fwy^i ! i i isiw » .^>^'^p ¥ppg^^ "•'f Cornell University Library BS2361 .F24 1885 Early days of Christianity. olln 3 1924 029 302 408 The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029302408 The Early Days OF Christianity. BY FEEDEEIC W. FAEEAE, D.D., F.E.S. ; LATE FELLOW OF TBIITITT COLLEGE, CAUBBIDGB; AECHSEACOH AUS CANON OF WESTMINBTEB ; AND CHAFLAIN IV 0SSINAI17 TO THE QT7EEN. POPULAR EDITION. CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK <£• MELBOURNE. 1885. [ALL BISHTS ItESEBTED,] ROBERT BROWNING, Esq., ADIHOR OF "a death IN THE DESEET," JJSD OF MAHT OTHER POEMS OF THE DEEPEST INTEREST TO ALL STUDENTS OF SORIPTDEE, I JBeiffcttte THIS VOLUME WITH SINCERE AVMIBATIoN AND ESTEEM. PREFACE. I COMPLETE in this volume the work which has absorbed such leisure aa could be spared from many and onerous duties during the last twelve years. My object has been to furnish English readers with a com- panion, partly historic and partly expository, to the whole of the New Testament. By attention to the minutest details of the original, by availing myself to the best of my power of the results of modem criticism, by trying to concentrate upon the writings of the Apostlea and Evangelists such light as may be derived from Jewish, Pagan, or Christian sources, I have endeavoured to fulfil my ordination vow and to show diligence in such studies as help to the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. The " Life of Christ " was intended mainly as a com- mentary upon the Gospels. It was written in such a form as should reproduce whatever I had been able to leam from the close examination of every word which they contain, and should at the same time set forth the living reality of the scenes recorded. In the " Life of St. Paul " I wished to incorporate the details of the Acts of the Apostles with such biographical incidents as can be derived from the Epistles of St. Paul ; and to take the reader through the Epistles themselves in a way which might enable him, with keener interest, to judge of their separate purpose and peculiarities by grasping the circumstances under which each of them was written. The present volumes are an attempt to set forth, in their distinctive characteristics, the work and the writings of St. Peter, St. James, St. Jude, St. John, and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. If my efibrt has been in any degree successful, the reader should carry away from these pages some con- ception of the varieties of religious thought which prevailed in the schools of Jerusalem and of Alexandria, and also of those phases of theology which are represented by the writings of the two greatest of the twelve Apostles. VI PREFACE. In carrying out this design I have gone, almost verse by verse, through the seven Catholic Epistles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Revelation of St. John — explaining their special difficulties, and developing their general characteristics. Among many Christians there is a singular ignorance of the Books of Scripture as a whole. With a wide knowledge of particular texts, there is a strange lack of familiarity with the bearings of each separate Gospel and Epistle. I have hoped that by considering each book in connexion with all that we can learn of its author, and of the circumstances under which it was written, I might perhaps contribute to the intelligent study of Holy Writ. There may be some truth in the old motto, Bonus textuarius bonus theohgus ; but he whose knowledge is confined to " texts," and who has never studied them, first with their context, then as forming fragments of entire books, and lastly ia their relation to the whole of Scripture, incurs the risk of turning theology into an erroneous and artificial system. It is thus that the Bible has been misinterpreted by substituting words for things ; by making the dead letter an instrument wherewith to murder the living spirit ; and by reading into Scripture, a multitude of meanings which it was never intended to express. Words, like the chameleon, change their colour with their surroundings. The very same word may in dififerent ages involve almost opposite connota- tions. The vague and difiering notions attached to the same term have been the most fruitful sources of theological bitterness, and of the internecine opposition of contending sects. The abuse of sacred phrases has been the cause, in age after age, of incredible misery and mischief. Texts have been perverted to sharpen the sword of the tyrant and to strengthen the rod of the oppressor — ^to kindle the fagot . ofi the Inquisitor and to rivet the fetters of the slave. The terrible w^wngs which have been inflicted upon mankind in their name have been due exclusively to their isolation and perversion. The remedy for these deadly evils would have been found in the due study and compre- hension of Scripture as a whole. The Bible does not all lie at a dead level of homogeneity and uniformity. It is a progressive revelation. Its many-coloured wisdom was made known " fragmentarily and multi- fariously " — in many parts and in many maimers. In the endeavour to give a clearer conception of the books here considered I have followed such different methods as each particular passage seemed to require. I have sometimes furnished a very PREFACE. Vll close and literal translation j sometimes a free paraphrase ; some- times a rapid abstract; sometimes a running commentary. Avoiding all parade of learned references, I have thought that the reader would generally prefer the brief expression of a definite opinion to the reiteration of many bewildering theories. Neither in this, nor in the previous volumes, h'-^.'e T wilfully or consciously avoided a single difficulty. A passiiig sentence often expresses a conclusion which has only been formed after the study of long and tedious monographs. In the foot-notes especially I have compressed into the smallest possible space what seemed to be most immediately valuable for the illustration of particular words or allusions. In the choice of readings I have "exercised an independent judgment. If my choice coincides in most instances with that of the Revisers of the New Testament, this has only arisen from the fact that I have been guided by the same principles as they were. This volume, like the " Life of Christ " and the " Life of St. Paul," was written before the readings adopted by the Revisers were known, and without the assis- tance which I should otherwise have derived from their invaluable labours. * The purpose which I have had in view has been, I trust, in itself a worthy one, however much I may have failed in its execution. A living writer of eminence has spoken of his works in terms which, in very humble measure, I would fain apply to my own. " I have made," said Cardinal Newman — ^in a speech delivered in 1879 — "many mis- takes. I have nothing of that high perfection which belongs to the writrags of the saints, namely, that error cannot be found in them. But what I trust I may claim throughout all I have written is this — an honest intention ; an absence of personal ends ; a temper of obedience ; a willingness to be corrected; a dread of error; a desire to serve the Holy Church; and" (though this is perhaps more than I have any right to say) "through the Divine mercy a fair measure of success." F. W. FARRAE. St. Margaret's Eectory, TFestmimier, June 1th, 1882. * I take this opportunity of thanking the Rev. John de Soyres and Mr. W. K. Brown for the assistance which they have rendered in preparing this hook for the press. TABLE OF CONTENTS. 1000^ I. THE WORLD. CHAPTER I. MORA.L CONDITION OP THE WORLD. PAflS Degradations wMcli accompaiiled tlie Decadence of FagauiBm — The Slaves — The Eich and Nohle — The JEmperor — Fatal Degeneracy — Grreeklings — Literature, Art, and Drama — The Senate — Scepticism and Superstition— Stoic Virtue — The Holy Joy of Christiaiis . 1 CHAPTER n. THE UISE OF THE AKTICHBIST. The Nemesis of Absolutism— Reign of Nero — Christians and the Roman Government — St. Paul and the Empire — Horrors of Cffisarism — Tlie Palace of the Antichrist — Agrippina the Younger — Infancy of Nero — Evil Auguries — Intrigues of Agrippina — Her Marriage with Claudius — Her Career as Empress — Her Plots to Advance her Son— Her Crimes — Her Peril— ^Murder of Claudius^Accession of Nero 10 CHAPTER in. THE FEATTTRES OF THE AHTICHItlST. Successful Gruilt— Fresh Crimes — The *' Golden Qtimqu&nmwm " — Polhes of Nero — Threats of Agrippina — Jealousy of Britannicus— Murder of Britannicus — Nero estranged from Agrippina— Influence of Poppsea — Plot to Murder Agrippina — Burrus and Seneca — Murder of Agrippina — A Tormented Conscience — The Depths of Satan .... 20 CHAPTER IV, THE BURNING OF ROME AND THE PIBST PERSECDTION. The Era of Martyrdom— The Fire of Rome— "Was Nero Guilty P^Devastation of the City — Confusion and Agony — The Golden House — Nero Suspected— The Christiana Accused — Strangeness of this Circumstance — Tiicitus — Popular Feeling against the Christians — Secret Jewish Suggestions— Poppsea a Proselyte — Incendiarism attributed to Christians — JEsthetic Cruelty — A Huge Multitiide — Dreadful Forms of Martyrdom—Mar t^rs on the Stage— The Antichrist— Retribution— Awful Omens — The Revolt of Vindex — Suicide of Nero — Expectation of his Retui'n 29 Book M. ST. PETER AND THE CHURCH OATHOLIO. CHAPTER V. WRITINGS OP THE APOSTLES AND EARLY CHRISTIANS. innflls of the Church— End of the Acts — Obscurity of Details— Little known about tne Apostles — St. Andrew — St. Bartholomew — St. Matthew — St. Thomas — St. James the Less — St. Simon Zelotes— Judas — ^Late and Scanty Records — "Writings of the Great A-poatles- Invaluable as illustrating different Phases of Christian Thought — They Explain the opposite Tendencies of Heretical Development— The Revelation— The CONTENTS. IX •, PAGB Epistle to the Hebrews— The Seven Catholic Epistles— Thp Epistle of St. Jade— The Epistle of St. James— The Epistles of St. Peter— Catholicity of St. Peter— The Three Epistles of St. John— Genuineness of these Writingrs- Contrasts between dif- ferent Apostles — ^Difference between St. Paul and St. John- Superiority of the New Testament to the Writings of the Apostolic Fathers — The Epistle of St. Clemens— Its Theological and Intellectual 'Weafeiess — The Epistle of Barnabas — Its exaggerated Faulinism— Its Extravagant Exegesis — The Christian Church was not ideally Pure — Yet its Chief Glory was in the Holiness of its Standard 4& CHAPTER TI ST. PETEB. Outline of hia early Life— Events recorded in the Acts— Complete Uncertainty as to his Subsequent Career— Legends— Domine guo vodw/- The Legends embem^ed and Doubtful- Legend about Simon Magus— Was Peter Bishop of Bome P— Improbability of the Legend about his Crucifixion head downwards— His Martyrdom — Uia Visit to Rome 60 CHAPTER VII. SPECIAL FEATUBES OF THE FIEST EPISTLE OP ST. PETER. Date of the Epistle — ^Its certain Genuineness— Style of the Epistle — A ChriBtian Treatise — Natural Allusions to Events in the Gospels — Vivid Expressions— Besemblonce to the Speeches in the Acts— Allusions to the Law— Besembhinces to St. Paul and St. James — Plasticity of St. Peter's Nature— Struggle aiter Unity-— Originality — His View of Bedemption— His View of Faith —His Views u^n Begenerat.on and Baptism — Not Transcendental but Practical — Christ's Descent into Hades — Great Importance of the Doctrine— Attempts to Explain it away — Eeference to the Epistle to the Gralatians — Addressed to both. Jews and Gentiles — Crisis at which it was Composed — A Time of Persecution— Keynote of the Letter— Analysis 67 CHAPTEE Vin. the FIBST epistle of ST. PETEB. Title which he Adopts — Address — Provinces of Asia— Thanks^ving — Exhortation to Hope — SpeclaJ Appeals— Duty of Blameless Living— Duty of Civil Obedience — Humble Sub- mission—Address to Servants— To Christian Wives— Exhortation to Love and Unity- Christ Preaching to the Spirits in Prison — Obvious Import of the Passage — Buthless- ness of Commentators — The approaching End— Address to Elders — Conclusion . , 83 CHAPTER IX, PECULIARITIES OF THE SECOND EPISTLE. Overpositiveness in the Attack and Defence of its Genuineness— Its Canonicity — Exaggera- tion of the Arguments urged in its Favour — Extreme Weakness of external Evidence — Tardy Acceptance of the Epistle— Views of St. Jerome, &c. — Cessation of Criticism — The Unity of its Structure— Outline of the Letter — Internal Evidence-^Besemblances to First Epistle — Difference of'Sl^le — Peculiarity of its Expressions — Difference in general Form of Thought— Irrelevant Arguments about the Style— Marked Variations — Dr. Abbott's Proof of the Besemblance to Josephus — Could Josephus have Bead it ? — Beference to the Second Advent— What may be Urged against these Difficulties — Priority of St. Judo— Extraordinary Belation to St, Jude— Method of Dealing with the stranger Phenomena of St. Jude's Epistle — Possible Counter-considerations— Allusion to the Transfiguration— Ancientness of the Epistle — Superiority of the. Epistle to the Post-Apostolic Writings— The Thoughts may have been Sanctioned and Adopted by St. Peter .... 87 CHAPTEB X. THE SECOND EPISTLE OF ST. PETEB. Reasons for offering a Literal Translation of the Epistle— Translation and Notes- Abrupt Conclusion 116 CHAPTEB XI. THE EPISTLE OP ST. JUDE. Its Authenticity — Who was the Author ?— Jude, the Brother of James— Not an Apostle— One of the Brethren of the Lord— Why he does not use this Title— Why he Calls him- self " Brother of James "—Story of his Grandchildren— Circumstances which may have CONTENTS. FAGS called forth the Epistle— Cormption ot Morals— Who ware the Offenders thus De- nounced ?— Eesemhlanoes to Second Epistle of St. Peter— Translation and Notes- Style of Greet— Simplicity of Structure — Fondness for Apocryphal Allusions — Methods of Dealing with these Peculiarities— " Yerbal Dictation "— Eabbinic Legends— Corrupt, Gnosticising Sects 122 ISooii lit. APOLLOS, ALEXANDRIAN CHRISTIANITY, AND THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. CHAPTER Xn. JUDAISM, THE SEPTUA&INT, ETC, Unity of Christian Faith— Diversity in Unity— Necessity and Blessing of the Diversity— IndividuaUty of the. Sacred "Writers— Phases of Christian 'Siu.ih—Ale!amcbvm Ch/tis- tiamiy — The Jews and Grreek Philosophy — Hebraism and Hellenism — Glories of Alexan- dria — Prosperity of the Jews in Alexandria — The Diapleuston — Favour shown the Jews by the Ptolemies— The Septuagint — Delight of the Hellenists — Anger of the Hebraists — Effects of Judaism — Bias of the Translators — Harmless Variations from the Hebrew — Hagadoth — ^Avoidance of Anthropomorphism and Anthropopathy — Deliberate Manipula- tion of the Original — ^Aristobulus — The Wisdom of Solomon — Semi-Ethnic Jewish Literature— Philo not wholly Original .... 130 CHAPTEE Xni, PHILO AHD THE DOOTKIHE OF THE LOdOS. Family lof Alexander the Alabarch — Life of Philo — Classification of his Works — Those tl^t bear on the Creation — On Abraham — ^Allegorising Fancies — The Life of Moses — Arbitrary Exegesis — Meanings of the word Logos — Personification of the Logos — The High Priest — A Cupbearer — Other Comparisons — Vague Outlines of the Conception- Contrast with St. John 146 CHAPTEE XrV. PHILONISM — ALLEGOET — THE CATECHETICAL SCHOOL. Influence of Philo on the Sacred Writers — Sapiental Literature of Alexandria — ^Defects of Philonism — The School of St. Mark — Motto of the Alexandrian School — Allegory applied to the Old Testament— The Pariies of the Kabbalists— History of Allegory in the Alexandrian School— Allegory in the Western Church IK CHAPTEE XY. AUTHORSHIP AND STYLE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBEEWS. Continuity of Scripture— Manifoldness of Wisdom— Ethnic Inspiration— the Epistle ■ Alexandrian — External Evidence — Summary — Superficial Custom — ^Misuse of Autho- rities — Later Doubts and Hesitations — Indolent Custom — Phrases common to the Author with .St. Paul— Differences of Style not Explicable — The Epistle not a Translation — Fondness of the Writer for Sonorous Amplifioations . . . . 157 CHAPTEE XVI. THEOLOGT OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBEEWS. DifEerence from the Theological Conceptions of St. Paul— Three Cardinal Topics— "The People" — Christianity and Judaism— Alexandrianism of the Writer— Prominence of the Jews — Method of treating Scripture— Indebtedness to Philo — Particular Expres- sions— "the Cutter-Word" — Stern Passages — Melchizedek-Priesthood ot Christ- Superiority to Philo — Fundamental Alexandrianism — Judaism not regarded as a Law but as a System of Worship—" The Pattern shown thee in the Mount " — Effectiveness of the Argument— A PrsB-existent Ideal— The World of Ideas — View of Hope Faith in this Epistle and in St. Paul— Eighteousness- Chkistologt— Eedemption Pro- minence given to Pkiesthood and Saceifice— Peculiar Sentences- The Author could not have been St. Paul jgg CONTENTS. XX CHAPTEB XVTL WHO WBOTE THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS P rAGB Absence of Qreetiug— Certainties about the Writer— by some known Friend of St. Paul- Yet not by Aqttila — Nor by Titus— Nor by Silas— Nor by St. Barnabas- Norby St- Clemens of Eome— Nor by St. Majre- Nor by St. Luke— Strong Probability tbat the Writer was Apollos — This would not necessarily be known to tbe Gburch ot Alexandria^Suggested by Luther— Grenerally and increasingly Accepted — Date of the Epistle — ^Allusion to Timothy— Addressed to Jewish Christians— Not Addressed to the Church of Jerusalem — Nor to Corinth— Nor to Alexandria— Hay have been Addressed to Borne — or to Ephesus— ** They of Italy "—Apollos 183 CHAPTEB XVin. THE EPISTLE TO THE HERBEWS. Section I. — The Swpenority of Christ — Comparison between Judaism and Christianity — Outline of the ^isUe — Its Keynotes — Striking Opening — Christ Superior to Angela — Peculiar Method of Scriptural Argument— Use of Quotations — An Admitted Method — Partial Change of View— The Style of Argument less important to us , . .191 Section II. — A Solemn Ea;7iortati(m.— Translation and Notes — Christ Superior to Moses — Parallelism of Structure— Appeal l^ Section III. — The Righ Priesthood of Christ. — ^Transitional E^ortation— Qualifications of High Priesthood— Sketch of the great Argument of the Epistle— Translation and Notes — Explanation of DifHculties respecting the Nature of Clmst— Digression — Post- Baptismal Sin^Iadefectibility of Grace — Calvinistic View of the Passage — Arminian View — ^Neither View Tenable — Obvious Limitations of the Meaning of the Passage — ** Near a Curse " — " Por Burning " — ^A Better Hope 2d — Last Discourses of Christ 546 Section in.— T?w Source of Sonship. — "Abide in Him "—Denial of Christ— " Testing the Spirits" — Confessing " Christ come in the Pleah " — Interesting Variation of Reading — What is meant by " Severing Jesus "-Argument for the Genuineness of the Reading- TheRecogDitionof God— "GodisLove" — Summary and Gathering up of the leading Conceptions 5H Secxion TV.—Asswri Caeiarem imitentur." (Cf. Suet. Jid. 88 ; Tib. 13, 58 ; Aug. 89 ; CaZiff 33 ; Ve^. 23 Domit. 13). Lucan, vli. 456 ; Philo, Leg. ad Oaium passim ; Dion Cass. Ixiii. 5, 20 : Martial, passim ; Tert. Apol. 33, 34 ; Boissier, La Rd. Bomaine, i. 122— 20S. 8 The degeneracy is specially traceable in thejr literature from the iaysi of PlautiM onwards, FAMILY LIFE. life among the Romans had once been a sacred thing, and for 620 years divorce had been unknown among them.' Under the Empire marriage had come to be regarded with disfavour and disdain." "Women, as Seneca says, married in order to be divorced, and were divorced in order to marry ; and noble Roman matrons counted the years not by the Consuls, but by their discarded or discarding husbands.' To have a family was regarded as a misfortune, because the childless were courted with extraordinary assiduity by crowds of fortune-hunters.* When there were children in a famUy, their education was left to be begun under the tutelage of those slaves who were otherwise the most decrepit and useless,' and was carried on, with results too fatally obvious, by supple, accomplished, and abandoned Greeklings.' But, indeed, no system of education could have eradicated the influence of the domestic circle. No care' could have prevented the sons and daughters of a wealthy family from catching the contagion of the vices of which they saw in their parents a constant and unblushing example.' Literature and art were infected with the prevalent degradation. Poetry sank in great measure into exaggerated satire, hollow declamar tion, or frivolous epigrams. Art was partly corrupted by the fondness for glare, expensiveness, and size,' and partly sank into miserable triviality, or immoral prettinesses,'" such as those which decorated the walls of Pompeii in the first century, and the Pare aux Cerfs in the eighteenth. Greek statues of the days of Phidias were ruthlessly decapitated, that their heads might be replaced by the scowling or imbe- cile features of a Gains or a Claudius. Nero, professing to be a con- noisseur, thought that he improved the Alexander of Lysimachus by gilding it from head to foot. Eloquence, deprived of every legitimate aim, and used almost solely for purposes of insincere display, was tempted to supply the lack of genuine fire by sonorous euphony and ' The first Roman recorded to have divorced his wife was Sp. Oarviliua Kuga, B.C. 234 (Dionys. ii. 25 ; Aul. Gell. xvii. 21). 2 Hor. Od. iii. 6, 17. "Baraque in hoc aevo quae velit esse parens," Ov. Jfrnc. 15. Hence the Lex Fapia Poppaea, the Jus trium Uberorum, etc. ' Suet. Oct. 34 ; Aul. Gell. i. 6. See Champagny, Les Chars, i. 258, seg. ' "Non consulum numero sed maritorum annos sues computant," Sen. De Benef. iii. 16; "Eepudium jam votiun erat, et quasi matrimonii fructus," Tert. Apol. 6; "Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vo(»tur," Tao. Germ .19. Comp. Suet. CaXig. 34. * Tac. Oerm. 20 ; Ann. xiii. 52 ; PUn. H. N. xiv. promm ; Sen. ad Marc. Consol, 19 ; Plin. Spp. iv. 16 ; Jut. Sat. xU. 114, seq. 6 Plut. De Lib. Educ « Juv. viL 187, 219. 1 Jut. Sai. xIt. 8 Jut. Sat. xiv. passim; Tao. De Oral. 28, 29; Quinot. i. 2; Sen. De Ira, ii. 22; Ep. 95. ' It was the age of Colossi (Plin. H. N. xxxiv. 7 ; Mart. Ep. i. 71, viii. 44 ; Stat, Sylv. i. 1, etc.). 10 ■Pioiroypo^ia. Cic. Att. XV. 16 ; Plin. xxxv. 37. See Champagny, Les Clsours, iv. 138, who refers to VitruT. Tii. 5; Propert. jj, 5; PUn. S. N. xiv. 22, aad xsxv. 10 (the painter Arellius, etc.). 6 THE EAELY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. theabrical affectation. A training in rhetoric was now understood to be a training in the art of emphasis and verbiage, which was rarely used for any loftier purpose than to make sycophancy plausible, or to embellish sophistry with speciousness.^ The Drama, even in Horace's days, had degenerated into a vehicle for the exhibition of scenic splendour or inge- nious machinery. Dignity, wit, pathos, were no longer expected on the stage, for the dramatist was eclipsed by the swordsman or the rope- dancer.^ The actors who absorbed the greatest part of popular favour were pantomimists, whose insolent prosperity was generally in direct proportion to the infamy of their character.' And while the shameless- ness of the theatre corrupted the purity of all classes from the earliest age,^ the hearts of the multitude were made hard as the nether millstone with brutal insensibility, by the fury of the circus, the atrocities of the amphitheatre, and the cruel orgies of the games.° Augustus, in the document annexed to his will, mentioned that he had exhibited 8,000 gladiators and 3,510 wild beasts. The old warlike spirit of the Romans was dead among the gilded youth of families in which distinction of any kiad was certain to bring down upon its most prominent members the murderous suspicion of irresponsible despots. The spirit which had once led the Domitii and the Fabii "to drink delight of battle with their peers " on the plains of Gaul and in the forests of Germany, was now satiated by gazing on criminals fighting for dear life with bears and tigers, or upon bands of gladiators who hacked each other to pieces on the encrimsoned sand.° The languid enervation of the delicate and dis- solute aristocrat could only be amused by magnificence and stimulated by grossness or by blood.' Thus the gracious illusions by which true Art has ever aimed at purging the passions of terror and pity, were ex- tinguished by the realism of tragedies ignobly horrible, and comedies intolerably base. Two phrases sum up the characteristics of Roman ' Tac. Dial. 36—41 ; Ann. xv. 71 ; Sen. Ep. ovi. 12 ; Petron. Satyi: i. ; Dion Cass. Ux. 20. 2 Juv. xiv. 250; Suet. Nero, 11; Galb. 6. 3 Mnester {Tac. Ann. xi. 4, 36) ; Paris (Juv. vi. 87, vii. 88) ; Aliturus (Jos. Vit. 3) ; Pylades (Zosim. i. 6) ; Bathyllus (Dion Cass. liv. 17 ; Tac. Aim. i. 54). ■* Isidor. xviii. 39. 5 "Mera homicidia sunt," Sen. Ep. vii. 2; "Nihil est nobis . . . cum insanii ciroi, cum impudioitia tlieatri, cum atrocitate arenae, cum vanitate xysti," Tert. Apol. 38. Cicero inclined to the prohibition of games which imperilled life {De Legg. ii. 15), and Seneca (I.e.) expressed his compassionate disapproval, and exposed the falsehood and Sophism of the plea that after all, the sufferers were only criminals. Yet in the days of Claudius the number of those thus butchered was so great that the statue of Augustus had to be moved that it might not constantly be covered with a veil (Dion Cass. Ix. 13, who in the same chapter mentions a lion that had been trained to devour men). In Claudius's sham sea-fight we are told that the incredible number of 19,000 men fought each other (Tac. Ann. xii. 56). Titus, the "darling of the human race," in one day brought into the theatre 5,000 wild beasts (Suet. Tit. 7), and butchered thousands of Jews in the games at Berytus. In Trajan's games (Dion Cass. Ixviii. 15) 11,000 animals and 10,000 men had to fight. « Suet. Glaud. 14, 21, 34 ; Ifer. 12 ; Calig. 35 ; Tac. Ann. xiii. 49 ; Plin. Pancg. 33, ? Tac. Ann. xv. 32. THE SENATE. 7 civilisation in the days of the Empire — heartless cruelty, and unfathom- able corruption.^ i If there had been a refuge anywhere for the sentiments of outraged virtue and outraged humanity, we might have hoped to find it in the Senate, the members of which were heirs of so many noble and aufstere traditions. But — even in the days of Tiberius — the Senate, as Tacitus tells us, had rushed headlong into the most servile flattery,^ and this would not have been possible if its members had not been tainted by the prevalent deterioration. It was before the once grave and pure- minded Senators of Rome — the greatness of whose state was founded on the sanctity of family relationships — that the Censor Metellus had de- clared in A.u.c. 602, without one dissentient murmur, that marriage could only be regarded as an intolerable necessity.' Before that same Senate, at an earlier period, a leading Consular had not scrupled to assert that there was scarcely one among them all who had not ordered one or more of his own infant children to be exposed to death.* In the hearing of that same Senate in a.d. 59, not long before St. Paul wrote his letter to Philemon, 0. Cassius Longinus had gravely argued that the only security for the life of masters was to put into execution the san- guinary Silanian law, which enacted that, if a master was murdered, every one of his slaves, however numerous, however notoriously inno- cent, should be indiscriminately massacred.^ It was the Senators of Rome who thronged forth to meet with adoring congratulations the miserable youth who came to them with his hands reeking with the blood of matricide.* They offered thanksgivings to the gods for his worst cruelties,' and obediently voted Divine honours to the dead infant, four months old, of the wife whom he afterwards killed with a brutal kick.* And what was the religion of a period which needed the sanctions and consolations of religion more deeply than any age since the world began ? It is certain that the old Paganism was — except in country places — practically dead. The very fact that it was necessary to * Eph. iv. 19 ; 2 Cor. vii. 10. Merivale, vi. 452 ; Champagny, Les Cesars, iv. 161, teq. Seneca, describing the age in the tragedy of Octavia, says : — " Saeculo premimur gravl Quo scelera regnant, saevit impietas furens," etc. —Oct. 379—437. ' Tac. Arm. iii. 65, vi. 2, xiv. 12, 13, etc. » Comp. Tac. Ann. ii. 37, 38, iii. 34, 35, xv. 19 ; Aul. Gell. N.A.i.6; Liv. Epit. 59. * This abandonment of children was a normal practice (Ter. Seaut. W. 1, 37 ; Ovid, Amor. u. 14 ; Suet. Oalig. 5 ; Oct. 6n ; Juv. Sat. vi. 592 ; Plin. i>. iv. 15 [comp. ii. 20] ; Sen. ad Mareiam, 19 ; Controv. x. 6). Augustine {De Civ. Dei, iv. 11) tells \is that there was a goddess Levama, so called "quia levat infantes ; " if the father did not take the new-bom child in his arms, it was exposed (Tac. Hi^t. v. 5 ; Germ. 19 ; Tert. Apol. 9 ; Ad Nait. 15 ; Minuc. Fel. Octav. xxx. 31 ; Stobaen's Flo^-U. Ixxv. 15 ; Epictet. i. 23 j Paulus, Dig. xxv. 3, etc. And see Denis, Idies mm-ales dans VAntiquite, ii, 203). = Tac. Ann. xiv. 43, 44 ; v. supra, p. 2. 5 Tac. Ann. xiv. 13, " festo cultu Senatum," ' "Quotiens fugas et caedes jussit princeps, totiens grates Deis actas," Tac. Ann xiv. 64. * Tac. Ann. xvi. 6 ; Suet. Ner. 25 ; Dion Cass. Ixii. 27. THE EARLY DAVS OF CUKI5TIAXITY. prop it up by the buttress of political raterference shows how hollow and ruinous the structure of classic Polytheism had become.^ The decrees and reforms of Claudius were not likely to reassure the faith of an age which had witnessed in contemptuous silence, or with frantic adulation, the assumption by Gaius of the attributes of deity after deity, had tolerated his insults against their sublimest objects of worship, and encouraged his claim to a living apotheosis.^ The upper classes were " destitute of faith, yet terrified at scepticism." They had long learnt to treat the current mythology as a mass of worthless fables, scarcely amusing enough for even a schoolboy's laughter,' but they were the ready dupes of every wandering quack who chose to assume the character of a maihematicus or a mage.^ Their oflBcial religion was a decrepit Theogony ; their real religion was a vague and credulous fatalism, which disbelieved in the existence of the gods, or held with Epicurus that they were careless of mankind.* The mass of the populace either accorded to the old beliefs a nominal adherence which saved them the ti-ouble of giving any thought to the matter,^ and reduced their creed and their morals to a survival of national habits ; or else they plunged with eager curiosity into the crowd of foreign cults' — among which a distorted Judaism took its place' — such as made the Romans familiar with strange names like Sabazius and Anchialus, Agdistis, Isis, and the Syrian goddess.' All men joined in the confession that " the oracles were dumb." It hardly needed the waU of mingled lamentations as of departing deities which swept over the astonished crew of the vessel off Palodes to assure the world that the reign of the gods of Hellas was over — that " Great Pan was dead." i" Such are the scenes which we must witness, such are the sentiments with which we must become famUiar, the moment that we turn away 1 Suet. Tib. 36. ' Suet. Calig, 51. See Mart. Ep. v. 8, where he talks of the " edict of our Lord and God," i.e., of Domitian ; and vii. 60, where he says that he shall pray to Pomitian, and not to Jupiter. 3 " Esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna . . . Nee pueri credunt nisi qui nondum aere lavantur.'' — Juv. Sat. ii. 149, 152. * Tao. H. i. 22 ; Ann. vi. 20, 21, xji. 68 ; Juv. Sat. xir. 248, iii. 42, vii. 200, etc. ; Suet. Aug. 94 ; Tib. 14 ; Ner. 26 ; Otho, 4 ; Domit. 15, etc. 5 Luor. vi. 445-455 ; Juv. Sat. vii. 189—202, x. 129, xiii. 86—89 ; Plin. H.N. ii 21 ; Quinot. Jnstt. v. 6, § 3 ; Tac. H. 1. 10—18, ii. 69—82 ; Agrk. 13 ; Germ. 33 ; Ann. vi. 22, etc. « Juv. Sat. iii. 144, vi. 342, xiii. 75—83. ? "Nee tui-ba deorum talis ut est hodie," Juv. Sat. xiii. 46; "Ignobilem Deorum turbam quam longo aevo longa superstitio oongessit," Sen. Ep. 110. See Boissier, Lei Religions Eirangires [Bel. Mom. i. 374 — 450) ; Liv. xxxix. 8 ; Tac. Arm. ii. 85 ; Val. Max. I. iii. 2. » Juv. Sat. xiv. 96—106; Job. Antt. xviii. 3; Pers. Sat. v. 180. 9 Cic. De Legg. ii. 8 ; De Div. ii. 24 ; Tert. ad Natt. i. 10 ; Juv. Sat. xiv. -263. XV. 1— 32. 1" Plut. De Def. Orac., p. 419. Some Christian writers connect this remarkable storj witU the date of the OrucifixioB. gee Niednw, Ldirbuch d, Cfir, K. C?,, p. 64. STOICISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 9 our eyes from the spectacle of the little Christian churches, composed chiefly as yet of slaves and artisans, who had been taught to imitate a Divine example of humility and sincerity, of purity and love. There were, indeed, a few among the Heathen who lived nobler lives, and professed a purer ideal than the Pagans around them. Here and there in the ranks of the philosophers a Demetrius, a Musonius Rufus, an Epictetus; here and there among Senators an Helvidius Priscus, a Paetus Thrasea, a Barea Soranus ; here and there among literary men a Seneca or a Persius — showed that virtue was not yet extinct. But the Stoicism on which thsy leaned for support amid the ten-ors and temptations of that awful epoch utterly failed to provide a remedy against the universal degradation. It aimed at cherishing an in- sensibility which gave no real comfort, and for which it offered no adequate motive. It aimed at repressing the passions by a violence so unnatural that with them it also crushed some of the gentlest and most elevating emotions. Its self-satisfaction and exclusiveness repelled the gentlest and sweetest natures from its communion. It made a vice of compassion, which Christianity inculcated as a virtue; it cherished a haughtiness which OhrLstianity discouraged as a sin. It was unfit for the task of ameliorating mankind, because it looked on human nature in its normal aspects with contemptuous disgust. Its marked characteristic was a despairing sadness, which became specially prominent in its most sincere adherents. Its favourite theme was the glorification of suicide, which wiser moralists had severely reprobated,^ but which many Stoics belauded as the one sure refuge against oppression and outrage.^ It was a philosophy which was indeed able to lacerate the heart with a righteous indignation against the crimes and follies of mankind, but which vainly strove to resist, and which scarcely even hoped to stem, the ever-swelling tide of vice and misery. For wretchedness it had no pity ; on vice it looked with impotent disdain. Thrasea was regarded as an antique hero for walking out of the Senate-Louse during the discussion of some decree which involved a servility more than usually revolting.* He gradually drove his few admirers to the I Viig. Mn. vi. 450, seq. ; Tusc. Disp. i. 74 ; Cic. De Senect. 73 ; £>e Sep. vi. 15 ; Somn. Scip. 3 ; Sen. Ep. 70. Comp. Epict. JEnchir. 52. ^ Both Zeno and Cleanthes died by suicide. For the frequency of suicide under the Empire see Tao. Arm. vi. 10, 26, xv. 60 ; Sist. v. 26 ; Suet. Tib. 49 ; Sen. De Bene/, ii. 27 J Ep, 70 ; Plin. Ep. i. 12, iii. 7, 16, vi. 24. For its glorification, Lucan, Phan. iv. : — " Mors utinam pavidos vitae suhducere nolles, Sed virtus te sola daret." "Mortes repentinae, hoc est summa vitae felioitas," Plin. H. N. vii. 53, cf. 51. The Sractice of suicide became in the days of Trajan almost a "national usage" (see [erivale, vii. 317, viiL 107). The variety of Latin phrases for suicide shows the frequency of the crime. On the pride of Stoicism see Tac. Ann, xiv. 57 ; Juv. xiii. 93. 3 On the motion against the memory of Agrippina (Tac. Ann. xiv. 12). He had aloo opposed the execution of Antistius (id. xiv. 48). It was further remembered against him that he had not {attended the obsequies of the deified Foppsea, or offered sacrifice for the preservation of Nero's "divine voice " 10 THE EARLY DATS OP CHRISTIANITY. conviction tliat, even for those who had every advantage of rank and wealth, nothing was possible but a life of crushing sorrow ended by a death of complete despair.' St. Paul and St. Peter, on the other hand, were at the very same epoch teaching in the same city, to a few Jewish hucksters and a few Gentile slaves, a doctrine so full of hope and brightness that letters, written iu a prison with torture and death in view, read like idylls of serene happiness and paeans of triumphant joy. The graves of these poor sufferers, hid from the public eye in the catacombs, were decorated with an art, rude indeed, yet so triumphant as to make their subterranean squalor radiant with emblems of all that is brightest and most poetic in the happiness of man.^ While the glimmering taper of the Stoics was burning pale, as though amid the vapours of a charnel-house, the torch of Life upheld by the hands of the Tarsian tent-maker and the Galilsean fisherman had flashed from Damascus to Antioch, from Antioch to Athens, from Athens to Corinth, from Corinth to Ephesus, from Ephesus to Rome. CHAPTER IL THE RISE OF THE ANTICHRIST. " Hio hostis Deum Hominumque templis expulit superos suis, Civesque patria ; spiritum fratri abstulit Hausit oruorem matris ; — et lucem videt ! " —Sen. Octav. 239. " Praestare Neronem Securum valet haec aetas." — Jut. Sat. viii. 173. All the vice, all the splendour, all the degradation of Pagan Rome seemed to be gathered up in the person of that Emperor who first placed himself in a relation of direct antagonism against Christianity. Long before death ended the astute comedy in which Augustus had so gravely borne his part," he had experienced the Nemesis of 1 Suet: JVer. 37. 2 " There the ever-green leaf protests in sculptured silence that the winter of the grave cannot touch the saintly soul ; the blossoming branch speaks of vernal suns beyond the snows of this chill world ; the good shepherd shows from his benign looks that the mortal way so terrible to nature had become to those Christians as the meadow-path between the grassy slopes and beside the still waters." (Martineau, Hours of Thought, p. 155). 3 On his death-bed he asked his friends " whether he had fitly gone through the islay of life," and, if so, begged for their applause like an actor on the point of leaving the stage (Suet. Octav. 99). CHRISTIANITY AND ROME. 11 Absolatism, and foreseen the awful possibilities -which it involved. But neither he, nor any one else, could have divined that four such rulers as Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, and Nero — the first a sanguinary tyrant, the second a furious madman, the third an uxorious imbecile, the fourth a heartless bufibon — would in succession afflict and horrify the world. Yet these rulers sat upon the breast of Rome with the paralysing spell of a nightmare. The concentration of the old prerogatives of many offices in the person of one, who was ^ at once Consul, Censor, Tribune, Pontifex Maximus, and perpetual Imperator, fortified their power with the semblance of legality, and that power was rendered terrible by the sword of the Praetorians, and the deadly whisper of the informers. No wonder that Christians saw the true type of the Antichrist in that omnipotence of evil, that apotheosis of self, that disdain for humanity, that hatred against all mankind besides, that gigantic aspiration after the impossible, that frantic blasphemy and unlimited indulgence, which marked the despotism of a Gaius or a Nero. The very fact that their power was precarious as well as gigantic — ^that the lord of the world might at any moment be cut off by the indignation of the canaille of Rome, nay, more, by the revenge of a single tribune, or the dagger-thrust of a single slave ' — did but make more striking the resemblance which they displayed to the gilded monster of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Their autocracy, like that visionary idol, was an image of gold on feet of clay. Of that colossus many a Christian would doubtless be reminded when he saw the huge statue of Nero, with the radiated head and the attributes of the sun-god, which once towered 120 feet high on the shattered pediment still visible beside the ruins of the Flavian Amphitheatre. ^ The sketch which I am now presenting to the reader is the necessary introduction to the annals of that closing epoch of the first century, which witnessed the early struggle of Christianity with the Pagan power. In the thirteen years of Nero's reign all the worst elements of life which had long mingled with the sap of ancient ci\Uisation seem to have rushed at once into their scarlet flower. To the Christians of that epoch the dominance of such an Emperor presented itself in the aspect of wickedness raised to superhuman exaltation, and engaged in an impious struggle against the Lord and against His saints. Till the days of Nero the Christians had never been brought into collision with the Imperial Government. "We may set aside as a worthless fiction the story that Tiberius had been so much interested in the account of the Crucifixion forwarded to him by Pontius Pilate, as to consult the Senate on the advisability of admitting Jesus among 1 Out of 43 persons in Lipsius's Stemma Caesartim, 32 died violent deaths, i.e., nearly 75 per cent. 2 Suet iVcr. 31 ; Mart. Spea. Ep. 2. 12 THE EAELT DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. the gods of the Pantheon.* It is very unlikely that Tiberius ever heard of the existence of the Christians. In its early days the faith was too humble to excite any notice out of the limits of Palestine. Gaius, absorbed in his mad attempt to set up in the Holy of Holies " a desolating abomination," in the form of a huge image of himself, entertained a savage hatred of the Jews, but had not learned to discriminate between them. and Christians. Claudius, disturbed by tumults in the Ghetto of Jewish freedmen across the Tiber, had been taught to look with alarm and suspicion on the name of Christus distorted into "Chrestus;" but his decree for the expulsion of the Jews from Rome, which had been a dead letter from the first, only affected Christianity by causing theprovidential migration of Priscilla and Aquila, to become at Corinth and Ephesus the hosts, the partners, and the protectors of St. Paul." Nero was destined to enter into far deadlier and closer relations with the nascent Faith, and to fill so vast a space in the horrified imaginations of the early Christians as to become by his cruelties, his blasphemies, his enormous crimes, the nearest approach which the world has yet seen to the " Man of Sin." He was the ideal of depravity and wickedness, standing over against the ideal of all that is sinless and Divine. Against the Christ wa? now to be ranged the Antichrist, — the man-god of Pagan adulation, in whom was manifested the consummated outcome of Heathen crime and Heathen power. Up to the tenth year of Nero's reign the Christians had many reasons to be grateful to the power of the Roman Empire. St. Paul, when he wrote from Corinth to the Thessalonians, had indeed seen in the fabric of Roman polity, and in Claudius, its reigning representa- tive, the "check "and the " checker " which must be removed before the coming of the Lord.' Yet during his stormy life the Apostle had been shielded by the laws of Rome in more than one provincial tumult. The Roman politarchs of Thessalonica had treated him with humanity. He had been protected from the infuriated Jews in Corinth by the disdainful justice of Gallio. In Jerusalem the prompt interference of Lysias and of Festus had sheltered him from the plots of the Sanhedrin. At Csesarea he had appealed to Caesar as his best security from the persistent hatred of Ananias and the Sadducees. If we have taken a correct view of the latter part of his career, his appeal had not been in vain, and he owed the last two years of his missionary activity to the impartiality of Roman Law. Hence, apart from the general 1 Ps. Clem. Horn. i. 6 ; Tert. Apol. 5 ; Euseb. H. E.n. 2 ; Jer. Chran. Poach, i. 480. Brann (De Tiberii Christum in Deorum numerum referendi consilio, Bonn, 1834) vainly tried to support this fable. Tiberius, more than any Emperor, was " circa Decs et religiones negligentior " (Suet. Tit. 69). 2 See Tert. Apol. 3 ; ad Natt. i. 3 ; my Life and Work of St. Paul, i. 559. I cannot accept the view of Herzog {Jteai-EncyU., s,v, Claudius), that Chrestus was some seditious Eoman Jew. 8 Life and Work of St. Paul, 1. 584, fg. tn^ EMPER0R8. 13 principle of submission to recognised authority, he had special reason to urge the Roman Christians " to be subject to the higher powers," and to recognise in them the ordinance of God.^ With the private wickednesses of rulers the Christians were not directly concerned. Rumours, indeed, they must have heard of the poisoning of Claudius and of Britannicus ; of Nero's intrigues with Acte ; of his friendship with the bad Otho ; of the divorce and legal assassination of Octavia ; of the murder^ of Agrippina and Poppasa, of Burrus and Seneca. Other rumom-s must have reached them of nameless orgies, of which it was a shame even to speak. But knowing how the whole air of the bad society around them reeked with lies, they may have shown the charity that hopeth all things, and imputeth no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity, by tacitly setting aside these stories as incredible or false. It was not till a.d. 64, when Nero had been nearly ten years on the throne, that the slow light of History fully revealed to the Church of Christ what this more than monster was. A dark spirit was walking in the house of the Csesars — a spirit of lust and blood which destroyed every family in succession with which they were allied. The Octavii, the Claudii, the Domitii, the Silani, were all hurled into ruin or disgrace in their attempt to scale, by inter- marriage with the deified race of Julius, " the dread summits of Csesarian power." It has been well said that no page even of Tacitus has so sombre and tragic an eloquence as the mere Stemma Gaesarum. The great Julius, robbed by death of his two daughters, was succeeded by his nephew Augustus," who, in ordering the assassination of Csesarion, the natural son of Julius by Cleopatra, extinguished the direct line of the greatest of the Caesars. Augustus by his three marriages was the father of but one daughter, and that daughter disgraced his family and embittered his life. He saw his two elder grandsons die under circumstances of the deepest suspicion ; and being induced to disinherit the third for the asserted stupidity and ferocity of his disposition, was succeeded by Tiberius, who was only his stepson, and had not one drop of the Julian blood in his veins. Tiberius had but one son, who was poisoned by his favourite, Sejanus, before his own death. This son, Drusus, left but one son, who was compelled to commit suicide by his cousin. Gains ; and one daughter, whose son, Rubellius Plautus, was put to death by order of Nero. The marriage of Germanicus, the nephew of Tiberius, with the elder Agrippina, grand-daughter of Augustus, seemed to open new hopes to the Eoman people and the imperial house. Germanicus was a prince of courage, ' Bom. xiii. 1 — 7. ,. ^ , j ■ -i t 2 It is characteristic of the manners of the age that Juhus Caesar had mamecl tour times, Augustus thrice, Tiberius twice, Gaius thrice, Claudius six times, and Nero thrice. Yet Nero was the last of the Cresars, even of the adoptive Une. >to dcsoondauta had survived of the offspring of so many unions, and, as Merivale says, a large propor- tion, which it would be tedious to caloulate, were the victims of domestic jealousy and politic assassination " [Mini, vi 300). 14 THE EARLY DATS OF CHEISTIANITT. virtue, and ability, and the elder Agrippiaa was one of tlie purest and noblest women of her day. Of the nine children of this virtuous union six alone survived. On the parents, and the three sons in succession, the hopes of Eome were fixed. But Germanicus was poi'soned by order of Tiberius, and Agrippina was murdered in banish- ment, after the endurance of the most terrible anguish. Their two elder sons, Nero and Drusus, lived only long enough to disgrace themselves, and to be forced to die of starvation.' 'The third was the monster Gaius. Of the three daughters, the youngest, Julia Livia, was put to death by the orders of Messalina, the wife of her uncle Claudius. Drusilla died in prosperous infamy, and Agrippina the younger, after a life of crime so abnormal and so detestable that it throws into the shade even the monstrous crimes of many of her contemporaries, murdered her husband, and was murdered by the orders of the son for whose sake she had waded through seas of blood. That son was Nero ! Truly the Palace of the Csesars must have been haunted by many a restless ghost, and amid its vast and solitaiy chambers the guilty lords of its splendour must have feared lest they should come upon some spectre weeping tears of blood. In yonder corridor the floor was still stained with the life-blood of the murdered Gaius ;^ in that subterranean prison, the miserable Drusns, cursing the name of his great-uncle Tiberius, tried to assuage' the pangs of hunger by chewing the stuffing of his mattress f in that gilded saloon Nero had his private interviews with the poison-mixer, Locusta, whom he salaried among " the instruments of his government ; " * in that splendid hall Britannicus fell into convulsions after tasting his brother's poisoned draught ; that chamber, bright with the immoral frescoes of Arellius, witnessed the brutal kick which caused the death of the beautiful PoppEea. Fit palace for the Antichrist — fit temple for the wicked human god ! — a temple which reeked with the memory of infamies — a palace which echoed with the ghostly footfall of murdered men ! Agrippina the Second, mother of Nero, was the Lady Macbeth of chat scene of murder, but a Lady Macbeth with a life of worse stains and a heart of harder steel. Bom at Cologne in the fourteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, she lost her father, Gennanicus, by poison when she was three years old, and her mother, Agrippina, first by exile when she was twelve years old, and finally by murder when she was seven- teen. She grew up with her wicked sisters and her wicked brother Gaius in the house of her grandmother Antonia, the widow of the elder Drusus. She was little more than fourteen years old when 1 Tac. Ann. v. 3, vi. 24. 2 "The Verres of a single province sank before the majesty of the law, and the righteous eloquence of his accuser ; against the Verres of the world there was no defence except in the dagger of the assassin " (Freeman, Essays, ii. 330), ' Tac. Ann. vii. 23. * Tac. Ann. xii. 66, xiii. 5. THE FATHER OF NERO. 15 Tiberius married her to Onseus Domitius Ahenobarbus. The Domitii were one of the noblest and most ancient families of Rome, but from the time that they first emerged into the light of history they had been badly pre-eminent for the ferocity of their dispositions. They derived the surname of Ahenobarbus, or brazen-beard, from a legend of their race intended to account for their physical peculiarity. ^ Six generations earlier the orator Crassus had said of the Domitius Ahenobarbus of that day, " that it was no wonder his beard was of brass, since his mouth was of iron and his heart of lead." But though the traditions of cruelty and treachery had been carried on from generation to genera- tion,^ they seem to have culminated in the father of Nero, who added a tinge of meanness and vulgarity to the brutal manners of his race. His loose morals had been shocking even to a loose age, and men told each other in disgust how he had cheated in his prsetorship ; how he had kUled one of his freedmen only because he had refused to drink as much as he was bidden ; how he had purposely driven over a poor boy on the Appian Road ; how in a squabble in the .Forum he had struck out the eye of a Roman knight ; how he had been finally banished for crimes still more shameful. It was a current anecdote of this man, who was " detestable through every period of his life," that when, nine years after his marriage, the birth of his son Nero was announced to him, he answered the congratulations of his friends with the remark, that from himself and Agrippina nothing could have been bom but what was hateful, and for the public ruin. Agrippina was twenty-one when her brother Gains succeeded to the throne. Towards the close of his reign she was involved in the con- spiracy of Lepidus, and was banished to the dreary island of Pontia. Gaius seized the entire property both of Domitius and of Agrippina. Nero, their little child, then three years old, was handed over as a penniless orphan to the charge of his aunt Domitia, the mother of Messalina. This lady entrusted the education of the child to two slaves, whose influence is perhaps traceable for many subsequent years. One of them was a barber, the other a dancer. On the accession of Claudius, Agrippina was restored to her rank and fortune, and once more undertook the management of her child. He was, as we see from his early busts, a child of exquisite beauty. His beauty made him an object of special pride to his mother. From this time forward it seems to have been her one desire to elevate the boy to the rank of Emperor. In vain did the astrologers warn her that his elevation involved her murder. To such dark hints of the future 1 Suet. Ner. 1 ; Plut. jEmil. 25. 2 " The grandfather of Nero had been checked by Augustus from the bloodshed of his gladiatorial shows . . . his great-grandfather, 'the best of his race," had changed sides three times, not without disgrace, in the civil wars .... his great-great- grandfather had rendered himself infamous by cruelty and treachery at Pharsalia, and was also charged with most un-Eomam pusillanimity " (see Suet. Ner, 1 — ^ J MeriTals, vi 62, leq,.). 16 THE EaELY DATS OF CHRISTIAXITT. slie tad but one reply — Occidat dim, imperet I " Let him slay me, SO ke do but reign ! " By her second marriage, with Crispus Passienus, she further increased her already enormous wealth. She bided her time. Claudius was under the control of his freedmen, Narcissus and Pallas, and of the Empress Messalina, who had borne him two children, Britannicus and Octavia. The fierce and watchful jealousy of Messalina was soon suc- cessful in securing the banishment and subsequent murder of JuUa, the younger sister of Agrippina,^ and in spite of the retirement in which the latter strove to withdraw herself from the furious suspicion of the Empress, she felt that her own life and that of her son were in perpetual danger. A story prevailed that when Britannicus, then about seven years old, and Nero, who was little more than three years older,^ had ridden side by side in the Trojan equestrian game, the favour of the populace towards the latter had been so openly manifested that Messalina had despatched emissaries to strangle him in bed, and that they had been frightened from doing so by seeing a snake glide from under the pillow.' Meanwhile, Messalina was diverted from her purpose by the crimiual pursuits which were notorious to every Roman with the single exception of her husband. She was falling deeper and deeper into that dementa- tion preceding doom which at last enabled her enemy Narcissus to head a palace conspiracy and to sti-ike her to the dust. Agrippina owed her escape from a fate similar to that of her younger sister solely to the infatuated passion of the rival whose name through all succeeding ages has been a byword of guilt and shame. But now that Claudius was a widower, the fact that he was her uncle, and that unions between an uncle and a niece were regarded as incestuous, did not prevent Agrippina from plunging into the intrigues by which she hoped to secure the Emperor for her third husband. Aided by the freedman Pallas, brother of Felix, the Procurator of Judaea, and by the blandishments which her near relationship to Claudius enabled her to exercise, she succeeded in achieving the second great object of her ambitioiL The twice-widowed matron became the sixth wife of the imbecile Emperor within three months of the execution of her predecessor. She had now but one further design to accomplish, and that was to gain the purple for the son whom she loved with all the tigress affection of her evil nature. She had been the sister and the wife, she wished also to be the mother of an Emperor. The story of her daring schemes, her reckless cruelty, her incessant intrigues, is recorded in the stem pages of Tacitus. During the five years of her married life,* it is probable that no day passed without her thoughts brooding upon the guilty end which she had kept steadily 1 Suet. Claud. 29. ^ Tacitus says two years ; but see Merivale, v. 517, vi. 88. 3 Suetonius thinks that the story arose from a snake's skin which his mother gave him as an amulet, and which for some time he wore in a bracelet (Xfer. 6). * She was married in A.D. 49, and poisoned her husband in October, a.d. 54. AGRIPPINA. 17 in view during so many vioissitudea. Her first plan was to secure for Nero the hand of Octavia, the only daughter of Claudius. Octavia had long been betrothed to the young and noble Lucius Junius Silanus, a great-great-grandson of Augustus, who might well be dreaded as a strong protector of the rights of his young brother-in-law, Britanni-cus. As a favourite of the Emperor, and the betrothed of the Emperor's daughter, Silanus had already received splendid honours at the hands of the Senate, but at one blow Agrippina hurled him into the depths of shame and misery. The infamous Vitellius — Vitellius who had once begged as a favour a slipper of MessaUna, and carried it in his bosom and kissed it with profound reverence — ^Vitellius who had placed a gilded image of the freedman Fallas among his household gods — trumped up a false charge against Silanus, and, as Censor, struck his name off the list of the Senate. His betrothal annulled, his praetorship abrogated, the high- spirited young man, recognising whose hand it was that had aimed this poisoned arrow at his happiness, waited till Agrippina's wedding-day, and on that day committed suicide on the altar of his own Penates. The next step of the Empress was to have her rival LoUia Paulina charged with magic, to secure her banishment, to send a tribune to kill her, and to identify, by personal inspection, her decapitated head. Then Calpurnia was driven from £.ome because Claudius, with perfect innocence, had praised her beauty. On the other hand, Seneca was recalled from his Corsican exile, in order to increase Agrippina's popu- larity by an act of ostensible mercy, which restored to Rome its favourite writer, while it secured a powerful adherent for her cause and an eminent tutor for her son. The next step was to effect the betrotLnl of Octavia to Nero, who was twelve years old. A still more difficult and important measure was to secure his adoption. Claudius was attached to his son Britannicus, and, in spite of his extraordinary fatuity, he could hardly fail to see that his son's rights would be injured by the adoption of an elder boy of most noble birth, who reckoned amongst his supporters all those who might have natural cause to dread the vengeance of a son of Messalina. Claudius was an antiquary, and he knew that for 800 years, from the days of Attus Olausus downwards, there had never been an adoption among the patrician ClaudiL In vain did Agrippina and her adherents endeavour to poison his mind by whispered insinuations about the parentage of Britannicus. But he was at last overborne, rather than convinced, by the persistence with which Agrippina had taken care that the adoption should be pressed upon him in the Senate, by the multitude, and even in the privacy of his own garden. Pallas, too, helped to decide his wavering determination by quoting the precedents of the adoption of Tiberius by Augustus, and ^f Gaius by Tiberius. Had he but well weighed the fatal significance of those precedents, he would have hesitated still longer ere he sacrificed to an intriguing alien the birthright, the happiness, and ultimately the lives of the young son and daughter whom he so dearly loved. 2 18 THE EARLY DAYS OP CHRISTIANITY. And now Agrippina's prosperous wickedness was bearing her along full sail to the fatal haven of her ambition. She obtained the title of Augusta, which even the stately wife of Augustus had never borne during her husband's Lifetime. Seated on a lofty throne by her husband's side, she received foreign embassies and senatorial deputa- tions. She gained permission to antedate the majority of her son, and secured for him a promise of the Consulship, admission to various priesthoods, a proconsular imperium, and the title of " Prince of the Youth." She made these honours the pretext for obtaining a largess to the soldiery, and Oircensian games for the populace, and at these games Nero appeared in the manly toga and triumphal insignia, while Britannicus, utterly eclipsed, stood humbly by his side in the boyish praetexta — the embroidered robe which marked his youth. And whUe step after step was taken to bring Nero into splendid prominence, Britannicus was kept in such deep seclusion, and watched with Such jealous eyes, that the people hardly knew whether he was alive or dead. In vain did Agrippina lavish upon the unhappy lad her false caresses. Being a boy of exceptional intelligence, he saw through her hypocrisy, and did not try to conceal the contemptuous disgust which her arts inspired. Meanwhile he was a prisoner in all but name : every expedient was invented to keep him at the greatest distance from his father ; every friend who loved him, every freedman who was faithful to him, every soldier who seemed Ukely to embrace his cause, was either secretly undermined, or removed under pretext of honourable promotion. Tutored as he was by adversity to conceal his feelings, he one day through accident or boyish passion returned the salutation of his adoptive brother by the name of Ahenobarbus, instead of calUng him by the name Nero, which was the mark of his new rank as the adopted son of Claudius. Thereupon the rage of Agrippina and Nero knew no bounds ; and such insolence — for in this light the momentary act of carelessness or venial outburst of temper was represented to Claudius — made the boy a still more defenceless victim to the machinations of his stepmother. Month after month she wove around him the web of her intrigues. The Praetorians were won over by flattery, gifts, and promises. The double prsefecture of Lucius Geta and E-ufius Crispinus was superseded by the appoint- ment of Airanius Burrus, an honest soldier, but a partisan of the Empress, to whom he thus owed his promotion to the most coveted position in the Eoman army. From the all-powerful freedmen of Claudius, Agrippina had little to fear. Callistus was dead, and she played off against each other the rival influences of Pallas and Narcissus. SPaUas was her devoted adherent and paramour ; Narcissus was afraid to move in opposition to her, because the accession of Britannicus would have been his own certain death-warrant, since he had been the chief agent in the overthrow of Messalina, As for the phenomena on which the populace looked with terror IXTItlGUKS OF AORirPINA. 19 the fact that the skies had seemed to Lltize with fire on the day ol Nero's adoption, and violent shocks of earthquake had shaken Rome on the day that he assumed the manly toga — AgrippLna cared nothing for them. She would recognise no omen which did not promise success to her determination. Nothing could now divert her from her purpose. When Domitia, the aunt under whose roof the young Nero had been ti-ained, began to win his smiles by the contrast between her flatteries and presents and the domineering threats of his mother, Agrippina at once brought against her a charge of magic, and in spite of the opposition of Narcissus, Domitia was condemned to death. The Empress hesitated at no crime which helped to pave the way ot her son to power, but at the same time her ambition was so far selfish that she intended to keep that son under her own exclusive influence. Many warnings now showed her that the time was ripe for her supreme endeavour. Her quarrel with Narcissus had broken out into threats and recriminations in the very presence of the Emperor. The Senate showed signs of indignant recalcitrance against her attacks on those whose power she feared, or whose wealth she envied. Her designs were now so transparent, that Narcissus began openly to show his compassion for the hapless and almost deserted Britannicus. But, worst of all, it was clear that Claudius himself was becoming conscious of his perilous mistake, and was growing weary both of her and of her son. He had changed his former wife for a worse. If Messalina had been unfaithful to him, so, he began to suspect, was Agrippina, and he could not but feel that she had changed her old fawning caresses for a threatening insolence. He was sick of her ambition, of her intrigues, of the hatred she always displayed to his oldest and most faithful servants, of her pushing eagerness for her Nero, of her treacherous cruelty towards his own children. He was heard to drop ominous expressions. He began to display towards Britannicus a yearning aflfection, full of the passionate hope that when he was a little older his wrongs would be avenged. All this Agrippina learnt from her spies. Not a day was to be lost. Narcissus, whose presence was the chief security for his master's life, had gone to the baths of Sinuessa to find relief from a flt of the gout. There lay at this time in prison, on a charge of poisoning, a woman named Locusta, whose career recalls the Mrs. Turner of the reign of James I., and the Marchioness de Brinvilliers of the court of Louis XIV. To this woman Agrippina repaired with the promise of freedom and reward, if she would provide a poison which would disturb the brain without too rapidly destroying life. Halotus, the Emperor's praeguatator, or taster, and Xenophon, his physician, had been already won over to share in the deed. The poison was infused into a fine and delicious mushroom of a kind of which Claudius was known to be particularly fond, and Agrippina gave this mushroom to her husband with her own hand. After tasting it he became very quiet, and then called for wine. He was carried oS to 20 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. bed senseless, but the quantity of wine which he had drunk weakened the effects of the poison, and at a sign from Agi-ippina the faithless physician finished the murder by tickling the throat of the sufferer with a poisoned feather. Before the morning of Oct. 13, A.D. 54, Claudius was dead. His death was concealed from the public and from his children, whom Agrippina with hypocritical caresses and false tears kept by her side in her own chamber, until everything was ready for the pro- clamation of Nero. At noon, which the Chaldseans had declared would be the only lucky hour of an unlucky day, the gates of the palace were thrown open, and Wero walked forth with Afranius Burrus by iis side. The Prsetorian Prsefect informed the guard that Claudius had appointed Nero his successor. A few faithful voices asked, " "Where is Britannicus ] " But as no one answered, and the young prince was not forthcoming, they accepted what seemed to be an accomplished fact. Nero went to the Prsetorian camp, promised a donation of 15,000 sesterces (more than a £130) to each soldier, and was proclaimed Emperor. The Senate accepted the initiative of the Prsetorians, and by sunset Nero was securely seated on the throne of the Roman world. The dream of Agrippiua's life was accomplished. She was now the mother, as she had been the sister and the wife of an Emperor ; and that young Emperor, when the tribune came to ask him the watchword for the night, answered in the words — Optimae Matri 1 " To the Best of Mothers ! " CHAPTER III. THE FEATURES OF THE ANTICHRIST. *E(rxaTi»j AlveaSav fitirpoKTSyos Tiyc/iovciffei. — Orac. Sib. ap. Xiphilin. Ixii. p. 709. " Nero . . . ut erat exseorabilis ac nooens tyrannus, prosilivit ad excidendum coeleste templum delendamque justdtiam." — Laotant. De Mart. Persee. 2. " Quid Nerone pejus ? " — Mart. Epig. vii. 34. From the very moment of her success, the awful Nemesis began to fall upon Agrippina, as it falls on all sinners — that worst Nemesis, which breaks crowned with fire out of the achievement of guilty purposes. Of Agrippina on the night of Claudius's murder it might doubtless have been said, as has been said of another queen on the tragic night on which her husband perished in the explosion at Eark o' Fields, that she "retired to rest — to sleep, doubtless — sleep with the soft tranquillity of an innocent child. Remorse may disturb the slumbers of the man who is dabbling with his first experiences of wrong. "When the pleasure has been tasted and is gone, and nothing is left of the crime ageippina's crimes. 21 but the ruin it has wrought, then, too, the Furies take their seats upon the midnight pillow. But the meridian of evil is for the most part left unvexed ; and when human creatures have chosen their road, they are left alone to follow it to the end." ' Prom the day that she had won her own heart's desires, Agrippina found that her hopes had vanished, and that her Hfe was to be plunged in retributive calamities. She found that crime ever needs the support of further crime ; that the evil spirits who serve the government of an abandoned heart demand incessant sacrifices at their altar. She had brought about the ruin of the young Lucius Junius Silanus. His elder brother, Marcus, was a man of such a gentle and unassuming character that Gaius had nicknamed him " the Golden Sheep ; " and though the blood of the imperial family flowed in his veins, he excited so little jealousy that he had been raised to the consulship, and even sent to Asia with proconsular command. Yet Agrippina dreaded that he might avenge the death of his brother, and, without the knowledge of Nero, sent the freedman HeHus, with P. Celer, a Roman knight, who poisoned Silanus at a banquet, so openly that the whole world was aware of what had been done. The aged Narcissus was her next victim ; and more murders would have followed had not Burrus and Seneca taken measures to prevent them. Their influence was happily sufficient, since they were still regarded as tutors of the young Caesar, who was only seventeen years old. They also endeavoured to veil, and as far as possible to cloak, the audacious intrusions into state afiairs, which showed that Agrippina was not content with the exceptional honours showered upon her. Of those honours, strange to say, one of the chief was her appointment to be a priestess of the now deified Emperor whom she had so recently poisoned ! It is clear that, though she had again and again proved herself to be the most ungrateful of women, she expected from her son a boundless gratitude. Indeed, she so galled the vanity and terrified the cowardice of his small and mean nature by her constant threats and upbraidings, that he feared her far more than he had ever loved. The consequence was that she had at once to struggle for her ascendency. It was threatened on the one hand by the influence of Burrus and Seneca, and on the other by the blandishments of bad companions and fawning slaves. Bent on pleasure, fond of petty accomplishments, flattered into the notion that he was a man of consummate artistic taste, Nero occupied himself with dilettante efforts in sculpture, painting, singing, verse-making, and chariot-driving, and was quite content to leave to his tutors the graver afiairs of state. His tiger nature had not yet tasted blood. Seneca in his treatise on clemency, written at the close of Nero's first year, had informed the delighted world that the gentle youth, on being required to sign the order for ' Froude, Hist. vii. 511. 22 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. a criminal's execution, had expressed tte fervent wish that he had never learnt to write. Seneca also composed for him the admired speeches which he was now and then called upon to deliver. Tho government of the world was practically in the hands of an upright soldier and an able philosopher j and however glaring were the inconsistencies of the latter, he had yet attained to a moral standard incomparably superior to that professed by the majority of his contemporaries. If the political machine worked \^th perfect smooth- ness, if Rome for five years was shocked by no public atrocities, if informers to some extent found their occupation gone, if no noble blood was wantonly shed, if the Senate was respected and the soldiers were orderly, the gloi'y of that " golden quinquennium "—which, in the opinion of Trajan, eclipsed the merits of even the worthiest princes —was due, not to the small-minded and would-be aesthetic youth who figured as Emperor, but to the tutors who kept in check the wild passions of his mother, and directed the acts which ostensibly, proceeded from "himself. But in order to keep him amused they thought it either inexpedient or impossible to maintain too strict a discipline over his moral character. Nero was nominally married to the daughter of Claudius, but from the first they were separated from each other by a mutual and instinctive repulsion. When he entered into an intrigue with , Acte, a beautiful Greek freedwoman, his tutors held it desirable to connive at vices which the spirit of the age scarcely pretended to condemn. Agrippina, however, treated him as though he were still a child, and, when she observed his resentment, forfeited all his confidence by passing from the extreme of furious reproach to the extreme of fulsome complaisance. Hence, alike in afiairs of state and in his domestic pleasures he was alienated from his mother, and in his daily life he fell unreservedly under the influence of coiTupt associates like Marcus Otho and Claudius Senecio, two bad specimens of the jeunesse doree of their day, the dandies of an age when dandyism was a far viler thing than it is in modern times. ■^ At last the quarrel between Nero and Agrippina became so fierce that she did not hesitate to reveal to him all the crimes which she had committed for his sake, and if she could not retain her sway over his mind by gratitude, she terrified him with threats that she who had raised him to the throne could hurl him from it. Britannicus was the true heir ; Nero, but for her, would have remained a mere Ahenobarbus. She was the daughter of Germanicus ; she would go in person to the Praetorian camp, with Britannicus by her side, and then let the maimed Burrus and the pedagogic Seneca see whether they could prevent her from restoring to the throne of his fathers the injured boy who had been ousted by her intrigues on behalf of an adopted alien. "I made you Emperor, I can unmake you. Bri- 1 Niebuur. ALAEM OF NERO. 23 tannicus is the true Emperor, not you." She dinned such taunts and threats into the ears of a son who was already vitiated in character, who already began to feel his power, until he too was driven to protect, by the murder of a brother, the despotism which his mother had won for him by the murder of a husband. Thus ia every way she became the evil angel of his destiny. She drove him iato the crimes of which she had already set the fatal example. It was her fault if he rapidly lost sight of tho lesson which Seneca had so assiduously iuculcated that the one impregnable bulwark of a monarch is the affection of his people.^ Nero began to look on the young Britannicus as King John looked on the young Arthur. Even civilised, even Christian ages have shown how perilous is the position of a hated heir to a usurped throne. The threats of Agrippina had deepened dislike into detestation, and uneasi- ness into terror. Britannicus was a fine, strong, well-grown boy, who showed signs of a vigorous character and a keen intellect. A little inci- dent which occurred in December, a.d. 54, had alarmed Nero still further. The Saturnalia were being celebrated with their usual effusive joy, and at one of the feasts Nero — who had become by lot the Hex bibendi, or Master of the Revel — had issued his mimic commands to the other guests in a spirit of harmless fun ; but in order to put the shy- ness of Britannicus to the blush, he had ordered the lad to go out into the middle of the room and sing a song. Without the least trepidation or awkwardness Britannicus had stepped out and sung a magnificent fragment of a tragic chorus, in which he had indicated how he was expelled from his rights by violence and crime. The scene would have been an awkward one under any circumstances ; it was rendered still more so by the fact that in the darkening hall a deep murmur had ex- pressed the admiration and sympathy of the guests. Yet no steps could be taken against a young prLace whom it was impossible to put to death openly, and against whom there was no pretence for a criminal accu- sation. But the first century, like the fifteenth, was an age of poisoners. Locusta was still in prison, and Nero employed the Prsetorian tribune Julius Pollio to procure from her a poison which might effect a slow death. There was no need to win over the praegustatur, or the personal attendants of the young prince. Care had long been taken that the poor boy should only be surrounded by the creatures of his enemies. The poison was administered, but it failed. Nero grew wild with alarm. Stories, which probably gained their darkest touches from the horror of his subsequent career, told how he had threatened the tribune and struck Locusta for her cowardice in not doing her work well, "as though he, forsooth, need have any fear about the Julian law." Deadlier poison was then concocted outside his own bed-chamber, and tried upon 1 "tTnum est inexpugnabile munimentum amor oivium" (Sen. De Clement, i. 11), .'•). 24 THE EARLY DATS OP CHRISTIANITY. animals, until its effects were found to be sufficiently rapid. Setting aside these stories as crude exaggerations, all authorities are agreed as to the circumstances of the death of Britannicus. It was a custom established by Augustus that the young princes of the imperial house should sit at dinner with nobles of their own age at a lower and less luxuriously served table than that at which the Emperor dined. While Britannicus was thus dining, a draught was handed to him which had been tasted by his praegustator, but was too hot to drink. He asked for water to cool it, and in that cold water the poison was administered. He drank, and instantly sank down from his seat silent and breathless. The guests,. among whom was the young Titus, the future Emperor of Rome, started from the table in consternation. The countenance of Agrippina, working with astonishment, anguish, and terror, showed that she at least had not been admitted into the terrible secret. Octavia looked on with the self-possession which in such a palace had taught her on all occasions to hide her emotions under a simulated apathy. The banqueters were disturbed until Nero, with perfect coolness, bade them resume their mirth and conversation. " Britannicus," he said, " will soon be well. He has only been seized with one of the epileptic fits to which he is liable." It was no epileptic fit — the last of the Claudii was dead. That night, amid storms which seemed to mark the wrath of heaven, the corpse was carried with hurried privacy to a mean funeral pyre on the Field of Mars. We may disbelieve the ghastly etory that the rain washed off the chalk which had been used to disguise the livid indications of poison ; but it seems certain that the last rites were paid with haste and meanness little suited to the last male descendant of a family which had been famous for so many centuries — to the sole in- heritor of the glorious traditions of so many of the noblest lines. The Romans acquiesced too easily in this terrible crime, because it fell in with the Machiavellian policy which would gladly rid itself of a source of future disturbances. But they were punished for their facile tolerance by the change which every year developed in the character of ' their Emperor. Agrippina felt that even-handed justice was indeed be- ginning to commend the ingredients of the poisoned chalice to her own lips. Her enemies began to see that their opportunity was come. Her prosperity was instantly swallowed up in the " chaos of hatreds " which she had aroused by her unscrupulous ambition. The coward conscience of the Emperor was worked upon by a plot, contrived by Silana and Domitia Lepida, which charged Agrippina with the intention of raising Rnbellius Plautus to the throne. This plot she overbore by the force of her own passionate indignation. Scornfully ignoring the false evidence trumped up against her, she claimed an interview with her son, and instead of entering on her own defence, demanded and secured the death or exile of her enemies. But she had by this time been deprived of her body-guard, of her sentinels, of all public honours, oven of her home in the palace. Her son rarely visited her, and then only among a nuni'ber of centun. salutation. She wa„ deliberate insults, in aii^ Worse clangers thickened u of Poppsea Sabina, the wife cruel and cold-blooded intriguei,. matrons. Nero was deeply smitteu complexion, which she preserved by daiiy o.. ''' i-^)- her assumed modesty, her genial conversation and spi^jji^oij v.iu ^^.e was specially enchanted with the soft, abundant hair, the envy of Roman beauties, for which he invented the fantastic, and, to Roman writers, the supremely ludicrous epithet of " amber tresses." If Otho was one of the worst corrupters of Nero's character, he was punished by the loss of his wife, and Nero was punished by forming a connexion with a woman who instigated him to yet more frightful enormities. Up to this time his crimes had been mainly confined to the interior of the palace, and his follies had taken no worse form than safe and cowardly outrages on defenceless passengers in the streets at night, after the fashion of the Mohawks of the days of Queen Anne. But from the day that he first saw Poppsea a headlong deterioration is traceable in his character. She established a complete influence over him, and drove him by her taunts and allurements to that crime which, even among his many enormities, is the most damning blot upon his character — the murder of his mother That wretched princess was spending the last year of a life which had scarcely passed its full prime in detested infamy, such as in our own history attended the last stage in the career of the Countess of Somerset, the wife of James's unworthy favourite, Robert Carr. "Worse than this, she lived in daily dread of assassination. Her watchfulness evaded all attempts at poisoning, and she was partly protected against them by the current fiction that she had fortified her- self by the use of antidotes. Plots to murder her by the apparently accidental fall of the fretted roof in one of the chambers of her villa were frustrated by the warning which she received from her spies. At last, Anicetus, a freedman, admiral of the fleet at Misenum, promised Nero to secure her end in an unsuspicious manner by means of a ship which should suddenly fall to pieces in mid-sea. Nero invited her to a banquet at Baiae, which was to be the sign of their public reconciliation. Declining, however, to sail in the pinnace which had been surrepti- tiously fitted up for her use, she was carried to her son's villa in her own litter. There she was received with such hilarity and blandish- ment, such long embraces and affectionate salutations, that her suspicions were dispelled. She consented to return by water, and went on board the treacherous vessel. It had not proceeded far when the heavily-weighted canopy under which she reclined was made to fall with a great crash. One of her ladies was killed on the spot. Imme- ^ether were pulled ue projecting sides of /es. A lady who was J her own life, exclaimed _, beaten down with poles and - ping with a single bruise on her till she was picked up by a boat glittering with lights and thronged with _ - i^jijoying the cool evening air. The wretched victim saw through the whole plot, but thought it best to treat the matter as an accident, and sent one of her freedmen, named Agerinus, to announce to N"ero her fortunate escape. Nero had already received the news with unfeigned alarm. Would the haughty, vindictive woman fire the soldiery with the tale of her wrongs ] would she throw herself on the compassion of the Senate and the people 1 would she arm her slaves to take vengeance on her murderer 1 Burrus and Seneca were hastily sum- moned. To them the Emperor appealed in the extreme agitation of unsuccessful guilt. In silence and anguish the soldier and the Stoic felt, as they listened to the tale, how fatal to their reputation was their prosperous complicity with the secrets of such a court. Seneca was the first to break the silence. He asked his colleague " whether the Praetorians should be ordered to put her to death." In that hour he must have tasted the very dregs of the bitter cup of moral degradation. Perhaps the two ministers excused themselves with the sophism that things had now gone too far to prevent the commission of a crime, and that either Agrippina or Nero must perish. But Burrus replied that " the Praetorians would never lift a hand against the daughter of their beloved Germanicus. Let Anicetus fulfil his promises." Miserable soldier ! miserable philosopher ! Stoicism has been often exalted at the expense of Christianity. Let the world remember the two scenes, in one of which the polished Stoic, in the other the Christian Apostle stood — the one a magnificent minister, the other a fettered prisoner — ^in the presence of the lord of the world ! Anicetus rose to the occasion, and, amid the ecstatic expressions of Nero's gratitude, claimed as his own the consummation of the deed. On the arrival of Agerinus with the message of Agrippina, Anicetus suddenly flung a dagger at the wretched man's feet, and then, declaring that Agrippina had sent him to murder her son, loaded him with chains. By this transparent device he hoped to persuade the world that Agrippiua had been detected in a conspiracy, and had committed suicide from very shame. The news of her recent peril had caused the wildest excitement among the idlers on the shore. Anicetus, with his armed emissaries, had to assume a threatening attitude, as he made his way through the agitated throng. Surrounding the villa and bursting open the door, he seized the few slaves who yet lingered near the chamber of their mistress. Within that chamber, by the light of a MURDER OF AGRIPPINA, 27 single lamp, Agrippina, attended by only one handmaid, was awaiting in intense anxiety and with misgivings which became deeper and deeper at every moment, the suspicious delay in the return of her faith- ful messenger. The slave-girl rose and left the room. " Do you too desert me 1 " she exclaimed ; and at that moment the door was darkened by the entrance of Anicetus, with the trierarch Herculeius and the naval centurion Obaritus. " If you have come to inquire about my health," said the undaunted woman, " say that I have recovered. If to commit a crime, I will not believe that you have my son's orders ; he would not command a matricide." Returning no answer, the murderers sur- rounded her bed, and the trierarch struck her on the head with his stick. " Strike my womb," she exclaimed, as the centurion drew his sword, " it bore a Nero." These were her last words before she sank down slain with many wounds. There is no need to darken with further and unaccredited touches of horror the dreadful story of her end. The old presage which she had accepted was fulfilled. She had made her son an Emperor, and he had rewarded her by assassination. Such was the awful unpitied end of one on whose birthday and in whose honour in that very year altars had smoked with sacrifices ofiered at the feet of the god Honov/r and the goddess Concordia.^ When the crime was over, Nero first perceived its magnitude, and was seized with the agony of a too brief terror and remorse. There is in great crimes an awful power of illumination. They light up the conscience with a glare which shows all things in their true hideousness. He spent the night in oppressive silence. For the first time in his life his sleep was disturbed by dreams. He often started up in terror, and dreaded the return of dawn. The gross flattery and hypocritical congratulations of his friends soon dissipated all personal alarm. But scenes cannot change their aspect so easily as the countenances of men, and there was to him a deadly look in the sea and shore. From the lofty summit of Misenum ghostly wailings and the blast of a solitary trumpet seemed to reach him from his mother's gi-ave. He despatched a letter to the Senate, full of the ingenious and artificial turns of expression which betrayed, alas ! the style of Seneca ; and in it he charged his mother's memory with the very crimes of which he had himself been guilty. But though he recalled her enemies from exile, and threw down her statues, and raked up every evil action of her life, and insinuated that she had been the cause of the enormities which had disgraced the reign of Claudius, men hardly affected to believe his exculpation, and the very mob charged him with matricide in their epigrams and scribblings on the statues and walls of Rome." But yet when he returned to Rome, the whole populace, from the Senate down- wards, poured forth to give him a reception so enthusiastic and 1 As shown by inscriptions of the Fratres Arvales (De Kossi, BvU. ArcMol. 186GI See Champagny, Les Clsa/rs, ii. 194. 2 Suet. iVer. 3 ; Dion Cass. Ixi. 16. 28 THE EAKLY DATS OP CnEISTIANITT. fcriumpliaiit that every remnant of shame was dispelled from his mind, Eeeling for the first time that no wickedness was too abnormal to shake his absolute power over a nation of slaves, he plunged without stint or remorse into that career of infamy which has made his name the synonym of everything which is degraded, cruel, and impure.^ Through the separate details of that career we need not follow him. The depths'' into which he sank are too abysmal for utterance. Even Pagan historians could not without a blush hold up a torch in those crypts of shame.' How he established games in which he publicly appeared upon the stage, and compelled members of the noblest Eoman families to imitate his degradation ; on how vast a scale, and with how vile a stain, he deliberately corrupted the whole tone of Eoman society ; how he openly declared that the consummation of art was a false sestheticism, corrupt and naked, and not ashamed ;* how he strove to revive the flagging pulse of exhausted pleasure by unheard-of enormities, and strove to make shame shameless by undisguised publicity j how he put to death the last descendant of Augustus,'* the last descendant of Tiberius, and the last descendant of the Claudii ; how he ended the brief but heartrending tragedy of the life of Octavia by defaming her innocence, driving her to the island of Pandataria, and there enforcing her assassination under circumstances so sad as might have moved the hardiest villain to tears; how he hastened by poison the death of Burrus, and entrusted the vast power of the Prsetorian command to Tigellinus, one of the vilest of the human race ; how, when he had exhausted the treasures amassed by the dignified economy of Claudius, he filled his cofiers by confiscating the estates of innocent victims ; how he caused the death of his second wife, Poppsea, by a kick inflicted on her when she was in a delicate condition ; how, after the detection of the conspiracy of Piso, he seemed to revel in blood ; how he ordered the death of Seneca ; how, by the execution of Psetus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, he strove to extinguish the last embers of Roman magnanimity, and to slay " virtue itself ; "° how wretches like Vatinius became the cherished favourites of his court ; how his reign degenerated into one perpetual orgy, at once monstrous and vulgar; — into these details, fortunately^ we need not follow his awful career. His infamous follies and cruelties in Greece ; his dismal and disgraceful fall — a tragedy without pathos, and a ruin without dignity — all this must be read in the pages of contemporary historians. Probably no man who ever lived has crowded into fourteen years of life so black a catalogue of iniquities as this Coliot d'Herbois upon an imperial throne. The seeds of innu- merable vices were laient in the soil of his disposition, and the hot-bod 1 Tac. Ann. xiv. 13. » Eev. ii. 24. 3 2 Cor. iv. 2. * Suet. iVcr. Ixxx. 29, 30. Dion Cass. Ixi. 4, 5. ' A son of the M. Jun. Silanus whom Gaius called " the golden sheep" (Tac. Arm, xvl. 9). * Tac. Arm. xvi. 21. NERO's CHIMES. 29 of absolutism forced them into rank growth. To speak thus much of liim and of his reign has been necessary, because he was the epitome of tho age in which he lived — the consummate flower of Pagan degradation at the time when the pure bud of Christian life was being nurtured into beauty amid cold and storm. But here we must for the present leave the general story of his reign, to give our attention to the one event which brought Mm into collision with the Christian Church CHAPTER IV. THE BUKNING OP ROME, AND THE FIEST PEESECUTION, " Mira Nero de Tarpeya A Roma como se ardia Gritos dan ninos y yiejos Y el de nada se dolia. Que alegre vista ! " — Spanish Song, Had it not been for one crime with which all ancient writers have mixed up his name, Christianity might have left Nero on pne side, not speaking of him, but simply looking and passing by, while he, on his part, might scarcely so much as have heard of the existence of Christians amid the crowded thousands of his capital. That crime was the burning of Rome ; and by precipitating the Era of Martyrdom, it brought him into immediate and terrible connexion with the Church of Christ. Whether he was really guilty or not of having ordered that immense conflagration, it is certain that he was suspected of it by his contemporaries, and has been charged with it by many historians of his country.' It is certain, also, that his head had been full for years of the image of flaming cities ; that he used to say that Priam was to be congratulated on having seen the ruin of Troy; that he was never able to resist the fixed idea of a crime ;^ that the year following he gave a public recitation of a poem called Troica, from the orchestra of the theatre, and that this was only the burning of Rome under a thin disguise ;' and that just before his flight he meditated setting fire 1 Tac. Arm. xv. 67 (of. 38); Suet. Ner. 38; Dion Cass. bdi. 16; Pliny, H.N. rvii. 1, 1 ; followed by Orosiua, Sulpioius, Severus, Eutropiua, etc. 2 Eenan, iMmiecArigJ, p. 144. ■ ., . , u i -o <. 46 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY It is probable that this silence is in itself the result of the terrible scenes in which the Apostles perished. It was indispensable to the safety of the whole community that the books of the Christians, when given up by the unhappy weakness of " traditors " or discovered by the keen malignity of informers, should contain no compromising matter. But how would it have been possible for St. Luke to write in a manner otherwise than compromising if he had detailed the horrors of the Neronian persecution 1 It is a reasonable conjecture that the sudden close of the Acts of the Apostles may have been due to the impossibility of speaking without indignation and abhorrence of the Emperor and the Government which, between A.D. 64 and 68, sanctioned the infliction upon innocent men and women of atrocities which excited the pity of the very Pagans. The Jew and the Christian who entered on such themes could only do so under the disguise of a cryptograph, hiding his meaning from all but the initiated few in such prophetic symbols as those of the Apocalypse. In that book alone we are enabled to hear the cry of horror which Nero's brutal cruelties wrung from Christian hearts. But if we know so little of Saint Peter that is in the least trust- worthy, it is hardly strange that of the other Apostles, with the single exception of St. John, and — in the wider sense of the word " apostle " — of St. James the Lord's brother, we know scarcely anything. To St. Peter, St. John, and St. James the Lord's brother, it was believed that Christ, after His resurrection, had " revealed the true gnosis," or deeper understanding of Christian doctrine.^ It is singular how very little is narrated of the rest, and how entirely that little depends upon loose and unaccredited tradition. Did they all travel as missionaries ? Did they all die as martyrs 1 Heracleon, in the second century, said that St. Matthias, St. Thomas, St. Philip, and St. Matthew, died natural deaths, and St. Clemens of Alexandria quotes him without contradiction.' The only death of an Apostle narrated in the New Testament is narrated in two words, aj/ciXe fiaxcdpf — "slew with the sword." It is the martyrdom of St. James the Elder, the son of Zebedee.' Of St. Philip we know with reasonable certainty that he lived for many years as bishop, and died in grea;t honour at Hierapolis in Phrygia. Eusebius makes express mention of his daughters, of whom two were virgins, and one was married and buried at Ephesus. It cannot be regarded as certain that there has not been some confusion between Philip the Apostle and Philip the Deacon ; but there is no reason why they should not both have had virgin daughters, and Polycrates expressly says that the Philip who was regarded as one of the great " Ughts of Asia " was 1 Clem. Alex. ap. Euseb. II. K ii. 1. 2 Clem. Alex. Sb-om. i. 4. See DoUinger, First Age of the Ofmrch, p. 137. 3 He became the patron saint of Spain from the legends about the removal of his Dody to Iria Flavia. Compostella is said to be a corruption of Giacomo Fostolo (Voss). See Cave, lAves of the Apostles, p. 150. The BoUandists still retain the legend, first mentioned by Wal. Strabo (Poem, de XII. Apost.), that he was martyred there. OBSCURITY OF CHURCH HISTORY. 47 one of the Twelve.' If we ask about the rest of our Lord's chosen Twelve, all that we are told is of a most meagre and most uncertain character. The first fact stated about them is that they did not separate for twelve years, because they had been bidden by Christ in His parting words to stey for that period in Jerusalem. Accordingly we find that up to that time St. Paul is 'the only Apostle of whose missionary journeys beyond the limits of Palestine we have any evidence, whereas after that time we find James the Lord's brother alone at Jerusalem as the permanent overseer of the Mother-Church. We are told that, after the Ascension, the Apostles divided the world among themselves by lot for the purpose of evangelisation,^ and in the fourth century there was a prevalent belief that they had all been martyred before the destruction of Jerusalem, excepting John. This, however, can have only been an cl priori conjecture, and there is no evidence which can be adduced in its support. The sum total, then, of what tradition asserts about these Apostles, omitting the worst absurdities and the legendary miracles, is as follows : — St. Andrew, determining to convert the Scythians,' visited on the way Amynsus, Trapezus, Heraclea, and Sinope. After being nearly killed by the Jews at Sinope, he was miraculously healed, visited Neo- CsBsarea and -Samosata, returned to Jerusalem, and thence went to Byzantium, where he appointed Stachys to be a bishop. After various other travels and adventures he was martyred at Patrse by ^geas, Proconsul of Achaia, by being crucified on the decussate cross now known as the cross of St. Andrew.* St. Bartholomew (Nathaniel) is said to have travelled to India, and to have carried thither St. Matthew's Gospel." After preaching in Lycaonia and Armenia, it is asserted that he was either flayed or crucified head downwards at Albanopolis in Armenia. The psendo- Dionysius attributes to him the remarkable saying that " Theology is both large and very small, and the Gospel broad and great, and also compressed."* St. Matthew is said to have preached in Parthia and Ethiopia, and to have been martyred at Naddaber in the latter country.' Accord- ing to St. Clemens, he lived only on herbs,' practising a mode of life which was Essene in its simplicity and self-deniaL 1 Clem. Alex. Strom, iii., p. 448; Polycr. ap. Euseb. iii. 31; Dorotheus, De Yit. el Mort. Apost. J Isidor. Pelus. Epp. i. 447, etc. Metaphrastes and Nioephorus add various fables. 2 Socrates, ff.E. i. 19. ^ Origen ap. Euseb. iii. 1. * See Euseb. ff. E. in,l; Nioephorus, S. E. ii. 39. In Hesychius ap. Pbotium, Cod. 269, is first found his address to his cross. The Acta Andreae (Tisohendorf, Act. Apocr., p. 105 if.) are among the best of their kind. 6 Euseb. V. 10 ; Sophronius ap. Jer. De Script. Ecd. ' De Mystic. Theol. i. 3. ? Nioeph. I.e. ; Metaphr. ad Aug. 24 ; Fortunatus, De Senat. vii. Various fables are added in Niceph. ii. 41. « Paedag. il. 1. 48 THE EAEL1 DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. St. Thomas is called the Apostle of India, and is sttid to havo founded the Christian communities in India who still call themselves by his name. But this seems to be a mistake. Theodoret says that the Thomas who established these churches was a Manichee, and the " Acts of Thomas " are Manichean in tendency. Origen says that the Apostlo preached in Parthia.^ His grave was shown at Edessa in the fourth century.^ St. James the Less, the son of Alphseus, who is distinguished by the Greek Church from James the Lord's brother, is said to have been crucified while preaching at Ostrakine in Lower Egypt.' St. Simon Zelotes is variously conjectured to have preached and to have been crucified at Babylonia or in the British Isles.* Judas, Lebb^us, or Thadd^us, is said to have been despatched by St. Thomas to Abgar, King of Edessa, and to have been martyred at Berytus.* Scanty, contradictory, late, and unauthenticated notices, founded for the most part on invention or a sense of ecclesiastical fitness, and recorded chiefly by writers like Gregory of Tours late in the sixth century, and Nicephorus late in the fourteenth, are obviously valueless. All that we can deduce from them is the belief, of which we see glimpses even in Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen, that the Apostles preached far and wide, and that more than one of them were martyred. It would be strange if none of the Twelve met with such an end in preaching among Pagan and barbarous nations ; and that they did so preach is rendered likely by the extreme antiquity and the marked Judseo- Christian character of Churches which still exist in Persia, India, Egypt, and Abyssinia. But in the silence and obscurity which thus falls over the personal history and final fate of the Twelve whom Christ chose to be nearest to Him on earth, how invaluable is the boon of knowledge respecting the thoughts, and to some extent even the lives, of such Apostles as St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John, as well as of St. Jude, and St James the Loi'd's brother, and the eloquent writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. And the boon is all the richer from the Divine diversity of thought thus preserved for ns. For each of these Apostolic writers, though they are one in their faith, yet approaches the hopes and promises of Christianity from a different point of view ; each one gives us a fresh aspect of many- sided truths. Let us imagine what would have been our position if, in the providence of God, we had not been sufiered to possess these works, of which the greater mmiber belong to the closing epoch of the New Testament Canon. The New Testament would then have consisted exclusively of the works of five writers — the four Evangelists and St. Paul. 1 Orig. ap. Euseb. iii. 1. 2 chrys. Bom. in Heir, xxvi. ' Niceph. ii. 40. * Nioeph. viii. 30. ' Dorotheus, De Vit. Apost. : Niceph. ii. 40. THE BOOKS OP THE NEW TESTAMENT. 49 The Synoptists, in spite of well-marked minor differences in their point of view, present for the most part a single — mainly the external and historical — aspect of the life of Christ. We find in them a com- pressed and fragmentary outline of the work of Christ's public ministry, and even this is almost confined to details about one year of His work and one region of His ministry,^ followed by a fuller account of His Betrayal, Passion, Cnicifixion, and Resurrection. In the fourth Gospel alone we have a sketch of the Judtean phase of the ministry, as well as the doctrine of the Logos, and a yet deeper insight into the Nature and Mind of Christ. But, with this exception, we should be left to St. Paul alone for the theological development and manifold applications of Christiaji truth. And yet in the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Epistles of St. Paul himself, we should have found abundant traces that his view of Christianity was in many respects independent and original. Alike fi-om his own pages, and those of his friend and historian St. Luke, we should have learnt the existence of phases of Christianity, built indeed upon the same essential truths as those which he deemed it the gloiy of his life to preach, but placing those truth^ in a different per- spective, and regarding them from another point or view. We should have heard the echoes of disputes so vehement and so agitating that they even arrayed the Apostles in a position of controversy against one another, and we should have found traces that though those disputes were conducted with such Christian forbearance on both sides as to prevent their degenerating into scliisms, they yet continued to smouldei as elements of difference between various schools of thought. Taking the Corinthian Church as a type of other Churches, we should have found that there was a Kephas party, and an Apollos party, and a Christ party, as well as a pai"ty which attached itself to the name of Paul ; ' and even if we admitted that the Corinthian Church was exceptionally factious, we should have learnt from the Epistle to the Galatians, and other sources, that there were Jews who called themselves Christians, and claimed identity with the views of James, by whom the name and w^oxk of tlie Apostle of the Gentiles were regarded not only with unsympathising coldness, but with positive disapproval and dislike. We should have felt that we were not in possession of the materials for forming any complete opinion as to the characteristics of early Christianity. We should have longed for even a few words to inform us what were the special tenets which differentiated the adherents of St. James, and St. Peter, and St. John, and Apollos, from those of the Great Missionary who in human erudition and purely intellectual endowments, no less than in the vast effects of his lifelong martyrdom, so greatly surpassed them all. We should have been ready to sacrifice no small part of classical literature for the sake of any treatise, however brief, which would have furnished us with adequate data for ascertaining 1 See the remark of St. Joha " the Elder " {i.e,, the Apostle) in Papian ap. Buseb. B. E. lii. 24. , i 50 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. the teaching of Apostles who had lived familiarly with the Lord by the Lake of Galilee ; or of some other early converts who, like St. Paul himself, formed their judgment of Christianity with the full powers of a cultivated manhood. We should, indeed, have known how Christianity was taught by one who had been living for years in Heathen communi- ties, whose Jewish training at the feet of Gamaliel had been modified by his early days in learned Tarsus, and still more by his cosmopolitan familiarity with the cities and ways of men ; but we should have asked whether the Faith was taught in exactly the same way — or, if not, with what modifications — by a Peter and a John, who had known, as St. Paul had never known, the living Jesus, and by a James the Lord's brother, who spent so many years in the rigid practice of every Jewish observance. "We should have been lost in vain surmises as to the growth of heresies. If Marcionism and Antinomianism sprang from direct perversion of the teachings of St. Paul, what was the teaching on which Nazarenes, and Ebionites, and Elchasaites, and Chiliasts professed to found their views ? In fact, without the nine books of the New Testament, which will be examined in these volumes, the early history of the Church would have been reduced to a chaos of hopeless uncertainties. We should have felt that our records were grievously imperfect ; that only in a unity wherein minor differences were reconciled, without being obliterated — only in the synthesis of opinions which were various, without contreiriety — could we form a full notion of the breadth and length, and depth and height of sacred Truth. Now this is the very boon which the Spirit of God has granted to us. Besides the four Gospels, besides the thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, we have nine books of the New Testament which are the works of five different authors, and every one of these brief but precious documents is marked by its own special characteristics. 1. Earliest, probably, of them all is the book which is unhappily placed last, and therefore completely out of its proper order in our New Testaments, The Revelation of St. John the Divine. It marks the beginning of the era of martyrdoms. It is in many respects exceptionally precious. It is precious as a counterpart to the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, and therefore as furnishing us ■^vith a splendid specimen of a Christian, as distinguished from a Jewish, Apocalypse. It is precious as showing the effect produced on the thoughts and hopes of Christendom by the ficrst outburst of Imperial persecution. It is especially precious as a Christian Philosophy of History, and as giving a voice to the inextinguishable hopes of Christians even in the midst of fire and blood. And besides all this it is precious as furnishing the earliest insight into the mind of the Beloved Disciple, in a stage of his career before the mighty lessons involved in the Fall of Jerusalem and the close of the old .iEon had emancipated him from the last fetters of Judaic bondage. 2. In The Epistle to the Hebrews, which is being more and THE EPISTLE OP ST. JUDE. 51 more widely accepted as Jhe work of ApoUos, we have a specimen of Aleaxmdrian Christianity. Valuable for its singular dignity and eloquence, for the powerful argument which it elaborates, and for the original truths with which it is eniiched, it also possesses a very special interest because it gives us a clear insight into the school of liought which sprang from the contact of Judaism and Christianity with Greek Philosophy. Of this Alexandrianism there are but scattered indications in St. John and St. Paul, but it was destined in God's providence to exercise a very powerful influence over the growth and development of Christian doctrine, because it furnished the intellectual training of some of the greatest of the Christian Fathers. Our loss would have been irreparable if time had deprived us of the earliest and profoundest Christian treatise which emanated from the splendid school of Alexandrian Theology. The remaining seven treatises of the New Testament are known by the general name of the Seven Catholic Epistles. Various untenable explanations of the name " Catholic " have been suggested ; but in the third century it was used in the sense of "encyclical,"^ and there can be little doubt that these seven letters were so called because they were addressed not to one city, or even to one nation, but generally, to every Christian. In the West they were sometimes called Ilpistolae Canonicae, but this could not have been the original meaning of OathoKc, since Eusebius gives the name to the letters of Dionysius of Corinth.^ Two of these letters — the Epistles of St. James and St Jude — belong to the Judaic school of Christianity ; two others — those of St. Peter — represent the moderate and mediating position of Christians who wished to stand aloof, aUke from Paulinists and Judaists, on the more general grounds of a common Christianity; three — ^those of St. John — represent a phase of thought in which the chief controversies which agitated the first decades of the Church's history have melted into the distance, or have been solved for ever by the Pall of Jerusalem. At that epoch Truth was beginning to be assailed from without by new forms of opposition, or corroded from within by fresh types of error. As we are about to study these Epistles in detail, we may here confine ourselves to a few general remarks respecting them. 3. The Epistle op St. Jude is the work of a non-Apostolic writer, but of one who was known as brother of St. James the Bishop of Jerusalem, and who evidently resembled his more eminent brother in ' Euseb. B. E. vii. 25. 2 Euseb. H. E. iv. 23; Leont. De Sect. 27. Theodoret says: "They are called 'Catholic,' which is equivalent to encyclical, since they are not addressed to single Clhurches, but generally (koSoXou) to the faithful, whether to the Jews of the Dispersion, as Peter writes, or even to all who are living as Christians under the same faith." The word itself simply means "general." Some scholars have argued that the Fathers use it in the sense of " canonical," but this is a later usage. See Ebrard's Appendix te hli edition of 1 John. 52 THE EAELY DAYS OF CHEISTIANITY. intensity of character and vehemence of con,viction. His brief letter is interesting from its very peculiarities. It abounds in original and picturesque expressions, and fearlessly utilises both the Jewish Hagadoth and the apocryphal literature, with which the writer's training had rendered him familiar. In the passionate vehemence of its deniuiciations against Gnostic libertinism it reads like a page of Amos or of Isaiah, and is evidently the work of one who, like so many of the early Jewish Christians, had thought it both a national and a religious duty in entering the Church to remain true to the Synagogue. It is a sort of partial and anticipated Apocalypse, but it rests content with isolated metaphors, instead of continuous symbols. 4. The same stern Judaic character, rendered still more unbending by the asceticism of the writer, marks every page of The Epistle of St. James. Living exclusively at Jerusalem, accurate as the Pharisees themselves in the observance of the Mosaic Law — a scrupulosity which had gained him his title of " the Just " — he was only called upon " to be a Jew to the Jews," and this he was by nature, by temperament, and by training. In the Synod at Jerusalem, where St. Peter proposed emancipation, St. James^even in assenting — proposes restrictions ; and while St. Peter, almost in Pauline language, declares that neither Jew nor Gentile can be saved except "through the grace of the Lord Jesus,"' St. James, while holding the same faith, urges the claims of Moses, and follows the indications of the Prophets. St. Peter never mentions "the Law;" St. James never mentions "the Gospel." He accepts it indeed with all his heart, but it still presents itself to him as "the Law," though glorified from "a yoke that gendereth to bondage"^ into a perfect " law of liberty."^ In reading St. James we can realise the sentiments of the Mother-Church of Jerusalem, and feel that there is no discontinuity in the great stream of Divine Eevelation. For him, and for the Jewish Christians of whom he was the recognised leader, Christianity is not so much the inauguration of the New as the fulfilment of the Old. 5. It is necessary, and even desirable, that there should in all ages be some whose mission it is to develop one special aspect of truth, and to stamp the whole of their religious system with the impress of their own powerful individuality. Such, respectively, were St. Paul and St. James. Even in their lifetime there were some who exaggerated and perverted the special truths which it was their work to teach. After their death there were Marcionites and Antinomians who perverted the doctrines of St. Paul, and there were Ebionites and Nazarenes who falsely claimed the authority of St. James. But happily there are Christians in all ages who, while they only acknowledge a heavenly master, are anxious to accept truth by whomsoever it is presented to them, yet at the same time to strif » Acts XV. 11. s Gal. iv. 24. » James L 25, u. 12. THE EPISTLE OF ST. JAMES, 53 it of all mere party peculiarities. Such was St. Peter. He can see the side of truth which either of his great contemporaries represents. He is pre-eminently the Apostle of Catholicity. He had shown in his conduct at Caesarea that his convictions leaned to the side of the Apostle of the Gentiles; and at Antioch that he could not wholly emancipate himself from the habits induced by lifelong training in the principles of St. James. He was neither able nor willing wholly to shake off the spell of personal ascendency exercised over him alike by the great world-missionary and by the unbending Bishop of Jerusalem In The Epistles of St. Peter we are able to trace the thoughts and expressions of both these great leaders. He dwells with all the energy of St. James on the glory of practical virtue, and with much of the fervour of St. Paul on the distinctively Christian motives and sanctions. But it is no part of his object to follow St. Paul in the logical development and formulation of Christian theology, nor yet to dwell with the exclusiveness of St. James on Christian practice. Even when using language which had been seized upon as the shibboleth of partisans, he strips it of all partisan significance. He was out of sympathy with the spirit which leads to disunion and factiousness by the exclusive maintenance of antagonistic formulae. It is interesting to see that the same distinctive peculiarities are continued in later writers of the first and second centuries. In the Epistle of the pseudo-Barnabas we have an exaggerated PauUnism ; in the pseudo-Clementines an exaggerated Judaism, which makes a special hero of St. James. St. Peter, standing between both extremes, was claimed by both parties. Basilides, the anti-Judaic Egyptian Gnostic, claimed to have been taught by Glaucias, the interpreter of St. Peter ; and another apocryphal work, which uttered strong warnings against Jewish worship, was called "The Preaching of Peter." On the other hand, St. Peter shares, though in a degree subordinate to St. James, the admiration of the Ebionite partisans who wrote the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions. In a less objectionable way, but still with something of exaggeration, Hermas, the author of the famous " Shepherd," reflects the teaching of St. James ; while St. Clement of Rome, Catholic, like St. Peter, in all his sympathies, "combines the distinctive features of all the Apostolic Epistles," and "belonging to no party, he seemed to belong to aU." 1 6. There remain The Three Epistles of St. John,' which may be regarded collectively as the last utterance of Christian Revelation in the New Testament. They are the more interesting not only on this account, but because they are the work of one who had been excep- tionally near to the heart of Christ, and had lived for many years face to face vnth the great heathen world. They are also the work of one 1 lightfoot, Galatiam, p. 315. 2 I have gone through every fact and every detail of the Gospel of St. John in the I4f( of Christ, and for that re^isop I do x^o\ toi)ch upon it here, 54 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. ■who lived to see mighty changes in the growth and fortunes of the Christian Church. He had perhaps been the only Apostle who had seen Jesus die; he had been last beside the Cross, and first in the empty tomb. As one who had watched the death-bed of the Mother of the Lord, he had been one of the very few depositories of the awful mys- teries which it had been given to St. Luke partly to reveal, after they had been pondered for many years in the holy reticence of the Virgin's heart. He had been one of the scattered despairing band who had spent in anguish the awful day in which they knew that Jesus was lying dead, and did not yet understand that He should rise again. For a quarter of a century he was the sole survivor, not only of those who had heard the last discourses of the Lord on the evening of His Passion, but even of any who could say, "That which we have seen and our hands have handled of the Word of Life declare we unto you." But his Epistles have yet a further interest as the writings of one who, in his long and diversified experience, had undergone a remarkable change alike of character and of views; of one who had passed from the Elijah-spirit to the Christ-spirit — from the narrower scrupulosity of a Judaist, living in the heart of the Jewish capital and attending thrice a day the Temple worship, to the breadth and width and spirituality of Christian freedoin. We have in the Apoca- lypse a work of his in the earlier stage of his Christian opinions, when he stood for the first time face to face with the Heathen world in its fiercest attitude of anti-Christian opposition. We have in his Gospel and Epistles the sweetest and loftiest utterances of Christian idealism ; the strains, as it were, of Divinest music in which the voice of inspiration died away. It may perhaps be said that our possession of these treasures — especially of some of them — is disturbed by the growing suspicion as to their genuineness. On this score Christianity has little to fear. Every true and honourable man will regard it as a base and cowardly unfaithfulness to defend as certain the genuineness of any book of the Bible of which the spuriousness can be shown to be even reasonably probable. In spite of the conflict which has raged around the Gospel of St. John, we are deeply convinced that the arguments preponderate in favour of those vho accept it as the work of the Beloved Disciple. I should find no difficulty in regarding the Apocalypse as being the work of another John if, in spite of some acknowledged difficulties, the Johannine authorship did not seem to be all but incontrovertible. The Epistle to the Hebrews is not a work of St. Paul, but it is pre-eminently worthy of its honoured place in the Canon. The first Epistles of St. Peter and St. John may be said to stand above all suspicion. The Epistles of St. James and St. Jude have less distinctive value as parts of the Christian Revelation, but yet have their own inestimable worth, and derive a deeper interest from being the works of "brethren of the Lord." The second and third Epistles of St. THE EPISTLES OP ST. JOHN. 55 John are almost cei-tainly genuine, but whether they be by the Apostle or not is matter of minor importance, because of their extreme brevity, and because they consist for the most part of recapitulated truths. They are but corollaries to the first Epistle, and contain no doctrine which is not found more fully in the Apostle's other writings. The only one of the seven Catholic Epistles against the genuineness of which strong arguments may be adduced is the Second Epistle of St. Peter, which is in any case the book least supported by external testimony. Its genuineness must be regarded as a question for still further discussion, and the recent discovery of its affinity in some passages to the works of Josephus requires careful attention.' In the introduction to each of these Epistles the evidence as to their genuineness is discussed. Many, both in ancient and in modern days, have doubted about some of them. Dionysius of Alexandria and Eusebius, Gaius and Jerome, Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan, Sixtus Senensis and Luther,* Zwingli, Calvin, CEcolampadius, Grotius, and many more, have regarded several of them as being at best deutero- canonical — authentic (if at all) in a lower sense, and endowed with inferior authority ; but though the Church of England has shown herself wiser than the Council of Trent in not binding with an anathema the necessary acceptance of the genuineness of every one of them, we have every reason to rejoice that they were admitted by general consent into the Christian Canon. Enough, I trust, has been urged to show the varied and exceeding preciousness of the writings which we are now about to examine. St. Paul, as has been said, dwells, not of course exclusively, but predomi- nantly, on Christian doctrine, St. James on Christian practice, St. Peter on Christian trials, and St. John on Christian experience ; — St. Paul insists mainly on faith, St. James on works, St. Peter on hope, and St. John on love ; — St. Paul represents' Christian scholasticism, and St. John Christian mysticism ; — St. Paul represents the spirit of Protes- tantism, St. Peter that of Catholicism, while St. James speaks in the voice of the Church of the Past, and St. John in that of the Church of the Future ; — St. Peter is the founder, St. Paul the propagator, St. John the finisher ; — St. Peter represents to us the glory of power and action, St. Paul that of thought and wisdom, St. James of virtue and faithfulness, St. John of emotion and holiness.* Again, to St. James Christianity appears as the fulfilment of the Old Law, to St. Peter as the completion of the old Theocracy, to St. Paul as the completion of the old Covenant, to Apollos as the completion of the old Worship and Priesthood, to St. John as the completion of all the truths which the 1 V. mfra, pp. 106—8. , . . ^ * Luther was not by any means the only great theologian, either in ancient or modern times, who adopted a subjective test. There were others also who "den Karujn im Kanon mchten undfanden." 3 See Sohaff, Siat. of the Church, 105—110. * See Stialev, Sermons on the Apostolic Age, pp. 4, 5. 56 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. woi'ld possessed.' Siicli generalisations may be too seductive, and may tend to mislead us by bringing into prominence only one special pecu- liarity of each writer, wliile others are for the time ignored. Yet they contain a germ of truth, and they may help us to seize the more salient characteristics. Two things, however, are certain : — One is, that in every essential each of the sacred writers held the Catholic faith, one and indivisible, which is no more altered by their varying individuality than Light is altered in character because we sometimes see it glowing in the heavens, and sometimes flashing from the sea. The other is, that in all these writers alike we see the beauty of holiness, the regenerating power of Christian truth. But among the writers of the New Testament two stand out pre- eminently as what would be called, in modern phraseology, original theologians. They are St. Paul and St. John. On some of the special differences between them we shall touch farther on. Meanwhile we shall see at a glance the contrast between the dialectical method of the one and the intuitive method of the other, if we compare the Epistle to the Romans with the First Epistle of St. John. The richness, the many-sidedness, the impetuosity, the human individuality of the one, are as unlike as possible to the few but reiterated keynotes, the unity, the sovereign calm, the spiritual idealism of the other. The difference will be emphasised if we place side by side the fundamental conceptions of their theology. That of St. Paul is :— " But now, apart fi-om the law, the righteousness of God hath been manifested, ■witness heing home thereto by the la-w and the prophets; even the righteousnesa of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe ; for there is no distinction : for aU sinned, and are falling short of the glory of God, being accounted righteous freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Rom. iii. 21—24). That of St. John is :— "Herein is manifested the love of God in us, because he hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him " (1 John iv. 9). It requires but to read the two formuliB side by side to perceive the characteristic differences which separate the theological conceptions of the two Apostles. It is a rich boon to possess the views of both. We shall be still more inclined to value this precious heritage of Christian thought when we notice that the least important of these Catholic Epistles stands on an incomparably higher level than any of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. This will be shown by a glance at the Epistle of St. Clement and the Epistle of Barnabas — writings so highly valued in the Church that the first is found in the Alexan- drian Manuscript, and the second in the Sinaitic Manuscript, after the Apocalypse, and both were publicly read in churches as profitable "scriptures." ' gee Lange, Introd.nction to Catholic Epistles, Bibelwerh, ijc, THE EPISTLE OF ST. CLEMENT. 57 (1) Tun Epistle op St. Clement is thoroughly eclectic, but the eclecticism is as devoid of genius and originality as an ordinary modem sermon. It consists in a free usage of phrases borrowed promiscuously from each of the great Apostles, rather than in a real assimilation of their views. The piety and receptivity of the writer is very beautiful, but it cannot be said that it is vivified by a single luminous or informing idea. (a) St. Clement has read St. Paul and St. John, and St. James and St. Peter, and as a pupil of the last he is animated by a genuine spirit of catholicity ; but he does not seem to have realised the essential dis- tinctions which separate their writings. The substance of his views is identical with that which we find in St. Peter and St. James, but he clothes them in expressions borrowed from St. Paul. He says with St. Paul, " We are not justified by ourselves, nor by works, but by faith " (c. xxxii.), and he says with St. James, "being justified by works and not by words" (c. xxx.) ; but he says nothing to bring into harmony the apparent contradictions. His readiness to accept all moral exhortations and all Apostolic phrases acts as a solvent in which the special meaning of these phrases as parts of entire systems is apt to disappear. Three of the sacred writers refer in different ways and for different purposes to Abraham (Rom. iv. ; James ii. 21 ; Heb. xi. 8). In the syncretism of St. Clement the allusions made by all three are mingled in one sentence. Eahab, in St. Clement, is saved by her faith and by lier hospitality, which is a curious union of James iL 25 and Heb. xi. 31 ; and the only original observation which St. Clement adds is the allegorising fancy that the red cord with which she let the spies down from the window indicated the efficacy of the blood of Christ for all who believe and hope in God {Ep. ad Cor. xii.). Thus the mechanical fusion of two quotations is ornamented by a loose, poor, and untenable analogy, which enables him to add " prophecy " to the faith and hospitality which distinguished the harlot of Jericho. (6) So, too, when St. Clement speaks of the Eesurrection, we see now immeasurably his theology has retrograded behind that of St. Paul. He does not connect it immediately and necessarily with the Eesurrection of Christ, but proves it by Old Testament quotations, and illustrates its possibility by natural analogies, especially by the existence and history of the Phcenix ! How much would our estimate of inspiration have been lowered- — how loud would have been the scornful laugh of modern materialists — had faith in the Eesurrection been founded in the New Testament on such arguments as these ! Tacitus, too, believed in the Phoenix ; but Tacitus does not refer to the fable of its reappearance by way of founding on it an inestimable truth. We are not comparing St. Clement with Tacitus ; we love his gentleness and respect his piety ; we are only endeavouring to show how far he stands below the level of St. John and of St. Paul. (c) But still more striking instances might be furnished of the thoo- 58 THE EAEL-X DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. logical and intellectual weakness of this ancient and saintly writer. He never deviates into originality except to furnish an illustration, and his illustrations, even when they are not erroneous, have but little intrinsic value. The worth of his Epistle consists in its earnest spirit, and in its historic testimony to the canonical Scriptures and to the constitution of the early Church. But how different is its diluted and transitional Paulinism from the force and wealth of the first Epistle of St. Peter ! (2) Nor is it otherwise when we turn to the exaggerated and extrava- gant Paulinism of The Epistle op Barnabas. Here the inferiority is still more marked : it even leads to decadent doctrine and incipient heresy. (a) The writer has learnt from St. Paul the nullity of the Law as a means of Salvation, but he has not learnt the true and noble function of the Law in the Di^dne economy. He cannot see that there may be even in that which is imperfect a relative perfection. He does not understand the Divine value of Mosaism as God's edtieation of the human race. Not content with spiritualising the meaning of the Law, he speaks of its literal meaning in terms of such contempt as almost' to compromise the authority of the Old Testament altogether. He ventures to say that the circumcision of the flesh was an inspiration of "an evil angel" (c. ix.). When a writer has gone so far as this, he is perilously near to actual Gnosticism. In his attempt to allegorise the distinction between clean and unclean animals (c. x.) he is seen at his very worst. A single chapter so full of errors and follies, if found in any canonical book, would have sufiiced to drag down the authority of Scripture into the dust. (6) Again, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Barnabas — for that may have been his name, though he was not the Apostle — is acquainted with Alexandrian methods of exegesis. But his use of them is indiscriminate and unsatisfactory. The Israelites had been promised a land flowing with milk and honey ; Barnabas proceeds to allegorise the promise as follows : — Adam was made of earth j the earth therefore signifies the Incarnation of Christ ; milk and honey, which are suitable to infants, signify the new birth. Thus the Old Testament is a prophecy of the New ! On this demonstration the author looks with such special complacency that he quotes it as a memorable example of true knowledge (gnosis). (c) Again, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews had proved from Scripture that there still remains a Sabbath-rest [Sabhatismos) for the people of God. Barnabas coimects this with what he calls an Etrurian tradition, and originates the notion that the world is to be burned up in the year 6000 after the Creation. Again, he has learnt the general con- ception of numerical exegesis (gematria) from Jewish and Alexandrian sources, and he is specially proud of pressing Abraham's 318 servants into a mystic prophecy of the Crucifixion, because 318 is represented by IHT, of which IH stands for Jesus, and T for the cross. This is a style THE EPISTLE OP ST. BARNABAS. 59 of exegesis Rabbinic, but not Christian. No one can read the Epistle of Barnabas after the Epistle to the Hebrews without seeing that the former is not only immeasurably inferior, but that it is so inferior as to tremble on the verge of dangerous heresy. Let the reader compare the reference to the Day of Atonement in the Epistle of Barnabas (c. viL) with that in the Epistle to the Hebrews — let him contrast the numerous errors and monstrously crude typology of the former with the splendid spiritualism of the latter — let him notice how tasteless are the fancies of this unknown Barnabas, and how absurd are many of his statements — and he wiU see the difference between canonical and uncanonical books, and learn to feel a deeper gratitude for the superintending Providence which, even in ages of ignorance and simplicity, obviated the danger of any permanent confusion between the former and the latter.^ We have already seen what the condition of the world was like, let us sum up its points of contrast with the general picture presented by the early Christian Church. To represent the Christian ^Church as ideally pure, as stainlessly excellent and perfect, would be altogether a mistake. The Christians of the first days were men and women of like passions with our- selves. They sinned as we sin, and suffered as we suffer ; they were inconsistent as we are inconsistent, fell as we fall, and repented as we repent. Hatred and party-spirit, rancour and misrepresentation, treachery and superstition, innovating audacity and unspiritual retro- gressions were known among them as among us. And yet, with all their faults and failings, they were as salt amid the earth's corruption ; the true light had shined in their hearts, and they were the light of the world. The lords of earth were such men as Tiberius and Caligula, and Nero and Domitian ; the rulers of the Church were a James, a Peter, a Paul, a John. The literary men of the world were a Martial and a Petronius ; the Church was producing the Apocalypse, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Gospel of St. John. The art of the world was degraded by such infamous pictures as those on the walls of Pompeii ; that of the Church consisted in the rude but pure and joyous emblems scrawled on the soft tufa of the catacombs. The amusements of the world were pitilessly sanguinary or shamefully corrupt; those of the Christians were found in gatherings at once social and religious, as bright as they could be made by the gaiety of innocent and untroubled hearts. In the world infanticide was infamously universal ; in the Church the baptised little ones were treated as those whose angels beheld the face of our Father in Heaven. In the world slavery was rendered yet more intolerable by the cruelty and impurity of masters ; in the Church the Christian ' The same result would follow from comparing the Shepherd of Hermas with the Apocalypse. On these writings we may refer to Eeuss, TMot Chrit. il. ; Hilgenfeld, Apoit. Vdter; Schwegler, J!fachap. Zeitalter ; Donaldson, Apostolical Fathers ; Lightfoot, 8t. Clement of Bome ; Pfleiderer, Pmdiniimus, ii. ; Eitschl, Altkatli. Kircke. 60 THK EARLY DAYS OF CnRISTIANITY. slave, welcomed as a friend and a brother, often holding a position of ministerial dignity, was emancipated in all but name. In the world marriage was detested as a disagreeable necessity, and its very meaning was destroyed by the frequency and facility of divorce ; in the Church it was consecrated and honourable — the institution which had alone survived the loss of Paradise — and was all but sacramental in its Heaven-appointed blessedness. The world was settling into the sad- ness of unalleviated despair ; the Church was irradiated by an eternal hope, and rejoicing with a joy unspeakable and full of glory. In the world men were " hateful and hating one another " ; in the Church the beautiful ideal of human brotherhood was carried into practice. The Church had learnt her Saviour's lessons. A redeemed humanity was felt to be the loftiest of dignities ; man was honoured for being simply man ; every soul was regarded as precious, because for every soul Christ died ; the sick were tended, the poor relieved ; labour was represented as noble, not as a thing to be despised ; purity and resigna- tion, peacefulness and pity, humility and self-denial, courtesy and self- respect, were looked upon as essential qualifications for all who were called by the name of Christ. The Church felt that the innocence of her baptised members was her most irresistible form of apology ; and all her best members devoted themselves to that which they re- garded as a sacred task — the breaking down of all the middle walls of partition in God's universal temple, the obliteration of all minor and artificial distinctions, and the free development of man's spiritual natura CHAPTER VI. ST. PETER. Cjiiivisr^T. in Joann. Horn. 88. TirE early life of St. Peter cannot here be re-written, because in. two previous works ' I have followed the steps of his career so far as it is sketched in the sacred volume. After his youth as a poor and hardworked fisherman of the Lake of Galilee, we first find him as one of the hearers of St. John the Baptist in the wilderness of Jordan. Brought to Jesus by his brother Andrew, he at once accepted the Saviour's call, and received by anticipation that name of Kephas which he was afterwards to earn, partly by the stronger elements of his character, and partly by the grandeur of his Messianic confession. We have already tried to understand the significance of the scenes in 1 The Life of Christ, 1874 ; The Ufe of St. Paul, 1879. SAINT PETER. 61 Which lie takes part. We have seen how he was called to active work and the abandonment of earthly ties after the miraculous draught of fishes. We have watched, step by step, tlie " consistently inconsistent " impetuosity of his character, at once brave and wavering — first brave, then wavering, but always finally recovering its courage and integrity.' The narrative of the Gospel has brought before us his attempt to walk to his Lord upon the water ; his first public acknowledgment of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God ; the magnificent promises which, in his person, the Church received ; the subsequent presumption, which his Lord so sternly rebuked ; the many eager questions, often based upon mistaken notions, which he addressed to Christ, and which formed the occasion of some of our Lord's most striking utterances ; the incident of the Temple contribution ; the refusal and then the eagerness to be washed by Christ ; the warnings addressed to him ; the inability to " watch one hour " ; the impetuous blow struck at the High Priest's servant ; his forsaking of Christ in the hour of peril ; his threefold denial ; his bitter repentance and forgiveness ; his visit to the Sepulchre; the message which he received from the Risen Saviour; the exquisite scene at morning, on the shores of the misty lake, when Jesus appeared once more to seven of His disciples, and when, having once more tested the love of His generous but un- stable Apostle, He gave him His last special injunctions to tend His sheep and feed His lambs, and foretold to him his earthly end. Similarly we have studied, in the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles, the leading part which he took in the early days after the death of Christ ; his speech on the day of Pentecost ; his miracles ; his journey to Samaria and the discomfiture of Simon Magus ; his kind- ness to St. Paul ; his memorable vision at Joppa ; his baptism of Cornelius ; his bold initiative of living and eating with GentOes who had received the gift of the Holy Ghost ; the dauntlessness with which he faced the anger of the Jerusalem Pharisees ; his imprisonment and deliverance, the manly outspokenness of his opinions iu the Synod at Jerusalem, when he declared himself unhesitatingly in favour of the views of St. Paul as to the freedom of Gentile converts from the burden of Mosaic observances. At this point — about a.d. 51 — he dis- appears from the narrative of the Acts. From this time forward he was overshadowed — at Jerusalem by the authority of James the Lord's brother, throughout the Gentile communities by the genius and energy of St. Paul. This was naturally due to his intermediate position between the extreme parties of Paulinists and Judaists. Among the scattered Christian communities of the Circumcision he maintained a high authority, although it is probable that Christian tradition has not erred in indicating that even among the Jewish Christians of the Dis- 1 "Vrai oontraste de pusillanimity et de grandeur, oondamni i, osoUler toujoiirs eutre la faute et le repentir, mais rachetant glorieuseijient sa faiblesse par son humility et sea larmes" (Thierry, St, Jirome, i. X76). 62 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. persion St. James still occupied the leading position. All that we can further learn respecting him in Scripture is derived from his own Epistles, and from one or two casual but important allusions in the Epistles of St. Paul. In the Epistle to the Galatians we read the description of the memorable scene at Antioch, which produced upon the Church so deep an impression. Led away by the timidity which so strangely alternated with boldness in his character, St. Peter, on the airival of emissaries from James, had suddenly dropped the familiar intercourse with Gentiles which up to that time he had maintained. Shocked by an inconsistency of which he would himself have been incapable, St. Paul, the younger convert, the former persecutor, was compelled by the caU of duty publicly to withstand the great Apostle, who by his own conduct stood condemned for inconsistency, and had shown himself untrue to his own highest convictions. Further than this, we learn that the name of Peter was elevated at Corinth (a.d. 57) into a party watchword ; and that he was engaged in missionary journeys, in which he was accompanied by a Christian sister, who (since we know that he was married) was in all probability his wife. From his own Epistles we learn almost nothing about his biography. Nearly every inference which we derive from them is precarious, even when it is intrinsically probable. He writes " to the elect sojourners of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia," but we cannot be certain that he had personally visited those countries. ^ The question whether his letter is addressed to the Jewish or the Gentile converts is one which still meets with the most contradictory, although at the same time the most confident, replies. He sends his letter by Silvanus ; but we are not expressly told that this Silvanus is the previous companion of St. Paul. He sends a salutation from " Marcus my son " ; but there is nothing to prove that Marcus was not his real son, ^ nor have we any certain information that he is referring to St. Mark the Evangelist. In these instances we may, however, accept the general consensus of Christian antiquity in favour of the affirmative suppositions. ' If so, we see the deeply interesting fact that the chosen friends and companions of St. Peter were also the chosen friends and companions of St. Paul — a fact which eloquently refutes the modem supposition of the irreconcilable antagonism between the two Apostles and their Schools. But when we come to the closing salutation — " The 1 That lie had done bo is simply an inference from 1 Pet. i. 1. Origen only says, " He seems to have preached there " (op. Enseb. iii. 1). See Epiphan. Haer. xxvii. ; Jerome, Catal. «. v., Petrus. 2 St. Clemens of Alexandria says {Strom, iii., p. 448) that he had sons of his own, but their names are not preserved, and they were therefore probably unknown persons. Ti'adition tells of a daughter, PetroniUa (Ada Scmct., May 31). 3 Some have supposed that an actual son of St. Peter's is meant, but Origen {ap. Euseb. H. E. vi. 25), CEcumenius, etc., are probably right in supposing that John Mark (Acts xii. 25), the Evangelist, is meant, especially as Papias, Clemens of Alexandria, Irenseus, and others, say that he was the follower, disciple, amd interpreter of St Paul (Euseb. H. E. iii. 39, vi. 14, etc. ; ten. Haei: iii. 11). SAINT PETEE, 63 co-elect ill Babylon saluteth you,'' the conclusions of each successive commentator are -widely divergent. It is still disputed whether "the co-elect " is a Ohristiaji Church or a Christian -woman ; and if the latter, ■whether she is or is not Peter's wife ; and whether Babylon is the great Assyrian capital or a metaphorical allusion to the great western Baby- lon — Imperial Rome. Eminent as was the position of St. Peter, ^ the real details of the closing years of his life wUI never be known. But Christian tradition, acquiring definitiveness in proportion as it is removed from the period of which it speaks, has provided us with many details, which form the biography of the Apostle as it is ordinarily accepted by Romanists. We are told that he left Jerusalem in a.d. 33, and was for seven years Bishop of Antioch, leaving Euodius as his successor ; that during this period he founded the Churches to which his letter is addressed ; that he went to Rome in A.D. 40, and was bishop there for twenty- five years, though he constantly left the city for missionary journeys. The chief events of his residence at Rome were, according to legend, his conver- sion of PhUo and of the Senator Pudens, with his two daughters, Praxedes and Pudentiana ; and his public conflict with Simon Magus. The impostor, after failing to raise a dead youth — a miracle which St. Peter accomplished — finally attempted to delude the people by asserting that he would fly to heaven ; but, at the prayer of St. Peter and St. Paul, he was deserted by the demons who supported him, and dashed bleed- ing to the earth." During the Neronian persecution the Apostle is said to have yielded to the urgent requests of the Christians that he should escape from Rome ; but when he had got a little beyond the Porta Capena he met the Lord carrying his cross, and asked him, " Lord, whither goest thou ? " (Domine, qiio vadis ?) " I go to Rome," said Jesus, " to be crucified again for thee." The Apostle, feeling the force of the gentle rebuke, turned back, and was imprisoned in the Tulli- anum. He there converted his gaoler, miraculously causing a spring to burst out from the rocky floor for his baptism. On seeing his -wife led ■to execution, he rejoiced at her "journey homewards,"^ and, addressing her by name, called to her in a voice of cheerful encouragement, " Oh, remember the Lord ! " He was executed on the same day as St. Paul. They parted on the Ostian Road, and St. Peter was then led to the top of tie Janiculum, where he was crucified, not in the ordinary position, ' See Excursus I., on the Asserted Primacy of St. Peter. 2 There seems to have been a similar legend about Balaam, dimly alluded to by the IiXX. in the words ei/ifpoTTfl, Josh. xiii. 22, and in the Targum of Jonathan, Num. xxxi. 6. See Frankl. Yorstudden, p. 187. For the -whole legend of Simon MiS% (Clem. Alex. Strom, vu.). 64 THK EAELY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. but, by his own request, head downwards, because he held himself unworthy to die in. the same manner as his Lord. In the whole of this legend, embellished as it is in current Martyr- ologies with many elaborate details, there is scarcely one single fact on which we can rely. For instance, the notion that Peter was ever Bishop at Antioch between the years a.d. 33 — 40 is inconsistent with clear statements in the narrative of the Acts, in which Paul and Barnabas appear as the leaders and virtual founders of that Gentile Church.' Again, if he had founded the Church of Rome, or had ever resided there before a.d. 64, it is inconceivable that neither St. Luke in the Acts, nor St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, nor again in the five letters which he wrote from Rome during his first and second imprison- ments, should have made so much as the slightest allusion to him or to his work. The story of his collision with Simon Magus is a romance. It is founded on St. Peter's actual meeting with the sorcerer in Samaria, which is developed in the Clementines into a series of journeys from place to place, undertaken with the express view of thwarting this " founder of all the heresies.'' The legend is partly due to a mistake of Justin Martyr, who supposed that a statue dedicated to the Sabine god Semo Sancus^ (of whom Justin had never heard) was reared in honour of " Simon Sanctus."^ With these elements of confusion there is mixed up a malignant Ebionite attempt to calumniate St. Paul in a covert way under the pseudonym of Simon Magus, and to imply that St. Peter was at the head of a counter-mission to overthrow the supposed heretical teaching of his brother Apostle. The notion of this counter-mission is derived from the actual counter-mission of Judaists who falsely claimed the sanction of St. James.* The circumstance which suggested the legendary death of Simon in an attempt to fly was the actual death of an actor, who was dashed to the ground at Nero's feet while trying, by means of a flying machine, to sustain the part of Icarus.* If the youthful actor who was condemned to make this perilous attempt was a Christian, who would otherwise have been executed in some other way, we may well imagine that Christians would not soon forget an incident which sprinkled the very Antichrist with the blood of martyrs.' But it is possible that the legend may rest on small basis of fact. Rome abounded in Oriental thaumaturgists and impostors. Simon may have 1 Acts xi. 19. 2 Ot. Foat. vi. 213 ; Prop. iv. 9, 74, &c. ' He was identified with Divs Mdius. The inscription was aotuaBy found in 1574, in the popedom of Gregory XIII., on an island in the Tiber, as Justin said. Justin, Apol. i. 26 ; Tert. Apol. 13 ; Baronius, Annal. ad an. 44 ; Gieseler, i. 49 ; Neander, ii. 162 ; Eenan, Zes ApStres, pp. 275 — 277. In this island, now called " The Island of St. Bartholomew," there was a college of Tridentales in honour of Semo Sancus (Orelli Xmcr., 1860-61). 4 Acts XV. 24. ' On this attempt to fly, see the commentators on Juv. Sat. viii. 186 ; Mart. Spectac. vii. ; Suet. Ifero, 12. ° "Icarus, primo statiin conatu, juxta cubiculum ejus decidit ipsiunqne cruore respersit, Suet. La, ST. PETEK's connexion with ROME. 65 been attracted to a city which naturally drew to itself all the villainy of the world, and there he may once more have encountered St. Peter.^ But if they met at Rome, all the details of their meeting have been disguised under a mixture of vague reminiscences and imaginary details. The assertion that Peter was Bishop of Rome, but that he constantly left it to exercise apostolic oversight throughout the world, is nothing but an ingenious theory.' The statement that he came to Rome in the reign of Claudius, A.D. 42, is first found in the Chronicon of Eusebius, nearly three centuries afterwards, and cannot be reconciled with fair inferences from what St. Paul tells us about the Church. As late as A.D. 52, St. Peter was at Jerusalem, and took an active part in the Synod of Jerusalem (Acts xv. 7) ; and he was then labouring mainly among the Jews (Gal. ii 7, 9). In a.d. 57 he was travelling as a missionary with his wife (1 Cor. ix. 5). He was not at Rome when St. Paul wrote to that Church in a.d. 58, nor when St. Paul came there as a prisoner in a.d. 61, nor during the years of St. Paul's imprisonment, A.D. 61 — 63, nor when he wrote his last Epistles, A.ix 66 and 67. If he was ever at Rome at all, which we hold to be almost certain, from the unanimity of the tradition, it could only have been very briefly before his martyrdom.' And this is, in fact, the assertion of Lactantius'' (t 330), who says that he first came to Rome in Nero's reign ; and of Origen (f 254), who says that he arrived there at the close of his life f and of the Praedicatio Petri, printed with the works of St. Cyprian.' His " bishopric " at Rome probably consisted only in his efibrts about the time of his martyrdom to strengthen the faith of the Church," and especially of the Jewish Christians. Indeed, there is much to be said in favour of the view that the Jewish and Gentile sections of the Church in Rome were separated by unusually deep divisions, and possessed their separate "presbyters" or "bishops" for some years. Such a fact would account for some confusion in the names of the first two or three Bishops of Rome. Eusebius — following Irenaeus and Epiphanius — says that the first Bishops of Rome were Peter, Linus, Cletus or Anencletus, and Clement.' But Hippolytus (a.d. 225) seems to regard Cletus and Anencletus as two difierent persons, and places 1 As asserted ill Justin, Apol. i. 26, 56 ; Iren. contra Haer. i. 23, § 1 ; Philosophumena, vi. 20 ; Constt. Apost. v. ; Euseb. It. E. ii. 13, 14, etc. 2 It was first suggested by Baronius {Amud. ad. an. 39, § 25) and Fr. Windisch- mann (Vindiciae Petrimae, p. 112), and hastily adopted by Thiersch (N. Test. Canon, p. 104). 3 This view is now accepted by Eoman Catholics like Valesius, Pagi, Baluz, Hug, Klee, Dollinger, "Waterworth, Allnatt. See Waterworth, Engl, amd Borne, ii. ; Allnatt, Cathedra Petri, p. 114. The Eoman Catholic historian Alzog only speaks of the twenty- fire years' episcopate as an ancient report (i. 104). * Lactant. De Mart. Pereec. 2. s Origen ap. Euseb. ff. E. iii. 1. 6 Cypriani, Opp., p. 139, ed. Eigalt. , „i „ , ^, . c^ ' Clemens Eomanus, third bishop of Eome, speaks even more of St. Paul than of ot. Peter [Ep. ad. Cor. v.). 8 Euseb. H. E. iii. 2, 4, and 21 ; Iren. ap. Euseb. E. E. v. 6. 66 THE EAELY DAYS OP CHRISTIANITY. Clement before Cletus; and TertuUian (+218) says that Clement was ordained by St. Peter. ^ The notion of the Apostle's crucifixion head downwards is derived from a passing allusion in Origen, and seems to contradict an expression of TertuUian.^ It was possibly suggested by an erroneous translation of some Latin expression for capital punishment. At any rate, it stands condemned as a sentimental anachronism, bearing on its front the traces of later and more morbid forms of piety rather than the simple humility of the Apostles, who rejoiced in all things to imitate their Lord.' Those who accept these legends must do so on the authority of an heretical novel, written with an evil tendency, not earlier than the beginning of the third century ; or else on that of the apocryphal Acta Petri et Fauli, which appeared at a still later date. All that we can really learn about the closing years of St. Peter from the earliest Fathers may be summed up in the few words, that in all probability he was martyred at Pome.* That he died by martyrdom may be regarded as certaia, because, apart from tradition, it seems to be implied in the words of the Risen Christ" to His penitent Apostle.' That this martyrdom took place at Rome, though first asserted by TertuUian and Gains at the beginning of the third century, may (in the absence of any rival tradition) be accepted as a fact, in spite of the ecclesiastical tendencies which might have led to its invention ; but the only Scriptural authority which can be quoted for any visit of St. Peter to Rome is the one word, " The Church in Babylon saluteth you."° If, as I endeavour to show in the Excursus, there is reasonable certainty that Babylon is here used as a sort of cryptograph for Rome, the fair inferences from Scripture accord with the statements of tradition in the two simple particulars that St. Peter was martyred, and that this martyrdom took place at Rome. These inferences agree well with the probability that Silvanus, of whom we last hear in company with St. Paul at Corinth, and St. Mark, for whose assistance St. Paul had wished during his Roman imprisonment, were also at Rome, and were now acting in conjunction with the great Apostle of the Circumcision. The belief that St. Mark acted as the " interpreter " (Ip/iij^eurV) of St. Peter may have arisen from the Apostle's ignorance of the Latin language, and his need of some one to be his spokesman during his residence and his legal trial in the imperial city. 1 Tert. De Praesc. Haeret. 32. . 2 " Ubi Petms passioni dominicae adaequatur, " De Praesc. 36. 5 Neander, Planting, p. 377. It is curious to watch the growth of this fioiion. It begins with Origen, who simply says that it was done " at his own choice " (op. Euseb. ff. E. iii. i). To this Bufinus adds, " thaf he might not seem to be equalled to his Ijord " (ne exaequari Domino videretur), which contradicts the saying of TertuUian, that ' ' he was equalled to his Lord in the manner of his death. " Lastly, St. Jerome says that he was crucified with his head towards the earth and his legs turned upwards, " asserting that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same way as his Lord" [De Vir. IWuetr. 1). * See Excursus II., on St. Peter's Visit to Home. * John xxi. 19. " See Excursus III., on the Cse of the Name Babylon for Rome. GENUINENESS OF THE FIRST EPISTLE. 67 CHAPTER VII. SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. PETEIt " Then all himself, all joy and calm, Though for a while his hand forego, Just as it touched, the martyr's palm, He turns him to his task below." — Keble. The previous chapter has led us to conclude that the First Epistle of St. Peter was written at Eome. The date at which it was written cannot be fixed with certainty. The outburst of the Neronian per- secution took place in A.D. 64, but it is difficult to suppose that St. Peter arrived accidentally in Eome on the very eve of the conflagration. It seems more probable that he was either brought there as "a prisoner, or went to support the Jewish Christians during the subsequent pressure of their terrible afflictions.^ In that case he wrote the First Epistle shortly before his death, and he must have been martyred in the year 67 or 68, about the same time as his great brother-Apostle, St. Paul, with whom he is always united in the earliest traditions. That the First Epistle of St. Peter is genuine — a precious reHc of the thoughts of one of Christ's most honoured Apostles — we may feel assured. Its authenticity is supported by overwhelming external evidence. The Second Epistle, whether genuine or not, is at any rate a very ancient document, and it unhesitatingly testifies to the genuineness of the first. " The First Epistle is," says M. Kenan, " one of the writings of the New Testament which are the most anciently and the most unanimously cited as authentic." Papias, Poly carp, Irenseus, Clement of Alexandria, TertulUan, and Origen,^ all furnish indisputable evidence in its favour.' The proof that the writer was influenced by the Epistle to the Ephesians is in accordance with the character of the age, for the early Christians, as was perfectly natural, were in the habit of echoing one another's thoughts. Modern writers • St. Paul seems to have been absent from Eome for two full years before his second, imprisonment, and during this time the Christians must stiU have been liable to oppression and martyrdom, even after the iirst attack upon them had spent its fury. TVr faillign afiserts that laws were for the first time promulgated against the Christians by Nero, which rendered Christianity a "rdigio Ulicita " (ad NaM. 74 ; Apol. 5; Sulp. Sev. Hut. ii. 29, § 3). This is rendered very doubtful by Pliny's letter to Trajan. ' See Euseb. B. E. iii. 2.5, 39 ; iv. 14, v. 8, vi 25 ; Polyoarp, Ep. ad PhiUp. ; Iren. canira Haer. iv. 9, § 2 ; Clem. Alex. Strmi. iii. 8, iv. 7 ; Tert. Scarp. 12. Besides this, there are many distmct allusions to it in the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, little importance, therefore, can be attached to its absence from the Muratorian Canon, and its rejection by Ilieodore of Mopsuestia. 3 Keim (Bom und ChritteKOmn, p. 194), without deigning to offer a reason, assigns it %o the time of Trajan. In this he follows Hilgenfeld. 68 THE EAKLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. do exactly the same. The words and thouglits of every -writer who makes any wide or serious impression are, consciously or unconsciously, adopted by others exactly as if they were original and independent; and this is true to such an extent that an author's real success is often obliterated by its very universality. The views which he origin-ated come to be regarded as commonplace, simply because all his con- temporaries have adopted them. But this was still more the case in days when books were very few in number. The writings of the Apostles are marked by mutual resemblances, and the works of men like Ignatius, and Poly carp, and Clement of Eome, consist in large measure of a mosaic of phrases which they have caught up from their predecessors. The style of St. Peter in this Epistle resembles in many particulars the style of his recorded speeches. It is characterised by the fire and energy which we should expect to find in his forms of expression ; but that energy is tempered by the tone of Apostolic dignity, and by the fatherly mildness of one who was now aged, and was near the close of a life of labour. He speaks with authority, and yet with none of the threatening sternness of St. James. We find in the letter the plain and forthright spirit of the man insisting again and again on a few great leading conceptions. The subtle dialectics, the polished irony, the involved thoughts, the lightning-like rapidity of inference and suggestion, which we find in the letters of the Apostle of the TJn- circumcision, are wholly wanting in him. His casual connexions, marking the natural and even flow of his thoughts, are of the simplest character ; and yet a vigorously practical turn of mind, a quick susceptibility of influence, and a large catholicity of spirit, such as we know that he possessed, are stamped upon every page. He aims throughout at practical exhortation, not at systematic exposition ; and his words, in their force and animation, reflect the simple, sensuous, and passionate nature of the impulsive Simon of whom we read in the Gospels. Even if the external evidence in favour of the Epistle had been less convincing, the arguments on which its authenticity has been questioned by a few modern theologians have been so amply refuted as to establish its authorship with completer certainty. 1. It is not so much a letter as a treatise, addressed to Christians in general. It is mainly hortative, and its exhortations are founded on Christian hope, and on the efieots of the death of Christ. It is not, however, a scholastic treatise, but rather a practical address, at once conciliatory in tone and independent in character. It may with equal truth be called Pauline and Judseo-Christian. It is Judaeo-Christian in its sympathies, yet without any Judaic bitterness. It is Pauline in its expressions, yet with no polemic purpose. In both respects it accords with the character and circumstances of the great Apostle. It is completely silent about the Law, and enters into none of the once vehement controversies about the relation of the Law to the Gospel EEliiNlSCEIfCES OF CHRIST. 69 Or of Faith to Works. There is no predetermined attempt to reconcile opposing parties, but all party watch-words are either impartially omitted, or are stripped of their sterner antitheses.^ 2. One proof that it was written by St. Peter results from the natural way in which we can trace the influence of the most prominent events which occurred during his association with his Lord.^ He docs not mention them ; he does not even in any marked way refer to them ; and yet we find in verse after verse the indication of subtle reminiscences such as must have lingered in the mind of St. Peter. Christ had said to him, " Thou art Peter, and on this rock will T build my Church," and he speaks of Christ as " a rock," the corner-stone of a spiritual house, and of Christians as living stones built into it. Christ had sternly reproved him when he made himself a stumbling-block, and he sees how perilous it is to turn the Lord's will into a rock of ofience,' using the two very words which lie at the heart of those two conse- cutive moments which had been the crisis of his life.^ When he had rashly pledged' his Master to pay the Temple didrachm, our Lord had indeed accepted the obligation, but at the same time had taught hini that the children were free ; and St. Peter here teaches the Churches that, though free, they were still to submit for the Lord's sake to every human ordinance.' Bound by the quantitative con- ceptions of Jewish formalism, he had once asked whether he was to forgive his brother up to seven times, and had been told he was to forgive him up to seventy times seven ; and he has so well learnt the lesson as to tell his converts that "Love shall cover the multitude of sins."° In answer to his too unspiritual question, " what reward the Apostles should have for having forsaken all to follow Christ," he had heard the promise that they should sit on thrones ; and throughout this Epistle his thoughts are full of the future glory and of its "amaranthine crown."' He had heard Jesus compare the " days of Noah " to the days of the Son of Man,* and his thoughts dwell so earnestly upon the comparison that he uses the expression in a way which unintentionally limits the fulness of his revelation.' He had seen his Lord strip off His upper garment and tie a towel round his waist, when, with marvellous self-abasement, he stooped to wash His Disciples' feet;'" hence, when he wishes to impress the lesson of humOity, he is led insensibly to the intensely picturesque expression 1 See Sohwegler, Nacha-p. Zeitalt. ii. 22 ; Pfleiderer, Paulinism. ii. 150, E. T. * Matt. xvi. 18 ; 1 Pet. ii. 4—8. This peculiarity of the Epistle has been worked out and illustrated by no one so fully or with such delicate insight as by Dean Plumptre in his edition of the Epistle in the Cambridge Bible for schools, p. 13, seq. 3 1 Pet. ii. 8, TTCTpa (TKavfidAov. * Matt. xvi. 18, eJTt TaiJTT] Tji werpa ; 23, (TKai'SaAo*' fiov et. » Matt. xvii. 24—27 ; I'Pet. ii. 13—16. ' Matt, xviii. 22 ; 1 Pet. iv. 8. 7 Matt. xix. 28 ; 1 Pet. i. 5, v. 4. ' Matt. xxiv. 37. ' Compare 1 Pet. iii. SO with iv. 6. w John xiii. 1—6. 70 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY. that they should "tie on humility like a dress fastened with knots.'" Perhaps, too, from that -washing, and the solemn lessons to which it led, he gained his insight into the true meaning of Baptism, as being not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the intercourse of a good conscience with its God.^ At a very solemn moment of his life Christ had told him that Satan had desired to have him and the other Apostles, that he might sift them as wheat,' and he warns the Church of the prowling activity and power of the Devil, using respecting him the word " adversary " (ai/riSMos), which occurs nowhere else in the Epistles, but more than once in the sayings of the Lord.^ Again and again on the last evening of the life of Christ he had been bidden to watch and pray, and had fallen because he had not done so ; and watchfulness is a lesson on which he most earnestly insists.^ He had been one of the few faithful eye-witnesses of the buffets and weals inflicted on Christ in His sufferings, and of His silence in the midst of reviling, and to these striking circumstances he makes a very special reference.^ He had seen the Cross uplifted from the ground with its awful burden, and respecting that cross he uses a very peculiar expression.' He had heard Jesus warn Thomas of the blessedness of those who having not seen yet believed, and he quotes almost the very words.* He had been thrice exhorted to tend and feed Christ's sheep, and the pastoral image is prominent in his mind and exhortations.' Lastly, he had been specially bidden when converted to strengthen his brethren, and this from first to last is the avowed object of his present letter.^" 3. Again we recognise the true St. Peter by the extreme vividness of his expressions. It has been a unanimous tradition in the Church that the minute details recorded by St. Mark are due to the fact that he wrote from information given him by St. Peter. Picturesque- ness is as evidently a characteristic of the mind of St. Peter as it is of the mind of St. Mark. In St. Mark it is shown by touches of graphic description, in St. Peter by words which are condensed metaphors." 4. Such is the close analogy between the thoughts and expressions of the Epistle and those which the Gospel story of the writer would have * 1 Pet. V. 5, lyKOfx^uitTaffSe. 2 1 Pet. iii. 21. For the "answer" of the A. V. the Eevised Version suggests "interrogation," " appeal," "inquiry," v. infrdk, p. 75. The verb meparav is common in the Gospels, and always means "to ask further," but the substantive does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament. 3 Luke xxii. 31. Here the common danger of the Apostles, " Satan has desired to have you (vj^m), . . . but I have prayed for thee («)," is restored by the Eevised Version. * 1 Pet. y. 8 ; Matt v 25 ; Luke xii. 58, xviii. 3. 6 1 Pet. v. 8, aeq. ^ 1 Pet. ii. 20, KoAa0i^ofi6i/oi ; 23, oSk aweXoiSopet ; 24, oS t^ jubiXuiri aiirov. 7 1 Pet. ii. 24, 6.vrtvtyKiv ev t^ o-w/*aTt errt to fv^ov. V, wfra, p. 71. 8 1 Pet. i. 8. 9 1 Pet. ii. 25, v. 2. re 1 Pet. v. 12. 11 1 Pet. ii. 2, "guileless, tmadulterated milk ; " iv. 4, "outpouring" (excess of riot); iv. 15, " other-peoplo's-bishop " (busybody in other men's matters). THE LAW. 71 led us to expect. Nor is the resemblance between the speeches of the St. Peter of the Acts and the style of the St. Peter of the Epistle less striking. As in the Acts so in the Epistle, he refers to Isaiah's meta- phor of the rejected corner-stone ; ^ in both the witness of the Holy Ghost is prominent ; ' in both he speaks of the Cross as " the tree " ; ' in both he dwells on the position of the Apostles as " witnesses ; " * in both he puts forward the death of Christ as the fulfilment of prophecy ; ^ in both the Eesurrection is made the main ground of faith and hope ; * in both we find special mention of God as the Judge of quick and dead ; ' in both the exhortation to repentance is based on the fact of man's redemption ; " lastly, in both, as a matter of style, there is a prevalence of simple relatival connexions, and as a matter of doctrine there is the representation of God as one who has no respect for persons." 5. Is it not, further, a very remarkable circumstance that in the Acts St. Peter, in one of his outbursts of impetuous boldness, ventures to call the Law " a yoke which neither our fathers nor we were strong enough to bear ; " and in the Epistle — though he was a Jew, though he was closely allied to St. James in many of his sympathies, though he strongly felt the influence of the Pharisaic Christians at Jerusalem, though he borrows the symbols of the theocracy to a marked extent '" — does not so much as once mention or allude to the Mosaic Law at all 1 Even if any of these peculiarities standing alone could be regarded as accidental, their aggregate force is very considerable ; nor do we think it possible that a forger — even if a forger could otherwise have produced such an epLstle as this — could have combined in one short composition so many instances of subtle verisimilitude." 6. A very remarkable feature of the Epistle, and one which must have great prominence in leading us to a conclusion about its date, characteristics, and object, is the extent to which the writer has felt the influence both of St. James and of St. Paul.'^ No one can compare the » 1 Pet. ii. 7 ; Acts iv. 11. a 1 Pet. i. 12 ; Acts v. 32. ' 1 Pet. u. 24 ; Acts v. 30, x. 39. * 1 Pet. i. 8, V. 1 ; Acts ii. 32, iii. 15, x. 41. s 1 Pet. i. 10 ; Acts iii. 18, x. 43. 6 1 Pet. i. 3, 4, 21, iii. 21 ; Acts u. 32—36, iu. 15, iv. 10, x. 40. 7 1 Pet. iv. 5 ; Acts x. 42. 8 1 Pet. ii. 24 ; Acts iii. 19—26. ' 1 Pet. i. 17 ; Acts x. 2. i» 1 Pet. i. 2 ("sprinkling"), 18—20, ii. 9, 10 (Ex. xix. 6, 6). 1! To these might be added 1 Pet. i. 13 (" girding up the loins of your mind "), com- pared with Luke xii. 35; i. 12, "to stoop and look" (iropaKvi((ai), compared with Luke zxiv. 12 ; ii. 15, "to put to silence" {(pi.iJ.ovy), compared with Luke iv. 35 ; and the use of the word irico^tbs (ii. 18), as compared with his use of the same word in his recorded speech (Acts ii. 40). 12 I pass over as very possibly accidental and independent the few points of resem- blance between the language of St. Peter and St. John (cf. 1 Pet. ii. 19, 22 with 1 John i. 7, iii. 3, iv. 11, and 1 Pet. ii. 9 with Rev. i. 6) ; nor do I think that much importance can be attached to the few coincidences between 1 Pet. and Hebrews [e.g., 1 Pet. i. 2 and Heb. ix. 13; 1 Pet. ii. 2 and Heb. v. 12, etc.). I regard the attempt of Weiss, in his elaborate Petrinuche Lehrbegriff, to prove the early date of -the Epistle, and the indebtedness of St. Paul to its expressions, as misleading and untenable. 72 THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRTSTIANITT. number and peculiarity of the identical expressions adduced in the note, without the conviction that they can only be accounted for by the influence of the earlier writers on the later. At tliis epoch, both among Jews and Christians, there was a free adaptation of phraseology which had come to be regarded as a common possession. That St. Peter has here been the conscious or unconscious borrower may be regarded as certain, alike on chronological and on psychological considerations. If the Epistle was written from Rome, we see the strongest reasons to conclude that it was written later than the Epistle to the Ephesians, and therefore after the death of St. James. The manner in which St. Peter writes shows that he is often accepting the phraseology of others, but infusing into their language a somewhat different shade of meaning. When we consider the extreme plasticity of St. Peter's nature, the emotional impressiveness and impetuous receptivity which characterise his recorded acts ; when we remember, too, that it was his habit to approach all subjects on the practical and not on the speculative side, and to think the less of distinctions in the form of holding the common faith, because his mind was absorbed in the contemplation of that glorious Hope of which he is pre-eminently the Apostle, — we find an additional reason for accepting the Epistle as genuine. We see in it the simple, unsystematic, practical synthesis of the complementary — but not contradictory — truths insisted on alike by St. Paul and St. James. St. Peter dwells more exclusively than St. Paul on moral duties ; he leans more immediately than St. James on Gospel truths. 7. There is no material difficulty in his acquaintance with these writings of his illustrious contemporaries. Among the small Christian if not as " altogether futile " (Pfleiderer, PauUnism. ii. 150). He has found very few followers in his opinion. The resemblances are mainly to the Epistles to the Romana and Ephesians : — IPet. i. 1 Eph. i. 4—7 1 Pet. i. S Eph. 1. 3 IPet. i. 14 Eph. ii. 8 Eom. xii. 2 IPet. ii. 6—10 Eom. ix. 25—32 1 Pet. ii. 11 Kom. vli. 23 1 Pet. ii 13 Eom. xiii. 1—* 1 Pet. ii. 18 Eph. vl. 6 1 Pet. iii. 1 Eph. v. 22 1 Pet. iii. 9 Eom. xri. 17 1 Pet. in. 23 Eph. i. 20 Eom. yiii. 34 1 Pet. iv. 1 Eom. vi. 6 1 Pet. iT. 10 Eom. iii. 6 1 Pet. V. 1 Eom. viii. 18 1 Pet. T. S Eph. T. 21 The chief resemblances between St. Peter and St. James will be found in the following 1 Pet. i 6—7 James i. 2-4 1 Pet. i. 24 James i. 10 1 Pet. iv. 8 James v. 20 IPet. V. 5,9 James iv. 6,7,10 The supposed parallels between the Epistle and those to Timothy and Titus are not real parallels, but arise from similarity of subject (1 Pet. iii. 1, v. 1, seq.). There is nothing in these similarities to discredit the authenticity of the Epistle, and tb<» absence of Johannine phrases is another proof of its antiquity. ORIGINALITY OP ST. PETER. 73 communities the letters of tlie Apostles were eagerly distributed. The Judaists would have been sure to supply St. Peter with the letter of the saintly Bishop of Jerusalem ; and such companions as Mark and SU- vanus, both of whom had lived in intimate relationship with St. Paul, and of whom the former had been expressly mentioned in the Epistle to the Colossians, could not have failed to bring to St. Peter's -knowledge the sublimest and most heavenly of the Epistles of St. Paul. The antagonism in which St. James and St. Paul had been arrayed by their hasty followers would have acted with St. Peter as an additional reason for usiag indiscriminately the language of them both. It was time that the bitterness of controversies should cease, now that the Church was passing through the fiery storm of its first systematic persecution. It was tune that the petty difierences within the fold should be forgotten when the howling wolves were leaping into its enclosure from without. The sufiering Christians needed no impassioned arguments or eager ' dialectics ; they mainly needed to be taught the blessed lessons of resignation and of hope. These are the key-notes of St. Peter's Epistle.' As they stood defenceless before their enemies, he points them to the patient and speechless anguish of the Lamb of God.* Patient endurance in the present would enable them to set an example even to their enemies ; the hope of the future would change their very sorrows into exiiltant triumph.' In the great battle which had been set in array against them, Hope should be their helmet and Innocence their shield.* 8. And yet in teaching to his readers these blessed lessons St. Peter by no means loses his own originality. The distinctions between the three Apostles — distinctions between their methods rather than their views — may be seen at a glance. They become salient when we observe that whereas St. James barely alludes to a single event in the life of Christ, St. Peter makes every truth and exhortation hinge on His example, His sufierings, His Cross, His Resurrection, and His exalta- tion ; ° and that whereas St. Peter is greatly indebted to the Epistle to the Romans, he yet makes no use of St. Paul's central doctrine of Justification by Faith. Thus even when he is influenced by his prede- cessor's phraseology, he is occupied with somewhat different conceptions. The two Apostles hold, indeed, the same truths, but, to the eternal advantage of the Church, they express them differently. Antagonism between them there was none ; but they were mutually independent. The originality of St. Peter is not only demonstrated by the sixty isolated expressions {Jiupax legomena) of his short Epistle, but also by his modification of many of St. Paul's thoughts in accords nee with his own immediate spiritual gift. That gift was the x«P'<^M« Kv$epvli