Three introductory lectures on ecclesiastical history

.5-.

THREE INTRODUCTORY LECTURES

ON

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

BY

WILLIAM LEE, D. D.,

FELLOW AND TUTOR OF TRINITY COLLEGE,
AND PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN.

DUBLIN:
HODGES, SMITH, & CO., 104, GRAFTON-STREET,

BOOKSELLERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.

LONDON: RIVINGTONS, WATERLOO-PLACE.
1858.

DUBLIN :

^rintetf at ti)e SHnitoersitp Press,

BY M. H. GILL.

CONTENTS.

LECTURE I.

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE.

PAGE.

The Mature of the subject illustrated, 1

I. The respective limits of Civil and Ecclesiastical History, 4

The relations of Church and State, 5

Examples: — 1. The Albigensian Crusade, .... 6

2. The Schism of the Non- Jurors, ... 7
The Study of Ecclesiastical History, thus understood,

alike important and attractive, 9

Nor does its extent render the task more arduous,. . . 15

The divisibility of Church History into distinct branches, 1 6

II. Ecclesiastical History, the History of Christianity, . . 17

The facts on which this depends, 18

The Aspect of the "World when Christianity was first pro-
claimed:— The Condition of the Eoman Slaye, . . 19

The Gladiator, 21

This state of Society, how encountered by the Church, . 25

Conclusion — The Catacombs, 27

LECTTTKE II.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OE THE CHURCH.

The Aspect of the World when Christianity was first pro-
claimed : — The Office of the Eoman Emperor, ... 33

The Deification of the Emperor, 37

" The first Christian Emperor," 40

The Church at the opening of the Eifth Century, .... 43

I. Preceding Events : — The Edict of Milan, 44

The Hostility of Julian, 45

Syncretism: — Elagabalus; Alexander Severus, ... 47

Neo-Platonism, 48

JV CONTENTS.

PAGE.

II. Eome the stronghold of Paganism, 50

Eoman Society as described by Macrobius, .... 51

The Altar of Yictory, 59

S. Ambrose, 60

Did Theodosius refer to the Senate the question as to the

adoption of Christianity ? 61

The Capture of Eome by Alaric, 63

Paganism lingered in the East, 65

And still longer in the West, 66

From these details two leading facts emerge : —

1. Centuries elapsed before the triumph of the Church

was secured, 67

2. The Bishops of Eome were not her leaders in the

conflict, ib.

LECTUEE III.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

The Progress of Christianity necessarily slow, 71

The Study of Ecclesiastical History proves that there

is no ground here for despondency, 73

Two principles must be our guide in this Study, . . 74
The Aspect of the World when the triumph of the Church

was secured, 77

The function of the Church at this epoch, 79

1. The Preservation of Knowledge: — Alcuin; S. Co-

lumbanus, 81

2. The Civilization of the Barbarians : — The Con-

version of Germany, 82

The results to the Church of the Calamities of the Empire, . 87

The Conduct of the Barbarian Chiefs, 88

The dark pages of Ecclesiastical History illustrated : —

1. The Donatist Controversy, 91

2. The Spirit of Persecution, 96

The Inquisition, 100

Persecution has failed to extinguish error, 105

Subject of the future Course of Lectures denned, . . . .108

.uiuc A

THREE INTRODUCTORY LECTURES,

LECTURE I

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY — ITS CHARACTER AND ITS
PROVINCE.

THERE is an early legend of the Eastern Church
which, from its beauty no less than from the
truth which it embodies, has at all times exercised
a powerful fascination over minds the most variously
constituted. It is introduced as a divine revelation
by Mohammed into the Koran, — it has been adopted
and adorned by his followers from Bengal to Africa ;
it is embodied in the hagiology of the Abyssinian,
and vestiges of the story have been discovered in
the remote extremities of Scandinavia. It has even
stirred the imagination of Gibbon, who has traced
u the authentic tradition" to within iifty years of its
alleged date. " Among the insipid legends of Eccle-
siastical History," he writes, " I am tempted to distin-
guish the memorable fable of the Seven Sleepers"1.

1 Chap, xxxiii.

2 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

The legend is as follows : — The middle of the third
century and the reign of the Emperor Decius are
memorable in the annals of the Church as the period
of the first general persecution. At this time there
lived in the city of Ephesus seven youths of noble
birth, who were Christians. As they refused to offer
sacrifice, they were accused before the tribunal ; but
they fled and escaped to Mount Cselian, where they
hid themselves in a cave. Being discovered, they
were doomed to perish by the tyrant, who gave or-
ders that the entrance should be firmly secured with
a pile of huge stones. They embraced each other,
and fell asleep: — and thus they miraculously slept
on, while years expanded into centuries. And it
came to pass, in the thirtieth year of the Emperor
Theodosius the Younger, that the slaves of Adolius,
to whom the inheritance of the mountain had de-
scended, removing the stones to build a stable for his
cattle, discovered the cavern, and when the light
penetrated therein, the sleepers awoke. Believing
that their slumbers had only lasted for a single night,
they rose up, and resolved that one of their number
should secretly return to the city to purchase food.
Advancing cautiously and fearfully, change every-
where meets his eye : he can no longer recognise the
features of the scene once so familiar, and his surprise
is increased by the appearance of a gilded Cross on
the city-gate by which he entered. He looks around
in vain for traces of the heathen worship ; he timidly
asks a passer-by whether there are any Christians

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 3

in Ephesus, and receives for answer, " We are all
Christians here." His singular dress and obsolete
language soon caused him to be brought before the
Pra3fect. His story told, the magistrates, the Bishop,
and the Emperor himself, followed him in haste to the
cavern of the Seven Sleepers, whose " faces had the
freshness of roses, and a holy and beautiful light
was about them."

The legend goes on to describe the feelings of
pious joy which replaced their previous fears, as the
Sleepers on re-entering the scenes of their youth be-
came gradually conscious of how the world had been
transformed. But, let us fancy them to have slum-
bered on for some ages longer, and the scene of their
reanimation to be some great city of modern Europe
— for example, the London of our own day ; let us
suppose the timid messenger to see before him the
stately Abbey, with the shadows of its centuries
around it ; and to have learned from every Cross-
surmounted pinnacle, from every answer to his won-
dering questions, " We are all Christians here," — we
shall the more readily conceive the nature of that
mighty change that has passed over the earth since
the days of the Caesars, the moving causes and the
events of which it is the province of Ecclesiastical
History*to describe.

To observe the manifestations of that Divine Power
by which this change has been effected ; to trace the
progress of Christianity as the regenerating element
of society ; to note the obstacles it has had to en-

b2

4 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

counter ; to watch the vicissitudes of its conflict with
the powers of earth ; to mourn over its temporary
defeats; to rejoice over its ultimate, though often
long deferred, triumphs ; to deduce from the tangled
details which fill up this chequered scene lessons of
practical wisdom, required alike by every Christian
nation and by every Christian man ; — such is the
grand subject in the consideration of which I invite
you to accompany me.

It is usual, when approaching the present inquiry,
and I believe it to be necessary, to offer some ob-
servations as to the peculiar nature and limits of
the field over which our investigations must extend.
There is a class of questions, indeed, which I am not
solicitous to answer : — What is meant by Ecclesias-
tical History, in the strict sense of the phrase ? How
far is it to be identified with, how far distinguished
from, the general History of the world, the annals of
the rise and fall of nations ? I believe no judicious
writer has ever attempted to fix the boundary here, or
narrowly to define the landmarks which separate the
story of man's progress on earth, from the records of
that Society which guides his road to Heaven. It does
not require any nice judgment to discriminate the
prominent features characteristic of each; and when
I remind you of a parallel and well-known question,
I shall, I hope, have satisfied you that I am justified
in not desiring to draw a sharp line of distinction
between these two departments of historical research:
— I allude to the controversy as to the relation be-

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 5

tween Church and State, the two essential elements
of modern society.

In every theory as to the nature of this relation
which deserves notice, the interests of Church and
State are ever found so closely commingled, that to
attempt to treat of either apart from the other must
be found as impossible as it certainly is unphiloso-
phical. It has been truly said by a great statesman,
that " the highest duty and highest interest of a
body politic alike tend to place it in close relations of
co-operation with the Church of Christ"1. Whether
then, with Hooker, we believe " the Church and the
Commonwealth" to be "personally one Society,"
which is thus variously named merely as we consider
its relation to the secular or the spiritual law;
whether, with Warburton and Paley, we deny a
conscience to the State, and regard considerations of
utility as the motive determining its necessary adop-
tion of a National Religion ; whether, with Burke,
we " think ourselves bound, not only as individuals
in the sanctuary of the heart to renew the memory
of our high origin and caste .... but also in our
corporate character to perform our national homage
to the Institutor, and Author, and Protector of Civil
Society ;" or, again, receiving the beautiful theory of
Coleridge, were we to look upon the Christian Church
as the soul which underlies and animates the body
politic, — as " the sustaining, correcting, befriending,

1 Gladstone, " The State in its Relations with the Church," 4th
ed., vol. i. p. 4.

6 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTOKY,

opposite of the world, the compensating counterforce
to the inherent and inevitable defects of the State, as
a State ;" or, in fine, travelling beyond the theories
for which our own Church is more or less responsible,
were we to accept either the theory of Hobbes, ac-
cording to which the Church and her Religion are
mere creatures of the State, or the opposite extreme
of UltramontaneRomanists, which holds the temporal
power to be wholly dependent on, and subordinate
to the Church : — on each and all of these theories
we shall find the provinces of Civil and Ecclesiastical
History inextricably intertwined; and no one, whe-
ther speculative student or practical statesman, can
pretend to a philosophical knowledge of the annals,
or the constitution, or the laws of his country, who
does not assign, at each era of his country's progress,
due weight to the influence of the Church.

Two striking examples will illustrate what I de-
desire to express.

1. Perhaps the darkest page even in the story of
religious persecution is that which recounts the
crusade against the Albigenses at the opening of the
thirteenth century. We can easily comprehend the
zeal to crush the Manichgean heresy, which prompted
ecclesiastics of every rank to take up arms, under the
mistaken belief of their age, that the cause of Reli-
gion could be promoted by the sword; but it is not
so easy, at first sight, to discern the motives that
led the chivalry of France to wage a war of exter-
mination against the land of the Troubadours.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 7

DeMontfort was, no doubt, a ferocious soldier, and it
is not difficult to understand how the fair regions of
Languedoc and Provence may have excited his cu-
pidity ; but that the great barons of every province
of France should have combined in this enterprise,
and that the successive armies which moved from
Lyons along the Rhone should have assembled to
ravage the most beautiful portion of their own coun-
try,— the focus of that spirit of chivalry which was
absolutely a religion to the knights and warriors of
the age, — requires to be explained by some other
cause than their hatred of heresy. This explanation we
shall find in the civil History of the time. It was the
age in which European society attempted republican
organization. The towns of Provence, Languedoc,
and Aquitaine, aimed at forming themselves into
independent communities. In this fact we discern
the moving power which led on the army of Simon
De Montfort. Besides its character as a religious
crusade, the struggle was still more the contest of
the feudalism of the North against this attempt at
democratical organization by the cities of the South.
The religious element was eagerly made use of by
the feudal barons, and the crusade established the
feudal system in the south of France1.

2. My second illustration is taken from a critical
period in our own history. The schism of the Non-
Jurors forms one of the most striking and, I may

1 Guizot, " Histoire de la Civilization en Europe," 10e Lecon.

8 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

add, most romantic incidents of the Revolution of
1688. The men who sacrificed so much, in obe-
dience to the dictates of conscience, — although the
majority of the nation felt that their sense of duty
was a mistaken one, — exercised an influence on
public opinion which no writer of English History
has ventured to ignore. A great historian has, in-
deed, recently thought fit to envelop in a cloud of
ridicule the conduct of Sancroft and of those who
followed his example ; but few thoughtful men will
refuse assent to the following judgment of Mr,
Hallam : "The necessity of excluding men so con-
scientious, and several of whom had very recently
sustained so conspicuously the brunt of the battle
against king James, was very painful ; and motives
of policy, as well as generosity, were not wanting in
favour of some indulgence towards them. . . . The
effect of this expulsion was highly unfavourable to
the new government ; and it required all the influence
of a latitudinarian school of divinity, led by Locke,
which was very strong among the laity under Wil-
liam, to counteract it"1.

In thus concluding that the History of the Church
must be studied in connexion with general History,
I do not forget that the space through which I invite
you to accompany me is somewhat extensive; and I
feel that this may prove a discouragement to those
who enter upon the study for the first time. I can-

1 " Constitutional History of England," vol. ii. p. 455, 4to ed.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 9

not even promise that our progress will be free from
difficulty, or that we shall pluck only flowers along
our path. Where, indeed, shall you find knowledge
acquired without toil, or what aspect of human
History can you discern undistorted by human weak-
ness or human error? But I believe that no de-
partment of intellectual research can offer more
important or more attractive results to students of
every class. I speak not now of the professed theo-
logian, the very rudiments of whose science depend
upon this knowledge — each phrase and formula in
dogmatic theology being expressed in language ge-
nerated and moulded during those controversies
which form one of the most prominent features of
Ecclesiastical History ; — but I refer to the general
body of educated men, whose training is the duty of
our Universities, and whose thoughtful and intelli-
gent acceptance of her doctrines our Church has ever
invited. I refer to the statesman who draws the
maxims of political wisdom from " the philosophy
that teaches by examples" — the well-known defini-
tion of History in general, one of the most fertile
provinces of which is to be found in the History of
the Church. I refer to those who desire, from what-
ever motive of amusement or instruction, to trace
the fortunes of mankind; and who, in the great drama
performed by human beings on the world's wide
stage, during each period of time, will ever find the
History of the Church opening out scenes that stir

10 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

the soul to its lowest depths, — depicting heroism
and endurance which elicit all the sympathies of our
nature ; genius and wisdom which command the ho-
mage of our understandings; holy lives which we
should all aspire to emulate ; lessons of duty which
we should strive, with prayer, to observe.

Nor can any one have failed to notice that those
portions of general History which involve a record of
the fortunes of the Church are ever the most attrac-
tive. We hear, again, in such episodes, the voice of
our common nature, which is drowned amid the crash
of arms or the fall of empires ; and the humanizing
influence of Christianity casts a cheering light across
the dark page that tells the story of political intrigue
or of national crime. The reading of any person of
ordinary education will furnish abundant proofs of
this. You are all aware, for example, how many
chapters of Gibbon's great work — throughout which
he studiously brings forward those facts that admit
of scenical treatment — are devoted to the affairs of
the Church ; and you surely have felt, when her
History is the theme, that his narrative possesses a
charm which neither the monotonous rhythm of his
rhetoric, nor the measured cadence of his sneer, can
weaken or dispel. Indeed, the records of the Church
are so necessarily and inseparably connected with all
the highest interests of man, that, though they were
regarded merely from a worldly point of view, they
naturally offer to the reflecting mind a degree of at-

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 11

traction which political details, or dynastic changes,
or even the " pomp and circumstance of war," can sel-
dom present.

Permit me to quote, in illustration of my general
meaning, the words of a well-known writer, which
forcibly describe a defect that has long characterized
general History, but of which the modern school of
historians has, at last, become conscious : —

"What good is it to me though innumerable
Smolletts and Belshams keep dinning in my ears
that a man named George III. was born and bred
up, and a man named George II. died ; that Walpole,
and the P'elhams, and Chatham, and Eockingham,
and Shelburne, and North, with their coalition or
their separation ministries, all ousted one another,
and vehemently scrambled for 'the thing they called
the rudder of government, but which was in reality
the spigot of taxation.' .... Mournful, in truth, is it
to behold what the business called ' History/ in these
so enlightened and illuminated times, still conti-
nues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your
eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to
that great question : How men lived and had their

being ? For example, I would fain know the

History of Scotland : who can tell it me ? ' Kobert-
son,' say innumerable voices ; 'Kobertson against the
world.' I open Kobertson, and find there, through
long ages too confused for narration, and fit only to
be presented in the way of epitome and distilled es-
sence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to this

12 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

question : By whom, and by what means, when and
how was this fair broad Scotland, with its arts and
manufactures, temples, schools, institutions, poetry,
spirit, national character, created and made arable,
verdant, peculiar, great, here as I can see some fair
section of it lying, kind and strong (like some
Bacchus-tamed lion), from the Castle-hill of Edin-
burgh ? — but to this other question : How did the
king keep himself alive in those old days ; and re-
strain so many butcher-barons and ravenous hench-
men from utterly extirpating one another, so that
killing went on in some sort of moderation ? In the
one little Letter of iEneas Sylvius, from old Scotland,
there is more of history than in all this. At length,
however, we come to a luminous age, of lasting im-
portance, and full of interest for us ; to the age of
the Reformation. All Scotland is awakened to a
second higher life ; the Spirit of the Highest stirs in
every bosom, agitates every bosom ; Scotland is con-
vulsed, fermenting, struggling to body itself forth
anew. To the herdsman, among his cattle in remote
woods ; to the craftsman, in his rude heath- thatched
workshop, among his rude guild-brethren; to the
great and to the little, a new light has arisen : in town
and hamlet groups are gathered, with eloquent looks,
and governed or ungovernable tongues; the great and
the little go forth together to do battle for the Lord
against the mighty. We ask, with breathless eager-
ness: How was it; how went it on? Let us under-
stand it, let us see it, and know it ! — In reply, is

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 13

handed us a really graceful and most dainty little
scandalous chronicle (as for some journal of fashion)
of two persons : — Mary Stuart and Henry Darnley"1.
The justice of Mr. Carlyle's complaint is now
fully recognised. The truth has, at length, been ac-
knowledged, that battles and sieges, the official acts
of governments, the changes of dynasties, are not the
only facts to which historical narrative should ex-
tend. The relation of events to each other, their
mutual connexion, their causes and their effects, all,
in short, that constitutes the philosophy of History,
are now universally received among the facts that
must be studied, narrated, described. Of the events
which make up History, thus understood, none have
had such influence on the universal interests of the
human family, none present such affinities with all
that concerns the welfare of man, as the spread
of the Christian Faith, the establishment of the
Christian Church. The Christian Clergy as a body
have ever been men of the people : and no surer
index can be found of a nation's civilization at any
stage of its progress, than the lives and the intel-
lectual culture of the ministers of Religion. The
term caste, you should remember, is a term wholly
inapplicable to the Christian priesthood. In Ori-
ental forms of Religion, as of civil government, the
individual was nothing — caste ruled all. Even the
Jewish priesthood was a caste, for the office was he-

1 tJ Samuel Johnson," by Thomas Carlyle.

14 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

reditary ; and the chronicles of the sons of Aaron
but partially unfold the history of the children of
Abraham. The idea of the corporate body of the Chris-
tian Clergy, on the other hand, continually recruited
from the mass of the people, has replaced in the
Christian Church the idea and the limited spirit of
caste. It has rendered the writings of ecclesiastics
a faithful transcript of the national characteristics of
each country, and ecclesiastics themselves true repre-
sentatives of the civilization of each successive age.
From the writings of ecclesiastics alone can any
correct information now be gained as to the recon-
struction and development of society, from the fall
of the Empire to the close of the Middle Ages. At
the commencement of this period, in the towns where
municipal institutions survived, sole relics from the
wreck of Roman organization, the Bishops and Clergy,
by their influence over the people, served as the con-
necting link between them and their conquerors; and,
as time moves on, we find a member of the Clergy
everywhere present, from the cottage of the serf at
the foot of the feudal castle, to the court of the mo-
narch. Not only were the Clergy the sole possessors
of the erudition of their age, they were also, by
early association and by actual occupation, the per-
sons best fitted to transmit to us the character of their
times. This task they have faithfully performed.
Where, for example, shall you find such a picture of
the crisis in which the Roman Empire expired as
in the pages of an Ambrose, or an Augustine; a

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 15

Jerome, or a Gregory the Great? The questions which
they discussed are the very questions that still stir
the heart, and influence the practice of men : — how
moderation is to be suggested to rulers ; how the do-
mestic or public legislation of society is to be guided ;
how religious dissensions are to be calmed ; how
error is to be resisted ; how the heathen are to be
evangelized.

From the manner in which Ecclesiastical History is
thus essentially united with the general History of the
world, its study may, as I have said, at first sight
seem to present a hopeless task. It is, however, a
characteristic of all inquiries relating to the Church,
that each line of investigation may be pursued apart,
and with but slight reference to the others. The
ecclesiastical records of each country, for example,
have a separate department of their own ; the growth
and cessation of controversies form a distinct branch
of the general subject ; the ritualist has open to him
channels of information that can be followed undis-
turbed by other inquiries ; the proceedings of Coun-
cils, the deliberative assemblies which express the
sentiment of the Universal Church, may be con-
sulted without invading any of the kindred topics
which constitute Ecclesiastical History. That a di-
vision of the general subject under distinct heads
should be thus feasible, is an immediate consequence
of the fact which underlies the notion of the Catholi-
city of the Church. When entering upon the study
of ordinary History, we are encountered at the outset

16 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

by a class of questions, in the case of each particular
branch of the human family, which do not arise at
all in the History of the Church — the questions, I
mean, which are involved in the title, "Constitu-
tional History." The origin and progress of govern-
ments, the modifications effected by time in the po-
lity of nations, these are questions which involve the
most delicate investigations, and demand long and
patient research ; but no such inquiry is necessary
on our part. The constitution of the Church Uni-
versal has been fixed from the first by its Divine
Founder. "It is evident unto all men," I quote
the Ordinal of the Anglican Church — " It is evi-
dent unto all men diligently reading the Holy Scrip-
ture and ancient authors, that from the Apostles'
time there have been these Orders of ministers in
Christ's Church, Bishops, Priests, and Deacons." This
was also, one may not unfairly argue, the essential
condition of the Church's triumph. Let us only con-
ceive Church-government not to have been fixed in
primitive times ; — let us imagine differences respect-
ing Ecclesiastical Polity, such as rend, at the present
day, the unity of Christian men, to have prevailed
when it was the task of Christianity to encounter the
civilization of the Roman Empire, and to tame the
barbarism of that Empire's destroyers, — and we shall
have pictured to our minds a state of things from
which God, in His good Providence, has shielded
mankind.

This reference to the idea of the "Universal"

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 17

Church suggests another preliminary topic. Having
stated the extent of the inquiry in which we are en-
gaged, it is necessary that I should also state the
point from which, in my opinion, Ecclesiastical His-
tory, properly so called, takes its rise. I know, in-
deed, that, in the Divine Scheme, the Christian
Church is but a continuation of the Jewish, and that
" the Church in the wilderness"1 was the type of the
Church in the world ; but still, there are features
characteristic of Christianity, and of Christianity
alone among all religions, sufficient to justify our
restricting to it this department of History. The
very title, " Catholic," to the force of which I have
just referred, was abhorrent to the genius and essence
of the religion of the Jew : — Ave learn from Holy
Writ how he received the announcement, "That
many shall come from the East and West, and shall
sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in
the Kingdom of Heaven"2. But there is another
feature of Christianity which distinguishes it not
only from Judaism, but from all other forms of re-
ligion that the world has ever seen, and which, by
rendering the records of the Christian Church the
record of the greatest social revolution in the annals
of mankind, has traced out for it, in universal His-
tory, a distinct epoch of its own.

You remember our Lord's reply to the question,
"Art Thou He that should come, or look we for

lActs, vii. 38. 3S. Matt. viii. 11.

18 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

another V " Go your way, and tell John what things
ye have seen and heard'1 The proofs which evinced
that His Religion was Divine were not merely His
acts of supernatural power, but a fact which, to His
hearers, was no less astonishing : " The blind see,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear,
the dead are raised, to the poor the Gospel is
preached"1. I do not know whether this colloca-
tion of proofs has ever struck you with surprise : —
the " preaching of the Gospel to the poor" is added to
the last and greatest of testimonies, that of raising
from the dead. Leavened as modern society has
been by the influence of Christianity, it may appear
somewhat superfluous even to particularize as a cha-
racteristic of any form of religion that the poor
should partake of its consolations. And yet the
Lord places in an equal rank of importance with the
miracles that manifested His Divine Glory, the fact
to us so familiar, so universally recognised as the
duty most incumbent on His Church, that " to the
poor the Gospel is preached." Consider the cha-
racter of the time. The philosophy of the age was
addressed to a chosen few. Christianity aimed at
making the knowledge of God the common property
of all. " The meanest Christian," wrote Tertullian,
"has found God, and shows thee practically what
thou seekest in God, although Plato2 says that the

1 S. Luke, vii. 22.

2 Timseus, ed. Bipont,, vol. ix. p. 303 ; — tho words are frequently
quoted by the other Apologists of the time. In China, observes

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 19

Creator of the world cannot easily be found, and
that, when He is found, it is impossible to make
Him known to all"1. In this simple characteristic
of the Religion of Christ consists the power that has
changed the destiny of the world. The social revo-
lution which it effected renders the annals of the
Church unique among the histories of mankind, and,
of itself, makes the rise and progress of Christianity
the greatest crisis in the fortunes of the human race.
A brief survey of the state of society at the date of
the Birth of Christ will exhibit how great a moral
miracle was here performed.

The aspect of the world at this epoch presented
an antithesis the greatest that the imagination can
conceive : — the office of the Roman Emperor, and
the condition of the Slave. Each member of this
antithesis calls for some remark. The former, the
office of the Emperor, I reserve for my next Lecture ;
I shall confine myself, for the present, to some ob-
servations suggested by the latter.

The Roman world under Augustus was composed
of citizens, subjects, and allies, — whom alone the
law recognised as entitled to social and political

Dean Milman, " The early Jesuit missionaries assert that the
higher classes (the literate-rum secta) despised the idolatry of the
vulgar. One of the charges against the Christians was their teach-
ing the worship of one true God, which they had full liberty to
worship themselves, to the common people." — Hist, of Christianity,
vol. i. p. 15.

1 " Apologeticus," c. 46.

c 2

20 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

rights. Beyond these, huddled together with goods
and chattels, lay the outer world of slaves, who were
allowed no part or interest in the law at all. The
mass of the provincial population belonged to the
class of dediticii — that is, those who had submitted
to the yoke of Rome without conditions, — the slaves,
as they may be termed, of the great Roman family1.
The civil wars had exhausted the centre of the Em-
pire more than the provinces ; and the rapid dis-
appearance of the free population had filled Roman
statesmen with alarm from the time of the Gracchi.
Notwithstanding the efforts of Julius Ca?sar and
others to check the evil, the lands continued to be
almost entirely cultivated by slaves. At a later pe-
riod domestic slavery attained an extent that may
appear fabulous. Athenams2 states that many Ro-
mans had 10,000 and 20,000 slaves. Pliny3 tells
us that a freedman of Augustus, who had lost much
property in the civil wars, left at his death so many
as 4116 ; and although some writers regard this as
an exaggeration, it has been calculated that for the
period between the conquest of Greece (b. c. 146)
and the reign of the Emperor Alexander Sever us
(a. d. 235), the proportion of three slaves to one
freeman is a sufficiently low estimate. According
to the principles of Roman law, a slave could not con-

1 See Merivale, " History of the Romans under the Empire,"
2nd ed., vol. i. p. 24 ; 1st ed., vol. iv. p. 399.

2 "Deipnos.," lib. vi. ed. Bipont,, vol. ii. p. 544.

3 " Xat. Hist.," lib. xxxiii c. 47.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 21

tract a legal marriage ; he was incapable of acquir-
ing property ; his gains belonged to his master, who
had also power of life and death over his slave. These
powers of the master were declared by the celebrated
jurist Gaius to be part of the jus gentium. The se-
verity of this code was, no doubt, from time to time,
of necessity, relaxed, but the frequent revolts of the
slaves against their tyrants sufficiently attest the in-
tolerable nature of their oppression.

The class of gladiators, an institution purely Ro-
man in its origin and to its end, presents the social
condition of the slave in its saddest aspect.

The very highest pitch of intellectual culture at
Rome failed to perceive that the exhibitions of gla-
diators were an outrage on humanity. Cicero, to
use the words of Gibbon1, " faintly censures the
abuse, and warmly defends the use, of these sports."
Some centuries later, and long after the reign of "the
first Christian Emperor," Symmachus,one of the most
refined of pagans, and the last influential defender
of paganism, notices the impiety of some Saxon cap-
tives who, by strangling themselves in prison, es-
caped the ignominy of being thus " butchered to
make a Roman holiday"2. Tragedy, it has been well
observed, had no existence as a part of Roman liter,
ature. There was too much tragedy, in the shape
of gross reality almost daily before the eye, to allow
the natural sympathy that softens at another's woe

1 Chap. xxx. *Iib„. ii. Epist. xlvi.

22 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

to retain a spark of sensibility. It was not until the
same year as the Council of Nicsea, and, it is stated1,
at the instance of the assembled Fathers, that " the
first Christian Emperor'7 partially disapproved of
these exhibitions. So late as the year a. d. 404,
Honorius was in vain2 solicited to suppress them ;
and his subsequent edict, which accompanied their
final cessation, was brought about by an act of
Christian heroism that merits a passing notice.

Of course the Church, from the first, raised her
voice in horror at such scenes of blood. S. Irenaeus,
and he is followed by S. Cyprian and Tertullian,
mentions as the widest departure from the life of a
Christian exhibited by the most fanatical sect of the
Gnostics, that some of them " did not even absent
themselves from these murderous spectacles"3. We
may well feel astonishment how any pleasure could
be felt by the Roman people in these games. The
very prince in whose reign Christ was born was so
devoted to this pastime, that Maecenas once reproach-
fully summoned him away with the words, " Surge,
tandem, carnifex." The story told by S. Augustine
in his " Confessions"4 strikingly illustrates the strange
fascination with which such scenes were witnessed.

1 See Jac. Gothofredus, " Cod. Theodos.," lib. xv., tit. xii.
t. v. p. 397.

2Prudentius, " Adv. Symmaclium," lib. ii. 1121.

3 " Coilt. Hser.," lib. i. C. 6 — T^s irapa Qeiv Kal av0pt»)7roi<i /utt/nta-
t)fievr)s; 7i^ twv Oijpio/nd^iv^^ Kal fiovofla^ia^ dvcpo(p6vov Ocas.

4 Lib. vi. c. 8.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 23

Alypius was the companion of his boyhood, — as
S. Augustine affectionately terms him, " the brother
of his heart." On a visit to Rome he had resolved
to refrain from such an unphilosophical recreation.
Compelled, however, by some fellow-scholars to ac-
company them to a spectacle of gladiators, Alypius
resolved to close his eyes while thus forced to be
present. " Though present in body," he said, " in
mind I will be absent." At a particular crisis of the
contest the fierce shouts of the multitude overcame
his resolution, and, " conquered by curiosity, he
opened his eyes." The spell was upon him: — the
sight of blood overcame his philosophical determi-
nation, and he became himself" one of the crowd."
He shouted with the rest, his eyes flashed fire, and
he was hurried away with wild delight in his enjoy-
ment of the butchery.

The event which led to the final suppression of
these exhibitions forms one of the most pleasing
episodes in the writings of the old ecclesiastical his-
torians. The occasion was the series of public games
lavished by Honorius on the Roman people, in
honour of the great victory of Pollen tia. A certain
monk, writes Theodoret1, named Telemachus, came
from the East to Rome, at a time when these cruel
spectacles were being exhibited. After gazing upon
the combat he descended into the arena, and tried to
separate the gladiators. The sanguinary spectators,
possessed by the demon of slaughter, were enraged

» "Hist, EccL," Lib. vi. 26.

24 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

at the cessation of their savage sport, and stoned to
death the person who had caused the interruption l.
But this one death had lasting effects. The impres-
sion produced by the murder of Telemachus was so
profound as to call forth a prohibitory edict from
the Emperor, — which edict, stranger still when we re-
collect that that Emperor was the imbecile Honorius,
was obeyed. The turbulent populace of Rome ac-
cepted the mandate, and submitted without a mur-
mur to the law which abolished for ever the human
sacrifices of the amphitheatre.

I have paused upon this topic because it affords
strong confirmation of the progress of Christianity
among the mass of the people. The aristocracy of
Rome, as I propose on a future occasion to point
out, were, to the last, obstinate adherents of pagan-
ism. The abrupt abolition, therefore, of this favourite
Roman amusement, without protest or popular tu-
mult, seems to admit of but one explanation, — the
growing and widely spread influence, among the
lower classes, of the Religion of Christ.

To return, however, to the condition of the world
when Christianity was announced to mankind.

Throughout the whole extent of the Roman domi-
nions, every city, every mansion, was divided into
two hostile camps, of the masters and the slaves, the
tyrants and their victims. This is a fact in ancient

1 Gibbon's comment on this act of Telemachus is characteristic :
his death, he observes, " was more useful to mankind than his
life," — char, xxx,

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 25

society which it is essential to keep before the mind ;
not only as exhibiting one of the chief social evils
with which Christianity had to grapple, but also —
and this is my principal motive for dwelling upon
the subject — because it appears to me to have been
the chief human instrument through which the Gos-
pel gained its victory. Christianity first proclaimed
to the world that all men, of every colour, and every
social grade, are in the highest sense equal before their
Maker ; that all are alike interested in its benefits,
joint heirs of its promises. Guided by the Revela-
tion of Christ, Reason has at length perceived, and,
in modern Europe at least, has recognised the truth,
that the different members of the human family are,
by necessity of logic, equal before God, as joint par-
ticipators in the ruin and the restoration. It is not
my province to recount how both the sacred wri-
ters and the later Christian teachers treated the
question of slavery,— an institution so deeply em-
bedded in the structure of Roman society, and which
for so many centuries held its ground in Europe.
The story told by Bede of that sale of British slaves
at Rome, at the close of the sixth century, which
led to the mission of Augustine ; the pious zeal of
S. Germanus of Paris, at the same period, for the re-
demption of slaves, — are facts well known to the
student of Ecclesiastical History : and, although the
various classes of slaves were, in course of time,
merged into the " adscripti glebse," or serfs of the
Middle Ages, it is a fact that servitude remained in

26 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

Italy down to the thirteenth century1. I may, how-
ever, remind you of the language, on this subject, of
inspired and uninspired preachers of the Gospel : how
"Paul the aged" besought Philemon for his "son
Onesimus f how the Alexandrine Clement reckoned
among the leading principles of the Faith that " we
should treat our domestics as ourselves, for they
are human beings as we are ; and God, bethink thee,
looks impartially upon all, whether they be bond
or free"2. In accordance with this principle, we find
the Church acting in each successive age. The im-
provement in the condition of the slave population
was a subject of constant solicitude to ecclesiastical
rulers, and to Councils ; and, from the hour that
Christianity enjoyed toleration, the highest festivals
were appointed as the seasons, and the churches as
the place, for manumission3. You will easily perceive
the important open here offered to the progress of
Christianity, and can understand how justly, under
social conditions such as I have endeavoured to de-
scribe, the " preaching the Gospel to the poor" could
be placed by Christ among the greatest miracles.

I shall conclude for the present with an illustration
of the principle which I wish to establish — namely,
that among the slave population of the Empire the
Church found some of her earliest and most nu-
merous triumphs.

1 Blair, " The State of Slavery amongst the Romans," p. 16.
? " Paedagogus," lib. iii. c. 12, cd. Potter, p. 307.
3 Blair, he. n't., p. 168.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 27

Eome, as you are aware, is undermined in every
direction by subterraneous excavations, forming a
maze of unknown extent, and with which we are
familiar under the name of the Catacombs. The
Romans had inherited from their Etruscan prede-
cessors these excavated labyrinths, formed, in remote
ages, in the process of quarrying tufo. We find al-
lusion to these sandpits in writers long before the
Christian era. The great increase of the city in the
latter days of the Republic led to the reopening of
the ancient excavations, in order to procure materials
for building ; and hence the whole subsoil on one
side of Rome was gradually perforated by a network
of quarries, which extended to a distance variously
estimated at fifteen and twenty miles. Here resorted
the " arenarii," or sand-diggers, who, as well as the
higher class of workmen, were slaves. Among the
Christian memorials represented in nearly all the
Catacombs are figures of men bearing instruments
of labour, often instruments for the purpose of exca-
vation, and clad in the dress peculiar to the slave1.
Here, then, among this despised class of the popula-
tion, the workmen in the Catacombs had provided
for themselves and their brethren in the Faith a
secure retreat — a retreat which became the estab-
lished refuge of the Roman Church. The number
of the Christian labourers in the Catacombs was in-

1 These are to be distinguished from the Christian Order of
"Fossarii" — see Bingham, " Antiquities," Book in. ch. viii. § 1.

28 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

creased, and this garrison of the Church continually
recruited from the ranks of those who were con-
demned, as was the practice at the time, to labour in
the sandpits as the punishment for abandoning the
ancient Roman faith1. If we read of a Christian
being dragged before the tribunal, or exposed to the
beasts in the Amphitheatre, we are apt to think of
him as one of a scattered community, few in number,
and politically insignificant. But all the while there
existed, literally beneath the surface of Roman so-
ciety, a population unheeded, uncared for, thought
of vaguely, vaguely spoken of, — a population strong-
hearted, of quick impulses, nerved alike to suffer or
to die ; and in numbers, resolution, and physical
force, sufficient to have caused their oppressors to
quail before them. But the sword had not yet been
enlisted in the cause of religion. Submissive, in
these adens and caves of the earth," to the "powers
that be," for their Redeem ers sake, the early Chris-
tians lived and died ; and here they found their
sepulchre2.

In these numerous excavations slaves and persons
of the lowest class, who could not afford the cost of
a funeral pile, were usually buried. You remember

1 We read in the "Acts of the Martyrs" that the Emperor
Maximian (A. D. 294), in the persecntion of Diocletian, "con-
demned all the lloman soldiers who were Christians to hard la-
bour, some to dig stones, others sand. He also condemned Cyriacus
and Sisinnus to dig- sand, and to carry it on their shoulders."

8 See the remarks of Lord Lindsay, " Christian Art," vol. i. p. 4.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 29

how Horace compliments Maecenas on his having
rescued the pits left by the sand-diggers on the Es-
quiline Hill from so base a use as that of being "the
common sepulchre of the vilest of the people"1. Here,
too, we find again the influence of Christianity. The
records of the ancient world prove, what we still see
exhibited in the cemeteries of Egypt, that social dis-
tinctions survived even death, and that separate
burial-places were assigned to the different ranks of
society as well as to different families. It was re-
served for Christianity first to deposit side by side
persons unconnected with each other, except by the
profession of a common Faith2. For three hundred
years the Christians of Kome found sepulture in
these recesses ; and in the still extant memorials of
their trials and sufferings during persecution, we see
the purity and the depth of their religious convic-
tions. The very name "cemetery," " place of repose,"
Koifx^T7]piov^ found for the first time in the inscrip-
tions of the Catacombs, points to a feeling of hope,
and a belief in immortality. Rude though the
mural pictures may be, they suggest all that is ex-
alted in heroism, and sublime in charity. We read
in the inscriptions no record of their sufferings, — for
death was hailed by them as the gate of everlasting

1 " Hue prius angustis ejecta cadavera cellis
Conservus vili portanda locabat in area,
Hoc miserse plebi commune sepulchrum." — Sat. i. viii.
3 See Maitland, " The Church in the Catacombs," p. 39. Of.,
too, Bishop Kip's pleasing volume, " The Catacombs of Rome."

3() ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

happiness, which they rejoiced to decorate with
pleasing symbols and flowers ; we can trace no
tokens of hostility against their persecutors, for they
had learned that the Christian must forgive : " There
is no sign of mourning, no token of resentment, no
expression of vengeance ; all breathes softness, be-
nevolence, charity"1.

Let me quote an inscription discovered by Ar-
inghi in the Cemetery of S. Agnes, which comprises
almost all that is affecting in the details of ancient
martyrdom, as well as the union of different so-
cial grades in the bonds of that Faith which drew
closely together the master and the slave : —
" Here lies Gordianus, Nuncius of Gaul, murdered
for the Faith with his whole family. They rest in
peace. The handmaid Theophila has erected this"2.
The uncouth Latinity and strange orthography of
these epitaphs afford the clearest proof as to the
rank and education of the persons who composed
and engraved them; while the same story, eloquent
in its simplicity, runs through them all — the story
which tells the hope of the Christian, the resignation
of the martyr. Enter the hall of the Vatican called
Lapidarian or "delle lapidi." On one side of this
long corridor you read the collected inscriptions that
have been taken from the Catacombs ; on the other
side are the monumental inscriptions of pagan Rome,

1 Cf. Seroux-D'Agincourt, "Hist, de l'Art," t. i. pp. 16-28.

2 " Roma Subterranea," lib. in. c. xxii. p. 337.

ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PROVINCE. 31

gathered from the ruins of " the Eternal City." The
thought conveyed by each Christian epitaph, as con-
trasted with the almost unvarying language of the
heathen gravestones, forcibly strikes the mind. The
pagan inscription breathes the very accents of despair.
Beneath lie buried the love of the survivors, the
hopes of the departed ; there the dead enter the
portals of that tomb which to them is " an eternal
home" (" domus eternalis"). " 0 relentless fortune,"
wrote a mother over her infant child, " who de-
lightest in cruel death, why is Maximus so suddenly
snatched from me ?" On another gravestone we read :
" To the divine manes of Titus Claudius Secundus,
who lived fifty-seven years. Baths, wine, love, make
life what it is. Farewell! Farewell!" With such
sentiments as these contrast the faith and hope of
the following: — "In Christ. Alexander is not dead,
but lives beyond the stars. His body rests in this
tomb :" or compare the thought which, almost with-
out an exception, is expressed by each Christian
epitaph — " In Peace."

LECTURE II

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

HPHE aspect of the world during the earlier cen-
-*- turies of the Christian era presented, as I stated
in my last Lecture, a contrast so striking as to
tax the utmost efforts of the imagination to con-
ceive it : — the condition of the Slave, and the office of
the Roman Emperor. I have already offered some
remarks on the relation to the spread of Christianity
of the former member of this antithesis ; and have
availed myself of the facts thence resulting, in order
to show that the Christian Church, by inaugurating
a complete revolution in the social organization of
mankind, has marked out for its History a new epoch
as its own. I now turn to the latter of these two
phenomena — the office of the Roman Emperor.

With this great institution, regarded politically as
expressing the voice of the State, was, of course,
deeply concerned the weal or the woe of the Chris-
tian as of every inhabitant of that broad belt around
the Mediterranean which constituted the Roman
Empire. But, if we regard it from another point of
view, which shall enable us to examine the claim to
divine honours advanced in that age by the Masters

D

34 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

of the world,— a claim which so long and so sadly in-
fluenced the fortunes of the early Church, — we shall
be naturally led to the subject with which, on the
present occasion, I desire to engage your attention, —
I mean the slow, and painful, and difficult progress
of Christianity during the protracted period of five
centuries1.

In approaching the subject of the dawn of Chris-
tianity upon the earth, the facilities afforded for
the propagation of the new Religion by the settled
government and the tranquillity of the Roman Em-
pire, as well as the impetus which its growth received
from the failure of the ancient religions to satisfy the
vearnino-s of human nature, are features of the case
which naturally suggest themselves to the mind.
The finger of Prophecy had already pointed out the
great Western Monarchy as included in the Scheme of
Providence for the regeneration of the world: and no
portion of the History of mankind is more full of deep-
est interest than that which accompanies the growth
of the infant Church beside " the Decline and Fall" of
the colossal Empire of Rome. The harvest was at
length ripe for the reapers. The prolonged peace
over the earth, and the culmination of Roman great-
ness under Augustus, mark the epoch in which was
born in the manger of Bethlehem the Saviour of the

1 The leading facts referred to in the present Lecture are dis-
cussed by ."Beugnot, " Histoire de la Destruction duPaganisme en
Occident ;" and by Dean Milraan, in his " History of Chris-
tianity" and his notes on Gibbon.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 35

human race. Henceforward each step in the progress
of History is marked by the most startling vicissitudes.
The gorgeous ceremonial, with which Philip the Ara-
bian commemorated the thousandth anniversary of
the building of Rome, was soon followed by the
Church's great trial under Decius ; — it was also soon
followed by the first inroad of the Goths. Many years
of bitter persecution had yet to be endured until the
final triumph of Christianity succeeded the capture
of Rome by Alaric. The closing of the temple of
Janus was to a human eye the great event of the age.
The general cessation of war, thus symbolized, has
ever been referred to, as fitly marking the point of
time from which we date the reign of the Prince of
Peace. The Assyrian, and Persian, and Grecian Mo-
narchies had passed away. The Roman, as the fourth
Monarchy of the ancient world, had absorbed the three
great powers that had successively subjugated the
human race, and had brought them under the unity
of a single will. These withdrawn, neither prince,
nor king, nor potentate of any denomination, ap-
peared to break the universal calm which through
centuries surrounded the throne of the Csesars. The
barbarians, it is true, were accumulating in vast
hordes beyond the Danube and the Rhine : the tem-
pest, however, had as yet given but few tokens of its
approach. The frontiers of the Empire were guarded
by troops, or bounded by forest and desert ; and the
proud Roman little dreamed that foes more terrible
than Gaul or Carthaginian were slowly gathering

d 2

36 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

around the borders. The Goth, the Vandal, and the
Frank, were still hidden behind a cloud of years ;
and centuries were yet to elapse ere those masses
were hurled on the hapless populations of Southern
Europe, — ere the storm had burst which swept away
the power of Rome, and the entire structure of
Roman society.

The authority, consequently, of the Roman Em-
peror, when Christianity was first preached to the
world, had neither hostility to apprehend from with-
out, nor opposition to encounter from within. His
position was one that overpowers the imagination
when we approach to contemplate it. Here, the
genius of Absolutism meets us in its most appalling
form. The Emperor's very title, " Imperator," marked
him as the sole representative of the military power,
the Stratocracy, as it has been happily termed, of
Rome. He was himself the great fountain of law,
of honour, of preferment, of civil and political regula-
tions. The nobles of every grade were under his im-
mediate censorship ; the lowest classes were linked,
in a connexion of absolute dependence, to the ruler
who provided their daily food. The character of
Roman Emperor was truly and mysteriously awful.
Gibbon has pictured with much force one of the fea-
tures of this character, its virtual ubiquity, by sup-
posing the case of a subject who should attempt to
evade the Emperor's vengeance. If we take the
case of a modern tyrant, he observes, " The object of
his displeasure, escaping from the narrow limits of his

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 37

dominions, would easily obtain, in a happier climate,
a secure refuge, a new fortune adequate to his merit,
the freedom of complaint, and, perhaps, the means
of revenge. But the Empire of the Romans filled"
the world, and when that Empire fell into the hands
of a single person, the world became a safe and
dreary prison for his enemies. 4 Wherever you are,'
said Cicero to the exiled Marcellus, ' remember that
you are equally within the power of the conqueror' "l.
What, then, was the natural and inevitable re-
sult produced on the minds of those subjected
to this power, thus palpable, as it were, and from
whose grasp there was no escape ? We find it in
the deification of the Emperor, that singular belief
of the Roman world, which, at first sight, appears to
us so incomprehensible. " Ye reverence Caesar,"
wrote Tertullian, " with greater apprehension, and
more fervid timidity, than the Olympian Jove him-
self. Neither do ye this so much from the

dictates of reason, as from the respect which ye bear
to his immediate and intrinsic power. In fact,
among you, a man had better forswear himself by
all the gods than by the simple genius of Caesar"2.
These words represent one aspect of the case; — they
describe the natural impression produced on the
mind of the Roman people by the concentration of
all the powers of the State in subjection to a single
irresponsible will. The fact may also be regarded

1 Chap. iii. a " Apologeticus," c. xxviii.

38 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OE THE CHURCH.

under another aspect, not, perhaps, altogether so
material.

The religions of the world, transplanted from
their native soil to Rome, had lost all their signifi-
cancy : — the contact, too, of the various mythologies
was necessarily followed by their mutual hostility
and destruction. Their contradictions could not be
reconciled. The political spirit of each alone re-
mained ; and in each case was attracted, as if by an
irresistible impulse, to that one self-dependent power
which now filled the world. " The worship paid to
the genius of the Emperor," observes Ranke, " was,
perhaps, the only one common to the whole Empire.
All idolatries clung round this, as to a common
prop"1. Dean Milman, indeed, cannot prevail upon
himself to accept this conclusion. His comment on
the words of Ranke which I have quoted is : "I am
not disposed to think so ill of human nature"2. That
conclusion, however, of the German scholar I cannot
help regarding as both borne out by facts, and as the
natural inference from the causes which I have re-
capitulated. The various forms of religion united
in paying this worship. Temples were raised and
altars dedicated to the Emperor. Men swore by his
name ; they celebrated festivals in his honour ; his
statues afforded sanctuary. It seems impossible to re-
gard all this as mere excess of adulation, or asmain-

1 " History of the Popes," B. i. ch. i. Austin's transl., .vol. i. p. 7.

2 " History of Christianity," vol. i. p. 29, note.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 39

tained by hypocrisy. It was a belief that grew with
the growth and strengthened with the strength of the
Empire. Domitian (a. d. 95) caused his Epistles to
commence, "Dominus etDeus noster hoc fieri jubet"1.
Upon medals struck during the lifetime of Aurelian,
the Pannonian peasant (a. d. 270 ), we read the titles,
" Deo et Domino nostro Aureliano Aug."2 Neither
the tragical fate of several of the emperors, nor
their short tenure of power, at all affected the belief
in their divinity. The corpse of the murdered Galba
was laid, within a few weeks, in the same cell which
had witnessed the suicide of Nero. The united reigns
of Nero's three successors amounted to no more than
eighteen months and twenty days. But the reverses
ascribed to the deities of the national religion had
prepared the minds of the Romans for such incon-
gruities ; — their faith in the divinity of the Em-
perors could not be shaken by events which were
merely parallel to the tragedies and revolutions of the
mythological Olympus. However this may be, the
fact is incontestable ; and the veneration paid to each
successive Csesar even increased in its intensity. To-
wards the opening of the fourth century, Diocletian
assumed the title of Jovius, Maximian of Herculius :
— the motion of the world (so said the panegyrists)

•Suetonius, "Domit.," 13. Gieseler writes: " Schon Casar
liess sich diese Ehren auch in Rom vom Senate decretiren (Suet.,
Caes., 76), Augustus nahm in den Proyinzen Tempel und Priester-
collegien an (Taciti Ann., i. 10 ; Suet., Aug., 52), und so alle seine
Nachfolger nur mit Ausnahme des Vespasianus." — B. i. § 14, s. 37.

2 Eckhel, " Doctrina Kumorum Veterum," 1. vii. p. 482.

40 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter ;
the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from
monsters and tyrants1. Even when the Emperors
had openly professed Christianity, the belief in their
divinity still remained the Eoman Creed. Scarcely
had Constantine expired, when the Senate enrolled
him among the gods. The poet Claudian almost
completes the apotheosis of the great adversary of pa-
ganism, Theodosius, whose son and successor, Hono-
rius, he deifies from his birth —

" Non litora nostro
Sufficerent angusta Deo"2.

It is a kind of popular belief to date the final
triumph of Christianity from the accession of Con-
stantine. The condition of the Church from this
period, if contrasted with her cruel sufferings under
his immediate predecessors, renders, it is true, such
a belief not unnatural. But the unbending facts of
History sometimes reverse the verdict of a courtier's
panegyric ; and here, too, we are compelled to ask
how far " the first Christian Emperor" merits the
glory so commonly ascribed to him ?

The claims of Constantine to the very name of
Christian are something more than problematical ;
the question, at least, still admits of discussion. I do
not argue from the slight influence of the Christian

1 Lactantius, " De Mort. Persec," c. 52 j Gibbon, chap. xiii.

2 "De quarto Cons. Honorii," v. 136. Gibbon (chap, xxix.)
observes : "An old inscription gives Stilicho the singular title of
Pro-gener Divi Theodosii."

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 41

Religion upon his actions ; nor do I build any-
thing upon that record of domestic crime, which
renders the family of " the first Christian Em-
peror" a second family of the Atridae1 : — human
nature is ever presenting inconsistencies too start-
ling to render such reasoning legitimate. But one
may fairly appeal to the evidence of facts. The
original adoption of the Christian cause by Constan-
tine appears to me simply to prove — and to prove
nothing more than this — that Christianity had now
attained an influence over the world which rendered
it a political power. The wide diffusion of the prin-
ciples of the new Religion — the subject on which I
dwelt in my last Lecture — among that class which
in modern times we significantly term " the people,"
could not have escaped the eye of the practised
statesman. It seems to be a fact well attested, that
Maxentius had endeavoured to revive the spirit of
paganism in his own favour, before the decisive
battle at the Milvian Bridge. To enlist, there-
fore, the antagonism of the Christians on his side,
appears, from the subsequent history of Constan-
tine, to have been motive sufficient to determine

1 The well-known verses affixed to the palace gates, comparing
Constantine to Nero, exhibit the light in which his acts were re-
garded by his contemporaries at Rome : —

" Saturni aurea ssecla quis requirat?
Sunthgec gemmea, sed Neroniana."
Sidonius Apollinarius ascribes these verses to the Consul Ablavius,
Epist,, lib. v. 8, ed. Simond, p. 138.

42 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

him as to the part he should take in this struggle :
and the well-known incident of the vision of the
Cross, with the suggested motto, " By this conquer,"
seen, as he marched to the victory that gave him
the sovereignty of the world, well symbolizes the
political reasons which unquestionably influenced
his mind. After he attained the supreme power,
although he did not sacrifice to Jupiter, — in general
the first act of a victorious Emperor, — he attended
the sacred games, he restored the pagan temples in
Rome, and assumed among his imperial titles that
of Pontifex Maximus. How little influence, to the
last, Christian associations had over the mind of
Constantine, is illustrated by the curious and, for
that age, significant fact, that in the entire coinage
of his reign we find a complete absence of Christian
allusion, or symbol1. To what extent, however,
Constantine's subsequent profession of Christianity
was sincere, how far his original zeal in its cause
was simulated, — are questions beside my present
object, which is to bring before you the position of

1 " Si sacros infimi sevi scriptores audias, obvios esse oporteret
Constantini numos crucis, aut etiam ipsa Christi insignes imagine.
Testatus utrumque est Joannes Damascenus ("In Synod. ad Theo-

pliil.") Et refert Sozomenus (H. E. lib. i. c. 8) Constan-

tinum imaginem snam seu in numis expressam, seu pictam in
tabnlis jussisse semper divino crucis signo inscribi et consignari

Verum excute universam Constantini monetam, nunquam

in ea aut Christi imaginem, aut Constantini effigiem erace insig-
nem reperies." — Eckhel, loc. cit., t. viii. p. 88.

On this entire question see the first Excursus in Heinichen's

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 43

the Church at the opening of the fifth century, re-
specting which, I apprehend, there exists no small
amount of misconception.

As to the relative position of Christianity and
paganism at this epoch, M. Guizot observes : — " The
first condition in which the Church appears at the
fifth century is that of the Imperial Church — the
Church of the Roman Empire. When the Roman
Empire fell, the Church thought herself at the
term of her career, and that her triumph was ac-
complished. In a word, she had completely van-
quished paganism"1. And the learned writer goes on
to imply that the presence of the barbarians, Goths,
Yandals, Burgundians, and Franks, could alone, for
the future, occasion her any solicitude. Now, how-
ever partially correct this statement may be as to
the position of the Church at the close of the period
named, were we to suppose it to apply to the com-
mencement of the fifth century, we should form a
most erroneous idea of the actual history of the
time. I am inclined to think that most persons, on

edition ofEusebius, "De Vita Constantini," p. 505, where a view
favourable to the Emperor is taken. When Pagi (on Baronius, a. d.
321, No. 18) notes that Constantine's rescript toMaximus, Praefect
of Rome, decreeing that the haruspices are to be consulted, merely
amounts to a permission that others should consult them, adding
that in the same year the Emperor conferred benefits on the
Church, — this defence simply confirms what I have stated in the
text. Cf. Niebuhr, " Lectures on Eom. Hist.," Schmitz's transl.,
vol. iii. p. 318, 2nd ed.

1 ''Hist, de la Civilization en Europe," 6e Lec,on.

44 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

reading the passage which I have quoted, would
picture to themselves the Church in full possession
of dignity and power, — the civilized world at her
feet, paganism a dream of the past, and the ob-
servance of Christian worship universal. It is my
present object briefly to show how far nearer the
truth is the reverse of such a portrait.

The reigns of Constantine and his successors were
professedly a season of equal toleration for both re-
ligions. The celebrated edict of Milan went no far-
ther than to recognise Christianity as one of the legal
forms by which the Divinity — Divinitas, to Qecov —
may be worshipped1. The respectful language in
which Constantine still spoke, in his public edicts, of
the established paganism has been noticed by writers
on this subject. We there read merely the terms —
" vetus consuetudo," "templorum solemnia," "consue-
tudinis gentilitise solemnia ;" while under his succes-
sors we find expressions such as the following — " de-
mentia," " superstitio damnabilis," " stolidus pagan-
orum error"2. The Theodosian code, indeed, in laws
bearing the respective dates of A. d. 353 and A. d.
356, attribute to the son of Constantine the forcible
suppression of paganism. The authenticity of these

1 See the form as given by Lactantius, "De Ifort. Persecut,"
c. 48 : — " lit daremus et Christianis et omnibus liberam potesta-
tem sequcndi religionem quam quisque voluisset, quo quidem
Divinitas in sede coelesti, nobis placata ac propitia possit exis-
tere."

2 Beugnot, i. p. 80.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 45

laws, at least of the dates assigned to them, has been
questioned. They certainly were not enforced: for, in-
scriptions prove that during the reign of Constantius
not only were the heathen temples open without re-
striction, but that sacrifices were offered in Rome, in
Italy, and throughout the whole of the Western Em-
pire, in perfect freedom. Julian, though professing
toleration, avowedly employed every means to re-
store paganism to its former splendour. Like many
of the most refined among the Romans of that age,
Julian seems to have embraced paganism sincerely.
A devout and sincere attachment, writes Gibbon,
for the gods of Athens and Rome constituted his
ruling passion1. The cruelty of Constantius to him
in his youth filled him with hatred even to the Re-
ligion which Constantius professed; and his passions
led him on to acts of persecution unworthy of his
genius, and inconsistent with his professions of libe-
rality. The sophist remembered that he was an
Emperor, and forgot his philosophy. Brutal as had
been the persecution of Diocletian, it was open and
honest ; that of Julian was covert and perfidious.
By one act he plundered the churches, alleging that,
as the Gospel recommended poverty, he performed
thereby a service to the Christians, since he thus

1 Gibbon adds in a note : — " I shall transcribe some of his own
expressions from a short religious discourse which the Imperial
pontiff composed to censure the bold impiety of a Cynic (Orat. vii.
p. 212.) The variety and copiousness of the Greek tongue seems
inadequate to the fervour of his devotion." — Chap, xxiii.

46 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

rendered them more worthy of the Kingdom of Hea-
ven1 ; by another, he closed the schools of those
Christians who would not confine their teaching to
" the study of Matthew and Luke"2. Julian's ephe-
meral hostility passed away ; but his successors, al-
though professing Christianity, were not yet prepared
to exceed the limits of simple toleration. Valen-
tinian is extolled by Ammianus Marcellinus, and
Valens by Libanius, both of them pagans, for the
severe impartiality with which they stood between
the conflicting religions (a. d. 375). In the follow-
ing reigns of Gratian and Theodosius we at length
discern the beginnings of the triumph of Christianity.
Even Theodosius did not attempt to interdict the
private exercise of the old religion which still re-
tained so powerful an influence over his subjects, —
an influence which time only could overcome.

The ancient worship of Rome possessed a hold
over the minds of men, far more tenacious than one
who does not closely examine the History of the age
can readily bring himself to believe. The idea has
been thrown out3, and, I think, with great justice,
that the indiscriminate mockery of all that had been
so long held sacred, such as we find in the writings
of Lucian, would of itself provoke opposition. Lu-
cian had exhausted the philosophy of unbelief ; and

1 1 va •jrevofievoi atotfipovCoai, kcu [irj aiep^QCbaiv, ^s en e\7r/£-

ovaiv, ovpaviov (iaaiXeias; — Ep. xliii., Ad Ecebolum, ed Spanh.

2 Ep. xlii., ibid.

3 Cf. Tschirner, "Der Fall des Heidenthums " s. 401.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 47

absolute unbelief cannot remain the dominant senti-
ment. The inclination began gradually to develop
itself, to mingle together various religions, and to
seek in each different system some point of contact
with the philosophy of the time. Of this incli-
nation two remarkable examples are afforded by
the two Caesars, Elagabalus and Alexander Seve-
rus, who ruled the Empire from the year 218 to
235.

At Emesa, a city of Syria on the banks of the Oron-
tes, Bassianus, the first cousin once removed of the
Emperor Caracalla, had been consecrated, in his earlv
youth, high priest of the Sun. In the year 218 he
was declared Emperor by the army, and assumed the
name of Elagabalus, under which appellation the Sun-
god was worshipped at Emesa under the form of a
black round stone said to have fallen from heaven.
The new Emperor erected at Rome a temple for his
idol, in which he deposited the most hallowed pledges
of the early Roman religion, the Ancilia, the Palla-
dium, and the sacred fire of Vesta. A consort must
be chosen for the god of Emesa, and the Moon, adored
by the Africans under the name of Astarte, was
deemed a suitable companion for the Sun : — her
image was transported with solemn pomp from Car-
thage to Rome. The Syrian, the Roman, and the
African religions being thus mingled, Elagabalus
cherished the further idea of making the temple of
the Sun a point of reunion for the worship of the
Samaritans, the Jews, and the Christians; and thus,

48 THE EAELY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

in a proper sense, a Pantheon1. This, it is true, was
merely the project of a dull fanatic ; but the same
spirit of syncretism appears in the more lofty con-
ception of Alexander Severus, who placed in his pri-
vate chapel, as objects of worship, Abraham the an-
cestor of the Jewish race, and Christ the Author of
Christianity, as well as Orpheus the founder of the
Grecian Mysteries, and Apollonius of Tyana the
teacher of Indian and Egyptian wisdom.

In these cases paganism does not come before us
as an aggressor : but direct opposition to the Church
was not long in appearing.

The foremost place among the hostile systems
must, without doubt, be assigned to that reaction
of Christianity upon heathenism, that gradual re-
finement of the old religions, which, by combining
certain principles of the Christian Faith with the
purer and more philosophical elements of the ex-
isting paganism, presented the sole adversary, in the
intellectual order, that the Church had to encoun-
ter— the Alexandrine Neo-Platonism. The hosti-
lity of this system of syncretism did not restrict
itself to the weapons of argument, on which phi-
losophy so proudly, and often so falsely, vaunts itself:
— the great hierophant of Neo-Platonism, Hieroeles,
is distinctly named as the author of the persecution
under Diocletian. Taking its rise with Ammonius
Saccas at the opening of the third century, Neo-

1 Lampridius, "Anton. Heliogab.," c. iii.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 49

Platonism continued to offer unceasing opposition to
Christianity, until Justinian closed the schools of its
professors at Athens, in the year 529 ; and long after
this its public suppression, the principles of this phi-
losophy continued to exert an injurious influence
on Christian literature1. The same spirit we find
once more in Manichaeanism, a form of religion
which about the year 270 was announced by the ad-
venturer Mani. The Christian element appears in
the titles " Apostle of Christ," and " Paraclete," which
he adopted ; Jewish traditions, too, and the Greek
philosophy, were not forgotten ; while the Zoroas-
trianism of Persia, and, apparently, the Buddhism2 of
India, contributed certain of their principles. The
foundation of the creed of Mani was, as all know,
pure, original, irreconcilable dualism ; the two prin-
ciples of light and darkness, of good and evil, were
the eternal antagonists. It is hard, indeed, to un-
derstand how such a system could have had so lasting
and so powerful an attraction alike for the highest in-
tellects, and for the peasants of the Middle Ages: — S.
Augustine with difficulty avoided this belief; and it
possessed an influence over the mind of the West
even in the thirteenth century, and during the Al-
bigensian crusade.

1 See Guizot, "Hist, de la Civilization en France," tome iii.
p. 160, who traces its pantheistic principles in the writings of
Joannes Scotns Erigena, through the medium of (the so-called)
Dionysius the Areopagite.

2 Milman, " Hist, of Christianity," vol. ii., p. 325.

E

50 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

At the beginning of the fifth century the strong-
hold of the ancient religion was Rome. In the East
its downfall took place at an earlier period ; and at
the close of the fourth century, like Christianity
under the Antonines, paganism, by the mouth of Li-
banius, makes its " apology" for its public worship.
To a stranger, Rome would still have offered all the
appearance of a pagan city. The Prefects were al-
most invariably pagans ; the heathen temples were
under their protection ; and in the time of Yalen-
tinian, there appear to have been in Rome 152
temples, and 183 smaller shrines ("sediculae"), which
bore the name of their tutelary gods, and were used
for the purposes of public worship. Some years after
the accession of Theodosius to the Eastern Empire,
sacrifices were performed as national rites at the pub-
lic cost ; and Libanius asserts, no doubt with perfect
truth, that the Emperor dared not endanger the
safety of the Empire by their abolition. The Em-
peror still bore the title and insignia of Pontifex Maxi-
mus, religious processions passed along the streets,
and the populace thronged to the festivals and the
theatres, which still formed part of the pagan wor-
ship.

The tone of literary society at this period may
be illustrated by a circumstance recorded of Am-
mianus Marcellinus. He wrote his history at Rome,
and recited in public its successive parts as he com-
posed them. This course of recitation was received
with much applause ; he was crowned and feted as

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 51

lie read aloud a narrative in which he compared the
Christians to " ferocious beasts." You will remem-
ber that Gibbon's account of the state of the Roman
Church, under Pope Damasus, is taken from the re-
port of Ammianus.

In order to give you an idea of the religious
sentiments of the Roman aristocracy at the close
of the fourth century after the birth of Christ, I
shall present to you a group of Roman nobles of the
highest rank. A selection of the representatives of
the most refined and most exalted grade of Roman
society, at this period, has been made in a work now
little known, — the " Saturnalia" of Macrobius. The au-
thor flourished at the opening of the fifth century; and
his treatise consists of a series of dissertations on his-
tory, mythology, criticism, and various points of an-
tiquarian research, supposed to have been delivered
during the holidays of the Saturnalia. The scene is
laid at the house of Vettius Praetextatus, who filled
the highest offices of the State under Yalentinian and
Yalens. Here, among other topics, for example, was
expounded the theory which deduces all modes of
worship from the worship of the Sun. There is one
remarkable feature, too, of the " Saturnalia" which
merits a passing notice, when we remember the sub-
jects discussed, and who the persons were, engaged
in the discussion. An absolute silence is observed
as to the very existence of Christianity. You re-
member the comments of Paley on the silence of Jo-

E 2

52 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

sephus as to our Lord's history, and on the silence of
later Jewish writers as to the Christian Religion1.
The silence of Macrobius affords a still more forcible
illustration of this intentional reticence than that ad-
duced by Paley. During the fourth century it wras
the policy of paganism to affect ignorance of the
progress of the Christian Faith. After the sack of
Rome by Alaric this silence ceased. Eunapius and
Zosimus commenced a fierce polemic against Chris-
tianity, of which it was the invariable theme that the
misfortunes which now befell the Empire Avere judg-
ments for neglecting the old worship, and tolerating
the strange Religion. S.Augustine's great work, "The
City of God," was the Christians' reply. Merobaudes,
a distinguished general and a poet in the first half of
the fifth century, adopts the same tone ; he even re-
news the old charge of atheism against the Christians,
when he closes a lament with the words —

" Omniaque haec sine mente Jo vis, sine 1ST amine summo"2.

" The first Christian Emperor" had preceded the pa-
gans in this line of argument. His own victories and
the disasters of his enemies were put forward by Con-
stantine as conclusive evidences of Christianity3.
Macrobius thus introduces us to the leading Roman

1 " Evidences," Part i. chap. vii.

2 See Milman's note, Gibbon, " Works," vol. iii. p. 20.

3 " It is remarkable in all the proclamations and documents which
Eusebius assigns to Constantine, some even written by his own

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 53

nobles : — If, he observes, " earlier writers have been
allowed to bring in the Cottas, the Lselii, the Scipios,
discussing questions of high import, I may be per-
mitted to introduce the Prsetextati, the Flaviani, the
Albini, the Symmachi"1. Let me say a few words as
to each of these personages, who were devoted pa-
gans, and bitter foes of Christianity.

Yettius Agorius Praetextatus, in whose house the
scene of his dialogues is placed by Macrobius, was the
leader of the Eoman aristocracy, the Praefect of Rome
under Yalentinian, and perhaps the most favourable
specimen of a character which one finds it so diffi-
cult to conceive, — that of a sincerely religious Roman
statesman, devoutly worshipping the gods 400 years
after the Birth of Christ. His death was mourned as a
public calamity, and he died without witnessing the
degradation of the religion which he loved. His re-
ligious sentiments were characterized by that spirit
of syncretism which I have already noticed. While
he was a member of the Pontifical College, " Ponti-
fex Major" as he is styled in inscriptions, all the re-
ligions of the Empire combined to pay him honour.
The epithet given him by Macrobius, " sacrorum om-
nium prsBSul," is confirmed by the fact that among
his titles we find included the highest rank in the

hand, how almost exclusively he dwells on this worldly superiority
of the God adored by the Christians over those of the Heathen, and
the visible temporal advantages which attend on the worship of
Christianity." — Milman, Hist, of Christianity, vol. ii. p. 397.
1 "Saturnalia," lib. i. c. 1.

54 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

Eleusinian, Phrygian, Syrian, and Mithriac mysteries.
His wife, Fabia Aconia Panlina, was no less zealous
for the ancient faith. She had been initiated in the
temples of Eleusis, Lerna, and iEgina; she was hiero-
phant of Hecate, and priestess of Isis. The anecdote
told by S.' Jerome has been often quoted, — that Prae-
textatus was in the habit of saying to Pope Damasus,
" Make me Bishop of Rome, and I will forthwith be
a Christian." Whether we take these words to con-
vey a sarcasm on the state of the Roman Church — as
they are understood by Gibbon, — or merely to repre-
sent the two religions maintaining towards each other
an attitude of outward amity, they afford, as uttered
by the pagan Governor of Rome, an instructive illus-
tration of the position of parties at this time.

Praetextatus, as I have said, was "Pontifex Major,"
or one of the fifteen members of the Pontifical College
presided over by the Emperor, for whom was reserved
the title of " Pontifex Maximus." This title had been
regularly assumed by the Christian Emperors down
to Gratian, who, on his accession, had been formally
arrayed in the robe of Sovereign Pontiff. But the
influence of S. Ambrose now began to be felt. In the
year 382, when Gratian was in Gaul, the Senate
sent a deputation from Rome to perform the cere-
mony of officially investing him with the insignia of
the Pontifical dignity. Gratian refused to accept
the symbols of paganism ; and the intelligence of
this act of the Emperor not obscurely announced to
the pagan party at Rome the first overt step in the

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 55

separation of the civil power and the ancient forms
of worship1.

Rome had for some time ceased to be the residence
of the Emperors. The chief supporters of pagan-
ism were now the Prasfects, who were almost inva-
riably devoted adherents of the old religion. The
necessity of removing the seat of government to a
position more central as regarded the Eastern fron-
tier, had been felt before Constantine had fixed it on
the shores of the Bosphorus. This idea was first
carried out by Diocletian, who selected Nicomedia,
on the Illyrian side of the Adriatic. In consequence
of this removal of the imperial residence, there arose
among the proud Roman nobility what we should
term an opposition party to that of the Court ; and
in the struggle between these parties we trace the
last public efforts of paganism. The abandonment
of the capital by the Emperors naturally inflamed the
animosity of the adherents of the old institutions,
while it concentrated their strength. Rome gra-
dually sank in political importance from the first to
the fourth or fifth city of the Empire. Even in Italy,
Milan and Ravenna enjoyed more of the presence of
the Emperor ; and the haughty Romans only clung
the more fondly to all that reminded them of their
former preeminence. The new Religion was gra-
dually associated with this new order of things ; and
the spirit of party, which ever rallies round what is

1 Zosimus, iv. 36.

56 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OE THE CHURCH.

ancient when menaced with ruin or decay, was evoked
with all its acrimony1.

The next members of the group particularized by
Macrobius are the Albini, of whom one was Prefect
of Rome from a. d. 389 to a. d. 391 , and another be-
tween A. d. 395 and a.d. 408. S. Jerome highly eulo-
gizes the former, Ceionius Rufius Albinus. The chief
labour of S. Jerome's life was to draw over to Chris-
tianity the Roman patricians, and to break the bonds
that still united them to the old religion. This we
learn from his numerous epistles, addressed chiefly to
Christian ladies, over whose minds he exerted a power-
ful influence. Albinus was devotedly attached to pa-
ganism, while his children were Christians. Among
them was that Lseta whose virtues and piety added
lustre to the Roman Church in the fifth century.
Laeta had been married to Toxotius, son of S. Paula,
and there is a charming letter from S. Jerome to
Lseta, now a widow, on the subject of her daughter's
education. Her father Albinus, he tells her, still
walks in darkness, and he applies to the case of the
pagan parent and the Christian child the counsel of
S. Paul to a wife united to an unbelieving husband :
"Thou art sprung," he writes, "from an ill-matched
union, and Paula is the daughter of thee and my Tox-
otius. Who would believe that the lisping accents
of thy little one should chant Alleluias to Christ,

1 See an article in the " Quarterly Review," September, 1886,
entitled, "Downfall of Paganism."

THE EAELY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 57

while her grandsire Albinus looks on and rejoices ;
or that the old man would nurture a child of God
in his bosom ? A holy and believing family sancti-
fies an unbeliever. That man is alreadv a candidate
for the Faith, who is surrounded by believing de-
scendants. Let him scorn my letter, if he will: his
son-in-law did the same before he was a Christian"1.
The third member of our group is Virius Nicho-
machus Flavianus, whose family was noted for their
veneration of the gods. He was Praetorian Praafect of
Italy and Illyricum a.d. 382 and a.d. 392. "When,
in the latter of these years, on the murder of Va-
lentinian, Arbogastes the Frank proclaimed his pup-
pet Eugenius Emperor, Flavianus at once embraced
his cause ; and to him is ascribed the saying that, if
successful against Theodosius, he would stable his
war-horse in the church of Milan. He was in high
repute for his skill in divination ; and when Theo-
dosius, by forcing the passes of the Alps, had falsi-
fied his prediction of victory to Eugenius, Flavianus
judged himself worthy of death, — rather, observes
the historian2, for his blunder as a soothsayer, than
his crime as a rebel. For a brief period previous
to the defeat of Eugenius, idolatry was restored
throughout the West, The images of the gods were
painted on his banners, and the statues of Hercules
and Jupiter were carried at the head of his army.
Flavianus obtained from him the restoration of the

lEp. cvii., ed. Vallars. 2 Ruffinus, " Eccl. Hist,," ii. 33.

58 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

Altar of Victory ; the mention of which brings me
to Symmachus, the last member of our group, and
also recalls the controversy respecting the Altar of
Victory itself, round which paganism fought its last
fight, and met its final defeat.

Foremost among his contemporaries as a scholar,
a statesman, and an orator, was Quintus Aurelius
Symmachus. In his youth he had accompanied his
father to Antioch when sent by the Senate, in the
year 360, on a mission to the Emperor Constantius.
Here he was placed under the charge of the cele-
brated Sophist, Libanius, the favourite of Julian, and
the teacher of S. Basil and S. Chrysostom. Libanius
sincerely believed that the national worship of the
Empire was superior to Christianity; he regarded
the old mythology of Greece as an inexhaustible
source of the beautiful and the sublime. From him
Symmachus imbibed a higher view of the ancient re-
ligion than that which was prevalent at Rome. He
returned to Italy convinced that there was still in
paganism a principle energetic enough to save so-
ciety. He would have nought to do with the prevalent
syncretism, which had led Prastextatus to combine
with the Roman faith the rites of Mithras and Cybele.
His devotion to the gods, unaccountable as it may
seem if we regard the Roman religion as Cicero and
others represent it, appears to have been unaffected
and sincere. A festival, a sacrifice, a religious cere-
mony celebrated with magnificence, were at all times
epochs in his life, and caused him to forget, for the

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 59

moment, all the evils of his country. One cannot
refrain from a smile at the solemnity with which the
statesman of the fourth century, the contemporary
of S. Jerome and S. Ambrose, writes to his friend
Praetextatus : — " My mind is overpowered with grief,
that manifold, and oft repeated sacrifices have not
yet publicly atoned for the portent at Spoletium.
Scarcely has the eighth immolation propitiated Jove ;
and the eleventh offering of numerous victims has in
vain been made to public fortune"1. He refers with
bitterness to the growing custom which led some of
the Roman nobles to absent themselves from the
public sacrifices, in the hope of thus gaining the fa-
vour of the Christian Emperor : " Nunc aris deesse
Romanos, genus est ambiendi"2. When accused of
cruelty to the Christians in his capacity of Prsefect of
Rome, he appeals in proof of the falsehood of the
charge to the letters of Pope Damasus3. This charge
of itself illustrates the misunderstanding, to which I
have already referred, which subsisted between the
Court and the pagan administration of the capital.

As we may easily conceive, Symmachus was ac-
tively engaged in the contest between the two reli-
gions. For ten years (a. d. 382-392) the struggle,
so far as its political aspect was concerned, centered
in the controversy respecting the Statue and Altar of
Victory which Augustus, after the battle of Actium,
had placed in the Senate-house.

1 Lib. i., Epist. xliii. 2 Lib. i., Epist. xlv. 3 Lib. x., Ep. xxxiv.

60 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

History records how Constantius first removed
from the hall in which the Senate assembled this an-
cient monument, a solemn offering at which was the
ordinary prelude to their public deliberations ; how
it was restored by Julian; tolerated by Valentinian,
and once more banished by Gratian. Four deputa-
tions were voted by the Senate to successive Em-
perors soliciting its restoration1. By the advice of
PraBtextatus the conduct of this business was now
intrusted to Symmachus. Here, again, the influence
of S. Ambrose was felt : — his eloquence prevailed
in opposition to the rhetorical pleading of the Ro-
man advocate. The Christian party in the Senate
was strong enough to resolve upon a counter -petition
to the Emperor ; and Pope Damasus had forwarded
it to S. Ambrose. At an earlier stage in this con-
test Gratian not only rejected the petition of the
pagan envoys, he also withdrew from the temples
the public support which they had hitherto re-
ceived. On the renewal of the Senate's applica-
tion to Valentinian, in the year 384, the ancient
parts of the two religions were for the first time
openly reversed. Symmachus2 invoked the spirit of
toleration, or rather of indifference, which Constan-

1 Gibbon notes : — " The Jlrst (a. d. 382) to Gratian, who refused
them andience. The second (a. d. 384) to Valentinian, when the
field was disputed by Symmachus, and Ambrose. The third
(a. d. 388) to Theodosius; and the fourth (a. d. 392) to Valenti-
nian."— Chap, xxviii.

2 Lib. x., Ep. liv.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 61

tine and Jovian had inscribed in their edicts : S. Am-
brose, in his celebrated reply, rejects this demand
as sacrilege. " You cannot," he tells the Emperor,
" serve two masters. They complain, forsooth, that
some paltry stipends are .withheld, they who never
spared our blood"1. The defeat of Symmachus gave
occasion to a poet of the time to say that Victory was
a very blind, or a very ungrateful goddess, since she
had so signally abandoned her defender.

The importance attached by the pagan party to
the removal of the Altar of Victory proves how well
aimed was this blow at the old religion. From the
first the importance of the act seems to have been un-
derstood on both sides. It was one of the measures
of Constantius in his overt hostility to heathenism.
Julian lost no time in restoring this symbol of the
ancient faith ; nor did subsequent Emperors venture,
for several years, to renew what paganism regarded
as the deepest insult at once to the glory and the re-
ligion of Rome.

I cannot leave this part of the subject without
saying a word on the well-known story, accepted as
historical by Gibbon2 and not rejected by Gieseler3
or Neander4, that Theodosius, subsequently to his
victory over Eugenius, placed before the Senate the
question, " Whether the worship of Jupiter or that
of Christ should be the religion of the Romans?"
This is one of those perplexing passages in History

1 Opp., t. ii. pp. 824, 833. 2 Chap, xxviii.

3 B. i. s. 360. 4 B. i. s. 449: Gotha, 1856..

62 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

as to which it now seems hopeless to look for abso-
lute certainty. For myself, I cannot believe the
statement, Every element of probability is wanting;
and the evidence itself is contradictory. The two
authorities for the fact — the pagan historian Zosimus,
and the Christian poet Prudentius — give results ex-
actly opposite, each claiming the majority of the
Senate on the side of the religion which he wrote to
defend. It is almost impossible to persuade one's self
that Theodosius could have adopted such a measure;
whether we consider his sincere attachment to Chris-
tianity, or the fact that for many years the Senate had
ceased to exert any influence on public affairs. The
date, moreover, assigned by both Zosimus and Pru-
dentius (a. d. 394) heightens the improbability ; as
it seems to be capable of demonstration1 that Theo-
dosius did not visit Rome subsequently to the defeat
of Eugenius. Gibbon, who after his peculiar manner
tells us that " Jupiter was condemned and degraded
by the sense of a very large majority," felt this dif-
ficulty ; and, accordingly, he has changed the date
to the year 388—389. But the fact that seems al-
most decisive of the question is the silence of S.
Ambrose and S. Jerome. Can we believe that S.
Ambrose would have remained inactive ? or that S.
Jerome, who directed the consciences of so many
members of the Senate, who so continually refers to
their conduct in matters of religion, would have

1 See the authorities quoted in Milman's note on Gibbon,
" Works," vol. iii. p. 7 ; and Beugnot, i. p. 483.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OE THE CHURCH. 63

omitted all allusion to an incident so startling, and
so important? The only solution which can be
offered is, that some one of the debates in the Senate
on the subject of the Altar of Victory has supplied
the foundation for this story ; and that the facts
have been misrepresented by the pagan historian,
and embellished with wonted exaggeration by the
Christian poet.

On the final decision of the question respecting
the Altar of Victory, the struggle by degrees grew
fainter. Symmachus mourns, with hands upraised to
heaven, the growing neglect of the sacred rites : " Dii
patrii facite gratiam neglectorum sacrorum"1. The
ancient worship did not even expire with dignity.
One of the last acts of pontifical authority was the
capital punishment of an unchaste Vestal2. Reli-
gious hatred, moreover, now stifled in the breasts of
the old Roman party even the spirit of patriotism.
When Florence, in the year 406, was reduced to the
last extremity by the savage Rhadagaisus, " the op-
pressed votaries of Jupiter and Mercury respected,
in the implacable enemy of Rome, the character of
a devout pagan"3.

The day from which we may date the final
overthrow of paganism in its stronghold is the 24th
of August, a. d. 410 : — the occasion, the capture and
sack of Rome by Alaric. S. Jerome, in words ad-

1 Lib. ii. Epist. vii. 2 Symmachus, Lib. ix. Epistt. cxviii. cxix.
3 Gibbon, chap. xxx.

64 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

dressed to Eustochium1, thus describes the results
of " this awful catastrophe :" — " Who would have
believed that Rome, exalted so high by her con-
quests, should have thus fallen ! That having
been the mother, she should become the sepulchre
of her people ! That the shores of the Orient, of
Egypt, of Africa, once the possessions of the Imperial
City, should now be thronged with crowds of her sons
and daughters led away to slavery ! That holy Beth-
lehem should daily receive within its precincts those
once rich and noble, who now come to beg their
bread ! We have not the power to aid them ; we
can only mourn with them, and mingle our tears
with theirs." Historians usually illustrate the cala-
mities of the unhappy Romans by the case of " the
noble and pious Proba, the widow of the Praefect
Petronius"2, who was compelled to give up every-
thing she still possessed to Heraclian, Count of Africa,
in order to preserve her daughters from the fate of
other Roman ladies — that of being sold to the slave
merchants of Syria. The fugitives did not main-
tain their dignity. Despoiled of all their former
wealth, the proud Roman nobles wandered, in a state
of complete destitution, through provinces which
their ancestors had ruled as conquerors. History
presents few examples of a reverse of fortune so great
and so sudden.

1 "Comment, in Ezech.," lib. iii. Preef., ed. Vallars, t. v. p. 79.
* Gibbon, chap. xxxi.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OE THE CHURCH. <lO

From this period, at length, we may date, as I
have said, the final triumph of Christianity. Hitherto
the laws which proscribed heathen rites and wor-
ship had no actual force in cities such as Rome or
Alexandria ; the name of pagan, which first appears
in a law of Yalentinian (a. d. 368), at length truly
expresses the fate of the old religion now banished
from the cities of the Empire1. At length had come
to pass before the eyes of the world, the event which
from the first had been inevitable, and which had
long been a reality. The saying ascribed to Julian,
when he received his fatal wound, was now openly
verified, — vevUrj/ca? Ta\i\a?e, " Thou hast conquered,
O Galikean !"2

The final overthrow of heathenism in the East was
not accomplished until the same period. In the
year 389 the Serapeum at Alexandria was still re-
garded as one of the wonders of the world. When
the colossal idol of that magnificent temple was des-
troyed, even the Christians looked on with awe ; and
hopes were for some time cherished by the pagans
that the Nile would withhold his annual supply, in
token of the displeasure of the insulted Serapis. Op-
tatius, a pagan, governed Constantinople in the year
4043. At Alexandria the celebrated Hypatia still ex-
pounded, down to her death in the year 416, the

luQ,ui ex loeorum agrestium compitis et paps pagani vocan-
tur." — Orosius (a. d. 416), Histor. Praf.
2Theodoret, " Eccl. Hist.," iii. 25.
3 See Beugnot, ii. p. 55.

G6 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

principles of the ancient philosophy, in the school of
Plato and Plotinus1 :— her sad history is finely told
in the brilliant romance of Mr. Kingsley. The doc-
trines of Neo-Platonism were taught at Athens until
the edict of Justinian, A. d. 529.

Superstitions, however, which are the growth of
ages cannot be at once eradicated. The seeds of
heathenism had been too deeply planted in the po-
pular mind to be uprooted even by the convulsions
which now rent asunder every social bond. In the
last years of the fifth century the celebration of the
Lupercalia still lingered in Eome. In the middle
of the eighth century, Winifrid, the Apostle of Ger-
many, better known as S. Boniface, complains to
Pope Zachary, that his labours among the Franks
and the Alemanni had been in many cases neutra-
lized, by those barbarians having witnessed, even in
the vicinity of the Roman churches, pagan proces-
sions traversing the streets, and pagan customs
openly practised'2. More generally still in the rural
districts had the attachment to paganism survived
the fall of its idols, and the destruction of its temples.
In the middle of the fifth century Maximus of Turin
is forced to remonstrate with Christian landholders
for tolerating the idolatry of their serfs. He still
found it necessary to continue the old polemic
against heathenism; to advance arguments to prove
that the worship of Venus was immodest, of Mars,

1 Socrates, "Eccl. Hist.," vii. 15.

2 Epist. cxxxii., ap. Max. Bibl. Patrum, t. xiii. p. 125.

THE EARLY STRUGGLE OE THE CHURCH. 67

barbarous, of Cybele, destitute of reason. We even
find the worship of Apollo lingering yet another
hundred years in Central Italy. Not until the year
529 was the Altar of Apollo on Monte Cassino de-
stroyed by Benedict of Nursia, and replaced by a
Christian church. Such was the origin of that re-
nowned Monastery; and this little mountain of Cam-
pania received the last sigh of paganism in Italy.

From the details on which I have dwelt in the pre-
sent Lecture two leading facts emerge, — facts which
those who approach the study of Ecclesiastical His-
tory should clearly represent to their minds : —

1. The first leading fact is the length of time that
elapsed before Christianity was finally triumphant.
For more than a hundred years longer than the
period which has now passed away since the Refor-
mation, paganism still held its ground. Even in the
fifth century the heathen Pontifex encountered the
Christian Bishop on equal terms in all but the truth
of his cause. The further consideration of this sub-
ject I must postpone until my next Lecture.

2. The second leading fact which I desire to im-
press upon you is the position occupied by Rome in
this prolonged struggle with the forces opposed to
Christianity. To the last, as you will remember, the
metropolis of the world was the stronghold of the
ancient worship ; and when we seek for the cham-
pions of the Church in her conflict, and in her
triumph, our search must not be made at Rome.
We turn to the cell at Bethlehem, or to the Numi-

f 2

C8 THE EARLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH.

dian seaport, for a Jerome, or an Augustine. When
his guilt is to be brought home to the conscience of
an Emperor, the prelate who asserts the broken
Christian law, and convinces a Theodosius of his sin,
is Ambrose of Milan. When the progress of the
Arian heresy is to be combated foot by foot, it is in
Alexandria that we meet an Athanasius.

Nor is it difficult to discern the reason.

So long as paganism had the mastery, there was
a natural obstacle which repelled the intellect of
the age from gravitating, so to speak, to Rome, the
acknowledged centre of the world's greatness. On
the other hand, when this obstacle was removed,
the spell which the very name of "the Eternal
City" exercised, as it still exercises, over men, as
naturally resumed its influence over the Christian
mind. Henceforward we find at Rome the fore-
most intellects of each generation, called forth by
the wants of the age, and the special circum-
stances in which the Church was placed. From
this period the series of great men who filled the
See of Rome from the First to the Seventh Gre-
gory, were the chief instruments in the maintenance
of Christianity, and the preservation of society itself,
during the dreary centuries that followed the disso-
lution of the Empire. The power thus called into
existence, and carried to its maturity by the legiti-
mate and inevitable operation of natural causes, was
one which produced, as I have said, in its season, an
amount of public benefit which no impartial stu-

THE EAKLY STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH. 69

dent of History desires either to deny, or to explain
away. It was a power which, had it been guided
by the spirit of the Gospel, or the principles of pri-
mitive times, needed not the authority of the False
Decretals for its assertion, or the subversion of the in-
dependence of National Churches, to give it strength.
But its work was accomplished : and then the Pa-
pacy, like other human institutions which have ful-
filled their task, began to degenerate. As the re-
sult, we peruse in the pages of History a record of
that struggle to attain both Spiritual and Temporal
Supremacy, the character of which has been fitly il-
lustrated, in each case, by its legitimate reductio ad
absurdum : — the life of John XXIIL, and the last
days of Boniface VIII.

LECTURE III.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

T REMARKED at the close of my last Lecture,
-*- that some further consideration was required
in order to enable us to estimate aright one of the
leading facts which emerge from the details con-
nected with the final overthrow of paganism.

Four hundred and ten years had intervened be-
tween the Birth of Christ and the capture of Rome
by Alaric, — an event which may be regarded
as at length bringing to light the power which
Christianity had attained in the world. The
haughty Roman aristocracy, by whose influence the
old religion had so obstinately opposed the Chris-
tian Faith, was now swept away before the resistless
barbarian, never to resume its position, or again as-
sert its sway over men. Paganism, however, still
lingered in many districts ; and the actual area over
which the Church possessed authority was not very
extensive. To expect, indeed, that the triumph of
the Cross should have been more sudden, or more
widely diffused, betrays at once a forgetfulness of
the manner in which God interferes directly in the
course of His dispensations — for His miraculous in-

72 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

terpositions are neither frequent, nor, when exerted,
of long continuance ; and also of the difficulty of
effecting a change in the opinions of mankind. We
should remember, too, how intimately connected
with the daily, nay, the hourly existence of the Ko-
man, whether in public or in private life, were the
rites of his national religion. The deliberations of the
Senate opened with sacrifice ; the centre of the camp
was a consecrated temple ; the domestic hearth was
guarded by the Penates. Each act of his life, from
his birth to his funeral, had its presiding deity ; and
the highest nobles, even the Emperors themselves,
aspired to fill the pontifical offices. Every de-
partment of rural life was no less pervaded by the
spirit of poly theism : — each feature of the landscape
was sacred to the Nymph, or the Faun ; each labour
of the agriculturist involved the worship of Ceres or
Pomona. Though paganism was banished from the
cities, centuries must pass away ere men would give
up all faith in those —

" Fair humanities of old religion,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat'ry depths."

It is most important to dwell upon this fact. To
a human eye the progress of Christianity unques-
tionably appears slow ; in certain cases its success
even seems doubtful. For consider how we our-
selves stand in the middle of the nineteenth century.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 73

How vast is the field still before the missionary of
the Cross ! It is but as yesterday that the principles
of the religion of half the whole human race have
begun to be comprehended in Europe1. Scarcely yet
have we been brought face to face with Buddhism
and the religions of the East, I suppose there are
few to whom the subject has suggested itself who
have not, at times, felt dismay at this thought, and
despondency at this prospect. It is only by the
study of Ecclesiastical History that we can satisfac-
torily combat the influence of such feelings. With-
out entering upon the question as to when Miracles
ceased, it is plain that at a certain point the visible
intervention of supernatural agency was withdrawn.
The new element infused into human nature was
henceforward to encounter by its own Divine energy
the resistance of a heathen world : and the gradual
and tardy triumph of Christianity leads the student
of History to the inevitable conclusion, that it was
not the purpose of God to effect an immediate revo-
lution in the moral condition of man ; but to instil
those principles which, under His unceasing guid-

1 I take the following numbers from the " Colonial Church
Atlas" for 1850:—

Population of the world, . . . .860,000,000

Christians, 260,000,000

Jews, 4,000,000

Mahometans, 96,000,000

Idolaters, 500,000,000

74 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

ance were, in due time, to work out His beneficent
design. The record of the progress of Christianity
proclaims on every page that " the Lord is not slack,
as some men count slackness ;" and we know that
here, as elsewhere, the only hope of mastering the
obstacles which we have to encounter, lies in our
thoroughly comprehending the difficulties of our
task.

I propose in the present Lecture to glance not
only at the progress of the Church, but also at some
of the impediments that have checked her growth
since the period of her public recognition by the
State. It is not within my province to do more
than remind you, as I pass on, of those events of our
time, which invest this whole subject with so thrilling
and universal an interest. Of course, any observa-
tions I can now make must be so brief as to be wholly
superficial. My object is to induce you yourselves
to penetrate beneath the surface ; and for this pur-
pose I desire to lay down, in the first instance, two
principles, which should, I conceive, be our guide
throughout every branch of this inquiry.

1. And, first of all, you must not apply the rules
of Logic to the facts of History. No amount of in-
consequence in events should perplex you ; no well-
attested result, however surprising or apparently
unreasonable, should render you sceptical as to the
matter of fact. If you remember, on the one hand,
that History involves the record of human passion
and human prejudice, you will cease to feel astonish-

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 75

ment if your anticipations are not always verified.
On the other hand, if you admit that the world is
the theatre of the acts of Providence, you cannot, as
you read the narrative of those acts, question the
marvels of the issue on account of the insignificance
of the means by which it has been brought to pass.
The special department of History with which we are
concerned, that of the growth and progress of Chris-
tianity, were we even to forget its miraculous source
and supernatural guidance, affords the most obvious
illustration. The "seed" was "cast into the ground ;"
it has " sprung and grown up," we " know not
how"1. Or, to turn to the ordinary records of the
world, what speculative inquirer, taking as his pre-
misses extent of territory and numerical population,
can safely predict the destiny of nations ? Though
you take statistical tables as your guide, and con-
struct your syllogisms in Barbara or Celarent, where
shall you obtain as your conclusions the battle-field
of Marathon, or the History of modern England?

2. The second principle which I would lay down
is of still greater importance. You must never study
the History of the past without making due allow-
ance, in your estimate of characters or events, for

1 S. Mark, iv. 26. This fact, as an argument for Christianity,
has been the theme of Apologists in every age : —
" Se 1 mqndo sirevolse al Cristianesmo,
Diss' io, senza miracoli, quest' uno
E tal, che gli altri non sono '1 centesimo."

Dante, Paradiso, xxir.

76 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

the degree of civilization, and for the tone of opinion,
of the age in which you live. You cannot judge of
the motives that actuated men in the tenth century
by the spirit of the nineteenth. This simple truism,
so often and so strangely neglected, is, after all, but
the precaution necessarily taken in every branch of
scientific research. The historian must allow for the
social influences of each century in bending events,
no less than the astronomer must allow for the in-
fluence of refraction. Time is to the one, what the
atmosphere is to the other. The historian should
not suffer himself to be led into error by forgetting
how the tone of morality or of intellectual culture,
at any period, deviates from that of his own, any
more than the mariner should suffer himself to be
led astray by forgetting the variation of the compass.
In fine, the very instruments with which observers
must work, in every department of inquiry, are
themselves defective. The views of those writers on
whom the historian must rely as his authorities, may
be warped, or wrongly graduated, no less than the
material of the sextant, or the index of the barome-
ter ; and for this, due allowance must in both cases
be made, or the results will be alike affected with
inevitable error. I need scarcely impress upon you
the importance of this principle in regulating our
estimate of events and of men. By attending to it
we shall be the less liable to misinterpret actions, to
criticise the opinions of any period too harshly, to
condemn with undiscriminating censure faults whicli

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 77

should be imputed to the age, rather than to the in-
dividual. While, on the other hand, we can all the
better appreciate the moral grandeur of those great
men whom the Spirit of Christianity elevated above
the standard of their generation; and whose lives and
teaching shed around them a light, which all the
darkness of the times in which they lived was not
able to overwhelm.

Christianity has at length triumphed: — but far dif-
ferent is the aspect of society from that which pre-
sented itself to the first preachers of the Gospel.
When you remember that the theatre in which the
new Religion was proclaimed was the Roman Em-
pire, and that Augustus was its ruler when Christ
was born, you have before your minds a picture of
prosperity, and pride, and power, the colours of
which no description can heighten. When, on the
other hand, you remember that the event by which
the position of the Church was at length secured,
was the capture by the Goths of " the Eternal City,"
you have again before your mind a picture no less
expressive. To form a conception of the fabric thus
overturned, we need only consider the light in which
the world has ever regarded its memory. Europe
still lingers on the idea of the Roman Empire ; and,
although this is but a shadowy sentiment now, there
were centuries throughout which the influence of
this idea was as beneficial as it was real. The His-
tory and even the legends of Rome had kept alive,
throughout the Middle Ages, the remembrance of

78 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

its civilization and its grandeur. To comprehend
the power of this idea some five hundred years ago,
we need but turn to the great poem of Dante; in
whose mighty verse the Csesar who has transmitted
to all time the immortal laws of Rome relates the
course of the " sacred sign," —

" Beginning from that hour when Pallas died,
To give it rule,"

till it had accomplished in Judea,

" Vengeance for vengeance of the ancient sin"1.

But what description can adequately represent the
condition of Europe subsequently to the death of
Theodosius the Great ? Take, for example, the reign
of his son and successor, Honorius. Events the
most unexpected succeed each other without appa-
rent cause or connexion. Commotions the most
fearful are followed by a calm no less fearful. Civi-
lization is gradually overpowered ; philosophy is
silent ; literature degenerates. The very life-blood
of society begins to stagnate. All throbs wildly,
and again is stilled, like the pulse of the dying.
Rome was captured by the barbarians ; and from
that hour we may date that complete dissolution of
national life, from the elements of which modern
Europe has arisen. The entire structure of govern-
ment was overthrown ; social order was swept away

1 " Paradiso," vi., Carey's transl.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 79

by the universal deluge, and the " fountains of its
great deep were broken up." For six hundred years
from this period the people groaned under that iron
yoke, which gradually assumed the form of the Feu-
dal System. Not until the tenth century do we see
the idea of Royalty, with government as its mission,
emerging from the tyranny of Feudalism ; and we
wait for three hundred years longer for the establish-
ment of regal authority and well-defined nationali-
ties1-

The rural population, whether slaves or a coloni,"
suifered, after the fall of the Empire, more than any
others, from the chronic prevalence of violence and
anarchy. The condition of this class continued to
deteriorate2 : witness the incessant revolts of the pea-
sants from the tenth century onwards. Among the
Clergy alone, under whose rule the people were ever
eager to place themselves, could the spirit of benevo-
lence or justice be found3. During those dreary
centuries, the one resting-place for the mind dis-
tracted and wearied with the narrative of war and
tumult is the History of the Church. Throughout
this age of anarchy and brute force, the one tie that

1 Guizot, "Hist, de Civilization en France," tome v., 13eLegon,
et 14e Lec,on.

2 Cf. Hallam's "Middle Ages," chap. i. part i.

3 See the letter, quoted by M. Guizot, he. cit., tome iv., 8eLe<;on,
from Pope Gregory the Great to the Subdeacon Peter, regulating
the imposts to be exacted from the bond-labourers of the Church
in Sicily: — Lib. i. Ep. xliv., Opp., t. ii. p. 533.

80 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

held society together was the principle of Christian
brotherhood ; —the one agency that had power to
build again its ruined fabric was that exerted by the
Christian Clergy. The decomposition of the Roman
Empire, and the foundation of the barbarous king-
doms into which Europe was now divided, left no-
thing almost remaining of what had constituted the
ancient world. The Church alone survived, and
gained power in the midst of so many ruins. " From
the bosom," observes M. Guizot, "of the most frightful
political confusion that the world has ever known,
arose, perhaps, the most extensive and the purest
idea that has ever rallied mankind, — the idea of Spi-
ritual Society"1.

The principle of Church authority is purely intel-
lectual. I do not mean to imply that the recognition
of this principle has not degenerated into supersti-
tion ; or that the exercise of the authority itself has
not been abused and perverted, s^> as to assume that
most irrational and repulsive form of power — a spi-
ritual despotism. Were I inclined so to misrepresent
facts, the stern voice of History would speedily pro-
claim the falsehood. But no one can have studied
the records of those dark ages of violence, and blood-
shed, and wrong-doing, without being compelled to
feel that, with all their faults, — and do not forget
that Churchmen are but men, — the individual mem-
bers of the Clergy, and the great Prelates, and the

1 Loc. cit., tome i. Loc.on 12me, p. 424.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 81

Councils of the Church, were, in truth, the very "salt
of the earth," without which the total decomposition
of nations and communities could not have been
checked.

Consider the Clergy merely as the preservers and
maintainers of knowledge.

During most of the period which we are consi-
dering, profane literature had ceased to exist ; sa-
cred literature stands alone. Take the case of the
Englishman, Alcuin, at the opening of the ninth
century, whose labours, in the single point of rescu-
ing ancient manuscripts from the condition into
which they had fallen, demand the gratitude of every
scholar. Or, again, to touch upon a subject more
practically religious, of deep importance at all pe-
riods,— at the present day, as you are aware, it forms
a topic of much discussion, — I mean the subject of
preaching, we find in the sermons of the Clergy mo-
dels which no divine need scorn to imitate. Let me
read you the comment of M. Guizot, who had just
quoted a passage from a sermon delivered at the be-
ginning of the seventh century by our countryman,
S. Columbanus, reproving the want of sanctity and
faith amid outward monastic asceticism : —

"Open the sermons of modern times," he observes ;
" they have evidently a character more literary than
practical. There is nothing of this kind, nothing
literary, in the sermons of which I have just spoken ;
no preoccupation about speaking well, about artisti-
cally combining images, ideas. The orator goes to

G

82 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

the facts. He desires to act ; he turns and returns in
the same circle. He does not fear repetitions, fami-
liarity, even vulgarity. He speaks briefly, but he
begins again each morning. This is not sacred elo-
quence ; it is religious power"1.

But the grand work of the Church, her special vo-
cation, and the chief means whereby she effected
that process of the restoration of Society to which I
have adverted, was her missionary labour. While
the last Emperors were sending against the barba-
rians armies demoralized and conquered beforehand,
the Church sent forth those bands of devoted men
who extended everywhere the doctrines of the Gos-
pel, and thus gained over to the cause of civilization
more adherents than Rome lost subjects. Let me
give a single illustration of how essential to the set-
tlement of society, and the re-organization of na-
tional life, was the dissemination of Christianity,
considered merely as a political agency2.

The introduction of the German race into Euro-
pean society — and the conquerors of the Empire
were nearly all Germans — was an event of the high-
est importance. It put an end to the perpetual
inroads of the barbarians, which rendered the re-
organization of States impossible. It closed the prin-
cipal route by which the nomad tribes of North-

1 Loc. cit., tome ii., 16e LeQon, p. 148.

2 See Mignet, " Memoirs Historiques ; Introduction de l'an-
cienne Germanie dans la Societe civilisee."

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 83

ern Europe and of the plateaux of Asia had ad-
vanced from time immemorial to the shores of the
Ocean and the Mediterranean, overturning all that
they encountered on their passage. A barrier was
thus formed capable of casting back those savage
hordes, which, like a torrent increasing in volume as
it advanced, successively inundated the countries of
the West and of the South.

The physical characteristics of the central and
northern regions of ancient Europe presented no at-
traction to a population disposed to settle on its
soil, and desirous of advancing to a state of civili-
zation. Barren steppes, extensive plains covered
with marsh and forest, an ungenial climate, afforded
a gloomy contrast to the luxuriant vegetation and
smiling skies of the South. United to the Eastern
Continent along the chain of the Oural for many
hundred miles, Europe was exposed, lower down, to
the invasion of the inexhaustible wandering tribes
of Asia, on the side of the Caspian, and by the gates
of the Caucasus. For many ages Europe could op-
pose but a feeble resistance to the assaults of a Con.
tinent of which the mass is nearly four and a half
times its own. Besides, it received the nomad po-
pulation of Asia on the least defensible portions of
its frontiers. Two great roads lay open to the in-
vaders:— that which leads by the North, in the valley
of the Rhine, and that which leads by the East, in
the valley of the Danube. The weight thus cast
upon Europe gravitated towards its extremities, the

g2

84 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

peninsulas of Greece, of Italy, and of Spain,— defended
though these countries were by the natural ramparts
of the Balkan, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. On
these barriers, concentric layers, as it were, of barba-
rous populations pressed irresistibly, as they moved
onward from the Wall of China to the Alps. Each
tribe, as it felt the shock, communicated the impulse
to those in contact with it, and the result was a con-
stant advance of invader after invader. Horde after
horde was gradually forced on to the maritime fron-
tier of Europe, and was there overwhelmed by the
pressure of those that followed.

The Romans had extended the frontiers of their
Empire to the banks of the Ehine and the Danube.
They advanced no farther, although they had
reached this limit nearly five hundred years before
the fall of their power. They had tried in vain to
penetrate the compact mass which extended to the
North of these two great rivers. The loss of the Le-
gions of Yarus had proved the warlike genius of the
population, and denoted too surely the disasters
which were still future. But a new power was at hand
to accomplish the task which ancient Rome had
failed to execute.

Christianity was now the sole bond that united
the western world, — the sole principle by which it
was animated, the sole force which placed it in
action. By means of the Church, having converted
the barbarians its conquerors, the old world was
enabled to transform the countries which were

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 85

the seat of barbarism itself. The Rhine and the
Danube ceased to be the limits of civilization. Two
great movements took place. The one bore on Chris-
tianity, with often checked, but never wearied course,
from South to North; the other, from North to South
urged successively the Gauls on Italy and Greece,
the Germans on Gaul and the Eoman world, the
Sclaves on Germany, the Tartars on Russia and Po-
land. The same instinct of self-defence which had
drawn the Romans to the Rhine and the Danube had
led the Merovingian kings to the same policy, in order
to preserve Italy from invasion, and to intercept the
passes of the Alps. But " the Merovingian Franks,"
observes the historian, " had not taken Christianity
as the auxiliary of their conquests ; they had em-
ployed the arms which subdue, they had not availed
themselves of the civilization which transforms"1.
Their efforts proved vain : their zeal fpr adventure
subsided ; and their vassals shook off their yoke.
In the year 719, the Austrasian Franks having re-
sumed the warlike spirit of their ancestors, S. Boni-
face offered himself as the Missionary of Germany.
Ecclesiastical History tells the story of his labours ;
of his success; of his martyrdom, in the year 755, by
the barbarians of Saxony. The years that followed
present a mournful contrast to the peaceful conquests
of Boniface ; and the History of Charlemagne re-

1 Migriet, loo. cit., p. 52.

86 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

counts the obstinate resistance and the final subju-
gation of the Saxons.

Since the year 7 9 2, after a bloody struggle of thirty-
two years, Saxony has formed an integral portion of
civilized society. Within the line of civilization
which Charlemagne pushed forward on the Conti-
nent, were now comprised all the peoples of Ger-
manic race, speaking the same language, holding the
same creed, governed by the same laws. Christian
Germany, at first bounded by the Elbe and the
Danube, by degrees exerted an influence on the
tribes which roamed to the Oder, or even to the
Vistula ; and prepared them for the gradual re-
ception of the Gospel. The chiefs of those very
Saxons who were still barbarians in the year 789, and
who had been the determined foes of the Christian
name, were, a century later, at the head of the move-
ment of civilization towards the North, became the
rulers of Germany, and the Emperors of the West.
In the ninth century Saxony proved the rampart of
Western Europe against the Danes and Norwegians ;
in the tenth century, it converted them to Christia-
nity. In the same tenth century, Otho the Great1
defeated, on the banks of the Danube, the Magyars
of the Kama and Volga. The Mongols, who had
invaded the vast space between the frontiers of China
and the Vistula, who had subjugated all the tribes

1 Gibbon, chap. lv.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 87

of the Sclave race, and threatened, by covering Eu-
rope with their hordes, to re-establish their nomad
life on its surface, were, for the first time, vanquished
in the year 1241 by Conrad, King of the Romans, and
Henry, son of Frederic II.1 The Tartar conquests did
not pass the German frontier. In fine, in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Germany arrested the pro-
gress of the last invasion, andhurled back theTurkish
armies, whose advance had filled Europe with ter-
ror. And thus, the German race, amalgamated
by Christianity, spread civilization through the
North, and repelled on the South the inroads of the
barbarians; thus deciding, in favour of Europe and
of the world, the question so long at issue between
civilization and barbarism2.

But to return to a somewhat earlier period.

The calamities of the Empire were not altogether
fraught with evil to the Church. The invaders were
more willing to embrace Christianity than had been
the subjects of the Roman Empire. In the middle of
the third century the first invasion of the Goths inter-
rupted Decius in his career of persecution. In the
year 251 he lost his army and his life in Maasia, the
modern Bulgaria, at the great battle of Forum Tere-
bronii ; and historians are careful to tell us that
the great disgrace of the convention made by his
successor Gallus with the conquerors, consisted in
his consenting to leave in the hands of the Goths " a

1 Gibbon, chap. lxiv. 2 Mignet, he. cit., p. 162.

88 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

great number of prisoners of the highest merit and
quality"1. Within a few years, under the reign of
Gallienus, occurred repeated inroads of the same
barbarians, who overran the Eastern Empire ; and
in their third naval invasion perished the pride of pa-
ganism, the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus. On
their retreat they again carried away captives, of
whom many were Christians. Here, too, the slaves
subdued their conquerors; and the gentle doctrines of
the Christian Religion seem to have touched to some
extent the hearts of these barbarous warriors. The
families of the captives supplied the priesthood of
this young Christian community; and we find a
Gothic bishop with a Greek name, Theophilus, at the
Council of Nicsea.

Though professing Christianity, the invaders were,
speaking generally, for many years, devoted to the
Arian heresy. Of this fact we have not far to
seek the reason. Instruct a child, — and the under-
standing of the untutored warrior from isolated
Scandinavia, or the Hercynian forest, was not more
developed than that of a child, — Instruct, 1 say, a
child in the transcendental mystery of the Christian
Faith, and the difficulties which the child invari-
ably starts, and the doubts which he proposes, will
account, without need of further explanation, for
the side taken by the barbarians in the great contro-
versy of the fourth century. A no less simple ac-

Clibbon, chap. x.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 89

count may be given of another feature in the History
of the invaders. As soon as they had passed the
Rhine or the Danube, they feel no disinclination to
become Christians : — did they remain in their father-
land, the missionary must toil for centuries before
they would abandon the worship of Thor and Odin.
The absence of a sacerdotal caste among the German
races — for their chiefs were at once their military
leaders and their priests — explains this fact. The
chiefs maintained or abandoned their former creed,
according as it promoted or opposed their warlike
designs. The Germans followed their leaders as faith-
fully to baptism as to war. In Gaul, Clovis led with
him the majority of the Frank warriors to the Ca-
thedral "of Eh eims : and, with Sigismund, the Bur-
gundians passed from Arianism to the Catholic Faith,
with as much facility as they had abandoned pagan-
ism for Arianism. The motives that induced the
barbarian chiefs thus to embrace Christianity when
once they had settled down within the Empire may,
I conceive, be explained as follows. Christianity had
now penetrated the mass of the rural population. It
was clearly the policy of the conquerors to conciliate
the inhabitants of the districts where they settled ;
to win to their side those who provided the harvests
which must support the invading army, or who, if
provoked to hostilities, could intercept its supplies,
and carry on that most harassing species of opposition,
— a guerilla warfare. In the dissolution of all ordi-
nary social ties, Christianity was the one uniting

90 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

principle now remaining in the world. To profess
themselves Christians, therefore, at once created a
common sentiment between the invaders and that
class of the Roman population of which alone they
need fear the hostility.

It is, perhaps, unnecessary to remark that the
course of events which I have endeavoured to illus-
trate, however ultimately beneficial to the progress
of Christianity, was attended with dire disasters to
the Church of the time. Countless instances might
be adduced; and they constitute the normal state of
what I cannot call the society of this epoch. But the
mere mention of a single individual will convey the
substance of volumes.

The lapse of ages has not lessened the impres-
sion produced on the minds of men by the name
of Attila. All have heard the saying, so worthy
of his ferocious pride, that the grass never grew
where his war-horse had trod; nor can the character
of the savage Hun be more tersely described than
in the words so unjustly applied to a great Roman:
" Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina." As regards the
Church, one need not travel beyond the epithet
which he was pleased to insert among the titles of
his royal dignity, — " The Scourge of God."

But however opposed to her rapid extension were
the evils with which the Church had to contend from
without, the evils which sprang up within her own
bosom had a still greater tendency to retard her pro-
gress. This is the page of Ecclesiastical History over

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 91

which we must blush, while we sigh. It is the page,
however, from which the most salutary lessons are
to be inferred. I will touch upon two of those dark
spots upon what should be the Church's unsullied
garment, — internal divisions, and the spirit of per-
secution.

The former may be fitly illustrated by the Dona-
tist Controversy.

In the days of the Church's early trials a question
of great practical moment had arisen, which gave
occasion for the development of an error that has
exhibited itself, under some form or other, in every
age of Christianity down to our own time. There
were many in the Christian community whose con-
stancy was not proof against the horrors of perse-
cution ; who, in a greater or less degree, had fallen
from the Faith. When the storm had passed by,
numbers mourned over their weakness, and sought,
with penitence, to be restored to the Church. Hence
the question, How should the Church treat such
cases ? This question, which in its own nature was
but temporary, was merged in another, which has
ever been a fruitful source of dissension amonof
Christians : — the question as to the characters by
which the True Church is to be known. Is there
any, or what, distinction between the Visible and the
Invisible Church ? Can that community claim the
title of "the Body of Christ" which tolerates in any
of its members the commission of a single sin ?

The Novatianists would show no mercy in such

92 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

cases ; they excluded a fallen brother for ever from
Church communion. The title which they assumed of
Cathari, or Puritans, is significant of the many points
of resemblance that may be traced throughout this
entire controversy between the stern Novatianist of
the third or the fiery Donatist of the fourth centuries,
and the Fifth Monarchy men of the seventeenth.
Let me mention, in passing, one trifling point of ana-
logy, which shows that human nature is in all ages
the same. One of the best-known traits of the Puri-
tanism of the Great Rebellion is the array of gro-
tesque names assumed by the Roundheads. In
Africa, in the fourth century, among the names of
Donatists preserved in the records of Councils, or in
the inscriptions of letters of that period, we meet
with names no less grotesque : — "Quodvult Deus,"
" Deo Gratias," " Habet Deum." The principles of
Montanism had prepared the fervid mind of the
Africans for the Puritanism of the Novatianists.
Novatus of Carthage, no less than Novatian of Rome,
was the moving spirit of this party; which, again,
was but the prelude of the melancholy strife which,
under the name of the Donatist Schism, rent the
Church of Africa for one hundred years, and did not
wholly cease till the African Church was swept away
by the Saracenic invasion.

In the course of this controversy blood was first
shed in strife between Christians. Africa had long
been the granary of Rome. The wild tribes of whom
we read in the pages of Sallust, and still read in the

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 93

despatches of French Marshals, had become industri-
ous agriculturists. Christianity had spread among
them ; and their numerous rural settlements had
become Christian bishoprics. But the savage was
only half tamed ; and no sooner had religious dis-
cord invaded these peaceful districts than the Chris-
tian was lost in the fierce child of the desert. The
severities exercised towards them by the imperial
officers enabled the Donatists to inflame the enthu-
siasm of this fiery peasantry ; and gave rise to those
cruel ravages of the " Circumcelliones," as their ad-
versaries called them, from their scattered cottage
life, — or,' as they styled themselves, " Soldiers of
Christ," " Agonistici"1. When the Vandal Genseric
desolated Africa, the " Circumcelliones" were among
his most efficient allies ; and " the calamities of war,"
to borrow the words of Gibbon, " were aggravated
by the licentiousness of the Moors, and the fanati-
cism of the Donatists"2.

A fatal blow had been inflicted from within on the
great and flourishing Church of Africa. It was the
Church of Tertullian, of Cyprian, of Augustine. Her
martyrs had been the first to confess the Faith in sea-
son of persecution ; in days of heresy her orthodoxy
had ever been unshaken ; her Councils commanded
universal respect; her great Prelates had ever asserted
the independence of the African Church against the

1 S. Augustine, "Enarr. in Psalm, cxxxii.," § 6, t.iv., p. 1487.
2 Chap, xxxiii.

94 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

attempts at usurpation by the bishops of Rome : —
and now her own dissensions prepared the way for
her fall. The close of the seventh century witnessed
the conquest of Africa by the Saracens. Mohammed-
anism, as you know, dates its rise from the 20th of
September, a. d. 6221. At the beginning of the next
century it had inundated the south of Italy, nearly
the whole of Spain, the south of Gaul. On Gaul its
assault was even more impetuous than had been
that of the German nations on the borders of the
Rhine. It was repelled from the gates of the West
by Charles Martel, in the year 732, at the great battle
of Tours. Africa alone continues to bear the yoke
of the false prophet.

In the year 698, Carthage yielded to the arms
of Hassan. Its very ruins have perished ; and the
History of Carthage is the History of the African
Church. The Nestorian and Jacobite communities
in Persia and Syria ; the Greek Church in modern
Turkey ; the Copts in Egypt ; notwithstanding their
subjection to the rule of the Moslem, have all main-
tained their Faith. Of the countries wrested from
Christendom by the Mohammedans, in North Africa
alone has Christianity ceased to exist. In the ele-
venth century, three bishops could not be found to
proceed to a canonical Consecration2. At the present

1 This is the date assigned by Dr. Weil, in his " Mohammed der
Prophet."

2 See Milman, "Latin Christianity," vol. iii. p. 122.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 95

day even this remnant of the African Church has
disappeared. You seek in vain for some trace of
Christianity in the land of Cyprian and Augustine ;
or you are startled at meeting such a passage as the
following in the columns of the " Times"1: —

" I have passed several days at Batna, partly
tempted by the beauty of the scenery, partly by the
frank hospitality of the camp at Lambessa, but even
still more by the wonderful ruins of the Roman city.
.... I may say, however, that, under the shadow of
the forest hills, upon which the lion, the panther, and
the wild boar, range, a Roman city, which once held
50,000 inhabitants, and where ninety bishops assem-
bled in council, lies in ruins. . . . This beautiful
city, in a beautiful plain, is worth a pilgrimage. It
was only discovered twelve years since"2.

Now remember that Donatism was no heresy that
assailed a doctrine of the Creeds3; no protest against
the ritualism or government of the Church ; no re-
fusal to accept Scripture as its guide or its rule ; —
it was merely one of those systems with which the
history of modern times has made us so familiar.

1 Oct. 31, 1856 : " The French in Africa. From an occasional
Correspondent."

2 Cf. Pellissier, " Exploration Scientifique de l'Algerie," vol. vi.
p. 388 ; S. Augustine, " Cont. Donat.," lib. vi. c. 13, t. ix.
p. 169. S. Cyprian writes: " Significavi tibi Privatum veterem
haereticum in Lambesitana Colonia nonaginta Episcoporum sen-
tentia condemnatum." — Ep. lv. p. 84.

S. Augustine, indeed, writes of Donatus: " Apparet eum non
Catholicam de Trinitate habuisse sententiam :" but he is careful

96 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

You have seen the result of its separation from the
Church. In perusing its History, we read the lite-
ral fulfilment of the warning in the Apocalypse : —
"I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy pa-
tience, and how thou canst not bear them which are
evil. Thou hast borne, and for My Name's sake hast
laboured. Nevertheless thou hast left thy first love.
Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen;
or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will re-
move thy Candlestick out of his place7'1. I know no
lesson more fearful, or more pregnant with warn-
ing;— no lesson that so forcibly impresses upon
every Christian man the appeal of S. Augustine when
he dwells upon the disunion of Christians, as con-
trasted with the power which the pagans of his day
gained from their being united : — "They have many
gods who are false ; we have but One who is the
True : and yet they remain united, while we cannot
maintain concord. 0 my brother, return to
unity !"2

The history of religious persecution comes next
before us.

to add: "In hunc ejus errorem Donatistarum multitude* intenta
non fuit ; nee facile in eis quisquam, qui hoc ilium sensisse no-
verit, invenitur." — Lib. de Hceres., c. lxix. t. viii. p. 21. While
he defines heresy to be " schisma inveteratum" ("Contr. Cres-
eon.," lib. ii. c. 7, t. ix. p. 413), he also says of the Donatists :
" Qui se negabant haereticos." — Lib. ad Bonifac, c. vii., t. ii.
p. 654.

1 Rev. ii. 2-5. 2 " De TJtilitate Jejunii," t. vi. p. 619.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 97

It would be easy to dilate upon this topic :
to show that the employment of force by a Reli-
gious Society is in its very nature unlawful — for the
exclusive territory of Religion is the human con-
science ; and that unity, if effected by force, cannot
but be factitious and fraudulent. " The conduct of
God," writes Pascal, "Who disposes all things with
gentleness, is to place Religion in the understand-
ing by reasons, and in the heart by Grace. But to
wish to place it in the understanding, and in the
heart, by force and by menaces, this is not to place
Religion there, but terror"1.

One leading maxim which History inculcates,
and of which the records of Christianity afford
the fullest illustration, is the length of time that
must elapse before Truth can be recognised, or
its principles acted upon. There are two such
principles which Christianity has proclaimed to the
world, — that all men are brethren, and that con-
science is free. I have already touched upon the
former, when alluding to Slavery as an institu-
tion of ancient society. It was not till our own age
- — and the honour has been reserved for our own
country — that a nation has proclaimed the emanci-
pation of the Slave. For our own age also has been
reserved the recognition — at least the practical re-
cognition— of liberty of conscience. The history of
intolerance, it has been said, is the history of the

1 " Pensees," 2e partie, chap, in., ed. Faugere, tome ii. p. 178.

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98 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

world ; for human nature unceasingly tends to
compel others to share either its belief or its scep-
ticism : — even in the classic land of freedom, the fate
of Socrates proves how universal is this tendency.

The principle of freedom of thought first announced
by Christianity was comprehended by its early fol-
lowers1; but the season came when the principle was
forgotten. In the year 385 occurred an event which
the Christian must mourn to the end of time. In
that year Priscillian, a noble Spaniard, with some
others, was tortured and beheaded as a heretic at the
instance of certain bishops of Spain. This was the
first death inflicted, in the name of Christianity, as
the penalty of religious error.

In this transaction two circumstances deserve our
notice : —

( 1 ) Firstly, the indignant protest of the leading
prelates of the day, S. Martin of Tours and S. Amb-
rose (whose conduct has extorted the praise even of
Gibbon), and Pope Siricius.

(2.) The second noteworthy particular is the
country with which religious persecution origi-
nated,— the country of the Inquisition and of Phi-
lip II. From that hour the genius of religious into-
lerance has brooded over Spain. We have seen how
religious disunion has destroyed a Church ; we here
see how religious intolerance has destroyed an Em.

1 Cf. Tertullian, "Apol." c. xxviii.; S. Chiysostom, " De S.
Babyla," t. ii. p. 540. For further authorities see Limborch,
" Hist. Imjuisitionis," ed. 1692, c. v. p. 16.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 99

pire. " The witnesses of History are events examined
by the light of ages." Let us then summon before
our mind Father Yalverde beseeching the hapless
Inca to embrace the Cross and submit to Baptism,
promising that by so doing his death at the stake
should be commuted for death by the garotte, —
while, to complete the picture of such a conversion,
" the Spaniards," we are told, " stood around mut-
tering their credos for the salvation of his soul"1 ; let
our imagination recall the scenes once enacted at
Valladolid or Seville; and let us follow that sad pro-
cession styled, as if in hideous mockery, " an Act of
Faith ;" let us read over once more the biography of
Alva ; — and we need feel small surprise at the con-
trast between the monarchy of Charles Y. and the
Spain of 1857.

The example of the execution at Treves was not
lost on after times. Let us pass on to the thirteenth
century and the Albigensian crusade — the bloodiest
drama ever enacted in either civil or religious warfare.
Here the highest prelates led on their divisions ; they
took part in the battle and the siege. It was in this
war, at the storm of Beziers where the number of
the slain is set down at fifty thousand, that Abbot
Arnold, Legate of the Pope, issued the command
" Slay them all ; God will know His own :" — words
which worthily inaugurated the foundation of the

1 Prescott, " History of the Conquest of Peru," vol. ii. p. 131,
ed. 1850.

H 2

100 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

Order of S. Dominic, no less than its natural and
speedy sequel, the Inquisition1.

The name of the Inquisition calls up associations
which one does notloveto dwell upon. Each feature of
that institution is alike abhorrent to every sentiment
of Christian charity and every honourable impulse
of human nature. The honest bigot who persecutes
because " he thinks he does God service," has, after
all, something lofty in his character, which we feel
while we condemn. He does not shrink from acting
on his convictions. If the victim is to perish, " he
will keep the raiment of them that slay him." Such
a bigot once was Saul of Tarsus ; such a bigot lived
and died S. Louis. But, in the laws of the Inqui-
sition, as if cruelty, and treachery, and espionage,
were not characteristics sufficiently odious, it was
ordained that hypocrisy also should signalize its pro-

1 Count Joseph de Maistre condemns this mode of stating the
connexion between the Order and the Inquisition: — " Quelques
incredules modernes, echos des Protestants, veulent que saint
Dominique ait ete l'auteur de l'lnquisition, et ils n'ont pas man-
que de declamer contre lui d'une maniere furieuse. Le fait est
cependant que saint Dominique n' a jamais exerce aucun acte d'
inquisiteur, et que l'lnquisition, dont l'origine remonte au
Concile deVerone, tenu en 1184, ne fut confiee aux Dominicains
qu' en 1233, c'est-ii-dire douze ans apres la mort de saint Do-
minique."— Lettres sur L'lnquisition Espagnole, p. 3. The term
" Inquisitio" may, indeed, be traced to a date anterior to the foun-
dation of the Order; but, in the sense in which all the world
understands the word, the statement in the text will, I apprehend,
be found correct. See Du Cange in voc.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 101

ceedings. The Church must not be soiled with
blood. The civil power becomes its executioner : and
the Inquisitor, as he delivers the luckless heretic to
" the secular arm," gravely assures him that the ma-
gistrate has been " earnestly entreated that he would
be pleased to mitigate the severity of the laws with
regard to the punishment of your person ; that it
may be effected without danger of death, or mutila-
tion of limb"1.

When such was the practice of the Church, can
we feel surprise that the noblest spirits of their
age did not rise above her example ? I have
mentioned the name of S. Louis. " He had kingly
qualities," Dean Milman writes, " of the noblest
order : gentleness, affability, humanity towards all
his believing subjects ; a kind of dignity of justice,
a loftiness of virtue, which prevented the most re-
ligious of men from degenerating into a slave of the
clergy"2. And yet what does the admiring chronicler
select as the trait which best exhibits his devotion
to Religion ? — " If, as a laic, he heard a man to be
an unbeliever, he should not dispute with him," the
King said, " he should at once run that sword into
his entrails, and drive it home"3.

1 I take these words from, the registered memorial of the final
proceedings against Fulgentio Manfredi, as given by Mr. R.
Gibbings in his learned tract, entitled : ' ' "Were ' Heretics' ever
burned alive at Rome ? A Report of the proceedings in the Roman
Inquisition," p. 50.

2 " Latin Christianity," vol. v. p. 4.

3 Joinville, " Histoire du Saint Louis," le partie, § 27.

102 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

I pass on two centuries, and see Huss and Je-
rome before the Council of Constance. By whom,
we ask, was Sigismund forced to violate his pledged
safe-conduct, and the Church led on to imbrue her
hands once more in blood ? It was John Gerson,
the philosopher, " the very Christian Doctor," the
man whom Bossuet could pronounce worthy of being
the author of" that universal work," the " De Imita-
tione Christi," and whose claims to its authorship are
to this day vigorously maintained. It was a sight
to make the angels weep. It is to us some consola-
tion to remember that Religion even here had her
champions ; and that the prelate who strove to turn
the Council from its unholy course was the English-
man, Robert Halam1.

I need not pause on the sixteenth century, and the
reign of Charles IX. : that reign, it has been well said,
has but a single date, the night of S. Bartholemew2.
I pass on once more to a period nearer our own
time, to the age of Louis XI Y. The History of this

1 " Ungcachtet einige Pralaten versucht, die Yater des Conci-
liums zu einem mildern Yerfahren gegen die Ketzer zu stiminen
und der englische Bischof Eobert Halam mit bedeutungsvollen
"Worten sich gegen die Verdamnmng der Ketzer zum Scheiter-
haufen ausgesprochen hatte : ' Gott will nicht den Tod des S tin-
ders, sondern, dass er sich bekehre und lobe.' " — Aschbach,
Geschichte Kaiser SigmuncVs, s. 202.

Robert Halam was Bishop of Salisbury in the year 1407, was
elected Cardinal in 1411, and died at Constance in 1417: see
Godwin, "De Praesulibus Anglice."

2 Jules Simon, " La Liberte de Conscience," p. 121.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 103

era presents the narrative of the Dragon ades, and the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Nothing, I sup-
pose, can show more clearly how deeply the prin-
ciples of persecution still continued to darken the
intellects of Christian men, than the fact that a Bos-
suet could select the author of those deeds as the
theme of a panegyric, and those deeds themselves as
the subject of his eulogium1.

The Reformation had intervened : but the lessons
of intolerance, enforced by the practice of centuries,
were not to be at once unlearned. The finger of
History points sternly to facts which should neither
be dissembled nor forgotten. I shall read you a few
lines from the simple narrative of the chronicler of
the reign of Elizabeth: — " a. d. 1575. The two-and-
twentith of Julie two Dutchmen, anabaptists, were
burned in Smithfield, who died in great horror, with
roring and crieng." "a. d. 1579, Matthew Hamont,
by his trade a plough Avrite, ofHetharset, thrae miles
from Norwich, was convented before the bishop of
Norwich, for that he denied Christ our saviour. . . .
For the which heresies he was condemned in the
consistorie, .... and afterwards, to wit, on the
twentith of Maie, he was burned in the castell dich
of Norwich"2.

" Oraison funebre de Le Tellier," (Euvres, torn. xvii. p. 504.
— "Touches de tant de merveilles, epanchons nos cceurs sur la
piete de Louis. Poussons jusqu' au ciel nos acclamations, et
disons a ce nouveau Constantin, a ce nouveau Theodose," &c. &c.
The passage is quoted by Jules Simon, he. cit., p. 98.
2 Holinshed, vol. ii. pp. 1261, 1299.

104 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

Let us leave England, and turn to Geneva. In
that city Servetus was burned alive on the 27th of
October, 1553. Under the date A. D. 1546, Calvin
thus wrote to Farel :— "Servetus lately wrote to me,
and coupled with his letter a long volume of his de-
lirious fancies, with the thrasonic boast, that I should
see something astonishing and unheard of. He takes
it upon him to come hither, if it be agreeable to
me. But I am unwilling to pledge my word for his
safety, for if he shall come I shall never permit him
to depart alive, provided my authority be of any
avail"1.

To the present hour, the laws of Sweden with re-
ference to the exercise of Religion — and here I shall
use an expression the most forcible that language can
supply or History suggest — are scarcely to be ex-
ceeded in intolerance by even the laws of Spain.

The facts which I have thus rapidly glanced at
clearly show that, after a certain period in the
Church's progress, the spirit of intolerance is not pe-
culiar to any age, or to any stage of civilization. " A
sort of fatality," it has been truly said, " urges on
those who wish to conquer reason without enlighten-
ing it. When men do not know how to be apostles,
they must resign themselves, sooner or later, to
become executioners"2. The most fiendish deeds
which the history of persecution records can plead

1 " Letters of John Calvin," compiled from the Original MSS.
by Dr. Jules Bonnet, vol. ii. p. 19. Edinburgh, 1857.
3 Jules Simon, he cit., p. 75

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 105

in excuse the hideous sophism — Let the body perish,
that the soul may be saved. Eeligious persecution,
to apply a well-known saying, " is worse than a
crime ; it is a blunder." Picture to your minds
Galileo in his cell, and the Inquisition invoking
against him the words of Revelation ; and yet, where
is the theologian now, where the Inquisitor, who re-
gards the earth as immovable, and as the centre of
the universe ?

All the rigours of persecution have failed to
banish schism or heresy. I have already spoken of
Donatism: — for centuries it maintained its ground
in spite not only of the arguments of the Church,
but of all the severities of the civil power. The
descendants of the Arian barbarians perpetuated
their heresy in Italy : — Arianism was still prevalent,
in the tenth century, in the districts of Padua, Ve-
rona, and Vicenza1. The execution of Priscillian
did not convince the Manichseans of the falsehood of
their principles: — the kindred views of thePaulicians
again crept into Europe from the East ; and after
the year 1000 this heresy had spread over Germany,
France, and Italy2. The Crusade against the Albi-
genses attests its tenacity, and its prevalence. Nay,
in this same thirteenth century the idea not of he-
resy merely, but of infidelity, was quite a familiar
one in Italy ; and, side by side with Aquinas and

1 TJghelli, " Italia Sacra/' t. v. pp. 429-33.

2 Gibbon, chap. liv. ; Muratori, " Script. ItaL," Dissert, lx.,
t. v. p. 82.

106 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

Bonaventura, there was working among the learned
of the day, among those who influenced fashion and
opinion, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion which
found countenance and sympathy in the refined and
enlightened Court of Frederick II. A hundred
years passed away, and the memory of the Albi-
£ensian massacres did not restrain the fanaticism of
the " Apostolic Brethren ;" or warn from their fate
Fra Dolcino and the fair Margarita. The deaths of
Huss and Jerome did not stay the wild war-chariots
of Ziska, or quench the ardour of Procopius ; and
when, at length, the Hussite war came to an end, and
the hopes of Bohemia perished with Procopius on
the field of Lepan, the Reformation was distant but
a hundred years.

The fact of these schisms and heresies repeated
and multiplied from age to age, the very ex-
istence of the Inquisition three centuries before the
Reformation, are the answers which Ecclesiastical
History gives to the taunt, so untruly cast on the
great religious movement of the sixteenth century,
that sectarianism and heresy are its special charac-
teristics, its peculiar and legitimate offspring.

Persecution, then, has failed to establish Truth.
Men have, at length, begun to recognise, and par-
tially, at least, to act upon the great principles that
Thought isfree, and that, in the domain of Conscience,
there is no ruler but God. The practical exercise
of these principles may justly be taken to indicate
that Civil Government is in possession of power;

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 107

and that a Church is in possession of Truth. There
is no surer test of our belief in the Divine origin of
our Religion, than the conviction that it can conquer
by its own unaided strength. Truth may be op-
pressed, maligned, almost extinguished ; but its final
triumph is certain. It were an insult to Reason
to question this ; as it is an outrage against Reason
to employ force to insure it. This is a maxim pro-
claimed by the voice of Inspiration itself : — " Thy
people shall be willing in the day of Thy power."

Having offered at the outset some general remarks
on the nature of Ecclesiastical History, its extent and
its limits, the attractions which the study presents,
and the profit to be gained from pursuing it, I next
proceeded to point out some of the chief impedi-
ments which have obstructed the progress of Chris-
tianity, which have either originally checked the
rapidity of its advance, or subsequently wasted its
power. I have indicated some of the lessons that
may be gathered from the History of the Church,
and glanced at their practical importance :— to mo-
ralize upon this topic, however, is not the province
of the historian. His duty is restricted to the im-
partial statement of facts. I have already explained
how extensive, according to my view of the relation
of Ecclesiastical to Civil History, is the field which
such facts occupy ; and since, as you are aware, my
tenure of this Professorship is limited1, I am com-

1 The Professorship of Ecclesiastical History in this University
is held for five years.

108 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

pellecl to mark out for myself some special branch of
the general subject.

I propose, therefore, to enter with you upon a
topic of much interest, — a topic which, from its very
nature, illustrates that divisibility of Ecclesiastical
History into separate departments, to which I al-
luded in my opening Lecture: — I propose to con-
sider the causes remote and proximate of the Refor-
mation. Commencing from the fifth century — that
epoch in the annals of the Church which I have
pointed out as determining the contest of Christia-
nity with heathenism, — I propose to examine, one
by one, the chief evils which gradually sprang up
corrupting the purity of the Faith ; as well as the
changes produced by time in the aspect of the world,
and in the tone of its civilization.

Many of the particulars embraced by this defini-
tion of the subject which I have marked out for our
consideration, will readily suggest themselves to your
minds : — the growth of superstition ; the gradual ac-
cretion of doctrines unknown in primitive times; the
tyrannical exercise of Church authority ; the unholy
Interdict— which, perhaps more than any other eccle-
siastical abuse of the Middle Ages, raised up a spirit of
opposition against the Clergy ; the usurpation of the
Papacy. Nor shall we, I trust, forget to dwell upon
the standing protest maintained, from the earliest
period, against the supremacy of the Bishops of
Rome, by our predecessor and present companion
in the same controversy — the great Oriental Church.

THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 109

I would neither palliate nor deny the deviations
from the purity of the primitive Faith, which now
characterize that Communion. But, we should re-
member, on the one hand, the proverbial tenacity
of the Eastern mind ; and, on the other, how the
working of its restless spirit was arrested, during the
darkest season in the History of civilization, by the
incessant assaults of the Moslem. Imagine the storm-
tossed waves to become frozen on a sudden, and the
turmoil of waters to be transformed into an ice-
bound sea, and you shall have formed some concep-
tion of the condition of the Greek Church, since the
day when Mohammed the Second alighted from his
war-horse before the gates of S. Sophia1. You
should remember, too, the maxim long since uttered
by the poet of all time, —

"Ylfiiav <yap t' apery? aTroaivviai zvpvoira Zeh's
'Avepos 6i)t' av fitv Kara <5ov\iov rjfxap eXrjOiv.

The various influences to which I have thus slightly
alluded had long fermented in the minds of men.
A new impulse was now added to the growing spirit
of opposition to the authority which the Church
had, for some ages, claimed. On a sudden, on
the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, the
sources of ancient learning were thrown open to the
world. The Kepublics of ancient Greece are the un-
dying witnesses of the cause of Liberty. The place

1 See Gibbon, chap, lxviii.

110 THE LESSONS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

which Greece once filled in Universal History at
length received its explanation ; and the remains of
her immortal literature now taught Europe the great
lessons of freedom. The enthusiasm with which those
lessons were caught up, how the discovery of print-
ing fanned the rising flame of knowledge, — these
are topics to which I hope, at a fitting time, to return.
All, in short, served to prepare for, and to inaugu-
rate, the great Religious Revolution which was ap-
proaching : — a New World even now opened its
shores, to transmit to the yet untrodden regions of
the West the rekindled torch of Truth.

THE END.

By the same Author.

THE INSPIRATION OF HOLY SCRIPTURE,

ITS NATURE AND PROOF:

(Hgbt discourses,

PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN.

Second Edition. 8vo, 14.?.

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