“Magnum hæreditatis mysterium! Templum Dei factus est uterus nescientis virum. Non est pollutus ex ea carnem assumens. Omnes gentes venient dicentes, Gloria tibi, Domine.”
Antiphon on Vespers of Circumcision.
The world which Augustus and Tiberius ruled was not conscious of the fact that there was an order of truth, and of morality based upon that truth, the maintenance of which was to be purchased, and cheaply purchased, with the loss of life, or of all that made life valuable. This world was indeed familiar with the thought and with the practice of sacrificing life for one object—an object which collected all the natural affections and interests of a man together, and presented them to him in the most attractive form, his country. Greek and Roman history, and indeed the history of all nations up to that time, had been full of instances in which privations and sufferings were endured, and, if necessary, life itself given up for wife and children, for the dear affections of house and home, for friends, for freedom, for fatherland. Man, civilised and uncivilised, was alike capable of this, and capable of it in profusion. Rome had [pg 178] many a Regulus and Sparta many a Leonidas in the humblest ranks of their citizens: Gaul had thousands as noble as Vercingetorex, and Spain not one but many Numantias. Human nature had never been wanting in the courage to die for the visible goods of human life. But to labour, to combat, to endure pain, sorrow, privations, to suffer in every form for the invisible goods of a future life, to recognise, that is, an inviolable order of religion and morality, so far superior to all that a man can grasp and hold in his possession, to wife, children, goods, friends, freedom, and fatherland, and to life adorned and crowned with these, that any or all of these, and life itself, are to be sacrificed for its preservation; this may be said to be a thought of which the whole heathen world ruled by Augustus and Tiberius was unconscious.132 For other reasons also it was familiar enough with the sacrifice of life, since the continual practice of war and the permanent institution of slavery had made human life the cheapest of all things in its eyes. And further, to die rather than to live dishonoured was still the rule of the nobler among the millions who yielded to the sway of Augustus. But to die for the maintenance [pg 179] of moral truth, that is, for faith,—this was known indeed to the Jews, who had already their “cloud of witnesses” to it; but it was unknown to heathendom, which has in all its ranks and times but one man133 to offer whose death approaches to such a sacrifice, and therefore shines with incomparable lustre among all deeds of purely human heroism. But the death of Socrates found in this no imitators, he created here no line of followers; and he stands alone in this greatness, an exception to an otherwise invariable rule.
However, in our two preceding chapters we have been describing something much more than the exhibition of this order of truth; that is, we have set forth the union of it with a Person, who both exhibits it in Himself, and is the source of it to others. And the difference between these two things is very great. Many at different times have said, “I teach the truth.” One only has said, “I am the Truth:” and to say it is the most emphatic indirect assumption of Godhead which can be conceived. And with it that One also joined a similar expression, containing the same assumption of Godhead, and which equally was never approached by any other teacher, “I am the Life.” The union of the Truth at once and of the Life with His Person, which is thus become the root of both to human nature, was the subject of the last two [pg 180] chapters. Now, as we have said, that there was an order of truth sacred and inviolable above all things, was borne witness to by the Hebrew martyrs, and therefore was not new to the chosen race of Israel, though it was new to heathendom, at the time at which our Lord appeared. But the union of the Truth and of the Life with the Person of One appearing visibly in the world as man, was as new to the Hebrews as to the heathen, was an absolute novelty to human nature. And so the Christian Faith also, as a system of belief and action, that is, as embracing the mind and the will of man, as giving both Truth and Life, is entirely new in this respect; that in this double action it is in its origin and in its whole course and maintenance bound up with a Person. Thus all which it teaches is not naked truth, unlocalised as it were, and impersonal, but is the development of relations in which the disciples of Christ stand to Him; for instance, as King, as God, as Head, as Bridegroom, as Father. As these, He is at once The Truth and the Life. Thus it is that the Christian Faith flows out of the Person of Christ the God-man; and, as its Truth is centered in that Person, so also its continuous Life depends on Him.
And further, as the connection of doctrine, or truth, and of life, that is, action, with a Person is the point from which all this movement springs, in which respect we have said it was absolutely [pg 181] new, so the term to which it reaches is the creation of something in both these things correlative to that Person, the creation of a Kingdom, a Temple, a Body, a Mother, a Race, in which respect also the term is as new as that from which it springs. That He is the Truth and the Life is shown in this creation, which has a distinctive character, as He has, an unique existence, and an organic unity with Him.
The subject on which we are now employed is to describe as an historic fact how the duty of maintaining, propagating, and dying for the truth and conduct thus identified with the Person of Christ, was carried out through many generations and under difficulties which seemed to preclude the possibility of its success; and to show the means by which this great creation, starting from the day of Pentecost, made a home and established itself in the Roman empire, by which, after a conflict of nearly three hundred years, it was finally recognised.
The worship of the one true God had been fixed in the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the faith which made them a nation, that is, as the dogma on which their national existence was so based, that through maintaining it they were to continue a people. The Jewish polity lived in and by this belief, and, as a nation, was its prophet. Certainly, this was the noblest form which nationalism has ever assumed. Yet it [pg 182] was nationalism still; and the proselyte who would enter into the full worship of the God of Abraham and all its privileges had to become a Jew. But now, instead of this bond another was substituted, signifying that the King of the Jews who had appeared was come as the saviour of man, not of this or of that nation. The bond is therefore placed at the point which constituted the salvation of the whole race, that is in the Person of the God-man, and by this the corporation was put beyond the bounds of a nationality, and made coextensive with the world. The Christian creed was formed round the Person, the actions, and the sufferings of Christ. Now here, precisely in what constituted the character, the greatness, and the glory of the Christian faith, was seated the principle and the beginning of the persecution which it encountered from the Roman empire. In that empire every species of idolatry134 had a right of homestead as the national or tribe religion of any one of its constituent parts; and the worship of even one God, exclusive as that Jewish worship was of the whole heathen pantheon, was allowed by the laws of Rome to the Jews, because he was considered [pg 183] their national god. But the Christians had no such justification in Roman eyes for their exclusive worship. They were not a nation nor a province of the empire; they had not, therefore, that title for their worship which constituted the charter of toleration to all besides, including the Jew, who worshipped the same God. For the Christians worshipped Him, not as their ancestral God, but as the Father of that Son who had taken human flesh, and become the Saviour of men. Their worship of the one true God was not only exclusive, but in and through the fact of the Incarnation claimed the homage of all men to it. It knew of no bond of brotherhood but in Him who had deigned to call men His brethren. Thus its special character and preëminent glory were the cause of its persecution, and from the moment that it came before the notice of the Roman governor not as a Jewish sect but as a distinct belief, it was considered as not a lawful religion. Thus too it was that the selfsame point which kindled Jewish hatred entailed Roman persecution. The Christian faith was a mortal offence to the Jew because it extended what had been his special privileges to all the Gentiles. He abhorred the substitution of the Person of the God-man for the race of Abraham after the flesh; as the Roman at once despised and hated a worship which not only adhered to one God, but dethroned from his political supremacy the capitoline Jupiter, and whose title rested [pg 184] not on tradition and national inheritance, but on a fact touching the whole race of man, and therefore claiming the allegiance of the whole race—the assumption of human nature by a divine Person. Thus the doctrine in which lay the whole creative force, the truth and the life of Christianity, was that which from the first caused the dislike of the Jew and the persecution of the Gentile—the kingship of Christ, involving the headship of a universal religion, and a power which was not that of Cæsar.
We have, then, now to treat of a period of 280 years, homogeneous in its character from the beginning to the end, which is, that it is the carrying out by a people ever increasing in number and strength of that good confession made before Pontius Pilate—that witness at its proper time of which S. Paul135 in its first stage said that he was the herald and apostle. The course and life of Christians during these ten generations is to be the prolongation of this testimony, the embodiment of this confession. It is as soldiers, imitators, followers of one Chief, that all appear on the scene in their respective order.136 It is by a direct virtue drawn from the cross of that Chief that they move [pg 185] onward to their own passion. They endure and they conquer simply as under His command, and because He endured and conquered before them. Their oath of military fidelity is the bond of their discipline; they prevail because they are His, and because they are one in Him:
The whole process and cause of Christians during this long period, the ground of their accusation, the conduct and principles of the judges, and their judgment, are summed up as in a parable in that scene which passed before Pilate, while the subsequent day of Pentecost is in the same manner an image of the final result won in these three hundred years. For as the crucifixion of the Truth in the Person of Christ is followed by the descent of the Holy Ghost forming the Church, so the persecution and crucifixion of the truth in ten generations of His people is followed by the empire's public recognition of His eternal kingdom—of that Body of Christ seen visibly in a council of its prelates assembling freely from all lands.
Take first the seventy years which form the Apostolic age. What do we find as the result when S. John, the last apostle, is taken away? In a large number of cities throughout the Roman empire a community has been planted after [pg 186] the pattern of that which we have described as arising at Jerusalem, and by the same means, the power of oral teaching. Every such community has at its head its bishop, or angel, who sums up and represents in his own person the people over which he presides. This is exactly the picture presented to us at the close of this period by S. John in the Apocalypse, when he is directed by our Lord personally appearing to him to write seven letters to as many bishops of cities on the seaboard of the province of Asia. Each, with his people, is addressed as a unit. One, “I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy endurance, and how thou canst not bear those which are evil;” a second, “Fear not what thou art about to suffer; behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison;” a third, “I have against thee some few things, that thou hast there some who hold the doctrine of Balaam.”137 Each has around him his council of priests, his ministering deacons, his faithful people. The last apostle is still living; but in all these communities many exist, both of teachers and taught, who have learned Christian doctrine, either from the mouth of an apostle or the comrade of an apostle—a Mark, a Luke, a Silvanus, a Clemens. Thus they live mainly upon oral teaching: the voice which went forth from the day of Pentecost is sounding freshly in their ears. Doctrine is in the stage of simple tradition and authority. [pg 187] The writings of the New Testament are completed, but being addressed to various parts of the Church, are best known to those for whom they were written. They are not yet collected and made the common patrimony of the whole Church. S. John leaves the earth without performing any such function; without setting the seal of his apostolical authority upon the New Testament as a whole; nay, the authorship of some of his own writings, as we now receive them, will be partially contested after his death before their final reception. Of the absolute number of these Christian communities, and of the multitude they severally embrace, we have no account; we can form no estimate, save to infer that the whole number of the faithful, at the end of this period, was very small in comparison with the mass out of which they had been drawn. Still it was a germ with a living force of expansion, planted in every considerable spot of the empire; and wherever it was planted, a Christian people, in the full sense of the word, existed, having a complete spiritual life of its own, possessing the sacraments which insured the beginning and the continuance of that life, an order of worship based on the great central fact which made them a people, and a ministry charged with the power to teach and to convey on to their successors the doctrines delivered to them.
But in the mean time how had the empire [pg 188] treated it? In these seventy years it has traversed the seven last years of the Emperor Tiberius, and the whole principates of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; the revolutionary crisis in which Galba, Otho, and Vitellius reigned for an instant, and then the settled time of Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, and Nerva. Now, during this period its treatment by the empire has been a singular reproduction of what passed in the hall of Pilate. For the Jewish religion was one allowed by Roman law. The profession of it entailed no penalty. Now the first heralds of the Gospel, as Jews, preached their message boldly and publicly, and in doing so it does not seem that Roman law would have interfered with them.138 At this stage it looked upon Christians as a sect of Jews. As no authority of the empire had interfered with the public ministry of our Lord, so it would seem to have left the ministry of His disciples in the first instance free. It is from another quarter that opposition arises. The Jew in his jealous anger at the promulgation of a Messiah and a spiritual kingdom which is not after Jewish taste, both because it is a kingdom not of this world, and because it raises the Gentile to coinheritance with the race of Abraham, drags the Christian missionary before the tribunal of the Roman magistrate [pg 189] and imputes to him “sedition.” Then many a Gallio, many a Felix, many a Festus have as it were unwillingly to enter into and decide these questions of the Jewish law. It would seem that converts to the Christian faith in these its earliest days might long have escaped the notice of the magistrate, as belonging to a Jewish sect, but for this enmity of the Jews themselves. But as the teachers of the new faith everywhere addressed themselves first to their countrymen, so everywhere they found these countrymen alive to their progress and bitterly set against it.139 This state of things is pretty well expressed by that answer of the Roman Jews to S. Paul when he excuses himself before them for having been compelled to appeal to the Emperor Nero: “as concerning this sect, we know that it is spoken against everywhere.”140 This, however, was Jewish, not Roman, contradiction. So far as everywhere Jewish hatred and jealousy could malign and counterwork the progress of the Christian Faith, and bring suffering on its teachers, it had been done. But nevertheless with this exception it would seem that for thirty-five years after the day of Pentecost that Faith had been freely and publicly taught throughout the empire. It was through the malignity of his own countrymen, stirring up a dangerous conspiracy [pg 190] against him, that S. Paul felt himself compelled to appeal to the emperor, and the result of his appeal was that he was set free. But in the year 64 another state of things had arisen. The ruin of a large part of Rome by fire had brought a great odium upon Nero. Now his wife Poppæa is said to have been a Jewish proselyte, he himself to have been surrounded by Jewish influences, and nothing is more probable than that Jewish hatred, which had tracked the Christians everywhere, pursued them especially here, and suggested them to him both as authors of the conflagration, and as convenient scapegoats whereon to divert the odium against himself which had arisen from it. Thus he took the opportunity of exposing to shame and torment, as victims of the popular dislike, and in popular opinion guilty of “hatred of the human race,” or of being hated by them, “a vast multitude”141 of Christians, who, says the heathen historian, were put to the most exquisite suffering, being wrapt in the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or clothed in garments of pitch and set on fire to illuminate the night. Thus it is, as decorations of Nero's games, in his gardens of the Vatican, where the obelisk from Heliopolis, once the ornament of his circus, now bears witness to the victory of Christ, that Christians first come before us in the pages of Roman historians, just at the middle of the period [pg 191] we are now describing, thirty-five years after the Ascension.
It may be considered part of this first persecution that the two great Apostles—Peter, who had founded the Roman Church, and Paul, who after its first foundation had helped to build it up—were condemned in the last year of Nero, and by his deputies142 during his absence, to suffer as Christians, the one the death of a Roman citizen by the sword, and the other that of a slave by crucifixion. Thus the two great brethren by enduring together the martyr's death, the highest mark of Christian charity, sealed their joint foundation of Christian Rome, that like as the Rome which had gained the conquest of the world by the strong hand of violence, had been planted in the blood of one brother shed by another, so the Rome which was to be the centre of Christ's kingdom, and in the words of S. Ignatius “preside over charity,” should have for her founders brethren in supernatural love, pouring forth their blood together for the seat of that Christian unity which binds the earth in one.
But this persecution by Nero is not transitory in its consequences. The emperor had judged that Christians as such professed a religion not allowed by the Roman laws, and were guilty therein of a capital crime. This crime, if technically expressed, [pg 192] would amount to sacrilege and treason;143 for they could not acknowledge the Roman gods as gods, nor the emperor as Pontifex Maximus; nor could they swear by his genius, which was the oath expressing fidelity to the Roman constitution in its civil and religious aspect. This was that “hatred of the human race,” that is, in other words, of the Roman empire, of which in the eyes of Tacitus and Pliny, of Nero now and of Trajan afterwards, they were guilty as Christians. But the singular thing is this, that the Jew, who was the first to drag them before the Roman tribunal, who was their omnipresent, ever-ready antagonist and traducer, though he worshipped one only God, though he abhorred the whole Roman polytheism, though he swore not by the genius of the emperor, was exempt from punishment: his religion was recognised by Roman law and the senate its interpreter, because it was the national and time-honoured religion of a constituent part of the empire. On the same ground the vilest Egyptian, Asiatic, African idol was allowed the worship of those who claimed it as their ancestral god. The Christian Faith was the sole exception to this universal tolerance, because it was not the religion of a subject nation, because it was new, because, in fine, it rested on principles which, if carried out, would sweep away [pg 193] the whole fabric of polytheism on which the Roman State rested. And the act of Nero had its great importance in that it formally distinguished the Christian from the Jewish religion, and took away from it by a legal decision of the State's highest authority the claim to be considered “licit.”
Nero then bestows the crown of martyrdom on S. Peter and S. Paul, and on what Tacitus calls, even within Rome alone, a vast multitude. But he does more than this. On the first appearance of Christians before the supreme authority he so applies an existing law to their case as to establish their liability under it to capital punishment, and this liability rests upon them henceforth down to the time of Constantine. It is by no means always carried out; it is often suspended, sometimes for many years together, according to the character of the ruling prince, or the maxims of his government, or the state itself of the empire. But it is henceforth the legal position of Christians. It is a danger which besets their condition, and may be called into action at any moment, in any city of the empire, from any motive of private enmity, cupidity, or passion. It is the legal Roman equivalent and interpretation of their Master's words, “You shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.”144
How often, and in how many instances, it was carried out in this period of seventy years we have [pg 194] no means of telling; but another emperor is named as a persecutor. Domitian not only put to death as Christian his cousin, the Consul Flavius Clemens, but, as it would seem, a great many others at Rome, in the latter years of his principate.145 Domitian and Nero are mentioned as persecutors by Melito when addressing Marcus Aurelius, and by Tertullian,146 in the time of Severus, though it was the object of both to make the emperors appear to have been not unfavourable to Christians. But, independent of any general act which would constitute an emperor a persecutor,147 this liability to punishment,148 in virtue of which the confessor or martyr was brought before the local magistrates, was that under which individual Christians, in most peaceful times, and in the reign of emperors generally just and moderate, endured their sufferings. The Emperor Tiberius is said by Tertullian [pg 195] to have brought before the senate a proposition to allow the Christian Faith as a lawful religion. Had this been done, the whole course of Christian history in these three centuries would have been changed. As it was, every one, in becoming a Christian, accepted the chance that he might thereby be called upon to forfeit the possession of wife, children, goods, every civil right, and life itself.
The end of the reign of the first Antonine, in the year 161, furnishes us with a second fitting epoch at which we may estimate the growth and position in the empire of the Christian Faith.
During the sixty years which elapse from the death of S. John to the accession of Marcus, the Roman empire is ruled by three sovereigns, who have each left a fair name and a considerable renown behind them, and who, compared with most of those who preceded or who followed them, may almost be termed great. Trajan by his military successes raised to the highest point the credit of the Roman arms, by his moderation in civil government effaced the remembrance of Domitian's cruelties, and gave the Romans perhaps as much liberty as they could bear. His successor Hadrian, joining great energy, administrative ability, and moderation of his own to the fear and respect for the Roman name, which the powerful arm of Trajan had spread around, was able at once to exercise his army with unwearied discipline, and to [pg 196] maintain the empire at its full tide of power in honourable peace, while Antoninus crowned the forty years of equable and generally just government—bestowed on the Roman world by Trajan and Hadrian—with a further happy period of more than half that length, wherein the glory of the empire may be said to have culminated. Imperial Rome never saw again such a day of power, or such a prospect of security, as when Antoninus celebrated the secular games at the completion of nine hundred years; and for ages afterwards his name carried respect, and men looked back on his reign as on an ideal period of happiness for those whom he ruled.
One of the most competent observers of our time has marked the last ten years of the reign of Pius as the period at which the independent development of Græco-Roman heathenism terminated, when it had exhausted all the forms of its own inward life, since the Neoplatonic philosophy which is the only striking product of intelligence that arises afterwards, is manifestly due to the antagonism with Christianity, and is no pure offspring of the heathen spirit.149 From this time forth Christian influences become unmistakable in their action upon heathen thought and society. This, then, affords another reason why we should endeavour to trace the progress and extension which the Church had reached at this point.
[pg 197]Now a contemporary of Antoninus declares that in his time, that is, about the year 150, there was no race of men, either barbarians or Greeks, none even of Scythian nomads roaming in waggons, or of pastoral tribes dwelling in tents, among whom prayers and thanksgivings were not offered to the Father and Creator of the universe in the name of the crucified Jesus.150 Thus, in a hundred and twenty years the Church had outstripped the limits of the empire. The germ which in the time of S. John was rooted in the chief cities, had spread out thence and increased, taking more and more possession of the soil in all directions. Still we must consider the Christian Church in each place of its occupation as a small minority of the people: nor is there any reason to doubt the statement made by Celsus, that at the period when he wrote, the middle of the second century, the Christian Faith counted few of the educated, distinguished, and rich among its adherents;151 for Origen, in replying to him, alleges no specific example to the contrary. Yet, here too we must consider the justice of Origen's remark,152 that these classes are everywhere few in proportion to the poor and ignorant, and that Christianity being the day-star arising on every soul took of all classes alike. So much, then, as to the [pg 198] Church's material extension: now as to its internal growth.
As this period opens, comrades of the Apostles still abound in the churches. We know of several instances wherein such persons hold eminent rank. At Rome, S. Clement is the third successor of S. Peter; and S. Irenæus,153 recording him as such eighty years afterwards, specially notes that he had seen and lived with Apostles, and had their preaching still sounding in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes; at Antioch, S. Ignatius, second after the same S. Peter; in the See of Jerusalem, S. Simeon, the brother of James, still survives; at Smyrna, S. John's disciple Polykarp is bishop. Many more such S. Irenæus declares that there were. This would prepare us for the strength with which the principle of authority and tradition was held, and show how completely the sense of a spiritual government, of cohesion, and continuity of moral life, and of a common doctrine and teaching, the foundation of these, prevailed. But we are not left to inferences, we have the clearest statements on this point about fifteen years after S. John's death. It has been remarked above how in the Apocalypse our Lord himself, addressing the seven churches, gathers them up in their bishops, and [pg 199] speaks of them each collectively as of one person. In the year 116, as is supposed, Ignatius still after forty-eight years bishop of one of the three great mother churches, all of them Sees of Peter, and types and models of church government, whence missions went forth, and the layers of apostolic teaching were propagated, in his seven extant epistles conveys the same idea as that presented by those divine words which S. John had heard in vision, and was commanded to record, but with much greater detail. As he is being led to martyrdom, in the long transit between Antioch and Rome, he pours forth the earnestness of one under sentence of death, glowing at the prospect of shedding his blood for Christ, and being for ever united with Him. These letters remain as a sample of numberless conversations held with the deputations which came to meet him on his way, mingling their tears at his approaching passion with their exultation in his triumph. They are of one tissue throughout. Ignatius dwells with incessant repetition upon union with God and with Christ through obedience to the hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, by maintenance of one faith, in one body of the Church, which is wherever Christ is.154 Let us take one instance from his letter to the Ephesians. After saying that he had “received their whole multitude in the person of Onesimus, their bishop,” he continues: “It is, [pg 200] then, fitting that you should by all means glorify Jesus Christ who has glorified you; that by a uniform obedience you may be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment, and may all speak alike concerning everything, and that being subject to the bishop and the presbytery, you may be altogether sanctified. I am not giving you commands, as if I were any one; for, though I am in bonds for His name, I am not yet perfected in Jesus Christ. For now I begin to learn, and I speak to you as my fellow-disciples, for I had need to be encouraged by you in faith, exhortation, endurance, long-suffering. But since charity suffers me not to be silent to you, I have taken on me to exhort you to run together all with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ, your inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, as also the bishops, placed in their several limits, are the mind of Jesus Christ. Therefore you should run together with the bishop's mind, as indeed you do. So then in your concord and harmonious charity Jesus Christ is sung. And each several one of you makes up the chorus; so that all being harmonious in concord, you take up the melody in unity, and sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, that He may hear you, and perceive by your good works that you are members of His Son. It is good for you then to be in blameless unity, that you may always have fellowship with God.” And then he adds: [pg 201] “For if I in a short time have had such familiarity with your bishop, and that not human, but spiritual, how much more should I think you happy, who are so fused with him as the Church with Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ with the Father, that all things may be accordant in unity.”155
This is an incidental passage out of a very short letter, in which the speaker is addressing practical exhortations to the people of a great church, founded by S. Paul about sixty years before, dwelt in by S. John up to about fifteen years of the time at which he was speaking. We should not in such a writing expect S. Ignatius to speak with the scientific correctness of a theologian, nor is he completely exhibiting his subject in a treatise; yet here, as it were at the first moment after the Apostles have left the earth, we have a picture of the Church as a world-wide institution, held together by a divine unity, which has its seat in the Person of Christ as the mind of the Father. It is a composite unity which is contemplated in the image of a harp with its strings pouring forth one song—the song of Christ—to the Father. It is a unity wide as the earth; for the bishops, placed in their several limits, constitute the mind of Christ, who is Himself the Father's mind. It is the unity of the diocese, for it is summed up in the bishop: but it is the unity likewise of the whole Church, for the bishops are linked together [pg 202] in One whose mind they collectively represent, and that One is He from whose Person their authority radiates; in whom, as he says in this same letter, “the old kingdom was being destroyed, God appearing in the form of a man, unto the newness of eternal life.”156 Again, it is not merely an outward unity of government, but an inward unity of the truth held in common, and also held as given by authority: not truth, as a result of the curiosity of the human intellect, rather truth, as a participation in the mind of Christ. Thus the Catholic unity of government is at the same time a unity of belief, which two unities are not, in fact, separable, for their principle is one in the Person of Christ, in respect of whom submission to the Ruler is one and the same thing with belief in the truth revealed by Him, who is King no less than Word, Word no less than King.
We have, then, here the principle of authority and tradition as seated in the hierarchy, and at the same time the whole order and unity of the Church as girdling the world by its chain of the Episcopate, and as possessing the truth and exhibiting it in its quality of an institution. It is before us and at work in its succession of men, in its sacraments which they administer,157 in its truth which is imparted [pg 203] by the one and delivered by the other. It is no vague congeries of opinions held by individuals with the diversity of individuals, but a body strongly organised, and possessing an imperishable life, the life of its Author. And we have all this mentioned as fulfilled at the distance of one life from our Lord's ascension, while indeed his kinsman and elder in age, S. Simeon, is still bishop of Jerusalem, and mentioned by one of whom a beautiful though insufficiently grounded legend says that he was that child whom our Lord had called and placed before His disciples as the model of those who should enter into His kingdom. He was at least so near in time to Christ that this could be said of him. He is the bishop of Antioch; he is on his way to be thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum at Rome;158 he is welcomed on his way by church after church, and he sees and describes the bishops, in their several boundaries through the earth, as each maintaining the mind of Christ in the unity of his Body.
Such is the Church merely stated as a fact towards the beginning of the second century.
And the trial which in these sixty years the [pg 204] Church was going through was well calculated to test her constitution. It is against the spread of false doctrine that S. Ignatius in these epistles so constantly appeals, to the unity of the faithful among each other.159 He warns them to use only Christian nourishment, and to abstain from strange food, which is heresy.160 The Church was then continually receiving into her bosom converts at all ages of life, some from the Jews, many more from the Gentiles; among these, therefore, minds brought up in Jewish prejudices, and others which had run havoc in eastern superstitions and systems of philosophy. In the course of these sixty years she probably multiplied many times over in number; and the multiplication was rather by the accession of adults than by the education of children born of Christian parents. The Church was composed of a small minority of the general population scattered at wide intervals over an immense empire; and, so far from being assisted by the civil power, was under constant persecution from it. Whatever force her spiritual government possessed could be exercised only by the voluntary submission of her members. Let us weigh the fact that, under these circumstances, a number of heresies arose. Some were of Jewish, some of Gentile parentage. But we are not here concerned either with their cause or with their matter: we dwell at present only on the fact of their existence. In [pg 205] number they were many; in character most diverse; they arose and flourished in different places. Hardly anywhere was the Church free from them. Let us ask only one question here: by what power were they resisted? The human mind had then the fullest liberty of action in Christians. It was by a free choice—a choice accompanied with danger, and persisted in through suffering—that men became Christians. The liberty which men exercised in becoming Christians they could use further against Christian doctrine, by innovating; by mixing it up with other doctrines, with which, perhaps, their minds had been familiar before their conversion; by developing it after their own fashion. The desire of fame, the self-will of genius, the mere luxury of thought, would offer a continual temptation to such a course. Many, from one motive or another, fell into it. The question which we repeat is, what power prevented the one Church from breaking up under this process of free thought into fragments? These heresies began even while the Apostles were teaching. S. Peter, S. Paul, and S. John speak strongly against them. They swarm in the two generations succeeding the death of S. John. How is it that, at the accession of Marcus Aurelius, Christians having passed the limits of the empire, and being found so far as the wandering tribes of the north, there is still one Church, surrounded, indeed, by a multitude of sects, differing from her and from [pg 206] each other, but herself distinguished and unmistakable among them all? We think the epistles of S. Ignatius furnish us with a reply to this question. As we have seen above, he views the Church in each place as a community closely bound together under a spiritual government which is summed up in the bishop, while the bishops in their several dioceses are as closely linked to each other, and all form one society, wherein is Jesus Christ. And these two truths are not separated from each other, but the unity of the part is deduced from the unity of the whole, and is subordinate to it. See, first, with what force he states the unity of the diocese.161 “Avoid divisions, as the beginning of evils. Follow all of you the bishop as Jesus Christ the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles, and reverence the deacons as God's command. Let no one without the bishop do aught of what appertains to the Church. Let that be deemed a sure Eucharist which is under the bishop, or under him who has the bishop's authority for it. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the multitude (of the faithful) be.” But this strict unity of the diocese is derived from that of the whole Church; for he adds as the reason of the foregoing, “just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”162 This is the first time when the word [pg 207] “catholic” is known to be used, and it is applied to the Church as its distinctive character, to convey the two attributes of unity and universality, in connection with the Person of Christ, exactly as it has been used, an unique term for an unique object, from that day to this. S. Ignatius further views the Church in each place as having one faith; and not only so, but the same faith in every place; one faith at Antioch, one at Rome, one at every city between them, beyond them, around them. Here, then, is a double unity, inward and outward. As the double unity of body and spirit makes the man, so the double unity of government and of faith makes the Church. As neither mind nor body alone make the man, so neither faith nor government alone make the Church, but the coherence of both. The Incarnation is the joining a human soul and body with the Person of the Divine Word; after which pattern the Church, which is His special creation, is the joining of one faith and one government in a moral unity. It is by this force, by the same hierarchy everywhere guarding the same faith, by the principle of authority and tradition planted in this one living organisation throughout the earth, that the attacks of heresy are everywhere resisted. [pg 208] What S. Paul163 lays down in dogma, history exhibits in fact. A hundred years after his words are written, the Church has stretched her limits beyond the empire, has multiplied incessantly, has been attacked by a crowd of heresies striving to adulterate her doctrine, and has cast them out of her by this double unity of her faith and her government, and so is one Body and one Spirit. Her victory lies not in being without heresies, but in standing among them as a contrast and a condemnation.
The solidity of internal organisation, and the definiteness of the One Faith which animated it, kept pace with the material increase of numbers. At the expiration of this period it is probable that among all the contemporaries and immediate disciples of the Apostles one only of high rank remained, that Polykarp, joint-hearer with Ignatius of S. John, and to whom in his passage the martyr addressed a letter as well as to his Church; whose own letter written at the time of the martyr's combat, and commemorating the wonderful patience therein shown forth, is yet extant. But in the mean time in every Church the transmission of authoritative teaching passed to those who had grown up themselves in the bishop's council—his presbytery, which Ignatius loved to represent as being to each bishop what the Council of Apostles was to their Lord. And as the death of Apostles themselves [pg 209] had caused no break in this living chain, so the gradual departure of their immediate disciples was made up by the careful handing-on of the same deposit, lodged securely in its receptacle, the succession of men, which carried on the teaching office of the Church.164
In the mean time, what was the attitude of the empire to the Christian Faith under Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius? Domitian's reign had ended in active persecution, to which Nerva had put a stop on his accession.165 But though Domitian's edicts had been reversed, like those of Nero, one of the most ancient laws of the Roman empire forbad the worship of any god not approved by the Senate.166 This, as we have said above, was the sword perpetually suspended over the heads of Christians, without any fresh action on the part of the emperors. By virtue of this, even when it was forbidden to accuse them, yet if they were brought before justice it was forbidden to absolve them.167 And even senators,168 if accused, [pg 210] were not exempt from this severity. We find Trajan acting upon this law in the year 111, when Pliny, being governor of Bithynia, brings expressly the case of the Christians before him. And the terms in which he does this show at once the temper of the Roman magistrate in such cases and the state of the law.
“I have never been present,” he says, “at the trials of Christians, and therefore do not know either the nature of their crime, or the degree of the punishment, or how far examination should go. And I have been in great hesitation whether age made any difference, or the tender should not be distinguished from the strong; whether they should be pardoned upon repentance, or, when once a man had been a Christian, ceasing to be so should not profit him; or whether the mere profession without any crime, or whether the crimes involved in the profession should be punished. In the mean time, with regard to those brought before me as Christians, my practice has been this: I asked them if they were Christians. If they admitted it, I put the question a second and a third time, threatening them with death. If they persevered, I ordered them to be led away to execution.169 For whatever [pg 211] it was which they were confessing, I had no doubt that stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment. There were others of a like infatuation, but as being Roman citizens I directed them to be sent to the city. Presently the crime spreading, from being under prosecution, as is usual, several incidents happened. An anonymous delation was sent in to me, containing the names of many who say that they are not Christians, nor ever were. As at my instance they invoked the gods, and made supplication with frankincense and wine to your image, which I had ordered for that purpose to be brought, together with the statues of the gods, and as moreover they reviled Christ, none of which things, it is said, real Christians can be induced to do, I thought they might be let go. Others, being accused by a witness, admitted that they were Christians, and presently said that they had been, some three years before, some many years, and some even twenty, but were no longer. All venerated your image and the statues of the gods, and reviled Christ. But they alleged that the utmost of their fault or error was this: They were accustomed to meet before dawn on a stated day, and addressed themselves in a certain form [pg 212] to Christ as to a god, binding themselves by oath not to any crime, but not to commit theft, robbery, adultery, the breaking of their word, or the refusal to restore a deposit. After this they were wont to separate, and then reassemble to take a common and harmless meal. This, however, they had ceased to do from the publication of my edict forbidding, according to your command, private assemblies. I therefore thought it the more necessary to examine into the truth by putting to the torture two female slaves, who were said to be deaconesses among them. I found, however, nothing but a perverse and immoderate superstition, and so, adjourning the inquiry, I took refuge in consulting you. For the matter seemed to me worthy of consultation, specially on account of the number of those involved in danger. For many of every age, every rank, both sexes, have been already, and will be endangered, since the contagion of this superstition has spread not only through cities but through villages and country. And it seems capable of being arrested and corrected. At all events there is proof that the almost deserted temples have begun to be frequented, and the long intermitted rites renewed, and victims for sacrifice are found ready, whereof hitherto there were very few purchasers. Hence it is easy to form an opinion what a number of persons may be reclaimed if pardon be allowed.”170
[pg 213]To which the emperor replies: “You have pursued the right course, my dear Secundus, in examining the causes of those delated to you as Christians. For no universal rule can be laid down in a certain formula. They are not to be searched after; but if brought before you and convicted, they must be punished. Yet with this condition, that whoever denies himself to be a Christian, and makes it plain in fact, that is, by supplicating our gods, though he has been in past time suspected, shall obtain pardon for his repentance. But anonymous delations must not be admitted for any accusation. This is at once the very worst precedent, and unworthy of our time.”
A great difficulty in tracing the progress of the Christian Faith in these three centuries is that we possess nothing like a consecutive secular or religious history of them. We only catch glimpses of what passes at intervals. Incidents are recorded which, like a flash of lightning, suddenly reveal the landscape and the actors. Such an incident is this letter of Pliny to Trajan, and his reply. We have here the governor of a province before whom Christians are brought as criminals. We find that if they acknowledge their faith and persist in professing it, he sentences them to death. But embarrassed by their numbers, and perplexed also by the fact, that, save the profession of their faith, there appeared nothing criminal in their conduct, he refers the matter to the emperor. The emperor, [pg 214] no Nero or Domitian, but one renowned for his justice and moderation, praises what the governor has done; pronounces that Christians as such are guilty of a capital crime, and that Pliny was right in so interpreting the existing law; that, however, it is not desirable to seek them out; that even when brought before justice they are to be released if they deny their faith, but that if they persist in it, they are to be punished with death.
Here, then, is the law—an original law of Rome before the Christian Faith began—under which the martyrs suffered at different times, throughout every province and city, without anything which could be called a general persecution on the part of the emperor directed to the destruction of the whole religion. This perpetual liability to punishment might be called into action anywhere in the empire for various causes. The first in time, and one of the most constant, was the enmity of the Jews; then the dislike of the heathens to Christians and their ways, which was further sharpened by local calamities or distress irritating the mind of the population, or by the jealousy of the heathen priests and worshippers at the desertion of their temples. Then, again, there was the ascription to Christian godlessness, as it was called, that is their refusal to acknowledge the Roman gods, of famines, pestilences, and whatever troubled the popular mind. To these we must add a copious harvest of private grudges, and a host of [pg 215] calumnies, which seem now almost grotesque, but then found wide belief. But it was the existence of such a law as this, acted on by Pliny before he referred to the emperor, and confirmed by Trajan, that gave force and effect to all these causes of persecution. And it would appear that when Christians were brought before the magistrates, as guilty of the Christian Faith, it was not in the magistrates' power to decline hearing the case, any more than any other accusation of sacrilege or treason, for it had been determined that Christians were not a mere Jewish sect, and therefore could not in security worship one God, as the Jews did. It was a ruled point that their worship was unauthorised.
The practice of Trajan himself was in accordance with his answer to Pliny.
The very ancient and genuine acts of the martyrdom of S. Ignatius state that having struggled with difficulty through the persecution of Domitian, he had carefully governed his church of Antioch, grieving only that he had not yet reached the rank of a perfect disciple by the sacrifice of his life, for he considered that the confession which is made by martyrdom brings into closer union with the Lord. Trajan then having come to the East, full of exultation at the victories which he had gained, and considering that the subjugation of the Christians was all that was wanting to the perfect obedience of his empire, began to threaten them with the alternative of sacrifice or death. Then Ignatius [pg 216] fearing for his church caused himself to be brought before the emperor, and being in the presence was thus addressed by him. “Who are you, evil spirit, who are zealous to transgress our commands, besides persuading others to come to an evil end?” Ignatius replied, “No one calls the bearer of God an evil spirit, for the demons fly away from the servants of God. But if you mean that I am a trouble to these, and so call me evil to them, I admit it, for having Christ my Heavenly King, I continually dissolve their plots.” Trajan said, “Who is a bearer of God?” Ignatius replied, “He who has Christ in his breast.” Trajan said, “We then appear to you not to have gods in our minds, whom we use to help us against our enemies.” Ignatius answered, “You in your error call gods the demons of the nations, for there is one God who made the heaven, the earth, and the sea, and all that is in them; and one Christ Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, of whose friendship may I partake.” Trajan said, “You mean him who was crucified under Pontius Pilate?” Ignatius answered, “Him who crucifies my sin, with its inventor, and condemns all the error and the malice of the demons under the feet of those who carry him in their heart.” Trajan said, “You then carry the Crucified in your heart?” Ignatius replied, “Yes; for it is written, I will dwell in them, and walk in them.” Trajan gave sentence: “It is our command that Ignatius, who says that he carries [pg 217] the crucified one about in him, be taken in chains by soldiers to the great Rome to become the food of wild beasts, for the pleasure of the people.” The holy martyr, when he heard this sentence, cried out with joy, “I thank Thee, O Lord, who hast thought me worthy to be honoured with perfect charity towards Thee, and to be bound in iron chains together with Thy Apostle Paul.”171
So, with great eagerness and joy, through desire of his passion, having commended his church to God, he set out on that long journey, “fighting, as he says, with wild beasts all the way from Syria to Rome, over land and sea, by day and by night,” a captive under sentence of death, in the hands of soldiers, but receiving at each city a deputation from the bishop and people, who came forth to honour him as their champion. And he has but one anxiety, expressed again and again in that fervent letter to the Roman Christians, that they should not by their prayers intercept his martyrdom. “I entreat you not to be untimely kind to me. Suffer me to be the food of the beasts, since by them I may enjoy God. I am God's grain: let me be ground by their teeth, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ:”172 and then, presently, “I do not command you, as Peter and Paul;” thus giving an incidental but most powerful witness of the special relation which those Apostles bore to the Roman Church.
[pg 218]And it may be remarked that while he has words of honour, praise, and affection for the other five churches which he addresses, yet in speaking of Rome his heart overflows with emotion. Upon this church he pours out epithet upon epithet, as “the beloved and enlightened in the will of Him who has willed all things which are according to the charity of Jesus Christ our God,” whose people are “united to every command of His in flesh and spirit, filled undividedly with the grace of God, and thoroughly cleansed from every spot of foreign doctrine.” She is not only the Church “which presides in the fortress of Roman power,” but likewise, “worthy of God, and of all honour and blessing and praise, worthy to receive that which she wishes, chaste, bearing the name of Christ and the name of the Father, and presiding over charity.” What is the meaning of this last phrase? As she presides in the fortress of Roman power, so she presides over charity. May we thus interpret the mind of the martyr? God in His Triune Being is Charity; the Holy Spirit, the ineffable embrace of the Father and His Image, their Love, or Delight, or Joy, or Blessedness, or whatever human name we may dare to give to what is most divine, is charity: by charity God became man; charity is the individual Christian's state; charity makes men one in the Body of the God-man; charity is the condition of angels and men in the great kingdom to come, the God-formed kingdom. Thus charity is the distinctive [pg 219] mark of the Christian religion, that from which it springs, that which it is, that which it points to, and in which it will be consummated. When, then, S. Ignatius said of the Roman Church, using the same word in one sentence,173 that as she presided over the country of the Romans, so she presided over charity, does he not with equal delicacy and emphasis indicate her primacy? she presides over that in which the Unity of the Church consists, in which its truth, its grace, and its holiness coinhere.