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This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: JOHNSON, EDWIN TITLE: RISE OF CHRISTENDOM PLACE: LONDON DA TE : 1890 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative # I3IDLI0GRAPHIC MirRQFORM TARCF. T Original Material as I'ilmed - Existing Bibliographic l^ecord ipwpi^r pOL \\ Restrictions on Use: ■"^ - rj w n" ' j iii « i » ii wi ii i ji k... ^ Johnson, Edwin, Af. a. A ^''c!l^l°^ Christendom. By Edwin Jolinson . . . Lon- ' ft^^'^^^-J ^Vaiiams-iimWfergate, 1 890. xvi, 49§'^ W^^ ' 1^3^)3fi 8-25320 Library of Congreyj--, no. O TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: /// FILM SIZE: 3S^f1_ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA /l^ IB III3 DAfE FILMED: _3Z^i^-93 INITIALS g^ HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS, INC WOODnRi hnP CT~' / ._XE Association for Information and image IManagement 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter mj iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii liiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiil 6 iiliin 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 mm mImiiIimiIiiiiIiiiiIimiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiii TTT I I I I I ^n TT r I II II T TTT TTT Inches .0 I.I 1.25 iM 2.8 2.5 1^ ta 1^ 2.2 |6.3 ■ III ^-^ ^ y^ 2.0 IS. Ui .. tSili.u 1.8 1.4 1.6 MfiNUFflCTURED TO flllM STPNDPRDS BY APPLIED IMAGE, INC. \ Columbia ©nifaersiitp intteCitpof^etDgorfe LIBRARY FROM THE LIBRARY OF MUNROE SMITH, BRYCE PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN LEGAL HISTORY. i THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. ANTIQUA MATER: A STUDY OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS. "He had an earnest intention of taking a review of the original principles of the primitive Church ; believing that every true Christian had no better means to settle his spirit than that which was proposed to ^Eneas and his followers to be the end of their wanderings, Antiquam exquirite Matrem:' —The Life of Mr. A. Cowley, by Dr. Sprat. LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Lt^ '^ BT EDWIN JOHNSON, M.A. ••Quisnescitpritnani esse historiae legem ne quid falsi dicere andeat, deinde ne quid veri non audeat? he quse suspicio gratise sit in scribendo? ne qua) simultatis?"— CIC. de Or il. 15. LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER, & CO., Lt^ 1890. I' \JU/yY\)iu ImU ^ ^ n.0 1 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, Bart., LL.O., O.C.L., F.R.S>) MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, IH SINCERE ESTEEM FOR HIS CHARACTER AND HIS MANY SERVICES TO HUMANITY AND SCIENCE, XTbfs IDoIume" IB DEDICATED. \The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.'\ PREFATOKY NOTE. While engaged in the revision of the following pages, I have examined some further branches of evidence relating to the subject, and have confirmed myself in the general conclusions which I have laid before the reader. About four hundred years ago the schools of England and of the West were ruled by the Black Monks, with their allies the Black, the White, the Grey, the Austin Friars, and other religious orders. They had formed an orthodox system of education. Its principle was theological ; it was derived from a peculiar interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures. From it was deduced an orthodox geography and chronology, an orthodox physiology and anthropology, and an orthodox astronomy. Every one of these orthodox doctrines has been super- seded in the course of experience. In the light of orthodox geography the dream of Columbus was absurd, but the discovery of Columbus— the fourth anniversary of which we shall soon be commemorating —converted the orthodox geography into an absurdity. The orthodox chronology has been shown to be as artificial as other medieval chronologies. The pro- ceedings of Galileo were absurd in the opinion of the Vlll PREFACE. orthodox astronomers ; and so was the philosophy of Bacon. Yet we hear nothing now of the orthodox astronomy, nor do men now seek to arrive at facts by dreaming first and observing later. We do not now seek to deduce our facts from our theories, as our early teachers persistently did. As for the orthodox physiology and anthropology, these subjects have passed so completely into the lumber-room of obsolete lore that most educated persons would be astounded if they knew what was the teaching on these subjects in our schools about a century before the time of Bacon. The Church history of the monks has not alto- gether escaped the fate of the rest of their teaching. An Anglican clergyman in the seventeenth century made a most damaging attack upon a part of it ; and late in the same age a Catholic clergyman exposed the system of it, with severer invectives against the literary monks than have ever fallen from the pen of layman or Pro- testant. It would be long to explain how it is that in this respect the monks of the West have so long retained their hold upon our imagination, and how it comes to pass that our scholars continue to edit as genuine representations of our past what are little more than a series of fables agreed upon, deduced from dogma, and published to the world as a means of ruling the world. In the present day it is well understood that history is the task of the solitary student ; and the notion of an university or other corporation conspiring and collaborating in the production of a dogmatic theory PREFACE. IX ■4 of the world in the form of story appears absurd. In the present day it appears to be conceded that no university or other learned body should rest upon a dogmatic principle which sets finality to any kind of knowledge and excludes inquiry. Our schools were founded on the opposite principle, and every thought- ful student of our history is aware of the great injuries to our spiritual and social life that have fiowed from it. A chasm deep and impassable separates us from the Middle Age and clerical theory of education. I have shown in this work, with as much of succinct- ness and brevity as it seemed to me the subject admitted, that orthodoxy in historical study leads to results in sharp contradiction with the facts of the past as they may still in their outline be known. Christianism is the system of a corporation ; it is the theory of the primitive monks. No other primitive Christians are to be ascertained. With regard to the epoch when the primitive Order appeared, I have endeavoured to approximate towards the fact, hoping that I may be enabled in some future work to do something more for the elucidation of this obscure question. I have written, though with the sense of great imperfections, for the best audience of my time, and especially for those who are aware with me of the need for solving this long-vexed historical problem ; because upon the solution of it great consequences in reference to our system of education, and to our common civility and culture, depend. 'i- CONTENTS. Introduction . PAOK I-2I CHAPTER I. THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. Origin of Rome-Preface of Livy-Theory of Holy Romanism -Pro- gramme of the first Church History-Its date and structure- The dogma and the facts -Programme of the present work- The Augustinian on the Civity of God-Romulus and Christ 22-38 pi M 1. 1 1 1 I ^ [1 CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CHRISTENDOM. , The evidence from inecriptions-The monogram-The Cross as sign of victory-The Crucifix-2. The evidence from coins- The Legend of the Labarum-Legend of Victoria-3. The evi- dence from Calendars-4. The evidence from Roman laws- Universities- The false Codes and the Novella>-5. The evidence from architecture-An imaginary Rome . • • • 39 4 CHAPTER III. GLIMPSES OF MEDIEVAL ROME AND ITALY. The fourth century-The Notitia CVte-The fifth ce"tu^-The thirteenth century-Legend of St. Eustachius-St Peter-s- Eoman guilds-The Leonine city-Monte Cassino-Legends of Xll CONTENTS. Origin— Farf a— The cult of St. Michael— St. Nicholas of Bari— CONTENTS. PAGE Salerno and St. Matthew- Papal legends -Messina, Monreale — Retrospect of 65-95 CHAPTER IV. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TEACHING AMONG THE ROMANS, L. Annaeus Seneca — Honesty — Virtue — Sanity — Liberty — Sociality — God — The gods — One essence in many forms — The future — Hell — Heaven — Claudian — Clemency— Good faith — Mother Rome — The new Pythagoreans — Life of Pythagoras — Miracles . 96-118 CHAPTER V. THE ETHICS OF THE MONASTERIES. Joannes Cassianus — The habit of the monk — Renunciation — Subjec- tion — Mortification — Humility — The eight vices — Love of money — Vainglory — The destiny of the monk — Contemplation — Three sources of thought — Hatred of liberal culture — Discretion — The flesh and the spirit 119-131 CHARTER VL THE TRADITIONS OF THE MOSQUE. The Moslems the critics of the Church — The Koran and the Chronicle — Legends of Genesis — Adam — The temptation — The serpent — Kabil and Habil — The first murder and burial — Posterity of Adam — The two witnesses — Seth — Enos, Cainan — Edris — The Prophet Noah — The Flood — Sem, Cham, Japhet — The Prophets Houd and Salih — Ibrahim the Iconoclast : his fiery trial — Nemrod wars against heaven — Flight of Ibrahim — Sara — Agar — Death of Nemrod — Ismail — Circumcision — The Kaaba — Ibrahim visits Ismail — Isak — The cities of Loth — Meal customs — Destruction of the cities by Gabriel — Sacrifice of Ismail — The sacrificial prayers — Ceremonies at the Kaaba — Birth of Yakoub — Ibrahim and the resurrection : his death — Death of Ismail — Nabit and Kedar — Esau and Yakoub — Romans and Arabians — Benjamin — Yussuf in Egypt — Ephraim and Manasseh — Ayoub > 1 r ? XUl PAGE the Patient— The Prophet Schoaib— King Minotschehr— Birth of Musa— The family of Imram— Flight of Musa— His prophetic mission— The holy valley— The Divine unity— Prayer— The resurrection— Sign of the rod— Musa before Pharaoun— The magicians become believers and martyrs— The nine signs— The exodus— The tomb of Yussuf— The day Aschoura- Death of Pharaoun— Sameri— The revelation on Mount Sinai— The golden calf— The repentance and expiation— Reading of the Taurath— Return to Egypt— Musa and Khidr—Qaroun— Fight of Musa with the giants— The manna and the quails— The rock and the twelve springs— Death of Musa and Harun— The Prophet Joshua —Phinees— Kings of Persia— The Prophet Khazqil— Elias- Eliseus- The ark— Kings of Israel— Samuel— Talout— Levi and Jehud— Daoud— Talout plots against him— The Prophet Daoud —Trial of Daoud— The Temple— Loqman— Suleiman— Legends of Suleiman— Balkis— The ring— His death— Kings of Israel - Ezechias and Isaias— Jeremy— Zerdusht and the mages- Destruction of the holy place— Daniel— Ahasuerus and Esther — Kirousch 132-207 CHAPTER VII. THE TRADITIONS OF THE MOSQUE— Continued. The Himyarite Kings— Persia— Dara the elder— Philip of Macedon —Alexander— Dsoul Qarnaim— Gog and Magog— Augustus— Antiochus— Constantine— The Aschkanian kings— Origin of the Christian legend— The Prophet Zachariah— The consecration of Mariam— The casting of lots— Birth of Yahya— Yussuf the car- penter—The annunciation— Heresies concerning Mariam and Isa— The creed of Islam— The birth of Isa— He speaks in tlie cradle— The fall of the idols— Flight of Mariam with Isa— The rearing of Isa— First miracle of Isa— Murder of Zachariah— Prophetic office of Yahya— Prophetic office of Isa— Raising of Sem from the dead— The twelve disciples— Story of the table from heaven— The law of the Sabbath— Betrayal of Isa— Cruci- fixion of Isoua in Isa's stead— The seven apostles : Peter and Paul, Thomas, Philip, John, James, Bartholomew— Ascen- sion of Isa— Tiberius and Herod become believers— The Cross becomes a Qibl ah— Heresies concerning Isa— Death of Mariam XIV CONTENTS. CONTENTS. XV PAGH —Murder of Yahja— King KherJous— The Prophet Daniel in the lion's den— Ardeschir, son of Babeth— The young men of the cavern— Jonas, son of Matai— The two apostles succoured by a third— Story of Samson— Story of George (Djirdjis) the martyr — Mani, the heresiarch— Yemen— The people of Nadjran— Fimioun— The men of the elephant— Epoch of the elephant — Islam and Christianism— Conversion of the Peris—The Beni- Israel and the Arabs— The Qiblah— The Fast of Ramadan 208-284 CHAPTER VIII. THE RISE OF HEBREW LITERATURE. Date of the Hebrew MSS — Hebrew writing and grammar — The Semitic mother-tongue — The Hebrew tradition depends on the Arabians— Ibrim and Eber— The Davidic tradition — The plot against the Jewish people — The Talmuds — Popular Jewish my- thology — Dogma of the Rabbinical succession — Actual rise of the Spanish schools — Examination of the Rabbinical theory — RR. Scherira and Hai — R. Saadia — Legend of Cordova — The splendid period of Judaism — Chronicle of Al Makkari — The Jewry at Toledo — The ideal of David — Persecution of the Jews — The Bible in the light of mediaeval times — The Table of Nations in Genesis x. — Symbolism of the Bible — Biblical refer- ence to Spain and France as homes of the people — R. Joseph of Sepharad — Descriptions of the Crusades — Cessation of the schools — The fast for the events of 11 71 — Origin of the fasts — The Rabbins and the Abbots — Legend of St. Nilus — The false Joseph i — Rabbins in Rome — Jerusalem in poetry and history — Mediaeval geographies and maps 285-331 \ PAOB 1,: I. The system of Chronicles— Chalcondylas on the Nazaraei— The Latin Catalogues— Jerome— Gennadius-Patrologic mythology- Life of St. Jerome— Isidore— Hildefonso and Toledo— Sigebert — Honorius— The illustrious of Monte Cassino— Peter the Deacon —The Anonymus of Melk— The Anonymus Zwetlensis— Ralph de Diceto— Henry of Ghent— Fathers and Doctors in the Divine Comedy— The Canterbury Tales— Abbot Trithemius— The Mis- sal—The Apostle and the Gospels— Legends of the Pascha— Date and character of the New Testament— The Ordo Romanus— The Franciscans and the New Testament— The Dominicans— Geo- graphy of the New Testament— The Book of the Popes— The Decretum of Gratian— The pseudo-Isidorian Decretals— Note : on Father Hardouin's Prolegomena 332-393 CHAPTER X. EARLY FORMS OF THE CHRISTIAN LEGEND. Chri stology— Titles of Christ — Mystical origin of the Christians — The reign of Augustus— Mystical derivation from the Old Testament— Typical Christs— The New Nation— The Epiphany — The genealogies— The cultus of the Blessed Virgin— The Holy Family— Feasts of St. Mary— St. Joachim and St. Ann— The Carmelites— The birthplace of Christ— The name Nazormus— Augustus and the Pythia— Gospel of the infancy — Time of Pilate —Jesus and Abgarus— The dogma of the Passion — The eclipse — Veronica— Election of Christ to the Jewish priesthood — Tiberius and the Senate— Caius Caligula— Claudius— Nero—St. Paul at Athens— The two Simons at Rome— Feast of SS. Peter and Paul 394-433 CHAPTER IX. THE SYSTEM OF CHURCH LITERATURE. The Mishnic period — The rise of Greek and Latin mediaeval litera- ture — The monks at Tusculum — Legend of St. Nilus — Innocent III. — The thirteenth century — The Catalogues of Church writers — Greek Catalogues — Photius— Josephus — Philo — Justus — Euse- bius Pamphili — Nilus the Monk — Suidas — The system of his- torians — The first Ecclesiastical History — The dogma of Christ — ,* CHAPTER XL THE INTERPOLATIONS IN THE LITERATURE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Fables about the Jews— In Cicero— Virgil— Horace— Ovid— Strabo — Pliny— P.-Mela— Ptolemaeus- Diodorus— P. Trogus— V. Pater- culus — Lucan — Q. Curtius— Juvenal— Seneca— Martial — V. Flaccus— A. Julianus— C. Silius Italicus— Statins— Persius- XVI CONTENTS. PAGE Quintilian — Tacitus— Pliny the Younger — Appian — Herodian — Dion Cassius — Suetonius — Florus — Epictetus — Apuleius — The jurist Tertullian — Pausanias — Plutarch — Lucian — Philo of Byblus — M. Aurelius — Numenius — Porphyry — D. Longinus — The Historia Augusta — Firmicus Maternus — A. Victor — Eutropius — S. Rufus— A. Marcellinus — Claudian — P. Vegetius Renatus — Rutilius-Boetius — Zosimus — Macrobius — Writers of the sixth century 434-469 CHAPTER XII. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. Literary sources for the first Crusade— Greek and Latin, Hebrew, Arabian-rRetrospect from Westminster — The Northumbrian monasteries — State of the world at the end of the twelfth century — the Rabbinical schools — The Mohammedans in Syria — The imperious Popes— The kingdom "not of this world" — Christianity and culture — The teaching of the future— Hopes for the Church 470-494 ^ INDEX 495-499 I % THE KISE OF CHEISTENDOM. INTRODUCTION. It is now about one hundred and twenty-five years since Edward Gibbon stood musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol of Rome, '' while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter," and the idea of writing the story of the DecHne and Fall of the City first occurred to his mind. The reader may, however, search in vain through the pages of his elaborate and splendid composition for any clear and intelligible account of the course of events which brought the Franciscan friars to the Capitol, where they had been from about the year 1250. It is said that the Benedictines had occupied the Capitol before them ; but if so, the Benedictines could not have been there much earlier than the end of the twelfth century. The very site of the Temple of Jupiter, and the history of the transition from the old Roman to the Mediaeval worship, remain wrapped in profound obscurity. Had Gibbon, while he meditated the rise of the Christian Church, remained still in thought upon the Capitol until he could discern the figure of the first monk ascending that sacred hill, he would have been led to very difi'erent conclusions from those which he adopted in his famous work. He might have waited a THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. until he could hear the monks proclaiming how the Emperor Augustus had, after a visit to the Pythian priestess at Delphi, been converted to belief in the power of a Hebrew Boy, the Ruler of Olympus, and how he had raised an altar on the Capitol to the First- Begotten of God. Had Gibbon determined the age of that legend, he would not have erred so widely from the true epoch of the origin of the Church. He has laid his finger upon the word " organisation," as indi- cating one of the secondary causes of the spread of Christianity, yet he has nowhere pointed out the nature of that organisation, nor how and where it was founded. Gibbon has acquired the repute of the first of eccle- siastical historians ; yet he has not been able to trace the rise of the Church in accordance with the laws of reason and experience. An enthusiasm for Oriental ideas appears suddenly to take possession of the popu- lar mind. Monotheism sets in. The tolerance of the Empire is violated, first for the persecution of the Chris- tians, then for the persecution of all who are not Christians. The emperors become theological madmen, either in their attachment or their enmity to this new religious system, which gradually becomes an establish- ment of the Empire. Gibbon should have observed, I think, that the Church historians delight in repre- senting the story as from the first incredible and con- trary to human reason. He should have taken the warning, and have made a more searching examination of his original sources. He has explained to us how he used his materials. He was guided by great Church collectors, as Tille- mont ; he verified the references given him ; he detected and exposed some falsehoods, but the rest he treated as genuine narrative. In short, he wrote too much on ; INTRODUCTION. 3 the faith of representations at second-hand. He never clearly detected the fact that the earliest Church litera- ture proceeded from a literary confederacy, which was sworn to support a dogma of history entirely at vari- ance with the events of the Eoman Empire. He was weU aware that the decline of the Imperial authority and the rise of the Popes were connected together as effects of one common cause ; but he never opened up to us the nature of that cause, nor the period during which it operated. I need' not further remark on this subject, because the reader will find that the following pages may incidentally be regarded as a critique upon the method and the results of Gibbon. Departing from him as I do, I should wish to render a tribute of respect to his name, as that of an Englishman of whom we are justly proud, and of an inimitable artist, who commands the admiration of all lovers of literature. Montesquieu had said before Gibbon that ** the monks wrote not in the interest of their subject^ hut for the glory of their Order;'' an observation perfectly just, and for want of attention to which the history of Christen- dom has so long remained in obscurity. In the present work i have dealt with the mythology of the cloisters, by means of which a great cloud of fancy has been made to envelop Church origins in our world, from Asia and Egypt to the British Isles. As briefly as I may, I will explain how I was led to the conclusions, strange and perhaps startling as they will at first appear, which are set forth in the following pages. The business of my life, for more than thirty years, has been mainly with classical and theological literature ; the serious problem to which I have devoted all my leisure of late has been the ascertainment of the origin of Christianity, and the way in which it was first planted I V 4 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. • in the world. In 1886 I occupied myself in finding an answer to a question propounded by the Teyler Theolo- gical Society of Haarlem. The student was required by the conditions of the question to close the New Testament, and to ascertain the origin of Christianity from the Christian and from the Grseco-Roman writers of the second century. I found that the Imperial writers, so to call them for convenience' sake, knew nothing whatever of the Church or of Christianity. I found that the Christian writers knew nothing of the New Testament — nothing of those strong dramatic representations which have been familiar to us from childhood, as derived from the hearing or reading of the Church Lessons. Christianity was a system of mystical ideas, wholly derived from a capricious exe- gesis of the Old Testament writings. The result asto- nished me ; but it stood fast, nor have my esteemed critics succeeded in the slightest degree in controvert- ing it.^ Another result of the investigation was, that the Church evidently supplanted or succeeded to some sect or sects of Orientals in Rome, whom the Churchmen then converted {prceposterously, in the strict sense of the word) into heretics from her system. The reader will find in the following pages the elucidation of these curious relations. I resumed the study by a close and prolonged examination of the first Ecclesiastical History ascribed to Eusebius PamphiH. Naturally the first his- tory of the Church is here to be sought ; and the neglect of this principle has been one of the chief causes of the long bewilderment from which we have sufl*ered. My previous results in general were confirmed by this study. I saw that the canonical books were still 1 See " Antiqua Mater : a Study of Christian Origins," 1887. i \ i INTRODUCTION. 5 unknown, except in their bare scheme, to this writer, who pretends to be contemporaneous with Constantine, and that he had no historical sources whatever. But this writer lays bare the great historical dogma of the Church, which from the first governed all its enter- prises, alike of the sword and the pen— the dogma that the Church was coeval in her origin with the Roman Empire itself. In further researches I found that the whole of the earliest Church literature proceeded from the cloisters of the two primitive Orders of St. Basil and St. Benedict. They, and they alone, were the inventors of the designation Christiani, and of the whole system of ideas connected with it. Their litera- ture was persistently antedated into times when it could not have been written. The whole problem was now to ascertain when this monastic confederacy began their literary enterprise. It became manifest that it was at no time during the old Roman Empire. When did the Holy Roman Empire begin ? I came to the rise of Islam. I studied the Koran and the great Arabian Chronicle of Al Tabari. I found that the Scriptures of the Muslim had been perverted by the Benedictines with a view to make the Orientals heretics from the Church, and that the misrepresenta- tion had never since been corrected. The great tradi- tion of the Mosque owed not a syllable either to the Church or to the Synagogue. On the contrary, both the Church and the Synagogue were indebted in diffe- rent ways to that great theological system, which was in existence long before its Jewish and Catholic sisters. I examined the traditions of the Synagogue, and found that the cause of our illusions in reference to the antiquity of Judaism was similar to the cause of our illusions in respect to the Catholic Church. I ' ; ' i 6 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. It is from want of attention to the nature of the Mediaeval literatures that the learned world has been so long deceived. We, who pretend to write history or science in these days, labour to ascertain and define the facts, that we may rise from facts to theory. The method of the Medisevalists was precisely the opposite. They insisted upon Dogma as the one thing needful to be asserted and believed. Facts were of no moment except in so far as they favoured or opposed the Dogma. They must be plastically dealt with in the interest of the Dogma, must be suppressed, perverted, or conjured out of the void by the magic power of historic inven- tion. The question is not now of the morality of these proceedings ; it is the fact that these things were syste- matically done which must be insisted on. Little is known of the religious life of the Arabs before Mohammed ; it was probably analogous to that of other peoples. But from the year 800 or earlier, men might hear on Fridays in the mosque at Cordova how the Apostle of God was the last in a long succes- sion of prophets and apostles that stretched from the first man, Adam, to Isa, son of Mariam, and from him to Mohammed. The Imaums were agreed that his genea- logy could be traced up through Ismail and Ibrahim to the very origin of mankind, more than 6000 years agone. The same great dogma was heard at their holy places in the East, Mecca and u3Elia, some four hundred years before there was a Christian university in any part of the world. The Arabians were our first teachers of the Book, and it is due to historic circumstances, as Gibbon points out in a lively passage, that our Oxford divines are not now defending and expounding the Moslem form of the Bible — that is, the Koran — rather than the Testaments. INTRODUCTION. 7 Cordova is one of the most suitable places in our world from which the rise of Christendom may be surveyed. There, about two hundred years after the erection of the mosque, the Rabbins, teachers of another and much smaller clan or caste of the children of Israel, began to read a somewhat different version of the Biblical tradition, and to give the preference to the younger son of Ibra- him (Abraham) as their ancestor. They leaned on the Arabian tradition ; they passed for Muslim in the world, but in secret they dreamed the dreams and saw the visions of an imaginary regal and rabbinical past. Gradually, during the next two hundred years, they formed a new people, and another great dogma was launched, that of the Prophetical Succession, stretching from Moses, whom they honoured in common with the Arabians, to Moses Maimonides of Cordova and Cairo. Here again the dogma of history is one thing, the facts are another, separated from the dogma by an impassable chasm. Again, but for historic circumstances, we might have been converted to the observance of the Sabbath, and synagogues of Moorish architecture might have been thickly studded over the lands of the West. As Friday is followed by Saturday, so the Synagogue succeeds the Mosque. Yet another branch of the children of Israel, settled at Nablus in Syria, had their theory of a priestly succession from Aaron, and a rival Law and Chronicle. These are the so-called Samaritans. In the time of that great revenge of the West upon the East, those Oriental wars we call the Crusades, a third religious corporation arose, and once more as- serted a dogma of history absolutely irreconcilable with the facts. The literary members of the two primitive Orders of St. Basil and St. Benedict, once united, laid down the basis on which all iJhurch literature was to f 8 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. be contrived and constructed. It was the theory that the Holy Catholic Church or Holy Koman Empire began with the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and that, according to an early legend I have already cited, Augustus was himself a Christian. These clerics looked with envious eye upon the prosperity of the Jews and the confederation of synagogues. They were bent upon crushing them, as their warlike allies were bent upon crushing the servants of Allah and his Apostle in the East. They directed in concert a malignant invec- tive against the whole people, whom they call Judaei. They represented them as cast ofiF from the mercy of the Eternal their God, and the Christians a sect from them, as having succeeded to their religious status and privi- leges. Sunday becomes the new day of worship. It was necessary, in support of this dogma, to invent a mass of fables respecting the Judaei, which still disgrace the pages of the writers under Imperial Rome, who were innocent of any knowledge of that Oriental caste. It was the greatest misdeed, I believe, that wielders of the pen had ever perpetrated ; and it is time that by wielders of the pen in this happier age it should be exposed and denounced. I write simply as an English- man of Northern extraction. I do not enjoy the acquain- tance of many members of the Synagogue. But I am sure there are now many admirable critical scholars of Jewish extraction who do not desire that the history of the people should any longer be darkened by fables which are injurious to our common culture. They may confirm or they may correct my views, but at least they will not be displeased with my intention, which is to do their respected community a long-delayed justice. I am in sympathy with those who are weary of hearing of the faults of the Jews, and who prefer to contemplate 4f INTBODUCTIOK 9 what is exemplary in their life ; who think, with Jules Michelet, that their vices are mainly of our own creation, while their virtues are all their own. I have endeavoured in the present work to deal with the masses of evidence relating to the rise of Christendom, and to define the efiect which they pro- duce upon the mind of one who desires to be an impartial observer and critic. Until the masses have been surveyed, no study of the details will bring us nearer to the objects of our research. We are con- cerned with four classes of witnesses. First of all, with the Imperial writers, who cease soon after the time of the Emperor Justinian. These are our best witnesses, not only as the earliest, but as the highest in character. They were, as a rule, men of rank; they wrote — as Englishmen should write now — in freedom and inde- pendence, yet with loyalty to the Empire which they served. They wrote to give information, not to pro- mote a religious dogma nor to deceive the world. To their testimony may be added the unconscious testi- mony of inscriptions and other monuments. Next come the clergy of Islam, who are responsible for the Koran and all the explanatory literature connected with the Koran, down to the late Arabian chroni- clers of the thirteenth century. Their testimony, of an importance still more massive, has hitherto been neglected or carelessly misunderstood. The Spanish Rabbins, from Samuel the Nagid to Maimonides, follow. Lastly, the Benedictines and Basilians of Monte Cassino and Grotta Ferrata, of Cluny and Citeaux, and many other cloisters, followed by the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Augustinians and the Carmelites, cla- mour to be heard. I have listened to the substance of what these various dogmatists had to say to the X V I 10 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. world through the universities, and I have drawn my own conclusions. They are such, I believe, as might have been drawn by a scholar at the court of Frederic II. during the first half of the thirteenth century ; they are such as might have been drawn by Laurence Valla or by Poggio, had they persevered in their critical inquiries. They are such conclusions as Prebendary Thomas Fuller, the keen satirist of the monks and their Church history of Britain, would have drawn, had he traced the monks to the earliest cloisters. Gibbon himself, had he felt the full force of what he wrote about Valla, and the discovery of the imaginary foundations of the Church, would have been led to similar conclusions. Macaulay, who, fresh from India, was in Rome some fifty and more years agone, wondering at what he called the Brahmanical government of the city, had he ad- dressed himself to the question, might have given to it the most masterly elucidation. It is with regret one re- flects upon the names of other English men of letters who have adorned our time, and who might have done much for the enlightenment of the public on these matters. Still more deplorable is it to reflect that the interest of the clergy cannot be in favour of free historical inquiry, and that a large number of the best-educated men of the time are where they are for the purpose of resisting inquiry. Bishop Sprat, in writing of Cowley, alluded to a prevalent opinion of his time that Chris- tianity was *' the interest of a profession." Dr. Robert South, that master of the science of human nature, remarked that sometimes Providence casts things so that truth and interest lie the same way, but that it is incredible to consider how interest outweighs truth. Interest turns the doubtful into the probable, or the INTRQPUCTION. IX truth into the doubtful or the downright false. He goes so far as to hint that when divines are unanimous on a disputed point, their opinion depends on interested considerations. Interest, he says, casts the balance ; in- terest is the grand wheel and spring that moves the whole universe. In the next age, the Bishop of Durham is complaining that the educated classes treat Chris- tianity as no longer a subject even of inquiry; as if it were discovered to be fictitious. In a perplexed work, he undertakes to show that it is not so clear a case that there is nothing in it. The same strong contrast of the ecclesiastical with the secular mind still obtains in England. How pathetic a record is to be found in Mr. Thomas Mozley's Reminiscences of the Oxford move- ment, of noble spirits whose force has been squandered in the effort to uphold the Mediaeval tradition, while leading Englishmen in politics and letters are said to have rejected it ! I write myself in the interest of teachers who feel that it is a great inconvenience not to understand the past of the world, or to understand that it has been misrepresented, and not freely to say so. The monks who first visited these islands had no such interest. Their object was to bring us under their yoke, and they succeeded in establishing credulity towards them and their theories as the first principle of education. They never earned even our confidence; their works have long been condemned ; yet slowly, very slowly, are we recovering the intellectual freedom of which they de- prived us. They have left certain fixed ideas about history on our minds which are destined to be unfixed and to pass away, as fixed ideas about astronomy have passed away. To be useful to others, we must write out of painful 12 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. experience ; and the reader will discover that there have been painful experiences behind what I have written. The result of these studies has forced me to withdraw from beloved avocations, wherein I have spent some of the happiest years of life. Could I have found an answer to my own arguments, I would gladly have done so, because interest — in more than one sense of the word — has not in my case lain the same way with truth. If the fact lends any indirect corroboration to my argu- ments, any weight to my conclusions, I shall perhaps be justified in having mentioned it. I have to thank many friends at home for their intel- ligent sympathy, also several professors of letters in Holland, France, and Germany for their civility in the reception of my former essay. Especially I am under deep debt to Dr. A. D. Loman of Amsterdam for the bright example of gentleness, truthfulness, and humanity which he has set in his writings, for the cordial friend- ship he has extended to me, and the great pains he has taken to assist me in the endeavour to solve this great historical problem. I may name also Dr. W. C. van Manen of Leyden, the late Professor Ernest Havet of Paris, Professor Jean Keville, Dr. Harnack, and Dr. Liinemann ; their suggestions have received my re- spectful attention. The lamented Dr. Hatch of Oxford maintained in a recent essay that many so-called ** primitive " institutions of Christianity were in reality Mediaeval. It will be observed that I give a great extension to that proposition. Curiously, my esteemed critics have complained of me for omitting the New Testament from the sources, although I was required by the conditions of the ques- tion to do so. It is no part of my present undertaking to investigate in detail the New Testament. A great INTRODUCTION. 13 advance has been made in this direction by the Verisi- milia of Professors Pierson and Naber (1886), with whose results my own coincided at many points. But I may simply say in this place that it is clear the books once called the Apostle, the Book of the Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles must be studied in relation to the Missal if a genuine New Testament criticism is ever to begin. These books do not contain the history of the causes ; they are themselves parts of the effects of Christendom. They show the great Orders of Reli- gious already formed, and represent in symbolic and allegoric forms their ideals, their canons, their dogmata, their visions and aspirations ; the enthusiasms of a mode of life which is remote from ours. The same principle must be applied to the Arabian and the Jewish Scriptures. They also are the effects, not the causes, of organisations. Nor will our know- ledge of this subject be improved until from other sources than these oracular books we have ascertained the epoch of the rise of those organisations. Will the kindly reader indulge me to some extent in the Kcense of repetition ? Although I am stating a series of commonplaces, they will appear so novel to the mass of readers, that I am forced to remind them again and again of the leading and decisive points in the evidence. Moreover, the nature of the subject renders repetition desirable, because we are forced to return again and again to the same ground. Each part of the evidence throws a gleam of light on the position of the Church in time. But again the mists of fable gather from other quarters, and the truth already won is apt, without reiteration, to be forgotten. My friend Dr. Loman says that my motto appears to be Frappez vite, frappez fort, mais frappez toujours. I 14 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. would modify another motto, and say it must be with me De Vemphase, encore de Vemphase, et toujours de Vemphase, until I have succeeded in impressing my points upon the reader. I have done little more than play the part of pioneer, which circumstances have forced upon me, into an ill-explored field of inquiry. If I have explained the causes of our long ignorance by laying bare the nature of our literary sources, if I have defined more clearly the epoch at which the Church arose in our world, and the nature of its earliest teach- ing than my predecessors, I shall have accomplished all that I intended in this work. In meditating on this great subject, it recently occurred to me to glance again at Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent, which I was reading in the summer of 1871, and which I had scarcely opened since. On p. 289, Newman refers to the opinion of the paradoxical Father Hardouin, that most of our Latin classics were forgeries of the monks of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. I have never been distressed by that suspicion. I have never thought that Horace singing Lalage is in fact a monk singing the praises of the Church, or that the ^neid is alle- gorical of the journey of St. Peter to Rome. Father Hardouin's discovery of wholesale Benedictine frauds during the thirteenth and following ages appears to have filled his mind with almost universal suspicion towards the Latin literature. The suspicion was well grounded ; even his favourite, Pliny, has not escaped interpolation. But that the monks could produce the finest classical quality of writing, even in the age of Petrarch, few will believe. Moreover, the motive must have been wanting. INTRODUCTION. IS But the Cardinal, in discussing the opinion, per- tinently observes, " That all knowledge of the Latin classics comes to us from the Mediaeval copies of them, and they who transcribed them had the opportunity of forging or garbhng them. We are simply at their mercy. . . . The existing copies, whenever made, are to us the autographic originals. . . . The numerous rehgious bodies then existing over the face of Europe had leisure enough, in the course of a century, to com- pose not only all the classics, but all the Fathers too." I was led by these remarks to consult the works oi Father Hardouin. To my surprise, I found that in his posthumous /I cZ CensuramVeterum Scriptorum Prolego- mena (1766) he had anticipated the substance of what I have had to say in these pages concerning the Basilian and Benedictine literature by some two hundred years. He denounces the ecclesiastical histories and the Fathers and Councils as a system of fable. He reveals to us the forgers sitting down in their scriptoria, with sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth century ink and parchments, and with corresponding alphabets, to write works in the names of imaginary authors. He desig- nates the producers of the first Church literature a conspiracy, a wicked and impious crew of atheists, whose virus had infected the Missal even, and the Breviary. He was aware that he was attacking the Benedictines of the thirteenth century, and he pointedly says that he bears no ill-will to the Benedictines of his own day. He maintained, as he was bound to do, the genuine- ness of the canonical literature, but his great object was to emancipate the Church from dependence on book tradition, with the exception of the Vulgate, and to found her on ** oral tradition." He thought that he I ! I I I lit i ? • i6 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. might thus beat the weapons out of the hands of the Jansenists and the Protestants in general, who appealed to ** Pseudo-Augustine " and other so-called Fathers. The polemical objects of this extraordinary scholar do not, however, concern me here. What Father Hardouin had as a literary critic destroyed, he was bound as a priest in some sort to try to build again ; but in construction he certainly failed. The fact remains that, as a critic of the Church literature of vast experience, he has never been refuted, and that his critique in effect cuts at the roots of the claim to antiquity on behalf of the Church. It leaves her a purely Mediaeval institution, without either literary or oral links with the past. For if the Patristic literature be cancelled, which contains no slightest proof of the existence of an oral tradition, but merely the pretension to it, the oral tradition is simply a base- less figment. I have been somewhat more conservative than Father Hardouin, because I have admitted that the military organisation against the Semites, which began the Crusades, may during the latter half of the twelfth century have been transforming itself into a spiritual organisation, and that there may possibly have been literaiy as well as military abbots before that century closed. Many a reader will thank me for calling attention to this fascinating work of the great Jesuit scholar. It appears to have been written in 1725-26, when he was about eighty years of age, some three years before his death. Nothing can be more impressive than to see the aged priest firmly persisting in opinions which he had long ago been required to retract by his superiors, and supporting them by all the weight of experience de- rived from a long life spent among books. The Bene- I INTRODUCTION. 17 dictine literary historians of 1754 have treated his memory with respect, and have described a most enter- taining scene which passed between him and one of their Order in Paris in the year 171 1. In the Bihlio- theque of Jesuit writers (1872), edited by A. De Backer, there is an inadequate account of these Prolegomena, which the writer can hardly have perused, and which he speaks of as " refuted." Hardouin's arguments in refer- ence to the late origin of Patristic literature cannot be refuted ; they will receive increasing confirmation from all critical students of the Middle Ages. The Prolegomena form the like useful introduction to the Benedictine mythology that the Prolegomena of C. O. Miiller form to the old Greek mythology ; in which relation there are some valuable remarks on the last chapter of Mr. Grote's first volume of the History of Greece; also in the sixth chapter of Mr. Buckle's History of Civilisation, We shall never understand our own English mythology until we understand the habit of mind of the Benedictines, who, under the influence of Jewish and Mohammedan teach- ing, sat down to trace the descent of King Alfred and the Bishop of London from Noah and from Abraham. All that I have written is intended merely as an introduction to the epoch of Church beginnings. I hope that I have dealt with what is material in the evi- dence ; nor can it be desirable that I should discharge into my pages more of the distasteful fictions which it has been my business to expose than is absolutely necessary. The waste of labour over this subject has been enormous, and the most useful thing one can do is to prevent it from going on. I have done my best to report faithfully upon the evidence ; but further, let me suggest to the serious student a method by following B i8 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. which he will be enabled either to confirm or to correct my conclusions. Let him, then, take up the Ecclesiastical History ascribed to Nicephorus Callistus, and said to have been written early in the fourteenth century. Let him compare with it the first Ecclesiastical History ascribed to Eusebius Pamphili ; he will convince himself of the absurdity of supposing that an interval of one thousand years elapsed between the two productions. They were written very nearly at the same time, and they represent the first effort at making out a Church theory of the past. Let the student then ascertain what Dante, Pet- rarch, and Boccaccio knew of the origin of the Church. He will find it extremely diflicult, by the aid of any indications in those writers, to grope his way upward through the preceding age, and to ascertain what had actually been done in Church organisation at the time of the death of the great Jewish legislator. He will find that the literature must be used with the greatest caution, and with constant glances of circumspection at the state of an ignorant world. For my own part, I am forced to think of the earliest homes of the Church in the Campagna, at Subiaco, Frascati, Anagni, Aquino, Monte Cassino ; and her cradle-period as the latter half of the twelfth century. But I cannot trust what profess to be contemporary sources ; while the admissions in the Papal annals of the obstinate resistance of the magistrates and people of Eome to Church invasions, together with the fact of the flight to Avignon, are strong evidences of the struggling condition of the monkish confederacy during the thir- teenth century. It has never yet been ascertained at what period the Bishop of Eome contrived to subordi- nate the Preefect of the city to himself, nor what was the part played in the movement by the families of the i INTRODUCTIOJS^ 19 1 Conti, of De Vico, of Colonna, and Orsini. Perhaps an exhaustive examination of the evidence will enable a critic to write some conjectural yet probable account of those times. Here, then, I leave the subject for the present. I write with no ill-will toward any Order or body of reli- gious men, but rather to aid the movement in which they are now to be engaged. For, to judge from recent distinct utterances of a Roman and of an Anglican arch- bishop, the word has gone forth, and the clergy are to transform themselves into a body of moral philosophers, of social reformers, and philanthropists. They are at last to be the friends of the poor, the promoters of all virtues, and enemies of all vices. Who will not bid the clergy God-speed in this new mission ? But are they still to teach the canonical writings ? Those writings plainly teach the clergy to follow the example of God, who made Himself poor for men's sake ; they exhibit the perfect life, to which absolute renunciation of the world is indispensable. If this is not intended by the arch- bishops, then they have practically sat in judgment on the enthusiasms of the primitive Orders, and have rejected them as unsuitable to our age. How can a mighty moral leverage be exerted on the multitude by a body of men in whose conscience there is this self- contradiction ? And, again, if ethics are to be the main business of the clergyman, veracity — the virtue that underwent eclipse during the Middle Ages — will be revived. The clergy will so teach that they will have nothing to defend. And if the age of apologetic towards the Mediaeval traditions be past, the day of judgment will swiftly follow, and the day of condemnation. Any writer who feels so strongly as I do the inability of the 20 THE KISE OF CHRISTENDOM. clergy to accomplish a great work for the future of man- kind, so long as they have not recovered their liberty, will work for that object. I am no fanatic for old Eomanism, but I cannot conceive that there was ever a nobler fraternity of teachers in the world than the Stoical communion, or one better fitted to exert a healthful influence alike over the minds of rich and poor. If in this new scheme for the education of the clergy, they are taught — after the advice of Chaucer — not only to " read David in his Psalms," but also to *'read Senec," that they may preach his ennobling wisdom to the multitude, the gain will be great. At the time of the Eevival of Letters, some scholars appear to have thought that after the long interruption of seven hundred years, the world was about to rid itself of the troubled tradition, half Roman and half Semitic, which resulted from the Oriental invasion, and that it would return to its inheritance in the schools of Greece and Eome. It was the organisation of the Church which defeated those bright hopes. 'Are we, at the close of this great century, destined to renew that dis- appointment and from the same cause ? One may not be sanguine ; but it seems a reasonable expectation that the next age will see the clergy reformed, and trans- formed into a pure philanthropic brotherhood, enjoying an equal freedom with that of the old guilds of philo- sophers, with no interests apart from that of society, with no message or dogma to deliver but the truths that find response in the universal conscience of mankind. I have looked with interest on the first mosque that has been built on English ground. Our Mohammedan friends may desire to learn something of us, but it is we who have to learn from them in respect to the great INTRODUCTION. 21 Mediaeval tradition. They are the masters of it. They are of the Orthodox Church ; theirs is the sublime theo- logy and the inflexible logic. We owe it to the com- mon civility of the great Empire to which we belong to endeavour to correct the vulgar fables which have pre- vailed since the fourteenth century in respect to their religion, and to desist from afironting them with what they must ever regard as a corrupt version of their own sacred legends. We need no more controversy, but mutual intelligence. And should a genuine study of the Oriental systems be destined to flourish in the West, it will be a great means of promoting that truly Catholic and all-tolerant sentiment which is suitable to the British no less than to the Eoman Empire. i K •1! !! CHAPTER I. THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. The object of the present inquiry is to draw aside, if possible, the veil which has so long concealed from us the origin of the Christian religion, and of the great Church from whence it sprang. All origins are involved in obscurity, but a clear distinction must be drawn between origins which are secrets of Nature and those which are secrets of human art. The origin of the physical universe is a secret of Nature, but the origin of human universities, that is, of corporations pervaded and governed by a unity of idea and purpose, lies within the grasp of human in- telligence. The Church, regarded in that light, may be studied and may be understood by the guidance of those general laws which account for the rise of insti- tutions. Its origin can only be mysterious in the same sense that all human societies are mysterious. The facts may be difficult to ascertain and to fix in respect of time, place, and person, but they are those of ordinary experience. If it be maintained that the Church is a supernatural society, the reply is that, in the opinion of the Church, humankind is also a great supernatural society; and if the one, so also the other is a proper object of histori- cal inquirj^ The Church herself has employed writers to give an account not only of her divine origin, but of her worldly course ; and the object of inquiry is to THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 23 ascertain whether the narrative of that worldly course has been traced in accordance with the facts or with the probabilities of human life in the antique and the Mediaeval world. The great corporations that we call nations all possess views of the past which are the product of poetic and patriotic imagination. Such representations, forming as it were a brilliant painted screen erected against the dark background of the unknown, become part of the spiritual treasures of the people. They appeal to patriotic love ; they minister to the joy in the great and beautiful; they reflect an abiding splendour on the present day. When a nation, after long struggles, has arrived at power and prosperity, the time of adversity becomes endeared to retrospective fancy. The distant scene is softened and mellowed ; figures of superhuman excellence, contrasted with types of superhuman malig- nity, arise in the imagination ; and the glory of national champions is contrasted with the infamy of their foes. Hence the unfailing charm of those fine legends which have enveloped the origin of the city of Rome in a luminous haze of poetry. The pages of Livy, for example, have rather gained in intellectual worth since the sharpened judgment of modern times has learned to recognise in their noble forms and vivid colours the efflux of the artist's soul rather than the reproduction of facts recorded in the pontifical annals. Nor has Virgil's divination of the genius of the old Eomans, his picture of their martial and civic greatness ceased to delight us because we know the ^neid to be a splendid fable of the Augustan age. These works of art reveal the pride, the lofty self-consciousness and self-love of a mighty people. And if the value of history lies in its record of the soul Origin of Rome. lii •1 t I II If! [f I 't J 24 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. of institutions, of the passions and the ideals of the men who made institutions what they were, then there is the most precious history of Roman sentiment and character in the pages of Livy and of Virgil. The Christian Church forms no exception to the ori in of ^^ ^^^^ corporations, in default of authentic the Church, knowledge, or in reluctance to publish the true facts of their origin, will have recourse to poetic art to supply the void. The primitive Churchmen — that is, the members of the two great Orders of St. Basil and St. Benedict— proclaimed to the first audience they could obtain at the rise of the Mediaeval universities, that a new nation had come into existence at an epoch near to that of Virgil and Livy. Their object was to illustrate the Christian name, even as the old Eoman name had been illustrated by those great masters. But the Church never discovered a genius — not even in Dante — equal to either of the old Romans, whom it might enlist in its service. Nothing will perhaps better illustrate the vast chasm which lies, both in point of time and of sentiment, between the old Roman and the Holy Roman beginnings, than a brief comparison between the Preface of Livy and that of the unknown monk who first undertook to trace the history of the Catholic Church. The Preface of Livy is modest and manly. He is Tiie Preface scusible of the immensity of his task, that of of Livy. ascending the course of time through some seven hundred years. He is aware that the fables of poets rather than genuine monuments form the tradition of the earlier times. He thinks that antiquity may be par- doned if she mingles the human with the divine in the first beginnings of cities, and so renders those begin- nings more august. But if any people may consecrate ^ i THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 25 its own origin and refer itself to divine authorship, then the Roman people, so glorious in war, may refer its parentage to Mars without offending the tribes of men which endure the Roman Empire. It certainly never entered the heart of Livy to con- ceive that a manifestation of the Divine in human form was near at hand, and that a great theological empire was to be founded within the heart of the old order, des- tined to be the source of all prosperity to the Romans, and to supersede their Empire. But such was the theory of the first Church mythographers. Let the reader s thought move swiftly on to the time after the first Crusades, when that Roman people, who had never forgotten their traditions, were sternly resisting, amidst riot and bloodshed, the efforts of the monks to set up the cathedra of a high priest as ruler of the city and the world. Then, looking back, he will see how deep and dark and how impassable is the chasm which sunders the old Roman tradition from that of the Holy Roman Empire, which was the shadow and the faint imitation of its predecessor. What was the theory of the Holy Romanists ? Let the dates in their mythographic structure be ^^^^^^ ^^ for the moment neglected, and the mere Holy P A ■T' Romanism. theory be the object of attention. An Eastern bishop is supposed to be addressing a Roman emperor : — ** Our philosophy formerly fiourished among bar- barians, but it flowered out among your nations about the great reign of Augustus, your ancestor, and became in the highest degree to your Empire a fortunate blessing. For from that time the might of the Romans increased to that great splendour, of which you have become the de- sired successor, and will be, along with your son, if you preserve the philosophy which was nursed in the same rl : i t if I i. IM I.' »i I 26 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. cradle with the Empire and began with Augustus; which also your ancestors honoured, in addition to the other cults." The given names of the emperor and the bishop signify nothing. The fable is audacious, and one of a mass of the most audacious fables relating to the old Eoman emperors, which disappear from the theatre of genuine history in the light of the known facts of the Empire. Another fable, relating to perhaps the most glorious period of the Roman Empire, is the following : — "There went on" (amidst slanders, persecutions, the constant pullulation of heresies), *' there went on, increasing in greatness, ever alike and the same, the splendour of the Universal and only True Church, distilling the solemnity, the sincerity and freedom, the temperance and piety, of the inspired policy and philo- sophy, upon every race of Greeks and Barbarians. With the course of time the accusation against the Dogma has died out ; and there has remained alone, prevailing, and confessed for the most part to excel in majesty and temperance, and in divine philosophic dogmata — our teaching.'^ Here then stands revealed, at whatever epoch, the Catholic Church in her majesty and boundless preten- sions to empire, such as they remain to this very day. It was at the same epoch that another monk of the same primitive Order put forth the dictum : — " The beginning of all things is the Catholic and Holy Church'' The style of the monk is somewhat swollen and The Pro- veutosc. lu simpler language may be stated the First what he proposes in his preface to do for the History. clucidatiou of the obscure past of the Church. He will record — THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 27 1 . The Successions of the Holy Apostles. 2. The distinguished men of various parishes. 3. The innovating teachers of the Gnosis, falsely so called — the wolves in the fold of Christ. 4. The calamities of the Jewish nation in conse- quence of the conspiracy against the Saviour. 5. Persecutions and martyrdoms. He will begin this narrative with a theological principle — the CEconomy or Dispensation of Christ. He craves the indulgence of his readers, because he is entering on a desert and untrodden path. He cannot find the bare footsteps of human beings who have travelled on this road. Some hints may be caught from partial narratives, some voices maybe heard, some flicker- ing torches on the heights may be discerned. He has gathered up some scattered memorials, has plucked some flowers from intellectual meadows. He will at least try to rescue the Successions of the Apostles from oblivion. The work, though dated in the time of Constantine, was in reality written far on in the Middle j^g D^te and Ages. It is, moreover, based solely upon a structure. theory, that of the Apostolical Succession. It has no sources in fact ; it supplies the void by a series of historic fables. It forms the introduction to a great system of monachic mythology. The writer, and those who depend upon him, hardly pretend to veracity. They write in the interests of orthodoxy and of edification alone. They beg the question from the ground and from the root. Orthodoxy will atone for the greatest vices, while the brightest virtues may not redeem the character of the heretic. These writers have drawn a series of fanciful portraits of Roman emperors, and have singled out the best of those princes as objects of malignant denunciation. ■ II «J» .iPT«WBW^«B!^?— 28 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. SI I iir ^ 1 it III r They have corrupted the genuine sources of our know- ledge by the introduction of a mass of interpolations into the literature of the Empire. They have invented edicts and codes, the contents of which would have filled Koman statesmen with amazement and horror. They have contrived a series of tales of the most hideous description concerning martyrs, which, were they credible, would represent the Roman Empire as a theological madhouse, where some were smitten with the frenzy of persecuting, others with the frenzy for being persecuted. They have wronged the spirits of the mighty dead. It is in part with the view of recovering a juster view of the old Roman Empire, and of the great men who lived under it, that a rigorous examination of the Church mythographers is here undertaken. It is pain- ful to take up one's pen not to detect an occasional im- posture, to contradict an incidental lie, but to apply it as a lever for the breaking asunder of a perfect system of wrongdoing in the field of literature. It will be shown that the dogma of the Apostolic Suc- andthe^™'' ccssiou is a dogma and no more, between ^^<'*^- which and the facts there lies an immense interval. It is a dogma which appeals only to unin- quiring credulity and passion, and which becomes as a dream before any steady examination of the evidence. It is a dogma which could only have been launched, have been supported by force and submitted to, in the darkest ages our world has ever known. It is a great need that we should, even in this late time, recover a correct representation of the past his- tory of our world from the beginning of the Roman Empire. For want of this, we have long been bewil- dered as to our place and duties in the present. Some THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 29 loss, it may be, will be felt, or rather imagined, as objects once thought to be real pass into the world of the ideal. Yet if our earthly horizon only opens the more widely, if our glance at the commonplace of exist- ence becomes unfettered, if we learn to see the con- tinuity of human life through all the ages the more distinctly, the gain will be great. Science and imagina- tion are each enriched by the discipline which separates their respective provinces. The fidelity of the poet is distinct from that of the historian ; and the facts which claim the attention of the historian are not to be con- founded with the impassioned dreams of the mystic. The historian, according to any sound definition of his office at any time, is bound not to impose upon the world representations of what was not as if they were reflections of what was, nor to treat the things that were as if they had not been. These are but broad rules, but they have been utterly disregarded by the first historian of the Church, Not that he was the only ofi'ender. Before him there had been Orientals who, with the muscular activity of imagination characteristic of their race, had bounded over thousands of years as if they had been but days, had planted themselves at the creation, and had thence deduced the scheme of the world to their own times. In the Middle Ages it may have been impossible for any corporation to rule mankind except by means of theo- logical fables. There lies in part a certain apology for what the first Churchmen did. But their literary deeds have proved a deep injury to our conscience and our culture, and we consent to that injury and prolong it, if we refuse to submit their writings to the closest scrutiny, and to correct their erroneous representa- tions of the past. .-I gLH-._LM i 30 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 31 it' t Programme of the Pre- sent Work. And now to resume. It will be shown in the fol- lowing pages that the whole system of Church ideas originated in the Middle Ages, at an epoch when every effort was being made to redress the balance of power between Europe and Asia, and to resist the great domination of the Orientals. The first Church Uterature was solely the product of the two great primitive Orders, who were united in this enterprise. The old Koman Empire had long run its course, exhausted in its struggles with its foes in the East and in the West. It had been replaced in Syiia, Egypt, Africa, Sicily, Spain by the empire of Islam, and by the Teutonic kingdoms in the West. But down to the end of the reign of Justinian, when our contemporary sources fail, the faith and the ideas of the Romans had remained substantially what they had been in the days of Augustus. The Eomans had never forgotten their sacred legends of ^Eneas and Romulus, had never ceased to cherish the lore of poets who sung of Roman virtue, and of philosophers who strove to lead them in the path of wisdom. There was not a Roman in the time of Justinian who dreamed that the city or the Empire was to become the seat of an Oriental or semi- Oriental propaganda, or that the memory of Roman gods and heroes, seers and lawgivers, was to be eclipsed by that of Arabian prophets and apostles. It is because the literature of the Empire has come to our hands from those of monachic editors, who have added to and taken from the text in the interest of their great dogma, that an illusion in this regard has ob- tained, ever since the opening of the universities, in the educated world. During the period 800-900, the building of mosques, the foundation of schools of Arabian learning, was no doubt going rapidly forward throughout the empire of Islam, from Bagdad to Cordova. The Koran had pro- bably assumed the form in which we now possess it during that period, and it was completed early in the tenth century by the great Chronicle of Al Tabari the Persian, which yields us a clearer view of that great dogma of the prophetical and apostolical succession from Adam to Mohammed which is characteristic of Islam. Towards the close of the same century a people akin to the Arabs formed themselves into a new religious organisation in the land which they called Sepharad or Spain, under the protection of their Muslim masters. The first Sephardim in the field of letters, i.e., the Spanish Rabbins, were known by Arabic names, and probably passed outwardly for Muslim. Their early school was Cordova ; others were found at Seville, Malaga, Toledo. Their literary activity was at first secret, and they based it on the traditions of the Arabians. They claimed, like the Muslim, to be chil- dren of Israel, and they deduced their origin from the younger, as the Arabians deduced theirs from the elder son of Abraham. The Spanish Rabbins had, as a matter of course, a theory of a great Rabbinical Succession and of a Great Synagogue, which served to lead imagination into a high ideal past. But this theory proves, on examination, to fall under mythological law, abundantly illustrated in the old Greek legends. It may be safely assumed that nothing definite was known of the people or of their priesthood until the foundation of the synagogues in Spain. Their buildings show a Moorish parentage, as their sacred language is the daughter of the Arabic. 32 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 33 h » III 'ii '. » It may be said that the foundation of the whole syna- gogue system dates from the period between Rabbi Samuel the Nagid of Cordova and R. Moses Maimonides, also a Spaniard, who settled at Cairo, and became the great lawgiver and dogmatist of his people. The period in round numbers is 1000-1200. From Spain the Rabbins went on their missionary errands, and founded schools in Africa, Syria, and Persia, in South and West France, Germany, and the Crimea. If there was ever a period during which the teachers of the Mishna travelled over sea and land to make proselytes, it must have been during that period, when their hearts beat high in the hope of realising the ideal kingdom of David and establishing another eccle- siastical empire in the world. They suffered a terrible blow at the time of the first Crusade. The records of a previous persecution at Granada are faint and indis- tinct, and those referring to the Crusade relate to the German synagogues. It is probable, however, that they all suffered ; and one of their feasts, with the explana- tory legend in an allegorical form, bears witness to their belief that at some epoch a great conspiracy was formed with the object of extirpating them from the world. It is to no other time that we can refer the origin of this belief. They recovered from that blow; and though they had to travel through a long valley of Baca, the woeful plaints from which are familiar in all our ears, they prospered under the peculiar conditions of the times. The twelfth century is the great age of early Rabbin- dom. It was then that their most celebrated scholars flourished ; then that Messiahs were often appearing to restore the kingdom of David ; then that they began to encounter the abbots at the head of their spiritual militia, the monks; then that the canon of the Old Testament was completed and the New Testament was begun; then that the Christian system was founded on a theory both of the great antiquity of the Jewish people, and of the Christiani as an offshoot from them. Here the root is touched of those fixed ideas and illusions which have long proved so injurious to our intellectual and moral culture. Had scholars taken their stand at the time of Maimonides, and strictly con- fined themselves to the question how much did he and his compeers know of the origins of his people, the question about the Jews would long ago have received an analogous solution to that which we have arrived at in the case of the Greeks and the Romans. It would have been seen that the dreams of a rising people about its past are one thing, its actual appearance in history another. But the monks exaggerated the Rabbinical claim to antiquity to a pitch of the greatest absurdity. The Bible is in greater debt to the Latin and the Greek than is commonly known ; and yet it has been pre- tended that the Hebrews were the elders of the Greeks, and that Moses was the teacher of Plato. Hebrew is one of the most vigorous but least cultivated of dialects, the reflex of minds of great energy but narrow educa- tion ; while Greek is the most magnificent monument of highly endowed, deeply cultivated, and long labour- ing genius that exists in the world. The illusion in respect to the antiquity of the Jews in Syria is destined to disappear the moment that Jewish critical scholars, of whom there are many in the present day, refuse all comphcity with the dreams of the Rabbins, and still more of the monks of St. Basil and St. Benedict. We have some particulars of the Rabbi Jehuda Halevy, and his enthusiastic journey c % ■t^^ .<*! ■ f ;1 II.- i' i n V 1 34 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. from Spain to Syria about the middle of the twelfth century — a journey that seems to have ended in a cloud of disappointment. We have particulars so late as 1267 of R. Nachmanides, who is securing some ruined buildings near Jerusalem for a synagogue of some dozen of his people. The settlement at Tiberias may date from the twelfth century, but probably not earlier. During the preceding four centuries and more, the land was holy to its Muslim occupiers, the true authors of the tradition about David and Solomon. But not to enter here into further details, the figure of Maimonides is the great landmark in the history of the Synagogue. His people say of him that *' between Moses and Moses there is not another Moses." Since the Moses of the ideal time is derived from the Moses of the Arabs, the later Moses of the Jews is their true lawgiver. He is believed to have passed away about the year 1205. He had stereotyped the creed of Juda- ism. In his time the Scripture lessons for the syna- gogue had doubtless been completed ; the Mishna had been begun. A new world begins to appear from that time, whether we glance at the seats of Judaism, of Islam, or of Christianism in East and West. In Rome our glance falls on the figure of Innocent HI., who is epochal in Church legend. The great monastery of the Benedictines at Monte Cassino, and all the cloisters of the two Orders connected with it, are said to be in the full tide of activity, and the foundations of that great system of mixed ideas under which we have so long lived have been laid. Glancing forward a little distance, we encounter the Emperor Frederick II., the favourer of the Muslim in Sicily and South Italy. It is said that he listened to advocates of the three reli- M ^^ THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 35 gions, and gave the preference to the Orientals over the Christians. If we may venture to divine his thoughts, he must have been well aware that Islam was the parent of the other two. It will tend to steady our attention and to fix it upon the proper objects, if we imagine ourselves to be students living at the court of that Emperor, and busying ourselves in the work of critical examination of the rival traditions of the Mosque, the Synagogue, and the Church. It will be found, on attentive in- spection of the evidence, that at the Emperor's death the schools of the Mosque had been some four hundred years in existence, those of the Synagogue some two hundred years, while those of the Church were in their infancy. His reign witnessed the rise of the great mendicant Order of St. Francis and the preaching Order of St. Dominic, by whose agency the popular influence of the Church was greatly extended, and dissenters of Oriental persuasions were cruelly sup- pressed. The advance of this second great line of the Church army is another landmark of history. Some of the most fervid passages in the Epistles and the Gospels resume the spirit and the life which they have long lost so soon as they are carried into the light of the legends of the Franciscans concerning their ideal saint. The spirit of enthusiasm, so fatal both for good and ill, has been aroused in the breasts of the mass of the people. But to return for a moment to the question with which we began this chapter, the relation of the Church to the old Roman Empire, tinia^orthe It was long after the reign of Frederick ^^'^°' ^''''• that an Augustinian produced a celebrated work on the new City or Church of God, which, as we 15 I h 3 ll I i It-' r? W: \}\ 36 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. shall show, has been antedated into an earlier age. He follows in this work the general lines laid down by the first ecclesiastical historian, but his composi- tion is of a far more elaborate and finished character. He expands the theme of the Church's relation to old Koman times. He pretends that the Erythraean Sibyl wrote certain manifest prophecies concerning the Christ, that he had read in some poor Latin verses. He produces them, and they form an acrostic on the words 'I>;croL'9 X^peiarro^ Qeov vio? croorrip. He points OUt that the first letters of these words form the word txOv?, that is, fish, by which name Christ is mysti- cally understood, because in this abyss of mortality, as in the depth of waters. He could live — that is, be without sin. He produces also a pretended prophecy of the Pas- sion from the same Sibylline source, and adds that there are some who place the Sibyl not in the time of Romulus, but of the Trojan war. He deduces the Nativity at Bethlehem wholly from the Hebrew prophet. Christ is declared to be *' man manifest from a human virgin, God occult from God the Father." His first miracle is His birth. His last the Ascension. The whole proof is drawn from an a priori, a metaphysical neces- sity, and from literature allegorically and mystically understood. Should the Sibylline verses, he says, prove to be forgeries, still the Psalms and Prophets suffice for the establishment of the theory. He proceeds to unfold his view of Roman history from similar foregone conclusions. There must have been ten persecutions, because there had been ten plagues in Egypt. But he is embarrassed by the fact that more than ten persecutions have been discovered in Roman history. THE OBJECT OF THE INQUIRY. 37 He draws a parallel and a contrast between Romu- lus and Christ. The belief in the deity of Romulus Romulus was imbibed by the Romans with *°^^^""^- their mother's milk. The nations ruled by Rome became also imbued by this idea. Not that they believed the dogma, but they professed it for fear of ofi'ending Rome. Rome herself believed, not from love of error, but from error of love. The new state, on the other hand, that is, the Holy Roman or Christian Empire, did not believe in Christ, her celestial and eternal Founder, because she was founded by Him, but be- cause she believed, she must be founded. Rome, already built and dedicated, worshipped her founder in a temple as a god ; but the New Jerusalem placed on the foundation of faith her Founder, Christ-God, so that she might be built and dedicated. Old Rome loved Romulus, and believed him to be a god, but the new state believed in the deity of Christ, and then loved Him. Old Rome was led into error by love, but by right faith the divine state is to be led into truth. We hear of Romulus what he did, not what was prophesied of him ; we hear that men be- lieved in his deification, but we do not know that he was actually deified. Moreover, men confessed the deity of Romulus from fear, but men overcame fear and suffering in their eagerness to confess the deity of Christ. The belief in Romulus produced no martyrs. This curious argumentation from theories to facts is not the eccentricity of an individual ; it is the consen- taneous and organised argumentation of the servants of the Christian Empire. They never depart from it. They are aware that they have no facts, either in mass or in fragments, to which they can point in confirma- tion of it. They announce a dogma evolved out of their 38 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. I mystical consciousness ; they demand a blind assent to it; they call that blind assent faith. They read the dogma into writings where it is not to be found ; they forge oracles which re-echo it. In obedience to a theory, they call an army of martyrs into existence, treat them as real persons, and ascribe to them suffer- ings in defence of the theory of which the martyrs themselves were the offspring. It is a mistake to suppose that the Middle Ages were wholly subject to unhappy dreams and hallucinations. The Church theoiy of history was firmly laid down by men the most shrewd and clear-headed, keen observers of the condition of the world. It was a theory that fell in with the militant and ambitious passions of the time, and was therefore accepted by a large, interested class. It came to be believed in that sense in which men say they believe whatever they wish to act upon. To a certain extent the saying of Tacitus, Fingunt simul creduntque, was made good. A great confluence of motives — fear, self-interest, love, hope — brought about that state of passive acquiescence in the dogma which the Churchmen call faith. But to the modern student belief means an intelli- gent state of mind produced by the knowledge of the facts. It will be shown in the following pages that the proud theoiy of a State or Church of God, a Chris- tian Empire, founded in the reign of Augustus and destined to survive all other empires, the theory so long and so massively supported by the great sacer- dotal Orders, is a theory not merely unsupported by facts, but massively refuted by them. I •-■•ifc li''.lS ^*5 CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CHRISTENDOM. I HAVE briefly to show in the following pages that the Roman Empire, from its rise to its decline, from the time of Augustus to that of Heraclius, was entirely unconscious of any such revolution in religious affairs as was implied by the introduction of Christianity. The greatest effort was made during the Crusades by the Basilian and Benedictine monks to make the facts appear otherwise. The consequence has been that the literary monuments of the Empire have come down to us in ^ fearfully garbled, corrupted, and interpolated condition, so that every branch of the evidence needs to be examined with circumspection, that we may dis- tinguish in this great palimpsest the old Roman Scrip- ture from the monkish over- scribble. Gratitude is sometimes expressed towards the monks because they preserved and handed down to us the classical letters. To borrow one of their own illustrations, the gratitude we owe them is of the kind that one feels towards the robber, who takes our purse and leaves us our bare subsistence. They have abstracted part of the litera- ture of the Empire ; they have foisted their own theory of the world upon the remainder. They have contrived a great imaginative screen which has hidden from us the old Roman world, and which has at the same time offered to us dream-pictures of a world as they wished it had been. 39 • s B iat^ -f-iMlliifclii 40 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. \u la I It may need a steady and a studious gaze to dispel the illusions they have created. But to those who seek it, the truth is still plainly visible. The monuments of the Empire, carefully reperused, not only reveal entire ignorance of the Christian movement, but they supply a mass of evidence condemnatory of those who strove to pervert and distort their testimony, and to wring from them false and dubious voices. Down to that great epoch, the rise of Islam, neither the inscriptions, the histoiy of architecture, the history of religious rites, neither the laws nor the literature of the Empire, afford the slightest evidence of any religious revolution hav- ing taken place in the Roman state. The Empire was and remained neutral amidst a great variety of creeds and cults. There was no toleration because there was no persecution. I. The Evidence from Inscriptio7is, The inscriptions — I allude especially to the sepul- chral inscriptions — have a still and ghostly tale to tell. They offer the criticism of the silent dead upon all those flourishing legends of the origin and sufferings of the Christians by which we have been so long deceived. These pathetic memorials of old culture have a weighty burden to deliver. They are devoid of polemical pas- sion ; they have been less open to the meddling hand of fraud, and the massive effect of their meaning admits of no contradiction. What have they to tell us concerning the rise of the Catholic Church ? Had the tales of the monks been even approximately true, the inscriptions should supply powerful confirmation of the idea that Christians had been swarming everywhere in the Roman world from THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CHRISTENDOM. 41 the beginning of the second century of our era. But the first fact that arrests attention is the utter paucity of any pretended Christian inscriptions, and the next fact is that the pretended Christian inscriptions are not Christian at all. These pretended Christian antiquities of the Cata- combs were a discovery of the fifteenth century : they were a discovery, in fact, in the sense of an invention. Those collected by De Rossi, Le Blant, and others, form a mere driblet amidst a great mass of antique inscrip- tions which show beyond dispute that the rehgion which had been recognised in the first century con- tinued to be recognised as long as any ancient tradi- tions of Rome lingered in the hearts of the people. Tombs and altars continued to be dedicated Dis Mani- bus, to the deified spirits of the departed ; and there is no reason to suppose that the beautiful and pious rites of the Parentalia and Feralia described by Ovid were not still annually practised by the majority of Romans at the close of the sixth century.^ The greater gods of Rome, Jove Optimus Maximus, Mars, Apollo, and other deities continued to receive reverential recognition to the end. Oriental deities also claim a considerable share of the inscriptions. Mithras, the Sol Invictus, to whose legends and rites the early apologists of the Church make reference in so pointed and sensitive a manner — 1 " Est honor et tumulis : animas placate paternas, Parvaque in extructas munera ferte pyras. Parva petunt Manes ; pietas pro divite grata est Munere ; non avida Styx habet ima deos." — Fasti ii. 533. Cf. the remains of the treatise of Jo. Lydus of the sixth century. Late in the Middle Ages, the Fasti of Ovid continued to be a study of delight to those who described the Mirahilia, or wonders of the golden city. Cf. also Agathias of the sixth century, v. 2. ' 1 i ; I) 42 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. Mithras, whose birthday feast on the 25th December was destined to give way to the feast of the Nativity, very frequently occurs. So do Isis and Osiris. There are, moreover, numerous inscriptions relating to the ministers of the old rehgions— to the priests and priestesses, the sacerdotes, the antistites, the flamines and the flaminicse. The only Pontifices Maximi are the emperors themselves, who were wont to wear the official Pontifical garb in time of peace.' With the exception of something spurious, relating to the noto- rious *' Damasus," there is no hint or trace to be found of any papa or pontiff in the Catholic acceptation of the words. It is impossible to resist the massive and overwhelm- ing contradiction which is thus given to the notorious boasts of the apologists concerning the universal diffu- sion of the Christian name during the Roman Empire. No student whose attention has been once steadily fixed upon this subject can rise from the examination of the volumes edited by Theodor Mommsen and others without the conviction that our traditional views of the origin of the Christians have been steeped in illusion. It is but one of many experiences, which brand upon the mind the ineffaceable impression that the monks have not only not told us the truth, but that they have actually smothered it beneath mountains of fable. But this is not all. De Rossi, Le Blant, and others have hastily assumed as Christian inscrip- grt.!\rsign tions all in which the monogram )^ occurs. of Victoria. ^^ AouU iu the notorious Eusebian story of Constantine and the vision of the Labarum it is claimed 1 See the description of the insignia of Augustus in time of peace in Jo. Lydus, De Magistrate ii. 4, who knows of no other pontiffs. Cf. the list of emperors as pontiffs in Corpus Inscr. Lat., Berol. 1873, vol. iii. part ii. pp. 1 108 seq. Julian is the last named Imperial pontiff in this connection. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND CHRISTENDOM. 43 as the Christian sign of victory ; but the character of the writer and of the miraculous story ought to have aroused suspicion. We have nothing here but one of the numerous attempts on the part of the Churchmen to fabricate evidence where it was not forthcoming, or to pervert extant evidence in favour of their own views. The monogram is notoriously of most antique origin. It occurs, for example, in monuments of Isis and of Pallas.^ It appears on coins of emperors of the fourth century— for example, on those of Jovian — who must have known what its real significance was, but who have been falsely claimed, partly on this ground, as Christians. This is not the place wherein to examine the archaeo- logy of the monogram and of the related sign of the cross. Perhaps it may be said that the ''cross" is one of the oldest objects in the lore of Egypt and of the West as a sign propulsive of evil spirits, and hence pointing, as a sign of weal, salvation, victory. Certainly in the times of the Empire the cross was associated with Victoria, and golden victorious were probably as common in temples as in the time of Cicero.'^ The Egyptian Tau or Crux Ansata, the handled cross, seen so constantly in the hands of Egyptian deities, had perhaps a more directly religious signification. The Basilian monks have endeavoured, though clumsily, to turn it to account in their argument for the antiquity of Christianity, and they say that it symbolised the life 1 Eckhel, DocL Numm., ii. 210. For Isis, I have found, but have been unable to verify, a reference to Franz, C. I. Gr., 4713^- The date is given B.C. 137-138. '^ See the story in N. D., iii. 34. Suetonius tells of a Victoria carried at the funeral of Augustus. Cf. Justin, xxxix. 2. *--> -*'»l*6^Bfl«.«(«l|ra»**' (\ \i i; 'I ! y 44 THE RISE OF CHRISTENDOM. to come.^ It seems probable that the monogram or the cross on sepulchral Eoman monuments had the mean- ing of victory over death.^ Other sepulchral signs— the dove, the fish, the palm, the olive-branch, the anchor imply no religious revolution, and may be probably explained from popular ideas concerning death and the life to come, that are as old as the world of thought and sentiment. The letters BM denote simply Bene Merenti, **to the well-deserving," a mark of respect to the departed. Yet an enormous fraud has here been perpetrated by ecclesiastics. The letters have been interpreted to signify Beato Martyr o, and in this way scores and hundreds of imaginary martyrs have been called into being. So late as the seventeenth century Bonfante was thus discovering three hundred martyrs in the in- scriptions of Sardinia, and Piacenza was allowed to share in the precious boon.^ But we need not dwell upon these follies. The Churchmen have made massive representations of the prevalence of the Christian name in the early times, and we are bound to demand massive confirmations. Instead of this, we find that the famous monogram has nothing whatever to do with the crucifix or with Chris- 1 Sozom H. E., V. 17, on its coanection with tlie worship of Serapis. The student will' find similar things in the Basilian monk Cedrenus, prohably of the fourteenth century, Compend., p. 325 P., also in J. Pollux, Chron., p. 366, probably of the same age ; to which may also be referred the Latin tracts ascribed to Tertullian, Apology, and M. Felix, Octavius. 2 It is needless to observe that the monogram )^ had nothing what- ever to do with such words as xpt(rT6s, or xp^ktto^, or xp7?