The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 19

The Roman came to the Church as he came to a new province. He gravely surveyed the situation, considered the existing arrangements, accepted them, drew up as it were a _lex provinciae_ to secure their proper administration, and thereafter interpreted it in accordance with the usual principles of Roman {147} law, and, like the procurator in Achaea, left the Greeks to discuss any abstract propositions they pleased.

Tertullian and Cyprian were lawyers, and gave Latin Christendom the language, in which in later days the relations of man with his Divine Sovereign were worked out by the great Latin Fathers.

[Sidenote: Freedom from daemons]

The confession of Tatian, above cited, emphasizes as one of the great features of the barbarian literature--its "monarchic" teaching--"it sets man free from ten thousand tyrants"--and this may be our starting-point in considering the new experience. To be rid of the whole daemon-world, to have left the daemons behind and their "hatred of men,"[16] their astrology,[17] their immorality and cruelty, their sacrifices, and the terror of "possession" and theolepsy and enchantment,[18] was happiness in itself. "We are above fate," said Tatian, "and, instead of daemons that deceive, we have learnt one master who deceiveth not."[19] "Christ," wrote an unknown Christian of a beautiful spirit--"Christ wished to save the perishing, and such mercy has he shown us that we the living do not serve dead G.o.ds, but through him we know the Father of truth."[20] "Orpheus sang to beguile men, but my Singer has come to end the tyranny of daemons," said Clement.[21]

The perils of "meats offered to idols" impressed some, who feared that by eating of them they would come under daemoniac influence. With what relief they must have read Paul's free speech on the subject--"the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof"--"for us there is one G.o.d, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him."[22] "Even the very name of Jesus is terrible to the daemons"[23]--the "name that is above every name." In no other name was there salvation from daemons, for philosophy had made terms with them.

No one can read the Christian Apologists without remarking the stress which they lay upon the _knowledge_ of G.o.d, which the new faith made the free and glad possession of the humblest. {148} "They say of us that we babble nonsense among females, half-grown people, girls and old people. No! all our women are chaste and at their distaffs our maidens sing of things divine," said Tatian, and rejoined with observations on famous Greek women, Lais, Sappho and others. Justin, always kindlier, speaks of Socrates who urged men to seek G.o.d, yet owned that "it would be a hard task to find the father and maker of this All, and when one had found him, it would not be safe to declare him to all,"[24] but, he goes on, "our Christ did this by his power. No man ever believed Socrates so much as to die for his teaching. But Christ, who was known to Socrates in part, (for he was and is the Word that is in everything...)--on Christ, I say, not only philosophers and scholars (_philologoi_) believed, but artisans, men quite without learning (_idiotai_), and despised glory and fear and death." "There is not a Christian workman but finds out G.o.d and manifests him," said Tertullian.[25] This knowledge of G.o.d was not merely a desirable thing in theory, for it is clear that it was very earnestly sought. To Justin's quest for G.o.d, allusion has been made--"I hoped I should have the vision of G.o.d at once (_katophesthai_)" he says. "Who among men had any knowledge of what G.o.d was, before he came?"[26] "This," wrote the fourth evangelist, "is eternal life--that they may know thee, the one true G.o.d and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."

[Sidenote: The holy spirit]

But it is one thing to be a monotheist, and another to be a child of "Abba Father," and this is one of the notes of the early Christian. It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Christian happiness amid the strain and doubt of the early Empire. Zeno and Isis each had something to say, but who had such a message of forgiveness and reconciliation and of the love of G.o.d? "G.o.d is within you," said Seneca; but he knew nothing of such an experience as the Christian summed up as the "grace of G.o.d," "grace sufficient" and "grace {149} abounding." It is hard to think of these familiar phrases being new and strange--the coining of Paul to express what no man had said before--and this at the moment when Seneca was writing his "moral letters" to Lucilius. Verbal coincidences may be found between Paul and Seneca, but they are essentially verbal. The Stoic Spermaticos Logos was a cold and uninspiring dogma compared with "Abba Father" and the Spirit of Jesus--it was not the same thing at all. The one doctrine made man self-sufficient--in the other, "our sufficiency (_hikanotes_) is of G.o.d." It was the law of nature, contrasted with the father of the prodigal son--"our kind and tender-hearted father" as Clement of Rome calls him [27]--the personal G.o.d, whose "problem is ever to save the flock of men; that is why the good G.o.d has sent the good shepherd."[28]

The more lettered of Christian writers like to quote Plato's saying that man was born to be at home with G.o.d (_oikeios echein prs then_) and that he was "a heavenly plant." Falsehood, they say, and error obscured all this, but now "that ancient natural fellowship with heaven" has "leapt forth from the darkness and beams upon us."[29]

"G.o.d," says Clement, "out of his great love for men, cleaves to man, and as when a little bird has fallen out of the nest, the mother-bird hovers over it, and if perchance some creeping beast open its mouth upon the little thing,

Wheeling o'er his head, with screams the dam Bewails her darling brood;

so G.o.d the Father seeks his image, and heals the fall, and chases away the beast, and picks up the little one again."[30]

G.o.d has "anointed and sealed" his child and given him a pledge of the new relation--the holy spirit. This is distinctly said by St Paul,[31]

and the variety of the phenomena, to which he refers, is a little curious. Several things are covered by the phrase, and are cla.s.sed as manifestations with a common origin. There are many allusions to "speaking with tongues"; Paul, however, clearly shows that we are not to understand a miraculous gift in using actual languages, reduced to grammar and {150} spoken by men, as the author of the _Acts_ suggests with a possible reminiscence of a Jewish legend of the law-giving from Sinai. The "glossolaly" was inarticulate and unintelligible; it was a feature of Greek "mantic," an accompaniment of over-strained emotion, and even to be produced by material agencies, as Plutarch lets us see.

Paul himself is emphatic upon its real irrelevance to the Christian's main concern, and he deprecates the attention paid to it. Other "spiritual" manifestations were visions and prophecies. With these Dr William James has dealt in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, showing that in them, as in "conversion," there is nothing distinctively Christian. The content of the vision and the outcome of the conversion are the determining factors. Where men believe that an ordinary human being can be temporarily transformed by the presence within him of a spirit, the very belief produces its own evidence. If the tenet of the holy spirit rested on nothing else, it would have filled a smaller place in Christian thought.

[Sidenote: Jesus the saviour]

But when Paul speaks of the holy spirit whereby the Christians are sealed, calling it now the spirit of G.o.d and now the spirit of Jesus, he is referring to a profounder experience. Explain conversion as we may, the word represents a real thing. Men were changed, and were conscious of it. Old desires pa.s.sed away and a new life began, in which pa.s.sion took a new direction, finding its centre of warmth and light, not in morality, not in religion, but in G.o.d as revealed in Jesus Christ. "To me to live is Christ," cried Paul, giving words to the experience of countless others. Life had a new centre; and duty, pain and death were turned to gladness. The early Christian was conscious of a new spirit within him. It was by this spirit that they could cry "Abba, Father"; it was the spirit that guided them into all truth; it was the spirit that united them to G.o.d,[32] that set them free from the law of sin and death, that meant life and peace and joy and holiness. Paul trusted everything to what we might call the Christian instinct and what he called the holy spirit, and he was justified. No force in the world has done so much as this nameless thing that has controlled and guided and illumined--whatever we call it. Any one who has breathed the quiet air of a gathering of men and women consciously surrendered to the influence of Jesus Christ, with all its {151} sobering effect, its consecration, its power and gladness, will know what Paul and his friends meant. It is hardly to be known otherwise. In our doc.u.ments the spirit is closely a.s.sociated with the gathering of the community in prayer.

Freedom from daemons, forgiveness and reconciliation with G.o.d, gladness and moral strength and peace in the holy spirit--of such things the early Christians speak, and they a.s.sociate them all invariably with one name, the living centre of all. "Jesus the beloved" is a phrase that lights up one of the dullest of early Christian pages.[33] "No! you do not so much as listen to anyone, if he speaks of anything but Jesus Christ in truth," says Ignatius.[34] "What can we give him in return?

He gave us light ... he saved us when we were perishing ... We were lame in understanding, and worshipped stone and wood, the works of men.

Our whole life was nothing but death.... He pitied us, he had compa.s.sion, he saved us, for he saw we had no hope of salvation except from him; he called us when we were not, and from not being he willed us to be."[35] "The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation, has brought to all the world the grace of repentance."[36] "Ye see what is the pattern that has been given us; what should we do who by him have come under the yoke of his grace?"[37] "Let us be earnest to be imitators of the Lord."[38] These are a few words from Christians whose writings are not in the canon. Jesus is pre-eminently and always the Saviour; the author of the new life; the revealer of G.o.d; the bringer of immortality. It made an immense impression upon the ancient world to see the transformation of those whom it despised,--women, artisans, slaves and even slave-girls. Socrates with the hemlock cup and the brave Thrasea were figures that men loved and honoured. But here were all sorts of common people doing the same thing as Socrates and Thrasea, cheerfully facing torture and death "for the name's sake"--and it was a name of contempt, too. "Christ's people"--_Christianoi_--was a bantering improvisation by the people of Antioch, who were notorious in antiquity for impudent wit:[39] it was a happy shot {152} and touched the very centre of the target. "The name" and "his name," are constantly recurring phrases. But it was not only that men would die for the name--men will die for anything that touches their imagination or their sympathy--but they lived for it and showed themselves to be indeed a "new creation." "Our Jesus"[40] was the author of a new life, and a very different one from that of h.e.l.lenistic cities. That Christianity retained its own character in the face of the most desperate efforts of its friends to turn it into a philosophy congenial to the philosophies of the day, was the result of the strong hold it had taken upon innumerable simple people, who had found in it the power of G.o.d in the transformation of their own characters and instincts, and who clung to Jesus Christ--to the great objective facts of his incarnation and his death upon the cross--as the firm foundations laid in the rock against which the floods of theory might beat in vain. For now we have to consider another side of early Christian activity--the explanation of the new experience.

The early Christian community found "the unexamined life" as impossible as Plato had, and they framed all sorts of theories to account for the change in themselves. Of most immediate interest are the accounts which they give of the holy spirit and of Jesus. Here we must remember that in all definition we try to express the less known through the more known, and that the early Christians necessarily used the best language available to them, and tried to communicate a new series of experiences by means of the terms and preconceptions of the thinking world of their day--terms and preconceptions long since obsolete.

Much in the early centuries of our era is unintelligible until we form some notion of the current belief in spiritual beings, evidence of which is found in abundance in the literature of the day, pagan and Christian. A growing consensus among philosophers made G.o.d more and more remote, and emphasized the necessity for intermediaries. We have seen how Plutarch p.r.o.nounced for the delegation of rule over the universe and its functions to ministering spirits. The Jews had a parallel belief in angels, and had come to think of G.o.d's spirit and G.o.d's intelligence as somehow detachable from his being. In abstract {153} thought this may be possible just as we think of an angle without reference to matter. The great weakness in the speculation of the early Empire was this habit of supposing that men can be as certain of their deductions as of their premisses; and G.o.d's Logos, being conceivable, pa.s.sed into common religious thought as a separate and proven existence.

[Sidenote: The holy spirit]

At the same time there was abundant evidence of devil-possession as there is in China to-day. Modern medicine distinguishes four cla.s.ses of cases which the ancients (and their modern followers) group under this one head:--Insanity, Epilepsy, Hysteria major and the mystical state. To men who had no knowledge of modern medicine and its distinctions, the evidence of the "possessed" was enough, and it was apt to be quite clear and emphatic as it is in such cases to-day. The man said he "had a devil"--or even a "legion of devils." The priestess at the oracle said that a G.o.d was within her (_entheos_). In both cases the ocular evidence was enough to convince the onlookers of the truth of the explanation, for the persons concerned were clearly changed and were not themselves.[41] Plato played with the idea that poetry even might be, as poets said, a matter of inspiration. The poet could not be merely himself when he wrote or sang words of such transforming power. The Jews gave a similar account of prophecy--the Spirit of the Lord descended upon men, as we read in the Old Testament.

The Spirit, says Athenagoras to the Greeks, used the Hebrew prophets, as a flute-player does a flute, while they were in ecstasy (_kat ekstasin_)[42]--the holy spirit, he adds, is an effluence (_aporroia_) of G.o.d.[43]

The Christians, finding ecstasy, prophecy, trance, and glossolaly among their own members, and having before them the parallel of Greek priestesses and Hebrew prophets, and making moreover the same _very_ slight distinction as their pagan {154} neighbours between matter and spirit, and, finally, possessing all the readiness of unscientific people in propounding theories,--they a.s.sumed an "effluence" from G.o.d, a spirit which entered into a man, just as in ordinary life evil demons did, but here it was a holy spirit. This they connected with G.o.d after the manner familiar to Jewish thinkers, and following the same lead, began to equate it with G.o.d, as a separate being. It is not at first always quite clear whether it is the spirit of G.o.d or of Jesus--or even a manifestation of the risen Jesus.[44]

When we pa.s.s to the early explanations of Jesus, we come into a region peculiarly difficult. A later age obscured the divergences of early theory. Some opinions the church decisively rejected--Christians would have nothing to do with a Jesus who was an emanation from an absolute and inconceivable Being, a Jesus who in that case would be virtually indistinguishable from Asclepios the kindly-natured divine healer. Nor would they tolerate the notion of a phantom-Jesus crucified in show, while the divine Christ was far away--like Helen in Euripides'

play.[45] "Spare," says Tertullian, "the one hope of all the world."[46] They would not have a "daimonion without a body." But two theories, one of older Jewish, and the other of more recent Alexandrian origin, the church accepted and blended, though they do not necessarily belong to each other.

[Sidenote: Paul]

The one theory is especially Paul's--sacred to all who lean with him to the Hebrew view of things, to all who, like him, are touched with the sense of sin and feel the need of another's righteousness, to all who have come under the spell of the one great writer of the first century.

A Jew, a native of a h.e.l.lenistic city--and "no mean one"[47]--a citizen of the Roman Empire, a man of wide outlooks, with a gift for experience, he pa.s.sed from {155} Pharisaism to Christ. The mediating idea was righteousness. He knew his own guilt before G.o.d, and found that by going about to establish his own righteousness he was achieving nothing.

At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms, unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. We can see this much in the tremendous efforts of the Apologists to overcome Jewish aversion by producing Old Testament prophecies that Christ was to suffer. _Pathetos_ (subject to suffering) was a word that waked rage and contempt in every one, who held to contemporary views of G.o.d, or even had dabbled in Stoic or similar conceptions of human greatness. But it seems that the serenity and good conscience of Christian martyrs impressed their persecutor, who was not happy in his own conscience; and at last the thought came--along familiar lines--that Christ's sufferings might be for the benefit of others. And then he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus.

What exactly happened is a matter of discussion, but Paul was satisfied--he was "a man in Christ."

Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology--if it were not for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood.

Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences--they pulse with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for men--"all things to all men"--such a master of language, so sympathetic and so open--he is irresistible. The quick movement of his thought, his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns--one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole man--half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek--and the Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "G.o.d forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."

Close examination reveals a good deal of Judaism surviving in Paul,--a curious way of playing with the text of Scripture, {156} odd reminiscences of old methods, and deeper infiltrations of a Jewish thought which is not that of Jesus. Yet it does not affect our feeling for him--he stands too close to us as a man, too much over us as the teacher of Augustine, Calvin and Luther--a man, whom it took more genius to explain than the church had for fifteen centuries, and yet the man to whom the church owes its universal reach and unity, its theology and the best of the language in which it has expressed its love for his master.

[Sidenote: Explanation of Jesus]

Paul went back to the Jewish conception of a Messiah, modified, in the real spirit of Jesus, by the thought of suffering. But when we put side by side the Messiah of Jesus and the Messiah of Paul, we become conscious of a difference. The latter is a mediator between G.o.d and man, making atonement, transferring righteousness by a sort of legal fiction, and implying a conception of G.o.d's fatherhood far below that taught by Jesus. At the same time Paul has other thoughts of a profounder and more permanent value. It is hard, for instance, to imagine that any change, which time and thought may bring, can alter a word in his statement that "G.o.d was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself"--here there is no local or temporal element even in the wording. It may be noted that Paul has his own names for Jesus, for while he uses "Messiah" (in Greek) and "Son of G.o.d," he is the first to speak of "the Lord" and "the Saviour." Paul held the door open for the other great theory of the early church, when he emphasized the pre-existence of the heavenly Christ and made him the beginning, the centre and the end of all history.

The Logos, as we have seen, was not an original idea of the Christian world. It was long familiar to Greek philosophy, and Philo and the Stoics base much of their thought upon it. It must have come into the church from a Greek or h.e.l.lenistic source, perhaps as a translation of Paul's "heavenly Christ." As it stands, it is a peculiarly bold annexation from Philosophy. No Stoic would have denied that the Spermaticos Logos was in Jesus, but the bold identification of the Logos with Jesus must have been "foolishness to the Greek." Still in contemporary thought there was much to dispose men to believe in such an incarnation of the Logos in a human being, though there is no suggestion that a spiritual being of any at all commensurate {157} greatness was ever so incarnated before. But the thought appealed to the Christian mind, when once the shock to Greek susceptibilities was overcome. Once accepted, it "solved all questions in the earth and out of it." It permitted the congenial idea of Greek theology to remain--the transcendence of G.o.d being saved by this personification of his Thought. It was a final blow to all theories that made Jesus an emanation, a phantom or a demi-G.o.d, and it kept his historic personality well in the centre of thought, though leaving it now comparatively much less significance.

Surveying the two accounts, Jewish and Greek, we cannot help remarking that they belong to other ages of thought than our own. Columbus, Copernicus and Darwin were neither philosophers nor theologians, but they have changed the perspectives of philosophy and theology, and we think to-day with a totally different series of preconceptions from those of Jew and Greek of the first century. The Greek himself never thought much of the "chosen race," and it was only when he realized that Jesus was not a tribal hero, that he accepted him. To the Greek the Messiah was as strange a thought as to ourselves. To us the Logos is as strange as the Messiah was to the Greek. We have really at present no terms in which to express what we feel to be the permanent significance of Jesus, and the old expressions may repel us until we realize, first, that they are not of the original essence of the Gospel, and second, that they represent the best language which Greek and Jew could find for a conviction which we share--that Jesus of Nazareth does stand in the centre of human history, that he has brought G.o.d and man into a new relation, that he is the personal concern of everyone of us, and that there is more in him than we have yet accounted for.

Into the question of the organization adopted by the early Christians and the development of the idea of the church, it is not essential to our present purpose to inquire. Opinion varies as to how far we should seek the origin of the church in the teaching and work of Jesus. If his mind has been at all rightly represented in this book, it seems to follow that he was not responsible either for the name or the idea of the church. Minds of the cla.s.s to which his belongs have as a rule little or no interest in organizations and arrangements, and nothing can {158} be more alien to the tone and spirit of his thinking than the ecclesiastical idea as represented by Cyprian and Ignatius. That out of the group of followers who lived with Jesus, a society should grow, is natural; and societies instinctively organize themselves. The Jew offered the pattern of a theocracy, and the Roman of a hierarchy of officials, but it took two centuries to produce the church of Cyprian.

The series of running fights with Greek speculation in the second century contributed to the natural and acquired instincts for order and system,--particularly in a world where such instincts had little opportunity of exercise in munic.i.p.al, and less in political, life. The name was, as Harnack says, a masterly stroke--the "ecclesia of G.o.d"

suggested to the Greek the n.o.ble and free life of a self-governing organism such as the ancient world had known, but raised to a higher plane and transfigured from a Periclean Athens to a Heavenly Jerusalem.

Fine conceptions and high ideals clung about the idea of the church in the best minds,[48] but in practice it meant the transformation of the gospel into a code, the repression of liberty of thought, and the final extinction of prophecy. For the view that every one of these results was desirable, reason might be shown in the vagaries of life and speculation which the age knew, but it was obviously a departure from the ideas of Jesus.

[Sidenote: The new life]

The rise of the church was accompanied by the rise of mysteries. There is a growing consensus of opinion among independent scholars that Jesus inst.i.tuted no sacraments, yet Paul found the rudiments of them among the Christians and believed he had the warrant of Jesus for the heightening which he gave to them. Ignatius speaks of the Ephesians "breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality (_pharkmakon athanasias_) and the antidote that we should not die"--the former phrase reappearing in Clement of Alexandria.[49] That such ideas should emerge in the Christian community is natural enough, when we consider its environment--a world without natural science, steeped in belief in every kind of magic and enchantment, and full of public and private religious societies, every one of which had its mysteries and miracles and its blood-bond with its peculiar deity. It was from such a world {159} and such societies that most of the converts came and brought with them the thoughts and instincts of countless generations, who had never conceived of a religion without rites and mysteries.

Baptism similarly took on a miraculous colour--men were baptized for the dead in Paul's time--and before long it bore the names familiarly given by the world to all such rituals of admission--enlightenment (_photismos_) and initiation; and with the names came many added symbolic practices in its administration. The Christians readily recognized the parallel between their rites and those of the heathen, but no one seems to have perceived the real connexion between them.

Quite navely they suggest the exact opposite--it was the daemons, who foresaw what the Christian rites (_hiera_) would be, and forestalled them with all sorts of pagan parodies.[50]

But, after all, the force of the Christian movement lay neither in church, nor in sacrament, but in men. "How did Christianity rise and spread among men?" asks Carlyle, "was it by inst.i.tutions, and establishments, and well arranged systems of mechanism? No! ... It arose in the mystic deeps of man's soul; and was spread by the 'preaching of the word,' by simple, altogether natural and individual efforts; and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it. Here was no Mechanism; man's highest attainment was accomplished Dynamically, not Mechanically."[51]

Nothing could be more just. The Gospel set fire to men's hearts, and they needed to do nothing but live to spread their faith. The ancient evidence is abundant for this. The Christian had an "insatiable pa.s.sion for doing good"[52]--not as yet a technical term--and he "did good" in the simplest kind of ways. "Even those things which you do after the flesh are spiritual," says Ignatius himself, "for you do all things in Jesus Christ."[53] "Christians," says a writer whose name is lost, "are not distinguishable from the rest of mankind in land or speech or customs. They inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do they use any different form of speech, nor do they cultivate any out-of-the-way life.... But while they live in Greek and barbarian cities as their lot may be {160} cast, and follow local customs in dress and food and life generally, ... yet they live in their own countries as sojourners only; they take part in everything as citizens and submit to everything as strangers. Every strange land is native to them, and every native land is strange. They marry and have children like everyone else--but they do not expose their children. They have meals in common, but not wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They continue on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the laws ordained, and by their private lives they overcome the laws.... In a word, what the soul is in the body, that is what Christians are in the world."[54]

"As a rule," wrote Galen, "men need to be educated in parables. Just as in our day we see those who are called Christians[55] have gained their faith from parables. Yet they sometimes act exactly as true philosophers would. That they despise death is a fact we all have before our eyes; and by some impulse of modesty they abstain from s.e.xual intercourse--some among them, men and women, have done so all their lives. And some, in ruling and controlling themselves, and in their keen pa.s.sion for virtue, have gone so far that real philosophers could not excel them."[56] So wrote a great heathen, and Celsus admits as much himself. In life at least, if not in theory, the Christians daily kept to the teaching of their Master. "Which is ampler?" asks Tertullian, "to say, Thou shalt not kill; or to teach, Be not even angry? Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery or to bid refrain from a single l.u.s.tful look?"[57] There was as yet no flight from the world, though Christians had no illusions about it or about the devil who played so large a part in its affairs. They lived in an age that saw Antinous deified.[58] They stood for marriage and family life, while all around "holy" men felt there was an unclean and daemonic element in marriage.[59] One Christian writer even speaks of women being {161} saved by child-bearing.[60] Social conditions they accepted--even slavery among them--but they brought a new spirit into all; love and the sense of brotherhood could transform every thing.

Slavery continued, but the word "slave" is not found in Christian catacombs.[61]

Above all, they were filled with their Master's own desire to save men.

"I am debtor," wrote Paul, "both to Greeks and to barbarians, wise and unwise."[62] If modern criticism is right in detaching the "missionary commission" (in Matthew) from the words of Jesus, the fact remains that the early Christians were "going into all the world" and "preaching the gospel to every creature" for half a century before the words were written. Why? "He that has the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence," said Ignatius; and if Jesus did not speak these words, men heard his silence to the same effect. Celsus, like Julian long after him, was shocked at the kind of people to whom the gospel was preached.[63]

The Christian came to the helpless and hopeless, whom men despised, and of whom men despaired, with a message of the love and tenderness of G.o.d, and he brought it home by a new type of love and tenderness of his own. Kindness to friends the world knew; gentleness, too, for the sake of philosophic calm; clemency and other more or less self-contained virtues. The "third race" had other ideas--in all their virtues there was the note of "going out of oneself," the unconsciousness which Jesus loved--an instinctive habit of negating self (_aparnesasthai heauton_), which does not mean medieval asceticism, nor the dingy modern virtue of self-denial. There was no sentimentalism in it; it was the spirit of Jesus spiritualizing and transforming and extending the natural instinct of brotherliness by making it theocentric. Christians for a century or two never thought of _ataraxia_ or apathy, and, though Clement of Alexandria plays with them, he tries to give them a new turn. Fortunately the Gospels were more read than the _Stromateis_ and "Christian apathy" never succeeded. The heathen recognized sympathy as a Christian characteristic--"How these {162} Christians love each other!" they said. Lucian bears the same testimony to the mutual care and helpfulness of Christians. "You see," wrote Lucian, "these poor creatures have persuaded themselves that they are immortal for all time and will live for ever, which explains why they despise death and voluntarily give themselves up, as a general rule; and then their original law-giver persuaded them that they are all brothers, from the moment that they cross over and deny the G.o.ds of Greece and worship their sophist who was gibbeted, and live after his laws. All this they accept, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike and count them common property." In a later century Julian, perhaps following Maximin Daza, whom he copied in trying to organize heathenism into a new catholic church, urged benevolence on his fellow-pagans, if they wished to compete with the Christians. It was the only thing, he felt, that could revive paganism, and his appeal met with no response.

"Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is the Christian life, and it must come from within or nowhere. No organization can produce it, and, however much we may have to discount Christian charity in some directions as sometimes mechanical, the new spirit of brotherhood in the world presupposed a great change in the hearts of men.

It was not Stoic cosmopolitanism. The Christian was not "the citizen of the world" nor "the Friend of Man"; he was a plain person who gave himself up for other people, cared for the sick and the worthless, had a word of friendship and hope for the sinful and despised, would not go and see men killed in the amphitheatre, and--most curious of all--was careful to have indigent brothers taught trades by which they could help themselves. A lazy Christian was no Christian, he was a "trader in Christ."[64] If the Christians' citizenship was in heaven, he had a social message for this world in the meantime.

[Sidenote: Woman]

Every great religious movement coincides with a new discovery of truth of some kind, and such discoveries induce a new temper. Men inquire more freely and speak more freely the truth they feel. Mistakes are made and a movement begins {163} for "quenching the spirit." But the gains that have been made by the liberated spirits are not lost. Thus the early Christian rose quickly to a sense of the value of woman. Dr Verrall p.r.o.nounces that "the radical disease, of which, more than of anything else, ancient civilization perished "was" an imperfect ideal of woman."[65] In the early church woman did a good many things, which in later days the authorities preferred not to mention. Thekla's name is prominent in early story, and the prophetesses of Phrygia, Prisca and Maximilla, have a place in Church History. They were not popular; but the church was committed to the Gospel of Luke and the ministry of women to the Lord. And whatever the Christian priesthood did or said, Jesus and his followers had set woman on a level with man. "There is neither male nor female." The same freedom of spirit is attested by the way in which pagan prophets and their dupes cla.s.sed Christians with Epicureans[66]--they saw and understood too much. The Christians were the only people (apart from the Jews) who openly denounced the folly of worshipping and deifying Emperors. Even Ignatius, who is most famous for his belief in authority, breaks into independence when men try to make the Gospel dependent on the Old Testament--"for me the doc.u.ments (_ta archeia_) are Jesus Christ; my una.s.sailable doc.u.ments are his cross, and his death and resurrection, and the faith that is through him; in which things I hope with your prayers to be saved."[67] "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," as Paul said.

G.o.d and immortality were a.s.sociated in Christian thought. Christians, said a writer using the name of Peter, are to be "partakers of the divine nature." "If the soul," says Tatian, "enters into union with the divine spirit, it is no longer helpless, but ascends to regions whither the spirit guides it; for the dwelling-place of the spirit is above, but the origin of the soul is from beneath."[68] "G.o.d sent forth to us the Saviour and Prince of immortality, by whom he also made manifest to us the truth and the heavenly life."[69] The Christian's life is "hid with Christ in G.o.d," and Christ's resurrection is to the {164} early church the pledge of immortality--"we shall be ever with the Lord." For the transmigration of souls and "eternal re-dying,"

life was subst.i.tuted.[70] "We have believed," said Tatian, "that there will be a resurrection of our bodies, after the consummation of all things--not, as the Stoics dogmatize, that in periodic cycles the same things for ever come into being and pa.s.s out of it for no good whatever,--but once for all," and this for judgment. The judge is not Minos nor Rhadamanthus, but "G.o.d the maker is the arbiter."[71] "They shall see him (Jesus) then on that day," wrote the so-called Barnabas, "wearing the long scarlet robe upon his flesh, and they will say 'Is this not he whom we crucified, whom we spat upon, and rejected?'"[72]