CHAPTER 1

RELIGIOUS CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MISSION-PREACHING

“Missionary Preaching” is a term which may be taken in a double sense. Its broader meaning covers all the forces of influence, attraction, and persuasion which the gospel had at its command, all the materials that it collected and endowed with life and power as it developed into a syncretistic religion during the first three centuries. The narrower sense of the term embraces simply the crucial message of faith and the ethical requirements of the gospel. Taking it in the latter sense, we shall devote the present chapter to a description of the fundamental principles of the missionary preaching. The broader conception has a wide range. The Old Testament and the new literature of Christianity, healing and redemption, gnosis and apologetic, myth and sacrament, the conquest of demons, forms of social organization and charity—all these played their part in the mission-preaching and helped to render it impressive and convincing. Even in the narrower sense of the term, our description of the mission-preaching must be kept within bounds, for the conception of the crucial message of faith and its ethical requirements is bound up naturally with the development of dogma, and the latter (as I have already remarked) cannot be exhibited without over-stepping the precincts of the present volume. At the same time, these limitations are not very serious, since, to the best of our knowledge, mission-preaching (in the narrower sense of the term) was fairly extinct after the close of the second century. Its place was taken by the instruction of catechumens, by the training of the household in and for the Christian faith, and by the worship of the church. Finally, we must eschew the error of imagining that everyone who came over to Christianity was won by a missionary propaganda of dogmatic completeness. So far as our sources throw light on this point, they reveal a very different state of things, and this applies even to the entire period preceding Constantine. In countless instances, it was but one ray of light that wrought the change. One person would be brought over by means of the Old Testament, another by the exorcising of demons, a third by the purity of Christian life; others, again, by the monotheism of Christianity, above all by the prospect of complete expiation, or by the prospect which it held out of immortality, or by the profundity of its speculations, or by the social standing which it conferred. In the great majority of cases, so long as Christianity did not yet propagate itself naturally, one believer may well have produced another, just as one prophet anointed his successor; example (not confined to the case of the martyrs) and the personal manifestation of the Christian life led to imitation. A complete knowledge of Christian doctrine, which was still a plant of very tender growth in the second century, was certainly the attainment of a small minority. “Idiotae, quorum semper maior pars est,” says Tertullian (“The uneducated are always in a majority with us”). Hippolytus bewails the ignorance even of a Roman bishop. Even the knowledge of the Scriptures, though they were read in private, remained of necessity the privilege of an individual here and there, owing to their extensiveness and the difficulty of understanding them.Bishops and theologians, in the West especially, are always bewailing the defective knowledge of the Bible among the laity, and even among the clergy. Cp. also Clement of Alexandrinus.

The earliest mission-preaching to Jews ran thus: “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent.”The earliest mission-preaching (Matt. x. 7 f.) with which the disciples of Jesus were charged, ran: κηρύσσετε λέγοντες ὅτι ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν. Although repentance is not actually mentioned, it is to be supplied from other passages. The prospect of power to do works of healing is also held out to them (ἀσθενοῦντας θεραπεύετε, νεκροὺς ἐγείρετε, λεπροὺς καθαρίζετε, δαιμόνια ἐκβάλλετε). The Jews thought they knew what was the meaning of the kingdom of heaven and of its advent; but they had to be told the meaning of the repentance that secured the higher righteousness, so that “God's kingdom” also acquired a new meaning.

CHAPTER 2

THE GOSPEL OF THE SAVIOR AND OF SALVATIONThis chapter is based on a fresh revision of Section VI. in my study on “Medicinisches aus der ältesten Kirchengeschichte” (Texte und Unters. VIII., 1892).

The gospel, as preached by Jesus; is a religion of redemption, but it is a religion of redemption in a secret sense. Jesus proclaimed a new message (the near approach of God's kingdom, God as the Father, as his Father), and also a new law, but he did his work as a Saviour or healer, and it was amid work of this kind that he was crucified. Paul, too, preached the gospel as a religion of redemption.

Jesus appeared among his people as a physician. “The healthy need not a physician, but the sick” (Mark ii. 17, Luke v. 31). The first three gospels depict him as the physician of soul and body, as the Saviour or healer of men. Jesus says very little about sickness; he cures it. He does not explain that sickness is health; he calls it by its proper name, and is sorry for the sick person. There is nothing sentimental or subtle about Jesus; he draws no fine distinctions, he utters no sophistries about healthy people being really sick and sick people really healthy. He sees himself surrounded by crowds of sick folk; he attracts them, and his one impulse is to help them. Jesus does not distinguish rigidly between sicknesses of the body and of the soul; he takes them both as different expressions of the one supreme ailment in humanity. But he knows their sources. He knows it is easier to say, “Rise up and walk,” than to say, “Thy sins are forgiven thee” (Mark ii. 9).Or are we to interpret the passage in another way? Is it easier to say, “Thy sins are forgiven thee”? In that case, “easier” evidently must be taken in a different sense. And he acts accordingly. No sickness of the soul repels him—he is constantly surrounded by sinful women and tax-gatherers. Nor is any bodily disease too loathsome for Jesus. In this world of wailing, misery, filth, and profligacy, which pressed upon him every day, he kept himself invariably vital, pure, and busy.

In this way he won men and women to be his disciples. The circle by which he was surrounded was a circle of people who had been healed.An old legend of Edessa regarding Jesus is connected with his activity as a healer of men. At the close of the third century the people of Edessa, who had become Christians during the second half of the second century, traced back their faith to the apostolic age, and treasured up an alleged correspondence between Jesus and their King Abgar. This correspondence is still extant (cp. Euseb., H.E. i. 13). It is a naïve romance. The king, who is severely ill, writes thus “Abgar, toparch of Edessa, to Jesus the excellent Saviour, who has appeared in the country of Jerusalem; greeting. I have heard of thee and of thy cures, performed without medicine or herb. For, it is said, thou makest the blind to see, and the lame to walk; thou cleansest lepers, thou expellest unclean spirits and demons, thou healest those afflicted with lingering diseases, and thou raisest the dead. Now, as I have heard all this about thee, I have concluded that one of two things must be true: either thou art God, and, having descended from heaven, doest these things, or else thou art a son of God by what thou doest. I write to thee, therefore, to ask thee to come and cure the disease from which I am suffering. For I have heard that the Jews murmur against thee, and devise evil against thee. Now, I have a very small, yet excellent city, which is large enough for both of us.” To which Jesus answered: “Blessed art thou for having believed in me without seeing me. For it is written concerning me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, while they who have not seen me will believe and be saved. But as to thy request that I should come to thee, I must fulfill here all things for which I have been sent, and, after fulfilling them, be taken up again to him who sent me. Yet after I am taken up, I will send thee one of my disciples to cure thy disease and give life to thee and thine.” The narrative then goes on to describe how Thaddaeus came to Edessa and cured the king by the laying on of hands, without medicine or herbs, after he had confessed his faith. “And Abdus, the son of Abdus, was also cured by him of gout.” They were healed because they had believed on him, i.e., because they had gained health from his character and words. To know God meant a sound soul. This was the rock on which Jesus had rescued them from the shipwreck of their life. They knew they were healed, just because they had recognized God as the Father in his Son. Henceforth they drew health and real life as from a never-failing stream.

“Ye will say unto me this parable: Physician, heal thyself” (Luke iv. 23). He who helped so many people, seemed himself to be always helpless. Harassed, calumniated, threatened with death by the authorities of his nation, and persecuted in the name of the very God whom he proclaimed, Jesus went to his cross. But even the cross only displayed for the first time the full depth and energy of his saving power. It put the copestone on his mission, by showing men that the sufferings of the just are the saving force in human history.

“Surely he hath borne our sickness and carried our sorrows; by his stripes we are healed.”1 Pet. ii. 24, οὗ τῷ μώλωπι αὐτοὶ ἰάθητε. This was the new truth that issued from the cross of Jesus. It flowed out, like a stream of fresh water, on the arid souls of men and on their dry morality. The morality of outward acts and regulations gave way to the conception of a life which was personal, pure, and divine, which spent itself in the service of the brethren, and gave itself up ungrudgingly to death. This conception was the new principle of life. It uprooted the old life swaying to and fro between sin and virtue; it also planted a new life whose aim was nothing short of being a disciple of Christ, and whose strength was drawn from the life of Christ himself. The disciples went forth to preach the tidings of “God the Saviour,”Luke ii. 11, ἐτέχθη ὑμῖν σωτὴρ, ὅς ἐστιν Χριστὸς κύριος; John iv. 42, οἴδαμεν ὅτι οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ σωτὴρ τοῦ κόσμου; Tit. ii. 11, ἐπεφάνη ἡ χάρις τοῦ θεοῦ σωτήριος πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις; Tit. iii. 4, ἡ χρηστότης καὶ ἡ φιλανθρωπία ἐπεφάνη τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν θεοῦ. By several Christian circles, indeed, the title “Saviour” was reserved for Jesus and for Jesus only. Irenæus (I. i. 3) reproaches the Valentinian Ptolemæus for never calling Jesus κύριος but only σωτήρ, and, as a matter of fact, in the epistle of Ptolemæus to Flora, Jesus is termed σωτήρ exclusively. of that Saviour and physician whose person, deeds, and sufferings were man's salvation. Paul was giving vent to no sudden or extravagant emotion, but expressing with quiet confidence what he was fully conscious of at every moment, when he wrote to the Galatians (ii. 20), “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. For the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave up himself for me.” Conscious of this, the primitive Christian missionaries were ready to die daily. And that was just the reason why their cause did not collapse.

In the world to which the apostles preached their new message, religion had not been intended originally for the sick, but for the sound. The Deity sought the pure and sound to be his worshippers. The sick and sinful, it was held, are a prey to the powers of darkness; let them see to the recovery of health by some means or another, health for soul and body—for until then they are not pleasing to the gods. It is interesting to observe how this conception is still dominant at the close of the second century, in Celsus, the enemy of Christendom (Orig., c. Cels. III. lix. f.). “Those who invite people to participate in other solemnities, make the following proclamation: ‘He who hath clean hands and sensible speech (is to draw near)'; or again, ‘He who is pure from all stain, conscious of no sin in his soul, and living an honorable and just life (may approach).' Such is the cry of those who promise purification from sins.The meaning is that even to mysteries connected with purification those only were bidden who had led upon the whole a good and a just life. But let us now hear what sort of people these Christians invite. ‘Anyone who is a sinner,' they say, ‘or foolish, or simple-minded—in short, any unfortunate will be accepted by the kingdom of God.' By ‘sinner' is meant an unjust person, a thief, a burglar, a poisoner, a sacrilegious man, or a robber of corpses. Why, if you wanted an assembly of robbers, these are just the sort of people you would summon!”Porphyry's position is rather different. He cannot flatly set aside the saying of Christ about the sick, for whose sake he came into the world. But as a Greek he is convinced that religion is meant for intelligent, just, and inquiring people. Hence his statement on the point (in Mac. Magnes, iv. 10) is rather confused. Here Celsus has stated, as lucidly as one could desire, the cardinal difference between Christianity and ancient religion.Origen makes a skillful defense of Christianity at this point. “If a Christian does extend his appeal to the same people as those addressed by a robber-chief, his aim is very different. He does so in order to bind up their wounds with his doctrine, in order to allay the festering sores of the soul with those remedies of faith which correspond to the wine and oil and other applications employed to give the body relief from pain” (III. lx.). “Celsus misrepresents facts when he declares that we hold God was sent to sinners only. It is just as if he found fault with some people for saying that some kind and gracious [φιλανθρωπότατος, an epithet of Æsculapius] monarch had sent his physician to a city for the benefit of the sick people in that city. God the Word was thus sent as a physician for sinners, but also as a teacher of divine mysteries for those who are already pure and sin no more” (III. lxi.).

But, as we have already seen (Book I, Chapter III.), the religious temper which Christianity encountered, and which developed and diffused itself very rapidly in the second and third centuries, was no longer what we should term “ancient.” Here again we see that the new religion made its appearance “when the time was fulfilled.” The cheerful, naïve spirit of the old religion, so far as it still survived, lay a-dying, and its place was occupied by fresh religious needs. Philosophy had set the individual free, and had discovered a human being in the common citizen. By the blending of states and nations, which coalesced to form a universal empire, cosmopolitanism had now become a reality. But there was always a reverse side to cosmopolitanism, viz., individualism. The refinements of material civilization and mental culture made people more sensitive to the element of pain in life, and this increase of sensitiveness showed itself also in the sphere of morals, where more than one Oriental religion came forward to satisfy its demand. The Socratic philosophy, with its fine ethical ideas, issued from the heights of the thinker to spread across the lowlands of the common people. The Stoics, in particular, paid unwearied attention to the “health and diseases of the soul,” moulding their practical philosophy upon this type of thought. There was a real demand for purity, consolation, expiation, and healing, and as these could not be found elsewhere, they began to be sought in religion. In order to secure them, people were on the look-out for new sacred rites. The evidence for this change which passed over the religious temper lies in the writings of Seneca, Epictetus, and many others; but a further testimony of much greater weight is afforded by the revival which attended the cult of Æsculapius during the Imperial age.For the cult of Æsculapius, see von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's Isyllos von Epidauros (1886), pp. 36 f., 44 f., 116 f., and Usener's Götternamen (1896), pp. 147 f., 350, besides Ilberg's study of Æsculapius in Teubner's Neuen Jahrbüchern, II., 1901, and the cautious article by Thrämer in Pauly-Wissowa's Real. Encykl. (II. 1642 f.). As far back as 290 B.C., Æsculapius of Epidaurus had been summoned to Rome on the advice of the Sibylline books. He had his sanctuary on the island in the Tiber, and close to it, just as at the numerous shrines of Asclepius in Greece, there stood a sanatorium in which sick persons waited for the injunctions which the god imparted during sleep. Greek physicians followed the god to Rome, but it took a long time for either the god or the Greek doctors to become popular. The latter do riot seem at first to have recommended themselves by their skill. “In 219 B.C. the first Greek surgeon became domiciled in Rome. He actually received the franchise, and was presented by the State with a shop ‘in compito Acilio.' But this doctor made such unmerciful havoc among his patients by cutting and cauterizing, that the name of surgeon became a synonym for that of a butcher.”Preller-Jordan, Röm. Mythologie, ii. p. 243. Pliny observes: “Mox a saevitia secandi urendique transisse nomen in carnificem et in tædium artem omnesque medicos” (“Owing to cruelty in cutting and cauterizing, the name of surgeon soon passed into that of butcher, and a disgust was felt for the profession and for all doctors”). Things were different under the Cæsars. Though the Romans themselves still eschewed the art of medicine, considering it a kind of divination, skilled Greek doctors were in demand at Rome itself, and the cult of that “deus clinicus,” Æsculapius, was in full vogue. From Rome his cult spread over all the West, fusing itself here and there with the cult of Serapis or some other deity, and accompanied by the subordinate cult of Hygeia and Salus, Telesphorus and Somnus. Furthermore, the sphere of influence belonging to this god of healing widened steadily; he became “saviour” pure and simple, the god who aids in all distress, the “friend of man” (φιλανθρωπότατος).The cult was really humane, and it led the physicians also to be humane. In a passage from the Παραγγελίαι of pseudo-Hippocrates we read: “I charge you not to show yourselves inhuman, but to take the wealth or poverty (of the patient) into account, in certain cases even to treat them gratis”—the repute of the ἰατροὶ ἀνάργυροι is well known—“and to consider future gratitude more than present fame. If, therefore, the summons for aid happens to be the case of an unknown or impecunious man, he is most of all to be assisted; for wherever there is love to one's neighbor, it means readiness to act” (ix. 258 Littré, iii. 321 Erm.; a passage which Ilberg brought under my notice, cp. also the Berl. Philol. Wochenschrift for March 25, 1893). How strongly the Christians themselves felt their affinity to humane physicians is proved by a striking instance which Ilberg quotes (loc. cit., from vi. 90 Littré, ii.123 Erm.). Eusebius writes (H. E. x. 4. 11) that Jesus, “like some excellent physician, in order to cure the sick, examines what is repulsive, handles sores, and reaps pain himself from the sufferings of others.” This passage is literally taken from the treatise of pseudo-Hippocrates περὶ φυσῶν: ὀ μὲν γὰρ ἰητρὸς ὁρεῖ τε δεινά, θιγγάνει τε ἀηδέων ἐπ᾽ ἀλλοτρίῃσι δὲ ξυμφορῇσιν ἰδίας καρποῦται λύπας. The more men sought deliverance and healing in religion, the greater grew this god's repute. He belonged to the old gods who held out longest against Christianity, and therefore he is often to be met with in the course of early Christian literature. The cult of Æsculapius was one of those which were most widely diffused throughout the second half of the second century, and also during the third century. People traveled to the famous sanatoria of the god, as they travel today to baths. He was appealed to in diseases of the body and of the soul; people slept in his temples, to be cured; the costliest gifts were brought him as the ΘΕΟΣ ΣΩΤΗΡ (“God the Saviour”); and people consecrated their lives to him, as innumerable inscriptions and statues testify. In the case of other gods as well, healing virtue now became a central feature. Zeus himself and Apollo (cp., e.g., Tatian, Orat. 8) appeared in a new light. They, too, became “saviours.” No one could be a god any longer, unless he was also a saviour.Corresponding to this, we have Porphyry's definition of the object of philosophy as ἡ τῆς ψυχῆς σωτηρία (the salvation of the soul). Glance over Origen's great reply to Celsus, and you soon discover that one point hotly disputed by these two remarkable men was the question whether Jesus or Æsculapius was the true Saviour. Celsus champions the one with as much energy and credulity as Origen the other. The combination of crass superstition and sensible criticism presented by both men is an enigma to us at this time of day. We moderns can hardly form any clear idea of their mental bearings. In III. iii Origen observes: “Miracles occurred in all lands, or at least in many places. Celsus himself admits in his book that, Æsculapius healed diseases and revealed the future in all cities that were devoted to him, such as Tricca, Epidaurus, Cos, and Pergamum.” According to III. xxii. Celsus charged the Christians with being unable to make up their minds to call Æsculapius a god, simply because he had been first a man. Origen's retort is that the Greek tradition made Zeus slay Æsculapius with a thunderbolt. Celsus (III. xxiv.) declared it to be an authentic fact that a great number of Greeks and barbarians had seen, and still saw, no mere wraith of Æsculapius, but the god himself engaged in healing and helping man, whereas the disciples of Jesus had merely seen a phantom. Origen is very indignant at this, but his counter-assertions are weak. Does Celsus also appeal to the great number of Greeks and barbarians who believe in Æsculapius? Origen, too, can point to the great number of Christians, to the truth of their scriptures, and to their successful cures in the name of Jesus. But then he suddenly alters his defense, and proceeds (III. xxv.) to make the following extremely shrewd observation: “Even were I going to admit that a demon named Æsculapius had the power of healing bodily diseases, I might still remark to those who are amazed at such cures or at the prophecies of Apollo, that such curative power is of itself neither good nor bad, but within reach of godless as well as of honest folk; while in the same way it does not follow that he who can foretell the future is on that account an honest and upright man. One is not in a position to prove the virtuous character of those who heal diseases and foretell the future. Many instances may be adduced of people being healed who did not deserve to live, people who were so corrupt and led a life of such wickedness that no sensible physician would have troubled to cure them. . . . . The power of healing diseases is no evidence of anything specially divine.” From all these remarks of Origen, we can see how high the cult of Æsculapius was ranked, and how keenly the men of that age were on the lookout for “salvation.”

Into this world of craving for salvation the preaching of Christianity made its way. Long before it had achieved its final triumph by dint of an impressive philosophy of religion, its success was already assured by the fact that it promised and offered salvation—a feature in which it surpassed all other religions and cults. It did more than set up the actual Jesus against the imaginary Æsculapius of dreamland. Deliberately and consciously it assumed the form of “the religion of salvation or healing,”The New Testament itself is so saturated with medicinal expressions, employed metaphorically, that a collection of them would fill several pages. or “the medicine of soul and body,” and at the same time it recognized that one of its chief duties was to care assiduously for the sick in body. We shall now select one or two examples out of the immense wealth of material, to throw light upon both of these points.

Take, first of all, the theory. Christianity never lost hold of its innate principle; it was, and it remained, a religion for the sick. Accordingly it assumed that no one, or at least hardly any one, was in normal health, but that men were always in a state of disability. This reading of human nature was not confined to Paul, who looked on all men outside of Christ as dying, dying in their sins; a similar, though simpler, view was taught by the numerous unknown missionaries of primitive Christianity. The soul of man is sick, they said, a prey to death from the moment of his birth. The whole race lies a-dying. But now “the goodness and the human kindness of God the Saviour” have appeared to restore the sick soul.Tit. iii. 4: ἡ χρηστότης καὶ ἡ φιλανθρωπία ἐπέφανη τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν θεοῦ . . . . ἔσωσεν ἡμᾶς. See the New Testament allusions to σωτήρ. Baptism was therefore conceived as a bath for regaining the soul's health, or for “the recovery of life”;Tert., de Baptism., i., etc., etc.; Clement (Paedag. i. 6. 29) calls baptism παιωνίον φάρμάκον. Tertullian describes it as “aqua medicinalis.” the Lord's Supper was valued as “the potion of immortality,”Ignatius, Justin, and Irenæus. and penitence was termed “vera de satisfactione medicina” (the true medicine derived from the atonement, Cypr., de Lapsis xv.). At the celebration of the sacrament, thanks were offered for the “life” therein bestowed (Did. ix.-x.). The conception of “life” acquired a new and deeper meaning. Jesus had already spoken of a “life” beyond the reach of death, to be obtained by the sacrifice of a man's earthly life. The idea and the term were taken up by Paul and by the fourth evangelist, who summed up in them the entire blessings of religion. With the tidings of immortality, the new religion confronted sorrow, misery, sin, and death. So much, at least, the world of paganism could understand. It could understand the promise of bliss and immortality resembling that of the blessed gods. And not a few pagans understood the justice of the accompanying condition that one had to submit to the regime of the religion, that the soul had to be pure and holy before it could become immortal. Thus they grasped the message of a great Physician who preaches “abstinence” and bestows the gift of “life.”Clement of Alexandria opens his Paedagogus by describing his Logos as the physician who heals suffering (I. i. 1., τὰ πάθη ὁ παραμυθητικὸς λόγος ἰᾶται). He distinguishes the λόγος προτρεπτικός, ὑποθετικός, and παραμυθικός, to which is added further ὁ διδακτικός. And the Logos is Christ. Gregory Thaumaturgus also calls the Logos a physician, in his panegyric on Origen (xvi.). In the pseudo-Clementine homilies, Jesus, who is the true prophet, is always the physician; similarly Peter's work everywhere is that of the great physician who, by the sole means of prayer and speech, heals troops of sick folk (see especially Bk. VII.). Simon Magus, again, is represented as the wicked magician, who evokes disease wherever he goes. Origen has depicted Jesus the physician more frequently and fully than anyone else. One at least of his numerous passages on the subject may be cited (from Hom. viii., in Levit., ch. i. vol. ix. pp. 312 f): “Medicum dici in scripturis divinis dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, etiam ipsius domini sententia perdocemur, sicut dicit in evangeliis [here follows Matt. ix. 12 f.]. Omnis autem medicus ex herbarum succis vet arborum vel etiam metallorum venis vel animantium naturis profectura corporibus medicamenta componit. Sed herbas istas si quis forte, antequam pro ratione artis componantur, adspiciat, si quidem in agris aut montibus, velut foenum vile conculcat et praeterit. Si vero eas intra medici scholam dispositas per ordinem viderit, licet odorem tristem, fortem et austerum reddant, tamen suspicabitur eas curae vel remedii aliquid continere, etiamsi nondum quae vel qualis sit sanitatis ac remedii virtus agnoverit. Haec de communibus medicis diximus. Veni nunc ad Jesum coelestem medicum, intra ad hanc stationem medicinae eius ecclesiam, vide ibi languentium iacere multitudinem. Venit mulier, quae et partu immunda effecta est, venit leprosus, qui extra castra separatus est pro immunditia leprae, quaerunt a medico remedium, quomodo sanentur, quomodo mundentur, et quia Jesus hic, qui medicus est, ipse est et verbum dei, aegris suis non herbarum succis, sed verborum sacramentis medicamenta conquirit. Quae verborum medicamenta si quis incultius per libros tamquam per agros videat esse dispersa, ignorans singulorum dictorum virtutem, ut vilia haec et nullum sermonis cultum habentia praeteribit. Qui sero ex aliqua parte didicerit animarum apud Christum esse medicinam, intelliget profecto ex hic libris, qui in ecclesiis recitantur, tamquam ex agris et montibus, salutares herbas adsumere unumquemque debere, sermonum dumtaxat vim, ut si quis illi est in anima languor, non tam exterioris frondis et corticis, quam succi interioris hausta virtute sanetur” (“The Lord himself teaches us, in the gospels, that our Lord Jesus Christ is called a physician in the Holy Scriptures. Every physician compounds his medicines for the good of the body from the juices of herbs or trees, or even from the veins of metals or living creatures. Now, supposing that anyone sees these herbs in their natural state, ere they are prepared by skill of art, he treads on them like common straw and passes by them, on mountain or field. But if he chances to see them arranged in the laboratory of a herbalist or physician, he will suspect that, for all their bitter and heavy and unpleasant odors, they have some healing and healthful virtue, though as yet he does not know the nature or the quality of this curative element. So much for our ordinary physicians. Now look at Jesus the heavenly physician. Come inside his room of healing, the church. Look at the multitude of impotent folk lying there. Here comes a woman unclean from childbirth, a leper expelled from the camp owing to his unclean disease; they ask the physician for aid, for a cure, for cleansing; and because this Jesus the Physician is also the Word of God, he applies, not the juices of herbs, but the sacraments of the Word to their diseases. Anyone who looked at these remedies casually as they lay in books, like herbs in the field, ignorant of the power of single words, would pass them by as common things without any grace of style. But he who ultimately discovers that Christ has a medicine for souls, will find from these books which are read in the churches, as he finds from mountains and fields, that each yields healing herbs, at least strength won from words, so that any weakness of soul is healed not so much by leaf and bark as by an inward virtue and juice”). Anyone who had felt a single ray of the power and glory of the new life reckoned his previous life to have been blindness, disease, and deathThat the vices were diseases was a theme treated by Christian teachers as often as by the Stoics. Cp., e.g., Origen, in Ep. ad Rom., Bk. II. (Lommatzsch, vi. 91 f.): “Languores quidem animae ab apostolo in his (Rom. ii. 8) designantur, quorum medelam nullus inveniet nisi prius morborum cognoverit causas et ideo in divinis scripturis aegritudines animae numerantur et remedia describuntur, ut hi, qui se apostolicis subdiderint disciplinis, ex his, quae scripta sunt, agnitis languoribus suis curati possint dicere: ‘Lauda anima mea dominum, qui sanat omnes languores tuos'” (‘The apostle here describes the diseases of the soul; their cure cannot be discovered till one diagnoses first of all the causes of such troubles, and consequently Holy Scripture enumerates the ailments of the soul, and describes their remedies, in order that those who submit to the apostolic discipline may be able to say, after they have been cured of diseases diagnosed by aid of what is written: ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, who healeth all thy diseases'”).—a view attested by both the apostolic fathers and the apologists. “He bestowed on us the light, he spoke to us as a father to his sons, he saved us in our lost estate. . . . . Blind were we in our understanding, worshipping stones and wood and gold and silver and brass, nor was our whole life aught but death.”2 Clem., Ep. ad Cor. i. Similar expressions are particularly common in Tatian, but indeed no apology is wholly devoid of them. The mortal will put on, nay, has already put on, immortality, the perishable will be robed in the imperishable: such was the glad cry of the early Christians, who took up arms against a sea of troubles, and turned the terror of life's last moment into a triumph. “Those miserable people,” says Lucian in the Proteus Peregrinus, “have got it into their heads that they are perfectly immortal.” He would certainly have made a jest upon it had any occurred to his mind; but whenever this nimble scoffer is depicting the faith of Christians, there is a remarkable absence of anything like jesting.

While the soul's health or the new life is a gift, however, it is a gift which must be appropriated from within. There was a great risk of this truth being overlooked by those who were accustomed to leave any one of the mysteries with the sense of being consecrated and of bearing with them super mundane blessings as if they were so many articles. It would be easy also to show how rapidly the sacramental system of the church lapsed into the spirit of the pagan mysteries. But once the moral demand, i.e., the purity of the soul, was driven home, it proved such a powerful factor that it held its own within the Catholic church, even alongside of the inferior sacramental system. The salvation of the soul and the lore of that salvation never died away; in fact, the ancient church arranged all the details of her worship and her dogma with this end in view. She consistently presented herself as the great infirmary or the hospital of humanity: pagans, sinners, and heretics are her patients, ecclesiastical doctrines and observances are her medicines, while the bishops and pastors are the physicians, but only as servants of Christ, who is himself the physician of all souls.Celsus, who knew this kind of Christian preaching intimately, pronounced the Christians to be quacks. “The teacher of Christianity,” he declares, “acts like a person who promises to restore a sick man to health and yet hinders him from consulting skilled physicians, so as to prevent his own ignorance from being exposed.” To which Origen retorts, “And who are the physicians from whom we deter simple folk?” He then proceeds to show that they cannot be the philosophers, and still less those who are not yet emancipated from the coarse superstition of polytheism (III. lxxiv.). Let me give one or two instances of this. “As the good of the body is health, so the good of the soul is the knowledge of God,” says Justin.Fragm. ix. (Otto, Corp. Apol. iii., p. 258). Cp. also the beautiful wish expressed at the beginning of 3 John: περὶ πάντων εὔχομαι σε εὐοδοῦσθαι καὶ ὑγιαίνειν, καθῶς εὐοδοῦταί σου ἡ ψυχή (ver. 2). “While we have time to be healed, let us put ourselves into the hands of God the healer, paying him recompense. And what recompense? What but repentance from a sincere heart” (2 Clem., ad Cor. ix.). “Like some excellent physician, in order to cure the sick, Jesus examines what is repulsive, handles sores, and reaps pain himself from the sufferings of others; he has himself saved us from the very jaws of death—us who were not merely diseased and suffering from terrible ulcers and wounds already mortified, but were also lying already among the dead . . . .; he who is the giver of life and of light, our great physician,Cp. Ep. ad Diogn. ix. 6, pseudo-Justin, de Resurr. x.: “Our physician, Jesus Christ”; Clem., Paedag. i. 2. 6: “The Logos of the Father is the only Paeonian physician for human infirmities, and the holy charmer (ἅγιος ἐπῳδός) for the sick soul” (whereupon he quotes Ps. lxxxii. 2-3): “The physician's art cures the diseases of the body, according to Democritus, but wisdom frees the soul from its passions. Yet the good instructor, the Wisdom, the Logos of the Father, the creator of man, cares for all our nature, healing it in body and in soul alike—he ὁ πανακὴς τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος ἰατρός ὁ σωτήρ (the all-sufficient physician of humanity, the Saviour),” whereupon he quotes Mark ii. 2. See also ibid., i. 6. 36, and i. 12. 100. “Hence the Logos also is called Saviour, since he has devised rational medicines for men; he preserves their health, lays bare their defects, exposes the causes of their evil affections, strikes at the root of irrational lusts, prescribes their diet, and arranges every antidote to heal the sick. For this is the greatest and most royal work of God, the saving of mankind. Patients are irritated at a physician who has no advice to give on the question of their health. But how should we not render thanks to the divine instructor,” etc. (Paedag. i. 8. 64-65). king and lord, the Christ of God.”Eus., H.E., v. 4. 11 (already referred to on p. 106). Cp. also the description of the Bible in Aphraates as “the books of the wise Physician,” and Cypr., de Op., i.: “Christ was wounded to cure us of our wounds. . . . . When the Lord at his coming had healed that wound which Adam caused,” etc. Metaphors from disease are on the whole very numerous in Cyprian; cp., e.g., de Habitu, ii.; de Unitate, iii.; de Lapsis, xiv., xxxiv. “The physician cannot introduce any salutary medicines into the body that needs to be cured, without having previously eradicated the trouble seated in the body or averted the approaching trouble. Even so the teacher of the truth cannot convince anyone by an address on truth, so long as some error still lurks in the soul of the hearer, which forms an obstacle to his arguments” (Athenagoras, de resurr. i.). “Were we to draw from the axiom that ‘disease is diagnosed by means of medical knowledge,' the inference that medical knowledge is the cause of disease, we should be making a preposterous statement. And as it is beyond doubt that the knowledge of salvation is a good thing, because it teaches men to know their sickness, so also is the law a good thing, inasmuch as sin is discovered thereby.”Origen, opposing the Antinomians in Comm. in Rom., iii. 6 (Lommatzsch, vi. p. 195), Hom. in Jerem., xix. 3. Similarly Clem., Paedag., i. 9. 88: “As the physician who tells a patient that he has fever is not an enemy to him—since the physician is not the cause of the fever but merely detects it (οὐκ αἴτιος, ἀλλ᾽ ἔλεγχός) neither is one who blames a diseased soul ill-disposed to that person.” Cp. Methodius (Opp. I. p. 52, Bonwetsch): “As we do not blame a physician who explains how a man may become strong and well,” etc.; see also I. 65: “For even those who undergo medical treatment for their bodily pains do not at once regain health, but gladly bear pain in the hope of their coming recovery.”

As early as 2 Tim. ii. 17, the word of heretics is said to eat “like a gangrene.” This expression recurs very frequently, and is elaborated in detail. “Their talk is infectious as a plague” (Cyprian, de Lapsis, xxxiv.). “Heretics are hard to cure,” says Ignatius (ad Ephes., vii., δυσθεράπευτος); “. . . . there is but one physician, Jesus Christ our Lord.” In the pastoral epistles the orthodox doctrine is already called “sound teaching” as opposed to the errors of the heretics.

Most frequently, however, bodily recovery is compared to penitence. It is Ignatius again who declares that “not every wound is cured by the same salve. Allay sharp pains by soothing fomentations.”Ad Polyc., ii. The passage is to be taken allegorically. It is addressed to Bishop Polycarp, who has been already (i) counselled to “bear the maladies of all”; wisely and gently is the bishop to treat the erring and the spiritually diseased. In the garb given it by Ignatius, this counsel recurs very frequently throughout the subsequent literature; see Lightfoot's learned note. Also Clem. Alex., Fragm. (Dindorf, iii. 499): “With one salve shalt thou heal thyself and thy neighbor (who slanders thee), if thou acceptest the slander with meekness”; Clem. Hom., x. 18: “The salve must not be applied to the sound member of the body, but to the suffering”; and Hermes Trismeg., περὶ βοτ. χυλ., p. 331: “Do not always use this salve.” “The cure of evil passions,” says Clement at the opening of his Paedagogus, “is effected by the Logos through admonitions; he strengthens the soul with benign precepts like soothing medicines,i. 1. 3, ἤπια φάρμακα (see Homer). and directs the sick to the full knowledge of the truth.” “Let us follow the practice of physicians (in the exercise of moral discipline), says Origen,In l. Jesu Nave, viii. 6 (Lomm. xi. 71). Cp. Hom. in Jerem., xvi. 1. “and only use the knife when all other means have failed, when application of oil and salves and soothing poultices leave the swelling still hard.” An objection was raised by Christians who disliked repentance, to the effect that the public confession of sin which accompanied the penitential discipline was at once an injury to their self-respect and a misery. To which Tertullian replies (de Poen., x.): “Nay, it is evil that ends in misery. Where repentance is undertaken, misery ceases, because it is turned into what is salutary. It is indeed a misery to be cut, and cauterized, and racked by some pungent powder; but the excuse for the offensiveness of means of healing that may be unpleasant, is the cure they work.” This is exactly Cyprian's point, when he writesDe Lapsis, xiv. Penitence and bodily cures form a regular parallel in Cyprian's writings; cp. Epist. xxxi. 6-7, lv. 16, lix. 13, and his Roman epistle xxx. 3. 5. 7. Novatian, who is responsible for the latter, declares (in de Trinit., v.) that God's wrath acts like a medicine. that “the priest of the Lord must employ salutary remedies.Cp. pseudo-Clem., Ep. ad Jac., ii.: “The president (the bishop) must hold the place of a physician (in the church), instead of behaving with the violence of an irrational brute.” He is an unskilled physician who handles tenderly the swollen edges of a wound and allows the poison lodged in the inward part to be aggraved by simply leaving it alone. The wound must be opened and lanced; recourse must be had to the strong remedy of cutting out the corrupting parts. Though the patient scream out in pain, and wail or weep, because he cannot bear it—afterwards he will be grateful, when he feels that he is cured.” But the most elaborate comparison of a bishop to a surgeon occurs in the Apostolic Constitutions (ii. 41). “Heal thou, O bishop, like a pitiful physician, all who have sinned, and employ methods that promote saving health. Confine not thyself to cutting or cauterizing or the use of corrosives, but employ bandages and lint, use mild and healing drugs, and sprinkle words of comfort as a soothing balm. If the wound be deep and gashed, lay a plaster on it that it may fill up and be once more like the rest of the sound flesh. If it be dirty, cleanse it with corrosive powder, i.e., with words of censure. If it has proud flesh, reduce it with sharp plasters, i.e., with threats of punishment. If it spreads further, sear it, and cut off the putrid flesh—mortify the man with fastings. And if after all this treatment thou findest that no soothing poultice, neither oil nor bandage, can be applied from head to foot of the patient, but that the disease is spreading and defying all cures, like some gangrene that corrupts the entire member; then, after great consideration and consultation with other skilled physicians, cut off the putrified member, lest the whole body of the church be corrupted. So be not hasty to cut it off, nor rashly resort to the saw of many a tooth, but first use the lancet to lay open the abscess, that the body may be kept free from pain by the removal of the deep-seated cause of the disease. But if thou seest anyone past repentance and (inwardly) past feeling, then cut him off as an incurable with sorrow and lamentation.”Cp. Clem. Alex., Paedag., i. 8. 64 f.: “Many evil passions are cured by punishment or by the inculcation of sterner commands. . . . . Censure is like a surgical operation on the passions of the soul. The latter are abscesses on the body of the truth, and they must be cut open by the lancet of censure. Censure is like the application of a medicine which breaks up the callosities of the passions, and cleanses the impurities of a lewd life, reducing the swollen flesh of pride, and restoring the man to health and truth once more.” Cp. i. 9. 83; also Methodius, Opp., I. i. p. 115 (ed. Bonwetsch).

It must be frankly admitted that this constant preoccupation with the “diseases” of sin had results which were less favorable. The ordinary moral sense, no less than the aesthetic,It was at this that the Emperor Julian especially took umbrage, and not without reason. As a protest against the sensuousness of paganism, there grew up in the church an æsthetic of ugliness. Disease, death, and death's relics—bones and putrefaction—were preferred to health and beauty, whilst Christianity sought to express her immaterial spirit in terms drawn from the unsightly remnants of material decay. How remote was all this artificial subtlety of an exalted piety from the piety which had pointed men to the beauty of the lilies in the field! The Christians of the third and fourth centuries actually begin to call sickness health, and to regard death as life. was deadened. If people are ever to be made better, they must be directed to that honorable activity which means moral health; whereas endless talk about sin and forgiveness exercises, on the contrary, a narcotic influence. To say the least of it, ethical education must move to and fro between reflection on the past (with its faults and moral bondage) and the prospect of a future (with its goal of aspiration and the exertion of all one's powers). The theologians of the Alexandrian school had some sense of the latter, but in depicting the perfect Christian or true gnostic they assigned a disproportionate space to knowledge and correct opinions. They were not entirely emancipated from the Socratic fallacy that the man of knowledge will be invariably a good man. They certainly did surmount the “educated” man's intellectual pride on the field of religion and morality.Clem. Alex., Strom., vii. 48. 4: ὡς ὁ ἰατρὸς ὑγίειαν παρέχεται τοῖς συνεργοῦσι πρὸς ὑγίειαν, οὕτως καὶ ὁ θεὸς τὴν ἀΰδιον σωτηρίαν τοῖς συνεργοῦσι πρὸς γνῶσίν τε καὶ εὐπραγίαν (“Even as the physician secures health for those who cooperate with him to that end, so does God secure eternal salvation for those who cooperate with him for knowledge and good conduct”). In Origen's treatise against Celsus, whole sections of great excellence are devoted to the duty and possibility of even the uneducated person acquiring health of soul, and to the supreme necessity of salvation from sin and weakness.C. Cels., III. 54: “We cure every rational being with the medicine of our doctrine.” Origen hits the nail upon the head when he remarks (VII. lx.) that “Plato and the other wise men of Greece, with their fine sayings, are like the physicians who confine their attention to the better classes and despise the common man, whilst the disciples of Jesus carefully study to make provision for the great mass of men.”In VII. lix. there is an extremely fine statement of the true prophet's duty of speaking in such a way as to be intelligible and encouraging to the multitude, and not merely to the cultured. “Suppose that some food which is wholesome and fit for human nourishment, is prepared and seasoned so delicately as to suit the palate of the rich and luxurious alone, and not the taste of simple folk, peasants, laborers, poor people, and the like, who are not accustomed to such dainties. Suppose again that this very food is prepared, not as epicures would have it, but to suit poor folk, laborers, and the vast majority of mankind. Well, if on this supposition the food prepared in one way is palatable to none but epicures, and left untasted by the rest, while, prepared in the other way, it ministers to the health and strength of a vast number, what persons shall we believe are promoting the general welfare most successfully—those who cater simply for the better classes, or those who prepare food for the multitude? If we assume that the food in both cases is equally wholesome and nourishing, it is surely obvious that the good of men and the public welfare are better served by the physician who attends to the health of the multitude than by him who will merely attend to a few.” And Origen was far removed from anything like the narrow-mindedness of orthodoxy, as is plain from this excellent remark in III. xiii.: “As only he is qualified in medicine who has studied in various schools and attached himself to the best system after a careful examination of them all . . . . so, in my judgment, the most thorough knowledge of Christianity is his who has carefully investigated the various sects of Judaism and of Christianity.” Still, Origen's idea is that, as a means of salvation, religion merely forms a stage for those who aspire to higher levels. His conviction is that when the development of religion has reached its highest level, anything historical or positive becomes of as little value as the ideal of redemption and salvation itself. On this level the spirit, filled by God, no longer needs a Saviour or any Christ of history at all. “Happy,” he exclaims (Comm. in Joh., i. 22; Lomm., i. p. 43), “happy are they who need no longer now God's Son as the physician of the sick or as the shepherd, people who now need not any redemption, but wisdom, reason, and righteousness alone.” In his treatise against Celsus (III. lxi. f.) he draws a sharp distinction between two aims and boons in the Christian religion, one higher and the other lower. “To no mystery, to no participation in wisdom ‘hidden in a mystery,' do we call the wicked man, the thief, the burglar, etc., but to healing or salvation. For our doctrine has a twofold appeal. It provides means of healing for the sick, as is meant by the text, ‘The whole need not a physician, but the sick.' But it also unveils to those who are pure in soul and body ‘that mystery which was kept secret since the world began, but is now made manifest by the Scriptures of the prophets and the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.' . . . . God the Word was indeed sent as a physician for the sick, but also as a teacher of divine mysteries to those who are already pure and sin no more.”So Clem. Alex., Paed., i. 1. 3: ἴσαι οὐκ ἐστιν ὑγίεια καὶ γνῶσις, ἀλλ᾽ ἡ μὲν μαθήσει, ἡ δὲ ἰάσει περιγίνεται· οὐκ ἂν οὖν τις νοσῶν ἔτι πρότερόν τι τῶν διδασκαλικῶν ἐκμάθοι πρὶν ἢ τέλεον ὑγιᾶναι· οὐδὲ γὰρ ὠσαύτως πρὸς τοὺς μανθάνοντας ἢ κάμνοντας ἀεὶ τῶν παραγγελμάτων ἕκαστον λέγεται, ἀλλὰ πρὸς οὓς μὲν εἰς γνῶσιν, πρὸς οὓς δὲ εἰς ἴασιν. καθάπερ οὖν τοῖς νοσοῦσι τὸ σῶμα ἰατροῦ χρῄζει, ταύτῃ καὶ τοῖς ἀσθενοῦσι τὴν ψυχὴν παιδαγωγοῦ δεῖ, ἵν᾽ ἡμῶν ἰάσηται τὰ πάθη, εἶτα δὲ καὶ διδασκάλου, ὃς καθηγήσεται πρὸς καθαρὰν γνώσεως ἐπιτηδειότητα εὐτρεπίζων τὴν ψυχήν, δυναμένην χωρῆσαι τὴν ἀποκάλυψιν τοῦ λόγου (“Health and knowledge are not alike; the one is produced by learning, the other by healing. Before a sick person, then, could learn any further branch of knowledge, he must get quite well. Nor is each injunction addressed to learners and to patients alike; the object in one case is knowledge, and in the other a cure. Thus, as patients need the physician for their body, so do those who are sick in soul need, first of all, an instructor, to heal our pains, and then a teacher who shall conduct the soul to all requisite knowledge, disposing it to admit the revelation of the Word”).

Origen unites the early Christian and the philosophic conceptions of religion. He is thus superior to the pessimistic fancies which seriously threatened the latter view. But only among the cultured could he gain any following. The Christian people held fast to Jesus as the Saviour.

No one has yet been able to show that the figure of Christ which emerges in the fifth century, probably as early as the fourth, and which subsequently became the prevailing type in all pictorial representations, was modeled upon the figure of Æsculapius. The two types are certainly similar; the qualities predicated of both are identical in part; and no one has hitherto explained satisfactorily why the original image of the youthful Christ was displaced by the later. Nevertheless, we have no means of deriving the origin of the Callixtine Christ from Æsculapius as a prototype, so that in the meantime we must regard such a derivation as a hypothesis, which, however interesting, is based upon inadequate evidence. There would be one piece of positive evidence forthcoming, if the statue which passed for a likeness of Jesus in the city of Paneas (Cæsarea Philippi) during the fourth century was a statue of Æsculapius. Eusebius (H.E., vi. 18) tells how he had seen there, in the house of the woman whom Jesus had cured of an issue of blood, a work of art which she had caused to be erected out of gratitude to Jesus. “On a high pedestal beside the gates of her house there stands the brazen image of a woman kneeling down with her hands outstretched as if in prayer. Opposite this stands another brazen image of a man standing up, modestly attired in a cloak wrapped twice round his body, and stretching out his hand to the woman. At his feet, upon the pedestal itself, a strange plant is growing up as high as the hem of his brazen cloak, which is a remedy for all sorts of disease. This statue is said to be an image of Jesus. Nor is it strange that the Gentiles of that age, who had received benefit from the Lord, should express their gratitude in this fashion.” For various reasons it is unlikely that this piece of art was intended to represent Jesus, or that it was erected by the woman with an issue of blood;Cp. Hauck, Die Entstehung des Christus-typus (1880), p. 8 f. on the contrary, the probability is that the statuary was thus interpreted by the Christian population of Paneas, probably at an early period. If the statue originally represented Æsculapius, as the curative plant would suggest, we should have here at least one step between “Æsculapius the Saviour” and “Christ the Saviour.” But this interpretation of a pagan saviour or healer is insecure; and even were it quite secure, it would not justify any general conclusion being drawn as yet upon the matter. At any rate we are undervaluing the repugnance felt even by Christians of the fourth century for the gods of paganism, if we consider ourselves entitled to think of any conscious transformation of the figure of Æsculapius into that of Christ.In the eyes of Christians, Æsculapius was both a demon and an idol; no Christian could take him as a model or have any dealings with him. Some Roman Christians, who were devotees of learning, are certainly reported in one passage (written by a fanatical opponent, it is true) to have worshipped Galen (Eus., H.E., v. 28); but no mention is made of them worshipping Æsculapius. In addition to the passages cited above, in which early Christian writers deal with Æsculapius (who is probably alluded to also as far back as Apoc. ii. 23), the following are to be noted: Justin, Apol., I, xxi., xxii., xxv., liv. (passages which are radically misunderstood when it is inferred from them that Justin is in favor of the god); Tatian, Orat., xxi.; Theoph., ad Autol., i. 9; Tertull., de Anima, i. (a passage which is specially characteristic of the aversion felt for this god); Cyprian's Quod Idola, i.; Orig., c. Cels., iii., xxii.-xxv., xxviii., xlii. Clement explains him in Protr., ii. 26, after the manner of Euhemerus: τὸν γὰρ εὐεργετοῦντα μὴ συνιέντες θεὸν ἀνέπλασάν τινας σωτῆρας Διοσκούρους . . . . καὶ Ἀσκληπιὸν ἰατρόν (“Through not understanding the God who was their benefactor, they fashioned certain saviours, the Dioscuri . . . . and Æsculapius the physician”). A number of passages (e.g., Protr. ii. 20, ἰατρὸς φιλάργυρος ἦν, “he was an avaricious physician,” and iv. 52) show how little Clement cared for him.

The characteristic features of belief in demonsThe scientific statement and establishment of this belief, in philosophy, goes back to Xenocrates; after him Posidonius deserves special mention. Cp. Apuleius, de Deo Socratis. during the second century were as follows. In the first place, the belief made its way upwards from the obscurity of the lower classes into the upper classes of society, and became far more important than it had hitherto been; in the second place, it was no longer accompanied by a vigorous, naïve, and open religion which kept it within bounds; furthermore, the power of the demons, which had hitherto been regarded as morally indifferent, now came to represent their wickedness; and finally, when the new belief was applied to the life of individuals, its consequences embraced psychical diseases as well as physical. In view of all these considerations, the extraordinary spread of belief in demons, and the numerous outbursts of demonic disease, are to be referred to the combined influence of such well-known factors as the dwindling of faith in the old religions, which characterized the Imperial age, together with the rise of a feeling on the part of the individual that he was free and independent, and therefore flung upon his inmost nature and his own responsibility. Free now from any control or restraint of tradition, the individual wandered here and there amid the lifeless, fragmentary, and chaotic debris of traditions belonging to a world in process of dissolution; now he would pick up this, now that, only to discover, himself at last driven, often by fear and hope, to find a deceptive support or a new disease in the absurdest of them all.Jas. iii. 15 speaks of a σοφία δαιμονιώδης.

Such was the situation of affairs encountered by the gospel. It has been scoffingly remarked that the gospel produced the very diseases which it professed itself able to cure. The scoff is justified in certain cases, but in the main it recoils upon the scoffer. The gospel did bring to a head the diseases which it proceeded to cure. It found them already in existence, and intensified them in the course of its mission. But it also cured them, and no flight of the imagination can form any idea of what would have come over the ancient world or the Roman empire during the third century, had it not been for the church. Professors like Libanius or his colleagues in the academy at Athens, are of course among the immortals; people like that could maintain themselves without any serious change from century to century. But no nation thrives upon the food of rhetoricians and philosophers. At the close of the fourth century Rome had only one Symmachus, and the East had only one Synesius. But then, Synesius was a Christian.

In what follows I propose to set down, without note or comment, one or two important notices of demon-possession and its cure from the early history of the church. In the case of one passage I shall sketch the spread and shape of belief in demons. This Tertullian has described, and it is a mistake to pass Tertullian by.—In order to estimate the significance of exorcism for primitive Christianity, one must remember that according to the belief of Christians the Son of God came into the world to combat Satan and his kingdom. The evangelists, especially Luke, have depicted the life of Jesus from the temptation onwards as an uninterrupted conflict with the devil; what he came for was to destroy the works of the devil. In Mark (i. 32) we read how many that were possessed were brought to Jesus, and healed by him, as he cast out the demons (i. 34). “He suffered not the demons to speak, for they knew him” (see also Luke iv. 34, 41). In i. 39 there is the general statement: “He preached throughout all Galilee in the synagogues and cast out the demons.” When he sent forth the twelve disciples, he conferred on them the power of exorcising (iii. 15), a power which they forthwith proceeded to exercise (vi. 13; for the Seventy, see Luke x. 17); whilst the scribes at Jerusalem declared he had Beelzebub,John the Baptist was also said to have been possessed (cp. Matt. xi. 18). and that he cast out demons with the aid of their prince.Jesus himself explains that he casts out demons by aid of the spirit of God (Matt. xii. 28), but he seems to have been repeatedly charged with possessing the devil and with madness (cp. John vii. 20, viii. 48 f., x. 20). The tale of the “unclean spirits” who entered a herd of swine is quite familiar (v. 2), forming, as it does, one of the most curious fragments of the sacred story, which has vainly taxed the powers of believing and of rationalistic criticism. Another story which more immediately concerns our present purpose is that of the Canaanite woman and her possessed daughter (vii. 25 f.). Matt. vii. 15 f. (Luke ix. 38) shows that epileptic fits, as well as other nervous disorders (e.g., dumbness, Matt. xii. 22, Luke xi. 14), were also included under demon-possession. It is further remarkable that even during the lifetime of Jesus exorcists who were not authorized by him exorcised devils in his name. This gave rise to a significant conversation between Jesus and John (Mark ix. 38). John said to Jesus, “Master, we saw a man casting out demons in thy name, and we forbade him, because he did not follow us.” But Jesus answered, “Forbid him not. No one shall work a deed of might in my name and then deny me presently; for he who is not against us, is for us.” On the other hand, another saying of our Lord numbers people who have never known him (Matt. vii. 22) among those who cast out devils in his name. From one woman among his followers Jesus was known afterwards to have cast out “seven demons” (Mark xvi. 9, Luke viii. 2), and among the mighty deeds of which all believers were to be made capable, the unauthentic conclusion of Mark's gospel enumerates exorcism (xvi. 17).Indeed, it is put first of all.

It was as exorcisers that Christians went out into the great world, and exorcism formed one very powerful method of their mission and propaganda. It was a question not simply of exorcising and vanquishing the demons that dwelt in individuals, but also of purifying all public life from them. For the age was ruled by the black one and his hordes (Barnabas); it “lieth in the evil one,” κεῖται ἐν πονηρῷ (John). Nor was this mere theory; it was a most vital conception of existence. The whole world and the circumambient atmosphere were filled with devils; not merely idolatry, but every phase and form of life was ruled by them. They sat on thrones, they hovered around cradles. The earth was literally a hell, though it was and continued to be a creation of God. To encounter this hell and all its devils, Christians had command of weapons that were invincible. Besides the evidence drawn from the age of their holy scriptures, they pointed to the power of exorcism committed to them, which routed evil spirits, and even forced them to bear witness to the truth of Christianity. “We,” says Tertullian towards the close of his Apology (ch. xlvi.), “we have stated our case fully, as well as the evidence for the correctness of our statement— that is, the trustworthiness and antiquity of our sacred writings, and also the testimony borne by the demonic powers themselves (in our favor).” Such was the stress laid on the activity of the exorcists.In the pseudo-Clementine epistle “on Virginity” (i. 10), the reading of Scripture, exorcism, and teaching are grouped as the most important functions in religion.

In Paul's epistles,See, however, Eph. vi. 12; 2 Cor. xii. 7, etc. in Pliny's letter, and in the Didachê, they are never mentioned.No explanation has yet been given of the absence of exorcism in Paul. His doctrine of sin, however, was unfavorable to such phenomena. But from Justin downwards, Christian literature is crowded with allusions to exorcisms, and every large church at any rate had exorcists. Originally these men were honored as persons endowed with special grace, but afterwards they constituted a class by themselves, in the lower hierarchy, like lectors and sub-deacons. By this change they lost their pristine standing.The history of exorcism (as practised at baptism, and elsewhere on its own account) and of exorcists is far too extensive to be discussed here; besides, in some departments it has not yet been sufficiently investigated. Much information may still be anticipated from the magical papyri, of which an ever-increasing number are coming to light. So far as exorcism and exorcists entered into the public life of the church, see Probst's Sakramente und Sakramentalien, pp. 39 f., and Kirchliche Disziplin, pp. 116 f. The church sharply distinguished between exorcists who employed the name of Christ, and pagan sorcerers, magicians, etc.;Cp. the apologists, Origen's reply to Celsus, and the injunction in the Canons of Hippolytus (Texte u. Unters. vi. 4, pp. 83 f.): “Οἰωνιστής vel magus vet astrologus, hariolus, somniorum interpres, praestigiator . . . . vel qui phylacteria conficit . . . . hi omnes et qui sunt similes his neque instruendi neque baptizandi sunt.” Observe also the polemic against the magical arts of the Gnostics. but she could not protect herself adequately against mercenary impostors, and several of her exorcists were just as dubious characters as her “prophets.” The hotbed of religious frauds was in Egypt, as we learn from Lucian's Peregrinus Proteus, from Celsus, and from Hadrian's letter to Servian.Vopiscus, Saturn. 8: “Nemo illic archisynagogus Judaeorum, nemo Samarites, nemo Christianorum presbyter, non mathematicus, non haruspex, non aliptes.” At a very early period pagan exorcists appropriated the names of the patriarchs (cp. Orig., c. Cels. I. xxii.), of Solomon, and even of Jesus Christ, in their magical formulæ; even Jewish exorcists soon began to introduce the name of Jesus in their incantations.Compare the story of the Jewish exorcists in Acts xix. 13: “Now certain of the itinerant Jewish exorcists also undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were possessed by evil spirits. ‘I adjure you,' they said, ‘by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.'” It is admitted, in the pseudo-Cypr. de Rebapt. vii., that even non-Christians were frequently able to drive out demons by using the name of Christ. The church, on the contrary, had to warn her own exorcists not to imitate the heathen. In the pseudo-Clementine de Virginitate we read (i. 12): “For those who are brethren in Christ it is fitting and right and comely to visit people who are vexed with evil spirits, and to pray and utter exorcisms over them, in the rational language of prayer acceptable to God, not with a host of fine words neatly arranged and studied in order to win the reputation among men of being eloquent and possessed of a good memory. Such folk are just like a sounding pipe, or a tinkling cymbal, of not the least use to those over whom they pronounce their exorcisms. They simply utter terrible words and scare people with them, but never act according to a true faith such as that enjoined by the Lord when he taught that ‘this kind goeth not out save by fasting and prayer offered unceasingly, and by a mind earnestly bent (on God).' Let then make holy requests and entreaties to God, cheerfully, circumspectly, and purely, without hatred or malice. For such is the manner in which we are to visit a sick (possessed) brother or a sister . . . . without guile or covetousness or noise or talkativeness or pride or any behavior alien to piety, but with the meek and lowly spirit of Christ. Let them exorcise the sick with fasting and with prayer; instead of using elegant phrases, neatly arranged and ordered, let them act frankly like men who have received the gift of healing from God, to God's glory. By your fastings and prayers and constant watching, together with all the rest of your good works, mortify the works of the flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit. He who acts thus is a temple of the Holy Spirit of God. Let him cast out demons, and God will aid him therein. . . . The Lord has given the command to ‘cast out demons' and also enjoined the duty of healing in other ways, adding, ‘Freely ye have received, freely give.' A great reward from God awaits those who serve their brethren with the gifts which God has bestowed upon themselves.” Justin writes (Apol. II. vi.): “The Son of God became man in order to destroy the demons. This you can now learn from what transpires under your own eyes. For many of our Christian people have healed a large number of demoniacs throughout the whole world, and also in your own city, exorcising them in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate; yet all other exorcists, magicians, and dealers in drugs failed to heal such people. Yea, and such Christians continue still to heal them, by rendering the demons impotent and expelling them from the men whom they possessed.” In his dialogue against the Jews (lxxxv.), Justin also writes: “Every demon exorcised in the name of the Son of God, the First-born of all creatures, who was born of a virgin and endured human suffering, who was crucified by your nation under Pontius Pilate, who died and rose from the dead and ascended into heaven—every demon exorcised in this name is mastered and subdued. Whereas if you exorcise in the name of any king or righteous man, or prophet, or patriarch, who has been one of yourselves, no demon will be subject to you. . . . Your exorcists, I have already said, are like the Gentiles in using special arts, employing fumigation and magic incantations.” From this passage we infer that the Christian formulae of exorcism contained the leading facts of the story of Christ.In the formula of exorcism the most important part was the mention of the crucifixion; cp. Justin's Dial. xxx., xlix., lxxvi. And Origen says as much, quite unmistakably, in his reply to Celsus (I. vi.): “The power of exorcism lies in the name of Jesus, which is uttered as the stories of his life are being narrated.”Ἰσχύειν δοκοῦσιν . . . . τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ μετὰ τῆς ἐπαγγελίας τῶν περὶ αὐτὸν ἱστοριῶν.

(3) Some are inspired who have power to clothe their experience in words—prophets to explain the past, to interpret and to fathom the present, and to foretell the future.These prophecies do not include, however, the Christian Sibylline oracles. The Jewish oracles were accepted in good faith by Christians, and quoted by them (ever since Hermas) as prophetic; but the production of Christian Sibyllines did not begin, in all likelihood, till after the middle of the third century. These oracles are an artificial and belated outcome of the primitive Christian enthusiasm, and are simply a series of forgeries. Cp. my Chronologie i., pp. 581 f., ii., pp. 184 f. Their prophecies relate to the general course of history, but also to the fortunes of individuals, to what individuals are to do or leave undone.

(4) Brethren are inspired with the impulse to improvise prayers and hymns and psalms.

(5) Others are so filled with the Spirit that they lose consciousness and break out in stammering speech and cries, or in unintelligible utterances—which can be interpreted, however, by those who have the gift.

(6) Into the hands of others, again, the Spirit slips a pen, either in an ecstasy or in exalted moments of spiritual tension; they not merely speak but write as they are bidden.

(7) Sick persons are brought and healed by the missionaries, or by brethren who have been but recently awakened; wild paroxysms of terror before God's presence are also soothed, and in the name of Jesus demons are cast out.

(8) The Spirit impels men to an immense variety of extraordinary actions—to symbolic actions which are meant to reveal some mystery or to give some directions for life, as well as to deeds of heroism.

(9) Some perceive the presence of the Spirit with every sense; they see its brilliant light, they hear its voice, they smell the fragrance of immortality and taste its sweetness. Nay more; they see celestial persons with their own eyes, see them and also hear them; they peer into what is hidden or distant or to come; they are even rapt into the world to come, into heaven itself, where they listen to “words that cannot be uttered.”Cp., however, Orig., Hom. xxvii. 11, in Num. (vol. 10, p. 353): “In visions there is wont to be temptation, for the angel of evil sometimes transforms himself into an angel of light. Hence you must take great care to discriminate the kind of vision, just as Joshua the son of Nun on seeing a vision knew there was a temptation in it, and at once asked the figure, Art thou on our side, or on our foes'?” (“Solet in visionibus esse tentatio; nam nonnunquam angelus iniquitatis transfigurat se in angelum lucis, et ideo cavendum est et sollicite agendum, ut scienter discernas visionum genus, sicut et Iesus Nave, cum visionem viderit, sciens in hoc esse tentationem, statim requisit ab eo qui apparuit et dicit: Noster es an adversariorum?”). See also what follows.

Many missionaries may have preached in this way, not merely after but even previous to the stern conflict with gnosticism. Faith is a matter of resolve, a resolve of the will and a resolve to obey. Trouble it not by any considerations of human reason!

Preaching of this kind is only possible if at the same time some powerful authority is set up. And such an authority was set up. First and foremost (cp. Paul), it was the authority of the revealed will of God as disclosed in the mission of the Son to earth. Here external and internal authority blended and coincided, for while the divine will is certainly an authority in itself (according to Paul's view), and is also capable of making itself felt as such, without men understanding its purpose and right (Rom. 9 f.), the apostle is equally convinced that God's gracious will makes itself intelligible to the inner man.

Still, even in Paul, the external and internal authority vested in the cross of Christ is accompanied by other authorities which claim the obedience of faith. These are the written word of the sacred documents and the sayings of Jesus. In their case also neither doubt nor contradiction is permissible.

For all that, the great apostle endeavored to reason out everything, and in the last resort it is never a question with him of any “sacrifice of the intellect” (see below). Some passages may seem to contradict this statement, but they only seen to do so. When Paul demands the obedience of faith and sets up the authority of “the word” or of “the cross,” he simply means that obedience of faith which is inseparable from any religion whatsoever, no matter how freely and spiritually it may be set forth. But, as Celsus and Tertullian serve to remind us (if any reminder at all is necessary on this point), many missionaries and teachers went about their work in a very different manner. They simply erected their authority wherever they went; it was the letter of Scripture more and more,For details on the significance of the Bible in the mission, see Chapter VIII. but ere long it became the rule of faith, together with the church (the church as “the pillar and ground of the truth,” στῦλος καὶ ἑδραίωμα τῆς ἀληθείας, as early as 1 Tim. iii. 15). True, they endeavored to buttress the authority of these two magnitudes, the Bible and the church, by means of rational arguments (the authority of the Bible being supported by the proof from the fulfillment of prophecy, and that of the church by the proof from the unbroken tradition which reached back to Christ himself and invested the doctrine of the church with the value of Christ's own words). In so doing they certainly did not demand an absolutely blind belief. But, first of all, it was assuredly not every missionary or teacher who was competent to lead such proofs. They were adduced only by the educated apologists and controversialists. And in the second place, no inner authority can ever be secured for the Bible and the church by means of external proofs. The latter really remained a sort of alien element. At bottom, the faith required was blind faith.

Still, it would be a grave error to suppose that for the majority of people the curt demand that authorities must be simply believed and reason repudiated, acted as a serious obstacle to their acceptance of the Christian religion.Naturally it did repel highly cultured men like Celsus and Porphyry. For Celsus, see above, p. 219. Porphyry, the pagan in Macarius Magnes (IV. ix.), writes thus on Matt. xi. 25: “As the mysteries are hidden from the wise and thrown down before minors and senseless sucklings (in which case, of course, even what is written for minors and senseless people should have been clear and free from obscurity), it is better to aim at a lack of reason and of education! And this is the very acme of Christ's sojourn upon earth, to conceal the ray of knowledge from the wise and to unveil it to the senseless and to small children!” In reality, it was the very opposite. The more peremptory and exclusive is the claim of faith which any religion makes, the more trustworthy and secure does that religion seem to the majority; the more it relieves them of the duty and responsibility of reflecting upon its truth, the more welcome it is. Any firmly established authority thus acts as a sedative. Nay more. The most welcome articles of faith are just the most paradoxical, which are a mockery of all experience and rational reflection; the reason for this being that they appear to guarantee the disclosure of divine wisdom and not of something which is merely human and therefore unreliable. “Miracle is the favorite child of faith.” That is true of more than miracles; it applies also to the miraculous doctrines which cannot be appropriated by a man unless he is prepared to believe and obey them blindly.

But so long as the authorities consisted of books and doctrines, the coveted haven of rest was still unreached. The meaning of these doctrines always lies open to some doubt. Their scope, too, is never quite fixed. And, above all, their application to present-day questions is often a serious difficulty, which leads to painful and disturbing controversies. “Blind faith” never gains its final haven until its authority is living, until questions can be put to it, and answers promptly received from it. During the first generations of Christendom no such authority existed; but in the course of the second century and down to the middle of the third, it was gradually taking shape—I mean, the authority of the church as represented in the episcopate. It did not dislodge the other authorities of God's saving purpose and the holy Scripture, but by stepping to their side it pushed them into the background. The auctoritas interpretiva is invariably the supreme and real authority. After the middle of the third century, the church and the episcopate developed so far that they exercised the functions of a sacred authority. And it was after that period that the church first advanced by leaps and bounds, till it became a church of the masses. For while the system of a living authority in the church had still defects and gaps of its own—since in certain circumstances it either exercised its functions very gradually or could not enforce its claims at all—these defects did not exist for the masses. In the bishop or priest, or even in the ecclesiastical fabric and the cultus, the masses were directly conscious of something holy and authoritative to which they yielded submission, and this state of matters had prevailed for a couple of generations by the time that Constantine granted recognition and privileges to Christianity. This was the church on which he conferred privileges, this church with its enormous authority over the masses! These were the Christians whom he declared to be the support of the throne, people who clung to the bishops with submissive faith and who would not resist their divinely appointed authority! The Christianity that triumphed was the Christianity of blind faith, which Celsus has depicted. When would a State ever have shown any practical interest in any other kind of religion?

II

Christianity is a complexio oppositorum. The very Paul who would have reason brought into captivity, proclaimed that Christianity, in opposition to polytheism, was a “reasonable service of God” (Rom. xii. 1, λογικὴ λατρεία), and declared that what pagans thought folly in the cross of Christ seemed so to those alone who were blinded, whereas what Christians preached was in reality the profoundest wisdom. He went on to declare that this was not merely reserved for us as a wisdom to be attained in the far future, but capable of being understood even at present by believers as such. He promised that he would introduce the “perfect” among them to its mysteries.For the “perfect,” see p. 216. They constitute a special class for Paul. The distinction came to be sharply drawn at a later period, especially in the Alexandrian school, where one set of Christian precepts was formed for the “perfect” (“those who know”), another for believers. Christ himself was said by the Alexandrians (not merely by the gnostics) to have committed an esoteric doctrine to his intimate disciples and to have provided for its transmission. Cp. Clement of Alexandria, as quoted in Eus., H.E., ii. 1: Ἰακώβῳ τῷ δικαίῳ καὶ Ἰωάννῃ καὶ Πέτρῳ μετὰ τὴν ἀνάστασιν παρέδωκεν τὴν γνῶσιν ὁ κύριος, οὗτοι τοῖς λοιποῖς ἀποστόλοις παρέδωκαν, κ.τ.λ. (“The Lord delivered all knowledge after the resurrection to James the Just, and John, and Peter; they delivered it to the rest of the apostles, and the rest of the apostles to the seventy,” etc.). This promises (cp., e.g., 1 Cor. ii. 6 f., σοφίαν ἐν τοῖς τελείοις) he made good; yet he never withheld this wisdom from those who were children or weak in spiritual things. He could not, indeed he dared not, utter all he understood of God's word and the cross of Christ—λαλοῦμεν θεοῦ σοφίαν ἐν μυστηρίῳ τὴν ἀποκεκρυμμένην (“We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom”)—but he moved freely in the realm of history and speculation, drawing abundantly from “the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.” In Paul one feels the joy of the thinker who enters into the thoughts of God, and who is convinced that in and with and through his faith he has passed from darkness into light, from confusion, cloudiness, and oppression into the lucid air that frees the soul.

“We have been rescued from darkness and lifted into the light”—such was the chant which rose from a chorus of Christians during those early centuries. It was intellectual truth and lucidity in which they reveled and gloried. Polytheism seemed to them an oppressive night; now that it was lifted off them, the sun shone clearly in the sky! Wherever they looked, everything became clear and sure in the light of spiritual monotheism, owing to the living God. Read, for example, the epistle of Clemens Romanus,Especially chap. xix. f. the opening of the Clementine Homily,2 Clem. i. 4-6: τὸ φὼς ἡμῖν ἐχαρίσατο . . . . πηροὶ ὄντες τῇ διανοίᾳ προσκυνοῦντες λίθους καὶ ζύλα καὶ χρυσὸν καὶ ἄργυρον καὶ χαλκόν, ἔργα ἀνθρώπων . . . . ἀμαύρωσιν οὖν περικείμενοι καὶ τοιαύτης ἀχλύος γέμοντες ἐν τῇ ὁράσει ἀνεβλέψαμεν (“He bestowed on us the light . . . . we were blind in understanding, worshipping stones and stocks and gold and silver and brass, the works of men. . . . . Thus, girt with darkness and oppressed by so thick a mist in our vision, we regained our sight”). There are numerous passages of a similar nature. or the epistle of Barnabas;Cp. chap. i., chap. ii. 2 f. listen to the apologists, or study Clement of Alexandria and Origen. They gaze at Nature, only to rejoice in the order and unity of its movement; heaven and earth are a witness to them of God's omnipotence and unity. They ponder the capacities and endowments of human nature, and trace in them the Creator. In human reason and liberty they extol his boundless goodness; they compare the revelations and the will of God with this reason and freedom, and lo, there is entire harmony between them! Nothing is laid on man which does not already lie within him, nothing is revealed which is not already presupposed in his inward being. The long-buried religion of nature, religion μετὰ λόγου, has been rediscovered.Cp. Justin's Apology, Tertullian's tract de Testimonio Animæ, etc. They look at Christ, and scales fall, as it were, from their eyes! What wrought in him was the Logos, the very Logos by which the world had been created and with which the spiritual essence of man was bound up inextricably, the Logos which had wrought throughout human history in all that was noble and good, and which was finally obliged to reveal its power completely in order to dissipate the obstacles and disorders by which man was beset—so weak was he, for all the glory of his creation. Lastly, they contemplate the course of history, its beginning, middle, and end, only to find a common purpose everywhere, which is in harmony with a glorious origin and with a still more glorious conclusion. The freedom of the creature, overcome by the allurements of demons, has occasioned disorders, but the disorders are to be gradually removed by the power of the Christ-Logos. At the commencement of history humanity was like a child, full of good and divine instincts, but as yet untried and liable to temptation; at the close, a perfected humanity will stand forth, fated to enter immortality. Reason, freedom, immortality—these are to carry the day against error, failure, and decay.

Such was the Christianity of many people, a bright and glad affair, the doctrine of pure reason. The new doctrine proved a deliverance, not an encumbrance, to the understanding. Instead of imposing foreign matter on the understanding, it threw light upon its own darkened contents. Christianity is divine revelation, but it is at the same time pure reason; it is the true philosophy.

Such was the conception entertained by most of the apologists, and they tried to show how the entire content of Christianity was embraced by this idea. Anything that did not fit in, they left out. It was not that they rejected it. They simply explained it afresh by means of their “scientific” method, i.e., the method of allegorical spiritualizing, or else they relegated it to that great collection of evidence, the proof of prophecy. In this way, anything that seemed obnoxious or of no material value was either removed or else enabled to retain a formal value as dart of the striking proof which confirmed the divine character of Christianity. It is impossible in these pages to exhibit in detail the rational philosophy which thus emerged;I have endeavored to expound it in my Dogmengeschichte I.⁽³⁾, pp. 462-507 [Eng. trans., iii. 267 f.]. for our immediate purpose it is enough to state that a prominent group of Christian teachers existed as late as the opening of the fourth century (for Lactantius was among their number) who held this conception of Christianity. As apologists and as teachers ex cathedra they took an active part in the Christian mission. Justin,See the Acta Justini, and his Apology. We know that Tatian had Rhodon as one of his pupils (Eus., H.E. v. 13). for example, had his “school,” no less than Tatian. The theologians in the royal retinue of Constantine also pursued this way of thinking, and it permeated any decree of Constantine that touched on Christianity, and especially his address to the holy council.This address, even apart from its author, is perhaps the most impressive apology ever written (for its genuineness, see my Chronologie, ii. pp. 116 f., and Wendland in Philolog. Wochenschr. 1902, No. 8). It was impressive for half-educated readers, i.e., for the educated public of those days. Very effectively, it concludes by weaving together the (fabricated) prophecies of the Sibylline oracles and the (interpolated) Eclogue of Virgil, and by contrasting the reign of Constantine with those of his predecessors. The Christianity it presents is exclusive; even Socrates finds no favor, and Plato is sharply censured (ch. ix.) as well as praised. Still, it is tinged with Neoplatonism. The Son of God as such and as the Christ is put strongly in the foreground; he is God, at once God's Son and the hero of a real myth. But everything shimmers in a sort of speculative haze which corresponds to the style, the latter being poetic, flowery, and indefinite. When Eusebius wishes to make the new religion intelligible to the public at large, he describes it as the religion of reason and lucidity; see, for example, the first book of his church history and the life of Constantine with its appendices. We might define all these influential teachers as “rationalists of the supernatural,” to employ a technical term of modern church history; but as the revelation was continuous, commencing with creation, never ceasing, and ever in close harmony with the capacities of men, the term “supernatural” is really almost out of place in this connection. The outcome of it all was a pure religious rationalism, with a view of history all its own, in which, as was but natural, the final phenomena of the future tallied poorly with the course traversed in the earlier stages. From Justin, Commodian, and Lactantius, we learn how the older apocalyptic and the rationalistic moralism were welded together, without any umbrage being taken at the strange blend which this produced.

III

But authority and reason, blind faith and clear insight, do not sum up all the forms in which Christianity was brought before the world. The mental standpoint of the age and its religious needs were so manifold that it was unwilling to forgo any form, even in Christianity, which was capable of transmitting anything of religious value. It was a complex age, and its needs made even the individual man complex. The very man who longed for an authority to which he might submit blindfold, often longed at the same moment for a reasonable religion; nor was he satisfied even when he had secured them both, but craved for something more, for sensuous pledges which gave him a material representation of holy things, and for symbols of mysterious power. Yet, after all, was this peculiar to that age? Was it only in these days that men have cherished such desires?

From the very outset of the Christian religion, its preaching was accompanied by two outward rites, neither less nor more than two, viz., baptism and the Lord's supper. We need not discuss either what was, or what was meant to be, their original significance. The point is, that whenever we enter the field of Gentile Christianity, their meaning is essentially fixed; although Christian worship is to be a worship in spirit and in truth, these sacraments are sacred actions which operate on life, containing the forgiveness of sins, knowledge, and eternal life.See the gospel of John, the epistle of John, and the Didachê with its sacramental prayer. No doubt, the elements of water, bread, and wine are symbols, and the scene of operation is not external; still, the symbols do actually convey to the soul all that they signify. Each symbol has a mysterious but real connection with the fact which it signifies.

To speak of water, bread, and wine as holy elements, or of being immersed in water that the soul might be washed and purified: to talk of bread and wine as body and blood, or as the body and the blood of Christ, or as the soul's food for immortality: to correlate water and blood—all this kind of language was quite intelligible to that age. It was intelligible to the blunt realist, as well as to the most sublime among what may be called “the spiritualists.” The two most sublime spiritualists of the church, namely, John and Origen, were the most profound exponents of the mysteries, while the great gnostic theologians linked on their most abstract theosophies to realistic mysteries. They were all sacramental theologians. Christ, they held, had connected, and in fact identified, the benefits he brought to men with symbols; the latter were the channel and vehicle of the former; the man who participates in the unction of the holy symbol gets grace thereby. This was a fact with which people were familiar from innumerable mysteries; in and with the corporeal application of the symbol, unction or grace was poured into the soul. T he connection seemed like a predestined harmony, and in fact the union was still more inward. The sentence of the later schoolmen, “Sacramenta continent gratiam,” is as old as the Gentile church, and even older, for it was in existence long before the latter sprang into being.

The Christian religion was intelligible and impressive, owing to the fact that it offered men sacraments.Many, of course, took umbrage at the Lord's supper as the eating and drinking of flesh and blood. The criticism of the pagan (Porphyry) in Mac. Magnes, III. xv., is remarkable. He does not attack the mystery of the supper in the Synoptic tradition, but on John vi. 53 (“Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, ye have no life in yourselves”) he observes: “Is it not, then, bestial and absurd, surpassing all absurdity and bestial coarseness, for a man to eat human flesh and drink the blood of his fellow tribesman or relative, and thereby win life eternal? [Porphyry, remember, was opposed to the eating of flesh and the tasting of blood in general.] Why, tell me what greater coarseness could you introduce into life, if you practice that habit? What further crime will you start, more accursed than this loathsome profligacy? The ear cannot bear to hear it mentioned—and by ‘it,' I am far from meaning the action itself, I mean the very name of this strange, utterly unheard of offence. Never, even in extraordinary emergencies, was anything like this offence enacted before mankind in the most fantastic presentations of the Erinyes. Not even would the Potidæans have admitted anything like this, although they had been debilitated by inhuman hunger. Of course we know about Thyestes and his meals, etc. [then follow similar cases from antiquity]. All these persons unintentionally committed this offence. But no civilized person ever served up such food, none ever got such gruesome instructions from any teacher. And if thou wert to pursue thine inquiries as far as Scythia or the Macrobii of Ethiopia, or to travel right round the margin of the sea itself, thou wouldst find people who eat lice and roots, or live on serpents, and make mice their food, but all refrain from human flesh. What, then, does this saying mean? For even although it was meant to be taken in a more mystical or allegorical (and therefore profitable) sense, still the mere sound of the words upon the ear grates inevitably on the soul, and makes it rebel against the loathsomeness of the saying. . . . . Many teachers, no doubt, attempt to introduce new and strange ideas. But none has ever devised a precept so strange and horrible as this, neither historian nor philosopher, neither barbarian nor primitive Greek. See here, what has come over you that you foolishly exhort credulous people to follow such a faith? Look at all the mischief that is set thus afoot to storm the cities as well as the villages! Hence it was, I do believe, that neither Mark nor Luke nor Matthew mentioned this saying, just because they were of opinion that it was unworthy of civilized people, utterly strange and unsuitable and quite alien to the habits of honorable life.” Without its mysteries, people would have found it hard to appreciate the new religion. But who can tell how these mysteries arose? No one was to blame, no one was responsible. Had not baptism chanced to have been instituted, had not the observance of the holy supper been enjoined (and can any one maintain that these flowed inevitably from the essence of the gospel?), then some sacrament would have been created out of a parable of Jesus, not of a word or act of some kind or another. The age for material and certainly for bloody sacrifices was now past and gone; these were no longer the alloy of any religion. But the age of sacraments was very far from being over; it was in full vigor and prime. Every hand that was stretched out for religion, tried to grasp it in sacramental form; the eye saw sacraments where sacraments there were none, and the senses gave them body.By the end of the second century, at the very latest, the disciplina arcani embraced the sacraments, partly owing to educational reasons, partly to the example of pagan models. It rendered them still more weighty and impressive.

Water and blood, bread and wine—though the apostle Paul was far from being a sacramental theologian, yet even he could not wholly avoid these mysteries, as is plain if one will but read the tenth chapter of First Corinthians, and note his speculations upon baptismal immersion. But Paul was the first and almostNot quite the last, for Marcion and his disciples do not seem to have been sacramental theologians at all. the last theologian of the early church with whom sacramental theology was really held in check by clear ideas and strictly spiritual considerations. After him all the flood-gates were opened, and in poured the mysteries with their lore. In Ignatius, who is only sixty years later than Paul, they had already dragged down and engulfed the whole of intelligent theology. A man like the author of Barnabas believes he has fathomed the depths of truth when he connects his ideas with the water, the blood, and the cross. And the man who wrote these words—“There are three that bear witness, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree in one” (1 John v. 8)—had a mind which lived in symbols and in mysteries. In the book of Revelation the symbols generally are not what we call “symbols” but semi-real things — e.g., the Lamb, the blood, the washing and the sprinkling, the seal and the sealing. Much of this still remains obscure to us. What is the meaning, for example, of the words (1 John ii. 27) about the “unction,” an unction conveying knowledge which is so complete that it renders any further teaching quite unnecessary?

But how is this, it may be asked? Is not John a thorough “spiritualist”? And are not Origen, Valentinus, and Basilides also “spiritualists”? How, then, can we assert that their realistic expressions meant something else to them than mere symbols? In the case of John this argument can be defended with a certain amount of plausibility, since we do not know his entire personality. All we know is John the author. And even as an author he is known to us merely on one side of his nature, for he cannot have always spoken and written as he does in his extant writings. But in regard to the rest, so far as they are known to us on several sides of their characters, the plea is untenable. This is plain from a study of Clement and Origen, both of whom are amply accessible to us. In their case the combination of the mysterious realistic element with the spiritual is rendered feasible by the fact that they have simply no philosophy of religion at all which is capable of being erected upon one level, but merely one which consists of different stories built one upon the other.This construction is common to them and to the idealist philosophers of their age. In the highest of these stories, realism of every kind certainly vanishes; in fact, even the very system of intermediate agencies and forces, including the Logos itself, vanishes entirely, leaving nothing but God and the souls that are akin to him. These have a reciprocal knowledge of each other's essence, they love each other, and thus are absorbed in one another. But ere this consummation is reached, a ladder must be climbed. And every stage or rung has special forces which correspond to it, implying a theology, a metaphysic, and an ethic of its own. On the lowest rung of the ascent, religion stands in mythological guise accompanied by sacraments whose inward value is as yet entirely unknown. Even so, this is not falsehood but truth. It answers to a definite state of the soul, and it satisfies this by filling it with bliss. Even on this level the Christian religion is therefore true. Later on, this entirely ceases, and yet it does not cease. It ceases, because it is transcended; it does not cease, because the brethren still require this sort of thing, and because the foot of the ladder simply cannot be pulled away without endangering its upper structure.

After this brief sketch we must now try to see the significance of the realistic sacramental theology for these spiritualists. Men like Origen are indeed from our standpoint the most obnoxious of the theologians who occupied themselves with the sacraments, the blood, and the atonement. In and with these theories they brought back a large amount of polytheism into Christianity by means of a back-door, since the lower and middle stories of their theological edifice requiredFor a considerable length of time one of the charges brought by Christians against the Jews was that of angel-worship (Preaching of Peter, in Clem. Alex., Strom., vi. 5; Arist., Apol., xiv. Celsus also is acquainted with this charge, and angel-worship is, of course, a note of the errorists combated in Colossians). Subsequently the charge came to be leveled against the Christians themselves, and Justin had already written rather incautiously (Apol. I. vi.): [τὸν θεὸν] καὶ τὸν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ υἱὸν ἐλθόντα καὶ διδάξαντα ἡμᾶς ταῦτα καὶ τὸν τῶν ἄλλων ἑπομένων καὶ ἐξομοιουμένων ἀγαθῶν ἀγγέλων στρατόν, πνεῦμά τε τὸ προφητικὸν σεβόμεθα καὶ προσκυνοῦμεν (“Both God and the Son who came from him and taught us these things, also the host of the other good angels who follow and are made like to him, and also the prophetic Spirit—these we worship and adore”). The four words πνεῦμά τε τὸ προφητικὸν are supposed by some to be an interpolation. to be furnished with angels and archangels, æons, semi-gods, and deliverers of every sort. This was due both to cosmological and to soteriological reasons, for the two correspond like the lines AB and BA.As to the “descent” and “ascent” of the soul, cp. Anz., “Zu Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnosticismus” (Texte u. Unters. xv. 4, 1897). But, above all, theology was enabled by this means to respond to the very slightest pressure of popular religion, and it is here, of course, that we discover the final clue to the singular enigma now before us. This theology of the mysteries and of these varied layers and stages afforded the best means of conserving the spiritual character of the Christian religion upon the upper level, and at the same time of arranging any compromise that might be desirable upon the lower. This was hardly the result of any conscious process. It came about quite naturally, for everything was already present in germ at the very first when sacraments were admitted into the religion.The necessity of priests and sacrifices was an idea present from the first in Gentile Christianity—even at the time when Christians sought with Paul to know of spiritual sacrifices alone and of the general priesthood of believers. Cp. Justin's Dial., cxvi.: οὐ δέχεται παρ᾽ οὐδενὸς θυσίας ὁ θεός, εἰ μὴ διὰ τῶν ἱερέων αὐτοῦ (“God receives sacrifices from no one, save through his priests”).

So much for the lofty theologians. With the inferior men the various stages dropped away and the sacramental factors were simply inserted in the religion in an awkward and unwieldy fashion. Read over the remarks made even in that age by Justin the rationalist upon the “cross,” in the fifty-fifth chapter of his Apology. A more sturdy superstition can hardly be imagined. Notice how Tertullian (de Bapt., i.) speaks of “water” and its affinity with the holy Spirit! One is persuaded, too, that all Christians with one consent attributed a magical force, exercised especially over demons, to the mere utterance of the name of Jesus and to the sign of the cross. One can also read the stories of the Lord's supper told by Dionysius of Alexandria, a pupil of Origen, and all that Cyprian is able to narrate as to the miracle of the host. Putting these and many similar traits together, one feels driven to conclude that Christianity has become a religion of magic, with its center of gravity in the sacramental mysteries. “Ab initio sic non erat” is the protest that will be entered. “From the beginning it was not so.” Perhaps. But one must go far back to find that initial stage—so far back that its very brief duration now eludes our search.

Originally the water, the bread and wine (the body and the blood), the name of Jesus, and the cross were the sole sacraments of the church, whilst baptism and the Lord's super were the sole mysteries. But this state of matters could not continue. For different reasons, including reasons of philosophy, the scope of all sacraments tended to be enlarged, and so our period witnesses the further rise of sacramental details—anointing, the laying on of hands, sacred oil and salt, etc. But the most momentous result was the gradual assimilation of the entire Christian worship to the ancient mysteries. By the third century it could already rival the most imposing cultus in all paganism, with its solemn and precise ritual, its priests, its sacrifices, and its holy ceremonies.

These developments, however, are by no means to be judged from the standpoint of Puritanism. Every age has to conceive and assimilate religion as it alone can; it must understand religion for itself, and make it a living thing for its own purposes. If the traits of Christianity which have been described in the preceding chapters have been correctly stated, if Christianity remained the religion of God the Father, of the Saviour and of salvation, of love and charitable enterprise, then it was perhaps a misfortune that the forms of contemporary religion were assumed. But the misfortune was by no means irreparable. Like every living plant, religion only grows inside a bark. Distilled religion is not religion at all.

Something further, however, still remains to be considered.

We have already seen how certain influential teachers—teachers, in fact, who founded the whole theology of the Christian Church—felt a strong impulse, and made it their definite aim, to get some rational conception of the Christian religion and to present it as the reasonable religion of mankind. This feature proved of great importance to the mission and extension of Christianity. Such teachers at once joined issue with contemporary philosophers, and, as the example of Justin proves, they did not eschew even controversy with these opponents. They retained all that they had in common with Socrates, Plato, and the Stoics; they showed how far people could go with them on the road; they attempted to give an historical explanationJewish Alexandrian philosophers had been the pioneers in this direction, and all that was really needed was to copy them. But they had employed a variety of methods in their attempt, amongst which a choice had to he made. All these attempts save one were childish. One was quite appropriate, viz., that which explained the points of agreement by the sway of the same Logos which worked in the Jewish prophets and in the pagan philosophers and poets. One attempt, again, was naïve, viz., that which sought to expose the Greek philosophers and poets as plagiarists—though Celsus tried to do the same thing with reference to Christ. Finally, it was both naive and fanatical to undertake to prove that all agreements of the philosophers with Christian doctrine were but a delusion and the work of the devil. of the points in common between themselves and paganism; and in this way they inaugurated the great adjustment of terms which was inevitable, unless Christians chose to remain a tiny sect of people who refused to concern themselves with culture and scientific learning. Still, as these discussions were carried on in a purely rational spirit, and as there was a frankly avowed partiality for the idea that Christianity was a transparently rational system, vital Christian truths were either abandoned or at any rate neglected. This meant a certain impoverishment, and a serious dilution, of the Christian faith.

Such a type of knowledge was certainly different from Paul's idea of knowledge, nor did it answer to the depths of the Christian religion. In one passage, perhaps, the apostle himself employs rational considerations of a Stoic character, when those were available for the purposes of his apologetic (cp. the opening sections of Romans), but he was hardly thinking about such ideas when he dwelt upon the Christian σοφία, σύνεσις, ἐπιστήμη, and γνῶσις (“wisdom,” “intelligence,” “understanding,” and “knowledge”). Something very different was present to his mind at such moments. He was thinking of absorption in the being of God as revealed in Christ, of progress in the knowledge of his saving purpose, manifested in revelation and in history, of insight into the nature of sin or the power of demons (those “spirits of the air”) or the dominion of death, of the boundless knowledge of God's grace, and of the clear anticipation of life eternal. In a word, he had in view a knowledge that soared up to God himself above all thrones, dominions, and principalities, and that also penetrated the depths from which we are delivered—a knowledge that traced human history from Adam to Christ, and that could, at the same time, define both faith and love, both sin and grace.

Paradoxical as it may appear, these phases of knowledge were actually fertilized and fed by the mysteries. From an early period they attached themselves to the mysteries. It was in the train of the mysteries that they crossed from the soil of heathenism, and it was by dint of the mysteries that they grew and developed upon the soil of Christianity. The case of the mysteries was at that time exactly what it was afterwards in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Despite all their acuteness, it was not the rationalists among the schoolmen who furthered learning and promoted its revival—it was the cabbalists, the natural philosophers, the alchemists, and the astrologers. What was the reason of this, it may be asked? How can learning develop itself by aid of the mysteries? The reply is very simple. Such development is possible, because learning or knowledge is attained by aid of the emotions and the imagination. Both are therefore able to arouse and to revive it. The great speculative efforts of the syncretistic philosophy of religion, whose principles have been already outlined (cp. pp. 30 f.), were based upon the mysteries (i.e., upon the feelings and fancies, whose products were thrown into shape by the aid of speculation). The gnostics, who to a man were in no sense rationalists, attempted to transplant these living and glowing speculations to the soil of Christianity, and withal to preserve intact the supremacy of the gospel. The attempt was doomed to fail. Speculations of this kind contained too many elements alien to the spirit of Christianity which could not be relinquished.These included the distinction between the god of creation (the demiurgus) and the god of redemption (redemption corresponding to emanation, not to creation), the abandonment of the Old Testament god, the dualistic opposition of soul and body, the disintegration of the redemptive personality, etc. Above all, redemption to the syncretist and the gnostic meant the separation of what had been unnaturally conjoined, while to the Christian it meant the union of what had been unnaturally divided. Christianity could not give up the latter conception of redemption, unless she was willing to overturn everything. Besides, this conception alone was adequate to the monarchical position of God. But as separate fragments, broken up as it were into their constituent elements, they were able to render, and they did render, very signal services to a fruitful Christian philosophy of religion—these separate elements being originally prior perhaps to the combinations of later ages. All the more profound conceptions generated within Christianity subsequently to the close of the first century, all the transcendental knowledge, all those tentative ideas, which nevertheless were of more value than mere logical deductions—all this sprang in large measure from the contact of Christianity with the ancient lore of the mysteries. It disengaged profound conceptions and rendered them articulate. This is unmistakable in the case of John or of Ignatius or of Irenæus, but the clearest case is that of the great Alexandrian school. Materials valuable and useless alike, sheer fantasy and permanent truth which could no longer be neglected, all were mixed up in a promiscuous confusion—although this applies least of all to John, who, more than anyone, managed to impress a lofty unity even upon the form and expression of his thoughts. Such ideas will, of course, be little to the taste of anyone who holds that empiricism or rationalism confines knowledge within limits which one must not so much as try to overleap; but anyone who assigns greater value to tentative ideas than to a deliberate absence of all ideas whatsoever, will not be disposed to underestimate the labor expended by the thinkers of antiquity in connection with the mysteries. At any rate, it is beyond question that this phase of Christianity, which went on developing almost from the very hour of its birth, proved of supreme importance to the propaganda of the religion. Christianity gained special weight from the fact that in the first place it had mysterious secrets of its own, which it sought to fathom only to adore them once again in silence, and secondly, that it preached to the perfect in another and a deeper sense than it did to simple folk. These mysterious secrets may have had, as it is plain that they did have, a deadening effect on thousands of people by throwing obstacles in the way of their access to a rational religion; but on other people they had a stimulating effect, lending them wings to soar up into a supra-sensible world.With this comparative appreciation of speculation in early Christianity, we concede the utmost that can be conceded in this connection. It is a time-honored view that the richest fruit of Christianity, and in fact its very essence, lies in that “Christian” metaphysic which was the gradual product of innumerable alien ideas dragged into contact with the gospel. But this assertion deserves respect simply on the score of its venerable age. If it were true, then Jesus Christ would not be the founder of his religion, and indeed he would not even be its forerunner, since be neither revealed any philosophy of religion nor did he lay stress on anything which from such a standpoint is counted as cardinal. The Greeks certainly forgot before very long the Pauline saying ἐκ μέρους γινώσκομεν . . . . βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾽ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι (“We know in part . . . . for now we see in a mirror, darkly”;), and they also forgot that as knowledge (γνῶσις) and wisdom (σοφία) are charismatic gifts, the product of these gifts affords no definition of what Christianity really is. Of the prominent teachers, Marcion, Apelles, and to some extent Irenæus, were the only ones who remained conscious of the limitations of knowledge.

The fourth evangelist makes Christ say (x. 16): “And other sheep have I which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one flock, one shepherd.” And again, in a profound prophetic utterance (iv. 21 f.): “The hour cometh when neither in this mountain [that of the Samaritans, who stand here as representatives of the Gentiles] nor in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father; ye worship what ye know not; we worship what we know, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth.” This passage is of importance, because it is something more than a merely formal classification; it defines, in a positive manner, the three possible religious standpoints and apportions them among the different peoples. First of all, there is ignorance of God, together with an external and therefore an erroneous worship (=the Gentiles, or Samaritans); secondly, there is a true knowledge of God together with a wrong, external worship (= the Jews); and thirdly, there is true knowledge of God together with worship that is inward and therefore true (=the Christians). This view gave rise to many similar conceptions in early Christianity; it was the precursor of a series of cognate ideas which formed the basis of early Christian speculations upon the history of religion. It was the so-called “gnostics” in particular who frankly built their systems upon ideas of this kind. In these systems, Greeks (or pagans), Jews, and Christians sometimes appear as different grades; sometimes the two first are combined, with Christians subdivided into “psychic” (ψύχικοι) and “pneumatic” (πνευμάτικοι) members; and finally a fourfold division is also visible, viz., Greeks (or pagans), Jews, churchfolk, and “pneumatic” persons.It is impossible here to go into the question of how this ethnological division of humanity intersected and squared with the other religious division made by the gnostics, viz., the psychological (into “hylic,” “psychic,” and “pneumatic” persons). During that period, when religions were undergoing transformation, speculations on the history of religion were in the air; they are to be met with even in inferior and extravagant systems of religion.With regard to the religious system of the adherents of Simon Magus, we have this fragmentary and obscure piece of information in Irenæus (I. xxiii.): Simon taught that “he himself was he who had appeared among the Jews as the Son, who had descended in Samaria as the Father, and made his advent among other nations as the holy Spirit” (“Semetipsum esse qui inter Judaeos quidem quasi fllius apparuerit, in Samaria autem quasi pater descenderit, in reliquis vero gentibus quasi spiritus sanctus adventaverit”). But from all this we must turn back to writers of the Catholic church with their triple classification.

In one early Christian document from the opening of the second century, of which unfortunately we possess only a few fragments (i.e., the Preaching of Peter, in Clem., Strom., vi. 5. 41), Christians are warned not to fashion their worship on the model of the Greeks or of the Jews (μὴ κατὰ τοὺς Ἕλληνας σέβεσθε τὸν θεόν . . . μηδὲ κατὰ Ἰουδαίους σέβεσθε . . . . μηδὲ κατὰ Ἰουδαίους σέβεσθε). Then we read: ὥστε καὶ ὑμεῖς ὁσίως καὶ δικαίως μανθάνοντες ἃ παραδίδομεν ὑμῖν, φυλάσσεσθε καινῶς τὸν θεὸν διὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ σεβόμενοι· εὕρομεν γὰρ ἐν ταῖς γραφαῖς καθῶς ὁ κύριος λέγει· ἰδοὺ διατίθεμαι ὑμῖν καινὴν διαθήκην οὐχ ὡς διεθέμην τοῖς πατράσιν ὑμῶν ἐν ὄρει Χωρήβ· νέαν ἡμῖν διέθετο, τὰ γὰρ Ἑλλήνων καὶ Ἰουδαίων παλαιά, ὑμεῖς δὲ οἱ καινῶς αὐτὸν τρίτῳ γένει σεβόμενοι Χριστιανοί (“So do you keep what you have learnt from us holily and justly, worshipping God anew through Christ. For we find in the scriptures, as the Lord saith, Behold I make a new covenant with you, not as I made it with your fathers in Mount Horeb. A new covenant he has made with us, for that of the Greeks and Jews is old, but ye who worship him anew in the third manner are Christians”).The term “religio Christiana” does not occur till Tertullian, who uses it quite frequently. The apologists speak of the distinctive θεοσέβεια of Christians.

This writer also distinguishes Greeks, Jews, and Christians, and distinguishes them, like the fourth evangelist, by the degree of their knowledge and worship of God. But the remarkable thing is his explicit assumption that there are three classes, neither more nor less, and his deliberate description of Christianity as the new or third genus of worship. There are several similar passages which remain to be noticed, but this is the earliest of them all. Only, it is to be remarked that Christians do not yet call themselves “the third race”; it is their worship which is put third in the scale. The writer classifies humanity, not into three peoples, but into three groups of worshippers.

Similarly the unknown author of the epistle to Diognetus. Only, with him the conception of three classes of worshippers is definitely carried over into that of three peoples (“Christians esteem not those whom the Greeks regard as gods, nor do they observe the superstition of the Jews . . . . [thou enquirest] about the nature of this fresh development or interest which has entered life now and not previously,” ch. i.; cp. also ch. v.: “They are attacked as aliens by the Jews, and persecuted by the Greeks”). This is brought out particularly in his endeavor to prove that as Christians have a special manner of life, existing socially and politically by themselves, they have a legitimate claim to be ranked as a special “nation.”

In his Apology to the Emperor Pius, Aristides distinctly arranges human beings in three “orders,” which are equivalent to nations, as Aristides assigns to each its genealogy—i.e., its historical origin. He writes (ch. ii.): φανερὸν γάρ ἐστιν ἡμῖν, ὦ βασιλεῦ, ὅτι τρία γένη εἰσὶν ἀνθρώπων ἐν τῷδε τῷ κόσμῳ· ὧν εἰσὶν οἱ τῶν παρ᾽ ὑμῖν λεγομένων θεῶν προσκυνηταὶ καὶ Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ Χριστιανοί· αὐτοὶ δὲ πάλιν οἱ τοὺς πολλοὺς σεβόμενοι θεοὺς εἰς τρία διαιροῦνται γένη, Χαλδαίους τε καὶ Ἕλληνας καὶ Αἰγυπτίους (then follows the evidence for the origin of these nations, whilst the Christians are said to “derive their genealogy from Jesus Christ”).“It is clear to us, O king, that there are three orders of mankind in this world; these are, the worshippers of your acknowledged gods, the Jews, and the Christians. Furthermore, those who worship a plurality of gods are again divided into three orders, viz., Chaldeans, Greeks, and Egyptians.” In the Syrian and Armenian versions the passage runs somewhat otherwise. “This is clear, O king, that there are four races of men in the world, barbarians and Greeks, Jews and Christians” (omitting altogether the further subdivision of the Greeks into three classes). Several scholars prefer this rendering, though it should be noted that Hippolytus also, in Philos., x. 30 (twice) and 31 (twice), contrasts the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks with the Jews and Christians. Still, the question is one of minor importance for our present purpose.—Justin (Dial. cxxiii.) also derives Christians from Christ, not as their teacher but as their progenitor: ὡς ἀπὸ τοῦ ἑνὸς Ἰακὼβ ἐκείνου, τοῦ καὶ Ἰσραὴλ ἐπικληθέντος, τὸ πᾶν γένος ὑμῶν προσηγόρευτο Ἰακὼβ καὶ Ἰσραήλ, οὕτω καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀπὸ τοῦ γεννήσαντος ἡμᾶς εἰς θεὸν Χριστοῦ . . . . καὶ θεοῦ τέκνα ἀληθινὰ καλούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν . . . . (“As all your nation has been called Jacob and Israel from the one man Jacob, who was surnamed Israel, so from Christ who begat us unto God . . . . we are called, and we are, God's true children”).

How seriously Irenæus took this idea of the Christians as a special people, is evident from his remarks in iv. 30. The gnostics had attacked the Jews and their God for having appropriated the gold and silver vessels of the Egyptians. To which Irenæus retorts that it would be much more true to accuse Christians of robbery, inasmuch as all their possessions originated with the Romans. “Who has the better right to gold and silver? The Jews, who took it as a reward for their labor in Egypt? or we, who have taken gold from the Romans and the rest of the nations, though they were not our debtors?” This argument would be meaningless unless Irenæus regarded Christians as a nation which was sharply differentiated from the rest of the peoples and had no longer anything to do with them. As a matter of fact, he regarded the exodus of Israel from Egypt as a type of the “profectio ecclesiae e gentibus” (iv. 30. 4).

The religious philosophy of history set forth by Clement of Alexandria rests entirely upon the view that these two nations, Greeks and Jews, were alike trained by God, but that they are now (see Paul's epistle to the Ephesians) to be raised into the higher unity of a third nation. It may suffice to bring forward three passages bearing on this point. In Strom., iii. 10. 70, he writes (on the saying “where two or three are gathered together,” etc.): εἴη δ᾽ ἂν καὶ ἡ ὁμόνοια τῶν πολλῶν ἀπὸ τῶν τριῶν ἀριθμουμένη μεθ᾽ ὧν ὁ κύριος, ἡ μία ἐκκλησία, ὁ εἷς ἄνθρωπος, τὸ γένος τὸ ἕν. ἢ μή τι μετὰ μὲν τοῦ ἑνὸς τοῦ Ἰουδαίου ὁ κύριος νομοθετῶν ἦν, προφητεύων δὲ ἤδη καὶ τὸν ῾Ιερεμίαν ἀποστέλλων εἰς Βαβυλῶνα, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς ἐξ ἐθνῶν διὰ τῆς προφητείας καλῶν, συνῆγε λαοὺς τοὺς δύο, τρίτος δὲ ἦν ἐκ τῶν δυεῖν κτιζόμενος εἷς καινὸν ἄνθρωπον, ᾧ δὴ ἐμπεριπατεῖ τε καὶ κατοικεῖ ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ (“Now the harmony of the many, calculated from the three with whom the Lord is present, might signify the one church, the one man, the one race. Or was the Lord legislating with the one Jew [at Sinai], and then, when he prophesied and sent Jeremiah to Babylon, calling some also from the heathen, did he collect the two peoples together, while the third was created out of the twain into a new man, wherein he is now resident, dwelling within the church”). Again, in Strom., v. 14. 98, on Plato's Republic, iii. p. 415: εἰ μή τι τρεῖς τινας ὑποτιθέμενος φύσεις, τρεῖς πολιτείας, ὡς ὑπέλαβόν τινες, διαγράφει, καὶ Ἰουδαίων μὲν ἀργυρᾶν, Ἑλλήνων δὲ τρίτην [a corrupt passage, incorrectly read as early as Eus., Prepar., xiii. 13; on the margin of L there is the lemma, Ἑλλήνων σιδηρὰν ἢ χαλκήν, Χριστιανῶν χρυσῆν], Χριστιανῶν δέ, οἷς ὁ χρυσὸς ὁ βασιλικὸς ἐγκαταμέμικται, τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα (“Unless he means by his hypothesis of three natures to describe, as some conjecture, three polities, the Jews being the silver one, and the Greeks the third [the lemma running thus:—“The Greeks being the iron or brass one, and the Christians the gold one”], along with the Christians, with whom the regal gold is mixed, even the holy Spirit”). Finally, in Strom., vi. 5. 42: ἐκ γοῦν τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς παιδείας, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐκ τῆς νομικῆς εἰς τὸ ἓν γένος τοῦ σωζομένου συνάγονται λαοῦ οἱ τὴν πίστιν προσιέμενοι, οὐ χρόνῳ διαιρουμένων τῶν τριῶν λαῶν, ἵνα τις φύσεις ὑπολάβοι τριττάς, κ.τ.λ. (“From the Hellenic discipline, as also from that of the law, those who accept the faith are gathered into the one race of the people who are saved—not that the peoples are separated by time, as though one were to suggest three different natures,” etc.).Clement (Strom., ii. 15. 67) once heard a “wise man” explain that Gentiles (“seat of the ungodly”), Jews (“way of sinners”), and heretics (“seat of the scornful”) were meant in Ps. i. 1. This addition of “heretics” is simply due to the passage under discussion.

Evidence may be led also from other early Christian writers to show that the triad of “Greeks (Gentiles), Jews, and Christians” was the church's basal conception of history.The letter of Hadrian to Servianus (Vopisc., Saturnin., viii.) is to be included among these witnesses, if it is a Christian fabrication: “Hunc (nummum) Christiani, hunc Judaei, hunc omnes venerantur et gentes” (“Christians, Jews, and all nations worship this one thing, money”). It was employed with especial frequency in the interpretation of biblical stories. Thus Tertullian enlists it in his exposition of the prodigal son (de Pudic., viii. f.); Hippolytus (Comm. in Daniel, ed. Bonwetsch, p. 32) finds the Christians in Susanna, and the Greeks and Jews in the two elders who lay snares for her; while pseudo-Cyprian (de Mont. Sina et Sion, vii.) explains that the two thieves represent the Greeks and Jews. But, so far as I am aware, the blunt expression “We Christians are the third race” only occurs once in early Christian literature subsequent to the Preaching of Peter (where, moreover, it is simply Christian worship which is described as the third class), and that is in the pseudo-Cyprianic tract de Pascha Computus (c. 17), written in 242-243 A.D. Unfortunately, the context of the expression is not quite clear. Speaking of hell-fire, the author declares it has consumed the opponents of Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, “et ipsos tres pueros a dei filio protectos—in mysterio nostro qui sumus tertium genus hominum—non vexavit” (“Without hurting, however, those three lads, protected by the Son of God—in the mystery which pertains to us who are the third race of mankind”). It is hard to see how the writer could feel he was reminded of Christians as the third race of men by the three children who were all-pleasing in God's sight, although they were cast into the fiery furnace; still, reminded he was, and at any rate the inference to be drawn from the passage is that he must have been familiar with the description of Christians as a “third race.” What sense he attached to it, we are not yet in a position to determine with any certainty; but we are bound to assume, in the first instance, from our previous investigations, that Christians were to him a third race alongside of the Greeks (Gentiles) and Jews. Whether this assumption is correct or false, is a question to be decided in the second section of our inquiry.

II

The consciousness of being a people,Cp. the first book of the Church History of Eusebius, especially ch. iv.: τῆς μὲν γὰρ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ παρουσίας νεωστὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἐπιλαμψάσης, νέον ὁμολογουμένως ἔθνος, οὐ μικρὸν οὐδ᾽ ἀσθενὲς οὐδ᾽ ἐπὶ γωνίας που γῆς ἱδρυμένον, ἀλλὰ καὶ πάντων τῶν ἐθνῶν πολυανθρωπότατόν τε καὶ θεοσεβέστατον . . . . τὸ παρὰ τοῖς πᾶσι τῇ τοῦ Χριστοῦ προσηγορίᾳ τετιμημένον (“It is agreed that when the appearance of our Saviour Jesus Christ recently broke upon all men, there appeared a new nation, admittedly neither small nor weak nor dwelling in any corner of the earth, but the most numerous and pious of all nations . . . . honored by all men with the title of Christ”). and of being indeed the primitive and the new people, did not remain abstract or unfruitful in the church; it was developed in a great variety of directions. In this respect also the synagogue had led the way at every point, but Christianity met its claim by making that claim her own and extending it, wherever this was possible, beyond the limits within which Judaism had confined it.

There were three cardinal directions in which the church voiced her peculiar consciousness of being the primitive people. (1) She demonstrated that, like any other people, she had a characteristic life. (2) She tried to show that so far as the philosophical learning, the worship, and the polity of other peoples were praiseworthy, they were plagiarized from the Christian religion. (3) She began to set on foot, though merely in the shape of tentative ideas, some political reflections upon her own actual importance within the world-empire of Rome, and also upon the positive relation between the latter and herself as the new religion for the world.

1. The proofs advanced by early Christianity with regard to its πολιτεία [citizenship] were twofold. The theme of one set was stated by Paul in Philippians iii. 20: “Our citizenship (πολιτεία) is in heaven” (cp. Heb. xiii. 13 f.: “Let us go outside the camp . . . . for here we have no permanent city, but we seek one which is to come”). On this view Christians feel themselves pilgrims and sojourners on earth, walking by faith and not by sight; their whole course of life is a renunciation of the world, and is determined solely by the future kingdom towards which they hasten. This mode of life is voiced most loudly in the first similitude of Hermas, where two cities with their two lords are set in opposition—one belonging to the present, the other to the future. The Christian must have nothing whatever to do with the former city and its lord the devil; his whole course of life must be opposed to that of the present city, with its arrangements and laws. In this way Christians were able emphatically to represent themselves as really a special people, with a distinctive course of life; but they need not have felt surprised when people took them at their word, and dismissed them with the remark: πάντες ἑαυτοὺς φονεύσαντες πορεύεσθε ἤδη παρὰ τὸν θεὸν καὶ ἡμῖν πράγματα μὴ παρέχετε (“Go and kill yourselves, every one of you; begone to God at once, and don't bother us”), quoted by Justin, Apol., II. iv.

This, however, represented but one side of the proof that Christianity had a characteristic life and order of its own. With equal energy an attempt was made to show that there was a polity realized in Christianity which was differentiated from that of other nations by its absolute morality (see above, pp. 205 f.). As early as the apostolic epistles, no point of dogma is more emphatically brought forward than the duty of a holy life, by means of which Christians are to shine as lights amid a corrupt and crooked generation. “Not like the Gentiles,” nor like the Jews, but as the people of God—that is the watchword. Every sphere of life, down to the most intimate and trivial, was put under the control of the Spirit and re-arranged; we have only to read the Didachê in order to find out the earnestness with which Christians took “the way of life.” In line with this, a leading section in all the Christian apologies was occupied by the exposition of the Christian polity as a polity which was purely ethical, the object being in every case to show that this Christian polity was in accordance with the highest moral standards, standards which even its opponents had to recognize, and that for this very reason it was opposed to the polity of the other nations. The Apologies of Justin (especially I. xiv. f.), Aristides (xv.), Tatian and Tertullian especially, fall to be considered in this light.The belauded description in the epistle to Diognetus (v. 6) is a fine piece of rhetoric, but not much more than that. The author manages to express three aspects, as it were, in a single breath: the Christian polity as the climax of morals, the Christian aloofness from the world, and the inwardness by which this religion was enabled to live in the midst of the world and adapt itself to all outward conditions without any loss of purity. A man who is able to weave these ideas into one perfect woof, either stands on the high level of the fourth evangelist—a position to which the author can hardly be promoted—or else incurs the suspicion of paying no serious attention to any one of the three ideas in question. The conviction that they are in possession of a distinctive polity is also voiced in the notion of Christians as the army of the true God and of Christ.Hermas (Sim. ix. 17) brings forward one most important aspect of the Christian polity, viz., its power of combining in a mental and moral unity peoples of the most varied capacities and customs. The stones built into the tower (i.e., the church) from the various mountains (the nations) are at first many-colored, but upon being built in, they all acquire the same white color: λαβόντες τὴν σφραγῖδα μίαν φρόνησιν ἔσχον καὶ ἕνα νοῦν, καὶ μία πίστις αὐτῶν ἐγένετο καὶ μία ἀγάπη . . . . διὰ τοῦτο ἡ οἰκοδομὴ τοῦ πύργου μιᾷ χρόᾳ ἐγένετο λαμπρὰ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος (“On receiving the seal they had one understanding and one mind, one faith and one love became theirs . . . . wherefore the fabric of the tower became of one color, bright as the sun”); cp. also Iren., I. 10. 2. Celsus (c. Cels., VIII. lxxii.) longed ardently for such a unity of mankind, instead of humanity being split up into nationalities. But he regarded it as a mere Utopia. Εἰ γὰρ δὴ οἷόν τε εἰς ἕνα συμφρονῆσαι νόμον τοὺς τὴν ᾿Ασίαν καὶ Εὐρώπην καὶ Λιβύην Ἕλληνάς τε καὶ βαρβάρους ἄχρι περάτων νενεμημένους (“Were it at all possible that the inhabitants of Asia, Europe, and Libya, Greeks and barbarians alike, should unite to obey one law”). On which Origen remarks: ἀδύνατον τοῦτο νομίσας εἶναι ἐπιφέρει [sc. Celsus] ὅτι ὁ τοῦτο οἰόμενος οἶδεν οὐδέν (“Judging this an impossibility, he adds that anyone who thinks it possible knows nothing at all”).

2. The strict morality, the monotheistic view of the world, and the subordination of the entire life of man, private and social, to the regulations of a supreme ethical code—all this is “what has been from the very first” (“quod ab initio fuit”). Now as the church finds this once more repeated in her own life, she recognizes in this phenomenon the guarantee that she herself, though apparently the youngest of the nations, is in reality the oldest. Furthermore, as she undertakes to bring forward proof for this conviction by drawing upon the books of Moses, which she appropriated for her own use (cp. Tatian, Theophilus, Clement, Tertullian, and Julius Africanus),Note in passing that this marks the beginning in general of the universal chronography of history, and consequently of the general Christian outlook upon the entire course of human history. she is thereby dethroning the Jewish people and claiming for herself the primitive revelation, the primitive wisdom, and the genuine worship. Hence she acquires the requisite insight and courage, not merely to survey and appropriate for herself the content of all connected with revelation, wisdom, and worship that had appeared on the horizon of other nations, but to survey and estimate these materials as if they were merely copies made from an original in her own possession. We all know the space devoted by the early Christian apologies to the proof that Greek philosophy, so far as it merited praise and was itself correct, had been plagiarized from the primitive literature which belonged to Christians. The efforts made in this direction culminate in the statement that “Whatever truth is uttered anywhere has come from us.” The audacity of this assertion is apt to hide from us at this time of day the grandeur and vigor of the self-consciousness to which it gives expression. Justin had already claimed any true piece of knowledge as “Christian,” whether it occurred in Homer, the tragedians, the comic poets, or the philosophers. Did it never dawn on him, or did he really suspect, that his entire standpoint was upset by such an extension of its range, and that what was specifically “Christian” was transformed into what was common to all men? Clement of Alexandria, at any rate, who followed him in this line of thought, not merely foresaw this inference, but deliberately followed it up.

By comparing itself with philosophy, early Christianity gave itself out as a “philosophy,” while those who professed it were “philosophers.” This, however, is one form of its self-consciousness which must not be overrated, for it is almost exclusively confined to the Christian apologetic and polemic. Christians never doubted, indeed, that their doctrine was really the truth, and therefore the true philosophy. But then it was infinitely more than a philosophy. It was the wisdom of God. They too were different from mere philosophers; they were God's people, God's friends. It suited their polemic, however, to designate Christianity as philosophy, or “barbarian” philosophy, and adherents of Christianity as “philosophers.” And that for two reasons. In the first place, it was the only way of explaining to outsiders the nature of Christian doctrine—for to institute a positive comparison between it and pagan religions was a risky procedure. And in the second place, this presupposition made it possible for Christians to demand from the State as liberal treatment for themselves as that accorded to philosophy and to philosophic schools. It is in this light, pre-eminently, that we must understand the favorite parallel drawn by the apologists between Christianity and philosophy. Individual teachers who were at the head either of a school (διδασκαλεῖον) within the church or of an independent school, did take the parallel more seriously;Such teachers, with their small groups, hardly felt themselves to be the “primitive people.” Their consciousness of entire independence was expressed in the titles of “gifted “and “learned.” We shall have to discuss the Christian διδασκαλεῖα [instruction] and its significance for the Christian propaganda in another connection; but we can well understand how pagans found the Christians' claim to be “learned” and “philosophers” a peculiarly ridiculous and presumptuous pretension. On their part, they dubbed Christians as credulous, and scoffed at them as πιστοί (“believers”), who put faith in foreign fables and old wives' gossip. but such persons were in a certain sense merely adjuncts of catholic Christendom.They have nothing to do with the primitive shape assumed by Christianity, that of Jesus as the teacher and the disciples as his pupils.

The charge of plagiarism was not merely levelled against philosophy, so far as philosophy was genuine, but also against any rites and methods of worship which furnished actual or alleged parallels to those of Christianity. Little material of this kind was to be found in the official cults of the Greeks and Romans, but this deficiency was more than remade up for by the rich spoil which lay in the mysteries and the exotic cults, the cult of Mithra, in particular, attracting the attention of Christian apologists in this connection at a very early period. The verdict on all such features was quite simple: the demons, it was argued, had imitated Christian rites in the cults of paganism. If it could not be denied that those pagan rites and sacraments were older than their Christian parallels, the plea readily suggested itself that the demons had given a distorted copy of Christianity previous to its real appearance, with the object of discrediting it beforehand. Baptism, the Lord's supper, the rites of expiation, the cross, etc., are instances in point. The interests of dogma are always able to impinge on history, and they do so constantly. But here we have to consider some cases which are specially instructive, since the Christian rites and sacraments attained their final shape under the influence of the mysteries and their rites (not, of course, the rites of any special cultus, but those belonging to the general type of the mysteries), so that dogma made the final issue of the process its first cause. Yet even in this field the quid pro quo appears in a more favorable light when we notice that Christendom posits itself as the original People at the dawn of human history, and that this consciousness determines their entire outlook upon that history. For, in the light of this presupposition, the Christians' confiscation of those pagan rites and ceremonies simply denotes the assertion of their character as ideally human and therefore divine. Christians embody the fundamental principles of that divine revelation and worship which are the source of human history, and which constitute the primitive possession of Christianity, although that possession has of course lain undiscovered till the present moment.

3. The most interesting side of the Christian consciousness of being a people, is what may be termed, in the narrower sense of the word, the political. Hitherto, however, it has been studied less than the others. The materials are copious, but up till now little attention has been paid to them. I shall content myself here with laying bare the points of most inportance.Tertullian's sentence (Apol., xxxviii.): “Nulla magis res nobis aliena quam publica; unam omnium rempublicam agnoscimus, mundum” (“Nothing is more alien to us than politics; we acknowledge but one universal state, the world”) has a Stoic tinge; at best, it may be taken with a grain of salt. Besides, people who despise the state always pursue a very active policy of their own.

The political consciousness of the primitive church was based on three presuppositions. There was first of all the political element in the Jewish apocalyptic, which was called forth by the demand of the imperial cultus and the terror of the persecution. Then there was the rapid transference of the gospel from the Jews to the Greeks, and the unmistakable affinity between Christianity and Hellenism, as well as between the church and the world-wide power of Rome. Thirdly, there was the fall and ruin of Jerusalem and the Jewish state. The first of these elements stood in antithesis to the two others, so that in this way the political consciousness of the church came to be defined in opposite directions and had to work itself out of initial contradictions.

The politics of Jewish apocalyptic viewed the world-state as a diabolic state, and consequently took up a purely negative attitude towards it. This political view is put uncompromisingly in the apocalypse of John, where it was justified by the Neronic persecution, the imperial claim for worship, and the Domitianic reign of terror. The largest share of attention, comparatively speaking, has been devoted by scholars to this political standpoint, in so far as it lasted throughout the second and the third centuries, and quite recently (1901) Neumann has discussed it thoroughly in his study of Hippolytus. The remarkable thing is that although Christians were by no means nunmerous till after the middle of the second century, they recognized that Christianity formed the central point of humanity as the field of political history as well as its determining factor. Such a self-consciousness is perfectly intelligible in the case of Judaism, for the Jews were really a large nation and had a great history behind them. But it is truly amazing that a tiny set of people should confront the entire strength of the Roman empire,Tertullian was the first who was able to threaten the state with the great number of Christians (Apol., xxxvii., written shortly before 200 A.D.), for up till then people had merely endeavored to hold out the terrors of the calamities at the close of the world and the return of Christ. Although Christians still lacked a majority in the empire, still (from the outset) a substitute for this, so to speak, was found in the telling fact of the broad diffusion of Christianity throughout the whole empire and beyond its bounds. Even as early as the first generations, the fact that Christians were to be found everywhere strengthened and molded their self-consciousness. In contrast to nations shut up within definite boundaries, even though these were as large as those of the Parthians, Tertullian calls Christians (Apol., xxxvii.) the “gens totius orbis,” i.e., the people of the whole world. And this had been felt long before even Tertullian wrote. that it should see in the persecution of the Christians the chief role of that empire, and that it should make the world's history culminate in such a conflict. The only explanation of this lies in the fact that the church simply took the place of Israel, and consequently felt herself to be a people; this implied that she was also a political factor, and indeed the factor which ranked as decisive alongside of the state and by which in the end the state was to be overcome. Here we have already the great problem of “church and state” making its appearance, and the uncompromising form given to it at this period became normal for succeeding ages. The relationship between these two powers assumed other forms, but this form continued to lie concealed beneath them all.

This, however, is only one side of the question. The transition of the gospel from the Jews to the Greeks, the unmistakable affinity between Christianity and Hellenismn, as well as between the church and the Roman world-power, and finally the downfall of the Jewish state at the hands of Rome—these factors occasioned ideas upon the relation of the empire to the church which were very different from the aims of the accepted apocalyptic. Any systematic treatment of this view would be out of place, however; it would give a wrong impression of the situation. The better way will be, as we are dealing merely with tentative ideas, to get acquainted with the most important features and look at them one after another.

2 Thess. ii. 5-7 is the oldest passage in Christian literature in which a positive meaning is attached to the Roman empire. It is represented there, not as the realm of antichrist, but, on the contrary, as the restraining power by means of which the final terrors and the advent of antichrist are held in check. For by τὸ κατέχον (ὁ κατέχων), “that which (or he who) restrains,” we must understand the Roman empire. If this be so, it follows that the church and the empire could not be considered merely as diametrically opposed to each other.

Rom. xiii. 1 f. makes this quite plain, and proceeds to draw the inference that civil authority is θεοῦ διάκονος (“a minister of God”), appointed by God for the suppression of wickedness; resistance to it means resistance to a divine ordinance. Consequently one must not merely yield to its force, but obey it for conscience' sake. The very payment of taxes is a moral duty. The author of 1 Pet. ii. 13 ff.Cp. Tit. iii.1. With regard to Paul's language in Romans, one may recollect what a quiet and happy time the early years of Nero were. expresses himself in similar terms. But he goes a step further, following up the fear of God directly with honor due to the emperor (πάντας τιμήσατε, τὴν ἀδελφότητα ἀγαπᾶτε, τὸν θεὸν φοβεῖσθε, τὸν βασιλέα τιμᾶτε).Greek Christians usually called the emperor βασιλεύς (“king”), a common title in the East, where it had not the same servile associations as “rex” had on the lips of people in the West. But βασιλεύς was also a title of the Lord Christ (κύριος Χριστός) which Christians dared not avoid uttering (not merely on account of “the kingdom of God,” βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, but also because Jesus had called himself by this name: John xviii. 33 f.). This occasioned a painful dilemma, though prudent Christians made strenuous efforts to repudiate the apparent treason which their religious usage of this title inevitably suggested, and to make it clear that by “kingdom” and “king” they understood nothing earthly or human, but something divine (so already Justin's Apol., I. vi.). Some hotspurs, no doubt, declared to their judges that they recognised only one king or emperor (God or Christ), and so drew upon themselves just punishment. But these cases were very rare. Christ was also called “imperator” in the West, but not in writings intended for publicity. Nothing could be more loyal than this conception, and it is noticeable that the author was writing in Asia Minor, among the provinces where the imperial cultus flourished.

Luke begins his account of Christ with the words (ii. 1): ἐγένετο ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις ἐξῆλθεν δόγμα παρὰ Καίσαρος Αὐγούστου ἀπογράφεσθαι πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην. As has been correctly surmised, the allusion to the emperor Augustus is meant to be significant. It was the official and popular idea that with Augustus a new era dawned for the empire; the imperial throne was its “peace,” the emperor its saviour (σωτήρ). Behind the earthly saviour, Luke makes the heavenly appear—he, too, is bestowed upon the whole world, and what he brings is peace (ver. 14, ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη).Even the expression used in Eph. ii. 14, αὐτὸς ἐστιν ἡ εἰρήνη ἡμῶν (“he is our peace”), is modelled on the language applied to the emperor in Asia Minor. I have shown elsewhere how strongly this language has influenced the terminology of Luke in the above-mentioned passage of his gospel. No doubt we have to think of Micah v. 4, in connection with Eph. ii. 14 and Luke ii. 14. But this converging of different lines was quite characteristic of the age and the idea in question. Luke hardly intended to set Augustus and Christ in hostile opposition; even Augustus and his kingdom are a sign of the new era. This may also be gathered front the book of Acts, which in my opinion has not any consciously political aim; it sees in the Roman empire, as opposed to Judaism, the sphere marked out for the new religion, it stands entirely aloof from any hostility to the emperor, and it gladly lays stress upon such facts as prove a tolerant mood on the part of the authorities towards Christians in the past.

Justin (Apol., I. xii.) writes to the emperor: ἀρωγοὶ ὑμῖν καὶ σύμμαχοι πρὸς εἰρήνην ἐσμὲν πάντων μᾶλλον ἀνθρώπων (“We, more than any others, are your helpers and allies in promoting peace”), admitting thereby that the purpose of the empire was beneficial (pax terrena), and that the emperors sought to effect this purpose. Also, in describing Christians as the powerWherever mention is made of the power of the Christian people which upholds the state and frees humanity, it is always these two factors which are in view—their strict morality and their power over demons. Others also wield the former weapon, though not so well. But the second, the power over demons, pertains to Christians alone, and therefore they render an incomparable service to the state and to the human race, small though their numbers may be. From this conviction there grew up in Christianity the consciousness of being the power which conserves and emancipates mankind in this world. best adapted to secure this end—inasmuch as they shun all crime, live a strictly moral life, and teach a strict morality, besides scaring and exorcising those supreme enemies of mankind, the demons—he too, in a certain sense, affirms a positive relationship between the church and the state.

When the author of the epistle to Diognetus differentiates Christians from the world (the state) as the soul from the body (ch. vi.) and elaborates his account of their relationship in a series of antitheses, he is laying down at the same time a positive relation between the two magnitudes in question: ἐγκέκλεισται μὲν ἡ ψυχὴ τῷ σώματι, συνέχει δὲ αὐτὴ τὸ σῶμα· καὶ Χριστιανοὶ κατέχονται μὲν ὡς ἐν φρουρᾷ τῷ κόσμῳ, αὐτοὶ δὲ συνέχουσι τὸν κόσμον (“The soul is shut up in the body, and yet holds the body together; so Christians are kept within the world as in a prison, yet they hold the world together,”). Similarly Justin (Apol. II. vii.).

All this implies already a positive political standpoint,I might also include here the remark of Athenagoras in his “Supplicatio” to the emperors (xviii.): ἔχοιτε ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν καὶ τὴν ἐπουράνιον βασιλείαν ἐξετάζειν· ὡς γὰρ ὑμῖν πατρὶ καὶ υἱῷ πάντα κεχείρωται, ἄνωθεν τὴν βασιλείαν εἰληφόσιν—βασιλέως γὰρ ψυχὴ ἐν χειρὶ θεοῦ, φησὶ τὸ προφητικὸν πνεῦμα—οὕτως ἑνὶ τῷ θεῷ καὶ τῷ παῤ αὐτοῦ λόγῳ υἱῷ νοουμένῳ ἀμερίστῳ πάντα ὑποτέτακται (“May you be able to discover the heavenly kingdom by considering yourselves! For as all things are subject to you, father and son, who have received the kingdom from above—since the king's soul is in the hand of God, saith the spirit of prophecy,—so are all things subordinate to the one God and to the Logos proceeding from him, even the Son, who is not apprehended apart from him”). but the furthest step in this direction was taken subsequently by Melito (in Eus., H.E., iv. 26). It is no mere accident that he writes in loyal Asia Minor. By noting Luke's suggestion with regard to Augustus, as well as all that had been already said elsewhere upon the positive relations subsisting between the church and the world-empire, Melito could advance to the following statement of the situation in his Apology to Marcus Aurelius:—

“This philosophy of ours certainly did flourish at first among a barbarian people. But springing up in the provinces under thy rule during the great reign of thy predecessor Augustus, it brought rich blessings to thine empire in particular. For ever since then the power of Rome has increased in size and splendor; to this hast thou succeeded as its desired possessor, and as such shalt thou continue with thy son if thou wilt protect the philosophy which rose under Augustus and has risen with the empire, a philosophy which thine ancestors also held in honor along with other religions. The most convincing proof that the flourishing of our religion has been a boon to the empire thus happily inaugurated, is this—that the empire has suffered no mishap since the reign of Augustus, but, on the contrary, everything has increased its splendor and fame, in accordance with the general prayer.”

Melito's ideasTertullian's opinion was different. He knew of no solidarity of Christianity and the empire: “Sed et Cæsares credidissent super Christo, si aut Cæsares non essent necessarii saeculo, aut si et Christiani potuissent esse Cæsares” (Apol., xxi.: “Yes, the very Cæsars would have believed on Christ, if Cæsars had not been necessary to the world, or if they could have been Cæsars and Christians as well”). need no analysis; they are plainly and clearly stated. The world-empire and the Christian religion are foster-sisters; they form a pair; they constitute a new stage of human history; the Christian religion means blessing and welfare to the empire, towards which it stands as the inward to the outward. Only when Christianity is protected and permitted to develop itself freely, does the empire continue to preserve its size and splendor. Unless one is to suppose that Melito simply wanted to flatter—a supposition for which there is no ground, although there was flattery in what he said—the inference is that in the Christianity which formed part of the world-empire he really recognized a co-ordinate and sustaining inward force. Subsequent developments justified this view of Melito, and in this light his political insight is marvellous. But still more marvellous is the fact that at a time like this, when Christians were still a feeble folk, he actually recognized in Christianity the one magnitude parallel to the state, and that simply on the ground of religion—i.e., as being a spiritual force which was entrusted with the function of supporting the state.Cp. also Orig., c. Cels., VIII. lxx.: ἀλλ᾽ οἱ καθ᾽ ὑπόθεσιν Κέλσου πάντες ἂν πεισθέντες Ῥωμαῖοι εὐχόμενοι περιέσονται τῶν πολεμίων ἤ οὐδὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν πολεμήσονται, φρουρούμενοι ὑπὸ θείας δυνάμεως, τῆς διὰ πεντήκοντα δικαίους πέντε πόλεις ὅλας ἐπαγγειλαμένης διασῶσαι (“According to the notion of Celsus, if all the Romans are brought to believe, they will either overcome their foes by praying, or refrain from fighting altogether, being guarded by that power divine which promised to save five entire cities for the sake of fifty just persons”).

There is yet another early Christian writer on whom the analogy of Christendom and the world-empire dawned (a propos of its œcumenical range); only, he attempted to explain it in a very surprising fashion, which betrayed a deep hostility towards the empire. Hippolytus writes (in Dan., iv. 9): “For as our Lord was born in the forty-second year of the emperor Augustus, whence the Roman empire developed, and as the Lord also called all nations and tongues by means of the apostles and fashioned believing Christians into a people, the people of the Lord, and the people which consists of those who bear a new name—so was all this imitated to the letter by the empire of that day, ruling ‘according to the working of Satan': for it also collected to itself the noblest of every nation, and, dubbing them Romans, got ready for the fray. And that is the reason why the first census took place under Augustus, when our Lord was born at Bethlehem; it was to get the men of this world, who enrolled for our earthly king, called Romans, while those who believed in a heavenly king were termed Christians, bearing on their foreheads the sign of victory over death.”

1. Christians borrowed from the Old Testament its monotheistic cosmology and view of nature. Though the gospels and epistles presuppose this, they do not expressly state it, and in the Old Testament books people found exactly what they required, viz., in the first place, innumerable passages proclaiming and inculcating monotheism, and also challenging polytheism, and in the second place many passages which extolled God as the creator of heaven and earth and depicted his creation.

2. From the Old Testament it could be proved that the appearance and the entire history of Jesus had been predicted hundreds and even thousands of years ago; and further, that the founding of the New People which was to be fashioned out of all nations upon earth,The apologists refute the idea that the Jewish proselytes were this new people. It was an obvious objection. But Christians alone have adherents ἐκ παντὰς γένους ἀνθρώπων. had from the very beginning been prophesied and prepared for (cp. pp. 240 f.).1To cite but a single passage, compare the Preaching of Peter (Clem. Alex., Strom., VI. xv.): Ἡμεῖς δὲ ἀναπτύξαντες τὰς βίβλους ἃς εἴχομεν τῶν προφητῶν, ἃ μὲν διὰ παραβολῶν, ἃ δὲ δι᾽ αἰνιγμάτων, ἃ δὲ αὐθεντικῶς καὶ αὐτολεξεὶ τὸν Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ὀνομαζόντων, εὕρομεν καὶ τὴν παρουσίαν αὐτοῦ καὶ τὸν θάνατον καὶ τὸν σταυρὸν καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς κολάσεις πάσας, ὅσας ἐποίησαν αὐτῷ οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι, καὶ τὴν ἔγερσιν καὶ τὴν εἰς οὐρανοὺς ἀνάληψιν πρὸ τοῦ Ἱεροσόλυμα κριθῆναι, καθὼς ἐγέγραπτο ταῦτα πάντα ἃ ἔδει αὐτὸν παθεῖν καὶ γεγραμμένων εἰς αὐτόν (“Unrolling the books of the prophets in our possession, which name Christ Jesus partly in parables, partly in enigmas, and partly in plain expressions and in so many words, we find his advent, death, cross, and the other punishments inflicted on him by the Jews, his resurrection and his ascension into heaven, previous to the fall of Jerusalem, even as it is written, ‘All these things which he had to suffer, and which shall be after him.' Learning all this, we believed in God by means of what had been written about him”). This writer explains, then, that on the ground of the Old Testament he came to believe in God the Father of Jesus Christ. Tertull., Apol., xlvi.: “Ostendimus totum statum nostrum, et quibus modis probare possimus ita esse sicut ostendimus, ex fide scilicet et antiquitate divinarum litterarum, item ex confessione spiritualium potestatum” [i.e., the testimony which the demons exorcised by us are forced to bear] (“We have stated all our case, and also shown you how we are able to prove it, viz., from the trustworthy character and great age of our sacred writings, and likewise from the confession of the powers of spiritual evil”). These, then, were the two decisive proofs.

Their own religion appeared, on the basis of this book, to be the religion of a history which was the fulfillment of prophecy; what remained still in the future could only be a brief space of time, and even in its course everything would be fulfilled in accordance with what had been prophesied. The certain guarantee for this was afforded by what had already been fulfilled. By aid of the Old Testament, Christian teachers dated back their religion to the very beginning of things, and connected it with the creation. This formed one of the most impressive articles of the mission-preaching among educated people, and thereby Christianity got a hold which was possessed by no religion except Judaism. But one must take good care not to imagine that to the minds of these Christians the Old Testament was pure prophecy which still lacked its fulfillment. The Old Testament was indeed a book of prophecies, but for that very reason it had didactic significance as the complete revelation of God, which needed no manner of addition whatsoever, and excluded any subsequent modification. The historical fulfillment—“lex radix evangeliorum” (Tert., Scorp., ii.)—of these revelations merely attested their truth in the eyes of all the world. Indeed, the whole gospel was thus put together from the Old Testament. Handbooks of this kind must have been widely circulated in different though similar editions.

3. Proofs from the Old Testament were increasingly employed to justify principles and institutions adopted by the Christian church (not merely imageless, spiritual worship, the abolition of the ceremonial law and its precepts, with baptism and the Lord's supper, but also—though hesitatingly—the Christian priesthood, the episcopate, and the new organizations within the cultus).

4. The book was used for the purpose of exhortation, following the formula of “a minori ad maius.” If God had praised or punished this or that in the past, how much more, it was argued, are we to look for similar treatment from him, we who are now living in the last days and who have received “the calling of promise.”

5. From the Old Testament (i.e., from its prophetic denunciations) Christians provedHow impressive was the argument— you see, the Jewish nation is dispersed, the temple is destroyed, the sacrifices have ceased, the princes of the house of Juda have disappeared! Compare the extensive use of these facts by Eusebius in his Church History. that the Jewish people had no covenant with God (cp. pp. 66 f.).

The Christians repudiated the imperial cultus in every shape and form, even when they met it in daily life, in the very oaths and turns of expression which made the emperor appear a superhuman being. Unhesitatingly they reckoned it a phase of idolatry. Withal, they guarded themselves against the charge of being disrespectful and disloyal, by pointing to their prayers for the emperor and for the state.Cp. the familiar passages from the New Testament, the apostolic fathers, and the apologists. The content of these intercessions, which was current in Carthage, is given by Tertullian in Apol., xxxix. (“Oramus etiam pro imperatoribus, pro ministris eorum et potestatibus, pro statu saeculi, pro rerum quiete, pro mora finis”—“We pray too for the emperors, for their subordinates, and for all authorities, for the welfare of the world, for peace, for the delay of the end”); and xxx. (“Precantes sumus semper pro omnibus imperatoribus: vitam illis prolixam, imperium securum, domum tutam, exercitus fortes, senatum fidelem, populum probum, orbem quietum, quaecumque hominis et Caesaris vota sunt [a deo oramus]”—“We ever pray to God for all the emperors, for length of life to them, for the safety of the empire, for the protection of the royal household, for bravery in the army, loyalty in the senate and virtue among the people, for peace throughout the world; in short, for whatever, as man or emperor, the Cæsars would desire”). These prayers, in fact, constituted a fixed part of Christian worship from the very first,Their origin dates from the very earliest times, but we do not know what considerations led to their institution. while the saying of Christ, “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's,” was generally referred, not merely to obedience and the punctual payment of taxes, but also to intercession. The sharpest strictures passed by individual Christian teachers upon the character of the Roman state and the imperial office never involved the neglect of intercession or dissuaded Christians from this duty. Numerous passages, in which the emperor is mentioned immediately after God, attest the fact that he was held by Christians to be “a deo secundus ante omnes et super omnes deos” (Tertull., Apol. xxx.: “second only to God, before and above all the gods”).This high estimate of the emperors as “second to God alone” does not, however, affect the conviction that they could never be Christians. At least it does not in the case of Tertullian (cp. Apol., xxi.: “Et Caesares credidissent super Christo, si aut Caesares non essent necessarii saeculo, aut si et Christiani potuissent esse Caesares”—“The Cæsars, too, would have believed in Christ, if they had not been necessary to the world as Cæsars, or if they could have been Cæsars and Christians as well”). Sixty years later a different view prevailed throughout the East. Not only was it reported widely that Alexander Severus and Philip had become secretly Christians, but even so prominent a teacher as Dionysius of Alexandria believed this legend and did not take umbrage at it. Christians, in fact, could declare that they tolerated no defect, either in the theory or in the practice of their loyalty. They taught—and they made their teaching an inherent element of history—that worship paid to God was one thing, and honor paid to a ruler quite another; also, that to worship a monarch was a detestable and humiliating offence. Nevertheless, they strictly inculcated obedience to all authority, and respect for the emperor.

The general position of the church did not alter upon this point during the third century;Dionysius of Alexandria (Eus., H.E. vii. 23) no doubt applied Isa. xliii. 19 to Gallienus, who was friendly disposed towards the Christians. But this was mere rhetoric. it adhered to its sharp denial of apotheosis in the shape of the imperial cultus. But at another point apotheosis gradually filtered into the church with elemental force, namely, through the worship of the apostles and the martyrs. As early as the apocryphal Acts, written towards the close of the second and the opening of the third century, we find the apostles appearing as semi-divine; in fact, even by the year 160 A.D., the pagans in Smyrna were afraid that the Christians would pay divine honors to the martyred Polycarp, while Lucian scoffs at the impostor Peregrinus, with his cheap martyrdom, passing for a god amongst the Christians. Both fear and scoff were certainly baseless as yet. But they were not baseless three generations afterwards. Towards the close of the third century there were already a number of chapels in existence, consecratedCp. Eus., Mart. Pal., p. 102 (Texte u. Unters. xv. 4). to the apostles, patriarchs, martyrs, and even the archangels; people had a predilection for passing the night at the graves of the saints, and a cultus of the saints had been worked out in a wide variety of local forms, which afforded an indispensable means of conserving those ancient cults to which the common people still clung. Theoretically, the line between the worship of God and this cultus of deliverers and intercessors was sharply drawn throughout the third century, although one Christian root for the latter cultus is evident in the communion of the saints. As things stood, however, the distinction between the two was constantly blurred in the course of practical experience.Origen attacks only a moiety of polytheistic superstition and its expressions; cp. Hom. viii. 4 in Jesum Nave (vol. xi. p. 67): “Illi qui, cum Christiani sint, solemnitates gentium celebrant, anathema in ecclesias introducunt. Qui de astrorum cursibus vitam hominum et gesta perquirunt, qui volatus avium et cetera huiusmodi, quae in saeculo prius observabantur, inquirunt, de Jericho anathema inferunt in ecclesiam, et polluunt castra domini et vinci faciunt populum dei” (“Those who, even though they are Christians, celebrate the festivals of pagans, bring anathema into the churches. Those who make out the life and deeds of men from the courses of the stars, who study the flight of birds, and engage in similar practices, which they formerly observed in the world, bring the anathema of Jericho on the church; they pollute the camp of the Lord, and cause God's people to be overcome”). He could and should have mentioned a great deal more; only in such directions he was no longer sensitive to polytheism. For all its monotheism, the Christian religion at the close of the third century represented a religion which was exceptionally strong in saints and angels and deliverers, in miraculous relics, and so forth; on this score it was able to challenge any cult whatsoever. Porphyry (the pagan quoted in Macar. Magnes, IV. xxi.) was quite alive to this. He wrote as follows: “If, therefore, you declare that beside God there are angels who are not subject to suffering and death, and are incorruptible in nature—just the beings we call gods, inasmuch as they stand near the godhead—then what is all the dispute about, with regard to names? Or are we to consider it merely a difference of terminology? . . . . So, if anyone likes to call them either gods or angels— for names are, on the whole, of no great moment, one and the same goddess, for example, being called Athenê and Minerva, and by still other names among the Egyptians and the Syrians—then it makes no great difference, as their divine nature is actually attested even by yourselves in Matt. xxii. 29-31.”Porphyry then proceeds, in his attack upon the cheap criticism leveled by Christians (see above) at idolatry: “When, therefore, it is admitted that the angels share in the divine nature, it is not, on the other hand, the belief of those who pay seemly honor to the gods, that God is composed of the wood or stone or brass from which the image is manufactured, nor is it their opinion that, whenever a hit of the image is broken off, some injury is thereby inflicted on the power of the god in question. Images and temples of the gods have been created from all antiquity for the sake of forming reminders to men. Their object is to make those who draw near them think of God thereby, or to enable them, after ceasing from work, and abstaining from anything else, to address their vows and prayers to him, that each may obtain from him whatever he is in need of. For when any person gets an image or picture of some friend prepared for himself, he certainly does not believe that his friend is to be found in the image, or that his members exist actually inside the different portions of the representation. His idea rather is that the honor which he pays to his friend finds expression in the image. And while the sacrifices offered to the gods do not bring them any honor, they are meant as a testimony to the goodwill of their worshippers, implying that the latter are not ungrateful to the gods.” The majority of Christians by this time scarcely held so pure and spiritual a view of the matter as this “worshipper of idols.”

4. The warfare against polytheism was also waged by means of a thoroughgoing opposition to the theatre and to all the games. Anyone who considers the significanceFor what follows, see Bigelmair's Die Beteiligung der Christen am öffentlichen Leben in vorconstantinischer Zeit (1902). of these features in ancient life and their close connection with idolatry,Tert., de Spect. iv.: “Quid erit summum ac praecipuum, in quo diabolus et pompae et angeli eius censeantur, quam idololatria? . . . . Igitur si ex idololatria universam spectaculorum paraturam constare constiterit, indubitate praeiudicatum erit etiam ad spectacula pertinere renuntiationis nostrae testimonium in lavacro, quae diabolo et pompae et angelis eius sint mancipata, scil. per idololatriam. Commemorabimus origines singulorum, quibus incunabulis in saeculo adoleverint, exinde titulos quorundam, quibus nominibus nuncupentur, exinde apparatus, quibus superstitionibus instruantur, tum loca, quibus praesidibus dicantur, tum artes, quibus auctoribus deputentur. Si quid ex his non ad idolum pertinuerit, id neque ad idololatriam neque ad nostram eiurationem pertinebit” (“Where, more than in idolatry, will you find the devil with his pomp and angels? . . . . Therefore, if it can be proven that the whole business of the shows depends upon idolatry, unquestionably we shall have anticipated the conclusion that the confession of renouncing the world which we make in baptism, refers to these shows which have been handed over to the devil and his pomp and angels, i.e., on account of their idolatry. We shall now exhibit their separate sources, the nurseries in which they have grown to maturity in the world; next the titles of some of them, the names by which they are called; after that, their contents, the superstitions by which they are supported; then their seats, the patrons to which they are dedicated; and finally their arts, the authors to whom they are to be referred. If any of these is found to have no connection with an idol, then it is irrelevant to idolatry and irrelevant also to our oath of abjuration”). Novatian, de Spect. ii.: “Quando id quod in honore alicuius idoli ab ethnicis agitur [sc. the theatrical spectacles] a fidelibus christianis spectaculo frequentatur, et idololatria gentilis asseritur et in contumeliam dei religio vera et divina calcatur” (“Since whatever is performed by pagans in honor of any idol is attended by faithful Christians in the public spectacles, and thus pagan idolatry is maintained, whilst the true and divine religion is trodden under foot in contempt of God”). knows what a polemic against them implied. But we may point out that existence, in case of vast numbers of people, was divided into daily drudgery and—“panis et circenses” (free food and the theatre). No member of the Christian church was allowed to be an actor or gladiator, to teach acting (see Cypr., Epist. ii.), or to attend the theatre.Minuc. Felix, xii.: “Vos vero suspensi interim atque solliciti honestis voluptatibus abstinetis, non spectacula visitis, non pompis interestis, convivia publica absque vobis, sacra certamina” (“But meantime, anxious and unsettled, you are abstaining from respectable enjoyments; you attend no spectacles, you take no part in public displays, public banquets and the sacred contest you decline”). The earliest flash of polemic occurs in the Oratio of Tatian (xxii.-xxiii.), and it was followed by others, including the treatises of Tertullian and pseudo-Cyprian (Novatian) de Spectaculis, and the discussions of Lactantius.Instit., vi. 20-21; see also Arnob., iv. 35 f.—Along with the games, participation in public festivals was also forbidden, as these were always bound up with polytheism. Cp. the seventh canon of Ancyra: περὶ τῶν συνεστιαθέντων ἐν ἑορτῇ ἐθνικῇ, ἐν τόπῳ ἀφωρισμένῳ τοῖς ἐθνικοῖς, ἴδια βρώματα ἐπικομισαμένων καὶ φαγόντων, ἔδοξε διετίαν ὑποπεσόντας δεχθῆναι (“With regard to those who have sat down at a pagan banquet, in a place set apart for pagans, even though they brought and ate their own food, it seems good to us that they be received after they have done penance for two years”). In this connection, Tertullian, de Idol. xiii.-xvi., is particularly important. All public festivals, he declares, are to be avoided, since they are held either owing to wantonness or to timidity. “If we rejoice with the world, it is to be feared that we shall also mourn with the world.” Here, of course, it is plain that Tertullian is in a minority. The majority of Christians at Carthage saw nothing wrong in attending public or private feasts; in fact, it was considered rather a dangerous mark of the factious spirit to abstain from them. “‘Let your works shine,' is Christ's rule,” says Tertullian in his cry of complaint. “But here are all our shops and doors shining! Nowadays you will find more doors unilluminated and unwreathed among the pagans than among the Christians! What do you think about the custom? If it is meant as honor to an idol, then certainly it is idolatry to honor an idol. If, again, it is done for the sake of some man, then let us remember that all idolatry is worship paid to men (the gods of the pagans having been formerly men themselves).” “I know how one Christian brother was severely punished in a vision on that very night, because his slaves had decorated his gateway with wreaths on the sudden proclamation of some public thanksgiving.” Tertullian only draws the line at well-established family feasts such as those at the assumption of the toga virilis, betrothals, marriages, and name-givings, since these are not necessarily contaminated with idolatry, and since the command to observe no particular days does not apply in these instances. “One may accept an invitation to such functions, provided that the title of the invitation does not run ‘to assist at a sacrifice.' Except in the latter event, I can please myself as much as I like. Since Satan has so thoroughly entangled the world in idolatry, it must be allowable for us to attend certain ceremonies, if thereby we stipulate that we are under obligations to a man and not to an idol.” These writings by themselves are enough to show that the above prohibitions were not universally obeyed.Novatian, de Spect. i.: “Quoniam non desunt vitiorum assertores blandi et indulgentes patroni qui praestant vitiis auctoritatem et quod est deterius censuram scripturarum caelestium in advocationem criminum convertunt, quasi sine culpa innocens spectaculorum ad remissionem animi appetatur voluptas—nam et eo usque enervatus est ecclesiasticae disciplinae vigor et ita omni languore vitiorum praecipitatur in peius ut non iam vitiis excusatio sed auctoritas detur—placuit paucis vos non nunc instruere [i.e., de spectaculis], sed instructos admonere” (“Plausible advocates of vice are not awanting, nor are complaisant patrons who lend their authority to vice and—what is worse—twist the rebuke of scripture into a defense of crimes; as if any innocent pleasure could be sought from public shows by way of relaxation for the mind. The vigor of ecclesiastical discipline has become so weakened and so deteriorated by all the languor produced by vices, that wickedness wins no longer an apology but actual authority for itself. Consequently I have determined not now to instruct you [on public shows], but in a few words to admonish those who have been instructed”). The passion for public games was almost irresistible, and Tertullian has actually to hold out hopes of the spectacle afforded by the future world as a compensation to Christians who were robbed of their shows in the present.De Spect., xxx., with its closing sentence, “Ceterum qualia illa sunt, quae nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascenderunt? Credo, circa et utraque cavea et omni stadio gratiora” (“But what are the things that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man? Superior, I imagine, to the circus, the theatre, the amphitheatre, and any racecourse!”). Still, the conflict with these shows was by no means in vain. On the contrary, its effects along this line were greater than along other lines. By the time that Constantine granted privileges to the church, public opinion had developed to such a pitch that the state immediately adopted measures for curtailing and restricting the public spectacles.Against games of chance, cp. the treatise of pseudo-Cyprian (Victor) adversus Aleatores, and a number of cognate passages in other writings.

5. A sharp attack was also made upon luxury, in so far as it was bound up in part with polytheism and certainly betrayed a senseless and pagan spirit. Cp. the Paedagogus of Clement, and Tertullian's writings “de cultu feminarum.” It was steadily maintained that the money laid out upon luxuries would be better spent in charity. But no special regulations for the external life of Christians were as yet drawn up.

6. With regard to the question of how far a Christian could take part in the manners and customs and occupations of' daily life without denying Christ and incurring the stain of idolatry, there was a strict attitude as well as a lenient, freedom as well as narrowness, even within the apostolic age. Then the one burning question, however, seems to have been that of food offered to idols, or whether one could partake of meals provided by unbelievers. In those days, as the large majority of Christians belonged to the lower classes, they had no representative duties, but were drawn from working people of the lower orders, from day-laborers, in fact, whose simple occupation hardly brought them into any kind of relation to public life, and consequently exempted them from any conflict in this sphere. Presently, however, a change came over the situation. A host of difficult and vexatious problems poured upon the churches. Even the laxer party would do nothing that ran counter to the will of God. They, too, had scriptural proofs ready to support their position, and corollaries from scriptural principles. “Flee from one city to another” was the command they pled when they prudently avoided persecution. “I have power over all things,” “We must be all things to all men”—so they followed the apostle in declaring. They knew how to defend even attendance at public spectacles from scripture. Novatian (de Spect., ii.) sorrowfully quotes their arguments as follows: “Where, they ask, are such scriptures? Where are such things prohibited? Nay, was not Elijah the charioteer of Israel? Did not David himself dance before the ark? We read of horns, psalteries, trumpets, drums, pipes, harps, and choral dances. The apostle, too, in his conflict with evil sets before us the struggle of the cæstus and our wrestling with the spiritual powers of wickedness. Again, he takes illustrations front the racecourse, and holds out to us the prize of the crown. Why, then, may not a faithful Christian look at things of which the sacred books could write?”

This defense of attendance at the games sounds almost frivolous. But there were many graver conflicts on this subject, which one can follow with serious interest.

Participation in feasts and in convivial gatherings already occasioned such conflicts to a large extent, but it was the question of one's occupation that was really crucial. Can a Christian engage in business generally in the outside world without incurring the stain of idolatry? Though the strict party hardly tabooed a single occupation on the score of principle, yet they imposed such restrictions as amounted almost to a prohibition. In his treatise de Idololatria, Tertullian goes over a series of occupations, and his conclusion is the same in almost every case: better leave it alone, or be prepared to abandon it at any moment. To the objection, “But I have no means of livelihood,” the reply follows, “A Christian need never be afraid of starving.”Cp. especially the sharp remarks in ch. xii. f. a propos of the passages from the gospels, which conclude: “Nemo eorum, quos dominus allegit, non habeo, dixit, quo vivam. Fides famem non timet. Scit etiam famem non minus sibi contemnendam propter deum quam omne mortis genus; didicit non respicere vitam, quanto magis victum? Quotusquisque haec adimplevit? sed quae penes homines difficilia, penes deum facilia?” (“None of those whom the Lord chose for himself ever said, I have no means of livelihood. Faith has no fear of starvation. Faith knows it must despise starvation as much as any kind of death, for the sake of God. Life it has learnt not to respect; how much more, food? How many, you ask, have answered to these conditions? Ah well, what is hard with men is easy with God”).

Tertullian especially prohibits the manufacture of idols (iv. f.), as was only natural. Yet there were Christian workmen who knew no other trade, and who tried to shelter themselves behind the text, “Let every man abide in the calling wherein he was called” (1 Cor. vii. 20). They also pointed out that Moses had a serpent manufactured in the wilderness. From Tertullian's charges it is quite evident that the majority in the church connived at such people and their practices. “From idols they pass into the church; from the workshop of the adversary they come to the house of God; to God the Father they raise hands that fashion idols; to the Lord's body they apply hands that have conferred bodies upon idols. Nor is this all. They are not content to contaminate what they receive from other hands, but even hand on to others what they have themselves contaminated. Manufacturers of idols are actually elected to ecclesiastical office!” (vii.).

As against these lax members of the church, Tertullian prohibits the manufacture, not only of images and statues, but also of anything which was even indirectly employed in idol-worship. Carpenters, workers in stucco, joiners, slaters, workers in gold-leaf, painters, brass-workers, and engravers—all must refrain from manufacturing the slightest article required for idol worship; all must refuse to participate in any work (e.g., in repairs) connected therewith (ch. viii.).

Similarly, no one is allowed to practice as an astrologer or a magician. Had not the magi to depart home “by another way”?Tertullian, de Anima, lvii.: “Quid ergo dicemus magiam? Quod omnes paene—fallaciam! Sed ratio fallaciae solos non fugit Christianos, qui spiritualia nequitiae, non quidem socia conscientia, sed inimica scientia novimus, nec invitatoria operatione, sed expugnatoria dominatione tractamus multiformem luem mentis humanae, totius erroris artificem, salutis pariter animaeque vastatorem. Sic etiam magiae, secundae scilicet idololatriae,” etc. (“What then shall we say about magic? Just what almost everybody says—that it is sheer imposture! The nature of the imposture has been detected by more than Christians, though we have discovered these spirits of iniquity, not because we are in league with them, but by a hostile instinct, not because our methods of work attract them, but on the contrary because we handle them by means of a power which vanquishes them. This protean pest of the human mind! This deviser of all error! This destroyer alike of our salvation and of our soul! For thus it is, by magic, which is simply a second idolatry,” etc.). Nor can any Christian be a schoolmaster or a professor of learning, since such professions frequently bring people into contact with idolatry.Mathematics was also suspect. Even in the beginning of the fourth century there was opposition offered in Emesa to Eusebius being promoted to the episcopate, on the ground that he practiced mathematical studies (Socrates, H.E. ii. 9). Knowledge of the pagan gods has to be diffused; their names, genealogy and myths have to be imparted; their festivals and holy days have to be observed, “since it is by means of them that the teacher's fees are reckoned.” The first payment of any new scholar is devoted by the teacher to Minerva. Is the contamination of idolatry any the less because in this case it leads to something else? It may be asked, if one is not to be a teacher of pagan learning, ought one then to be a pupil? But Tertullian is quite ready to be indulgent on this point, for—“how can we repudiate secular studies which are essential to the pursuit of religious studies?” A remarkable passage (x.).The perusal of bad and seductive literature was, of course, always prohibited, so soon as this danger became felt. If one must not listen to blasphemous or heretical speeches, far less must one handle books of this character. What Dionysius of Alexandria relates about his own practice, only proves the rule (Eus., H.E. vii. 7): “I have busied myself,” he writes to Philemon, the Roman presbyter, “with the writings and also the traditions of the heretics, staining my soul for a little with their utterly abominable ideas, yet deriving this benefit from them, that I refute them for myself and loathe them all the more. One of the presbyters sought to dissuade me, fearing lest I might become mixed up with the mire of their iniquity and so injure my own soul. I felt he was quite right, but a divine vision came to confirm me, and a voice reached me with the clear command: ‘Read all that you come across, for you can estimate and prove everything; and this capacity has been from the first the explanation of your faith.' I accepted the vision, as it tallied with the apostolic word spoken to the stronger Christians, ‘Be skilled moneychangers.'” Cp. Didasc. Apost., ii. (ed. Achelis, p. 5): “Keep away from all heathen writings, for what hast thou to do with strange words or laws and false prophecies, which indeed seduce young people from the faith? What dost thou miss in God's Word, that thou dost plunge into these pagan histories? If thou wilt read histories, there are the books of Kings; if wise men and philosophers, there are the prophets, with whom thou shalt find more wisdom and understanding than in all the wise men and philosophers; for these are the words of the one and the only wise God. If thou cravest hymns, there are the psalms of David; and if thou wantest information about the beginning of all things, there is the book of Genesis by the great Moses; if thou wilt have laws and decrees, there are his laws. . . . . Keep thyself therefore from all those strange things, which are contrary.” General prohibitions of definite books under pain of punishment begin with Constantine's order regarding the writings of Arius and other heretics (Eus., Vita Const., iii. 66; for the prohibition of the writings of Eunomius, ep. Philostorgius, H.E. xi. 5).—Whether one should quote pagan philosophers and poets, and, if so, how, remained a problem. The apologists made ample use of them, as we know. Paul's citations from profane literature are striking (Tit. i. 12, 1 Cor. xv. 33, Acts xvii. 28); since Origen's treatment of them, they have often been discussed and appealed to by the more liberal. Origen (Hom. xxxi., in Luc., vol. v. p. 202) thought: “Ideo assumit Paulus verba etiam de his qui foris sunt, tit sanctificet eos.”

Then comes trade. Tertullian is strongly inclined to prohibit trade altogetherTertullian stands here pretty much by himself. We find even a man like Irenæus (cp. iv. 30. 1) had no objections to a Christian engaging in trade. owing to its origin in covetousness and its connection, however indirectly, with idolatry. It provides material for the temple services. What more need be said? “Even supposing that these very wares—frankincense, I mean, and other foreign wares—used in sacrificing to idols, are also of use to people as medicinal salves, and particularly to us Christians in our preparations for a burial, still you are plainly promoting idolatry, so long as processions, ceremonies, and sacrifices to idols are furnished at the cost of danger, loss, inconvenience, schemes, discussion, and commercial ventures.” “With what face can a Christian dealer in incense, who happens to pass by a temple, spit on the smoking altars, and puff aside their fumes, when he himself has provided material for those very altars?” (xi.).The clergy themselves were not absolutely forbidden to trade; only restrictions were laid on them (cp. the nineteenth canon of Elvira). The taking of interest on money was not differentiated from usury, and was strictly prohibited. But the prohibition was not adhered to. Repeatedly, steps had to be taken against even the clergy, the episcopate, and the church widows for taking interest or following occupations tinged with usury.Cp. Funk, “Interest and Usury in Christian Antiquity” (Tübingen Theol. Quartalschrift vol. lvii., 1875, pp 214 f.). See Eus., H.E. v. 21; Cyprian, de Lapsis, vi., and Testim., iii. 48; Commod., Instruct., ii. 24; and the twentieth canon of the Council of Elvira.

Can a Christian hold a civil appointment? Joseph and Daniel did; they kept themselves free from idolatry, said the liberal party in the church. But Tertullian is unconvinced. “Supposing,” he says, “that any one holder of an office were to succeed in coming forward with the mere title of the office, without either sacrificing or lending the sanction of his presence to a sacrifice, without farming out the supply of sacrificial victims, without handing over to other people the care of the temples or superintending their revenues, without holding spectacles either at his own or at the state's expense, without presiding at such spectacles, without proclaiming or announcing any ceremony, without even taking an oath, and moreover—in regard to other official business—without passing judgment of life or death on anyone or on his civil standing . . . . without either condemning or laying down ordinances of punishment, without chaining or imprisoning, or torturing a single person—well, supposing all that to be possible, then there is nothing to be said against a Christian being an official!” Furthermore, the badges of officials are all mixed up with idolatry. “If you have abjured the pomp of the devil, know that whatever part of it you touch is idolatry to you” (xvii.-xviii.).

This involves the impossibility of any Christian being a military officer. But may he not be a private and fill subordinate positions in the army? “‘The inferior ranks do not need to sacrifice, and have nothing to do with capital punishments.' True, but it is unbecoming for anyone to accept the military oath of God and also that of man, or to range himself under the standard of Christ and also under that of the devil, or to bivouac in the camp of light and also in the camp of darkness; no soul can be indebted to both, to Christ and to the devil.” You point to the warriors of Israel, to Moses and Joshua, to the soldiers who came to John the Baptist, to the centurion who believed. But “subsequently the Lord disarmed Peter, and in so doing unbuckled the sword of every soldier. Even in peace it is not to be worn” (xix.).

Furthermore, in ordinary life a good deal must be entirely proscribed. One must abjure any phrase in which the gods are named. Thus one dare not say “by Hercules,” or “as true as heaven” (medius fidius), or use any similar expletive (xx.). And no one is tacitly to accept an adjuration addressed to himself, from fear of being recognized as a Christian if he demurs to it.“I know one Christian who, on being publicly addressed during a law-suit with the words ‘Jove's wrath be on you,' answered, ‘Nay, on you.'” The unlawfulness of this answer, according to Tertullian, consisted, not simply in the malediction, but in the recognition of Jupiter which it implied. Every pagan blessing must be rejected; accept it, and you are accursed of God. “It is a denial of God for anyone to dissemble on any occasion whatsoever and let himself pass for a pagan. All denial of God is idolatry, just as all idolatry is denial of God, be it in word or in deed” (xxi.-xxii.). Even the pledge exacted from Christians as a guarantee when money is borrowed, is a denial of God, though the oath is not sworn in words (xxiii.).

“Such are the reefs and shoals and straits of idolatry, amid which faith has to steer her course, her sails filled by the Spirit of God.” Yet after the close of the second century the large majority of Christians took quite another view of the situation, and sailed their ship with no such anxieties about her track.Read the second and third books of Clement's Paedagogus. The author certainly does not belong to the lax party, but he does not go nearly the length of Tertullian. On the other hand, he lashes (Paed. III. xi. 80) mere “Sunday Christianity”: “They drop the heavenly inspiration of the congregation when they leave the meeting-place, and become like the great majority with whom they associate. Or rather, in laying aside the affected and specious mask of solemnity, they show their real nature, undisguised. After listening reverently to the word of God, they leave what they have heard within the church itself, and go outside to amuse themselves in godless society with music,” etc. Coarse forms of idolatry were loathed and severely punished, but during the age of Tertullian, at least, little attention was paid any longer to such subtle forms as were actually current. Moreover, when it suits his point to do so, Tertullian himself in the Apology meets the charge of criminal isolation brought against Christians, by boasting that “we share your voyages and battles, your agriculture and your trading” (xlii.), remarking in a tone of triumph that Christians are to be met with everywhere, in all positions of state, in the army, and even in the senate. “We have left you nothing but the temples.” Such was indeed the truth. The facts of the case show that Christians were to be found in every line of life,Of course, as Tertullian sarcastically observes (Apol. xliii.), “pimps, panders, assassins, poisoners and sorcerers, with sacrificial augurs, diviners, and astrologers, very reasonably complain of Christians being a profitless race!” As early as Acts 19. we read of tradesmen in Ephesus who lived by the cult of Diana feeling injured by Christians. and that troubles occasioned by one's occupation must have been on the whole very rare (except in the case of soldiers; see below, Bk. IV. Ch. II.). Nor was the sharp criticism passed by Tatian, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and even (though for different reasons, of course) by Origen, upon the state as such, and upon civil relations, translated very often into practice.

Still, Cæcilius (in Min. Felix, viii.) describes Christians as a “natio in publico muta, in angulis garrula (a people tongue-tied in public, but talkative in corners), honores et purpuras despiciunt (despising honors and purple robes).” Cp. Tatian, Orat., xi.: βασιλεύειν οὐ θέλω, πλουτεῖν οὐ βούλομαι, τὴν στρατηγίαν παρῄτημαι . . . . δοξομανίας ἀπήλλαγμαι (“I have no desire to reign—no wish to be rich. I decline all leadership. . . . . I am void of any frenzy for fame”); Speratus (in Martyr. Scil.): “Ego imperium huius saeculi non cognosco” (“of the kingdom of this world I know nothing”); Tertull., Apol. xlii.: “Christianus nec aedilitatem affectat (“the Christian has no ambition to be aedile”), and his critique of Roman laws in chaps iv.-vi. of the Apology. On the charge of “infructuositas in negotio” (barrenness in affairs), see Tert., de Pallio, v., where all that is said of the pallium applies to Christians: “Ego, inquit, nihil foro, nihil campo, nihil curiae debeo, nihil officio advigilo, nulla rostra praeoccupo, nulla praetoria observo, canales non odoro, cancellos non adoro, subsellia non contundo, iura non conturbo, causas non elatro, non iudico, non milito, non regno, secessi de populo. in me unicum negotium mihi est; nisi aliud non curo quam ne curem. vita meliore magis in secessu fruare quam in promptu. sed ignavam infamabis. scilicet patriae et imperio reique vivendum est. erat olim ista sententia. nemo alii nascitur moriturus sibi. certe cum ad Epicuros et Zenones ventum est, sapientes vocas totum quietis magisterium, qui eam summae atque unicae voluptatis nomine consecravere,” etc. (“I,” quoth the cloak, “I owe no duty to the forum, the hustings, or the senate-house. I keep no obsequious vigils, I haunt no platforms, I boast no great houses, I scent no cross-roads, I worship no lattices, I do not wear out the judicial bench, I upset no laws, I bark in no pleadings at the bar; no judge am I, no soldier, and no king. I have withdrawn from the people. My peculiar business is with myself. No care have I save to shun care. You, too, would enjoy a better life in retreat than in publicity. But you will decry me as indolent. ‘We must live,' forsooth, ‘for country, empire, and estate.' Well, our view prevailed in days gone by. None, it was said, is born for another's ends, since to himself he is to die. At all events, when you come to the Epicureans and Zenos, you dub all the teachers of quietism ‘sages'; and they have hallowed quietism with the name of the ‘unique' and 'supreme' pleasure”). Apolog., xxxviii. f: “Nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica . . . . unam omnium rempublicam agnoscimus, mundum (“Nothing is so alien to us as political affairs . . . . We recognize but one universal commonwealth, viz., the universe”). On the absence of any home-feeling among Christians, see Diognet. v. 5: πατρίδας οἰκοῦσιν ἰδίας, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς πάροικοι· μετέχουσι πάντων ὡς πολῖται, καὶ πάνθ᾽ ὑπομένουσιν ὡς ξένοι· πᾶσα ξένη πατρίς ἐστιν αὐτῶν, καὶ πᾶσα πατρὶς ξένη (“They inhabit their own countries, but merely as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens and endure everything as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign”); also Clem., Paed. iii. 8. 41: πατρίδα ἐπὶ γῆν οὐκ ἔχομεν (“On earth we have no fatherland”); Vita Polycarpi, vi.: παντὶ δούλῳ θεοῦ πᾶς ὀ κόσμος πόλις, πατρὶς δὲ ἡ ἐπουράνιος Ἰερουσαλήμ· ἐνταῦθα δὲ παροικεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ κατοικεῖν, ὡς ξένοι καὶ παρεπίδημοι τετάγμεθα (cp. also xxx.). Not without reason does Celsus (Orig., VIII. lxviii.) remark to his Christian opponent: “Were all to behave as you do, the emperor would ere long be left solitary and deserted, and the affairs of this world would presently fall into the hands of the most wild and lawless barbarians.” He proceeds to point out that, in the event of this, Christianity would cease to exist, and that the Roman Empire consequently was the support of Christianity. To which Christians replied that, on the contrary, it was they alone who upheld the empire.

Between the second century and the third (the line may be drawn about 180 A.D.) a vital change took place. In the former, Christians for the most part had the appearance of a company of people who shunned the light and withdrew from public life, an immoral, nefarious set who held aloof from actual life; in the third century, paganism, to its alarm, discovered in Christianity a foe which openly and energetically challenged it in every sphere, political, social, and religious. By this time the doctrine of Christianity was as familiar as its cultus, discipline, and organization; and just as Christian basilicas rose everywhere after the reign of Gallienus beside the older temples, so Christians rose to every office in the state. So far as regards the civil and social status of Christianity, the period dating from 250 A.D., belongs on the whole to the fourth century rather than to the preceding age.