criticism.

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 which shines from the pages of the genuine history and correspondence 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 admiration 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 J are clearly set forth in the genuine writings of the apostles, faith in their mission by Him whom they never tired of preaching, 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; establish " 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 remotest times the history, doctrine, and authority of Jesus Christ. The apostles were no vapid dreamers, but men of action — elevated and transfigured, indeed, but with clear and fixed purposes that culminated in the establishment of a universal religious association. Hence in the New Testament one sees them everywhere, travelling, 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 stupendous 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 external peace of Rome covered much mental commotion. " Caesar, 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 conducted 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 consolation, 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 religious consolation, for the popular faith on which it stood has universally 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 Philip, 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 unconquered 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 manner 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, without being moved by the fine exalted mysticism of his speech, without feeling that a new and irresistible 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 transform 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 believe 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 personal 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 Galilee, who had walked with them through its valleys and its villages, who had sailed with poor fishing folk in their humble boats on Gennesaret. With the compelling 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 light in the heart of 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 like unto memory? It is like the sword that reaches the innermost divisions of the soul and pierces us in the remotest of our spiritual fortresses. Or again it is like the wings of the morning on which we may fly from all that is little 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 memory 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 focused upon His person forever the attention of all mankind in that mystic moment when divine love emptied itself 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 banquet was the great driving heart of the society, its vivifying sun, the secret of its inexhaustible strength. The little house-churches of Jerusalem, the upper chambers where the brethren met to break bread, the descriptions of such banquets in St. Paul, the confession of the Christian deaconesses to the Younger Pliny, the pages of the earliest 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 apostolic energy, here Jesus dwelt forever among them. The momentary transfiguration on Tabor, 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 disciples a number of charismatic gifts, special graces given to them as public teachers, for the more rapid attainment of a certain external growth, efficiency, and organic consistency in the new religion. God withdrew before their discourse the barrier of differing tongues and idioms. They enjoy the gifts of prophecy and miracles, especially of healing and of exorcism of evil spirits, and in their exercise of these high gifts we see a prudence and a practical beneficence which resembles the conduct of Jesus.

Another element of the apostolic success is their incomparable 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 eloquence, 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 transfigures 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 obtained. Leonardo da Vinci walking the streets of Milan for his head of Christ, Bernard Palissy casting to the flames the furniture of his poor workshop as a last holocaust to his fleeting dream of beauty, Columbus following his glorious ideal from one rebuff to another, 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 anticipation of the cherished object, lives 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 immeasurably 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: " Going therefore, teach all nations."

Henceforth no scorn shall chill their resolution, no apathy or dullness 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 impulses of the Holy Spirit. Before their generation was over, this world had recognized the kingship of Jesus Christ, and a peaceful revolution had been accomplished, the immensity of whose import no one could yet fathom, but which rightly forms the division-line between the Old World and the New, between an imperfect and stumbling humanity in which the animal element was supreme and a humanity awakened, self-conscious, transmuted, in which the spirit was henceforth dominant, and which had henceforth its universal ideal, realized, living, 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 civilization, perfect in all the appointments of speech, literature, art, communication and administration. It was an enlightened age, and the most progressive materially that has preceded our own. It was curious, critical, skeptical, 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 life 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 show that many looked to the Orient and especially to Judaea for a Saviour, so powerful had been the Old Testament propaganda in the basin of the Mediterranean. The Sibyls, those strange intermediaries between Jew and Gentile, sang of an approaching age of gold, of an immortal reign of justice, of a Virgin and a celestial Child who were to be the authors of all future happiness. The popular philosophy, Stoicism, was of Oriental origin and borrowed much of its practical value from Semitic ethics. The eyes of the world were fixed on Judaea, if only because its mountains were the last refuge of ancient national liberty, and men were selling dearly on those sacred hills the great jewel of personal and religious freedom. The theology and the ethics 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 result 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 expiation 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 on the blast, the cry: " Great Pan is dead." The ancient travesties of religion 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 lines 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 cosmopolitan tendency. The final establishment of the Christian society met with superhuman 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 sufficient to compel the attention of every seeker after truth, and to force them to look into her claims.

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 which 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 Alexandria to draw the attention of the Emperor Hadrian on his visit to that city, in the early part of the second century, and it was quickly carried over the entire Delta and along the great river, not only among the Graeco-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 Cappadocia, Galatia, Bithynia, and along the northern and southern coasts of Asia Minor. Peter and Paul, Barnabas and Mark, Timothy and John, had gone 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 climbed into the most inaccessible regions.

Throughout the first and second centuries of Christianity there is observable a universal propaganda 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 following century, i.e., before the year 200 a.d.: bishops preaching, travelling, 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 Hieropolis, 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 Christianity, 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 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 received the faith of Christ at a very early date, being really a portion of the Greek world by language, institutions, and traditions. Its progress was slower in northern Italy, but within the apostolic 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 Christian missionaries, St. Irenaeus 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 sects the original doctrine of Jesus. For that reason, 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 with great care, before SS. Peter and Paul were a hundred years dead, by St. Irenaeus of Lyons and by Hegesippus, a Palestinian traveler. In other words, the first list 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 populations as well as among the semi-barbarians of the empire, they found two great sources of almost insuperable 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 that transcended all human experience and analogy. These exacting critics leave nothing undone to transform the great victory of Jesus Christ over the Graeco-Roman world into the stages of a natural and easy evolution in which every circumstance favors the Christian cause and operates equally to the detriment of the pagan religion 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 skepticism. For him Christianity is a phenomenon to be explained by a brief catalogue of natural situations and contemporary advantages. He ignores habitually 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 lifts 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 responsible role of a principal or an efficient cause. He emphasizes with the delicate patient care of a miniaturist every detail favorable to his own contentions, and cloaks in rhetorical silence whatever would reduce their value. By this long unbroken process of caricature he has given to the world an account of the first Christian ages that is a compound of rhetorical minimism, exaggeration, and distortion. In it every paragraph is charged with infinite injustice. These literary 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 Caliban was like the fairy nymph Ariel. There is in this extraordinary man something of Milton's graceful and humane Belial:

"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 history, 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 when it lay humbled in the dust by an astounding series of causes. But he is frequently inexact and careless in statements, as every new edition of his work shows. He is incurably afflicted with a cheap and flippant rationalism that runs always, animal-like, terre-à-terre