The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

The same writer cordially admits the moral grandeur and the moral power of the philosophers whose teaching had, for several generations, been leavening the thought and ennobling the humanity of the Roman world. "The philosophy of the Stoics, the highest and holiest moral theory at the time of our Lord's coming, – the theory which most worthily contended against the merely political religion of the day, the theory which opposed the purest ideas and the loftiest aims to the grovelling principles of a narrow and selfish expediency on which the frame of the heathen ritual rested – was the direct creation of the sense of unity and equality disseminated among the choicer spirits of heathen society by the results of the Macedonian conquest. But for that conquest it could hardly have existed at all. It was the philosophy of Plato, sublimed and harmonized by the political circumstances of the times. It was what Plato would have imagined, had he been a subject of Alexander."

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

Merivale, it will be understood, writing in the interest of Christianity, makes note of the limitations of the Stoic Philosophy, calls it vague, unsatisfactory and aristocratic, the "peculiarity of a select class of minds;" and so it was, to a degree; but that it had a mighty influence throughout the intellectual world, as much as any system of belief could have, must be confessed. So far as ideas went, it comprehended the wisest and best there were. As respected the authority by which the ideas were recommended and guaranteed, it was the authority of the intellectual lights of the world. To say that the truths were limited, is to say what may be said of every intellectual system under the sun, including the beliefs of christian apostles which the christian Church has outgrown. To say that they were not final, is to say what will be affirmed of every intellectual system till the end of time. There the beliefs were, stated, urged, preached with earnestness by men of live minds, fully awake to the needs of the society they adorned, thinking and writing, not for their own entertainment, but for the improvement of mankind. Their books were not read by the multitude, the multitude could not read: scarcely can they read now. But the men influenced the directors of opinion, the makers of laws, the builders of institutions, the wealthy, the instructed, the high in place.

Nor must it be forgotten that these ideas of philosophy did not remain cold speculations. They bore characteristic fruits in humanity of every kind. The brotherhood was not a sentiment, it was a principle of wide beneficence. The charities of this gospel attested the presence of a warm heart in the metropolis of the heathen world. Of this there can no longer be any doubt. Works like that of Denis' "Histoire des Theories et des Idées Morales dans l'Antiquité," reveal a condition of becoming in the Roman Empire that might dispel the fears of the most skeptical in regard to the continuous moral progress of the race. The immense popular distributions of corn which from being occasional had become habitual in Rome, were as a rule prompted by no humane feeling, were not designed to mitigate suffering or express compassion. They were in the main, devices for gaining popularity. Caius Gracchus, who, more than a century before Christ, carried a law making compulsory the sale of corn to the poor at a nominal price, was perhaps actuated by a worthier motive; but it is doubtful whether his successors were. Cato of Utica was not. Clodius Pulcher was not. The emperors were obliged to purchase popularity by these enormous bribes. It is said that Augustus caused the monthly distribution to be made to two hundred thousand people. Half a million claimed the bounty under the Antonines. The addition of a ration of oil to the corn; the substitution of bread for the corn; the supplementing of this by an allowance of pork; a subsequent supply of the article of salt to the poor on similarly easy terms; the distribution of portions of land; the imperial legacies, donations, gratuities, mentioned as bestowed on occasion; the public baths provided and thrown open to all at a trifling expense, were also means of winning or retaining the good will of a fickle and turbulent populace. They neither expressed a humane sentiment nor produced a humane result. They were suggested by ambition, no better sometimes than that of the demagogue, and they begot idleness, and demoralization. But some part of the beneficence must have sprung from a more generous motive. The interest manifested by several emperors in public education, and the appropriation made for the maintenance of the children of the poor, five thousand of whom are said, by Pliny, to have been supported by the government, under Trajan, who presume never heard of Christianity, – cannot fairly be ascribed to political motives. The private charities of the younger Pliny, who devoted a small patrimony to the maintenance of poor children in Como, his native place; of Cœlia Macrina, who founded a charity for one hundred at Terracina; Hadrian's, bounties to poor women; Antonine's loans of money to the poor at reduced rates of interest; the institutions dedicated to the support of girls by Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius; the private infirmaries for slaves; the military hospitals, certainly owed their existence to a humane feeling. Pliny is responsible for the statement that both in Greece and Rome the poor had mutual insurance societies which provided for their sick and infirm members. Tacitus expatiates on the generosity of the rich, who, on occasion of a catastrophe near Rome, threw open their houses and taxed their resources to relieve the suffering.⁸

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

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

The mischiefs of the oriental method were apparent before Christianity appeared, and its zealous adoption of them early awakened misgivings. The indiscriminate almsgiving, the elevation of poverty to the rank of a privilege, the glorification of self-impoverishment, the acceptance of feeling as a divine monitor, and of emotion as a heavenly instinct, the substitution of the worship of the heart for deference to reason, the loose compassion, the practical and professed communism – for some of the fathers maintained that all property was based on usurpation, that all men had a common right in the earth, and that none was entitled to hold wealth except as a trust for others – soon disclosed disastrous results. Against the evils that are fairly chargeable upon the wholesale measures of the imperial bounty, must be offset the equally grave, and in some respects, not dissimilar evils incident to the unprincipled practice of loving kindness on the part of the bishops and their flocks, the increase of the dependent, the encouragement of pauperism, the waste of wealth, the worse waste of humanity. National philanthropy in London and New York finds no more serious obstacle to its advance than the benevolence that is inculcated in the name of Christ, and by authority of the New Testament. It is the battle of science against sentiment.

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

The longing for spiritual satisfaction that stirred in the heart of the empire, found neither its source nor its gratification exclusively in the religion that afterwards became the professed faith of Rome. It slaked its thirst at older fountains. Such longings will, at need, open fountains of living water for their own supply. Passing through the valley of Baca they create a well, the streams whereof fill the pools. The smitten rock pours out its torrents. The hungry soul creates its harvest as it goes along, feeding itself by the way with food that seems to fall miraculously from the sky. It makes a religion if there be none at hand. A new heaven peopled with angels; a new earth full of providences come into being at its call. But in this emergency the religion was extant in the world, already venerable, already proved. It was the religion of Israel, with all that was necessary to attract attention and command reverence; a holy God, an immediate providence, a solemn history, a glorious prophecy, an inspiring hope, traditions, institutions, a temple, a priesthood, sacrifices, a code of laws, ceremonial and moral, poetry, learning, music, mystery, stately forms of men and women, judges, kings, heroes, martyrs, saints, a superb literature, legends of virtue, festivals of joy, visions of resurrection and judgment, precepts of righteousness, promises of peace, songs of victory and of sorrow, dreams of a heavenly kingdom to be won by obedience to divine law, tender lessons of charity, stern lessons of denial, fascinating attractions and yet more fascinating fears, gentle persuasions and awful menaces, calculated to lay hold on every mood, to thrill and to satisfy every human emotion. The religion of Israel lacked little but outward prestige of power and wealth to make it precisely what the time required; and in times of real earnestness the prestige of power and wealth is readily dispensed with. The unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers. Its very dogmatism, its proud exclusiveness and intolerance, were in its favor. Its haughty reserve assisted it; its superb disdain of other faiths, its boast of antiquity, its claim to a monopoly of the future of the race, exerted a weird spell over the dazed and decrepit minds of the superstitious, high and low. Its lofty belief in miracle and sign, fairly constrained the skeptical to bow the head.

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

If it be asked why Judaism, then, was not made the religion of the empire, instead of Christianity, which it hated with all the fervor of close relationship, the answer is at hand: Judaism laid no emphasis on its cosmopolitan features, and discouraged belief in the historical fulfilment of its own prophecy. The charge that it was a national religion, the religion of a race, it was at no pains to repel; on the contrary, it seems to have exaggerated this claim to distinction, standing on its dignity, despising the arts of propagandism and demanding the submission of other creeds. This attitude alone might have recommended the religion in some quarters, and would not have seriously embarrassed it in any, supposing it to have been loftily and worthily sustained. A graver cause of its unpopularity was its failure to lay stress on its Messianic idea. It would abate nothing of its monotheistic grandeur. Its God was the everlasting, the infinite, the formless, the invisible. The command to make of Him no image whatever, either animal or human, to associate Him with neither place nor time, was obeyed to the letter. Among a people extremely sensitive to grace of form and beauty of color, the Jews had no art; they set up no statue; they painted no picture; they allowed no emblem that could be worshipped. Their Holy Spirit was an influence; their Messiah was a distant hope; their kingdom of heaven was a dream. The Christians of both schools – the conservative and the liberal – thrust into the foreground the conceptions which their co-religionists kept in the shadow of anticipation. In their belief, prophecy was fulfilled. The Messiah had come; he had taken on human shape; he had passed through an earthly career; he had ascended in visible form to the skies; he sat there at the right hand of the Majesty on high; he was active in his care for his own, suffering and sorrowing on earth; he sent the Holy Spirit, the comforter and guide to his friends in their affliction; he was the immediate God; he heard and answered prayer; he pardoned sin; he opened the gates of heaven to believers. They did not scruple to make images of him; to represent him in emblems; to eke out their own rude art by adopting the art which the heathen had ceased to venerate, and, where they could, re-dedicating statues of Apollo and Jupiter to their Christ. They were eager to have legendary portraits accepted as faithful likenesses of their Lord. Fables were invented, like that of Veronica's napkin, to give currency to certain heads as the Christ's own image of himself miraculously imprinted on a cloth. They claimed to have seen him, in moments of ecstasy; they ascribed to his prompting, states of feeling, purposes and courses of action. By every means they created and deepened the impression that the Divinity they worshipped was a real God, and no intellectual abstraction.

This was the very thing the pagan world wanted – a personal Deity, Providence, Saviour. Through their acquiescence in this demand, other oriental faiths, without a tithe of Israel's grandeur – mythological, superstitious, sensual even – gained a popularity that Judaism could not attain. The strange Egyptian divinities drew many to their shrines. Three emperors – Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus – are said to have been devoted to the mysteries of Isis and Serapis. Juvenal describes Roman women as breaking the ice on the frozen Tiber, at the dawn of day, and plunging thrice into the stream of purification; as painfully dragging themselves on bleeding knees around the field of Tarquin; as projecting pilgrimages to Egypt, expeditions in search of the holy water required at the shrine of the goddess. The Persian Mithras had his throngs of adoring devotees. The prominence given at this period to the statues of Mithras, the existence of temples to Isis and Serapis, attest the power that these divinities exerted over the imagination of the Italian people. These people demanded deities human in shape and attributes. So clamorous were they for images, that they would consecrate them at any cost of decency. The emperor Augustus was deified. His statue on the public square, his insignia on a banner, his name on a shield excited veneration. The noblest religion without a human centre was less prized than the ignoblest with one, and the faith of Israel was compelled to yield to the degrading fascinations of the Bona Dea.

The Christian Jews, with their Messiah, took the popular desire at its best, and satisfied it. The image they presented, though to the mind's eye only, was so much more gracious than the loveliest that eastern or western art furnished that its acceptance was assured. Early in the fourth century the impression made was too deep to be overlooked by the controllers of public opinion. The politic Constantine, seeking a spiritual ally, and finding none among the faiths of his own land, called in the Nazarene to aid him in establishing an empire over the souls of his subjects. Christ was king in fact before he was formally crowned.

But the true history of his reign began with the ceremony of his coronation; the history of Christianity as a distinct religion commences with the so-called "conversion" of Constantine. Latin Christianity was the first, some think the consummate, in fact the only, Christianity. The adoption of the religion as the State Church, was for it a new creation. From that moment, began the efforts to complete its dogmatical system by a succession of councils, the first one, that of Nicæa, being held A. D. 325, about twelve years after the imperial "conversion;" that of Sardica – ecclesiastically of great importance – in 347, and the councils of Arles and of Milan in 352.

Once seated on a throne of power, a crown on his head, a sceptre in his hand, clothed with authority, protected by armies, girded with law, instigator of policies, chief of ceremonies, the Christ in heaven rapidly completed the structure whereof Constantine had placed the corner-stone. The materials he gathered right and left, wherever they were to be found. Right of supremacy made them his. Judaism gave temple, and synagogue, the organization of its priesthood, the distinction between priest and layman, its worship, music, scripture, litany, sentiment and usage of prayer, its ascetic spirit, its doctrines of resurrection and judgment, its code of righteousness, its altar forms, its history, and its prophecy. Paganism was laid under contribution for its military spirit. The "stations" of the Passion, were copied from army usage, so were its practical temper, its regard for precedent law and policy, its rules of obedience, its distrust of speculation, its horror of schism, its passion for unity, its skill in diplomacy, its solid respect for authority. Quietly, without leave asked, or apology offered, the insignia of the old faiths were transferred to the new. The title of Sovereign Pontifex, or bridgemaker – given originally to the chief of the guild of mechanics, passed along from the period of the earliest kings through persons of consular dignity, and finally bestowed on the Roman emperors; a title given at first, in commemoration of the pons Janicularis, which joined the city to the highest of the surrounding hills – was conferred on the bishops or popes whose office it was to bridge over the gulf between the earth and the celestial mountains. The statues of Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, Orpheus, did duty for the Christ. The Thames river god officiates at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Peter holds the keys of Janus. Moses wears the horns of Jove. Ceres, Cybele, Demeter, assume new names as "Queen of Heaven," "Star of the Sea," "Maria Illuminatrix;" Dionysius is St. Denis; Cosmos is St. Cosmo; Pluto and Proserpine resign their seats in the hall of final judgment, to the Christ and his mother. The Parcæ depute one of their number, Lachesis, the disposer of lots, to set the stamp of destiny upon the deaths of Christian believers. The aura placida of the poets, the gentle breeze, is personified as Aura and Placida. The perpetua felicitas of the devotee becomes a lovely presence in the forms of St. Perpetua and St. Felicitas, guardian angels of the pious soul. No relic of Paganism was permitted to remain in its casket. The depositories were all ransacked. The shadowy hands of Egyptian priests placed the urn of holy water at the porch of the basilica, which stood ready to be converted into a temple. Priests of the most ancient faiths of Palestine, Assyria, Babylon, Thebes, Persia, were permitted to erect the altar at the point where the transverse beam of the cross meets the main stem. The hands that constructed the temple in cruciform shape had long become too attenuated to cast the faintest shadow. There Devaki with the infant Crishna, Maya with the babe Boodha, Juno with the child Mars, represent Mary with Jesus in her arms. Coarse emblems are not rejected; the Assyrian dove is a tender symbol of the Holy Ghost. The rag bags and toy boxes were explored. A bauble which the Roman school-boy had thrown away was picked up and called an "agnus dei." The musty wardrobes of forgotten hierarchies furnished costumes for the officers of the new prince. Alb and chasuble recalled the fashions of Numa's day. The cast off purple habits and shoes of pagan emperors beautified the august persons of christian Popes. The cardinal must be contented with the robes once worn by senators. Zoroaster bound about the monks the girdle he invented as a protection against evil spirits, and clothed them in the frocks he had found convenient for his ritual. The Pope thrust out his foot to be kissed, as Caligula, Heliogabalus, and Julius Cæsar had thrust out theirs. Nothing came amiss to the faith that was to discharge henceforth the offices of spiritual impression. Stoles, veils, croziers, were all in requisition without too close scrutiny of their antecedents. A complete investigation of this subject will probably reveal the fact that Christianity owes its entire wardrobe, ecclesiastical, symbolical, dogmatical, to the religions that preceded it. The point of difficulty to decide is in what respect Christianity differs from the elder faiths. This is the next task its apologists have to perform.

But this question does not concern us here. Having indicated the source whence the religion proceeded, and the process by which the successive stages in its development were reached, we have done all that was purposed. We have tried to make it clear that the Messianic conception from which it started, and from which its life was derived at each period of its growth, presided over its destiny in the western world, and introduced it to the place of honor it was afterwards called to fill.

What that place was and how the Church filled it has been told in a multitude of historical books. The history of Christianity is not the story of a developing idea, but a record of the achievements of an idea developed, organized, instituted. From the date of the established religion, the writings of the New Testament became the literature of the earliest period. In the western world the mind of Christendom expanded to deeper and wider thoughts, a new literature was originated of great richness, affluence and beauty, and gave expression to ideas which, in the primitive period could not have been formed. The Greek and Latin Fathers, the schoolmen, the catholic theologians, Italian, Spanish, French, the German mystical writers, the Protestant divines and preachers, have produced writings unsurpassed in intellectual strength and spiritual discernment. The possibilities of speculation have been exhausted; the abysses of reflection have been sounded; the heights of meditation have been scaled. The christian idea of salvation has been applied to every phase of human experience, and to every problem of social life. The rudimental conceptions have been distanced; the original limitations have been overpassed. Rites have been charged with new significance, symbols loaded with new meanings, doctrines interpreted in new senses. Christianity as the modern world knows it, is a new creation. The name of Messiah is spoken, but with feelings unknown to the Jews of the first and second century. The New Testament is regarded as a store house of germs, a magazine of texts to be interpreted by the light of the full orbed spirit, and unfolded to meet the needs of an older world. The cord which connected the religion with the mother faith of Israel was broken and the faith entered on an independent existence. To the cradle succeeds the cathedral.