Part 5 (1/2)

Lecky, the historian of European morals, a.s.signs as a reason why the Jews in Rome were less vehemently persecuted than the Christians, that ”the Jewish religion was essentially conservative and unexpansive. The Christians, on the other hand, were ardent missionaries.” Would it not be more exact to say that the Jews of one school were essentially conservative and unexpansive; that the Jews of another school were ardent missionaries? That the one school should be persecuted, while the other was left in peace, was perfectly natural, especially in communities where their essential ident.i.ty was not understood. There is no necessity for supposing that the two faiths were actually distinguished because one attracted attention and provoked attack, while the other did nothing of the kind. Not history only, but common observation furnishes abundant examples of faiths fundamentally the same, meeting very different fortunes, according to the att.i.tude which circ.u.mstances compelled them to a.s.sume. The Christians might have presented the aggressive front of Judaism, as Paul did, and still not have forfeited their claim to be true children of Israel.

There is, in fact, no doubt that discerning persons perceived the substantial ident.i.ty of the two religions. It is conceded on all sides, by Jewish and by Christian writers,--Milman and Salvador, Jost and Merivale, corroborating one another,--that Jews were taken for Christians and Christians for Jews. They were subjected to the same criticism; they were exposed to the same contumely. Indeed it may be questioned whether the early persecutions that were inflicted on the Christians were not really directed against the Jews, whose reputation for restlessness and fanaticism, for stiffness and intolerance, was established in the minds of all cla.s.ses of society. The Jews were a mark for persecution before there was a Christian in Rome, before the Christian era began. They were persecuted on precisely the same pretexts that were used in the case of the Christians. They had a recognized locality, standing and character. They were many in number and considerable in influence. The lower orders disliked their austerity; the higher orders dreaded their organization; philosophers despised them as superst.i.tious; politicians hated them as intractable; emperors used them when they wished to divert angry comment from their own acts. They were ”fair game” for imperial pursuit. A raid on the Jews was popular.

It is possible, to say the least, that the Christians would have pa.s.sed unmolested but for their a.s.sociation with the Israelites. This is no novel insinuation; Milman hinted at it more than a quarter of a century ago, in his ”History of Christianity.” ”When the public peace was disturbed by the dissensions among the Jewish population of Rome, the summary sentence of Claudius visited both Jews and Christians with the same indifferent severity. So the Neronian persecution was an accident arising out of the fire at Rome; no part of a systematic plan for the suppression of foreign religions. It might have fallen on any other sect or body of men who might have been designated as victims to appease the popular resentment. Accustomed to the separate wors.h.i.+p of the Jews, to the many, Christianity appeared at first only as a modification of that belief.”[6] The same conjecture is more boldly ventured in the History of Latin Christianity. ”What caprice of cruelty directed the attention of Nero to the Christians, and made him suppose them victims important enough to glut the popular indignation at the burning of Rome, it is impossible to determine. The cause and extent of the Domitian persecution is equally obscure. The son of Vespasian was not likely to be merciful to any connected with the fanatic Jews.” ”At the commencement of the second century, under Trajan, persecution against the Christians is raging in the East. That, however, (I feel increased confidence in the opinion), was a local, or rather Asiatic persecution, arising out of the vigilant and not groundless apprehension of the sullen and brooding preparation for insurrection among the whole Jewish race (with whom Roman terror and hatred still confounded the Christians), which broke out in the b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres of Cyrene and Cyprus, and in the final rebellion, during the reign of Hadrian, under Bar-Cochab.”[7] If the Christians made themselves particularly obnoxious, they did so by their zeal for beliefs which they shared with the Jews and derived from them; beliefs in the personality of G.o.d, the immediateness of Providence, the law of moral retribution, and the immortal destinies of the human soul. Their belief in the ascended and reigning Christ gave point to their zeal; but the Jews, too, clung to their hope of the Christ, and through the vitality of their hope were known.

[Footnote 6: History of Christianity, II; p. 8.]

[Footnote 7: Vol. I.; p. 528.]

The importance ascribed to Christianity as a special moral force working in the const.i.tution of the heathen world, is, by recent admission, acknowledged to have been much exaggerated. The chapter on ”The state of the world toward the middle of the first century” in Renan's ”Apostles,”

sums up with singular calmness, clearness and easy strength, the influences that were slowly transforming the social condition of the empire; the n.o.bler ideas, the purer morals, the amenities and humanities that were stealing in to temper the violence, mitigate the ferocity, soften the hardness and uplift the grossness of the western world.

Samuel Johnson's little essay on ”The Wors.h.i.+p of Jesus” is a subtle glance into the same facts, tracing the efficacy of powers that co-operated in producing the atmospheric change which was as summer succeeding winter over the civilized earth. Mr. Lecky, with broader touch, but accurately and conscientiously, paints a n.o.ble picture on the same subject. But other artists, of a different school, make the same representation. Merivale, lecturing in 1864, on the Boyle foundation, in the Chapel Royal, at Whitehall, on the ”Conversion of the Roman Empire,”

in the interest of the christian Church, says, ”the influence of Grecian conquest was eminently soothing and civilizing; it diffused ideas of humanity and moral culture, while the conquerors themselves imbibed on their side the highest of moral lessons, lessons of liberality, of toleration, of sympathy with all G.o.d's human creation.” ”Plutarch, in a few rapid touches, enforced by a vivid ill.u.s.tration which we may pa.s.s over, gives the picture of the new humane polity, the new idea of human society flashed upon the imagination of mankind by the establishment of the Macedonian Empire. Such, at least, it appeared to the mind of a writer five centuries later; but there are traces preserved, even in the wrecks of ancient civilization, of the moral effect which it actually produced on the feelings of society, much more nearly contemporaneous. The conqueror, indeed, perished early, but not prematurely. The great empire was split into fragments, but each long preserved a sense of the unity from which it was broken off. All were leavened more or less with a common idea of civilization, and recognized man as one being in various stages of development, to be trained under one guidance and elevated to one spiritual level. In the two great kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, which sprang out of the Macedonian,--in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, to which the true religion owes so deep a debt,--the unity of the human race was practically a.s.serted and maintained.” ”After three centuries of national amalgamation, the result of a widespread political revolution, after the diffusion of Grecian ideas among every people, from the Ionian to the Caspian or the Red Sea, and the reception in return, of manifold ideas, and in religious matters of much higher ideas, from the Persian, the Indian, the Egyptian and the Jew, the people even of Athens, the very centre and eye of Greece, were prepared to admit the cardinal doctrine of Paul's preaching.”

The same writer cordially admits the moral grandeur and the moral power of the philosophers whose teaching had, for several generations, been leavening the thought and enn.o.bling the humanity of the Roman world.

”The philosophy of the Stoics, the highest and holiest moral theory at the time of our Lord's coming,--the theory which most worthily contended against the merely political religion of the day, the theory which opposed the purest ideas and the loftiest aims to the grovelling principles of a narrow and selfish expediency on which the frame of the heathen ritual rested--was the direct creation of the sense of unity and equality disseminated among the choicer spirits of heathen society by the results of the Macedonian conquest. But for that conquest it could hardly have existed at all. It was the philosophy of Plato, sublimed and harmonized by the political circ.u.mstances of the times. It was what Plato would have imagined, had he been a subject of Alexander.”

”It taught, nominally at least, the equality of all G.o.d's children--of Greek and barbarian, of bond and free. It renounced the exclusive ideas of the commonwealth on which Plato had made s.h.i.+pwreck of his consistency. It declared that to the wise man all the world is his country. It was thoroughly comprehensive and cosmopolitan. Instead of a political union it preached the moral union of all good men,--a city of true philosophers, a community of religious sentiment, a communion of saints, to be developed partly here below, but more consummately in the future state of a glorified hereafter. It aspired, at least, to the doctrine of an immortal city of the soul, a providence under which that immortality was to be gained, a reward for the good, possibly, but even more dubiously, a punishment of the wicked.”

Merivale, it will be understood, writing in the interest of Christianity, makes note of the limitations of the Stoic Philosophy, calls it vague, unsatisfactory and aristocratic, the ”peculiarity of a select cla.s.s of minds;” and so it was, to a degree; but that it had a mighty influence throughout the intellectual world, as much as any system of belief could have, must be confessed. So far as ideas went, it comprehended the wisest and best there were. As respected the authority by which the ideas were recommended and guaranteed, it was the authority of the intellectual lights of the world. To say that the truths were limited, is to say what may be said of every intellectual system under the sun, including the beliefs of christian apostles which the christian Church has outgrown. To say that they were not final, is to say what will be affirmed of every intellectual system till the end of time.

There the beliefs were, stated, urged, preached with earnestness by men of live minds, fully awake to the needs of the society they adorned, thinking and writing, not for their own entertainment, but for the improvement of mankind. Their books were not read by the mult.i.tude, the mult.i.tude could not read: scarcely can they read now. But the men influenced the directors of opinion, the makers of laws, the builders of inst.i.tutions, the wealthy, the instructed, the high in place.

Nor must it be forgotten that these ideas of philosophy did not remain cold speculations. They bore characteristic fruits in humanity of every kind. The brotherhood was not a sentiment, it was a principle of wide beneficence. The charities of this gospel attested the presence of a warm heart in the metropolis of the heathen world. Of this there can no longer be any doubt. Works like that of Denis' ”Histoire des Theories et des Idees Morales dans l'Antiquite,” reveal a condition of becoming in the Roman Empire that might dispel the fears of the most skeptical in regard to the continuous moral progress of the race. The immense popular distributions of corn which from being occasional had become habitual in Rome, were as a rule prompted by no humane feeling, were not designed to mitigate suffering or express compa.s.sion. They were in the main, devices for gaining popularity. Caius Gracchus, who, more than a century before Christ, carried a law making compulsory the sale of corn to the poor at a nominal price, was perhaps actuated by a worthier motive; but it is doubtful whether his successors were. Cato of Utica was not. Clodius Pulcher was not. The emperors were obliged to purchase popularity by these enormous bribes. It is said that Augustus caused the monthly distribution to be made to two hundred thousand people. Half a million claimed the bounty under the Antonines. The addition of a ration of oil to the corn; the subst.i.tution of bread for the corn; the supplementing of this by an allowance of pork; a subsequent supply of the article of salt to the poor on similarly easy terms; the distribution of portions of land; the imperial legacies, donations, gratuities, mentioned as bestowed on occasion; the public baths provided and thrown open to all at a trifling expense, were also means of winning or retaining the good will of a fickle and turbulent populace. They neither expressed a humane sentiment nor produced a humane result. They were suggested by ambition, no better sometimes than that of the demagogue, and they begot idleness, and demoralization. But some part of the beneficence must have sprung from a more generous motive. The interest manifested by several emperors in public education, and the appropriation made for the maintenance of the children of the poor, five thousand of whom are said, by Pliny, to have been supported by the government, under Trajan, who presume never heard of Christianity,--cannot fairly be ascribed to political motives.

The private charities of the younger Pliny, who devoted a small patrimony to the maintenance of poor children in Como, his native place; of Coelia Macrina, who founded a charity for one hundred at Terracina; Hadrian's, bounties to poor women; Antonine's loans of money to the poor at reduced rates of interest; the inst.i.tutions dedicated to the support of girls by Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius; the private infirmaries for slaves; the military hospitals, certainly owed their existence to a humane feeling. Pliny is responsible for the statement that both in Greece and Rome the poor had mutual insurance societies which provided for their sick and infirm members. Tacitus expatiates on the generosity of the rich, who, on occasion of a catastrophe near Rome, threw open their houses and taxed their resources to relieve the suffering.[8]

[Footnote 8: For references, see Lecky's ”European Morals,” II., p.

79-81.]

Such acts attest a genuine kindness. The protests of the best citizens against the b.l.o.o.d.y gladiatorial shows,--a protest so eager and persistent that the trade of the gladiator was seriously injured--must have been in the highest degree unpopular, for the populace found in these shows their favorite amus.e.m.e.nt. The remonstrances of philanthropic men against the barbarities of the penal code; the call for the abolishment of the death penalty; the pity for the woes of neglected children; the indignation at the crime of infanticide; the earnest interest taken in the problems of prost.i.tution and the most revolting aspects of pauperism were such as might have proceeded from nineteenth century people.[9] Stronger words were never spoken by American abolitionists than were uttered by pagan lips against the slavery that was pulling down the Roman State.

[Footnote 9: See Denis, II., p. 55-218.]

That beneficence in the Roman Empire during the latter half of the first century and the first half of the second was fitful, formal, limited, and unimpa.s.sioned, as compared with the charities of Christians in their communities, need not be said; of course it was. The Christians succeeded to the legacies of kindness left by the pagans; they were comparatively few in number, and were bound to one another by peculiar ties; they were themselves of the great family of the poor; they were obliged to help one another in the only way they could, by personal effort and sacrifice. Their traditions, too, of beneficence were oriental. The difference in spirit between Roman and Christian charity cannot be fairly described as a difference between heathen charity and christian; it is more just to call it a difference between Eastern charity and Western. The Orientals, including the Jews, made beneficence in its various forms, an individual duty. Kindness to the sick, the unfortunate, the poor, compa.s.sion with the sorrowful, almsgiving to the dest.i.tute, hospitality to the stranger, are virtues characteristic of all eastern people. The New Testament chiefly echoes the sentiment of the Old on this matter, and the Old Testament chimes in with the voices of eastern teachers. In the West, government undertook responsibilities which in oriental lands, were a.s.sumed by individuals; people were to a much greater degree ma.s.sed in orders and cla.s.ses; the distance was wider between the governors and the governed, and considerations of state more gravely affected the actions which elsewhere seemed to concern only the private conscience and heart. The question of advantage between these two systems is still an open one. In every generation there have been some, christians too, who preferred the western method to the eastern, as being less costly, and more methodical; the debate on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the personal and the impersonal methods still goes on in modern communities; neither system prevails exclusively in any christian land; the Latin races still, as a rule, prefer the Roman way, France for example, where charity is a matter of public rather than of private concern.

The mischiefs of the oriental method were apparent before Christianity appeared, and its zealous adoption of them early awakened misgivings.

The indiscriminate almsgiving, the elevation of poverty to the rank of a privilege, the glorification of self-impoverishment, the acceptance of feeling as a divine monitor, and of emotion as a heavenly instinct, the subst.i.tution of the wors.h.i.+p of the heart for deference to reason, the loose compa.s.sion, the practical and professed communism--for some of the fathers maintained that all property was based on usurpation, that all men had a common right in the earth, and that none was ent.i.tled to hold wealth except as a trust for others--soon disclosed disastrous results.

Against the evils that are fairly chargeable upon the wholesale measures of the imperial bounty, must be offset the equally grave, and in some respects, not dissimilar evils incident to the unprincipled practice of loving kindness on the part of the bishops and their flocks, the increase of the dependent, the encouragement of pauperism, the waste of wealth, the worse waste of humanity. National philanthropy in London and New York finds no more serious obstacle to its advance than the benevolence that is inculcated in the name of Christ, and by authority of the New Testament. It is the battle of science against sentiment.

The increased devoutness that showed itself in the empire, about the beginning of the second century, the pious pa.s.sion that broke out, is attributable to natural causes, that have been mentioned by every author who has written on the subject. It is familiar knowledge that the decay of inst.i.tutions, the disintegration of social bonds, the general decline of positive religious faith, a decline partly due, possibly, to the tolerance which placed all faiths side by side, was followed, or we might say accompanied by a longing after divine things that was wild in the fervor of its impulse. The complacent reign of skepticism was succeeded by a volcanic outbreak of superst.i.tion. What has been called ”a storm of supernaturalism” burst forth, with the usual accompaniments of frenzy, and took possession of all cla.s.ses. Only general causes of this can be a.s.signed. That it was due to any special influence cannot be alleged. That it was due to any ”supernatural” interposition of heaven, is an unnecessary supposition. The cursory reader of the history of the empire, as written by intelligent modern scholars, of whatever school, sees plainly enough the pa.s.s that things had come to and how they came to it. Christianity came in on the wave of this movement, felt its force, struck into its channel, was borne aloft on its bosom. It is customary to speak of all this spiritual ferment as a preparation for Christianity; it was such a preparation as left Christianity little of a peculiar kind to do. What new element it introduced, it would be hard to say now, however easy it seemed half a century ago. The desert land of heathenism has been explored, and the result is a discovery of fertile plains instead of barrenness. The distinction between the ante-Christian and the post-christian eras is, if not obliterated, yet so far effaced, that the transition from one to the other is natural and facile.

The longing for spiritual satisfaction that stirred in the heart of the empire, found neither its source nor its gratification exclusively in the religion that afterwards became the professed faith of Rome. It slaked its thirst at older fountains. Such longings will, at need, open fountains of living water for their own supply. Pa.s.sing through the valley of Baca they create a well, the streams whereof fill the pools.

The smitten rock pours out its torrents. The hungry soul creates its harvest as it goes along, feeding itself by the way with food that seems to fall miraculously from the sky. It makes a religion if there be none at hand. A new heaven peopled with angels; a new earth full of providences come into being at its call. But in this emergency the religion was extant in the world, already venerable, already proved. It was the religion of Israel, with all that was necessary to attract attention and command reverence; a holy G.o.d, an immediate providence, a solemn history, a glorious prophecy, an inspiring hope, traditions, inst.i.tutions, a temple, a priesthood, sacrifices, a code of laws, ceremonial and moral, poetry, learning, music, mystery, stately forms of men and women, judges, kings, heroes, martyrs, saints, a superb literature, legends of virtue, festivals of joy, visions of resurrection and judgment, precepts of righteousness, promises of peace, songs of victory and of sorrow, dreams of a heavenly kingdom to be won by obedience to divine law, tender lessons of charity, stern lessons of denial, fascinating attractions and yet more fascinating fears, gentle persuasions and awful menaces, calculated to lay hold on every mood, to thrill and to satisfy every human emotion. The religion of Israel lacked little but outward prestige of power and wealth to make it precisely what the time required; and in times of real earnestness the prestige of power and wealth is readily dispensed with. The unfas.h.i.+onable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. ”The l.u.s.t of the flesh, the l.u.s.t of the eyes, the pride of life,” delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wis.h.i.+ng to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in a.s.sociations with the coa.r.s.e, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers.

Its very dogmatism, its proud exclusiveness and intolerance, were in its favor. Its haughty reserve a.s.sisted it; its superb disdain of other faiths, its boast of antiquity, its claim to a monopoly of the future of the race, exerted a weird spell over the dazed and decrepit minds of the superst.i.tious, high and low. Its lofty belief in miracle and sign, fairly constrained the skeptical to bow the head.

The interest felt in Judaism, and its influence on society in its high places, have already been alluded to, and need not be further insisted on. The testimony of Juvenal--the testimony of sarcasm and complaint--is enough to establish the fact that a curiosity amounting to infatuation had taken possession especially of the women of Rome.

If it be asked why Judaism, then, was not made the religion of the empire, instead of Christianity, which it hated with all the fervor of close relations.h.i.+p, the answer is at hand: _Judaism laid no emphasis on its cosmopolitan features, and discouraged belief in the historical fulfilment of its own prophecy_. The charge that it was a _national_ religion, the religion of a race, it was at no pains to repel; on the contrary, it seems to have exaggerated this claim to distinction, standing on its dignity, despising the arts of propagandism and demanding the submission of other creeds. This att.i.tude alone might have recommended the religion in some quarters, and would not have seriously embarra.s.sed it in any, supposing it to have been loftily and worthily sustained. A graver cause of its unpopularity was its failure to lay stress on its Messianic idea. It would abate nothing of its monotheistic grandeur. Its G.o.d was the everlasting, the infinite, the formless, the invisible. The command to make of Him no image whatever, either animal or human, to a.s.sociate Him with neither place nor time, was obeyed to the letter. Among a people extremely sensitive to grace of form and beauty of color, the Jews had no art; they set up no statue; they painted no picture; they allowed no emblem that could be wors.h.i.+pped.

Their Holy Spirit was an influence; their Messiah was a distant hope; their kingdom of heaven was a dream. The Christians of both schools--the conservative and the liberal--thrust into the foreground the conceptions which their co-religionists kept in the shadow of antic.i.p.ation. In their belief, prophecy was fulfilled. The Messiah had come; he had taken on human shape; he had pa.s.sed through an earthly career; he had ascended in visible form to the skies; he sat there at the right hand of the Majesty on high; he was active in his care for his own, suffering and sorrowing on earth; he sent the Holy Spirit, the comforter and guide to his friends in their affliction; he was the immediate G.o.d; he heard and answered prayer; he pardoned sin; he opened the gates of heaven to believers. They did not scruple to make images of him; to represent him in emblems; to eke out their own rude art by adopting the art which the heathen had ceased to venerate, and, where they could, re-dedicating statues of Apollo and Jupiter to their Christ. They were eager to have legendary portraits accepted as faithful likenesses of their Lord.